- I'm Diane Plotkin.
- This is December 16th, 1991, SMU.
- We're interviewing Erica Stein.
- I'm Mark Jacobs.
- I'm Erica Stein.
- And I'm ready to talk about my experiences
- during the Holocaust.
- I don't know where to start, really.
- Why don't you tell us a little bit
- about yourself, where you were born, when you were born,
- a little bit about your family.
- OK.
- I was born in Leipzig, in the former Eastern Germany,
- on September the 30th, 1909.
- My father and his other brother, Albert,
- had a small department store in the working class
- section of Leipzig.
- And we lived right above the store.
- I have an older brother, Manfred,
- who he's two years older than I am.
- And my mother was born in the province, Posen,
- and born a Krauser.
- Her father had a brick factory.
- And he was mayor of the town, Wolfstein,
- in the province, Posen.
- At the time that was German territory.
- And he was a staunch royalist.
- He believed in the Kaiser.
- And just the opposite was my mother's brother, only brother,
- who was a social democrat from the very beginning.
- And I guess that made our minds in that in that direction.
- Anyway, I had a very normal childhood.
- We had everything that our middle class could
- have, good schooling and arts and piano lessons and dance
- lessons and what have you.
- And everything was very normal.
- What kind of Jewish education did you have?
- It was Reform, Jewish Reformed.
- And when I was 18 years old, I had a boyfriend,
- which my parents didn't approve of,
- so they sent me to Frankfurt on Main,
- to a widow, who kept young girls, like a boarding school.
- And as it happened, my mother took me there.
- And she went for a weekend to Wiesbaden, for a little rest,
- and stayed in a hotel, where she saw a sign up.
- Some people, some men looked for a third person to play cards.
- And my mother was an avid card player.
- She was an excellent bridge player and skat.
- So they took her and played.
- And on weekend, I visited her there.
- And my husband-to-be came with his sister
- and visited his father.
- And that's how we met.
- But it was a long, drawn out story.
- It was four years before we could marry,
- because he was still in dental school.
- And the old times, a couple didn't
- marry until the man could support his wife.
- So that was in the year 1928, when we met.
- And we married a day before my 23rd birthday,
- in 1932, in Leipzig.
- And I moved to Frankfurt, which I liked very much from the very
- first.
- And three months later was the first and last election.
- That's when Hindenburg was elected.
- And a month later, Hitler came to power.
- That's how our married life started.
- And my husband had started his practice in 1939
- and worked hard.
- And it grew.
- And after Hitler came to power, quite a few
- of the professional people, who had enough money, left.
- At that time, they could leave and take everything with them.
- Excuse me, what year did he start his practice, again?
- Dentist.
- What year?
- 1939 or 1929?
- He started in 1931.
- '31.
- '31.
- Yeah, in 1932, we married.
- In 1933, everything went haywire.
- And what was his name?
- Pardon?
- What was your husband's name?
- William, William Stein.
- And he was eight and 1/2 years older than I.
- He had already a degree in business
- but wasn't happy there.
- And since his father--
- my husband's mother passed away when he was six years old.
- And the father had remarried.
- And there were three more children there.
- And he didn't want to burden his father
- and ask him for the money to go back to school.
- But he wanted to be a dentist.
- So he got the money, from an uncle, from his mother's side.
- And that's when I met him, when he was still in dental school.
- And well, life went on.
- And he gradually built up his practice.
- And it got better after several of his colleagues
- left Frankfurt.
- And he did not want to any even think about going away.
- We had the worst argument, in 1936, when I told him,
- it's time we look around.
- He said, you are ruining my practice.
- You can't do that.
- We have to stay here.
- What was happening?
- So I was powerless.
- I couldn't do anything.
- Then by 1937-- his father traveled quite a bit
- in Switzerland.
- And he worked for a Jewish company, who--
- well, what do you call that?
- They didn't manufacture it.
- They just sold rubber items and stuff.
- And he mostly traveled in Switzerland.
- And they had, in the upper group of the employees,
- a non-Jewish man, who was very, very nice,
- a younger man, and pro-Jewish.
- And he thought he could help the company by joining
- the Nazis, the Brownshirts.
- And in September, they had that big rally in Nuremberg.
- And his buddies said, we are going there.
- He said, OK.
- I'll go by train.
- No, you go with us by car.
- And next morning, his wife got a phone call, that he was drunk.
- And he had fallen in a pit and had a concussion.
- He never came to again.
- And he never drank.
- So that was the first sign.
- When my father-in-law heard that, he was beside himself.
- He came back, on the 27th of November, from a trip.
- I have to say that he had the angina pectoris, anyway.
- His heart wasn't good.
- But two days later, he died from a heart condition.
- After that, we got more serious about thinking about leaving.
- So we started to write all over the world, to Manila.
- He had a patient.
- My husband had a patient, who had married
- an Indian Jew in Calcutta.
- And she wrote, she would help us,
- if we come there, to start a practice there.
- And we wrote to the Woburn House, in London.
- That was a central station for professionals
- to help them find places where they could go.
- And my husband went to London to talk to them.
- And it turned out that the secretary of the woman,
- who took care of his case, was the daughter
- of my parents' best friends.
- And she, of course, had quite an interest to help us.
- And they had helped a doctor from Dusseldorf,
- a young doctor, who had a non-Jewish wife,
- to go to British Honduras.
- And he was so happy there that he wrote them and thanked them
- and said that there was room for a dentist.
- If they had somebody, he gladly would
- help to establish his practice there.
- So she told us about that.
- And since we needed a lot less money there,
- than if we would have gotten to India,
- where you have to have God knows how many servants
- and spend money to make money, we
- decided we look into that more.
- And then we made up our minds, we will go there.
- But also, he wanted to take a young mechanic along,
- because he, himself, was not too good in mechanical work.
- So he put an ad in a professional paper
- for a young mechanic.
- We would pay his way.
- And he would live with us and take chances.
- But he could get out this way.
- And we found a young, nice man from Cologne,
- whose father had died while the young man was in college.
- And he had to stop his studies and become a dental mechanic.
- And he had a brother, who was retarded, and a mother.
- And he had no way to get out.
- And we thought, if he gets out with us,
- he will be able to get his mother and brother out,
- too, sooner or later.
- What year was this?
- Pardon?
- What year was this?
- That was in 1938.
- Were you still in Germany during Kristallnacht?
- Beginning of 1938.
- Yeah.
- We still could do that.
- And then there were my husband's two sisters, maiden sisters.
- The one was my age.
- And the other was, at that time, in '38, she was 21.
- She had just gotten out of a--
- well, it's not college.
- It was where she was training for a kindergarten teacher.
- And so we had to take them along, too.
- They had no way to get out.
- They both had numbers to wait for a visa
- to go to the United States, but we didn't have anything.
- And nobody wanted to help a family with two children
- anyway.
- Our only chance was just to go to British Honduras
- and start a new life there.
- You have some passports?
- And you told me--
- Well, these are the passports of my parents.
- Those are your parents?
- But ours were not any different, but I have, here,
- a letter from the British consulate, where they told us
- that they can give us visas, for ourselves and for our two
- children, to go to British Honduras.
- And I had to go to the police department
- to get the passports.
- By the time that happened, that was in--
- well, that really comes later.
- That was one thing.
- So we were not that far yet.
- Can you show the passport again, please?
- Can you show the passport again, please?
- The passport, you want to see that, too?
- This is my father's passport.
- Oops.
- And this is the identification card
- that every Jew had to have, with a big J in the middle of it.
- But ours were the same way, only I have mine in the safe.
- I didn't get to it.
- You mentioned that you already had two children by 1938.
- Yeah.
- My son was born 9th of November in 1935,
- and my daughter, the 7th of January in 1937.
- And what were--
- They were quite small, still.
- And what were their names?
- Walter, Ernest Walter, and Ellen--
- Ellen is named after my husband's late mother, Ella.
- Her name is Ellen.
- Anyway, where were we?
- You had just received word that--
- You could go to British Honduras.
- --you could go to British Honduras.
- Oh, yeah, we could go to British Honduras.
- Well, we had to make quite a few preparations.
- Because we found out, when my husband was in England,
- he got a little brochure about British Honduras.
- And it was so desolate there and so little there,
- that even the Nazis felt sorry for us
- and gave us permission to take--
- he could take a portable drilling machine.
- We could take a sink and all kinds of things
- that, normally, you wouldn't put in your baggage,
- while you travel.
- You know, what can be sent with you?
- And then we had two huge lift vans--
- that's big boxes-- that were full with our furniture
- and our other belongings.
- But this, we were allowed to take with us.
- We took mattresses with us to sleep on
- and a stove, gasoline stove.
- That little country had no regular water supply
- except the rainwater, which was collected in big cisterns
- from the rooftops.
- And everything had to be sterilized.
- And there was just nothing.
- Electricity was a few hours at night.
- And otherwise, you had to have kerosene.
- The stoves were kerosene.
- I mean we knew it was going to be a hard life.
- But it was all better than to stay in Germany at the time.
- What kind of things were happening in Germany?
- At that time?
- That you saw.
- Well, for one thing, I mean, we knew that they arrested people.
- And they came out with their heads shorn.
- You knew, right away, they were in concentration camp,
- because everybody got their heads shorn.
- And nobody would say anything.
- They clammed up, nothing.
- They were afraid to talk.
- And one after another, they lost jobs.
- My husband worked as a dentist until September the 30, 1938.
- And at that time all doctors, all dentists,
- everybody had to stop working.
- My father's business, they had already sold it
- or had more or less given it up.
- Because in 1934, they had the boycotts.
- And although people knew my father--
- his business started in 1906--
- and he was well established there and well liked,
- but they had to do what they were told to do.
- So everything stopped.
- You couldn't do anything.
- After we stopped, we sent--
- I mean he stopped working, we started getting all the things
- together.
- And end of October, I think it was,
- or beginning November, we sent my children to my parents,
- in Leipzig, so that we didn't have to worry about them
- and could really get busy.
- We had, in the meantime, booked passage, on a Dutch boat,
- to leave on January the 29th.
- Oh, no.
- Well, we tried to take English lessons.
- And everybody, who still was there, clung together.
- Because, in our house, where we lived,
- people were afraid to say hello to us on the stairway.
- Somebody might hear.
- my husband had an old practice help.
- She was with his predecessor, already.
- It was a little old lady.
- And very late in '36 or something, she married.
- And the sons of her husband were avid Nazis.
- And they told her what she had to do.
- She was afraid to do anything different.
- And we had to pay her salary for four weeks after--
- no, for two months after he stopped working.
- The only time she came was when she picked up her check,
- and otherwise.
- And she always said, oh, she loves the Jews.
- And she feels like one of them, all that kind of stuff.
- But they were all cowed.
- Nobody dared to do anything.
- Were you in Frankfurt during Kristallnacht?
- And then that's what I come to now.
- Then, while my children were in Leipzig,
- my son's birthday came on November the 9th.
- And we got a call from my mother.
- That was after they had broken all the glasses and everything
- and picked up all the men.
- She called us.
- They had come and got my father.
- Although they had said they wouldn't.
- They didn't take any men older than 60 or younger than 14.
- It wasn't true.
- My father was 64 already, and they took him.
- And she said, come and get the children.
- I don't want the responsibility for them.
- So we tried to get a train.
- That was the only possibility.
- And couldn't get one until at night, at 11 o'clock.
- So we called back to let them know we wouldn't be there
- until the next morning.
- No answer.
- And I got hysterical.
- I thought they had come back and had taken
- my mother and my children, too.
- I didn't know what to do.
- So by the time we got there, we found everybody asleep
- and everything all right.
- And it turned out that Walter, he was at that time
- three years old, but crawling around,
- he must have pulled out the telephone wire.
- Or maybe the Nazis have done it.
- I don't know.
- But anyway, we couldn't reach him.
- But that was a terrible night.
- And then we took them back.
- We took the children and went back by train.
- And when we came to the house--
- my sister-in-law, Alice lived with us, at the time.
- And she greeted us that the Gestapo had been there wanting
- to pick William up.
- And if he's not reporting, they are
- going to come back and get her.
- So my husband, who really was a schlemiel in that respect,
- he was too honest and too believing.
- He couldn't think that they would do anything to him.
- He had never done anything wrong in his life.
- He took his overcoat.
- And I packed him a lunch.
- And he had a little suitcase and put the underwear in there.
- And he went and reported to the Nazis,
- to the police department.
- And they took him to the Festhalle, which
- is a huge hall in Frankfurt.
- And there, they had already collected all the men
- that they had picked up the day before.
- He found an uncle of his, who was also in the 60s already,
- and his best friend, Hans, who was William's age,
- and a whole lot of people.
- They kept them there.
- And from there, they marched them to--
- well, they put them in a train or buses, I don't know what.
- And took them to Buchenwald.
- And on the way, they marched them through a tunnel
- and hit them over the head.
- He still had a bump, years later, on his head.
- And some of them died, right then and there.
- And my father, they were together
- by that time in Buchenwald.
- They were together.
- And my uncle, my mother's brother,
- who was very prominent in the social democrat party,
- they had picked him up as his house.
- And his wife had lost her mind.
- She was running around, half-naked, with a knife
- in her hand when they came and knocked on the door.
- And he didn't want to open the door, like that,
- and fought with her.
- And it took them too long, so they crashed in the door.
- And then they beat him up, terribly,
- and took him to Buchenwald.
- And when he got there, a few days later, he died.
- And my father and my husband, they were there with him.
- And all his wife got was a postcard that her husband died
- from a heart attack, and the ashes would be sent to her.
- And of course, she was, by that time, completely gone.
- She died a few months later in a hospital.
- And my mother?
- When that card came, my mother got hysterical.
- She said, they got my husband.
- They got my husband.
- And she ran off.
- She didn't know what to do.
- I didn't know anything of all that going on.
- But then they said that we could make
- applications to get them out.
- That meant I had to go downtown, to a Nazi--
- what was he, a CPA or something like that
- or half a lawyer or something--
- and fill that out.
- And you had to do it in the morning.
- You had to be back by 2 o'clock, because there was curfew.
- You couldn't get out.
- Or if they caught you, it was just too bad.
- So he filled out the application and sent it in.
- And I waited for him to come back.
- And in the meantime, there were practically no men left.
- My brother-in-law, my husband's brother, Julius, he was lucky.
- He had quite some trouble with his knee.
- He had several knee operations and had
- a cast that was cut open.
- And he put that cast on.
- He didn't need it anymore.
- But he put it on.
- And when they came for him, he limped around.
- And they said, we can't use you, and left him there.
- And then there was a fraternity brother of my husband's.
- He was a marvelous guy.
- He was blind.
- They didn't take him.
- But he was so smart, he gave us English lessons.
- And his hearing was so keen, and he was so fantastic.
- He was the only one I could talk to, discuss things with him.
- He came by bus.
- He knew exactly which bus to ride and all.
- And he was the only one I could lean on in the whole building.
- We were in an apartment building.
- All the Jewish men were gone.
- There was one woman, her husband was Jewish and she was not.
- And as it was at that time, the women
- didn't have signature on the bank accounts.
- And all the bank accounts were blocked.
- She didn't have any money.
- And she couldn't get any money.
- So we helped each other that way.
- There was a milkman, young man who came,
- they brought the milk and everything every day.
- One day, he gave me a pound of butter,
- which we were not allowed to have,
- just to show how he felt about us.
- Really, that touched me.
- People that you hardly knew, and you didn't expect it.
- But he wanted to do something.
- So he gave us some butter.
- And things like that.
- And before the Kristallnacht, we went walking
- in the park with the children.
- I went walking with the children.
- And my husband's best friend's father was an old man.
- And he always was in the park, too.
- And Walter saw.
- And from far away, he saw an old man
- sitting, there, with a cane.
- And he ran up to him, because he wanted to play with the cane.
- And I after him, and I just heard, when I got there,
- the old man told Walter, go away, you dirty Jew.
- Go away, you dirty Jew to a three year old boy.
- I mean that's the mentality of the people.
- How did he know he was Jewish?
- Well, he looked Jewish, I guess.
- So it's unbelievable.
- I mean you were afraid to move, more or less.
- And anyway, time passed.
- There were two weeks when I hadn't heard from William.
- And then, one day, by word of mouth,
- we were told there is bus coming with people that they released.
- So I was hoping and hoping.
- But he didn't come.
- But then, one morning, an elderly man
- came by and said that he was together with William.
- And I asked him how is he.
- Oh, he's all right.
- And he just sat there, didn't say much.
- I fed him.
- And he was there most of the day.
- He never said very much.
- And then he came back the next day and the same thing.
- And then suddenly, he blurted out
- that the application was rejected, because they
- had transposed our birth dates.
- And when they called him up and he
- had to say his name and his birth date,
- it was the wrong birthday.
- So he was sent back.
- So I had to go back to that man and make a new application.
- And he took another two weeks, then, one night, he came out.
- And he smelled to heaven.
- We had to burn his coat and his hat and everything.
- And his head, of course, shorn.
- And the next week, most of the time,
- just like that man that came out before, he just
- sat there, brooding, hardly saying anything.
- The only thing he said, we have to get Hans out-- his friend.
- We have to get Hans out.
- We went to his parents.
- And he told them to write to some colleagues.
- He worked for a big iron company that had branches
- all over the world.
- And he said write to England and tell them
- to send him a visa or something, right away,
- that he can get out.
- So they did that.
- And he did come out, then, a week later.
- Was in the same state of mind, like everybody.
- Then William said that they were told not to tell
- anything what's going on there.
- If they would, they would find them, no matter where
- they go in the world.
- They would find them.
- So we rushed, then, with all our preparations.
- And William had the internal revenue check
- to find out if he had always paid properly his taxes.
- And that man said he had never seen as good accounts
- as his were.
- When everything was cleared, he had reported everything-- yeah,
- one other thing.
- My husband had the ring from his father.
- It was a diamond.
- And he wore that, always.
- When he was in England, in September,
- they told him, leave that ring here.
- And he said, I can't do that.
- I listed all what we have.
- And it's on the list.
- And if they find it's gone, I get in trouble.
- I can't afford that.
- So he didn't leave the ring there.
- And then we all had to give up all our jewelry.
- We could keep the wedding band and a watch, that was it.
