Destined to Witness by Hans J. Massaquoi

He also urged me to record my equally unique experience of finding my own African roots.įour fundamental aspects set the private hell I endured under the Nazis apart from both the pogroms suffered by my Jewish compatriots in Germany and from the racial persecution inflicted on my African-American brothers and sisters in the United States.Īs a black person in white Nazi Germany, I was highly visible and thus could neither run nor hide, to paraphrase my childhood idol Joe Louis. Alex felt that because I was both an insider in Nazi Germany and, paradoxically, an endangered outsider, I had a rare perspective on some of the Third Reich’s major catastrophic events. Each convinced me that my experiences as a black youngster growing into manhood and surviving in Nazi Germany-an eyewitness to, and frequent victim of, both Nazi racial madness and Allied bombings-followed by my years in Africa were so unique that it was my duty as a journalist to share this rather different perspective on the Holocaust. Douglass, I nonetheless decided to risk being thought of as weak, vain, and egocentric by making public the story of my life, it was mainly because of the persistent urging of persons whose literary judgment I felt was above reproach, such as my longtime friends Alex Haley, the author of Roots Ralph Giordano, of Cologne, Germany, author of Die Bertinis and my former employer and mentor. I could not agree more wich the above sentiments, expressed so eloquently over a century ago by the great abolitionist in the preface to his autobiography, My Bondage, My Freedom.

To write of ones self, in such a manner as not to incur the imputation of weakness, vanity, and egotism, is a work within the ability of hut few and I have little reason to believe that I belong to that fortunate few. Ironic, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi’s account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door-or Allied bombs falling on his home. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. Like other German boys, Hans went to school like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Fuhrer’s spell.

The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, due to concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia.

In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir-an astonishing true tale of how he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany

Destined to Witness by Hans J. Massaquoi