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Oral history interview with Liesl Loeb

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1997.A.0441.65 | RG Number: RG-50.462.0065

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    Oral history interview with Liesl Loeb
    Transcript
    Side one.
    Oral memoir by Liesl Joseph Loeb,
    recorded on November 16, 1998.
    My name is Liesl Joseph Loeb.
    Spell it L-I-E-S-L, Joseph is J-O-S-E-P-H,
    and Loeb is L-O-E-B, like in Bob.
    I was born on June 17, 1928, in a small industrial town
    in the Rhineland, West Germany.
    And the town's name was, at that time, Rheydt.
    And it's spelled R-H-E-Y-D-T. It was a town with many textile
    mills, some other industry and manufacturing.
    My father, Josef Joseph--
    the first Josef is spelled with an F, J-O-S-E-F,
    and the second, J-O-S-E-P-H--
    was a prominent lawyer in Rheydt.
    My mother, Lilly Solomon Joseph--
    Lily, L-I-L-L-Y. Salmon is her maiden name, S-A-L-M-O-N,
    and Joseph, J-O-S-E-P-H--
    my mother was born in the next small town.
    And the name of that town was Odenkirchen.
    And that is spelled O-D-E-N-K-I-R-C-H-E-N.
    Today these two smaller towns are incorporated
    into one large municipality, with another adjacent town,
    and that is called today Moenchengladbach.
    And that is spelled Moenchengladbach.
    M-O- M like mother--
    O-E-N-C-H-E-N-G-L-A-D-B-A-C-H. It's a little bit hard
    to pronounce, I know.
    And these separate little municipalities
    are simply called Monchengladbach 1, 2, 3, and so
    on.
    There are, I think, four or five areas altogether
    that are all under one city government today.
    Jews were already living in this area in the 12th century.
    A local historian wrote the history of the Jews of the area
    in 1989, two thick volumes, and my mother's family
    plays quite an important part in that history.
    Her family can trace its years back to about 1800
    in that area.
    And from there, the family seems to have come from Nurenberg
    in Germany, N-U-R-E-N-B-E-R-G.
    My mother's father, my grandfather,
    had a men's clothing manufacturing concern.
    And my mother told me that during World War I,
    my grandfather was a great patriot, always
    inviting soldiers to the house when they were on leave.
    If any of his employees came home on leave,
    he invited them for dinner and brought them home.
    And my grandparents had a very hospitable home.
    My mother was the youngest of three daughters
    of my grandfather, whose name was David Salmon, S-A-L-M-O-N.
    And my grandmother was one of 12 children who came from the town
    of Kaiserslautern, K-A-I-S-E-R-S-L-A-U-T-E-N.
    My grandmother's family was quite liberal,
    and among her many siblings there were some intermarriages
    already in those years.
    One of her more well-known cousins
    was Nathan Strauss, who, with his wife, sank on the Titanic.
    Also, my grandmother can trace her relationship
    to the Macy Strauss family, well-known here
    in the east coast of the United States.
    My mother and father married in 1927, and I was born in 1928.
    And I must say that the first 10 years of my childhood
    were as ideal as any could be.
    I am an only child.
    The first six years of my life I had a governess who
    came to the house every day.
    She didn't live in, but came every day to be with me.
    And then when I started school, she got married,
    and she insisted that I would carry her veil
    at her wedding in church.
    I mention this fact because when I was six years old,
    the year was 1934.
    And at that time already, Hitler had come to power
    and certain anti-Semitic sentiments
    had become very noticeable in Germany.
    Children with whom I used to play,
    children in the neighborhood often
    called me names such as dirty Jew and other such names,
    and I didn't understand why they did that.
    And carrying the veil in church, my mother
    felt, might be dangerous, not just to us, but,
    perhaps, also to my nanny.
    But she insisted that I must be at her wedding.
    And so I did what she asked me to do.
    And I have to say also that throughout all the years we
    were in Germany until we left, she came to visit us regularly.
    I was her one and only charge at that time.
    She came to us straight from the school
    where she had trained as a kindergarten specialist.
    And there was much more between us
    than just an employee relationship.
    She was like my second mother.
    And our contact was discontinued during the war,
    but was taken up again after of the war until she passed away
    in 1987.
    My grandmother lived nearby and often came to our house,
    and I was extremely fond of my grandmother.
    She was the only grandparent I knew.
    I had an aunt and uncle nearby.
    Until 1937, I had a big cousin nearby
    who was like my big sister, who, however,
    came to the United States, to Philadelphia in 1937.
    And I had various other cousins and aunts and uncles
    of whom I was extremely fond and whom
    we got to see at least once each year
    even though we didn't live in the same cities.
    We were a close-knit family.
    I think I was a happy child.
    I was sad at being an only child,
    and therefore I loved to go to school,
    and I loved to be anywhere where there were other children.
    My parents were comfortable.
    We often had concerts in the house.
    Various friends and their musical friends
    came to make music.
    And my mother also was a trained coloratura soprano singer,
    and I loved it when she sang to me.
    Very often when I was sick, and I
    was sick very often during my childhood in the wintertime,
    she would sing to me.
    And I do treasure the memory of that a great deal.
    After Kristallnacht, my mother never sang again.
    My father also played the piano, as did my mother.
    And I had piano lessons starting at age seven.
    And I must say, I just loved the piano.
    After being in bed sick for days on end, the first day where
    I was without temperature and I was allowed to come downstairs,
    my first place was to go to the piano and start playing.
    I'm not sure that I would have made any kind of a class artist
    on the piano, but I did love the instrument, and to this day
    I love piano music best.
    And I do love classical music.
    As I said, I loved to be where there were children.
    I went to a Jewish school.
    In our town at the time of my childhood,
    the population was approximately 70,000 people.
    The Jewish community consisted of about 100 Jewish families
    and was a close-knit community.
    Everybody knew everybody.
    And the Jewish school was a one-room schoolroom.
    All eight grades were in that one room.
    And the teacher was not just the teacher who
    taught all those grades, and everybody learned,
    but he was also the Reverend.
    He was not an ordained rabbi, but he was a Reverend,
    he was the Cantor.
    He did the marriages and he did the divorces
    and he visited the sick.
    And he was an all around person to minister
    to his congregation.
    We often made fun of him, as children do.
    But in retrospect, I must say here
    that he was the most heroic person because later when
    it came to the deportations, the time
    when the deportations started, long after we had left already,
    he did have a chance to leave Germany
    with his family, his wife, and his two children,
    but chose to stay with his congregants who were still
    there, and was sent with them away to the ghetto of Riga.
    I think that is the most heroic thing.
    And I have revered him ever since I
    have known this about him.
    And I only did find that out about him in 1989.
    So life was nice and comfortable and safe.
    And as long as my parents were around,
    I always felt very secure.
    But this did not last, unfortunately.
    I would say that on the night of November 10,
    my childhood suddenly was brought to an end.
    My childhood, my security, my whole life came to a stop
    that night.
    What happened that night, what changed
    my life and the life of my family,
    it's called Kristallnacht.
    Up until that point, I think my father,
    who was politically very knowledgeable-- he
    was an active Social Democrat, which in itself was already
    a very negative thing to be in Germany of those days.
    He always believed that things that
    were going on in Germany just could not last,
    that the regime would change, something would change.
    It was such folly, he couldn't believe that Hitler
    would go on and on and on.
    But after Kristallnacht, I think all the non-believers
    of the Hitler intentions changed their minds.
    Actually, at one time--
    I think it was in 1936 or 1937--
    my father considered emigration to Palestine.
    At that time, one could still take out
    a considerable amount of money.
    And a friend of his, as a matter of fact, a Gentile friend
    of my father married to a Jewish woman, went on a trip
    to Palestine to inquire what living conditions would
    be like.
    During the time that he spent in Palestine
    there were Arab riots, and civilians,
    especially Jewish people, Jewish settlers, were killed,
    and there was much malaria.
    Tel Aviv was still a little village on the beach.
    And there was lots of sickness.
    Things were very primitive yet in Palestine.
    And he came back and he said to my father,
    we cannot expect our wives to have such a lifestyle,
    to live under such conditions.
    So that idea was tabled by these two men.
    As it happens, this friend of my father's and his wife,
    unfortunately, both went to the concentration camps
    and were killed eventually.
    We did have other non-Jewish friends.
    First of all, my parents, were friendly with the family
    of my governess.
    Then my father who had been a bachelor until the age of 45,
    had a very close friend.
    This friend was also his client.
    My father was the attorney for his firm.
    He had some kind of a manufacturing concern.
    But they were buddies, and they hung out together.
    This friend never married, although he had a woman friend
    but never married.
    But they did all kinds of things together,
    especially before my father was married.
    Sometimes they would take trips together,
    and just hung out together, maybe
    rode their bicycles out into the country
    on a weekend or something.
    And my father didn't drive.
    He never drove a car.
    And there weren't too many cars around yet
    in those years anyway.
    His name was Albert.
    And after my mother married, Albert
    was still part of the household.
    He'd come, drop in for dinner any old time,
    and very often he also invited my parents for dinner.
    The men had this special friendship
    that rarely exists among men.
    And for me, he was Uncle Albert.
    I mention him because he will come up
    again later in the story.
    The boycott of 1933 and the Aryan laws that Hitler brought
    out, which took away the privilege
    to practice for doctors and lawyers and other professionals
    of the Jewish faith, temporarily put my father out of his job,
    more or less.
    My father had a junior partner, and the firm
    was well-known in the area.
    He was admitted at court in the capital of our district, which
    was Dusseldorf, a larger, well-known city
    in the Rhineland.
    And you spell that D-U-S-S-E-L-D-O-R-F.
    My father lost his practice for a short time.
    But after a while, these laws were modified,
    and everyone who had already been
    practicing before the beginning of World War I was reinstated.
    I guess maybe they found out they
    had a brain drain or something.
    At any rate, my father had been a judge in Cologne
    before World War I, and he served in the military tribunal
    during World War I.
    My father was a pacifist in those days,
    and he was glad not to be in any kind of front lines
    for the fatherland.
    I don't know if you would say he was not a patriot,
    but definitely his philosophy of pacifism
    made it so that it was against his principals to actively
    engage in fighting, I suppose.
    At any rate, my father was reinstated,
    which was really not to his advantage
    because again, he must have thought that things wouldn't
    get any worse.
    If anything, they might get better.
    And he didn't want my mother to have to change her lifestyle.
    And so he perhaps became a little too complacent
    until a few years later, when his practice
    had to be limited only to Jewish clientele.
    Slowly but surely, the Gentile friends
    that used to come around stopped coming.
    And there came a day when his friend Albert, my Uncle Albert,
    called him up on the phone and told him, listen, Jupp.
    My father's nickname was Jupp, J-U-P-P.
    And he said, I'm sorry, but I'm not
    going to be able to speak to you on the streets anymore.
    And I can't call you anymore, and please
    don't call me anymore because I've just been reinstated
    as an Admiral in the German Navy,
    and that would compromise me too much.
    You must understand.
    My father was terribly hurt from this phone call.
    You must understand that all this information
    was told to me by my mother.
    But I can well understand how he must
    have felt, how his friend of so many years
    suddenly seemed to turn against him.
    Most likely, though, his phones were being tapped
    and he was being watched because it must have been knowledge
    also of the local little spies or the local Gestapo
    that Albert had a Jewish friend.
    At any rate, they did not communicate from that time
    on until the last day that we were in Germany,
    and I'll tell you about that a little bit later on, too.
    And nevertheless, my nanny came to visit
    whenever she was in town.
    She had moved away from our town.
    And she didn't let anybody tell her whom she could visit.
    She had gotten word from the Nazi party,
    the local Nazi party, through her father,
    that it would be better if she didn't come to visit with us.
    And she said she was going to visit whomever she wants to.
    And then they suggested that maybe she
    shouldn't be seen coming into our house during the daytime.
    And she said that she would come whenever she wanted to,
    daytime or evening time.
    She wasn't going to let anybody tell her whom she could visit.
    My nanny's name was Otty, O-T-T-Y.
    And Otty's father was a member of the party.
    That doesn't mean to say that he was a Nazi.
    It was sometimes expedient to belong to the party.
    And as a matter of fact, when the non-Jewish children started
    to bait the Jewish children on their way to school,
    which started to happen frequently--
    that they threw stones at us or harassed us in some way,
    they kind of tried to knock us about a little bit--
    Otty's father told the local powers
    that be that he wants this stopped.
    He also spoke to the superintendent of schools.
    And at that time, it was mentioned that in return, maybe
    his daughter wouldn't be so friendly with the Jews.
    But as I've already told you, it didn't make
    much of an impression on her.
    Then one day in school, something
    happened that really touched the whole school.
    We had one family in town, a Polish Jewish family that
    had come into town a few years before trying to make a better
    life for themselves.
    They were quite poor.
    And the father was a handyman, hired himself out
    to whomever needed work done.
    And everybody tried to keep him working in some way or another,
    which wasn't so hard to do.
    There's always people who need to have a handyman.
    And the children went to our school.
    They came one day in October of 1938 with their Shabbas clothes
    on, their best clothes.
    And they said they had come to say goodbye.
    And we didn't understand why.
    And they told us that they and their parents
    were being sent out of the country.
    What really had happened was that Jews
    who were not German citizens had been
    ordered to leave the country.
    There were more people like themselves,
    people who had mostly come from the east, Jewish people,
    to find a better life and more possibilities of making
    a living, had come into Germany, had not
    become citizens of Germany, whether that
    was by law that they couldn't become German citizens,
    or whether that was because of their own desire not to.
    I don't know that.
    At any rate, these people were all expelled from Germany
    at that time.
    And they were sent to no man's land, which
    is a certain area of land between the borders of Poland
    and Germany, where German people live
    and also where some Polish people live.
    And one isn't quite certain just exactly
    to whom that strip of land belongs.
    It's a kind of no man's land, as I said.
    And there they lived off the generosity of farmers, perhaps,
    and perhaps not.
    But the living conditions were like animals.
    And it was a terrible situation.
    A boy in Paris by the name of Herschel Greeszpan--
    Herschel, H-E-R-S-C-H-E-L, Greeszpan, I think,
    was spelled G-R-E-E-S-Z-P-A-N, I think.
    Herschel Greezspan lived in Paris,
    and his parents were among those people who
    had been chased out of Germany.
    And they had written a letter to Herschel
    and told him about the terrible living
    conditions that beset them.
    And Herschel was terribly upset, to such a point that somewhere,
    somehow he got a gun.
    He went to the German embassy and rang the bell.
    The person who answered was a minor official at the embassy,
    and Herschel just shot him.
    He was so distraught and so angry, he shot this man
    and killed this man.
    This was the match that lit the pogrom that we know today
    as Kristallnacht.
    And the shooting in Paris must have
    happened around November 7.
    Not quite sure, but it must have happened around November 7.
    November 9 had been my father's birthday,
    and my mother had a few guests in.
    The Gestapo had been at the house
    some days before looking through all kinds of papers
    of my father's because my father was
    president of the B'nai B'rith.
    And the B'nai B'rith was considered
    a subversive organization as far as the Nazis were concerned.
    And so they rippled through all this stuff and took some of it
    with them with not too much of any friendly words
    for my father.
    On the morning of November 10 there
    was a harsh knock on the front door.
    And there stood some men in black uniforms with black boots
    on.
    And they asked to open up, and they came in,
    and they said they were arresting my father.
    I was extremely upset because I couldn't understand why anybody
    would want to arrest my father.
    What had he done?
    He hadn't done anything.
    I was terribly fond of my father.
    I idolized him.
    And I can't tell you how upset I really was.
    They didn't give much of an explanation.
    They just took him away.
    My mother, of course, was on the phone
    with friends and relatives to find out
    whether anyone else was being arrested also.
    And she found out that unless somebody
    was able to hide, unless somebody had heard about this
    ahead of time, the men, all the Jewish men
    in town from the age of 16 on up were arrested.
    We didn't know where they were taking my father.
    We had no idea where any of these people were being taken.
    And you can imagine the distraught women
    who didn't understand or didn't know what
    was happening to their men.
    Of course, I didn't go to school that day,
    and I was very aware of the anxiety of my mother.
    And myself was just as upset.
    At the time we had a visitor from Bonn, B-O-N-N,
    the present capital of Germany.
    She was a very, very close friend of ours
    and had come to visit for my father's birthday.
    We, at that time, had a young Jewish girl helping my mother
    in the house since we weren't allowed
    to have non-Jewish domestic help anymore.
    That evening I was torn out of bed in the middle of the night
    by my mother.
    Tape one, side two.
    Liesl Joseph Loeb.
    There was a terrible noise going on downstairs in my house.
    I was terrified.
    I hadn't woken up from it, but once my mother tore me out
    of bed, I was aware of all this crashing noises that I heard.
    Somebody seemed to be trying to bash in our front door.
    My mother put some housecoat over me
    and dragged me upstairs to our tenants.
    We lived in a very large 20-room house,
    and we had rented one floor to tenants.
    They were not Jewish.
    They occupied the third floor in our house.
    And my mother, together with our visitor and our domestic help,
    knocked on their door, and they took us into their apartment.
    In the meantime, all this noise kept going on downstairs,
    and I couldn't understand what was going on.
    I was 10 years old at the time.
    I was a slight little girl and very attached to my parents.
    I had been so upset during the day about my father
    having been taken away, and now somebody
    was trying to break into our house,
    and I couldn't understand why and what was going on.
    I did not know of the shooting in Paris at that time.
    I did not know that that was what caused all this commotion.
    All I knew was I heard terrible noises in my house.
    I also heard fire engines and sirens outside.
    And it turned out that these were
    going to our synagogue, which had been set on fire.
    And I was so upset that I wanted in the worst way
    to run downstairs and tell whoever
    was down there to stop, to stop this noise
    and to stop breaking up our house.
    But my mother had a very hard time
    to hold me back because surely they
    would not have left me unharmed had I gone downstairs.
    However, the man of that apartment, our tenant,
    went downstairs, and he told those hoodlums
    that they should kindly keep their activities
    on the first floor because he and his wife
    occupied the rest of the house.
    The hoodlums didn't know what was going on in our house.
    They at least accepted that and kept their activities
    in the first floor because mostly the vandals who
    made all the destructions were usually called from out of town
    so that nobody could finger them.
    Nobody could recognize them if they were seen.
    And they wouldn't know exactly whose house
    they were destroying.
    They were just told an address and told
    to go there and do their thing.
    Another one of, probably, Mr. Joseph Goebbel's fine thinking.
    Josef Goebbels-- and you spell that J-O-S-E-F,
    and his last name is G-O-E-B-B-E-L-S,
    was the propaganda minister of the Hitler regime, a small,
    crippled man with a clubfoot who became a social misfit,
    but seemed to have found his niche in Hitler's cabinet,
    so to speak.
    And the other thing was that he was a native son of our town.
    Not only that, but as a student and after he
    graduated college, and was very poor,
    he often ate at my father's table.
    But that's a whole another story.
    At any rate, the noise went on downstairs.
    Glass was broken, and it was just a night of terror.
    Somebody stood at the front gate.
    We could see somebody standing there
    with a cigarette in his mouth.
    And luckily nobody smoked while they were doing their thing
    downstairs because they had pulled the gas range out
    of its connection.
    And if it weren't for the broken windows
    and that the gas could escape outside,
    they could have blown up the house.
    As it got light in the morning, they left.
    And as soon as my mother was sure they were gone,
    she went downstairs and called the police.
    And the police told her to come over,
    and she took pictures of the house and the destruction,
    the broken windows you could see from the outside.
    And she went to the police station.
    And they said, oh, why didn't you call us?
    We would have come and stopped that.
    Sounded very nice, but there wasn't much truth to that.
    And when I finally came downstairs,
    I was completely speechless.
    All I saw was our beautiful furniture hacked into pieces,
    the legs of tables and chairs strewn about the floor amidst
    the shards of glasses and crystal and window glass,
    and eggs thrown in the midst of that,
    and other food articles, a piano turned over on its front,
    and the back side had an ax stuck into it.
    I mean, just simple, pure vandalism.
    It looked like a bomb hit there.
    Books had been torn out of the bookshelves,
    and everything was strewn about.
    It was just the biggest mess you ever want to see,
    and I was very upset about that.
    I loved my house, and I loved everything there.
    My toys had been thrown around and broken up, too,
    and that wasn't so good, either.
    But I was just completely speechless when I saw this.
    Our visitor decided that it would
    be best if my mother and I came back to Bonn
    with her because it so happened that her daughter lived
    with her.
    And her daughter had married a Jewish man
    from Holland, a Dutch gentleman.
    And the house in which they lived,
    therefore, became that of a Dutch owner.
    And even though you had the vandalism of Kristallnacht,
    the law of the land said that any foreign property was
    off limits to Nazi intrusion.
    That was still at that time.
    And so my mother decided that was a good idea.
    She had boarded up the windows and did what she could.
    And we went back with our guest to Bonn.
    And I stayed there from November, 1938 until May, 1939.
    From that time on, all normal life stopped,
    and a whole other routine began.
    In Bonn there was also a Jewish school.
    And it so happened that that school
    was in a building that, from the outside,
    looked like an office building, not like a school.
    The schoolyard was behind the building,
    could not be seen from the street,
    and therefore the school was not in any way vandalized.
    So that school was still in session,
    and I could continue to go to school in Bonn.
    I lived with our friends, and there were quite a few adults
    living in the house there, and everybody was very caring
    toward me.
    I also met one of my best friends
    in Bonn, who is still one of my best friends today.
    We were 10 years old when we met each other.
    And her way led her through Auschwitz to Philadelphia,
    and my way led me through the St. Louis to Philadelphia.
    And today we are still very close friends,
    as fate would have it.
    We both have stories to tell.
    Naturally, there was no more school.
    The school building had been vandalized,
    although the teacher lived on top of the school building,
    and his apartment was not destroyed.
    As a matter of fact, the only other house
    in the city that was destroyed like ours
    was right up the street from us.
    It was a villa that belonged to a Jewish shoe manufacturer, one
    of the very wealthy men in town.
    Otherwise, Jewish businesses had been vandalized,
    but no other private homes.
    I don't know who or why picked on those two houses,
    but they did.
    My father's practice was at an end.
    His partner had also been arrested.
    As a matter of fact, his partner was
    sent on to a concentration camp, I believe,
    whereas my father was fortunate enough
    to have been taken to the local jail.
    Knowing most of the people there at the police station
    because he had to visit his clients in jail sometimes,
    they were not too hard on him.
    He was confined, but he was not harassed by anyone.
    And as a matter of fact, a policeman one night
    called my mother.
    My mother had gone back to Rheydt
    in order to straighten up the house
    and perhaps put it up for sale and see
    what she could do to find out where
    my father was and possibly help him to be released.
    And the policeman did, indeed, call her one night,
    asked her to meet him in some dark alley,
    and that he had news from my father,
    and would she please bring some of his medication
    and some clean clothes and underwear for him also.
    And so my mother, who was very brave, I think,
    to take a man's word for it that he's a policeman
    and to meet him in a dark alley somewhere,
    she took some money along for him.
    And she met him, and he did, indeed,
    tell her that my father was all right, that he was not
    being mistreated, and that he would let her
    know when he will be released.
    I think the policeman got in touch with her several more
    times, and finally also called her when he was, indeed,
    being released from jail.
    All the men who had been incarcerated
    as a result of Kristallnacht had to sign upon their release
    that they would leave Germany very quickly, as quickly as
    possible within a certain time limit,
    and that they would never tell what happened to them
    or what they saw.
    This was especially directed to the men, who were
    put into concentration camps.
    And most of the men were taken to the camps.
    There was already Dachau, D-A-C-H-A-U. And there was,
    I believe, Buchenwald.
    That's spelled B-U-C-H-E-N-W-A-L-D.
    And I think there was also Sachsenhausen,
    And that's spelled S-A-C-H-S-E-N-H-A-U-S-E-N.
    And some of the men were much mistreated.
    Some were even killed.
    And they, too, had to sign that they would never
    reveal what they had experienced or seen
    in these camps that would leave Germany at all possible speed.
    Now it so happened that my parents had made friends
    with a Cuban couple who had gone to Cuba to visit,
    had come back to Germany.
    They were living in Bonn at the time
    because their children were going to university there.
    And while they were in Cuba, they
    found out that the Cuban government
    seemed to be issuing emigration permits for a price.
    And knowing that my parents were desperate to leave Germany,
    they bought these immigration permits and brought them back
    to my parents.
    The real story is that the immigration official
    of the Cuban government at the time
    was a very enterprising man.
    His name was Mr. Gonzales, G-O-N-Z-A-L-E-S,
    and he decided he would print these immigration permits
    on official-looking stationery and sell them at any kind
    of price that he could get for them.
    And he was making a nice little pile of money that way.
    The president of Cuba, who at the time
    was president Bru, B-R-U, heard about it
    and he wanted a share in the profits
    that Mr. Gonzales was cashing in.
    And Gonzales said no, he wasn't going to share with him.
    So as president, the man said, well,
    if you're not going to share, I'm
    going to declare these documents illegal
    because they really are.
    They haven't been issued by permission of the government.
    You're just printing them.
    And you don't want to share, I'm just
    going to say they're illegal, and that's that.
    Well, my parents had gotten a set of these immigration
    permits.
    And luckily, the German government
    had announced that they were scheduling a ship to sale
    to Cuba that would be available for Jews to leave the country.
    The Germans made leaving difficult for Jews,
    and the American consulates also made emigration
    into the United States difficult for the Jews of Germany.
    In 1937, when there was a new wave of requests
    for immigration into the United States,
    mostly by Central European Jews, the consulates
    decided to give out numbers like they do in the delicatessen
    store, first come, first serve, because there
    was such an onslaught on the German quota of immigration
    into the United States.
    United States has quotas of how many people
    can come into this country from the various countries
    of the world.
    So many from Germany, so many from Holland,
    so many from Poland, so many from wherever.
    And at the time, the German quota
    allowed 25,000 people per year to come into the United States
    from Germany.
    There were 350,000 Jews, approximately,
    living in Germany at that time.
    And you can figure out how many years
    it would take for everybody to be
    able to get out if everybody would request
    to come into this country.
    My parents, as soon as they heard about this number
    business, went to Stuttgart, S-T-U-T-T-G-A-R-T,
    which was the locale for the American consulate closest
    to us, to get their number.
    They had to be there in person and were fortunate enough
    to get what was considered at the time a fairly low number.
    The number was in the 14,000S.
    By the time my mother could call her mother in Berlin--
    my grandmother was living in Berlin at that time--
    by that time, and until they could get to their consulate,
    which I think was right there in Berlin,
    their number that was issued to them was in the 76,000s.
    And unfortunately, it was later determined that number was also
    their death sentence because it never even came up
    at all anymore.
    So that was the next step to be taken toward our immigration.
    My parents, for some time before Kristallnacht,
    had made inquiries here in the United States
    to see if they could find some relatives that
    would give us an affidavit.
    An affidavit was required for any immigrant to come in.
    And what it was was a guarantee that the immigrant would not
    be a burden to the state, that in case the immigrant couldn't
    find work, the guarantor, the issuer of the affidavit,
    would support that person so that there would not
    be a question of the immigrant becoming a welfare person.
    The Depression was still on in '38 and '39,
    and the American government was very stringent about that.
    Besides that, we have found out from the Holocaust Museum
    in Washington that there is evidence
    that the consuls in the various European cities and countries
    were told not to make immigration so easy,
    to make things as difficult as possible
    because America was not too anxious to receive people
    without means.
    By the time, in 1939, that immigrants left Germany,
    they could not take any kind of finances out of Germany
    anymore.
    As a matter of fact, they were stripped of all their assets.
    Everything was confiscated.
    Bank accounts were confiscated, houses were confiscated,
    businesses were confiscated.
    And by confiscated.
    I mean just that, taken away.
    A bunch of people would march into an office,
    into the offices or the headquarters
    of Jewish businesses and manufacturers and doctors
    and lawyers, and would say, your practice or your business
    is now being confiscated by the German government.
    And out you went.
    That was it.
    Your bank account was confiscated.
    If you didn't have some money stashed away somewhere,
    were out of luck.
    Your jewelry had to be turned in with the exception of a wedding
    ring, a wedding band.
    All silverware, all valuables, all precious metals and jewels
    had to be turned in, coins, except for one
    set of silverware per person to eat with.
    The Jewish people were being stripped of their belongings
    by a government that sanctioned this highway robbery.
    Can you understand that?
    I can't understand it, and I never will.
    I will never understand that people can come into your home
    and bash it into pieces, that people can take you away
    because you are of a certain religion, put you in a jail.
    Even though it's still happening,
    I still don't understand it.
    Who gives them the right?
    I don't understand it.
    I don't understand how the Holocaust could happen.
    I don't understand that the whole world could watch this
    and nobody did anything about it,
    or doesn't even believe today that it might have happened.
    I don't understand.
    I don't think any of us do.
    But to go on, I just want to backtrack
    for a moment to the morning when we came downstairs
    after Kristallnacht on November 10.
    The way these hoodlums had gained entrance into our house
    was that they had sawed off young tree trunks in our garden
    and had rammed these tree trunks against our front door, which
    was a very sturdy, heavy oak door.
    And also, they had gained entrance
    through one of the first floor windows, which
    happens to be the room in which my grandmother would normally
    sleep.
    My grandmother had moved in with us
    after her oldest daughter had emigrated to Holland,
    and she was now living with us.
    But at the time, luckily, she was
    visiting her other daughter, my aunt, in Berlin
    because the hoodlums who came through
    the windows there had stuck a knife into the top
    of the mattress in her bed and had just slashed
    from top to bottom the mattress and the coverlet.
    And if, God forbid, there had been a person sleeping
    in there, I don't think you need much imagination
    to know what would have happened.
    This was an example of what some people,
    with the permission of the government,
    were capable of doing.
    Now it was very important for my parents to get out of Germany.
    And it seemed so lucky that they had gotten these immigration
    permits and that the ship had been scheduled
    that was sailing to Cuba and was going
    to take German Jewish refugees out of the country.
    The ship's name was the steamship St. Louis,
    and it sailed under the German flag and the German company
    known as Hamburg America Passenger Line, or H-A-P-A-G,
    HAPAG.
    I'll be mentioning the name HAPAG from time to time.
    The St. Louis was scheduled to sail on May 13, 1939.
    I was still in Bonn, and my parents
    were busy finalizing the emigration.
    I want you to know, though, that until they
    had found a guarantor, and the guarantor
    happened to be not even blood family related, but related
    by marriage, and the day after Kristallnacht
    the affidavit had arrived, even though, up to that point,
    they had felt that my father was too old to make the emigration
    trip, that as a lawyer, he would not be able to practice law
    in this country.
    He didn't know the language too well, and of course,
    would have to study all over again.
    And at that time, my father was already in his late 50s.
    He wasn't in the best of health.
    But nevertheless, the day after Kristallnacht,
    the affidavits arrived per whatever, air mail,
    or per wire.
    And so we had the prerequisites of leaving Germany.
    We had the affidavit.
    We had a quota number.
    And my father wanted to wait for that quota number
    to come up somewhere else out of Germany.
    He wanted out.
    He had to get out.
    And we had the prerequisites, and also, fortunately,
    still enough money left to buy tickets
    first class on the St. Louis.
    And we were getting ready for the trip.
    I was still in Bonn, and my parents sold the house,
    and they managed to supervise the packing of the furniture.
    These transports of furnitures were called lifts.
    And one lift went to New York because that was
    our intended goal, eventually.
    And one lift with new furniture for the tropics
    went to Havana, Cuba, and was shipped out.
    Various documents had to be signed yet
    by my father, one document saying that he owes no taxes,
    and that financially, his slate is clean.
    He's done what he's supposed to do
    and turned in what he's supposed to turn in, and so on.
    I happen to have those documents,
    and that's how I know about them.
    And surely my parents must have been very harried
    about all the preparations for emigration.
    I came back to Rheydt just a few days
    before we were leaving in order to say goodbye
    to those friends of mine who were still there.
    Lots of them had already left with their families,
    were fortunate enough to have emigrated out
    of Germany to other countries as far away as
    South America, the United States,
    perhaps closer by, to France or Holland or Great Britain.
    But there were still quite a few left,
    and I made the rounds to say goodbye to my friends.
    And one of the people that I visited were the two children
    of our teacher, our teacher Mr. Heymann, H-E-Y-M-A-N-N.
    Their name were Edith and Walter.
    And while I was visiting there, we played some games,
    and we were playing with a deck of cards.
    And Walter showed me how to shuffle the cards
    like they do in the casinos.
    And that's really where I learned how
    to shuffle the cards that way.
    And to this day, I remember what he
    said while he was doing that.
    And every time I shuffle the cards, I think of that.
    He said to me, you know, Hitler said
    that by 1942, there will not be any Jews alive in Germany
    anymore.
    That was a very frightening sentence,
    and I've never forgotten it, and I always think of it.
    I always think of those two young people
    that I visited to say goodbye to for the very last time.
    What happened to them and to their father and mother
    I've already told you.
    They stayed behind because the father did not
    want to leave his flock, and they were all sent to Poland,
    I think to Riga, to a ghetto, and from there
    to extermination.
    It's a very sad thing, and sad memories
    among many sad memories in my life.
    Our departure took us first to Berlin
    to say goodbye to my grandmother and my aunt and uncle
    and cousin.
    My aunt, my mother's sister, was a doctor,
    and of course, she too had lost her practice.
    My uncle was a professional concert pianist.
    My grandmother was going to stay there with them in Berlin.
    And my cousin Gunter, G-U-N-T-E-R,
    was one of my favorite cousins.
    He was a year younger than I, a blue-eyed, freckle-faced blonde
    little boy, cute as a button and full of humor.
    He often could speak the dialect of Berlin
    and made jokes in that dialect.
    And he made
    Liesl Joseph Loeb-- we also used to love to play duets
    on the piano together, not necessarily Beethoven and Bach,
    but little funny ditties that we made up together.
    We just had a good time together when
    we saw each other, which was, unfortunately, not that often.
    And that was the last time I saw him too.
    We stayed in Berlin for three days.
    We didn't go out at all and then left by train to Hamburg--
    H-A-M-B-U-R-G-- which was the port from where the St.
    Louis would sail.
    My aunt accompanied us to Hamburg.
    In Hamburg, we stayed in a very nice hotel.
    But at the door of the dining room was a sign that said,
    "Jews are not permitted."
    So we had to go to a restaurant, find a restaurant
    where we could eat.
    But they did take our money for renting us rooms in that hotel.
    I think we were only in Hamburg for two days.
    My father bought for my mother and me
    just a few leather trinkets, I remember,
    to spend the last money that he had in his pocket
    because everyone who left Germany was allowed to leave
    with 10 marks, Deutschemarks.
    And-- or rather, Reichsmarks--
    R-E-I-C-H-S-M-A-R-K-S. And that was equivalent to $2.50
    at the time.
    We boarded the ship on Saturday, May 13.
    I remember that it was a Saturday because they even
    allowed the Orthodox Jews to board on Fridays, according
    to Halakhah.
    And it was a matter to be discussed.
    And so I remember that it was a Saturday when we boarded.
    We were not Orthodox.
    I don't remember much about the city of Hamburg other
    than there was the first time where I saw a Black man.
    You know, a 10-year-old child takes all these things in
    with so much wonder and finds out new things about the world.
    And boarding the ship was also like a new adventure.
    I realized that my parents were very
    sad to be leaving, not because they were sad to be leaving
    Nazi Germany, but they were leaving a country
    where their families had been rooted for hundreds of years,
    and where the graves of their loved ones were,
    and where they left behind, still, family.
    My father had a sister.
    And my mother had a sister in Berlin, with her family,
    as I've already described.
    My father's sister was a widow.
    She lived near Frankfurt--
    F-R-A-N-K-F-U-R-T. And, as a matter of fact,
    he had bought tickets for her for the St. Louis,
    and emigration papers, and had hoped that she would come
    aboard in Cherbourg together with her two sons,
    who had been sent to Holland with Kindertransports.
    And we were hoping that they would come aboard in Cherbourg.
    But they did not come.
    My aunt hadn't sold her house yet
    and decided she would come on the next ship.
    Well, the next ship never sailed.
    And unfortunately, she and her two sons
    ended up in concentration camp.
    One son survived.
    The other and my aunt did not.
    Sometimes people made very bad choices
    and didn't even live to regret them.
    At any rate, boarding the ship was a whole new world for me.
    It seemed to be a hotel floating on the water.
    We had a very nice cabin on the B deck,
    right across from the purser's cabin.
    And my parents slept in the lower bunks,
    and I slept in the upper bunks.
    Even though this was first class,
    the staterooms then were not what the state rooms
    on a cruise ship are today.
    The St. Louis was, indeed, a luxury cruise liner,
    which usually sailed between New York and Havana in season.
    The season being probably from spring to late fall
    and perhaps even in the wintertime, since Cuba
    was a tropical country.
    But the Germans had scheduled the St. Louis
    to sail to Havana because they actually had a reason
    to schedule the ship.
    That being an espionage mission.
    Now, none of us knew that.
    It wasn't known at all by any of the passengers.
    And it was only really made public
    when the book Voyage of the Damned
    came out, which had been well researched by its authors, Max
    Morgan Witts--
    that's W-I-T-T-S-- and Gordon Thomas,
    two non-Jewish British authors, who decided that the story
    of the St. Louis could, in a smaller way,
    detail a Holocaust happening.
    In the year before the beginning of World War Two,
    German spies had managed to come into this country
    and were looking for military secrets
    to carry back to Germany and had, indeed, gotten
    information, in this case about American submarines.
    Mr. Hoover had managed to expel them from this country.
    And they had decided to go to Cuba,
    which was an easy country for people such as spies
    and international crooks of all sorts to assemble there.
    The Cuban government was a very corrupt government.
    And with a little extra money in their pockets,
    they didn't look too closely as to who came in
    and what they were doing there, except, of course, maybe
    Jewish refugees.
    And there were secrets to be picked up from Havana.
    And in those days, not having yet the communication systems
    that we have today per computers, per satellites
    and so on, they had to send a man over to pick up plans,
    plans of submarines.
    And they decided, if they scheduled this ship,
    they could let the Jews pay for the journey.
    The Jews had to pay not only their passage one
    way, but round trip just in case a country--
    the country that would be the destination
    would change its mind and close its borders
    and not accept the people who were on the way, in which case,
    they would have to be returned and, therefore, the roundtrip
    fee for their passage.
    And so that paid for the expense of sending the ship to Havana.
    It was very thoughtful of the Nazis
    to provide such a beautiful ship for us, I would say.
    As a matter of fact, some passengers
    had already booked on other ships that
    had reached Cuba but changed their minds because they
    had teenage daughters who might want
    to meet nicer young men on a ship such as the St. Louis
    and changed their tickets from one ship to another.
    I have met people who told me these stories
    of personal experience.
    That's just a little sideline.
    At any rate, it was a beautiful ship.
    I went all over the place to explore.
    My mother finally allowed me to wander about,
    knowing I couldn't get lost, being on the ship.
    Because she was usually always very concerned
    as to my whereabouts.
    And I wrote the elevators up and down.
    And I saw that there was a gym with all these fun machines.
    And there was a swimming pool, once the weather got warm.
    And they had a place where they showed movies at night.
    And they had dances.
    And they had deck games.
    And there were gift shops.
    The grownups enjoyed lounging in the sun on deck.
    And for the children, there was much entertainment.
    We had over 200 children among the passengers.
    And there was a program to keep them busy and entertained
    throughout the day so that the parents could relax and know
    that the children were also looked after
    and were having a good time.
    Things were made very pleasant for the passengers.
    And the sadness of the departure soon faded somewhat
    from people's memory.
    When the ship had left Hamburg, the band
    played the usual tune upon departure,
    which is a German song called "Must I Leave My Little Town
    Today."
    And for us it was much more than a frivolous song.
    On a cruise for us, it was definitely a final goodbye
    to the homeland, where we were born and raised,
    and where our families were buried.
    And especially to the adults, it was a tearjerker to be sure.
    I, myself, remember seeing my aunt standing on the docks
    and waving to us.
    And in my 10-year-old heart, I knew, I felt, I
    may never see her again.
    But as the weather get warmer, as I mentioned before,
    things got a lot brighter, and people--
    spirits became more positive.
    And they were looking forward to reaching
    their destination, which meant freedom,
    freedom to be out of Germany, to be out of the hellhole it
    had become.
    The captain, however, had heard some rumors
    that there might be trouble upon reaching Havana, Cuba, that it
    was possible that the Cuban government would not
    allow the passengers to disembark because the ship that
    had left before us had been turned away.
    And so he decided to call together a few men
    from among the passengers because he
    felt he might have to communicate some bad news
    to the passengers.
    The captain was a very sensitive and very intelligent,
    a highly intelligent man.
    Years later, we heard about him and that he was really
    a Renaissance man, who loved classical music.
    He played the cello.
    He wrote poetry and was quite the opposite
    of what one might have imagined a German captain of a ship
    to be in 1939.
    He was not a Nazi, it turned out.
    And he was determined to take his passengers
    to their destination because that was his job.
    So he called together a few of the men
    from among the passengers to act as a liaison between himself
    and the passengers.
    Probably he realized that a man in a German uniform
    at this time in history, when so much had happened in Germany
    and when the people on board had suffered so much already,
    that a man in such a uniform might be intimidating
    and not really trustworthy.
    And he figured that a group of passengers
    would be a good way to communicate
    with the passengers.
    At first, there were five gentlemen
    who were called to the captain's quarters.
    Later on they added two more gentlemen, to this committee.
    Most of the men were lawyers.
    And there was a doctor amongst them and also a businessman.
    There were-- no, actually there were
    two doctors on the committee and two businessmen.
    And the rest were lawyers, summing up,
    when the committee was complete, seven people.
    My father was chosen by these men
    to be the chairman of this committee.
    And so a period of time began when
    I didn't see very much of my father,
    especially not during the day.
    And many times it was late at night
    until he came to the cabin, even though he
    ate with us every day.
    But as we came closer and closer to Havana,
    the more often he seemed to be in the captain's quarters.
    News had been wired to the ship that there may be
    trouble landing the passengers.
    And telegrams began to be sent out
    to Jewish organizations in New York
    and to people of importance throughout the world.
    That meant that telegrams were sent to President Roosevelt
    and to his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt,
    and to Prime Minister Chamberlain of England
    and to the mayor of St. Louis, of St. Louis in Missouri,
    because kind of fishing for help because of the name.
    We reached Havana after two weeks.
    And the ship did not pull into port.
    The authorities came on board, uniformed shore--
    shore patrol and all kinds of Cuban officers.
    And the ship threw anchor about a mile outside of the harbor.
    We children would ask these men, who let us play with their hats
    and who smiled at us, when can we get off?
    And the answer was always manana, a word
    that I've never quite forgotten in Spanish.
    It means tomorrow.
    I remember our entry into the harbor of Havana.
    It was early in the morning, and the houses along the shoreline
    all were in pastel colors.
    And they were outlined sort of by palm trees and the beach
    in front of that.
    It was a beautiful sight, a magic land to me.
    I had only seen pictures of palm trees.
    And here was a whole city with lovely little houses
    and a golden-domed capitol, which
    looked very much like the capitol in Washington, DC,
    except that the dome was golden.
    And it seemed like a magic land.
    Plus, the weather was balmy.
    It was warm.
    I've always loved warm weather.
    And it was just such a lovely sight.
    And I was so happy that we would be
    staying in this place for a while at least.
    But it was not to be.
    People had lined up their luggage on deck.
    All the luggage had been brought up,
    and tables had been set up to process disembarkation.
    And a few people seemed to start leaving the ship, when
    everything stopped.
    And from then on, the whole situation seemed to change.
    When we were not making any progress
    in leaving the ship after a while,
    little boats started to surround the St. Louis.
    Being in the harbor, the ship was in somewhat shallow waters
    and projected to quite a height out of the water.
    And the little boats, which came out
    with people who were looking for their relatives,
    seemed to be far down below us.
    I remember it that way.
    But sometimes heights and depths, to a child,
    are much exaggerated.
    But that's how I remember it, this big ship with little boats
    surrounding it day after day.
    You see, there were many relatives and family members
    who had come to Havana to meet their loved
    ones who were on the St. Louis.
    My cousins, who were on board the ship,
    had their father already in the United States.
    He had preceded them in his immigration,
    and he had come down to Havana from New York
    to meet his family.
    And he came out on this little boat and--
    as did so many others.
    And people would be lining the deck and also
    the portholes in their cabins.
    And somebody would shout, could you please find so-and-so?
    I'm the father.
    I'm the husband.
    I'm the uncle.
    I'm a friend.
    I'm a cousin.
    And people would be called that somebody is looking for them.
    And there was all this shouting going on.
    And I know that my cousins saw their father
    and could only shout some words to him.
    But they couldn't touch him or hold his hand
    or give him a hug.
    And it seemed very sad to me that they
    were in that kind of a predicament, as were
    so many other passengers.
    This scene was to be going on day after day
    as long as we were sitting there in the harbor,
    until it got dark every night.
    They came out early, and they were there
    until late in the evening.
    It was a very disconcerting scene.
    I don't think that the publicity of what was going on
    was too favorable toward Cuba.
    And after a week, the Cuban government
    requested that the ship leave the harbor.
    They said that the conferences and the communication
    would go on, but that the ship had to leave the harbor.
    In the meantime, the captain had told the spy
    that, if the passengers can't leave the ship,
    you can't leave the ship either to do whatever
    you have to do in Havana.
    And the spy told the captain, if you
    don't allow me to leave the ship,
    you must know we have your family in Germany.
    And you better think about the consequences.
    So, the captain had to let the spy leave the ship
    to complete his mission.
    The captain himself donned civilian clothes, as
    is shown by photographs, and went into Havana
    to try and confer with the powers that be to allow
    the passengers to leave.
    Eventually, a declaration came forth
    saying that, if there were funds enough to pay $500 per head
    for each passenger, the Cuban government
    would consider allowing the passengers to come on land.
    And they would probably put the passengers
    into a confined area on the Isle of Pines.
    How wonderful that would have been.
    It is something we can only conjecture.
    It never did happen in the first place.
    Somebody had come down from New York,
    from one of the Jewish organizations,
    and had the money with him.
    But he wanted to bargain with President Brú, who
    had declared the immigration permits as illegal.
    And he thought he would try and reduce the price a little bit.
    In the meantime, President Brú had
    set a deadline for these communications and declared,
    the deadline is over.
    I'm not going to accept any kind of money.
    The ship has to leave.
    That was the final word from the Cuban government.
    And the captain only requested one more day
    so he could load provisions because, after all, he only
    had enough provisions to make this trip one way.
    And he was permitted to do that.
    The day that the St. Louis sailed out of the harbor
    was probably the saddest day for the passengers
    that they spent on the ship.
    Slowly the motor started to rev up.
    And with the accompaniment of the shore patrols and cars
    upon cars lining the oceanfront boulevard that accompanied us
    until they could go no further, tooting their horns,
    and the people in the boats shouting after us
    encouragements and hasta la vista, which I think
    means we'll hope to see you again,
    the ship left Havana, out to high seas.
    And I can imagine how desperate the people on board
    really were.
    We had already had an attempted suicide while we were still
    in the harbor.
    A man, who was so despondent after his experiences
    in a concentration camp and on the prospect of not being
    able to leave the ship, had jumped overboard
    and had cut his wrists.
    And a German sailor jumped after him and rescued him.
    And he was taken to a hospital in Havana.
    His wife and daughter, who were on board,
    were not allowed to join him there.
    And after his wounds were healed,
    his physical well-being was restored,
    he was sent back to England, where, meanwhile, his daughter
    and his wife had landed.
    So imagine, the man jumps overboard
    and tries to-- he cuts his wrist,
    and his wife and his daughter are not
    permitted to accompany him to the hospital.
    They don't know how he will be treated there.
    And it's just one more example of what people had to suffer.
    Many people saw this event.
    It was after lunch.
    And many people were taking a siesta on deck.
    And it was an extremely upsetting event.
    You can imagine.
    On top of that, the German sailor who rescued this man
    was written up by the Gestapo on board.
    You must know that wherever there was a German presence,
    whether it be on board a ship or in a foreign embassy
    or many places all over Germany, Gestapo was always present.
    Gestapo being the secret police.
    And on board the St. Louis, the Gestapo
    posed as the firemen of the crew.
    And they were present and kept tabs on everyone
    and had regular indoctrination sessions for the crew,
    to keep them in line, to make sure there
    was no fraternization between sailors and passengers.
    Slowly we approached the shores of Miami Beach.
    And as we passed by, we could clearly
    see the luxurious hotels, which lined the oceanfront--
    the oceanfront boulevard, which turns out to be Collins Avenue.
    I remember it, as a child, seeing
    these beautiful high structures.
    And in 1989, when the St. Louis survivors
    had a reunion in Miami exactly on the 50th anniversary
    of our passing Miami Beach on the St. Louis,
    we were taken out in a private yacht
    to exactly the place where the St. Louis had passed.
    And it corroborated my memory as to being
    able to see all the details of this beautiful avenue,
    with its beckoning luxury that we could see
    as the ship slowly passed by.
    At that time, on the St. Louis, the captain
    had thought that, perhaps, approaching
    Miami Beach at night he might be able to land the passengers.
    But the congress sent down military planes.
    And the shore patrol on--
    in the waters close to Miami made sure
    that the ship kept moving.
    This was an added insult to the people on the ship,
    to send military planes.
    It was unbelievable.
    After all, the majority of the passengers on board
    only wanted to wait for their turn on the quota system
    to come into the United States.
    They had all the prerequisites, the proper papers and visas
    and affidavits and guarantors.
    What was the harm of taking in 900-some people, which
    included 200-some children in this country that was so large
    and had so much potential, to give a safe haven
    to these poor souls on board.
    In retrospect, it's something I don't understand at all.
    Tape two, tape two, Liesl Loeb.
    Now, the really busy time began for the gentlemen
    of the committee.
    Day and night they were called to the captain's quarters.
    Day and night telegrams went out.
    Day, And after day, encouraging messages
    were posted outside of the elevators throughout the ship,
    encouraging people and telling them
    that they are in contact with this or that country, this
    or that organization, especially with the Jewish--
    American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,
    whose offices in Paris were also in contact with us.
    When telegrams arrived that were encouraging,
    they were posted also on these bulletin boards.
    Much of this material is now in Washington, DC,
    at the Holocaust museum because my father
    had many of the original material that
    was the communication means with the passengers
    in those dark days that we were on high seas going nowhere.
    The captain tried to stay in the Western hemisphere
    just in case some good news might come through that
    could take us quickly back to Havana or perhaps
    into one of the other Central or South American countries,
    with whom there was also communications.
    The cry for help was publicized in all the press of the world,
    but there was no answer from anyone for the time being.
    And eventually, the St. Louis was
    ordered to return to Europe.
    It had to resume its cruise schedule
    between New York and Havana.
    And as much as the Hamburg America Line
    was trying to be helpful, after all, I suppose,
    business is business, and the ship had to return.
    And we couldn't endlessly stay on the water
    without any end in sight.
    I know one of the wires, as we approached Europe,
    requested the Joint office in Paris to try and find
    another ship to take over the passengers in case
    the St. Louis had to resume its cruise schedule
    and to delay having to return to Germany.
    Not only that, there was a small piece of paper
    that I found among my father's documents.
    It was written in-- scribbled in pencil
    on a torn off piece of paper.
    And in German it said, when the ship reaches Hamburg,
    there will be over 100 empty cabins.
    It was a desperate and threatening and--
    and unbelievably terrorizing message.
    There were some young teenagers, or I would say, perhaps,
    late male teenagers, who were hatching a plot to take over
    the ship to commit a mutiny.
    And luckily, the committee found out about it
    and discouraged these young people from taking such steps.
    It would have been unthinkable.
    Also, patrols were formed to look in on cabins,
    to make sure that nobody was going
    to attempt any desperate acts.
    And the committee people were visible practically all the
    waking hours of the passengers, assuring them and encouraging
    them, even though they themselves sometimes
    didn't know why they're doing this because there was nothing
    to be encouraged about.
    We had been on board since May 13.
    On June 13, a telegram arrived on board.
    That telegram also is now in Washington DC.
    It came from England.
    And it said that four countries--
    England, Holland, Belgium, and France--
    would be willing to take one quarter each of the passengers.
    When the news was ascertained that it was really so,
    immediately the passengers were asked to assemble.
    And the happy news was announced to them, both by the captain
    himself and also the committee.
    And you can imagine that the slow realization
    that, after all, they didn't have to go back to Germany,
    came upon the passengers.
    In retrospect, what could have been,
    if we had returned to Germany?
    Nobody had a home anymore.
    Nobody had money anymore.
    Nobody had any means of living anymore.
    The relatives that were still behind barely
    had enough to get along on their own
    because they had no means of making a living anymore either.
    And so the solution would have been to put us
    into a concentration camp.
    That would have been our--
    the solution to our problem and our fate.
    However, the captain had confided to the committee
    that, if nothing else came forth,
    he would take the ship off the coast of England.
    He would set it on fire in a way that would not
    endanger the passengers, and it would force the British
    to take the passengers in.
    However, it didn't ever have to come to that "Thank goodness."
    The telegram with the good news of our redemption arrived.
    And so then plans had to be made--
    how to divide up the passengers into each
    of these four countries.
    Some people had relatives in any of these countries.
    Some people may have had bank accounts there
    or some other reasons of going to the continent.
    That is to say to Holland, France, or Belgium.
    But the majority of people wanted to go to England.
    However, it wasn't possible to grant these requests.
    England, after all, was somewhat separated from the continent
    by a body of water and one felt a little safer
    being as far away from Germany as possible.
    The committee set up tables on deck,
    and everything was properly organized.
    People were asked to give certain information
    as to relatives in certain countries
    and addresses of these relatives and other information.
    And all this information was taken down.
    The ship arrived in Antwerp on June 17, 1939.
    I remember the date so distinctly because June 17,
    it was my birthday, my 11th birthday.
    The passengers had been aboard that ship for 40 days.
    And this was the day of our rescue.
    Mr. Morris Troper, who was the chairman
    of the American Jewish Joint Distribution
    Committee with headquarters in Paris,
    had been responsible for our rescue.
    It was through his efforts that, finally, these four countries
    agreed to take in the passengers of the St. Louis.
    And on that day, he was expected to come aboard in Antwerp,
    where the ship landed on June 17, together with his secretary
    and with his wife and an entourage of people.
    All the children on board had been gathered together on deck,
    then formed the semicircle when Mr. Troper came on board.
    And because it was my birthday, and because of the hard work
    that my father had performed, I was
    allowed to greet Mr. Troper in the name of all
    through the town.
    And my father wrote this little speech for me, ,
    which in essence said that we were sorry that we
    couldn't greet him with flowers because our flower shop had
    long been depleted of its merchandise after being
    underway for 40 days.
    It was a small little speech, but Mr. Troper
    took it much to heart and, the next day,
    sent me a bunch of beautiful red roses.
    That was my first gift of flowers from a gentleman,
    I suppose.
    Pictures were taken of the girl with the flowers.
    And in the hardcover book of Voyage of the Damned,
    it is included in that book.
    In retrospect, I have to say that I am eternally
    grateful to the JDC for its efforts
    on behalf of the St. Louis passengers
    as well as for its efforts still going
    on throughout the world for people
    who are politically persecuted and who need help,
    who need to be rescued, who need to be fed,
    who need to be nurtured.
    I think it's the most wonderful organization.
    It deserves everyone's support.
    To get back to June 17 and Antwerp,
    eventually people began to disembark.
    And here is a humorous note.
    On board there had been a very heavy, obese lady,
    who unfortunately had broken her leg and was in a cast.
    And they had difficulty getting around.
    The children, being children, had nicknamed her "Big Bertha"
    and were now quite curious to see
    how she would get off the ship.
    Perhaps they would have to take her off with a crane.
    And everyone was watching to see what would happen.
    After all, in even the saddest situations,
    children do have a way of getting
    through things with their own sense of humor, so to speak.
    The people going to France and to Holland
    were taken per land to their destinations.
    People were also put up in camps until homes
    could be found for them or families could be found who
    would take them in because, after all,
    an influx of a sudden group of several hundred people
    had to be put up somewhere.
    And many of these countries were not set up
    to simply put them into hotels.
    The people who went to England, however,
    were first put up into hotels until homes
    could be found for them.
    My family and I-- my father, mother, and myself--
    were bound for England, and we were transferred together
    with all the other passengers going
    to England onto a small German merchant ship, the SS Rakotis.
    It was spelled R-A-K-O-T-I-S. And it took another few days
    for us to reach Southampton.
    During this little trip on the Rakotis,
    my father and I were taking a walk on deck.
    And I noticed these heavy rolls of what looked like carpeting
    rolled up in brown paper.
    It's the best way I can describe it.
    And I said to my father, what do you
    think is in these big rolls?
    And my father said, child, those are cannon.
    And he was absolutely right.
    Hitler was ready at a moment's notice to go to war,
    and this little merchant ship, together with probably
    the entire German merchant fleet,
    was ready to arm itself at a moment's notice.
    We arrived in Southampton and took a train from there
    to London, where we were received by the committee that
    was going to look after us while we were staying in England.
    St. Louis passengers were considered guests in England.
    They were not permitted to work.
    And they were supported with a meager sustenance
    from the Jewish organization housed in the Bloomsbury
    House of London.
    This, on the one hand, allowed people to learn the language,
    to relax, to finally resume a life of more normalcy.
    And also, it seemed like St. Louis people
    got together socially in London very often
    and shared their common experiences
    and made plans when the time came to emigrate from England,
    and just enjoyed each other's company.
    They had so much to talk about, so much
    to share from the past few months.
    Everybody was in the same situation.
    Nobody had any money.
    Everybody was being supported.
    And when the get-togethers occurred,
    most everybody had to bring his own cup and his own saucer
    and his own little cake plate.
    Some yesterday cake was bought, and coffee was made,
    and everybody was happy to be in a safe place in spite
    of everything.
    So everybody was poor.
    So what?
    In the wintertime, when it got cold
    and you had to put money into the little heater that
    was in the room, instead of doing that,
    my parents often went to the free library
    and spent time there.
    It was warm there, and they could
    be comfortable for a few hours of the day.
    To get back to our first days in England,
    we went to York in the northern part of England.
    And we accepted the hospitality of the Roundtree family,
    a truly Quaker family with the highest principals
    of Quakerdom being practiced.
    We lived in a beautiful Villa.
    Food was plentiful.
    Our hosts were most generous and hospitable.
    And it seemed like life was pretty good, considering
    what we had experienced.
    But soon my father felt that, living in York,
    we were too far removed from where things were
    happening, which was in London.
    My father was anxious to get out of Europe as soon as possible.
    And he wanted to be near the headquarters
    of the committee that would further our emigration out
    of Europe.
    And so at the end of August, we moved back to London.
    And we moved in, first, into a rather
    religious Jewish neighborhood, Stamford Hill.
    The end of August was also the time
    when the politics in Europe were coming to a very threatening
    situation.
    As a matter of fact, on September 1,
    the Germans invaded Poland and all the schoolchildren
    in London were summoned to the playgrounds of their schools.
    I had been enrolled in a neighborhood
    school, the Jewish Secondary School of London.
    It was a very Orthodox Jewish day school
    because this was the neighborhood where
    lots of Orthodox people lived.
    Not only that, apparently a lot of Jewish refugees
    were living in this neighborhood as well,
    so that many of the children who came to the playground
    on that day spoke German.
    Some of them didn't know how to speak any English.
    I had already learned quite a bit.
    And everybody gathered on the playgrounds.
    We were issued gas masks in little boxes
    that we had to wear around our necks.
    And we were shown how to put on these gas masks.
    We had also been told to bring lunch along,
    to pack a lunch, and perhaps a little bit more,
    and clothing for 24 hours.
    This went on for three days.
    On the 3rd of September, England declared war
    on the Axis, Germany and, I suppose, also Italy.
    And things became more earnest.
    The schoolchildren who gathered on the playgrounds on that day
    were taken to train stations and bus stations
    and were dispersed to the countryside outside of London.
    The authorities wanted to make sure
    that the children would be safe.
    They didn't know what to expect when war broke out.
    And they wanted to assure the safety of the children.
    Our school ended up in Bedfordshire in three villages.
    We were kind of separated by age.
    There were three villages.
    The central village was the one which
    housed the kosher canteen, where we would eat our main meals.
    The village was called Clifton.
    And the people who took in the evacuees
    were subsidized by the English government.
    I was very fortunate to be billeted with a family
    by the name of Whittington, Mr. And Mrs. Whittington.
    They were in their 70s.
    And I think, in retrospect, they were
    very brave to take in two foreign children who might not
    know the language too well.
    And they had no knowledge of what type of children we were.
    I mentioned two children.
    As a matter of fact, a little boy aged eight--
    his name was Eddie Shul--
    was my companion at the Whittington's.
    His parents and my parents had rooms in the same house
    in Stamford Hill.
    And so we kind of teamed up together
    when we got off the buses and it was time for us
    to be housed with people.
    And I think he was happy that he knew me
    and that he was with somebody that was familiar to him.
    Mr. Whittington was the village shoemaker.
    And after a while, I was his helper
    in carrying out the finished shoes.
    Mr. Whittington had bought me a bicycle.
    And that helped me in my job.
    And for each pair of shoes that I carried out,
    he paid me two pennies, or tuppence.
    So I made a little allowance for myself along the way.
    Eddie and I were both very happy with the Whittingtons.
    They were almost like our grandparents.
    They were very sweet old people.
    And we loved being there and living in their little house
    with them.
    The village was quite small.
    Our house was right opposite the church.
    And our classes in Clifton were held
    in the large hall of the church, the social hall of the church.
    It was a very big hall, as I remember it.
    And to heat it, there was a very small coal-burning stove.
    I had volunteered to start the coals going
    each morning because I was living
    so close by to the church.
    And I would be up and over there about 7 o'clock in the morning
    and start up the coal burning in the oven, in the stove.
    There was another reason why I was
    anxious to volunteer for that, because watching the fire,
    I could sit near the stove and be
    warm, at least during the assembly time
    before classes began, and get a little bit warmed up
    at the beginning of the day.
    We had arrived in Clifton in September.
    But as the season progressed, it proved
    to be a very severe winter.
    And sometimes the snow was up to my waist.
    And being a very small, a small person to begin with,
    it was difficult to negotiate even the trip
    between the Whittington house and the church
    across the street.
    But life settled in, and I became
    accustomed to a whole new way of life, a whole new lifestyle.
    The school, being Orthodox Jewish, the kashrut laws,
    the laws of keeping kosher were strictly enforced.
    And we were permitted to eat with
    our landlord only breakfast and high tea and supper.
    We were not allowed to eat any meat.
    Our main meals were served in our kosher canteen.
    And the system was run a little bit
    like systems were run in the army.
    Students had to take turns in serving,
    in preparing meals, in KP--
    kitchen police-- peeling potatoes and vegetables,
    and helping with the preparation of the food.
    Everyone had a turn, and everyone
    did it very cheerfully.
    Nobody complained.
    We were just glad to be able to get a warm meal every day.
    And even if it wasn't always to our liking, being hungry,
    we ate.
    In addition to sitting and eating together,
    a meal every day, the highlight of the week
    was always the Sabbath, the Shabbat.
    On Fridays, the main meal was served in the evenings.
    And dinner was enhanced with much singing of songs,
    both on Friday nights and on Saturday mornings
    after services.
    Services were conducted by students and teachers.
    I became very well versed in the prayers in Hebrew,
    in the grace after meal, which I memorized after a while.
    And I loved all the songs that we sang all the time.
    Everyone was in high spirits, and observing the Sabbath
    strictly became a routine that one just got used to.
    You didn't ride your bike.
    You didn't ride at all on the Sabbath.
    You walked wherever you had to go.
    And your methods of playing were also
    restricted to certain things that were not
    done on Saturdays and certain things
    that you could do on Saturdays.
    But it became just part of our lifestyle.
    And I became completely used to it to a point
    that, when I visited my parents during my evacuation--
    I visited them twice, on Hanukkah and on Passover--
    I did not eat meat in my mother's house.
    On the other hand, my parents, after all,
    didn't have too much food to share.
    And in retrospect, I'm glad that I didn't eat meat
    so that they could have a little bit more
    of the meager food supplies that they could afford to buy.
    As a for instance, my mother would
    buy two ounces of salami for the whole week,
    for instance, very little butter,
    and generally they were on very much of a restricted diet.
    In retrospect, we children had plenty of food
    and were well taken care of and looked after.
    I made friends with other children
    at the school, some friendships which have lasted to this day--
    one friendship actually.
    And it was an experience that, even though I
    was separated from my parents again,
    as I had been when I lived in Bonn,
    and I was living with strange people, I was treated well.
    And it was an experience that I wouldn't
    have wanted to miss in a way.
    It certainly added something to my life, an experience that
    perhaps matured me in a way and taught
    me the values of friendship and loyalty
    and being able to cope with any situation that comes up.
    And to this day I'm grateful for that
    because, as most people have experienced,
    one does have to adapt to many different situations that
    come in in a lifetime.
    --not feel much of the war in that year
    that I spent in Clifton with the school.
    Nor was there much war activity in London.
    Certainly one saw a few young men in the streets.
    And if one did, they were mostly in uniform.
    Once, I remember that an air raid siren went off
    while we were asleep.
    I woke up, and I said to Eddie, let's put on our gas masks
    just in case.
    We didn't have a shelter to go to or anything.
    We didn't really know what to do.
    So we put on our gas masks and went back to sleep.
    And when Mrs. Whittington came to wake us up in the morning,
    she shrieked when she saw us because it seemed
    like little monsters from Mars were lying in the beds
    when she came to wake us up.
    It's another episode that brings forth a smile
    when I think about it.
    In the meantime, there was an occurrence at Dunkirk
    that changed the whole war situation.
    There was a time when the Ascot races began.
    And apparently, most of the officers
    in the British military came home to attend the Ascot races.
    And Hitler had decided that this might be the right time
    to invade England.
    But at the last minute, he changed his mind.
    However, at Dunkirk there was severe bombings
    from German military planes.
    There were no officers available to give the orders.
    And it was generally a big defeat, that battle.
    And after Dunkirk, things changed.
    For one thing, all the German and Austrian Jewish male
    refugees from the age of 14 on up
    were rounded up and interned.
    It was said that amongst the refugees
    there were German spies posing as refugees.
    Lisa Loeb.
    My father was among those who were rounded up and interned.
    He ended up in a camp on the Isle of Man
    together with many, many others in the same boat.
    And my father's mail to my mother was censored.
    I have a stack of his letters with the censorship marks on it
    at home.
    In it, he often wrote about some of the people he met.
    And he met some rather auspicious persona,
    writers and musicians, all kinds of people.
    And also, there was quite a rumor line going on
    in the camps, all kinds of information as to where to go
    and whom to see if it was your turn to leave Great Britain
    and emigrate and so on.
    And eventually, when our quota number came through,
    that summer of 1940, my father was
    able to tell my mother which offices she
    had to visit in order to process him to get him expedited,
    insofar as I think he had to pass a physical
    and had to see some authorities in London.
    And she was able to accomplish all this because
    of the information that my father wrote to her from camp.
    I was very upset hearing that my father once again had
    been arrested, so to speak.
    And I was quite anxious to get back to my mother
    when school ended in June.
    Even though the roundups had taken place
    and Dunkirk had been a very negative aspect
    of the first war years, nothing much
    had happened to London so far.
    The school year ended in June and I returned to my mother.
    But soon the air raids began.
    As I said before, we lived in this rooming house
    where lots of other refugees lived as well.
    It was kind of a humorous situation at times.
    The owners of the house were a couple who were schoolteachers.
    They lived in a house nearby, a few blocks away.
    They had a daughter my age, and sometimes they
    invited me to come over and play with their daughter,
    as a matter of fact.
    And they had invested in this house,
    taking advantage of the need that refugees
    had to live someplace.
    And most of the refugees couldn't afford
    to pay for a whole apartment.
    They made do with a room in a rooming house.
    Next door to us lived a Polish opera singer
    who was also an air raid warden in his spare time.
    And across from us lived a family from Cologne.
    And downstairs lived a Hungarian opera singer.
    And upstairs lived some Irish prostitutes.
    And after the invasion of Belgium,
    we got some Belgian refugees into the house.
    There was only one bathroom on the second floor
    and one bathroom on the first floor,
    and everyone had to share that bathroom.
    If you wanted a bath, you had to pay money in a slot in order
    to draw hot water.
    If you wanted heat, you had to put money in the little heater.
    If you wanted to cook something on an electric burner,
    you had to put money in that.
    If you wanted to put the light on,
    you had to put money somewhere.
    All utilities were well-monitored
    with little slots where money had to be deposited.
    Of course, also, telephone downstairs in the hall
    was a paid telephone.
    The only good thing about all this
    was that lots of these money-devouring slots
    didn't work too well.
    And you often got more back than you put in,
    which was a blessing.
    And the idea was to find out which machines were so blessed.
    My mother got busy trying to get all the things done
    she had to do once it was clear that our number had come
    through and we could possibly leave England
    within a short period of time.
    She would go into town, and if there were any phone messages,
    she would call in once in a while in the public phone
    downstairs in the hall and.
    I would take the messages for her.
    Also, some of the pennies that I had earned carrying shoes out
    for Mr. Whittington and money that I earned together
    with my co-students in the school helping the farmers,
    were quite helpful to my mother in order to have car fare
    and to use the telephone.
    As the spring came along, the students in the school
    were told that we must help the farmers.
    And so there was a period of time
    where we got up at 5:00 in the morning
    and were out in the fields picking currants and picking
    peas and various other vegetables.
    And for a certain amount of fruits or vegetables
    that you picked, for a certain weight, you got paid.
    And I put the money away, and I was happy
    that I could help my mother a little bit that way.
    It was, unfortunately, not pleasant for her
    to have to take from me.
    But we had to do what we had to do.
    As the summer progressed, the bombings increased,
    and today we know this period of time as the Blitz of London.
    We lived in what was essentially a private home,
    and it had a backyard.
    And homes like that all over London
    had what was called an Anderson shelter.
    These were hastily built at the beginning of the war.
    And what it was was a hole in the ground,
    perhaps three feet into the ground.
    There was an area that was dug out that would eventually
    hold perhaps six people along each long side and two people
    across the bottom.
    There were benches, so to speak, installed,
    which were really boards mounted on some bricks to sit on.
    And then the whole thing was covered by a corrugated metal
    dome.
    And that corrugated metal dome was covered with dirt
    so that from the sky, you couldn't
    see that it was anything than just a yard with dirt in it.
    You couldn't tell that these were shelters where people
    were hiding from the bombs.
    And starting in late June, my mother and I
    would pack a brown bag with sweaters and long slacks,
    and perhaps a blanket and something to eat for a snack
    during the night and for possibly
    breakfast in the morning.
    And no sooner was it bedtime, perhaps around 10:00
    at night, the sirens would sound and everybody scrambled out
    into the shelter.
    Many people in London went to the undergrounds, the subways
    because they were very far below the street level
    and were pretty safe from bombing.
    But in these private homes, people usually
    sat in their Anderson shelters.
    In our case, there were about 20 people living in that house.
    And most of the time, the men would stay outside
    and the women and children sat in the shelter.
    But I do remember one night when we had fire bombing.
    The bombs would burst into flames
    just before they would hit the ground,
    and you could see these things coming down en masse.
    And it was very, very scary.
    And I remember that the men all jumped into the shelter
    when they saw those firebombs dropping.
    By the time we were ready to leave England, my mother
    and I had not slept in a bed for a full night
    for close to three months.
    And as the end of August approached,
    it seemed that all was ready for us to leave England.
    We were told that we would take the train from London
    to Glasgow and that the men had been brought to Linfield, which
    was a camp much closer to London,
    and were going to be taken onto the train
    and would be traveling in the back of the train
    in a sealed car under guard of Scotland Yard
    as though they were common criminals.
    All along the trip to Scotland, we really
    weren't very sure whether or not the men were really there.
    It was just hoped that they would be.
    It was a long trip, an overnight trip,
    and three times this train was stopped because of air raids.
    And finally we did arrive in Glasgow, which
    seemed a very dreary city.
    We were taken to the port, and there the customs officers
    examined us very thoroughly.
    The lining of my coat was ripped open to look
    for possible hidden money.
    We were not allowed to take out any valuables or anything that
    could possibly incriminate us as spies,
    and so on, as though anybody had any money.
    But then there were some exceptions.
    For instance, we were traveling together with a lady
    that my mother had befriended.
    And she had a young child, a little girl
    who was carrying a doll.
    And this lady had confided in my mother
    that she had hidden money in the head of the doll
    and then pasted the wig back onto the doll's head.
    It was one of these porcelain dolls.
    My mother got terribly nervous about this information.
    It would have been so much better if this lady had never
    confided in her because why should she have been nervous
    for somebody else's daring?
    At any rate, in spite of the bodily examinations,
    nobody thought to take the hair off of that doll,
    and the lady got through with flying colors.
    But too much of a worry to my mother, which shouldn't have
    happened.
    We boarded the ship, and we were anxiously
    waiting to see my father.
    Nothing happened, and ship was ready to leave toward evening
    when finally the men filed on board.
    And what a wonderful and moving reunion that must have been.
    I know only that I was just overwhelmed to see my father.
    And my mother has told me many times
    that the reunion of the men with their families
    made the sailors cry.
    What had happened was that somebody
    had decided to put this carload full of men from the internment
    camp onto another ship that was going to New Zealand.
    And the men had actually started a mutiny
    because they were not going to put up with that sort of thing.
    You see, the British deported many of the younger men
    who had been rounded up from among the Jewish refugees
    and shipped them out to New Zealand and to Australia,
    where they were then not confined,
    but where they were out of any sort of area that
    could be harmful to England.
    And somebody took it upon themselves
    to put all these men who were, for the most part, older,
    and family men whose families were waiting
    for them on the ship, and thought
    they're going to ship them out to Australia as well, or to New
    Zealand.
    At any rate, the outcome was happy,
    and our reunion was ecstatic.
    I think that the Jewish organizations had
    paid for the tickets and that at a later time,
    my parents and the families reimbursed these organizations
    once they were in a situation to do that.
    Our cabin was on D deck, which meant
    no porthole, inside cabins.
    We had many, many children on board.
    As a matter of fact, this ship was a Scottish liner.
    It went under the Scottish flag, and the name
    was The SS Cameronia.
    Did not have a first class.
    It had a tourist class and a third class,
    and of course, we were in the third class.
    We had a small cabin.
    Again I was in the top bunk.
    And we had to take the elevators up to any of the public rooms
    into the dining rooms and so on.
    The tourist class was booked in almost entirely
    for British children who were being
    sent to the United States, and more so to Canada
    for the duration.
    Many people assured their children's safety
    by sending them to the Western hemisphere.
    Had we been attacked by a submarine,
    I am certain that anybody on D deck, which included ourselves,
    could have never made it to the upper decks at all.
    We did have convoy, and we made the trip safely.
    The ship before us and the ship after us were not so lucky.
    They were followed by German submarines, as we were as well.
    I don't know if they didn't have convoys with them.
    At any rate, we made it and unfortunately, they didn't.
    On the morning of September 10, 1940,
    we sailed into New York Harbor.
    It was still a little bit dark, and we saw a city lit up.
    And it was a sight that was unbelievable.
    We hadn't seen a city lit up for years.
    Already in the last years before the war in Germany,
    there were semi-blackouts.
    One had to have an air raid shelter in one's home,
    mostly in a cellar or in a basement.
    And the house had to have blackout facilities.
    And many times there were inspections.
    And as I remember it, there was semi-blackout the last months
    that I lived in Germany.
    Came to London, sure, it was all lit up, was wonderful.
    But when we came back from York at the end of August,
    the war began, and again there was complete blackout.
    As a matter of fact, the headlights of cars
    had to be covered with a blue paint.
    And when we had some really foggy, real pea coup foggy
    London nights, there were squads of people
    who were employed as guides for the buses.
    They walked in front of the buses with subdued flashlights
    so the buses could get through because there
    were no streetlights, and it was very dark.
    The only light that came from the sky
    were the searchlights that were constantly
    strafing the skies every night.
    It was a kind of ghostly atmosphere.
    And to see a city like New York with the lights on was
    like getting to Oz, I suppose.
    Maybe that's a good comparison.
    And so we sailed into New York Harbor, passed
    the Statue of Liberty, and finally, finally we
    were really in America.
    My concept of America, I think, had
    been fed, perhaps, by movies.
    And I thought that everywhere would be skyscrapers,
    and cowboys would be running around the streets.
    And so I was in for a brand new adventure
    of exploring my new country and my new surroundings.
    Our relatives who had furnished our affidavit
    were at the pier to pick us up and took us immediately
    to Philadelphia.
    The first few days we stayed with them.
    They had a house in Oak Lane.
    They had two little boys.
    One was two at the time and one was six.
    And I was to stay with them for awhile
    until my parents could settle down and manage to have a home.
    In the beginning that wasn't really possible because,
    of course, my father had to find something to do.
    He obviously couldn't practice law.
    And my mother, who had not been a working woman in Germany
    and had herself two servants at home, had not much of a choice
    as to what kind of work she could do.
    As I mentioned before, I think in 1939,
    in 1940, the country was just getting over the Depression.
    And for refugees who did not have too many skills,
    there wasn't a whole big choice of jobs available.
    So she began at first to be a domestic help in the household.
    Her first position didn't last very long,
    but then she found a place and a house in Elkins Park,
    where she was to cook and to mind the baby
    and where my father could live with her.
    There was an apartment on the top floor of the house,
    and my parents could live there.
    My father could have his meals there.
    And in the meantime, he was looking for something to do.
    And he began by peddling European homemade candy
    from door to door.
    He had found another refugee who was making European-type candy,
    chocolates.
    And in knocking on doorbells and then
    being referred to other people, he made a lot of contacts.
    Eventually my father found a job with a German newspaper,
    which was being published in those days on a daily basis.
    It was called The Philadelphia Gazette Demokrat.
    The last word, demokrat, was spelled D-E-M-O-K-R-A-T.
    This German newspaper was published daily all through
    World War I, all through World War II until, in the 1950s,
    it merged with a New York German language newspaper,
    which was called The New York Staats Zeitung.
    And that's spelled S-T-A-A-T-S, and the second word is
    Z-E-I-T-U-N-G.
    Eventually these papers became weekly, and then
    eventually ceased to publish because there was obviously
    not a public for a German newspaper anymore.
    But at any rate, it was what was considered
    then a well-paying job from papers I
    found among my mother's things.
    There was an income tax return.
    And it seemed that my father was earning $22 a week,
    and that was considered a very good salary at the time.
    My mother had meanwhile graduated
    from domestic to factory worker to a clerk in a jewelry store,
    and she enjoyed that job very much,
    and they were able to rent an apartment.
    And I was finally, after three years,
    able to move back to my parents'.
    I think that first year in the United States,
    besides being interesting for me--
    interesting because the school system was so different--
    it seemed very easy to me.
    But at the same time, it was also painful
    because I would visit my parents on Friday evenings.
    I would take the subway and visit them.
    lived further into the city, around the Erie Avenue
    and 119th Street at the time.
    And on Sunday nights I had to say goodbye.
    And take the subway back to Oak Lane, to the suburbs,
    and stay with the family that was giving me a home.
    And of course, I appreciated their hospitality.
    They were very kind to me.
    I loved the two little boys.
    And I also enjoyed the friends I had made in the school
    that I was attending.
    But nevertheless, it was hard for me every Sunday
    to say goodbye.
    My father would walk me to the subway,
    and I wouldn't see him again until the next weekend.
    I often think back on that, and in remembering that, sometimes
    tears come to my eyes.
    It's funny, there were a lot of other experiences
    that you might think would draw tears.
    But it was just a child's yearning
    to be back with her parents and to have a real home together.
    And I was so happy when that finally became a reality.
    We moved into a third floor apartment
    in a neighborhood which, at that time,
    had these beautiful old brownstone row
    houses with porches three and four stories high.
    And it was near the synagogue that we were attending.
    And many of our neighbors were also refugees.
    As a matter of fact, it had the nickname
    of being the Fourth Reich.
    Hitler's Germany was the Third Reich,
    and they called Park Avenue, at the time, the Fourth Reich.
    And Reich is spelled R-E-I-C-H.
    So there were also children of refugees in that block,
    or in those two blocks where so many of us lived.
    Quite a lot of Jewish people lived there.
    It was near the original building
    of Adat Jeshurun on Broad and Susquehanna,
    and also near Gratz College, near Dropsie College.
    And the rabbis of these institutions
    lived on our block.
    And it was comfortable to live there.
    We attended the Clymer Public School at 12th and Cambria,
    which was kind of a blue collar neighborhood
    closer to Lehigh Avenue, not in our immediate neighborhood.
    And I did like going to school there very
    much because the teachers were much more progressive,
    much younger than they had been in the school
    that I attended in the suburbs.
    And even though some of the student body
    was a rather tough student population,
    I was kind of a novelty to them.
    And I made friends, and I was happy there.
    I graduated from the Clymer School in eighth grade
    and received the American Legion Award,
    which was a source of great pride to my parents.
    From that school, I enrolled and attended the Philadelphia High
    School for Girls.
    And for me, that was one of the happiest time in my life.
    Four years I attended the school at 17th and Spring Gardens.
    It was a college preparatory school only offering
    the academic course.
    I majored in languages and art.
    And I found that American schools could really be fun.
    You could choose some of your subjects.
    And after school, there were so many things
    to do that were fun.
    German and English schools just simply
    weren't like that at all.
    In England we had a sports day on Wednesday afternoons.
    But to be able to choose some of your subjects,
    and to have clubs and all kinds of fun things
    to do after classes, that was not
    in the picture in European schools.
    And I had the time of my life there.
    Besides that, though, I also found myself an
    after school job as soon as I was old enough to work.
    And Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays
    I worked in a department store.
    And except for $2.00, I gave my mother my earnings because she
    needed it.
    Unfortunately, my father did not live too long
    once we came to this country.
    He lived only another five years, and then he passed away.
    I was only 17 years old.
    I was a junior in high school, and I
    had to help my mother as much as I could.
    I would have liked to go to college,
    but it was not possible for my mother to support me,
    even though I had a scholarship opportunity.
    And eventually, after I graduated,
    I married almost immediately after I graduated high school.
    I had met my husband, who was a GI
    and had been in the Army Air Force during the war.
    And I met him in a place called the Central Club.
    The Central Club of Philadelphia was
    a club that was formed for refugees from Central Europe.
    And they had a youth group, they had
    a building which was right close by to where
    I lived at the time.
    There was a restaurant in the building
    where you could have a cup of coffee
    or where you could have a whole meal.
    And it was a nice place to--
    place to spend time, and my mother
    didn't have to worry about me.
    When the soldiers came home from the war in 1945,
    the boys who had been members of the Central Club
    certainly came back to socialize.
    We had dances, and it was the opportunity where
    I met my husband on a hike.
    The end of the war, in the summer of 1945,
    had also brought some very sad news to my family.
    My father found out that his sister and one of her sons
    had been murdered in the concentration camps,
    and that her other son had survived and had returned
    to Belgium at the time.
    He immediately had gotten in touch with us
    upon his liberation.
    And eventually, he had written his memoirs and sent them to us
    and thought that we could translate these memoirs
    and have them published here.
    We could not believe what we were reading.
    It was so painful to my family.
    I think it helped my father along when
    he was feeling ill to read such an astounding document
    of brutality.
    I think it gave him the rest of the shock that
    sent him to his grave in November of 1945.
    My mother also found out that her family from Berlin,
    her sister and husband and child and her mother,
    had been deported as early as October, 1941 from Berlin
    to the ghetto of Lodz, and from there
    were deported to parts unknown.
    One could only conjecture what their end was.
    My mother's older sister, who had
    emigrated to Holland with her husband,
    had been sent to Sobibor.
    And I never really discussed these matters with my mother
    or told her what I have read about these places
    because I just didn't want to cause her any more pain.
    There was not a family among our friends, who were all Europeans
    and immigrants into this country, not one family who
    did not lose loved ones to the crematoria of the concentration
    camps.
    And it was a hard nut to swallow, I suppose.
    It was something that stayed with us all.
    And it was also a common experience among the friends
    because we all had loved ones who perished.
    After I graduated in January of 1947,
    I married my husband the following June,
    and we were married happily for 40 years.
    We had two children, Joni and Joe, a girl and a boy.
    And we built a new life in our adopted country.
    Our children were American born.
    And I have become, I think, 100% American through the years.
    I feel at home here.
    And even though this country, at one time, did not welcome us,
    eventually we were able to come.
    We were able to create a new life for ourselves.
    And that I am grateful for.
    I suppose the experiences that I have survived in my lifetime
    have made me feel that it is my responsibility
    to speak about it.
    I am an eyewitness.
    After my generation dies out, there
    will be no one else to tell all the stories.
    It is important that there be a record of these eyewitness
    experiences.
    And so I do devote a great deal of my time in this endeavor.
    I am 70 years old at this time.
    I have four grandchildren that are the sunshine of my life,
    and I am very content in my lifestyle.
    A few footnotes, if you will.
    I have in my possession a letter from a Cuban government
    official who, through the auspices of our Cuban friends,
    had written a permit for the Joseph family to leave the ship
    and to debark in Havana.
    The letter is in Spanish on official letterhead paper,
    and I had it translated into English recently
    by a Spanish-speaking friend.
    My father would not leave the ship
    because as the chairman of the committee,
    he felt responsible not to abandon
    this position of trust that had elected him to be the chairman.
    And so we never took advantage of that letter.
    Another item.
    In the papers of my mother, who passed away at the age of 92,
    I found a stack of letters that were
    sent to my father in response to an ad
    that he had placed in a German language weekly that is still
    being published.
    This newspaper is called The Aufbau, A-U-F- like Fred,
    B-A-U. It means reconstruction, and this newspaper
    is distributed worldwide.
    It's published in New York, but it is distributed worldwide.
    In November of 1941, my father had placed an ad in The Aufbau
    asking former St. Louis passengers
    if they would like him to try and retrieve
    the monies that they spent on these illegal immigration
    permits.
    And he had a whole stack of letters with replies.
    Some of them even included a three cent stamp postage
    for his efforts.
    In these letters, the people said
    they bought their permits from Mr. Goldsmith or Mr. Schwartz
    or Mr. Goldstein or Brownstein, or obviously all Jewish names.
    And they paid so much money for these permits.
    The prices that were paid for these
    permits all differed, from which I
    can surmise that Mr. Gonzalez sold these permits to middlemen
    who would then sell them to people who wanted to emigrate
    out of Germany who had contacts, who
    had more contacts, personal contacts with the people
    wanting to emigrate in a hurry.
    And these middlemen then charged prices,
    whatever they could get, from the poor victims
    who needed these permits.
    And it's kind of a little bit of a sad statement
    to see that Jews were plying on the needs of other Jews
    and making a profit from it.
    It was bad enough that Mr. Gonzalez
    was making a profit from an actually illegal document.
    Apparently, my father was not able to accomplish anything
    because I would imagine otherwise,
    I would have found other correspondence.
    Finally, after meeting the Troper family on that day
    that we reached Europe again, I stayed
    in touch with Mr. and Mrs. Troper until they died.
    And the communications were always very, very cordial
    and very loving in nature, actually.
    Mrs. Troper had taken a shiner to me,
    and actually had asked my mother if she
    could take me back to the States with her to assure my safety.
    But my father and mother insisted
    that we are all going to stay together no matter what comes.
    To emphasize one more point, at the time that the St.
    Louis reached Europe again, no one went back to Germany.
    It has been printed in various publications and books
    that some people went back to Germany.
    No, they did not.
    Nobody who got off the St. Louis in Antwerp
    on June 17, 1939, nobody went back to Germany at that time.
    However, the people who went to France, Holland, and Belgium,
    and who did not manage to leave Europe
    before the outbreak of World War II due to their quota
    numbers coming up, and people who did not
    manage to escape to a neutral country such as Portugal
    and make their way from there to the States
    or to other countries outside of Europe--
    those people, unfortunately, were
    overrun by the Nazis when they invaded these countries
    and were deported to the extermination camps.
    And sadly enough, at the end of the war,
    I think that most of the survivors
    were the ones who went to England.
    Approximately 250 people survived World War II.
    Some people stayed in England.
    Eventually they were able to work and make
    new lives for themselves in England
    and had children and grandchildren born there.
    And some people came to the States and so on.
    But unfortunately, the survivor group, by now,
    is down to a very minimal number.
    In 1989, we had a 50th anniversary reunion
    in Florida, at which time 29 original St. Louis
    survivors came.
    Most of them, including myself, were children on board,
    although the older generation was represented by perhaps
    three or four people.
    By this time, as we face the 60th anniversary of the ship,
    naturally the number of survivor decreases by each year.
    I don't have any statistics, but it
    stands to reason that would be the case.
    Captain Schroder] was caught in the beginning
    of the war with the ship still in this hemisphere.
    He had to bring the ship back to Germany
    and managed to do so by January of 1940 by way of Murmansk.
    Because of his sympathy toward the Jews,
    his services as a captain were not required.
    They gave him a desk job.
    I suppose they didn't have time to give him a trial.
    And at the end of the war, he was quite destitute
    since he also had no pension of any kind.
    Many of the passengers, the former passengers
    of the St. Louis, helped him after the war,
    sent him money and sent him food.
    He also wrote a small book about the St. Louis trip
    in German, which he called Homeless on High Seas.
    In it, he also divulges his feelings
    of sympathy toward his passengers.
    And at one point, he quotes that he
    felt that we were all on another planet
    as we were sailing back and forth on the ocean
    and not really having a goal or a destination.
    When we had our reunion in Florida,
    we brought over the only living survivor of the captain's
    family, his nephew.
    And he told us many stories about his uncle, the captain.
    And eventually the captain has been
    made a righteous among the nations at Yad Vashem
    and in Jerusalem in Israel.
    I think these are all the footnote
    notes I can think of and hope that you find the St. Louis
    story one of, in a small way, giving
    a grasp of the Holocaust.
    Here were less than 1,000 people, a and the handful
    survived as compared to six million.
    And a comparative handful survived.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Liesl Joseph Loeb, born on June 17, 1928 in Rheydt, Rhineland, Germany, describes being a passenger on the St. Louis along with her father, Josef Joseph, an attorney, and her mother, Lilly Salmon Joseph; sailing on May 13, 1939 from Hamburg toward Havana, Cuba with 937 Jewish refugees on board; her family background and life leading up to Kristallnacht, during which she hid in her own home while Nazis were vandalizing it; the months leading up to embarkation and conditions which had to be met before leaving Germany and immigrating to Cuba; her family’s plan to be in Cuba until their quota number was called for the United States; the trip and its complications from a child’s perspective; her father’s sense of duty as the chairman of the passenger committee and the commitment and devotion of all its members; the desperate situation of the hapless passengers to whom no country offered a haven; spending 40 days at sea and the rescue efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the countries that offered refuge to the passengers; her family landing in England and their life as World War II began; the destiny of most of the passengers; attending school as an “evacuee” and the internment of her father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien; arriving in New York, NY on September 10, 1940; and her graduation from high school and her immediate marriage after.
    Interviewee
    Liesl J. Loeb
    Date
    interview:  1998 November 17
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 sound cassettes (60 min.).

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Corporate Name
    St. Louis (Ship)

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive conducted the interview with Liesl Loeb in Philadelphia, Pa., on November 17, 1998. The Unite States Holocaust Memorial Museum received the tapes of the interview from Gratz College on September 30, 1999.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:36:18
    This page:
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    Oral history interview with Margaret Beer

    Oral History

    Margaret Beer (née Weiss), born in 1911 in Sziget, Hungary (Sighet, Romania), describes the German invasion of Hungary; S.S. troops being moved into many Jewish homes, including hers; how the troops with the help of Hungarian authorities identified prominent Jews who were forced to form a Jewish council; the Germans confiscating Jewish businesses and personal property; ghettoization; how the Jews were helped by non-Jewish Hungarians, who smuggled food into the ghetto; the evacuation of all Jewish patients from the local hospital; the formation of a Jewish police force; the evacuation of the Jews from the ghetto and the transports to Auschwitz; life in Auschwitz including the initial selection, showers, barracks, Appells, work conditions, food allotment, wash barracks, and her selection by Mengele; transported to Gelsenkirchen, Germany in July 1944 to work in the Krupp armament industry; the working conditions and Allied bombings; being transferred to Sömmerda in Thuringia, Germany in September 1944 to work in another ammunition factory; being evacuated from the camp in April 1945 when the Allies got closer; escaping during the march and eventually finding housing in a German village until liberation at the end of April 1945; receiving help from Russian POW’s and later American liberators; and her skills as a dressmaker helping sustain her until May 1946 when she could join her brother in Philadelphia, PA.

    Oral history interview with Hans Braun

    Oral History

    Hans Braun, born in Hannover, Germany in 1923, describes his family, who were German Sinti (Romanies); being part of a small carnival and traveling around Germany during the summer and living in Bernau in the winter; Nazi persecution beginning in 1939 and having to wear a patch with the letter “Z”; being forced with his father to work for the German army in the armament industry in 1941; being suspected of sabotage after accidentally breaking a machine and escaping arrest by fleeing to his grandfather’s home in Berlin, Germany; being pursued by the Gestapo and going into hiding first with friends in Berlin then with an uncle in Eger and finally with Sintis in Luxemburg who gave him false papers; being arrested and jailed when he returned home but escaping; his subsequent arrests and escapes using disguises and false papers; his final capture and being put on a transport to Auschwitz with other Sinti families; being put into the Birkenau Romani camp where he was reunited with his family; conditions in the Romani camp; his work loading and unloading the dead at the crematorium; being beaten by guards; his entire family dying one by one by either typhus and/or starvation; getting typhus and being experimented on in the hospital barracks; how Dr. Mengele tortured children and used them for his medical experiments; being sent to Flossenbürg labor camp, where he was beaten; being sent on a death march with surviving inmates for four days and nights just before liberation; escaping with two other men and hiding in a village which was defended by the SS; and being liberated by American troops.

    Oral history interview with Eva Burns

    Oral History

    Eva Burns (née Gerstl), born in 1924 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes her father, who was a pediatrician, and her mother, who was a concert pianist; living a mostly secular life with some intermarriages in her mother's family; how the German takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939 drastically affected their lives; her brother being sent to Kladno and the rest of the family to Theresienstadt; receiving help from non-Jews; being deported to Theresienstadt on November 17, 1942; how Theresienstadt was a "show" camp with books, a coffee house, and concerts; being part of a chorus preparing Verdi's Requiem and observing religious activities and humor; being transported to Auschwitz in May 1944 and six weeks later to Christianstadt, a women's labor camp; helping to sabotage grenades in the ammunition factory; the cruelty of the women SS guards; escaping from a death march in February 1945; assuming a German identification and working in the Sudetenland; how in the spring of 1945 she went to Prague, where she worked for the family of an SS officer serving at the front; revealing her Czech identity in May 1945; getting married in November 1947 in Prague; and immigrating to the United States in June 1948.

    Oral history interview with Susan Faulkner

    Oral History

    Susan Faulkner (née Neulaender), born in 1921 in Berlin, Germany, describes her father, who was a banker; being raised in an assimilated Jewish family; still having Jewish religious instruction in her public school during the first year under the Nazi regime; being favorably influenced by the ordained female rabbi, Regina Jonas; experiencing antisemitism and traumatic discrimination at school after 1933; the brief relaxation of anti-Jewish measures in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games; attending a private Jewish school for a year; having a brief, unhappy experience in a Zionist agricultural school in Silesia in 1936; working for relatives in Gleiwitz in Silesia (Gliwice, Poland), where she felt more protected in a traditional Jewish community than she had felt in Berlin; returning to Berlin and working in Alltrue emigration processing agency; her memories of Kristallnacht in November 1938 and witnessing the destruction of Jewish property, the burning of the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue as onlookers cheered, and the beating of an elderly Jewish man; how her father fled to Belgium, was later caught in Marseilles, and died in Auschwitz; traveling with her mother and sister to Guatemala in 1938 on a German ship; their fourth class passage and how they were treated with disdain by the crew; reaching the United States two years later; getting married in 1942 to an Austrian refugee who converted to Protestantism; beginning her college studies in 1958 with restitution money from Germany and earning a Ph.D. in English; becoming a teacher; her need to bear witness to the Holocaust; her psychological problems associated with survivor guilt; and her painful attempts to identify as a Jew, including compulsive writing of pro-Jewish and pro-Israel letters to editors.

    Oral history interview with Rose Fine

    Oral History

    Rose Fine (née Hollender) born in Ozorków, Poland in 1917, describes her Orthodox Jewish family; her father, who was a shochet; the living conditions during the German occupation before and after the establishment of the Ozorków Ghetto in 1941; the health conditions in the ghetto; deportations; her work in the ghetto hospital, where children were put to starve to death; the behavior of the Volksdeutsche in Ozorków; her mother’s deportation to Chelmno, Poland, where she was gassed to death; witnessing the deportation of the old and infirm in chloroform-filled Panzer trucks in March 1941; seeing the public hanging of 10 Jews; being transferred to the Łódź Ghetto in 1942 where she worked for Mrs. Rumkowski until she was deported to Auschwitz in August 1944; going through a selection and sent to the Freiberg, Germany airplane factory; being transferred later to Mauthausen in Austria, where she was liberated by the Americans in the spring of 1945; the birth of a baby girl (both mother and baby survived) just prior to liberation; receiving help from a German farmer; staying briefly in Łódź and Gdansk; life in Gdansk, where she got married; living with her husband for four years in Munich, Germany, where they belonged to Rabbi Lazerowski’s synagogue and she attended the ORT school; immigrating to the US in 1949 with the help of the Joint Distribution Committee; and the story of the hiding of a Torah by a non-Jew in Ozorków and how he gave it to a survivor from Ozorków to take to Atlanta, Georgia.

    Oral history interview with Dora Freilich

    Oral History

    Dora Golubowitz Freilich, born December 25, 1926 in Pruzany, Poland, near Bialystok, describes her pre-war life, including her schooling, relations with non-Jewish Poles, Jewish community life, and youth groups; the Russian occupation from 1939 to 1941, including the expropriation of her family’s business; the German invasion and her family being forced to move into the Pruzany ghetto in June 1941; the living conditions, cultural activities, labor units, Judenrat (Jewish council), and contact with Jewish partisans in the ghetto; how a non-Jewish ex-employee of her father hid her baby sister but later the family asked him to return the child; the evacuation of the ghetto in January 1943 and her family’s transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau; witnessing Mengele’s sadistic games with prisoners and her awareness of the medical experiments (which she describes in great detail); sadistic behavior by guards, including the shooting of her sister for sport; conditions at Birkenau, including slave labor, types of prisoners, orchestra, death process, and relations among inmates; how older girls tried to help the younger ones and the coping strategies they used to survive; the sabotage of a crematorium in October 1944 and the public hanging of four girls held responsible; the escape, capture, and execution of Mala Zimetbaum; life in the camp in January 1945 and the death march to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she stayed for three months; being transferred to Malchow; escaping with 11 girls into the forest; being liberated by Russian soldiers in May 1945; the treatment by Russians, which ranged from kindness to brutality; their return to Pruzany after a three month journey, during which she experienced both antisemitism and help from non-Jews; going on to Łódź, Poland; their failed attempt to go to Palestine; getting married; going to Feldafing displaced persons camp in 1946; immigrating to the United States in March 1949; survivor’s guilt; and how the Holocaust and the loss of her family still affects both her and her daughter.

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Fuchs

    Oral History

    Baroness Elizabeth Kemény-Fuchs, the Austrian-born young wife of the Hungarian Foreign Minister Gábor Kemény, describes being shocked by the October 1944 persecutions of Jews under the Arrow Cross government; being approached by Wallenberg and being ready to help him, mainly by persuading her husband to help issue protective passports for Jews and also prevailing upon the German Ambassador Veesenmayer to issue needed visas, all at considerable risk to herself; how the stress of this, of the official duties, and of a difficult pregnancy caused her to go for a brief visit to her mother in South Tyrol, Austria; how because of the baby’s birth and the Soviet siege of Budapest, she never could return there; her critiques of a film made about Wallenberg and her role, describing his actual activities, his special qualities, and his misjudgment regarding the Soviets' motivations; aid given to Jews by Weiss diplomats and by Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio; how her own involvement was solely humanitarian and that she is neither of Jewish descent nor was ever Wallenberg's mistress; her insistence that her husband was not a Nazi and how he helped save many Jews; her belief that collective guilt led to his arrest, condemnation, and execution; her own post-war struggles; and her feelings that more could have been done, especially by Swedes, to free Wallenberg and her belief that he should remain "a very bright example" in an ever more selfish world.

    Oral history interview with Alexandra Gorko

    Oral History

    Alexandra Gorko (née Paley) born in Kiev, Russia (Ukraine) in 1916, describes her family returning to Łódź, Poland in 1922 to escape communism; getting married to a non-Jewish Polish Judge and reserve officer who was killed after the German invasion; her life after the German invasion and the establishment of the Łódź Ghetto; receiving help from non-Jewish neighbors; her work as the supervisor and nurse in one of the ghetto hospitals; the betrayal and deportation of 13 young men to Chelmno in January 1942 for building and using an illegal radio; being transported to Auschwitz in August 1944; the transport, selection, and “Appells” (roll calls); her refusal to follow Mengele’s orders to inject pregnant women with a gasoline-type solution and her subsequent beatings; being transported to Ravensbrück then Muhlhausen ammunition factory in the fall of 1944; being sent in February 1945 to Bergen-Belsen and conditions there; her work in an ammunition factory; being liberated in April 1945; the Swedish Red Cross moving Jews who were ill to Sweden; strategies for coping; and immigrating with her second husband to the United States in July 1948.

    Oral history interview with Anatole Gorko

    Oral History

    Anatole Gorko, born in Łódź, Poland on June 28, 1907, describes his well-to-do Zionist family; working in his father’s spinning factory until 1939, when Germany invaded Poland; fighting in the Polish Army for three weeks; being taken to a prisoner-of-war camp for a few weeks; living with his family in the center of the Łódź Ghetto and life there; working as head cashier for the ghetto stores until August 1944; being deported with his family, including his wife and child, to Auschwitz in cattle cars; being selected with his brother-in-law for work while the rest of the family perished; remaining in Auschwitz for one month, then pretending to be a mechanic and being selected for a camp in Sudetenland, where after two weeks of training he worked on V2 rockets; his sabotage and persuading other workers, including German mechanics, to sabotage the work; working there from September 1944 until May 1945 when the Russians liberated the area; making his way back to Łódź, where he remarried; becoming head of the textile production for Communist Poland, but deciding to leave; smuggling himself and his wife to Munich, Germany, and waiting from 1946 to 1948 to obtain necessary papers to resettle in the United States; and his adjustment to the US.

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Gross

    Oral History

    Suzanne Gross (née Sarah Pertofsky), born in Paris, France in 1931, describes her parents, who were born in Belz (Ukraine) and immigrated to France around 1924; her parents’ parlor in Paris, which was closed by the Germans after the invasion of Paris; the round up of Jews and separation of families; how non-native born Jews were rounded up before Jews who were considered French; being made to feel she was not really French before the war, especially after she started school; having to wear her Yellow Star to school; her father going underground and working at first on a farm, then joining the Jewish French partisans; antisemitism within the French partisans; her father working later in a steel factory; her mother being hidden by neighbors for three months; being sent to a farm in Normandy with five or six other children by the French Jewish Scouts (Eclaireurs Israelites de France), who had an underground network to hide Jewish children; working on various farms under harsh conditions; being hidden in a convent school, where she pretended to be Catholic; reuniting with her parents in Paris; how her parents lived clandestinely on and off in their boarded up shop; the family receiving money from a resistance movement in the steel factory where her father worked; the concierge helping by selling items knitted by her mother; the imprisonment of many Jews at Drancy; how families searched for arrested relatives from afar; giving a detailed account of her emotional responses to the childhood trauma she experienced and to surviving the Holocaust; and her family immigrating to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Isadore Hollander

    Oral History

    Isadore Hollander, born 1920 in Paris, France, describes moving to Bendin (Bedzin), Poland with his Polish parents and older sister in 1923; the pre-war Jewish community; his father’s death and living from ages 11 to 15 in an orphanage, which operated according to Janusz Korczak guidelines; his mother’s re-marriage; joining a Zionist youth group; the growing antisemitism in Poland; the German invasion in September 1939 and running from town to town to avoid forced labor, until he was captured and sent to work in a coal mine in Javorzno near Krakow, Poland; escaping to Russian-occupied Poland and living in Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine) at the beginning of 1940; avoiding imprisonment for “illegal” business by registering for work in Russia; being assigned to Stalino coal mine in the Donbas region; escaping to Rovno (Rivne, Ukraine) and his religious life there from the winter of 1940 to June 1941; the establishment of the Rovno ghetto and escaping from slave labor with help from former Polish soldiers; living with 10 other Jews in near by forests until 1943; having minimal contact with Polish partisans due to mutual suspicion; serving in the Polish Army; witnessing the German-evacuated Majdanek; his life as a Polish soldier including revenge he and other Jewish soldiers took on Volkdeutsche Poles; returning at the end of the war to Bendin and meeting his future wife; their escape from Poland and life in Deggendorf displaced persons camp in Bavaria, Germany; and immigrating to the United States and settling in Philadelphia, PA in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Mina Kalter

    Oral History

    Mina Kalter (née Basseches), born in 1921 in Przeworsk, Poland, describes being raised in a religious family; her father, who was a traveling merchant, and her mother, who worked in retail fabrics; how both her parents were active in Zionist organizations and charitable endeavors and on good terms with their Christian neighbors until 1939; the extensive work of the Kehillah in helping those in need; life after the German invasion of Poland in 1939; the bombing and desecration of the synagogue; forced labor and the confiscation of Jewish property; all Jews being forced into a ghetto; the lack of help from former Christian friends; conditions in the ghetto; smuggling her small brother to the home of a loyal former family housekeeper; escaping from a work detail in March 1941; crossing the River San to Soviet-controlled Poland, where she was helped by a Russian Jewish family prior to being resettled in a small town near Lvov (L’viv, Ukraine); life under Soviet rule in Poland; being exiled to Siberia because she refused to accept Soviet citizenship; the transport to the labor camp, where she lived for four years, until May 1945; her clandestine trip outside the Siberian camp to obtain potatoes for planting; receiving permission by mail to return to Poland in March 1945; working her way across Siberia toward Poland with her husband in June 1945, where she experienced antisemitism; receiving help from the Joint Distribution Committee in Szczecin, Poland that her two brothers were alive and joining them in a displaced persons camp in Berlin, Germany in August 1945; the living conditions with her new born baby; staying in another camp near Landsberg, Germany in 1948; immigrating with her family to the United States in 1950; her adjustment to life in the US; her children’s awareness of their parents’ background and their commitment to Judaism; and her hope that her testimony will remind future generations of the horrors of the Hitler years.

    Oral history interview with Inge Karo

    Oral History

    Inge Karo (née Heiman), born in 1926 in Essen, Germany, describes her father, who was a part owner of a business; her parents’ active participation in the Jewish community and belonging to a conservative synagogue; being part of a non-Zionist youth organization and educated in a school for Jewish children until the schools were closed by the Nazis; the effects of the Nuremberg laws; the effects of Kristallnacht in 1938 on the Jewish community of Essen and her family; the confiscation of her family’s home; being affected by the pervasive Nazi propaganda and persecution; her family’s attempts to escape from Germany to the United States; immigrating with her family to the US in December 1939; and life in the United States as a refugee, including her experiences in public school.

    Oral history interview with Genia Klapholz

    Oral History

    Genia Klapholz (née Flachs), born in 1912 in Wisnicz, Poland, describes being raised in a religious family; the ghettoization of the town during WWII; witnessing the murder of her baby niece by a German soldier; escaping with her younger sister and paying a woman in a neighboring village to hide them for eight days; having to return to Wisnicz; being transported to the Bochnia ghetto, where they worked in a uniform factory for one year, enduring terrible conditions; moving next to the Szebnie transit camp, where they saw Jews from Tarnow burned alive; her Yiddish poem, “In Memory of My Sister, Serl, of Camp Szebnie” (she reads it during the interview; note that it and another poem, “The Death March from Auschwitz” are included with the transcripts); working for three months as a cleaning woman in a factory at Szebnie; being deported to Auschwitz in 1942, which she describes in detail; the brutal treatment during her two years in Birkenau; working in the ammunition factory, from which four young women smuggled gunpowder for the attempted explosion of the crematoria and witnessing their hanging after they were caught; a particular delousing incident, during which she had to stand in the snow, naked for hours; her foot operation, performed without anesthesia; being forced to leave Auschwitz on a death march in January 1945; escaping with two other women and finding shelter with a Polish woman and her family in Silesia; how this family was recognized as one of the “Righteous among the Nations” by Yad Vashem in 1991; being liberated by the Russians on March 28, 1945 and returning to Krakow, Poland in search of her family; living in displaced persons camps in Ainring, Regensburg, and Landsberg, where she met and married Henry Klapholz; immigrating with her husband and baby son in 1948 to the United States; buying a farm in Vineland, NJ; and moving to Philadelphia, PA in 1955.

    Oral history interview with Kurt Kupferberg

    Oral History

    Kurt Kupferberg, born in September 1907 in Berlin, Germany, describes his observant, middle-class family, who were originally from Galicia; how after World War I his family’s citizenship was changed to Polish; being part of the mass deportation to Zbaszyn, Poland in 1938; how a Nazi policeman had warned them to leave Germany earlier; his return to Germany in 1939; his deportation to and experiences in Sachsenhausen in 1939, Dachau in 1940, and Buchenwald in 1941; the selections and medical experimentation performed on him in Buchenwald; suffering from typhus following an injection; how as Allies approached Buchenwald, non-Jewish political prisoners sheltered Jews from the S.S.; liberation from Buchenwald; marrying a survivor in Berlin in 1946; and immigrating with his wife and baby to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Herbert Lindemeyer

    Oral History

    Herbert Lindemeyer, born in Minden, Germany in 1922, describes his father, who owned a pharmacy; antisemitism after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor; the boycott of Jewish stores in April 1933 and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935; his parents’ discussions of whether to emigrate; Kristallnacht and his father’s incarceration in Buchenwald for a month and the confiscation of his pharmacy by the Nazis; immigrating to England in August 1939 through the help of a British Quaker woman; his internment with thousands of German and Austrian refugees in June 1940 on the Isle of Man; being allowed to leave the internment camp in December 1941; working in a defense job in Manchester, England; getting married in January 1944 to a woman who had traveled to England on the Kindertransport; joining the American Army in October 1945 for an assignment in Germany as an interpreter and mail censor; tracking Werner Von Braun; returning to Minden, where the new owner of his father’s pharmacy had kept papers which helped Herbert obtain restitution; and immigrating to the US in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Manya Perel

    Oral History

    Manya Perel (née Frydman), born in 1924 in Radom, Poland, describes being the youngest of 10 children in a traditional Jewish family; her father’s bakery; her education and Jewish life in Radom; antisemitism and the Przytyk pogrom in 1936; German invasion in 1939; the persecutions and the deportation of younger males to Belzec labor camp in 1941; the establishment of a ghetto in Radom; the collaboration of Volksdeutsche and Ukrainians in brutalities and some help by Jewish police; the “resettlement” of Radom Jews to Treblinka in August 1942 while younger, able-bodied persons were retained for forced labor in factories near Radom; her efforts to hide her five-year-old niece in the barracks of a Majdanek subcamp; being transferred to Majdanek, then Płaszów, and then Auschwitz; conditions in the camps; the harsher conditions in Gundelsdorf in Oberfranken, Germany, where slave laborers were taken as the Russian Army approached; experiencing near starvation in early 1945 during their evacuation to camps Ravensbrück and Rechlin; nearly dying of typhus after liberation; returning to Radom to search for family and finding continued antisemitism there; going to Stuttgart with the help of UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee; immigrating to Montreal, Canada in 1948; and moving to Philadelphia, PA in 1958.

    Oral history interview with Anne Weidemann-Russell

    Oral History

    Anne Dore Weidemann-Russell, a non-Jew born in Brandenburg, Germany in 1926, describes going to school from 1933 to 1945 in Brandenburg; her father telling her about the experiences of Germans opposed to Hitler; her uncle being sent to Sachsenhausen; hearing about a Jehovah’s Witness who was imprisoned and later killed for his beliefs; a neighbor who had been a Nazi sympathizer and had a mental breakdown after executing Jews as a soldier on the Eastern Front; Kristallnacht and life in Brandenburg under the Nazis; her father, who was a civil servant, losing his position in 1933 because he was a Social Democrat and belonged to the Socialist Party (SPD); her father’s reasons for opposing the Nazi regime; how her father avoided using the “Heil Hitler” salute and secretly listened to the BBC (British Broadcasting Company); learning to be careful in public because of her father’s beliefs; the local police taking her father into protective custody in July 1944 during a roundup of men suspected of involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler; the behavior of local Nazis near the end of the war; and attending Humbold University in East Berlin and the Free University in West Berlin after the war.

    Oral history interview with Hanna Seckel

    Oral History

    Hanna Seckel (née Dubova), born in Kolin, Czechoslovakia, describes growing up in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); her father, who was a doctor; being involved in the Zionist youth movement; attending a French school until the German occupation in 1939 when the schools were closed and restrictions were imposed on Jews; being 14 years old in 1939 when she went to Denmark on a transport of children from Hashomer Hatzair, sponsored by the Danish League of Peace and Freedom; her life and work in Denmark; working at two farms under harsh conditions; the farms in Gørløse and Naestved; learning through letters from her family about the worsening conditions for Jews in Prague; her parents writing of their immanent deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 and her attempted suicide; the Danish underground called “Radishes”; working as a chambermaid at a Danish boarding school in exchange for her tuition; suffering from her lack of money and being an outsider; how her goal was to get to Palestine; quitting school in 1943 and working as a maid for a family in Naestved; how some refugee children reached Palestine, some were caught, and some were sent back to their original countries by Denmark; being rescued by the Danish underground and the trip to Sweden hidden in a fishing boat; the chief rabbi of Copenhagen, Rabbi Melchior, who was part of the group; being received warmly by Swedish fishermen; the Red Cross handing out supplies and the Swedish police processing them; working as a maid for room and board; working as a maid in exchange for tuition to schools of nursing in Norrköping and Södertälje; losing all contact with her former friends while she was in Uppsala, Sweden; receiving her nursing certificate and working in an insane asylum; returning to Denmark in 1945 because she heard that she was entitled to Danish citizenship, which was not true; working in Copenhagen in a restitution office for Danish Jews; returning to Prague in 1946; living with relatives and earning a degree from Charles University (Univerzita Karlova); returning to Denmark on a Nansen Pass in 1947; going to Sweden and working as a translator in a factory owned by the Noble family; and immigrating to the United States under the Czech quota in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Philip Solomon

    Oral History

    Philip Solomon describes serving in the United States Army as part of the 101st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized), which liberated the Landsberg concentration camp on April 28, 1945; his unit’s arrival in Germany in February/March 1945 and their military mission; their lack of knowledge of concentration camps or the scale of mass murder; how their first indication of Nazi horrors occurred after crossing the Rhine, heading east, when his unit captured small towns, liberating displaced persons from forced labor camps (mostly Eastern Europeans); his second indication came when liberating several prisoner of war camps; the ominous experience of finding sealed railroad cars on a siding filled with dead concentration camp victims; his unit stopping on April 28, 1945 near the city Landsberg, Germany waiting for a bridge to be repaired and unaware of the camp 1000 yards away; how a shift in the wind eventually alerted them to the smell and sight of smoke from the camp, where retreating S.S. had just massacred the inmates; his unit finding about 20 starving and ill survivors; the conditions of the camp and his feelings upon seeing the massive piles of bodies, hangings, and other atrocities; how his unit had no food or medical and could only radio for help; being commanded to leave Landsberg after 20 minutes in order to seize and hold a causeway near Munich, Germany; the reactions of the prisoners to liberation and the response of the young soldiers to the experience of witnessing atrocities in the midst of war; his own complex and gradually evolving psychological reaction to the experience; his concern about genocides since World War II; and his faith and pride in his Jewish heritage.

    Oral history interview with Harold Stern

    Oral History

    Harold Stern, born August 31, 1921 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, describes being the only child of middle-class Jewish parents; his father, who came from an Orthodox background, and his mother, who was raised in a non-observant home; belonging to a large liberal congregation, the Westend Synagogue in Frankfurt; the educational system and antisemitism before and after 1933; the Kultusgemeinde, his Jewish education, and his upbringing; his studies at the Philanthropin (a Jewish secondary school), which he attended in 1935 due to increased antisemitic ex