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Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1999.A.0122.31 | RG Number: RG-50.477.0031

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    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert
    Transcript
    It wasn't Rosenberg.
    Rosenberg.
    And what's your first name?
    Emily.
    My role is just to be a listener today
    to try to keep track of the place names and spellings.
    Today is the 10th of March, 1992.
    I'm Sandra Day Nionne and I'm here with Laurie Gilbert
    doing an interview for the Oral History
    Project of San Francisco.
    And Emily Rosenberg is here as our second.
    Laurie, could you start please by telling us
    where and when you were born, and what
    your name was if it was different than what it is now?
    I was born in Worms on Rhein-- in Rheinhessen in Germany
    four years before Hitler came to power-- in 1929.
    My parents and family were very typical middle class, maybe
    upper middle class merchants.
    My family life in that area--
    Worms was a small community, I should start from that area
    actually.
    Worms was the oldest Jewish community probably in Europe.
    The Jewish cemetery is the oldest in Europe,
    and there are graves going back to the year 1000.
    The Jewish community in Worms, I don't
    know exactly how large it was at the time when I was born--
    a few families, maybe 200 families--
    was extremely proud of that identity
    and still is extremely proud.
    The synagogue when I was five years old in 1934,
    we had the 900th anniversary of the synagogue.
    It had burned down several times and was always rebuilt.
    But I think my hometown in that sense
    is rather unique because of the very strong connection
    of having lived, and been born, and raised in that community.
    The pride of the synagogue is to this day
    and the connection to this day is very, very strong.
    And I would say that there were really
    two sides to my early life--
    the inside life of that community, the strong bond,
    and the family.
    Our life really reverted completely around the family.
    And the outside life, which on the other hand Worms was
    extremely anti-Semitic, and I perceived it--
    I was terrorized as a small child.
    I just read my memories are mainly being afraid.
    I was afraid to go from home to school.
    I was little, and I was afraid to go without protection.
    I either went with my older sister
    or with some other friends, because the kids
    used to taunt us on the way from home to school.
    Do you remember what they said?
    Well, yeah, they would call us a dirty Jew,
    and they would throw stones after us.
    And I've had really, to my adult life and even, at this point
    until very recently, I would have
    nightmares of running and being afraid of being persecuted.
    So there was really that feeling of the contrast between inside
    and outside was what I came away from.
    I hated Worms, whereas my sister who was several years older
    had a much stronger connection even
    with the outside community, because she
    did go to the regular school for several years.
    I went immediately into the Jewish school,
    which was on the grounds--
    this was at the community house in Worms,
    right next to the synagogue.
    And it was part of the old ghetto.
    Do you think going to the Jewish school increased
    the anti-Semitism towards you?
    I don't think so.
    The reason the school was established
    was so that we did not have to go to the other school.
    My sister had very bad experiences,
    and I remember growing up with the idea
    when I was a young child, because my father was very
    much involved in recruiting teachers for the school
    and setting the school up, that, oh, the school is really
    being set up for my benefit, because my daddy doesn't want
    me to go to the Nazi school.
    And it was a very typical small town milieu,
    because on one hand, everybody pretty much knew everybody.
    I had that pride of being Jakob Sundheimer's little girl
    and Adolf Kers little granddaughter.
    But on the other hand, I realize now
    that we really grew up very innocent
    because it was a small town.
    I've talked to other survivors who
    were born in Berlin or in the bigger towns,
    and they had a lot more street smarts.
    And they were much more able to stand up for themselves.
    I don't think that in the small towns,
    we were prepared for that.
    I've given a lot of thought to that lately thinking about some
    of the people who went to England on the children's
    transports.
    And when I was that age, I wanted to go very badly.
    I was very conscious of what was going on around us,
    and I wanted to leave.
    I wanted to escape, and not really giving my family,
    my parents any thought.
    At age five?
    Well, at age seven or eight.
    And I would talk to my parents and to my father--
    I want to go, I want to go with them.
    And they said, no, no, you're too little.
    We can't do that.
    And had they said, yes, I really wasn't up to handling that.
    And I know a lot of children had to.
    A very good friend of mine left at the age of eight
    with her younger sister--
    eight or nine.
    And she was from Berlin--
    I can't believe that that's the only reason,
    but I hear her stories and I'm amazed
    how she was able to handle situations
    that I would have really been much too much of a little girl
    to handle that.
    Would your sister have gone along?
    Well, my sister was almost seven years older,
    and she would have been in a much older group.
    And there were arrangements being made for my sister
    to go to England, not on the children transport,
    but to work as a house servant.
    But that never came to pass.
    But I was very jealous that my parents
    didn't want to let me go.
    And it wasn't until I became a mother myself that I thought,
    oh, my god, what situation where they in to even let
    go of their baby, their young child?
    And also we had a very good friend who
    did leave at the age of seven.
    Kurt and I were approximately the same age--
    I think he was a little younger than I.
    And his older brother was the same age as my sister.
    And we were always together in a group.
    The young people at the synagogue,
    there were certain groups who always were together
    in the activities.
    And Kurt, his older brother Herman
    was able to emigrate to the United States,
    and Kurt was sent to England.
    And he never saw his parents again.
    And he really never made it as an individual.
    I saw him several times later in New York--
    we had common relatives, so we were fairly close.
    And the fact that he was taken away from his parents
    at such an early age, it saved his life,
    but he was emotionally a cripple.
    And he died at the age of 52.
    And he never married.
    He never had a family.
    And he lived with a woman at the time of his death
    who was 25 years older than he.
    So he clearly never could manage without a mother.
    In your family, it sounds like your parents were orthodox.
    No.
    My parents were not really keeping religion at all.
    They were fairly assimilated.
    My father's parents had been very orthodox.
    My father didn't keep anything, and he always
    said he didn't even know Hebrew.
    He must have known some.
    On the other hand, my grandfather
    on my mother's side, my grandparents,
    they didn't keep kosher, but they were very much involved
    in all the Jewish rituals, although I never
    saw lighting of candles on Friday nights or anything
    like that.
    But we had our Friday night dinner.
    And we went to synagogue on Friday nights.
    My parents didn't go, but my sister and I
    went, because that's what the children were doing.
    And my grandfather was very much involved
    in the life of the synagogue and the community.
    He sang in the choir.
    He had a beautiful voice and used
    to say that he could have been another Caruso if he
    had had the training.
    And he was very proud of his voice
    and always sang solos on the [YIDDISH]
    It was a very important thing for him.
    He was very active.
    He belonged to the hiver kadisha and was generally,
    as I said, an important member in a small town.
    I adored my grandfather.
    He was a very, very warm and wonderful individual.
    Later on, my grandparents came to live with us, but not
    early in life.
    My parents were very typical of that generation--
    very kind of Victorian and afraid to show too much pride
    in their children, which we later realized
    was not what we needed, because it didn't really
    give us that self esteem that we needed.
    But that was something that people that were raised
    with the philosophy that we were raised with, typically German,
    that was not healthy.
    It was not a good thing to be raised that way.
    What were your parents' names?
    My father was Jacob and my mother was Gertrude.
    My grandfather was Adolf.
    And so we had a mixture--
    my sister is Miriam.
    And when I was born--
    I don't remember whether it was my mother
    or my father wanted me to be called Eva.
    And one of the other objected.
    They said they didn't want to have
    to hold the entire Bible between Jacob and Miriam.
    So that was enough.
    So that's why I was called Laura.
    And what kind of business was your family in?
    Yeah, as I said, they were very typical merchants.
    My father was a grain and feed merchant.
    He was very much of a self-educated man--
    very intelligent and a real workaholic.
    He was in business with two of his older brothers--
    sorry, one older brother and one younger brother.
    My grandfather who lived in a small town--
    my father was born in a small town near Worms--
    it's a little dwarf, really, a village,
    by the name of Bierstadt.
    And it was already my grandfather's business
    in Bierstadt-- the grain and feed business.
    But my father and my uncle brought it into the town,
    into Worms, and really enlarged on it.
    My father was very much the provider.
    And I realized later that even though he was not
    at all religious, his philosophies, everything,
    he was very much of a Jew in the way he lived--
    his ethical standards of taking care of the family,
    taking care, being charitable, and helping
    those less fortunate was really one of our most important
    commandments.
    So he was a very good and fine individual.
    And his values were very Jewish.
    What was the interaction with the Gentile community,
    either business wise or socially?
    Well, for my father, evidently, and for my grandfather--
    I'd like to backtrack for a moment-- my grandfather was
    a wine merchant, which was in the Rhineland very much
    the business.
    And he was very highly esteemed in his field.
    There's a little biography of my grandfather's that I still have
    where they are quoting one of his Gentile business friends.
    At the time when we had to leave, one of his friends
    said, if he could at least leave us his tongue,
    because he was he was so knowledgeable about tasting
    the wine and knowing which is good.
    And he had his Gentile buddies that he
    used to meet regularly in the late afternoon
    to have their liter or whatever wine together.
    My father had a lot of business associates.
    And evidently, he had no problems
    because he really wanted to hold on to that business
    as long as possible.
    And he was very much of an optimist.
    That's what killed so many of our people because of that.
    Did the local townspeople trade in his shop?
    Well, he didn't have a shop.
    He was a wholesaler, and he was traveling around all
    over Germany to buy and sell.
    And when he sold, it was by the train loads.
    And he also did a lot of real estate
    in farms, brokering in farms.
    So that was another part of the outcome,
    because he knew all the big farmers,
    and the little farmers, and so on.
    So he was very knowledgeable about what
    was going on in each community all over Germany.
    So the outside life for the older people seemed to be OK--
    for a long time, anyway--
    for too long.
    But as I said, not so the way I perceived it as a child.
    I remember going to school one day--
    depending on what hours were scheduled,
    the school tried to schedule the hours for the younger children
    to come in and their classes to start
    at the same time as the older children
    so that they could go together.
    So my sister and I would leave in the morning
    to go to school-- it was a short walk, maybe 10 or 15 minutes
    to walk together.
    And there was one particular guy that we always seemed to meet.
    And actually, they tried to schedule
    the start of the school hour earlier
    from the public schools so that we wouldn't
    meet the children on the way.
    But there were always a group of real Nazi kids
    who realized that, and they deliberately left early too so
    that they would meet us and they could have some fun.
    And there was this one guy who was always either trying
    to hit us, or throw stones, or say anti-Semitic things.
    And he always tried to spit at us.
    But he never hit us.
    He always missed.
    And this one day, my sister decided
    she's going to fight back, and she spit at him,
    and she hit him.
    And that was too much for him.
    He couldn't handle that.
    So he didn't start to fight her, he started to punch me.
    He pushed her out of the way, and he was trying to hit me.
    And my sister wasn't going to let him do that,
    so she had a fist fight with him.
    And it was a very scary situation for me.
    But she was better than he was.
    And a passer-by stopped and he said to the guy,
    aren't you ashamed of yourself having a fight with a girl?
    He said, but she's a Jew.
    So he must have been the only decent Gentile in Worms,
    because he said, so much the more so.
    And I've never forgotten that incident because of that.
    It was very interesting.
    Was that the only time you were beaten, actually?
    I was never really beaten hard.
    But there was always that potential.
    When I was 2 and 1/2, we moved from a house that
    belonged to the family, that belonged to us,
    and that was a little bit outside town,
    into a larger apartment in a three-family home that we
    rented.
    And there was a little boy downstairs
    that was the family of the owners of the house.
    He was the grandson of the owner of the house.
    There was a doctor.
    He had his medical practice downstairs
    and they lived there too.
    And we were the same age, and we used to play together
    until about 1934 or '35.
    And we played very well together, but then
    when it became time to go to school--
    his parents, his mother, and his father then became real Nazis.
    And the grandmother wasn't so much.
    And once he started to go to school,
    he realized that there was this Jewish girl.
    And after a while, we stopped playing.
    But for a while, they would include me in playing,
    but then would kind of taunt me.
    That was their fun.
    He would call and he would say, can I
    come down and play with him?
    And I would say, yes.
    But then his other little buddies came.
    And they had a sandbox downstairs in the yard
    and stuff that we always used to play very nicely together.
    But then they started just playing by themselves,
    and excluding me, and just generally making things
    very uncomfortable for me.
    And I had no idea how to handle that situation.
    And I used to be in that kind of closed in environment--
    it was the regular backyard, which was
    closed in by other buildings.
    And there was this big, heavy wooden door
    to go out to get to the staircase.
    And I used to call up to the third floor
    and call my mother--
    is it time for me to come back up?
    And she would say, no, because she didn't
    know what was going on with me.
    And I wanted her to say, yes, come back up.
    It's time for dinner or whatever,
    because I was very unhappy in that situation.
    They taunted me.
    They made fun of me and they called
    me a dirty Jew or whatever.
    I was never really able to fight back in any way.
    Did you tell your parents about that?
    I don't remember.
    I really don't know whether they really realized it.
    I must have eventually, because then it stopped.
    But I had a problem with that boy for many, many years.
    I remember him-- eventually we left Worms,
    we moved to Heidelberg--
    and that was after November '38--
    in March '39 we moved to Heidelberg,
    because they would not renew our lease anymore.
    And ultimately, that's really what
    saved my life because if we had stayed in Worms,
    we would have ended up in Auschwitz.
    But I remember him passing us on the way to the railroad station
    and giving us that arrogant look--
    that really arrogant Nazi look.
    And I can see to this day.
    And I always felt if I ever go back to Worms,
    I would have to confront that man.
    And I didn't know how I would handle it if I did.
    You seem to be very perceptive about a lot of things
    that were happening even when you were young.
    Do you remember any discussions in your family in the early
    days of Nazis in the early-'30s?
    There was always the talk about the political situation,
    and the general, and the situation of the war,
    and the situation of the Jews.
    It was always constantly around us.
    I don't think there was ever anything else.
    What was your parents' point of view?
    Well, on the one hand, they saw all the things that
    were happening around them.
    And my father tried very much to help Russian and Polish people
    that had emigrated to Germany, because they
    were the first ones attacked.
    And he helped them in any way he could as far as I
    remember to get out.
    But they always thought that they were going to be safe.
    And then by the time they needed to leave, it was too late.
    Did your family suffer any losses in those years?
    A business--
    Well, after '38, naturally, everything--
    I think probably because, and surely
    because my father was doing well and was considered successful,
    that he felt he can wait it out.
    In 1937, my father had a brother who had emigrated to the United
    States early on as a young man.
    The story is that in his late teens,
    he had to sow his wild oats or whatever.
    And he got a girl, as the story, a girl into trouble.
    So the grandparents sent him to America.
    And so that side of the family eventually
    were there to save us.
    But that uncle was constantly writing to us
    that we should leave.
    And he said he would be able to and wanted
    to give affidavits to either us or my mother's brother
    and his family.
    The two families who are related twice--
    once to my parents and then again through my mother's
    brother, who married, actually, an older cousin of mine.
    But I always considered her my aunt,
    because my father was the second youngest from seven children.
    And so there was a double relationship.
    So my uncle pleaded with my father to leave.
    And he said, but if you're not coming,
    then I'll give the affidavits to the kids.
    And that's what he did.
    So your parents--
    They didn't want to leave yet-- no.
    Both of them?
    I really don't know how my mother felt at that point.
    My mother was such a typical wife,
    she didn't really voice her opinions that much.
    I'm sure she must have had them, but she just
    went along with whatever my father thought right.
    I think you asked me something else.
    No, I was asking whether they each had an opinion
    about leaving Germany.
    Yeah, yeah.
    But as I said before, I wanted to leave very badly.
    And at one point, there was some talk
    of a friend in Switzerland, a business friend
    of my father's in Switzerland, would take me.
    I must have been 6 or 7.
    And somehow, it didn't come to pass,
    but I wanted to go very badly.
    So do you think your parents were aware of how much terror
    you were feeling?
    I don't think so.
    I don't think that they gave it much value, much importance.
    I was baby in the family, and my feelings were whatever.
    You're too little, you're too young.
    That was the way I was treated.
    We don't really have to pay too much attention to her
    because she's so little.
    Were you aware of any of the stories or descriptions
    from the refugees, the Poles or other people who were fleeing?
    Well, I was very much aware of the Sturmer, the newspaper,
    and that sort of thing.
    That was always something that was talked about.
    And we were constantly aware of the people
    that were leaving, because our community kept shrinking
    and shrinking all the time.
    Our friends left, our teachers left.
    We had a hard time replacing teachers again.
    So it just dwindled and dwindled more and more.
    And a lot of the fathers were trying to learn a trade--
    if they had been merchants, to learn
    a trade, because they thought that they might do better.
    As a matter of fact, my uncle did
    do that, my mother's brother.
    He had been in business with his father as a wine merchant.
    And when he came to the United States,
    he had a woodworking shop--
    a finishing shop.
    And in fact, that shop is still in existence today in New York.
    Any other relatives or friends that you knew of leave?
    Well, a lot of our relatives did not.
    My father's brother, older brother
    that he had been in business with,
    his daughter, she went on hashara
    and then she went to Palestine.
    And her father, my uncle, went there at one time
    to see if he would want to go there and live there.
    And he came back and he said, no.
    His younger daughter, my cousin, had, what is it called,
    not muscular dystrophy--
    she was born with muscular dystrophy.
    I can't think of it.
    Cerebral palsy perhaps?
    Yeah, cerebral palsy.
    So my uncle was divorced, and he was
    taken care of the younger daughter
    so that I don't know what he thought.
    He also probably thought that it would blow over.
    But eventually, they didn't leave and they were deported.
    I had another uncle, my father's youngest brother,
    who was single.
    He had been the baby in the family.
    And I think my father and my uncle were pretty strong.
    I'm trying to think of the word--
    assertive men, at least within the family.
    And I think the younger brother was very much also treated
    like the baby in the family.
    And he lived with us.
    And he married very late.
    I think he married in 1939, but I'll get to that later.
    But again, there was one family member--
    he was my favorite.
    He lived with us and he would spend more time with my sister
    and me to play with us--
    much more time than my father would.
    So again, he was one of a family member that I really adored.
    And when we moved to Heidelberg, he
    had wanted to move with us because he
    had had a room in our apartment, but at that point
    in 1939, he couldn't get permission.
    Well, he married at that time, and his wife
    couldn't get permission to live in Heidelberg,
    and he couldn't get permission to live in Worms.
    So they rented a room in Heidelberg,
    and they also lived with her parents in Worms.
    And they were commuting back and forth.
    They would spend a week here and spend a week there.
    And I'll come to that later.
    In 1938 at the Kristallnacht, my sister was already almost 16.
    She must have been just before her 16th birthday.
    And I was nine.
    So she was in Frankfurt.
    She wanted to be a baby nurse.
    And there was a home for wayward girls,
    which actually had been started by the famous patient
    of Freud's.
    I'm trying to think of her name, it's Papa something.
    But her name is mentioned a lot in Freud's books.
    And she had started this home.
    And my sister went there to learn
    to be a nurse, and particularly infants.
    So she was there at the time.
    And my father was out on a business trip.
    So my mother and I were alone.
    And I was on my way to school.
    It must have been maybe 7:15, 7:30 in the morning.
    And about halfway on the way to school,
    I met some other Jewish children who were already
    on the way back and they said to me, the synagogue is burning.
    And I was just stunned.
    I couldn't understand how that could be happening.
    And there must have been some Gentile children also
    that were talking about it.
    And I just turned right around and I ran home
    to my mother to tell my mother.
    And they must have said, you can't go there.
    And just as I was ready to get into our house,
    I looked up the street--
    and we had relatives about a block
    away from where we lived who had a villa there--
    and I saw this white stuff, looked like snow, in the air.
    How come it's snowing there and it's not snowing here?
    It was that they had opened up the feather beds
    and slashed them.
    And I saw all the feathers flowing down.
    But I didn't realize that yet at the time.
    And I went upstairs to my mother--
    I think I must have been crying, because I just
    couldn't understand this whole situation.
    And then somehow, we must have heard that there
    was something going on.
    And my mother and I went to the attic room.
    I think the owner of the building, the old lady,
    must have told us that we should go.
    Every apartment had like a maid's room upstairs.
    And my mother and I went there.
    And I still remember taking a [INAUDIBLE] with me--
    you might remember that too.
    I would take an empty spool of thread with four nails,
    and you'd kind of do crocheting.
    And I loved doing that, so I took that with me.
    And I think we took some bread.
    Those are the things I can remember.
    And we sat there for several hours, my mother and I.
    And I don't know--
    she must have communicated somehow
    with the woman, the old lady in the house.
    Because at some point, we left.
    And my father's business was a block away from our apartment.
    And the building belonged to the family.
    And my uncle live there with his daughter and their housekeeper.
    And at this point, my father had a single sister also,
    but she had she was already in the Jewish old age
    home at that time.
    But the downstairs were the offices
    and upstairs was my uncle's apartment.
    And then above his apartment was an apartment
    that belonged to the caretaker of the building.
    And he was a member of the Nazi party.
    So we went into my father's office space.
    And eventually, a lot of our relatives all ended up there.
    It was like a safe haven, because we
    had the protection of the Nazi party guy from upstairs.
    Why did you have his protection?
    Well, I guess he would have told the hoodlums if they came
    or when they came to back off.
    Don't bother these people.
    He must have done that, because nothing happened.
    They never came upstairs, they never
    bothered us in the office space.
    And as far as I know, they never bothered my uncle's apartment
    either.
    My uncle had a heart condition, and he was upstairs in bed.
    But eventually, my grandparents came and stayed there with us.
    And my grandmother's sister and her daughter also came.
    And I think there might have been some other relatives.
    And we stayed in the office--
    there was no place for us to sleep or anything,
    but we stayed there for that night for sure,
    and maybe for another night.
    I remember trying to sleep on a chair.
    And someone must have brought us some food.
    But my grandparents came, and their apartment
    had been completely destroyed--
    totally destroyed.
    I think part of their bedroom furniture was saved,
    but everything else was gone--
    living room furniture, dishes, and everything
    was totally destroyed.
    My grandfather had been rounded up
    to be taken to the police station.
    And he was over 75, and he had a limp.
    And they let him go.
    They sent him home again.
    I think he cried bitterly at that time.
    I think from then on, I saw him cry many times.
    I had never seen a man cry before.
    My Uncle Albert who was upstairs,
    I think that man must have somehow protected him.
    My other uncle, my other younger uncle, he was he
    was taken to Dachau.
    And my father had been on a train on a business trip.
    And my father looked like a typical German.
    And a German said to him on the train,
    if I had a Jew in front of me now, I would strangle him.
    My father just kind of left and locked himself
    in the bathroom for the rest of the trip.
    And he must have heard rumors or seen
    something in the newspaper, so he went to Heidelberg.
    We had an aunt--
    one of my father's sisters lived in Heidelberg.
    And he went there and stayed with them.
    And he was OK.
    But we didn't know that at the time.
    We had no idea where he was.
    Why did he choose Heidelberg?
    Was it closer?
    Nobody knew him in Heidelberg.
    If he would have come back to Worms,
    they would have sent him to a concentration
    camp like the other people.
    He just tried to save his neck.
    Somehow, we must have talked eventually by telephone,
    but he obviously realized that if he was going home,
    he would be taken.
    So he wasn't.
    What about the women and children?
    They were OK.
    We were OK.
    We were not bothered.
    After a few days, we went back to our apartment.
    And the landlady was very proud of herself,
    because she went in with the hoodlums--
    OK, here you can have your fun, but you can only go so far.
    So my parents had some very nice paintings, oil paintings--
    so they slashed the oil paintings.
    I think they didn't do much else--
    very little else.
    So I guess she must've figured they
    can live without the paintings, but the furniture was
    OK and whatever.
    So she kind of tried to do it both ways.
    So did you view her as a benefactor then?
    I really don't know.
    We knew that she certainly wasn't friendly,
    but she also wasn't as malicious as some of the other people.
    She was from the older generation.
    Her son and her daughter-in-law were very rabid Nazis.
    And I hated the daughter-in-law, because she was always
    dressed in her dirndl dress, which that just symbolized
    the Nazi party.
    She was always wearing that dirndl dress.
    But she did not renew our lease.
    So after November '38 when our lease ran out,
    it wasn't renewed.
    And my aunt in Heidelberg and my uncle emigrated to India.
    They had a son who had emigrated to India,
    and they followed him.
    And they had lived in a Jewish house.
    It was owned by Jews.
    And all the apartments were Jewish people living in it.
    And it was a much more modern house.
    It was fairly new.
    But it was a much smaller apartment.
    So we moved there with our grandparents.
    My grandparents after they lost everything
    had moved in with us, and they moved with us to Heidelberg.
    Had they owned their own home in Worms?
    Yes.
    [INAUDIBLE] about that?
    Well, it was an apartment.
    It was a rented apartment.
    It was a rented apartment.
    They didn't own a house, no.
    They had their apartment, and all of their possessions
    were destroyed.
    They had their bed, and they had a dresser, and very little
    else.
    My grandmother was always talking--
    it became a saying in the family,
    [SPEAKING GERMAN] We used to laugh about it and joke about
    it a lot because [GERMAN] is a long-stemmed wine glass.
    And there was this beautiful set of wine glasses
    that was supposed to go to me--
    that was my older sister, she was supposed
    to inherit that eventually.
    And my grandmother was always saying,
    only two or three glasses left for you, my sister.
    So that became a family joke.
    By the way, did you speak Yiddish in your family?
    No.
    I don't think that--
    The German Jews was really didn't speak Yiddish.
    Why did your father decide to go to Heidelberg
    and leave Worms altogether?
    Well, as I said, we were able to get that apartment.
    And I think that they also wanted to get away from Worms,
    because Worms was so very anti-Semitic.
    And Heidelberg, I was very happy.
    It was only maybe 60 kilometers away from Worms,
    but it was a university town and was much more cosmopolitan.
    And nobody knew us.
    And it felt wonderful to me to be in Heidelberg.
    There were the mountains around it,
    and I loved going hiking in the mountains
    and go up to the Schloss.
    And it was a totally different life.
    And I didn't feel that aura of hate
    around me when people looked at me.
    They didn't know who I was.
    I looked like any other little girl.
    So I was really happy in Heidelberg.
    And there was a day in 1939 after the war started
    and the German troops came back from France
    with their ideas of victory, and they were going up to the Main
    Street in Heidelberg, and I was on my way home
    from the school-- again, a Jewish school,
    but it was only a block and a half away from where we lived.
    I had to cross the main street, and I
    couldn't cross it because the troops were going through.
    And there were the crowds lining the streets, and screaming,
    and everything.
    And this tank or whatever the vehicle was, I don't remember,
    stopped or slowed down.
    And he was handing out chocolate bars.
    And there you saw this German little kid,
    and he gave me a chocolate bar.
    And that was the most wonderful moment in my life--
    that he gave me something and he didn't even
    know that I was Jewish.
    And wasn't that wonderful?
    I really got one over them because I got this bar
    of chocolate by mistake.
    I wasn't supposed to get it.
    It's something that made such a strong impression on me
    as a moment of glory that I never forgot it.
    And none of the people around me said, hey,
    she's not supposed to get it.
    She's Jewish.
    Nobody knew the difference.
    So I thought I had such a good joke on them.
    I ran home, and I was happy, I was delighted,
    and I showed my mother, look what I got.
    Did you connect up with the Jewish community in Heidelberg
    other than the school?
    I think my parents knew some people.
    It was one thing about my parents--
    they had very little social life.
    As I said, my father was a workaholic.
    And whatever they did was usually with the family--
    90% with the family.
    They had some friends, but the friends
    were not all that terribly important as the family.
    I think my mother wasn't too happy about that,
    because whatever free time-- holidays, vacations--
    it was always either one side of the family or the other
    that we spent our time with.
    Were you going to the synagogue or was there a synagogue
    still in operation?
    In Heidelberg?
    No, never.
    My parents never set foot in a synagogue
    anymore after the synagogue in Worms was destroyed.
    In New York they went a few times for the high holidays
    later on, but they didn't like it.
    There was no other place in the world
    as the synagogue in Worms.
    It was the choir, the music, the rabbi--
    nothing was right.
    It was the same thing about Passover.
    I try to recreate seders now, and it's impossible.
    It's impossible.
    The seders we had with the family
    were so wonderful with the whole family being together,
    and my grandfather with his singing,
    and my cousin Walter there, and we kids had so much fun.
    And it was such a great, wonderful, warm feeling.
    And of course, everybody knew how to sing everything.
    The singing, the melodies were all important.
    And now when we make a seder, nobody knows.
    Nobody really knows what to do with it.
    And so that's something my sister and I both really miss.
    We try our best, but it doesn't come across too successfully.
    Yeah, absolutely.
    How was your sister faring throughout that period, '38,
    '39?
    She was in Frankfurt.
    She was in Frankfurt.
    She wasn't faring too well.
    It was more like a prison than a place to learn.
    And they were not even allowed to associate
    with these so-called wayward girls
    who had illegitimate babies.
    And she was very unhappy, and she came home, fortunately.
    In the end, she had come home just a few days
    before we were deported.
    Otherwise, we wouldn't have been together.
    Because then on October 22, 1940,
    the deportation came to Gurs.
    What had been leading up to that?
    How [INAUDIBLE]
    It was a total surprise, although because of the war,
    we were kind of prepared to run at any moment.
    Everybody had rucksacks packed with certain staples
    to be ready and go.
    But then we saw that the Allies really didn't do too much,
    and we were fairly secure.
    There was one bomb that fell about a block away from us
    at one time, and that was it.
    We used to have the alarms, but Heidelberg was totally spared.
    Worms was completely destroyed, and Heidelberg
    was completely saved.
    But by 1940, the war was elsewhere, not in Germany.
    Had you been hearing anything about what
    was going on in the East or the Jews in Poland?
    Yes.
    There were rumors, but I didn't really
    understand it completely.
    I heard all the adults sitting around the table
    and talking a lot.
    I perceived it somehow, but nobody really could understand.
    It was impossible.
    I'll get to that later-- when we realized
    that the train was going west and not east, we felt relieved.
    But what would have happened in the East, of course,
    we didn't know.
    We knew that it would be it would be bad.
    But at that time, it hadn't happened.
    Actually, our deportation was the very first one.
    So it was totally unexpected.
    From what we learned later, they were really very
    anxious to start the deportation,
    but the camps in the East weren't ready yet.
    And there were some in France that were ready.
    So they made an arrangement with the Vichy government
    to take us.
    But the day we were deported, the Gestapo came,
    and we were still in bed in the morning.
    And they came between 7 and 7:30.
    And they rang the bell and said we
    have two hours to get dressed, and get ready, and take
    warm clothes, and you can take whatever you can carry,
    and take some provisions--
    take as much food, whatever you can take.
    Did they say things like if you were
    going to be relocated for work?
    Or [INAUDIBLE]
    They didn't say anything.
    They just told us that we're going away, that's all.
    And this was the very first heard of this.
    Yeah, it had not.
    We're rolling.
    In a minute, we'll have speed.
    OK.
    Emily, you had a question [INAUDIBLE] that last period.
    Yes.
    I want to know what concept the adults seemed
    to have of deportation prior to the day that you were deported.
    Was this a known fact in Jewish history?
    I think there had been some deportations on a smaller scale
    of Polish or Russian citizens.
    But as far as the German Jews was concerned,
    it had not happened.
    Whether people thought eventually
    we're going to get there too--
    I'm sure by that time, they must have thought so.
    But really something to face as a reality
    that this is going to happen or will most likely happen,
    I don't think so.
    And then again, it might have depended on the family.
    My father was an optimist.
    And in a way, it was very good for us.
    But in another way, it was also very bad for us.
    But he always tried to hold on to something positive--
    the saying that always went that he always said,
    the soup isn't eaten as hard as it's cooked--
    that sort of thing.
    It's not going to be that bad.
    What about your grandparents?
    Did they have any other feelings?
    About leaving?
    I don't think that they ever really thought
    of themselves as emigrating.
    Once we were out, of course, but before that, I don't think so.
    Because they realized that they would have to be taken
    care of by their children.
    And they realized how difficult that was.
    My uncle and aunt, they were obviously
    having a very difficult time in New York.
    Were your grandparents optimistic also,
    I mean, in the sense if nothing worse would happen?
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    I think up to a certain point, they were.
    But as I told you earlier, I saw my grandfather
    crying on a number of times after that.
    So.
    What about the daily living conditions by that time,
    say, '39, '40?
    How was food, clothes?
    Food was rationed.
    And by the time we moved to Heidelberg,
    we were only allowed certain shops at certain hours.
    We couldn't go grocery shopping anymore wherever we wanted to.
    We had to go to that particular store between 5 and 7
    or whatever when the other people weren't
    going to be there.
    But by the time we left in 1940, it wasn't as vicious
    yet as it became later.
    It was vicious, but not from what
    we know what happened later on.
    And was your father able to continue on with his business?
    No.
    No, after the Kristallnacht, that stopped.
    And what happened by that time, by the time
    we moved to Heidelberg, is that all your money, all your assets
    had to be turned over to the government,
    and we were allowed a certain amount of monthly allowance.
    But evidently, whatever that was was sufficient for us.
    I never had the feeling that there was a problem.
    And were you able to retain enough clothing and household
    effects?
    At the time when we were living in Heidelberg?
    Oh yeah.
    Yeah, we had that.
    And there was no problem.
    I remember my mother going shopping
    with my sister for clothing--
    that was just before the war started--
    because she was going to she was preparing
    herself to go to England.
    And I was very jealous that she got all those nice clothes
    and I didn't get any.
    My grandfather, he made it his life's work to go out
    and to make friends with certain tradespeople in the town--
    and he was the sort that could do that very easily--
    to get candy for me.
    So he came back and he bought every candy that was available.
    Chocolate wasn't available anymore, but other kinds of
    candies--
    he would come back and, he would have something for me.
    And that was great.
    And he was the best joke-teller--
    there must be a word to for that,
    I don't know-- that I ever knew.
    And he used to keep everybody laughing.
    He had his little black book and he would look up one--
    almost like a joke number 17 and everybody would start laughing.
