Zach Eaton - Edith Coliver

       Edith Coliver was born July 26th of 1922 in the town of Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Coliver was the ordinary child, interested in sports, especially track and field, loved to do arts & crafts, draw, and was very good at poetry. Coliver’s father found a way to get her a Visa even though the waiting list to receive a Visa was over ten years long. In June of 1938 her whole family left Germany and set sail for New York. There they stayed for a few weeks before traveling through the Panama Canal to San Francisco. The Coliver family arrived in San Francisco on Halloween in 1938. There the family resided in a two story house, where later Coliver’s grandmother passed away due to cancer. Edith went to George Washington High School during the war. After the war was over, Coliver became an interpreter for the judicial trials of the German Generals. This was almost like being the prosecuting attorney in a trial. Most of the Generals committed suicide before they could even get to court. During her return to Geremany, Edith ran into an old classmate from her secular school in Karlsruhe. They talked about all the other classmates until they got to a particular classmate who had died; they left the conversation at that, no goodbye, no anything. They were too embarrassed to continue. Coliver was the first female to be the head of the program committee of the Commonwealth Club, and in the Asia Foundation. Coliver has been married for 31 years, and was married in the house she lived in when she first came to America. She has two daughters who are happily married. Her youngest daughter is actually the founder of the “Human Rights Advocates” association.

1. “I went to Germany not with a sense of revenge, but with a sense of curiosity, what makes people do the things they do.”
 2. “I trust the people more that say they were powerless, not the ones that said they didn’t know what was going on.”