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Oral history interview with Max Knight

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1999.A.0122.771 | RG Number: RG-50.477.0771

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    Oral history interview with Max Knight
    Transcript
    Today is November 15, 1990.
    I am Peggy Coster, an interviewer
    with the Holocaust Oral History Project
    of San Francisco, California.
    Today we are talking with Max Knight.
    Assisting in the interview today is Jack Clarke.
    Good morning, Mr. Knight.
    Could you just begin by telling us where you were born
    and when?
    I was born in 1909 in Austria.
    My hometown is Vienna.
    My family comes from the German-speaking part
    of what then was Bohemia, the Sudetenland.
    It was a middle-class family.
    My father was a director of a branch bank in Pilsen
    outside that German area and later in Vienna
    was vice president of a major bank, Bankverein Creditanstalt,
    which still exists.
    I grew up in a very sheltered atmosphere.
    My name was not Knight.
    It was a German name or a German-sounding name, Kühnel,
    K-U-H-N-E-L with an umlaut over the U. And to jump the gun,
    I changed it on the advice of friends just before--
    at the moment of my emigration to the United States
    because that was just briefly before the outbreak of the war
    at Pearl Harbor.
    War was expected and anticipated,
    and my friends told me that during the First World War
    German-sounding names were a problem.
    There was great antagonism against Germans,
    and it turned out that this was not at all the case
    in the Second World War.
    In fact, the Germans were more the darlings
    than anything else in later years.
    And sometimes I was thinking of changing that back
    because there was really no reason otherwise.
    I did not do so because it just would
    have been too complicated with all the documents,
    and accounts, and whatnot.
    Also, in the meantime, I got married.
    My wife is American-born.
    My children-- I have two sons.
    Both are born in this country.
    So they are the rightful bearer of this name,
    although I myself feel I'm not--
    --second
    Eight seconds before we can begin.
    So as I was saying, it was just too much commotion
    to change the name back, and so I left it the way
    it was, although in the early years
    I felt uncomfortable with an English-sounding name,
    especially when I was with my own kind,
    and it was obvious that the name could not
    have been my real name.
    Meanwhile, I got quite used to it,
    and it may amuse whoever ever sees this thing here
    to learn why I, in later life, wrote books,
    and when the first one was published
    under this name, Knight, and I saw fine reviews
    in the literary section of the newspapers I
    was happy to identify with that name.
    So ever since then I feel all right.
    So to get back , I went to grade school and to middle school
    in Vienna.
    Middle school was the gymnasium, meaning the classic school,
    the one that feeds you six years of Greek and eight
    years of Latin, which later on turned out much more useful
    than I thought it ever could be.
    I'm referring to Latin, particularly.
    And it had also got me interested in languages.
    I dabbled in several, and I'm very
    fond of studying languages.
    I have in later years--
    well, we'll come to that, what I later studied.
    So I graduated from that classic high school in 1928,
    and I went on to the university in Vienna.
    For five years I studied law.
    I graduated in law, got my JD in 1933,
    and that was also the year in which Hitler took over
    in Germany.
    Now, there were five more years to go, from 33 to 38,
    when he took over in Austria, so these were the five breathers,
    you might say.
    Unlike other people who had to interrupt their studies
    or gave up their jobs, break up with their family,
    I was very fortunate that, if I had
    to leave the country, if I had to leave my home,
    it could not, ironically, have been at a better time, before I
    took roots, before I had a wife, before I had a permanent job.
    So these five years, the years of gestation, you might say,
    of the political situation, was one that worried me very much.
    I saw the build-up of armament in Germany.
    I saw the growing militancy of the Nazi Party.
    And yet I felt isolated in seeing this.
    It must be remembered that Austria was the first country
    taken over by Hitler.
    There was no precedent, so my pessimism of what might come
    seemed unjustified.
    Jewry in Europe was emancipated.
    I had learned in history the Emperor
    Joseph, Joseph II of Austria, had
    emancipated the Jews in 1782.
    They had become citizens of equal right.
    There was supposed to be no more discrimination.
    There was religious discrimination in Austria--
    I'm saying religious rather than racial discrimination--
    in the early years, earlier years,
    but that did not affect me at all.
    My family was totally acculturated.
    I did not know my Jewish descent until I was a teenager.
    It was never mentioned.
    It was never practiced.
    I mean the religion was never practiced.
    There was no such thing as diets, holidays.
    I was a lost cause for two days.
    I felt simply as an Austrian and nothing else.
    But I was very interested in the political situation,
    although I was not a political person.
    I was a literary person.
    I wrote stories, poetry.
    My first production was actually printed
    when I was seven years old.
    There was a contest that was during the First World
    War, a contest by a women's magazine,
    "How Do Our Children See the War?"
    It was a well-known women's magazine.
    Die Frau und Mutter was the name.
    And I had once written longhand with pencil on line paper
    a poem about the war, and how the soldiers suffered,
    and how they were hungry and froze in the woods, the way
    I imagined that.
    And without my knowing it, my mother
    sent that in in the original handwriting.
    I didn't know anything about this
    until many years later when, lo and behold,
    I found a clipping my father's desk which told about that,
    that I had won the first prize in this contest.
    I'd won the prize because the submissions were always
    very patriotic, and hurrah, and flag-flying, and soldiers
    on high horses.
    It was all very, very wonderful.
    So I was the pessimist even then.
    I remember how my father, shortly after my mother had
    sent it in without my knowing this,
    got up at lunchtime one time rather formally
    and read from a paper the fact that here this Max
    Kühnel had won the prize for this and that.
    Well, I paid no attention to this at all.
    And my father used to write things presumably
    from the newspaper-- to read things all the time.
    I couldn't read this until just a year ago.
    I did this the second year of grade school.
    And my father was in the habit of, quote,
    "reading from the newspaper" what my mother told him I
    had done wrong during the day.
    I had broken this dish or this or that,
    and look what I read in the newspaper,
    you have broken a dish.
    So I thought I knew what this was all about,
    paid no attention until those years later.
    Well, anyway, during my high school days and universities
    I wrote short stories, many, many of them,
    and they were readily printed and published
    in magazines and newspapers.
    They were short.
    They had a little unexpected twist at the end.
    They were lightweight, humorous.
    And so I became quite well-known in those years
    under a pen name, Peter Fabrizius.
    In the final years of this period between '33 and '38
    I collaborated with a friend who was a fellow student in law
    school who also wrote, and we formed a great friendship.
    We wanted to write jointly, and although this
    seems a difficult thing to do.
    We found a way, and we jointly published in later years--
    published these stories under that name of Peter Fabrizius.
    In 1937, the last year before Hitler took over,
    I avidly read a little magazine that
    was published in Germany, Das Neue Tagebuch, well, originally
    Das Tagebuch, later Das Neue Tagebuch.
    And this paper published articles
    well-researched, well-reasoned, and well-written
    about things which I didn't read in the daily press
    about Hitler's growing power, rearming, stoking
    the factories.
    And I became more and more disturbed about this.
    It was, as it turned out later, very important that I
    read this.
    Although this magazine had a relatively small circulation,
    it was more intelligent.
    It was more better-reasoned.
    I would compare it, if you can compare anything
    of that sort, vaguely with The New Republic here
    or The Nation.
    They didn't go in for advertising but the facts.
    And this made me perhaps, you might say--
    well, I was going to say prematurely.
    It was not at all prematurely.
    It was very timely--
    aware of what turned out to be the real political situation.
    I was worried, disturbed, and lonesome,
    and I talked about it.
    People would say, uh-huh.
    I was tossing in bed during the night.
    What to do about this?
    I saw this avalanche of barbarism,
    and I finally came to the conclusion
    that the only thing to do was--
    and it took me a long time to come to this conclusion--
    to go abroad, not to emigrate, to go abroad for a visit
    and try to establish a place so that in case this avalanche
    should really come and roll over us
    I would have a place of refuge.
    Israel did not exist in those days, the normal haven.
    Besides, I doubt that I would have chosen it.
    I was just a plain Austrian.
    And so in the fall of 1937 I went to England.
    It was a great decision for a young fellow
    who had no particular reason to do that, no apparent reason.
    But I said right away when they asked me, why do you do that--
    I said, well, I just want to dig myself a mouse hole
    to crawl into if this is necessary.
    Well, I tried to publish my stories in England.
    England in those days was very, very conservative.
    My stories didn't seem to fit there.
    I went from one to another.
    And then came a decisive interview with one editor
    there, a fiction editor, for a newspaper called the Daily
    Herald, and mass circulation, five-million-readers newspaper.
    And he, to get rid of me, said, even
    if everything were fine with your stories
    and if it did meet the taste of our readers,
    they are much too short.
    We have a page assigned for short stories,
    and we have to fill this.
    This is tradition.
    This is a custom.
    This is the policy we have here.
    And then I said, well, if my stories are too short,
    why don't you use two on one page?
    Well, that caught him unprepared,
    and he thought it was funny for me to say such a thing.
    You have to imagine the stereotypical Englishman.
    We have a paper.
    The page is that long, and you have to have a story, not
    two stories.
    But it amused him somehow that I had said that,
    and I said, what can you lose?
    Try it one day.
    Our stories were translated into 13 different languages
    all over Europe.
    Why should they not appeal to the Englishman here?
    So he did this.
    He really-- the day came when he printed two stories by Peter
    Fabrizius on that one page, and I
    had said before, if it doesn't take,
    you don't ever have to take another story from me.
    You cannot risk so very much--
    you do not risk very much doing that.
    And so he did it, and it turned out to be a bang-up success.
    And he then ordered a whole dozen of those stories
    and announced a series of them in the paper saying next week
    we will print the whole week nothing but these stories.
    Well, you can imagine the triumph.
    And I returned, after this, back to Vienna, and I thought,
    I do have a niche now.
    If something happens, I can go to England
    and publish my stories and can live on that.
    What I failed to mention was that these stories
    were in English, of course, but I didn't know English.
    My stories had been written in German.
    And in view of what happened in later years--
    and to jump the gun again, I'm today a professional translator
    and have more than a dozen books on my shelves translated.
    In those days, I had to hunt for a translator,
    and I couldn't promise to translate anything
    except perhaps sharing the proceeds.
    It was on speculation.
    These people-- and I had several because I wasn't satisfied
    with the first, or the second, or the third, or the fourth.
    I tried so many because I wanted idiomatic English that
    didn't sound translated.
    As a matter of fact, I had to ask the translator to forgo
    even mentioning of his name.
    I said, otherwise I cannot succeed.
    And I turned over the entire proceeds to him and said,
    you can have all of this.
    I merely want to establish myself.
    So I came back to Vienna, and we are now talking
    about the first weeks of 1938.
    I cannot at this point here-- and I don't expect it to be
    necessary, to give you a background of went
    on, a historical, political background except to say that
    Hitler was in the last stages of taking over Austria.
    And the demonstrations in the streets, the increasing
    brutalities of those SS men, the SA men in the streets accosting
    of people in the streets who they suspected of not having
    the blue blood that they desired,
    the increase in terrorism, the setting off
    of bombs in movie theaters, all that--
    and to me, it all seemed to merely confirm
    what I had read in this journal I was mentioning, the Tagebuch.
    And then came the dramatic day on which
    the last chancellor of Austria, Schuschnigg
    called on the Austrians to have a plebiscite on March
    the 13th to decide whether they want
    to have an independent Austria or whether they wanted
    to be taken over by Hitler.
    Well, I felt that was such a crucial historical parting
    of the ways, and I couldn't see how this small country could
    really resist the big, powerful neighbor of Germany.
    I packed my suitcase and had it ready on the 11 of March,
    two days before the announced plebiscite, Friday.
    I was with my parents, sitting around the dinner table.
    The radio was on.
    We listened to the news.
    And I heard that last Austrian chancellor, this Kurt
    Schuschnigg, say that Austria was
    in the process of being taken over, that he had to resign.
    And his last words were, God save Austria.
    When I heard that, I said to my mother,
    please call the Western railroad station
    and ask when the next train is leaving for England.
    Nowadays we think in terms of when does the next plane go,
    but there was no such thing then.
    When there were-- planes existed,
    but the normal way of traveling was by train.
    And I heard my mother speak on the phone
    with the depot of the railroad station, and I heard her say,
    9:00?
    That is too soon.
    When does the next one go?
    And I cut in, and I called to her, saying, never mind,
    never mind.
    I'll catch that one, the first one.
    But it was only 8:00.
    There was only an hour to go.
    Well, I went to my room.
    I closed the already-packed suitcase in a hurry,
    in such a hurry that when I finally arrived in England
    there was still--
    there was a spoon lying on top of my clothes
    and my things which I had held my hand and dropped then.
    Well, I reached that railroad station right
    in the middle of jubilant Nazi formations
    that cut off our way in several places,
    but the taxi driver got through.
    I caught the train.
    I said goodbye to my father.
    There were only three people who caught
    that very, very first train immediately after the takeover.
    Were there three or four?
    I'll come to that.
    In your book you said four.
    I beg your pardon?
    In your book you said four.
    Four people, four people, yes.
    And if you visualize the map of Central Europe,
    Austria is what you might call a horizontal country,
    long-stretched from the Hungarian border
    to the Swiss border, and Vienna is at the extreme right,
    the extreme eastern point.
    We were only an hour away from Hungary.
    And so we had to travel all night to the Swiss border,
    not knowing whether we would get through or not.
    The train indeed was stopped at many places,
    and I saw the Nazi guards on the platform of the various towns.
    And you never knew whether they would come in or do something
    or whether they would leave you alone.
    It was high tension atmosphere in that compartment.
    We spent a long time in Salzburg,
    which is sort of halfway, not quite on the way.
    As it later turned out, we did pass Salzburg.
    Going from east to west we went like that,
    and the Nazi troops came in from north to south like this.
    But I just missed them, you see?
    Like that, within hours, perhaps less.
    I cannot describe the terrible pressure and tension that
    prevailed during those hours between Vienna and the border.
    Shortly before the border one of the other three
    was taken from the train by two Nazis
    who came in the last station before the border
    and took him away.
    We didn't know why.
    In fact, they took all three away.
    They left me alone.
    What happened, why I was passed I will never know.
    Perhaps I looked least conspicuous,
    a young fellow going, as I had claimed,
    to see my fiancee in England.
    They asked me, why are you going there?
    I didn't have any package.
    I didn't have any money.
    They left me alone.
    But they took out the other three.
    And the train started going again.
    After a few minutes, however, one of the fellows
    came back, and shortly after the other one,
    another one, but never the third one,
    and I don't know what happened to him.
    Those two were not saying a word.
    One was furiously smoking.
    They all didn't want to say what happened to them.
    And then we reached the Swiss border and passed the border,
    and I saw Swiss uniforms on the station
    there, one of the great moments in my life.
    I knew that I had escaped.
    This was the first of several escapes.
    One of the two men who had come back told us--
    and now he opened up and just gushed out everything
    he had to say.
    He was just ecstatic with joy, jubilant
    saying, they took all my money away,
    everything I'd saved in my life.
    I had it in my shoe, you know, in cash,
    planning to build up a new life in another country.
    But they took it all away.
    He seemed to be happy about this.
    It didn't make any sense until we found out.
    They didn't take it away.
    He threw it away on the way to the interrogation room
    which had been at that station.
    He knew that if they had found this money with him that
    would have been the end of him.
    But he pretended to fix his shoelaces.
    There were columns holding up the building,
    and at the base of that column he put his shoe,
    took out the money, stuck it quickly underneath,
    and went in clean from the Nazi point of view.
    And so they let him go.
    And he was speculating that the cleaning woman who
    would find that money the next day a fortune, and he
    was the happiest guy in the world.
    Well, so we went to--
    so we arrived in Switzerland, and to shorten it just a bit,
    the train went through all of Switzerland, all of France.
    We got to the French Channel, Calais,
    and there to the channel boat-- on the channel boat
    a rough crossing, but we arrived at Folkestone
    at the British port of entry.
    At the British port of entry there
    were the immigration people, the British officers,
    interrogating everyone.
    Why did you come?
    Who are you?
    At that day, at that time--
    mind you, that was the first day, the very first day
    after the Hitler take over because the Nazi troops had
    arrived in the night from the 11th to the 12th.
    I was now--
    I'm now talking about Saturday the 12th of March.
    Things hadn't worked out yet quite.
    The Nazis on the train--
    there were only relatively few of them.
    They were looking for the highly visible political figures
    on the train.
    As a matter of fact, I had a brother
    who took another route, the short route,
    namely to Czechoslovakia.
    There were two short routes, to Czechoslovakia and to Hungary.
    He took the short route, and on that they expected
    everybody trying to get out.
    And they did not let that train go through,
    and they nabbed everybody there, including my brother,
    who eventually perished.
    But that's another story.
    My route, however, was less watched.
    It was less expected that people would
    try to flee the long way out and take many hours rather
    than the short one.
    So the British officer also was not quite prepared.
    He did not have any instructions.
    All this had happened the night before.
    You cannot-- the government doesn't work that fast.
    But he only applied the standing instructions, the ones,
    you might say, in peacetime, in normal times,
    and in normal times visitors were
    allowed to come to England without visa for three months,
    not longer than that, without special permission.
    And they were not allowed to work.
    You're a visitor.
    You can spend your money, but you cannot work here.
    So this officer asked me routinely,
    looked at my passport, how long I intended to stay.
    I said, I intend to stay three months.
    Three months?
    Yeah.
    Do you have money to support you for three months?
    Well, I didn't.
    I had nothing because I knew that you were not
    allowed to take any money out of even pre-Hitler Austria.
    You could see from that fellow who
    was with me in the same compartment who
    got rid of all the money because he knew that this was illegal.
    I said, I have only pocket money.
    I think the Nazis allowed 10 marks, the equivalent of--
    I don't know what it was--
    a few dollars, $10, $8.
    So he said, well, what will you live on?
    I said, well, I'll work here.
    He said, you're not allowed to work.
    You cannot come in without money.
    I said, I'm a free writer, and I can sell my stories here
    in England.
    So you are, he says.
    I said, yes, I was here three months ago and stayed here
    and sold my stories, went back home.
    Now I'm here again.
    I gave the impression that I was a big-time writer who
    just manages to go back and forth countries.
    But he didn't play ball.
    He says, no, you're not going to sell your stories to newspapers
    here.
    And I said, why not?
    Because you are taking away space from British writers.
    They would sell their stories if you hadn't been here.
    Well, that seemed like the end of the story.
    That was one-- the second time, the crucial point
    in life I had to think up something quick immediately
    and convincing.
    And while he was looking at my passport,
    a matter of a few seconds, I had this idea.
    I said to him--
    let me, at this critical point, go back a few moments.
    He had also said he was going to send me back to France.
    That's what he said.
    So I had to give some answer, and I said,
    you can send me back to France.
    But then I will just mail my stories to your papers
    and will spend the money that the papers pay me
    in France instead of in your own country
    where it circulates about your own economy.
    This is what the free writer can do.
    You cannot prevent a letter to go through.
    He looked at me, and he bought it.
    He just said ah-ha.
    He waved me through, and here I was, saved again.
    The truth is that I had bluffed.
    I could not go back to France and sell my stories from there
    because the French would not have let me in.
    I had no permission to go to France.
    You had to have it in those days.
    They would have sent me right back
    again to where I had come from, where I had just gotten out of.
    And so I was now in England, penniless.
    I will say, when I was there the first time in the fall,
    digging my mouse hole, I had left the proceeds of my stories
    at that time in England.
    I did have a little money, just enough to tide
    me over the first two weeks, something like that,
    just that much so that I could afford a place to sleep
    and to eat.
    In the weeks and months that followed,
    I gradually could expand the foothold
    that I had been able to find earlier in my first visit,
    and I published many more stories in England.
    Yet all this was a hand-to-mouth situation.
    I had-- I could just eat once a day,
    and I got my meal on the basis of a meal
    ticket that was issued by the local Jewish community.
    When I first, on the first day after my arrival,
    appeared there, I was received by a very distinguished-looking
    gentleman.
    He was a senior member of the Montefiore family,
    a very well-known name in England and perhaps throughout
    today's--
    and he listened to my story, my escape,
    to this horrible night of the escape.
    He said, do you know that you are the first swallow?
    Meaning I was the first Austrian who
    had reached England after the Hitler takeover, the number
    one, because although there had been four originally,
    one we knew nothing about.
    He disappeared.
    He was taken out by the Nazis, and he never came back.
    Two had come back, of whom one left in Paris.
    And the other one--
    I forgot to say that earlier--
    did get with me all the way to Folkestone,
    and he was turned back.
    They let me through, but they did not let him through.
    So I was the first swallow.
    In the weeks that followed I met the publisher of a very
    distinguished magazine called The Cornhill Magazine,
    old, established magazine.
    The first editor was Thackeray, who
    somehow had heard about this first swallow,
    and he asked me if I would write the story
    of that night of escape.
    And so I wrote the story under that name, "The First Swallow,"
    and it was published there.
    It was a great break for me.
    As a matter of fact, some papers picked it up,
    the fact that there had been such a story.
    Among others it was picked up by the London Jewish Chronicle.
    We are here in Northern California.
    We might compare it to the Northern California
    Jewish Bulletin, but it had a much longer tradition.
    And today it carries the--
    it still exists.
    It carries the subheading, "The world's most--"
    something or other, "distinguished,"
    or "famous," or something "Jewish newspaper," which
    it is, the leading newspaper.
    I struggled through with writing these stories.
    Mr. Montefiore, the Jewish community,
    had given me a meal ticket.
    Once a day the German refugees, the ones that
    had come before me-- you see, this committee
    had existed during the past five years for the German refugees.
    I was the first Austrian refugee.
    They were sitting in the same--
    in the same office building in which I had been received
    and had their meal.
    It had to be just meal time, and I was interviewed
    by this Mr. Montefiore.
    And he gave me this ticket.
    And so I went downstairs.
    There was a big hall, long tables,
    and there were these other mostly young people.
    And to my surprise, it wasn't that I--
    I went in a line and got some soup ladled out.
    But we were served.
    Ladies came, not waitresses, but they acted as waitresses.
    They were all volunteer community ladies, well-dressed,
    wearing their jewelry, not pretending
    that they were just servants.
    And they served us.
    These ladies served us, the nobodies.
    I was very moved by that, that they
    should look after us, that they should be interested enough.
    Here we were, dropped into a country
    where we didn't even know the language,
    let alone knew how to behave.
    All our movements were awkward.
    They didn't fit in.
    There are many mannerisms for every country.
    British mannerisms-- they are very
    different from Continental mannerisms,
    from French or Italian, and at every corner
    I noticed I was foreign.
    I didn't fit.
    It didn't matter.
    They came.
    They served us.
    They were friendly.
    And then they would sit down next to us
    and ask in a very restrained way--
    they didn't want to dig into us, but they asked, they found out.
    They tried to find out what would we be doing,
    where do we stay, what resources did we have,
    what did we want to accomplish here, how did we--
    will we try to make a living as refugees,
    having no permits from the Home Office.
    The Home Office was the government agency
    that was our government because we had no government.
    The Austrian government had disappeared,
    and the German government, of course, did not accept us.
    So we were stateless, one of the most frightful conditions
    you can be in and least recognized
    as being so frightful.
    And I will explain later why this is such a terrible thing.
    So they were sitting with us and trying
    to make connections for us, getting each other introduced.
    They started to get-together places.
    They would invite us, always treating us as equals.
    That was the moving thing, especially
    in a class-conscious country like England.
    We were equals.
    We were their kind.
    We were fellow Jewish citizens.
    I remember one who was opening her house for regular Wednesday
    afternoon get-togethers, an open house.
    Everybody could come.
    This was very important to us because we were flotsam.
    We didn't know anybody at all.
    And so we at least got to know each other,
    and we could share experiences.
    So time went on.
    In the meantime, I didn't mention my parents,
    whom I had left behind.
    I was footloose and fancy-free.
    I could go anyplace.
    But of course, it's not the same thing with all people.
    My father still had a position.
    He had a pension to lose.
    He had a home, a house.
    He had savings.
    Here again, as in the case of my brother,
    whose story I cannot tell when I tell my story,
    which in itself is a tremendous story which led all the way
    to Czechoslovakia, France, Algiers, Martinique,
    New Caledonia--
    I cannot tell that story now.
    But I have to tell part of my parents' story
    because it ties in directly with my stay in England.
    My father was taken away by the Nazis and put in jail,
    and they said he had illegally sent money to me in England.
    I can only say I wish he had.
    I wouldn't have had such a struggle.
    So my father was in jail.
    He was in ill health, poorly fed, damp prison.
    My mother wrote that I should try--
    could I somehow get them to England?
    I was still living from hand-to-mouth.
    I did not get or take any money from the Jewish committee.
    I shouldn't say take.
    They were not giving you any money.
    They gave you a meal ticket, and they, in some cases,
    helped with the rent directly.
    But we did not get any money.
    But I had-- and I was stretching all the time of something I
    could do in England, something that would not break the ban
    on--
    how do you say that-- labor.
    We didn't have any--
    no permission to work, and yet you have to live.
    There were very rare exceptions.
    The Home Office would, on special occasions,
    if one of the refugees had some talents
    that you couldn't find or were hard to find in there,
    they would make exceptions.
    And so I was hoping that I could think
    of some exception for myself.
    And just as in the case of the British immigration officer,
    I did have an idea eventually of what I might do.
    And I went to the Jewish Chronicle,
    and I asked them who was monitoring the Nazi newspapers.
    Well, they didn't have anybody who read German.
    Well, I said, wouldn't that be a job for me
    to import Nazi papers via Switzerland-- of course
    you couldn't merely send them to England.
    So they would-- some cover-up in Switzerland
    would import Nazi papers to Switzerland.
    They would forward them to us.
    I would read them, and I would make a very unskilled,
    rough translation.
    When I said I didn't know English,
    I knew enough to buy groceries, not enough to ride on the bus,
    by the way.
    I must insert here this episode which I will never forget.
    I got on a bus and asked for a ticket,
    and the bus conductor asked me where I was--
    where I wanted to go, and I said to Trafalgar Square.
    And he said, huh?
    And I said to him, Trafalgar Square.
    What?
    Well, I said, to Trafalgar Square.
    The fellow next to me said to the conductor,
    this bloke wants to go to Trafalgar Square.
    Oh, to Trafalgar Square.
    Why didn't you say so?
    This was my English.
    Well, but that was accepted, that I
    would make a rough translation, just
    give the general idea of what these articles
    in the [German newspaper name] and in the Volkischer
    Beobachter, and Der Stürmer and all these rotten papers,
    what they were saying.
    That was very important, of course,
    for the Jewish Chronicle in London.
    And then there was another editor
    who put this into readable English,
    and here I had in existence.
    And that was something the Home Office was by.
    The director of The Jewish Chronicle applied for that job.
    He said, this is an unusual--
    and he decorated this application
    by saying I had special knowledge
    about the Jewish situation on the continent.
    I had no idea but he could claim that.
    I didn't know anybody--
    I didn't know any way more than the next fellow.
    So, lo and behold, I had a job in England.
    Now I had a job, but there were my parents,
    and there was especially my father.
    My mother wrote that he had been--
    there had been an interrogation.
    He had signed away everything he owned, stocks, bonds, cash,
    and they would let him go if he cleared out within--
    I don't know what it was-- six weeks, or two months,
    or something.
    If he was still around, they would take him
    to a concentration camp.
    This was in 1938.
    It was long before the so-called Final Solution for Jews.
    There were no extermination camps at that time.
    These are the early days when prisoners in concentration
    camps were ordinary--
    "ordinary" in quotation marks-- jail prisoners
    in the cities themselves in Vienna.
    He was held in an ordinary prison.
    They were not only let go, but the Nazis
    expedited, pushed them to go.
    Of course they couldn't provide any permits
    to go to another country.
    The countries all were closing themselves out.
    They didn't allow anybody to come in.
    But such people as Eichmann-- he was in charge
    of particularly expelling Jews.
    That was before exterminating.
    That was the earlier phase.
    First get them out, Juden [INAUDIBLE]
    aus, out with the Jews.
    So my father was given an ultimatum.
    Within six weeks, out you go.
    It's your worry how you find the permit
    or how you find a way to get out.
    As far as we are concerned, you can walk illegally
    over the border if you can do it.
    It was, of course, guarded on both sides of the border.
    So I was in England.
    I was told by the Home Office, if you
    can find a British citizen who will guarantee that your father
    and mother will never become a public charge,
    will never take a job, then you can bring them in.
    I said, never?
    Their whole lifetime?
    Somebody has to guarantee for their lifetime to support them.
    Here I was the last flotsam in this country,
    not knowing anybody, let alone somebody
    who would have the means to do that,
    not to speak of compassion or interest.
    I had to provide such a guarantee, and only then.
    Well, last year I published a book in which I told my story,
    and it takes many pages to describe what
    happened in the next six weeks.
    In a report like this I can only give you the bottom line,
    namely I started with my landlady.
    I lived in a little attic way up in the roof
    with a slanted ceiling.
    And the landlady hardly knew me.
    I was just a tenant there.
    There were many tenants in that place.
    And I said, look, I have to find somebody
    who will guarantee for a lifetime to support my parents.
    And how-- I don't ask you to do that, but I want--
    I don't know anybody in London, but I
    want two names from you of people
    whom I could ask what I need.
    I will not ask them either, but I will tell them the story
    and ask them to give me two names each.
    She was very puzzled and slightly embarrassed
    about the thing, but I was just so firm.
    I wouldn't leave that room without getting those two
    names, and I did get them.
    And I got the two names, and I went
    to tell my story to these people.
    It's that I have to get this guarantee.
    And would they give me two names?
    And I did the same thing persistently.
    I wouldn't leave.
    And they lived--
    London is an enormous city.
    It's a country almost it is so big.
    And there were long bus rides, and I hardly
    have the money for the fare.
    It was a great expense for me to have even the bus fare.
    And it took hours to get from one to another,
    and I neglected my job.
    I didn't eat.
    I didn't sleep.
    I did nothing, those four people.
    And I told each of them, if you would sign such a commitment--
    and this is an official document that
    has to be signed for the Home Office,
    for the British government.
    It's not a promise to me and said, yes, yes, yes, you
    are going to do that.
    If you do this, you will not be called upon.
    It would be a pro forma thing.
    So they listened to me, these four people,
    and the four snowballed again into each--
    four times two and those two.
    And it went on and on day after day
    after day, and these people, all strangers, all people whom
    I had never seen--
    and they said, well, you say they will never
    call on implementing such a commitment.
    What will they live on?
    And I said, I will keep them.
    They said, you will keep them?
    Do you have such means?
    Do you have a major bank account or something?
    I said, no, I don't have that.
    But you have a good job?
    Well, at that time--
    I was telling the story a little bit ahead of time.
    At that time when this happened I did not yet even
    have that small job at The Jewish Chronicle which
    allowed me to refrain from going to the one meal
    a day thing at the committee.
    I just had barely enough for me to hold myself over there.
    No, I didn't have the money, and I didn't have the job.
    And yet I said, they wouldn't call on you.
    And when they asked me how I would do it I said,
    I don't know, but I will keep to this.
    Now, this is no proposition for anybody,
    to have a stranger who speaks a peculiar type of English,
    somebody whom they've never seen in their life who says sign
    an official British document which obligates me
    to the government to support two people whom I've never seen--
    who are not related to me or anything.
    Well, as I say--
    I started to say that I will give you only the bottom line.
    I didn't keep my promise, and I started
    to tell you the real story.
    But I will now really cut it short
    and say that eventually, eventually,
    eventually there really was somebody who bought my story.
    There was an officer of the British army who
    heard it who felt not only sympathy but had the trust just
    from my telling this story, from my face, from the way I put it.
    This man, ordinary middle-class man, signed this paper
    and restored my faith in mankind, not Jewish.
    In no way did I have any connection with him.
    He did it.
    He said afterwards, if you don't keep your word, I'm ruined.
    I didn't know how I would keep my word, but I knew I would.
    So since we are talking about bottom lines,
    my father was released from prison,
    and they left on the 10th of November 1938.
    You remember a few days ago we celebrated Kristallnacht?
    They left at the day of the Kristallnacht.
    So as I left on the very day of the takeover which
    made me the first swallow in Austria,
    they left again on this key date at the Kristallnacht itself.
    As we found out later, while they
    were on the way to the airport-- they came by air.
    While they were on the way--
    they were still in town--
    Nazis came.
    Mind you, although my father had just been released,
    that didn't matter to them.
    They grabbed anybody in the Kristallnacht.
    Despite that promise they would let him go, this meant nothing.
    They came to the house.
    They asked the caretaker where is this Mr.
    Kühnel, and the caretaker--
    bless him.
    He said, well, they have long left for England.
    He said that.
    I will say that my mother was always
    particularly nice to this man.
    They were in class-ridden Vienna just about the lowest class
    that existed--
    a caretaker is not like a receptionist
    at the hotel in this country--
    lived in a hovel down there, the basement of the house.
    My mother was always very good to him
    and gave him food and so forth.
    That paid off now.
    He did not betray the fact that they were still in town
    and could be still caught at the airport.
    They got through.
    And while they were in the air they saw the burning synagogues
    down there.
    They arrived at the airport in London, and we were reunited.
    Of course, they were not allowed to take anything, no money,
    no jewelry, nothing, although they
    had bought with their last money since they could not take it
    out outfits, clothes, and all that.
    When they came to the little place where I lived,
    I had taken another room in the same very, very modest place
    where I stayed, and they came there.
    My mother showed me a pin.
    It was a gift from my father on the occasion
    of my birth, a beautiful jewel.
    It had two emeralds, and two sapphires,
    and two rubies in the shape of a butterfly.
    I said, how come?
    It was all-- the frame was cold.
    I said, how come?
    You're not supposed to take anything.
    Oh, she said, you know what I did?
    On the train going to where the plane started
    I put that pin on my hat.
    I did not hide it.
    I put it on the rack.
    It was like a piece of costume jewelry.
    It was tossed up there, and nobody paid any attention
    to it.
    When I said jewelry earlier, I meant,
    of course, gold, and silver, and diamonds, and that.
    So she salvaged this wonderful piece.
    And to jump ahead now, seven years ago,
    when my grandchild was born, I gave her mother,
    my daughter-in-law, that pin.
    So it continues the tradition.
    I'm now in England.
    I have my parents.
    And now what do you do?
    They had to have groceries for the next day, perhaps
    not for the next day but certainly for the next week.
    What I did was--
    I had to have somebody.
    I could not go to the person who sponsored them,
    of course, except that I called him up and I said,
    I do want you at least to meet my parents.
    And so we went there, and even at the door I said,
    don't be afraid.
    You'll just say hello to them, and you'll never see them again
    in your life.
    Don't worry.
    So it happened.
    He was very gracious.
    His wife-- they gave us some coffee.
    We had a nice chat, and that was the end, nothing.
    But for me it was the beginning.
    I had to do something for my parents.
    This is another long story, and here I will really
    tell you the bottom line.
    I decided to go to the richest man in London
    and ask for the support of my parents.
    The richest man in London is Lord Rothschild.
    I went to the Rothschild Bank.
    You can imagine somebody off the street coming in
    to ask for the Baron de Rothschild.
    It was bizarre.
    To get by the receptionist, to get--
    But if you're really in a corner somehow the way
    you present things must make some impression.
    I did get past the receptionist.
    I did get past the watchdog number
    three, and watchdog number two, and watchdog number one,
    and finally faced Mr. de Rothschild.
    And he was in the room.
    He saw my parents.
    I took them along.
    We were in the room three minutes.
    He had an aide who had come in with him,
    and he said to the aide, [? Handler ?] Fund.
    I didn't know what that was.
    What it meant was he had, with one word, given my parents
    a pension, what he called a pension, to live
    for one year, which it was understood, although not said,
    that it might be renewable, but for one year.
    It's like going to see Mr. Bush in Washington.
    I had my job at The Jewish Chronicle.
    My parents had this so-called pension, and we could exist.
    I am now approaching September 1939,
    the day Hitler invaded Poland.
    I wonder whether this is a good moment--
    To take a break?
    So Peggy, in about 10 seconds, you
    can identify everybody, date, place, and start.
    Oh, you-- you start then?
    You identify and you say get going.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    OK, the date is February 28, 1991.
    We are interviewing Max Knight.
    My name is Peggy Coster, and with me are
    Jack Clarke and Peggy Poole.
    We are interviewing for the Holocaust Oral History Project
    at the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
    OK, why don't you just start, basically
    telling the story where you left off last time?
    Since this is my second session here,
    and there has been some time since the first one,
    I'm not quite sure whether I might not
    duplicate at least at the beginning what I said before.
    So taking that risk, I believe I ended last time
    with the arrival of my parents in England.
    I may have said that they came to England on that historic day
    when the synagogues burned and the Jewish shops
    were looted in Germany and in Austria,
    the night of the broken glass, a historic date.
    And on that very date, they left.
    I may have mentioned that when they left the home in Vienna,
    and were on their way to the airport,
    the Gestapo came to re-arrest my father,
    and the caretaker of the house who
    had been particularly well treated
    by my parents all those years, was grateful enough
    to tell them that the parents had already left for England.
    He did not tell them, they were still
    within the boundaries of the town.
    And they could still be caught, so they got away.
    And they were flying over Germany.
    They actually, through the window
    could see the burning buildings down below.
    So they arrived on that historic date at the London airport.
    My mother wore something like a beret
    on which she had pinned what looked
    like costume jewelry, a pin in the form of a butterfly.
    The Nazis had not allowed any jewelry
    to go out of the country.
    And she used this pin on her hat in such a way
    that nobody would think that this is real jewelry.
    She was actually flaunting it, taking great risk,
    and got away with it.
    She brought actually a second pin, also a very valuable piece
    of jewelry, diamonds.
    I forget how she managed that one.
    On both-- in both cases, she rescued that.
    The first one had emeralds or sapphire.
    It's a very beautiful pin.
    Today, these two pins are worn by the wives of my two sons.
    So, I took my parents to the little place where I stayed.
    Again, I'm afraid I do not remember whether I mentioned
    in the first session that I actually
    had found a job in England, and had a minimum income.
    At the risk of repeating myself, until now, how I got that job,
    it was a great problem.
    Because the British were jealously guarding
    the workers' rights, and did not want any unemployment.
    And they did not allow refugees to take any jobs,
    except if the refugee could prove
    to the satisfaction of the home office, which
    was the same as the Interior Department
    here, that he had skills which were scarce or not available
    in England.
    Well, I didn't see any particular skills
    in having studied law, Austrian law, now being in England.
    What should I do with that?
    And there were many days wondering what I could do,
    and what I could offer.
    In Austria, you might call it a skill
    to be able to speak English.
    But in England, it certainly--
    I couldn't even speak their language properly.
    I had a vague idea.
    I could buy groceries.
    But that was all.
    So then I thought in England it was perhaps
    a skill to be able to-- to speak German.
    And I had seen over the previous days and weeks,
    copies of the foremost Jewish journal in England,
    the Jewish Chronicle, an old established periodical.
    And it occurred to me--
    or before I say that, that was not a paper that I usually saw.
    I couldn't afford buying newspapers.
    But I occasionally saw it when friends had it.
    And now, I'm going to say it occurred
    to me that this Jewish weekly, might be able to use somebody
    who reads the German newspapers, the Nazi newspapers, because I
    saw them occasionally quoted.
    So I went to Moor Lane, which was the address of this paper,
    and told them that I was a writer, a journalist you might
    say, and whether they could use somebody
    who would read the Nazi papers, and make
    a rough draft, of a summary, in my kind of English
    at the time, which then could be put into proper English
    and used for the paper.
    And not only did they buy the story,
    but they applied to the home office
    for this kind of special skill, a permit, labor permit, permit.
    They embellished it.
    They said I was a great expert in knowing the Jewish refugee
    situation on the continent.
    I didn't know it any better than the next guy.
    But it sounded good.
    And so the day happened when actually I
    got a job at the Jewish Chronicle of London.
    And I read there the Nazi papers,
    which were imported through Switzerland.
    The Nazis would not be expected--
    or be able to send it to England,
    but to a neutral country.
    And from the neutral country, it was then forwarded to London.
    That's what called the Volkisher Beobachter, Der Sturmer,
    the notorious paper.
    So I read these papers, and made notations,
    which were then expanded and used for the Jewish Chronicle.
    So that was all nice.
    And I was much envied for having a job there.
    But still, I had my two parents, and my job was not paid--
    it did not pay well enough to support three people.
    It was barely enough for one.
    And here I was now in the very fortunate situation of having
    been able to rescue my parents.
    But I didn't have money for groceries.
    It was a great problem.
    And when it became acute enough, I
    took a bold step, which is something
    that you couldn't use in a fiction story,
    because it is so unbelievable.
    But here is what happened.
    Ever since I was a teenager, I was very interested
    in family history and genealogy.
    And I pumped my relatives and my parents for background.
    Who was your grandfather, and your great-grandfather and all
    that.
    During the course of these investigations
    as a young fellow, I came across various rumors.
    It seems that people who write, genealogists, always
    like to have illustrious forebears and ancestors which
    slip in, documented or not.
    And one of those rumors in my family
    had long been the fact that I shouldn't use the word fact.
    The rumor was that way back somewhere,
    there was some connections with the Rothschild family.
    Well, I decided to go to the richest man in England,
    and ask him to support my parents,
    Mr. Lionel Rothschild, the head of the Rothschild
    family in England.
    I looked up my family tree, which I had.
    And in there, it was claimed that the current head
    of the house Rothschild, the Lionel Rothschild and his
    brother Anthony, were married to two sisters,
    by the name of Beer, B-E-E-R, Beer,
    who supposedly had the same great grandmother as my mother.
    I took my parents, and without an appointment,
    went to the fortress of the Rothschilds,
    their bank in a street called St. Swithin's Lane.
    St. Swithin's Lane.
    I remember that.
    And there was this palatial bank.
    I walked in there with my parents.
    Of course, there was a receptionist there.
    What did I want?
    He said, did I have an appointment?
    I said, no I said, I'm a relative.
    They looked at me.
    I didn't look very much like a relative.
    My clothes had the Austrian cut.
    My English-- you can hear it now after 50 years, how I speak.
    And you hear my accent.
    But that is nothing compared with what I had then.
    But they couldn't immediately brush me off,
    if I claim to be a relative.
    So this receptionist went in the next room
    and asked the receptionist number two,
    and there was number three, and four and five.
    And here, I was waiting while they were
    consulting with each other.
    I remember the walls were covered
    with life-sized oil paintings of the Rothschild ancestors.
    Well eventually, the first miracle happened.
    I was asked to--
    I was led to a room and asked to wait there.
