Oral history interview with Anita Haas

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1990.339.29 | RG Number: RG-50.161.0029

: Normal rate because this records nicely.
: You'll see.
: All right.
: Anita?
: Yes.
: This is going to be your story from leaving Germany.
: Now can you tell me how old you were when you left Germany?
: I was 10 years old.
: So you have some memories then--
: Yes, I have--
: --of being there?
: [INAUDIBLE]
: Well, this is mainly what we'd like to share,
: some of those memories, too.
: Then you were in school.
: On and off, yes.
: I was born in a small town near Kassel.
: We were 900 people in our little town.
: Jews or everybody?
: Everybody was 900.
: Oh.
: And the only Jewish family was my grandmother, my dad,
: and my mother, and us two girls.
: There was no synagogue.
: Well, were you near a larger city
: that you could go to synagogue or meet with other Jewish--
: We were near another city where there were more Jewish people.
: And then we went-- and that city, again,
: was near Kassel, which was a much bigger city.
: And today I think they keep all the archives in Kassel,
: so it's well-known.
: And I went to the regular school.
: I was excused from school on Saturdays.
: I didn't have to go to school.
: And everybody really knew that my grandmother kept kosher.
: How could she keep kosher?
: The meat was sent from Frankfurt.
: Oh, OK.
: And if there was a chicken, then you
: had a schochet kill the chicken.
: And the farmers, if they had two pigeons
: and they wanted to do a good deed,
: they would give her two pigeons.
: She'd kill one pigeon.
: [INAUDIBLE] reason for it, but you don't kill one.
: You kill two.
: So maybe somebody else knows the reason.
: I don't know that.
: [LAUGHS]
: I could look it up, probably.
: And she would order matzah for all her farmer friends,
: so for Passover, the matzah that came
: was exchanged for eggs and milk.
: All those things she would get from the farmers.
: And we had a potato field.
: And we had our orchards, you know.
: Was your grandfather a farmer?
: My grandfather was an antique dealer, and he was the shochet.
: But he died when my mother was 17,
: so that was early in the 1900s and [INAUDIBLE].
: So your grandmother had somebody work the farm, then?
: No, it was just a potato field.
: And I remember going to the field to pick the potatoes
: and burn all the potato greens, you know.
: Oh, yeah, so you don't get a fungus.
: We used to put the potatoes into that burned ashes while we
: were working at the field.
: And then afterwards we had baked potatoes, which was a treat.
: I never [INAUDIBLE].
: Fresh picked baked potatoes.
: Wow.
: Well, see, I was seven.
: I was not quite seven when we left my hometown.
: Because my dad couldn't work anymore at home.
: Nobody was allowed to come to the house.
: He was a shoemaker.
: You mean, because of Hitler?
: Because of being Jewish, right.
: So how were your relationship with the rest--
: it sounded like you had good relations, though.
: Everybody was at good terms.
: But nobody was allowed to show it
: because we had one Nazi sturmbannführer, one
: of the leaders of the Nazi party in this city,
: in the little town.
: And he would forbid people to come and patronize my dad.
: So all of a sudden from him earning a living,
: he couldn't do it anymore.
: So my uncles lived in Hamburg, and a big city was still easier.
: So they called, and they said somebody had died,
: and there was a shoe [? repair ?] store.
: He would have to come right away.
: That was the only future that we had.
: So my dad went to Hamburg and he stayed 1 and 1/2 years alone
: there.
: And we stayed home.
: And of course, then he called us.
: And he had an apartment.
: And we moved to Hamburg.
: Did you have any trouble with the people
: in the village while you were all alone, the women?
: No, not really.
: No.
: I mean, we were two little children.
: I'm sorry.
: Two little children, and everybody
: really honored my grandmother very much
: because everybody liked her.
: My grandfather always helped everybody
: while he was alive, and so on.
: And you didn't have any problems in school,
: like children didn't pick on you or anything?
: Well, see, I was 6 and 1/2.
: No, I don't even remember that anymore, really, the school.
: I only remember that Saturdays, I did not have to go to school.
: And my slate was washed.
: And the sponge was washed.
: And it was hanging outside on the clothesline
: so the sponge would dry out for Monday school again.
: I remember taking, when my grandmother baked
: the a challah for Friday, she would give me
: a piece of dough and an apple.
: And I would take the dough and the apple
: to the bakery on my way to school and give it to the baker.
: And he rolled the apple inside the challah dough.
: And at noontime-- not noon, before noon, there was a break.
: Recess.
: Recess, we all run over to the bakery.
: Everybody picked up something.
: I got my apple.
: You had a dumpling.
: In that dough, right, yes.
: But then we went to Hamburg, and I started going to the Jewish
: school, to the school for daughters of Jews,
: that's how it was called, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
: And that was very short because we only
: lived in Hamburg three years.
: And school was interrupted by Hitler taking away
: the school building.
: And then we had to go to the Talmud Torah, which
: was a boys' school.
: And that was just down the street from us.
: And I went to Talmud Torah also for just a short time.
: Then started the Crystal Night.
: You know, when they destroyed the synagogue and everything.
: And that's when it all just started
: because my dad was picked up and took him to concentration camp
: for six weeks.
: How did he get out?
: We don't know exactly the reasons.
: My mother worked on every embassy she could.
: Haiti, the Embassy of Haiti requested
: that he should be present in order to apply for a visa.
: At the same time, we were waiting for our American quota.
: And at the same time, my aunt was arranging, in Argentina,
: for us to get a visa to come.
: You already had relatives in South America, then?
: And here.
: Oh, and here.
: Here we had more, right.
: And so all these different requests came.
: And I remember vaguely the jokes at home
: that if we all go to Haiti, we wouldn't need any clothes.
: We'd just need a little square or triangular
: pieces to cover our certain parts, and that was it.
: So that was a joke, I guess, when you're nine years old.
: Well, do you remember any feelings?
: Were you frightened?
: Were you aware of the seriousness
: of what was going on, is what I'm trying to get at?
: Well, I knew I wasn't allowed into the ice cream parlor.
: But I also knew that behind the ice cream parlor in the back,
: she would give me an ice cream cone.
: OK?
: So I suppose as a child, you learn to live with it.
: One of my favorite places to eat was
: the automat, where you put the dime in,
: and you got a lox sandwich.
: That was my favorite food that I had.
: And there it says No Jews or Dogs, or No Dogs or Jews.
: I don't know which sequence.
: That hurt me.
: OK?
: And I knew that my dad was in a concentration camp.
: I knew that I wasn't supposed to say certain things.
: But then they never spoke in front of us, really, about--
: How bad things were.
: --problems, I think.
: I know that my grandfather had fled his home
: and came to Hamburg.
: And I remember he had no clothes with him,
: just house shoes and his dirty old vest
: that he was wearing in the house when he had to flee.
: I remember when they picked up my dad.
: And I remember when he came home.
: It was Hanukkah.
: And he had had one night of Hanukkah in Berlin already.
: OK?
: And they had given him candy and dried fruits
: and a cap and a scarf, because they came out
: of the concentration camp.
: He was in Oranienburg.
: That's near Berlin.
: And then he came back to Hamburg and it was still Hanukkah.
: And he never said a word.
: He never spoke about the concentration camp [? at all.
: ?]
: And then, of course, he couldn't work anymore.
: And he came home Hanukkah, 1938.
: He was picked up November.
: It started, I think, the 8th of November, [INAUDIBLE],
: 9th of November.
: You're talking about Kristallnacht?
: [CROSS TALK] Crystal Night, right?
: And he was picked up.
: And he came back sometime towards the end of Hanukkah.
