Windsor – When Jean Messinger heard of a local woman who had survived a Nazi concentration camp, competed in the 1954 Winter Olympics and later became a globe-trotting businesswoman, she knew she had to write about her.
The woman’s life was the type of story that had always enamored the 76-year-old former teacher and architectural historian: ordinary people triumphing over extraordinary odds.
“Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods don’t interest me at all,” Messinger said. “But people like Hannah do.”
Messinger met the woman about a year ago and began interviewing her once a week for nine months. The result is “Hannah: From Dachau to the Olympics and Beyond.”
Hannah’s last name is never mentioned in the book and Messinger refuses to divulge it. The anonymity is at the request of Hannah, who fears retribution from neo-Nazis and others who claim the Holocaust – the systematic killing of 6 million Jews by Germany – never happened.
Messinger self-published the 144-page account of Hannah’s life. It has recently been released and is now in Front Range bookstores.
That’s due mostly to a heavy marketing campaign by Messinger, who wanted complete oversight over her work to make sure Hannah’s tale would not be compromised by a long-distance publishing house.
“You don’t have any control over your work,” she said. “They’ll do whatever they want with it, and you have no say whatsoever.”
Messinger is happy with the quality of “Hannah,” as is the subject of the book. “I think she is pleased and proud,” Messinger said.
Others are impressed as well.
“Messinger has captured the inner being of Hannah, and without editorializing, reveals the challenges and hardships of Hannah’s life,” said professor Barry Rothaus, chair of the history department at the University of Northern Colorado.
Hannah was three when she and her doctor parents, all German citizens, were shipped in a railroad boxcar to Dachau in 1941. “I remember that it smelled terrible, people all over, some lying down. At the time I didn’t know they were dead,” Hannah recalls in the book.
Once at the camp, she was separated from her parents and never saw them again.
The camp was liberated by American troops in April 1945 and Hannah was taken in by German nuns who ran a convent in the Bavarian Alps. The nuns clothed, fed and educated her and taught her how to ski. She was chosen to train with the German Olympic team and participated in the 1956 games in Cortina, Italy.
She left the convent and served briefly in the Israeli army. Her later life included losing a husband in Vietnam and her only son in a plane crash.
Hannah became a travel guide and trekked all over the globe. Now in her 60s, she has since settled in northern Colorado and helps run a hotel, Messinger said.
“I want her story to be seen as an inspiring story,” Messinger said. “I want people who read this to feel renewed.”
Staff writer Monte Whaley can be reached at 720-929-0907 or mwhaley@denverpost.com.