    And after a while, a very ebullient big man,
    with a lion's mane, came in.
    And I showed him my family tree diagram.
    He seemed to know a little bit about all this,
    because I had told it so many times
    to the various receptionists.
    So they had coached him in some way.
    He was in the room I don't think three minutes.
    But three minutes as the head of the Rothschild family
    has consequences.
    I told him about my parents.
    And I said, would you like to meet them?
    He says, meet them?
    Where are they?
    Well, I said, they're waiting downstairs underneath the oil
    paintings.
    So they came in too.
    He says, hello to them, shook hands.
    And their hands were worth what he called a pension for a year,
    supporting them for a full year.
    I-- he had a--
    an aide there whom he instructed to take care of things.
    Apparently, they have or had a fund
    for all kinds of people who came to see Rothschild and asked
    for help, if they could substantiate it somehow.
    They are generous enough, or were.
    I couldn't believe what I heard.
    But on the other hand, I was determined that something
    would have to happen.
    They were so considerate that on leaving,
    that aide gave me an envelope with cash in it,
    so that there was an immediate tying us
    over the next few days, because the so-called pension wasn't
    due until whenever it was the first of the month or so.
    They did it in a very discreet way
    where we didn't have the feeling of just being beggars there.
    Well, that was how we managed.
    It was a moderate sum.
    But it was entirely adequate for what we needed.
    I then went to my daily job.
    My parents had subsistence.
    And everything seemed, quote, "fine," unquote.
    But the war on the continent was imminent.
    The Germans swallowed one country after another.
    Czechoslovakia first, after the disaster at the Sudetenland,
    Munich.
    Then came Belgium, Holland, and finally France in June 1940.
    Am I right?
    In it must have been '39, in June '39.
    You mean Poland?
    Beg your pardon?
    Are you talking about the invasion of Poland?
    No, not yet.
    OK.
    Am I mixing things up?
    Let me see for a minute.
    Poland was invaded on the 1st of September, 1939.
    So everything must have happened in 1940, of course.
    It was in 1940, in May.
    May 10, 1940 was Belgium and Holland.
    And soon thereafter France fell in June.
    Here we, the refugees, we are sitting in England.
    Those who managed to get to England, most of them
    managed only to get to France, or to the lowlands,
    if they could get away at all.
    In France, when the Nazis took over,
    the refugees whom the French had put into camps, into work
    camps, into internment camps, did not
    let them run away when the Germans came,
    but simply changed guards.
    And the internment camps became concentration camps
    under the Gestapo.
    This was an idea that terrorized me,
    that the same would happen with England.
    It is easy to sit here in 1991, 50 years plus later,
    knowing full well that England was never
    occupied by the Germans.
    But at that time, that hung on a hair.
    London was under siege.
    They expected the Germans to invade.
    The Germans had every plan to invade.
    The plans were found later in Brussels.
    Churchill tells about the invasion plans in detail.
    The British are very scared.
    They took down the street signs in London.
    So if the Germans came, they would be confused, and not
    find their way around.
    With these naive and primitive means,
    they thought they could maintain themselves.
    They were practicing with broomsticks instead of rifles.
    They didn't have enough for the general population.
    We, the refugees, had to give up our cameras,
    and even the London City plans.
    They didn't trust us.
    After all, we spoke German.
    So I was--
    I just thought I got away once.
    I don't want to be caught like those in France
    here in England a second time.
    I wanted to get away a second time.
    So--
    You mean caught in an internment camp.
    Caught in-- not in an internment camp, but caught by the Germans
    when they and if they invaded England.
    I know it seems far-fetched now.
    But it was imminent then, or seemed imminent.
    It was imminent.
    What happened was that Hitler was so--
    I always say gorged like a cobra after having eaten an animal.
    That he couldn't devour immediately something else.
    He hesitated a few weeks.
    Those few weeks were the salvation
    of England and perhaps the world.
    Because the RAF, the Royal Air Force
    managed to get their act together,
    and a few brave men fought the Germans over the channel coast,
    and England was--
    the invasion was delayed.
    And the delay was final.
    And then later on, the United States came in.
    But that is a different story.
    Now, I wanted to find some way of solving the situation just
    for my own family.
    And although I had considered England as they originally
    considered England as a country of refuge,
    I went to the American consulate and applied for immigration
    to the United States.
    As most of those who will hear or see this might know,
    the immigration policy of the United States at the time
    was that each European country, each country in the world,
    had assigned a certain quota, so many people from this country
    may immigrate to the United States,
    if all other requirements were favorable, were met.
    Austria and Germany had a certain number,
    like all the other countries.
    But each number was different.
    For each country it was different.
    But if that quota was filled for that year,
    you had to wait for next year, or for the year thereafter.
    In a country where there was a great demand for those visas
    to an immigration visa, people had
    to wait sometimes for years.
    I had applied relatively late.
    Most of my friends had applied while they were still
    in Vienna at the American consulate in Vienna.
    I applied to American consulate in London.
    I applied late.
    Therefore, my number was high.
    I would have to wait about a year.
    But to wait a year at a time when the Nazis invaded
    countries by the month, and by the week,
    and finally by the day, was something
    that was practically--
    practically meant giving up the idea of getting away at all.
    You had the choice of either waiting for that number
    to come up no matter how long, or trying
    to find a third country of refuge,
    where you could wait out the time that you had to wait.
    My friends and myself were in panic during that time.
    We had a number.
    There were other requirements, which
    I don't want to go into now, an affidavit, and an exit
    permit, and a ship ticket, and all kinds of things,
    which were all dated.
    And the date-- the one date would run out
    before you had the next paper.
    And then you had to start all over again.
    We investigated the various countries in the world.
    We actually on one occasion turned the globe
    looking for where is a country.
    But no country would give an entry visa,
    or would set conditions which were
    so impossible to fulfill that it was equivalent to a denial.
    And then suddenly, a rumor came up in the refugee community.
    The rumor was there is a place where you can go
    and do not need a visa, an entry visa.
    You could just go there.
    I mean it was just fantastic.
    and totally incredible, in view of the fact
    that every other country, every little mini state in South
    America would deny entry.
    As a footnote, I tried for example,
    to get permission to go to the Dominican Republic, which--
    which at that time had a small Jewish community.
    And I tried to convince the consul
    that I was a journalist who wanted to report on these,
    and for that reason would need a visa.
    But he saw through this, and threw me out.
    And so it was with every other country in one way or another.
    And now at this time comes this crazy rumor
    that you can go to China without a visa.
    That is to say you cannot go to China itself,
    but you can go to Shanghai.
    There is a background to this, which I really
    don't think I should include here, why this was so.
    Let it suffice to say that this rumor turned out to be true.
    That China alone, this one tiny spot on the globe,
    was the only place that did not check on immigration.
    If anybody got off the boat there, he was in China.
    He was in Shanghai.
    And that was it.
    And they didn't care one way or another.
    It turned out that it wasn't quite that simple.
    That the shipping companies, after they also
    heard about that, and after they were suddenly
    overrun by people who wanted to go to Shanghai,
    not only did they immediately raise
    the price for the tickets, and would sell only first class
    tickets to the most wretched refugees who didn't have
    money for first class tickets.
    But they also required, the shipping companies required,
    that each passenger, would-be passenger deposit $2,000
    at the bank in Shanghai, just in case
    there should be a change in the immigration policy
    there, just in case, they, the shipping company
    would be forced to take the people back again,
    and they were not allowed to land.
    Now 2,000 at that time was an enormous amount of money.
    We didn't have the money, of course.
    I think I mentioned in my earlier session
    here that when I first came to London, I got a meal ticket,
    and was fed one meal a day.
    That was all I had.
    I didn't have money for food.
    And here we were supposed to deposit 2,000 American dollars
    in a bank in Shanghai.
    If I may make a jump, now for a moment,
    in 1988, 50 years after Austria's
    annexation to Germany, my friend Joseph Fabry
    and myself wrote a book called one and one make three.
    It was published by a Jewish publisher
    in Berkeley, Benmir Books, Benjamin and Miriam, Benmir
    Books.
    The book looks like this.
    It is written under a joint pen name that we used,
    Peter Fabrizius.
    And in this book, I'm explaining the background,
    the preparations in trying to leave for Shanghai.
    My inability to prevent my parents
    from getting interned by the British in internment camps,
    now these were not concentration camps.
    These were humane internment camps.
    But nevertheless, there were great hardships
    in those internment camps.
    The British not only were they unprepared for war,
    they were even more unprepared suddenly to feed and house
    thousands of refugees within their borders.
    The camps were on the Isle of Man.
    They were very poorly furnished.
    There was no light in the camp.
    My father, a man in his 70s, broke his leg there
    in the darkness.
    Only the minimum food, well, I cannot--
    I could not save them from internment.
    I managed to hold off the British police
    from interning me, because I could
    prove that I had made arrangements
    for traveling to Shanghai.
    I mentioned this book because in this book here,
    I tried to figure out how much $2,000 in today's terms
    would be.
    At that time, at the writing of that book, it was $16,000.
    It's still more today.
    A sum, it was totally out of reach for us.
    Now, I did find a distant relative
    in New York who was willing to put up this money.
    And they'd send it to the Chase Bank in Shanghai.
    I know I have here permission to tell the story at large,
    and yet it would be an endless story
    if I went into these details, how
    it was possible to reach this person, and why he did this,
    and why my parents were not included.
    But it would-- it would not be practical to do this.
    Perhaps at the end if you still think so, I can go into this.
    It is told in the book.
    So we-- I say we, because I was with a friend, Kurt Schwalz,
    with whom I shared my little room in London.
    So the two of us had decided to indeed, take
    this weird trip into an unknown land, to China of all places.
    Today, you can reach every point in the world
    from every other point in the world within 24 hours.
    At that time, the airlines were not yet
    common public transportation.
    To tell the end, at the beginning,
    it took us 54 days to reach Shanghai.
    We had to cross the Atlantic.
    And we had to cross the Pacific.
    And there was something in between.
    When we finally did get a ship ticket, when
    we got a travel paper, we didn't have any passports anymore.
    We had lost our citizenship in Austria,
    never received citizenship in Germany.
    We were, of course, not British.
    But the British did furnish an identity paper
    to us, which allowed us to leave England,
    but not to return to England.
    Our paper was stamped, not valid for return
    to the United Kingdom.
    So you have to put yourself in a position
    of a person who was let go into the universe, into nowhere.
    If for one reason or another something
    went wrong on the trip, if in Shanghai they said no,
    we have enough, we don't want these.
    Or in between something, there was nowhere to go.
    We were just a bird in the sky.
    In addition to that, our ship ticket was also stamped.
    And it said on it, no refund in case of war,
    meaning that if we were caught in between, wherever we were,
    there we were.
    We went to Liverpool, waited for the ship.
    I'm sorry.
    I have to be back in my chronology.
    We are not in Liverpool yet.
    I'll come to that later.
    We finally managed to get all these complicated papers
    with the various deadlines together.
    We had a ship ticket that would take us to our destination.
    But in order, but when the booking agent made out
    those papers, he said, do you have a visa?
    The shipping agency would not issue a ticket
    unless you had a destination, a visa
    to go somewhere, because they didn't want to take us back
    at their own expense.
    And when we said Shanghai, we don't need a visa for that.
    He said, do you have a bank deposit there?
    Yes, we said we have this.
    All right.
    Where is your transit visa through Panama?
    What?
    A transit visa Panama?
    What is that?
    Well, if you go from here to China,
    you have to go somewhere.
    You go through Panama.
    You have to have a transit visa.
    This came at the very last minute
    when everything was already prepared.
    Well still we thought it was no great difficulty.
    We would get a transit visa.
    So we went to the Panamanian consul in London,
    and asked for a transit visa.
    And the man said no.
    Yet again, it is a lengthy story how
    we fought that, how we tried desperately to convince
    this man to let us have a visa.
    The Panamanians were afraid that these refugees would not
    have a place to go, and would use the transit visa in order
    to stay in Panama.
    And he said, visa, transit visa only
    if you have a final destination visa.
    But we said, we don't need one.
    Shanghai doesn't require one.
    He wouldn't hear it.
    And that was where it was left.
    At the very moment when we were ready with everything else,
    came this final hitch, and we didn't get that transit visa.
    And we went home, and were in despair.
    We told the booking agent our story.
    But this man didn't seem to be disturbed particularly.
    And he said, well, I'll book you on the Oronsay, 20,000 ton
    ship, originally military transport.
    Well I said, you book us on the ship, but about the Panama?
    He said, I route you through Canada.
    I said, Canada?
    How about that?
    You cannot go through Panama, but you can go to Canada?
    Will they--
    He says, yes, they don't require a visa.
    Just like that.
    These are the unforeseeable things
    that happened in such critical situations.
    So all of a sudden, we were permitted
    to cross all the way to Canada, but that was only a transit
    situation.
    We had to meet the ship at the other end
    of the continent in Vancouver, to go to Japan and China.
    The first part was Atlantic.
    The middle part was across Canada, only that many days.
    You were not-- we were allowed to pass through Canada,
    but not longer then the deadline,
    which was September 8, I remember, 1940.
    From there we had to cross the Pacific to Japan,
    cross Japan, cross the Yellow Sea,
    and then finally to Shanghai.
    This is what took 54 days or so.
    So now, we are back in Liverpool.
    We boarded the ship there, the Oronsay.
    It was full of evacuated British children.
    They were all taken to Canada for safekeeping during the war.
    It was total darkness, of course.
    England was under blackout.
    We didn't have any lights.
    We hadn't had any lights for many days.
    And-- two destroyers, and one cruiser
    accompanied our ship and seven other ships.
    It was a convoy of eight ships going to Canada.
    We left on 20th of August.
    The crossing took nine days.
    On the 29th, we arrived in Halifax.
    And for the first time saw lights, a city lit up.
    That is I'm sure I'm unable to convey what that meant.
    So we were in Halifax.
    And now, of course, we had--
    I forget how much it was, I think about two weeks,
    or thereabouts.
    Well, yes, I do know when.
    Because the ship at the other side of the world,
    on the Pacific side, would leave on September the 8th.
    So since we arrived on August 29th so we had--
    10 days-- 18 or so days for that.
    And during this time, you can imagine
    we tried to move heaven and Earth to get permission
    from the Canadians to allow us to wait until our quota
    number would come up.
    We did not ask for immigration to Canada.
    All we asked for is let us wait here,
    and not go all the way to the other end of the world,
    especially at the time when the war between Japan
    and the United States was imminent.
    Now, we talk about the surprise attack of the Japanese
    in Honolulu, Pearl Harbor.
    Not Honolulu, Pearl Harbor.
    Of course, we didn't know that they
    were going to attack Pearl Harbor on that date,
    in this place, but that war was imminent.
    But war was imminent for weeks before that.
    They were always talking about the outbreak of the war.
    And I mentioned that my ship ticket was already stamped.
    I think his were no refund.
    So they were certainly expecting it.
    And we were now destined to go to Shanghai,
    which I should have mentioned earlier,
    was under Japanese control.
    The Japanese, since 1932, had conquered
    all of North China, including Shanghai,
    and were in control there.
    But they allowed that one enclave
    to be open to whoever wants to go there.
    They didn't care.
    So here we were 18 days to try to convince somebody
    in Halifax, in Canada to go to Ottawa,
    and get permission for us.
    Well, it was in vain.
    We couldn't get this permission.
    So we decided at least to make the best out of these 18 days,
    and go sightseeing, and be tourists,
    and make the best of it.
    Just as we had been traveling first class on the Oronsay,
    we didn't even have money for the most elementary necessities
    beyond that.
    But we had-- but we traveled first class,
    because the company didn't sell anything else to us.
    During the course of this sightseeing expedition,
    we went to Montreal.
    There is-- what is this mountain called?
    I think it's called Mount Royal.
    And we went up there, looked down.
    And over there, there was the promised land.
    There was the United States.
    We saw it.
    But we, in fact, would come closer even.
    And what happened that was the most traumatic moment
    during that trip, and in fact, in my life.
    What happened was this.
    We went after Montreal to Toronto.
    And in Toronto, we decided to go on a side trip
    and see the Niagara Falls.
    We were playing tourists.
    We went to the Niagara Falls.
    It was on Labor Day, September the 1st, I think.
    The situation at Niagara Falls is this.
    You have the Niagara River.
    There are the falls.
    At the bottom of the falls the water
    is calm after a few yards or meters.
    And there's a little boat that goes from the Canadian side
    to the American side, and back from the American side
    to the Canadian side.
    The Maid of the Mist, the name comes because Niagara Falls
    has this dust-like mist.
    And American tourists can get on that boat, cross over
    to watch the falls, are not allowed to disembark
    on the Canadian side.
    But they come back again.
    They go for the ride to Canada and back.
    And I said it wrong, to the United States and back.
    From Canada to the United States and back to Canada.
    Although the American tourists cannot get off again,
    I said it wrong.
    Although the Canadian tourists cannot get off on the American
    side, the boat will take on American tourists who can do
    the same trip in reverse, go to Canada while watching
    the falls, not get off in Canada,
    and come back to the United States.
    Now you can see what's coming, or what went through our heads.
    You don't need any visa, passport, immigration, anything
    to get on that little boat.
    You get on that boat in Canada, cross over
    to the United States, and off you go, perhaps.
    Perhaps.
    You don't know what's on the other side.
    We went on that boat.
    We bought a ticket.
    Canadian tourists get one kind of ticket.
    Let's call it a red ticket.
    You take your red ticket, go to the American side, come back
    to Canada, surrender your red ticket, and that's it.
    In the meantime, American tourists have gotten on,
    and they have, let's say, a blue ticket.
    Travel to Canada, go back, throw away their blue tickets,
    and their blue ticket is the passport to the United States.
    Our red ticket indicates the permission
    to come back to Canada.
    But an American with a blue ticket cannot get off
    in Canada.
    So I made this clear.
    So we bought our red tickets.
    Now that ship on that day was just crammed with tourists.
    It was Labor Day.
    There was standing room only.
    They were packed there.
    And they were indistinguishable one from another,
    because so as not to get wet from the midst of the falls,
    tourists were handed rubber coats,
    and even rubberized plastic hoods,
    so we were just like little dwarfs like in disguise.
    So here were all these people, this humanity
    packed on that little boat.
    With this costume type thing, and
    with either red or blue tickets, depending on where
    they got onto the boat.
    Here we were standing.
    I was standing right behind another fellow.
    I looked exactly like this guy here,
    and he stood there, watching the falls.
    He had had his hands behind him, in a casual way.
    And between the two fingers was a blue ticket,
    immigration to the United States of America.
    Could I jostle him a little bit?
    Could I even slip it out of his fingers,
    and then play innocent?
    He couldn't possibly know which of these many people standing
    around there had done this.
    Maybe he didn't even notice.
    It was just like when you get on a bus.
    You have a bus ticket.
    So what?
    There's no particular-- it didn't cost much.
    It was of no consequence to the one
    who has a good residence in the United States.
    To the other one, it means--
    it's not an exaggeration to say it
    could have meant life or death.
    Because what we desperately didn't want
    was to have to continue this trip, go to Japan,
    go to Shanghai under the control of the Japanese.
    The Japanese being the axis friends of the Nazis,
    the Shanghai Nazi Council riding high there,
    and maybe we would be taken into an oriental type concentration
    camp, under the whip of the Japanese.
    It just was horrible things.
    And here, if you get this little blue ticket,
    you get off on the other side.
    You disappear in the populace.
    And you save your life.
    Well, it depends on your background.
    If you grow up in what I would call a normal way,
    as a law-abiding ordinary citizen such experiments,
    you do them if you are directly under the whip of death.
    But if you have this alternative,
    perhaps it would work out with this trip, and perhaps
    your quota number, you could wait
    for that in Shanghai under the American consulate there,
    and come back in time, maybe, maybe, maybe.
    What you want to do now is not a maybe.
    It is an absolutely vital decision,
    because if on the other side, on the American side,
    there is somebody there and catches you,
    or if he is not there and you try
    to disappear in the general population,
    you would be on the run all your life,
    because you could never be-- you are an illegal immigrant.
    You cannot get this paper or that paper,
    and Social Security, and nothing.
    You have to be underground forever,
    because an illegal immigrant is not
    converted into a legal immigrant,
    especially in times of war.
    Well, the tension was just palpable between myself
    and my friend, the two of us still.
    And we didn't do it.
    We couldn't bring ourselves to do this.
    And we got back to the Canadian side,
    and we sat down there by the shore,
    emotionally totally exhausted.
    And we were watching the next Maid of the Mist
    making the next trip, and going across more people, on and on.
    We didn't say a word.
    But our hearts were in our throats.
    And while we were sitting there, suddenly a man came along.
    And he said, may I see your papers?
    He was not in uniform.
    And so we said, who are you?
    Naturalization Service.
    This guy had been watching us all the time.
    They were watching people more than we thought.
    We didn't know there was anybody watching us on either side.
    We were not Canadians.
    We were not Americans.
    We were not Austrians.
    We were nothing.
    But we were legal.
    We were legal.
    We could show him the papers.
    He said, thank you, and off he walked.
    Now, no doubt on the American side
    there's exactly the same kind of a guy doing that at their side.
    If we had done it, we would have been caught immediately.
    This is the moment I was talking about.
    The rest is an anticlimax.
    We traveled through the rest of Canada, days and days
    on that train, bitter.
    When we looked out the window and saw
    these enormous empty territories, room for thousands
    and these stone-hearted Canadians would not
    allow us even for a very short time to wait,
    it would be within the year, would not
    allow us to stay there to wait for our visa.
    So that we could legally immigrate.
    We had to get out.
    We did go to Halifax, made a last desperate attempt there.
    It didn't do any good.
    We got on the ship.
    It was a Japanese ship.
    The Hiye Maru, Nippon Yusen Kaisha, NYK, shipping company.
    And we traveled across the Pacific.
    And we arrived in Kobe, in Japan.
    And we stayed a few days in Japan
    to wait for the connecting boat that would take us from Japan
    to the coast of China.
    We were tourists again there.
    We saw the temples and everything in Japan.
    And then we embarked on the West side of Japan.
    And this was now the third ship.
    The first was the Atlantic.
    The second was the Pacific.
    And now it was the Yellow Sea.
    And after a few days, we arrived in Shanghai,
    indescribable the feeling that we were now
    in this weird, strange foreign place, language and all.
    And in Shanghai, we had friends there,
    who had come through the Suez Canal, the other way,
    the other half of the world.
    They had come through the Mediterranean and Suez
    and India.
    And so we lived there for several more months.
    I got a job at the University of Shanghai,
    teaching poor innocent Chinese English, believe it or not.
    And I got another job at the British owned big newspaper,
    the North China Daily News.
    I was an editor at that paper.
    It was a great miracle to get any job there, let alone two
    jobs.
    Most of the other refugees were on welfare there,
    couldn't find anything.
    And meanwhile, we were just watching the newspapers one day
    after another, the newspapers.
    Will our quota number be transferred from the London
    American consulate to the Shanghai American consulate
    in time, so that the quota number would come up
    before Japan would be at war with the United States,
    and thereby cut us off?
    No more transportation after war breaks out.
    This is the trouble with these oral reports.
    That you can only tell facts.
    But you cannot tell feelings.
    You cannot tell what it means to convey the idea and the terror
    to sit on a powder keg, watching the days slipping by.
    Will the consulate tell you that your number is now
    it's now your turn?
    It's a number, just like going to a candy store here
    or to a bakery, when you pull a number.
    If your number is low enough, you are still within this year.
    And you can go.
    If it's too high, you have to wait for next year.
    But next year-- next year, for most
    of those who had their numbers in Europe, let's say,
    I had applied at the American consulate in Vienna,
    for example.
    You couldn't wait.
    Waiting meant that they pick you up and ship to Auschwitz.
    And that's the end of it.
    There is no waiting here.
    It's-- so there we were waiting day after day.
    I was with this friend whom I mentioned
    earlier this whole trip.
    I might say at this point that I'm
    doing an injustice both to this friend, Kurt Schwalz,
    and to my writing friend, Joseph Fabry, the one who
    wrote this book jointly with me, and who
    was my literary companion for many years,
    and is still my friend today.
    And we are still in close touch.
    And I am not telling their story,
    although it is so intertwined with mine.
    But I'm not telling the story of my brother either,
    and of my parents except to say this much
    that my parents, after about eight months internment,
    were finally released.
    They lived through the blitz in London, were bombed out twice,
    and eventually after the war, I was
    able to bring them to this country,
    to California, where they lived their final years until they
    died in peace here.
    No, and as for my brother, I can only say--
    and I may have mentioned him in the first session,
    I'm not sure of that.
    But just say this much, that he tried
    to escape to Czechoslovakia, which was
    the closest border to Vienna.
    Czechoslovakia and Hungary are close borders,
    Switzerland is far away.
    I had chosen Switzerland.
    He had chosen to close border, for a reason.
    He had closed in the Czechoslovakia
    because he actually had a job there, was working there.
    He had a position in a factory.
    He had been in Vienna only for a visit.
    He was trapped during these few days on his visit.
    And then he couldn't get out again,
    back to where he originally had come from.
    And he had some hair raising experiences.
    The train was not on which he left
    for the Czech border was not allowed
    to get into Czechoslovakia, was turned back during the night.
    The Nazis commandeered it back to Vienna.
    He didn't want to be shipped back to Vienna.
    He jumped out of the moving train.
    He didn't hurt himself.
    And during the night he walked back,
    walked back, to the border river between Austria
    and Czechoslovakia.
    He got himself a little rowing boat.
    He got to the Czech side.
    On the Czech side, the Czech guards caught him.
    They didn't let him land.
    So he had to go back with his boat.
    He finally did get back to Vienna,
    and had all kinds of experiences there.
    Finally, was able to get papers, to emigrate to leave Austria,
    again, back to Czechoslovakia, where he wanted to go.
    And just as my parents left Vienna,
    just that it so happened just on the day
    of the night of the broken glass,
    he got to Prague on the very day that the Nazis marched
    into Prague, in September.
    He and the relatives hired a private plane,
    flew out from Czechoslovakia, from Prague,
    tried to get into France.
    If you do that, you have to cross Germany.
    If you have your map in your head.
    They had to fly over Nazi Germany,
    from Czechoslovakia to France.
    When they got near the French border
    the plane had engine trouble.
    There was a forced landing.
    And the question was whether the plane
    would land on the German side or on the French side.
    It landed within yards on the French side.
    The French didn't want to let them get out of the plane.
    They didn't want to let them in.
    There was a whole story as long as my own
    how he did finally managed to stay in France for a few days,
    for finally for a few weeks.
    Then he had to leave France.
    He did find a ship.
    He did-- he did get a permit to emigrate to Australia.
    Australia was the only country outside the United States
    that had a formalized established immigration
    policy not by bribery, or by exorbitant demands,
    like these $2,000, $16,000 in Shanghai,
    but regular legal policy.
    So he got a permit for Australia,
    boarded the ship in Marseilles.
    He then went to Algiers, and to the French Island,
    to Martinique, then the Panama Canal.
    And he got as far as New Caledonia.
    The ship didn't go any further than that.
    He had to stay there, he went to the interior of New Caledonia.
    That's where the man eaters seem to be still,
    and all kinds of experiences in the interior of New Caledonia.
    It was an exasperating trip on his part.
    Finally, did get a connecting ship into Melbourne
    from New Caledonia.
    But he was so exhausted from the experience,
    from all this being hunted first this business about
    at the Czech border, and then afterwards getting
    into Czechoslovakia, just when the Nazis came in,
    and the business about the plane, and then in France
    not being allowed, and on, and on, and on.
    His health was totally undermined.
    And after a relatively short stay,
    he died in a hospital in Melbourne,
    just from a late victim, of the Nazis
    although not burned in Auschwitz.
    This much of a digression I meant
    not to say much about this.
    But I've got carried away.
    I'm sorry.
    So I think I'm coming to the end part of what I have to say.
    My number, my quota number did come up in time
    before Pearl Harbor.
    My friend's did not.
    He had to stay in Shanghai throughout the war.
    He had his own experiences, which
    again means a different tape.
    He survived it.
    And I boarded a ship on the 1st of May, 1941.
    Because of my two jobs in Shanghai
    I had accumulated enough money to pay for that ship,
    to pay for the boat transportation.
    The Jewish community in Shanghai did what they could,
    in the most self-sacrificing way to help us.
    The day before I boarded the ship, a man came to the place
    where I lived.
    I had never seen him before.
    He introduced himself as a member of the Jewish community.
    He said, I understand that you are
    one of the lucky ones who got your visa
    and are allowed to leave tomorrow.
    He said, I hope you don't mind my asking you.
    Do you have enough money?
    I said, yes, I had enough money [INAUDIBLE] my ticket.
    Well, he says, you may need some money,
    even aboard ship, some spending money.
    And he gave me an envelope.
    He gave me this envelope.
    It had $44 in it, American dollars, in bills.
    And then he said, this is a loan, you know.
    And he smiled when he said that, a loan.
    He didn't expect ever to see this again.
    It was more money than it is now, of course again.
    Well, I took this money in the envelope in my pocket.
    I got on the ship.
    I won't talk much about the return trip first
    to Japan, then to wait there, then
    and for the next connecting ship across the Pacific.
    I never bought a drink or anything on that ship.
    I never spent $1 of it.
    But I had this envelope.
    I arrived in Seattle eventually.
    And there to my enormous surprise,
    I was expected by a lady, very elegant, very nicely dressed.
    And she had my name.
    Somehow, they are in touch, these Jewish communities.
    See, she said, I understand you are going to California.
    And I'm here to take you to the train.
    She had a car, which--
    and I was very moved by that.
    She wanted to do something for me.
    She didn't know what to do.
    She wanted to buy me something.
    And I didn't want anything.
    I didn't need anything.
    So she bought a Life magazine, I remember.
    I remember even the cover on the outside.
    She just she wanted to help.
    And I said, no, I really don't need anything.
    But on the way to the railroad station,
    I would like you to stop at the bank.
    We stopped at the bank.
    And I sent the 44 bucks, as they were back to Shanghai
    to this man.
    Well, I got on the train, passed through Portland
    in the middle of the night.
    I had friends in San Francisco who had long before told me
    that I could stay with them if I ever could make it.
    I passed through Berkeley in the morning.
    Somebody in that train pointed out to me the hills.
    You see?
    They said these are the hills of Berkeley.
    There are nice homes.
    They are residences.
    All the professors live there.
    Little did I know that this is where
    I would be living for the rest of my life
    up in the Berkeley Hills.
    And I came to Oakland.
    There was a ferryboat there.
    There was no-- that was the transportation.
    You went by ferry.
    My San Francisco friends had come to meet me in Oakland.
    I asked my way around.
    There were many people going back and forth
    at the ferry station.
    I wanted to know just exactly where it was.
    And I heard a voice behind me, somebody saying, take it easy.
    Take it easy.
    Things-- It's OK, or something to this effect.
    And here was my friend, Harry Liese, from San Francisco,
    who had come to meet me.
    And so we went together.
    Here I was in good hands.
    I went on the ferry.
    I remember this unforgettable sunset that evening.
    That was a real welcome to the New World.
    And at the other end in San Francisco,
    there were other friends.
    And they took me to the home of Harry and Trudy Liese
    in San Francisco.
    And it is there that the second part of my life begins,
    and my immigration story ends.
    I think this is a natural end of my story,
    because my career here, how I became
    a member of the University of California Press,
    and how I wrote, and got married, and had children,
    and all this is perhaps not what is
    meant via tape for Yad Vashem.
    Actually, we would like to hear about that.
    If it's-- but if you don't want to, that's OK.
    Well, it's not a matter of not wanting to do that.
    But it is-- it is a long, long story.
    Perhaps I could summarize it by saying that I was befriended
    by a British writer, CS Forester,
    who lived in Berkeley, who took me in, he
    and his wife in their beautiful Berkeley home,
    treated me as a son, although I was a stranger to them.
    And after a year, when the American part of the war
    began and the shipyard started taking laborers in Richmond,
    I became a laborer there in the shipyards,
    officially the tag was ship fitter.
    But that was entirely meaningless.
    Actually, this was my second job.
    Because my first job in America was polishing shoes
    for the Forester family.
    You know, I wanted to do something for them.
    And so their wife said--
    of Mr. Forester.
    She said, there's one thing I don't like.
    I can understand you want to do something for me.
    One thing I don't like, to polish four pairs of shoes
    every morning.
    She had two children.
    So I polished shoes.
    And then I became a laborer, and after a year or so, I married.
    I married Charlotte Lowes, a Canadian whom I got to
    through the Sierra Club.
    And she was sort of a refugee herself
    from her own family, a non-Jewish family, in Canada.
    She ironically came from that same Toronto
    from which I had taken the trip to Niagara Falls.
    And I now remember that I left off
    one little point in my story about Niagara Falls.
    And that was when the boat, The Maid of the Mist
    landed on the American side, there
    was a pole in the water painted red, white, and blue.
    I was on deck of that little ship.
    And I touched that pole with my left hand.
    That was the United States.
    With my left hand, my left hand had touched the United States.
    The day before, at Mount Royal from the height
    of the mountain, I had seen the United States.
    But here I actually touched it.
    And then it would take the whole trip
    and the whole emotional experience
    of going into the teeth of the enemy,
    and come back again, before I could use my right hand
    to touch American soil.
    But back to where I was with Charlotte.
    And she worked at the California State Employment office.
    Later, she became administrative assistant
    to a Clark Kerr, who became president of the university
    here at Berkeley.
    And we started from scratch, and together built up an existence
    in this country.
    I wanted to, all the time, to find work
    at the University of California Press,
    because there was a combination between
    my academic inclinations and my writing experience.
    It was an ideal joining of two interests.
    And I applied there.
    But they had no position for me.
    And so I decided to go to school here in Berkeley.
    I had an advanced degree from the University of Vienna.
    I wanted another advanced degree here.
    And I got various odd jobs in between,
    including a year when I had no jobs,
    and when I was entirely freelancing, meaning writing
    stories for journals, papers, miserable year, when
    I was afraid we wouldn't have enough to eat.
    We had a child.
    Later on we had a second child, two boys.
    And then I managed to get the research assistantship
    at the university in Berkeley.
    Later I got a fellowship job at Stanford University,
    where I had to commute from Berkeley, a five-hour commute,
    coming and going because I had no car.
    I had to take what then was a train.
    It doesn't run anymore.
    There was a so-called key train that went to San Francisco.
    And from San Francisco, I had to transfer on a bus.
    And from the bus, I had to transfer to the railroad.
    To go to the Palo Alto.
    And from the railroad another bus to Stanford.
    And the whole thing to 2 and 1/2 hours.
    I had to leave in the middle of the night
    in order to get there in the morning.
    But I didn't mind any of that.
    I had a job.
    I had a job.
    I had a job.
    And it was indeed a good thing.
    And I did some research work there that ended in a book
    I did under the auspices of the Stanford University Press.
    And in between all these part-time jobs,
    I kept going to the University of California Press,
    hoping that they would have a place for me.
    And they didn't, and they didn't.
    And after nine years, they did.
    And I waited nine years.
    And only after those nine years, had I caught up,
    you might say, with my previous life.
    That I was again not hunted, and not eating from hand-to-mouth.
    So I-- and it was not even the lowest job.
    Because of my previous experience,
    they gave me the second lowest.
    But nevertheless, I started, of course,
    at the bottom of the totem pole.
    And that was in 1951.
    And I stayed there for 25 years.
    They gave me two extra years, so I stayed there 27 years.
    And I wound up at the top of the totem pole.
    I was finally the Principal Editor
    of the Editorial Department.
    And I retired in 1976.
    And I've been retired ever since then.
    And am now here to tell my Oral History story.
    Would you want to mention that funny part about the desk
    at the University of California?
    How do you know about this?
    I must have told it before.
    No, I read it in the book.
    Oh, you read it in the book.
    Well, I left out a lot that I did say in the book.
    In a way, this is a repetition of what it says in the book,
    except that it is disorganized, and it leaves out 75%.
    Well, since you asked me about this, when I first
    asked for a job at the University Press,
    I was interviewed by the what then was called manager, later
    director of the University Press,
    Mr. Harold Small was his name.
    And he asked me about my background.
    And I told him that I had--
    that I have the European type high
    school classical, high school gymnasium,
    where we studied Latin for eight years, and Greek for six years,
    and that my own interests were also in history, especially art
    history, and literature.
    And every time I said something, and then
    I told him that I worked for newspapers in Vienna,
    first as a freelancer, and I finally
    got a permanent, quote-unquote, "permanent job" on the last day
    before the Nazis took over.
    And then I worked for journals in London.
    And then I worked for also as an editorial writer in China.
    And every time I said something, he nodded,
    affirmatively as though he were to say, well, that's good.
    That's what we need.
    And he said so eventually.
    And he said, well, that's exactly the kind of background
    we need, and we want.
    And he was so encouraging, and I thought
    I had a job in my pocket.
    And when I was all through, when I thought he would say,
    all right, start work for us.
    He said, I cannot give you a job.
    I said, why not after all this?
    He said, because we do not have a desk for you.
    I said, now that is a strange reason for not.
    He said, yes, yes, but look at our accommodations here.
    Where would I put your desk?
    Well, it would have been no problem for me.
    I would have put the desk in the middle of the room,
    if necessary.
    But that was not his idea.
    And I couldn't get past that.
    He said, we don't have a desk.
    And-- and I had to wait nine years until they finally
    found the desk for me.
    That's it.
    It must have been difficult becoming an editor
    in a foreign language.
    You must have been pretty new with the language stuff.
    Well, that of course, was the paramount problem.
    And you certainly ask the right question.
    But it begins in England, this story.
    You may recall what I just said, that I had to find a job there
    where English was not needed, and or only primitively enough
    that so it could be used by somebody else
    to rewrite it all.
    And well, yes, in England that was
    the first time I was confronted with the question of whether I
    would still be a writer, or as I put it at the time,
    sell insurance, in other words, something totally different.
    And I wanted to be a writer.
    I wanted to use the language.
    And so I just had determined that I
    had to learn the language.
    I had to learn it.
    And I had to learn it in a way that was fit to be printed.
    I could buy my groceries.
    But if I could write something in that style that
    couldn't be pretty, it couldn't be used for books,
    for a newspaper article.
    And I learned desperately.
    I listened to the radio.
    And I read books, and conversation, and girlfriends
    who spoke English, all that.
    And I have no magic formula except this firm determination
    to learn the language well enough that it could
    be used for published material.
    As long as I was in England, myself and my friend Joseph
    Fabry, whom I mentioned several times, our stories which
    were in German, had to be translated by translators.
    Our stories, now, I am a professional translator.
    I translate for money.
    I mean I-- aside from being a journalist and a writer,
    I'm a translator.
    And I have several books published by the top publishers
    in America in English.
    But that is even hear me talking,
    I can never lose my accent.
    That is impossible.
    But what I tried to do is that the accent could not
    be seen in the printed word, in the printed article.
    And finally I was recognized.
    My work was recognized.
    The Austrian government, the President of the Republic
    gave me a decoration, grandiosely
    called the Golden Merit of something or other.
    And that was for the writings.
    So it came full circle.
    My first book published in translation was German verses.
    I'm particularly interested in translating
    poetry, because it's such a challenge,
    to rhyme in English something that rhymes in German.
    And of course, not just the rhymes.
    I'm talking about the technique.
    And that was in 1967.
    And it was published here.
    It has had seven printings so far.
    It was very well received, and had wonderful reviews
    in the New York Times in the London Times
    literary supplement, in the professional journals.
    It was a great triumph, and made me very happy
    to have that published.
    It was also published--
    the same book was published also in Germany,
    although it was half in English.
    The German text on one side and the English on the other side.
    So it was published in the United States,
    in German English, and in Germany, English German.
    The same book was republished, and it had many printings there
    also.
    It was also read--
    read, the whole book was read on a recording by Ogden Nash.
    He is the-- or was the editor of The New Yorker.
    And he read my translations on a recording.
    And I in turn took his poetry.
    He wrote poems, very funny whimsical poems.
    And I translated them into German.
    It was published in Germany.
    So it was sort of a seesaw sort of thing.
    And since then, I translated mostly together
    with my friend Fabry, several other authors, German authors.
    They were all published.
    I also, on one occasion, had a translation
    from French medieval poetry that was French.
    It was done by the University of Chicago, and various odds
    and ends.
    And I'm busy to this day editing and writing a little bit,
    and enjoying it.
    And I regard it as the--
    the great grace of my life that I was able all my life
    to work in an occupation which I loved, that you could do
    something that you like to do.
    I did not work from 8:00 to 5:00 in a stupor,
    and then come home and being eventually freed
    from the chore, and now my life begins.
    My life began at 8:00 in the morning in the job.
    So we can start talking again.
    Any time.
    OK.
    You were talking when we stopped the tape about how
    you were able to go to a job that's very fulfilling.
    Yes and that it is, of course my experience that stories I
    heard from others, are all different,
    and fundamentally different.
    And I have now in my late years started
    to encourage other people to write their stories.
    That was before I ever heard of Oral history.
    I had a class, or I still have it, at the Jewish Community
    Center in Berkeley, where I invite people
    who had gone through the Holocaust,
    or be witnesses of this Holocaust,
    to write their stories.
    And since my job is writing, I can help them do so.
    And it is very satisfying for me to see
    those important stories preserved, doing the same thing
    that you are doing, only in a less efficient way,
    couldn't be better than video.
    And you see the person actually.
    But the next best thing is to write the story,
    and especially I have some--
    these are all old people, very old, in fact.
    Last year, the average age of the people
    who wrote their stories, the average age was 85.
    Only recently did I finish the story of what--
    I said I finished.
    She finished it.
    But I helped her along, once a week,
    to write to rewrite, to organize, and so forth.
    And she called her report or account, on reaching 90.
    She is now 93.
    This I have now quite a collection
    of those completed stories.
    Others are still being done.
    They are done in this beautiful way that exists now.
    What is it?
    Desktop publishing.
    And but some had them job printed.
    They really printed books.
    They bound-- printed, bound printed book,
    at his own expense.
    He wanted it this way for friends, for family.
    And on one memorable occasion, a book
    was picked up by a publisher.
    It is commercially published.
    That may interest you particularly,
    because it was done by the founder of the Holocaust
    library, Mr. Garcia.
    Mr. Garcia is a Dutch Jew married to a Gentile wife, who
    was in one of my classes.
    I forgot to mention that.
    During those nine waiting years, I gave courses on the campus,
    in the university campus in Berkeley,
    training editors how to write for publication.
    And since you read the book, I will also tell this anecdote.
    You know which one probably.
    But before I come to that, at the end of one of those courses
    there was a small, quite inconspicuous young lady
    who came, whom I hadn't noticed before.
    After all there are 30 people in every class.
    I hadn't noticed her.
    And she came, and she said--
    introduced herself.
    She said she is the Gentile wife of a Jewish man who
    had been in concentration camps for four years, including
