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Oral history interview with Peter Aldin

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2017.198.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0926

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    Oral history interview with Peter Aldin
    Transcript
    You're good?
    Most of the day is how many hours?
    United-- what?
    No?
    OK.
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Dr. Peter Aldin on April 26, 2017, in Manhattan,
    New York City.
    Thank you very, very much, Dr. Aldin,
    for agreeing to speak with us today,
    and to share your experiences and your life story
    as it relates to the Holocaust and World War II,
    and how this impacted your family.
    I'm going to start with very basic questions.
    And from there, we'll develop what happened.
    So my first question is, can you tell me the date of your birth?
    October 29, 1932.
    And where were you born?
    Schwerin, Mecklenburg, Germany.
    Schwerin, Mecklenburg, Germany.
    So that's north of Berlin a little bit?
    Rather.
    OK.
    And what was your name at birth?
    Peter Abendstern, Eveningstar.
    Peter Abendstern.
    And now today it is Aldin.
    Yes.
    How did that happen?
    After the war, I didn't want to advertise the fact
    that I'm Jewish, for understandable reasons.
    And my stepfather chose this name
    because it has no religious or country tag.
    Yeah.
    So it had no ethnic connotation.
    Right.
    No religious connotation.
    Correct.
    OK, but you were born Peter Abendstern.
    Yes.
    I wouldn't do it again.
    I understand there's a lot that's
    loaded into changing a name.
    No, no, I wouldn't do it again because I
    don't see a need for it now.
    But at the time I did.
    OK, well, that's a telling statement.
    What was your father's name?
    Otto Abendstern.
    Otto Abendstern.
    And your mother's?
    Elly, originally Meyerhoff, then Abendstern,
    then after my father's death, Fleischmann.
    Fleischmann?
    With double N.
    OK.
    Because one N is Christian.
    Two Ns-- no, two Ns is Christian.
    One N is Jewish usually.
    Really?
    I never knew that.
    That's what I've been told.
    I have have never checked.
    OK.
    But her maiden name was Meyerhoff?
    Yes.
    OK.
    And do you have brothers--
    Elly Henrietta Meyerhoff.
    Excuse me, I didn't hear.
    Elly Henrietta Meyerhoff.
    Elly Henrietta Meyerhoff.
    She had her mother's middle name.
    I think.
    Now that I think of it, I'm not quite sure.
    OK.
    Because her mother was Henrietta also.
    OK.
    Did you have brothers and sisters?
    No.
    They said they didn't have the time.
    I guess it took longer in those days.
    Tell me a little bit about your family background,
    in so far as were they always in Schwerin?
    Was this for generations?
    Was this something that was rather new as a development?
    Actually, my father was from Stuttgart.
    Oh, that's where he was.
    And they met in Stuttgart.
    And actually my grandfather, where my mother grew up,
    had a farm where he raised cattle.
    And he was also the self-styled veterinarian of the region.
    And he also would go out of town to buy some new breeding
    stock for the locals.
    And it is said that when he did this--
    it is probably an apocryphal story--
    a German shepherd would install himself
    in front of the train station, and wouldn't leave
    until his owner came back.
    He also taught himself the violin.
    Oh, my goodness.
    And to disgrace, I was going to get his violin,
    but it was taken by the Germans on his way to Theresienstadt.
    He either dropped it or was going to be shot.
    Oh, my goodness.
    And so I took up the harmonica.
    And for a while I was trained by America's foremost harmonica
    player.
    But I have trouble reading notes and something else intervened,
    so I had to stop my lessons.
    Did you know your grandfather well?
    I remember him.
    OK, what did he look like?
    He-- and I have a photo.
    He had a big mustache.
    He was, I think, bald.
    I'm not sure.
    He was the kind of person that would impose his will
    upon other people, which I suppose,
    was endemic in the male population.
    Some of us in the female population
    would certainly say so.
    And my mother wanted to be a lawyer.
    She was allowed to go through the Abitur, a bachelor's degree,
    I mean.
    But she couldn't become a lawyer as she had wanted.
    She would have been a great lawyer.
    And why?
    What was her father's argumentation?
    I don't know.
    OK.
    Off the cuff, girls don't do that.
    Yeah.
    And her brother wanted to be, I think it was an engineer.
    I don't quite remember.
    But he was forced in the butcher trade.
    And then when he immigrated to this country,
    he and some other person opened his supermarket.
    And he made the mistake of selling it to him for reasons
    unknown, and found himself to be a simple butcher,
    and was quite unhappy thanks to my grandfather.
    As I wrote in my donation to the museum,
    it is a window on my grandfather's psyche
    that he would tell me several times the story of how
    monkeys are caught.
    Tell me how monkeys are caught.
    Monkeys are caught in the following way.
    The catcher would wash his face in the basin.
    And the monkey had a basin too, but in it was glue, thus
    dooming the monkey.
    And he would keep telling this story.
    Oh.
    You figure.
    Yeah, that's very sad for the monkey.
    Yes.
    Very sad.
    So that also comes to a question I usually ask is,
    did your mother have siblings?
    And you had at least an uncle who was her brother.
    That's the only sibling.
    And your father, did he have siblings?
    Yes, he had Martin, a sibling who,
    like his father, my father's father, and my father,
    worked for Adler and Oppenheimer, the possibly
    biggest tannery around at the time.
    They were in France, in South America,
    in England, and of course, in Germany in, I think,
    Neustadt-Glewe.
    I'm not sure.
    OK.
    And I think they had also something in Hamburg.
    OK.
    Was your father's family also from Stuttgart, in the area,
    or was it--
    I think so, yes.
    So how did they end up in Schwerin, which is
    the other end of the country?
    This I don't know.
    OK.
    And did you have contact with your father's family?
    My grandfather, his father, died of kidney disease
    before I was born.
    And Oma Gina--
    Oma Gina would be grandma.
    Regina.
    Regina, his mother who was feared
    by my mother, very tough lady, was taken to Riga
    and killed shortly thereafter.
    So she was-- OK.
    She was then deported to--
    Riga.
    --to Riga, OK.
    Did you know her?
    I don't remember her.
    OK.
    There are pictures.
    I gave you either 400 or 740--
    I forgot-- pictures.
    And she is portrayed there because my father's brother's
    wife was a photographer.
    So after the war she sent me the photos.
    And every one of them is in your possession.
    I have scans thereof.
    There are numerous photos of Oma Gina with my mother
    and pushing my baby cart.
    But I don't remember her at all.
    OK.
