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Oral history interview with Kitty Weiss Penner

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2016.240.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0885

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    Oral history interview with Kitty Weiss Penner
    Transcript
    What do you-- do you want a slate?
    I'd love a slate, but I mean--
    Yep.
    I can do a slate.
    Bring it down a little bit.
    Right there.
    Marker.
    Perfect.
    OK.
    And you're just going to look at Ina the whole time, Kitty,
    OK.
    And you guys have a nice conversation.
    And--
    There we are.
    --and we're good.
    OK.
    I'll put that in.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    OK.
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Kitty Weiss Penner,
    in South Portland, Maine, on July 29, 2016.
    Thank you so much, Kitty, for agreeing
    to meet with us today, speak with us today, and share your
    and your family's experiences.
    As I explained earlier, we're going
    to be doing a lot of discussion, a lot of delving
    into the past, particularly the European history of your family.
    And we start this with the most basic of questions.
    So I've got three of them, and here they are.
    Can you tell me the date you were born?
    August 7, 1933.
    And where were you born?
    In Vienna, Austria.
    And what was your name at birth?
    Kitty Miriam Weiss.
    Kitty Miriam Weiss.
    And has it stayed Kitty the whole time?
    Yes.
    That was a name my mother found for me.
    She read a book, she liked the name Kitty,
    and so I've been Kitty.
    So it's not a very either German, or Austrian,
    or even Jewish name.
    That's right.
    It's very Anglo.
    Yeah, I think it was a book about England.
    And the character was Kitty.
    Has anybody ever questioned you about it?
    Constantly, they keep fixing my name.
    They get mail from Katherine-- and with a K,
    and Catherine with a C, and they keep--
    Katie, and--
    So even for something as simple and recognizable, that comes up.
    Yes.
    So what about the rest of your family?
    Did you have brothers and sisters?
    Yes.
    I have an-- had an older sister.
    Her name was Inge Weiss.
    And she was 2 and 1/2 years older than me.
    So she was born in 1931?
    Correct.
    And what about your parents?
    What were their names?
    My father's name was Lazer.
    Lazer?
    Lazer.
    Lazer Weiss.
    And he came from Knihynicze.
    Knihynicze.
    Knihynicze.
    And what is that?
    That was in Galicia.
    However, it has changed borders and rulers constantly.
    So when you say Galicia, Knihynicze, was it a shtetl,
    was it a town?
    I believe so.
    I think it was a shtetl.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    Did you ever go there?
    No.
    I've never found it.
    I've never found it on a map.
    But a cousin of mine who is very savvy on the internet found it.
    Oh really?
    Yeah.
    So now at least you know where it is.
    Exactly, and the spelling, which is extraordinary.
    Well, the places in that part of the world
    can have five spellings for small towns, small place, five
    different languages.
    Did your father ever speak of it?
    He did-- not too fondly.
    He was very eager to get away from it.
    And he served in the First World War,
    and had a chance to see the world--
    a little more of the world.
    And he was very eager to get away from Kniehenitch.
    So where-- can you give me a sense.
    Now that you found it on the map, where is Kniehenitch?
    Where in Galicia would that be?
    Today it's Ukraine.
    OK.
    It has changed hands.
    Sometimes called Poland-- the Germans called it Poland.
    And so my passport said Poland.
    Because you had your citizenship based on your father's
    correct birth.
    OK.
    Correct.
    Is it near any large city that you
    were able to place when you finally--
    No.
    But he always spoke of Krakow, which is in Poland.
    Of course.
    And he sort of hoped that--
    that was a goal of his, to go to Krakow.
    Well, that's a beautiful city.
    It is.
    I've been there.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Did your father come from a large family himself?
    He was the oldest, and he had quite a few sisters
    and brothers.
    And his father was a carpenter, and who quickly brought him
    into the business.
    And so he learned carpentry from the knee-high up
    and he became a carpenter, which served him
    very well throughout his life.
    Yes.
    It's one of those types of skills that is transferable.
    Exactly.
    A lawyer may not be able to be a lawyer in every country,
    but a carpenter, that's different.
    Yes.
    And it gave him sort of a privileged position
    during the First World War, when his commanding officer
    recognized his talent and sort of kept him close by to feather
    his love nest, basically.
    And so he made things for this--
    Commanding officer?
    Commanding officer and stayed safe.
    So one thing I didn't ask was which army did he serve with?
    That's also not a done deal.
    Right.
    It must have been the Kaiser's Army.
    So it would have been the German depression army?
    He was drafted.
    Correct.
    Not the Austro-Hungarian army?
    You know, I don't know.
    I don't know.
    Poland, when it was subdivided--
    well, basically torn apart in 1795,
    is when it went to Austria-Hungary, to Prussia,
    and to Russia.
    And when your father was born, he
    was born in one of those three places,
    whether it was the Russian part--
    I think it was Austria.
    Austria, yes.
    So then it probably was the Austrian Army.
    --Army, Correct.
    OK.
    OK.
    He spoke German, so.
    OK.
    Well, both places, Prussia and Austria-Hungary--
    Well, they were on the same side.
    Yeah.
    What else did you-- did he tell you about his life
    as he was growing up that sticks in your mind?
    Well, they were in a small town.
    And everybody watched everybody else and made sure
    that you were doing the right thing.
    That you were going to cheder, you were observing the holidays.
    And of course, it was a very kosher home.
    And that was all he knew.
    When his father died suddenly, he was 14 years old.
    Oh, he was very young.
    He was very young, and he became the head of the house.
    That's a huge burden for a young boy.
    It was, and he never--
    he never quite got over it.
    I mean, I think the man was a genius.
    Your father?
    Yes.
    And the older I get, the more I can
    relate to what he went through.
    But he was very stern.
    And he had all these kids to take care of and his mother
    to take care of--
    and he did.
    He did.
    So what year was he born?
    He was born in 1892.
    OK.
    So his father would have died in 1906, something like that.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    And he took care of these kids.
    Had learned the carpentry trade from his own father
    during those first few years that he had with him.
    And he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army
    during World War I, where the carpentry kept him safe.
    Exactly.
    Exactly.
    Did you ever know any of your aunts and uncles, his brothers
    and sisters?
    I knew two of them.
    There was of hard feelings in that family, very, very
    hard feelings.
    And so there was a rift.
    And I did not really get to know them.
    I know of them, but I did not have
    a direct experience with them.
    So you say, when you know two of them, you know of two of them,
    rather than having met them.
    I think we did meet them.
    In fact, one of my father's sisters
    came to meet the boat when we arrived.
    Oh I see.
    So she had already been to the United States.
    She was already in America.
    Yes.
    My grandmother's-- my father's mother, Chaya Rivka Goldberg,
    had a large extended family.
    And some of them had emigrated to the United States,
    probably before the First World War.
    And so there was a family on this side of the ocean.
    Yes.
    And they were the ones who provided the first visas
    for our family.
    We'll come to that.
    We'll come to that.
    Now what did your father tell you about his own parents?
    What kind of people they were and things like that?
    He didn't really talk about them too much.
    As I say, by the time he was talking to me,
    there was this rift.
    Do you know what it was due to?
    It was a lack of appreciation for what he had done for them.
    It was a lack of acknowledgment.
    And he just couldn't get over that.
    So he just turned his back on them.
    It was very painful.
    I can imagine-- or I can't imagine, actually.
    Well, it meant that we didn't have any supportive family
    around.
    Yeah.
    And that means in Vienna.
    No.
    This was in the United States.
    In Vienna, his mother had her own apartment,
    which my father supported.
    So you knew your grandmother?
    A little bit, yeah.
    Do you have any memories of her?
    Just that she was very tiny--
    very tiny.
    And she didn't speak German.
    She spoke Yiddish.
    And we didn't have much--
    much contact.
    Yeah.
    What about religion?
    Was he brought up in a very Orthodox family, or?
    I don't think they were really committed to orthodoxy,
    but the trappings of orthodoxy.
    A kosher home and the food and observation of major holidays.
    But I don't think the real ethnic deepness
    of the Jewish religion was something that they actually
    felt connected to.
    Even your grandparents' generation?
    I think it was just--
    Tradition?
    Yes.
    Just the trappings of it.
    I don't think they were intellectually rooted
    in Judaism.
    Did the children-- that means your father and his siblings--
    what kind of schooling did they get?
    Well, as I said, my father left school by the time he was 14.
    And he was very frustrated with the schooling
    because it was German one day, and then
    they'd come back from a vacation,
    and they-- everything was in Polish.
    Then everything was in Russian.
    And he just lost patience with the whole thing.
    He just said, "To heck with it."
    Yeah.
    Well, that's what happens when borders change, you know?
    He just-- it was too frustrating.
    Yeah.
    Sure.
    I'm sure.
    Now your mother, let's turn to her side of the family.
    Where is your mother from?
    My mother was born in Vienna.
    And what was her maiden name?
    Her maiden name was Zhengut, which means 10 times good.
    And her parents were Austrian.
    Her father was a photographer and a inventor.
    He invented a washing machine, and he invented
    all kinds of useful things.
    But he never made money.
    He never made money at that.
    Sometimes it's not the inventors who do.
    It's the people who take their ideas and market them.
    Right.
    And there were no patents and everything.
    But he was a very kindly person, very generous and very nice.
    Do you remember him?
    Barely.
    Barely.
    I remember my mother's impressions of him,
    where he was very gentle and very kind to the girls.
    She had two sisters and she was the youngest.
    And her mother was--
    her maiden name-- the mother's maiden name
    was Ernestina Deutch.
    Ernestine German.
    Yes.
    Deutch.
    And she had several siblings whom I knew.
    And she actually was the breadwinner of the family.
    And she did sewing, which many of the women did in those days
    because everything was handmade--
    clothing was handmade.
    And so she supported the family.
    And she was-- she had a tough job.
    She had a tough job.
    At a time when that wasn't acknowledged
    so easily, or almost at all by society,
    that women were supporting families more than men were.
    Some of them ended up in such a predicament.
    Was your maternal side of the family well-to-do or struggling,
    do you think?
    I think they were struggling.
    I think they were struggling to be middle class.
    But they valued culture.
    They loved to go to the opera, and dances,
    and beautiful clothes, and Vienna was sort of a--
    I don't know-- high-class place like Paris or New York.
    Before the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell, it certainly was.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    And the trappings are still there,
    the baroque buildings, and the opera, and museums and--
    that's still there.
    And the art and the music--
    very, very proud of it, the Austrians,
    especially the Viennese.
    Now do you know much about your mother's side
    of the family, if they had been Viennese for generations
    or whether they had come from someplace else?
    Well, with the name of Deutch, I would guess that maybe they
    were sort of more from Germany.
    OK.
    And her father, Zehngut, had a branch
    of the family that was in Eisenstadt.
    Where is that?
    Which is-- well, it was the mining area,
    probably more to the east.
    So there was some relationship there.
    So it was Austria--
    Within those lands, within the German-speaking lands.
    Exactly.
    Exactly.
    And the Austrian Empire, the Hungarian Empire
    was quite extensive.
    What was your mother's first name?
    Stella.
    Stella.
    And so her maiden name was--
    she was Stella Zehngut.
    Correct.
    Do you know how your parents met?
    I do not.
    I do not.
    Were they very different as people?
    I think so.
    I think they were.
    I think my mother was very proud of her Austrian heritage
    and sort of lauded it over my father, who
    was the country bumpkin.
    Well, you know, I didn't want to ask it quite like that.
    But these are different worlds, the world of Vienna.
    Even if you are, let's say, in a lower-middle class and the world
    of the town I can't pronounce--
    Kniehenitch.
    Kniehenitch.
    The world of Kniehenitch are two different ones.
    For sure.
    And when they're blended, how do they mix?
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    There was always that tension.
    Yeah.
    But she recognized that he always earned a good living,
    and that he was very reliable and very dependable,
    but had rough edges.
    What were their personalities like as people, your parents?
    Well, my father loved to work.
    He really liked his work.
    He knew that he had ability.
    He could look at something and make it.
    He could design something new, and did.
    I have some of his furniture that he made for me.
    Oh really?
    Yes.
    Made here in the United States.
    So he was really--
    I think he was a genius.
    If he had had any schooling, he would have--
    God knows where he would have been.
    But and my mother was very, you would have to call it shtalts.
    Proud.
    She was very proud.
    Yeah.
    And snooty.
    Kind of snooty.
    I have to say that.
    Yeah.
    And so she always liked pretty things,
    and made sure that her girls had pretty things,
    and that sort of thing.
    But she was a very strong woman.
    I mean, she was the one who signed us up to come to America.
    My father was in Kniehenitch taking care of things there.
    He was out of town at the time.
    And she signed us up when he came home.
    It was a fait accompli.
    Oh my goodness.
    Yeah.
    He went crazy.
    I can imagine.
    I can imagine.
    One parent taking the decision on the children--
    and such a decision.
    Yes.
    We'll come to that.
    We'll come to that.
    But this sets the scene.
    This really does.
    And what about as parents?
    Was there one parent that you were closer to than the other?
    Well, I think children are--
    especially girls-- are close to their mothers.
    And it's only later that they discover
    that their fathers are people, too my father seemed brusque.
    And he was very powerfully built, so he was a little scary.
    Was he a handsome man?
    I think so, yeah.
    They were both handsome people.
    So yeah.
    For a little girl, he was--
    He was tough.
    Yeah.
    I sort of--
    Were your parents strong disciplinarians?
    Well, they were very protective for girls, very protective.
    But we were such good girls.
    We didn't do anything.
    We were such good girls.
    We were so obedient and nice.
    You were well behaved?
    Yes.
    I don't know where that came from, but I made up for it.
    The second part of one's life, one undoes the first part.
    Probably.
    Can I just interrupt?
    Do you have your little tissue there?
    And kind of just dab your chin maybe--
    Can I spit?
    You can do whatever you want.
    it's just a little bit shiny, that's all.
    Just kind of try [CROSS TALK]
    How's that?
    That's fine.
    Can you do forehead a little bit?
    Yeah.
    Thank you.
    Yeah.
    Good.
    Thank you.
    Yeah.
    I thought you were editing that.
    OK.
    Are we on?
    We-- I'm rolling now, I can stop.
    We're rolling again.
    OK.
    What do you remember from home, from your home in Vienna?
    Can you tell me what it looked like?
    We had an apartment in Vienna.
    I believe it was on the second floor.
    And it was on Rotensterngasse.
    Rotensterngasse.
    Rotensterngasse.
    Red Star Street, huh?
    Uh-huh.
    Alley, actually.
    And I remember that each room had a ceramic heater.
    You mean one of those old stoves that you put coal into?
    Exactly.
    Those used to be huge.
    Each room had its own heating.
    Vienna, being in central Europe, was quite chilly.
    So yes, and it was heated with coals.
    The furniture, my father made every stitch.
    Really?
    Everything that you had in your home--
    Everything, yes.
    Did he have a workshop nearby?
    Yes.
    OK.
    I don't know the address of it, but it was nearby.
    And it was a Jewish neighborhood.
    And it was not fancy.
    I mean, we didn't have the furniture that we have today.
    We did not entertain at home.
    My children puzzled about that, that I don't entertain.
    Didn't you entertain in Vienna?
    No, people met in cafes.
    It was only family that came home and had--
    I would say that's like Manhattan.
    In Manhattan, people don't have space to entertain,
    so they meet in restaurants.
    Well, they meet in restaurants, but this was-- this
    predates that by quite a bit.
    The home was for the family.
    So it was more than just space.
    It was a tradition, it was it way.
    It was, yes.
    And it was around the dining room table and meals
    that one had entertainment with the family.
    So there was not the easy chair kind of sitting area.
    There were bedrooms.
    And there was probably like a big common area.
    I don't remember the kitchen at all.
    I probably was not permitted to go into the kitchen.
    We did have a maid because there was so much in terms of coal,
    and laundry, and cooking that unless you were very poor,
    you had a maid.
    It was far more prevalent in Europe.
    Yes.
    It was not unusual.
    It was not the status thing that we have. it was a necessity.
    And the maid very often would be a young woman
    from the country who was looking for opportunities to meet
    a nice young man, somebody that wouldn't be in her hometown.
    Everybody wanted to get away from all those eyes.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Totally understandable.
    But I do remember that we had Christmas for the maid,
    and I would hang up the stocking,
    and I would get a hunk of coal in the toe,
    just to keep me humble, and oranges.
    And it was not a matter of toys so much,
    but it was just little things.
    But I do remember the hunk of coal
    which was supposed to be that you were a bad girl.
    And you weren't.
    No.
    Yeah.
    Let's see, what else?
    Well, when things got bad, after Kristallnacht, which was 1938,
    which I do remember--
    and so pretty soon the maid said that she couldn't
    work for a Jewish family.
    Her boyfriend was a Nazi.
    And so the maid left.
    And that was a real change.
    It was.
    It was.
    Did your mother--
    We really liked her.
    What was her name?
    Erica.
    Did your mother take in sewing like your grandmother did?
    No.
    No.
    She did not have to do that.
    OK.
    So was her role basically running the household?
    Exactly.
    She was running the household and taking my sister to school.
    And then when things got bad, and she was trying
    to figure out what to do--
    of course my father was working, working, working--
    she was figuring out what to do, she left us alone.
    And my sister went to school.
    Now I can't imagine that I was totally alone in the apartment,
    but I would paint.
    I was painting and drawing from time I could hold a pencil.
    And so I was busy with my own things that I was doing.
    This was on paper, not like on the walls or anything like that.
    No, no, no.
    This was on paper with watercolors--
    See, I painted on the walls--
    No, I wouldn't think--
    --with lipstick.
    --of that.
    Oh my goodness.
    You were a free spirit.
    I paid.
    I bet.
    I bet.
    Yeah.
    No, no.
    This was just at a desk.
    And I would be busy for hours.
    Let's go back before history and politics makes itself felt.
    Did you have plumbing?
    Oh yes.
    Oh yes.
    So there was running water?
    Running water.
    There was a bathroom?
    Plumbing-- yes, yes.
    Tub, yes.
    OK.
    And of course, I would assume electricity.
    Yes.
    Even a telephone.
    You had a telephone.
    We did.
    Did you have a radio?
    Yes.
    One of those big, curvy jobs.
    Yes.
    And my father listened intently in the evening to the radio.
    Do you know what kind-- was it music, or was it news,
    or was it--
    Oh he wanted only the news.
    But there was music, too, yes.
    At the workshop where he worked, was he self-employed
    and the only person?
    He was.
    No.
    He hired.
    He had people working for him.
    And one worker in particular was--
    probably had been with him for years.
    And he actually warned us of Kristallnacht.
    Really?
    And warned that we were not to open the door, no matter what.
    And when the storm troopers and the Black Shirts
    came, and knocked on the door and banged and called
    for my father to come out, he did not.
    He would have been sent off to Buchenwald or God knows where.
    So I just want to make sure-- can you
    tell me the name of that worker who warned your father?
    Did you know him?
    I can't come up with a name, no.
    No.
    I guess I didn't--
    I didn't really go to the shop.
    Yeah.
    Did any of them ever come to your home, any of these workers?
    No.
    No.
    No.
    But was your father friendly with them then?
    I guess so.
    I guess he was a good employer.
    He was very short with people.
    They had to-- he had few people.
    In the United States, he never kept a worker.
    They just didn't do it right or he didn't
    have the patience to teach.
    Yeah.
    I see.
    But there, this person felt this obligation.
    Right.
    Kristallnacht in Germany had preceded the one in Austria.
    So what was the date for Austria?
    It was November 10, 1938.
    OK.
    I believe it was the day earlier.
    In Germany, yes.
    In Germany, yes.
    Yes.
    And so he got wind of it and warned my father.
    Did your father ever speak of that in later years?
    Not really, no.
    Do you remember the banging on the door?
    Oh yes.
    Oh yes.
    We were all in one bed.
    Were you really?
    Yeah.
    And the idea was to be hushed and not make a peep,
    not breathe.
    And so they went away, and they came back,
    and they banged and yelled again.
    But at that, time they didn't break in.
    They didn't break in.
    They just expected cooperation.
    Yeah.
    And that was-- you said you lived in a Jewish neighborhood.
    Yes.
    So that would have been a target area.
    Oh for sure, yeah.
    And the next day, do you remember seeing other things
    or things being different?
    Oh yes, yeah.
    What did you see?
    A lot of broken glass.
    Storefronts had been smashed.
    I don't remember-- I know that they broke into the synagogues
    and set fires.
    And the police and the fire department
    just watched and let it happen.
    And the next day, they got old man with beards
    to clean it up on their knees.
    You saw that?
    To clean up the streets.
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    With buckets of water.
    And did your father go to work the following day?
    I believe so.
    And you said that--
    how did you know that he could--
    well, this must have been afterwards.
    Did you hear of people who had been
    picked up, men from families and sent to Buchenwald?
    I personally don't know.
    But I've certainly read about it.
    And that was the first round.
    Although, intellectuals and people who were prominent
    were rounded up--
    had been that that was an ongoing process.
    I jumped ahead of myself a little bit.
    I want to go back to the smaller world
    without the politics in it.
    You say-- and I'm going to repeat a little bit--
    your father was at the workshop, he hired workers.
    Correct.
    As subcontractors, do you think, or as permanent workers?
    Oh, as permanent workers.
    Yes.
    Everything was done by hand.
    There probably was an electric saw or something like that,
    but everything was done, measured, and cut, glued--
    Did you ever visit the place?
    Not in Vienna, no.
    OK, only here.
    And your mother ran the household,
    and you had a maid named Erica who
    stayed with you until her boyfriend, whom she did find
    having left the village, who was a member
    of the Nazi, the Nazi party, or at least a young--
    Yeah.
    He was a sympathizer.
    Yeah.
    No longer could she work there.
    And before then, your sister went to school.
    Yes.
    Had you started school?
    No.
    So your world was the home world.
    Exactly.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    Now did you know your grandmother--
    your maternal grandmother, your maternal grandfather?
    Did they visit the home?
    Did they come and see you?
    I don't remember.
    I don't remember that.
    OK.
    And do you remember other people coming and sitting
    around your dining room table and being with you?
    I don't remember that.
    Do you remember going to the cafes and meeting people there?
    No.
    Did your parents have much of a social life?
    I think they were mostly focused on family.
    OK.
    And did they talk much to one another about these events,
    this wider world?
    My father sort of--
    as I said, he listened to the radio.
    And my mother read the newspapers.
    And he said Hitler was a menace, and that he
    was going to go after England, which was out of the blue.
    Nobody really thought that that would ever happen.
    But he really-- and he says, well,
    he's going to go after England.
    My mother read the paper.
    And my mother socialized in the cafes.
    And there was an exchange of information.
    I mean, that's all they really talked about was the oncoming
    menace, and how do we get out?
    My mother-- I don't know how she got
    the addresses of the family that was in New York.
    And wrote to them--
    You mean your father's side of the family?
    Correct.
    She wrote to them and asked for visas for the family.
    Did they supply them?
    Pardon?
    Did the New York relatives supply them?
    Well, I think they wrote back that they were not wealthy,
    and that they would send a visa for my father.
    And that as soon as he became established,
    he would bring the family.
    And that's the way it had been done previously.
    It's true.
    I mean, in the first wave of immigration,
    that often is what happened.
    One family member came over and then brought the rest.
    Correct.
    But who knew that this was not going
    to be that kind of situation?
    Exactly.
    Exactly.
    So they sent papers--
    visa.
    And immigration was tight.
    The visas were allocated according to strict quotas.
    And so they sent visas for my father.
    His mother, who was the relative that they knew,
    and I believe for his brother.
    Was his brother in Vienna as well?
    I guess so.
    I guess so.
    You don't know.
    Yeah.
    I guess he lived with his mother.
    Oh OK.
    And that was in a separate apartment.
    So when your father had turned his back on the family,
    it wasn't to his mother.
    It was much later.
    Oh, that was much later.
    It was stateside-- stateside.
    No, he supported his family through thick and thin.
    And so they sent those visas, and not for my mother,
    and not for my sister and me.
    And so my mother, as I said, was constantly
    reading the newspapers, and talking to people,
    and hearing how everybody was trying to get away.
    And she came across this article in the paper
    that this family was coming and they
    were going to bring 50 children out of Vienna.
    This must have been a Jewish newspaper-- was it?
    I don't know.
    My mother did not read Hebrew.
    No, no, no.
    But I mean a German-speaking-- or maybe there weren't any
    by that point--
    because I can't imagine that in an Austrian newspaper
    such a thing would have been published.
    I think it might have been a little ad, something like that.
    Maybe something innocuous.
    Yeah.
    They were-- the Krauses were below the radar.
    They were very-- they did not call attention
    to themselves either in Vienna or when
    they got to the United States.
    It was very hush-hush.
    There were Kindertransports going to England.
    A lot.
    Yes.
    And my cousins went.
    Your mother's side?
    Yes.
    Tell me about that.
    What did you know of that?
    Well, I did know my cousins.
    Herta, who was older, she was a teenager, and her brother
    Freddie, who was the only grandboy--
    grandchild-- grandson.
    And so he had a special place.
    Of course he would.
    And so we were closer to them.
    And we went to the park together and stuff like that.
    And my aunt, Olga, had an opportunity to sign her kids up.
    This is your mother's-- one of your mother's older sisters?
    Correct, her oldest sister.
    And so that was a little precedent that--
    and of course they were older than my sister and me.
    So Herta went to England as an au pair to a family.
    And Freddie was adopted into an English home
    where they had already adopted a boy out of Berlin.
    So that was the precedent.
    And they left quite a while before my sister and I.
    And your mother's father, was he alive then, your grandfather?
    He was.
    He had cancer at some point, came down with cancer--
    you know, these things, whether there's a war going on or--
    and he was at home and he died I think shortly after we left.
    Yeah.
    And your grandmother, your maternal grandmother,
    was she alive?
    She was alive and her oldest daughter stayed back with her.
    That wasn't Herta.
    That was--
    That was Herta's mother.
    Oh excuse me.
    So Herta's mother stayed.
    Yes.
    And her name was what?
    Olga.
    Olga.
    Excuse me.
    You had told me.
    Yes.
    So they two stay together.
    Yes.
    And what about the other sister?
    The other sister, Annie, was married--
    well, Olga was married, too.
    Annie went-- her husband was Bulgarian.
    Let's cut.
    [AUDIO OUT]
    So Annie, what happened with her?
    Annie was married, she had no children.
    Her husband was Bulgarian.
    His name was Tager.
    Annie Tager.
    And we always called him Tager.
    I don't know that he had any other name-- he must've.
    But when things got bad, everybody kind of made a plan.
    And they said, well, I'm going to do this,
    and either you're going to come with me or you're not.
    And many people did that.
    So what did Annie do?
    Annie, I think she went to France.
    And ultimately, she was interned in a camp in Nice.
    And she spent the war years in Nice and survived.
    What about Tager?
    What happened to him?
    No one knows.
    He went back to Bulgaria and disappeared.
    Was he Jewish?
    I believe so, yes.
    So that could have been--
    Right.
    Right.
    He got caught in some net.
    And Olga?
    Olga was married to a man named Ulmacher
    who was the father of those children, my cousins.
    And he-- she said she had to stay back and take care
    of her parents as the oldest.
    And as I said, my grandfather probably
    had early signs of cancer at that time.
    She stayed back and sent her children to England.
    So Herta was the one who was the au pair?
    Yes.
    OK.
    And what about her father?
    So what happened to Mr. Ulmacher?
    He wound up in South America, in Caracas.
    After the war?
    Before the war?
    I don't know when he got to Caracas.
    But he had a whole new life in Caracas.
    But Olga stayed with her mother?
    Olga stayed with her mother.
    And I always thought that the two of them
    stayed together and went--
    were sent to Theresienstadt together.
    And from there, to Auschwitz.
    But I understand they were separated
    and they went to Auschwitz at two different times.
    And is that the--
    no trace then after that?
    No.
    OK.
    No.
    And after the war, my mother sent for Annie
    to come to the United States.
    And did she?
    And she came to New York, yes.
    She came to live with us for a short time.
    And then she went off on her own and went to the cafes
    as she always did in Vienna, and continued
    playing cards in the cafes.
    And at one time, she was playing cards,
    she said I have a terrible headache, fell over.
    She had had a massive brain hemorrhage and died.
    Oh my goodness.
    Shortly after she came.
    To the United States.
    To the United States, yes.
    Wow.
    What different destinies for everybody.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    And what it shows is how families were completely torn--
    I mean, people can tear one another apart.
    But these are outside forces that come in and--
    And how you deal.
    Yeah.
    And how you deal.
    And how they tear, and what do you do,
    and how you end up one place and like another--
    it's like a storm.
    It was.
    It was.
    That's why it's the Holocaust.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    You were such a little girl.
    Mm-hmm.
    Do you remember-- children remember through their emotions
    very often.
    Do you remember what your emotions might have been
    or were?
    Not what they might have been, what they were?
    I remember going to pick up my sister at school with my mother.
    We walked to get her at the end of the day.
    And there were other mothers standing outside
    and jeering and yelling about the Jewish children.
    I don't know what they were-- but it was horrible.
    And these were mothers jeering at the Jewish children
    coming out of school.
    They had separated-- you couldn't go to a regular school.
    They were now into Jewish schools.
    So this was jeering in front of a Jewish school?
    Probably.
    Yeah.
    That's where she went.
    And so pretty soon, she didn't continue going to school.
    Did Inge talk at all about what school life
    would have been like?
    Because you were little and you hadn't yet gone,
    and it's a new thing.
    No, she didn't talk about it that I remember.
    But I had great confidence in my parents.
    I just trusted that they knew what to do.
    So in other words, you were you had a security kind of--
    Yes.
    Yes.
    I felt secure, I did.
    I felt secure and I felt confident.
    I sort of got that from them, that they felt confident
    that they would figure it out.
    Now did your father travel to Knie--
    Kniehenitch.
    Kniehenitch.
    I mean, for someone who has such a--
    He had property there.
    Such a long last name as mine, and I can't pronounce it--
    it's shameful.
    Kniehenitch.
    He had property there, you're saying?
    Yes.
    So did any of his siblings stay in Kniehenitch?
    I believe that--
    I believe that I think maybe there
    was one that stayed there and was still there.
    OK.
    But everybody else had kind of scattered?
    Right.
    All right.
    So he had property there and he was going back?
    Yes, to see what he could--
    I don't know-- what he could sell, or what he could rescue,
    or what they had taken at that time.
    Was this a one-time visit or was this something
    that he did on a regular basis?
    I don't think he did it on a regular basis.
    I think he went to sort of clear things out, to settle things.
    OK.
    And it's during this time that your mother finds out something,
    sees this ad.
    Right.
    Correct.
    And what happens then?
    Well, she inquired about it.
    And she said, count me in.
    Take my girls.
    Take my girls to America.
    And the hope was that when my father's family saw
    how desperate they were by sending the girls away alone
    that they would send the visa for her, which
    indeed is what happened.
    They did send the visa.
    They saw that we were-- did not have horns, that we
    were normal, healthy girls.
    And my sister's job was to beg them to send
    that last visa for my mother.
    Oh my gosh.
    What a--
    It was quite a responsibility, and I don't
    think she ever got over it.
    Yeah.
    I don't think she--
    that was her task, one, to look after me, and, two,
    to convince them--
    And she only had like one little visit--
    to send the papers for my mother.
    In what ways would you say your sister didn't get over it?
    How did it show itself?
    I think she always felt that she had extra responsibility
    and that I got a free pass, which
    there's some truth to that.
    And in some ways, it's an echo of your father
    having had too many burdens.
    Exactly.
    Exactly.
    But it is a huge--
    had it not worked--
    and it would never have been anything of your sister's fault
    because she's a child--
    the kind of burden that was on her should she fail is huge.
    So do you remember saying goodbye
    to your mother and your father?
    I remember the fight when my father came home.
    All the yelling and screaming and carrying on.
    What have you done?
    You must be crazy.
    You're insane to send your children away.
    But he already had the visa.
    And he already was secure.
    And she was desperate, absolutely desperate.
    This was her last chance and our last chance.
    And she was right.
    Absolutely.
    She was very wise.
    She was very wise, intuitively wise.
    So she said--
    So he came to terms and she put her foot down, huh?
    She said, they're going.
    And she made all the arrangements
    for my father and his mother and his brother
    to travel to America.
    How bitter that is, though.
    That's what she did.
    Everybody gets to go and I'm back here.
    Exactly.
    And she was a hair's breath away from Olga's fate.
    Exactly.
    So do you remember taking leave of your parents?
    I remember the train station.
    And we all sort of--
    everything had been said.
    There was nothing to say.
    It was silent.
    Was it a heavy silence?
    Yeah, it was.
    And the station was patrolled by Black Shirts and Brown Shirts
    and we just waited for the train.
    We were not going to miss that train.
    Did you have anybody accompany you?
    The other children.
    Do you remember having gone to a US consulate
    to get paperwork, to get medical exams?
    Do you remember anything of the process?
    I remember being interviewed.
    And I remember what I thought was sort of silly questions.
    Would you make a window out of wood or would you make it out
    of glass, you know.
    Being a carpenter's daughter, I had a hint on that.
    Stuff like that, and maybe a Rorschach test
    and physical exam.
    But that was the question that I remember.
    And I was a very charming kid.
    I was.
    That stayed.
    I was cute.
    And so they said, yeah.
    She's just on the border of the right age--
    just on the border.
    Which meant you could have been too young.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Do you remember meeting the Krauses?
    I remember them on the ship.
    I don't remember meeting them.
    I remember meeting the doctor, Dr. Schless.
    And then I remember meeting them on the ship.
    Who was Dr. Schless?
    He was their German-speaking spokesperson.
    In Vienna?
    He came from America with the Krauses.
    And he was their German-speaking envoy
    who was able to talk to people.
    They didn't speak German.
    OK.
    What do you remember of him?
    Dr. Schless?
    Mm-hmm.
    He was just a kindly man.
    And I'm reading Stephen Pressman's book.
    He has several children-- he was a widower
    and had several children of his own.
    So he was good with kids.
    But going outside of his book, if you can remember this--
    One second.
    And we are rolling here.
    Yeah.
    What I'd like to get a sense of is
    Dr. Schless, from your memory as a little girl.
    What did he look like?
    You say he was kind and--
    He had glasses.
    He was not imposing.
    He was very easy to talk to.
    He was very pleasant.
    That's all I really remember.
    And you remember going out of your house
    to meet him someplace?
    Yes.
    I don't remember where.
    It was some office place, it was--
    yeah.
    OK.
    You say the air was heavy when you--
    The train station.
    --at the train station.
    It was May, 1939.
    You remember?
    I don't remember the date.
    But you remember that it was May.
    Yeah, something like that.
    Yeah, early spring.
    Was the heaviness due to the fact
    that your parents had had this huge fight?
    Or was it due to the politics of the situation?
    Both.
    Both.
    It was just-- we were saying goodbye.
    Although, the actual goodbye had--
    and the whole why we're going, and I'll see you soon,
    and that--
    that had all transpired.
    That had all been done.
    Yeah.
    Let's cut.
    And you're just looking right at Ina again, Kitty.
    OK.
    So we talked about Dr. Schlesser.
    We talked about--
    I think his name was Schless.
    Schless, excuse me.
    We talked about the heaviness of the air and what it was due to.
    Now you're very little.
    Did you know what being Jewish meant?
    Well, I knew it was a burden because I remember walking down
    the street with my father one time and we were--
    I think we were going to the bakery.
    And this man in uniform came up-- as I said,
    I was a cute kid--
    came up and he said--
    and started talking to me.
    And he said, are you Catholische?
    Ist du Catholische?
    And I said, no, I'm Polish.
    That must have gone over well.
    He was flabbergasted is all I know.
    And he didn't say another word.
    He turned on his heel and walked away.
    But my father held his breath.
    OK, well, being Polish--
    or being Jewish Polish--
    neither was great.
    Well, Polish was synonymous at that time with being Jewish.
    In Vienna.
    Yes.
    My little passport said Polish, not Austrian, Polish.
    That was like a code word.
    Isn't that interesting?
    Isn't that interesting?
    I wouldn't have thought that there would be
    an equals sign between the two.
    But--
    I believe so.
    Clearly.
    Well, there are many--
    there were many Jews from Poland living in Vienna.
    They were many.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    And your mother, did she have an Austrian passport?
    You know, I don't know.
    I don't know.
    And would she have had to change it?
    I think she also--
    because she was married to someone who was
    Polish, even though he was--
    I don't know-- Ukrainian or whatever, was labeled Polish.
    OK.
    And so you knew that it was something that was a burden.
    Mm-hmm.
    Were your parents religious at home-- your own parents?
    My mother kept a Jewish-- a kosher home,
    but I don't remember any big hoopla.
    Yes, my mother went off to Yom Kippur and--
    but it was not a big deal.
    But it also sounds fairly flexible,
    if she put Christmas stockings.
    Yes.
    Well, ostensibly, that was for the maid.
    For the maid, yes.
    But it was fun for the kids.
    I can also see that it would have
    a feeling that you wouldn't be left out
    from that other kids have.
    Exactly.
    Exactly.
    Do you remember anything of the train ride?
    No.
    I remember the train stopped in Berlin.
    And subsequently-- I mean, I knew we were in Berlin.
    I didn't know why we were there.
    Apparently, we were there to get the last exit papers.
    And if we hadn't gotten those, we
    would have had to turn around and go back home.
    So we were at this Jewish--
    some kind of Jewish organizational building.
    And my sister and I were in bunk beds.
    And there was a big to-do downstairs in the street--
    marching, and music, and parade.
    And so my sister jumped down from her upper bunk
    and came into my bed.
    And then we peeked out the window,
    and we thought it was Hitler.
    And we watched.
    And saw this-- all this uniforms and flags,
    and it was very frightening.
    It turned out it was kind of the solidifying
    the relationship between Germany and Italy.
    Von Ribbentrop was representing the German Reich,
    and Mussolini's son-in-law Ciano,
    was representing the Italians.
    And this was their allegiance--
    their alliance being cemented with great pomp.
    How interesting.
    And we watched it.
    How did you trace that back?
    Because as a five-year-old, you wouldn't know.
    No, I thought it was Hitler from all the pomp that was happening,
    and the marching, and the uniforms, and the flags.
    Subsequently, from Stephen Pressman's book and his research
    filled in the details.
    I see.
    I see.
    Isn't it interesting when you see dots that connect things
    that you yourself have seen?
    It was wonderful to fill in the spaces
    because I just had a generalized impression of what was going on.
    Was there an adult accompanying all the children from Vienna?
    There were the Krauses, there was Dr. Schless,
    and there were two nurses for 50 children.
    Excuse me.
    Now we can [INAUDIBLE]
    Excuse me.
    There were two nurses.
    Two nurses-- or women in white uniforms.
    So there was very little supervision.
    I can imagine.
    I can imagine.
    Can you imagine 50 children?
    Chaos.
    Well--
    Or were you very well-behaved children?
    We were very well-behaved children, but we were curious.
    Yeah.
    And we ran all over that ship, my sister and I.
    You're talking about the ship now?
    Yes.
    I'm still on the train.
    Oh sorry.
    That's OK.
    So on the train--
    I guess I'm wondering, when you say goodbye to the two adults
    that you know, your parents, is there
    somebody that you remember who kind of takes over,
    or no adults are kind of foggy, hazy?
    We were on our own.
    OK.
    And my mother said, you are going to have a wonderful time.
    And you believed her.
    I totally believed her, and I made sure that I did.
    So I made--
    I was curious, I looked around, I had my sister.
    And I was out for adventure.
    Oh how wonderful.
    I mean, she put that security blanket around you
    it stayed there.
    She did.
    She said, you're going to have a great time.
    OK.
    Do you remember anything else from that train ride?
    I don't remember eating.
    I don't remember sleeping.
    I don't remember any of it.
    OK.
    And now you're on the ship.
    Mm-hmm.
    Do you remember what the ship looked like?
    Big-- it was a big ship with a very loud horn.
    And we took off and we went from Hamburg to Southampton, England.
    And then we went across the ocean.
    So were there other passengers not
    part of this group of children?
    There must have been.
    I'm going to pause for a second.
    OK.
    We're rolling again.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    I wanted to get a sense of that ship life.
    Were there people on there who weren't
    part of the group of children?
    Was it like a regular passenger liner?
    I'm sure it was, but I am not aware of--
    I don't know whether we had a separate dining room
    or they kind of kept us together as best they could.
    Do you remember being seasick?
    No.
    No.
    And now, this is the part where I had kind of interrupted you
    before, when we went train, ship, train, ship.
    So what did you guys do on this ship?
    We ran around.
    Sounds like great fun.
    We ran up and down the stairs, and we ran up the decks,
    and we explored.
    And we found first class playroom
    with fabulous rocking horses, or FAO Schwarz toys.
    I mean, we weren't supposed to be there.
    But there were no other children there at the time.
    So maybe there were no other children
    on the ship besides these.
    And so we availed ourselves of that fabulous playroom.
    And as far as I remember, we did not like the food.
    It was not familiar.
    But we did find a barrel of apples, and we ate those.
    You remember this?
    I remember-- yes-- stealing apples.
    And but I don't remember sitting at a table
    or anything like that.
    I just remember being totally free.
    I mean, we could have fallen overboard,
    not even made a splash.
    And every once in a while, the two nurses in white
    would be kind of seen around?
    Seen especially for taking pictures,
    photographs, documentation.
    But I can't remember seeing them.
    I don't remember what our bunk was like.
    I just
    Do you remember playing with other kids?
    Just my sister.
    No.
    No.
    We were--
    And how was Inge doing?
    The older you are, the less that security blanket can work.
    Well, again, she had a heavy responsibility
    to keep track of me, which was probably quite a job.
    But she went along with me.
    I mean, we had fun.
    And so I don't remember being seasick.
    I don't remember--
    I remember taking a bath in saltwater.
    The water, even the hot water, was sourced from the ocean,
    and it had a particular smell.
    Bad or good?
    Different-- just different.
    OK.
    And many years later, when I was in Atlantic City, lo and behold,
    the bathtub water was saltwater and had a particular odor.
    And that brought you back?
    Yes.
    And that was--
    I don't know--
    25 years later.
    And when you were on the ship with the Krauses,
    did you know who they were in your life?
    Did you know of their role?
    No.
    Did they talk to you at all?
    I don't-- they didn't speak German.
    Of course.
    Of course.
    They did not speak German and we did not speak English.
    Of course.
    We were on our own.
    Make sense of it as best you can.
    OK.
    Did the children talk amongst themselves
    about why we had all-- you had all left?
    Not that I know of.
    OK.
    Well, you were little.
    You were little.
    Yeah.
    Right.
    It was many years later that there was a reunion
    of the so-called children and--
    Excuse me?
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Yeah.
    There was a reunion--
    There was a reunion.
    And people got up and talked about their memories.
    And the men had total amnesia.
    Really?
    They did not remember the trip at all.
    And there were several who had no memory of their transport
    or anything like that.
    Their memory picked up again when they
    were on land in Philadelphia.
    How curious, how sad.
    Amnesia, and it was probably a safety mechanism.
    It was too traumatic.
    It was too traumatic for several of them.
    So they blocked it out.
    But it wasn't for you?
    Well, I have very--
    just smatterings of memory.
    But I remember being happy, sunshine, and freedom,
    and I was good to go.
    Yeah.
    I mean, that was one of the biggest aufgaben, one
    of the biggest sort of like efforts
    that parents made to protect their children from what's
    going on.
    Definitely.
    To protect them emotionally.
    And some succeeded because of a confluence of factors sometimes
    they had no control over, and sometimes they did.
    You were littler, that helps.
    I think so.
    And sometimes they didn't succeed.
    Sometimes the children--
    It's trauma.
    Yeah.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    What do you remember next while you're on this boat
    and you're having a good time.
    You're with your sister, whose job is to make sure you're OK
    and participate in some of these adventures.
    Right.
    What happens after that?
    Then we got to Ellis Island.
    And my aunt met us.
    This aunt that you didn't know.
    Right.
    What was her name?
    I think her name was Freiche.
    Freiche?
    Freiche.
    OK.
    That's a last name?
    No, that's her first name.
    Freiche.
    I don't know that name.
    OK.
    What's her last name?
    OK.
    Tante Freiche.
    Right.
    Weiss, if she was not married--
    Weiss.
    And she was a young woman.
    She was pretty and she wore a fashionable hat.
    And she came to meet us.
    And that's when my sister delivered her message.
    Oh, she had held it in all this time.
    You've got to send that visa.
    You've got to send the papers.
    There on Ellis Island?
    Yeah.
    The first thing she does when she gets off the boat.
    Right.
    Oh dear.
    And do you remember how Freiche reacted?
    She was very friendly.
    She was very pleasant.
    And I guess she took it to heart.
    Now there's no telephone.
    I could not write.
    I don't know how soon thereafter the visa was sent.
    Hang on a minute.
    OK?
    But she got the message, she relayed it to the family
    in Brooklyn, and they sent the visa for my mother.
    Now when you get to Ellis Island, did she take you home?
    No.
    What happened with you both-- with you girls?
    Well, the group stayed together.
    And I don't know how--
    I guess we took a bus or something, put us on a bus.
    We went to Philadelphia where the Jewish organization
    had a summer camp.
    Today, I would call it like a motel.
    It was all on one floor and we had our separate rooms.
    And there was an attempt to teach us English, and baseball,
    and stuff like that.
    And we played hopscotch and games, and looked at the comics,
    and just had summer--
    played outdoors and rallied around the flag
    to pledge allegiance, which we were taught.
    And it was just nice.
    It was pleasant.
    Did anything strike you as impressive when you first
    came to the United States?
    Different from what you were thinking-- how the place looked,
    how people talked, how the food tasted--
    anything in your mind's eye?
    No, I was receptive to it all.
    It was all new and it was OK.
    I didn't have any great expectations or disappointments.
    A lot of the members of this Jewish organization,
    the Brith Sholom of Philadelphia,
    took an interest in the children and came to visit us.
    And they brought-- they were business people.
    Some brought hats that they had in their shop
    or they brought cakes.
    They befriended us and visited us.
    And I made particular friends with somebody
    who had the ability to throw his voice.
    He was like a ventriloquist.
    And I just thought that was the most fabulous talent.
    And we just had a great time together.
    So this is one of the visitors?
    Yes.
    Oh and he kept you entertained?
    He did.
    He did, and he came regularly, more than once.
    And I don't know whether he thought he would adopt us
    or what.
    And how was Inge doing now that her mission was accomplished?
    We didn't talk about it.
    She just--
    Was she is carefree as you were?
    Probably not.
    Probably not.
    In general, was she a serious personality?
    Oh yes.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Well, I put words there.
    How would you describe her personality?
    I don't think she ever got out from under that cloud
    of responsibility.
    And she just had very different interests.
    And I was successful in ways that she was not.
    And that was hard, that was hard for her
    because she felt that she had blazed the trail
    and that I had an easy time.
    Yeah, you said that before.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    So for instance, I mean, we both did well at school and stuff,
    and skipped--
    in the New York City school system, if you did well,
    they didn't know what to do with you.
    There was no such thing as enrichment.
    They just pushed you ahead so that you were in the next class.
    And so they pushed us both ahead and we
    had some of the same teachers, and that sort of thing.
    And then I tried out for a special high school in New York.
    Now she had--
    What high school?
    High School of Music and Art.
    She had tried out for that school--
    We got a plane and we're going to split it.
    Go over while we roll it here.
    Stand by us, ladies and gentlemen.
    You don't want to continue where we were?
    We will.
    But no, it won't--
    How's the plane?
    Good-- about 10 more seconds.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    We had a break now.
    And before going back to the point where we had our break,
    I wanted to ask a question that I hadn't before.
    And that is your earliest memories, total.
    Well, the very earliest memory is of a curtain,
    and probably in the nursery, which sort of--
    they were casement windows, which
    means that they rolled out.
    And when the breeze came in, it would
    lift this curtain which was very airy, very lightweight.
    And it would lift this curtain up.
    And I just thought of a giant outside the window,
    breathing in and out, because the curtain
    would rise up and then fall, and then rise up and fall.
    And I remember the fabric so distinctly.
    It was a pale, sort of a pea green with white leaves--
    ovoid leaves-- scattered throughout the curtain.
    And there was a heavy thread running the warp of the fabric
    to make it hang right.
    Wow.
    And if I ever ran into that, I would
    know that fabric in a minute.
    Isn't that amazing?
    And that was the very earliest memory that I have.
    And it has the logic of a child.
    The giant.
    A giant-- how could a curtain move like that?
    Right.
    Repetition-- in and out, in and out.
    And we were on the second floor, so it had to be a giant.
    So are we talking second floor American or second floor
    European?
    Vienna.
    So it would be the third floor in the United States
    because there's the erdgeschoss, and then there's
    the first floor, and then there's the second floor.
    OK.
    So that's the way it is in Europe.
    So if it was the second floor from what
    you remember from Europe, then it would be the US third floor.
    There was a courtyard in the center of the house.
    Now these houses were very old, so the courtyard was probably
    at one time where carriages would
    enter this large gate at the entrance,
    and then there'd be this courtyard.
    And then these wide, curved stairs going upstairs.
    And did your house have windows going onto the street
    or onto the courtyard as well?
    Yes.
    Both.
    Both.
    OK.
    And was it a house that was of stone, or brick, or--
    I'm not sure.
    I don't know what the construction was.
    But it maybe had five floors, five stories high.
    It probably was.
    OK.
    So let's go back to the camp that you
    were in outside Philadelphia that first summer when
    you were here.
    And you make a new friend who knows
    how to throw his voice, the ventriloquist.
    And the only time you saw your relative,
    her name is Aunt Freiche--
    Freiche.
    Freiche.
    --is when she greets you at the boat.
    At Ellis Island.
    At Ellis Island.
    And your sister delivers her message.
    And you two go off to camp.
    What happened after the summer was over?
    Well, my mother had made all the arrangements for my father,
    his mother, and his brother to travel to America.
    And so since her visa arrived in time,
    she was simply added to his cabin.
    So it did arrive, and she was able to travel with him.
    Exactly.
    You didn't know this at the time, though.
    No.
    We did not.
    I mean, I wasn't in touch with her.
    The letters that went back and forth would take weeks.
    That's right.
    And no telephone, and nothing like that.
    No Twitter.
    No Skype.
    No Skype.
    So we didn't know anything.
    Can we break for a second?
    OK.
    So all of this is going on, but you don't know it.
    You and your sister are unaware.
    Right.
    And when the summer ends, what happens with you two?
    Well, my parents arrived at the end of August, 1939.
    We had been at the camp since the beginning of June,
    when we arrived.
    And so they arrived and--
    They picked you up?
    They picked us up.
    And somehow we got to Brooklyn where the family had set up
    an apartment, sort of like a railroad
    flat, all the rooms were in line.
    And we settled in and war broke out, officially--
    Of course.
    --September 1.
    That's right.
    I mean, they got in by a hairsbreadth.
    By a hair.
    And so September comes around and we start school
    not speaking English.
    And my mother described us walking
    to the school weeping because we couldn't understand
    and couldn't speak.
    But the teacher spoke Yiddish.
    And so she said, don't worry, I'll take care of them.
    And within weeks, we were speaking English.
    Of course.
    Of course.
    But the beginning is difficult.
    Yeah. the very start was hard.
    But people were friendly.
    It wasn't like it was in Austria.
    It wasn't that way.
    There was nobody jeering and throwing things at us.
    And so we started school and learned English, fit right in.
    Cool.
    Yeah.
    Very cool.
    Yeah.
    It was like a magical age, just that little margin
    of adaptability.
    Yeah.
    And also being shielded and protected from the larger events
    and the reasons for them.
    Right.
    Well, of course, that was all that my parents talked about,
    was what was happening in Europe.
    And my mother had her family there
    and received letters periodically
    that had big pieces censored out--
    black marks cut.
    And so she pieced it together that her father
    was dying of cancer.
    And pretty soon those letters stopped.
    Did your father ever say to your mother, you were right,
    I was wrong?
    Not that I know of, no.
    But they were very, very happy.
    And then we were at some kind of family gathering and--
    I don't know-- the family was talking,
    and they asked my grandmother something
    about how her life was in Europe.
    Oh, she said, it was terrible, terrible.
    And it was-- she never got anything,
    and she never had anything, and so my father said,
    well who bought your shoes?
    And who paid your passage?
    And he was just--
    he was humiliated in front of these strangers who were family.
    I don't know what her motivation was.
    Maybe she was just stupid.
    She could have been stupid.
    Or she-- this was before Social Security and things like that.
    Maybe she thought that she would do better by throwing herself
    on these relatives.
    And my father was just more than incensed.
    I can imagine.
    And that was the end of that.
    Yeah.
    And he took a job in the Bronx, and we moved
    to the Bronx, which was like--
    Another world.
    Another world, different.
    So where in Brooklyn had you had this flat?
    Do you remember?
    I do not.
    Do you remember where the rest of the family
    lived in Brooklyn, what part of it?
    No.
    They had a house and a garden.
    And I believe this uncle--
    I don't remember what his business was.
    He was elderly.
    He had a parrot, I remember that.
    And he used to cut the parrots toenails, or claws, yes.
    Oh my goodness.
    But we broke off.
    So it was through his mother actually,
    more than the rest of the siblings,
    that this kind of absolute unawareness
    of what his sacrifice had been.
    Mm-hmm.
    Yep.
    Yeah.
    And when you moved to the Bronx, when was that?
    I think I was in about third grade.
    So you had been there a few years?
    Possibly, yeah, a year or two.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And I remember third grade in the Bronx, Ms. Bullock.
    And-- Ms. Bullock--
    it's funny how we remember our grade school teachers, huh?
    Mm-hmm.
    And your father, how did he make a living?
    He was a carpenter.
    His own, or did he work for somebody?
    Well, he worked for somebody, and then he
    lost patience completely and set up practically next door
    in the Bronx.
    And so we had an apartment first.
    And then my mother noticed--
    she would walk from the apartment two blocks
    around the corner to his shop.
    And one day, she was walking by and people were moving furniture
    out of one of the houses.
    And so she inquired, and it turned out an old lady
    had lived there and died.
    And she said, well, can I buy this house?
    And I don't know, they said something ridiculous,
    but $5,000 and it's yours.
    She went to the bank without my father's knowledge,
    plunk down $5,000, and the house was ours.
    Oh my God.
    So here was the second time that she acted totally on her own,
    and it was wonderful.
    It was wonderful.
    Did he give her any grief for that?
    No.
    No.
    That was a good thing.
    It was a brick house, three stories, fabulous woodwork,
    oak paneling, and moldings, and stairs, and it was a godsend.
    It was like a middle-class life.
    A nice middle-class life.
    Absolutely.
    Absolutely.
    It had a porch.
    I have a picture, and I'll show it to you, of this house.
    It was something special.
    And your father's workshop was right--
    Around the corner, like two blocks away
    --around the corner.
    And did he own his workshop?
    Or did he rent it?
    No, he rented the space.
    Yes.
    And originally, it had an apartment behind it.
    And he thought that maybe we should move in.
    And my mother said, oh no.
    She's not going to raise her children, her girls,
    in this situation.
    There's a benefit to having Viennese standards, you know?
    Definitely.
    Definitely.
    Yeah.
    Did she also work when she came-- work for pay, I mean--
    No.
    Never.
    --when she came?
    No?
    Never.
    She worked in my father's shop.
    When he went out to install things--
    and he did storefronts and fixtures very often
    for immigrants, refugees who established
    their own businesses.
    And he would make their showcases and their storefronts.
    And if he was out of the shop, somebody had to mind the store.
    So she stayed at the store while he was out.
    So she would do that.
    Yeah.
    That really does sound like an amazing--
    I don't want to say easy, but so much easier
    than someone who doesn't have that skill.
    Oh of course.
    I know people who were lawyers and whose skills
    did not transfer.
    Yeah.
    And people-- one family, a doctor, and he spent--
    he had to go back to school and do--
    make up some coursework or something in order
    to get licensed here.
    And there were furriers and shop people.
    When you were now in the Bronx, what language
    did you speak at home?
    German.
    Still?
    Yes.
    We would come home for lunch--
    it was quite a walk.
    Go to school, speak English, come home for lunch,
    go back to school, come back home.
    So yeah, we spoke German at home and we
    spoke English in the world.
    Very much an immigrant kind of experience.
    Oh yes, yes.
    My mother was very eager to learn English,
    and she went to classes and became a citizen.
    My father became a citizen, too.
    When?
    As soon as they could.
    So within the '40s?
    Yeah.
    Sometime in the '40s.
    Definitely.
    Yeah.
    I think even before the end of the war.
    And what about you and your sister?
    I think I had my own papers, yes.
    And do you remember becoming a citizen, too?
    A US citizen?
    Yes.
    OK.
    You remember the actual experience?
    They just asked some historical questions and things like that.
    OK.
    Did your parents-- you mentioned in the beginning
    that they were trying to keep track
    of what was going on in Europe.
    Definitely.
    And did that continue?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Oh my father railed--
    railed against the government in Germany.
    He gave up being Jewish completely.
    I mean, he never--
    we never had a kosher house again, he never went to temple.
    My mother did once in a while for the holidays,
    so Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.
    He said, there is no God if this can happen.
    And he just turned his back on the whole thing.
    Wow.
    Because so many other people had the reverse thing.
    They did not particularly feel themselves to be Jewish,
    and then when they were targeted said, all right, now.
    I'm not going to pretend to be someone I'm not.
    Did that seem strange to you at the time
    or it was just that's his choice and that's her choice?
    Definitely.
    That was--
    And what about you and your sister?
    My sister felt more connected to her Jewish heritage.
    When they were in Florida, she participated at a temple.
    I never have.
    And her daughter also seems more connected
    to the Jewish heritage and--
    not that she keeps a kosher home,
    but she's connected to the community, and I'm not.
    Was this a conscious thing or is the way
    you developed in your interests and how they grew?
    Well, I'm an atheist.
    And I just-- from my experience, and my reading,
    I have come to that conclusion.
    If anything, I would be a Buddhist.
    Did your parents eventually find out
    what happened to various family members?
    They did.
    I mean, some people just disappeared, like Tager.
    OK.
    And I think one of my father's brothers just--
    Vanished.
    --disappeared like a lone leaf.
    We did know that my grandfather passed.
    And we knew that Olga and her mother, my grandmother,
    were pushed from one apartment to another.
    I always thought that they were together,
    but I've subsequently learned that they also were separated.
    How did you discover this?
    A friend, a cousin of my ex-husband
    is very savvy on the internet, and she puzzled it out.
    So it's a recent knowledge.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    I always had a little fantasy that somehow they
    went off to the Vienna woods and hid and survived.
    As you were growing up, tell me a little bit about school,
    about high school, about--
    how did your life develop?
    Well, I enjoyed school, I had friends in school.
    I applied to the High School of Music and Art,
    which was a special high school that you
    auditioned for in New York.
    And I prepared a portfolio and auditioned, and was accepted.
    And that was probably the biggest learning experience.
    Was it really?
    Yes, because I was with a wide variety of people,
    a very diverse student body from all over the city.
    Some very well-heeled people, some people who were very
    political--
    there was one girl whose father was a die-hard communist.
    There were people of color, which was unusual--
    it wouldn't have been in the neighborhood school.
    There was a Chinese girl that I was very friendly with,
    Gloria Wong.
    And when the Communists took over in China, I hadn't a clue.
    I said, well, what do you think?
    And she said, I think it's going to be a better thing for China.
    This was the era of the Rosenberg trials.
    And it was very it was still very conflicted.
    It was still very--
    the world was coming to my awareness.
    Yeah.
    That's normal.
    When you're in high school, that's what happens.
    Probably, yeah.
    But I was so happy at that school.
    I just blossomed.
    I couldn't wait for summer vacation
    to end and go back to high school, which
    is not your typical high school experience.
    No, it isn't.
    No, It isn't.
    But I was very lucky.
    yeah.
    And I still have friends from high school.
    From high school?
    Yes.
    And then when I went off to college,
    it was a total disappointment.
    It was not as stimulating as high school,
    Where did you go to college?
    Well, I started out at Brooklyn College, which was free.
    Yes.
    The City Colleges of New York--
    I mean, totally unbeknownst to anybody today,
    were free, just like high school.
    And so I would meet my friends on the subway.
    There was quite a little contingent
    that went from the Bronx to Brooklyn--
    Brooklyn College because they had a very interesting art
    department.
    And but of course it was a liberal arts school,
    and so I had classics, and I had history,
    and I had language and--
    yeah.
    But it wasn't as stimulating?
    No.
    It was not.
    It was a comedown.
    We had artists--
    I mean, it was sort of like a carryover from the WPA projects,
    where they hired artists in the art department to teach.
    So I had Mark Rothko as a teacher.
    The poor man could not put two words together.
    He was a wonderful artist, but he was not a teacher.
    And Clyfford Still, and William Baziotes--
    I mean, all these fabulous names today,
    they were struggling artists at the time.
    Anyway, they were not good teachers.
    And so I decided that I really wanted to know about art.
    I wanted to know the background.
    And so I was interested in art history.
    And Barnard College at that time was investing heavily
    in their art history department.
    And I was told to apply.
    And I did and I got in, and so I have
    a degree from Barnard College, which is prestigious.
    OK.
    Can I do [INAUDIBLE]?
    And good to go.
    A question.
    You mentioned the different languages
    when you were at home, at lunchtime, and going back
    to school.
    Did that ever change?
    Did you ever end up speaking English at home?
    I think yes, as the years went by.
    They understood-- my parents understood more
    than they could speak.
    My mother was pretty proficient.
    My father never--
    I mean he spoke Yiddish.
    Did he speak any other language besides German and Yiddish?
    Did he speak Polish?
    Did he speak Russian?
    He just had a few phrases.
    OK.
    And he even had--
    had an English phrase, like son of a bitch.
    Somebody when he was a kid had come back
    and taught him son of a bitch.
    And he used that.
    He knew that from then?
    Yes, he knew that from Kniehenitch.
    Isn't that funny?
    Yeah.
    Did you ever-- wait--
    OK.
    Let me rephrase-- I was going to say something.
    Did you ever feel like you were an outsider when
    you were in the United States?
    No.
    OK.
    So there was no sense of, I don't really
    belong to this society.
    I'm from over somewhere-- from someone else?
    Never.
    No.
    Not in New York, not in Connecticut, not in Maine.
    I don't know.
    I just-- that's where I'm at.
    Did you ever think of Vienna?
    I've gone back to visit.
    Well, I want to come to that point
    about returning to your story.
    You mentioned that you are writing your memoirs?
    Mm-hmm.
    And what prompted you to look back?
    And when did you start looking back?
    I think I've always been sort of an introspective person.
    And I realized that my grandchildren, who are not near
    and have not been close to me--
    or I to them, because they've always grown up away from me--
    So you mean geographically?
    Yes.
    But geographic distance also means
    emotional distance, and knowledge, and knowing somebody.
    So I thought that I would clue them and help them out
    to know me a little better.
    And that's what's prompted the memoirs?
    Correct.
    Correct.
    How far along have you come?
    Well, I can't say it's a thing that goes chronologically
    from here to there.
    It's a series of stories of things that happened
    or things that I've thought about.
    And we'll put them together in some kind of a scrapbook
    and that'll be it.
    Those are the kinds of most precious gifts.
    I hope so.
    I hope so.
    When did you first go back to Vienna?
    My sister has gone back several times.
    And then one time, we went together.
    And we went with my niece also, Tina, her daughter.
    And my sister had some money there.
    She filed for Social Security, basically,
    where she paid into the system, and then
    accumulated the money out of the system,
    which was effective if she spent the money there in Europe.
    And so she was motivated to use that money.
    I never bothered to pay into the system.
    I don't care about it, and I don't want it.
    And she planned to live to be 100, so she would use it all.
    That didn't quite work out.
    So we went back--
    I'm trying to think of when--
    I don't know-- in the '90s--
    and maybe '92 or so.
    And we went to Rotensterngasse, we went to the Prater,
    and we went to the Vienna woods, and we went to the opera.
    And then Pat and I, my partner, went to Vienna also
    as part of a trip that included Budapest and Prague.
    And I don't like Vienna.
    I find it stuffy, Baroque, false, pretentious.
    I don't like it at all.
    Was there anything that was familiar?
    Or did you-- when you went, you felt
    like you were coming to a place you had never been before?
    No, I was a tourist.
    I was a tourist.
    I had my eyes open and I was curious.
    And we went to Salzburg, went to a play there.
    It turned out to be a play about an old age home.
    And my sister said, well, why do you want to go to see that?
    I said, well, because it interests me.
    I didn't get all the nuances of the language,
    but I got enough of it.
    And it was interesting.
    It was interesting.
    And we went to performances, and I thought
    that they were just stuffy.
    They were for tourists.
    There was nothing with heart.
    We went to Bratislava, which was just recently liberated
    from Russian domination.
    And we went to the opera.
    And they could have been bus drivers.
    They were just doing a job.
    They had no heart.
    They had no emotion into the parts.
    It was just a businessman's opera.
    It was nothing-- it was just nothing.
    What a disappointment.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Because my parents loved opera.
    And we went to the opera in New York.
    We went to the City Center and we went to the Met.
    You mentioned off camera that in 1998, I believe it was,
    you went to Auschwitz.
    I did.
    Tell me about that trip and what that was all about.
    Well, it's something called the March of the Living.
    And apparently--
    OK.
    What is that?
    Well, it's a Jewish organization that
    tries to get young people to understand the Holocaust
    and their heritage firsthand.
    So they were mostly young people,
    but there were some survivors.
    And we were on a bus.
    And I made friends with several people, one of whom,
    Sophia Aferiat, who was--
    spent the war years in Poland.
    And she spoke fluent Polish, so she
    had the advantage of language.
    And we went to restaurants and things like that,
    and she could speak fluently with people.
    We went to Krakow, we went to Warsaw,
    and went to some of the stations that Jews were assembled.
    We went to the ghetto.
    It was the first time that I was with very devout Jews.
    The young people were devout.
    They prayed on the airplane.
    So that was a first.
    And then we went to Israel.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    We have to stop every time that door opens and closes.
    Oh.
    We are rolling.
    OK .
    What are the most memorable moments for you of that trip?
    Of the trip?
    Well, seeing Krakow, which my father had spoken of,
    was a high point.
    I thought that Warsaw was just a gray, depressing place.
    We had a bus that took us from one place to another.
    We had guards on the bus.
    We had a Polish soldier who was on leave, earning extra money
    accompanying us on the bus.
    And the purpose of his presence?
    Well, there's a lot of antisemitism.
    A lot of antisemitism.
    We went to a little village--
    I don't even know that it had a name.
    But it was a typical village, shtetl town.
    The Jewish synagogue-- and there were no more Jews living there.
    It was somehow--
    I don't know who took care of it.
    So the synagogue was neatly tended.
    And the church was on the top of the hill.
    So the church was on the hill, and the synagogue was down here.
    There was a contingent of Polish soldiers with a tank stationed
    at the synagogue.
    They were playing cards, but there was a military presence.
    We passed houses that were very derelict, that probably had not
    been lived in for a number of years.
    We passed another place that was like a farm, where
    they were very neat and tidy.
    They had cranes nesting in the chimney.
    I'd never seen anything like that.
    And that was a tidy farm.
    So if the people who had the place could take care of it,
    had the wherewithal to take care of it,
    had the energy, and the skill, and maybe
    some money to take care of it, they did well.
    If the people were old, poor, the place was derelict.
    So you saw these types of things.
    I saw that, yes.
    This lady, Sophia, who had spent the war,
    she was able to talk to our guard,
    and sort of befriend him and find out who he was.
    And that's how I know that he was on furlough and stuff
    like that.
    We went to a place in Krakow that
    was sort of a folk art place.
    And I wanted to buy something for my grandchild who
    was little at the time--
    my first grandchild.
    And so we bought something there,
    and I brought it to the hotel, opened it up,
    and it had shattered into-- you know--
    42 pieces.
    So the next day, we went back.
    And I said, well, this--
    you packed it poorly.
    I need something else.
    And oh, no.
    No, they wouldn't honor that.
    And so Sophia said, but we are Jews.
    And she played the Jew card.
    I was so embarrassed.
    I was so embarrassed that she felt
    it necessary to draw that card.
    And he said, OK.
    Pick out something else.
    We went to a Jewish cemetery.
    And there was this little old lady
    scuttling through the cemetery.
    Sophia started talking to her.
    And she had spent the war-- she was Jewish.
    She had spent the war there.
    She had no prospects of going anywhere else.
    The lady in the cemetery.
    Yes.
    And that was her life.
    I don't know--
    I think she was doing a shortcut through the cemetery
    to her home.
    Yeah.
    She lived in that town with her daughter.
    Did you feel in some way distant from these themes
    or close to these themes?
    No, I fell close to that--
    I did.
    It was very emotional.
    And when we went to Auschwitz, there were graffiti--
    antisemitic graffiti on the walls outside of Auschwitz--
    just outside.
    They do keep the grounds themselves preserved.
    But it was very emotional.
    And so I left a note saying, but for fortunate kindness
    in this world, I would be here, too.
    Have you gone to any other of these former camps?
    Well, that was part of the trip.
    We went to Sobibor, and we went-- yeah-- we got the whole--
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Let's go back a little bit to when you finish Barnard College.
    How did your life evolve after that?
    Well, I got married.
    And that made me very happy.
    He was a wonderful young man.
    What was his name?
    Eugene.
    He had a very supportive family. .
    My family loved him.
    So all was good.
    It was good.
    Yeah.
    How many children do you have?
    Two sons.
    One lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with two daughters who are now
    going to live on the East Coast, one of whom
    is a graduate student at Harvard.
    And the other one is just a graduate
    out of the college at Worcester, Ohio.
    I have a son married in LA who had two children, one of whom
    is in Providence, Rhode Island, at Brown University.
    And the daughter is a high-school graduate--
    graduating-- senior.
    And she plans to go into musical theater.
    She's very, very talented.
    Have you talked about these things with them?
    About your childhood, about your escape with your own children?
    A little bit.
    With your grandchildren?
    Well, they've seen the--
    they've seen the video of the 50 children
    that Stephen Pressman made.
    They have the book.
    So they have very casual interest in it all.
    How do you think it shaped you?
    Did it shape you?
    Did it contribute to you being the kind of person
    that you are today?
    Oh completely.
    In what way?
    I don't know.
    If I had remained in Austria, and there had been no war,
    I would be a German hausfrau.
    Artist.
    I don't know.
    I think that women still have a very tangential life there.
    I think it's still very patriarchal.
    I think there's still some antisemitism that keeps people
    from dreaming and thinking that they could do something more.
    I don't think I'd have the education that I have.
    I'd be somebody else.
    In your personality, has it had an effect
    on things that are your values or the way you look at things--
    that early history?
    Well, I think my mother's message
    that I'm going to have a wonderful time
    and to be open to new experience has been my way of doing things.
    What a wonderful gift.
    I know.
    Tell me about how the rest of their years
    were here in the United States.
    When my sister hit adolescence, my father lost it.
    He wanted to impose kind of the old protection.
    He did not understand that girls have rights and thoughts
    of their own.
    He made life very hard for her--
    constant bickering, constant picking on her,
    constant demeaning.
    He did not understand that she wanted to wear something
    that he did not approve of.
    Lipstick drove him up the wall.
    And she-- she was distraught.
    And my mother could not stop him.
    I don't know what he had in mind--
    loose women wear lipstick.
    And he just had a totally, totally other way
    of looking at a young woman.
    It sounds almost like the village in him came through.
    Exactly.
    Don't be this and don't be that, and be careful here,
    be careful there.
    And he just made her life miserable.
    Somehow I did not get it into his craw the way she did.
    Something deep set him off.
    I did not bug him.
    I put on lipstick around the corner.
    I did not--
    I didn't defy him.
    I just went my own way.
    And somehow he could accept that.
    So again, she was the pioneer.
    She got the full brunt of his ire.
    And the only way she could think of to get out of it
    was to get married, which she did when she was like 17.
    Oh, very young.
    It didn't work out too well--
    of course.
    Your parents, did they stay in that nice brick
    house in the Bronx?
    They did until my sister--
    my sister divorced that husband and remarried.
    And they, with her new husband and her daughter, who was--
    Tina was about 8 by that time--
    moved to Florida.
    My parents had vacationed in Florida, just briefly,
    go on two weeks vacation.
    They liked it.
    And I don't know if you were around at the time,
    but Arthur Godfrey--
    radio program-- really was a spokesman for Florida.
    And he talked up Florida.
    And so my sister asked my father to come down and build something
    for her.
    To build-- I don't know-- some kind of storefront.
    And of course he went.
    And he was not a young man at that time.
    So my mother saw an opportunity to get him out
    of his regular routine.
    And they started talking about retiring to Florida.
    Nice.
    Which they did.
    Where in Florida?
    They bought a place in Coral Gables.
    They liked Miami.
    There is a large Jewish contingent there.
    A lot of [? lawns ?] people.
    And they were very happy there.
    Did they ever go back to Europe?
    No.
    At one point, my father wanted me
    to go with him to some of his haunts, like Bad Gastein.
    And I had little kids at the time, and so it wasn't that--
    I couldn't do it.
    Yeah.
    And they passed away in Florida?
    Yes.
    My mother had a series of heart attacks and died at age 59.
    Oh my gosh, how young.
    Yeah.
    And my father, who was like 12 or 13 years older,
    he lived to be 88 on his own in Florida.
    Of your journey over to the United States,
    what would you want your grandchildren--
    and everybody else's grandchildren,
    because this will be on the internet--
    what would you want them to understand
    the most about that journey?
    Hmm.
    I think it is to just keep an open mind.
    Keep your eyes open to experience things for yourself.
    Not what somebody told you, not what you read in a book,
    just be there.
    Be there and see it for yourself,
    and live it for yourself and make
    whatever sense you can of that experience
    because it'll be your own.
    Is there anything else you'd like
    to add to what we've talked about today?
    No, it's been good.
    Thank you.
    Thank you.
    Thank you very much, Kitty.
    My pleasure.
    And with that, this concludes the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Kitty Weiss Penner,
    on July 29, 2016, in South Portland, Maine.
    I'm going to just hold this down so it doesn't move.
    And any time.
    OK.
    So Kitty, tell me, what is this picture of?
    This is a picture of Gilbert Kraus reading to four children,
    and I'm one of the children.
    And which one are you?
    So this is me.
    Next to the doll.
    Yes, her name was Judy.
    She was yours?
    Yep.
    A doll I had to share with my sister.
    But she was not a very cuddly doll, so I didn't mind.
    And do you know the other children, who they are?
    I do not.
    OK.
    Let's go to the next picture.
    OK.
    Stand by.
    OK.
    Let's see.
    Am I going to be in the shot if I hold that?
    OK, I got that.
    OK, now if you want to talk about it, go ahead.
    OK.
    What is this picture of?
    This is the last picture that we took with my mother in Vienna
    before leaving to go to the United States.
    So in the shot, there's your mother?
    Yes.
    And then?
    The blonde is me and the dark-haired girl
    is my sister, Inge.
    OK.
    So this is in 1938 or '39?
    1939.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    Let me just-- does that work?
    Mm-hmm.
    It works fine.
    OK.
    Go ahead.
    OK.
    Kitty, what is this photograph of?
    This is a picture of my sister and myself in happier times.
    I would guess that this might be 1938, spring of '38,
    something like that before Kristallnacht.
    Well, you both look very nicely dressed, very cute.
    Which one is you?
    Yeah, which one is you?
    The little one.
    Point at it.
    The little one?
    Oh.
    The little girl.
    That's you?
    Yes.
    And the one next to you is--
    Is my sister, Inge.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    Great.
    --are, just watch the boom shadow.
    OK, we're rolling.
    So Kitty, tell me, what is this photograph of?
    This is a picture of my maternal grandparents.
    This is Ernestina Deutch and Joseph Zehngut.
    And this is about 1895, maybe.
    And the signature at the bottom says Zehngut [GERMAN].
    So that means he took a photograph of himself
    in his own photo studio.
    In his photo studio.
    He had a photo studio for many, many years.
    And this is his wedding shot?
    It is.
    It is, very elegant.
    So your grandmother Ernestina is the one
    who ended up in Auschwitz with her daughter, Olga.
    She did.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And Joseph passed away of natural causes in about 1942.
    Thank you.
    We are rolling.
    OK.
    Kitty, then tell me who are the little girls in this photograph?
    This also is from the Zehngut studio.
    And they are my mother, who is the youngest.
    In the middle.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And her two sisters, Olga and Annie.
    So your mother in the middle is Stella.
    Yes.
    And Olga is to her left and Annie is to her right?
    No, the other way.
    Olga is the tallest.
    You can point to them.
    Yeah.
    Olga is the tallest.
    And she is I think probably six years older than my mother.
    And Annie is maybe four years older.
    And Olga is the one who perished in Auschwitz
    along with your grandmother?
    Yes.
    OK.
    And Annie was in France.
    Annie escaped to France and was in an internment camp--
    interned in Nice, France.
    Came to the United States after the war.
    And so this was taken in their father's studio?
    Grandfather.
    Your grandfather?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    Wide enough, or do you want tighter?
    Do you want to go--
    This is good.
    Yeah.
    About there?
    That's about it.
    I don't want to sacrifice any of the letters.
    OK.
    We're rolling.
    OK.
    Kitty, tell me about what these photographs are.
    It looks like newspaper clips.
    We saw a close-up of one of them.
    Tell me what it generally is.
    This is from the Sunday Daily News, the Sunday news,
    which is like a magazine section of the newspaper--
    Of the Daily News?
    Of the Daily News in New York City.
    OK.
    And it's dated June 18, 1939.
    And this documents the children, of which
    I am one, in Collegeville.
    Brith Sholom-- you can see on the carpet there--
    was the sponsoring organization that
    helped the Krauses get all these children here.
    And my mother found this just in the newspaper.
    And she said, oh my God.
    These are my children.
    The one on the bottom right--