    Auschwitz, or mostly Auschwitz.
    I couldn't believe that, for four years.
    He had the most hair-raising experiences.
    And she had pumped him over the years,
    him telling a little bit today, and another little bit
    another day.
    He was very reluctant.
    He didn't want to tell his story.
    And she is a very loyal wonderful woman,
    she was so enthralled by all this,
    she was literally sitting at his feet,
    and urging him to tell a little more, and a little more.
    And she took notes.
    And then she had all these notes,
    she came to my class to learn how
    to turn those into a narrative, into a book,
    into a readable account.
    And so she asked whether she could continue privately
    with me.
    This was-- these are public lectures
    or courses on the campus.
    And so for a year thereafter, she came.
    And she took him along.
    By that time, he was sufficiently softened up
    to play ball with us.
    And then he, and she, and I, we worked on this book.
    It is incredible, incredible experiences of this man.
    Now this is somebody who either you already
    have his oral history or you certainly should have.
    Is it Max Garcia?
    It's Max Garcia.
    Yeah, we interviewed him.
    You have it, don't you?
    Well, I don't know about the book,
    but I know we've interviewed him,
    so I'm sure we have the book.
    Well, his book was published.
    And there was this incredible episode
    of a man who in Auschwitz had appendicitis,
    a broken appendicitis, if you know what that means.
    It could not be operated in the normal containing way,
    but it had already putrefied, and broken into the whatever.
    And with an SS man operating on this man, he wanted to--
    not out of compassion.
    He wanted to see whether such a challenge in job
    would be something for him, whether he can fix that.
    And so-- so he operated on this poor man.
    And it was successful, the operation.
    But the moment the SS man saw it was this doctor,
    saw it was successful, he was no longer interested
    in this fellow.
    And sent him right back to the barracks on this flea bitten
    straw mattress.
    It's not a bed.
    What do you call these things?
    A pallet?
    Call them pallets, or cots, or something.
    And-- and this man survived.
    And Max Garcia tells that story.
    Well, so this only a part of my--
    only one of the various accounts, which I have now.
    Are you still helping people write them?
    Yes.
    I'm still doing it.
    The last one, about a lady who fled from Krakow in Poland,
    and wound up in a refugee camp in East Africa, Tanganyika.
    Have you ever heard of that?
    In all your accounts, you will not
    have anybody who's spent time in a camp in East Africa.
    And what is in between, is a long, long story.
    And I have it.
    And I sent it, the story.
    It's not for my personal amusement, of course.
    I sent this account to the various depositories there.
    There are quite a few now.
    And in fact, they are competing with each other.
    They want these stories.
    There is in Germany, there are some.
    I sent one to London.
    I sent one to the Beck Institute.
    And I think you have one.
    I am not sure.
    I think so.
    And--
    Do you send each one only to one depository?
    No.
    No, no.
    I sent the same story to three or four of these depositories.
    Her name is Dora Moskowski.
    I think you have that.
    Yeah.
    Well, I was wondering because I like--
    I would probably like to be able to get a copy of please
    all of them, if it's possible.
    It is possible.
    I can tell you who has them.
    And I'm sure.
    But I believe you have at least some of them.
    You certainly have the one by Max Garcia.
    It's getting close to--
    [INAUDIBLE]
    OK.
    Any time.
    OK.
    It is April 17, 1991.
    We're interviewing Max Knight at Temple Beth
    Shalom for the Holocaust Oral History Project.
    My name is Peggy Coster, and with me is Peggy Poole.
    OK.
    So Max, in your book, you said your uncle
    asked if your playmate was Jewish when you were a child.
    What did you make of this at the time?
    I thought it was an irrelevant question.
    I shrug it off.
    To me, it sounded like somebody saying was this boy born
    in May or in September.
    I brushed it off.
    I wasn't aware of this situation,
    but it was the first time that I heard such a question.
    And as that, it stuck in my memory.
    So you had never heard anything antisemitic up
    to that point from anybody?
    No, I never did.
    Although I lived in an antisemitic country,
    I did not live in an antisemitic neighborhood.
    It so happened that the school to which I went
    had mostly Jewish students.
    So I remember on one occasion, we left for a summer home
    near Vienna.
    And at the time when I still had to go to school,
    it was before the regular summer intermission.
    So I had to go to school, to a different school.
    And there, for the first time, I was
    separated from the rest of the class
    and had to go to another place for religious instruction.
    So it was then that I became aware
    that indeed there was something that I did not
    share with the others.
    And it was also in that place where I first
    heard an antisemitic slur.
    There were some boys that were outside the garden that
    belonged to the house in which we lived.
    And they were yelling something outside,
    which only after a few seconds I realized
    that it was aimed at me.
    It was the first time that I heard it.
    I was quite shocked.
    It stuck in my mind.
    That was my first experience.
    How old were you?
    I must have been about nine.
    Did your parents tell you you're Jewish
    because otherwise you would be going to the Christian lessons
    in the school?
    They didn't have to tell me anything.
    I mean, it developed gradually.
    It was not that there was suddenly
    great revelation about this.
    Off and on, I might have heard a remark to which I didn't
    attribute much importance, such as that of my uncles,
    but the cumulative effect was that, OK, we talked,
    and we thought in religious terms,
    not in Nazi racist terms.
    So it was a different religion.
    What the heck?
    It was not a problem.
    Did you ever try to hide being Jewish after you found out,
    after you figured it out?
    I had no need to.
    No.
    I didn't hide it, but I didn't advertise it either.
    It was just-- this is something that is so unusual, perhaps,
    to hear now.
    It simply was unimportant.
    It was like what is your preference, this kind of movie
    or that?
    I brushed it off that--
    I've used the word before, but I cannot say anything else.
    I was a boy like every other boy.
    I didn't feel I was different.
    I didn't look different.
    I didn't dress differently.
    And it just played no particular role in my life.
    I didn't feel Jewish.
    Hitler made me a Jew afterwards.
    Then I became conscious of it.
    I still didn't become religious, but I
    knew that there was a problem, of course.
    What was your father like?
    Well, my father came from very humble beginning,
    from a poor family in the country.
    He was a very good-looking man, dressed well,
    liked the ladies, was noted by them.
    He was very ambitious.
    He had to leave home when he was only 12 years old.
    His father died early.
    The father had a little country store, which was then
    run by my father's mother.
    But she could hardly make a living.
    He went to school in the capital in Prague
    and was taken in by an uncle.
    He was very eager to learn.
    He was a good student.
    Typically, he preserved his certificates, straight A's
    all the way through.
    I still have them.
    He wanted to get somewhere, and he did.
    He became the manager of a big bank, which
    had its headquarters in Vienna.
    And because he had such a good position, the quote, "better,"
    unquote world opened up to him.
    He was invited here and there.
    Got to know my mother, who came from a well-to-do family,
    quite different from my father's family.
    Got to know her and married her.
    He was not satisfied even with this position as a manager
    of this branch bank.
    He wanted to go to the headquarters of the bank,
    so we moved to Vienna.
    And he became a member of the headquarters.
    We lived in Vienna.
    We had two bosses in the family.
    One was the nominal boss.
    That was my father.
    The other one was the real boss.
    It was my mother.
    When we-- I mean my brother and I--
    were naughty for some reason in the morning
    while my father was at work, my mother
    would say, now, wait until Daddy comes home.
    So when Daddy came home, he was the authority, supposedly.
    And he would frown when he heard about the misbehavior.
    In serious cases, he had a cane, which he never used.
    He threatened with it.
    He showed it to us.
    But he never used it.
    So although my mother referred to my father as the authority,
    as the one to whom you tell things if things go wrong,
    actually she was the absolute boss in the house.
    He respected her.
    He loved her.
    It was a love marriage.
    In all my childhood, I never heard them
    quarrel or shout at each other.
    They were sometimes angry at each other.
    My mother was angry at my father when he wouldn't
    acknowledge her good cooking.
    And he would say, well, that last goose was a little more
    crisp than this one.
    She didn't like that.
    But this never went beyond this.
    So what else can I tell you about my father?
    He was very fond and interested in words.
    That is something that runs in the family.
    His father was also interested in writing.
    My father was a specialist in shorthand.
    Shorthand in those days was very important.
    Nowadays it's practically forgotten
    because you have tapes.
    But then they did not have tapes,
    and you had to take important things down in shorthand.
    You took dictation in shorthand.
    Not only did he write shorthand and various systems
    of shorthand, he was also a court-appointed specialist.
    Sometimes the courts needed interpretation of documents,
    and he was assigned to do that.
    And he also would take down parliamentary debates.
    Unheard of today in parliament you
    would have to rely on shorthand.
    But they just didn't have the tapes then.
    So writing, words, grammar--
    that was important to him, and he was interested in it.
    His father was also noted for his calligraphy,
    and his grandfather, my great-grandfather,
    was the scribe in his little village
    who would write the Torah scrolls.
    I have some writings preserved.
    So you see, I also became a writer.
    So it's really you have several generations on that.
    He was nice to us children.
    He would take us sledding in the Vienna woods,
    sometimes played with us.
    I liked my father.
    I liked him, but my relation to him
    was never as deeply warm as that to my mother.
    I loved my mother, and I liked my father.
    Not that I didn't love him, but it
    was a different relationship.
    To this day, I miss my mother.
    I'm almost 82, but I still miss my mother.
    I cannot say that I miss my father.
    I think of my father.
    I especially am indebted to him for his love of nature.
    When we were very small children,
    he took us to the mountains, first to the Vienna woods,
    then to the Alps.
    And that has indeed--
    that stayed with me all my life.
    I go back as often as I can to the mountains,
    to the Austrian mountains, the Swiss mountains.
    And by golly, so do my children.
    They both go back.
    A few years ago, I wrote a book about my experiences
    in the Alps for the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth,
    with nice pictures, which I didn't take,
    but which accompanied the text, of course.
    That was well received.
    And that expresses my feelings about the mountains,
    and that I owe to my father.
    When he finally came to California,
    he was fond of my two little sons.
    He liked my wife.
    It was a good relationship.
    Do you think the same thing happened in your son's
    relationship to you that--
    a lot of it's natural because small children spend
    so much time with their mothers while their fathers are gone
    working and things, so they very frequently
    develop this warmer relationship with their mother.
    Do you think that happened to you
    in your life with your children also?
    Well, that's hard to say.
    I wouldn't know that, really.
    The whole pattern is a little different.
    There was a more intimate relationship when I was a kid.
    Our kids much earlier became independent.
    They didn't want to live at home anymore.
    That was unheard of in our situation.
    So it isn't quite comparable.
    We are also very close, I believe.
    I don't think there's much difference in that.
    But the circumstances are different,
    largely because the children leave home so early.
    You know how today the fathers complain if the mothers say,
    wait till your father comes home,
    because they say that teaches the children that the father is
    a disciplinarian, and the mother is the one who loves them.
    What would your father say if he were alive today about that?
    Well, he wouldn't accept that.
    I mean, he lived his life that way.
    But I accept it.
    It's a ridiculous thing to say, wait until Dad comes home,
    and make him the devil and the authority figure.
    But that was the pattern, not just in my family.
    That was simply the cultural pattern of the time.
    Was he very critical?
    I mean, did he compliment your mother
    as well as say her cooking wasn't too great?
    No, he didn't compliment her enough.
    When she complained about this--
    she would say, for example, well,
    she prepared something that was very special.
    And he wouldn't say anything.
    And he had this outrageous answer saying, well,
    if I don't say anything that means I like it.
    So she said, what kind of an answer is that?
    But that's the way he did it.
    And I became aware of the importance of giving credit
    where credit is due.
    To this day, I resent it if I don't get credit when it's due.
    I hate it when it is not due, flattery, or saying,
    oh, this wonderful man and all this.
    None of that.
    But when I do something which I feel deserves praise,
    I want to get it.
    So you learned to compliment others.
    So you learned to give compliments as well
    as [BOTH TALKING]
    I think I do.
    I think I do.
    I'm aware of it.
    And I feel that people ought to be given credit
    when they deserve it.
    Did your father treat you and your brother the same way?
    Was he willing to compliment you,
    or did he do the same thing to you?
    Well, he certainly didn't treat us differently.
    But I had a different position in the house than my brother.
    I was more conspicuous.
    In the earlier years, my contributions were published,
    or people talked about it.
    I was noticed.
    Later I completed the university.
    I became a doctor.
    So I was more visible that way.
    And without my really realizing it at that time,
    I dominated my brother.
    My brother didn't like that until at one occasion
    he actually said so.
    And I became aware of it only then.
    I didn't mean to dominate him at all,
    but this is how it develops.
    And that was one reason why he, much later than our children,
    left the home and accepted an invitation from a relative who
    was a businessman in Prague, in what is now Czechoslovakia.
    So he left the home.
    There was not a crisis or anything of that sort.
    It was not even particularly discussed.
    But it was mentioned at one time.
    And so to this day I feel sorry about that because in no way
    did I intend to do that.
    But he quote, "liberated himself," unquote.
    He did very well in Prague in that business.
    And we did become what you might call equal partners after that.
    We were very fond of each other.
    It was much expressed in our correspondence later on.
    Somehow this pattern repeats itself with our children.
    I also believe that the first born originally somewhat
    dominated the younger one, but he also, the younger one,
    liberated himself and is now, as I see it, an equal partner
    in this brother relationship.
    Did you ever hear of those psychologists who
    say that very often the first child has
    a real strong relationship with authority and is--
    maybe much more self-confident would
    be another way of putting it.
    And the second children are typically very competitive.
    Do you think that would apply and--
    another way of saying what you're talking about?
    I think it does.
    I think it does, yes.
    I mean, there's a historic myth about the first born.
    And it is more than a myth.
    The first born throughout history
    had greater legal rights.
    And I think some of this survives.
    In our family, it's similar, yes.
    I have one more question about this.
    You know in your book where you talk about how--
    you say something about you think you're a perfectionist.
    Did I read that?
    I think I am.
    I think I got the impression that you like
    things to be really perfect.
    Oh, yes, yes, yes.
    Yes, I do.
    This I inherited also from my father.
    It has something to do--
    I believe it does--
    with this very meticulous handwriting,
    with this attention to detail.
    He had a very neat desk.
    My younger son tells me that in his office
    they call him Mr. Neat.
    In my mind, I connect that.
    And the older son certainly is very meticulous.
    So is his wife.
    Their homes are very neat and well scrubbed, inviting,
    and pleasant.
    Do you think this has to do with your father's critical approach
    to life?
    I'm not aware of any particular critical approach to life.
    Well, maybe I said that wrong.
    His refusal to give compliments, and he
    probably did try to give instructions
    when he saw something needed improvement,
    but then he didn't give compliments.
    Well, I don't want this to become,
    in this conversation, a primary characteristic of this man's
    profile.
    Just an incidental thing, which I mentioned in response
    to a question.
    OK.
    I'll move on.
    But you have another one, you say?
    No, I said I'll move on.
    Oh, yeah.
    He was almost pedantic and bureaucratic.
    Perhaps my mother had more vision than he had.
    She was more imaginative.
    She had a wonderful sense of humor, sometimes wicked humor.
    She, in an emergency, would find a solution.
    He would be stuck.
    He wouldn't know what to do.
    He was desperate when inflation hit us in the 1920s.
    I'd like to remember the episode when he called me in,
    haggard and distraught, and called me into his office
    at home, into his little room.
    And he would lick a postage stamp, the equivalent
    of an ordinary first-class letter,
    and put it on an envelope.
    He had just written a letter.
    And he said, I want you to see this.
    This is all that I received in return for many years,
    having your mother and you insured.
    I paid in insurance for years and years, life insurance.
    And it melted away into nothing, a postage stamp.
    The result of this was that we were literally destitute.
    Suddenly, everything was washed away.
    And my mother didn't know a way out.
    And my father didn't know a way out.
    But that's where my mother came in.
    And we had wealthy relatives in France.
    They lived in Paris.
    And my mother would sit down and write a tactful and thoughtful
    letter to these uncles, telling them what the situation was.
    And these uncles immediately answered the call
    and helped us out as long as the emergency lasted.
    But it was her initiative that did this.
    I mean, he knew about this.
    He might have said something like this.
    And it was not--
    didn't really have the character of just asking for a handout.
    It was on a different level.
    Here was a situation for which nobody was responsible at all.
    It was a world catastrophe, just not only in Austria.
    And these uncles came to our support.
    But it was the mother who did that.
    There was another situation, when
    my father, who, as I mentioned originally,
    was the manager of a branch bank and then came
    to Vienna to the main branch, to the headquarters.
    But even that was not good enough for him.
    You see what is happening.
    If somebody comes from humble beginnings,
    he wants to get ahead.
    So at that time, it seemed very desirable
    for him to become a member of the Stock Exchange, which
    is a different organization from the Stock
    Exchange in this country.
    A member of the Stock Exchange was an official.
    It's different.
    Well, he didn't know how to go about it.
    But my mother, again, found a way.
    She made some connections, knew some people,
    who in turn knew other people.
    And through her doings and the influence of those people
    my father got that position.
    But he always recognized this.
    He did give her credit for these things,
    not so much for the new goose, but when
    it came to these important things,
    he absolutely acknowledged that.
    Did his bank fail during all this inflation?
    Yes.
    It was a great failure of the [NON-ENGLISH] which had
    worldwide repercussions.
    It was in turn connected with the bank crash in New York.
    And--
    How old were you when this happened?
    In the '20s-- well, I was born in 1909, so--
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Yeah.
    Did you feel a lot of resulting fear?
    Like over here, my parents and people
    of my parents' generation, they're always
    talking about the Depression.
    And a lot of things that they've done since then
    have been still responding to the Depression at the time.
    You were very young and very impressionable at that age.
    Did that have a big effect on your life?
    Well, it did have a big effect.
    Yes.
    It taught me about providing for a rainy day,
    looking to the future, not living from hand to mouth,
    certainly not living on credit.
    I do have a credit card, but I do not use it.
    I buy what I can afford.
    If I have the money, I buy it.
    If I don't have the money, I will not buy it on credit.
    The only thing I ever bought what you might call on credit
    was our house in Berkeley.
    But I took a mortgage.
    But even then, I avoided, as much as I possibly could,
    taking that mortgage.
    I rounded up relatives.
    And there were savings.
    There were my parents.
    I privately managed to raise most of the money.
    The only amount I had to ask the bank for was $1,000.
    It was the only money I ever borrowed.
    I have never borrowed money from anybody in my life.
    And that includes borrowing through the means
    of a credit card.
    In fact, I believe this is characteristic
    for the American way of life.
    I believe that this feeling of security
    that the average American appears to have,
    where he never worries--
    or she-- whether the rainy day might
    come, whether the job might be lost,
    whether a political upheaval might happen,
    whether a natural catastrophe may happen.
    This is not taken into account.
    You have a credit card, and enjoy now, pay later sometime.
    Well, perhaps you cannot pay later.
    This is considered overly cautious
    and not the American way, even if it is official policy.
    Buy, buy, buy, whether you need it or not.
    Why should you buy when you don't need it and especially
    buy on credit.
    It is not my way of life.
    And it is quite possible that this original episode,
    the one with the postage stamp, may have something
    to do with it.
    I could see with my own eyes what happens
    if you don't have resources.
    And even if you have resources, it
    can happen that they melt away, like this inflation
    business was.
    And for that reason, I also believe
    it's a good idea to have some funds outside the country.
    If I had had some, I wouldn't have
    had to struggle so hard in England--
    if I had had some English money.
    That's my answer.
    Thank you.
    What do you remember about World War
    I, where you lived, what you ate,
    what your parents told you about it?
    I have little bits of memories, episodes about the First World
    War.
    For one thing, the earliest thing
    I can remember about the First World War
    was the death of Francis Joseph, the emperor.
    This was in 1916.
    The war began in '14, ended in '18.
    That was right in the middle of it.
    And I remember as a little boy, I
    was allowed to see this enormous, pompous funeral
    procession.
    We had friends who had a store window
    in the very street in which the funeral could be seen.
    And so I remember the crowned heads of state
    that had come to Austria with their plumed, shiny helmets,
    uniforms, the horses, the catafalque itself, somebody
    carrying a pillow with the medals of the emperor on it.
    Later on, I remember Russian prisoners of war
    who came to Vienna and where they were farmed out
    into the country to help as farmhands,
    even to look after children.
    They were very good-natured people.
    They were so considered.
    Some of them were very handy in carving
    intricate puzzles that had to be put together in certain ways.
    They did this for the children.
    And they sold some of them.
    I remember them.
    I remember what they looked in their long coats.
    They had fur hats like the Cossacks.
    And I was sorry for them.
    I saw them getting out of the trains.
    I also remember the horrible last year
    of the war in Austria.
    And the powers Allied with Austria were about to collapse.
    Food shortages.
    We had bread that when you tried to cut it,
    it fell apart because it contained sawdust, strangely.
    It was made of cornmeal, which here is a delicacy, but--
    I noticed that sometimes they have cookies made out of those.
    But these are different items, I assure you.
    That was hardly palatable.
    It was terrible, this bread.
    And the food in general was pretty poor.
    We had another dish made of cornmeal.
    It was called polenta.
    It was an Italian dish.
    And my brother and I just hated it.
    I understood that we had to eat it.
    We had little else to eat.
    My little brother didn't want to eat it.
    And I was assigned coaxing him into eating it.
    I was even then known as a storyteller.
    And so I made up a story to my little brother.
    He was sitting on the bench there.
    I was sitting in front of him.
    I had a bowl of polenta in my hand with a spoon.
    And I would say to him, as my family often
    quoted me in later years--
    I said to him, well, once upon a time, there was a war.
    And there was a family.
    And they had hungry children.
    And he, in amazement, opens his mouth like that,
    looks at me, and at the moment he had opened his mouth
    and shoved a spoonful of polenta into it.
    And so it went.
    And my parents sent both of us to our maid's parents
    in the country.
    We had a live-in maid.
    And her parents, farming peasant people, lived in the country.
    And they had all the good things that we did not
    have in the city, especially milk, eggs, and butter.
    And so we were sent out to these people.
    And we were fattened up by them.
    We were considered very fortunate
    that we had such a possibility.
    Most of the children in my class went
    to the barracks, which ladled out food provided
    by President Herbert Hoover.
    It was called American Austrian Children's Help.
    And he sponsored these charitable meals
    for the children.
    We were directed directly from school to go to those barracks.
    And there we received a big beaker of cocoa with milk.
    It was very nourishing.
    And we also received dumplings.
    Well, I was a spoiled child from those farm outs
    to the maid's parents.
    And although this was nourishing food, I was quite ungrateful.
    I didn't like that food.
    The dumplings were very, very hard.
    They were just like a bowling ball.
    But we could not just make them disappear.
    We were watched.
    We were not allowed to take them home either.
    We had to eat them right there, which was,
    of course, the right thing.
    But I still managed to get one of those dumplings home
    without being seen.
    I couldn't put the dumpling in my satchel
    because they searched the satchel.
    We had those satchels on our backs.
    But then I could put the dumpling between my back
    and the satchel.
    The weight of the satchel pressed it just enough
    so it wouldn't fall out.
    And when my mother saw that dumpling--
    and she was such a gourmet cook--
    she'd shrug her shoulders and said, well, OK, you
    don't have to go anymore.
    [LAUGHS] And she was very understanding.
    And somehow we managed to be fed at home.
    What else about the war?
    I remember the end of the war, when Austria really collapsed,
    the monarchy.
    And we were all assembled in the gym of the school, all the boys
    and the girls.
    And we were told that Austria from now on is a republic.
    Our school principal explained that to us.
    We didn't understand it.
    We didn't care one way or another.
    But we somehow felt it was a historic occasion.
    The voice, his conduct, the way he presented it,
    it was a major thing.
    And that was it.
    It's not very much that I remember.
    I do remember that I was sorry about the soldiers,
    about both the Russian prisoners and about our own soldiers,
    which was also the source of this poem I
    did about the soldiers.
    And one of the soldiers was my mother's brother,
    whose permanent residence was Prague,
    but he came from time to time to visit us when he was on leave.
    And I was much impressed by his rifle.
    He showed me how the rifle worked.
    This rifle was his undoing, when after the war
    and during the Nazi period, he lived in Prague, as I said.
    And there was this terrible episode
    when the so-called Reich protector, whom Hitler
    installed in Czechoslovakia, was assassinated by Czech Patriots.
    You mean Reinhard Heydrich?
    Reinhard Heydrich, yes.
    And he was assassinated.
    The Nazis just went wild.
    It is well known what they did.
    They burned down this small town in which the assassins were
    thought to have stayed before the assassination, razed
    it totally to the ground, killed all the men,
    and also had so-called punishment transports.
    They rounded up Jewish people in Czechoslovakia
    and put them on trains for the camps in the east.
    But many of them--
    in fact, I believe, all of them--
    did not reach these camps because the people
    were murdered en route.
    One of them was my first cousin, the daughter
    of my mother's sister.
    The Nazis also came to my uncle's apartment,
    my mother's brother.
    And there he had that rifle hanging
    on the wall as a memento of the First World War,
    as a decoration.
    The Nazis had earlier said that possession of weapons
    is punishable by death.
    They took him to the Prague prison against the wall
    and shot him.
    It was the end of my uncle.
    Was your father in the war at all, the First World War?
    My father was not in the war.
    I cannot quite remember why that was.
    I do remember that he came home one time
    saying that he was not taken, but it must
    have been some health reason.
    I don't know.
    Would you tell about that poem that you
    wrote because I have a couple of questions
    I want to ask you about--
    Well when I was a seven-year-old boy,
    I went once for a walk with my nursemaid.
    This was not the maid that was in the house--
    helped in the house, but was for me.
    And I said I have to go.
    It was in the winter.
    It was a cold day in November or something.
    And she held me by my hand.
    I said, no, I have to go home.
    I have to go home.
    And what's the matter?
    I have to write something.
    And she was quite puzzled, but she took me home.
    And when I was at home, I took one of my school writing books
    with lines on them.
    And somehow you remember these early things.
    I laid down on my stomach on a couch,
    which had a red velvet cover on it in my parents' bedroom--
    the bed was pretty bad there--
    and in longhand with a pencil on those
    lines wrote a poem about the war.
    This I had concocted on the way while I was going on the walk.
    And I had it all firmly in my head,
    and I didn't want to forget it.
    It's for that reason that I wanted
    to go home right, right then.
    So I wrote it down in these long German Gothic script letters.
    I had learned to write only a year before that.
    I was turned seven years old.
    And forgot about it.
    The moment it was done, that was fine with me.
    I was no longer interested in it.
    I didn't try to preserve it or anything.
    What I didn't know was that my mother preserved it.
    And what I didn't know either was
    that there was a contest for children in a women's magazine.
    How do children see the war?
    And she mailed it in, all this unknown to me.
    And one day-- my father would get up at noontime,
    at the meal, which is the main meal in Europe,
    or it was in Austria, and pretended
    to read from a newspaper, or so I thought.
    Because it was his habit not to say,
    Mother told me you didn't behave this morning.
    But he said here, I read in the newspaper
    that you broke a dish in the kitchen this morning.
    Of course, I was too small.
    I couldn't read.
    And on that occasion, he read from a magazine
    that Max Kuhnel--
    that was my name then--
    had won the first prize in this children's contest.
    I just smiled.
    By that time I got wise to this.
    I knew it wasn't true when he read something
    from the newspaper, that it was all make-believe from earlier
    occasions when I broke a dish.
    Well, of course, it doesn't say that in the newspaper.
    That Mother told you.
    I paid no attention to this at all.
    I took no credit for it.
    Forgot about it.
    It was years later that I found the clipping.
    And I even found the original writing of the poem
    because my mother had transcribed it.
    She sent it.
    It was not easy to read.
    And I still have it.
    I have since written my own story.
    And I included that sheet of paper
    in my early years account.
    That is the story.
    I should have said--
    you were probably thinking of that when
    you asked me about the poem.
    The prize I won, because so the people said in this journal,
    in this magazine that it was the only poem that expressed sorrow
    about the sufferings of the soldiers
    and what they had to go through in the trenches,
    whereas the poems ordinarily would
    talk about flags flying and the field
    marshals on horseback and the music
    and the parades and the marches and all the glamour
    of soldierdom.
    So that was the story.
    I was very pleased about this in later years.
    I didn't need credit then, but now when I read it,
    I was very happy to.
    This was my first published piece of writing.
    Did your parents talk about that kind of things at home?
    Because if not, how did you become aware
    of the pain and the suffering in the trenches instead
    of what the other children seemed aware of,
    which was the glory and the fighting and the--
    Well, I don't know how I picked that up.
    You do hear about this as a child.
    For one thing, this uncle I was talking about--
    and he would sometimes tell about the freezing.
    And when he had my mother's food,
    he would make comparisons of what they had in the field.
    But beyond this, I cannot tell you how I picked it up.
    I was sorry for the Russian prisoners.
    I could see here were people taken away
    from their own country and having
    to serve, perhaps, frivolous bosses in the country there.
    There were odd bits here and there that you pick up.
    After all, it was four years.
    During that time, something ought to seep through.
    Do you remember very many antisemitic incidents
    prior to the Second World War, after the first one
    that you remembered, that you told us about?
    Well, I think I covered that because in the early years
    I was not exposed to antisemitic outbursts anywhere.
    I do remember an antisemitic weekly
    that was in every restaurant and coffeehouse.
    It was called Kikeriki, supposed to be what the rooster says,
    cock a doodle doo.
    And it was quite similar to this notorious weekly, Der Sturmer,
    in later years.
    It showed the most ugly caricatures, Jewish rabbis
    with big noses and all the hateful
    attributes that they could think of.
    But to me it looked so absurd.
    No sane person would believe that this was true.
    It was, to me, clearly aimed at the lowest class that
    somehow didn't count anyway.
    And no decent person would pay much attention to those.
    It was an oddity.
    It was a hateful oddity.
    I didn't like it.
    But that is the one thing I do remember.
    But after that, not until the Nazis
    became more and more visible in high school.
    When did you notice the Nazis becoming visible?
    In high school, when I was in high school.
    We had in our class one professed official Nazi.
    And I was on very good terms with him for a strange reason
    or for two reasons really.
    The one was he was the poorest student in the class.
    And when we had homework, he would
    come to my place, my parents' place,
    and do the homework there because he couldn't do it
    by himself.
    And the other was--
    after all, high school is eight years or was eight years.
    And so it was quite a development during that time.
    And in the later years when we were in the higher classes,
    I would read a little-known--
    I wouldn't say little-known.
    It was well-known, but it was a magazine
    that didn't have large circulation, something
    akin to The New Republic or The Nation
    here, a liberal magazine.
    I read this very carefully and was
    very disturbed by what I read.
    And it was the major reason for my later actions,
    for my trying to do something to get away
    from this imminent-- what I considered to be
    imminent danger of the Nazis.
    But this friend-- and I can call him
    a friend, really, because he was, you might say,
    a theoretical Nazi.
    He was a political creature.
    He was not one of those mobsters who later, in the streets,
    would harass Jewish people or--
    let alone become violent, like those beasts in the camps.
    And he was just as interested in that magazine
    as I was, only from the opposite end.
    When I saw an article about the Nazi victory in one
    or the other of the German provinces, I was terrified.
    And he was elated.
    He read it because he thought that he
    was interested in the rise of Nazism.
    So we shared this magazine for quite a long time.
    And well, later on, when the Nazis came to power,
    he got his rewards for having been a good Nazi earlier.
    He became the police chief of a provincial town in Austria.
    It's called Wels, W-E-L-S, Wels.
    And that was a good hideaway so he
    didn't have to be in the army.
    But it didn't do him any good.
    In the later part of the war, he was drafted, after all,
    and sent to the Russian front.
    And there is missing in action.
    He was killed there.
    Nothing is further known about him.
    When did he become police chief in that town?
    In 1938, '39.
    [BOTH TALKING]
    Immediately after the--
    Anschluss?
    --Nazis took over, yes.
    Did that mean that he automatically
    became a part of the Gestapo and the SS?
    Yes.
    It did mean that.
    I have, in later years when I visited Europe,
    talked to his sister, who never was a Nazi herself.
    And that was known, even at the time.
    She did not like her brother being a Nazi.
    She was not.
    And at least according to her, he never brutalized Jews.
    She said-- this, of course, is a subjective view.
    It's a sisterly view.
    You cannot check on that.
    But she said that he was not violent enough and not maybe
    arrogant enough.
    And it was for that reason that the Nazis sent him
    to the front.
    Maybe a good story.
    It might be true.
    I can hardly imagine him being such a monster
    because after all, we were schoolmates
    for eight long years.
    And some of the education that I got--
    not some but the same education that I got, he got.
    We went to a classic gymnasium, to a humanist gymnasium.
    We studied the classics, the ancient classics, the Roman
    and the Greek classics.
    We read them in the original Latin and Greek.
    We were taught history.
    Well, how can you absorb all this and yet become a monster?
    It's hard to imagine that.
    Many other Nazis, those who paraded in the streets,
    were semi-educated people.
    Of course, not all of them.
    Goebbels had a doctorate.
    But I still think it was mostly the quote, "lower classes,"
    unquote, who made up the bulk of the original Nazi party
    members.
    Eventually, of course, everybody was a Nazi all the way
    to the directors of the bank and whatnot.
    Did you ever talk to anybody else who knew
    this guy when he was a police chief or [BOTH TALKING]
    No, no, I had no chance for that.
    No.
    When did you first notice things?
    Like what year did you first start notice
    the Nazis making a difference?
    During high school.
    During high school, they were--
    The '20s?
    Beg your pardon.
    The '20s then?
    No, that was from--
    being from 10 to 18.
    Are you talking about my years or the years--
    The years, like 1930.
    Yeah, well, you have to figure it out.
    I was-- you are six--
    I was 10 years old when I started high school.
    That was in 1919.
    And it was ended eight years later.
    So it was in the '20s, yes.
    It was in the '20s.
    Now, in the years before the takeover of Austria in 1938,
    the Nazi party was forbidden under Schuschnigg,
    the chancellor, and his predecessor--
    they murdered Dollfuss, chancellor--
    so that you couldn't see them in the streets,
    but you heard all the time that the illegal Nazis
    would drop a bomb here or do other mischief.
    Before that, in the early years, you
    did hear about them, in the early days,
    and you saw the posters, and you saw the graffiti,
    and you saw they cut out little swastikas in the streets
    and all kinds of mementos that these people were around.
    So it was well known.
    Did the kids in your school ever start
    doing antisemitic things as the Nazis gained power or gained
    popularity?
    I cannot say that.
    I cannot say that.
    As I mentioned before, the neighborhood in which we lived
    was not much exposed to this.
    If somebody was a Nazi or a sympathizer, it was known
    but it was not flaunted.
    Some of our teachers--
    when we were students in high school,
    we knew teacher A, B, and C was a Nazi sympathizer.
    But they did not come with the swastika in her lapel.
    The same was true at the university later.
    In the early years, although they sympathized
    with the Nazi students, they did not come raise their arm
    and say Heil Hitler.
    I was pretty protected during those early years.
    Did your parents ever actively teach you about antisemitic
    or did it just never get brought up
    because it was not that important a deal where
    you lived?
    No.
    No, we didn't talk about it.
    OK.
    It says Joe talks about using the tutors at Vienna University
    because it meant he didn't have to chance
    the antisemitic episodes in class.
    But you just say it was because teaching was so boring.
    So was the antisemitic, by the time you reached
    university, part of your reasoning
    for using tutors also?
    It was, yes.
    But I managed to keep away from the active Nazis.
    They were primarily active in front
    of the university, which had a ramp going up
    to the main entrance.
    This ramp was considered part of the university.
    The university had autonomy, meaning the police was not
    allowed in the university.
    So the Nazis could reign supreme on that ramp there.
    And when students came and they found out
    it was a Jewish student, they would beat him up or insult him
    or do whatever Nazis do.
    I knew that was going on.
    And I just didn't go there.
    It was not necessary.
    And in this strange system that existed then
    in Vienna in law school, there was no need to do that.
    We did have these private tutorials, in which we really
    studied, whereas the lectures were rather pro-forma.
    The lectures are, I always felt, more for the professors
    than for the students.
    So it didn't affect me.
    I was never embroiled in any of these beatings.
    I think Joe was on one occasion.
    Can you talk about refusing to use
    logarithm tables and other mechanisms
    because you wanted to know why they were used
    and how they worked, that knowing the logical connection
    was very important and you did not
    have the down-to-earth flexibility needed
    to bridge that gap?
    Did this personality trait contribute
    to your refusal to deny the signs of rising Nazism?
    Very much so.
    This continued.
    To this day, if I don't understand something I cannot
    use it.
    I remember when I first came to California
    and tried to learn how to drive.
    And I was just told you do this and do that.
    But why do you do that?
    And you shift the gear.
    Well, what does that mean?
    I want to see the inside.
    If you want to get a license in Vienna,
    you have to pass a test about the motor.
    You are supposed to be able to do
    simple things about the motor yourself
    without going to a mechanic, and you have
    to understand how it works.
    Well, I hold the record in the Bay
    Area of flunked driver's tests.
    And I think it was the fourth time only that I finally
    got that license.
    And I went to school actually, which was announced to--
    for instruction to tell you about how a car works.
    But it was there the first time that I encountered
    this miserable educational system, that the teacher will
    not start at the beginning and gradually build up to something
    higher.
    The first thing the man said is, who has a problem?
    So those who grew up with cars, they said, well, my gear jams,
    let's say, or whatever.
    What do you do about it?
    And then he talked and told what to do about it,
    used terms which he was supposed to explain,
    from my point of view.
    And what's a vapor lock?
    I don't know.
    That's why I'm here to learn it.
    So now this is indicative that--
    yes, to this day I do want to have a logical sequence
    and a logical explanation.
    And this, I think, spills over into my work.
    If you are an editor worth your while,
    you will insist that what you read
    makes logical sense, that sentences form a chain,
    one after another, that you don't have gaps.
    You don't have duplications.
    I think my unhappiness with only using the logarithm tables
    but not knowing why they are what they are is pretty
    typical of my attitude in life.
    Where did you see your first Black or Brownshirt?
    When did you see your first Blackshirt or Brownshirt?
    Well, actually, I saw them only for a few hours.
    Since I left on the day they took over,
    I saw them in the streets.
    I saw them later from the train window in the stations.
    But before that, the uniforms were illegal,
    and I did not see them.
    Regarding your hitchhiking trip in '34--
    Was it in '34?
    I forget.
    That's what I got out of the book.
    Yeah, yeah.
    If it says so in the book, it was.
    OK.
    I have some questions about that.
    Where did you go?
    Who did you meet?
    The most memorable experience you had.
    Did you go to Germany?
    And what awareness did you gain of Nazism during this trip?
    Do you think this caused you to be so much more pessimistic
    than Joe and others you knew?
    So basically, what was your awareness
    of-- how did your trip raise your consciousness of Nazism?
    I cannot oblige.
    This trip had nothing to do at all with Nazism.
    I didn't go to Germany.
    I went to France, to the northernmost point of France,
    near the Channel coast, and there picked up a car
    and first went south to Paris, across Paris, then further down
    throughout the whole country all the way to the French Riviera,
    to Marseilles first, then along the French Riviera,
    then in the Italian Riviera and then up north,
    back over the Alps and back into Austria.
    It was a very liberating period.
    I felt free, unencumbered.
    The world was wide open.
    I later wrote my first literary essay about that trip.
    It was called "Highway," landstrasse in German.
    And there I had had expressed this euphoria about,
    as I say in this piece, I have no deadline.
    I have no destination.
    I don't have any girlfriend.
    I can do what I want.
    I can go where I want.
    The world belonged to me.
    And I felt it very strongly.
    It was expressed in this piece of writing.
    And it came through because it was the very first time
    that a literary piece like that was
    accepted in one of the major newspapers in Vienna.
    It established myself.
    It established my belonging to the clan, you might say.
    From then on, it was not difficult to have
    pretty soon a second one.
    That one was on experiences in Paris.
    And then the third and fourth, and from then on I was in.
    It was the first time that something
    was published in the paper which eventually gave me
    a permanent position.
    That had been my dream as a youngster,
    to be part of this much admired organization of this newspaper.
    I remember passing by at night, seeing the lights up there,
    and hoping one time I would sit up there.
    I was, in 1937, given various assignments.
    It was no longer that I had to submit things.
    They gave me assignments.
    And I was being groomed for being
    eventually a member of it.
    And I did become a member of that newspaper on March
    the 10th, 1938.
    And one day later, the Nazis came.
    And I lost not only the job but everything else.
    So for one day--
    and yet it was very important.
    It was something that I aimed at and eventually, by golly, I
    got it.
    Perhaps this is a trait from my father, who
    always wanted something more.
    I felt similarly about my graduating from the university.
    So many of my friends, my younger colleagues,
    had to interrupt their studies.
    They were yanked out of the university
    in the middle of their studies.
    I was not.
    I had it completed.
    There were no loose ends.
    This fact, having something accomplished
    that you wanted to do, gave me a feeling of inner security.
    You can do it if you want to.
    For that reason, I felt never degraded when, on my coming
    to this country, I had to start out, as I tell in my account,
    as a shoeshine and as a laborer in the shipyard.
    I didn't feel declassed.
    It didn't matter.
    I knew my time would come and that I could do it.
    And this feeling was, I believe, triggered originally
    by these two examples.
    I got the job I wanted.
    I did graduate.
    This was pretty tough in Vienna.
    I mean, we had to study quite hard to be graduated.
    There was no affirmative action pushing us.
    We had to perform or else.
    OK.
    You said working on news stories increased
    your awareness of Nazism, but Joe had access
    to those news stories too.
    What do you think made the difference?
    That Joe-- I didn't quite catch what you were saying.
    Well, would you repeat that?
    OK.
    You said working on news stories increased
    your awareness of Nazism.
    And then my question is that Joe had
    access to those stories too.
    Yeah, yeah.
    What do you think made the difference
    that you became so much more--
    Well, I was politically more aware
    than Joe was because of my reading this magazine.
    It was not just reading.
    It really infused my political awareness.
    And in addition to that, Joe had specialized interests.
    His cousin was editor of a newspaper.
    And he gave him assignments, or Joe wrote his own.
    He was very interested in the theater.
    There were slight differences in approaches.
    Joe became politically interested later.
    This may also have accounted for the fact
    that he didn't care to leave on that critical day I left.
    In your first interview you said you felt isolated.
    What caused this isolation at the time,
    and how did you handle it?
    Well, the isolation was that I seemed
    to be overly worried, that people
    didn't share in my concern.
    If you consider that Austria was the first country that
    was taken over by the Nazis, you can see how much more difficult
    it would be to talk to people about this.
    There was no precedent.
    For instance, somebody, let's say, who lived in France,
    might have said, well, look here.
    Belgium has fallen.
    Holland has fallen.
    Czechoslovakia-- look at all this.
    You better pack your things or you better
