Following her acclaimed memoirs Against the Stream and Out of Passau, Anna Rosmus revisits the crimes perpetrated in her German hometown during the Second World War
Passau, a small Bavarian city situated along the border with Austria, had gone decades without acknowledging the roles—however small or large—its citizenry played in the atrocities of World War II. When Anna Rosmus attempted to rectify this oversight, she was met with praise from everywhere but Passau itself, where threats and vitriol from the local population eventually led her to emigrate from Germany to the United States. In Wintergreen, Rosmus writes of the prisoners of war and forced laborers, the Jews and other Eastern Europeans who lost their lives in Passau to the Nazi regime, and whose graves were hastily consigned to the cheapest plot of land in town.
Deftly researched and powerfully written, Wintergreen is a tragic history of the atrocities committed in and around Passau, a searing rebuke of those who seek to suppress them, and a moving tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and the importance of keeping their memory alive.
Anna Elisabeth Rosmus, from Passau, Germany, is an author, human rights activist, and the real-life heroine of the Academy Award–nominated film The Nasty Girl (1990). For thirty-three years she has dedicated her life to uncovering the Nazi past of her hometown in Bavaria and to combating neo-Nazis in Germany. The winner of numerous awards for her efforts in Europe, the Middle East, and North America, Rosmus represents to many the legacy of the Holocaust in memory, education, and action in the continuing struggle against bigotry and anti-Semitism.