Werner, Emmy Elizabeth 1929–

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WERNER, Emmy Elizabeth 1929–

PERSONAL: Born May 26, 1929, in Eltville, West Germany; immigrated to United States, 1952; naturalized citizen, 1962; daughter of Peter Josef (a businessman) and Liesel (Kunz) Werner. Education: Johannes Gutenberg Universität (Mainz, Germany), B.A., 1950; University of Nebraska—Lincoln, M.A., 1952, Ph.D., 1955; University of California—Berkeley, graduate study, 1953–54.

ADDRESSES: Home—2330 Haste, #402, Berkeley, CA 94704. Office—209 Walker Hall, University of California—Davis, CA 95616.

CAREER: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, assistant professor and research associate, 1956–59; National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, visiting scientist, 1959–62; University of California—Davis, assistant professor, 1962–65; associate professor, 1965–69, professor of human development, 1969–94; University of California—Berkeley, associate child psychologist, 1965–69. Consultant to UNICEF, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Child Development, and Office of International Activities.

MEMBER: American Psychological Association, Society for Research in Child Development, Institute of International Education, Psi Chi, Phi Lambda Theta.

AWARDS, HONORS: Various research grants; Elsie Worcester Memorial Award for exceptional accomplishment in the area of special education, 1974; scholarly awards for contributions to child development studies; Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award, University of California, 2000.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) The Teen-Age Parent: Early Marriage and Childbearing, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1967.

(With J. Bierman and F. French) The Children of Kauai: A Longitudinal Study from the Prenatal Period to Age Ten, University of Hawaii Press (Honolulu, HI), 1971.

(With Ruth S. Smith) Kauai's Children Come of Age, University of Hawaii Press (Honolulu, HI), 1977.

Cross-Cultural Child Development: A View from the Planet Earth, edited by Elaine Linden, illustrated by Lori Gilbo, Brooks/Cole (Monterey, CA), 1979.

(With Ruth S. Smith) Vulnerable, but Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of Resilient Children and Youth, foreword by Norman Garmezy, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1982.

Child Care: Kith, Kin, and Hired Hands, University Park Press (Baltimore, MD), 1984.

(Compiler, with Joyce Hassan-Williams) California's Minority Youth in Transition: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography, Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1987.

(With Ruth S. Smith) Overcoming the Odds: High Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1992.

(With Ruth S. Smith) Journeys from Childhood to Midlife: Risk, Resilience, and Recovery, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1992, 2001.

Pioneer Children on the Journey West, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1995.

Reluctant Witnesses: Children's Voices from the Civil War, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1998.

Through the Eyes of Innocents: Children Witness World War II, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 2000.

A Conspiracy of Decency: The Rescue of the Danish Jews During World War II, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 2002.

Contributor to Women in Politics, edited by Jane S. Jaquette, Wiley Interscience, 1974; contributor of articles to journals, including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and Journal of Social Psychology.

SIDELIGHTS: Child development specialist Emmy Elizabeth Werner has written a number of studies related to her field, as well as later books that focus on children in various historical settings. One of these, Reluctant Witnesses: Children's Voices from the Civil War, relates approximately 400,000 children were directly involved with that war. The youngest of these were drummers and buglers, while the older boys fought as soldiers. Werner draws on letters and diaries, including the writings of an Atlanta boy who wrote that he watched starving Union troops eating fruit from his family's vineyard like "a flock of hungry blue-birds." Laura Green commented in the New York Times Book Review that "the best stories are the least-told tales of former slave children." These include Werner's story of Susie King, who taught emancipated children and soldiers to read in a Union camp.

Werner studies a later generation of children in Through the Eyes of Innocents: Children Witness World War II, again using diaries and memoirs in offering two hundred accounts of American, European, and Asian children as she chronologically tracks the war. Included are letters sent between General Dwight D. Eisenhower and a seventh-grade girl in Ohio, accounts of young soldiers who witnessed the invasion of Normandy, and the stories of orphans and survivors. Photographs show children participating in gas mask drills and Japanese children being relocated to camps. Booklist contributor Vanessa Bush called the book "a poignant account of war from the perspective of children."