    do something about it.
    Well, that was not the case in Austria.
    This idea of it cannot happen here was very strong
    in Austria.
    They said, for example, that there were so many
    mixed marriages in Austria, how could this Hitler separate
    those people?
    It was technically not possible.
    All of the things are technically possible.
    It was technically possible to kill 6 million Jews.
    And-- which is, if you think of it, is a technical feast.
    I'm sorry-- feat, I mean.
    Perhaps for the Nazis it was a feast.
    But how do you do this?
    Suppose you did not have the knowledge that you have now,
    how they did it.
    Somebody had to think this up first,
    such a fiendish thing as the gas.
    I saw only a few days ago, this movie Wannsee on television,
    where they--
    it was in 1942 when they decided on
    the so-called final solution.
    Well, almost in passing, one of those top Nazis
    said to the other, you know, to kill--
    you say, you have 10,000 too many
    and they have to be killed.
    That costs a lot of ammunition.
    And that's an awkward situation.
    And the other one said, well, there are other means.
    Gas.
    Somebody had to think that up.
    It was unheard of.
    This is the 20th century.
    This is a time of emancipation.
    So you can see I was isolated.
    All this went through my head.
    But with whom could I talk about it
    without being considered paranoid?
    I did talk to this Nazi friend in my class about this.
    Now, he understood that.
    He saw the Nazis coming.
    But of course, he was at the other end of it.
    He gleefully rubbed his hands at the elections in Saxony,
    I remember.
    He came and he said, look here, we have 22 new seats.
    We-- we the Nazis have 22 new seats.
    To whom was I to go and say, now, look, these are 22.
    They're coming.
    They're coming.
    It cannot happen here.
    Not in Austria.
    In Germany that's different.
    But Austria with all these intermarriages
    and this cosmopolitan population and--
    no.
    This is what causes the isolation, if you don't
    have a partner to talk to.
    I was just struck by what you were describing,
    about how similar that sounds to when people explain what
    happens with child abuse in the family
    because especially in the past it was never something
    you could talk about, and people would always
    tell you that your parents loved you
    more than anybody and a lot of myths about the family.
    And I was just struck about how similar
    that sounded to the experience of children in child abuse.
    And later on, I was going to ask you this anyway,
    so I might as well now.
    Alice Miller talks a lot about child abuse
    and how she believes child abuse affected the Holocaust
    and even very much contributed to the Holocaust.
    I'm not familiar with this book.
    I don't know what connections there
    might be between child abuse and the Holocaust experience
    and how one should affect the other.
    This is outside of my experience entirely.
    OK.
    I didn't even know the word until a few years ago,
    and it came up for the first time.
    No, I have no particular comment on that.
    OK.
    Thanks.
    Excuse me.
    In the last interview, you mentioned violence by the SA
    and SS before Schuschnigg.
    Did you ever see anything specific?
    I did not myself see anything.
    But it was all over town.
    And it was-- every day you opened the newspaper,
    there was something going on.
    And you talked to people who did see.
    I didn't happen to witness it myself.
    Did you or your friends ever do anything to rebel?
    Well, maybe it's not appropriate because maybe there was no need
    to rebel before the Anschluss.
    There wasn't anything, right.
    OK.
    Regarding your escape from Vienna to England,
    how did the fear affect you?
    Well, that was handled the way I described in my sleepless
    nights when I reviewed in my mind
    those well-documented articles that I
    had read in that magazine.
    And they talked about the German factories
    grinding out more and more planes and tanks and all this.
    I read this as applying to us, not as
    something happening in the other country, in Germany.
    And that eventually made me think that I cannot
    singlehandedly do something about this.
    But I do want to provide for the possibility and perhaps
    likelihood of the Nazis taking over this country.
    And that then caused me to find a haven
    and find a place to go to if this should happen.
    It was for that reason that a few months
    before the Nazis took over, I went to England
    and looked around--
    what I might do if I had to come.
    This is my answer.
    Do you still wake up with nightmares now ever?
    I cannot say I wake up with nightmare.
    But I do think a great deal and dream about my-- especially
    my brother occurs in my dreams.
    And the whole history is ever present in my mind.
    I cannot talk about this all the time, especially family,
    friends.
    But I lived with it.
    It will never go away.
    I see these various clips in, especially television,
    late at night, usually, when other people cannot see it.
    I wish they would produce these at a time
    when more people can see it, on weekends, particularly
    on weekends.
    For example, this Wannsee Conference I
    mentioned a moment ago.
    I wish that more people had seen that.
    And so it is with me.
    It will always be with me, whatever time is left.
    It is an overweening experience.
    It is something you just cannot get out of your system.
    I cannot.
    It is naturally always paired with the current situation.
    In a way what happened in '37 when I felt isolated,
    some semblance of this exists even now,
    living in a country that considers itself entirely safe.
    It cannot happen here.
    Well, it ain't all this safe.
    But since, in your daily life, you have no reason
    to think of this, if I were to talk about it,
    it would be alarmist.
    Now, I'm not comparing the situation here
    with the situation in '37.
    I'm not that much of an alarmist.
    But I have certain reservations.
    And that concerns the attitude of the Jewish population.
    It's a very touchy subject.
    I feel that the more the differences are accentuated,
    the more dangerous it can become.
    What differences?
    To give you a drastic example of differences,
    I think of the Orthodox and the Hasids
    running around in long coats and black hats and beards
    and behaving like out of the Middle Ages
    and announcing wherever they go, we are different.
    We are different.
    We are different.
    It is very sad but true that difference
    is the beginning of Auschwitz.
    It begins with that.
    There's a famous passage in Hitler's Mein Kampf
    in which he says, how, for the first time in his life
    in the street in Vienna, he saw two figures that
    seemed strange to him, attired the way I just said.
    And he said, who are these people?
    And he seemed alienated, disgusted.
    That was the very first trigger.
    He describes it.
    Now, I'm not talking about everybody's right
    to dress and behave and have customs the way they want.
    But it's not just their dress.
    It's the way they treat women, the way they insist
    of outdated dietary customs, constantly advertising
    that they are different, which can easily
    be interpreted of saying, we are not just different.
    We are better.
    And ordinarily, one could ignore them.
    They are a small minority, but I've often
    heard people saying in Vienna at the time,
    I can tell a Jew when I see one.
    I can make him out.
    The answer is you cannot.
    But you think you can because if you see one like that, then
    you see there's one.
    Yes, all right.
    Look at me.
    I feel and I look like everybody else.
    And the tragic thing is that one could just
    ignore them, like, let's say the Amish or other people who
    have every right to dress the way they want.
    It's not a matter of right.
    It's a matter of learning from history.
    After persecution of 2,000 years,
    by golly, you might have learned a little bit what it means
    to parade your being different.
    Ah, they say, but you are an assimilationist,
    and you are running away and all this.
    You can call it what you want, but I would like to survive.
    And I would like not to carry this burden all my life
    and be discriminated against.
    And there's some professors in me.
    I have to convert to Catholicism and all this business.
    I'd rather cut off my payos.
    Now, I may be quite aggressive in talking like this.
    But if you consider that this minority has
    a central role in Israel now.
    The Hasidim?
    The Orthodox, including the Hasidims, yes.
    They are a minority.
    But since the two big parties are so well balanced that none
    can overcome the other, it is these people who are being
    coveted by both parties and being given more and more
    privileges that they dictate how women are to be treated
    and that they have to be separated,
    and they and they cannot marry and whatnot.
    And it is the yeshiva students that are
    exempted from military service.
    The same people who deny the state of Israel--
    they do not recognize the Messiah hasn't come.
    I was told that some don't even use the local money.
    I don't know how they do it.
    They deal in dollars.
    And there's a question about praying
    at the wall and dictating women's fashions.
    Well, what they demand is more and more given to them.
    So this is how I feel about Orthodoxy.
    And I do realize that I am now pretty much exposing myself,
    that maybe everything I have said and will still say
    will be discredited by this point of view.
    There are enough people who think that it's
    scandalous to talk like that.
    I'm aware of it.
    I talk like that.
    Perhaps I should read a short paragraph
    in my book, which makes my position clear.
    I would rather use the words that I chose here.
    This is the book I'm reading from, One and One Makes Three.
    It is written under the pen name that I share with Joe Fabry.
    The name is Peter Fabrizius.
    It is the name that we used for many years
    while we were working together in Austria
    and we still use occasionally here.
    And here is what I'm saying.
    "Hitler and the antisemitic years
    made me conscious of my roots.
    I was placed in a category I hardly knew existed.
    I was arbitrarily made a target, first of ridicule,
    then of discrimination, deprivation, expulsion,
    and finally destruction, although I escaped the worst.
    "It was during the years of my flight on three continents
    that I became defiantly Jewish in solidarity
    with the persecuted, in loyalty, in compassion,
    in acknowledgment of a shared destiny.
    Jewish diet laws and other restrictions,
    which still seem anachronistic to me,
    and the belief in a caring deity,
    seems almost obscene after Auschwitz.
    "My consciousness of my heritage is political, not religious.
    I accepted my heritage because I identified
    with those who had survived the Brown Scourge,
    and in supreme sacrifice had established
    an island of self-respect in Palestine, in a world of hatred
    and murder."
    When you went to London to build yourself
    a nest outside Austria--
    when you went back to Austria, did it occur to you
    that you might not be able to make it out
    of Austria in an emergency?
    I don't think so.
    I was not worried about that.
    This much I shared in cautious optimism
    with all the rest of the country.
    However, I was on my toes.
    I did have a packed suitcase, not a suitcase, but a packed
    suitcase.
    So I didn't think that I would be cut off.
    But I was ready to leave when it became too hot.
    When you were working for the Jewish Chronicle in London,
    how easy was it for you to recognize the propaganda
    from the real news?
    Well, that was no problem at all.
    We were certainly accustomed to hearing what the Nazis said,
    which we simply dismissed and could
    dismiss because we knew better.
    When they were in the Nazi paper--
    there was one in Vienna--
    told about the provocations of the Jews in the streets,
    I mean, it was just ridiculous.
    We were happy to be left alone.
    We were the last ones to provoke anybody.
    But they used these words in order
    to justify that they themselves beat us up.
    No, I had no trouble at all to distinguish
    between Nazi propaganda and the facts of life.
    Were your letters from your parents in Austria censored?
    The letters of my parents were always censored, yes.
    I'm a stamp collector, and I save the whole envelope,
    so I still have those with the censor markings on them.
    My father rather foolishly wrote secret messages
    on the bands that are wrapped around-- the wrappers that
    enclosed newspapers, which he regularly sent me.
    That was all right to send newspapers.
    I mean, newspapers under the Nazis.
    And he sent them with a wrap around.
    And at the place where the wrapper overlapped in order
    to be connected, he wrote shorthand,
    to be sure, messages.
    There was no need to write this in shorthand at all.
    These were just inconspicuous, silly messages.
    But if they had found out, it could
    have been very serious for him.
    So he played that game.
    Yes, all messages were censored.
    In later years, they were censored at both ends,
    at the German and the British side.
    I have covers that have the markings of both.
    It's quite sought after nowadays, these mementos.
    Were you embarrassed the time you
    were hired to write about the woman's plight
    using a woman's name in London?
    And did that experience give you insight
    into cultural differences in how women and men are treated?
    This is far too highfalutin for my situation.
    Here was a fellow who quite literally did not
    have enough money to buy food next Monday.
    Now, here is a paper that gives you an assignment.
    By all means, whether this is a destitute woman
    or whether this is a circus talking
    about training of elephants, to me,
    it was no more at that time than an assignment.
    It was not a sociological study or research project in any way.
    I am not going to glamorize my insights at the time.
    I tried to find out a little bit.
    And we did have girlfriends in England.
    And so I pumped them all right, and they said, how is this?
    And so they explained the situation to me.
    And so I could write this.
    It was, in a way, amusing for me that--
    and I told this story to others just as an example
    of what you can get yourself into,
    suddenly to write about something of which you
    know absolutely nothing.
    But it was a journalistic, low-level, general newspaper
    article, the sob story.
    It was a sob story.
    And it was in a paper of that kind
    that would publish things like that.
    Sort of like National Enquirer?
    Almost like that.
    Almost like the National Enquirer.
    Yes.
    No, I cannot claim any insights on that.
    And of course, I was not aware of the women's rights then
    either.
    It was not until I came to this country when I had to teach
    in my class, you cannot say "he."
    You have to say, "he and she."
    When you went to England, you said
    you heard a lot of rationalizations,
    for instance, the lady with the rose garden.
    What were some of the rationalizations
    that you heard?
    That it cannot happen here.
    There will always be an England.
    I mean, the Germans were dismissed, not as Nazis,
    but as Krauts.
    That's the word the British used for the Germans.
    Which nothing could more clearly show the ignorance
    of the run-of-the-mill Englishman.
    They did not know--
    a Kraut is a clumsy, slightly ridiculous idiot.
    The Nazis were not clumsy, not ridiculous, and no idiots.
    They were vicious and dangerous.
    Germans-- they didn't understand that in England.
    I wouldn't-- well, I was going to say, perhaps the higher-ups,
    but even Chamberlain didn't understand it, as we all know.
    No, they did.
    Churchill did.
    And he saved not only England but perhaps the world.
    No, they didn't know.
    They were so naive.
    Although they didn't think this could ever
    happen that the Germans, the Krauts
    would come and take London away or England away, well, they
    nevertheless prepared themselves--
    what they thought was preparation.
    They took the street signs off the corners of the streets
    so if the Germans should come, they
    should get lost in big London.
    They shouldn't know which way to go.
    And you see there are sometimes like store names that
    include the street.
    Let's say on Market Street, it said the Market Store.
    Or on Broadway, it said the Broadway Upholstery
    or something of that sort.
    So they would go around and take off these signs, all worried
    that the Nazis may then have a clue of what street
    they were on.
    From us they would take not only the cameras away, which
    makes some sense, maybe, but they took even
    the ordinary street maps of London
    away so that we were considered not quite reliable,
    so better not have those German-speaking people
    any of our street maps.
    Oh, they were so naive.
    They had a museum piece of a World War I
    cannon in Regent's Park.
    That's a park in London.
    I see it sitting there under the tulips.
    It was just a laugh.
    A kid could play with this.
    They were exercising, I understood, with broomsticks.
    I didn't see that.
    But so I was told.
    England was not just a country.
    It was an empire--
    Britain, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Canada,
    South Africa.
    That was Britain.
    And those Krauts would come and do something to us?
    They didn't know how close they were from being swallowed up.
    It is not just my own firm conviction
    that if Hitler had continued, pressed on immediately
    after the conquest of France, he would
    have found the British as defenseless as I
    am now describing and could have taken it.
    Very fortunately for the world, he hesitated.
    He had to savor that victory of beating France, the arch enemy,
    the enemy who defeated Germany in 1870.
    He had his revenge now.
    This had to be somehow digested, celebrated.
    And he hesitated.
    But there was no doubt that he was
    going to-- planning to do that.
    All the papers about this, all the invasion papers
    were later found in Brussels.
    And it's described in detail in the Churchill
    memoirs and elsewhere and in the Nazi interrogations
    after the war.
    They are all on record.
    So it's not a fantasy that they were going to take England
    and with it, the rest of the world.
    And when I say the rest of the world, you see, he took France.
    But France also had an empire.
    I lived at the opposite end of the world, shortly after that,
    In the French concession of Shanghai.
    And there, the French concession of Shanghai,
    there were Vichy officials.
    So it wasn't that if you dominated
    only the metropolitan country itself, that this
    wouldn't do anything elsewhere.
    Oh, it did.
    It did.
    And in all the French colonies, there were Vichyites.
    So much for that.
    What did you do for fun in London?
    In London?
    Well, we didn't feel isolated.
    There were quite a few of us.
    And more came every day.
    I had this dubious honor of being the first one.
    I was the very first one who arrived in England
    because of this first train I caught,
    number one on my food card that I
    was given by the community, which was my only meal.
    And so we had quite a few friends.
    They lived mostly in the same area again.
    And there, there were many in the British Jewish community
    who took an interest in us.
    It was a moving experience to see how these society
    ladies gave parties, made sure that we could have a place
    to get together, that we met English girls, that we could
    go on what they called rambles, little outdoor trips
    in the countryside around.
    They tried in all kinds of ways to help us.
    We were not allowed to work, so they had to find other ways.
    And we had quite social life.
    And we were young.
    My friend with whom I shared the original experience
    in London, Kurt--
    we were young.
    I was 29.
    And the girls took an interest.
    They would pop in at any time, day or night.
    And we actually-- some of us formed serious relationships.
    In this case, both Kurt and I had girlfriends,
    whom we probably would have married,
    both of us, both non-Jewish girls, by the way.
    And we were largely befriended also
    by the parents of these girls.
    There was one who plundered her mother's kitchen every time
    before she came, took everything out
    of the refrigerator, whatever the equivalent there
    was of a refrigerator, and brought us food.
    Well, that meant something at the time.
    More than that, the one would sit--
    we had a little balcony there.
    We would sit out there and mend our socks
    and did some sewing for us.
    They were wonderful, those girls.
    And so it was a strange dichotomy of feeling.
    Here we were, penniless, speechless,
    in fact, because our English was just
    to buy groceries at best by pointing out and having
    no connections, no family.
    Well?
    Yes, you may now.
    OK.
    Well, just I haven't been asking the questions
    where I had written them down, just to put it on the tape.
    Because I have so many questions,
    and it is taking a lot of your time.
    And it is in the book, if anybody wants to read it.
    So I just want this on the tape, in case anybody
    watches the tape and wants to read the book
    to find out that information.
    Well, it is the book, if anybody is interested.
    It's published by Benmir Books.
    Benmir, this is Benjamin and Miriam, the grandchildren
    of the publisher.
    Benmir Books.
    And in Berkeley.
    So whatever is not discussed can be found here.
    I interrupted myself earlier, describing
    the situation in which we were.
    Hardly enough to eat, and we should have been desperate.
    But actually we were not at all.
    And we knew that it was important for our morale
    to regard our existence as a game, a sport.
    We sometimes said, here are two people, my friend and I.
    Of course, there were more, but we
    are talking on our own terms.
    Like dropped in a parachute, in a country where they knew
    nobody, where they couldn't talk,
    where they had no shelter, no money, no nothing.
    And we're told, here you are-- live.
    And that was a challenge.
    And we held on to this.
    Could we make it?
    Could we not make it?
    My friend was an antique book dealer,
    and he brought along some books of his,
    hoping that he could sell them.
    And I brought along some manuscripts, not just
    some pieces of paper, which I hoped I could sell.
    And then we had our meal tickets at the beginning,
    but we didn't like that.
    We wanted to earn our own meals.
    And then I would come home one wonderful day,
    when for the first time the story was accepted,
    a contribution to a magazine.
    And I said, look at this.
    5 pounds.
    Five guineas, they said.
    Five guineas.
    A guinea is a pound and a shilling.
    I mean, that was such a triumph.
    We could live for maybe nine more days now on our own.
    If you think of what people are figuring
    in investment and for rainy dates, as I mentioned earlier,
    and what would they do in old age, God,
    we didn't have money for two weeks from now.
    But we felt nine days, that's plenty of time.
    Meanwhile, you could sell something else.
    And sure enough, Kurt would come home and say, I sold a book.
    So that gave us another, I don't know,
    five or six or seven days.
    And that went faster and faster, and this was the way we lived.
    And it was one triumph after another, oddly enough.
    It shows how much really the attitude counts.
    We could have been desperate.
    We could have said, good god, we're
    going to starve two weeks from now.
    No, we will not starve.
    And we could pay for the rent and could
    eat with the community.
    There was one friend of ours who met us one time on Tottenham
    Court Road in the street.
    And he said, I bet you you're hungry.
    I know a place where you can get spaghetti for only sixpence
    and they're wonderful.
    And this is the way we lived.
    How did your parents support themselves
    after they got out of the internment camp?
    Hah.
    Before the internment happened, I once,
    in a restaurant, in that very restaurant that I just
    mentioned, where we got those spaghetti, I was befriended.
    There was somebody at the next table.
    I was befriended by this young couple.
    And we got to know each other, and we remained in touch.
    And these people, Englishmen, English man and woman,
    his wife.
    And these people, they were really friends in need.
    When it came to internment, all these myriad things that
    had to be taken care of with the flat, with the furniture,
    it was incredible.
    They would come, and this was rented
    but it was our own furniture.
    So they would come and take it in
    and stuff it into their own apartment.
    And it was these same people, these two,
    who looked after my parents after they were released from--
    they were seven months in this internment camp.
    And Mother did the cooking for them.
    And they appreciated it very much.
    And that was a good tit for tat.
    And this is how they lived.
    Did your relative renew the stipend he gave him?
    It was not renewed.
    I didn't want.
    No.
    I said beforehand I was trying to live without it.
    I suppose if it had really come to a catastrophe,
    then perhaps it would have to be done.
    But I didn't want to.
    What was your trip to Shanghai like on the boat?
    The food, your average day?
    I'm talking, I guess, about the trip from here.
    Didn't you go to New York first?
    No, I was not allowed into the United States.
    I had an affidavit.
    And I had a quota number.
    These two elements were central for immigration.
    You had to have an affidavit, which
    means that American citizen had to guarantee
    to the government for five years that the sponsored person,
    the immigrant, the refugee, would not
    become a public charge.
    That was affidavit.
    In addition to that, you had a quota number under this system.
    Only so many could immigrate from Austria,
    so many from Denmark, so many from Ecuador.
    Depending on how your number was, if it was a low number,
    you could come this year.
    If this year's quota was filled, you had to wait for next year.
    If you couldn't wait for next year,
    for example, if you lived in Austria,
    that meant that Nazis picked you up and sent you to the camps.
    And that was the end of it.
    Therefore it was so vital to have a low number.
    And as for my trip to Shanghai, it was a long, long trip.
    It took, in all, 55 days to get from Liverpool to Shanghai.
    I had to cross the Atlantic in the blackout.
    England was under blackout during the war.
    The ship was blackout.
    We were escorted by destroyers because of the submarines,
    the German u-boats.
    In fact, we had to wait an extra day in Liverpool
    because the ship before us was sunk by u-boat.
    Imagine that, the frame of mind in which we were.
    We were the next one, and there were these u-boats.
    Well, anyway, we got through, and we saw the lights
    for the first time in Halifax.
    And we were allowed only to pass through Canada, not
    to the United States.
    United States you could only enter when all these two
    conditions were fulfilled, affidavit and your number
    had come up.
    Then you can immigrate.
    But not even transit through, no.
    But Canada allowed that.
    Only on condition that you would immediately
    take the connecting ship on the West Coast of Canada,
    going on to Shanghai.
    So we arrived in Halifax.
    We saw the lights.
    Metaphoric word.
    It was quite an experience to see a lit up city
    for the first time.
    We crossed the continent from coast
    to coast in many days of train travel.
    I think in the early interview, I talked about this episode
    at Niagara Falls, which is forever engraved in my memory.
    And our really desperate efforts to convince
    the Canadian authorities to allow
    us to stay long enough until our number would come up.
    We were not going to stay.
    We could prove that we would be allowed in the United States.
    Absolutely not.
    The Canadians were worse than the United States
    and certainly worse than most other countries,
    which we painfully felt when we saw these vast stretches
    of uninhabited country.
    As we rode on, we looked out the window in the Great Plains
    and endless hours and hours.
    Not only were there no settlements,
    there wasn't even a house.
    There was nothing.
    There would have been room for the rest of the world
    it seemed like.
    No.
    Nobody was allowed in.
    So we arrived in Vancouver, again, a last effort.
    Somehow, I made a connection with Ottawa and with an MP
    there, but nothing helped.
    And then across the Pacific into--
    we arrived in Japan.
    And here we had the same mentality as in London
    when we said, well, we are here now.
    Now, by golly, we are going to make the best of it,
    and we are going to live.
    And in Japan, we behaved as tourists.
    We were now in Japan, looking at Japan.
    We went to the museums and went to the temples
    and went to Nara, where they had beautiful waterfalls.
    And there were these animals, deer, rickshaw.
    Just behaving-- nobody would have known the difference
    just looking at us.
    And we had fun with the chopsticks,
    with the food, everything else.
    It was only a few days, but by golly, we
    were going to get everything out of this trip to Japan.
    We would have never dreamed sitting in Vienna that we would
    at one time be visiting Japan.
    So then they came.
    Again, we had to take the ship in Vancouver
    on that particular day.
    We had been issued in London a travel paper that
    allowed us to go only one way.
    We could not return to England.
    They had thrown us out.
    But they allowed us to go to our destination.
    And we were expecting war, the world war.
    It was not--
    I think I mentioned this in the first interview
    that nowadays you look upon Pearl Harbor as a surprise
    attack.
    The word is always used "surprise,"
    it was no surprise at all that there would be war.
    In what form that would come nobody knew,
    that's true enough.
    But I think I mentioned this in the earlier interview
    that our tickets were stamped "no refund in case of war."
    So everybody expected it.
    Anyway, so and we were going right back to the Axis
    again, to the Japanese, who were the partners of the Nazis.
    It was a terrible, terrible feeling.
    We didn't know whether we would come out alive.
    And so we crossed the Pacific.
    We headed to Japan.
    And then came the next ship from Japan, across the Yellow Sea
    into Shanghai.
    And there we were.
    Now on this trip we really felt isolated.
    You asked about isolation earlier.
    Here we were, so totally different from everybody else.
    Everybody else was at least a citizen of some country,
    had a passport.
    We had nothing but this piece of paper
    that allowed us to breathe, allowed us to exist.
    But the moment you get to Shanghai, you're on your own.
    You're no better than a bird--
    nothing.
    And there was a commercial sign in the harbor of Shanghai,
    of that shipping company.
    The shipping company was called NYK, three Japanese, Nippon
    Yusen Kaisha.
    And there was this big sign as the ship landed.
    And it said on that sign, the NYK welcomes you.
    I'm sure it is hard to understand now,
    but tears came to our eyes.
    There was something welcoming us.
    We applied it to us.
    They were welcoming us.
    I mean, that sign had been there 20 years.
    And it was all shabby and rundown and all,
    and nobody gave it that much thought.
    Of course, it was just a commercial sign.
    Welcome us.
    They were throwing us out of Austria.
    They were throwing us out of England.
    They were not allowing us to stay in Canada.
    We couldn't stay in Japan.
    The NYK welcome us.
    It's just like saying Hell welcomes you.
    Because we regarded that as the entry to Hell, which we thought
    the Japanese would take over and we would be trapped there.
    And that was our trip, 55 days.
    We traveled first class.
    The British shipping company extorted from us
    the money for the most expensive tickets.
    They took advantage of our desperate need.
    We had to leave.
    That's why I--
    At any point in Canada, do you think
    if you'd wanted to put up with everything it would have taken
    to live illegally, you could have
    actually gotten off the train and stayed in Canada?
    Yes, I could at any time.
    We did get off the train.
    We interrupted in Jasper.
    Since we were the elegant travelers,
    we went to the National Park in British Columbia.
    And we squeezed the last trip out of the opportunity.
    We went in Montreal, up Mount Royal, and as you have heard,
    Niagara Falls.
    Everything that was possible to see as tourist sites, yes, we
    did.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    We could have let the ship leave,
    so we would have been in Canada.
    But what kind of a life?
    You cannot live without any papers.
    I have a wallet.
    Look how thick it is.
    Look here.
    There are so many--
    from the car license beginning and to the health insurance.
    It will go on and on and on, and you--
    I'm sure it would have been a matter of a few days
    that the police would have picked us up.
    And then not only is it inconvenient to be in jail,
    but you have a plot against it in your life.
    Then this is on record.
    You are now on the other side of the fence.
    No, we decided we are not going to risk it.
    We took a chance.
    On the ship from London to Halifax,
    how did you spend your days?
    What did you do?
    Was the food any good?
    The food was as good as--
    British food is no good anyway.
    But on the ship first class, we dressed up.
    We didn't tell anyone who we were or what.
    Elegantly sitting at the table with people who--
    except there were many refugee--
    British refugee children.
    They weren't-- Refugee isn't really correct.
    It cannot apply to them.
    But they evacuated the children into safe Canada.
    So there were many of those.
    But otherwise, just like going on a cruise.
    And the same was true at the other end, in the Pacific.
    There are people, including some Americans.
    I remember one professor going to Manila just--
    and so the whole world situation didn't exist.
    A strange insularity.
    When you got to Shanghai, how did teaching English go?
    Well, I kind of--
    You weren't very proficient anyway, were you?
    Well, I wasn't very proficient.
    But then, after all, I had lived three years in England
    and had intensely struggled with acquiring the language.
    I wanted to learn English.
    I had to.
    I needed it for my work, for writing.
    I wanted eventually to write in English.
    So I was very intensive.
    I was sort of a three-year-old ulpan,
    you might say, in England.
    I knew English quite well by that time,
    and well enough that I could broadcast from the Shanghai
    radio station.
    And it was all right.
    I could never get rid of the accent, as you can hear.
    But I did pretty much understand and could write in English,
    and certainly enough to teach somebody
    who didn't know anything.
    And these Chinese students, they were very eager beavers
    and very devoted, applied themselves, did their homework,
    asked questions.
    It was a pleasure to teach these students.
    I like to think that they got something out
    of it, even though I was only halfway and they were no way.
    I didn't mean to imply that they didn't get anything out of it.
    No, you didn't say that.
    No.
    OK, good.
    You know where you talked about how
    the students wanted to study Shakespeare
    instead of basic English.
    How did you handle that?
    Well, I tried to explain the situation, of course.
    I would have done this to students in any country.
    And certainly this is too difficult
    and only the obvious thing I could tell them.
    And, well, they reluctantly had to accept that.
    They were so, so sweet and so, so interested.
    They would not only ask questions all the time,
    but after the lesson, after--
    I gave these courses at the Shanghai University
    there, afterwards they took a bus home.
    We didn't have cars.
    And some of them would get on the bus with me.
    I had a long way to go home.
    They would get on the bus only that they
    could pump me some more and ask them more questions.
    And that made a difference, the bus
    fare to these students, Chinese students.
    And they did this.
    It was really a moving experience.
    What were your rooms like in Shanghai?
    They were no different from any room you would rent here
    in any Western countries.
    It was a pension that was run by exiled Germans who
    had been there earlier, who had had enough capital to buy
    that place.
    And we had our meals there.
    It was like an Island.
    But then in Shanghai, this is a city
    like no other in the world.
    Because you can live any style you want there.
    If you are a Korean, if you are a South American
    and you want Spanish, or if you are a White Russian,
    you can go to a White Russian family or a place to live.
    Everything is in Shanghai.
    So there was a large colony of refugees.
    They lived among themselves.
    And if they had the money, they could
    live the way we lived in the French concession.
    And it was so, quote, normal there that we even
    could drink the water, which was something special.
    We were told beforehand not to drink the water,
    not to eat any fruit unless you can peel it like a banana.
    We didn't even eat a banana.
    We were worrying about something.
    And we religiously observed that we never drank unboiled water.
    It's a long process.
    First, you have to boil it.
    Then you have to refrigerate it.
    You could never use ice, because ice is equally contaminated.
    But we did observe that, and we did not buy any fresh fruit.
    As I also mentioned here in this book, never touched women.
    We had decided that onboard ship, my friend and I.
    With all these enormous opportunities and temptations
    in Shanghai, it's like Paris or like Bangkok, just anything.
    It's very hard to keep out of it.
    An enormous surfeit of prostitution, also,
    in the streets.
    They would not just look at you or talk to you.
    They would grab on to you, and hold your hand and arms
    and pull you.
    And there would be another one pulling me on the other side,
    like that.
    They would be in little clusters of three or four
    or five, and always with an amah,
    and an older woman who does the negotiating.
    And just no.
    I remember one time I was watching a window
    display, a big glass window.
    And suddenly I have a voice behind my ear,
    a man's voice saying, Chinese girl?
    So he was a pimp.
    And I said no.
    Oh, he said, Japanese girl?
    I said no.
    Korean girl?
    No.
    Finally, in desperation, French girl?
    I said, go away.
    Leave me alone.
    So his last effort was, want to watch?
    This was in front of a department store
    called Wing On.
    It's a chain.
    And this Wing On was not only a department.
    There you could buy just everything, including that.
    They had a section that was a bordello.
    And there you could meet a room.
    And here were these girls, and you could just
    walk in right there where you were, take care of things.
    Well, with all this going on, we did not--
    we absolutely lived like monks there.
    We thought there's contamination or whatnot.
    You don't know.
    And so we never were sick from food.
    And of course, never had anything else that mattered.
    We really survived that very well.
    Was it very expensive to live there at that time?
    No, it was not expensive, particularly.
    I cannot tell you how much it was, but we could afford it.
    When you wrote about how you had given your money to that man
    to put in a gold bar and then when you asked for it back,
    he seemed hesitant.
    Whatever happened with that gold bar?
    That gold bar was restored to us in full.
    There was nothing wrong with this man.
    I'm not sure nowadays, whether what I perceived as hesitation
    wasn't there at all.
    But I could imagine that if he answered just a second later
    and said, aha, I expected this man to make an excuse.
    It was particularly expected because there was something
    about this being a weekend, I believe,
    when he couldn't go to the bank right then and there.
    And I said aha, aha, if you are so suspicious,
    if your whole fortune hangs on this piece of gold
    that this other man had--
    Well, I think this was a perfectly honest, decent guy.
    Mr. Tavela.
    I wish I had the chance to be in touch with him in later years
    and found out-- he was an important man.
    He was the head of a bank.
    And weekly he wanted to learn German.
    That was wonderful for us.
    That was one way of earning some money,
    so we didn't have to use this gold bar.
    We didn't want to use the gold bar.
    What kind of culture shocks did you experience?
    Not in Shanghai.
    In Shanghai, although we were in Asia,
    it was just a matter of curiosity
    there, how strange the customs were.
    Walking around in Shanghai was like sightseeing in Japan
    or going to the various places in Canada.
    It was another country.
    It was an adventure.
    We had those who had been there earlier going around with us
    and showing us things.
    All of a sudden, the queue of Chinese
    watching a handwritten letter in a store window.
    What are they doing here?
    Well, what about this thing?
    What does it say?
    It says A. Just a letter?
    Yes.
    Well, they were admiring the craftsmanship of how
    beautiful was this letter.
    We learned a lot.
    It was wonderful to sense that there
    are other things in the world.
    But even little oddities, flags everywhere of some sort.
    Instead of advertising, the stores
    had flags that merely said the name of the store.
    But they had holes in them.
    So why do they have holes in them?
    So that the wind can blow through.
    And in this way, the flag, you can read what it says there
    and the flag won't curl up.
    I mean, little things like that.
    And the strange music.
    This is not music to our ears at all.
    It's sounds.
    Many, many oddities.
    I saw a tube of a mat in the corner of a street.
    I mean, here's the wall of the house and here's the street.
    And where the two meet, there was this tube.
    Well, what is this?
    oh this is a bed.
    That's a man inside.
    They sleep in these mats.
    These are the homeless.
    And I collected these oddities.
    I remember one thing.
    There was a barber store.
    And it had a glass door.
    And it said "rebrab" on it.
    So what does that mean?
    Is that Chinese or something?
    Well, the guy said go inside.
    So I went inside and looked at the door,
    and the it said barber.
    What happened was that the Chinese who had to paint that,
    he didn't know English.
    He just copied exactly the letters.
    And on the inside, it was backwards.
    He didn't know that.
    And later on, when I became the editor
    of a magazine, a German language refugee magazine there,
    the Chinese typesetters didn't know any German.
    They set every letter meticulously.
    There was never any error.
    But if you made an error, if you had a word mistyped,
    the typo got right into the printed thing there.
    I collected all these oddities and wrote stories about that.
    And I did quite a bit of writing in Shanghai.
    And I could mail it to Switzerland
    and to other places.
    I saved all these.
    I have so much stuff at home.
    My kids will not know what to do with all the junk, boxes
    and boxes.
    But I cannot tear myself away from all these mementos.
    It is all fate and destiny.
    I remember one article writing about the Chinese food,
    of course, which then was a sensation for me.
    Here, you can go in a Chinese restaurant.
    This is as common as anything here.
    But there, for me, it was new.
    I had never had one before.
    And how I was introduced to this and all these oddities
    and make a very colorful story.
    I was just thinking that, John, he's probably
    going to want to break before his next interview,
    and I've got a couple of questions
    that are out of sequence.
    They're more towards what I would usually
    ask in an interview.
    But I think I'd like to ask them now.
    And one is, it was brought to my mind
    last night when I watched Ted Koppel on Nightline.
    And he was talking about how we actually in this latest
    Iraq war, we sent--
    up through December 1990, we actually
    sent, like, spare parts, things that
    could have a military application to Jordan.
    And we didn't-- even though the reporters who reported this say
    that we most definitely have proof that the real high-ups
    who had a conversation with Bush at the White House knew that
    if it continued on the pipeline, it was already in and went
    to Jordan, it would most likely be a transshipment point
    for Iraq.
    So we were basically sending them materials
    to war against us when we were going to war.
    Yeah, yeah, yeah.
    And so that's part of the question has to do with that.
    And then the other part of the question
    has to do with an excerpt of an interview
    I saw John Stockman about the CIA,
    and how we have actually gone over
    and started wars in other countries.
    I mean, just been real agitators.
    And I mean, we do all the things that we condemn the Nazis for.
    We have-- it's never come to what the Nazis came to,
    for probably a lot of reasons.
    We're a bigger country, and we're powerful.
    It's a different time, different weapons,
    people are more aware of what war would mean today.
    And the nation, as a whole, doesn't really
    want to go to war.
    But I mean, what do you think about these things, when
    you see America doing these things today?
    I have no more wisdom than everybody else.
    I'm horrified.
    I think it's terrible.
    It is short-sighted.
    That is to be taken pretty literally,
    this short-sightedness.
    Because it is only the immediate future that is of interest,
    it seems, from what I can make out.
    Only in this case, the immediate profits
    from this war, war material deliveries.
    And there's no long-range planning in anything.
    And this is why the Japanese and the Germans are ahead of us
    in so many ways.
    This the immediate gratification,
    here I come back again to the credit card.
    The usual argument, why not enjoy the car immediately
    and have the use of it and pay later?
    You don't plan of what might happen later that you may not
    be able to do this.
    And especially with Bush, you can
    see he will not, in my opinion, do anything that--
    let's put it this way.
    If there's a conflict between having some advantage
    during his presidency versus a long-range thing that
    will be beyond his time but will benefit the country,
    he will take the first one.
    There have few, quote, real patriots
    to whom the country is more important than
    their own political career.
    And for that reason, things like this happen.
    Which Bush will do nothing that he hasn't found out beforehand
    will be popular, will be accepted.
    He watches the polls.
    He sticks his finger in the air.
    And if the popular--
    You could see it so drastically.
    Only just now, only two or three days ago,
    he was not going to commit any troops to the Kurds.
    Today, two days later, ah, when he
    sees how the people watching television and see
    the misery of these people, these hundreds and thousands
    of people, and everybody is revolting,
    he's revolted about that.
    Now he sends his troops.
    He has seen if he does commit troops--
    what he wants is to see the troops coming home.
    I will show you, I am the popular president.
    I am the popular--
    I'm not going to be unpopular by saying then you stay something
    longer.
    But when the people say we cannot bear this misery there,
    perhaps even maybe I'm projecting too much,
    but way back in my mind is, if there hadn't been a Holocaust,
    where they keep saying now, year after year, you,
    the rest of the people stood by and did nothing,
    I wonder whether the same--
    whether this may not in some way color also
    these expeditions now.
    But what I'm saying, the moment he
    saw that the public opinion was swinging over,
    well, all right, the soldiers won't come home immediately,
    at least not those that have to go to protect those new camps.
    Then he did it.
    And there are many examples earlier than that.
    He is not a leader.
    He's being led.
    And he listens to what goes on.
    You might say this is democracy.
    Well, you have to do--
    if you are a person in this position,
    you have to do something, even if it is not popular
    and be able to lead and guide people.
    See what Roosevelt did.
    He did many unpopular things, but he managed to do it.
    He used some tricks, even.
    I remember delivering so-called outdated destroyers to Britain.
    So he called them outdated and everything goes fine.
    He's not supposed to give them ships.
    Ah, if they are outdated-- this is leadership.
    I'm appalled about-- the politics are terrible.
    What about the fact that Bush was head of the CIA,
    so he had to have known what we were doing?
    And not only known what we were doing in other countries,
    but he had to have been a participant, because he
    was the head of it.
    Yeah.
    And the same with Noriega.
    It's shameful.
    It is shameful.
    I have no use for this man at all.
    I was so disgusted with Reagan, and see what comes afterwards.
    I don't think we had a decent president since Truman.
    For a short time you didn't know about Kennedy, maybe,
    but he was only a short time.
    But what kind of people?
    Nixon?
    A fraud.
    Ford?
    A nobody who is much more interested
    in garnering honorariums for speeches and things like that.
    No color, no initiative.
    Johnson?
    How he got us into this Vietnam War more and more,
    insensitive, pulling dogs up by their ears?
    Things like that, details, they show what kind of a person
    it is.
    And it's very sad that a big country like this with so many
    good people cannot produce a president because of these
    politics and because you have to play the game,
    and you have to be a millionaire.
    What kind of a democracy is that if only a millionaire
    can become a senator?
    This is democracy?
    Do you see any similarities between the American people
    in the relationship to our politicians
    as to kind of the rise of Hitlerism, of Nazism
    in Germany, that maybe the sense of powerlessness, or I
    don't know, anything?
    Do you see any similarities?
    Well, the potential for such demagoguery is always there.
    This is a totally different country.
    It's a different continents.
    It's a different history, if there is a history.
    And the situation is really radically different,
    but the vermin is always there.
    What's this guy's name?
    Farrakhan, and the skinheads, and the Aryan Nation fellas.
    They can all be dismissed as weirdos who don't count
    and who will never accomplish anything.
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    It's my opinion that as long as this country is prosperous
    and that everybody has a job, everybody--
    we something like 6% unemployed.
    Nevertheless, the majority, most people,
    this so-called recession isn't so hot either.
    It's not the Depression.
    As long as, in general, you have your shelter
    and have your food and a little extra,
    I think that we, the refugees, are more or less safe.
    But more or less.
    Let things go wrong, if the economy goes wrong,
    scapegoats will be needed.
    Who are the first to be blamed?
    Your guess.
    You know who the first ones will be.
    If Germany had been prosperous, there
    would have been no Hitler.
    There was vast unemployment.
    The unemployment figures we see, which
    are quoted from time to time on television,
    they are a barometer of the security of the Jewish people
    in this country.
    Quote.
    The unemployment figures are the barometer of our welfare.
    If you want to break now, we're going to quit.
    It is July 24, 1991.
    We're at Beth Shalom, interviewing
    Max Knight for the Holocaust Oral History Project.
    My name is Peggy Coster and with me are
    John Grant and Tami Newnham.
