Natalie B. Hess

Natalie Hess was born to a Jewish family in Piotrków Trybunalski, a small town in Poland. She was a tiny child when Nazi Germany invaded her country in World War II. When her parents were rounded up and deported to the Treblinka concentration camp, a Polish family temporarily hid six-year-old Natalie. She was then forced into her city’s Jewish ghetto, before being sent to a slave-labor camp and finally to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She survived and was liberated at age nine.

She was taken to Sweden to recuperate and grew to love her new home. At age 16, she was claimed by relatives in the USA and uprooted again, moving to Evansville, Indiana.
She mastered English and ultimately earned a PhD degree in literature. She married John Hess, with whom she had three children. The family spent several years in Israel, before returning to the USA and settling in Arizona. Natalie spent many years as a high school teacher in both the USA and Israel, and worked as an English as a second language (ESL) instructor and teacher-educator in England, Mexico, and Taiwan. She's the author of several textbooks and teacher resource books, including Finding Family (2011), Teaching Large Multi-Leel Classes (2011), and Stories with a Twist (1999). In 2020, she published a memoir called Remembering Ravensbrück: Holocaust to Healing.