    So it is that your grandfather on your father's side
    died before you were born.
    Yes, his wife died in Riga.
    And his wife was killed in Riga.
    And my-- yeah, was killed.
    Actually understand that they took some of them to camps.
    The others they killed in some woods close to Riga.
    Do you know any details of--
    No.
    No.
    OK.
    No way to know.
    How do you know that it was Riga?
    How did you find out?
    I don't know.
    I don't remember.
    My mother must have told it to me.
    OK.
    And your grandfather on your mother's
    side was taken to Theresienstadt--
    Theresien.
    He first moved to Stuttgart with us.
    And actually I have to tell, in parallel,
    the story of my mother, father, grandparents, and my stepfather.
    OK, we'll get there.
    We'll get there.
    So I don't know whether you want me now
    to go to the story of my grandfather and grandmother
    from beginning to end.
    OK, let me explain.
    What I'm focusing on right now is your--
    Family structure.
    Yeah, yeah, and your pre-war life.
    OK.
    And family structure is part of pre-war life.
    OK.
    So sometimes-- like we just did right
    now, sometimes some events from the war will intervene,
    for example your grandmother, Oma Gina,
    being deported to Riga.
    But basically I'm trying to get a sense of who
    are the people who you either knew personally, or heard of,
    and most importantly, those who shaped you.
    So in these questions--
    What--
    Those who shaped you, those who had an influence on you,
    those who you were closest to.
    So that's why I start with asking about family members.
    And if we're talking about pre-war life,
    I would like to stay with your earliest memories.
    And then we can develop the other stories.
    We'll come to them--
    OK.
    --your grandparents' stories.
    So did you grow up in Schwerin?
    I don't know how long we stayed there.
    I think it's in my donation.
    I think we were in Neustadt-Glewe.
    And I don't know whether that's close to Schwerin or not.
    Neustadt-Glewe, OK.
    You want me to talk before Hitler?
    As much as possible, yes.
    We can do that.
    I don't remember much.
    I was--
    You were a year old when he came to power.
    Because when I was a one-year-old
    Hitler came to power.
    Yeah, yeah.
    So my mother writes for my daughter,
    a long letter where she mentions that she was probably
    in Neustadt-Glewe.
    I'm not sure.
    And how did this start?
    How did she find out?
    Oh, and all of a sudden stones were thrown at her window.
    And a mob was screaming [SPEAKING GERMAN].
    Which in English means?
    I was going to say.
    OK.
    I will translate everything.
    OK.
    "Hit the Jews until they're dead."
    And they went to the people downstairs
    with whom they had been friendly.
    And the people wouldn't open the door.
    To your parents?
    To your parents?
    Yes.
    The people wouldn't open the door?
    No.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    I was going to interject something about the Germans
    at the time, but never mind.
    Go ahead.
    Go ahead.
    Oh, my mother told me that they were absolutely wild
    about Hitler instantly, especially the women.
    And the way she describes them, it's
    like the teenagers with the Beatles, you know, hysterical.
    So my father-- she tried to--
    is this when she tried to call him?
    Or was this when he was taken prisoner later on?
    Anyway, she reached her husband, who
    said pack everything in the car, including
    the niece, a little girl, who was
    spending the holidays with her, and get out as fast as you can.
    OK.
    And on the road--
    I think they went to Hamburg then.
    On the road, it was full of SS or that uniform, Nazis.
    And he wound up in Hamburg, which
    she refers to as the El Dorado of Germany, which is
    an exaggeration, because they--
    I guess, they didn't kill the Jews at the time
    yet-- they gave them a little longer before they
    came after them.
    And there my father was taken to--
    he was the only Jew, or maybe one more Jew,
    who was working at the factory.
    He was in the leather business.
    Well, see, I was going to come to that question too.
    What was your father's profession?
    My father was a graduate with honors from one
    of the main schools in Stuttgart.
    And he learned, like his father, the tanning of leather.
    And he was in charge of buying leather for the tanneries.
    OK.
    So your mother is--
    I'm sorry to interrupt.
    But I want to bring this back to where it started, which
    is, your mother is writing, after the war, a letter
    to your daughter about what had happened.
    Yes.
    OK.
    I don't remember it.
    All right.
    And that was my question.
    I was one year old.
    Then you were taken too.
    But you were in the car, you were at the house,
    but you have no memories of this.
    No, I don't have--
    if I had the memory of what happened at one-year-old,
    they would have me in the Museum of Natural History.
    Yeah, I guess.
    I guess.
    A permanent exhibit.
    So he and I think one more Jewish person worked in Hamburg.
    Do you want me to go on?
    Yes.
    Or do you have questions?
    I do have questions.
    Go ahead.
    And they are more clarification kinds of questions.
    One is your actual conscious life,
    is then always under Hitler.
    There is no childhood that you could tell us about.
    You were born in 1932--
    That's correct.
    I didn't have a childhood at all.
    They stole it.
    Well, yes.
    Well, yes.
    The second is a kind of observation
    in that many people that I've talked to who are from Germany
    often only left--
    the successful ones, the ones who were luckier or had
    foresight more--
    several years later.
    That is in '36, '37, sometimes even '39, '40,
    and got out of Germany.
    Or whose lives were affected such that they had to leave.
    From what you were telling me, this was really early on.
    Hitler comes to power, and boom.
    Right.
    The rocks are being thrown.
    Are you making this a didactic experience also
    in telling the listeners?
    Well, I don't know.
    It's just very soon.
    Yes.
    It's very soon after he comes to power that your family is
    actually displaced.
    Yeah.
    And that's unusual from what I've heard before.
    I see.
    Well, they then went to Luxembourg.
    From Hamburg?
    From Hamburg, Wiltz, Luxembourg.
    There may be another town in the middle.
    I don't know.
    I should tell you that something else happened at that time.
    Oh, please do.
    Which is that I was, at the recommendation
    of the pediatrician, I was put in a children's home.
    And this children's home, as luck would have it,
    was run by some creature who was denounced to the authorities
    for doing something which my mother wouldn't tell me
    what it is with children.
    Naughty things.
    The only thing I remember was that--
    there's a photo there of which you have--
    she tied our-- naturally, I don't remember.
    I remember my mother telling me.
    I don't remember personally--
    tying our legs at the ankle and letting us jump around.
    And the other thing is that the parents were not
    allowed to see the children--
    Was this in Hamburg?
    --except through a window.
    This was between Hamburg and the time I went to Luxembourg.
    OK.
    OK.
    And so--
    How long-- and let me get back--
    I don't know.