    Why don't you start by showing us the books that you brought?
    Well, I mentioned my books last time.
    And you asked me to do some show and tell.
    So I brought some of them along.
    There are three I would like to be remembered by, eventually.
    And they are first, this book, which is
    called The Pure Theory of Law.
    It is a book on legal philosophy by Professor Hans Kelsen, whom
    I consider my mentor, who was one of my teachers
    at law school in Vienna.
    And he himself became a refugee, eventually
    and came to Berkeley.
    And so I became his student for a second time.
    I treasured him very highly.
    And his principal work, the work he's primarily known for,
    is this book, The Pure Theory of Law.
    It has been translated in every language you can think of.
    And I had the privilege of translating it into English.
    The other one is my joy and pride,
    Morgenstern, The Gallows Songs.
    I brought the two paperbacks along.
    It appeared in hardback in 1963, I
    had the date wrong in the earlier tape.
    And it was very well-received.
    This is the American edition.
    And this is a German edition.
    It appeared twice.
    German, English on facing texts, poetry,
    by this turn of the century humorous writer.
    And the last one is this book, Return to the Alps.
    It tells about my adventures in the Austrian and Swiss
    mountains.
    It's published by The Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth.
    And has beautiful pictures, which I can
    say because I didn't take them.
    But I wrote the text.
    I'm used to meeting people who tell me, oh, I've
    seen your beautiful book.
    Then I know they have never read it.
    They looked at the pictures.
    And this is just about all you can do at first.
    On the earlier tape, I did already mention this book,
    one and one make three, what you might
    call our joint autobiography, my friend Joe Fabry and myself,
    written under the name of Peter Fabrizius, which
    is our old pseudonym, the name under which we wrote
    our stories in the old country and partly
    also in this country.
    Then here, my great love, is my mother's cookbook, The Blue
    Danube Cookbook, which is a transcription
    of a handwritten cookbook which my mother kept
    from the time she was a young girl until old age.
    Well-fingered, full of grease spots,
    not so much from her but from me when I was a kid
    and played with it.
    I got it away from her on her 70th birthday
    and transcribed it, translated it,
    edited it, and published it.
    It was quite a success.
    It had three printings.
    It was a birthday gift.
    She was often asked by friends, when
    she served a dish, how she did this, and how did she do that.
    And there were usually long conversations
    over the telephone.
    And now I saved her these.
    And I said next time when somebody asks me
    how do you do this, you can grandiosely say,
    here's my book.
    It was a surprise.
    It was on her table the right time on the proper date.
    I only want to mention, I don't have this book here.
    I did translate the correspondence between Richard
    Strauss and the distinguished Austrian essayist
    Stefan Zweig, which was published by The University
    of California Press.
    So these are my trophies.
    There are more than that, also many anthologies.
    But I think I have boasted enough.
    The name Strauss, was he the musician?
    Yes.
    Yes, Richard Strauss, the musician.
    Yes.
    How did you meet them and get to do--
    I did not meet them.
    I translated their correspondence,
    which was excellent.
    I had the correspondence and I translated it.
    It was not collected by me.
    It was collected by the university.
    OK.
    Well, I guess we'll kind of start
    by going back to Shanghai when you were leaving,
    actually leaving Shanghai.
    Well, I guess the whole thing is Shanghai--
    can you turn off a moment?
    Let's see.
    Can ask you a question maybe.
    OK.
    What was your trip to Shanghai like, on the boat?
    On the boat?
    The food, the average day, the length of the trip.
    Well, it really was a routine trip for everybody else.
    It was only different inside us.
    When I say us, this is my friend, Kurt Schwalz, with whom
    I took the trip, myself.
    We were very apprehensive.
    We didn't know what was going to happen to us.
    We didn't know whether we would get into the Japanese hands,
    what they would do to us.
    We didn't know whether there would ever
    be a return trip back to the Western hemisphere
    or whether, in the meantime, war would break out
    between Japan and the United States
    and so we would never get back.
    We did prepare ourselves for China, as it were,
    by reading a very good book called
    My Country and My People, by Lin Yutang an Americanized Chinese.
    We learned a great deal in that book.
    It was a preparation.
    And when we actually got to Shanghai,
    we tried to continue that.
    We wanted to inform ourselves.
    We would study the various dynasties for 2,000 years.
    And well, we were wide awake.
    We realized that we were having a very unusual experience.
    And we wanted to make the best of it.
    That's all I can say about that.
    Was the food good?
    Was the food good?
    Yes, the food was very good.
    On these liners, the food is always very good.
    You get a fancy menu, and you pick something.
    So yeah.
    When you got to Shanghai, you taught English.
    How did that go?
    Well, it's a strange experience for somebody
    who doesn't know English to teach English.
    But I just knew that much more than my poor Chinese students
    at the university there.
    They were very motivated, devoted, eager students.
    They were all Chinese.
    I was the only non-Chinese there, very conspicuous.
    They have great regard for teachers.
    They were very appreciative and, as I say, most eager to learn.
    They seemed to hang on every word that was said.
    They would follow me after the lessons down the hallway,
    down the stairs.
    There were some that even went on the bus with me
    on my way home, which means something
    to those Chinese students.
    That was an expense, the fare.
    Yet, they wanted to have still more information
    and asked questions.
    I had one funny experience.
    And that was I did notice some unease among them.
    And when it continued for two or three sessions,
    and I tried to find out what it was all about,
    they reluctantly came out eventually.
    And one of them told me, you know,
    you give us such sentences as dog bites the man,
    the garden has nice flowers, such simple stuff.
    We would like to read Shakespeare.
    So I tried to explain to them the facts of life.
    But you can see the ambitiousness.
    You can see the seriousness.
    They thought learning English means to read Shakespeare.
    That they had a long way to go, they didn't immediately
    realize.
    But they were a very, very nice bunch.
    And I was very fond of them, very.
    And I enjoyed the experience.
    Did you teach them any Shakespeare?
    We never got to Shakespeare.
    No, I don't think they would have
    been able to read Shakespeare for another 10 years.
    I can't read Shakespeare today.
    What other funny things happened when you were teaching?
    Well, that's the one I remember.
    That's the one incident.
    Where did you live?
    My friend and I lived in a part of Shanghai,
    which was known as a French concession.
    Part of Shanghai is the international settlement,
    or was.
    This is all past tense.
    And one part was the French concession,
    where the municipal authority were the French.
    It was a residential area.
    There were quite a few German newcomers
    who had enough means to run a pension.
    And we stayed in one of them, quite Western.
    It was just like a bed and breakfast place here.
    There's nothing Chinese about it.
    You wouldn't know it was Shanghai if you were inside.
    We had meals in the style that we were used to.
    The only difference was that we did drink the water there,
    which you couldn't drink anywhere else,
    or we did not drink anywhere else in Shanghai.
    We had been warned that it was dangerous.
    And we knew, in that place, that the water
    was boiled and then refrigerated and got that way on the table.
    And so we could drink the water, which was a great relief.
    We felt very much at home there.
    And we lived in a Western style.
    Was it hard to get food?
    No.
    We could go shopping.
    You could buy anything.
    There were many White Russian stores
    where you could buy caviar, which we couldn't afford.
    The White Russians came from an earlier wave of refugees
    after the Russian Revolution.
    And we did not buy food in the way a housekeeping person would
    buy food.
    Because we ate in that place where we were.
    That was with all meals.
    There was a lot of selling of food in the streets.
    The Chinese had little shacks in which
    they sold strange kinds of food, steamed often.
    But we did not try that.
    We were scared.
    We were told right from the beginning
    to be very careful with food.
    And so we were.
    Many people got sick.
    We never got sick.
    Because we absolutely observed the rules.
    For example, no vegetables, no fresh, green vegetables,
    or food, I mean, fruit.
    No fruit and no vegetables uncooked, only those
    that we got cooked in the place where we lived.
    So that was about the story.
    Well, when you were away from home then all day,
    did you take the food and water with you?
    No.
    I cannot give you an exact rundown of how we took every
    meal, certainly in the morning and in the evening.
    During lunch hour, I don't quite know.
    I cannot quite remember how we did this.
    We had business of different kinds.
    And I believe, though, that we did come home mostly for lunch.
    The afternoon was often very hot.
    And it was somewhat like the Mexican siesta.
    You didn't do too much in the afternoons.
    And then life began again in the late afternoon and the evening.
    My job at the newspaper, I had two jobs.
    I think I mentioned it in the earlier session.
    In addition to teaching, I was an editor for a newspaper
    there.
    And I had to go there in the late afternoon,
    early evening, I think around six or so.
    And I stayed there half the night.
    So there was still time for me to have my dinner at home.
    Were the rates that you paid for the pension inflated?
    I think it was a quite reasonable rate.
    I cannot tell you how much it was.
    We could afford it.
    There was no trouble about that.
    Who did you meet that became most memorable to you?
    Well, the situation was not unlike that in England.
    There were refugee colonies.
    They were very large in Shanghai.
    Altogether, there were 20,000 of us eventually.
    They came in waves.
    And I usually associated with people
    who had some literary interests, or people who were introduced
    to us through other friends.
    And we had quite a lively social life.
    I had a second editing job.
    In addition to working for that paper,
    I also worked for a local German language weekly, which
    one of the emigres had started.
    And it was done by volunteer work, except for me.
    I was the editor.
    I was paid.
    I also joined a short story club,
    people who wrote short stories, mostly White Russians.
    And through them, I also read those stories
    over the Shanghai radio station, which was quite an exotic thing
    to do, to see your name listed on the Chinese radio station
    program.
    So we had a good life there.
    And in this respect, we were not isolated, sitting at home.
    We had friends, girls, women.
    But we were very careful.
    Again, it was like drinking water.
    You were not going to drink any female water.
    We were told to be very cautious, which
    was the paradox in the great Babel of sin
    of the Orient, Shanghai, full of all kinds of places
    and prostitutes and whatnot.
    We were totally abstinent during the time that we were there.
    We were quite decided not to catch any diseases.
    And that was it.
    Did you take precautions about getting emotionally
    or romantically involved with a girl
    because then you wouldn't be able to just take off and leave
    when your visa came through?
    I cannot say that I did any deliberate program
    of protecting myself emotionally.
    It was an easygoing social life.
    It was social life and no more.
    Did you spend much time with the Jewish community?
    No.
    We were not in touch with the Jewish community,
    which was unusual perhaps.
    Because so many had to be supported by the community.
    But since we were self-supporting,
    and the group that we were part of
    was also self-supporting in their own ways,
    we had no contact with the Jewish community.
    We had contacts with all kinds of people.
    Strangely, for example, I met the bishop
    of the Jesuits there one time, quite
    an interesting and intriguing encounter.
    Or the director of the Royal Asiatic Society,
    which resulted in my friend Kurt Schwartz's getting
    a position there as librarian at The Royal Society.
    Or I met a nephew of the former President
    Hoover, who was the head of the YMCA there,
    not the JMCA, but the YMCA.
    It was really quite an international intercourse,
    which was not surprising in this international and cosmopolitan
    city.
    Why was the Jesuit meeting intriguing?
    Because it was such an unusual thing for one of us
    to meet with a Catholic priest to begin with and with a bishop
    at that.
    And here he was, in his palace-like place,
    with a great big wall around an enclosure of gardens.
    To us, it seemed like meeting the Pope.
    And he was very benign and very friendly, a little anxious,
    maybe.
    But it was a friendly encounter.
    And it was a policy on our part to follow up
    any sort of introductions that we could get.
    You asked me earlier was I protecting myself emotionally.
    We were protecting ourselves, we were
    trying to protect ourselves from a situation in which the war
    would break out between Japan and the United States,
    we would be isolated among the Japanese,
    and we would then need friends, non-Japanese friends
    in as high positions as possible to, in some way
    perhaps, to help us.
    We did not want to be unknown flotsam in a million people
    city.
    It was a calculated effort to have connections
    as high as possible.
    And you can see the three I just mentioned,
    the bishop, the director of The Royal Asiatic Society,
    and the head of the YMCA, who was
    a close relative of the former President of the United States.
    I also met two Jewish people, because we asked
    about something like that.
    One was Mr. Sassoon, who was a very prominent and important
    figure in Shanghai.
    His family comes originally from Baghdad and from a yet earlier
    wave preceding also the White Russians that went back
    to the previous century.
    I don't know why--
    these people came in via India, I believe,
    Baghdad, India, and then Shanghai.
    The Sassoons and also relatives of theirs,
    also a prominent family from Baghdad, Kadoorie,
    the Kadoorie family, both prominent Jewish families,
    Oriental families.
    The Kadoories were very charitable and philanthropic.
    Mr. Kadoorie, whom I met, ran a school, high school,
    private high school.
    And in the early part, before I had my job with the North China
    Daily News, with this British newspaper,
    I was a teacher in that Kadoorie School.
    So I did all kinds of things while I was there.
    It was less than a year.
    Did concentration camp refugees talk to you
    about their experiences?
    Not so much then, but now in recent years,
    when I conducted these classes for survivors,
    and participated in their writing their own memoirs,
    I heard a lot about what went on in concentration camps.
    Yes.
    Not there so much.
    Right after the war, when all the information came out,
    did you read up on it then?
    Oh, I did have all the information right then.
    This was not a secret.
    There were enough people that had come out
    and told their stories.
    And of course, some of these gruesome details
    came out after the war, especially when
    the pictures came out.
    We saw them on television and in the newspapers
    and in the magazines.
    Yes.
    Perhaps since you're touching on these questions,
    I feel I ought to make a statement about my own position
    toward the Jewish community and my own origins.
    I wrote it quite carefully in my book.
    And I do not want to paraphrase that.
    I have this short paragraph, three sentences.
    And if I may, I will read them.
    They are what you might call my creed.
    Hitler, in the antisemitic years,
    made me conscious of my roots.
    I was placed in a category I hardly knew existed.
    I was arbitrarily made a target, first of ridicule,
    then of discrimination, deprivation, expulsion,
    and finally destruction.
    Although I escaped the worst, it was
    during the years of my flight on three continents
    that I defiantly acknowledged my roots, in solidarity
    with the persecuted, in loyalty, in compassion,
    and acknowledgment of a shared destiny.
    Jewish diet laws and other restrictions
    still seem anachronistic to me.
    And the belief in a caring deity seems almost obscene to me
    after Auschwitz.
    My consciousness of my heritage is political, not religious.
    I accepted it because I identified
    with those who had survived the Brown scourge
    and in supreme sacrifice, established
    an Island of self-respect in Palestine, in a world of hatred
    and murder.
    I felt I had to make this statement.
    How did you spend your time when you weren't working?
    How did you spend your time when you weren't working?
    Well, I tried to cover this earlier.
    We had some social life.
    And we had the short story club and the broadcasting.
    And we invited each other.
    But there's nothing-- and of course, I had a lot to--
    my work took very much of my time.
    I had a very crowded calendar.
    It sounded like it.
    What was an average day like?
    Well, it depended on what part of my stay there.
    In the early part, I had this school, the one I mentioned,
    the Kadoorie school.
    As a matter of fact, there was another one,
    another high school where I also taught.
    Sometimes the same day, different hours, so I
    had to get up in the morning and go to this one school,
    and perhaps come home for lunch, as you asked me earlier,
    and then go to the other school.
    And it was then different when I worked for The North China
    Daily News and, again, different when
    I taught at the university.
    We did go out together quite a bit,
    just to learn about what the Chinese are up to.
    And we had no contact with them, but we
    were very interested in their culture,
    in their literature, their writing, their customs,
    their temples.
    We would go around sightseeing and watch them.
    There were so many strange things going on in the streets.
    There were these horrible beggars.
    It's hard to imagine in a Western city
    what these beggars did and how they tried to get coins
    from the people who walked by.
    Many of them were sick.
    They're just lying in the gutter there, all kinds of wounds.
    And we were later told that they even encouraged those wounds,
    they should look horrible.
    There was one who carried his mother on his back
    in order to attract attention.
    But especially with those gaping sores, there was much to see,
    both positive and negative.
    And so many strange things, the music
    that came out of the windows, they
    had their own kind of scale or whatever that is.
    It didn't sound like music to me.
    A kind of a sing song, but no melody.
    And the rickshaws, I don't think they exist anymore.
    I wouldn't know.
    The rickshaw pullers, I was so terribly sorry
    for those rickshaw pullers, human beings carrying
    other humans and running.
    I swore I would never use a rickshaw.
    There were buses there.
    But it's easy swearing if you don't know the situation.
    On one occasion, we went to a show, a theater.
    And by the time it was over, the buses didn't run anymore.
    We had a long way to go home.
    And here were all these rickshaws waiting for us.
    We knew that we would have to take them.
    And so very reluctantly, we took rickshaws, my friend
    and I each one.
    And here was this rickshaw puller.
    He was starting to run.
    And I tried to tell him that I wasn't in a hurry.
    He shouldn't exert himself.
    Go easy.
    It's all right with me.
    There was even a word which I have forgotten,
    the one I learned while I was there for slow,
    slow, take it easy.
    But I tried to show this with my hands.
    And so he slowed down a bit.
    But I was told later that I didn't
    do any favor to this man.
    Because they know exactly the speed that is necessary.
    There is a certain trot which allows them to pull the least.
    If it runs along at a certain speed,
    then the pulling doesn't have to be so hard.
    I didn't know this at the time.
    So you can see all the kinds of things that happened
    in a strange and foreign city.
    What other things were strange to you?
    Well, I just told you.
    OK.
    Once Kurt made it to the United States, your friend Kurt--
    Yes?
    Did you stay in touch with him?
    Yes, I did stay in touch with him.
    He arrived with his wife, whom he
    had married in Shanghai, a lady from Vienna whom
    I got to know when I was there.
    They brought along a little boy.
    And as a matter of fact, they stayed in our place
    a few days at the beginning.
    And they later moved to Los Angeles.
    And they did very well there.
    I was in touch with him many times.
    We visited back and forth.
    I stayed in their place.
    They eventually had a very beautiful home, a lovely house.
    He got sick in later years and passed away.
    His wife Martha is still a good friend of mine,
    stays in the same house.
    The little boy who is now a grown man, married.
    And we are all still in touch.
    Did you ever talk about his war experiences in Shanghai?
    What work he did, Kurt?
    Just his whole general war experience in Shanghai.
    Whose?
    Kurt.
    Yes.
    He was a rare book dealer.
    And he established a business in his field.
    He was a very learned man.
    He knew very much.
    And so he continued the business that he originally
    had in Vienna and later in London also
    in Shanghai and, eventually, in Los Angeles.
    There was continuity in this there.
    He did very well.
    It was very successful.
    And he was a good and dear friend.
    So was his family, and still is.
    Did the fact that you managed to get out before the war ever
    come between you?
    It did not, at least not on the surface.
    I felt extremely guilty for years.
    And I couldn't look into him.
    But I can well imagine how he felt.
    And I believe, since he married immediately after I left,
    that he sought and received comfort from his wife, who
    was also left behind.
    And it was indeed a very touchy point.
    And not until he came, finally after the war,
    he spent the whole war there.
    And it was not so much the waiting there
    that caused the guilt feeling.
    But not knowing whether he would ever make it.
    So when he did make it, whatever such feeling remained,
    dissipated.
    Did you ever discover why Senor Tavela seemed uncomfortable
    when you asked him to liquidate your gold bar?
    Looking back now, I have the feeling
    that maybe we projected into him the anxieties we had,
    wondering whether a total stranger would really
    behave in an honest way, since all our fortune was
    in his hand.
    Our material fortunes were in his hands.
    So when I said we wondered whether he would come through,
    when he said that at any time that we wanted our gold bar--
    which we had entrusted to him because he
    was the manager, or the director of a bank,
    the natural person to be the guardian of that--
    so when we wondered whether we would ever get it back
    when he asked for it.
    So it was probably from the objective point of view
    not justified.
    This was an honest man and behaved honestly.
    But of course, we were so much at the mercy of forces
    that we couldn't control, that perhaps we could be excused
    for being worried about that.
    When did you pay back the cousin who
    deposited the money in the Shanghai Bank
    so you could get on the ship to Shanghai?
    The money that my cousin deposited for me
    in the Shanghai Bank, the New York-based person,
    never asked the money back.
    And it was not necessary.
    Because the moment I arrived in Shanghai,
    and the money, this deposit, had done its duty, namely
    as insurance for the shipping company that they would be paid
    in case we would not be admitted in Shanghai
    and they would have to take us back,
    this money was no longer needed.
    And I sent it back in the very first days of our arrival
    in Shanghai.
    It was not a loan.
    It was a deposit.
    What was your trip on the Kobe Maru like?
    That was quite an uneventful trip, the trip back from Japan
    to the United States.
    Well, I should say, back to the Western hemisphere.
    Because I didn't come from the United States.
    I came from Canada.
    There is not much to say.
    There were some, I think three other emigres on that ship.
    I shared the cabin with one of them.
    And the dominant feeling of that trip
    was one the supreme peace and rest,
    the feeling of security that finally being out
    of the storm, finally not being exposed
    to the whims of all kinds of authorities, of unknown forces
    in strange countries, being hunted, waiting for their visa,
    waiting for this or that paper, not knowing
    whether you would have money enough for groceries
    the next day, wondering whether you
    would be stranded in a country that was
    the Axis partner of the Nazis.
    All this was over.
    I remember my lying there on that deck
    chair with a good warm blanket, just closing my eyes
    and being at peace with the world.
    Whatever would come now could not
    be compared with what we had gone through before.
    We were not on the run anymore, like a drowning person reaching
    an island, reaching shore.
    But we had reached, or I had reached the shore.
    And there I was, happily exhausted.
    When you arrived in Seattle, what cultural differences
    did you notice first?
    Oh, the cultural differences were the same
    as the cultural differences when I arrived originally
    on the trip out from Liverpool to Halifax
    when I reached Canada.
    Those elegant railroad cars, upholstered, comfortable dining
    car, people well-dressed.
    I came from a city in which 2/3 of the people
    ran around raggedy, torn clothes, no shoes.
    And here, everything was relaxed, easygoing.
    Nobody seemed to have any worries.
    I know it was deceptive to believe that.
    But that was the feeling I had.
    The lady that picked me up from the arriving boat in Seattle
    and took me to the railroad station, she,
    too, she was so well-dressed and shiny car.
    For me, to see a person that even has a car,
    it was a great luxury in my eyes for somebody
    to own an automobile.
    And here she was and invited me in.
    She wanted to do something for me.
    Did I need this or that?
    I said, no, thank you.
    I couldn't think of anything that I needed.
    I don't know what she exactly meant, perhaps
    to buy me a hat or what.
    But I could see the attitude, the generosity of this woman.
    A stranger, she had never met me, of course.
    She was only alerted by the committee
    that somebody was arriving from the Far East,
    and would you give him a hand.
    She was so eager to do something for me,
    when we passed a newsstand, that she picked up a Life magazine
    just to buy something for me.
    And so on the way to Portland and later to beyond Portland,
    to Oakland and San Francisco, I read this Life magazine.
    You said it was difficult getting comfortable
    with the name "Knight."
    Yes.
    What did changing your name mean to you?
    That was very uncomfortable.
    I had so many friends from Austria.
    And it was quite obvious that this could not be my name.
    It sounded like having to hide something.
    I did it because I was told by a friend
    before I came to this country that German-sounding names had
    great trouble in the First World War.
    And since war was about to break out again,
    he thought would be wise for me to anglicize it in some way.
    And so I did this.
    When I arrived in Seattle, the immigration officer asked me,
    what do you want to call yourself?
    Well, I wanted a short name that had the same initials
    as my original name.
    And so I didn't have to change the painting
    on my suitcase, where the initials were
    painted on, and on my hankies, handkerchiefs.
    They had the initials embroidered on it.
    So I wanted the same initials.
    And so I took that name on the suggestions of some friends
    on the ship before we arrived.
    It was picked out of the telephone book.
    And I was always uncomfortable, really,
    until my first book was published
    and had favorable reviews.
    And I began to identify with that name that
    was cited in the reviews.
    And with more books coming out later,
    that was the case more and more.
    And then after that, my wife Charlotte was American.
    Both my children were born here.
    So they wear the name legitimately, you might say.
    And so I grew into it.
    I was thinking for some time of changing back, because there
    was really no reason.
    It turned out that the Germans in this country
    during the Second World War didn't
    have any trouble with their German-sounding names.
    But it was too far gone.
    All the documents were already under that name.
    So I let it go.
    And now I'm used to it.
    And I'm no longer embarrassed.
    When somebody asks, when the history comes up, I say, yes,
    my name was Kuhnel, K-U-H-N-E-L, two dots over the "U."
    But otherwise, I'm now accustomed to it completely.
    I did have a strange feeling when I first came in
    and the immigration officer asked me.
    Because I thought changing your name, that is a major process.
    You have to go to court, maybe.
    You have some papers.
    No, this fellow said, what do you want to call yourself.
    Such and such?
    He wrote it down.
    That was the end of it.
    I felt rather humiliated by that, which may be unusual
    for you to hear that.
    But that this fellow would regard immigrants
    as so nondescript, like cattle, it doesn't make any difference.
    So whatever you cal;ed yourself before is of no consequence
    to us.
    Now pick a name, anything, and it is OK with us.
    No trace is left of this name now except on the back
    of my naturalization paper.
    There the formal name is still listed.
    On the back, mind you, not on the front
    with the printed text.
    So this is the end of my name story.
    I have now three names, don't I?
    Kuhnel, and Knight, and Fabrizius.
    Yeah.
    Would you talk about meeting Charlotte?
    Oh, yes.
    That was one of the most pleasant episodes in my life.
    I told him in the previous session
    that I was a guest for one year in the house
    of the British author CS Forester.
    And Mrs. Forester had a kitchen with a notepad.
    So whenever she would go out shopping,
    she wrote down what she had to buy, some bread, some eggs,
    milk, and so forth.
    This by way of introduction.
    After I'd stayed with the Foresters for one year,
    and had started my first job as a shoeshine for the family,
    I had an opportunity to engage in my second job, which
    was a laborer in a shipyard.
    The war had broken out.
    Anybody with two legs and two arms
    was accepted in the shipyard.
    So I took a job as quote, "ship fitter," unquote.
    This was my official designation in the Kaiser shipyards
    in Richmond, together with my friend Joe also,
    who also became a ship fitter there.
    I knew as much about ship fitting
    as I knew about Manchuria when I was
    hired by the Office of War Information
    to monitor the texts that came out of Manchuria.
    I had to look at the map where that place is.
    But all this was told in the earlier session,
    or I think it was told.
    And so I became a ship fitter.
    It's just an elegant name for a laborer.
    All I had to do is to snap the chalk line sometimes,
    if you know what that means.
    There were steel plates.
    And they had to be cut by welders.
    Now a welder in the shipyard knew his job.
    He really was a craftsman.
    But I didn't know what I was doing.
    And so there are two people at each end of the plate.
    And in the middle is a piece of string, chalked string.
    And one person has to snap so that it
    makes a straight line and the welder can then cut it.
    So that was my egregious job there.
    Now this was only by way of explaining
    that I now had an income.
    And I no longer needed the charity of the Foresters.
    And so I said to Mrs. Forester, it's
    been a long time, almost a year.
    And I don't want to be a burden anymore.
    I can now stand on my own feet.
    I can pay for an apartment.
    I want to start a life in the United States now.
    And I want to get married.
    I don't want to be by myself.
    The expected answer was that she would smile.
    But she didn't smile.
    She took it very seriously.
    And she said, so you want to get married, all right, as though I
    had ordered something which she was going to take care of.
    And this is precisely how it was.
    Shortly after I had told her that, it
    was in November or early December,
    I think early December, maybe, she one day
    came with a little envelope.
    And she said, here's your wife.
    I opened the envelope.
    She said, I have to give you your Christmas
    present a little early.
    And you will understand why.
    And in the envelope was a membership card
    to The Sierra Club.
    And The Sierra Club has, every year, an annual dance.
    And she said, you are now a member.
    You can go to this dance, I paid the membership for you.
    And you go there, and there you'll find your wife.
    And this is what happened.
    Although there was a slight detour about that.
    When I got there, I was very shy.
    There were all these people.
    They all seemed to know each other.
    There was a lot of noise, many, many people, music.
    I didn't dance.
    For hours, I was just sitting there and didn't dance.
    And then came the last dance, midnight or 1 AM.
    And that was ladies' choice.
    And in that ladies' choice, a blonde came along.
    And she asked me for a dance.
    So I danced with her.
    She was quite an aggressive gal.
    And the dance was fairly long, because it was the last one.
    And before it was all over, she asked me if I would visit her.
    She lived in Berkeley.
    I said, well, yes.
    So I wouldn't know how to say no.
    And I had no particular reason to say no.
    I cannot say I was particularly impressed by her, either.
    It was just a dance.
    So she asked me to come to--
    she said to "our" place.
    "Our" meaning that she shared the place with another girl,
    a young woman.
    So a few days later, sure enough, they had a party.
    And when I came close to the house,
    it was in Berkeley on Euclid Avenue.
    And there were a few steps before you reached that place.
    And on top of there, when I reached the top of the place
    from the street, she came running out of the house,
    took me under, and escorted me into the house.
    I was her catch.
    And inside there were other people.
    And she introduced me also to her roommate, to her housemate.
    And that housemate that came in with a tray, coffee
    or tea on it, in a very inviting and welcoming posture.
    I have always said afterwards I remember the picture on--
    is it tea or coffee, I think tea, Hooton--
    on the can, there is the picture of a Danish woman
    with a little hood carrying this cup.
    She reminded me of that picture in a very caring way.
    She had auburn hair, with a white strand right
    in the middle of it, a prematurely white strand.
    And in that strand, there was a flower.
    And that impressed me greatly.
    And I liked her off the bat.
    The other one, not the one who had brought me in,
    but her roommate, the housemate So
    she was very good-looking, very charming.
    So there was this party.
    I forget what happened during that party.
    But a few days later, I called up
    that first one, the one that had brought me to the house.
    And I said, can I talk--
    I'd like to talk with Charlotte.
    That was the other one.
    Oh, she said, sorry, she's not here.
    I said, no, I'm sorry.
    I'm sorry.
    I'm not telling you this correctly.
    During that party, the first one, her name was Sue,
    Susan, had told me in some context which I do not
    remember, that on Saturday she would not be at home,
    had to go somewhere.
    So I called on Saturday.
    And it was Charlotte who came to the phone.
    And when I said who I was, before waiting for anything
    else, she said Sue is not home.
    She thought that I was phoning for Sue.
    I said, I know she isn't home.
    That's why I am phoning now.
    I want to see you.
    You want to see me?
    Well, OK, come along.
    We got married six months later.
    It happened precisely as Mrs. Forester
    had said, except for this little detour via Sue.
    Sue became the bitter enemy, of course, of Charlotte.
    But after a few years, good Sue got herself another catch
    and married.
    And so the friendship was rescued
    and there were no bad feelings.
    And Christmas cards were exchanged every year
    since then.
    Charlotte and I had a very nice wedding.
    It was nice for several reasons.
    One was that neither of us had any relatives.
    Hers were in Canada.
    Mine were in England.
    My friend, Joe Fabry, was the witness, or one of them.
    Another reason why it was nice was
    that we chose as a place to get married the Rose
    Garden in Berkeley.
    It's a very beautiful setting.
    It was to my knowledge, the first time it happened.
    It was afterwards written up in the local paper as a novelty.
    So it was in the evening, July 11, 1942.
    We got married there and had a nice reception
    at the Foresters.
    The Foresters did everything, all the food,
    and they invited friends.
    And then we had a honeymoon at Fallen Leaf Lake.
    This was very pleasant.
    We took a horseback trip up a little lake
    which is up from there.
    I forget the name now.
    And later on, I moved in instead of poor Sue in the place
    on Euclid Avenue.
    Until a few years later, we moved in our own place,
    Grizzly Peak Boulevard.
    And there she has become the mistress of the house.
    And we've never regretted it.
    We have lived happily ever after.
    And next year, we will have our golden anniversary.
    That's my story.
    That's a wonderful story.
    Isn't this a good ending of it all?
    Well, it's not the end of the interview.
    I mean, of your interviewing?
    I knew that you meant that.
    I didn't mean the end of my life,
    exactly, although it's not likely to be very far off.
    I just had my 82nd birthday.
    Well, that's a wonderful story.
    Well, why don't we leave it at that?
    Oh, well, actually, I have quite a few more questions.
    You have more questions?
    Well, all right.
    Have more questions.
    When you were at your ship fitting job?
    Oh, back to that, yes.
    Go back to the ship fitters--
    what was the work atmosphere like?
    The work atmosphere?
    My goodness.
    They tried to make it very patriotic.
    And they told everybody what great patriots we were.
    I think everybody took the job because it was highly paid.
    But I must say that we, the newcomers,
    were very much aware of what it really meant.
    I doubt that many were too much aware of the fact
    that we were here building ships that would help defeat
    the Japanese and the Nazis.
    We did feel that there was a cause.
    And from the working point of view,
    it was nothing to boast about.
    It was very much a waste of person's time.
    And I'm sure funds.
    But they put out those Liberty ships with great festivities
    every time one was launched.
    Weren't you on the ship that was built--
    it was an experiment for five to do it and you did it in five
    days?
    We were there, my friend Joe and I were there at the same time.
    And we indirectly participated in this.
    This ship was built in parts.
    And that was the whole idea, to build the various sections
    on the various--
    what they call the waves.
    And so in some way, he, or I, or both put on some brackets,
    I suppose.
    But we do not claim that we built that ship.
    It was one of those bravura exploits.
    It was much written up.
    And there was a story in The Reader's Digest, to our grief,
    because we wanted to write out that story ourselves.
    And then we discovered all too soon
    that they had beaten us to it.
    It was a great day when that ship was launched.
    I liked the work there, except for the long waits in between.
    Sometimes for hours I had nothing to do.
    And I felt I should do something.
    I wanted to earn my pay.
    I wanted to contribute something.
    And I felt very frustrated that they didn't
    make use of the manpower.
    And Joe was in a better position than I was.
    Because he could read blueprints.
    He almost was a ship fitter, really.
    And he was also promoted faster than I
    was, rightly so, because he could tell
    these plans what they were.
    And as a matter of fact, he even showed the other ship fitters
    who couldn't read these blueprints what to do.
    But I was really the fifth wheel on the wagon.
    I didn't belong there.
    I knew I didn't belong there.
    But I also knew that this was the basis.
    I first had to find a footing in American life.
    And I had to start it at the lowest
    part, low in terms of any sort of preparation or training.
    But I never felt declassified.
    I knew what I had to offer.
    And I was quite certain that eventually I
    would get to the place where I belonged.
    But I was not resentful of it, that I had to do this work,
    and it didn't in any way discourage me.
    Today I say it with some smugness,
    that I began as a shoe polish and a laborer, a shoeshine,
    I should say, not a shoe polish.
    Did you notice any prejudice towards the Blacks
    when you were working as a ship fitter?
    I did not notice any prejudice towards the Blacks.
    But then I wasn't keyed up to this.
    Perhaps if I had had a better hearing,
    I might have noticed something.
    But I was preoccupied with what I was doing or not doing.
    And the Blacks and Hispanics and the Indians, they
    were all there.
    They-- we didn't treat--
    I certainly didn't discriminate.
    And I was myself a minority.
    And it was very harmonious, as far as I could tell.
    And I can only say, if it would be like this generally
    in American life, it would be so much the better.
    No, I could not find anything wrong
    with the race situation in the shipyards.
    We were all in the same basket.
    When you were getting your parents into the country,
    why don't you show a picture of your mother now?
    Well, I'll show that in a minute.
    The war was not over yet on the Japanese side.
    I applied for my parents, who had
    lived throughout the blitz in England.
    They were bombed out on two occasions, but survived.
    And I applied for immigration for my parents.
    It was a long process, quite bureaucratic,
    and frustrating for that reason, all kinds of affidavits,
    and support, and papers.
    The climax was that I had to go to Washington, DC.
    There was a commission to decide on
    whether to grant the visa or not and to interrogate me
    as a sponsor.
    It was not very generous, I believe, of the government
    to demand that the applicant have
    to travel to Washington if you had immigration offices right
    here across the bay in San Francisco.
    It was a great expense for me to do that.
    I had no more money than paying for a bus, not even
    enough for the train.
    The bus took three days, or four days, on and on.
    But I did go to this, of course, when
    I was called to meet this committee in Washington.
    There were, I don't know, either three or five people
    on that panel.
    I cannot remember now.
    But they were sitting in front of me, above me.
    I was a little down below.
    I was very anxious to appear as a good, solid, middle class
    citizen.
    I didn't want to look outlandish, foreign.
    I knew I couldn't do anything about my accent.
    But whatever else I could do, I wanted to do.
    I wanted to dress in an inconspicuous quote,
    "normal," unquote way.
    I remember the very last item in my preparation
    was already on my way to that meeting,
    I wondered whether men in America use a tie pin.
    I wore a tie.
    Now in Berkeley, I don't wear a tie anymore, or rarely,
    on special occasions.
    When I have to tell the oral history in my first session,
    I wore a tie.
    So that worried me.
    I thought this pin I wore, would that
    look conspicuous and outlandish?
    Or on the other hand, if I didn't have it,
    would that look sloppy?
    So what I did I stood at the corner of one
    of the main streets and one of the side streets.
    And just watched the men walking by.
    And I took a count.
    It turned out that few had tie pens.
    There were one or two who did.
    So it wasn't totally odd.
    But when I saw that most of them didn't, I took mine away.
    And I put it in my pocket.
    And so I appeared in front of this commission there.
    And they asked me all kinds of questions.
    I could see what I anticipated, that what they really
    wanted to know was whether, heaven forbid,
    these parents of mine would be communists.
    They were worried about communism, about nothing else.
    They didn't say so.
    But all their questions were that way.
    When I said I worked for a newspaper in Vienna,
    they asked me what kind of a newspaper it was,
    perhaps it was a socialist newspaper.
    It would have been almost as perhaps just as bad.
    Well, I was so innocent at that time.
    And since I never worked for the political side of a newspaper,
    but only for the literary side, I
    didn't even quite know what kind of a paper that
    was politically.
    And I didn't care about that.
    And I was a little vague in my answer.
    But these people had a fat book sitting
    there which apparently listed the newspapers of the world,
    or of Austria and Germany.
    And one of them looked it up.
    Sure enough, the subtitle of the paper for which I worked was
    [NON-ENGLISH]--
    that was the main title, the subtitle translated,
    a democratic organ.
    That saved the day.
    It was a democratic organ.
    So I didn't work for the socialist paper and not
    for the communist paper.
    So that part of it was fine.
    But there were more questions.
    And they all-- how much money did I make,
    and would I become a public burden, maybe,
    and who were the people with whom I associated, on and on.
    As I say, I had anticipated that.
    And because of that, when I told about my parents
    and what their social position was before,
    my father was a vice president of a bank in Vienna.
    And my mother was a lady.
    What do you mean by a lady?
    And it was then that I pulled out a picture of her
    which was painted on ivory.
    It was a miniature, an oil painting,
    nicely framed in bronze.
    I always treasured it very much.
    And I showed them this picture.
    And they passed it from hand to hand, smugly smiled.
    You can see she sits there, rather prim, like a princess,
    with a shawl draped around her.
    And so the whole thing looked like
    a good, non-communist, middle aged bourgeois
    woman who would not be a danger to the government of the United
    States of America.
    And so this little picture took its part
    in the eventual admission of my parents,
    who were indeed allowed to come and join us.
    It still took six or eight months until these gentlemen
    made up their minds.
    But eventually, they came.
    What was your mother like?
    What was my mother like?
    Remember, I was going to ask you that this time.
    Well, you're asking a prejudiced person.
    My mother was a woman who had a wonderful sense of humor,
    was very much down to Earth, very practical.
    She was an excellent cook, recognized as that not only
    by me.
    Even after she had come to this country,
    she demonstrated in various service clubs
    how to make a Viennese strudel and things like that.
    And after all, this cookbook is a result of her art.
    I call it an art.
    And she was a person who particularly
    showed her mettle in tough situation, in a crisis.
    When my father wanted a higher position,
    when he wanted to change from the job he had to one
    which was recognized as a more important post,
    it was she who made it possible, through pulling strings
    and getting him this job.
    When we were in London together, and were evacuated
    when the war broke out because we were not
    allowed to stay in London itself anymore, being aliens,
    we took refuge in a very small, very primitive house
    that, through friends, were rented to us.
    There was nothing but a single gas burner.
    They had no kitchen.
    It was she who made it comfortable for my father,
    and myself, and of course, herself,
    and my friend Joe Fabry, who stayed with us there.
    She made a home out of this shack with very limited
    facilities, not much food.
    When I'm here mixing up chronologies,
    there was an earlier occasion when, again, she
    came to the rescue.
    That was at the time long before the Nazis
    came, in the '20s, when inflation hit Austria,
    this runaway, terrible inflation which
    resulted in my father's fortunes being wiped out entirely.
    And when I say entirely, I mean, everything.
    I like to tell the story how he called me into his study
    and showed me a postage stamp, one that
    was for First Class letters.
    The equivalent, which at the time of my saying it here,
    is $0.29.
    By the time this will be seen, it'll be probably $0.50,
    a stamp like this.
    He moistened it.
    Put it on an envelope.
    And says, I want you to see this.
    This is all that has been left of all,
    I have saved all these years for you and your mother.
    That's all we have now.
    He had life insurance, wiped out.
    He had savings, stocks.
    Everything was wiped out.
    It was she, my mother, who in this crisis
    found a tactful way of approaching my great uncles,
    her uncles, the brothers of her mother
    who lived in Paris to support us.
    I mean, it is very difficult to write to a relative for money.
    It was her way of approaching it.
    And her way of doing that.
    She took the initiative that resulted in our rescue.
    These uncles were very generous.
    And immediately came to our help.
    So this is, again, my mother.
    When they were bombed out in London,
    they were taken in by friends whom
    I mentioned in an earlier session, a young British fellow
    and his wife.
    They took my parents into their house.
    Well, my parents had no funds at all.
    So it was she, again, who kept house
    for these people, who were very happy to have such a good cook.
    And she maintained the standards.
    She was very popular.
    She got along.
    I had a very good relationship with my father.
    He was the one who played the chief of the family.
    But she was the boss, without any doubt.
    And he was very, very respectful of her and affectionate.
    So was she, very affectionate.
    They sometimes disagreed about things.
    But I never heard them quarrel in all my life.
    I never heard a harsh word.
    She was angry with him sometimes,
    but it never went beyond that.
    This attitude, this home atmosphere was, of course,
    of fundamental importance to my own development.
    It shaped my views.
    She was very much liked.
    She had an open house, often dinner parties, large dinner
    parties.
    She was liked in England.
    She was popular when she came to California.
    I was the beneficiary of all her warmth and affection and love.
    And if today, let me dramatically say, the end
    of my life, I have to say something
    about what is important in life.
    I can only say a cliche, because cliches have become cliches
    because they are so true.
    This is why everybody uses them.
    So the ultimate word I can say, what is important in life,
    it's love.
    If I am remembered by that, and my children,
    by my lovely grandchild, that is all I can expect.
    Nothing survives.
    Some of the printed books will kick around for a few years.
    But if I am remembered as a loving person,
    I will feel that that was what mattered.
    And let's end it here.