: That was '38.
: And we left Germany on the 21st of April '39.
: During that time, he was sitting at home.
: And he was very good.
: He could do anything he wanted to.
: He made sewing baskets that would open up.
: They had three tiers, and he made
: those for several people, the lady we lived with,
: her daughter, and my mother.
: And then we watched when they packaged all our belongings.
: He didn't watch it, but he was there.
: So you were allowed to take things out?
: Only our linen.
: And there was a man who did the packing.
: You mean from the government?
: The packing was done from a company.
: And there were supervisors who were
: Nazis, who were supposed to watch what was being packed.
: OK?
: We had a Bible which was as big as a table, this big.
: Oh, my.
: And these officers were so involved with the Bible.
: There was one packer who packed all my dad's new tools.
: They were there.
: They didn't know if they could pack them.
: They were allowed to take old tools.
: He was a shoemaker.
: He packed all his new tools, which
: was like accomplishing something, I guess, at the time.
: And that was it.
: I don't know where the Bible went.
: I have no idea.
: This was something that had been in the family for a long time?
: Right.
: I don't know where we got it.
: My grandfather was an antique dealer.
: I have no idea.
: There was some beautiful jewelry that my mother would have liked
: to take, but she couldn't.
: OK?
: And then, of course, back home, the whole room
: was full of antiques.
: And that's all gone.
: You never got any of that back afterwards,
: because I know there were people who
: were able to find some of their things afterwards and get--
: No.
: You didn't?
: The house was sold.
: I don't know who got the things or anything like that.
: My grandmother left Germany in 1940.
: That was wartime.
: She didn't come with you?
: No, my grandmother left from back home to Argentina.
: Why didn't she come with the family?
: They couldn't get a visa for her?
: Everything had to be bought.
: Those visas was a big industry.
: And there was just so much money available.
: We didn't have any money when we left.
: Every penny we had went towards the ship that took us.
: OK?
: My aunt who lived in Frankfurt, she
: had gold coins from her father.
: And when she knew that my grandmother was
: going to finally make it to Argentina,
: she made a sewing, a pincushion.
: They were always filled with sand.
: Right.
: And she told her mother, she said
: I want you to take that to her daughter in Argentina,
: to my grandmother's daughter, my aunt.
: And brought this pincushion to my grandmother,
: beautifully made, my aunt was a seamstress.
: And my grandmother said OK.
: And when my aunt went back to Frankfurt,
: she decided that she wasn't going
: to go on this trip loaded down with a pincushion that
: had nothing but sand in it.
: She figured my aunt really didn't need it
: that badly in Argentina, and she gave it to somebody as a gift.
: Well, when she came to Argentina,
: my aunt said Mother, where's the pincushion that [? Meta ?] wrote
: to me about?
: And my grandmother said I didn't think
: you needed a pincushion for me to schlep the thing full of sand
: from [INAUDIBLE], where we come from,
: to Argentina in the middle of the war was kind of foolish.
: And that was filled with gold coins.
: So they're gone.
: She never got it back?
: No, we don't even know.
: If my aunt had known--
: Oh, what a story!
: Everybody did it.
: My husband's mother threw all the gold coins in the well.
: And a well, after 40 years, gathers a lot of sand.
: There's no way you can [INAUDIBLE].
: She had told her something like, take very good care
: of this or something.
: She made a pincushion.
: She didn't want to burden her down with worries.
: And Grandmother decided why carry a bag full of sand
: to Argentina, which I can see.
: Today, I know I wouldn't do it this way.
: But at the time, I didn't know.
: Yeah.
: How old was your sister?
: She older or younger?
: My sister's five years younger than I am.
: Yes.
: So when we left Hamburg, I was 10 and she was 5.
: Yeah, she was much younger.
: So she just started school in Bolivia.
: And I went to school two years.
: That's it.
: What about the trip?
: Did you have any frightening experiences?
: It was one of the nicest things that I remember.
: Oh, really?
: We were on a German freighter.
: It was a brand new freighter.
: And it only carried 31 or 32 passengers.
: And they all were first class.
: That's where all our money went, because my parents were not
: waiting for any other ship to come along.
: There was room on it.
: Very smart.
: And they took it.
: And we had two single cabins.
: My dad had one and my mother had one.
: There was no other way.
: And in each cabin, they put a children's bed.
: OK?
: When I say a children's bed, it was a crib [INAUDIBLE].
: [LAUGHS]
: So we had to climb into it.
: It had these bars.
: And when I saw it, I was 10.
: So then they told me they would put
: me a berth on top of my mother's bed.
: But that night we had rough water,
: and everything was tumbling.
: And I said [INAUDIBLE] stay in that crib.
: I just felt safer in it.
: But then on the ship, they didn't treat you badly?
: On this ship, we were four children, three Jewish
: and one little Norwegian child.
: She was one-year-old.
: Oh.
: And her dad was going as a whaler to Chile.
: And her mother used me as a babysitter.
: And I watched this little girl, and I
: used to get a tablet of chocolate a day,
: or I used to get something else.
: And everybody was more than nice to us.
: I had the best time I can [INAUDIBLE].
: The ship's doctor would paint our lips with a red grease pen.
: [INAUDIBLE] went swimming upstairs.
: They would feed us.
: We were in the pool at around 10 in the morning, 10, 11 o'clock,
: you get, according to the temperature, either lemonade
: and little sandwiches, or bouillon and sandwiches.
: And so we were just so many passengers on board.
: And so we were inside the pool.
: And they would all feed us sandwiches and lemonade.
: And we had movies just for the three children.
: Then it was a lot better than some.
: The captain called us in one day and he asked what
: do you like to do the most?
: And of course, I liked to draw always.
: So I got a big box with all the drawing utensils.
: And the other little girl, Helga, she got another game.
: And my sister, I think, got a jumping rope.
: Just a little one, that's what she liked, whatever.
: But when we came, there were Germans on board
: who lived in Chile.
: He was a professor.
: And they could not take their fortune out of Germany.
: They were Jewish also.
: No, Germans.
: They were not?
: Germans.
: So what they did was, their daughter, they
: would take trips to Germany.
: And they bought materials, yard goods by the bolts and all
: during the voyage, she and her daughter were sewing.
: They were just sewing seams and pleats and making.
: Because once they went through customs in Chile,
: they were afraid that the Chileans would say hey,
: you're bringing materials in.
: You have to pay.
: So all through the voyage, they were sewing.
: Everything was pleated, whatever,
: just to use the material.
: She gave my mother money for us children.
: OK?
: But she asked her please not to tell us.
: Because she didn't want us to thank her out of
: fear that there was somebody on board that would [INAUDIBLE].
: Report her, yeah.
: That money my mother used to buy food for us
: to travel from Chile to Bolivia on the train.
: Oh, you didn't go to Bolivia?
: You went to Chile.
: Oh, there is no port in Bolivia.
: Right.
: There's no port.
: Right.
: So when our ship came to the port in Arica, Arica is a port,
: maybe it's changed now, but it was one big rock.
: And the boat has to stay outside in the water.
: And they have tenders to take you.
: I started to cry because it meant to say goodbye,
: you know, to everybody on the ship.
: And there was one little man who had come
: on board when the ship docked.
: And he came over to me, and he said
: if you don't shut up right now, I'm going to spank you.
: Give thanks to God that you get off this Nazi ship.
: Well, that was very strong for me.
: Because I don't think that, at 10,
: nobody had done anything to me really.
: And you say your folks hadn't really even told
: you what the problem--
: Well, I knew that they destroyed the synagogue down the street.
: Oh, you did.
: Yeah, there was a fear in me.
