Gabrielle Robinson Boeken

Focusing on the first German immigrants to northern Indiana, this book details their pivotal role in transforming South Bend from a trading post into a bustling industrial hub between the 1840s and 1870s. It utilizes personal accounts, public documents, and over 200 letters to reveal the settlers' daily lives and connections to their homeland. Additionally, contributions from descendants enrich the narrative, offering genealogies and stories that create a comprehensive portrait of the immigrant experience and the development of the region.

After her mother's death, Gabrielle Robinson found diaries her grandfather had kept while serving as doctor in Berlin 1945-only to discover that her beloved Api had been a Nazi.

Robinson was mainly brought up by her grandparents. Her grandfather, known to her as Api, was an opthalmologist. Forty years after his death, she discovered a diary that he had kept beginning in April 1945, when he had left her and her grandmother in the countryside and returned to Berlin. Api had been an army doctor and as such, however reluctantly, he had had to join the Nazi Party. His diary is a heart-rending account of what is was like to live in Berlin as Hitler's Reich collapsed-- the hunger, the disease, the bombing, the threat of retribution from the occupiers-- and his struggle to survive, to shake off the stigma of being a Party member, to rebuild his life and to return to his beloved wife and granddaughter.

In 1950, a group of African American workers at the Studebaker factory in South Bend met in secret. Their mission was to build homes away from the factories and slums where they were forced to live. They came from the South to make a better life for themselves and their children, but they found Jim Crow in the North as well. The meeting gave birth to Better Homes of South Bend, and a triumph against the entrenched racism of the times took all their courage, intelligence and perseverance. Author Gabrielle Robinson tells the story of their struggle and provides an intimate glimpse into a pan of history that all too often is forgotten. Book jacket.