    I'm going chronologically a little bit.
    I don't remember the dates.
    That's OK.
    But do you have a general idea how long
    the family was in Hamburg?
    Months?
    A year?
    Maybe a year or two.
    I don't remember.
    OK.
    I remember the walls of the court
    of where we lived in Hamburg.
    It's all I remember.
    OK.
    And why was she advised to put you in a children's home?
    What was the reason for that?
    I don't know.
    Because it was dangerous, I guess.
    OK.
    All right.
    She also, at the time, went to a doctor who
    acted very unprofessionally.
    And she had symptoms of anxiety.
    And he told her that, don't worry,
    there's nothing wrong with the heart.
    You will be able to do your duties, marital duties,
    and whatever life throws at you.
    Really misogynistic.
    And he noted, at the time, some symptoms of anxiety.
    And my mother was an anxious woman at the time.
    Anyway, I know that because my father
    had to ask his brother's wife to talk to my mother
    so that she would be willing to get pregnant.
    Oh.
    My mother met my father at Silvester, New Year's.
    And I have a photo of it.
    They seemed to fall in love instantly.
    And whenever there is a photo of the two of them,
    she looks at him, unless she's pushing a carriage,
    ecstatically.
    And she is reported to have told him-- she said to me,
    couples have arguments, how come we never have arguments?
    After she married her second husband, she said to me,
    Papa is the only man I ever loved.
    Your father?
    So we are in Luxembourg, right?
    Not quite yet.
    You said your father was arrested in Hamburg.
    Is that correct?
    No, no, he was not arrested in Hamburg.
    He was arrested in Luxembourg.
    OK, then we are in Luxembourg.
    OK.
    We are in Luxembourg.
    And they gave us a very nice house, a middle class city.
    And we had the usual Biedermeier furniture
    required for every upstanding middle class German,
    and I guess--
    and he would go to work.
    And one day-- yeah, I remember learning the alphabet there.
    And the teacher was putting letters
    on a shelf which was on a window.
    And the letters were unruly.
    They wouldn't stay in place and form a word.
    And thus he taught while we laughed.
    Well, that's pretty clever.
    Indeed.
    Meanwhile, my grandmother and my grandfather also joined us.
    From which side of the family?
    My grandfather had died.
    Oh, so it was your mother's family.
    My mother, yes.
    So this would have been--
    was Luxembourg then considered safer?
    What?
    Luxembourg was safer to be at that time?
    Well, it was in Germany.
    Who knew?
    Yes, of course.
    Who knew?
    Yeah.
    And one day my grandmother apparently
    was horrified that the [SPEAKING GERMAN],
    the Germans are above us.
    Oh, no, no, no, no, before that something else happened.
    I don't know whether it's before or after that.
    It's in my donation.
    OK.
    My father-- it has to be afterwards.
    So the Germans are after us.
    And the planes were going overhead.
    My mother got me.
    And she said my grandparents-- at least
    it's what I somehow remember-- that in fact, it
    was the neighbors who got into the car
    with an inordinate amount of luggage.
    That I remember.
    It was a little car.
    And I was allowed to take my harmonica,
    my favorite harmonica.
    Oh, now I remember too, which I had forgotten.
    OK.
    She, in typical German mannerism,
    she told me when I was given the harmonica originally,
    that I was not good enough to get a violin, which was a lie.
    But that's what they did in those days.
    What a charming way to present a gift.
    You see, people going into the car.
    Yeah, yeah, I know.
    OK.
    OK, fine.
    I'm doing pretty well on my own.
    Oh, you're doing fine.
    You're doing fine.
    Yeah.
    And I've given thousands of interviews
    myself because I did some forensic psychiatry.
    So I have a feeling where to go.
    Oh, yes, at the next intersection--
    and this I remember--
    I saw the German army going--
    we were at one level.
    At the lower level the German army was going by.
    And we would have met them at the next crossing.
    And so we had to go back, thanks God.
    I also remember in the car, saying to my mother--
    no, no, no, I don't remember it.
    See, if I read something, I don't know whether I remember it
    or read it.
    But anyway--
    OK.
    I said to my mother, Mama, do not--
    I was also allowed to get my stuffed animal with me--
    do not give away my toys when I'm not-- please
    do not give away my toys when I'm not watching.
    Was that something that she did?
    She said that.
    She did that, yes.
    She did that.
    Well, she had to give them away because we were leaving.
    Oh, so when you say you saw people getting into a car,
    it wasn't neighbors.
    It was your family getting into the car.
    Yeah, and two neighbors.
    And two neighbors, OK.
    I think I have to go back because I now remember--
    Sure.
    --things that happened in Luxembourg.
    OK, please do.
    I have, through my life, had to move from one place to another.
    I have attended--
    I don't know which is 25 or 26 and which is 22.
    But one of them is a number of places in which I've lived.
    And the other one is the number of schools I have attended.
    But most of them the school after the war.
    But I had to move also.
    Mm-hmm.
    So I was, I guess, always searching for friends.
    That's why my friend who lent you his studio
    is a blessing from heaven, if there were one.
    To me, heaven is something you get rain from.
    And so I once was caught by my mother
    stuffing my pockets with every single piece of candy
    I could find.
    And I had to empty them, a very embarrassing situation.
    Also at that time, I could have been traumatized by the fact
    that a young man exhibited himself to me.
    And the police drove me all over the place
    with promises of chocolate galore if I could identify him.
    He turned out to be the mayor's son.
    Oh, my goodness.
    This was in Luxembourg?
    That was in Luxembourg.
    But I saw it, not that he was--
    exhibitionism is an aggressive act.
    But I saw him that the man had a physical abnormality.
    I didn't know penises could grow to that size.
    So I wasn't traumatized.
    But it stayed in your memory.
    Yes, so I guess I was.
    Very good.
    And I don't remember him doing this.
    I just know that he did it.
    OK.
    I don't remember it.
    By the way, the only memory I have of my father
    is remembering that he took me to pick mushrooms
    in the in Wiltz.
    But I don't remember it.
    Wiltz is in Luxembourg?
    In Luxembourg.
    So it was in the woods?
    Yes.
    You would be picking mushrooms in the woods.
    Yes.
    Also, while I was in Luxembourg, while the Germans were there--
    by the way, after the Germans came through the Maginot line
    and took over Luxembourg, my mother
    had to house some officers and take their shoes off at night
    and feed them.
    And when he first came, he said to them--
    making fun of the Frenchmen--
    that his feet were swollen because he
    ran after the Frenchmen as they ran away so fast.