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Max Knight
    Date
    interview:  1990 November 15
    interview:  1991 February 28
    interview:  1991 April 17
    interview:  1991 July 24
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    5 videocassettes (SVHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Knight, Max--Interviews.

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project conducted the interview with Max Knight on November 15, 1990, February 28, 1991, April 17, 1991, and July 24, 1991. The interview was received by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Branch in June 2004.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:46:47
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn515718

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    Oral history interview with Julius Drabkin

    Oral History

    Julius Drabkin, born in 1918 in Maritopa, Latvia, describes his parents, Mikhail and Sarah Daviolovna; life before the war when he lived in Riga, Latvia; being a soldier in the Latvian Army until the German invasion in July 1941; living in the ghetto for most of the war; getting married to his first wife, Amalia, in 1941; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943; being sent to Kaiserwald camp; being liberated on March 10, 1945 at Stutthof; returning to Riga after the war because he was distressed, even though he had the opportunity to emigrate; the perishing of all of his family during the Holocaust, except for one of his aunts; getting remarried shortly after the war (his wife also lost all her family); having two sons and living in Riga until he immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s; emigrating because his older son found it impossible to pursue his career because he was Jewish; and visiting Riga for the World Conference of Holocaust Survivors.

    Oral history interview with Renee L. Duering

    Oral history interview with Renee L. Duering

    Oral History

    Renee Duering, born January 7, 1921 in Cologne, Germany, describes her childhood in Cologne; moving to Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1933; her experiences in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation; getting married in 1941; the time she and her husband spent in hiding; her family's deportation to Westerbork in July 1943; her experiences in Westerbork; her parents’ deportation to Bergen-Belsen; her and her husband's deportation to Auschwitz; how her husband perished in Auschwitz; being a subject of medical experiments, including those involving sterilization; her deportation to three other camps; her experiences on a death march to Ravensbrück in January 1945; her escape during the march; hiding near Dresden, Germany until liberation by the Soviets; living with her sister after the war; moving to Israel; immigrating to the United States; her second marriage; and her joy at becoming pregnant despite the experiments she endured.

    Oral history interview with Werner Epstein

    Oral history interview with Werner Epstein

    Oral History

    Werner Epstein discusses his childhood in Berlin, Germany; the anti-Jewish regulations he and his family encountered when the Nazis rose to power; his decision to leave Germany after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; fleeing by bicycle to Belgium, where he prospered until the war began in September 1939; being arrested as an enemy alien; his experiences in a series of detention camps in southern France; his arrest, imprisonment, and deportation to Auschwitz; arriving at Auschwitz; volunteering to work in a coal mine in Silesia, where he remained until December 1944; being ill with malaria, which he contracted while in French detention camps; the death march he endured after the camp’s evacuation in advance of the Soviet Army’s approach; being liberated by Russian Mongol soldiers; journeying to a transit camp in Magdeburg, Germany; reuniting with his fiancee; returning with her to Paris, France, where they settled and he became a chef; and immigrating to California in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

    Lya Galperin discusses her childhood in a small town near Kishinev, Romania (Chisinau, Moldova); her family's flight after the invasion of Nazi Germany; a traumatic incident in which Romanian soldiers sexually assaulted the women in their group, after which the family returned to their home town; her family’s imprisonment in the local synagogue; her experiences in the ghetto of Beshard, Ukraine from 1943 until her liberation in 1945; her postwar life in the Soviet Union; her marriage; her life in Riga, Latvia; her mother's attempts at helping the family immigrate to the west; and her eventual immigration to San Francisco, California in 1981.

    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

    Oral History

    Lore Gilbert, born in Worms, Germany in 1929, describes her childhood in Worms; the antisemitism she experienced as a child; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938 and its impact on her family when her father's assets were confiscated; the family's move to Heidelberg, Germany and their deportation to France; their experiences in Gurs concentration camp; the family's selection by the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA) to be sent to the Dominican Republic; the Jewish refugee community in Sosua, Dominican Republic; the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina; the security and safety Jewish refugees enjoyed in the Dominican Republic during the war years; her family's immigration to the United States; her father's difficulties in adjusting to their new life; the experiences of her grandparents, who remained in France during the war years and were sheltered by the French Catholic Church; and the trauma and fear she has felt over the years as a result of her Holocaust-related experiences.

    Oral history interview with Rita Goldman

    Oral history interview with Rita Goldman

    Oral History

    Rita Goldman discusses her childhood in Berlin, Germany; her parents' painful decision to send her on a Kindertransport; leaving Germany for England in 1939; the kindness of the family with whom she stayed; the events of the war years; corresponding with her parents, who had fled to Shanghai, China; her reunion with her parents after the war; and the difficulties she experienced in adjusting to life with them.

    Oral history interview with Mala Holcberg

    Oral history interview with Mala Holcberg

    Oral History

    Mala Holcberg describes her childhood in Poland; her early memories of the Nazi occupation of Poland and crimes committed against Jews and her family's desire to flee Poland; the confiscation of her family's possessions and the family's deportation to an unidentified ghetto; her experiences in the ghetto; the murder of her father; being deported to an unidentified concentration camp, where the inmates were forced to make bombs and grenades; the terrible conditions in the camp and her illnesses; the camp's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Poland; her marriage and family; her present ill health and the lasting emotional effects of her experiences during the Holocaust; and the loss of many family members.

    Oral history interview with Kate Kaiser

    Oral history interview with Kate Kaiser

    Oral History

    Kate Kaiser describes her childhood in Mistek, Austria (now Czech Republic); her marriage and move to Hamburg, Germany; the rise of antisemitism after the Nazi's rise to power; how she and her husband were affected by the Nuremberg Laws; their decision to leave Germany after their daughter was born; the wait to obtain papers; her husband's move to the United States in advance of them; waiting with her daughter in Mistek until August 1938 when their visas arrived; her adjustment to life as an immigrant in the United States; her attempts to find her family after the war; learning of the death of her family, all of whom perished except for one brother and a cousin; and her trip to Prague, Czech Republic in 1998 to discover the details of her mother's fate.

    Oral history interview with Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner

    Oral history interview with Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner

    Oral History

    Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner describes her childhood in Odessa, Ukraine; her family life and her marriage at age 19; the outbreak of World War II being ejected from her home by her neighbors and being imprisoned with her family in Odessa; the ensuing chaotic events; being separated from two of her brothers; being placed on trains to a small village, where she endured terrible conditions with her younger brother, daughter, and mother; the threat of mass murder; escaping with her mother and daughter; being transported to a series of villages; attempted sexual assault at the hands of a Rumanian officer; being separated from her mother; successfully passing as a non-Jew and working as a cook at a police station until the end of the war; reuniting with her mother and husband; and immigrating to the United States with her family in 1978.

    Oral history interview with Vera J. Lieban-Kalmar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nadine Lieberman

    Oral history interview with Nadine Lieberman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral History

    Bernard Offen discusses his childhood in Krakow, Poland; his early experiences with antisemitism; the events he witnessed during the German invasion of Poland in 1939; his experiences in the Krakow Ghetto starting in 1941, including the deportations of many family members and hiding from raids; being deported to Płaszów in 1943; his narrow escape from Płaszów; hiding in a nearby camp with a family member; his deportation to Mauthausen; his subsequent deportation to Auschwitz in August 1944; his experiences in Auschwitz; his transfer in October 1944 to a subcamp of Dachau near Landsberg; his experiences in the subcamp; being on a death march in May 1945; being liberated by the United States Army; his search for other surviving family members; the fates of the rest of his family; immigrating to the United Kingdom after the war; his subsequent immigration to the United States; enlisting in the United States Army to serve in the Korean War; his life after the war; returning to Poland to conduct tours of Holocaust-related sites; the time he spends speaking about his personal experiences.

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral History

    William Pels, born on May 11, 1924 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses his prewar experiences in Amsterdam; his memories of the German invasion of Holland in 1940; the changes that he witnessed during the occupation; witnessing the arrest and deportation of Jews; the German raids on homes to find hidden Jews; his own close call with deportation; moving to Vienna, Austria in 1942 to work in a hotel; his experiences with wartime Vienna; the bombing campaign by the Soviets in March 1945; travelling into Hungary, where he remained until May 1945; his postwar activities; working for the United States Army; working in a former concentration camp; returning to Holland; marrying his wife in Great Britain; immigrating to the United States in 1957; and his life in America.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral History

    Ruth Plainfield (née Oppenheimer), born on January 27, 1925 in Gau Bickelheim, Germany, discusses her childhood in Mainz, Germany; the rise of the Nazi party to power; her father's arrest in 1935 and the effect that had on her; her childhood encounters with antisemitism; her family's immigration to the United States; living first in New York and then San Francisco, CA; her family's experiences in California; her education; and learning of the fate of family members, including a grandfather who died in Theresienstadt.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral History

    Thomas Schneider discusses his childhood in Vienna, Austria; being raised as a Catholic child of a Jewish father and a Jewish mother who had converted to Catholicism; being forced to leave school and study at a Jewish school in 1938 after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany; his family's immigration in March 1939 to the United States; settling in New York, NY; his experiences in school, college, and law school; his legal career; and the conflicts he has felt throughout his life about his Jewish identity.

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Shlyapochnik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

    Benjamin Sieradzki, born on February 4, 1927 in Zgierz, Poland, discusses his childhood in Zgierz; his awareness in 1938 about Hitler and the discrimination experienced by German Jews; his memories of the mobilization of the Polish Army, and the invasion of Poland by Nazi forces in September 1939; hiding from the bombing; his brothers' escape to the Soviet section of Poland; his family's move to the Łódź ghetto; the harsh conditions in the ghetto; the first deportations in 1941; Chaim Rumkowski's leadership in the ghetto; a visit by Heinrich Himmler in 1942; the deportation in September 1942 of the ill, elderly, and children, during which his parents were sent to Chelmno and killed in gas vans; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944; his transport, with one sister, to Auschwitz; watching the selections and seeing his sister being taken to the gas chambers; his experiences in Birkenau, then in a concentration camp in Hannover where he worked for the Continental Rubber factory; being forced to work in a quarry, where he became emaciated, sick with dysentery, and indifferent to his fate; the abandonment of the camp by German troops; being liberated; the state of his health and his experiences in military hospitals and then in convalescent homes in Sweden; experiencing anti-Jewish sentiment in Sweden; being smuggled to Denmark to stay with his uncle; his reunion with his older brothers, who had survived the war; the difficulties of his living situation; his immigration to the United States in 1953; and his marriage and family life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral History

    Erika Weingarten (née Mosler), born on October 9, 1918 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Berlin; her assimilated family life; her education; the few instances of antisemitism she experienced; her family's decision to send her out of Germany to attend school in Switzerland and her experiences there; her journey in August 1939 to Great Britain, where she reunited with her parents; their immigration to the United States in March 1940; the work she performed; her continued education; passing as Swiss when she tried to get work; her trips to Europe in later years and the closure she experienced; and her thoughts about the German people.

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral History

    Max Weingarten, born in April 1913 in Lechnau, Poland, discusses his childhood in Vienna, Austria; his education and religious upbringing; studying the law; his work in the film industry with his uncle in London beginning in 1936; his immigration to the United States in 1938 and the work he performed in the film industry; his experiences in the United States Army and his work in intelligence and international law; his life after the war; his marriage and children; his work as a lawyer; his feelings about the United States; and the fates of his other family members.

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral History

    Liza Avrutin, born in 1930 in Odessa, Ukraine, describes her big family, which consisted of nine brothers and sisters; how even though her family was not very religious, Liza remembers various religious traditions such as all of the kids saying a Shabbat wish in front of the candles; her mother’s reluctance to leave before the Nazi occupation; her uncle’s evacuation to Tashkent where he and his family survived the Holocaust; the Nazi occupation in October 1941 and the summoning of Jewish residents on December 22; being taken with other Jewish residents to Slobodka (a section of Odessa) where they spent three months; a pogrom in Odessa on October 23-24, 1941 in which much of the remaining Jewish population was murdered; being sent with her family on cattle trains to Vaselinivska; the train journey, during which many passengers died including her father and her four-year-old brother, Boris; her mother’s psychological reaction to their deaths and her eventual death; being taken to Vasnisenska (Voznesensk, Ukraine), where they were sorted and sent to different places; being sent to Babini Balki in Krivoruchka, Ukraine; the lack of food and the death of many of the imprisoned people from starvation; the arrival of the Russians, who murdered all the civilians; being one of two survivors (Rosa Lifchitza also survived) who were rescued by the nearby villagers; waking up in Nadia Zhigalovna’s house with a bullet wound on the top of her head; hiding her Jewish identity by saying her name was “Lida” not “Liza”; changing her name to Valentina Ivanovna Panchivka; her life in the village and the sacrifices her new mother made for her; living with Nadia and her family until 1947; staying in close contact with the family that rescued her; getting married and immigrated to the United States; and changing her name back to Liza when she became a US citizen.

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral History

    Aleksandr Belfor, born September 18, 1923, describes his childhood in Kishinev, Ukraine (now Chisinău Moldova); the onset of the war and his family's escape from the approaching Nazi forces to Alma-Ata, Khazakstan, where Mr.Belfor lived and studied medicine until he was inducted into the Soviet Army; the stories he heard about the tragic fate of many family members during the Holocaust, including the sexual assault of one aunt; being arrested and imprisoned after the end of the war; his life in the Soviet Union and the antisemitism he encountered there; and his immigration to the United States in 1983.

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral History

    Semyon Berenshteyn discusses his childhood in Moldova; the family's move from Balta to Odesa after the beginning of the war in 1941; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto in Balta; working for a Christian friend; passing as a non-Jew by wearing a crucifix; learning of war news from Christian neighbors; the forced labor imposed on Jews; the murders of Jewish men, women and children by German soldiers, including the death of his father; liberation by Soviet troops in March 1944; his service in the Soviet armed forces; his marriage and the birth of his son; and his immigration with his family to the United States in 1988.

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    George Denes, born on September 9, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his family and early life; the fates of different family members; growing up Jewish but not Orthodox; the beginning of the war at which point his father was sent to the front to perform forced military labor and his return before the German occupation began; antisemitism before and during the war; Polish refugees arriving in 1939 and 1940; the belief amongst Hungarian Jews that the Nazi policies would not affect them; the German occupation and his father relocating the immediate family to another part of the city; his mother working as a nurse for a wealthy family while he and his brother stayed in a "private day care" for Jewish children; being discovered and escaping; his father acquiring false papers for the family (new surname was Faketta); staying with an older Christian woman until her son, a Nazi sympathizer, had the boys and their father arrested and taken to a local Nazi headquarters; being imprisoned in the basement of the building with other Jews and some other people arrested by the Nazis; being taken on December 29, 1944 with his family to the river to be shot by the Nazis and being saved when the German army prevented the Hungarian Nazis from shooting in this area; escaping the prison a few days later; reuniting with his mother and going with his family to the eastern side of the river; hiding for several weeks in the basement of a villa; having difficulties acquiring food and being near starvation by the time the Red Army liberated the city; being given food, baths, and clean clothes by the Russians; attending a Jewish high school after the war; being refused by the university because he attended a religious high school; befriending the head of the university's engineering department and being accepted the following year (1956) [note that the first interview includes family photographs]; the revolutionary period following 1956 as well as his life as a university student in mechanical engineering; everyday life in post-war Communist Hungary, including some analysis of the political and social climate of that period; his life after the revolution, including his marriage, the birth of his son, and his military career; his family's two attempts to defect, once without help, and once with help (the second one was successful); the time they spent in Vienna, Austria while their refugee status was established; the help given to them by HIAS; the medical care given to Robert, who had contracted typhus during their escape; his life in the United States, including his career as an electrical engineer working in semiconductors and his divorce; and his state of mind at various points in his life.

