About ninawolff

Nina Wolff is the author of Someday You Will Understand: My Father’s Private WWII. This riveting non-fiction narrative distills the harrowing, hilarious, and inspiring details of civilian and military life on both sides of the Atlantic. The vignettes, conversations, political reflections, humorous episodes, and vividly drawn people throughout the book are unforgettable. The memoir highlights her father's escape from Nazi-occupied Europe with his family at fifteen, his arrival to New York in 1941 just before Pearl Harbor, and sojourn as a refugee student at The Dwight School. Soon after graduation, he was drafted by the U.S. Army, returning to Europe two weeks after the death of President Roosevelt as part of an elite unit made up of refugees from war-torn Europe called the Ritchie Boys. Having reversed his role as a young Jew on the run in Europe, he occupied a position of authority in the U.S Army Intelligence Corps and he went from being persecuted to prosecuting his oppressors. Wolff’s book gained international attention and has been read and collected by libraries and universities around the world. Underwritten by The New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education and The Jewish Federation of Somerset, Hunterdon, and Warren Counties, she donated her collection of contemporary and WWII era research books, associated with Someday You Will Understand, to the Warren County Community College World War II & Holocaust Research Center in 2016. This ensures her commitment to Holocaust Education by giving community, faculty, staff, veterans, and scholars a place to learn about the Holocaust. Her work is recognized by the Belgian government for her contribution to Belgian Arts and Letters, she was an honored speaker at The United Nations on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and her book was the subject of a symposium at the International Organisation of La Francophonie, at the UN. Most recently Nina Wolff was awarded a grant by the CCDL foundation in Germany to fund groundbreaking research to study the building where her father lived before the Nazi invasion of Belgium in 1940. From the perspective of an imposing Art Deco building in Brussels formerly known as Le Résidence Palace, Nina Wolff’s new project aims to uncover the history of the building which houses the seat of the European Council and Council of the European Union and will examine European-American relations from the late 1930s to the late 1950s. This revolving door of history was once the largest residential building in Europe. Few are aware of its past. She is a graduate of Skidmore College and the Pratt Institute of Architecture. She is currently studying with Volker Berghahn, Seth Low Emeritus Professor of History at Columbia University supporting her latest research for her second book. As an independent scholar, Nina Wolff focuses on the continuation of Holocaust Education to mitigate anti-Semitism, all forms of racial hatred, and the continuing possibility of terrorism and genocide.