Ruth Rahn Budd

From Generation to Generation: a Family Story Ruth Rahn Budd

From Generation to Generation is a family history, based largely on personal documents and letters, of a wealthy, educated and integrated Jewish family tracing their roots back to 1666. The extraordinary story of how my family got out of Nazi Germany in 1939 is unique and incredibly suspenseful. Escape was made possible ultimately by a decision of Homer Cummings, Attorney General of the United States, reported on the front page of the New York Times, and enabling many others to emigrate. My mother was the last Jew to receive her Ph. D. from her university in Erlangen. This degree, revoked by the Nazis, was reinstated (along with others) in 1999 by the university, which established an annual award for the best Ph. D. dissertation, named for her having written the best thesis of all those that had been revoked. The saga of my mother's degree says much about Germany's attempts to deal with its past. Its author, Ruth Rahn Budd, came with her family as a 2 1/2 year old. She is a retired lawyer living in Lexington, MA.