    Whether it's true I don't know.
    And for reasons which I don't understand,
    how I could do something so crazy.
    But again, in the vein of wanting friends,
    I convinced a bunch of early school students that--
    pre high school-- that I knew a cache of weapons,
    where the Germans put them.
    And I made a map.
    And I took them there, which was where the Germans were,
    which was insane.
    And of course, if we didn't find anything,
    and the night was falling, and I came home,
    and my mother was in a state and ran towards me
    with her mother in tow, begging her not to beat me up.
    Oh, god.
    No, no, telling her to beat me up.
    But once my mother got hold of me,
    she begged her not to, but to no avail.
    Oh.
    And what about those friends?
    I don't remember.
    How did they react when there was no cache?
    I don't remember any child of that time.
    So you don't remember having friends at that time?
    There was one person that I saw in a picture.
    And I was told he was close to my home.
    And so I was friends with him.
    But I don't remember them.
    OK.
    It doesn't mean that there was something traumatic that
    prevented me from remembering them.
    It's just too far away.
    OK.
    So my father would go to Belgium to buy leather for the firm.
    And when the Germans came in, he--
    to go back-- he denounced a person
    who was dealing with Adler and Oppenheimer for cheating them,
    essentially.
    But nevertheless, he asked him for help
    in hiding him when the Germans came
    into Belgium, which was the same movement that got them
    into Luxembourg.
    And the man refused.
    And he was taken.
    So I want to understand this properly.
    Your father had denounced somebody
    who had been cheating the company that he was working for.
    Yes, when he was in Belgium on business,
    with the Germans crawling all over the place, he asked to be--
    Hidden?
    To be hidden by this man.
    OK.
    Or to help him.
    The man refused.
    OK.
    So he was taken, and went through,
    I think six or seven camps--
    I think six-- of which, Les Milles, Saint-Cyprien,
    Gurs, and the other one is in my donation.
    I don't remember the other one.
    I want to interrupt here at this point.
    Oh, in Drancy.
    In Drancy.
    You said you have only one memory of your father.
    And that's quite a--
    No, no, actually, I no longer remember it.
    But I remember remembering it.
    OK.
    OK.
    But you don't remember your father playing with you?
    You don't remember his personality?
    You don't remember--
    Oh, from the way my mother talks about him, and from everything
    I've read about him, he was a gentle, modest,
    and a very nice human being.
    I need some water.
    Is that possible?
    OK, sure.
    OK, so we were talking about your father,
    and how he then goes through several different camps.
    Yes.
    And then I asked about his personality.
    And you said that from your mother
    you learned that he was a very gentle person.
    And very bright.
    And he spoke French and English.
    And he mentioned that in one of the camp
    transports, the cattle trains, his relative, whose name I
    forgot, who also perished, was the only decent person
    in the whole car.
    He was too modest to name himself.
    But he was the kind of person who would be.
    OK.
    And so upon learning from the Red Cross
    that my father was interned, my mother
    decided to go to France to be near him.
    In those days, the chief of staff
    of the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg
    was ferrying, illegally, Jews across the frontier.
    And he had a premonition, or a clue,
    or whatever that he would be caught on the day where
    he was supposed to ferry my mother and I.
    And indeed, he was searched.
    And so we went to France illegally without passport.
    With or without?
    Without.
    Without a passport.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    In a train with a large number of German soldiers.
    And we spent an inordinate amount of time in the toilet.
    But somehow we got through.
    And your grandparents?
    I'm going to get myself to France.
    OK, fine.
    And then we talk about them, fine.
    I have the--
    You have it already in your mind.
    Yes.
    All right, cool.
    Let me just interrupt.
    Sometimes, as I said, I say this so that I don't forget.
    I know that grandparents are left behind.
    Yeah.
    And we'll have to come to that point.
    I'm not forgetting anything.
    OK, good.
    So you're in the train, you somehow get there.
    We are in the train.
    And the first station was a place
    where the French retreating soldiers
    were taken, including wounded.
    And there was dried blood all over the place,
    on the cots on which we stayed.
    My other memory is that my mother spoke French,
    and so she served as the interpreter for other people
    around who were also in the same predicament.
    She only had one thing in her mind, to get to France
    and be in contact with her husband.
    So this was very difficult for her.
    Now I'm going to leave her there.
    OK.
    Peter and Elly are in France.
    OK.
    And I go back to my grandparents.
    My grandparents did not go to France with us.
    And they were, shortly thereafter,
    taken to the camp of Fünfbrunnen.
    Fünfbrunnen?
    Mm-hmm.
    OK.
    There's always a new one popping up.
    Yeah.
    And from there to Theresienstadt.
    In Theresienstadt my grandfather needed an operation.
    I was told it was an appendicitis.
    And my grandmother washed clothes
    to make a little money to feed him.
    But she didn't wash enough clothes,
    so he died of starvation.
    Do you know why they decided or did not
    go with you and your mother?
    Because it wasn't feasible.
    They were too old.
    OK.
    And it was a dangerous trip.
    We could have been caught.
    Of course.
    Now I'm off my train of thought.
    Well, he died of starvation in Theresienstadt.
    I know.
    Oh, yeah.
    And in those days, some of the German gangsters
    had made a deal with the--
    what's his name?
    Roosevelt, to get something--
    I don't know what it is--
    in exchange for a few Jews.
    So there were always requests for transfers.
    Wouldn't you like to go here and there?
    And this time there was a request,
    does anybody wanted to go to Switzerland?
    And my grandmother thought that, well, if this is a subterfuge,
    she doesn't care because life without her husband
    is meaningless.
    And if it is true, then all the better.
    And so she spends the rest of the war in Switzerland,
    where from she went to her son in Kansas City,
    and his wonderful sweet wife, Marianne.
    And I was there at the time.
    And I remember her.
    And she was a gentle, somewhat anxious woman.
    And when she started giving away her clothes
    to the mailman we knew that her mental status was starting
    to fall apart, the end was near, which it was.
    Yeah.
    Can you clarify for me--
    I have to stop a second because I'm freezing.
    Maybe it's psychological.
    So you were in France.
    Yes.
    And we wound up in, what they call in France, the patelin.
    Excuse me.
    I know I had a question.
    I'm sorry.
    It was when your grandmother goes to Switzerland, just
    to wrap that up before we go to France.
    Your grandmother is in Switzerland
    because she may be traded to Roosevelt from--
    Right.
    --German gangsters.
    And she stays there for the duration of the war, which
    means she survives.
    Yes.
    And then comes to the United States.
    And the relation--
    No, no, not my grandmother.
    She-- oh, to the United States.
    Yes, yes.
    Your grandmother.
    Now who is the relation in the United States?
    As I said, her son and his lovely wife.
    Oh, so that means your mother's brother,
    who had been the butcher?
    Yes.
    OK.
    He was the butcher.
    He was the butcher who went and had the store,
    and then sold the store, and then became a simple butcher.
    Yes.
    And they were in Kansas City.
    Yes.
    That's what I wanted to clarify.
    Thank you.
    We're back in France.
    [SPEAKING CHINESE]
    That's "you're welcome" in Chinese.
    How do you say it?
    [SPEAKING CHINESE]
    [SPEAKING CHINESE]?
    Right.
    OK.
    So yes, we're back in France.
    And you were telling me what happened after you--
    Yes.
    So here we are in Graulhet, which is--
    in French, you would call it a "patelin."
    The best translation of that is "a hole in the ground."
    In German, it would be "hinter pfui Teufel."
    "Behind the devil."
    And this is the place where La Cuir Moderne, the Modern
    Leather, was one of the many tanneries.
    It was possibly the French tannery center,
    which it no longer is.
    Mm-hmm.
    And it also was the center for fleas.
    It was a town with a medieval center.
    And this was pre DDT.
    And the fleas had the run of the town.
    Across the street from us was a Monsieur [? Calmes ?]
    who had a job as a chef in the great Normandy ship
    once upon a time.
    And he would pick them up, pick them off his corpulent wife,
    and in the morning, announce how many fleas.
    And you could just push them off your legs.
    So that's where we were living.
    Oh, how charming.
    And we were living in one room without a stove
    and with a hot plate.
    And above was the commissioner of the police,
    the head of the police department,
    who took it upon himself to proposition my mother.
    Oh, good god.
    She says she refused.
    Mm-hmm.
    And told her that if there would be a rafle.
    A [? raffia? ?]
    No.
    The kind of thing where they get all the Jews and--
    A roundup.
    Roundup, yes.
    He would tell her-- which he did after the war.
    He asked her to intercede with him in the tribunal,
    and she refused.
    I would have then told the truth.
    So he did warn her?
    No, he did not.
    He did not?
    No.
    He did not.
    No.
    And in the town lived a Monsieur and Madame [? Vale. ?]
    And Monsieur [? Vale ?] was the head of Le Cuir Moderne.
    What's that?
    Le Cuir Moderne, as I mentioned, The Modern Leather,
    was the tannery which belonged to Adler and Oppenheimer.
    Mm-hmm.
    What I forgot to say before, by the way,
    is that on the day of Hitler's taking power,
    the chauffeur of Adler and --
    I think it was Adler--
    showed up in the firm and took the tannery over.
    He was a friend of the owner.
    So back in Graulhet, there was a series
    of letters between La Cuir Moderne
    and the tannery near Manchester in England--
    where my father's brother was, I will get to him in a minute--
    about the very small sum, which to quote my mother,
    was [SPEAKING FRENCH], "not enough to live,
    but too much to die."
    That was for a period of six months.
    Could they prolong it?
    And this went back and forth.
    You have the letters.
    So this sum was to keep you and your mother alive?
    Yes.
    This sum is what she lived-- because that was one
    of my questions, is how did she feed--
    We lived on noodles.
    That's what we lived on.
    OK.
    And so this Monsieur Vale and Madame Vale-- actually,
    Madame Vale, the head of La Cuir Moderne, at least once--
    I think it's happened several times--
    took my mother to the refrigerator--
    which I can still see, the refrigerator, not Madame Vale--
    and gave her a tiny bit of butter.
    And this was a full refrigerator.
    Well, she too was deported, as I wrote.
    Oh, yeah, she was reputed to have sexual relations
    with either the Germans or the German soldiers.
    It's not clear.
    But she too was deported.
    And as I wrote, abetting the enemy
    does not come with a guarantee.
    That's true.
    Meanwhile, since I mention my father's brother,
    he had left for England.
    And he became the head-- because he had the PhD in chemistry--
    of the Bury, B-U-R-Y, near Manchester, firm.
    OK.
    Can you tell me when he left Germany?
    Do you know?
    Probably around the time he went to Wiltz, Luxembourg.
    OK.
    People would have to read what I--
    What you've written.
    Where I have all the dates.
    Do you know why it is that your uncle went to England,
    but your father did not?
    No, I don't.
    OK.
    I gather-- well, maybe because the firm sent him there.
    It could well be because he was the head of the place in one
    place, and my father was a buyer in Luxembourg.
    OK.
    OK.
    OK.
    And after the war, let me just mention this.
    Mm-hmm.
    He took me once on the moors.
    Oh, really?
    Near Rochdale, next to Manchester.
    And he said to me--
    it comes in waves--
    you remind me--
    We've cut.
    You can go.
    You remind me so much of my brother.
    So apparently my mother got a little money.
    So let me just get finished with the family of my father's
    brother.
    The brother did well.
    One of his sons was a practical engineer,
    one step below full engineer.
    And he wrote the manuals for entities such as Rolls Royce.
    Now you can see him on the internet with long gray hair
    and a beard, a shabby beard, and his wife
    wearing a kaf-- something or else,
    a headgear worn by the Palestinians,
    promoting a Palestinian cause.
    He is intensely communist.
    And that's how he has--
    I suppose, that's how he was able to keep his sanity.
    The other brother-- and they haven't talked to each other
    for years--
    is a general practitioner.
    He is retired now.
    And he as three children, one of them
    is a timpanist for the famous Hallé Orchestra in Manchester.
    He put himself through school, partially, by borrowing-- no,
    no, going to a--
    how do you call these places where
    you put something on consignment, you get money
    for it?
    Pawn broker.
    Pawn shop, mm-hmm.
    A pawnshop.
    And getting himself a xylophone, and going to Paris
    with a friend, who I guess, carried the instrument.
    That's why he was in music school,
    and playing Bach in Paris.
    So he was a busker?
    Was he a playing Bach in Paris, on the street
    and getting money there?
    Yes, yes.
    He was a busker, how cool.
    Oh, he paid part of his tuition that way.
    And so back to Graulhet.
    But no, before we get there, do you keep in contact
    with both of these cousins?
    One of them doesn't talk to anybody.
    That's Gugu, George.
    OK.
    The other one, I keep emailing him.
    And occasionally he will answer.