    And it took me years--
    I think I must have been close to 18 or 20 years
    when it just hit me one day that, oh, the reason he always
    sent me out of the room to get a glass of cold water was, aha--
    but I was so innocent and naive that I went outside--
    and he would say, child, go outside
    and get me a glass of water, and let it run really cold.
    And I would do that.
    And I would go outside, and I would really let the water run
    for a long time.
    And then I would bring it back to him
    and I would say, here, papa.
    Here's your water.
    And I would put it in front of him,
    and I couldn't understand why he didn't
    bother to drink it-- didn't even seem
    like he was thirsty at all.
    He was great.
    And your father when he was working,
    how was he spending his days?
    Waiting for the next newscast on the radio.
    He would turn on the radio, and we have to get some news now,
    and he couldn't understand why there
    wasn't any news when he happened to be turning on the radio.
    But basically, there wasn't much for him to do.
    He got together with the other people
    in the building in Heidelberg-- with other Jewish families.
    We all became very friendly.
    It was like a little community unto
    itself with those other people.
    And he had a flair for leadership,
    so he kind of took on a little bit of leadership.
    And it was always the war and the situation for us there.
    Was nothing else.
    You didn't have to turn your radios in?
    No, not at that time yet.
    But as I said, my uncle, he married in 1939.
    He was in his late-40s.
    '39, he might have been close to 49.
    And incidentally, at the Kristallnacht, he was deported.
    He was sent to a concentration camp.
    And when he came back, he was in very bad shape.
    And that was kind of kept from me.
    I think he really had some kind of a nervous breakdown
    at that point.
    Was he the person that was sent to Dachau?
    Yes.
    How long did he remain there?
    I would think maybe four, six months.
    I really don't remember.
    And I didn't see him for a long time.
    After he came out, they sent him to some kind of a sanitarium.
    And then he married.
    And again, I adored his wife.
    She was wonderful.
    And they would spend a week in Heidelberg with us
    and then another week in Worms with her parents.
    Was it a problem for the one who didn't
    have the permit in the town?
    Yeah, either one of them weren't getting permission
    to stay in the other town.
    So I think my uncle had moved with us officially when
    we moved to Heidelberg, and he had a rented room
    about a block away from us.
    And then my aunt couldn't get permission
    to stay in Heidelberg, and he didn't have permission
    to stay in Worms anymore.
    And as it turned out, they were always together,
    but the day we were deported, he was in Heidelberg alone.
    And my aunt was in Worms.
    And after the Gestapo had rounded us up,
    he said to them he would like to go
    to Worms to be with his wife.
    And they allowed that.
    But Worms was not deported.
    People from Worms were not deported.
    So ultimately, they were together.
    But if they had been in Heidelberg that day,
    they would have been deported with us
    and ended up in the Dominican Republic.
    And that's been very, very difficult for me
    over the years too.
    I just somehow couldn't accept that,
    because I loved them that much-- both of them.
    It's been really rough on me.
    It sounds amazing that they even gave him permission
    to return to Worms.
    Yeah.
    The type of Gestapo that were going around in Heidelberg,
    they would come to our house to investigate something
    because a neighbor complained.
    And they were always very apologetic.
    Sorry we have to do that.
    And oh, if they were all like you--
    look at this wonderful house, these cultured people
    with everything.
    And every German knew one good Jew, right?
    So how come they're not all good, right, or whatever.
    But that was most of the time, in Heidelberg anyway,
    the attitude of them.
    It was part of their job, and they couldn't really
    understand why they had to do that.
    And they were, some of them-- most of them,
    actually-- a little bit apologetic about it.
    So they had been to your home on other occasions.
    Across the street from us, there was an old age home
    for the spinster daughters of Episcopalian or whatever
    ministers.
    And they were very anti-Semitic.
    They knew that they lived across this house from these Jews.
    And my father had all these connections with the farmers.
    So every year we used to get apples during the fall--
    he would buy apples to last us for the whole winter.
    And in every apartment house, you
    had shelves downstairs in the cellar to keep your potatoes,
    and your apples, and your wine, and all of those goodies.
    So the other people in our house all ordered apples
    from the same farm as my father ordered them.
    And I guess they came in boxes.
    So they called the police because they thought,
    those Jews are getting grenades or something.
    So the Gestapo came, and they were investigating
    what we had in the basement.
    And I guess then they left.
    They had gotten that complaint and then laughed about it.
    What was a daily ration of food for a person in that time?
    I don't know that.
    You remember being hungry?
    No, I wasn't hungry, I just couldn't
    get a lot of the nice things.
    I couldn't get any chocolate.
    But considering it was wartime, no, not there, I wasn't hungry.
    In the camp later, I was hungry, but not in Heidelberg.
    We had fish, we had some meat, and we had lots of vegetables
    still.
    Aside from the home across the street,
    did you have any other relationships
    with the non-Jewish people in Heidelberg?
    How were they reacting?
    My parents knew some people who kept some things in storage
    for us.
    But I wasn't too much aware of that.
    But there was also a man who my father was an acquaintance--
    he wasn't really a friend--
    I don't remember how my father knew him.
    But he had party member thing on his jacket all the time.
    And my father always said, oh, he's an opportunist.
    He's really not a Nazi.
    And he wasn't, because he came to visit us
    in this Jewish house with his Nazi party thing on his jacket.
    And my father used to say, well, he's an opportunist.
    Early in the '20s when it was popular to be a communist,
    he was a communist.
    Sorry.
    I want to stop.
    I don't want to make a lot of noise [INAUDIBLE]
    Sure.
    Rolling.
    You were talking about this guy--
    non-Jewish man.
    Yeah, the party member.
    Well, he came to visit us from time to time.
    And I don't know what the men discussed,
    but in 1940, it was pretty risky for him to be seen
    entering that Jewish house.
    And apparently, he really didn't care.
    And he used to bring us things.
    And he went hunting, I guess, and he had just brought us
    a big piece of venison.
    And my mother had made it into a pot roast.
    And that's what we had in the house the day
    that we were deported.
    And I remember that.
    We were eating that on the train.
    They had told us to take provisions,
    and so that's what we had with us.
    I imagine you must have been tired.
    I've always over the--
    yes, I was--
    I've always over the years told Sam
    when we would go out somewhere and I would say,
    I want some venison, and I said, the last time
    I ate venison was on the way to a concentration camp.
    But I did.
    But as I said before, we were all in bed.
    And the doorbell rang, and the Gestapo said,
    you have two hours to pack whatever you can carry--
    only what you can carry--
    and some provision.
    And wear as much warm clothes as you can.
    And it was terrifying-- really terrifying for me.
    My sister kept a diary, fortunately,
    because a lot of things would have been forgotten.
    And I was able to refresh my memory, especially about
    those events.
    In her diary, she said she was panicked
    and she didn't know what she was doing.
    But actually, I know from my mother
    and from the rest of the family that she really
    was the one who stayed levelheaded,
    and really packed correctly, and was very helpful to my mother.
    And my grandparents were probably too upset to do much,
    and they needed help from the rest of the family.
    I didn't do anything.
    I just took some of the things that meant the most to me,
    like my watercolor set that I wanted so badly
    and a charm bracelet--
    little things.
    And I remember going through my drawers
    with my underwear, and my clothing, and everything,
    and just messing it up, because I didn't
    want them to get it orderly.
    The least I could do is that it should be messed up.
    And what I had an urge to do is to take the drawers out
    of the chest of drawers and dump them out into the street.
    But I didn't do it.
    I couldn't get myself to do it.
    It's funny how, really, emotions stay with you more than the
    actual things that happen.
    Our maid-- we were still allowed household help
    for a few hours a day at that time.
    She appeared out of nowhere with a niece and with a truck.
    And that was happening all over the area.
    Friends who had help in the house,
    where the help just went with a wet basket of laundry
    and just walked out with it.
    The Gentiles were just carrying out as much
    as they possibly could--
    just taking it.
    So your maid was just going to--
    Whatever she could, yeah, she took.
    And we didn't mind, because we figured,
    might as well let her get it than anybody else.
    But she appeared, I think, with a niece or a nephew
    in a truck and just taking things along.
    You think she knew about this deportation?
    She must have found out real quick.
    I don't think that she had any advance warning,
    but then it didn't take much time in the morning for people
    to find out what was going on.
    And eventually by noon or so, they came with a car--
    some kind of a long van or something--
    to take us away to the railroad station.
    And at that point, I think I must have started to cry.
    And apparently the Gestapo told my sister
    that she could go back upstairs into the apartment
    and get me some warm milk, which she apparently did.
    And that I only know from my sister's diary.
    I would have forgotten about that,
    but it's little things like that are really very helpful--
    little anecdotes like that.
    And she managed to keep that diary through everything.
    Yeah.
    She didn't write a lot of things into it
    until after we left the camp--
    until we were out of France.
    I think she started writing again when we were in Portugal
    later on.
    She mentioned that-- that she was afraid to write before,
    but at least things were still fresh in her memory
    at that point.
    So you were driven to the railroad station.
    We were driven.
    And we were very much aware of the people
    in the streets watching.
    And you couldn't tell any emotion one way or the other.
    They just stared.
    And that's how they were.
    And that's how people are in a dictatorship.
    It was the same in Russia all these years.
    You could never tell what people were thinking
    or what they were feeling out in the street.
    The Sturmer was always, for the people who didn't buy it,
    it was always on a poster on a billboard.
    And people would stand in the street and read it,
    and you could never tell--
    unless they were very openly demonstratively saying,
    those damn Jews--
    but you didn't hear that all that much either.
    But you could never tell one way or the other how they felt.
    That's why it was such a good feeling for us when my sister
    had that fight with that young boy,
    with the man who came by and he said, if she's a Jew,
    so much more so you don't.
    That was very, very unusual, at least in my experience.
    Anyway, to get back--
    I think they were three trains.
    And that day from all over--
    it's called the [SPEAKING GERMAN]
    is what it later became known as in history.
    And 5,600 people were deported on three trains.
    Would you translate that, the [GERMAN]
    Well, Boden, I don't really know the English translations
    for those states in Germany.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    Well, [GERMAN] I don't know how to translate that,
    but it's an action.
    [GERMAN] is the same thing as an action,
    which you would translate into words I can't--
    In this case, I guess it would be a roundup.
    Yeah, that would be a good word for it.
    And I think that was the word that they generally
    used for the deportations.
    What were the conditions like on the train?
    Well, we thought they were bad, but they were really,
    compared to what happened later on,
    we were traveling in the lap of luxury
    because we were on regular trains with seats.
    Not everybody was able to get a seat,
    but people could take turns.
    And you could walk through the aisles.
    And we were able to have our provisions, whatever
    we had brought with us.
    I don't remember whether we kept our luggage right overhead
    or not, but we had our luggage.
    Our luggage stayed with us.
    It was just very, very slow.
    It took three days to get from Germany to Pau in the Pyrenees
    in France.
    We were not allowed to keep the windows--
    we had to pull the blinds down.
    We weren't allowed to look out until we
    got into the unoccupied part in France.
    Those were really the major restrictions,
    except that the SS came through every once in a while,
    and they said that anybody who looks out the window
    or goes out to the front when the train stopped
    is going to be shot.
    And my father always did, and I was afraid.
    I would call him back, and I was afraid
    that something would happen to him.
    And he would say, no, no, no, it's all right.
    I'm OK, don't worry about me.
    But the older people had seats.
    I had a seat.
    My grandparents had seats.
    In that respect, it was OK.
    And every once in a while when they stopped,
    they either brought us some water or maybe even
    some hot soup one time.
    And one time whatever gold rings or whatever you had left,
    I think except for your wedding band, you had to turn in.
    And other than that, we weren't persecuted in any way.
    At one point--
    I think it was before we got on the trains--
    my father had to sign over everything to the state.
    Whatever he had had to go to the state.
    But the people weren't treated brutally-- beaten or whipped--
    Not that I saw, not that I saw.
    Was anybody ever shot for looking out?
    No, not that I'm aware of.
    I don't think so.
    Yes, then once we realized that we
    were going west and not east, of course, that was a big relief.
    Until we got to that point, we were very worried,
    and then everybody sighed a sigh of relief.
    And then once we got into the part of Southern France,
    into the unoccupied part of France,
    the Nazis disappeared, and the French took over.
    And I thought I was in heaven.
    And I was really happy when we arrived at the concentration
    camp.
    There were no Nazis there.
    And I thought, no matter what, they aren't there.
    Now we're out of Germany, and everything is fine.
    I think my mother, she could never understand that.
    She used to make fun of me in later years
    because I think I wrote to my relatives
    that I'm very happy here.
    I thought it was just like being in a day camp.
    And we had to camp out at first.
    We arrived there and there was nothing.
    What do you mean nothing?
    There were just barracks--
    bare barracks with nothing in them.
    And typical, my mother was always
    imitating this lady who arrived with her fur coat,
    as typical middle class Jewish lady--
    who said, oh, that must be the baggage room.
    People really didn't know, and they couldn't perceive it
    at that point.
    Well, it wasn't the baggage room.
    The first few nights, I think they gave us some blankets,
    and we just slept on the floor with a blanket.
    Eventually, we got some narrow cots and a straw mat.
    And that was it.
    We had no utensils.
    We got a pail of soup twice a day.
    There was really nothing in the soup.
    There was some [GERMAN] which I think is either
    turnip and garbanzo beans.
    That was it in the soup--
    sometimes a little bit of horse meat, I think.
    And we had that twice a day and a piece of bread--
    and a ration of bread that kept getting smaller and smaller.
    The worst condition-- well, there were two conditions
    that we had to fight to survive with.
    One was the mud.
    That area in France, the soil is clay, and it was raining a lot.
    We had constant rain.
    And the mud literally was knee deep,
    and we had no protection to go through that.
    Eventually, they issued us some kind of rubber boots, I think.
    But it was just difficult even to walk
    because the mud was so deep.
    There were 25 barracks to one what
    was called an [GERMAN],, which was one section.
    And they went by letter--
    A, B, C.
    The men and the women were separated in different areas.
    And we had I don't know whether there were 10
    or how many barracks in our [GERMAN]..
    And we were separated by a fence--
    what do you call it.
    Barbed wire.
    Barbed wire, right.
    And the women, I think, were never or hardly ever allowed
    to go to visit the men.
    The men were allowed once in a while to visit--
    to get to the fence where the women were, but not
    really allowed to go inside.
    So my mother and my father had to talk to each other
    through the barbed wire.
    The children were allowed to run and go freely
    from one to the other.
    You're grandparents were with you?
    Yes, my grandmother was with us, and my grandfather
    was with my father.
    Eventually, they organized a children's barrack
    in each area.
    And that was a little bit better for the children.
    They organized some French lessons for us,
    and we were also given some kind of an extra ration.
    The gendarmes that were at the gate of each [GERMAN] were not
    terribly--
    they may have been somewhat anti-Semitic,
    but they were not anything.
    They were benign-- let's say they were benign
    rather than anything what we had been used to.
    We could kid around with them.
    It would have been very easy to escape from there.
    And some people did.
    But you couldn't get very far if you don't know French
    and if you don't have any connection to the underground.
    So families really didn't attempt it.
    A lot of single people did, but families didn't.
    And then, of course, they didn't know what was coming later.
    The other thing that we had to fight was dysentery.
    People were dying like flies.
    There were hundreds of deaths from dysentery all the time.
    There was a population at the camp already when we arrived,
    which was from the Spanish Civil War.
    For some reason, I think they fled into France
    and the French kept them prisoner there too.
    So we kind of felt the connection there.
    They were already there, and we tried
    to communicate with them in some way,
    but nobody knew how to speak Spanish.
    But eventually, the camp life, like anywhere,
    we developed a cultural life.
    We put on plays and shows.
    And there was, as I said, some school
    organized for the children.
    My sister worked as a nurse in the barrack for the dysentery.
    And she eventually caught it too.
    My father, the way I described him before--
    he immediately started to do something
    about the conditions for the older men
    and organized a barrack.
    He enlisted another one or two younger men,
    and they took care of all the older men.
    They just organized one barrack for the men between 65.
    I have a folder here to show you.
    One man was 97.
    And they made sure that they bathed them.
    I remember one time I visited him,
    and he had gotten chestnuts from somewhere,
    which was wonderful--
    nourishing.
    So somehow, he was able to do these things.
    And when I said to you before, he lived a very Jewish life,
    and he was an optimist.
    He tried to always do something constructive with the situation
    that he found himself in.
    But then in December--
    I should backtrack --
    other areas then emulated him.
    They also organized these things.
    But my father was really the first one to do that.
    So you got there around the end of October, end of November?
    The day of the deportation was October 22,
    and I think we arrived on the 25th.
    And in December, we got a letter from my American uncle, Gus,
    that my cousin, his son, Walter, had
    a job working with the [YIDDISH] establishing
    a community in the Dominican Republic for refugees.
    And we didn't know much more about it at the time--
    and that he would try to get papers for us
    to leave and to go to the Dominican Republic.
    Clearly, you were getting mail.
    We were getting mail.
    We were in unoccupied France.
    You could send mail out whenever you wanted?
    Yes.
    From there, yes, we could.
    Could you buy stamps?
    I think we could even somehow, somebody
    would always make a trip to Pau to the post office and things
    like that.
    I think my mother even bought an egg once
    in a while, which she gave to my grandmother.
    Where'd you get the money?
    They must have sent us some money from the United States.
    My uncle must have sent us some money.
    And I don't know--
    maybe we had a few marks left too.
    I don't know.
    But there was enough for some small things like that.
    Was there any trade amongst the townspeople,
    or were they [INAUDIBLE] to you in any way?
    There was a lot of trade going on.
    And at the age of 11, I was already
    very conscious of the fact that conditions
    when there's a situation of life or death
    bring out the best and the worst in people.
    I realized that.
    I remember thinking about it at that age, because people
    would air out their blankets.
    They would have one blanket, and they would try to air it out,
    and it would be stolen.
    And somebody else would then sell it,
    and you would buy it for something else.
    And a lot of stolen trade was going on,
    and a lot of other trade was going on too.
    Did you have any interaction with the townspeople at all?
    No.
    No, not at all.
    Were any of the French gendarmes kind to you?
    Or [INAUDIBLE]?
    Not in that sense.
    They were kind in the sense that they weren't bad.
    They were benign, and I think we perceived that
    as kind at the time.
    How about the conditions like for washing, keeping
    clean, toilet?
    Glad you asked.
    There were no facilities for washing.
    There were water faucets out in the open.
    And that's where you had to wash, out in the open.
    And it was in the winter.
    The toilets were latrines, and I think there was one latrine.
    Each [GERMAN] was in a square, and there was one
    at each corner of the square.
    And it was just a hole with a bucket under it.
    But you had to go through the mud to get there.
    And some people couldn't handle it.
    The older people couldn't handle it,
    sick people couldn't handle it.
    In the children's barrack, we were
    allowed to have a bucket outside the barrack for overnight,
    not during the day.
    And then we took turns carrying the bucket
    to the latrine in the morning.
    What did the old people do, then?
    They messed themselves up.
    Or maybe some of them had buckets too.
    I don't remember.
    Or I think most of the time they had to have the younger
    people go with them.
    It was a big problem--
    a very big problem.
    And I don't know what they did in the hospital barrack
    with the people who had dysentery.
    I really don't know how they handled it.
    But the washing and the latrines were what we were fighting.
    That was our survival to manage that.
    Eventually, we acquired a tin can,
    which was about the size of a pound of peaches--
    the big size.
    And the four of us-- my grandmother, my mother,
    my sister, and I-- we had one little stove,
    a little potbelly stove to heat the whole barrack, which
    it really didn't do anything.
    But we would take turns so that maybe every third or fourth
    day, or maybe once a week, we would
    have our turn to heat the water, that can of water,
    on the stove.
    So the four of us, first, we would all wash our face
    and go the rest of the way in that one little can of water.
    It wasn't very clean by the time we were finished.
    But that was the life.
    How did you keep [INAUDIBLE]?
    Well, a lot of people got lice.
    We had to we had to de-louse.
    We had to look at our clothes every night
    before we went to sleep.
    We had to check everything out.
    I know my dad got it, but the rest of us didn't.
    We were OK.
    When we washed something, we found that, well, we'd
    have some rope, and we would string it across
    in the barrack.
    We always had laundry hanging up there.
    We had to wash it in the cold water outside.
    And my mother, eventually, the women
    realized they could even iron their clothes
    by putting their handkerchief things around the stove pipe.
    And so you get very inventive when
    you're under those conditions.
    But we received that letter from my uncle in December,
    and sometime between December and February,
    my father got a letter asking him to find out
    from other people if they were interested in going
    to the Dominican Republic, because they were
    willing to take more people in.
    I can assure you, it wasn't difficult to get
    a lot of names.
    But we were told right away that they had to be young people--
    preferably single and young, healthy people--
    not middle aged people, not families.
    The fact that we were allowed to go as a family,
    and my parents being in their late-40s,
    my father already in his early-50s, my mother being 45--
    that was an exception, only because my cousin
    was in the administration.
    Where was [INAUDIBLE] your grandparents?
    They were not allowed to go.
    They said they weren't allowed.
    They were not allowed.
    He didn't arrange that.
    No, I think he could have at that time.
    He still could have, but he didn't.
    And of course, if my other uncle had been in Heidelberg with us,
    then he and his wife, obviously, would have also gone.
    This is the uncle named as Joseph before?
    Yeah, my uncle [PERSONAL NAME]
    Do you know why this relative didn't
    pursue your grandparents?
    He may have tried later on.
    But basically in those days, the idea of the settlement
    was an experiment to see if people from middle class
    Western Europe could manage physically in the tropics
    to live as farmers and adapt to the conditions.
    So they weren't even thinking of bringing in older people.
    And of course, the rest of the situation is that in 1938,
    there was the Evian Conference--
    I don't know if you've heard of it at all--
    when President Roosevelt called together 33 countries
    to talk about the Jewish question, the Jewish problem,
    and how to help the Jews of Europe.
    And there was only one country in that entire conference
    of all the 33 countries that said,
    yes, we want Jews from Europe, and we're
    willing to take 100,000.
    And that was the Dominican Republic.
    But they specify that it couldn't
    be families or older people.
    I don't know to what extent the Dictator Trujillo specified
    that they could not bring older people.
    Because, obviously, there would have
    to be some extent of families.
    He had two reasons for volunteering this,
    and number one was to get into the good graces of the United
    States, because he wanted loans, and because sometime
    in the '30s, there was a very bad war with Haiti,
    and they slaughtered about 12,000
    Haitians, the Dominicans.
    So they were not in the good graces of the United States.
    And he wanted to get on their good side again.
    That's what historians say now.
    We didn't know that at the time.
    What we did know was that he wanted
    to lighten the population.
    He was very race-conscious.
    And the lighter, the more Spanish and light influence--

    There is no transcript available for this track

    One second, and you can start [INAUDIBLE]..
    OK.
    Today is April 8, 1992, and what you're
    doing part two of the interview with Lore Gilbert.
    I'm Sandra Bendaya, and again, we have second Emily Rosenberg.
    And when we left off, Lore, was that you had,
    your family had received information
    that the Dominican Republic was inviting Jews
    to come and settle there.
    And you were all still located in the camp at Gurs,
    but you had received this information.
    That's right.
    We had received a letter from my father's brother.
    His son, my cousin Walter, was the secretary
    of the DORSA, which was Dominican Republic, Dominican
    Republic, let me see.
    Yeah, Dominican Republic Settlement Association.
    Sorry about that.
    The directors, the people who organized
    it were associated with HIAS, the Jewish-- and Joint.
    And my cousin was secretary of Mr. Schweitzer, who
    was the big honcho at the time.
    Anyway, my uncle sent us a letter,
    and that came in December.
    And we had to go through a number of things
    to get our papers.
    And every time that happened, we were called to the Kommandantur
    in the camp as a family, and there were a number of delays.
    Now if I look back and I see, December to February
    doesn't seem all that long, but it seemed like an eternity.
    It was then.
    What year was that?
    In 1940.
    At one time, we were sitting in the commandant's office.
    And while we were there, he received a notice
    that the laws had changed, and everything
    that had been done for us before was not acceptable anymore,
    and everything had to be redone.
    So all of these delays were emotionally very
    difficult to take, naturally.
    And at the same time, there was a notice
    that older people were being sent to a different camp,
    and both my grandfather and my grandmother were on that list.
    And at one point, we got a notice,
    or they got a notice that in two days, they were being--
    that they were leaving.
    And we thought that we were not going to be leaving for a while
    yet.
    We thought there was a delay.
    As it turns out, just as we were saying
    goodbye to my grandmother, there was
    a call that Sondheimers at the Kommandantur.
    And we said-- oh, my sister ran to the other part of the camp
    to notify my father.
    And he said, well, we will have to go, all of us, right away.
    And my sister said, well, we can't.
    Mother and Lore and I can't, because we're just
    in the middle of preparing our grandmother for leaving.
    And of course, we had no idea if we were ever
    going to see each other again.
    So my father was very angry, and he went by himself,
    and we just stayed behind with our grandmother.
    Your father went to--
    He went to the Kommandantur.
    And just as we were saying goodbye to our grandmother,
    and she was ready to go into the car, my father arrived.
    And he was furious, because he said he had gotten his papers,
    and the commandant wouldn't give our papers to him.
    We had to show up personally.
    And he thought that just because we weren't there immediately
    when the commandant ordered us to,
    that we would forfeit the whole thing.
    He was just getting really panicky about it,
    and he was angry.
    So we had to just run off, and it was a very, very dramatic
    experience.
    But we, as it turned out, we did receive our papers,
    and we were told that we were leaving
    the next day on the Saturday.
    What does that mean with your grandmother, then?
    My grandparents were in a truck or a car--
    I don't remember which-- and were
    being sent to a different camp.
    Do you know which camp?
    It was called Camp Noé.
    I am not entirely sure exactly where the camp was located.
    In France?
    Yes, in France.
    And a lot of the young-- what they did at the time is
    separate out the old people from the young people,
    so that it would be--
    I mean, in retrospect, we realize what they were doing.
    They were telling the old people that they would be better taken
    care of there.
    And the younger people were told that they
    were going to a much nicer camp later on, where
    they would be able to live in stone houses, and as a family.
    Actually, I'm not too sure of the conditions
    in the other camp, Rivesaltes, what it was like.
    But some of my friends, the children,
    were then separated from the parents
    by the French underground.
    And some of them were saved, some
    of the really younger people.
    But then the older people, the parents
    and the older teenagers, 19, 20-year-old siblings
    of my friends, they all didn't make it.
    What happened to them?
    They were eventually, when the Germans occupied
    the rest of France in 1941, '42, they
    were all sent to Auschwitz.
    They were all sent to Poland.
    And your grandparents?
    My grandparents, from Noé, were taken by the French Catholic
    Church.
    They had a hospice for poor older people,
    and they were fortunate to end up
    in this hospice in [? Romain, ?] where
    the conditions were not good, as far as hardship was concerned.
    They didn't have any food, but they could be together.
    My grandparents were both together.
    And my grandfather eventually died.
    He had a stroke.
    But my grandmother was able to take care of him
    and be with him to the very end, and he
    had a regular Jewish funeral.
    And we even have the eulogy that one of his friends,
    that he made, did at the funeral.
    So they were very fortunate.
    My grandfather was, I think, close to 80 at the time.
    And my grandmother survived and came to New York.
    She survived the war and came to New York.
    So your grandfather was buried in France?
    Yes, yes.
    And my sister was in Europe last year, and before she went,
    she wrote to that little town, [? Romain, ?] several times
    and tried to contact the--
    what is it called--
    the mayor of the town, and she never got a response.
    Because she really wanted to go there.
    She wanted to find my grandfather's grave,
    and she also wanted to thank the convent and the people who
    saved them for doing that.
    And she wasn't able to, because she never
    had gotten a response at all.
    She tried several times, which is too bad.
    But she then planned to go to the town
    anyway and do the research on her own,
    but she was too exhausted and she was never able to make it.
    So originally, your grandparents were not invited or included
    in this idea to go to [INAUDIBLE]..
    They were not included.
    That's another part of the story.
    It was, unfortunately, only for very young people.
    They wanted, as far as the Jewish organization was
    concerned, it was to be an experiment whether--
    you have to remember, in 1940, when
    people were going to concentration camps,
    Joint and HIAS decided they will try
    an experiment in the Dominican Republic
    to see if young people could work as farmers
    in tropical conditions, and not having, not knowing anything
    about farming.
    I mean, this is--
    it's so weird.
    And so my parents were--
    [LAUGHING]
    [INAUDIBLE] a second, and I [INAUDIBLE]..
    OK.
    I think I'll get back to that later.
    So the next day, we left the camp by train
    with 12 other people.
    And we left Saturday around noon and didn't arrive in Marseilles
    until Sunday late at night.
    And we had two French guards with us,
    but they were friendly.
    We had to spend the night on a bench
    in a little town in France, at the waiting room,
    but we were able to go to a real restaurant
    and eat real food off tables, you know, sit at a table
    and have real china and silverware.
    That was a big experience at the time.
    And when we arrived in Marseilles,
    we had distant relatives who had emigrated to France,
    but then had to leave Paris and were living in Marseilles,
    in a hotel.
    And my dad had written to them and told them
    that we were coming, so they actually
    were at the train station to welcome us.
    And that was a very wonderful feeling, to have someone there.
    It turned out that our destination
    was supposed to be the Hotel Terminus, which
    was a form of a camp.
    But the guards had no idea where that was.
    And my relative's son, who was about the same age
    as my sister, about 18, went with the guard
    into town to find it.
    And in the meantime, when they came back two hours later,
    they came back and we were told that there
    was only one room available.
    So we were allowed to spend the night with our relatives
    at their place in the hotel, and then we
    had to check in to the other place the next morning.
    Do you remember that Terminus hotel at all?
    Yes, I remember that very well.
    We got a room.
    We were very crowded.
    We were my mother, my sister, and myself, and one other woman
    the first few days, one room, two beds, four people.
    And then eventually we got a fifth person
    coming into the room.
    So I guess I must have slept with two other people,
    since I was the smallest one.
    Was it well-furnished, or shabbily?
    Well, it was shabbily furnished.
    But to us, it was luxurious, because we had a real wardrobe.
    We had a sink in the room with running water.
    We had real beds, and we had a mirror, which I just
    saw in my sister's diary that we considered
    that an immense luxury.
    Because in the camp, we were never
    able to look into a mirror.
    There was no such thing.
    Did you have washing and toilet facilities?
    We had a sink, so I think we just washed at the sink
    in the room.
    And that, too, was a luxury.
    My father had to stay in a different place.
    The men were not--
    they were outside in a camp that was called Les Milles, which
    is a little town not too far from Provence, Aix en Provence,
    so it was a really pretty area.
    And we could walk around and take care of our business
    during the day in Marseilles, but we had a curfew.
    We had to be back by 7 o'clock, I believe.
    And the food situation was terrible.
    We were we were hungry all the time.
    What the hotel provided was just a soup, and just
    a little bit better than what we had gotten in the camp.
    But apparently, once in a while, we
    were able to buy some things on the black market
    or get some ration, buy some bread ration cards.
    And the mood in Marseilles, in May-- see,
    we were there from February to May--
    was very, very panicky and frightening,
    and there were all kinds of rumors.
    And every day seemed like an eternity,
    because you knew that you were sitting on a powder keg.
    You knew that the Germans were going to come and occupy
    the rest of the country.
    It seemed like-- we were just able to slip out.
    And even that, we didn't know for sure.
    It seems my mother and my sister were
    really afraid that we would be turned back again
    at the border, once we got onto the train from Marseilles
    to Lisbon because we did not have a ship passage booked yet,
    boat passage.
    Apparently that was one of the requirements,
    and we were not able to get it.
    Do you know why?
    Probably just because everything had
    been taken, or all the delays.
    I don't remember why.
    Did your family have to have a certain amount of money
    to be able to complete these arrangements?
    Well, the DORSA, the organization, I think,
    covered all of that, as far as the passage was concerned.
    And I think eventually, we were supposed to--
    I know eventually, we had to repay it.
    My relatives just helped us with that.
    Do you know if other people in this camp at Gurs
    were invited to do the same thing?
    No.
    Well, yes and no.
    My dad had gotten a letter from the DORSA organization
    to ask if there were other people interested in going
    to the Dominican Republic.
    And he said it should be mostly young people who would
    be able to work physically.
    And there was another reason why the Dominican Republic wanted,
    they wanted mainly young, white males,
    because they wanted to lighten their population.
    That was one of the reasons why the dictator, Trujillo, had
    extended the invitation to us.
    One reason was that he wanted to be in favor with President
    Roosevelt, because he wanted loans of money,
    and the other was to lighten the population.
    He was a terrible racist, even though his mother was,
    I believe, a Haitian, and very dark.
    And he was very light.
    I don't remember exactly what his background was.
    But it's a status symbol.
    And there had been a very--
    there had been a war in the early '30s, I believe,
    or in the '20s, between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
    And the Dominican slaughtered about 12,000 Haitians,
    and they were out of favor with Washington because of that.
    So that was one of the reasons why he did that.
    And he was willing to take 100,000 Jews.
    And no other country, no other country
    made that kind of an offer.
    But unfortunately, the people from our Jewish organizations,
    they went to England to enlist people,
    and they went to Switzerland, and they went to Luxembourg,
    and they never went into France, and never went
    into where it was dangerous for them personally.
    And it's just unforgivable.
    You mean as in Germany or Poland?
    Yeah.
    Well, Germany, I guess, they wouldn't
    have been able to get to.
    My dad had a long list of people that had wanted to come.
    And when we were in Portugal, I remember very clearly
    that almost daily, we went to the Dominican consulate
    and asked, when did they leave to go to France?
    And every day, we were told, no, not yet, tomorrow, tomorrow.
    And one day, we were finally told, yes, Mr. [PERSONAL NAME]
    left yesterday.
    Where did he go?
    He went back to the United States.
    And that was just maybe a week or so before we left.
    And I was not able to talk about that story
    without really getting--
    for years, I couldn't even talk about it, because I just, it's
    unforgivable.
    But to get back to our trip, it took a few days from Marseilles
    to Lisbon.
    And it was a very interesting experience,
    going through Spain.
    Spain had been totally devastated by the Civil War,
    and there was lots of evidence of the war all around,
    and the poverty.
    And the war ravaged, was worse, much worse than in France,
    even.
    And I remember little children on the train,
    little four-year-old Spanish boys on the train begging
    for food and for money.
    And then there was this contrast,
    when we got off in Barcelona--
    we stayed overnight one night in Barcelona--
    and it was this gorgeous, gorgeous city
    that we all fell in love with.
    And the people were, they were like robots, really.
    They looked so devastated.
    And then when we got to the Portuguese border,
    we had to go through customs, and we were bodily searched.
    Or maybe that was before, several times on the train.
    But we had no problem getting through the border.
    And that was a big relief, as I mentioned
    why we had been afraid that maybe they would turn us back.
    And it was like black and white, going across the border.
    Because Portugal was so clean and well taken
    care of that you can't believe, when you're on the train,
    and you're going from here to there, what a change that was.
    And we realized finally that we made it.
    It was incredible.
    And then we spent about three, three and a half weeks
    in Lisbon and were able to get passage on the Nyassa.
    And I have that on my notes, what the date was.
    Yeah, we arrived in Lisbon on May 10th.
    Oh, June, on June 3rd, we left Portugal.
    And on the boat, we met some of the other people
    that were destined to go to the Dominican Republic.
    There was one group that had been--
    I think it was the Luxembourg group-- that had
    been selected in Luxembourg.
    And those groups were no more than maybe 30 people,
    35 people, and all young, single men,
    and a few young, single women and young couples.
    They were all in their early 20s.
    Did you, either in France or Spain or Portugal,
    find any reaction towards the Jews amongst the people?
    Well, in France, the people that were guarding us,
    they were collaborators.
    So although they were not openly terrible,
    sometimes they were in the camp also.
    And I remember that the woman who ran the-- it
    was so-called hotel.
    I mean, it was a hotel that wasn't making it,
    and obviously, the owners were collaborators.
    So they were given this, they were paid something
    by the government.
    So she-- I remember the woman-- she was very tough, very tough.
    You always had the sense that she didn't like you,
    and she was not your-- she certainly was not your friend.
    And other than that, we didn't have all that much contact
    with the French people.
    And we didn't speak all that much French, either.
    But there was one Armenian, an old man
    who was an Armenian who was a helper at the hotel.
    He was kind of a kitchen helper.
    And he seemed to be just a lonely,
    you know, unhappy old man.
    I don't know.
    He was looking for just human contact.
    I don't know exactly what his political leanings were,
    but since he was an Armenian, he certainly, I
    think he sympathized with our predicament.
    I think we all had that feeling.
    In Spain, we didn't really have any contact.
    And in Portugal, whatever contact
    we did have with the population, they were neutral.
    There were lots of Nazis in uniform all over Portugal,
    and we were really paranoid.
    I remember that very well, that we sometimes were afraid
    that they were going to follow us in the street
    and do something to us.
    But the Portuguese population was friendly.
    They were not unfriendly.
    And on our arrival in New York, when we arrived,
    we were looking down, you know, at the people.
    And my father kept saying he thought that he
    saw his brother in the crowd.
    And as it turned out, I don't think
    that anybody was allowed to make contact with us.
    But we found out later, when our other relatives visited us,
    we were not allowed to go and be with our relatives.
    Even though we had a transit visa,
    we were on Ellis Island for three weeks.
    And when our relatives finally were
    able to visit us on Ellis Island,
    we found out that my uncle had just died
    two weeks before we arrived.
    He had had a heart attack and died.
    So that was a big disappointment, certainly,
    for my father.
    I had no recollection of that uncle at all.
    And I did not really know the American relatives.
    My sister did, because they had lived in Germany for some time,
    and they came to visit us.
    But I was just a baby, and I didn't remember them.
    So that was then very exciting, to meet my aunt and my cousin.
    And in Ellis Island, everybody came to visit us,
    well, all the relatives and lots and lots
    of friends from Germany came to visit us,
    and they brought us clothes and food.
    And it seemed like heaven, in a way.
    But on the other hand, there were the guards, too,
    the American guards, and they were constantly clicking,
    counting us.
    They had those little machines in their hand,
    counting everybody.
    And the reason we were not--
    we arrived in June, 1941, and we were considered
    German citizens, aliens.
    And so they were afraid that we might be Nazis,
    and they wouldn't let us go into New York.
    The guards in Ellis Island were not all that friendly.
    And at one point, it must have been about a week
    before we left, I got sick.
    I had a tummy ache.
    I was 11 years old, and I hadn't been used
    to eating real food anymore.
    And I had a wonderful time eating pears, and you know,
    fresh fruit, and I remember corn flakes.
    That was our first experience with cold cereal,
    plus all the chocolate and things
    that our relatives brought us.
    So there was a--
    we had a medical, every morning, I
    think someone came, a doctor or nurse, to check us out,
    if we had any problems.
    And I mentioned that I had a tummy ache,
    and so I was given a laxative.
    And I was also told that maybe I had appendicitis, which
    is just exactly what you do.
    And then they told me that I had to go
    to the hospital for tests, and my mother couldn't come along.
    And I didn't speak any English.
    And on Ellis Island, the buildings,
    the hospital was in a different building.
    And you don't go above ground.
    There are tunnels underground.
    And there would be one woman taking me
    to one room, maybe a few paces to here, and they would say,
    you sit here, and somebody else will come and take you further.
    And I was sitting there for maybe an hour or more,
    and nobody came, and I had to go to the bathroom.
    They had given me a laxative.
    Nobody came.
    I didn't know how to find the bathroom.
    And finally, I was looking for somebody, and they said,
    do you need anything?
    I said, yes, I have to go to the closet,
    because in German, it's the Klosett.
    And I finally, finally was able to find a bathroom.
    And I don't remember how many hours
    it took them to get me from one building to the next.
    And then I arrived at the hospital,
    and I was supposed to get an examination.
    That examination didn't materialize
    for about three or four days.
    My parents were not allowed to visit me.
    And I was given a nightshirt, which
    was a shirt that came from here to here on me,
    and it had lots of big holes in the front.
    And the buttons were missing, and they gave me a safety pin
    to hold it together.
    I don't remember what I had on my feet.
    And most of the other patients in the hospital where
    I was where women of staff members, either
    staff themselves, or family of staff at Ellis Island.
    And I was the only little child, and not one
    of the American ladies kind of befriended me,
    and, you know, mothered me.
    I was just totally ignored.
    And that was my hospital experience on Ellis Island.
    What was the diagnosis?
    I never got one.
    They did take me in one time, and they put me
    on an examination table.
    And I was so excited and frightened that I broke out
    on a rash on my chest.
    So they looked at that, and they thought
    that might be something really strange,
    and that was the end of it.
    I don't remember them ever giving me a blood test,
    or even feeling my stomach or anything.
    Fortunately, there was nothing wrong with me.
    But I kept wondering, what's going to happen?
    I knew that we were supposed to leave
    to go to the Dominican Republic any day, and I had no contact.
    And I kept thinking, well, maybe they're
    going to forget about me, and then
    eventually I'll be able to live with the Kehrs, which
    were my relatives in New York.
    And I had this, I kept thinking, maybe I
    won't go to the Dominican Republic.
    There had been rumors on the boat, it seems,
    that things on the Dominican Republic were terrible,
    and at Ellis Island.
    But my cousin Walter, who was my idol--
    I adored him.
    He was, he is four years older than I.
    And when we were little children, we played together,
    and I just, I was going to marry Walter when I grow up.
    And I thought, I'll have to--
    I'm going to stay in New York, and I'll live with the Kehrs,
    and I'll have a big brother, Walter.
    Never mind the rest of the family.
    They can go to the Dominican Republic,
    and I'll stay in New York.
    As it turned out, the call came.
    There was also delays with which boat we were going to go on.
    And the call came that the group was leaving.
    I think we met another group on Ellis Island that
    was also going.
    And they were getting into, they were piling into cars
    to get to the pier, to New York.
    Well, from, I guess they had to take a car to the ferry first,
    to get to the pier in New York.
    And I wasn't there.
    Still in the hospital?
    I was still in the hospital.
    And I found out later that my mother
    refused to get into the car until they brought me.
    So then they made this, you know,
    somebody came to me in the hospital
    and brought me over directly from the hospital to the pier
    to be with my family.
    That was New York.
    It was fun.
    What was the living conditions on Ellis Island?
    On Ellis Island, well, they were clean.
    We had good beds.
    Everybody had their own beds.
    We had a big dormitory with maybe 10.
    I don't remember exactly, but there were
    quite a few women in one room.
    But for me, that was heaven.
    I really didn't care.
    Of course, we were very unhappy that we
    couldn't be with our family.
    We had wanted to be with our family.
    And it was very difficult from them to come from Manhattan,
    to come to Ellis Island maybe two, three times a week
    to see us.
    But aside from that, if we couldn't be with them,
    Ellis Island, as far as I was concerned,
    it was so much better than what we had left behind.
    And we knew that there was going to be an end to it.
    It was a temporary thing.
    So we were fed, and we had beds.
    What more did we need?
    And we were going away.
    We were out of hell.
    My sister's diary said when she-- actually, she
    typed it all up, and she had parts of it published.
    And she titled it Liebe Gottes Danke Dir, which
    means dear Lord, I thank you.
    And that's what she had written in her diary
    when we left France, when we get to Portugal.
    She said that we got out of this witch's brew.
    That's exactly the way she had thought,
    and it's how we all felt.
    And then the next comes a completely different chapter
    with the tropics, which was very exciting, very exciting to--
    it was fun on the boat, on the Algonquin.
    At night, most of the young people in the group
    were in their, as I said before, in their early 20s.
    And a lot of them came from Austria, from Vienna.
    And there was a few young men who
    were very good on the mandolin, and at night, we had concerts.
    We had singalongs with the mandolin.
    And there we are, floating on the Atlantic Ocean
    and singing, and having a wonderful time,
    and, I imagine, feeling very guilty at the same time.
    There was one experience, one of the matrons on the boat told
    my father he should shave his little mustache,
    because it made him look too much like Hitler, which he did.
    And I remember stopping.
    It was a banana boat, and we had about three stops
    in Puerto Rico, where the bananas were unloaded.
    I mean loaded, and I don't remember what
    they delivered in Puerto Rico.
    But it was a fairy land, all of a sudden.
    And little boys came onto the boat.
    They had us drop pennies in the ocean,
    and they dived for the pennies.
    And they also came on board and they sold these big bananas,
    and you know, we said, oh, my goodness.
    We had never seen such big bananas.
    Aren't they wonderful?
    So we bought some, and when we started eating them,
    they didn't taste like bananas.
    They were plantains.
    But we didn't know that, and we ate them raw.
    What strange tasting bananas they were.
    They became one of my favorite foods,
    cooked, baked, eventually.
    And it took about a week to get to the Dominican Republic,
    and we arrived in Puerto Plata, which
    is about 10 miles from Sosua, which is
    the name of the little village.
    We were given-- actually, Trujillo gave our organization
    a huge piece of land for us to settle.
    And it's a beautiful, absolutely beautiful piece of land,
    right on the ocean, and there's always a breeze.
    And it's on the Atlantic side of the island, which
    is a little bit cooler and breezier.
    The capital is Santo Domingo, which was then
    called Ciudad Trujillo.
    That is on the Caribbean, and it's always very humid,
    and no breeze at all.
    And the Caribbean is not all that great for swimming,
    and there are lots of sharks.
    But we had the most wonderful beach,
    one of the finest beaches in the country.
    And the land had belonged to the United Fruit Company,
    and they realized that the soil was not conducive
    for them to have a plantation, a fruit plantation there.
    So they abandoned it and gave it up, and Trujillo gave it to us.
    And over the years, we also found out
    that farming, which is what we were supposed to be there for,
    did not work out.
    People were supposed to go form little groups.
    And they did form little groups and have
    established small settlements.
    There was a main area for those who
    chose not to be on settlements.
    That was right along the shore, which is now
    the wonderful tourist area.
    And those who chose to go on settlements were given--
    they were able to build little houses, wooden houses,
    and they were given a mule, and a horse,
    and a certain amount of land to cultivate.
    And I don't remember if they started out with--
    yes, they did have maybe one or two cows,
    because we immediately had our own dairy products.
    I mean our own milk.
    Dairy products came much later.
    But I think one or two more groups arrived after we did.
    And by the end of '41, the door closed.
    No one came anymore.
    Was that because of--
    Because of the war.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    No, no, no.
    Because once the United States entered the war, in December,
    that it wasn't possible anymore.
    We had wanted to bring our other relatives,
    but it never happened.
    Why was the entry of the United States a critical thing?
    I don't think there was any direct--
    how were people going to come from Europe to the Dominican--
    They wouldn't be able to stop at the port in New York
    or in Puerto Rico?
    Is that what you mean?
    Right, although my brother-in-law
    came from Austria.
    He found out about it in Vienna, and he went on his own.
    He traveled by himself.
    And I think he was one of the few people who
    did not come in a group.
    And he went by train all the way through Russia and China,
    and I think then took a boat from Japan to San Francisco,
    and then, I mean, he went all the way around the world.
    How he got the money and how he managed to do it,
    I really don't know.
    I don't know how.
    And I don't think there were too many people who came that way.
    There was a group of like 18, 19-year-olds,
    to between 17 and 20, that came from England.
    Those, I think, because they were afraid
    that their permits in England were going to run out,
    and that they would have had to return to Austria.
    There was one young man who was from Hungary
    who had been studying.
    Actually, he came from New York.
    He was Hungarian, and he had been
    studying in the United States.
    And his student visa ran out, and somehow he found out.
    And we were only a little bit over 600 people.
    Out of [INAUDIBLE].
    Out of 100,000, yes.
    There were about 2,000 people that came on their own,
    living in the capital, who chose never to go to the settlement.
    They were just refugees that went to the Dominican
    Republic on their own, had nothing to do with the Joint
    organization.
    But Sosua was, at the time, most of the people,
    they couldn't wait to leave and go back to, go
    to their final destination, which was the United States,
    for most everybody, and just did not
    want to commit themselves to do any kind of farming
    and have a settlement.
    There were some people like that.
    Others did commit themselves and tried,
    and saw that it didn't work out, that it was difficult.
    Eventually, they realized that only cattle--
    they could just be dairy farmers,
    which is what they still are today, to this day.
    They have, there are maybe, I don't know, maybe 50 people
    left.
    I don't know how many remained, maybe 100, maybe 150,
    originally.
    Most of them died by now.
    It really was a paradise.
    We didn't know it at the time, but it was a paradise.
    We didn't know.
    We were worried about our family in Europe,
    but we had no idea how bad things were.
    Had you heard anything from your grandparents?
    We were getting some letters through our relatives through--
    they were able to correspond with our relatives in New York,
    and we had contact with the New York family all the time.
    News from Europe was very sparse.
    Did you hear from your grandparents directly,
    or news from the relatives?
    I think it was-- it all came through our relatives.
    I don't remember now.
    Maybe we did get some letters.
    I have some letters.
    They may have been sent directly to us.
    I think maybe they were, as a matter of fact.
    I don't know whether, once France was totally occupied,
    whether any mail would go out.
    But then the Dominican Republic was a neutral country.
    So I think we did.
    We must have gotten some mail there, directly ourselves.
    I have the letters, but not the envelopes.
    So I don't know exactly where they went.
    When you arrived, did they make provision for housing and food
    [INAUDIBLE].
    At first, we lived in barracks.
    They had some barracks that were just for single people,
    and there were several barracks for families.
    Essentially, there was no difference,
    because it was two people to a room.
    And it was just a long barrack with separate rooms,
    and then in the center was an area with sinks and showers.
    So that was like a community area.
    And we had latrines.
    We had to go outside for latrines.
    But after about six months, we were given a little cottage.
    Or rather we had two rooms in a little cottage.
    There were other people who had rooms there too,
    but we were able-- we had our own kitchen, so we were
    able to cook for ourselves.
    Up until then, we ate in the community kitchen,
    and our own people.
    It was a little bit like a kibbutz, in a way.
    What I need to say is about the Dominican people
    themselves and the country.
    They are just wonderful people.
    They don't know what anti-Semitism is.
    It just doesn't exist.
    And as a matter of fact, many of the upper classes,
    Dominicans, are very proud when they say--
    some of them are very proud of Jewish heritage,
    that there were quite a few morenos that ended up
    in the Caribbean, and some people trace their heritage
    to Jewish heritage, and they're very proud of it.
    That was the upper classes.
    But the native people, who were just dirt poor, just who walked
    barefoot and just had one cotton dress on their backs,
    and those are the people that we were dealing with.
    The poverty was incredible.
    But they have an inner charm and a wonderful hospitality.
    And I can't tell you what it felt like to be out of Germany
    and to be fully accepted and equal.
    I found out in 1990, when I went back with my son
    for our 50th anniversary celebration,
    that we were actually given a bill of rights
    by Trujillo just for us.
    And our bill of rights was--
    we had more rights than the Dominican people,
    because he had a monopoly on practically all business.
    Anything that was lucrative was his monopoly.
    His family owned practically the entire country.
    The rum production and the sugar cane production, all of that
    was in Trujillo hands, just a couple of families.
    We had no restrictions.
    Our people could go into any kind of business.
    We had religious freedom, of course.
    I was trying to get a copy of the bill of rights that
    were given to us when I was there in 1990,
    but I wasn't able to.
    But we now have a museum with all of that,
    and your niece should try to see it.
    In 1990, when I was there with my son,
    we had the opening, the ceremonies
    of a museum that was built by some of the settlers that
    remained there.
    I went to school.
    The schools were-- we were short on teachers,
    but we were long on educated people who just gave us
    whatever they were able to.
    But after I was 14 or 15, I think
    by the time I was in seventh grade, they stopped.
    They no longer went along with the upper grades,
    and I never did end up with--
    whatever else education I have, I did on my own.
    But I really had very, almost no formal training,
    because my training was interrupted in Germany.
    From my first day in school--
    it was a Jewish school-- and our teachers constantly
    left the country.
    So you know, those conditions kept
    getting smaller and smaller, and more and more difficult.
    And then in the Dominican Republic,
    it was not a formal training.
    But eventually, they those settlers
    that remained had a private school and better schools
    than anywhere else in the country.
    In fact, when I talk to some of the people who were born there,
    who were there at our meeting who said that--
    and whose parents remained and who
    went to school there, and eventually went to college
    in the United States, and were better prepared for college
    in the United States than the students that
    came from schools, United States schools.
    But those were the schools that--
    and still are provided for the children there.
    Now, I saw the school when I was there in 1990,
    and they have something like 400 children.
    And most of them are native Dominicans
    that are working in the area.
    It's now a Dominican town.
    It is no longer a settlement.
    Were you given a kind of citizenship
    when you first arrived?
    No.
    We could have asked for it, but we didn't want it.
    Most of us didn't intend to stay.
    Your parents also?
    My parents, there was really nothing there for them.
    Unfortunately, my parents, my dad
    had a little bit of a problem there doing
    what he wanted to do.
    Because our cousin, since he was part of the administration,
    he was always afraid of allowing us
    to do anything that would look like he's favoring his uncle,
    and by doing that, actually restricted
    my dad in doing things that would
    have been very helpful for him.
    And I remember my dad wanted to buy cattle,
    and he needed a loan to get the cattle.
    And those people who started doing that eventually
    had their own cattle farms, and still have them,
    and became very wealthy.
    But my dad wasn't allowed to take out the loan.
    And my dad was one of the few people who actually
    had some background in soil, because he was a grain and feed
    dealer in Germany and had grown up in a little village,
    and his business was related to-- with farmers.
    But he wasn't listened to, and he was very hurt.
    His feelings were very hurt.
    On the other hand, I have a wonderful report
    that he wrote in German, unfortunately
    hasn't been translated yet, with his impressions
    about the country and about the settlement,
    which is really great.
    What kind of work did he do?
    As a matter of fact, yes, my sister
    did translate it, and my son.
    Yeah, he did it on the plane on the way down.
    He ran the colmado.
    Now, this is the other thing that I
    need to, wanted to talk about, is
    that within that little group of 600 people,
    we had so many gifted people that there wasn't a thing
    that we could not provide on our own.
    We had a bakery with wonderful breads and cakes.
    We had a restaurant.
    We had three or four doctors, naturally, amongst 600 Jews.
    We had three or four doctors and a dentist.
    We provided free medical--
    when I say we, it's the organization,
    DORSA-- provided free medical care
    to any native who was able to come to the hospital.
    And there were long lines every day.
    My sister worked as a nurse.
    We had lots and lots of babies, and they
    were absolutely beautiful, absolutely wonderful children.
    When I was there in 1990, a son from, actually,
    one of our teachers who then was the principal of the school,
    he came with his three sons and his wife.
    And one of the sons was looking at the pictures of the children
    that were born there, and he said, the terrible irony
    of here in Europe, the babies were killed,
    and went to the gas chambers, and we had this wonderful crop
    of children.
    I have some pictures in that thing.
    We had people that--
    wonderful craftspeople.
    We had carpenters that made wonderful furniture.
    We had a garage.
    We had the metal and machine shop.
    We had a goldsmith.
    We had people that were making jewelry.
    I myself, once I left school, I was always
    interested in arts and crafts, and I wanted
    to be an artist, worked in a--
    well, we were trying to make some kind of crafts
    that we could produce with native products.
    So we had what was called a straw shop, from the palm
    leaves, the dried straw.
    We were dying and weaving placemats and handbags.
    And I don't remember all of the different products
    that we tried to produce.
    My dad, at one point, tried to produce jams and jellies
    and chocolate-covered candied fruit through the kitchen,
    with the women in the kitchen.
    He was also involved in working with a couple of chemists.
    They produced mosquito repellent.
    We had the dairy with the, at that point, just heavy cream.
    We had someone who produced sausages.
    We had dressmakers.
    We couldn't buy clothes, but we made,
    we had people who made our own clothes.
    We had everything.
    And your father was mostly involved in this jam and--
    No, actually, my father then became--
    he managed the general store.
    And he wanted to have as many of our own native-grown products
    to sell, like tomatoes and corn, and those things, what
    they were able to grow.
    But he also ordered whatever other products
    we needed in the store.
    And he had his staff there.
    He supervised it.
    No one got any money.
    Every settler received $3 pocket money a month, and that was it.
    But everything we needed was provided for us.
    So the $3 we had to go to the movies, which was like $0.15.
    And we had a maid, which I think we paid $3 a month to her.
    And she did all of our heavy work,
    and we cooked from an open, a cold stove.
    But we had, someone had made aluminum,
    like an aluminum box to put on top of the open fire
    so that my mother was able to bake a cake.
    And so we always kept a fire going.
    Was there a barter system?
    Or how were the products distributed?
    For us, we would go to the colmado
    to buy things with whatever money we had,