Susan Faulkner, nee Neulaender, was born April 27, 1921 in Berlin. Her father was a banker and she grew up in an assimilated Jewish family. During the first year of the Nazi regime, she enjoyed Jewish religious instruction in her public school and was very favorably influenced by the ordained female rabbi, Regina Jonas. After 1933, she experienced antisemitism and traumatic discrimination at school. She describes the brief relaxation of anti-Jewish measures in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games. After attending a private Jewish school for a year, she had a brief, unhappy experience in a Zionist agricultural school in Silesia in 1936 and then worked for relatives in Gleiwitz in Silesia, where she felt more protected in a traditional Jewish community than she had felt in Berlin. Upon her return to Berlin, she worked in Alltrue emigration processing agency. During Kristallnacht, on November 9, 1938, she witnessed destruction of Jewish property, burning of the Fasanenstrasse synagogue as onlookers cheered and the beating of an elderly Jewish man. Her father fled to Belgium, was later caught in Marseilles and died in Auschwitz. Susan managed to travel with her mother and sister to Guatemala in 1938 on a German ship. She describes in detail their 4th class passage and how they were treated with disdain by the crew. Two years later, she reached the United States. In 1942, she married an Austrian refugee who converted to Protestantism and was divorced, following the adoption of two children. In 1958, she began college studies leading to a Ph.D. in English, with restitution money from Germany. She became a teacher and expresses her need to bear witness to the Holocaust. She discusses her psychological problems of survivor guilt and painful attempts to identify as a Jew, including compulsive writing of pro-Jewish and pro-Israel letters to editors.
