On Sunday, August 11 at 3 pm Eastern Time, Dena Rueb Romero, widow of Dartmouth ’69 classmate Oscar Romero, with be our guest for a Casual Conversation on Zoom.
Dena will speak with us about her parents’ years-long quest to escape Nazi Germany and reunite, ultimately joining for marriage in the United States and settling in Hanover where her father had made a success out of the Hanover Camera Shop. Her story is told in All for You: A World War II Family Memoir of Love, Separation, and Loss (She Write Press 2024).
The book begins with the birth of Dena’s father Emil in Guntersblum to David and Bertha Rüb, a Jewish couple, well respected in the community. (In coming to the US, Emil changed the “u” with umlaut in his name to “ue”, ergo, “Rueb”.) Some 20 miles away in Worms, Elisabeth, who came to be known as Deta, was born to the Bickels, Lutherans. She was the seventh child out of twelve, two of whom died in infancy. The Rübs also gave birth to a girl, Hede, who married a cantor.
Emil and Deta met, fell in love, and faced the barrier of Hitler’s racial purity laws which made it a crime for the two of them to date, much less marry. The rest of the book tells the remarkable tale of how both left Germany, Emil escaping to the United States and Deta moving to Britain, where she took positions caring for young children. They communicated for years by letter. Emil wound up eventually as an employee at the Hanover Camera Shop, and finally owning it. To say that he was driven to bring Deta to the United States is an understatement: this man was indefatigable. Trying again and again to obtain a US visa for Deta during the war, he enlisted the help of Dartmouth professors and students. Finally, of course, Deta flew to New York City where the reunion took place, and the civil marriage ceremony.
The story ends far less happily for Emil’s immediate family, his parents and sister (and her husband) did not survive Hitler’s killing machine. That Emil felt guilt for what he did not accomplish is detailed by his daughter in this memoir. She also discusses her mixed feelings about her father’s travails, ultimately expressing an understanding and forgiveness: he had an extraordinary set of burdens on his shoulder: the camera shop, Deta’s coming to America so he could marry her, his own health (suffering from and ultimately undergoing surgery for a hernia), and acting as best he knew how, and without the funds to buy passage for his family to get out of Germany. He did a lot but could not do it all.
This book’s genesis came from finding “the cardboard box” after her father died at age 73 (younger than we are now) with letters and documents and continued through a detailed search of archives and interviews to produce a lovely and heartbreaking memoir. Dena comes out of it with anger and disgust for the neighbors who carried out the pogrom in Guntersblum: “For the perpetrators—unfortunate, misguided men—there is no space in my heart.”
But for her father, there is newfound respect. Dena tells of an incident where a student broke into the Camera Shop in 1966, during our time in Hanover. Her father refused to press charges and urged the police to protect the student against self-harm:
The story of my father’s decency and his compassion for the student has stayed with me. I wish I had appreciated more the qualities that made him stand out, rather than focusing on our differences.
The usual rules apply. Let me know if you want to be part of the conversation with Dena by emailing me your RSVP by the close of business on Friday, August 9 at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .
Arthur Fergenson