GERMAN DAY OF DEFIANCE MARKED

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, February 26, 1993                   TAG: 9302260056
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BERLIN                                LENGTH: Short
GERMAN DAY OF DEFIANCE MARKED
Charlotte Israel refused to fade away when the Nazis seized her Jewish husband. Blinded by rage, emboldened by love, she stood in the street and stared down the guns until he came home.
Fifty years later, she and hundreds of other such women are finally being honored as the rarest sort of Germans: People who publicly defied this century's most evil regime and won.
Sunday is the anniversary of the heart-stopping stand made by the "Rose Street Women," distraught wives who gathered on a Berlin street on Feb. 28, 1943, and successfully blocked the deportation - and likely deaths - of their Jewish husbands.
At a news conference Thursday marking the occasion, historians marveled at a classic case of peaceful protest almost unheard of during the Nazi era.
A new book and film about the incident also were announced, and a statue will be unveiled Sunday that seeks to enshrine these women in the sparsely populated pantheon of Germans who publicly opposed Adolf Hitler's slaughter of 6 million Jews and several million others.
Charlotte Israel, since widowed and remarried and now Charlotte Freudentheil, quietly sat in the press rows.
"Naturally, we all expected to die," the 82-year-old Berliner said softly. "I would not leave until my Julius came home. I could not."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB