By Marshall Hammond
“Like many Holocaust survivors, my parents didn’t want to talk about the horrors they had lived through,” says Portland author Bettie Lennett Denny. “They were focused on the future.”
Denny was born in 1949 and raised in the borough of Queens, New York by her parents, Robert and Ella Lennett. Before immigrating to the United States in 1941, they had been Saly and Elsa Levi of Frankfurt, Germany. The change to American-sounding names was one example of how the couple wanted to put the past behind them.
It wasn’t until after the death of her father in 1984 that Denny would learn the harrowing story of her family’s escape from the Nazis from her mother.
Ella had left her home in Queens, where she had lived for 40 years and moved in with Denny and her husband, Pat, who were then living in Omaha, Nebraska. When Ella’s health began to fail, Denny, an aspiring author working at an ABC Television network affiliate, knew she had to preserve those stories before they disappeared.
“In 1993, when she was 88 and I was exactly half her age, I almost lost her, and it hit me then that if I wasn’t more pointed in my questioning, I would lose that history forever,” says Denny.
“So I started asking about her childhood, how she met my father, how they escaped, how part of the family ended up in Chile. After all those years, the stories just started spilling out. I think it was her way of reconnecting with my dad.”
Those conversations with her mother were the seeds that would eventually grow into Denny’s book, In the Wake of Madness: My Family’s Escape from the Nazis, released in February by Amsterdam Publishers.
In addition to her mother’s firsthand accounts, Denny inherited a trove of documents from her parents. These letters, receipts, travel applications and photographs allowed her to piece together the story of her parents’ escape in granular detail.
“It’s a miracle that my parents saved all these documents,” says Denny. “And that I never discarded them!” Deciphering and translating the letters, all written in German, was a monumental task.
The book provides a perspective of WWII and the Holocaust that is not as common as that of the soldier or the death camp survivor. It’s a story about refugees fleeing violence, death and oppression, forced to leave behind everything they know for an unknown future in an alien land.
The story starts with a young Ella, then known as Elsa, growing up during World War I and the fractious inter-war period in Germany. By the time she married her husband in 1935, Hitler had taken power, antisemitism was rampant and many Jews were beginning to flee Germany. Ella’s family was torn apart as a brother fled to Chile and a sister fled to Palestine.
By 1938, Ella and Robert thought they had found safe haven in neutral Belgium – until Nazi bombs fell on the city in May 1940. Barely escaping with their lives, they worked their way into France, only to have to flee again when that country also fell to the Nazis. Their next stop was Lisbon, Portugal, where the couple would wait in limbo until finally securing passage to the United States in April 1941. It was a journey fraught with peril.
The United States had not yet entered the war; Nazi allies and anti-semites seemed to be everywhere. Only two years prior in 1939, Madison Square Garden hosted a rally for 20,000 members of the pro-fascist, pro-Hitler, German-American Bund complete with swastika banners hanging beside a giant portrait of George Washington.
For Denny, learning about the global spread of antisemitism and fascist ideology, and the role those attitudes played in enabling the Holocaust, was an eye-opening process. It wasn’t just a story of one government turning on the citizens it deemed undesirable, but of a whole world turning its back on those people as well. Many countries, including the United States, did not want to take in Jewish refugees.
Even more concerning are the parallels Denny sees between the political climate of the 1930’s and 1940’s and that of today, when fascist rhetoric, antisemitism and all kinds of “othering” are once again on the rise globally.
“I now understand that societies are fluid, and that things can change,” says Denny. “America went through turbulent times when I was young, but you had a sense that this was a stable country, even if it wasn’t perfect.”
Now Denny is not so sure. Ironically, she has recently become a naturalized citizen of Germany, as Germany allows children of German victims of Nazi persecution to reclaim their citizenship. If the political climate in the United States becomes intolerable, she will have the ability to move anywhere in the European Union. For now, she is just hoping to pay a visit to the country her family fled all those years ago, but with antisemitism on the rise in Germany as well, that trip may be on hold.
In the Wake of Madness: My Family’s Escape from the Nazis is available at Powell’s Books and most online and neighborhood booksellers. A book signing will be held Friday, April 3, 5-8 pm at Chapters Books & Coffee, 701 E. First St., Newberg as part of First Friday Art Walk.
Learn more about Bettie Lennett Denny and her work on her website, bettiedenny.com.
Robert and Ella Nennett. Photo by Bettie Lennett Denny.
