Clara Leiser

Clara Leiser ( 1898 – May 11, 1991 studying with the linguist and poet William Ellery Leonard, among others. She was a graduate of the class of 1924. She worked with young refugees who were displaced by European fascism, and this led her in 1944 to found Youth of All Nations (YOAN), By 1955, YOAN was active worldwide; then-Senator Hubert Humphrey spoke out for the organization in the Senate in 1955, and entered a plea for support by Leiser, and quotations from letters by young people from various parts of the world who had built correspondence friendships through YOAN, into the Congressional Record.

Leiser died in 1991 in Manhattan of congestive heart failure at age 93.

Anti-Nazi scholarship and publications Leiser became friends with Mildred Harnack while studying at the University of Wisconsin, early in the 1920s. Leiser visited Harnack and her husband, Arvid Harnack, in Europe, and Harnack stayed with her in 1937, when Leiser lived in New York. which contained an interview with an anonymous director of a Nazi prison, who described the conditions inside the prison. Leiser noted that "this official does not resign his position or leave Germany because he feels that he can best fight the regime by keeping eyes and ears open as to who is in prison and why, so far as any one person can become so informed, and by treating the people in his charge with as much decency as he can 'get away with.'"

One of Leiser's goals in Nazi Germany was to collect information on the family members of political prisoners; in 1940, she translated, edited, and published Refugee, the autobiographical account by Hilde Koch. The German anti-Nazi activist met Leiser, introduced by a friend, after she had experienced that her husband, F. Koch, was imprisoned in Sonnenburg concentration camp and was released; Koch told Leiser with growing trust of her experiences, and later described the act of sharing oppressing secrets as comforting and liberating. (Koch: "Es tat ja so unendlich gut sich einmal aussprechen zu koennen.) Einmal etwas herunterzureden von all dem was da in der Brust verschlossen aufgespeichert war." (It did feel so good to be able to talk things out for once. To be able to talk down something from all that was stored in my heart.)

When she learned of the execution of her friend Mildred Harnack by the Nazis in 1943, she wrote a poem of 18 pages, "To and from the guillotine", remembering and imagining stations of her life and death in detail.