Anna Rosmus

When Safer first interviewed Rosmus in 1994, he asked if she had any suspicions about what she might discover. "No, not at all," she replied. "No idea what I could find, no idea what happened." Rosmus lived in Passau, a picture postcard of a town of 50,000 on the banks of the Danube. Passau is strictly Catholic. Its great cathedral is part of the heart and soul of every Passauer. Its values are old and homespun. Its food, drink and culture as German as good beer and old-fashioned Oom-pah-pah. Gemutlichkeit is the word for it: coziness. But for more than a decade now, Passauers have not been so cozy, because of the girl with the nasty questions. "Several of them used even the word 'shut up,' and 'Don't ask any more questions about this time.' 'Don't you think you ask nasty questions?'" Rosmus recalled. The questions were all about World War II: "What did you do in the war, Passau?" The answers were in vivid black and white in the archives. Back then, Passau took great pride in its Nazi connection. Rosmus' history odyssey began 13 years ago when she entered a national high school essay competition and chose as her subject: "My Hometown During the Third Reich." Her belief that Passau had resisted was dashed when she found in the archive an old newspaper, one that had been edited by a family friend. "I couldn't believe it. There was not at all anything about resistance," she recalled. "There were anti-Semitic articles; there were hatred-filled articles, anti-democratic articles." The more she looked, the more she asked, the more she found: priests who were active Nazis; virtually every prominent family represented in the party long before it came to power. "What I found was just awful," she said. "The bishop himself told me, 'We haven't had Jews in town, no. Passau was such a small town, we've never seen Jews.'" But she traced a Jewish woman in New York who knew the bishop very well. "This bishop, Antonius Hoffman, was sitting at the same school bank as she did for years and years in Passau," Rosmus said. "In the same classroom, beside her. These both were sitting together for years" The woman's family was forced out, as were most of the 400 other Jews of Passau. And all of their property, much of which is now a fashionable shopping mall, was confiscated and "Aryanized." "The mayor of Passau picked out several of them personally and brought them to the train station and told them, 'Now you have to leave forever," she added. Her school essay won a prize. It was followed by a book, then two more books. And to Passau's dismay, a movie called The Nasty Girl was made, portraying Rosmus' efforts and the town's anger and faulty memory. It became an international hit in 1990. The movie also dealt with the obstruction she faced when she sought particular files from the local archives. "At first I had to sue them to get access, then they told me they lost it," she recalled. "It happened over and over again." "Wherever crimes have happened, I think we have to go for the perpetrators, and we have to find out what happened with the victims," Rosmus said. She found out about some of the victims. She discovered that no one in Passau wanted to talk about them or about the eight concentration camps in the area - three in town, five in the countryside. And what shocked her most was what she found out about a memorial to the victims put up by survivors after the war: a little plot hidden by trees with a wall containing six tablets bearing the names of 250 Jews who perished. Today there are no names. "An official reason was never given," Rosmus said. "They said just at first, 'Therhas never been an inscriptions.'" She went to Israel and found photographs of the memorial's dedication. Under enlargement, it's just possible to read the names of the dead. "I asked back, 'What happened?'" she recalled. "The official answer was, 'Well, it must have been the bad weather; all the snow and all the rain in Bavaria (that) washed them out.'" "