Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on August 3, 2013

Mildred Fish Harnack was an ordinary girl from the Midwest.

Growing up in a working-class family, she attended Milwaukee High School of the Arts and went on to study at the University of Wisconsin.

But the avid learner who once spent pleasant summers swimming in the Milwaukee River and gathering sweet corn on relatives farms would meet a horrible fate far removed from her tranquil childhood home.

On the evening of Feb. 16, 1943, Harnack, then a 40-year-old scholar, journalist, lecturer, translator and wife of a German government official, was led to the cold, dark execution room of Berlins Plotzensee, a notorious prison for Nazi dissidents during World War II.

There she was beheaded.

Her crime: resisting Adolf Hitlers Nazi Party. She was the only American woman executed on Hitler's direct orders.

This largely unknown heroine who died in her adopted country for what she felt was right and just is the focus of a new exhibit opening Sunday at the German American Heritage Center in Davenport.

Other events celebrating her extraordinary life are planned for next month. They include showings of a Wisconsin Public Television, or WPT, documentary, Wisconsins Nazi Resistance: The Mildred Fish Harnack Story, at 2 p.m. Sept. 7-8 at the Bettendorf High School Performing Arts Center, It was produced by WPTs Joel Waldinger, who will be on hand to introduce the film and answer questions. The cost is $5 at the door and free for students with a valid ID.

Waldinger also will lead a teachers workshop on the film from 10 a.m. to noon Sept. 7 at the center. To register for the free session, go to gahc.org by Sept. 4.

The exhibit at the German American Heritage Center, titled In Memoriam: Mildred Fish Harnack, is on loan from the Jewish Museum in Milwaukee. The exhibits Quad-City presentation is the first since it was shown in Milwaukee in 2011. The display and related programming are sponsored by the Jewish Federation of the Quad-Cities and the Holocaust Education Committee of the Greater Quad-City Area.

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Honoring an American woman who defied the Nazis

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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