- I had a pearl ring, that wasn't even a real pearl,
- but it had the gold band.
- It was gone, too.
- Everything.
- And then he had two little life insurance policies,
- one in American dollars and one in Dutch gulden.
- And he had reported that.
- It was listed.
- And they OKed it.
- It was all fine.
- Then the day before we were ready to leave-- we
- had to leave on the 28th of January,
- to drive by train to Hamburg, to catch our ship.
- They called and said, what about these two policies?
- He said, well, they are on my list.
- And they were approved.
- Well, you can't leave.
- You have to leave them here.
- So he called me.
- He said please, call Holland and tell them,
- please, to write them over and send the certifications
- as fast as they can.
- We have to leave tomorrow.
- And I have to have it, or we cannot leave.
- And they just couldn't understand what was going on.
- And to make sure that we don't leave with these policies,
- they kept my husband overnight in prison,
- there, didn't let him go home.
- So they were as good as gold from Holland,
- and they sent the certification.
- So then we could leave on time.
- And we stopped in Leipzig and said goodbye to my parents
- and went to Hamburg.
- This ship was a Dutch boat, but they
- took on provisions and stuff in Hamburg.
- And we boarded in Hamburg and came to Amsterdam
- and were laid over, there, two days in a posh hotel.
- Our passage was first class, because we
- decided, if we can pay it in German money,
- we go first class.
- Because we get higher boarding money to spend.
- That was included in it, that you get the money for tips
- and things like that.
- And so we took that.
- By the time, now, we were seven people, my husband and I,
- my two sisters-in-law, my two children,
- and Eric, Eric Joseph, the young man that we took along.
- And we stayed in that hotel.
- And William made a quick trip to England, last minute directions
- with everything.
- While we were there, Walter got sick.
- He got a sore throat.
- And an uncle of my husband's second mother--
- a brother, rather, from my husband's second mother,
- who had died when William was 18 years old.
- She had a kidney disease.
- He was working at an Aliyah in Holland.
- And he had his mother and his sister with him.
- He got them both out.
- And he had contacted us when we were in Amsterdam.
- And he got a doctor to come to the hotel and look at Walter.
- And that doctor couldn't understand
- how we could stay in such a fancy hotel
- and then not be able to pay for the doctor.
- We had, each person, 10 German marks.
- That's all what we were allowed.
- And we were lucky, in so far, my husband, being a dentist,
- he had accumulated a lot of old gold from teeth and bridges,
- that he had taken out from people and kept this.
- And he had sent that all to a dentist friend of his
- in Switzerland.
- He also, as long as we had still passports,
- he went, in the wintertime, for ski vacations.
- And in the summertime, regular vacations, with money
- that we could take, and then we scrimped.
- And what we didn't use, we left it there.
- We also smuggled out some gold.
- There was a young Polish goldsmith,
- who made beautiful work.
- And he made belt buckles, that he covered with leather,
- and wore and watchbands, and all kinds of things
- to smuggle it out.
- It wasn't much, but it helped us, anyway.
- And this dentist friend kept it, and then sent it to us
- on the ship, before we sailed from Amsterdam.
- And you did all kinds of things in desperation
- to help yourself.
- So well, then, Walter got all right before we left.
- And we sailed off.
- There was another thing, too.
- When we were children, we had a governess, you can call it.
- She came every afternoon after school
- and stayed with us, because my mother didn't
- want us to just run wild.
- And we lived in a section where there
- were no other Jewish families except my uncle's, who was
- in the business with my father.
- And they had married two sisters.
- And we all lived in the same house.
- That was a five-story house.
- And they lived on the second floor.
- And we lived on the first floor.
- And by the way, last year, my son and I went to Leipzig.
- And we saw that house.
- It still stands.
- It was, in the meantime, a communist building.
- And it's run down terribly, but it still
- had the store downtown.
- And there are, now, people interested
- who wanted to buy it but not for me.
- It was very depressing to see that.
- Anyway, where was I?
- You left Amsterdam.
- The governess that you had.
- Oh, yeah, we had a governess.
- She had a sister, who had married a Singer sewing machine
- man, who had gone to Chile.
- And she had visited him there, her sister.
- And on the way back, they came into the First World War.
- And she was interned in England and learned a little English.
- And then she was exchanged with English people from Germany.
- And she came and stayed with us for years.
- And she was like family.
- We were very close, always, and kept contact with her.
- And when this came up all with the Nazis,
- she wrote and said she would help us.
- And she came to Dover--
- after we had left Amsterdam, we went to Dover--
- to say goodbye to us.
- And she told us she would help my brother to come out, too,
- if he manages to get out.
- And she helped.
- My brother had married a year after me
- and had two children, a little girl.
- She was born in '34, so she was a year older
- than Walter, and a boy who was a year younger than Ellen.
- And they barely got out two days before the war broke out.
- They had advance , warning and he still had his passport,
- luckily.
- So they went back over the border to Holland.
- And from Holland to England, and there, this Hanna,
- we called her, she helped him.
- She had met her husband, who was an English prisoner of war,
- in the First World War.
- And they fell in love.
- And after the war, they married.
- And they lived in Kew, England.
- He was a railroad man.
- And we kept contact all the time.
- And she helped my brother, got him together with the Quakers,
- and they did what they could for them.
- But that's another story.
- Anyway, they were, by that time, then safe, at least,
- in England.
- But we had-- well, that comes later.
- So then we had a wonderful vacation, you can call it.
- We were four weeks on this boat, that
- went from Dover, to Calais, to Madeira, and then
- across to Barbados, to--
- British Honduras?
- British Honduras?
- It went all around the northern coast
- of South America, Colombia.
- And my mother had a cousin, who had married in 1925 or '28,
- a cousin of hers, who lived in Chile and went there.
- And they lived in Caracas.
- And she came to see us when we were
- in some port in Colombia, I think or something.
- There were so many different ones.
- And we saw her.
- And then we went on to Panama, and from Panama to Jamaica.
- And that part was the worst part.
- They told us that the ship usually go like that,
- and from Panama to Jamaica, they go like that.
- So everybody got seasick.
- I mean it was--
- we didn't care whether we lived or died.
- I didn't look after the children.
- If the steward and stewardess wouldn't have been so nice,
- I don't know what would have happened to them.
- But otherwise this was a beautiful trip, I have to say.
- And from Jamaica, then we took, what
- you would call, a banana boat, a dinky, little, dirty boat.
- That's where we first time saw roaches, real big roaches, too.
- And that was a forewarning of what's ahead of us.
- So we came to British Honduras.
- And that was quite some let down, let's say.
- I mean it was so primitive, we couldn't imagine it.
- It was primitive housing.
- And the food, everything so different.
- They had these open sheds, where they sold
- the vegetables and the meats.
- I mean you had to buy meat every day and cook it, right away.
- We were prepared.
- We had bottles of quinine with us against malaria.
- And I don't know what the name of it-- some blue stuff
- in which we had to wash everything,
- just like when you go to Mexico.
- You cannot eat anything without disinfecting it first.
- But the people were very nice, thanks to this Dr. Friedman
- and his wife.
- They were established.
- And they introduced us to everybody.
- And Dr. Friedman had already contacted a local dentist,
- who was an American citizen.
- His parents were evangelists and lived in British Honduras.
- And he grew up there.
- But he went to college in America.
- And he married the daughter of a high English official.
- He came from Scotland.
- And I think he was in the bank business or something.
- And she had money.
- And he was a very good dentist but not a good businessman.
- Everybody had a soft heart, and they charged,
- for pulling a tooth, $1.
- So you can imagine what the income was.
- And then, if he didn't let them pay, they had a rough time.
- He had four children.
- All four children went to school and college in America.
- And his mother-in-law liked William very much.
- And she was all for it, that he goes in practice
- together with him.
- So they had a little, like an outhouse built,
- and they turned that into his practice room.
- At the time, he had only his manual drilling machine
- and everything primitive.
- His real stuff came, later, when we got our lift vans.
- And he started working with him and Eric doing
- the dental mechanical work, which
- was a big help for Dr. Pierce.
- That was his name.
- And he loved it.
- He was very happy about it.
- At the time, when we first came, we got an apartment.
- It was an empty store, two--
- a ground floor and first floor, with a huge veranda
- all around it.
- And it was completely empty.
- There was nothing in there.
- It was facing the center, practically, of the city.
- There was a river and a bridge, that.
- When a boat came that had a little too high a mast,
- they had to turn the bridge on pontoons, so that the boats
- could get through.
- This was all very, very primitive.
- And we lived up there, on our mattresses,
- which we had with us, and mosquito nets.
- And we had a bathroom.
- The water supply was, if you want to take a bath,
- you had a little--
- what do you call that?
- Like a shell where you collected the water,
- and you rinsed it over you.
- And then when you were through, you let the water out.
- And it went underneath, into a drum,
- and that you used to water your flowers and vegetables with,
- because you couldn't waste any water.
- It just wasn't there.
- If it was dry, it didn't rain, and you needed water,
- you had to buy it, so much per gallon.
- That was expensive.
- But we settled down there as good as we could.
- We didn't have any furniture just boxes.
- And my younger sister-in-law, she
- tried to get some children together as kindergarten.