    But I don't know what it is.
    After the war, they invited me a number of times.
    And it was wonderful being there.
    But he just doesn't communicate.
    When he does, he's very warm.
    But I guess he just doesn't communicate.
    What about the last name?
    Did they keep the last name, Abendstern?
    Abendstern, yes.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    I guess my excuse is that they had an easy life.
    So here we are in Graulhet.
    OK.
    And for a while the police were looking for my mother.
    She wrote to a relative in Switzerland--
    she sent her a letter--
    I just arrived in Switzerland, et cetera.
    And that letter was to be sent to Madame [? Jarlan. ?]
    Her former landlady, who couldn't be trusted
    to keep any secret whatever.
    And shortly thereafter the police stopped searching.
    Oh, OK.
    I'm going to repeat this, just so I understand it.
    You can get me off my train of thought,
    just the next thing in my mind.
    Oh.
    Anyway, go ahead.
    When your mother writes this letter to a relative
    in Switzerland--
    Yes.
    --it is to inform her landlady in--
    That my mother had arrived safely in Switzerland.
    In Switzerland.
    Meanwhile--
    But landlady in France--
    Yeah.
    No, no, no, no, I know why you don't understand it, because I
    forgot to mention something.
    And that is when my mother went into hiding actually, in France.
    OK, tell me about that.
    First of all, before she went into hiding, I was in school.
    And I remember not speaking French and confusing the word
    "cheveux," which means hair, with "chevaux,"
    which means horses, and declaring to the assembled class
    that I had horses on my head.
    And I was terribly embarrassed.
    Since that period I embarrass very easily.
    Did I mention about that lottery I had?
    No.
    No.
    Another thing that I did in my attempt to have friends
    is I concocted a series of origami type pictures.
    And we were [SPEAKING FRENCH]--
    the window was this high.
    And I made a little lottery then.
    When the students saw--
    and I told my co-students too that they
    could win some of these things.
    When they saw that these things were flimsy pieces of paper--
    I don't remember it.
    But I remember having the feeling
    that I made a fool of myself.
    And the embarrassment that this caused me
    was so intense that I have never been
    able to tell that story to this day,
    except when I was in psychiatric treatment, and to my wife.
    Mm-hmm.
    And it's to the point where whenever
    I see a business man who is not doing well, it hurts me.
    And I never look in a restaurant because I'm
    afraid it's going to be empty, and it would be too painful.
    That feeling of--
    Same feeling.
    Yeah.
    Your mother-- when you were sent to a children's school--
    I mean, were you sent to live--
    was it a dormitory?
    Was it a boarding school?
    That comes later.
    That comes later, OK.
    I wouldn't forget that.
    OK.
    So your mother is in hiding, but where
    are you living while she's in hiding?
    We're not there yet.
    Oh, we're not there yet, OK.
    Oh, I first have to tell you what happens to her.
    Yes.
    Then I will tell you what happens to me.
    OK.
    So at one point, my mother had the presentiment
    that there would be a rafle.
    Mm-hmm.
    Now it is my opinion that presentiment is not
    a gift from heaven which allows you
    to see things nobody else could pick up,
    but it is the act of acting on a cue
    and you don't know what the cue is.
    And what the cue was, I don't know.
    But that day, she went to Monsieur Marty, her shoemaker,
    who was as poor as a shoe himself.
    Mm-hmm.
    But she told him--
    she started crying.
    And she said, I don't know what to do.
    Marty told her, go back home, and come back in the afternoon.
    That afternoon he hid her.
    OK, now before going into my mother being hidden,
    I have to mention the few of the other people who
    were hiding in Graulhet.
    OK.
    One of them was the brothers Hirsch.
    Mm-hmm.
    One of whom was--
    [INAUDIBLE] interested in my mother.
    They were both taken and killed.
    The Bachmanns, who also were paraded through the town.
    And then she was used as a German sex slave,
    and then made to work in a salt mine, where she perished.
    And he became an East German communist, the head
    of some communist whatever.
    Any children?
    When you were there, were there any children
    who were also refugees on the run from Germany?
    You're mentioning people who are all adults.
    No, no, that comes later.
    That's in Font-Remeu.
    OK.
    So at one point-- so here is my mother hiding at the shoemaker.
    And she did so two years, day for day.
    When she emerged after the war, she made an arm in arm
    with a Madame Marty.
    She met a policeman who said, that night I
    saw you going to Mr. Marty, but I too was in the resistance.
    And Marty was in the resistance.
    He later showed me one of the guns he had there.
    And he was also a communist.
    At one point, living with my mother
    got the better of Mr. Marty.
    And he goes, Madame Etoile, Abendstern, Eveningstar Etoile
    star, [SPEAKING FRENCH].
    Mr. Marty was [SPEAKING FRENCH].
    Mr. Marty, you are crazy.
    Tell us what he said in French to her.
    [SPEAKING FRENCH]
    Yeah, what does it mean in English?
    "I love you."
    That's what I thought.
    Oh, I forgot.
    Yeah.
    Upon which he sends her to his brother-in-law,
    Monsieur Tournier, with a note that she is a spy,
    so that he would kill her.
    However--
    Because she says no?
    Because she says you're crazy?
    Yeah, whatever it was.
    That's what he decided to do.
    OK.
    But the Tourniers figured out what was going on,
    and didn't kill her.
    And shortly thereafter, Madame Marty, an angel,
    showed up there, and telling, Madame Etoile,
    I cannot live without you.
    Oh, my dear.
    So she went back.
    So Madame Marty--
    She's a saving feature of the family.
    Isn't that interesting?
    Mm-hmm.
    Isn't that interesting?
    So where were you?
    Another drama occurred-- and this is--
    OK, another drama occurred, yeah.
    --when my mother had a tooth problem.
    Mm-hmm.
    And she went to a dentist out of town,
    dressed as a little old lady, I think with a wig.
    All this arranged by la veuve.
    Widows are called "veuve."
    You don't call them Mrs. Rouffiac--
    Veuve Rouffiac.
    OK.
    Veuve Rouffiac was in charge of coal--
    she had the big coal for coal stoves, concession for --
    And she was the go-to person for the Resistance, Jewish problems,
    anything to do with against the Germans.
    And she had to go with a false identity card
    to an out-of-town dentist.
    And the identity card said that she's from Alsace-Lorraine where
    Frenchmen have often an accent.
    Cut it for a second.
    You're in this town which is known for tanning leather.
    And are you in this town because your father is in a prison camp
    nearby?
    Yes.
