By Sean Olson, University Relations
Rosmus, the subject of the film "The Nasty Girl," will speak at UNCG as part of Human Rights Week on Sept. 14.
UNCG will celebrate Human Rights Week with a speaker who stood up against her hometown to reveal its Nazi past.
The Office of Multicultural Affairs will bring award-winning writer, historian and activist Anna Rosmus to campus at 7 p.m. Sept. 14 in the Elliott University Center Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.
As a teenager, when Rosmus discovered her hometown’s Nazi past, she refused to ignore it. Rather, she exposed the dark past and the living culprits of Passau, Germany, an act that was lauded by historians and human rights activists, and lambasted by opposition. She was shunned, received death threats and was stonewalled by teachers and town officials.
Author of “Resistance and Persecution in Passau from 1933-1939,” Rosmus outlined her town’s ignominious history during the Nazi years, when Jewish residents were exiled and worse. Her work on this document and other investigations won her the Geschwister-Scholl Award, the 1995 Galinski Prize and has been featured in both a fictional film, “The Nasty Girl,” and a documentary, “The Nasty Girl in America.”
Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, La Pensée et les Hommes, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The European and Aufbau. Journalist Morley Safer profiled her twice on 60 Minutes.
In “The Journal of the Historical Society II,” Robert E. Hertzstein wrote, “Anna Rosmus’ remarkable studies of the Passau region in Bavaria stand out as the rare exception. Despite the opposition of her teachers and of the people who ran Bavaria’s educational establishment in the late 1970s, Rosmus decided to examine the history of the town of Passau during the years of the Third Reich. She has never stopped and in the process has found the bodies and identified the culprits.”
Rosmus’ visit is part of an entire year of events sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs at UNCG. For a more information, click here.