- But it didn't work out.
- They were not used to something like that.
- There was quite a caste system.
- There were the upper-crust English,
- that was the governor and the judge
- and the Dr. Pierce and people like that.
- They belonged to that.
- Then there was this second class.
- This Dr. Friedman and his wife, they
- knew already what was going on.
- They could tell us, from the way we
- were invited by the wife of Dr. Pierce--
- she invited me for tea--
- and who was invited with me.
- She knew it wasn't upper class.
- It was somewhere down the road.
- Then they had all colors and mixtures of blacks and whites,
- because everybody mixed together.
- I mean the morals were nonexistent,
- although there was a big Catholic school there.
- And nuns were there.
- But the men married, and then they
- had girlfriends, or friends on the side.
- That was common.
- Or they didn't even marry, just lived together
- and had a bunch of children.
- So it was very, very immoral, you can say.
- But we got used to that.
- And William, he really dived into it.
- And he met all kind of people.
- And he was happy.
- He was in his element with what he did.
- And then right away, we started to try and look around,
- what we could do to help get my parents there or get
- Eric's mother there.
- So there was one native.
- He had apparently a Colored or Mayan
- or something mother and an English father.
- And his wife was something similar.
- And they were lovely people.
- He was in the government.
- And he was responsible for bringing people or giving visas
- out and so.
- And we got very friendly with him.
- And he gave us a visa for my parents, right away.
- And Dr. Friedman wrote an affidavit
- that he would hire my brother, as his assistant,
- so that he could come over and send them visas.
- And my parents, they had already prepared.
- And they had also in lift van, my mother
- had collected beautiful antiques and porcelain stuff
- and everything and had carpets, the real McCoy.
- And she wanted to bring all that out, because we could sell it.
- We could get some money out of that.
- And were they finally left end of October,
- with the same ship's company, and my brother
- was supposed to leave, a short time later, from England.
- And my parents got to Panama.
- And there they stopped them.
- They had to have another entry permit.
- And we had to send them money, because they didn't have
- it to get that entry permit.
- And then came the news that that ship,
- where my father was supposed to be on, was torpedoed and sunk.
- And until we found out he wasn't on that boat, it was terrible.
- But it just so happened that my nephew Tom got sick, too.
- And he wasn't able to travel.
- And my brother had given their tickets
- to another family with two children.
- And they were on that boat.
- And only the wife and one of the children survived.
- The other two drowned.
- So that was God's will, that they were not there.
- So they stayed there.
- And my brother was first on the Isle of Wight,
- interned with everybody else, but then,
- since he was a doctor, they could use him.
- And he worked in the country, in a hospital, all during the war.
- Then, after the war, when we wanted him to come over here,
- they were so well settled, they decided they stay there.
- They had a rough time.
- They would have had it easier over here,
- but that was their choice.
- Anyway, so then my parents came around in December.
- It was shortly before Ellen's birthday on the 6th of January.
- And I never forget that my mother
- bought her a beautiful hand-embroidered dress
- from Panama.
- This is what year?
- That was in 1930--
- no, that was in-- yeah, in '39.
- In 1939.
- We left in January, and they came in December.
- And Ellen took it, and she had gotten a little bucket,
- and she filled it with water and took the dress
- and started to wipe the floor with it.
- I never forget that.
- So the children picked up the language, pretty fast.
- As a matter of fact, so fast that one day, Eric came home,
- and he said do you know what kind of language
- your children speak?
- I said, I have no idea.
- Our English wasn't that good.
- He said, you better watch and listen and see
- who they associate with.
- They use very foul language.
- We didn't know anything about that.
- So then that was in 1939.
- Then 1940, one day, we got the SOS call from a cousin
- of William's.
- He and his young bride had gone on one of those ships
- to go to south America, I think to Colombia or what.
- And when they got there, they wouldn't let them land there.
- And they were ready to turn around and ship them back
- to Germany.
- So he called us and asked if we could help him.
- So William went to Robbie Gabriel, this good friend,
- and he gave him an affidavit.
- Since they wanted agricultural people, and this cousin,
- he lived in a small town near Frankfurt, in Weilbach.
- And his father was a grain dealer.
- And he had raised chickens, exotic chickens,
- and entered them in contests and exhibitions.
- And he had the certificate signed by Adolf Hitler
- in the early Nazi time.
- So when William told him what he was, they gave him,
- right away, a visa.
- So he came.
- And he and his wife lived with us.
- And he tried to install a chicken farm in our house.
- We had, in the meantime, moved in a two-story building.
- Rather, it was a one-story building,
- but all the houses are built on stilts
- because of danger of floods.
- And we lived upstairs.
- And there was a little, tiny, like a balcony,
- that we had screened in, where we
- could stay without being eaten up
- by the sandflies and the mosquitoes.
- And where was I?
- I lost my--
- You were talking about the cousin who
- came over raising the chickens.
- Oh, the cousin came, yeah.
- They lived with us, too.
- In the meantime, we had all our furniture and everything
- and had a regular household.
- And Eric had the room downstairs.
- There was one small storage room, and that was his room.
- So he had some privacy there.
- And they stayed with us until the American consul got
- him his visa to go to America.
- All the people had numbers and were waiting before they
- could get to America.
- And in Germany, it was hopeless.
- Nobody could get out anyway.
- So it suddenly went much faster.
- All these people, who had their waiting numbers,
- they got the permission to come in.
- The same happened to my two sisters-in-law.
- Alice was the first one who got it, and she left on a boat.
- And she was afraid of becoming seasick,
- so Dr. Friedman gave her some medication or something
- or a shot to prevent that.
- But apparently, he gave a too large a dose,
- and she started to hallucinate.
- And we thought, my gosh, something terrible is going on.
- But she came out of it, and then she took a later boat.
- And she went over.
- And she went to visit our friend Hans,
- that William was in concentration camp
- with, his close friend, to visit them
- in Mississippi, where his Hans his brother
- had established a business.
- And they were both lonely.
- So they fell in love, although they knew each other from 10,
- 15 years ago.
- And they got married.
- They moved to New York, where Hans had connections
- through his former job.
- And they had a very good life there for 12 years.
- And then my sister-in-law unfortunately
- had inherited the sickness of her mother,
- and she died from the same kidney disease.
- But they had a nice, wonderful time together.
- So then the other one, the other sister-in-law, she
- was next to leave when she went to Tampa Florida,
- with a banana boat, and stayed there for a while,
- tried to work in kindergarten work.
- And then she went to New York, because she felt lonely,
- and my brother-in-law, in the meantime, had come to New York.
- And so she went to be with them, together.
- Well, Lena Grünebaum, the housekeeper
- of my father-in-law's, she had a brother
- who couldn't get anywhere, find a place where he could get out.
- So she wrote us.
- And he was kind of agricultural--
- in a wider sense, agricultural person.
- We got the visa for him.
- But then he decided he didn't want
- to come to British Honduras.
- And he used that visa, after he was out of Germany,
- to go to Canada.
- And as far as I know, he still lives there.
- Then we urged Eric, long before that,
- when my parents started to prepare, to get his mother out.
- And he wrote her and begged her to come.
- And she didn't want to be a burden for him.
- She knew that she couldn't earn anything.
- And there was that brother who was not normal.
- And she put it off and put it off.
- And finally, when she realized it was too late--
- the last minute, it was too late.
- And she never got out.
- So that was very hard on Eric.
- Then there was a another couple that came to us,
- my brother-in-law's former boss from Germany.
- He was in New York, too.
- And he had a niece that had gone out, with her husband,
- to Italy.
- He was agricultural.
- He had an education in agriculture, a college
- education.
- And so there was no problem to get a visa for him.
- But they had gone to Italy.
- And then, when the war started, and the Nazis
- ran all over everything, they fled to France.
- And there, they got stuck.
- They had waiting numbers, too.
- But there was no way for them to get away.
- So he asked if we could help them.
- So William got visas for them.
- And they came over.
- And they stayed with us.
- And he wanted to start a farm in British Honduras.
- They had a little money.
- So they went to the outskirts, and he
- started to plant vegetables, mainly,
- which you couldn't get any fresh vegetables
- that we were used to.
- But he soon gave it up, because the land
- was arid and mostly sand, and no water supply.
- So it depended on the rain.
- And if it didn't rain, you were out of luck.
- So they gave that up.
- And then, when their visa came, they left, too.
- And they settled in Miami.
- He didn't stay in the agricultural business.
- But he planted mango trees in his backyard.
- And for years, he sent us, during the mango season,
- a box with mangoes.
- We planted, in our garden, mangoes,
- but, since we are not agricultural people
- and don't know much about anything,
- we planted so many trees that, in the end,
- it looked like a forest.
- And we never got any mangoes.
- Because just when they started to have fruits,
- that's when our troubles started again, there.
- And we were shipped out from there.
- So we never got any from our own trees.
- And there was another family we got out.
- William had a colleague in Frankfurt, also
- a fraternity brother, with a wife
- and two boys, who had no way.
- They didn't have anywhere else to go, no visas to go
- to America, just like we were.
- So he looked around.
- And he found there was, north of British Honduras, a little town
- called Corozal.
- It was right on the border to Mexico.
- And it was, considering the size of the whole country,
- a fairly nice town where a dentist could make a living.
- So he got permission for him to come.
- And he settled him in Corozal, with his hand-drilling machine
- and all the stuff that he had first when we came in.
- And they settled there and were adjusted pretty well, there,
- too.
- They had two boys.
- The older one was already 15, and the younger one
- was ready to be bar mitzvah.
- And they wanted their son to be bar mitzvah.
- So besides the refugees that were in British Honduras,
- there were also some Polish people
- that had come from Mexico and settled in British Honduras.
- And there was an older man, who was kind of a rabbi,
- and he agreed to teach him.
- And so every week, that boy came from Corozal
- and had his lesson.
- And then when it was time to be bar mitzvah,
- we had a big bar mitzvah in our house.
- That was really very, very nice.
- That's the only time we had some religious celebration
- or anything like that there.
- You didn't have any other kind of religious?
- No.
- No.
- Nobody.
- As a group, nobody held it.
- I guess, everybody-- some of them were Orthodox
- and we were Reformed and didn't get together.
- So and Dr. Friedman, since he had a non-Jewish wife,
- he didn't keep much of anything.
- He had some-- a cousin of his that came over,
- who was a very nice man.
- They stayed there until they could go to America.
- They're mostly just passing through.
- And there were a bunch of people.
- They came.
- I don't really know how they hit on British Honduras.
- But they had money.
- And they lived from their money, comfortably.
- And they went on to South America from there.
- So it was a coming and going, more or less.
- But altogether, I mean William helped a lot of people,
- that I must say.
- And we always told them what we had gone through in Germany
- and what's going on there.
- So we made sure that everybody knew it.
- And they all believed us.
- And then, in 1942, we went on our first vacation
- in the jungle.
- You could get there only by plane.
- And they had just a five-seat or little one-motor plane
- that shuttled back and forth.
- And you flew into the inner country,
- where the Mayan, the original Mayan still live.
- There was some couple.
- They had like a little vacation home there.
- It was just an open house, with a thatched roof and no doors
- between, just some curtains.
- The only doors and walls they had was at the main bedroom.
- Everything else was open, so that the breeze
- could get to it.
- Because it was hot there.
- And we had rented that for two weeks.
- And we went there.
- And from there, we made horseback rides into the jungle
- and saw the Mayan villages.
- And they had a little creek running along
- where the children could play in the water.
- And that was very relaxing and very nice.
- And then we came back.
- And I apparently caught some bug or something.
- And I got diarrhea and was deathly sick.
- I was still not quite in order.
- And that was just after we came back.
- William went to the office, in late evening,
- to look at the books and so on, because he was very particular
- about all these things.
- And it was late when we went to bed.
- And suddenly, in the middle of the night, a knock on the door.
- There was soldiers.
- And one of the British, well, he was the son-in-law
- of a store owner.
- He had come to British Honduras and married the owner
- of it, a rich man, and stayed there
- and acted like a big shot.
- And he was an English officer, apparently.
- And he came with his police officers
- and said, we arrest you for helping
- the U-boats in the Caribbean.
- We were not allowed to dress.
- My parents had to go.
- The children had to go.
- We couldn't find Walter's shoes, so he had to go barefoot.
- And I am sick still, with a housecoat over my nightgown,
- no dressing, nothing.
- They took us to that same building where we started out,
- that was empty again.
- And they had made that in kind of a detention station
- or something.
- They herded us all in there.
- Didn't say anything else.
- Next morning, they said the parents and the children
- could go, could leave.
- But William and I and Dr. Friedman and his wife,
- and there was another couple that had come from Germany--
- that's interesting story, too.
- He, Leo Kaidas, he is a son of a cantor
- in Berlin, very religious.
- And he had gone to England, to London.
- And his wife is the daughter of strong, strictly Catholics
- Irish people.
- And the Irish are just as hated by the English
- as are the Germans.
- She grew up in South Africa.
- And she had a degree in chemistry.
- They fell in love and wanted to marry.
- And neither family would allow them.
- They were strictly against it.
- So they decided they are going somewhere,
- where they don't know anybody.
- And of all places, they picked British Honduras.
- And one day, they showed up there.
- And they opened a shirt factory.
- And he did very well, established himself,
- made friends.
- And they had a little boy, David.
- And when he was still a small baby, he broke out in heat rash
- all the time.
- And it got infected.
- And the doctors, there, I don't know.
- They didn't have Dr. Friedman as a doctor.
- They had a local doctor.
- And he gave him not penicillin, at that time it didn't exist.
- Oh, what is it?
- I forgot it.
- Anyway, something that you shouldn't give
- without making blood tests.
- And they didn't have even a laboratory.
- They had a hospital but no laboratory.
- And the infections got worse and worse.
- And I can't think of what is this-- sulfa drugs.
- They gave him sulfa drugs.
- And that made it worse.
- And that poor child, he got only four years old,
- and, in all these four years, he lived more in hospital
- than at home.
- And they tried everything.
- When they came finally to America,
- they took him to New York.
- And they removed his spleen.
- And they removed everything.
- I mean he suffered terribly.
- And then, finally, he died.
- Anyway, they had their hands full with that baby.
- Anyway, they arrested them too.
- And the baby had to stay with friends of theirs.
- And because she had to stay in, too.
- So we six, we three couples, plus the owner of the banana
- boat, who was a native, and his radio operator,
- they were all arrested and not openly.
- But we were told that we had helped U-boats.
- And the strange thing is that things came out
- that we hadn't realized before.
- They were telling stories--
- we heard that afterwards-- that we had the radio equipment
- and God knows what in our house.
- And before our trip, we had a beautiful German
- shepherd puppy.
- And one morning, we found him dead, poisoned.
- And that was probably already the beginning
- of the whole thing.
- And it turned out that their governor had,
- one time at a cocktail party, when he was half-drunk,
- made the remark that he didn't have any use for Jews.
- And he found that some guy from Malaysia,
- I think he was or something, who had visions of grandeur, who
- wanted to be big shot, and he wrote beautiful books
- about birds and animals in the tropics.
- And he let his imagination go a little too far.
- And he found out that this whole story,
- that there is a group that helps the Nazis.
- And those were the three German couples and that boat owner
- and the radio operator.
- We had no connection whatsoever with that boatman,
- except that Dr Friedman, he had been in America.
- He had gotten a permit to go to Tampa on the boat.
- And he bought a bunch of things that he
- thought he could sell in British Honduras, shirts
- and jewelry and all kinds of stuff like that.
- So maybe they thought that was for the U-boat people,
- the shirts or something.
- I don't know.
- But they did never openly accuse us.
- Nobody ever interrogated us.
- And they just held us there, first in that building,
- and then later, they--
- I don't know where they brought the men to, but the three
- women, we were brought to the--
- they have a golf club that was closed for the season,
- because it was too hot.
- Nobody wanted to play golf in the summertime--
- and kept us there.
- The first night that British man came, with a can
- of soup, and said, here's your supper, one can of soup.
- And you should have heard that Irish woman.
- She let him have it.
- She was the only one who could fluently speak English.
- And she really let loose.
- But it didn't do any good.
- But the next day, then, we got some fresh vegetables
- and stuff.
- But we three were together there for about two weeks.
- And then one day, they came and say-- no, first, they
- approached me.
- They wanted to make a proposition.
- The men are going to be shipped to Jamaica
- for the duration of the war.
- And we women can stay in British Honduras.
- When I said, what are we going to live from?
- Our husbands are the earners and not we.
- What should we do here?
- We stick together with our men.
- No way.
- So then they came and told us that we
- were going to be shipped to America for the duration.
- And we were not allowed to go in our house.
- They sent somebody, the wives of some of those official
- or something there on, they must have looked and picked
- out the oldest stuff they could find, old torn socks
- and stuff like that, and made suitcase.
- And the children?
- Yeah, in the meantime, when the my parents and the children
- were sent home, they couldn't go in the house either.
- And this Robbie Gabriel took them in.
- And they stayed with them two weeks.
- That was taking some guts for them
- to do that, because not even William's partner, who
- was an American, he didn't do anything for us.
- And he knew the whole story and everything.
- And he was afraid.
- One day, then came an American.
- It wasn't FBI, but it was a secret police
- or whatever you call it.
- I don't know.
- Anyway, an investigator, and he talked to William
- and got the story from him.
- And he shook his head.
- He couldn't believe that they didn't ever ask you anything?
- No, nothing.
- So they took us, and they brought us, by navy plane.
- The children were thrilled.
- My mother almost died, because--
- anyway, she was very hard of hearing.
- And her equilibrium was not very good.
- And so she got already seasick when she saw the water.
- We had to go in a little boat where
- they took us to the plane.
- And she was seasick the whole time.
- But the children, they let them look through.
- It had a bubble.
- I don't know what plane it was.
- But they let the children look through there and all that.
- For them, it was an adventure, especially after they
- were confined so much before.
- And they brought us to Panama.
- And there, they put the women and children
- in the quarantine station.
- And the men, across a fence, in an army camp--
- that was all army there, anyway, that army camp.
- And we could see each other, but we couldn't talk to each other.
- And there, we were--
- that was all.
- Let me see.
- I tried to think, if that was August.
- It must have been August, yeah.
- I really don't know.
- Anyway, yeah, it was August, end of August.
- And we had three--
- what do you call those--
- women that watched over us.
- Guards.
- What do they call them?
- Guards?
- Are they guards?
- Guards?
- No.
- Matrons.
- What do they call them in prison?
- Wardens?
- Matrons?
- Matrons, right.
- We had three matrons, eight hour shifts each
- they stayed with us.
- And they were awfully nice.
- They helped us to amuse the children.
- And they got toys, little toys for them.
- And we got some material that we could do some embroidery
- or something, just to keep us busy,
- because there was nothing else to do there.
- But for the first time, there, we also had good food.
- It wasn't canned food, like we had in British Honduras.
- It was fresh.
- And it was real butter.
- And we enjoyed that very much.
- But apparently, it was a little too much for my father.
- And all the excitement on top of it,
- and he not knowing any English, he got a stroke.
- And one night, they came, got us, my mother and me,
- to the hospital.
- And there he was, in a cell, with an iron gate in front,
- and a soldier with a bayonet guarding him.
- And he didn't know what's going on.
- So we were terribly upset, of course.
- And then, on top of that, there came two Jewish men
- starting to say prayers.
- And my father got so restless.
- And my mother and I so upset, I yelled
- at them, he's not dead yet.
- Get him out of here.
- I just couldn't take it.
- And then came a doctor.
- He was an Jewish-American.
- And he listened to us.
- And he ordered my father in a private room.
- It was a suite.
- It was not a room.
- It was two rooms.
- And there were another bed.
- And they let us stay there with him.
- And the moment he got in there, he relaxed.
- And he was much better.
- And the next morning, he could talk a little.
- And he could move his arm and his legs a little bit.
- But he never got well again.
- But that was terrible.
- Shortly after that, we were told that we are going
- to go by convoy to America.
- And since my father was not able to be transported,
- my mother and I and the children could stay with him,
- but my husband had to go with the rest of them.
- So that was just beginning of September.
- Then they left, and we didn't know where they go
- or what's going to happen.
- And that investigator, he came.
- And he talked to me.
- And he told me, I could write a letter.
- And he would personally see that it gets to him.
- And my husband, he wrote a diary about it,
- which I didn't even know.
- I found it just yesterday, that he
- wrote a diary about his experience
- when he was transported to America.
- They were on a convoy, like we were.
- And they moved around, zigzag all the time.
- And it took them two weeks to get to New Orleans,
- because of the U-boats.
- And there, they took them, marched them through town,
- and sent them, by train, to a prisoner
- of war camp in Tennessee.
- And there, they had a separate tent for some Jewish people,
- they had there picked up in the north of South America,
- and people that had German origin but lived for years
- there but were not naturalized, and they had them all in there.
- And the rest of it was German prisoners.
- And he said, it was pretty tough sometimes.
- They were pretty nasty with remarks they made and all.
- And we stayed until--
- no, it must have been later.
- We didn't stay that long there, because we
- left on Walter's birthday, on the 9th of November,
- going through the canal to Balboa
- and, from there, joined a convoy to Ellis Island.
- And the matron, when she said goodbye,
- she gave Walter a 50 cent piece.
- That was his birthday present.
- And we saved it.
- And when we came to Ellis Island,
- he bought an apple with it, something we couldn't
- get in British Honduras at all.
- And we were in two cabins.
- I think it was two cabins, I with the children,
- and my mother-- no, I think we were in one.
- Most of the time, we were together, anyway.
- And we were not allowed to talk to anybody.
- They had a guard in front of our cabin door, too.
- And that was kind of like a little hall,
- and the children sometimes peeped outside or looked out.
- And they were restless.
- They wanted to talk to somebody.
- We were not allowed to.
- And our meals, we got in the dining room,
- but after everybody else had eaten,
- not together with anybody else.
- And every day, twice, they let us out for half an hour
- or so, out along the railing, to walk there or to move our legs
- and get some fresh air.
- But otherwise, we were just locked up all the time.
- This was at Ellis Island?
- You were locked up at Ellis Island?
- That was on the boat.
- Oh, on the boat, OK.
- And then when we came to Ellis Island, we came.
- I remembered it, when I saw the pictures, now,
- from the renovated Ellis Island.
- It's a huge hall.
- And there were hundreds of people there.
- And they were mostly people who were
- supposed to be repatriated, Germans and Japanese
- or whatever.
- and we kept kind of to ourselves.
- Of course, the children played with the other children.
- And Walter almost got killed when he climbed on a table,
- and one of the German boys pulled his leg
- and almost threw him down on his head.
- He didn't do it on purpose, I'm sure,
- but it scared me to death.
- And then I was told that we could have some visitors.
- So I could get my brother-in-law,
- with his wife, and my sister-in-law,
- who was the youngest sister-in-law, who
- was, at the time, pregnant.
- They came to visit us.
- And they also asked me if I wanted kosher food.
- And I said yes, please.
- Because that was one way of staying
- separate from the rest of them.
- So by that time, it was Thanksgiving.
- And I had a beautiful Thanksgiving meal.
- And they obviously had some big kettle,
- and they got it out of there.
- So we gloated over that, my mother and I.
- But yeah, it was tough.
- I mean, I one time stood in line to get some milk.
- And when my turn came, and I grabbed the ladle,
- the German woman tried to get it away from me.
- And I got mad.
- I said, this is not Germany.
- This is America.
- I was here first.
- And I grabbed it back and got my milk.
- But it was no pleasure.
- And to top it all off, then, one day,
- one German woman came to me and said, Mrs. Stein,
- I didn't know that you are one of us.
- We are all going to be sent to Texas now.
- And I am the leader of the group you are in.
- So I'm one of them.
- So we all were packed in a train, with my father.
- He was all that time in Ellis Island in the sick bay.
- And we could visit him, every day.
- But that was all.
- He wasn't able to walk alone.
- And so they shipped us off, two days and two nights, to Texas.
- And in Dallas, they took us off the train and put us in a bus.
- And the women started singing German songs.
- And my mother and I, we wanted to crawl under the seats.
- It was terrible, embarrassing.
- And they brought us to Seagoville.
- Seagoville was converted into a detention station for families
- to be repatriated.
- And there was already a group, our people were there,
- and a group of people they had picked up
- from the northern part of South America and brought them,
- for safekeeping, there.
- And then there was a group of Japanese there,
- and a large group of Germans, all to be repatriated.
- There were mostly the families of Bund members.
- And the men they had arrested right
- at the beginning of the war.
- And the women were allowed to sell their belongings and all,
- and settle their affairs before they repatriated them.
- So we housed about 40 people, and we
- took turns cooking and cleaning in our little private lives
- there.
- And besides that, we were able--
- since this was in a low security prison, before,
- they had work rooms there to teach the prisoners trades.
- And they had a big sewing room, with commercial sewing machines
- and material.
- And we could get some help, too.
- And I started to sew some clothes for the children,
- because we didn't have anything.
- We had summer things.
- Luckily, in Panama, the matron went to the Salvation Army
- and got some coats.
- And we converted them, for the children,
- into small coats and a coat for me,
- so that we, at least, were warm when we came to Ellis island.
- Walter didn't have any shoes.
- He had one pair of shoes.
- And when we got off, we walked off the boat,
- I had to tie a string around his soles because they came off.
- So he didn't even have that.
- And yeah, a funny thing happened while we were in Ellis Island.
- One day, I was standing around next to the staircase.
- And suddenly, there came a man to me and said,
- are you Mrs. Stein?
- I say, yes.
- He said, well, I thought I saw your picture from your husband
- showed me.
- He is with me in a camp.
- And he told me where he is.
- But then there came a man and took him away.
- He was one under guard, too.
- And he had to go to some meeting,
- came extra from the camp where they were,
- to go to the meeting.
- And so at least, I knew where he was.
- Where was he in?
- In the camp in Tennessee.
- But before that, we hadn't heard a word.
- We didn't know whether they ever got over or what happened.
- Then in Seagoville, then we got two rooms.
- Yeah, first, we had two rooms, then
- we got a third room when William came--
- one room for the children, one for my mother and father--
- my father was mostly, also, there in the hospital--
- and one for William and me, when he came, which was a while.
- But the others had been there already a long time.
- And they had rearranged the furniture
- and taken what they liked, and I was left with slim pickings.
- I didn't have a dresser, at first.
- And we had just the beds and no pillows and all that.
- But it was all straightened out.
- And then we all got rations, like everybody else.
- And we did our own cooking.
- We usually cooked in groups.
- And lived there.
- And then one day, in December, William showed up,
- he came and Eric.
- He came, too.
- So we were all together, again.
- And we stayed there and made the best of what we could.
- And every Friday, there came a rabbi to visit us.
- And we always looked forward to that.
- He first took turns from each congregation.
- But in the end, it was only Rabbi Abramowitz,
- from Agudas Achim, which doesn't exist anymore.
- He was the only one who came every Friday.
- And we were so touched that William, who
- had a very religious childhood, but he
- didn't keep very much later on.
- But he was so touched that he insisted, after we came out,
- that the children go to Hebrew school and Sunday
- school to Agudas Achim, which, for my mother and me,
- was not the right thing.
- But we went along with it.
- And Walter was bar mitzvah and confirmed at Agudas Achim,
- and so was Ellen.
- And yeah, and then we had some other visitors from Dallas.
- And of course, the news came around
- that there were German refugees in Seagoville.
- And one day, there came a couple.
- It turned out that he was a fraternity brother
- of William's, from the same fraternity,
- and his wife was a childhood friend of my sister-in-law.
- They lived next door to each other and were close friends.
- And we knew them both.
- And then there was another couple,
- who were patients of my husband's in Frankfurt.
- And they lived in Dallas.
- The first couple was Morgensterns.
- They moved later to California.
- And now, they are both dead.
- And the other couple, that's Paul and Tesy Oberndorfer.
- He passed away quite a few years ago.
- And she lives, with her son, in San Francisco.
- They came to visit us.
- And it turned out that there was quite a large group
- of German refugees already in Dallas.
- So that kind of made it feel more like home, let's say.
- But then, in beginning April, we got permission to leave there.
- We went on parole.
- They let us out.
- And everybody could go where they wanted to.
- The others, the ones from north of South America,
- they all wanted to stay in Florida.
- And some of them went to New York.
- But we couldn't do much traveling with my father.
- So we decided, we stay in Dallas.
- And my husband said, afterwards, if he
- had known the summers as hot, he would have never stayed.
- He couldn't take the heat.
- But once we were here, we stayed.
- And the children liked it.
- And otherwise, we liked it.
- So we came out.
- And the Federation was supposed to take over.
- And they took us to an apartment or a bedroom,
- that they had rented for my parents,
- upstairs, with stairs like that.
- We hardly could get my father up there.
- And then the room was filthy dirty, the linens were dirty.
- So the other refugees came to the rescue.
- They found us some place, downstairs, on Gaston Avenue.
- This doesn't exist anymore.
- It's all torn up.
- And my parents had a room in the front.
- And we and the children lived, above the garage, behind there.
- And we had $25 among us that my sister-in-law had sent us.
- And they said, well, spend that, and then come to us.
- We'll see what we can do for you.
- So that didn't go very far.
- But some of the other refugees brought us stuff.
- And we were just like coming from another world.
- You know, first, another country,
- and we were not too familiar with the language.
- And then, we didn't know anything.
- We didn't know where to go, what to buy, and how to function.
- So they took us and took us to a 5 and 10 store,
- and we bought plates and forks and everything.
- We didn't have anything.
- We couldn't keep house.
- And then we had to get jobs.
- That was very important.
- Luckily-- luckily, I say--
- it was during wartime, when it was easier to find jobs.
- My husband could get a job, as a dental mechanic,
- in a laboratory, although he never was a very good mechanic.
- But it was better than none, for them, I guess.
- And thanks to what I had learned at the sewing
- machine in Seagoville, I got a job at Nardis.
- I don't know if you remember Nardis.
- That was a big, very fashionable dress factory, ladies' apparel.
- And I started out as a beginner, for $0.40 an hour,
- 40 hours a week.
- But in no time, I did better, and I could make overtime.
- And we managed, more or less, unless something extra came up.
- And in the end, well, we had to borrow $125
- from the Federation.
- And so we kind of got along.
- Then we got another apartment in the Oak Lawn area.
- The children went to school.
- And we worked.
- And then my father got another stroke and passed away.
- That was August the 30, 1943.
- And when we came back from the funeral,
- there was the representative from the Federation.
- And I thought he wanted to bring his condolences.
- And then he came out to ask when we could
- start paying back the $125.
- And I'll never forget it.
- We see what they do now for them and what they did for us,
- it's like black and white.
- But luckily, we didn't need them.
- We managed.
- And then William started to correspond,
- with British Honduras, with that other dentist, who miraculously
- was spared all what we went through, because he wasn't
- in town and nobody knew of his existence in that little town,
- there.
- So never anybody even thought about him.
- And he took care of our things and told us
- what terrible condition everything was,
- that they had opened the furniture, not with the locks,
- with the keys that were around there, but pried them open.
- And there were ashes on the carpets and termites
- all over the place.
- As a matter of fact, the termites
- were so bad that, in Germany, you have kitchen cabinets.
- They are not built-in, like an armoire, you have that.
- And it was eaten up, that, when you touched it, it fell apart.
- I mean all that we had, forget about that.
- But they also talked to Dr. Pierce.
- And after all, William had money coming, from the income,
- while he was still working there.
- So we got, here and there, a small check from him.
- And after the war ended, surprisingly,
- the British government paid to ship all our belongings to us.
- And that is proof that they were in the wrong, otherwise
- they wouldn't have done that.
- But it didn't help us very much.
- William never could go back to practice there.
- And in America, he tried every which way.
- When they let us out, right away,
- Eric was told he should sign up and go
- into the army, which he did.
- And he was sent to the Pacific, as a dental mechanic,
- on a ship, and came through it very well.
- And when he came out, he became, right away,
- American citizen and could go, under the GI bill of rights,
- to dental school.
- And he had a hard time, but, with the help of his wife,
- which he met in California, he made it.
- And he has a beautiful practice in Los Angeles.
- So it was, in a way, lucky for him.
- But my husband, he tried every which way to enter the army.
- But he was, at that time, already 42 years old.
- And they wouldn't take him older than 40.
- So that was out.
- Then he wanted to go back and make another examination,
- but not only did they ask for four years of college,
- but, to get into the college, you had to be a citizen.
- We were not even in America, officially.
- We were wetbacks.
- We had no papers.
- We had nothing.
- So he had to give that up.
- And that was the hardest time.
- He never got over that.
- Really, it hurt him deeply.
- But there was no way, unless, after the war,
- he could have gone back to Germany,
- and they would have taken him with open arms.
- They needed people there.
- But I couldn't see my children growing up in Germany.
- There was no way.
- I told him, if you wanted to go alone and see, first,
- how the situation is and all, that was fine with me.
- But he didn't want to do that either.
- So he had to give that up.
- And he had a very, very hard time to fit in anywhere.
- He was not a good businessman although he had a degree in it.
- But that was more theoretically then practical.
- And he had too good a heart, and he was too honest.
- He went into real estate, for a time, and made it a habit,
- before he showed the house, he told the customers
- all the bad things about the house first.
- So that shows you what type he was.
- That was hopeless.
- We had to adjust quite a bit.
- And it took a long, long time.
- And finally, in the last years of his life,
- while he was still working, he was a accountant.
- I mean not certified, but he did accounting work.
- And that suited him much better.
- He should have done that long before.
- But I never could get him to go to school.
- But in the end, he said, the grandchildren
- made up for everything.
- He adored them.
- To go back a little, when you were in Seagoville,
- how were you treated by the Germans who
- were going to be repatriated?
- Well, we kept apart from them.
- And some of them, they came and talked to us.
- And they said, they were innocent,
- and they never did anything against America.
- But their husbands were members of the Bund.
- So maybe they were forced to go into it,
- but they didn't need to.
- And they lived-- the one, they had a 15 year old son
- and never became citizens.
- So that alone shows it.
- Did they know you were Jewish?
- No.
- Yeah, they knew we were.
- Oh, yeah.
- They knew that there was a Jewish group there.
- Some of them talked to us, also.
- But we kept separate.
- We didn't want to.
- How many other Jewish families were with you in Seagoville?
- The wanted-- Dr Friedman, he was lucky.
- He could work in the medical profession.
- He could work as an intern.
- And then he got his license back.
- And he went first to Evansville, Indiana, and practiced there.
- And then later on, he worked half a year
- in Evansville and half a year in Florida.
- And then he moved all the way to Florida.
- And the last I heard from him is when my husband passed away.
- That's now almost seven years.
- I don't know.
- And the other ones, they stayed in Dallas.
- But we never had much contact with them.
- And they were mad at us because, when my son's--
- wait a minute.
- When was that?
- I tried to think what happened?
- We had given them the kiddush cup for their little boy
- when he was born.
- And she had said, if we let him know
- when we have the first grandchild, boy grandchild,
- they want to give it to him.
- And we forgot about that.
- And when my oldest grandson was born, we didn't announce it.
- So they got mad with us.
- So we have no contact with them.
- Do you know how many Jewish families
- were in Seagoville with you?
- I don't know exactly.
- I know we were about 40 people.
- And our children were the only children.
- There were some grown children there, some girls, no boys.
- And one man died while we were there.
- And we were allowed to go to the funeral
- at Agudas Achim, all of us.
- He's buried there.
- How were you treated by the prison authorities?
- Very good.
- They were very, very nice.
- I cannot say any different.
- And very helpful.
- Were you investigated, at all, by the FBI or the OSI?
- Well, that was all before.
- Once, we were in there--
- when we came out on parole, we had
- to report, every week, to the immigration service.
- And they were fantastic, too.
- Well, they told Eric what he should do.
- And later on, William was an avid photographer.
- He had worked in photography since he
- was a teenager, developed his own films,
- and glass plates it was at that time.
- And he saw an ad in the paper, one of the nightclubs,
- they were looking for a photographer
- that could do developing.
- So he got permission to apply there.
- And he worked there.
- And then he wanted to go on his own.
- He thought he can do better on his own.
- And they gave him permission to have a camera, which
- nobody else had.
- And we could have a car, but we had to stay within, I think,
- 80 miles radius.
- Couldn't go further.
- And he started a photography business--
- nightclub business.
- And he did that practically until my daughter got married,
- in '56.
- Then everybody had their own cameras,
- and there was not much money in that.
- But before, he worked every Friday,
- Saturday, Sunday, and Monday night, nightclub pictures.
- Partly, he had help, partly I did it.
- We're nearing the end of the second hour.
- Is there anything else that you feel
- is important to tell about your experience?
- Well, I would like to show these letters and stuff here.
- We didn't have that yet, did we?
- Yeah, we had that.
- We had that one.
- We had that one.
- OK.
- This is my father's passport, with a big J on the top.
- Can you explain what the J was for?
- The J means Jew, of course.
- And this was his identification card,
- with a big J in the middle.
- And notice the name "Israel" after his first name,
- David Israel Bergman.
- Every man had to have Israel in his name
- and every woman, Sarah.
- I have a passport of my mother's--
- the same thing.
- And you even had to write a letter to the authority--
- I don't know what you call that here-- where you get your birth
- certified.
- We had to write them, that they have to add the name--
- this is for the children--
- the name Israel and Sarah to the names of our children
- and to ourselves, too.
- So to make sure that everybody, right away,
- knows we are Jewish.
- And this was all before the war started.
- Did your husband ever talk about the short time
- that he spent in Buchenwald?
- About what?
- About the time he spent in Buchenwald?
- Yeah, he told some of the things.
- For one thing, he said that they were
- living in a hut, where he had this little suitcase,
- about that high.
- And he took a pencil.
- And he said that was about the height between the shelves
- where they slept.
- When one wanted to turn around, everybody had to turn around.
- There wasn't enough room to do it otherwise.
- And they got one cup of water a day.
- When it rained, they licked the water from the windows,
- because they didn't have any water.
- And of course, I mean there was no change
- of clothes or anything.
- From the way he smelled, when he came out,
- I know it must have been terrible.
- And they saw men sitting on the side of the road, half-dead.
- They could never go on.
- They just died, then and there.
- And if it was before they all were registered,
- then nobody knew what happened to them.
- They just didn't care about anything.
- They saw beatings and everything.
- But he wouldn't talk in detail about all that, not at all.
- Well, anything else you'd like to know?
- Anything you feel is important.
- We have one minute.
- Anything else you'd like to share with us?
- We have about 30 seconds.
- We have about 30 seconds, if there's anything
- you'd like to close with.
- I don't know what else.
- So many things that go through the head, you forget them.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
- Oh, boy.
- I didn't think I would survive it.
- You were very good.
- Oh, yeah.
- You did very well.
- A fascinating story.
Overview
- Interviewee
- Erica Stein
- Interviewer
- James Pennebaker
Alan Griffin - Date
-
interview:
1991 December 16
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
2 videocassettes (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Personal Name
- Stein, Erica.
Administrative Notes
- Holder of Originals
-
Dallas Holocaust Museum, Center for Education and Tolerance
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- James Pennebaker and Alan Griffin of the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies conducted the interview with Erica Stein on December 16, 1991. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch received the tapes of the interview from the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies on January 23, 1992. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received the interview by transfer from the Oral History branch in February 1995.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 08:09:06
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn506614
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Transcripts (2)
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- This record is digitized but cannot be downloaded online.
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Date: 1985-1992
Oral history interview with Helen Biderman
Oral History
Helen Biderman (née Prengler), born April 21, 1928 in Luków, Poland, describes her four brothers; her parents; growing up in Poland; the chaos of the beginning of the war; the roundup of Jews by the German Army on October 5 and the subsequent execution near a church; the deportations from Luków; going with her family to a nearby town; being forced to live with several families; the winter of 1940; her parents hiding while she stayed with an aunt; being moved to a ghetto with the other Jews; hiding with her family in an underground space during the deportations; being discovered by a Polish fireman hiding in various places; staying for seven to eight weeks in her grandfather's underground bunker with 17 members of her family; hiding with a German woman who owned a brick factory; being found by the Germans and the death of her younger brother; life in the ghetto from the end of 1942 to May 2, 1943; the attempt by some Jews to form a resistance group; falling ill with typhus; being attacked by a German Shepherd; hiding outside the ghetto; her parents reopening their business and staying until April 1945; moving to Katowice, Poland for a year then going to Munich, Germany for three years; her family getting papers to move to the United States; getting married and living in New Orleans, LA; how the Holocaust brought her family closer together; and her feelings about Germans.
Oral history interview with Max Biderman
Oral History
Max Biderman, born February 11, 1917 in Luków, Poland, describes his family; growing up in Poland; the beginning of the war; his family hiding during the roundups; the execution of Jews by the German Army; being caught with two of his brothers and forced to walk to Siedlce, Poland, where they were put in jail; being marched to a town 20 kilometers away and escaping with one of his brothers; returning home and hearing of the deportations to Treblinka; the creation of a ghetto in 1942 during the New Year; hiding during a deportation and the death of one of his brothers; living in the ghetto; working in a German factory; avoiding another deportation by hiding in the woods; contracting typhoid; witnessing the shooting of one of his brothers; being hidden by a Polish couple; hiding with several other Jewish boys; being hidden by a Polish farmer named Bronkevitch; defending themselves against a group of 40 armed men (possibly the Armia Krajowa); hiding in the forest; his group taking revenge on a farmer who denounced hidden Jews; reading newspapers; the arrival of the Russian Army; returning to Luków; finding the Prengler family (he later married Helen Prengler, RG-50.045*0001); going to Brest-Litovsk (Brześć Litewski), Poland after the war; going to Katowice, Poland then Munich, Germany; immigrating to the United States in September 1949; his children and grandchildren; not sharing his story with his children until recently; visiting Poland in 1984 and showing his children where he hid; the importance and danger of having a gun during the occupation; and testifying against a war criminal.
Oral history interview with Ala Danziger
Oral History
Oral history interview with Martin Donald
Oral History
Oral history interview with Bela Einhorn
Oral History
Oral history interview with Marie Fauss
Oral History
Marie Fauss (née Lucet Marie Selek), born August 25, 1925 at Pont-à-Mousson, France, describes her Catholic mother and Jewish father; visiting the synagogue with her father when she was four years old; her education; beginning college when she was 12 years old; her father reading Mein Kampf and warning her of Hitler’s intentions; her family’s Jewish and Catholic friends; her father deciding she should attend Catholic church; the invasion of Poland; the scarcity of coal; being out of college in July 1940; being warned by an Italian of the impending invasion; her fear of the Germans; fleeing with an Italian family south on minor roads; seeing an exodus of people moving south as they arrive in Nancy, France; being in Nancy during a bombardment; the German restrictions during the occupation; the taking of a census; the round ups and deportations; rumors about concentration camps; taking in other refugees; collaborators; becoming silent and withdrawn; being required to take German at school; being interrogated six times and having their house searched by the Germans; being beaten by interrogators; her belief that the mayor betrayed her to the Germans; being told to report to the town square to be sent to a work camp; being taken to a farm that produced food for a concentration camp in Lorraine; being taken out of the camp after three months with the help of her father; contracting tuberculosis; the arrival of American troops in September 1944; the Germans burning the college and hospital; how the war affected her; and getting married in 1945.
Oral history interview with Max Glauben
Oral History
Oral history interview with Bela Goldberg
Oral History
Oral history interview with Henry Goldberg
Oral History
Oral history interview with Alli Itzkowitz
Oral History
Oral history interview with Mike Jacobs
Oral History
Oral history interview with Miriam Joseph
Oral History
Oral history interview with Abram Kozolchyk
Oral History
Oral history interview with Leo Laufer
Oral History
Oral history interview with Helen Neuberg
Oral History
Helen Neuberg (née Chaja Miemacher), born December 12, 1926 in Ostrowice, Poland (possibly Ostrowiec in powiat sokołowski), describes her Orthodox family; growing up Jewish and her interactions with Gentiles; the German invasion; the restrictions placed on Jews; people being killed for breaking the curfew; her experiences in the ghetto; hiding during the deportation of her family, all of whom perished in Treblinka; witnessing acts of brutality and cruelty; obtaining false papers; moving to Warsaw, Poland; finding work as a waitress in Stuttgart, Germany, where she lived in fear of discovery; being aided by a Jewish American solider after the war, who assisted her in finding relatives in North America; meeting her husband, who was a survivor of concentration camps, in a displaced persons camp; and immigrating to the United States with her child and husband.
Oral history interview with Jack Oran
Oral History
Oral history interview with Sol Prengler
Oral History
Oral history interview with Lori Price
Oral History
Oral history interview with Ann Salfield
Oral History
Oral history interview with Rosalie Schiff
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Oral history interview with William Schiff
Oral History
Oral history interview with Jack Stein
Oral History
Oral history interview with Manya Wozobski
Oral History
Oral history interview with Greta Zetley
Oral History
Oral history interview with Leon Zetley
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Oral history interview with James Hirsch
Oral History
Oral history interview with Alegre Tevet
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Oral history interview with Zohn Milam
Oral History
Oral history interview with Eva Nanasi
Oral History
Oral history interview with William Schiff
Oral History