Regina Steinberg has spent more than 40 years as a volunteer helping the mentally ill at Springfield Hospital Center and other institutions.
She says her work honors the American family who took her into their home when she was a refugee, and the Nazi who paid for her freedom with his.
Mrs. Steinberg, a Jew, now 70, fled Nazi Germany at the age of 12.
She said she was saved by the foresight and courage of Wilhelm Horlacher, a Nazi, who was her family's landlord.
Mr. Horlacher paid for his actions in a concentration camp; he was turned in by his adopted daughter for aiding Jews.
Wilhelm Horlacher "was the Nazi leader in our town," she said.
He was also the family's landlord in Merchingen, a farm community of 700 people northwest of Munich.
"He and his wife lived on the first floor," Mrs. Steinberg said. Mr. Horlacher's father lived on the third floor. Regina Hamburg and her family lived on the second floor.
The Horlachers were childless, she said, and accepted the Hamburg children as part of their family.
"We called him Uncle," she said, "and his wife was Aunt Anna."
The Horlachers were sent to a concentration camp -- Mrs. Steinberg has never discovered which one -- after their 12-year-old adopted daughter, Hedwig, a member of the Hitler Youth, turned them in.
Many town residents joined the Nazi party in the early days of the Third Reich. Some, Mrs. Steinberg said, believed only the Nazis could salvage the wrecked German economy.
The true nature of the Third Reich didn't make itself obvious in the countryside as early as it did in the cities, she said.
Mrs. Steinberg said she is not bitter toward the old neighbors and friends who joined the Nazi party. "I can understand," she said, "because they were promised the sky."
Later, she said, most gentiles in her town joined the Nazi movement.
"They had to, whether they wanted to or not," she said.
Regina's father, Isaak Hamburg, made and repaired boots for a living. Eventually, the Nazis banned gentiles from doing business with him.
But many townspeople circumvented the rule. They arranged clandestine drop-offs with Mr. Hamburg, leaving their shoes and boots for him in barns and haystacks.
When the Nazis began searching Jewish homes for contraband and valuables, the Hamburgs' neighbors tried to protect them.