: But I still liked some of the people.
: You don't stop liking people because some have done
: certain things to you, right?
: Well, he was a Jewish reporter from a Mexican newspaper.
: And he was reporting because, at the time,
: there was [INAUDIBLE] trying to get news out
: of everybody who came out of Germany [INAUDIBLE].
: We disembarked.
: And we arranged for all our belongings
: to be sent on the same train with us to Bolivia.
: And on that train, I traveled with a Polish family.
: I liked their food better than my mother's food.
: She had bought typical German food, bread, apples and bananas.
: OK?
: No wurst?
: No.
: [LAUGHS]
: I would think that's typically German, the worst.
: Not when you come to a place like Chile or so.
: And the Polish people had bought bread, tomatoes, and onions.
: OK?
: And I wrote this down.
: I sat with them because I loved the bread, the tomatoes,
: and the onions better than--
: I still like bread.
: Bananas.
: Well, I still like bananas and breads.
: It used to be a dinner at home, bread and bananas.
: And when we came to Bolivia, La Paz is, like, in a valley,
: like in a deep pot.
: And all around it are the Andes, the mountains.
: And I looked down into that city.
: And I said I'm not going down there.
: Because I thought the train was going to go straight down.
: And one woman, she still writes to me
: every holiday from New York, she had come up to meet her family.
: And she said no, you don't ride down this way.
: You go around the mountainside.
: So inch by inch, you go down.
: When we got down there, they put us--
: they came from the health service, Jewish--
: Jewish distribution or whatever.
: --Jewish aid [INAUDIBLE].
: And they put us on buses.
: So you remained in La Paz?
: Yes.
: Because Mr. Haas--
: Well, see--
: --went someplace else?
: --my father was a shoemaker.
: Yes.
: All the people who were, like he was,
: businessmen, he had a hardware store,
: and he would travel and sell his merchandise.
: And farmers were not allowed to stay in the city.
: They had to go out into the land and work the farms.
: So the Haases and the Schloss, all those had to go to farms.
: My father could stay in the city because he
: was going to add, I suppose, to the community this way.
: And so we were all put into a home.
: They had all the houses there, or anyhow, big homes.
: And most of the houses are built around a courtyard,
: the inside was like balconies.
: Spanish style.
: Balconies, yeah, and huge, high ceilings.
: And we were 13 people in one room.
: Did you know the other people before?
: You didn't know them before?
: No.
: And we just got a cot with a straw bag on top.
: And then we used to get--
: like, in the morning, there was one toilet.
: And you used to get a cup of tea and a piece of bread,
: a hot roll.
: That was breakfast.
: And for lunch, they gave us some coupons.
: And we could go to a Jewish restaurant.
: It's not a restaurant, like, open on the street.
: It's, like, in a private home.
: They used to call them pension.
: They still call them pension in Europe, too.
: Well, was this something, like, that
: had to do with the synagogue or something like that?
: No, no.
: This was a Jewish family who already
: had established themselves.
: And they were running like a--
: Yeah.
: OK.
: A little business [INAUDIBLE].
: And they would serve us a meal for lunch.
: And the meat that we got was so black
: that many people refused to eat it.
: And everybody would say it's horsemeat.
: So then people didn't eat it at all.
: Well, then later on, we learned that they would never
: kill a horse because a horse is too precious and really too
: expensive.
: So you would never get a piece of horsemeat.
: Horses cannot live in the altitude.
: Oh.
: And so all the horses they have, they're
: treated like something very precious and only for parade.
: What happened is the meat was so poor because there's not
: enough food.
: There's not enough--
: No grazing land for cattle.
: The meat is probably healthier than the marbleized meat today.
: But it was just black, red, dark.
: And then, of course, everybody gets sick.
: Everybody gets sick, high fever, diarrhea--
: Till you get adjusted?
: --till you learn to live with those kind of bugs.
: 14 years, never drank a sip of water out of the faucet.
: If you really wanted water, you boiled it.
: Then you let it settle.
: And then the next morning when it settled, half of it was mud.
: And you just put the upper part [INAUDIBLE].
: If you made soup, of course, you didn't see it.
: It was potatoes, you didn't see the dirt in the water.
: But if you wanted to drink it, you couldn't.
: Well, did they have a school?
: Because their schools would be Spanish?
: Right.
: Was there a special school for you children to go to?
: No, there was a man who opened school,
: and he taught us wherever they let him use the facilities.
: So my first school was in a bordello--
: [LAUGHS]
: --which was used by night.
: And by day time, they allowed him to use the premises.
: OK?
: And he taught you in German, is that it?
: Oh, yes.
: And he also taught us whether you were 10 years old or 14.
: You know, they put all ages together.
: But first what they did, after they put us in a home
: with our parents, then they took us children
: and put us in a children's home for a time being
: to give our parents a chance to find something to do.
: Oh, yes.
: This was near, though, that you saw your parents?
: No, they would come and visit.
: Well, everything there is really near.
: You can walk within 15, 20 minutes any way you want to.
: But everybody was getting sick.
: So they had to take care of the children.
: Well, did this upset you, that you were
: separated from your parents?
: Yeah, I suppose at the beginning.
: But then, I think we always had a good understanding.
: And I suppose my parents were more upset than their children.
: Today I can see that life must have been hell for them
: more than for us.
: We got used that we, right away, had other children to play with.
: And I only had two more years of school,
: of playing, whatever it was.
: Then I worked.
: Well, did your mother have to work then?
: No.
: No?
: My mother kept the house.
: And my dad had a shoe repair store.
: And just keeping house was a full-time job.
: No, women just did not go to work there.
: And the people did pretty good [INAUDIBLE].
: Most people made a good life for themselves.
: Once you earned enough money, then you
: had to return the cards that they lent you,
: and then you were able to buy your own.
: It was just a [? frame, ?] really.
: And talking about my family, all our wooden crates,
: we had, I think, two or three of them,
: well, they became furniture.
: And my dad put shelves inside.
: One was for the China plates and the other one was for linen.
: And I went to the Argentinian school after that.
: And my uniform was a white apron with a blue bow, which
: were the colors of Argentina.
: And every city school adopts a country there.
: And the country is compelled, the other country's
: compelled to come on that country's holiday
: and bring gifts to the school.
: And we as the Argentinian school,
: we had to sing the Argentinian anthem as well
: as the Bolivian anthem.
: And we wore the colors of Argentina.
: And then when there was the 25th of May,
: which is independence day for Argentina [audio out].
: After the Argentina school, I went on to the Jewish school.
: And like I said before, one night we
: were in this nightclub, whatever else you want to call it.
: How old were you?
: 10, 11.
: And you were in a nightclub?
: Well, we didn't know that.
: Then we had school in a restaurant, which opened at 12.
: So we had classes, from 8:00 till 11:0 in the morning.
: And we had classes on the stairway to the restaurant.
: OK?
: It was always to be in a place, you know?
: And then we had classes in the Polish club, which allowed
: us to use their premises.
: And then we had classes in the German synagogue.
: That was the last--
: You never had a regular school.
: Not while I was going.
: And then we had neighbors where we lived.
: We then already could live with my parents.
: And they were Bolivian ladies.
: And they insisted that I should go with them to the school.
: The one was a teacher at the Argentinian school.
: And they liked me and they wanted me to come along.
: And my mother said fine.
: And by then, I spoke already the language.
: So I went to the school with this lady.
: And I liked the school.
: And of course, being a foreigner, in the school,
: they treated us very, very nicely.
: OK?
: Were you the only girl?
: Were there other little refugee girls?
: What I'm saying was--
: I was the first one to go, and then a few more girls came.
: OK?
: I think we had four Jewish girls in the Escuela Argentina.
: And the principal, the lady who was the principal, she loved us.
: Because to her, we were the foreigners,
: we were the gringos, the greenhorns.
: And we could do no wrong.
: And when we came home, when we came back to school at noon,
: at 12 o'clock, we'd go home for lunch.
: OK?
: And then we had to be back in school by 2:00.
: So on the way to school, of course, everybody was eating,
: and we would eat oranges.
: And when we came, the principal was standing in the door.
: And everybody kisses her.
: When she would smell oranges on my mouth,
: she would say I'm disappointed in you because you are not
: supposed to do that.
: You don't do what the Indians do.
: You don't eat on the street.
: A lady doesn't do that.
: Oh.
: It was very important for us really to please her.
: And I was the only one, I suppose,
: in my class who could write without mistakes in Spanish.
: And most of the girls were much older than I
: because they never passed school,
: or they didn't follow it up, and they came back to school.
: There was no need to go to school, OK?
: There was no must, like you have to go [? here. ?]
: And across the school from us, across from us,
: there was a military garrison where there
: were a lot of young soldiers.
: And these girls were flirting with the soldiers
: through the little windows upstairs.
: They would throw messages.
: And they asked me, because my handwriting was nice,
: to send messages.
: And I was 11 years old.
: And I wanted to be part of them.
: I wanted to be included in everything.
: So I would write the messages.
: And they would put hair barrettes onto the message
: and throw it over.
: And then one little soldier would run up and pick it up.
: And one day the principal picked it up.
: And she knew just who had written the message.
: And she made me feel, I mean, terrible.
: She said my little Jewish girl, why do you do things like that?
: Those are Indians.
: They are not in your class.
: And she made me feel so bad.
: Did she know that the other girls
: were putting you up to this?
: Oh, yes, of course, afterwards.
: But she felt, still, I wasn't supposed to do things like that.
: Was this a Catholic school?
: They had Catholic classes.
: They had.
: But this was not nuns?
: This was not nuns running--
: Oh, no.
: These are city schools.
: There is no fee.
: You don't have to pay for them.
: How do you call it?
: Well, OK.
: No, I was asking because I have a friend from Colombia,
: and she went to school.
: There were Catholic schools.
: Oh, yeah.
: All the others are paid Catholic schools.
: And the nuns ran the school.
: OK.
: Well, we had--
: She said that's the way the schools were, except for the--
: If you had money to go to them.
: We didn't have money to go to a Catholic school
: or any other school, you know, at the time.
: But then we had a Jewish school, and every kid
: went to the Jewish school.
: And the way things are right now,
: the Jewish school is one of their top schools,
: only there are no Jewish children in there
: because there aren't any left at this point.
: But it's still called the Escuela Israelita,
: which means the Israeli school.
: OK?
: It's still in existence.
: This is in La Paz?
: Right.
: The Jewish school then built their own later on,
: when everybody had money to help out, you know?
: At the beginning, we didn't have any money.
: My white apron, my school uniform,
: was made out of bed sheets that we had brought from Germany.
: Well, at the Jewish school, did they teach religion there?
: Did you get sort of like what you got Talmud Torah?
: Well, I went to religious classes after my school.
: In the Escuela Argentina where I went,
: there was a priest who came in the mornings
: to give them Catholic teachings.
: Did you have to go to that?
: No.
: He was a German.
: And before he started, we always had a talk.
: He was very nice to me.
: And we always just schmoozed a little bit.
: But I didn't have to attend it, no, never anything like that.
: I would go with my friends.
: They would not pass a church without going in.
: And I would go with them to the church,
: and wait till they finished saying their prayer,
: and crossed themselves, and kneeled.
: And then when we went home.
: So being exposed to all those things
: doesn't mean you're going to adopt them.
: No, no, that wasn't-- no, no.
: But it was just that so often the children,
: if there would be Jewish children
: in the Catholic schools, they would
: try to convert the children.
: The nuns would.
: Most of our Catholic schools, I don't
: think there was one Jewish child in parochial schools.
: They were all uniformed.
: They were all upper class people, the rich people.
: In Bolivia, you have the rich and the poor.
: I went to the school where the poor
: went, the Indians, and so on.
: And my sister then went to the real Jewish school, which
: was also in the synagogue.
: You know?
: Mhm.
: But when I was 13, I started to work.
: So I did not go on to school anymore after that.
: So you didn't get what we would call a high school
: education, then?
: I didn't even get a full-time primary education.
: Because from my hometown, I went to Hamburg.
: In Hamburg, they took the school away.
: Everything started to go wrong.
: And then coming to Bolivia, we did not
: learn what you learn here.
: We learned from life, which I still
: feel is a much better teacher than what some classrooms teach.
: When you were in Germany, was your family Orthodox,
: or were they reform, or were they not religious at all?
: My parents, no.
: Yes.
: My grandparents all were Orthodox.
: Yes.
: Yes.
: My grandmother kept kosher, my grandmother
: from my mother's side.
: And my father's parents, my grandfather
: was also a [? schochet. ?]
: Oh, yes, and you mentioned--
: [INTERPOSING VOICES]
: Oh, both grandparents were [? shochet. ?]
: But the other grandfather, I didn't
: know from my mother's side.
: But my father's dad, he was very well-liked in his community.
: He was a very fine person.
: My grandmother was an angel.
: But she died in '34.
: She was a wonderful person.
: And then when the Nazis came around,
: everything turned against my grandfather.
: He had to flee as well.
: And when my son went back to my hometown,
: he went back to where my father was born.
: And everybody told him how marvelous my grandfather was.
: There were still people there that remembered him?
: Oh, yes.
: There's still people.
: There are still people my father-in-law's age around.
: Sure.
: Sure.
: I mean, they don't remember the times.
: Many of them have lost track of what really has happened.
: Between my son, my husband, and my father-in-law,
: many people in my husband's hometown
: forgot that there was a third person, that my husband was
: in the middle.
: For whatever reason, they thought
: there was my father-in-law and then our son.
: They just it's like they wanted to wish the time
: in between away or something.
: They kept calling Herbie my dad's name.
: And they couldn't understand that my husband was still there,
: you know?
: Like, they just wanted to forget what was in between.
: Did you ever go back?
: No, no, no.
: My children have been to Germany.
: I have nobody there.
: So I never go.
: Why did you leave Bolivia and come to the United States?
: Why?
: Because it was a game we started.
: We had friends that had come from the Russian zone in Europe.
: They were Czechoslovakia.
: And they came to their family in Bolivia.
: And we became friends with them.
: They had two little girls.
: And he worked in the brewery.
: And we would see them on weekends and all that.
: And they were trying to emigrate to America.
: And she would say wouldn't it be nice if all of us could go
: and then we could always meet, and all that.
: We didn't know what America meant.
: Nobody ever took time out to think about America, really.
: Is that right?
: [INAUDIBLE] by my generation.
: Yes.
: And so when she kept saying that, we said,
: well, maybe we could go to America.
: And then we had a revolution.
: They always do, don't they?
: [LAUGHS]
: But we had a bad one, really bad.
: They killed--
: What year was this around?
: My son was born in '52, in 1952.
: And April the 9th was the revolution.
: My son was born March the 16th.
: And he was a baby.
: And there was shooting.
: It was really bad.
: They had so many people killed.
: You never know who is being killed
: because you don't know where the people are laying around
: on the mountainside.
: Everybody just kills anybody.
: This was really bad.
: And they killed two Jewish men on our street.
: Not because they were Jewish, because one
: was running for the other and they were caught in the fire.
: That was it.
: It was just, you know--
: It wasn't antisemitism was not connected with the revolution?
: It had nothing to do with that the two
: men happened to be Jewish.
: Only when it's somebody Jewish, it gets closer, and all that.
: It was Pesach.
: And we had matzah.
: We never ate matzah because we couldn't afford it.
: For all of us, OK?
: Matzah was very expensive.
: Now, the irony was that we paid a lot of money for our matzah.
: And we bought it only for our parents,
: because we wanted him to continue
: eating matzah on Pesach.
: And we just tried not to eat anything,
: seeing that it wasn't Pesach day.
: But the matzah, the packages said a gift
: from the people of the United States of America.
: Well, the corruption in Bolivia--
: And we paid for that matzah, you know?
: And wherever the corruption, somewhere along the way,
: it had to cost a lot of money.
: Well, that was Passover.
: And I had the matzah.
: And my neighbors next door had four or five children,
: Catholic people.
: So I sent matzah over.
: Because I knew nobody had any food at all.
: So then she sent rice cooked in milk [INAUDIBLE] with cinnamon.
: And so we ate rice.
: And it was really good.
: Then afterwards I realized that wasn't a Pesach thing,
: but it didn't matter.
: But if you're Sephardic, it's all right.
: Yeah.
: [INAUDIBLE]
: [LAUGHS]
: I never knew that till, like, last year.
: Because then we argued.
: And I said, no, you're not allowed to eat [INAUDIBLE].
: Ashkenazi, it's not allowed.
: But Sephardic, it is.
: Anyhow, the Jewish law is to keep yourself alive.
: You're allowed to do anything.
: The rabbi told, when my father was in camp, in concentration
: camp, people who were serving kashrut,
: he told them you must eat.
: And many of them wouldn't.
: And they were found just dead.
: But Jewish law is the most important
: is you try to keep alive.
: Right.
: Well, at the time, it wasn't that terrible, you know.
: So, anyhow, because of my husband's profession
: at the time and our age, we got our visa very fast.
: And we didn't figure on that.
: It was so quick.
: And it was in three months.
: We had to sell what we had and come to America.
: And that's how it really started,
: more than anything was [CROSS TALK]--
: So it was like the revolution sort--
: I think I better close the door.
: Because her voice will be picked up on here.
: She doesn't know.
: I wasn't expecting [INAUDIBLE].
: But that sort of gave you the impetus,
: like, you were happy to leave.
: It sounded like a good thing.
: We had enough of revolution.
: And let's go about it and do it.
: And of course, we expected it to take
: as long as it took our friends.
: We had our papers.
: And they were still working at it, you know?
: So if you want to turn that off a minute?
: [INAUDIBLE] I forget where.
: OK, stop.
: [INAUDIBLE]
: Oh, shoot.
: [CLICKING]
: Did you feel that there were any special problems
: that you had when you came to America, where
: you were already married?
: Oh, yeah.
: We had two little boys.
: Oh, you had both children by then?
: OK.
: And as far as your adjustment in any way or anything
: that you had any special problems
: as a child of a survivor?
: No.
: Because I don't think we ever looked at ourselves
: as children of survivors from Germany.
: I think that's coming out more today than it did at the time.
: We were in Bolivia.
: We belonged to the Zionist group because that
: was all we could look towards, was to one day go to Palestine.
: OK?
: And we went to the [INAUDIBLE], to the meetings,
: and we learned the songs, and we collected money
: for Keren Kayemet.
: And we got awards for collecting the most money.
: And we had people coming from Israel
: who told us, from Palestine, it wasn't Israel.
: Yes.
: And so all we could think of that we were going to Palestine.
: And then, in 1948, most of us got married, really.
: We were the first ones in our group to get married.
: And then it started.
: And then once we got married different things took over.
: Because then we had a baby.
: After a year, we had a family.
: We had to provide more, or better,
: and try and make a life there.
: Right.
: We married in '48.
: Israel became independent in '48.
: And that started a whole new thing there,
: which was fighting for Israel.
: Our boys, our men, at the time, they were still boys,
: they were all in their 20s, they would ride like shotgun,
: without guns by night to protect the Jewish stores.
: Because we had the third generation Arabs in La Paz.
: They're all good friends of ours.
: And we are still friends.
: But when Israel became independent,
: the Lebanese descendants started to destroy Jewish stores,
: or they started to interfere with the showing of a newsreel.
: Every movie was preceded by the newsreel.
: OK?
: And they couldn't show these newsreels.
: Then if the men would have a congregational meeting or so,
: it was unwise to go home alone because somebody might
: be waiting for you and beat you up, a Nazi group, or even
: the Arabs.
: The old Arabs, the ones who came around 1900
: and their children and their children,
: OK, those were our generation.
: We were good friends.
: We're still good friends.
: When I go back today, I still have friends
: among the Lebanese Arabs.
: We lived with them.
: I lived with the Lebanese Arabs for 14 years in La Paz.
: But as a group, they became dangerous,
: and they started to hit back at us because Palestine
: became Israel.
: Well, they must have a PLO force down there, then?
: No, it was the Sons of Lebanon.
: It was a group.
: They had their fun.
: They had their good times.
: Really, it sounds paradox, because they were all
: nice people.
: But when this all happened, and the young people
: started breaking windows, breaking the glass, you know.
: My father was beaten one night when he came from a meeting.
: His nose was broken.
: Well, didn't the police interfere?
: They didn't?
: No, the police there are just as good as not having any police.
: There's nothing.
: There really is no--
: Protection, you didn't have any protection?
: --somebody, the higher ups, really, who can help you.
: It's so corrupted that you must have friends on all levels.
: OK?
: And every time the government gets overthrown, so
: do your friends get kicked out.
: So you have to try and have good friends
: with every new government, really.
: Because my husband was arrested because his boss wasn't in,
: and he was the second one in command.
: They arrested him on a charge of there
: was a complaint against his boss.
: And the police was not allowed to come into the machine shop
: where he worked, so they called him out.
: But he didn't know what they wanted.
: So since his boss wasn't there, they arrested him.
: He had nothing to do with it?
: No, there was no telephone.
: And nobody knew that he wasn't my husband yet.
: He was my boyfriend.
: But nobody knew he was arrested.
: So here he was in a jail cell in the municipal building.
: And a Jewish man who carried a lot of power with the people
: there walked through.
: And my husband saw him and he called to him.
: He said, Mr. [? Ufer, ?] please, can you get me out of here?
: And he said what's the matter, boy?
: Why are you in here?
: And he got him out.
: And then he came to my house.
: And he said I just have to wash up.
: So he went to the kitchen to wash up.
: And then he came and he told us they arrested him.
: They put him with all these--
: kind of the petty criminal, no murderers, anybody.
: But it's dirty.
: It's filthy.
: There are lice and everything.
: And you are in a hole and nobody knows you're in there.
: That's the worst thing--
: Yeah.
: --that we could have gone out searching for him
: and wouldn't have known.
: We wouldn't have known.
: His father would have thought he was in my house.
: I would have probably thought he's not coming to my house
: tonight.
: And he could have been a whole night in jail
: and nobody would have known.
: But I guess I'm getting off the subject.
: I don't even know anymore.
: Well, that's OK.
: [INTERPOSING VOICES]
: We're just talking about the--
: Coming here, we made a promise.
: We said we're leaving La Paz never to return.
: I meant to live there.
: Because we were going to America.
: And we were going to any job we had to do.
: But we were not going back to La Paz.
: That was the one thing we promised each other.
: Well, I was ready to go back to La Paz
: after my first week in my own apartment.
: Oh, why?
: I opened my bed.
: And I found a big black cockroach,
: one of those big black things.
: And I said that's it.
: I'm going back to La Paz.
: Oh, I know you had bugs in La Paz.
: No.
: But they had lice and everything.
: But nothing ever had--
: when you live on the altitude, you're not bothered by bugs.
: Because the ultraviolet rays from the sun,
: they kill all that.
: Thank God for it.
: Because if not, the city wouldn't exist.
: There's so much filth, the urine on the streets, the excretion.
: Oh, really?
: Yeah.
: Well, we had bathrooms, toilets.
: But the Indians sit on the street or on the mountain side.
: And if you had flies, they'd go all over.
: You would have epidemics of disease.
: So thank God for the sun rays that protect you, really.
: Well, is that the worst thing that happened to you here?
: That bug?
: That was terrible.
: But I also found out you cannot run away, really,
: from your destiny.
: Here I wanted my children to live in peace and quiet.
: I didn't want to hear any more revolution.
: So what happened?
: Riots at UC, everything becomes magnified here,
: drug problems, riots at UC, things
: that we figured we had everything behind us
: with revolutions, no more problems.
: On the airplane, I was sick from Bolivia to Miami I was sick.
: OK?
: I couldn't take care of my children.
: It's just a mental thing.
: I was throwing up from beginning to the end.
: I had so much fear that they would bring us
: back or something,
: There was a little boy on the airplane
: running around all excited.
: He was telling me he's going to America.
: And he told me that everything in America
: is plastic, even their money.
: It was so funny.
: That's 27 years ago, 28 years ago.
: He knew something at the time.
: [LAUGHS]
: Brilliant child.
: He knew something at that time.
: It's really funny.
: That is funny.
: Now, when we came here, it was all getting and coming to--
: So what year was this?
: Is in the '50s?
: '53.
: '53.
: Yeah.
: My son Raul was one-year-old, and Herbie was just
: going to be four.
: And he went to Beth Am school.
: And he was five years old and he went all by himself to Beth Am,
: you know?
: But they learned English rather fast.
: At the beginning, it was nice to be
: able to talk to them in Spanish and give them
: all the comment in Spanish, don't do this, don't do that.
: And then they forgot Spanish.
: Then they went to school.
: And it's a [INAUDIBLE] school.
: And we survived.
: We survived on ourselves.
: Did your sister come, too?
: My sister came exactly one year after us.
: She went to New York, which is a big mistake to go to New York.
: I was glad we didn't come to New York
: first because most of these people stayed in New York.
: Did you know somebody in Cincinnati?
: Was that the reason you came to Cincinnati?
: My husband's cousin was here.
: And since we knew her from Bolivia,
: coming with two children and a parent,
: we felt maybe she could be of more help to us
: than my uncles who knew me as a little child.
: So you came direct.
: From Bolivia, you came directly to Cincinnati?
: Cincinnati, right.
: We picked it.
: And we didn't even know that Cincinnati was a good town
: for my husband's profession.
: Happens, yeah.
: We also didn't know that the Korean War would interfere
: with him getting employment.
: If he had known all these things,
: that he couldn't be employed as an alien,
: he can't work on government contracts--
: and in his profession, everything
: was government contract-- we would have never come.
: So it's good sometimes not to know everything.
: We wouldn't have come.
: It's just as simple as that.
: Everyone we knew, every American friend we had over there,
: we had a lot of--
: I worked in a men's tailor shop--
: we had a lot of Americans we worked for.
: They would always tell us, your husband
: has the best profession It's no problem.
: So going by that, we never thought
: about the war and the reason that he might not
: get a job, more or less.
: Well, did the agencies in Cincinnati help you then?
: At the time when we came, he went from one company
: to the other trying to find a job.
: And he did this on his own.
: But then we found out that none of them
: could hire him because they were all government contracts, work
: that they were doing.
: So then through the Jewish vocational,
: he got a job in a small machine shop who was not
: working for the government.
: Yes.
: And he worked.
: That was Ben Lippert was the owner and his son-in-law Ed
: Stern, who had this machine shop, and it didn't last long.
: So he probably worked with them, like, three years.
: So he got a good start anyhow that way, from the agency?
: Yes.
: Well, it was a job.
: That's the worst thing, is for a man not [? to have ?] a job,
: really.
: And it was even worse, my father-in-law,
: who has no profession, he worked the next day.
: And my husband was a profession and with all that vision
: that he was going to get a job, he couldn't get one.
: So then what happened after that shop folded?
: They folded.
: And the man who was their salesman
: bought his own shop in Mount Healthy kept calling my husband,
: come work for me.
: But he stayed until the Lipperts completely
: closed up because they never laid him off.
: They never let him go.
: They kept him all the way down to 11 men.
: And out of allegiance to them, he
: said I'm staying with them until they closer their doors.
: Then he went with his boss from today.
: So there's still five, four or five
: guys that are working together there from the beginning
: that he started here.
: So he's been on the same job for [INAUDIBLE].
: But we were not spoiled.
: OK?
: And anything I found here was added to the pleasure, let's
: put it this way.
: I did miss a maid.
: OK?
: Because over there you can have a maid for each room.
: Right.
: And there were many times when I'd sit there
: and I'd just call for her, you know.
: She didn't show up.
: And then when I had once a woman to clean my house,
: somebody told me, you can have someone.
: And I had to serve her her lunch.
: And I had to pay her, like, $7 or $8 for the day.
: And what she did in that day I would have done in one hour.
: And my husband was making $50 a week, $47, I think.
: I said, that's it.
: I'm not going to have anybody doing my work for me anymore.
: That's it.
: At the beginning, you changed the money value
: into the value you're used to.
: Yeah.
: [INAUDIBLE]

: Her children, although they were pretty young
: when the kids came here.
: There-- if they had any problems maybe
: later in school or anything as foreign children
: and as children of foreign parents or?
: Never.
: They never did?
: Never.
: No, I think it's probably also an attitude.
: I don't think we ever took the attitude that there
: should be a problem with stuff.
: The only one time my oldest son, they
: told me he had a speech defect.
: And they asked me to come to school.
: I had to come to school, and I was very upset
: because I didn't know he had a speech defect.
: And when I came and I met the teacher that called me,
: she talked to me and she said, what language do you speak?
: And I said German and Spanish.
: She said, I don't think your child has a speech defect.
: I think he's just picking up words from you and instead
: of saying like "the," the child has something like he says
: "der," because that's what I do.
: And they figured, well, that poor child--
: Spanish.
: And I also use certain words, and he used those words.
: I used them ever since they were little.
: And if they had hurt themselves, I'd say,
: let's put a little Spucke on it, which is spit.
: You know, let's clean it up with a little Spucke.
: So--
: I don't know that word.
: So Spucke just stayed in my vocabulary,
: and my son picked it up.
: And if a kid fell, he'd say, don't worry.
: Just put some Spucke on it.
: But the other kids just didn't know what Spucke was.
: And there are lots of words like blanket.
: I used the German word for blanket
: too when I spoke to them.
: And he didn't know there was a word blanket when he was
: four years old, five years old.
: He thought the word was Decke.
: You know?
: And kids just didn't understand him.
: I guess grownups didn't understand him either.
: So--
: Well, did he feel that that made him different or something?
: No.
: The kids didn't make fun of him?
: He just took it for granted.
: The teacher just felt that which I
: couldn't pronounce these words.
: But the other kids didn't make fun of him
: or anything like that?
: Oh, no, no.
: In fact, then he graduated with a major in English,
: so it wasn't that bad.
: You know?
: Well, you know sometimes kids do have problems, not in the sense
: that terrible problems like I mean they get in trouble.
: That's not the kind.
: But I mean like emotional within themselves
: in dealing with two worlds in the sense
: that they're living in one kind of a world,
: and yet their parents are from another world
: and bringing something else.
: I know your husband told me that you're
: friends with Stuart Susskind.
: And Stuart told us this when we were talking about--
: he came and spoke to us once when
: we were preparing to do this.
: And he is a child of a survivor, as we say, his parents.
: And he told us something like that when he was younger
: and he remembers being embarrassed sometimes
: if kids would come to the house from school
: and his parents acted differently or spoke
: with the accent, and that that would embarrass him when he was
: young, because he knew that these kids who came there,
: that their parents were not like that
: and that perhaps his parents manners, which were a lot more
: European and more reserved perhaps than American manners,
: or more casual and so on, and he felt that the kids would think
: his parents were weird or something like that.
: And he's thinking back and he's saying, well,
: you know how great his parents all were.
: But at the time when he was younger,
: he felt it bothered him, and he wouldn't bring-- he'd think,
: well, I'm not going to bring the kids home because--
: No, we didn't have that.
: We really never-- I don't ever think
: that our kids were embarrassed.
: In fact, they took pride, first of all, in having the grandpa--
: everybody calls him Opa.
: I mean, nobody knows him by any other name.
: And in fact, children have asked me
: how come they have two daddies?
: Oh, wow.
: When we lived in Avondale, there's
: one boy asked me once, how come your children have two daddies?
: But I think my kids always took pride in really that maybe we
: were a little bit different.
: I know that they have warned their friends, if you don't
: want to eat, you better don't come
: to my house, things like that.
: But we've had kids coming through here, all kind of kids
: from all over.
: Well, that's very interesting.
: Because this is different than what you hear from some others.
: Yeah, no.
: That's interesting.
: I don't think the immigration, what
: it did to my parents must have been really bad.
: Oh, your parents came too?
: But no.
: I mean when they came visiting--
: Oh, when they came to Bolivia.
: Bolivia.
: Yes, I would think so.
: Yes.
: My parents came here too.
: They did?
: Yes, we brought them over after nine months.
: We had promised them.
: I said, we bring you--
: as soon as we can, we bring you to America.
: They didn't believe that we would ever leave Bolivia.
: They really thought we were just playing
: a game, which at the beginning it sounded
: like we were doing that.
: Well, were they worried or frightened
: that you were leaving?
: Our parents?
: Our parents were too attached to us, which today I
: have learned from that.
: I have learned that I have to have my own life.
: I cannot make my life around my children.
: That's what my parents did.
: That's the European parent or German parent or maybe
: Polish parent.
: Yes, but OK.
: But it's not only that.
: It was the whole experience they went through.
: Don't you think?
: And you know what they went through
: was not a normal thing for people to go to,
: and the fear of perhaps losing your children.
: Back home, the normal thing was also for everybody to stay home.
: My father-in-law-- my father-in-law-- my grandfather
: would not speak to his youngest son when he
: decided he was leaving Germany.
: My grandfather was very uptight, very upset
: about that, that that my uncle was going to leave his Germany.
: You know?
: I'm sure he changed late on his attitude about that,
: but then it was too late for my grandfather.
: But my parents did not make--
: they were friendly with people, but they did not make friends
: just for themselves.
: It was-- when I married, my parents
: were right there with me.
: They were with us every Sunday, every holiday all the time.
: Which is fine, but it's too much at times.
: And as a child, you feel bad because you know you're
: leaving your parents all alone.
: And so I promised my mother when I get to America,
: we'll do the best we can.
: And over there, we had a house, which we sold.
: We got $2,000 for it.
: That was our whole house.
: And here you don't get much for $2,000.
: The whole family lived in that, you know?
: And here it wasn't a down payment.
: Exactly, right.
: So there were some things that were difficult
: because we gave up a lot.
: A way of life.
: In Tangibles I had everything that you could possibly get,
: even if the electric icebox didn't work most of the time
: because you had no electricity.
: In summertime, they cut your electricity during the day.
: And they give it back to you at 7:00 at night.
: So during the day, your icebox doesn't work.
: All right.
: So it's not good for anything.
: But I had it.
: It was available.
: Money was losing its value every day from hour to hour.
: So if you had some money, you bought something for it.
: You bought rolls of linoleum.
: You bought dishes from England.
: You just bought things to hold on to whatever little money
: you had.
: Did they allow you to take things
: with you when you left Bolivia?
: We didn't bring any of that, no.
: The only stupid thing we did, we brought nine German feather beds
: to Cincinnati, and we arrived in May.
: But it gets cold.
: Yeah, but I got rid of my feather bed.
: I don't like feathers anymore at all.
: That's probably something that stuck with me.
: I can't stand feathers.
: Did your parents adjust all right here?
: For my mother, it probably was the nicest four years
: of her life.
: She worked.
: She worked at the Jewish Hospital.
: Oh.
: And earned money.
: Oh.
: And she ate there, and she went on a diet.
: And she--
: Met a lot of people.
: --worked good and she felt good.
: She'd take a Sunday pass for--
: I don't know how much it cost at the time.
: And she'd ride the bus all Sunday.
: She knew every corner of Cincinnati.
: She could read the paper.
: Her English wasn't good, but she could read perfect.
: And she knew the city.
: Anybody who would have been lost she
: would have found a way for them.
: And she died of cancer.
: And my dad was a shoemaker.
: He had his shoe shop then later on in St. Bernard.
: Oh, he did?
: Yeah.
: He died 12--
: I think it's 12 years or so ago.
: But for my mother, now she had her grandchildren.
: And for-- I can't remember what she earned, but there
: used to be the drugstore in Avondale,
: King's Drugstore on the corner you
: of Rockdale and Reading Road.
: And you could buy--
: for $0.39 they had little things, clothing, something
: for the children, little tops.
: For $1 you could buy two or three items.
: And she'd always enjoy that, just go shopping,
: buy something for the kids.
: And she was fascinated by the pressurized things
: that finally one day I was shopping,
: and she saw the top of my shopping cart.
: And she said, oh, that's the whipped cream.
: And she put it on her hand.
: It was shaving cream.
: But she was just fascinated by that stuff.
: So it turned out all right.
: Yeah.
: I mean, sure, she was very sick, but she
: got all the care she could get.
: Everybody was nice to her.
: And would have been nice if she's still around.
: Yeah.
: Yeah.
: Kids-- the kids really--
: my kids adored my parents.
: My parents never had any money, but my kids loved them the same,
: just the same.
: And so--
: How-- she only lived here four years then?
: My mom was 54 when she died, yes.
: Just been married 30 years.
: Mhm.
: At the time.
: She liked it here very much.
: She really enjoyed it.
: Well, that's good.
: That's good.
: I think Bolivia was very difficult. But we were so young.
: We didn't feel it so bad.
: We could go outside and play, you know?
: For her, she'd go to the market.
: She couldn't speak the language.
: She'd go with a piece of paper and a pencil,
: and she was going to write down everything.
: She never learned Spanish?
: She did.
: But the Indian woman doesn't read or write or even
: speak Spanish.
: So right there you have a problem.
: Here was my mother with her dictionary, her book,
: and her pencil, very proper.
: And the Indian woman just thought she was crazy.
: What does she want with paper and pencil for her?
: So you had to go, and you had to use your hands and use the money
: and then bargain and make your way this way.
: The Indians speak a dialect you know?
: But it's-- my first love--
: this is my home here.
: But if I have a choice, it's always been let's visit Bolivia,
: you know?
: My friends are there.
: It's a different friendship that I have there
: than I have with my friends here.
: We were in September over Rosh Hashanah.
: We were in Rio de Janeiro.
: And I met a friend that we had lost the year we got married.
: He disappeared.
: And we met him one night as we walked out of a hotel.
: There was about 18 of us, all old friends
: or the children of friends.
: You mean from Bolivia?
: People from-- you met together with people from Bolivia?
: Yeah, but they came from Colombia now.
: And so we went to a wedding.
: And as we walked out, we were all
: speaking either Spanish or German.
: I was speaking German with my friend's oldest
: brother who was visiting.
: And this man approached us.
: And he says, ah, you're all German.
: And my friend says, no, we are not German.
: We are Jews.
: And the other man said, I'm Jewish too.
: You know, so that softened it.
: And he said, but how come you speak German?
: And so my friend Julio said, because you speak German
: doesn't mean you are a German.
: We are from all over.
: Like his nephews and nieces were from Colombia, he said.
: My friend's here from America.
: And I was born in Vienna, and I lived in Bolivia.
: And this fellow says, oh, I used to live there too.
: And I said, where did you live?
: And he said, in La Paz.
: And I knew.
: I looked at those eyes and I said, what's your name?
: And he says Jacobowitz.
: I said, are you Billy?
: And he looks at me like I was crazy.
: And he says yes.
: And I said, I'm Anita.
: And he didn't know who I was.
: And I yelled, everybody come.
: I was just trembling.
: And I said, look who I found.
: This is Billy Jacobowitz.
: And the poor guy was--
: he didn't know what to make of it.
: And I said, where are you?
: He said, I'm in this hotel for tonight, one more night.
: And I live in Argentina.
: And he calls his wife from the other side.
: It was 1:30 in the morning.
: And he calls her and introduces her,
: but he really couldn't place us.
: It's been--
: Well, how old was when he disappeared?
: Like my husband, 21.
: And he didn't remember?
: He left.
: He left, and he made a different life for himself.
: And we got married.
: And slowly we had different friendship circles.
: And all of a sudden, we said, where's Billy?
: Nobody knew.
: So a lot of young people had gone back
: to Berlin, some that came from there.
: Some had joined the communists.
: So then we figured, well, just as well leave it alone.
: If he was a communist, we didn't want to have anything
: to do with him.
: And we had to lead our own lives.
: So here we ran into him.
: In a matter of five minutes a little later
: or a little earlier, we would not
: have met him, or one more day.
: And we had a dinner planned the next night in this hotel.
: So we quickly told him we had to leave
: because we had three cars waiting for us to take us home.
: And the next morning when I tried to reach him, he was gone.
: But my friend Julio had reached him
: and told him we'll be upstairs tonight for dinner.
: Come upstairs.
: So when he came-- well, I left him
: a message at the concierge downstairs too, telling him
: we were upstairs.
: And he came up with his wife, and she said he was putting us
: all in certain places, trying to get his [NON-ENGLISH] back.
: And our host and hostess that night,
: the parents of some friends of mine
: who gave their daughter a birthday party,
: and they know me when I was 10.
: And of course, when Billy comes in, they said,
: using the German word "boy," everybody always called him boy,
: Junge, Mr. Finkelstein says, but boy, he said,
: you came on the same ship with us.
: So there was more for him to digest.
: And he's fine.
: He's a grandfather.
: He works for a travel bureau.
: His wife is very Jewish and very, very--
: She was not a Bolivian.
: Because she is from Argentina.
: Yeah.
: He met her in Tucuman.
: That's where he's been living 32 years.
: So you had a grand reunion.
: It was just-- we couldn't believe it.
: Unbelievable.
: Yeah, we couldn't believe it.
: And my girlfriend whose parents were giving the party,
: she says to him, but Billy, remember you took me home after
: [NON-ENGLISH] after the meetings?
: And he said, did I behave myself?
: [LAUGHTER]
: I mean, here we are, old people, and that used to be so long ago.
: But I wrote to him.
: He wrote back to me.
: And so it's another link from the past.
: I just couldn't believe it.
: But it's happened to me many times.
: We've sat in a sidewalk cafe and I ran into old friends.
: And that's happened all over the world.
: That's important because it's a part of your life.
: There are some all over the world, you know?
: Some where we run into them in New York.
: We have them at this, or we have them,
: because they're all immigrants.
: For whatever reason, they haven't stopped yet.
: They're still going.
: Some come here.
: Some go there.
: But I think I'm very happy with my life.
: And there are days when you feel gloomy,
: when you raise three children and you're cooped up at home.
: There are days when you say, I don't want to do that anymore.
: But today, I'm--
: You're glad you came.
: I've always been happy with what I did.
: Even you have to work at it.
: Nothing comes to you already wrapped up, you know?
: You just have to do it yourself.
: But then both of us, we are not worried about work.
: We've lived on so little.
: We have not been to concentration camps.
: Thank God for that.
: But the way we lived at the beginning,
: it wasn't a bed of roses either.
: Pretty rough.
: Very bad.
: When we're on our own.
: We had one room, three beds.
: My sister and I, we shared one bed,
: and we never thought about it.
: And today, I see kids can play in one room, you know?
: And we had one room.
: That was kitchen, living room, bedroom, everything right there.
: And cooked on a kerosene cooker like these Coleman
: cookers that you have to pump.
: And you had to cook your meat 24 hours because it's
: tough from the altitude.
: It doesn't get down as quickly.
: Or potatoes have to boil two hours before they're ready,
: and then you have just one little cooker.
: You boil your potatoes, let's say, at 9:00 in the morning.
: They get put on, and when they're almost done,
: you pour the water out.
: You wrap them in old newspaper, and you put them in the bed.
: That's where your feather beds come handy.
: Put them into the feather bed.
: And at 12:00 or 12:30 at lunchtime,
: by then you might have put spinach in your bed too,
: in a pot, and wrapped up in paper.
: And then when it's lunchtime, you've got your potatoes hot.
: The spinach is hot and your meat is fried.
: That's good.
: Well, all this just helps you to grow up, I suppose.
: I mean, nobody picks it.
: It just happens, you know?
: And if you don't know any better, you live with it.
: Well, you make your adjustments on the way, and--
: You jiggle along and you find just where to put the things.
: So I'm not--
: I'm not ever worried if we don't have enough oil or gasoline
: or electricity.
: There are other ways of doing it.
: Yeah.
: You're right.
: I am.
: OK.
: I think that's--

Overview

Interviewee: Anita Haas
Interviewer: Helen Bass
Date: interview: 1981 January 11

Physical Details

Language: English
Extent: 2 sound cassettes (90 min.).

Rights & Restrictions

Conditions on Access: There are no known restrictions on access to this material. Museum staff are currently unable to copy, digitize, and/or photograph collection materials on behalf of researchers. Researchers are encouraged to plan a research visit to consult collection materials themselves.
Conditions on Use: No restrictions on use

Keywords & Subjects

Topical Term: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives. Holocaust survivors--United States.
Personal Name: Haas, Anita.

Administrative Notes

Holder of Originals: American Jewish Archives
Legal Status: Permanent Collection
Provenance: The interview with Anita Haas was conducted on January 11, 1981 for a joint project with the National Council of Jewish Women, Cincinnati Section and the American Jewish Archives of the Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion entitled "Survivors of Hitler's Germany in Cincinnati: An Oral History." The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired a copy of the interview in June 1990.
Funding Note: The creation and display of the time-coded transcript for this collection was completed with assistance from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, supported by the German Federal Ministry of Finance and the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.
Special Collection: The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive