Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper
Transcript
- Any time.
- OK.
- This is the Holocaust Oral History Project interview
- of Annemarie Roeper taking place in San Francisco on June 23,
- 1992.
- My name is Sylvia Prozan, and the second interviewer
- is Jake Birnberg.
- Annemarie, where were you born?
- I was born in Vienna, Austria, August 27, 1918.
- Tell me about your parents, your father's name.
- My father's name is Max Bondy, and my mother's name is Gertrud
- Wiener, W-I-E-N-E-R.
- Where was your father from?
- My father was born in Hamburg, and my mother
- was born in Prague.
- And what did your father's family do?
- Well, my father's father actually came from Bohemia
- and emigrated to Hamburg.
- And his parents were bakers, I think, somewhere
- in Czechoslovakia, and I don't exactly
- have that information with me.
- He came as a person who had very little money or background
- and became a banker in Hamburg and became very wealthy.
- From a baker to a banker?
- Yeah.
- Well, his parents were--
- his background.
- And my grandmother on my father's side--
- I have very little information, really,
- about my family's background.
- I don't know how much you want me
- to just start talking because--
- what I do remember--
- I think the reason I have very little information
- is that my father really didn't want to be Jewish,
- and nothing was ever discussed about our past.
- There was little connection between what
- happened between his--
- He was a very enthusiastic German and volunteered
- in the First World War along with many, many other German
- Jews.
- It was really a period, especially people
- from more intellectual background who
- wanted to be German and gave up all of their Jewish background.
- So I have very little--
- I don't have a Jewish upbringing at all.
- I didn't know I was Jewish until I was 11 years old.
- And then it came as a shock to me
- because someone made an antisemitic remark, and I said,
- who is Jewish around here?
- Someone told me, you are.
- That's how I found out that I was Jewish.
- But I don't know.
- Why don't you ask me similar questions?
- Do you remember your father's parents?
- My father's mother died before I was born,
- and I remember his father very well.
- What do you remember?
- I remember that he was a very charming man.
- He gave-- my father had a--
- my parents ran a boarding school,
- and my grandfather gave them the property, gave them money
- so they could buy an estate not far from Hamburg
- on which the boarding school existed.
- And it's a school that still exists today.
- Did your father have any siblings?
- My father had four siblings, and my father was the oldest.
- And by the time he was two, there were four children
- because he had--
- his sister was born 10 months after he was born,
- and twins were born a year after that.
- And then another child was born, I think, 15 years later.
- Did you know them?
- I knew all but one of the twins who died in the war.
- And were they practicing Jews?
- No, except my aunt married a practicing Jew,
- and so she then became practicing.
- In fact, we were baptized.
- I was baptized when I was six.
- My whole family was baptized around the time I was six.
- What about your mother?
- My mother was my father's first cousin,
- and she was born in Prague.
- I don't know if there's so much to tell, of course.
- Her father died when she was very young,
- and he had been blind ever since her birth.
- He'd never seen her.
- My mother was a very beautiful woman,
- and she always regretted that her father had never
- had the chance to see her.
- And they moved to Vienna.
- My grandmother later on remarried,
- and she lived in Vienna with my step-grandfather.
- And later on, she also moved to Hamburg.
- Actually, I think he was a lawyer,
- but I think what happened was that when--
- that they moved to Hamburg because they were really
- supported by my father's father because the two were sisters.
- My two grandmothers were sisters,
- so I have what you call a lack of ancestors.
- Did you know your mother's mother?
- Yes.
- I didn't know my mother's father.
- I knew my mother stepfather.
- What memories do you have your mother's mother?
- Well, memories of my mother's mother
- are that she was a very warm, loving woman.
- She was quite smart.
- She had candy in every room of her house,
- and as children, we could just have as much candy
- as we wanted to, which really was
- one of the best educational principles you
- could have because we never craved it like other children.
- And my step grandfather used to have a cigarette
- box with chocolate cigarettes, and whenever
- you came to the house, he offered you
- this box of chocolate.
- I also remember that my mother and my grandmother
- didn't get along, and all of the family,
- by the time that I have a real memory,
- lived in the environment of Hamburg.
- My mother's older sister and her husband lived there,
- and my grandmother was very, very close
- with her oldest daughter much more so than with my mother.
- And then there was another brother
- between my aunt and my mother.
- He and his family also lived in that area.
- Did you have cousins?
- I had lots of cousins.
- I had only male cousins.
- But my aunt had two children, two boys.
- My uncle had two boys.
- That's my mother's brother.
- He had two boys.
- They all lived in that area.
- My other aunt had three boys.
- That's my father's sister.
- Actually, I guess there weren't that many,
- but there were a number of very close friends, family friends,
- and I remember during--
- we were the only ones that didn't live close by.
- We lived a little further away because we grew up
- in my parents' boarding school.
- But I remember during vacation we would go to Hamburg,
- and I'd be surrounded by only boys, not only my own family,
- but all of the other friends.
- There were just no other girls around except for my sister
- and myself.
- What did your father do?
- Well, my parents ran a boarding school.
- Before that, at the time that they married.
- Did your father have any formal training?
- Oh, yeah, my father--
- my mother's a medical doctor, and my father has a PhD,
- and he's a art historian.
- And when I was born, my father was at the front, as they say,
- and he didn't know about my birth for a while.
- And then he received a telegram, which said--
- and this story has been repeated I don't know how many times.
- It said, "Child born, sex mutilated,"
- meaning that the telegram didn't say whether it was a boy or girl
- because that part of the telegram was mutilated.
- But the way it arrived--
- so that he didn't know whether he had a boy or a girl
- for a while.
- Where was he educated?
- Well, he went to public school near Hamburg,
- and we went to different universities.
- In Germany, you just don't stay in the same place.
- But he got his PhD in a little university town named Erlangen,
- E-R-L-A-N-G-E-N. That was after the war.
- All the details about both of my parents' background--
- I have brought you a little booklet.
- They did a great deal of research
- now in the school of my parents, and they've
- got a whole little booklet about their background.
- Just what you remember, what about your mother?
- Where did she receive her medical training?
- In Vienna.
- She got her-- she got her-- she was one of the first women
- doctors, and later on, she became a psychoanalyst.
- And she was still-- she was doing her--
- what you call that, when you are at a hospital
- doing your training?
- Internship.
- --internship during the time that I was born.
- And so she took me to the hospital.
- I spent the first three months in the hospital
- because she only could do her training if she
- took me along, and so she--
- actually, she had never expected to have any children.
- She'd been told she wasn't going to be able to have children.
- And also, she had suspected that my grandfather had syphilis
- and that that's why he was blind, which is true.
- That's what he had.
- So she warned all of the family that, before they
- had any children, they should make sure that they were safe.
- And when she then had a medical examination,
- she was told she wasn't going to have any children.
- She was really going to be a professional woman, and all
- of a sudden, she did.
- I came along.
- And the way the story goes is that she wasn't really expecting
- me to be born yet at the time that I was born,
- and she was jumping on a running streetcar
- because she was late for her appointment at the hospital.
- And all of a sudden, she realized
- she was-- the baby was coming, so she had to somehow get
- to the hospital and have me.
- By streetcar?
- Well, she got there by streetcar.
- So then I was born, and she just took me back to the hospital
- every day for three months until she realized that I had lice
- and that somehow in the hospital--
- it was during the war--
- that it wasn't a very good place for me.
- And then she stopped taking me.
- She nursed me until I was almost two years
- old mostly because there was very little food
- around in those days, and the only way
- she could keep me healthy was by nursing me
- and by continuing to breast-feed me.
- And I don't remember this, of course,
- but she said that I was already walking
- and just would be running up to her breast and get nursed.
- I guess that's my very first experience.
- My father didn't meet me until I was quite a bit older.
- You see, I was born in August, and the war wasn't over
- until, I think, the end of September,
- I think until September, later than that.
- And then it took a while before he came home.
- And he wasn't too happy to meet me, I think.
- They had never lived together, actually.
- I think they got married during the war
- just when he came home for furlough or something,
- and then he came, and there was I.
- And so he wasn't all that interested in me.
- Another story is that he always tried
- to put me in the wastebasket.
- And they were sort of living a student kind of life,
- especially during those years when they were an Erlangen.
- There's a story about me when my--
- I had a nurse who took care of me,
- and she used to take me out in a buggy somewhere.
- And apparently, she would leave me in the buggy
- and then go off with her boyfriend,
- so one day, my mother was walking along,
- found me all by myself, without supervision in that buggy.
- So she took me home, and when the nurse came back,
- she couldn't find me.
- And she, of course, got upset.
- Well, those are the stories that I've been told.
- Did you have siblings?
- I have two siblings, a sister and a brother.
- My sister died when she was 49 of cancer,
- and we were in this country by that time, of course.
- And your brother?
- And my brother took over the school of my parents
- after we moved here, after my father--
- my father was very ill even before we left Germany,
- and he had a kind of illness-- and I'm
- forgetting the name now-- where you have too many red blood
- cells.
- And it's the opposite of leukemia,
- but it's a kind of cancer.
- And he had that for many, many years.
- He had to have blood taken out because he had too much,
- I think, and he finally died of that disease.
- And then my brother took over the school together
- with my mother.
- You were born in Vienna, and then
- when the war ended in November, your father came home.
- And then I lived in Erlangen for a while.
- Which is where?
- Which is the southern part of Germany.
- It's a small, little town.
- And why did the family move to Germany?
- That's where they found a place to--
- that's where they graduated.
- My mother went back to school there,
- and my father got his PhD.
- And I think he's always--
- my father was a member of the youth movement, which was some--
- actually, it was, among young people,
- a very frequent thing at that time.
- It was sort of comparable to the 60s here, I think,
- where they were back to nature, and no drinking,
- and very natural kind of living, free love.
- And out of that grew his idea that he
- was going to start a school which
- would live by those principles.
- And so he and my mother founded this school in a little town
- in the southern part of Germany.
- First, they had it together with another man, and the two of them
- separated because the other man was a communist.
- I think that was the reason.
- And they moved to another--
- rented a place.
- Oh, and my sister was born in that first place where
- our school was.
- If you want to name, it's called Brückenau, B-R-Ü-C-K-E-N-A-U.
- And then we moved to--
- and after they separated from this other man,
- whose name was Putz, P-U-T-Z, they rented a place in another
- little town called Gandersheim, and that was also more
- in the middle of Germany.
- It was spelled G-A-N-D-E-R-S-H-E-I-M.
- And my brother was born there, and both my sister and brother--
- well, I don't know about my sister.
- I know my brother was born at home in the school,
- right in the middle of the school,
- and I remember I was sent somewhere,
- to some other part of the building while he
- was being born.
- And somehow I remember that moment
- that I was standing all by myself somewhere in front
- of the building and realizing that my sibling was being born
- and sort of wondering about it.
- And I was six at the time.
- We stayed in Gandersheim until I was about 10.
- By that time, the school was about maybe 30 students,
- and my future husband was already a student there.
- And there were very few girls.
- In fact, schools weren't supposed to-- boarding schools
- weren't supposed to be--
- what's the word, not bisexual.
- That's another word.
- Coeducational?
- --coeducational.
- And so that whenever there was any kind of inspection--
- there were about three or four girls besides me--
- and we all had to disappear and go on a hike or something
- because there weren't actually any girls supposed to be there.
- Actually, the classes didn't really
- start until what would be, I think,
- fourth grade to, fifth grade because in Germany you
- had something that was called a preschool, which
- was for the first three years, three or four years.
- And I went to the village school where
- they didn't treat me very well at all because they were--
- they were sort of jealous of the students at my parents' school
- because they made friends--
- they were high school students, and they made friends
- with the girls in the village.
- Somehow they were more attractive to them
- than the village people.
- And so there was a resentment against the school,
- which was being expressed to me when I went to that school.
- Also, I was sick all the time.
- It seems to me that there were--
- classrooms were in very, very old, musty buildings.
- And I was just not doing very well there,
- so my parents took me out.
- And they took a few other children my age
- and started some younger classes.
- And then after that, I was being educated at my parents' school.
- And it was always a strange thing to be both a student there
- and to be the children of the directors
- because all of my life I really--
- my parents were very popular among the students.
- They had a totally different approach to education
- than people in Germany, which was much more authoritarian
- than you can ever imagine here.
- Teachers would say, you are a good teacher if your children
- will obey you, if they will jump out of the window
- if you tell them to.
- They weren't going to use their own judgment.
- They should-- obedience was the basis of their whole education.
- And my parents had the totally opposite point of view.
- They were called by their first name.
- They had very close personal relationships with the students.
- There was a student government where children participated
- in all the decision-making.
- It went much beyond anything that you
- might find in this country now.
- And from there, we moved to Marienau,
- which was near Hamburg.
- That's spelled M-A-R-I-E-N-A-U. And that was this estate which
- my grandfather bought for my father,
- and that's really the place where I--
- I was already 10 by the time we moved there.
- I was old enough to really participate in the community,
- and I spent eight years of my life there.
- But I feel that--
- I used to feel--
- I still feel that was where I felt at home.
- That was where my life--
- where I really began to grow and where I had a--
- it was sort of the foundation of my life,
- and it was a very, very happy life.
- I never had a family life.
- We never sat down as a family until we came to America.
- I was a member of the school community,
- and my parents were the final authority both for me
- and for everybody else, so I didn't
- have what other children have, that they sort of began
- to take the next step and relate to teachers and other people.
- All there was for me was my parents, which
- I think is a totally different upbringing than most
- other children have.
- But it was a true community, and relationships to teachers
- were also very close.
- Not everything was always fine, but I look back on it--
- and this has never changed--
- as an absolutely wonderfully happy time.
- It was also a very beautiful landscape,
- which was most important for the feeling of community there.
- It was way out in the country, far away from most other places,
- and it was in the heather.
- Especially in the fall, you could
- see miles and miles of purple interspersed with birch trees,
- and forsythia, and lambs.
- It was an unusual landscape and a sort of slightly hilly.
- We'd take walks there a lot.
- I couldn't separate the landscape from my life.
- It was sort of integrated into everything we did.
- Then in 1933, the Nazis came.
- Oh, maybe I should still say, it was such a protected and happy
- time that, in my mind--
- I remember saying to somebody that war is history.
- There will never be another war.
- Somehow that's the way it felt to me was that it was--
- not that I was always happy or not that I was always--
- that there were no conflicts.
- It was just a normal kind of growing up, but all of this
- was within the context of that community
- and of feeling totally protected and taken care of.
- Then when the Nazis came--
- excuse me-- and all of that ended,
- for me, it was a total, total shock
- because these powerful parents of mine, all of a sudden,
- were powerless.
- At first, my father took in another man who was supposed
- to be in charge of curriculum, but he was really supposed
- to take over for him-- it was a friend of his--
- so that we wouldn't be running--
- they wouldn't be running the school--
- wouldn't be as visibly running the school.
- One memory I have--
- somehow I feel that maybe that was the day that--
- well, I was 15 in '33.
- I must have been 16 or so.
- We had a festival day.
- That was always the high point, when the parents were invited
- and there were plays, and music, and sports activities,
- and so on.
- And all of a sudden, I looked out of the window,
- and I saw this brown ocean coming toward me.
- And what had happened was that the SR, the Storm--
- not the SS.
- They are the worst ones.
- The brown ones were the SAs.
- Sturmabteilung is what they were.
- --had decided they were going to participate in that festival,
- and they decided-- and my mother was providing
- food for all of the guests, and all of a sudden,
- she had to provide for 200 more people
- because these people-- they came from the village.
- They were the village people--
- had decided they were going to participate in it.
- And I think that image is probably
- a memory that covers a lot of how it felt to me,
- this total dissolving of what my life had been.
- I have another memory of that time, which I've written,
- and I brought up here for you.
- I wrote it about five years ago, and I
- think it sort of shows my feelings more
- than anything else.
- I had walked to the village by myself.
- It was this small village.
- And in order to walk there, you had
- to go across a little country road,
- and I remember this walk because it was such a beautiful walk.
- It was in spring, and they had these huge wheat fields
- that the wind would sort of blow over.
- And the wind sort of touched my cheeks,
- and I just loved that walk.
- That's the thing that I remember.
- And I go to the village, and I had
- to buy some books or something.
- And all of a sudden, I found myself in the middle of a group.
- I heard this voice, this loud voice, and out of this radio,
- this loudspeaker came Hitler's voice.
- He had a specific way--
- all the Nazis-- a specific kind of tone.
- The they would speak louder than their voice box allowed them to,
- I think, and so then it became a kind of shrill kind of thing.
- And here Hitler was speaking, and without my knowing,
- I was surrounded by these redneck people.
- And I couldn't even move.
- I couldn't move because they were all standing in front
- of that box, listening to Hitler,
- and every few moments they would lift their arm and shout "heil
- Hitler."
- And their arms would go right by my face.
- And then, of course, I remember thinking, am I going to--
- am I a coward if I don't say how Hitler like all the rest?
- Are they going to kill me if I do or if I don't?
- I don't remember whether I did that or not,
- but I do remember this feeling of total evil around me--
- it's funny, after 55 years--
- do you have Kleenex ready?
- --and also the total helplessness.
- I remember the thoughts that went through my mind,
- that people didn't know who I was.
- People knew I was Jewish.
- We were probably the only Jews anywhere around there.
- If anybody wanted to do anything to me,
- they probably could, and nothing would happen to them.
- This was early in the Nazi period,
- and probably it wasn't even quite true.
- But it sort of felt like that.
- I don't know the end of that story.
- I just remember that feeling of total evil
- and being surrounded by a wild animal.
- That's the way it felt. And the strange thing
- is that when this fire happened and I wrote a letter--
- a Christmas letter, actually-- to all of our friends,
- all the people who had been so helpful,
- I described the fire as this animal
- coming at me which was so much more powerful than I was.
- And I had lost this little thing that I had written.
- Someone just gave it to me, actually, a few days ago,
- and I found that I used exactly the same words
- to describe that situation as I did to describe the fire.
- Which fire?
- The Oakland fire.
- We were in the Oakland fire.
- And it was just an amazing--
- it truly was a total repetition from me.
- All these many years later, it was
- like-- it was just the second time that I had to flee.
- But it was also a totally different feeling
- because, with the fire, I felt in control.
- My mind just-- and I remember watching in my mind that--
- I think the survival instinct took totally over,
- and I didn't feel--
- usually you have a number of layers
- and different thoughts at the same time.
- There was nothing else in my mind
- but that I had to get my husband out from way downstairs
- when he could hardly walk.
- I had to get the car out.
- I had to get my purse, and I had to be in total control.
- But I was.
- I managed it.
- And I also thought later on how very--
- it was a repetition, but it was a very different repetition.
- And also, this has been several--
- in our school in Michigan, which I have to tell you about later,
- someone wrote an article about that
- because the reality is that my husband--
- and I'm not being sequential about this,
- and that's all right--
- had really saved me and my whole family
- from the Nazis in some way because he was not Jewish.
- And he took care of all sorts of things for us.
- Among them, he saw to it--
- one of the important things was that you
- had to get a passport so you could get out,
- and if you had a J in your passport,
- then things were much more difficult.
- He went for us to the passport place and somehow convinced them
- not to put a J into our passports.
- And in many ways, he just he helped to sell the school,
- and he did all sorts of things.
- And then later on, after we had left Germany,
- I'd gone back to Vienna to study because I wanted
- to become a psychoanalyst.
- And he was still in Hamburg, and he called me and said,
- the Nazis are marching into Austria.
- You have to get out right away.
- And so that was the second time, actually,
- he saved me because when I left with the last train that
- came out of Vienna where they didn't take the Jews off
- at the border--
- and if he hadn't called me and if I hadn't gone right away--
- I went immediately.
- He called me in the morning, and I left--
- then I would have been kept back.
- Going back to the earlier part of your life, what
- is the first memory you have of Jews--
- you didn't know you were Jewish--
- of somebody else being Jewish?
- Well, the first memory I have--
- well, not a lot of other thoughts that come into my mind,
- but the first memory I had was that my aunt's family, who
- lived right next door to my grandfather
- because he had built his house and her house,
- celebrated Hanukkah.
- And we celebrated Christmas right next doors,
- but then we'd go over to have Hanukkah in her house.
- I don't know if I had a mental block or something.
- Also, it really wasn't important at that time.
- That was really-- I should say that, too.
- It was a period where, especially in Hamburg--
- my first real experience with antisemitism
- was outside of Germany.
- I didn't experience-- that's not true.
- Before the Nazis, I didn't experience anything
- or hear of anything that was antisemitism
- until the Nazis came that.
- Was another reason why it was such a shocking thing for me.
- Did you know any other Jews other than your aunt?
- Oh, yeah.
- There were some Jews in our school.
- There was a young boy with whom we're still very close friends
- who was Jewish.
- It was not something that was ever discussed in my circles,
- not only with my parents, but my family never talked about it.
- What happened at Christmas time?
- At Christmas time, we celebrated Christmas.
- We were not religious.
- It was totally-- it was a time you got presents,
- and you had a Christmas tree, and you sang some songs.
- But we didn't ever--
- it was a free-thinking-- it was a period of free-thinking.
- It was reasoned-- or else we had--
- we used to talk a lot about, is there a God, is there not a God.
- We had a theory.
- We had a feeling.
- We learned a lot about the Eastern religions,
- as much as they do here now, quite a bit about Buddhism.
- I believed that there was a God in everything and everybody
- and that it was what we called a pantheist religion.
- It was just-- you talked about the tasks you had in life,
- and how were you going to serve mankind,
- and what was friendship.
- There was a lot of intellectual discussions.
- My father was a art historian, and I learned a great deal
- about art.
- We had wonderful music at our school.
- I learned a lot about America.
- It was the thing you were interested in,
- except I never ever thought I was going to live here.
- Were there any religious Jews or Jews who
- were obviously orthodox that you came in contact with or saw?
- Not many, not in my environment.
- I don't know anybody that went to temple.
- How about church?
- Or church.
- You just didn't.
- Accept that, when I was--
- I told you we were baptized.
- And then after the Nazis came, our not being Jewish
- took on a different form.
- It became a way of trying to not be hurt.
- And I remember I did--
- what do you call it?
- We were Lutherans.
- That was as far as we got in terms of religion,
- except that I was-- and I can't think of the word
- now, when you're 13.
- Bat mitzvahed?
- Confirmed?
- Confirmed, yeah.
- And I didn't have anything to do with that.
- And my mother insisted that I would go through with it,
- and she said, but you do believe in this?
- And I said no.
- And I knew she didn't, and it was my first big disappointment
- because I knew that it was an opportunistic thing that she
- did.
- She thought it would help me if I--
- How would it help you?
- It would help me by not being identified as a Jew,
- and that was not what--
- and that was not her reason.
- As I said, her reason was not that she was religious
- or I was religious, but she felt it would be a good thing.
- In those days, you really thought
- the Nazis were going to be a passing thing.
- You thought, we'd just make it through it.
- But I think that this--
- and actually, in another way, my father really
- became rather Christian, not in a religious way,
- but he felt that there was some--
- that the Christian ethics were what he believed in.
- It looks like all this is shocking you.
- Yes.
- Good.
- And this, I think, has become one of the problems of my life
- because once I found out I was Jewish,
- I thought I should be Jewish.
- I thought that it was--
- I felt this dishonesty that my parents were--
- mostly my father.
- My mother just went along with it.
- It was a disappointment for me, but also, I
- think it isolated me.
- I've just now got a book from a friend of ours who
- described the young Jews in Germany, age 14 through 17
- or something, who were being prepared to leave the country.
- In fact, my uncle--
- oh, sure, there was--
- my uncle, who was my father's brother, was Jewish.
- My father was not.
- But as I said, it never played a great role,
- but he, I think probably, maybe in '34, '35,
- started a school for emigrants, of people who were to emigrate,
- a school for young German Jews who
- learned agriculture, who learned how to work on farms,
- learn farming.
- In one of the East German--
- someone gave him a big piece of property
- where he educated these children for about two years
- before he had to leave.
- And then I think it existed for another year,
- and then this thing was closed.
- But I had not realized until I read this book
- that there were a number of places like that in Germany
- and that they were quite well-organized in preparation
- for either emigration to Israel, or America, or other places.
- And what happened-- it was then that I
- began to really miss the fact that I
- wasn't identified with that.
- I really didn't have what other people had,
- namely the bond among them, because I
- had no Jewish background and no Jewish community.
- I didn't have that at all, and yet, we were Jews,
- and we had the same fate that everybody else did.
- What do you remember about the day
- that you were told you were Jewish?
- Well, I was 11 years old, and we were on a class trip.
- We were in what is now Gdansk.
- At that time, that was part of East Germany.
- That was Danzig.
- And we were walking through the streets,
- and some children were throwing stones at us.
- And I was very frightened.
- And they made some antisemitic remarks.
- That was the first time I ever heard antisemitic remark.
- And I said, my goodness--
- I was just terrified, and I said to a another boy who
- was next to me, nobody's even Jewish in this group,
- or something like that.
- And he said, yes, there are two Jews here.
- And I said, who are they?
- He said, you and I. That was how I first
- found out that I was Jewish.
- What did you think?
- I was just very stunned.
- I don't know what I thought.
- I just remember this incident as an incident.
- Did you think it was true?
- Yes, yeah.
- Actually, I never doubted that it wasn't true.
- I probably did know it.
- And that's the thing that I've often wondered about.
- It was not discussed in our family.
- I was baptized when I was six.
- All of us were.
- My brother was just born.
- My sister was three.
- Both my parents-- we were all baptized.
- Well, usually you remember--
- six is not that young, but I don't remember anything
- about that.
- But not only my family was.
- I mean not only my immediate family,
- but my other relatives were all baptized,
- and I don't know if at the same time.
- The reality actually is that all of our friends were Jewish,
- and they were all baptized, except for my father's sister's
- family.
- Did you have a discussion with your parents
- after this incident?
- No.
- It wasn't very important.
- That must be hard to understand, but it was--
- we were so totally assimilated, and not only--
- everybody in my environment, too.
- It was not very important here.
- And actually, probably, what I remember was just this incident
- and then that I found out I was Jewish.
- But it wasn't-- it didn't change anything.
- When did a change occur?
- Probably when I saw those brown people coming in
- and when it became a matter of, within our school,
- students, children having to become members of the Hitler
- Youth.
- And of course, my family wasn't participating in that.
- But even that didn't seem-- it wasn't anything we wanted to do,
- and we were so integrated in that--
- I think what made it different was that our identity was
- with that school.
- That was more-- and also, it was such a safe place.
- There wasn't-- I was frightened when people threw rocks at me,
- but it didn't really upset me at the time.
- I didn't see it in the same context.
- When you had this strong sense of the evil,
- that you were in the midst of evil,
- why do you think it felt evil?
- Well, by that time-- that was about maybe--
- I think this class trip--
- I was 11, so that was before the Nazis came.
- But I had this sense of evil after the Nazis were there,
- when I began to realize that we would be leaving.
- In '36, it was very clear that we had to leave the country,
- and my mother went to Switzerland
- and started a school there and took my younger brother
- and sister with her.
- And I stayed with my father in the school in Marienau
- because I just had one more year before I--
- it was my last year, and I was graduating that year.
- Back to the time when the Nazi's first came,
- what are the initial changes that you
- remember in the school administration,
- in your life in 1933?
- That was very strange.
- There was a Hitler Youth in there,
- and this man came in to help my father, who was not Jewish.
- Mr. Putz?
- No, no.
- He was there-- this man's name was Donandt, D-O-N-A-N-D-T. No,
- Mr. Putz was in that very first school.
- But the school went on the way it was,
- and in fact, about a month ago, I
- went to Germany because the school there
- had built a memorial for my parents,
- had built a building in the name of my parents.
- And it was my father's 100th birthday, a memorial,
- and so they had a very nice memorial service for him.
- And one of the former students gave a speech about--
- he called it something like a continuing democracy
- within the--
- or a secret democracy or something
- within the Third Reich because it went on the way it had.
- They had the school student government,
- the school government I told you about where
- everybody participated in all the decisions.
- My parents had-- their relationships were unchanged.
- The students would come and say good night to my parents
- every night when they were already in bed,
- and it just continued for a while the way it was.
- So there was little to be noticed, except when
- there were some incidences.
- This is one thing that was terribly frightening to me.
- Within the school, there was this Hitler Youth organization,
- and some money had been stolen from them.
- And there were some Nazis that did an investigation.
- We were all herded into a room.
- But this investigation-- it was not directed particularly
- against us.
- All the students were herded into that room.
- All of their rooms were totally searched,
- and it was awfully, awfully frightening.
- And then my mother somehow figured out--
- and it turned out that the person who had stolen that money
- was the leader of that organization.
- He had stolen his own money.
- And when-- he must have been 16 or something-- his mother heard
- about that, she sent him to Africa.
- I remember that.
- She wouldn't let him come home.
- She said she was dishonored by her son having done this thing.
- And what I remember is that I couldn't imagine
- that a mother would be so cruel that she didn't try
- to teach him that it was wrong.
- I don't know.
- I remember feeling sorry for that boy rather than much else,
- but it wasn't that much of a--
- it was an experience that was shared with everybody
- in this community.
- It wasn't something where the Jews were picked out
- as being the ones who most likely had done this.
- When did you first become aware that there
- were changes because of your being Jewish, changes
- for the Jews in Germany?
- I think mostly through this personal thing,
- that personal experience that I had.
- Oh, yeah, well, I guess I'm not--
- you see, I think what it was for me--
- it was more a difference between the good guys
- and the bad guys in the school.
- Afterwards, you knew exactly who were the Nazis
- and who weren't the Nazis, who were
- the people you could talk to and you couldn't talk to,
- who were the people who had to be afraid of.
- And I began to be just very scared, personally.
- I don't know.
- It's strange because it seems to me
- there are times when I could tell this whole story quite
- differently.
- I think that the greatest--
- I guess for me it wasn't a problem of Jewish or not Jewish.
- It was a problem of evil or not evil.
- I just thought these people were so evil.
- I had always thought that you were supposed
- to be good to each other and helpful,
- and I had a whole psychoanalytic upbringing
- and that you had to think about other people's feelings
- and try to be supportive of others.
- And I think that's probably what I've done all of my life.
- I think I knew--
- my husband and I were friends since I was six years old,
- and I knew I was going to marry him when I was 13 or something.
- He was not Jewish, and he was very much of a hero for me.
- You spoke about your parents, everything ending
- and your parents being powerless.
- How did you arrive-- when did you arrive at that feeling?
- I'm sure that that didn't happen from one day to the next,
- I think when I realized that they had to leave,
- that they had to--
- that they could not combat this evil.
- The country was taken over by insanity.
- That's the way it felt.
- And then I think the most impressive thing for me
- was that last year, that my father and I were sort of left
- behind.
- My mother had already left, and we were the only ones there.
- He was already sick, but he was in a total, total depression.
- He was so-- he'd become absolutely silent,
- and I remember a meal-- and it's probably incidents
- that tell you the most.
- We were all-- the whole school was always eating together,
- and I remember that I was sitting at the table,
- at his table with a group of other people.
- We were all sitting there, talking, and he came in late.
- And his expression was so terribly sad
- that a silence spread across the room,
- and not that it was the habit that when the headmaster comes
- in you were quiet.
- He could have just come in, and sat down,
- and would have just come in late, and that was it.
- And under normal circumstances, no one
- would have stopped talking about it.
- I mean stop talking, would have just continued on,
- maybe said hello to him.
- But there was something about the expression in his face
- and his whole posture that was so depressed and so unhappy.
- And most of these students had a very close relationship to him.
- There are about 60 of them that still do.
- They're still around, and that's a whole extra story how
- they dealt with it, and with their being Germans,
- and realizing that my parents had to leave, and all of that.
- And that's, I think, the thing I remember most about that year
- was his total depression and inability
- to change the situation.
- Was he still in control of the school?
- Yes.
- He was in control of the school, but at the end of the year,
- when I graduated, he and I both left the school.
- And by that time, it had been sold to somebody else,
- and we went to Switzerland.
- That was in '37.
- Now, in 1936, your mother went to Switzerland.
- Do you remember any incidents around her departing?
- Did she pack and leave as if she were leaving forever?
- I don't remember that much about that at all.
- I remember my father and me departing.
- What do you remember about that?
- I remember that-- and there are some pictures of it, too--
- we were leaving in the car.
- He had always-- there was a big place in front of the building.
- It was sort of like a square, that the several buildings that
- made the square.
- And he'd always had the habit that, before he left anywhere,
- he'd drive around a few times.
- He'd call it the Honor Round and sort of waved to everybody.
- And when that happened the last time,
- and there were still people standing around,
- and they're all waving goodbye, I had the feeling then
- that I could not bear the pain and that I
- would have to just turn off all of my feelings
- or else I couldn't bear it and I would die because it was so--
- it was such a--
- our departure-- it wasn't just a departure.
- It was a kind of death.
- That's the way I remember it.
- And the reality is that I did turn off my feelings.
- I remember that, everything that happened after that and then
- immigrating here--
- it was like, first of all, things
- didn't happen, like I wasn't really living.
- And it's only been many years later that--
- now I can cry, but I couldn't do any of that.
- And when I--
- I felt totally alienated, also, from--
- I never felt at home here.
- Neither did I feel at home in Germany.
- I felt that, in spite of the fact that I had a very
- rich and rewarding life--
- and we haven't gotten into that part--
- that a lot of me was not really living.
- And it actually only came-- something came back to me when I
- finally began to sort of believe that the people who are now
- running the German school--
- and the man who is running it now
- took it on because he was impressed
- with my parents' theories.
- He wanted to continue what my parents had started.
- And they collected the money to build that building,
- and they had me speak at the dedication of that building.
- That sort of allowed me to, in some way,
- bring my life back into a circle in some way,
- and what I said in that speech then is that I actually that I'd
- lived two lives and that my life had ended when I left Germany,
- that my real life began at the age of 21, which is when I came
- here, when I got married.
- And even now talking to you, I forgot most of everything,
- and I know I've heard that of other people
- too, that there's a kind of amnesia that took place.
- And now things are coming back to me
- that I had forgotten about my youth.
- Just right now during this--
- No, no.
- No, no.
- During the last few years, it's been coming back to me.
- And the fire brought a lot back.
- The fire really awakened a lot of my early feelings.
- And also, it actually happened before.
- When we left our school in Michigan
- and moved to California, I went through a period
- of a kind of panic.
- No, I don't think it was a nervous breakdown,
- but I had some real, strange emotional reactions.
- And I felt then that leaving the German school--
- I mean the school in Michigan--
- made it possible for me to, for the first time,
- experience my leaving the German school,
- that it was just also a repetition.
- And moving all the way across the country, which
- happened nine years ago, it was like a reaction of experiencing
- something 50 years later.
- That's really what happened.
- And the fire did it all over again but in a different way
- because there I really felt in charge.
- This leaving the Michigan school,
- where I'd had a very happy, wonderful life, really--
- and then I left again, and it was--
- What do you remember about your father selling the school?
- Did he ever sit down and talk to you about it?
- Actually, my husband did that.
- He became very much--
- he was one of my parents' students,
- but he was their favorite student.
- And my father was paralyzed.
- He couldn't do anything.
- What my husband did was that he got in touch with--
- There were quite a number of private schools
- who had more or less the same kind of philosophy
- as my parents did.
- And so what he did was get in touch with the other school
- to see if there was somebody there who would want to buy it.
- It was then sold to a young teacher
- from one of the other schools.
- It was sold for very little money,
- and the money, as soon as it was paid out,
- was confiscated by the Nazis.
- But there is a very interesting history connected with that
- because, actually, that's the reason I'm here today
- is because the wife of the man who took over my parents school
- was the sister of one of the people who
- were killed in the White Rose, and so she
- was put in prison also.
- It was real luck that they were able to even continue
- the school because they remained as anti-Nazi, I think,
- as they could possibly be without being closed down.
- So she was sent to prison because her brother was
- among the White Rose people.
- Who was sent to prison?
- The wife of the man who took over my parents' school.
- There, she met another woman whose brother had also
- been in the White Rose, and she then came to Marienau.
- Knoop is the name of the man who took over the school, K-N-O-O-P.
- And I don't know the circumstances,
- but he divorced his first wife and married Anneliese Knoop,
- who is now one of the leaders of the White Rose and who was also
- in prison because her brother was one of the people
- in the White Rose.
- I just-- well--
- OK.
- What was Anneliese Knoop's role with the White Rose?
- After the-- no, I think the White Rose really got developed
- as an organization after Reagan went to--
- what was that place?
- Bitburg.
- Beg your pardon?
- Bitburg.
- Yeah.
- What was it called?
- After he went to Germany, to the cemetery.
- Right.
- That was when it became--
- it was very organized, and I think
- there was a connection, then, with America.
- And I think that she was very instrumental in doing this,
- and that's really how I got to be a member of the White Rose.
- I mean the White Rose organization.
- And she and I became very close friends, and so in Berkeley,
- at the White Rose--
- at this exhibit, where I met somebody from this organization,
- that's really how the whole-- how it came about.
- Going back to the time that your father sold
- the school and the money was confiscated,
- do you know where your family had the money to emigrate?
- And once you came?
- My mother must have taken some.
- I know we rented this place in Switzerland.
- What about the other parts of your family, your grandfather,
- grandmother, the uncles, aunts, cousins?
- Do you know whether they left at the same time?
- There were no-- my grandparents weren't living.
- Nobody was living.
- My uncle I was telling you about already,
- he founded the school for young emigrants,
- and he and a group of about 10 of them
- were in a concentration camp for about three months.
- And that was--
- I don't think anything--
- they weren't beaten or anything, but they
- were living under terrible, terrible conditions.
- And I remember him talking about it later, saying--
- these were all young students that were young children--
- that the way he got them through this experience
- was by creating a very, very strong bond between them
- and just making them feel that they, as a unit,
- were going to be strong enough to withstand this.
- And what I also remember is that he
- said that they he made them stay just within themselves
- and if, for instance, some other person in the concentration
- camps was cold or needed a blanket, he wasn't going to-- he
- didn't allow them to give it to that person.
- He felt that they had to just protect themselves.
- I think I remember it because it seemed very strange to me,
- and it seemed like a strange reaction.
- What happened to him?
- He was released from the concentration camp.
- He and a whole group of them emigrated to the United States.
- They lived in a house in Richmond, Virginia for a while,
- and then from there, they spread all over the whole world.
- And everything seems to be coming in round circles now
- because my brother is now running a school in Virginia,
- and at the 50th anniversary of this house that this person had
- given them--
- some rich American Jew gave them this place,
- and they lived there, I think, for about two or three years.
- And it was 50 years now, so there
- was something in the paper about it,
- and somehow, then, people began asking my brother if he
- was related to Curt Bondy.
- It was sort of an interesting thing
- that things are all coming back.
- He later on went back to Germany after the war.
- Beg your pardon?
- Your aunts and your uncles--
- did they remain in Germany?
- No, my other-- no, everybody emigrated,
- except for my step-grandfather, who died in--
- who died in a concentration camp.
- And I also have a cousin was a whole long story in itself.
- He was also leaving the country.
- He and his wife were already in London,
- and they arrived there with an airplane in the evening.
- And he already had a job waiting for him there,
- and the people would not let him--
- they didn't let him come into the country,
- and they didn't allow him to call anybody.
- They sent him back to Czechoslovakia
- on the next plane, and they then spent four years
- in a concentration camp.
- And they were saved at a very-- they were in Terezin,
- and they were saved from being--
- from Terezin, people were sent to the extermination camps.
- My cousin was a chemist, and his specialty was disinfection.
- And one of the things the Nazis were terribly afraid of
- was disease for themselves, not for the Jews.
- And the circumstances in which people
- lived in those concentration camps, of course,
- would spread disease.
- And he knew what to do in terms of what things
- that you could put there to keep it from spreading.
- So every time-- and the people in the concentration camps--
- the Jewish leadership had to decide
- who was going to be sent to the extermination camps,
- and every time their name was on the list,
- the Nazis would cross it out again.
- The same thing happened with her because she
- took care of the children, and it's always
- struck me as such a terrible feeling
- it must have been for them.
- Well, of course, I had the same feeling, too.
- Why did I survive and other people didn't?
- But in their case, other people would be substituted for them
- because they were more expendable
- in terms of the Nazis.
- And so they actually did survive,
- and other people had to die.
- Other people's names were substituted for their name,
- and it always seemed to me like one of the most terrible things,
- really, strangest things to be saved on that basis.
- They came to this country--
- and by that time, they were in their early 40s--
- and then had two children.
- And actually, they're our closest friends.
- We used to travel with them quite a bit.
- And I have one memory when they were at our house.
- We'd just come back from a trip together,
- and they were going to leave the next morning-- they lived
- not too-- we lived in Michigan.
- They lived in Pennsylvania.
- And I'd already gone to bed, and they came up to say goodbye
- because they were going to leave at 5:00 in the morning
- or something, before I would be up.
- And their young son was a teacher at our school,
- and somehow--
- oh, and someone had given my husband
- some money that was supposed to have been used in Terezin.
- And so at that moment, he found it, or he had it there,
- and he showed it to them.
- And he said, was that money actually used?
- And that triggered, of a sudden--
- we'd spent many, many vacation, much time with them,
- and they'd never talked about their concentration camp
- experience.
- This was 30 years later or something.
- This triggered-- all of a sudden,
- it all poured out of them, and what
- triggered it was that that money had never been used.
- That money was just used for one day
- when the Red Cross came to visit.
- And we spent all night talking, and they just
- poured out all of the experiences they had had.
- And their young son was also sitting there--
- he must have been maybe 20 at the time--
- and I remember that his eyes literally
- got bigger and bigger because he had never heard any of it.
- And he kept saying, why didn't you tell me?
- Why didn't you tell me any of this?
- That was really one of the strangest experiences.
- And I've heard that this has happened to many--
- and you probably have had heard that concentration camp people--
- that they keep it in, and then something just triggers it.
- And they said they'd never talked about it.
- When you and your father left for Switzerland
- and you felt this death of everything,
- did you think it was final?
- Did you think you would ever be able to get back?
- Oh, yes.
- I never thought-- at that time--
- oh, I don't know if it was then or if it was when we finally
- emigrated to America, but I thought
- it was totally behind us.
- But we didn't live together.
- There was something else.
- I had to have a slight operation,
- and I think we tried to do everything before emigrating,
- although I don't know that we even know about emigration.
- I think we thought we might have stayed in Switzerland.
- But anyway, I had to have that operation, and my husband, who--
- we weren't married then.
- My husband and I, together with my aunt,
- were going to Switzerland, and what I remember about that is
- only that I felt very sick, that I hadn't--
- I just had an operation, and I wasn't feeling well at all.
- And I wanted to just get away, and get over the border,
- and get somewhere.
- But then I went back to Vienna, then went through the same thing
- all over again.
- What city in Switzerland did you go to?
- It was a very small place called Gland, G-L-A-N-D.
- It was right between Lausanne and--
- there's another bigger city there--
- Geneva, opposite the Mont Blanc, ride on Lake Geneva.
- You could just see the Mont Blanc on the other side.
- And there my parents--
- and the school actually consisted mostly
- of German immigrants where the parents
- were still living in Germany and were able to send money
- for the tuition.
- And it was run, actually, by another former student
- of my parents, together with my mother,
- and it only existed for about three years
- because although there were other students-- there were
- some Swiss people there, and there were some French people
- and a few Americans, I think.
- But most of the money came from Germany, and that dried up.
- People lost their money or they emigrated.
- But that was--
- I've talked to other people who'd gone to that school,
- and it was--
- my parents had a real ability, I think,
- to make people feel very much at home and very protected.
- And for these children who all had to flee the Nazis,
- it was still not a bad time.
- What was the name of the school?
- It's called Les Rayons.
- And I don't think we gave it that name.
- It had been a Quaker school before,
- and that had closed for some reason.
- And then we rented it from them.
- Let's go back briefly to your husband.
- What is his name?
- George.
- And when did you meet him?
- I met him when I was six years old,
- when he was a student in my parents' school.
- How old was he?
- He was 13.
- No, more than that, 15.
- And we had become friends, even then.
- Somehow it was never questioned that he and I
- were going to get married.
- No, I was thinking.
- We tried to get married in Switzerland, and he says--
- and I must have forgotten that because I
- think it's such a shocking thing is that the Swiss wouldn't allow
- us to get married there because they were following
- the German laws and wouldn't allow Jew and a non-Jew
- to get married.
- And I hadn't really realized that.
- When I went to Vienna, he was still in Germany,
- and of course, there was no--
- he was not allowed to communicate, even, with a Jew,
- so the arrangement that we had was that he would--
- his letters would be--
- he'd send them to me--
- what you call it, [NON-ENGLISH]--
- to the post office--
- I don't remember the word now--
- where you just pick them up.
- And we made up a name for me, and I forgot the name.
- So I couldn't pick up his letters
- until three weeks later, all of a sudden, it came back to me.
- We made up a sort of Austrian-sounding name.
- Do you remember it now?
- No.
- I had remembered, but I've forgotten it again.
- And the way we had to do this was that my mail went to--
- I sent my letters to a Jewish friend of ours
- in Hamburg, who then gave them, unopened, to George.
- That was the only way we could communicate.
- And then we also made a habit of tearing up
- everything we got the minute we got it, and we've often--
- I think I wrote such nice letters.
- Why did you tear up?
- Because we were afraid of--
- because he was really in danger because he
- was known for being so supportive of my parents,
- for trying to help them before.
- He tried to organize-- after we had to leave the school,
- he tried to organize a meeting of the former students
- of my parents in some different building,
- and that was seen as some kind of an act of anti-Nazi thing.
- He was also of draft age, and so he wasn't really
- allowed to leave the country.
- And once he came to Switzerland, I think just for a visit--
- no.
- Wait a minute.
- This is the way it was.
- He bought a ticket on the Queen Mary,
- but he had to buy a return ticket.
- Otherwise, they wouldn't have allowed him to go to America.
- So he still-- up until the fire, we still had that return ticket.
- In order for him to even leave the country,
- he went through a whole lot of things he--
- first of all, he bought some gold,
- and if you burn it or something, it gets black.
- And he put it under the car somewhere
- in order to take some money out.
- Then he got himself all rigged up in mountain climbing outfits
- with a rope and everything, and he decided
- to go over a very small border.
- What I should say is he was not allowed
- to leave because he was of draft age, and also, he was wanted.
- He was on a list to be shot on-sight because
- of his Jewish relationships.
- So when he got to the border, that
- was the thing he had to be afraid of, that the man was
- going to look up that list.
- And he decided to get into a discussion with the person
- at the border about mountain climbing,
- and the way he describes it is that he said to the man--
- he pointed up some mountain, and he said,
- this is the place I want to.
- How do I get up there?
- And while the man was looking up and giving
- some kind of explanation of how you got up there,
- he just stepped on the gas and went through
- without giving that person any time to look up anything.
- And that is really how he got out.
- He went with you to Switzerland.
- And you couldn't get married, so he returned to Germany?
- No, he went to America.
- But this timeline is a little different
- because he went with me to Switzerland at one time.
- Then he was back in Germany, I think still taking
- care of our affairs.
- He was living in an apartment that belonged to my parents.
- After we had to leave the school,
- we took an apartment in Hamburg, where I've never stayed.
- But this description I just gave you was
- the last time he left Germany.
- That must have been after I left Vienna, after he'd called me
- and told me to leave.
- And he then started the whole thing about our emigration.
- He got that into--
- All right.
- Going back to what you just said-- you said your parents
- had to leave the school, and they got an apartment
- in Hamburg?
- Mm-hm.
- When was that?
- That must have been in '37, but they never lived there either.
- I think that we needed an address in Germany.
- You went to Switzerland with George, and your aunt,
- and your father and mother, and eventually he
- returned to Germany.
- What made you decide to go to Austria?
- Oh, I had always planned to do that.
- I was going to study medicine in Vienna,
- and I lived with a kind of aunt of mine, who was also a doctor.
- She actually had delivered me.
- She was my mother's friend, and she delivered me.
- And I lived with her.
- I was going to study medicine, and I was going
- to become a psychoanalyst.
- And I had just talked to Anna Freud and her father
- because she was going to start give a course on child analysis
- the following fall.
- They had the rule you had to be 21 years old before you
- were mature enough to take that course.
- And, well, I wanted very much to do it before that.
- So I had this long talk with Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud,
- and after that interview, they decided,
- even though I was only 18, that I
- was going to be mature enough to take that course.
- And I was very excited about that.
- And at the same time, I was studying medicine,
- and that was going to start the next fall, I think.
- Can you describe the Freuds?
- My mother knew him also because my mother had studied with him.
- It's hard to differentiate all the things
- that I've read about them and what I saw that day.
- What I remember is--
- Anna Freud was one of my heroes, along with Eleanor Roosevelt
- and that woman in Israel.
- Golda?
- Golda Meir.
- Those are my heroes.
- I thought she was very, very kind and very friendly-looking.
- I also thought she was very matter-of-fact
- and asked me what I knew about psychoanalysis, what my reasons
- were for wanting to do that.
- And she wore a long, old-fashioned dress
- like people who had worn maybe 30 or 40 years before that.
- I lived, actually, across the street from them.
- And he was smoking a pipe, and it was in their house.
- But I think it must have--
- I don't know.
- It probably was in their waiting room or their living room,
- which looked the way a Viennese apartment would have looked,
- very warm, carpets all over, lots
- of knickknacks and pictures.
- He was smoking a pipe, which he always did.
- And then just a few months later--
- he was being treated terribly, terribly,
- and I left probably a month before they did.
- And of course, nothing ever came of that course
- that I was going to take, but I did
- correspond with her later on about a child that
- had been in a--
- came to us that had been in a concentration camp
- and then later came to our school in Michigan.
- When did George notify you that something was going to happen?
- It was the same day, and I'm trying to figure out
- to remember-- dates are something I--
- I don't remember what it was, I think in March '37.
- No, '38, wasn't it?
- Yeah.
- And what happened there, also, my parents--
- I took a train to Prague because my parents were on a trip,
- and they were in Prague, which is where my mother was born.
- And I don't think I'd ever been there before.
- When I arrived at the platform in Prague,
- there were 30 people picking me up.
- All of my mother's old friends were there
- because they thought that it was impossible that I'd get through.
- They were all there to pick me up,
- not expecting me to be there, actually.
- And what I remember--
- I was still very young.
- I was about 19 at the time.
- And I remember a conversation--
- I think in moments like that you're not aware
- of the general problem but of your own--
- what happened to you.
- Well, I had not been scared because I didn't realize
- that people were being detained at the border,
- and mine was the last train that went
- through where they didn't take all the Jews off at the border.
- But the thing I remember about it
- is that I heard some of these people who
- had known my mother all their life say,
- oh, Annemarie looks just like her mother.
- And the other one said, oh, I don't think so.
- She said, her mother was always so beautiful.
- Now, that impressed me much more than all the political danger
- I was in because it upset me, I must say.
- But the other thing I remember is that--
- these were all rather wealthy people.
- Somehow, people always think that when you have money
- you can overcome any dangers.
- And I remember my father telling those people
- that they should get out, that the Nazis were
- going to be in Czechoslovakia.
- It was just a matter of time.
- And they just wouldn't believe him.
- They just said that, pretty soon the Nazis will be gone,
- and they didn't see themselves in any kind of danger.
- Do you know what happened to them?
- Most of them emigrated.
- OK.
- What happened after you arrived in Prague?
- Well, I told you part of the story.
- And then it was a matter of everybody
- wanting to know what happened to me, of course.
- But mostly, I got to know--
- I met for the first time all these people
- that my mother had grown up with.
- And I don't know how much you know about Prague.
- There's sort of a--
- the German-speaking people are the Jews in Prague.
- There was a whole society who were usually
- the wealthier, better educated people who spoke Czech
- as a second language, and German was really
- what they grew up with.
- I actually don't know the background, where
- they came from originally.
- But it was a very closely knit group
- that my mother was very much a part of.
- And so what I remember there is just that I think we
- stayed for about two or three more days.
- And I met all sorts of different people,
- and sort of went from one social occasion to another.
- And then we went back to Switzerland from there
- in the car.
- And my parents and I and--
- there was another girl with us, who
- must have been one of my parents' students.
- Where she came from, I don't remember,
- but I remember she was also in the car.
- And we had to sort of circle our way around Germany
- to avoid any place that would get us into Germany.
- So we drove, I don't know, through several other countries,
- I remember.
- And some of them, on the border, they
- were very, very rigid, looking for all sorts of things.
- And at one place, I had to get all the way undressed,
- and some woman was checking through everything.
- And the one thing I remember about this other girl
- was that she kept a piece of paper in her hand.
- And she said she could have--
- and nobody found that even, in spite of all
- that thorough investigation.
- And somehow, that really made her feel that she had really
- fooled them.
- You had left Vienna to go to Prague
- after your friend and husband-to-be George warned you.
- Right.
- Yes.
- How much advance was that?
- That was the same day.
- The same day.
- Mhm.
- How--
- See, he knew, he had heard that the Nazis
- were marching into Austria.
- And in fact, he remembers--
- he told me later that he was surprised
- that he was able to just make a simple telephone call
- and tell me that the lines weren't closed
- and that they're all busy or something.
- He just called and said, you have to get out.
- And my aunt went and bought me a golden bracelet
- as a farewell present.
- And it was very pretty, and it had white gold and yellow gold.
- And it got burned up in the fire, like everything else,
- but I had it and treasured it.
- And then she put me on the train, and she followed.
- She went to England, I think, several months later,
- and then also came to America.
- And was it by prearrangement that you
- met your parents in Prague?
- You know, that part I don't know.
- I don't know how they got in touch,
- or how I got in touch with them.
- It seems to me that I was probably supposed to--
- I think it might have been around vacation time anyway,
- and that I was supposed to meet them there
- probably a few days later.
- I don't really remember those details.
- And how did you get back to Switzerland?
- What mode of transportation?
- Car.
- They were there in the car.
- My parents had driven there.
- There were just on a vacation trip,
- which you could clearly still take, even
- in those terrible days.
- Did you get any news of what had happened in Austria?
- Not that I remember.
- I think most of that was later.
- I mean, these were the very first few days.
- I don't remember much about that.
- What happened after you went back to Switzerland
- with your parents?
- I stayed there with them.
- And that was when I knew I wasn't ever going
- to go back to Vienna.
- I wasn't going to finish my medical studies,
- at least in Vienna.
- I don't know if I thought I was going to finish them later on.
- And it seems to me that's when we
- began in earnest to think about the emigration to America.
- And I stayed there, and I worked.
- I took care of the little children at the school.
- We had some very young children there.
- There were about five or six boys that I took care of.
- And I worked there then for--
- I think it must have been for about a year.
- And then what was going on with George in Germany
- during this time?
- It seems to me that it was about that time
- that he then took this trip that I was telling you about,
- and finally came to Switzerland.
- And from there, he went to America.
- He came over here a half a year before we did, and was sort
- of preparing--
- he was trying to buy or rent some kind of property
- so that my parents, so that we could all together, all of us
- started at school together.
- And so one of the interesting things that we noticed,
- he was not as fluent in English as I was.
- My parents, as though they had foreseen this,
- they had hired an English woman to teach English.
- And when my sister was three and I was six,
- we had private lessons in English,
- so that I spoke English quite well when I came here.
- But my husband didn't know that much.
- And what I remember was that he learned the real estate
- language, because that's what he was trying to negotiate
- with people, about getting some property or a house
- or something.
- So he didn't know most of the social kind of daily language,
- but he knew all sorts of expressions
- that he's probably forgotten long since.
- And then we came over half a year after he did.
- On a German passport?
- On a German passport.
- With no J.
- No J. We came over on a boat.
- What was the name of it?
- It was sort of-- it was a freighter.
- There weren't very many people on it.
- And I remember getting into a terrible, terrible storm.
- I also remember they were showing a movie
- about a storm on the ocean.
- And I just remember feeling quite seasick.
- And there were all of us, both my parents
- and my brother and my sister, who
- were coming over here together.
- Was this in 1939?
- Yes.
- Do you remember the month?
- It seems to me we arrived there April 3rd,
- but I'm not sure that that's exactly true.
- But I think so.
- Was there a specific impetus to your leaving Switzerland
- at that time?
- Just that we got the visa at the time, and we--
- were just waiting, then, to go whenever
- we'd get the transportation and the American--
- you had to have an American person vouching for you.
- And I think George found people to do that for us.
- But that's one of the problems, is that his memory
- is totally gone.
- And it's too bad because he knew much more about these things
- than I did.
- I was just sort of going along.
- Do you remember when he left Germany
- to join you in Switzerland?
- I think it was that time that I told you about.
- What the date was, no, I don't remember that.
- I remember our last days in Switzerland,
- I remember when we left, I was participating in a play
- the night before I left, a Shakespeare play.
- And I was very excited about that, but I also knew--
- I mean, I knew then, which turned out not to be true,
- that I'd never go back to Europe,
- that that was my very last moment there.
- And--
- Which play?
- I can't remember what play it was.
- I know it was a Shakespeare play.
- And I also remember that we packed at two o'clock
- at night, even though we were packing
- for the rest of our lives.
- And we had some books in boxes that we had mailed over here,
- or that we'd sent over here.
- My parents had several boxes.
- And when we arrived in America, we
- didn't have the money to pay for whatever it was in order
- to get them, so that we never got them out.
- And years later, I found on some street corner some books that
- had the name [INAUDIBLE] were being sold for $0.30
- or something, because somehow I guess those boxes were opened up
- then and sold.
- I don't know.
- I remember being in New York, just finding my parents' books.
- On a street corner.
- On a street corner.
- Did you buy them?
- I don't think I did.
- I mean, I don't remember that.
- Probably I did, but I can't remember that.
- Where were you when Kristallnacht occurred?
- Here.
- In the United States?
- Yeah.
- But my father's, or my husband's brother and his wife
- were still in Berlin then.
- And the story has never been quite clear whether it
- was Kristallnacht or the night after that they took 15 Jews
- into their apartment.
- One of them was my cousin, who--
- I don't know if they--
- my cousin [INAUDIBLE] was in England,
- and he was about my age.
- And somehow, he talked to George's brother,
- who must have--
- my cousin was in Hamburg, I mean.
- And he talked to him, and it was expected.
- It seems to me that Kristallnacht was expected.
- And what people tried to do was to go to places
- where they were not known.
- And he said to my cousin, why don't you
- come to us, come to Berlin?
- Because something is going to happen.
- And so they took 15 Jewish people into their apartment.
- They were living in an apartment building that had a doorman,
- and they had to find ways of getting
- these people past the doorman.
- Took them up to their apartment, where they stayed,
- I think, for two or three days, and then they
- had to smuggle them past the doorman out again.
- I don't know how they did it.
- I do know that, of course, had they been found,
- they would have been killed or sent to concentration camps.
- My husband's brother died about three years ago.
- And I remember asking him-- actually,
- the last time I saw him, I asked him about this.
- I've always felt this is a story that ought to be known.
- You know, I think it's important that people
- know that not all Germans behaved like the Nazis did,
- and that there are people who really risked their life.
- And when I asked him how he could even do that,
- and I remember saying that I don't
- know that I could have done that, he said he had no choice.
- He's never wanted it publicized very much,
- he never talked about it, but he said
- there was just-- he saw what was happening,
- and there was no way in which he could not
- try to help to save people.
- And it's one of the stories that I always
- felt should have been told before either one of them died.
- Now, she died about six or seven years ago, I think.
- When you left Switzerland to come to the United States,
- where did you go to get the ship, the freighter?
- I think we went to England.
- We had to go from France to England.
- And I can't remember the port there.
- We left from England, I think.
- But first, we had to take a boat from France to England.
- I'm not good at remembering all those things.
- They somehow don't seem to--
- like, dates and places don't register very much with me,
- I think.
- Can you remember the day that you
- arrived in the United States?
- Oh, I remember that very well.
- That was very strange because, first of all,
- we got up very early in the morning.
- And you really do see the Statue of Liberty
- before you see anything else.
- And it does impress you, just the way one always hears.
- I mean, it really was the symbol of freedom for us.
- And my husband was supposed to pick us up.
- And for some unknown reason-- and I can't remember now
- what the reason was-- he was four hours late picking us up.
- And that was a very strange situation,
- because we were just waiting around for him.
- In those days, people were still taken to Ellis Island.
- And I don't know why that was never even a question.
- Well, some of my other relatives had been on Ellis Island,
- but we were not.
- And then he had rented an apartment,
- and we were supposed to get married right away.
- I remember having-- felt so strange, the whole thing.
- It was like a dream, all of a sudden being
- so far away, getting married.
- You know, it was all happening at the same time.
- I remember having to get a Wassermann test.
- And then we were married two weeks after I arrived here.
- That's why-- we did arrive on April 3rd,
- because we were married on April 20th,
- which was also Hitler's birthday.
- And I have never forgotten that those same--
- Did you ever see Hitler?
- No.
- I think my husband did, though.
- Did he convey his impressions to you?
- He just told me that, if he could have killed him,
- he would have.
- My husband is a very unaggressive person,
- but he said seeing Hitler-- and I can't remember what occasion
- that was--
- he just said he's never wanted to kill a person like he
- wanted to kill Hitler.
- Did you hear many of Hitler's speeches?
- No.
- I heard that one that one time.
- No, I don't think one--
- you know, you avoided that if you could.
- You had mentioned that your father didn't want to be Jewish
- anymore in Germany.
- Did he talk about that, or was it
- something that was just told to you?
- No, I don't think we ever talked about that.
- It was just a fact of my life, I think.
- It was just the way it was.
- And I think I told you, it really only became important
- after the Nazis came.
- Before that, it really wasn't an issue.
- [INAUDIBLE]
- Actually, I was really curious as to where
- the boy who told you that you were Jewish,
- that you were Jewish, how did he know that you were Jewish?
- I think everybody else knew it, except I didn't.
- It was a well-known fact.
- My family was a well-known Jewish family, really.
- It was just known, but it wasn't talked about.
- And so you didn't celebrate any of the holidays, right?
- No.
- No.
- Since we've been in this--
- well actually, since I've been in California,
- I've been going to a Seder every year,
- but no, otherwise, it's just not been a part of my upbringing.
- But it seems to me we probably would
- have come across other people who were assimilated as we were.
- Ours was just-- and I think people who lived in Hamburg,
- it was particularly less of an issue, as I said.
- People became German and wanted to be German,
- and that was all the--
- the only language they knew.
- I heard Yiddish for the first time when I came to America.
- I never heard anybody speak Yiddish.
- Do you remember the time that you heard
- Hitler speak that one time?
- Do you recall anything about the content of his [INAUDIBLE]?
- About what he said?
- Yeah.
- No, I just remember his voice.
- He probably didn't say very much.
- Probably said-- oh, and the little story
- which I have over there, I did write something.
- I think he said something about the Germans being
- the leaders of the world or something like that, being--
- oh, we're going to conquer the whole world.
- That's what he probably said.
- And where were you when you heard that talk?
- Were you at the school?
- No, I was in the village that's near the school.
- You were in the village.
- And that's where you encountered so many of these Brown Coats?
- That's what?
- That's where you encountered the Brown Coat general?
- Well, I was telling two stories about that.
- One was about when they wanted to come to this festival
- that the school had, and the other time
- was when I just went there just to buy something.
- I have a feeling I bought some books.
- I have a feeling that I had these books in my hand
- when all of this happened.
- And so the people around you who were saying "Heil Hitler,"
- they were just the people who lived in that village?
- I think so.
- To me, what I remember-- all of this is over 50 years ago--
- I remember a lot of red faces, and the odor of perspiration.
- Just evil passion is what I remember.
- But nothing happened to you?
- Nothing did happen to me.
- And after the speech you just went back to--
- I just went back.
- No, nothing ever happened to me.
- And I think that is something that I would like to talk about,
- because I have always felt as though my fate didn't count,
- because I never was in a concentration camp.
- Nobody ever did anything to me.
- And why should it affect my whole life as it has, and why
- should anybody take it seriously?
- And this is the reaction that I've
- found other people have too.
- I've told a number of people of my relatives about being--
- about this interview, and the answer--
- and their reaction is, but nothing happened to us.
- We're not the people they want to talk to.
- They want to talk to people who are concentration camp
- survivors.
- And that's always, I think, given people like me
- a kind of in-between position.
- It gave me the feeling that it really
- didn't count what happened to us, that I had no reason
- to be so affected by it.
- On the other hand, I had a tremendous survivor guilt.
- All of my life, I had the feeling that I
- had no right for pleasure.
- My other interests, which I got from my father,
- was history of art--
- used to be very interested in going to museums and in learning
- something about art.
- And I used to know quite a bit about it.
- After I came to this country, I never went to a museum
- for a long, long time.
- And I remember when my son--
- my oldest son got to be about seven or eight,
- and I thought, well, it's really probably time
- that he should learn something about art
- and that he should go to a museum.
- And there was a very good art museum in Detroit,
- where we lived.
- And it was so nice to know I had a good reason to go,
- because I could do it for him.
- I couldn't do it for myself.
- And it's been a long time before I even
- thought that anything should be done for me,
- or that I should have--
- that I should enjoy myself, when other people died
- in concentration camps.
- And what really I think made it possible
- for me to really live a normal life
- and a very happy life was, first of all,
- we were very, very closely knit family,
- especially after we came here.
- We still all stick together quite a bit-- all of our cousins
- and everything.
- And my husband and I were very close,
- and we were starting the school, which--
- whenever people ask me why we started it,
- my answer was-- and I think it's the real reason--
- is that it's the only way in which you could survive
- something like the Nazis, by feeling that you were going
- to be able to create an atmosphere for young people
- which will give them so much inner security and so
- little reason for aggression that they would never
- have to act like the Nazis did.
- And of course, in those days, I still
- had hopes that this world would really
- become a better world, which, at this moment,
- I don't feel is true.
- I also feel that it's a mistake to think that what the Nazis did
- was put peculiarly German.
- And I used to feel that way very strongly.
- I thought it was an aberration, and we'd get over this,
- and then this world would be a better place.
- I don't think it's peculiarly German.
- I think it's an attitude that exists all over the world.
- The world is really filled with hostility.
- And I think people all over the world
- are capable of the same kinds of things that the Nazis did.
- And I still hope that we can change it.
- [INAUDIBLE] wanted to talk more about this--
- what you did in this country.
- Where did you get married?
- We got married two weeks after we arrived here.
- And who married you?
- Well, that was a whole story by itself.
- We were going to be married at the city hall, I guess,
- and when we arrived there, the man said, you have to be 21.
- I wasn't quite 21 at the time--
- said, we can't marry you.
- And they said, but if you go to Lafayette Street 1.
- This was in New York-- if you go to Lafayette Street 1,
- there's a judge and he can marry you.
- So my mother had a little party at the hotel--
- at the apartment building waiting for us.
- And we thought it would be a good idea if we really
- got married.
- And we were wandering the streets
- in the rain trying to find this Lafayette 1.
- And finally, when we did, we walked in there
- and we asked if there was somebody would marry us.
- And there was this man who said, well, if you give me something,
- I'll find somebody for you.
- So my husband-- we really didn't have much money-- gave him $10.
- Then he introduced us to somebody else,
- and that man said, I'll find you a judge.
- And if you give me something, then I'll
- see that the judge can marry you.
- So they brought us into--
- there was some kind of a court session,
- and the man interrupted the court session
- and he put this book in front of him.
- He asked my husband a question, and I didn't really
- understand especially the American English.
- I knew English well, but American English was pretty--
- was hard to understand.
- And my husband said, no.
- And I was a little shocked.
- I thought, you're supposed to say I do.
- So when he asked me the same question-- which I, again,
- didn't understand--
- I said no too.
- And apparently, the question was,
- is there any reason why this marriage shouldn't take place?
- And then he kept on rattling up more things,
- and finally, I did get to say I do.
- And he said, kiss your bride, and he kept the book closed.
- And then we got some kind of a certificate, which also must
- have burned up now in the fire.
- But also, it never had a date.
- They never put a date on it.
- And it was sort of a very funny story.
- There was an ongoing session in court,
- and they just adjourned that or went--
- Yeah, they just interrupted it and--
- And you went to the judge's chambers and--
- No.
- they all the people were there.
- They were sort of the witnesses.
- I think the two fighting parties were there
- at the end of the ceremony.
- They all clapped.
- It was probably the only time they were in agreement.
- And you thought this is the way of all things happened in this--
- Yeah, I did.
- Where did George find an apartment
- for you and your family?
- Somewhere in New York--
- I don't know-- some plaza--
- Plaza Hotel?
- The word plaza comes to my mind, but I don't--
- Where did you and George live after you got married?
- We then had a summer camp.
- We lived all together for a little while.
- I remember it was the days before air conditioning.
- It was so hot.
- We weren't used to New York heat.
- And I also remember that, 3 o'clock at night, we'd
- get up and go for a walk in Central Park, which is probably
- totally unheard of today.
- Then we had a summer camp right away in New Hampshire, near
- [? Wolfboro, ?] New Hampshire.
- But at that time, we had somehow--
- people were very helpful to us.
- We had some connections in America,
- and had also some students from America in my parents' school,
- so we were not unknown.
- And people would give parties for us
- and introduce us to people so that we--
- when we started our summer camp, we had 30 campers.
- But my father was so homesick for Germany
- that he went back to Germany, which was--
- still seems like the craziest thing he could have done.
- When?
- While we were running a camp, he--
- we didn't have the money or anything.
- He took a boat back to Germany.
- He went to Switzerland to visit the school there,
- and then he must have spent some time in Germany where, as a Jew,
- he could have been stopped right away.
- He got back here just a few days before the war started.
- You mean in August of '39?
- Yeah.
- Was he still depressed?
- It was very hard for him to give up his German school,
- and also he was sick.
- He had this illness that I explained to you before.
- He was just driven to get back.
- He just wanted to have one last look.
- And so we ran the camp without him.
- And we had also mostly--
- a lot of refugee children.
- And we've become friends with the Budapest Quartet,
- and they used to play there all the time--
- which we didn't even think was anything special, but--
- Did your father say much about the trip?
- I don't think so.
- No.
- He died in '51.
- And we came in '39, he really wasn't here that long, in a way,
- and he never made a--
- he was sick, and he never made a real adjustment, I think.
- But he had to same--
- there was something about him.
- Students used to love him, even though he didn't speak English
- very well.
- I was talking to my--
- the same cousin who was in a concentration camp,
- and was telling him that I was going to give a short speech
- about my father on May 11th this-- of this year,
- because of his birthday.
- And he said he remembered that he and his wife--
- there was a group that had invited my father to speak
- to them, and he said-- my father always looked very sloppy,
- and he said that he went up to try and straighten out his tie
- and the tie--
- and he couldn't do it, and he had spots all over.
- And anyway, they listened to the speech that he gave.
- He was never a good speaker and he didn't speak English very
- well, but they said that they remember like it was today--
- and this must be least 30 years ago--
- how he had impressed the people, that they were totally quiet
- and that they were--
- they listened to his stammering English for an hour,
- because he was a very impressive personality.
- And he was very, very sincere about his love for children
- and his philosophy of community and of simply more respect
- and love than people usually give.
- Do you recall being very anxious about when--
- his trip back to Europe?
- Yes, but I also--
- we were so busy.
- We had never run a camp.
- We didn't know the language too well.
- We had to do everything.
- We had to take care of the garbage, and get the food,
- and create activities for children.
- And we found there were things that were different.
- We used to have a camp in Switzerland,
- and the way we did it was that there'd be maybe two or three
- organized activities that you had supervisioned at the lake,
- and the rest of the day children did what they wanted to do.
- And you didn't worry every moment about them.
- And when we found out that you can't run a camp like that
- here--
- here you have to make sure that every minute is organized
- and that there's supervision every moment--
- it was a totally different concept
- that we had to get used to.
- So what I remember mostly of that time
- was that we were worried about him and--
- but we were too busy.
- We just had to take care of things.
- Had he written to friends that he was going to come?
- Did he--
- You know, it's strange, because when
- I was in Germany right now--
- and they have tried very hard to sort of restructure
- my parents story--
- no one remembered seeing him in Germany.
- One friend, though-- actually, the wife
- of the man who started the school in Switzerland with them
- remembered that he was in Switzerland.
- But I remember that he went to Germany.
- I do remember that, but nobody knows where he went, really.
- I know, sure, he couldn't go back to [? where he know,
- ?] he probably went to Hamburg.
- Did he tell you anything about the trip?
- I don't think so.
- He came back and the war started.
- And then we got all concerned about the war.
- And my brother volunteered pretty soon
- after the war had started.
- Well, couldn't have been, because my brother then
- went to another--
- to a boarding school after we were married.
- Our honeymoon consisted of taking my brother
- to a boarding school.
- The war started in '39.
- And how old was he then?
- Well, he was very young.
- That's why I'm getting confused about it.
- I do know that he volunteered.
- He was right in the middle.
- He went to the worst part of the war.
- Where did he serve?
- It's funny how much of it is lost in my mind.
- I know that he had training--
- very, very hard training.
- He was in the intelligence, but I also
- know that he crossed the channel.
- I don't remember, exactly.
- Was he in the Army?
- He was in the Army, yes.
- Yeah.
- It was sort of a strange thing that he--
- my father fought on the German side in World War I,
- and my brother fought on the American side in World War II.
- Where did you live during those first years?
- Did you live in Manhattan in New York?
- No, we lived in Manhattan for a few months, and then we--
- my husband and I ran the school together with my parents
- in a place in Windsor, Vermont, where we rented a building.
- And seems to me we had about 30 students there that very first
- year.
- Then we moved to Manchester, Vermont.
- I guess we were with them for two years,
- and then we decided that we should leave the school.
- And we taught in a school in New Jersey for a year.
- And we lived in an apartment in a little city--
- What did you teach?
- Little children-- just was a progressive school,
- and we both assisted in some-- in a classroom.
- I think probably I worked with five and--
- four, five-year-olds.
- During this time, were you in contact
- with a lot of Jewish people?
- No.
- Did you ever have any curiosity about Jewish holidays?
- No.
- I was working and I was young married.
- Early, you had mentioned that this was--
- that you'd never sat down together as a family
- until you came to this country.
- Mm-hmm.
- Elaborate on that, sitting down together as a family.
- How was it?
- It was a new experience.
- It was nice.
- We really only got very close as a family after we came here.
- But it was mostly a time when you had
- to worry about your existence.
- We had very little money.
- I remember, when my brother wanted to go to the movies
- when he was maybe 14 or 15, that he'd
- go around and collect pennies from everybody so that he
- would have the money to go.
- It really wasn't in the center of my thinking at all.
- I was concerned with building up a school.
- I was also concerned with working with my own parents
- and trying to find my place.
- I was beginning to compete with my mother.
- She was a queen, and I felt I couldn't really ever find
- a place where she was.
- And that was when we decided to--
- actually, we decided to move to Detroit.
- We had people at the summer camp--
- not only children, but sometimes whole families would come.
- And one family that used to come every year where the Sterbas.
- They were psychoanalysts from Vienna,
- who were the only non-Jews in--
- who were surrounding Freud.
- But they left out of loyalty to Freud,
- because they didn't really want to live in a country like that.
- They came to our summer camp with their two children.
- They had been living in Detroit and had started a nursery school
- for their children.
- I guess George and I realized that we
- needed to leave my parents-- that it wasn't really possible,
- especially for me, to try and really become somebody or be
- myself, since they were such domineering personalities--
- both of them.
- And the Sterbas had been--
- they had a nursery school--
- which was called Editha Sterba Nursery School--
- in Detroit, and were looking for somebody to take it over.
- And even though I didn't have any training,
- they asked me to take it over.
- And that's what we did.
- That's how we moved to Detroit.
- And my husband--
- I ran the nursery school, and he ran--
- he had some older children among them,
- one of the Sterba's children.
- So he took care of seven and eight--
- seven, eight, and nine-year-olds.
- And in fact, just recently, everything
- seems to be coming back.
- We had the 50th anniversary of our school,
- and one of the students who had been one of my husband's first
- students came back and talked about it.
- He later on became a teacher at our school,
- and his children were--
- went to our school.
- That was the beginning of the school that we developed.
- It was later called Roeper City and Country School.
- We had about 500 students by the end,
- and it was very much based--
- whenever anybody asked me, why did we have the school,
- I said that it was the only way in which you
- could survive the Nazis.
- I told you that.
- I said that before.
- And that was really the basic principle was that it was a very
- open, progressive type school based on psychoanalytic theory,
- where we thought about-- talked about the--
- and taught to teachers about unconscious motivation,
- and about what really made a person be what they are.
- We worked very closely with the Sterba all during that time.
- We participated in psychoanalytic seminars--
- and probably was one of the very few schools
- that were based on psychoanalytic theory,
- as well as a philosophy of humanistic philosophy.
- And later on, it was turned into a school for gifted children.
- This was a day school.
- We never had a boarding school, because we didn't really want--
- we wanted to have a family life, which was the only thing that I
- think I missed in my childhood.
- And it became a school for gifted children.
- It also had a totally different approach
- than most other schools.
- We had no grades.
- We had very, very individualized education.
- And we, in the end, developed a participatory democracy
- among the teachers, because we felt that the teachers--
- oh, I'm getting very tired--
- that the teachers could only be models for children
- if they really knew how to live in a democracy.
- And it was a very wonderful--
- we were able to recreate what we had
- had in our school in Germany.
- And it was a very satisfying life.
- We touched probably thousands and thousands of people.
- We've retired now 12 years ago now,
- but I'm still closely involved with the school,
- and I'm still involved with education.
- I have a consultation service for gifted children now.
- And what I believe and know is that it's absolutely necessary
- that one develops a concept of global education
- and global awareness.
- And it's something that I think people have not understood yet--
- that this world is only going to be
- saved if we understand that we all depend on each other.