    Did she ever see your father?
    Oh, that's what I'd forgotten.
    OK.
    For good reason.
    Yeah, she would go to see him at Les Milles.
    And I once was--
    to vacation-- probably it was for free, I don't know--
    at Font-Remeu, a children's home.
    Font-Remeu in the Pyrenees mountains.
    But that I will get to later.
    Also once she went to see my father.
    And I must have gone with her because I had no place to go.
    She probably went the first time.
    And she went to--
    I lost my train of thought.
    While I was near Aix-en-Provence,
    where Les Milles is, I caught typhoid from poisons
    from bad snails.
    And I was hospitalized for quite a while.
    I remember having nightmares, if you can call them
    that, about playing cards.
    And if I lost, I would make in my pants, which I always
    did because I had diarrhea.
    I also remember a young man who was making
    Balsa airplanes, which he sold.
    And I can see the entire room where I was.
    I can also remember being given--
    although I don't remember that I was being given injections
    because they had no IVs at the time.
    It was intramuscular.
    Followed by horrendous diet because it
    was the same thing, day in, day out,
    of pork chops and mashed potatoes.
    Oh, dear.
    I also-- it's like it's a blank.
    But I know that my mother and my father
    were standing next to the bed.
    But as hard as I try, I cannot remember him.
    So he was let out to visit you in the hospital?
    Yes, that's what happened.
    He also worked for peasants while he was in Les Milles.
    So he was able to leave the camp environment, the prison
    environment?
    Yes.
    And one day my mother was with him.
    And the camp people said quick, quick, they're closing the camp,
    you have to come, or you won't be able to whatever.
    And he was thinking of escaping.
    And he discussed it with my mother.
    But he-- you can get me to cry just
    by mentioning my father's name.
    1,000 years of analysis won't stop this.
    Nor will the good Dr. Merkel, who reconciled me with this
    generation of Germans.
    But this doesn't go away.
    He essentially gave his life for us.
    So-- yeah.
    How is it that he decided not to escape?
    Because they would get us.
    OK, we can have lunch.
    OK.
    So I am now on my way to Font-Remeu.
    It is your father who doesn't leave, doesn't escape from
    the camp, yes?
    Right.
    And his last letter, of which I have 30 some--
    my mother gave me his letters.
    And some I got from my uncle.
    My mother said she destroyed the sexy ones.
    She destroyed all of them.
    Oh.
    I guess all of them were sexy.
    And she destroyed them because?
    Because they were too intimate.
    But all the letters are at the museum,
    including the last one, which says
    that he has to finish now because he's
    going to go to a farm near, I think, Aix-en-Provence
    to do farming.
    Mm-hmm.
    That's what they called German public relations.
    Oh.
    And it doesn't matter how evil you are,
    as long as you present it well.
    Yeah.
    So while my mother was being hidden, at the time she--
    first of all, we always had a backpack packed just in case,
    one for her, one little one for me.
    I suppose it was smaller.
    Mm-hmm.
    And she wanted to send me back to the children's home.
    Somehow, at this point, the sister
    of Mendes France, the great, great French premier who
    ended the Vietnamese war--
    Jewish.
    She paid for my upkeep for a period of two months.
    Sometimes at 3:00 in the morning,
    I'm on the internet looking for the past.
    And I got this quote from her that she did this.
    And besides, everybody likes him--
    and remember that I had been there once before.
    Well, this I don't remember that you had been in the children
    homes before.
    Before, yes.
    Mm-hmm.
    I probably should page through that too.
    Everybody likes him.
    He is even in temper, and something like he loves to help.
    So this is about you?
    Yeah.
    So this was a personal connection
    where this lady paid for your--
    The sister of Mendes France.
    Of Mendes France, this I don't know.
    M-E-N-D-E-S.
    Ah-huh.
    France.
    Yes.
    He is a very, very well-known premier,
    possibly the best they've had--
    OK.
    OK.
    --in that period of time.
    How was the connection made between--
    I don't know.
    OK.
    It probably-- somehow she got the money together
    to send me there, or they did it for next to nothing
    because the woman hid several kids.
    I'll tell you about that.
    OK.
    But before we get there, I know I'm interrupting here.
    But earlier when we were talking about your mother
    hiding and the drama involved with the shoemaker and--
    Yes, this comes before that.
    This is before that.
    She went to the shoemaker.
    I came.
    I went to Font-Remeu.
    Oh, that's what my question was.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    And so here I go back there.
    And Monsieur Marty was supposed to--
    there are three people who claimed they brought me there.
    I think Monsieur Marty did it.
    And I was supposed to call him uncle while on the way.
    Once I slipped, and I called him by his name,
    and he slapped me, which I think was a good idea.
    And so I stayed there for two years,
    together with a number of other Jewish children, which
    I will mention.
    First there were two homes, one for the younger children.
    Then I went to the one with the older children.
    This was between age 12 and 14.
    And Tante Suzanne, mentions that the woman who
    had us, Suzanne Canard, who never married, never
    had children, apparently liked me maybe more
    than the other children.
    She writes that some of them were not pleased with that.
    But I remember it is that we all get along well.
    Mm--hmm.
    I went to school there in the pension.
    And her tenderness sort of saved me.
    Can you describe what it looked like, this children's home?
    Oh, it looked like a--
    in French they call them chalet.
    It looked like a very large private home,
    or a small pension.
    OK.
    The other place for the younger children, Estem Bé,
    which in Catalan means [SPEAKING FRENCH],
    "we are well there," is now a pension.
    And [SPEAKING FRENCH] is now a social something or else, part
    of the city's social something.
    I found it again through Google, viewed from above.
    Oh, satellite.
    Satellite.
    Yeah.
    It was not easy.
    I was always hungry because we were on rations.
    And I didn't have any.
    And so she had to share.
    I was called-- some kids called me Gargantua.
    What does that mean?
    Gargantua is the--
    I was just going to say.
    It's the huge person who is the hero of Gargantua
    and of Pantagruel by Rabelais, one of the great French writers
    and philosophers.
    He was a doctor too from the University of Montpellier.
    Because I was always hungry, and so was Gargantua.
    Or they called me the poet because I took long
    walks in the forest.
    I didn't have enough clothes.
    And my shoes leaked all winter long.
    I had frostbite.
    Oh.
    I missed my mother.
    And I would write her letters under the name of Mitsu,
    promising to be good, writing her love poems.
    And I didn't know where my father was.
    And did you know that your mother was with Mr. Marty?
    Oh, yes.
    You knew that?