Werner was a child exposed to war, a survivor who later immigrated to the United States with her family. History Cooperative reviewer Donna L. Boutelle wrote: "That fact and her own experience surely adds an intensity to this study and makes it better." But Boutelle noted that Werner is not a historian, saying that "the contrasts between such groups as the British children (sad, but very plump) and the Dutch kids starving in the Dutch East Indies is apples and oranges. Contrast Japanese-American kids playing baseball in Boston with Japanese children walking in the ruins of Nagasaki and imagine, if you can, that such experiences are somehow comparable."

In A Conspiracy of Decency: The Rescue of the Danish Jews During World War II, Werner provides the history of how Denmark, with a population of approximately 4.5 million people, saved nearly all of the Jews living there. She begins in 1940, with the start of the German invasion, documents the resistance movement, and ends in 1945, when the Jews returned from their exile. During three weeks in October 1943, seven thousand Jews and seven hundred of their non-Jewish family members were smuggled into neutral Sweden. Werner questions whether this mass exodus could have been carried out without the cooperation of German occupiers and cites specifics, including warnings by Germans and an instance when the German Coast Guard placed their ships in dry dock, enabling the Danish fishing boats with their cargo of fleeing Jews to pass untouched to the Swedish coast. Werner suggests various reasons why the escapes were made easier, including the small number who sought escape, the fact that many Germans opposed the war against the Jews, and because the German occupation was comparatively less brutal than the occupation of other regions. She notes as a factor the courage of King Christian X, who every morning rode his horse through the streets of Copenhagen, and who acknowledged "the greetings of the Danes with a salute, a handshake, or a smile," but "who never responded to the salute of the German soldiers who sprang to attention as he passed." Some 450 Danes were captured by the Germans and sent to a camp in Czechoslovakia, but none were killed, the result of Danish lobbying.

Shofar reviewer Andrew Buckser felt that Werner "paints this picture with broad strokes, leaving out many of the inconsistencies that historians have identified in the behavior of the actors. The Danes appear mainly as saints, while the complexities and contradictions of German actions are largely ignored; as a scholarly study, this depiction of the rescue would be a very weak one. But for those new to the story of the rescue, these chapters bring the events of the time vividly to life." Buckser felt that the experiences of Jewish children provide "some of the most moving stories" and noted that "the episodes Werner includes are undeniably affecting, the kinds of stories which have made the rescue an icon of moral courage during the Holocaust."

Werner once told CA that her motivation for writing is "to share with others the joys of children, travel, other cultures, the miracle of growth, the plight of those who battle against great biological or environmental risks." She has traveled extensively in Africa, India, Nepal, Indonesia, Thailand, and Israel. In addition to English and German, she speaks French, Spanish, and some Swahili.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 1997, review of Pioneer Children on the Journey West, p. 182.

American Journal of Sociology, January, 1993, review of Overcoming the Odds: High Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood, p. 986.

Bloomsbury Review, July, 1995, review of Pioneer Children on the Journey West, p. 21.

Booklist, May 1, 1998, Roland Green, review of Reluctant Witnesses: Children's Voices from the Civil War, p. 1500; December 1, 1999, Vanessa Bush, review of Through the Eyes of Innocents: Children Witness World War II, p. 683; November 15, 2002, George Cohen, review of A Conspiracy of Decency: The Rescue of the Danish Jews During World War II, p. 567.

Children Today, September-October, 1985, Gail Gordon, review of Child Care: Kith, Kin, and Hired Hands, p. 34.

Journal of Southern History, November, 1999, review of Reluctant Witnesses, p. 872.

Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, November, 1993, H. D. Dunton, review of Overcoming the Odds, p. 1310.

Library Journal, November 1, 1999, David Keymer, review of Through the Eyes of Innocents, p. 109.

New York Times Book Review, August 2, 1998, Laura Green, review of Reluctant Witnesses, p. 17.

Pacific Historical Review, May, 1996, review of Pioneer Children on the Journey West, p. 327.

Publishers Weekly, November 4, 2002, review of A Conspiracy of Decency, p. 76.

Shofar, spring, 2004, Andrew Buckser, review of A Conspiracy of Decency, p. 158.

Washington Times, December 31, 2002, Arnold Beichman, review of A Conspiracy of Decency.