- And I've written quite a bit about that,
- and it's somehow what keeps me from being desperate.
- But it also, I feel, goes directly back to my experience
- with the Nazis.
- I think you can only either despair
- or continue to believe that maybe one can do something
- about making this a better world.
- I know you keep asking me about my Jewish feelings,
- about Judaism.
- I don't feel Jewish.
- I don't feel that any kind of nationalism of any sort
- is helpful at this time.
- I think one really needs to feel as a human being,
- without any chips on one's shoulder.
- This is probably going beyond what
- this is supposed to be about, but I feel that so very
- strongly.
- I was telling you in the car that I think--
- be interesting to do the same kind of thing
- that you're doing with people who've
- experienced the Nazis with people like the Vietnamese,
- with other people who've had--
- or maybe people who live in Los Angeles-- who
- knows-- who've have had some terribly cruel things
- happen to them.
- There are many, many more stories around.
- But on the other hand, you say you have
- guilt because you survived.
- I do.
- I don't know if it's a rational emotion.
- I lived through a terrible, terrible thing,
- and millions and millions of people died, and I didn't.
- I not only feel I have guilt, but I also feel that I--
- that there is maybe a reason I survived-- maybe
- that I have to help people.
- But there isn't really a reason why
- I should feel more guilty than my husband does,
- just because he isn't Jewish.
- He survived.
- Does he feel guilty?
- He never shared that with me.
- No, he doesn't.
- And I'm sure it's because I'm Jewish that I feel it.
- And I know that he could-- for him, it wasn't the same thing.
- The big difference is that he chose to leave Germany,
- and he chose to align himself with us.
- But I didn't choose it.
- It could have happened to me just,
- as it happened to all the other Jews in Germany.
- I escaped it somehow.
- It's a very important difference.
- If you had been in a concentration camp,
- do you think you would feel more Jewish, if you survived that?
- If I had been in a concentration camp,
- I would have died in the first month.
- I've often thought about that--
- because I wouldn't have had the strength to deal with it.
- I can't see anything--
- even watching other people being mistreated.
- I truly think I couldn't have survived it.
- I don't know that I would have felt more Jewish.
- I'm sure I wouldn't have survived it.
- I couldn't have.
- I wouldn't.
- I don't think I would have had the strength to even live
- a life like that.
- Well, what did your father do during--
- father and mother do during the time that you lived in Michigan
- and set up this school?
- Oh, they had their own school.
- Where was their school?
- In Massachusetts-- they had a boarding school,
- and for 30 years-- they had actually spent more time in this
- country-- my mother did--
- running the school than in Germany.
- Where was the school?
- In-- oh my goodness--
- Lenox, Massachusetts.
- What was the name of the school?
- Was called the Windsor Mountain School--
- and it was named that because that's
- where the word originated, in Windsor, Vermont.
- They had the same type of school that they had in Germany.
- And they had the same charismatic influence.
- My father died very early.
- He died with 59 years of age, and my brother and my mother
- ran the school together.
- And I still meet many people who went to school there who--
- and who just absolutely love my mother.
- She would know every individual child.
- She'd have-- speak with every child about once
- a month for at least half an hour,
- and they all felt that they were her special child.
- How large was the school?
- Probably about 150-- wasn't nearly as large as our school.
- Your parents started it when?
- '39, I think, or '40--
- we started it together, and then we left.
- Is this what I speak into?
- You hear it?
- I mean, I know my voice doesn't carry very much.
- OK, any time.
- This is a continuation of the Holocaust oral history project
- interview with Anne-Marie Roeper.
- The first interview was held on June 23, 1992,
- and this continuation is held in San Francisco on September 23,
- 1992.
- My name is Sylvia Prozan and assisting in the interview
- is Jake Birnberg.
- Anne-Marie, our condolences on the loss of your husband.
- Why don't you talk about that?
- Well, in a way I could take up the whole interview time
- with that because it was a very amazing and a very traumatic
- experience.
- My husband had been ill for many years,
- ill in the respect that he had lost the use of his legs slowly.
- He was incontinent.
- He had some mental problems.
- But during all that time, he became,
- I think, even more loving, which is maybe
- a strange way of saying it.
- He enjoyed his life still.
- He woke up every morning looking out saying,
- it's a beautiful day.
- And I used to take him on rides.
- I knew the environment of Berkeley and Oakland
- probably better than most people who
- were born here because any spot that had a view,
- I would take him to.
- I also knew all the restaurants that you could go to
- with a wheelchair, and the theaters
- where it was possible to get into with a wheelchair.
- And I had also other people taking care of him
- so that I was able to continue my work.
- And yet I spent most of my time with him.
- And when he came to the hospital,
- he had a bad infection, and the thought
- was that he would be coming out the next day.
- And actually, he stayed there for two months.
- More and more things were wrong.
- We never knew what it was.
- But in between, they always said he was fine.
- I hired two people to take care of him
- because I knew I couldn't do it by myself,
- and moved to a new apartment because I needed an extra room.
- He's never been in that apartment.
- I bought a new car so I could accommodate the wheelchair.
- He's never been in the car.
- So that when he finally died, it was a combination of losing him
- and the memory of having lost the house.
- Having lost him and having lost my home, original homeland,
- it all became just one.
- My children were with me all during that time.
- My son from Massachusetts and his whole family
- stayed with me for three weeks.
- And we had a lot of decisions to make.
- In the end, the final thing, which was,
- I think, probably the most terrible experience
- was that he had an internal breakthrough,
- an intestinal breakthrough.
- And it was just the day before he was supposed to go home,
- so that he almost died then.
- And then we had to make a decision about were
- we going to let him die or we were going to risk an operation.
- And we talked to him, and he couldn't talk.
- And he squeezed each of our hand when we asked
- him, did he want the operation.
- He said yes, he never wanted to die.
- He loved life even in spite of all of the trouble he had.
- So then he had the operation, and he left about two weeks
- after that.
- And then we were all at his bedside when he died,
- all his grandchildren and all of his children and I. We
- each talked to him alone.
- And it was quite an amazing experience for all of us.
- And during that time we were all together.
- We were practically together day and night.
- And after he died, we had a memorial service here for him.
- We had three memorial services.
- We had one here where many people came,
- and everybody expressed-- it was such an emotional thing, much
- more than I've ever seen when people died.
- I mean, we all were in tears most of the time.
- And then we had, as people do, made
- no plans for what we were going to do after he died.
- But I had asked him one question.
- I asked him if he were to die, did
- he want to be buried in the grave of my parents
- in Lenox, Massachusetts, where the school of my parents was.
- And a few days after his death, I
- had a dream which explained to me
- why I knew that's where he had to be buried.
- I had a dream that there was a train,
- and his coffin was on the train.
- He has been cremated, but I on that dream he was not cremated.
- And my grandfather's old cook, who
- cooked for 25 years for my grandfather in Germany,
- and who is buried in my grandparents' grave in Germany,
- ran after that train and wanted to get on.
- And somehow the train stopped and let her on.
- And I woke up from the dream in the middle of the night
- and went to the typewriter and wrote the story that came--
- wrote the reason why he had to be buried in my parents' grave
- and why I needed all of my relatives around
- at that funeral.
- And the story I'm going to tell you now
- I've always known, but somehow never put it together,
- never thought about it.
- It was really my husband who sort of started the movement
- to America.
- He told my family that we needed to emigrate to America,
- that that was the only safe place for us.
- He came here half a year before my parents and I did.
- He looked around for real estate.
- And shortly after we came, we first rented the place
- and then we bought the place where my parents' school was.
- And my parents had a totally open door policy.
- All of the relatives first spent a month or a year
- or many years at my parents' school.
- And later on, they all brought their children and grandchildren
- there every Christmas.
- When the boarders weren't there and the rooms were empty,
- we had about 20 families there.
- And so that in a way, all of my relatives--
- these were my cousins and uncles and friends--
- had a friendly reception because of the fact
- that my parents had that attitude.
- But that could have never happened
- if George hadn't come here first,
- if he hadn't opened those doors to us.
- And also-- I don't know how much I told you about that before--
- that he saw to it that we didn't have a J in our passports, which
- made it possible for us to get out
- and really made it possible for us to come over here.
- Well, I had a cousin, for instance, whose mother
- died in a concentration camp.
- And the moment he heard about it, the first thing he did
- was to come to my parents to be consoled by them.
- And even now, when anything goes wrong, when my husband died,
- every single one of them called or wrote,
- and not only once every day.
- It's very, very close-knit.
- But when we had this funeral, which was totally unstructured--
- we are really a family without rituals and without religious
- affiliations--
- we just did it.
- And so we were just standing around the grave
- where they had that little box, and that
- was very upsetting to me, you know, after he was cremated.
- And everyone started talking about his experiences.
- And they all came back to how he had received them.
- And there was one woman who was the daughter of our closest
- friends.
- And she said that until she was eight years old,
- she didn't realize that she wasn't related to us because she
- felt that she was so well-accepted, like everybody
- else.
- And so that in a way, his dying has, for me,
- meant that a circle has sort of closed,
- but also that all these memories came back
- to all of these people.
- They were all talking about how he helped them.
- But also, something that we have heard from many people
- is that many of them wished that we were their parents,
- that in us they saw a couple that was really relating
- so well, and they thought they would have
- like the same kind of care.
- And so it was a very emotional thing.
- And then from there, we went to Massachusetts,
- where there were, what, 20 speakers.
- It was more organized.
- But all three of my children spoke,
- and I did, and many other people, and someone
- from the Detroit City Council.
- And there, the emphasis was on the fact that he was a very--
- well, I think they always said what a gentle man he was--
- not gentlemen, but gentle man, and how they each felt,
- the former students, particularly,
- that he understood them and was particularly interested in them.
- And it all came back to it--
- and I think you can write that, probably,
- in these obituaries-- how our whole idea of education
- was formed by the fact that we lived through the Nazis.
- And it was formed, I think, in many ways.
- I think it gave us a different attitude
- toward the kinds of things that people think are important.
- We always felt that becoming a human being who is not
- aggressive, who is interested in the world around them, who
- is not competitive, but cooperative,
- who is passionately involved in their fellow man, so to say,
- was much more important than how well you learn to read
- and what people usually consider education.
- And this is what all of these people
- kept saying, that they had felt either they
- or their children received an education that
- had an enormous impact on their lives.
- And there was something that I would
- like to say because somehow at the last interview,
- I was left with the impression that there
- was a feeling that people who are Holocaust victims,
- or at least lived through the Holocaust,
- would become more interested in Judaism.
- And I think that it probably led me in the opposite direction,
- namely that I feel the Holocaust happened to the whole world.
- It happened to many, many people who were not Jewish.
- And it taught us the lesson that we
- need to really understand our interdependence
- and our moral obligations to each other.
- And these are things that are very easily said,
- but they have all sorts of consequences
- that most people don't follow up on.
- And I don't know if you want to ask me some questions now.
- Is this going?
- Yes, it's going.
- It's going.
- I thought you need a man behind it.
- Not always.
- I didn't mean to leave you with that impression.
- I think what I was trying to say--
- I was just wondering how you felt because being Jewish
- changed your whole life, and how you felt about that.
- I didn't mean to leave the impression that you would become
- more interesting in Judaism.
- Yeah, well, it was one thing I wasn't sure about.
- I wondered how you felt about it.