Among the heartfelt Mother's Day tributes published all over the web this weekend, you might have come across this touching entry from BlogHer community member Rosemarie Pena:

As a mother, I know how easy is is to love your child. I am not sure I can fully understand the love of woman who can love a child she didn’t bear as if it were her own. My mother has done this more than once. I didn’t even know I was adopted when I brought another baby girl home. A classmate had a baby she was unprepared to raise and I volunteered my mom. She didn’t refuse. My baby sister is still there living with and caring for Mom.

Rosemarie's mother, Perrie Haymon, is even more extraordinary when one knows Rosemarie's story. Here's a glimpse, an introduction to a presentation she gives at speaking engagements throughout the US:

Ilse Moellgaard, a Danish child, survived the Holocaust but never recovered from the experience. Neither have her four daughters.

Rosemarie Pena is the oldest of those four daughters, although she did not learn until the mid-1990s that Ilse Moellgaard had been the woman who brought her into the world. Learning about Moellgaard and her story completely altered Rosemarie's understanding of who she was. She had spent 38 years thinking of herself as an African American woman. Through Ilse, she came to understand that she was not only adopted, but bi-racial, an immigrant, and a child of the Holocaust.

At the same time, Pena told me, learning about her origins explained some things about her life, such as her recurrent nightmares. One is of "lying in the snow surrounded by German soldiers." Another is of "being in a playpen with my hands raised and no one would come for me."

In this month that marks both the Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel, I wanted to share Rosemarie's story, not only because I find it unique and compelling, but because it speaks to the myriad, unexpected ways in which history echoes in our lives, shaping and re-shaping our notions of who we are and how we connect to the world. Helen Epstein described being a child of Holocaust survivors as "being possessed by a past which one has not lived," but one might argue that to some degree, history has all of us in its grasp.

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One means that Pena has chosen of reclaiming her history is through her involvement with the Black German Cultural Society, an international community that claims several thousand members in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Members of the Society include people of mixed German and African ancestry, as well as people of African descent who were born in Germany. BGCS works to increase awareness of Afro-German history and cultural contributions. For example, Nubian Queen reminds readers that Afro-Germans were among the victims of the Holocaust:

Did you know that in the 1920's, there were 24,000 Blacks living in Germany? Neither did I. Here's how it happened, and how many of them were eventually caught unawares by the events of the Holocaust....

Perhaps the best known contemporary Black German is Hans Massaquoi, a veteran journalist who startled many with his 1999 memoir, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. At that time, Kirkus reviews said of Massaquoi's book:

As a small boy, Massaquoi was "fascinated and ... more » moved" by Hitler and seduced by Nazi busywork and organized pageantry. Thus he felt exceptionally betrayed upon realizing that there was no place for a "non-Aryan" such as himself in the Reich. Although his devoted mutti protected him fiercely (his father had returned to Liberia), he encountered virulent abuse at school and was dehumanized by the Nuremburg Laws, which essentially barred him from public life, whether from a playground or from the Hitlerjugend, which all his chums joined. Things became much worse during the war years, when, perversely, he repeatedly escaped the worst fate by a hairbreadth. This included nearly being discovered "race mixing" by the SS and surviving the protracted fire bombing that leveled his beloved Hamburg.

Even those who consider themselves knowledgeable about German culture admit to ignorance about the black German experience. KJD ad Love German Books writes:

I was unaware that there have been black people here since French colonial troops occupied the Rhineland after WWI - most Afro-Germans I've known have one "non-German" parent. It also raised an issue I was aware of, but in a different context - the country's racist determination of nationality, based on "German blood". And it pays a lot of attention to language and the media - which is miles behind even Britain when it comes to showing black people and ethnic minorities in any other context than as criminals or victims. Or, of course, athletes and entertainers.

Actually, the Afro-German presence goes back even farther -- to at least the 18th century. Former African slaves and indentured servants joined the Hessian army, as allies of the British during the US Revolutionary War, and some of them emigrated to Germany when the colonists emerged victorious.

Other well-known Afro Germans include actor Boris Kodjoe, historian and archivist Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and poet May Ayim.

cross-posted at Professor Kim's News Notes