Growing Up Black In Nazi Germany: Author To Speak at Harvard, March 6

Hans J. Massaquoi, author of Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, (Morrow, 1999) will give a talk about his memoir on Monday, March 6, at 6 p.m. in the Fong Auditorium at Boylston Hall.

The son of a well-to-do African diplomat and a white German nurse, Massaquoi’s early life in Germany was privileged. But illness, family separation, and most importantly, Hitler’s rise to power changed his entire world. His memoir tells how he survived his childhood under the increasingly dangerous, ethnic-cleansing Nazi regime, when his life was equally threatened by Gestapo death squads and Allied bombs. He would ultimately immigrate to the United States, where he became a civil rights activist and worked as a journalist and managing editor at Ebony magazine.

Massaquoi’s talk is sponsored by the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations and Harvard Hillel. The event is free and open to the public.