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral History

    Lev Dumer, born in 1919 in Odessa, Ukraine, describes the Jewish community in Odessa before the war; experiencing antisemitism before the war; the deaths of his maternal grandparents in pogroms; receiving a degree in radio engineering; working in Kirovograd (Kropyvnyts'kyi, Ukraine) when the war began; the German occupation of Kiev; the Jewish response to the invasion; his family’s evacuation to Chelyabinsk in August 1941; his grandmother, Pena Gershova Dumer, dying while evacuating later in 1943; the Romanians entering Odessa; Jews having to register; the denouncement of Jewish families by antisemitic neighbors living in the same building as his family; the hanging of his college mathematics and physics professor, Foodim, for failing to register; the roundups and mass murders in Odessa; Alexander Sepino, who was able to escape imprisonment; observing a minute of silence every day for five years as a prayer for those who perished; the deportation of the remaining Jews to a ghetto in Slobodka; various righteous people who risked their lives to save Jews, including Oleg Krist and Jora Temoshenko; the experience of his aunt, uncle, and two cousins in Pervopol; the difficulty of living during the Stalin regime; the growing antisemitic trend in Russia during the years following WWII; the Russian government hiding the evidence of the Holocaust from the people; and spending many years gathering information from survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust in Ukraine in order to preserve the memory for future generations.

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral History

    Anisim Dworkin, born in 1923 in Smirenskiy, Soviet Union (possibly one of the many Russian places named Smirnovskiy), describes how at the time Jews were required to live in a few designated towns in the Soviet Union; his great-grandfather, who served in the Tsar’s army as a cannon operator for 12 years and was thus given the right to live in a Russian town even though he was Jewish; the regret he feels for having spent his childhood in a Russian town because it stripped him of the rich Jewish culture he saw in his parents, including celebration of Jewish holidays and speaking Yiddish; not experiencing antisemitism as a child but being teased as a child for being part of the lower middle-class; moving with his family to a kolkhoz in Smolensk in 1928; having a good life on the farm until the famine in 1933; several of his aunts and uncles who moved to Brest, Belarus with their families; the arrest of his older brother for writing a letter expressing anti-Hitler sympathies in 1939; the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941; being sent to the east since he was not able to serve in the army because of an injury to the eye; being accepted to serve in the Allied army for four months; studying after the war at a university in Ural (possibly Ural Federal University); working in the oil industry in Ural after the war and being discriminated against because of his religion; being fired from a job as head of the research department at a university because of rumors that he was involved in the Zionist movement; his life now in Perim, North Ural (probably Perm’, Russia); his daughter who is married to a non-Jew; and reuniting with his older brother in 1987.

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral History

    Ernest Feld discusses his childhood in Lucenec, Slovakia, close to the Hungarian border; the occupation of his town by Hungary in 1938; the onset of anti-Jewish restrictions and curfews; his removal to a ghetto; being conscripted for forced labor in 1944; being able to continue his apprenticeship in a bakery; the advance of the Soviet Army and the ensuing confusion; his return to Lucenec in November 1945; his reunion with his mother; their move to Prague, and then Karlsbad; their decision to immigrate to Israel; the boat trip to Israel; the detention of the group in Cyprus by the British; his life in Cyprus until 1949; emigrating from Cyprus to Israel with his wife, whom he met in Cyprus; his successful bakeries in Israel; his later move to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

    Lya Galperin discusses her childhood in a small town near Kishinev, Romania; her family's flight after the German invasion; the gang rape of women by Romanian soldiers; her family’s imprisonment in the local synagogue; her experiences in the ghetto of Beshard, in the Ukraine, from 1943 until her liberation in 1945; her postwar life in the Soviet Union; her marriage and life in Riga; her mother's attempts at helping the family immigrate to the west; and her eventual immigration to San Francisco in 1981.

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral History

    Inna Kagan, born in 1937 in Kharkov (Kharkiv), Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Kharkov; being a descendant from Khazars; the evacuation of her family in September 1941 to Khazakstan; her father's later evacuation to Perm, Russia; her family's move to Bukhoro, Uzbekistan; and the family's reunion in Kharkov in December 1944. She dicsusses the destruction of the city and learning of the death of her paternal grandparents at the hands of the Nazis. Ms. Kagan describes the increase in antisemitism that she experienced after the war, and emigrating with her family to the United States in 1989.

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral History

    Vilem Kriz discusses his experiences in the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) in the late 1930s and under Nazi occupation; his observations, as a journalist, of the unfolding events of Nazi aggression; an encounter with Reinhard Heydrich in 1936; the mobilization of a small national army in 1937; the betrayal of Czechoslovakia by its allies in 1938; the grief of the Czech people after Nazi troops occupied Prague in March 1939; demonstrations against the Nazis by university students and reprisals that came after; his experiences as part of the Czech underground; and conditions in Czechoslovakia during its occupation and after the war ended.

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral History

    Mikhail Lapan, born on March 9, 1920 in Bobruisk, Belarus, discusses his childhood in Bobruisk; his enlistment in 1941 at the age of 16 in the Soviet Army; the German attack on Bobruisk; his hospitalization in 1942 in Stalingrad (Volgograd); the invasion of Stalingrad by the Germans; an incident in which the German troops removed the hospital patients and selected Jews and Communists for execution, and that by using the name of a fellow patient who had died earlier that day, he was able to escape that fate; being forced to work in a salt mine in Peine, Germany; having his Jewish identity betrayed; his escape, recapture, and removal to Braunschweig concentration camp; being liberated by US troops; being returned to the Soviet Union; his work in a coal mine in Harlov; his marriage; his return to Bobruisk, where he discovered that he parents had died during the war; and his eventual immigration to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral History

    Shaya Neys, born on June 28, 1927 in Liepaja, Latvia, discusses his childhood in Liepaja; the arrest of his family in June 1941 by the Russian security agency NKVD, and the family's transport to a military port, where the men were separated from the women and children; traveling by train with his mother to Krasnoyarsk, Russia; their experiences of forced labor and misery in various locations in Siberia until the end of the war; difficulties in returning to Latvia after the war ended and his return in 1956; his reunion with his son and their lives in Riga, Latvia; learning that his father died in a labor camp, and that many of his relatives from Liepaja perished; and his reflections that their deportation to Siberia probably saved his and his mother's lives.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

    The interview describes Mr. Sieradzki's childhood in Zgierz, Poland; his awareness in 1938 about Hitler and the discrimination experienced by German Jews; his memories of the mobilization of the Polish Army, and the invasion of Poland by Nazi forces in September 1938. Mr. Sieradzki describes hiding from the bombing; his brothers' escape to the Soviet sector of Poland; and his family's move to the Łódź ghetto. Mr. Sieradzki recalls the harsh conditions there; the first transports in 1941; Chaim Rumkowski's leadership in the ghetto; a visit by Heinrich Himmler in 1942; and the deportation in September 1942 of the ill, elderly and children, during which his parents were sent to Chelmno and killed in gas vans. He describes the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944; his transport, with one sister, to Auschwitz; watching Dr. Mengele make selections and seeing his sister being taken to the gas chambers. Mr. Sieradzki describes his experiences in Birkenau, then in a concentration camp in Hannover where he worked for the Continental Rubber factory, and then in a quarry, where he became emaciated, sick with dysentary, and indifferent to his fate. He recalls the abandonment of the camp by German troops, his liberation, the dreadful state of his health and his experiences in military hospitals and then in convalescent homes in Sweden. Mr. Sieradzki describes anti-Jewish sentiment in Sweden, being smuggled to Denmark to stay with his uncle, and his reunion with his older brothers, who had survived the war. He discusses the difficulties of his living situation, and describes his immigration to the United States in 1953, and his marriage and family life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral History

    Rahilia Sirota (née Aizenman), born in 1913, discusses her childhood in Chemirovits (now Chemerivtsi), Ukraine; the Nazi occupation of her town in the summer of 1941; her move to a nearby village; learning that the Jewish community of Chemirovits had been taken to the Kamentsk Podolsky ghetto, where 80 of her relatives were killed days after their arrival (this included her parents and younger brother); living in fear in the village she had moved to, and being rescued by two brothers, Nikolay and Pavlo Kuchman [PH], who hid her and then her boyfriend throughout the remaining years of the war; living in holes in the corn fields and caves; moving from village to village; living in barns and hiding from the Ukrainian SS; the assistance she received from the Kuchman brothers and other Ukrainians; learning of the liberation of the Chemirovits in March 1945; her reunion with her boyfriend; finding that everything they had was gone; getting married; the birth of her son; her life in post-war Ukraine until her immigration to the United States; and her enduring gratitude to those who hid and save her during the war years.

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral History

    Tom Szelenyi discusses his childhood in Budapest, Hungary; his assimilated family life; his education; his religious upbringing; the antisemitism he experienced while growing up and the increase of antisemitism after the war began in 1939; his family's deportation to the ghetto in Budapest; the anti-Jewish laws; being deported to a Hungarian military labor camp in 1944 and the changes he experienced after the Germans occupied Hungary; his experiences on a forced march in October 1944 from Budapest to Wiener Neustadt, Austria; his journey to Buchenwald by train; the conditions there; the cruelty of the guards; his transfer to Colditz a month later; the work he performed; his experiences on a death march in April 1945 to Terezin (Theresienstadt); his liberation there by the Soviet Army and the conditions after; his return to Budapest; his reunion with his mother; his work with the American Joint Distribution Committee; his experiences in the DP (displaced persons) camp in Ulm, Germany; his immigration to the United States in 1948; his life in the US; his family; and his work.

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral History

    Tamara Iosifovna Albukh, born on December 21, 1918 in Minsk, Belarus, describes her childhood; having to leave school after six years to work and contribute to her family financially; getting married and having two daughters (Sara born on May 5, 1940 and Gena born on August 31, 1942); not being able to evacuate once the war started; the German occupation of Minsk; her husband being taken into the army; moving into one of the Jewish ghettos in Minsk; pogroms in the ghettos; doing forced labor in the ghetto and the murder of her daughters one day while she was working; being moved to Trostinetskiy (Maly Trostinec) concentration camp and having to work for the Germans; the murder of inmates every day in the camp and ghetto; escaping the camp on July 29, 1944; the intensification of antisemitism during the war; hearing Russians scream the slogan “Kill Jews, save Russia” which continued even after the war; and having two daughters after the war in 1946 and 1949.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    George Denes, born on September 9, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his family and early life; the fates of different family members; growing up Jewish but not Orthodox; the beginning of the war at which point his father was sent to the front to perform forced military labor and his return before the German occupation began; antisemitism before and during the war; Polish refugees arriving in 1939 and 1940; the belief amongst Hungarian Jews that the Nazi policies would not affect them; the German occupation and his father relocating the immediate family to another part of the city; his mother working as a nurse for a wealthy family while he and his brother stayed in a "private day care" for Jewish children; being discovered and escaping; his father acquiring false papers for the family (new surname was Faketta); staying with an older Christian woman until her son, a Nazi sympathizer, had the boys and their father arrested and taken to a local Nazi headquarters; being imprisoned in the basement of the building with other Jews and some other people arrested by the Nazis; being taken on December 29, 1944 with his family to the river to be shot by the Nazis and being saved when the German army prevented the Hungarian Nazis from shooting in this area; escaping the prison a few days later; reuniting with his mother and going with his family to the eastern side of the river; hiding for several weeks in the basement of a villa; having difficulties acquiring food and being near starvation by the time the Red Army liberated the city; being given food, baths, and clean clothes by the Russians; attending a Jewish high school after the war; being refused by the university because he attended a religious high school; befriending the head of the university's engineering department and being accepted the following year (1956) [note that the first interview includes family photographs]; the revolutionary period following 1956 as well as his life as a university student in mechanical engineering; everyday life in post-war Communist Hungary, including some analysis of the political and social climate of that period; his life after the revolution, including his marriage, the birth of his son, and his military career; his family's two attempts to defect, once without help, and once with help (the second one was successful); the time they spent in Vienna, Austria while their refugee status was established; the help given to them by HIAS; the medical care given to Robert, who had contracted typhus during their escape; his life in the United States, including his career as an electrical engineer working in semiconductors and his divorce; and his state of mind at various points in his life.

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral History

    Audrey Doughty, born in San Diego, California in 1921, describes her mother, who died when Audrey was three years old; her father, who was a naval officer and a member of the diplomatic core; going with her father to Berlin when he was stationed there in 1938; transferring from Stanford University to the University of Berlin; being in Berlin during Kristallnacht and taking photos afterward; writing a journal entry describing that night; having little notion of what was really happening in Germany apart from Kristallnacht as well as the antisemitic and anti-American sentiment from the Germans; how soon after arriving in Berlin, she and her father were invited to review the troops with Nazi officials; sitting in the stands three feet from Adolf Hitler, watching endless waves of troops pass underneath; going with her grandmother on a tour of Germany and neighboring countries in 1939; working at the American consulate after she turned 18; her duties, which consisted of convincing refugees applying for visas to leave the country; being evacuated to Copenhagen in 1940; returning to the US after the war ended; graduating from Stanford University; working as a war correspondent in Honolulu and then went to work for the San Francisco Chronicle; working in the Office of War Information and then working as an Associated Press correspondent in China; leaving journalism and pursuing a career as a social worker; becoming the director of the International Institute in San Francisco from 1975 to 1983; spending two and a half years as the director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation; founding and directing the AIDS Benefits Counselors; directing AIDS Indigent Direct Services; her plans to write a book about her family's history; writing many editorials on possible fascist trends in American society; and her thoughts on Germans [note that artifacts relating to her experiences are shown at the close of the interview].

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

    Sara Gelender (née Buzyn), born circa 1927 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses her childhood in Warsaw; her memories of the bombing and burning of Warsaw in September 1939; her family's escape to a farm near the Russian border; hiding there for several months; being part of a group of Jewish refugees sent to Siberia in June 1940; the primitive conditions in the labor camp; the work she performed in the camp; getting married in the camp; leaving the camp with her husband for a small town; her continual state of hunger during those years; moving with her husband to Ukraine in 1944; returning to Poland in 1946; the antisemitism they encountered in Poland; escaping to Czechoslovakia, Vienna, and then to a displaced persons camp in Germany; moving to Paris, France, where they lived until 1951; their immigration first to Canada, and then to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral History

    Sofia Ginzbursky (born on December 27, 1915 in Asipavichy, Belarus) describes her mother, who died at the age of 27, soon after she gave birth; going with her siblings to live with their grandfather, who observed Jewish traditions; studying at a technical school in Gomel (Homel), Belarus; living in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), working as a nanny and secretary; getting married and moving to Gomel; moving later to Belostock (Białystok), Poland; being left alone with their two children when her husband was called up for military duty at the beginning of WWII; evacuating from Belostock by train to Zlobin (ZHlobin, Belarus) and then to Baranovichi, Ukraine; destroying all her documents to hide her Jewish identity; witnessing the persecution of Jews in Ukraine when locals helped the Nazis find Jews; how speaking German helped her find a job at a food exchange center where she received food to feed her children; obtaining false papers with a new last name that showed she was Russian and not Jewish; returning to Gomel to look for remaining family members and being captured by the Nazis and was humiliated by Politsai for several days; being released and living with a woman named Nadia Lisitskaya; passing as a gentile refugee from Poland; washing clothes for the German army in exchange for soap and kerosene; seeing the deportation of hundreds of Jews from the Gomel ghetto; traveling with her friend, Sonia, as well as all their children to Oryol (Orel), Russia; finding a new place of stay every night so no one would suspect them of being Jewish; living with Sonia and the children at the house of a Latvian lady for two years; choosing to not wear the Star of David as was requried for the Jews by the Nazis; passing as Russian Orthodox; having a Russian lady teach her son how to pray to an icon when bombings occured; working small jobs while in Oryol; being liberated and moving to Leningrad; getting a new passport and stating her nationality as “Jewish” again; reuniting with her husband in Chkalov (possibly Orenburg, Russia) with the help of her sister; experiencing even more antisemitism after the war; and becoming more observant after the war.

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral History

    Annemarie Roeper (née Bondy), born August 27, 1918 in Vienna, Austria, describes her childhood in Vienna; her parents' progressive boarding school; her memories of the Nazi ascension to power; her mother's move to Switzerland in 1936 with Annemarie’s siblings; remaining behind to graduate; her father selling their school; the family's reunion in Switzerland; her psychoanalysis studies in Vienna with Anna Freund; her husband-to-be's warning to flee; immigrating with her family to the United States in 1939; moving to Vermont, where they opened a school; her marriage and move to Michigan with her husband; and opening a progressive school for gifted children there called Roeper School.

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

    Ilse Sternberger (née Naumann), born in 1914, discusses her childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); her assimilated family life; her education; her marriage and her decision to move to Belgium with her husband in 1933; her life in Belgium; her husband's success as a photographer; their decision to move to London, England in 1936; returning to Germany in 1939 in an attempt to help Jewish children leave the country, and being stymied by the bureaucracy; immigrating to the United States with her husband and children in July 1940; her life in the US; her work as a teacher and writer; and her curation of books and exhibits of her husband's work.

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral History

    Clara Tsukerman discusses her childhood in Chisneau, Romania (now Chișinău, Moldova) and her experiences after the war began in her region in 1941; her experiences during her family's journey on foot to Vasylivka, Ukraine; their efforts to evade the advancing German front; and their life in hiding in an unnamed village after the Germans caught up with them; the help and protection they received from the villagers, as well as her experiences during and after the war.

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral History

    Sam Weiss, born in 1928 in Ricka, Czechoslovakia (now in Ukraine), discusses his childhood in Ricka, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); the occupation of the town by Hungarian soldiers; the conscription of Jewish men for forced labor; his father being sent to Germany for forced labor; the institution of anti-Jewish restrictions such as yellow stars and in March 1944, the deportation of the Jews of Ricka; his arrival at Auschwitz; being separated from his family and sent first a children's barracks; being sent to Camp Four in Munich, Germany; being sent to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau, where he was liberated by American troops in 1945; his return to Ricka, where he was reunited with his sister; his attempts to escape Czechoslovakia; his imprisonment by Russian soldiers; his escape to Munich; his immigration to the United States; his service in the United States military; and his family life and career in California.

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Laszlo Vass

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral History

    Isaac Silber, born in 1913 in Złoczów Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), discusses his childhood in Złoczów; the occupation of Złoczów by German troops; the violent and terrifying conditions of the Nazi occupation; his escape from murder by German troops; being conscripted for forced labor in a brick factory; returning to Złoczów to learn of the murder of family members; his experiences in the Złoczów ghetto and in work camps; giving up his baby daughter to be cared for by a non-Jewish family; escaping with his wife and finding refuge in the farmhouse of a Polish man who hid them; and the gratitude he feels to his rescuer.

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Roeper

    Oral History

    Anne Marie Roeper describes her childhood in Vienna, Austria; her parents' progressive boarding school; her memories of the Nazi acsencion to power; her mother's move to Switzerland in 1936 with her siblings; remaining behind to graduate; her father's selling of their school; the family's reunion in Switzerland; her psychoanalysis studies in Vienna with Anna Freund; her husband-to-be's warning to flee; immigrating with her family to the United States in 1939; moving to Vermont, where they opened a school; her marriage and move to Michigan with her husband; and opening a progressive school for gifted children there called Roeper School.

    Oral history interview with Janina Swift

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

    Paul Nebenzahl, born August 9, 1921, discusses his childhood in Long Island, New York; his career in advertising; enlisting in the United States Army in 1942; his experiences as a sergeant in the Signal Corps; being part of a secret OSS operational group; working with the French underground movement in southwestern France to hinder the German retreat in 1944; his military service in India and China for the remainder of the war; his life after the war; marrying; having children; and his leisure activities.

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral History

    Janice Auerbach, born August 7, 1934 in South London, England, describes her childhood in London; the bombings and fear she felt during World War II; her evacuation to a farm in Cornwall; the discomfort she experienced while there; her reunion with her family after the war; her various employments around the world; and her marriage to a Jewish man in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral History

    Helmut Kobler, born on January 18, 1928 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna and Pohorelice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); his experiences growing up with his Jewish father and Catholic mother; his experiences after the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938; his mother's decision to move herself and her son to Brno, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); the conditions they lived under; the Nazis' search for his father; being deported to a camp near Ivancice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in 1939; the camp’s transformation from a concentration camp to a forced labor camp; working as a coal miner at the camp; the camp’s liquidation in June 1942; being transferred to another labor camp near Oslavany, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); the work he continued as a coal miner; the conditions at the camp; the brutality of the Czech and German guards; being transferred in the summer of 1944 to a labor camp near Postoloprty, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); working to construct an underground fuel pipeline; an accusation against him of sabotage; his subsequent imprisonment in Saaz, Czechoslovakia and Karlsbad, Germany (now Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic); the brutality of the guards; the poor conditions there; his escape from Karlsbad while out on a labor detail; being recaptured in Brno; the executions he witnessed while imprisoned there; being transferred by cattle car to a prison in Mirosov; escaping from Mirosov in May 1945, a few days before liberation by the United States Army; the aid he received from refugee organizations after the war; reuniting with his mother; being educated as a mining engineer; defecting to the west with a sample of uranium ore; moving to Canada; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral History

    Anne Marie Yellin (née Feller), born on December 6, 1928 in Chemnitz, Germany, discusses her childhood in Chemnitz; her family life; the changes she experienced after Kristallnacht in November 1938; her father's arrest and release; her parents' decision to leave Germany; her journey with her parents to Belgium in September 1939; her experiences after the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 and her father's decision to hide her in a convent; her experiences in the convent; moving between institutions to avoid capture by the Nazis; her conversion to Catholicism; her reunion with her parents after liberation in September 1944; their immigration to the United States at a later point; her life in the US; and the emotional aftermath of her wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral History

    Adele Silber discusses her childhood in Warsaw, Poland; her education in a Catholic school; her family's religious practices; her experiences during the German invasion in 1939; hiding her young daughter with a Catholic family; living in hiding on a farm with a group of partisans; her experiences while in hiding, including the lack of food and the necessity of living in the woods near the end of the war; her reunion with her daughter; her decision to immigrate to the United States with her husband and daughter in 1946; and their life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral History

    Sylvie Marshall (née Bedel), born on July 1, 1923 in Paris, France, discusses her childhood; her older brother Michel Bedel (born 1918) and her younger brother Alain Bedel (born 1926); her father, who was the president of the largest moving and storage company in France before the war; her adolescence in Paris; being raised Catholic; the participation of her father and brother Michel in the French Resistance; her life with her mother in south central France; the liberation of Paris; the story of her father and brother's arrests by the Gestapo and her father's subsequent death in Buchenwald.

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral History

    Elena H. Javor (née Gross), born December 15, 1914 in Martin, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), describes her childhood in Martin; her siblings; her medical education and practice; the birth of her three children; the threat of deportation in 1942; her escape from deportation due to her husband's exemption; Allied bombing in spring 1944; the Slovak national uprising in August 1944; her husband's enlistment to fight; fleeing with her children to a monastery, where they were sheltered; joining her husband in Banska Bystrica; her arrest in October 1944; her husband's disappearance; her liberation in April 1945; her reunion with her three children; learning of her husband's, sister's, and parents' deaths in Auschwitz; her return to Martin with her children; her life after the war; how she studied dermatology; her remarriage; and her family's immigration to the United States in 1968.

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral History

    Joseph Welgreen, born in 1918 in Sosnowiec, Poland, discusses his childhood in Sosnowiec; his family life and education; the work he performed; the antisemitism he experienced; the changes he experienced after the German invasion of Poland in 1939; being deported to Annaburg in late 1940, and his subsequent transfers to several other labor camps, including Breslau and Klettendorf (both subcamps of Gross-Rosen); the conditions in these camps, his experiences there, the work he performed in highway construction, and his experiences with the guards and Kapos; being transferred to Bunzlau in 1943; the work he performed as a machinist and the conditions there; his experiences on a death march to Dora in February 1945; the work he performed there and the conditions; his liberation at Bergen-Belsen; his journey to Hannover, Germany; the business he established there; and his immigration to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

    Frank Weinman, born on July 9, 1914 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna and Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia); the introduction of restrictive anti-Jewish laws in Vienna after the Anschluss in March 1938; the family's definitive move to Bratislava soon after; his marriage; his and his wife's forced move to a ghetto camp after Nazis took control of Czechoslovakia; their experiences there doing manual labor; their fortunate escape through a German baggage firm, HAPAG, to Budapest, Cuba, and finally the United States; his parents' escape to Cuba where his father died; his reunion with his mother in October 1942; the assistance he received from his brother who had immigrated to Chicago, IL in 1938; and the success and prosperity he experienced in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral History

    Morris Rosnow (né Moishe Raznov), born on January 7, 1927 in Zdzieciol, Poland (now Dzyatlava, Belarus) discusses his experiences during World War II while hiding in the woods as a member of a Jewish partisan group operating under the organization of the Russian partisans; liberation in 1944 by the Soviet Army; his return to his hometown in Poland, where he remained with his sister until the death of their father; moving to Munich, Germany; earning a degree in engineering; immigrating with his sister to join their other sister in the United States; and earning a degree in pharmacy and raising a family.

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

    Gerta Wingerd (née Alper), born on September 23, 1923 in Bеrhomet, Romania (now Berehomet, Ukraine), discusses her childhood in Czernowicz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine); the increase in antisemitism in 1938 after fascist rule was established; the occupation of her town by Soviet forces in 1939; the retreat of the Soviet forces; her two brothers' escape toward Russia; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto; her family's release; their eventual internment in a ghetto camp in Transnistria until 1944; the conditions, difficulties, and disease that were prevalent there; the family's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Czernowicz; her escape from Romania to Vienna, Austria, where she worked for the United States Army; being sponsored by the Joint Distribution Committee to immigrate to the United States in 1949; and her experiences in New York, Minneapolis, and Great Falls, Montana before marrying and settling in Mill Valley, California.

    Oral history interview with Ilse Eden

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva K. Breyer

    Oral History

    Eva Breyer, born on August 18, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her parents, who converted from Judaism to Catholicism after the death of her grandfather; being christened Catholic; her brother, who was born Jewish and converted when he was about a year old; attending Catholic religious classes; antisemitism in Hungary before the Germans invaded; the laws passed against Jews in the 1930s; the bombings after the war started; the drafting of non-Jewish men for the military and Jewish men for labor service; her father being called up for labor service near Budapest; how her mother was able to keep her father from being sent to the front in 1943; the German occupation, at which time the Jewish laws grew worse; having to move to Jewish houses with other families; the round ups led by the Arrow Cross and police in the summer of 1944; her aunt saving her mother from deportation; moving into an apartment building that was under the protection of the Vatican; her brother, who was sent to a monastery for extra protection; being sent to the hospital where a doctor diagnosed her as sick so she could hide with terminally sick children; going to a convent outside Buda; seeing people being shot into the Danube; going to a Swedish house and finding it empty; the arrival of the Russians; her family, who went to the ghetto while she was in hiding; her father’s death from pneumonia in March after the liberation; the mistreatment of the Hungarians by the Russian soldiers; life under the communists; escaping to Austria and then the United States in 1956; and how she identifies as Catholic.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Levi

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

    Paul Nebenzahl discusses his childhood in Long Island, NY; his career in advertising; enlisting in the United States Army in 1942; his experiences as a sergeant in the Signal Corps; being part of a secret OSS “operational group” working with the French underground movement in southwestern France to hinder the German retreat in 1944; his military service in India and China for the remainder of the war; his life after the war; marrying; having children; and his leisure activities.

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral History

    Ellen Van Creveld, born in 1933 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Amsterdam; her assimilated family life; her lack of awareness of her Jewish heritage; the changes she experienced after the German invasion of Holland in May 1940, including the new restrictions and her transfer to a Jewish school; her relationships with her non-Jewish friends during this period; the fear of arrest and deportation; her family's decision to go into hiding in November 1943; her experiences while living in hiding; her family's move to Brussels, Belgium with the help of the underground; the false identities they acquired; her experiences in Brussels under false papers, her education; the betrayal of the family and their arrest; her reprieve from deportation due to illness; her experiences in the Jewish hospital and orphanage; her subsequent time spent living in hiding on a farm and in an abandoned castle during the winter of 1944-1945; her reunion with one of her brothers after the end of the war and the fates of her other family members; her postwar life in the United States and Holland; the challenges she faced; her marriage and family; her permanent immigration to the United States in 1956; and her life in the US.

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshtein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

    Sara Gelender discusses her childhood in Warsaw, Poland; her memories of the bombing and burning of Warsaw in September 1939; her family's flight to a farm near the Russian border; hiding there for several months; being part of a group of Jewish refugees sent to Siberia in June 1940; the primitive conditions in the labor camp; the work she performed in the camp; marrying in the camp; leaving the camp with her husband for a small town; her continual state of hunger during those years; moving with her husband to the Ukraine in 1944; returning to Poland in 1946; the antisemitism they encountered in Poland; escaping to Czechoslovakia, Vienna, and then to a displaced persons camp in Germany; moving to Paris, where they lived until 1951; their emigration first to Canada, and finally to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

    Ilse Sternberger (née Naumann), born in 1914, discusses her childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); her assimilated family life; her education; her marriage and her decision to move to Belgium with her husband in 1933; her life in Belgium; her husband's success as a photographer; their decision to move to London, England in 1936; returning to Germany in 1939 in an attempt to help Jewish children leave the country, and being stymied by the bureaucracy; immigrating to the United States with her husband and children in July 1940; her life in the US; her work as a teacher and writer; and her curation of books and exhibits of her husband's work.

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral History

    Leonid Bobrovsky, born on May 4, 1937 in Odessa, Ukraine, describes being only three years old when the war began; his father who fought with the partisans during the war; the Nazi invasion of Odessa, at which time he and his family were in an underground hiding place (“Kotokloomba”) reserved for partisans and their families; hiding with his mother while his older brother and father helped the partisans; getting sick because the hiding place was very wet; the Nazis discovering various entrances to the hiding place and using poisonous gas to force the people out; escaping from the hiding place along with his mother and older brother; getting caught by the Nazis and taken away to the city jail where there were many other Jewish residents; being separated from his mother, who was later murdered by the Nazis; being moved with his brother to a different jail; his brother’s attempted escape and then suicide; being taken to camp Ombarova where he remained until liberation; working even though he was so young; attributing his survival in the ghetto to the women who protected and took care of him; liberation; being taken to an orphanage where he stayed until his father’s return; his father, who remarried after the war; attending school and studying construction at a college; being married twice and having two daughters; and naming his younger daughter, Polina Bobrovskaya, after his mother.

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

    Joseph Schein discusses his childhood is Sosnowiec, Poland; his experiences with antisemitism, and how his plans to immigrate to the United States were disrupted by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany; being sent to his mother’s hometown Brzostowica-Wielka, Poland (now Vialikaia Berastavitsa, Belarus); avoiding forced labor in Russia by returning to Sosnowiec; being conscripted for forced labor by the Germans in October 1940; his experiences in several forced labor and concentration camps throughout the war years, which included Geppersdorf, Gross Sarne, Kleinmangersdorf, Wiesau, Waldau, Casper Bowder, Gintersdorf, Rostitz, Hundsfeld, Hirschberg, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, and Buchenwald; the conditions in these camps and the various labors he was forced to perform; being witness to medical experiments at Hundsfeld; enduring a death march from Buchenwald; being liberated by American troops; being hospitalized; his marriage to his childhood sweetheart and their stay in a displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany; immigrating to the United States in June 1946; being the only member of his family that survived the Holocaust; immigrating with an accordion, which was his only possession at the time; and his experiences in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagi-Talavera

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral History

    Edith Eger (née Elefant), born on September 29, 1927 in Kosice, Hungary (now Slovakia), describes her father (Lajos), who was a tailor, and her mother (Helen Klein), who worked for the Hungarian ministry; her two sisters, Magda and Klara; her favorite memories are of her mother's cooking; her childhood, during which she trained in ballet and gymnastics; preparing to compete for the Olympics for Hungary but being disqualified because she was Jewish; her sisters, who were gifted musicians; the story of how her sister Klara was smuggled out of Hungary when the war began by one of her professors from the music academy in Budapest; the German occupation of Hungary; being taken to a brick factory; being deported with her sister, parents, aunts, and uncles to Auschwitz in May 1944; being separated from her parents, and thus spared the gas chambers; being selected to dance for Dr. Josef Mengele; using her talent for gymnastics and dancing to help survive in Auschwitz; conditions in the barracks; how she helped Magda survive in the camp; being liberated from Gunskirchen on May 4, 1945, at which time she had five types of typhoid fever, pneumonia, and no hair left; going to a displaced persons camp, where she met her husband and became pregnant; immigrating to the United States in 1949, going first to New York, and then to Baltimore, where she worked in a factory; moving to Texas, where she had two more children and attended the University of Texas at Austin; earning her doctorate; moving to San Diego, CA and working as a family therapist; and how her grandchildren are her world and how she lives every day for them. Ms. Eger, her parents, aunts and uncles, and her eldest sister Magda, were deported to Auschwitz in May 1944. Ms. Eger was separated from her parents; she and her sister Magda were spared the gas chambers. Because of her talent for ballet, Ms. Eger was selected to dance for Dr. Josef Mengele. She was able to use her talent for gymnastics and dancing to help survive in Auschwitz. Ms. Eger was liberated from Gunskirchen on May 4, 1945. While in a displaced persons camp, she met her husband and became pregnant. She emigrated to the United States in 1949; first to New York, and then to Baltimore, where she worked in a factory. She, her husband and her daughter Marianne moved to Texas, where Ms. Eger had two more children, and attended the University of Texas at Austin where she ultimately received her doctorate. She settled in San Diego and works as a family therapist and with battered wives and abused teenagers.

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral History

    Otto Springer discusses his German upbringing in Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic); his education; his family life; the antisemitism he witnessed in Prague in the early 1930s; his marriage to his Jewish wife and the discrimination he experienced as a result; his arrest in 1941; his sentence of forced labor; the help he received from a Gestapo officer; his activities in the Czech underground including the rescue of Jews, aided by two members of the Gestapo; his experiences in another labor camp near Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) beginning in October 1944; the work he performed; a forced march he underwent in January 1945; acts of vengeance by Czechs that he witnessed after the war ended; the suspicion he fell under because of his German heritage; the assistance he received from a Czech military commander; and his immigration with his wife and children in September 1948.

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral History

    Magda Silberman, born on August 17, 1928, discusses her childhood in Pavlovo, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); the occupation of her town by the Hungarians; antisemitism that she and her family experienced; the occupation of her town by Nazi troops; the gathering of the Jewish citizens and their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1944; her arrival, the selections, and her experiences while at Auschwitz; the death march she endured in January 1945 to Ravensbrück and Leipzig; her liberation in May 1945; and her immigration to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral History

    Eric Willgott, born on February 12, 1925 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood in Vienna; his family life; his Orthodox religious upbringing; his involvement with a Zionist youth organization; his education; the increased antisemitism he experienced after the German annexation of Austria (Anschluss) in March 1938; his experiences during Kristallnacht in November; his family's decision to send him to Great Britain with the Kindertransport in December 1938; his experiences in London during the Blitz; his work with the United States government in Germany after the war; his immigration to the United States in 1948; his marriage; his life in the US; and his work.

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral History

    Cecilia Kornbluth (née Cilli Mehlman), born on October 11, 1920, discusses her childhood in Vienna, Austria; her early experiences with antisemitism in elementary school and gymnasium; her memories of the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, Chancellor of Austria, by Austrian Nazis in 1934; the Anschluss in March 1938; the changes that occurred for Jewish Austrians afterward; her two older brothers fleeing to France and to Switzerland; the arrests of her younger brother, father, and mother; her father's eventual deportation to Auschwitz; her brother's incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps for 11 months, and his release and move to England; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; being sent for by her brother in Switzerland; her illegal crossing into Switzerland; hiding because she lacked legal papers; being questioned and released; living and working in a refugee camp for single Jewish girls in Basel; living there throughout the war; marrying another refugee who was living in a single man's camp in 1942; having a son; being supported by the Jewish community during this period; her immigration to the United States in 1947; and her family and work life in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral History

    Ruth Steiner discusses her childhood in Dresden, Germany; her well-integrated family life; her education; the changes she experienced after the Nazis came to power in 1933; the necessity of attending a university outside of Germany due to her Jewish heritage; her studies in Geneva; her family's decision to leave Europe in 1939; their immigration to Brazil; their move to the United States in 1940; her life in the US; the work she performed as a librarian; and her husband and family.

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral History

    Trudy Lyons discusses her childhood in Vienna, Austria; the family's assimilated life; the changes that occurred after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938; having to leave school, and witnessing abuses against Jews. Ms. Lyons describes the family's flight to Czechoslovakia, and their successful immigration to the United States in November 1938; the family's adjustment to life in the US, eventually settling in Indiana; and her education, marriage, and family life in Detroit, MI and San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral History

    Margrit Schurman, born on April 1, 1925 in Essen, Germany, discusses her childhood in Essen; her memories of antisemitism; the flight of her sister to Switzerland and her brother to England; the events of Kristallnacht; being sent with her sisters to a Catholic school in England; their conversion to Catholicism; her life and experiences in England during the war, including her brother's deportation as an enemy alien to Canada; her separation from her mother, who had married an Italian and spent the war years in Italy; her immigration to the United States; her marriage and life in Berkeley, California; being reunited with her family in California; and her return trip to Germany.

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral History

    Edith Deutsch, born on January 21, 1925 in Arnswalde, Germany (now Choszczno, Poland), discusses her childhood in Arnswalde; her father, Fritz Abrahamowsky, and her mother, Lotte Gradnauer; living in a large home and being raised as a young child by servants, rarely seeing her mother or father; her family's move to Berlin, Germany in 1933; the difficulties experienced by her family when Hitler rose to power; going to the Olympic Stadium with her class and seeing the No Jews Allowed signs; having to leave public school after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; fleeing Germany with her family in April 1939 for Thailand; traveling by ship to Singapore; abandoning their plans to travel to Bangkok and instead opting to go to Shanghai, China; staying in a camp in Shanghai for a week; her experiences in Shanghai; working as a sales girl and as a beautician; her marriage in 1946 and the birth of her son in 1948; immigrating to Australia in 1949; living in a boarding house; moving to the United States in 1951; living in Oregon and then San Francisco, CA; and her efforts to socialize with other refugees over the years.

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral History

    Francis Cappel (né Franz Erwin Cappel), born on June 2, 1916 in Cologne, Germany, discusses his childhood in Cologne, Germany;his parents, Dr. Paul H. and Meta Cappel (née Braunschweig); growing up in an apartment flat near a synagogue in a mixed (Jewish and non-Jewish) neighborhood; antisemitism in Germany; the beating of his lawyer father by Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilung) in April 1933; the boycott of Jewish business; moving in October 1933 to France, where he worked in the textile business; concealing his Jewish origins as best he could, always carrying French or English newspapers with him; befriending a man who brought him to the German Reich secret headquarters where he got to see rare German stamps (Mr. Cappel was an avid stamp collector); moving to Hamburg, Germany in 1935; immigrating to England in 1937; serving as a corporal in the British Army; his success in obtaining transit visas for his father and mother, thus rescuing his father from Dachau concentration camp; getting married to his wife Margo in 1944; leaving the Army in April 1946 and returning to London; immigrating with his wife, children, and parents to the United States; and settling in San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral History

    Thomas Trier, born December 27, 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany, discusses his childhood in Frankfurt; his family's roots in the city; his integrated family life; his education in a Jewish school; his experiences in Nazi-era Germany; the economic difficulties his family faced; their decision to immigrate to the United States; the journey to New York, NY and then Chicago, IL; his experiences as a young immigrant in America; his feeling of isolation among his peers as a boy; his education through graduate school; his life after school; the work he performed; his feelings about his German and Jewish identity; and his marriage and family.

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral History

    Rita Grunbaum (née Rita van Leeuwen), born on April 9, 1910 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Holland; her career as a social worker in the Hague; her marriage in 1936;the onset of World War II in September 1939; the bombing of Holland; the German occupation beginning in 1940; the birth of her daughter in 1942; the family's arrest in September 1943; their transport to Westerbork concentration camp; her experiences in Westerbork; receiving papers for Palestine from her in-laws who had fled to Mexico; being selected as part of an exchange program with German prisoners-of-war held in Palestine; being sent with her family to Bergen-Belsen in February 1944; being transported from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 on the Lost Train (also called Lost Transport); her liberation in Troebtiz, Germany; the deaths of her family members during the Holocaust; and her post-war experiences.

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral History

    Lily Robinson (née Lily Solomon Leibovitch), born on June 29, 1939 in Sofia, Bulgaria, discusses her childhood with her mother and sister who had been deported to Haskovo, Bulgaria from Sofia in 1940; her experiences there as a young child; her family's return to Sofia in 1945; immigrating to the United States in December 1946; her life in California; and the emotional aftermath of the Holocaust that she witnessed in her brother.

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral History

    Herman Apteker, born on October 9, 1915 in Dresden, Germany, discusses his childhood in Dresden; his Ukrainian parents; his father (Elieser), who was in business and died when Herman was only four years old; his mother, who started a wholesale business selling clothing out of the family's six or seven room flat; his four older siblings (three brothers and one sister); his male "guardian" (this was a German requirement for children whose fathers had died) Dr. Avraham Borg, who took Herman to synagogue and was the primary source of Herman's religious education; his experiences with antisemitism at public school; his strong desire to leave Germany once Hitler rose to power; his trip to Czechoslovakia in 1933 as part of the Young Macabees, in preparation for immigration to Palestine; spending 10 or 11 months in Slovakia, taking part in agricultural training; his arrival in Palestine in April 1933; becoming very ill with dysentery and malaria; his experiences in Palestine; the immigration of his mother and brothers to Palestine; his work in Haifa; riots that occurred in 1936; becoming a temporary policeman before a British officer offered him a job in the immigration office; his marriage in 1938; the beginning of WWII and his work for the British army (in an office) until he was conscripted into the Israeli Army; working as a commission officer at the Lebanese border; his unique relationship with an Arab officer on the Lebanese side; his divorce and remarriage; his immigration with his second wife to the United States in 1953; and settling in San Francisco, CA.

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral History

    Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, born on February 14, 1929 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses his childhood in Budapest; his time in a Transylvanian ghetto in 1944; his subsequent deportation to Auschwitz; the work he performed in Josef Mengele's medical complex; the experiments he witnessed; his impressions of Mengele; and his subsequent experiences at Mauthausen, Gusen II, and Ebensee.

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral History

    Semyon Veyber, born on December 20, 1927 in Tomashpil, Ukraine, discusses his childhood in Tomashpil; his religious upbringing; the changes he experienced after the German Army invaded in June 1941; his family's attempt to evacuate, their capture by the Germans, and the help given to the Germans by the local Ukrainian people; his escape from an Einsatzgruppen action; being deported with his family to a ghetto in July 1941, and his experiences there; the work he performed and the conditions; the fear he felt as the German Army retreated that he and his family would be killed before they were liberated; the arrival of the Soviet Army in March 1944; the charges of collaboration that he faced; his life after the end of the war; and his immigration to the United States in 1989.

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral History

    Chaya Ash-Furhman (née Averbuch), born March 19,1920 in Kishinev (now Chisinau), Moldova, describes her childhood; her parents’ involvement in Yiddish theater; her own involvement in theater at a young age; the outbreak of war in June 1941; hiding with her family in the basement of a theater in the Russian section of Tiraspol, Moldova; being transported to cooperative farms in Ukraine and Uzbekistan; being underfed; her father, who suffered from mental distress and dysentery and was taken to a courtyard and shot; how the people who were murdered were then covered in lime, so as not to spread disease; the hardships she and her family endured working on these farms; becoming sick with malaria; working as a seamstress in a nearby town where conditions were better; meeting her first husband; antisemitism that was rampant after the end of the war; her leaving for Poland with her mother and husband, who was Polish by birth; their decision to leave Poland in 1947 while she was pregnant; the family's experiences in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria; and their immigration to Israel, where she continued her involvement in Yiddish Theater.

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral History

    Peter Mueller, born on December 30, 1926 in Hannover, Germany, discusses his childhood in Hannover; his family's decision to leave Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938; his life with his father in England; his decision to immigrate to the United States in 1943; his service in the US Army with the medical corps as an instructor in Texas; and his life after military service.

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral History

    Eva Cohn (née Eva Maria Rhee), born in 1923 in Dortmund, Germany, describes her parents, Max Rhee and Else Heinemann; experiencing a warm family life and peace in her early childhood; not experiencing antisemitism until 1934 when her friend shunned her, teachers began to treat her unfairly, and Aryan students were being separated and taught antisemitism; being prohibited from attending public schools around 1935; moving to Cologne, Germany, where she attended a Jewish school while staying with a Jewish family; her family’s experience during an anti-Jewish “Aktion” in 1938, during which German soldiers threw rocks at their windows and burned their synagogue; returning to live with the family in Cologne, while her parents moved to Baudin and stayed with a friend; leaving Germany with her family circa 1938 and going to England just before the ill treatment of the Jews became worse; a law in England that prohibited immigrants from working, which meant her family could not make any money; spending one year in England, before being allowed to immigrate to the United States; settling in Los Angeles, CA; attending Whittier College and majoring in English; working at a school as an instructional supervisor; her father’s death in 1941 from a heart condition; meeting and marrying Hans in Salinas, CA in 1949; having three children and moving quite frequently; and her life in Palo Alto, teaching German, participating in the German association, and leading the Bridge to Understanding, which takes a group to Germany each summer.

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Fred Baum (né Efriam Dovid Boymelgreen), born in Slupaianowa, Poland (possibly Nowa Słupia, Poland), on October 1, 1921, describes his childhood; his one younger brother; his parents, Majlech and Miriam Nhuna, whom he lived with until 1930 when their mother died; being raised religious, and studying before the war at a yeshiva in Otwock, Poland; returning home from school after the war started, and seeing Jews being rounded up for forced labor; working in various government factories, and how the situation got worse and worse; his memories of shootings, confiscations, and deportations; how Jews were not allowed to go to school or to religious services and there was no electricity; his memories of several events including a memory of the rabbi of his town being tied to a horse and forced to run after it until he died; being put into Starachowice with his father and brother in August 1942; suffering from typhus and his father’s efforts to keep him out of the "hospital" so he wouldn't be shot; their transfer in July 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau; his father’s death in Birkenau around January of 1945; being sent with his brother to Buna (Monowitz), where they were given striped uniforms; being transferred with his brother to Lara Hut; being moved in early 1945 to Mauthausen and then to Gusen in Austria; spending a week there and then four days without food in an open train to Hannora, where they worked on an unfinished concentration camp; being separated from his brother on April 5, 1945 and sent to Bergen-Belsen; being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945; spending six months in a hospital unit recuperating, and then staying in Bergen-Belsen for five years; meeting his wife, Helen Wiesel, there; getting married in 1946; never returning to Poland; reuniting with his brother, who was his only surviving family member; immigrating in 1950 with his wife and young daughter to the United States; having two more children; and his brother, who also immigrated to the United States and started a family.

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral History

    Cantor Hans Cohn, born in Berlin, Germany on May 31, 1926, discusses his childhood in Berlin; being forced to leave his public school after the passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935; antisemitic propaganda; his feelings of exclusion from social and athletic activities; the 1936 Olympic games; the events of Kristallnacht; the long wait for a visa to the United States; the family's decision to leave Germany for Shanghai, China; his impressions upon arrival in Shanghai; the life of his family and the Jewish community in Shanghai; his mother's death; the difficulties and illnesses he endured; moving into the Hongkew ghetto when the Japanese took control of Shanghai in 1942; his experiences there; the Allied bombings of Shanghai that took place in the spring of 1945; his life in post-war Shanghai; stowing aboard a ship to Australia in 1946; living as an illegal immigrant in Australia; his immigration to the United States in 1948; being drafted into the military; volunteering as a cantor in a San Francisco synagogue; returning to school and obtaining a cantorial diploma; working as a singing waiter in the Borscht Belt in New York while he was attending Hebrew Union College in New York; being reunited with his father in 1952; and his later experiences.

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral History

    Gilbert L. van Mourik, born June 27, 1930 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, discusses his childhood in Rotterdam; his family life; his Protestant upbringing; the changes he experienced after the German invasion of Holland in May 1940; his experiences during the bombing of Rotterdam; his father's efforts to gather and store food; his parents' decision to become part of the resistance; his family's activities, which included hiding a Jewish child in their home for the duration of the war; and the dangers his family experienced and their efforts at self-preservation as well as the moral challenges they faced.

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral History

    Sam Zelver, born in 1935 in Kalisz, Poland, discusses his childhood in Kalisz; fleeing with his family to the Soviet Union after the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939; the attempts of his father, who was in the Polish Army, to join them; the family's journey across Russia to Siberia; his mother doing hard labor in return for housing and food; the hardships they endured for a year and a half; the journeys the family took, which ended in Kazakhstan, where they lived with other Jewish refugees; discovering a relative nearby with whom they stayed from 1942 until the end of the war; the family's post-war journey to Germany, where they lived in a DP (displaced persons) camp; his immigration with his sister in 1947 to San Francisco, CA, sponsored by an uncle who died before they arrived; their stay in the Jewish children's home, Homewood Terrace; his reunion with his mother and stepfather, who emigrated in 1952; his education and service in the United States Army; his work as a salesman; his marriage; family; and religious life.

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral History

    Asya Grunkina, born on March 2, 1936 in Odesa, Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Odesa; her memories of the occupation of Odessa by Nazi troops on October 16, 1941; the orders for Jewish families to identify themselves in preparation for deportation; hiding with her family in their home to escape deportation; the family fleeing with the assistance of a local Russian man in January 1942; hiding in the catacombs and caves nearby; the assistance of their rescuer and his family who brought them food at great risk; the terrible conditions and privations they endured; and leaving their hiding place in April 1944.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral History

    Kurt Mostny, born on March 3, 1919 in Linz, Austria, discusses his childhood in Linz; the antisemitism he experienced growing up; enlisting in the Austrian army and being posted in Vienna; the Anschluss in March 1938; serving as part of the honor guard surrounding Adolf Hitler when he arrived in Vienna to oversee the transfer of power; evading the roundup of Jews in Linz; escaping from Austria; going to Egypt to join his sister, who was pursuing a doctorate in Egyptology; their subsequent move to Belgium; his mother's friendship with a woman from Chile; her success in obtaining visas for Mr. Mostny, his sister, and herself; the entire family's immigration to Chile in 1939; his experiences in Chile; his work and family; his immigration to the United States with his wife and five children in 1964.

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

    Hanna Cassel, born on December 6, 1914, in Berlin, Germany, describes her father Arthur, who owned a shoe store and her mother Rebecca, who helped run the store; her one brother, Werner, who was six years younger than her; her mother's parents, who were very religious, and spending during many holidays going to the temple with them; her parents, who were not religious; attending a private elementary school and then a girls' high school, which she was not able to finish because about a year and a half before she would have graduated, she lost her scholarship (because she was Jewish); her father's business ending because he was Jewish; not experiencing much antisemitism when she was younger, and how at first most people thought Hitler was crazy and he would never amount to anything; her very good non-Jewish friends, especially at school; her family home and her childhood and her love for reading; not having many options after she dropped out of school; her desire to go to Palestine with some of her friends, which her parents did not want her to do; moving to Rome, Italy and working as a nanny for several different families; how by 1939, Hitler had influenced Mussolini's policies and foreign Jews were required to leave Italy; the popular sentiment in Italy about Germany; the government-sponsored persecution growing worse; being arrested in December 1940 and put into a women’s concentration camp (she had avoided the first roundups); living with about 65 other Jews, Roma, and Yugoslavian partisans; conditions in the camp, the people there, and the flourishing black market; the German occupation of Italy and how the villagers in the town around the concentration camp helped free the prisoners because they knew the women of the camp would be killed or deported immediately by the Germans; hiding in the fields and then walking back to Rome, which took her about ten days; eating vegetables she took from nearby fields during her journey; being given fake papers by the police in the concentration camp’s town (the papers identified her as Anna Castelli; she told anyone who asked that she was an Italian fleeing the Allies); hiding with various friends in Rome; how most people at this time were surviving on the black market; the destruction of the synagogue in Rome right after she returned and the liquidation of the ghetto; the deportation of thousands of people; how several years earlier her parents and brother had gone to Shanghai, China, where her brother and father both died; having very little correspondence with her family while she was in Rome; getting some information from listening to the radio, which was illegal; living in hiding on the outskirts of the city when Rome was liberated on June 5, 1944; the euphoria at that moment and the difficulty of life after the liberation; how food was hard to come by; getting a job at the American Joint Distribution Committee; getting a visa to the United States and arriving in the US in December of 1948; her mother’s death and Hanna’s depression; working nights while taking classes at San Francisco State College; earning a BA and wanting to become a librarian; becoming a teacher after earning her Master’s degree; returning to Italy almost every summer once she was a teacher and visiting friends; returning to Germany for the first time in 1972 to visit a cousin; her hesitation to return to Germany; having a Bat-Mitzvah in 1983; experiencing antisemitism in the US, especially at the high school where she worked; and never marrying or having children.

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral History

    Vera Korkus, born in 1928 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood in Vienna; the onset of World War II, and the opportunity that she and her sister had to go a Kindertransport, which they both refused; the forced move she and her family made in 1940 to Jewish ghetto in Vienna; their transport in October 1942 to an unnamed camp, where her father died of lung cancer; being sent with her mother to Auschwitz two years later; being separated from her mother; her reunion with her sister; the terrible conditions at Auschwitz; her encounter with Dr. Josef Mengele; being transported to Kurzbach, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen, where she endured forced labor and a 3-day march to Bergen Belsen; her escape from the march; finding protection from the Germans with Russian soldiers; the sexual assaults that occurred; her life after the war; moving to Bohemia (Czech Republic) then Vienna; and her immigration in 1949 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral History

    Steffi Black, born on October 17, 1920 in Berlin, Germany, describes her childhood; her Polish parents Charlotte Pink and Felix Israel; her father’s factory in Berlin and his work with his brother, Leo, installing electricity in the city; her complex family dynamic; her lack of a Jewish identity; her parents' divorce; her mother's remarriage to Otto Goetz in Switzerland; her separation from her father; her father's involvement in the Spanish Civil War; spending the summers of 1932 and 1933 in Poland with her grandparents; attending a Jewish school for about nine months, but feeling left out since she was not Jewish; her reunion with her father and their immigration first to Cuba and then to the United States; her father's death in 1946 in Nevada; her marriage and life in the US; visiting Germany in 1980; and her three children.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral History

    Ann Burger (née Anni Rosalie Rautenberg), born in 1920 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), discusses her childhood; her father Arthur Rautenberg, who was the manager of department stores; being raised religious but not Orthodox; attending private school and then public schools; her experiences with antisemitism in school after Hitler's rise to power in 1933; her Jewish friends at school; the loss of her father's business; the family's move to Berlin, while she remained in school; her move to Berlin after her graduation in 1936; her cousin's immigration to Palestine; the family's decision to flee Germany; the efforts of their American family members to obtain visas for them; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; training as a nurse; a job opportunity for work in Sweden, where she remained during the war years; her parents’ journey to Spain, Cuba, and then to the United States; her reunion with them in the US in 1946; and settling in San Francisco, CA, where she married and had a family.

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral History

    Klara Garmel (née Pleshivaya), born on February 17, 1926, discusses her childhood in Yarun’, Ukraine; her parents' work on a collective farm; her memories of Jewish school as well as participating in a pioneer Ukrainian youth organization; the onset of war with Nazi Germany in 1941; the confusion that ensued; the enforcement of anti-Jewish laws; hiding from a roundup; witnessing brutal acts perpetrated against her grandfather; escaping, with the assistance of non-Jewish friends, to Poland; encountering her mother and sister, who returned to Ukraine; her experiences moving, hiding, and passing for a non-Jew; her conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith; marrying a widower far older than she; the advance of Soviet liberating forces; reclaiming her Jewish identity; leaving her marriage; working until she had sufficient funds to return to her home; learning that all but a sister and brother had perished; remarrying and having a daughter; and immigrating to the United States in 1992 due to the antisemitism she experienced in Ukraine.

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral History

    Polina Sorkin (née Britavskaya), born on November 25, 1931 in Krutye, Ukraine, discusses her childhood in Ukraine; her brother and father's service in Soviet Army; the German invasion and seeing troops in her town; her family's unsuccessful attempt to flee; an incident in which all the Jews were rounded up and marched to a barracks where they were imprisoned; escaping the barracks; traveling from village to village; being sheltered by relatives and strangers; her reunion with family members in a ghetto; traveling to an orphanage in Balta, Ukraine, where she remained until the end of the war; reuniting with her family; her life after the war; and her immigration to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral History

    Mikhail Blank, born on April 22, 1930 in Bershad, Ukraine, discusses his childhood in Bershad; the family's experiences on a collective farm; his memories of antisemitism; the family's move from Bershad to a nearby camp after the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; an incident in which his father and brother with other men were locked in a stable from which they escaped and returned to Bershad; the occupation of the area by Romanian troops and the establishment of a ghetto in September 1941 in Bershad, where he and his family lived until the end of the war; his escape attempts; illnesses he endured; the forced labor his father and brother performed; his father's death; the liberation of Bershad in March 1944 by Soviet troops; his brother joining the fight against the Nazis and his death in battle in July 1944; his life in Bershad after the war; his military service; and his immigration to the United States in 1991.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral History

    Kurt Gronowski, born on July 16, 1923 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his childhood in Berlin; the antisemitism he experienced; the destruction of his family's business during Kristallnacht, November 1938; the family's escape to Shanghai, China; his experiences while on board the ship from Italy; the family's arrival in Shanghai and the assistance they received from the Jewish community; life in the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai; conditions during the Japanese occupation; the improvement of conditions after the war ended; immigrating to the United States; the difficulties he encountered while living in Indiana; and settling in San Francisco, where he became a successful businessman.

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral History

    Rosa Wigmore (née Adler), born September 8, 1923 in Ulic, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), discusses her childhood in Ulic; her family life; the changes she experienced in 1939 following the Hungarian annexation of the region; her experiences during her deportation with her family in 1944 to a ghetto in Ungvar, Hungary (now Uzhhorod, Ukraine); their deportation to Auschwitz; the selection she survived with her sister; her illness; her experiences in the infirmary and the help she received from a doctor who arranged to transfer her to another camp; the work she performed; the assistance she received; her lingering health issues; being liberated in May 1945 by Czechoslovakian partisans; her postwar experiences in Prague; her reunion with her sister; their immigration to the United States; and the fates of her other family members.

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

    Gerta Wingerd (née Alper), born on September 23, 1923 in Bеrhomet, Romania (now Berehomet, Ukraine), discusses her childhood in Czernowicz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine); the increase in antisemitism in 1938 after fascist rule was established; the occupation of her town by Soviet forces in 1939; the retreat of the Soviet forces; her two brothers' escape toward Russia; the occupation of the area by Nazi troops; the establishment of a ghetto; her family's release; their eventual internment in a ghetto camp in Transnistria until 1944; the conditions, difficulties, and disease that were prevalent there; the family's liberation by Soviet troops; her return to Czernowicz; her escape from Romania to Vienna, Austria, where she worked for the United States Army; being sponsored by the Joint Distribution Committee to immigrate to the United States in 1949; and her experiences in New York, Minneapolis, and Great Falls, Montana before marrying and settling in Mill Valley, California.

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral History

    Evelyn Lowen Apte (née Eveline Loewenberg), born in 1929 in Goerlitz, Germany, describes her brother Gerald; her father Herman Alexander Lowen, who was a cavalry officer during the First World War; her mother Else (Gradnauer) Lowen, who had a great interest in art and attended an art school in Berlin; how her family did not consider themselves religious but when the war began the Jewish holidays became more culturally significant to the family; having a happy childhood; her father’s desire to emigrate as soon as Hitler came to power; getting around the quota system by becoming property owners in the United States; traveling through Paris, France in 1937 and taking a ship to New York, NY, arriving on February 22, 1937; the fate of her extended family; settling in Portland, Oregon; learning English; the difficult transition to American life, especially for her mother; feeling like an outsider in high school, but beginning to feel American in college; visiting Germany in 1966; how she does not enjoy speaking German with people her age, but is willing to speak German with the younger generation; attending Reed College in Oregon for two years, and then transferring to the University of California at Berkeley, where she did her undergraduate and some graduate work, finishing her education in London; becoming a social worker; considering herself an atheist, but still feeling close to the Jewish culture and traditions; the large community of Jewish refugees in Portland; and her reflections on her experiences as a refugee.

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral History

    Annette Herskovits discusses her experiences as a young child during the Holocaust, including her infancy in Paris, France; the occupation of Paris by Nazi troops; her father's decision that the family should go into hiding; hiding with her older siblings with occasional visits from their parents; the arrest and deportation of her parents in June 1943; her brother's efforts to find a safe place for her outside of Paris; being fostered with a couple in an unidentified location; being visited by her siblings during this period; and understanding that she would never see her parents again.

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral History

    Alfred Cotton (né Baumwollspinner), born on December 29, 1925 in Hamburg, Germany, discusses his childhood in Hamburg; his Polish parents; his father’s wholesale wine distribution business; his memories of the antisemitism after the Nazis rose to power; his parents' selling their business because of the anti-Jewish boycotts; the expulsion of his father to Poland in 1938; the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; the arrests of the teachers at the Jewish school he attended; his parents' decision to place him on a Kindertransport; leaving Germany for a boy's camp in Suffolk, England; the arrest and internment of all boys over age 16; being moved to Sheffield, England and living in a camp run by refugee women; attending a public school; learning that his parents and grandparents were deported in 1942 from Poland where they were living; his immigration to the United States in the early 1950s; and his involvement in Kindertransport reunions.

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral History

    Marion Mostny, born on May 22, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Berlin; the changes she experienced during the 1930s; her parents' decision to leave Germany; her family's immigration to Santiago, Chile in April 1939; the community of Jewish refugees there; the fates of family members left behind in Germany; her life in Chile; her and her husband's decision to immigrate to the United States in 1963; their life in San Francisco, CA; her decision to write her memoirs; and the importance of Holocaust remembrance. [See her memoir titles, Conversations with my grandchildren : a journey through three continents.]

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral History

    Roy Calder describes his early life in an assimilated family in Berlin and Dresden; his invovlement in Jewish youth groups; his awareness of increased antisemitism after the Nazi rise to power; his parents' decision to send him to school in Switzerland in 1935; his attempts to convince his family to leave Germany; his regret that they did not; his decision to immigrate to Great Britain; the jobs he held in Birmingham, England; the beginning of World War II in 1939; his internment as an enemy alien in Sherbrooke, Canada; his return to England in late 1940; why he volunteered for the British army; his six year service in Scotland, Nigeria, India, and Burma; his marriage to another Holocaust survivor; his decision to immigrate to the United States in 1953; his Jewish identity; and the effects the events of the Holocaust had on him and his wife.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Batzdorff

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Felberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral History

    Abraham Jaeger, born on March 13, 1916 in Vel'ký Bočkov, Czechoslovakia (now Velykyi Bychkiv, Ukraine), discusses his childhood; his career as a salesman; his escape in October 1939 to Palestine, where he was imprisoned for six months; his experiences serving in the British Army in Egypt, Syria, and Cyprus; joining the Israeli Army in 1948; his career and life in Israel, where he lived until 1958; his immigration to the United States; and the death of his parents and three of sisters in the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rita Kuhn

    Oral History

    The interviews describe Ms. Kuhn's childhood in Berlin, Germany, her life as the daughter of a Jewish father and non-Jewish German mother as the Nazi regime rose to power, and her growing awareness of antisemitism and change. Ms. Kuhn describes the dismay she felt after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, and the privations her family suffered as a consequence of the Nuremberg Laws and her father's unemployment, living with meager ration allotments, detainments, and forced labor. She discusses life trapped in Berlin during the war years, bombings, and forced labor in a small factory. Ms. Kuhn remembers the round-up of Jews in Berlin in February 1943 and her release, because her mother was German. Of particular note, Ms. Kuhn discusses the Rosenstrasse Protest of 1943, when a group of Aryan women protested the imprisonment of their Jewish husbands and children, in which her mother participated. Ms. Kuhn describes the occupation of Berlin by Russian troops, and her family being asked to identify Nazis to them. She recalls her first exposure to information about the concentration camps and the Holocaust, the time she spent in a displaced persons camp, her desire to leave Germany and her immigration to the United States in 1948. Ms. Kuhn describes her return to Berlin for the 50th year memorial of Kristallnacht, when she participated in a silent march from the a synagogue to Rosenstrasse in commemoration of the protest there.

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral History

    Greta Reisman, born on January 6, 1927 in Mattersdorf (Mattersburg), Austria, discusses her childhood in Nuremberg, Germany; her religious upbringing and assimilated education; the changes she experienced after the Nazis came to power; the increasing antisemitism as well as her family's decision to relocate to Yugoslavia and Hungary; her experiences in Yugoslavia; the actions her grandmother took to allow them to remain there; her decision to join the rest of the family in Hungary; and immigrating to the United States in 1940.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

    The interviews describe Mr. Schein's childhood is Sosnowiec, his experiences with antisemitism, and how his plans to immigrate to the United States were disrupted by the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. Mr. Schein describes being sent to his mother’s hometown, Brzostowica-Wielka, near Volkovisk, in Russian Poland, and eluding forced labor in Russia by returning to Sosnowiec. He discusses being conscripted for forced labor by the Germans in October 1940, and his experiences in several forced labor and concentration camps throughout the war years, which included Geppersdorf, Gross Sarne, Kleinmangersdorf, Wiessau, Waldau, Casper Bowder, Gintersdorf, Rostitz, Hundsfeld, Hirschberg, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, Buchenwald, and possibly others. Mr. Schein describes the conditions in these camps and the various labors he was forced to perform, being witness to medical experiments at Hundsfeld, and enduring a death march from Buchenwald. He discusses his liberation by American troops, his hospitalization, his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, their stay in a displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany, and their immigration to the United States in June 1946. Mr. Schein relates that he was the member of his family that survived the Holocaust and his only possession when he emigrated was an accordion. He also describes his experiences in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral History

    Dan Dougherty, born May 30, 1925 in Austin, Minnesota, describes being drafted into the United States Army 17 days after his high school graduation; transferring from the 44th Division to the 45th Division; seeing combat on the Sigfried Line and experiencing a slight injury; returning after his recovery and fighting at Aschaffenburg, Germany; the surrender of Germany seven days later; taking part in the liberation of Bavarian US prisoner of war camps and concentration camps; going towards Nuremberg, which had already fallen to the Allies; arriving in Dachau, where they found thousands of emaciated corpselike inmates; coming upon Allach concentration camp; and going to Munich, which they occupied on May 1, 1945.

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral History

    Max Erlichman, born in November 1931 in Caracas, Venezuela, describes his parents Tobias Erlichman and Bella Galinskaja; spending his childhood years in Amsterdam, Holland until he was taken to Westerbork with his brother and father in mid-November 1942; the deportation of his mother to Auschwitz in September of 1942; the deportation of his older brother Zacharias to Auschwitz in October of 1942; never seeing either Zacharias nor his mother again, and finding out after the war that they were both killed in the camps; being sent with his brother and father to Bergen-Belsen, where they stayed for nine weeks; being sent to a camp in Wülzburg, Germany and remaining there until they were liberated in March or April of 1945 by the American Army; recuperating along with his father and brother in a house provided to them by civilians in the town of Weissenburg in Bayern, Germany; being sent to a displaced persons camp in Würzburg for a week before being sent back to Holland; his father’s travels between Holland and the United States for a few years after the war; and immigrating to the US with his brother.

    Oral history interview with Marianne Gerhart

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eugene Katz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral History

    Tillie Molho, born on December 25, 1926 in Salonika, Greece, discusses her childhood in Salonika and Athens, Greece; her experience of the Italian and German invasions of Athens; living in hiding for two years with a Christian family; the scarcity of food and the fear of discovery; her reunion with her family after the liberation of Athens; her family's attempt to reclaim their home from German collaborators; her life after the war; and her immigration to the United States in 1951.

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral History

    Agnes Allison (née Agnes Suzannah Halàsz), born on October 28, 1926 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses her childhood; her younger sister, Judy; her mother, Ilona Gero and her father, Robert Halász; attending a private German school established for the children of diplomats; the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, and the arrival of Polish refugees; the Hitler Youth movement at her school; her family’s conversion to Catholicism in 1939 and her awareness of the anti-Jewish laws in Hungary; the German occupation of Hungary beginning in March 1944 and the increased restrictions imposed on the Jewish community; her family being forced out of their home; working for the Germans for a short time in exchange for protection; becoming friendly with a German officer's chauffeur, Fritz, who told her that the German soldiers kept watch at night to protect everyone in the apartment from the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross; going into hiding in December 1944 with the help of a priest, Father Reile; remaining in hiding until the liberation of Budapest in April 1945; learning the fates of family members; and her belief that the Arrow Cross was responsible for the deaths of Budapest Jews.

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral History

    Ann Gabor Arancio, born on September 2, 1926 in Gyula, Hungary, discusses her childhood in Gyula; her childhood experiences with antisemitism; her experiences passing as a Christian with false identity papers; being captured in November 1944 by Nazi troops; doing forced labor in a brick factory; her escape with her mother and sister; going into hiding in several locations; the liberation of Hungary; studying in Holland; immigrating to the United States with her husband in 1950; and her divorce, remarriage, and family life in the United States. [Ms. Arancio was featured in the book, A Time to Flee: Unseen Women of Courage.]

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

    Yanina Cywinska, born on October 28, 1929, describes growing up with her Ukrainian family, including her parents, Wladyslaw and Ludwika, and her older brother, Theodor; traveling a lot as a child; living mostly in and around Warsaw, Poland; attending ballet classes; being raised Catholic; her father’s Jewish friends; being taught by her parents to not look down on Jews or ever make an antisemitic comment; her father, who was a doctor and was asked by the Nazis, once they had invaded Poland, to perform some medical experiments on Jewish twins; his refusal to conduct the experiments and his subsequent imprisonment in jail for a short period; the Warsaw Ghetto, which was constructed in 1939; her father’s realization that he had a moral obligation to help the Jews and his failed attempts to get the local priest to help; her family’s participation in the underground movement; making several trips a day through tunnels and sewer lines into and out of the ghetto; carrying ammunition, jewelry, furs, medicine, and poison for the black market; witnessing executions and other violence; the various tunnels that they used to get in and out of the ghetto; being arrested and sent to a detention center; being taken out in the middle of the night with other people into the forest, where they dug ditches and then were lined up and shot; surviving the massacre because she was behind another woman, and she fell into the pit and pretended to be dead; climbing out of the pit and hiding in a haystack, where a farmer found her; reuniting with her parents at the detention center; her aunt, Stasha, paying the Gestapo to get Yanina and her brother out of the detention center; returning to her aunt’s house; being beaten and abused by her aunt for being a “Jew-lover”; her brother, who ran away; working as a servant for her aunt; ending up homeless and wandering around the streets of Warsaw for a while; staying for a few weeks with a couple she met at the detention center; reuniting with her parents at the detention center; being sent with the other prisoners to Auschwitz in cattle cars; the journey; arriving at Auschwitz; surviving a gas chamber after being revived by another inmate; being given a uniform; the shaving of her hair; being tattooed with a number; working in various places, including a factory, a kitchen, in the labs, and at the crematorium (note that it is generally thought that only men worked in the Sonderkommando doing the jobs that Yanina said she did); her methods for survival; being forced on a death march to Dachau; being liberated by American soldiers; staying in a displaced persons camp for a while, where she was sexually assaulted and impregnated by a soldier; her two abusive marriages after the war; meeting her third husband; the effects of the war on her emotionally; giving up on God; and her long recovery from her traumatic experiences.

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral History

    Ilse Lewy, born on February 26, 1920 in Wuppertal, Germany, discusses her childhood in Wuppertal (now part of Elberfeld); her memories of the increase in antisemitism after Hitler rose to power 1933; being forced to leave school and move with her family; working at a factory until 1936; her move to a children's school in Sweden that prepared students for immigration to Palestine; her travels there by train and her experiences in the school for the next two years; being summoned back to Germany to immigrate with her parents and sister to the United States; the voyage on a ship through the Panama Canal; arriving in San Francisco, CA; returning to school; her attempts at and final success in being admitted to nurse training; her experiences with antisemitism in the United States; volunteering for the United States Army; being stationed in the Philippines where she met her future husband; and their marriage and family life.

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral History

    Esther Kemeny, born on August 19, 1912 in Michalovce, Slovakia, discusses her childhood in Michalovce; attending law school and graduating 1936; incidents of antisemitism; her disbarment in 1939 because she was Jewish; meeting her husband and their marriage; the escape of her brothers and father to the United States in 1940; being deported with her husband to Auschwitz in 1944; the deplorable conditions at Auschwitz; the birth and tragic loss of her son in Auschwitz; her work in the hospital at Auschwitz; the death march she endured; her experiences at Ravensbrück concentration camp; being liberated by Russian soldiers; the assistance she received from the Red Cross; her return to Slovakia and her reunion with her husband who was in the hospital in Bratislava; their immigration to the United States in 1949; their move to New York and then Ohio; her husband's medical practices; and the birth of her daughter in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Ray Redel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral History

    Roma Barnes (née Rosenmann), born on March 15, 1930 in Demblin (Deblin), Poland, describes being subjected to a lot of antisemitism in school when she was growing up; the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939; the roundup of Jews; fleeing the roundups several times; her parents, who were caught in the first roundup and sent to Sobibor, where they were killed immediately upon arrival; returning to her town, where she met up with her uncle and stayed with him; her uncle’s preparation of fake passports for all of them to go to Switzerland; watching as her uncle was captured by the Nazis and shot; being caught and sent to a work camp, where she witnessed such atrocities as watching the hanging of her friend; being sent to Chesokova, where she was liberated; and staying in Egland after the war before going to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral History

    Margot Braun (née Feibush), born January 28, 1923 in Berlin, Germany, describes growing up in a suburb of Berlin, where there were very few Jews; being forced to go to a Jewish school in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933; her family’s experience of a "pre-Kristallnacht" in June of 1938, at which time she and her family were awakened and forced to leave their businesses and move in with their relatives; her father’s many siblings, including his brother who was an extremely wealthy businessman in San Francisco, CA; leaving with her family for England in March 1939; the arrest of her parents at the beginning of the war; living with her cousin in a foster home in England; her parents’ eventual release; and her family’s immigration in October 1948 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral History

    Theodore “Ted” Ellington, born in February 1928 in Vienna, Austria, describes being an only child; growing up around antisemitism and being defensive of his Jewish identity; the religious nature of Vienna schools and having to attend Christian educational activities; being also required to go to Jewish education sessions; how there were about eight Jewish students in his elementary school class of 35 children; his father, who made a living selling foodstuffs for livestock; the economic inequality in Vienna and his family’s practice to provide lunch for an unemployed family once a week; the violence that erupted in Vienna in 1934; the Anschluss in 1938; seeing tanks in the streets and army planes flying overhead daily; the Nazi flags and swastikas all over Vienna and the pro-Nazi sentiment of many Austrians; the Nuremberg laws; being forced to attend an all-Jewish school, where Nazi children would gather outside and taunt the Jewish students; the burning of synagogues and the destruction of his grandfather's store; his memories of Nazis entering their family home and beating his father after he asked the officers for paperwork stating that they were allowed to conduct the search; how the officers took virtually everything the family owned, including his cherished stamp collection; his parents’ desire to relocate to the United States; his parents’ decision to enroll Ted in a program that was run by the Quakers that took children from Austria and placed them temporarily with a family in England; going to Belgium in April 1939 to live with his uncle; going to England in May 1939 and staying with a family there until 1946; being treated well by the English family; attending school in London; his parents’ migration to San Francisco, CA in 1940; traveling to New York, NY in 1946 and a train to San Francisco, where he reunited with his parents in May 1946; attending San Francisco City College for one year and then UC Berkeley; earning his degree in accounting in 1950; joining the US Army for two years and then becoming a CPA; getting married in 1965; and his two daughters.

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral History

    Elisabeth Katz (née Rosenthal), born on April 23, 1920 in Fürth, Germany, discusses her childhood in an assimilated Jewish family; her mother's conversion to Judaism and reversion to Lutheranism; the ambivalent position that she felt placed in because of this difference; having to change schools once Hitler rose to power in 1933; attending a Jewish boarding school; entering nursing school in Frankfurt in 1938; her memories of the events surrounding Kristallnacht in November 1938, including the arrest of her father; immigrating to London in late 1938 to work in a hospital; being interned as an enemy alien; returning to London and working as a nurse during the Blitz; visiting her parents in 1947 in Germany, where they had remained throughout the war; her father being one of the three Jews in Furth who survived the Holocaust; immigrating to the United States in 1949; moving to San Francisco, CA; and marrying a fellow refugee.

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral History

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