    Yes.
    You knew where she was, but not where he was.
    Yes.
    One summer I was taken there through the Col de Puymorens,
    a meandering route through the Pyrenees mountains.
    In those days, buses functioned with charcoal.
    They had big tanks of charcoal.
    And private cars had tanks of gas, and not gasoline, gas.
    Mm-hmm.
    And we had a huge thunderstorm in the Col de Puymorens.
    And we were, essentially, [SPEAKING FRENCH],
    how do you say that?
    The piece of metal you put on top of the roof to attract--
    Oh, thunder-- uh, lightning.
    Lightning--
    Rods.
    We were essentially lightning rods, but somehow we made it.
    OK.
    The Col de Puymorens was when Madame Marienneau,
    one of the helpers at the school, and her lover,
    the head of [SPEAKING FRENCH], of food supply in Toulouse,
    brought me to Toulouse with them, which was very nice.
    And I somehow used magic thinking in the sense
    that I somehow felt that my intelligence would save me.
    I was just being [INAUDIBLE] obviously.
    And also, only once in my life have
    I lost control of my bowels, except when I was hospitalized,
    as before said.
    And it is only after I went back to there with my son,
    that I realized that it was in front of the Gestapo.
    But I wasn't aware of it at the time.
    Also, I could see from my window,
    the magnificent valley of the Cerdanya, many, many,
    many miles and going up from 1,800 meters down and up again
    in Spain with a mountain in the background.
    And in the middle was what we used to call the camel,
    or chameau.
    Mm-hmm.
    It was two sort of hilly promontories
    with forests on them.
    It sounds beautiful.
    And I remember the houses in front of me too.
    But I had obliterated, as I realized when
    I went back there, one house.
    And that was the gendarmerie, the police station.
    So I knew, but I didn't know.
    Yeah.
    Likewise, the Grand Hotel was taken over by the Germans.
    One of them would come and bring me
    those triangular pieces of cheese, Bonbel, occasionally.
    And I think I spoke a few words of German to him.
    I mean, it's as if I didn't know what horrible danger I was.
    I even began identifying with the Catholic religion,
    especially every week when they traipsed us up to the--
    what's it called?
    Confession?
    No, no, no, it's a little church with a magnificent,
    I think, Black Madonna nailed.
    Mm-hmm.
    Eventually, my mother came to get me
    because one day the Germans were--
    they were just gone.
    Well, tell me, before we get to that part,
    were the other children almost all Jewish?
    Or were they mixed?
    No, no, no, no, there were just a few Jews.
    I will tell you what happened to them.
    OK.
    And she took me to a restaurant.
    And this was the first time in two years I had enough to eat.
    And I ate and ate and ate and ate, and she stopped it.
    Now, the children were as follows.
    The nephews of Mendes France, Etienne Grumbach
    and Didier Grumbach.
    And Didier Grumbach became--
    he was gay.
    He became one of the luminaries, if not the highest placed person
    of French couture.
    He took me to his New York pad, beautifully--
    it was on the front page of the New York Times,
    just to give you an idea.
    And in front of me was a Fortuny lamp with a pale glow.
    And right in front of me-- and in spite of myself,
    I couldn't help feeling that he had the Gestapo there.
    Oh, gosh.
    This is when you're already in New York?
    Yes.
    And I brought photos of us together.
    And I'd get closer to him to show them to him,
    and every time I did, he'd move away a little bit.
    And he mentioned that Tante Suzanne
    had, essentially, an army-like regiment going on there.
    And he doesn't like her.
    In other words, it leaves different kinds
    of traces on different people.
    Yes.
    The other one, Etienne Grumbach, Thiennot Grumbach,
    later in life, became a lawyer, one
    of the-- if not the most liked lawyers in France,
    very highly placed, and interested in the working
    man and probably the poor.
    A wonderful man.
    Mm-hmm.
    The first gentleman, by the way, took me out to lunch.
    I first was fantasizing taking him to the Boston Symphony
    where I had an ongoing subscription, but I realized--
    and I finally, a few years ago, got
    the courage to call Etienne Grumbach
    and ask to see him again.
    And he had died--
    Oh.
    --at the age of 74.
    The other one still lives.
    We are now back in Graulhet.
    Yeah.
    Well, from the world, [? graulhus, ?] which means in--
    I think, Catalan-- no, in Patois.
    I forgot the exact name--
    frog, because it used to be swamps.
    So it sounds to me, geographically,
    you were very close to the Spanish border--
    Yes.
    --if you mentioned the children's home,
    you could see even into the Pyrenees.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Now, when you go back to Graulhet,
    can you place that for me geographically?
    How far away that was?
    It's on the left side, on the Western side, of the Pyrenees
    mountains, Near Pau, P-A-U.
    Ah-huh.
    Still in the Southern part of France?
    Yeah, it's at the frontier.
    OK.
    So it was time for me then to go to public school.
    And the Lycée de Toulouse was full.
    So my mother went there, and very atypically for her,
    she broke down in front of the, I think, principal.
    And he said, Madame--
    and this man who had a reputation of being very stern--
    said to her, [SPEAKING FRENCH], what
    is it, Madame, that I did to you?
    And recommended me to the sweet Oratorian monks
    in their school of Santa Barbe, Saint Beard.
    Mm-hmm.
    I was told that my tuition for one year was--
    or at least my tuition was assured by a poem
    which I wrote about my father, and which
    was highly praised by the minister of culture
    of the provisional French government, which story must
    have gotten perverted in the transmission
    because such a thing is impossible.
    This would have been the Vichy government?
    No, no, no, the provisional French government.
    OK.
    I cannot believe this all the more since I--
    and when I looked at the poem later, it was such kitsch--
    with the exception of one line, [SPEAKING FRENCH],
    "in the shadow of my father who is no more--"
    that I destroyed it.
    Oh, but do you remember it?
    No.
    Oh, because I was going to ask you to recite it for us.
    No, I can tell you, Goethe in French and in English,
    plus all kinds of French poetry, plus EE Cummings, et cetera.
    How old were you at the time?
    12 or 14.
    I think-- it was near the end of World War II.
    Was it?
    If you were born in 1932, you may be 13 years old or--
    Must be the 12 then, yeah.
    Yeah.
    The monks were very sweet to me.
    Mm-hmm.
    And during the weekend I found myself
    with two volunteer little, old ladies
    who were into making their own soap,
    and promoting the use of Esperanto, so
    clearly had a good heart, and let me loose
    in Toulouse, which was--
    oh, wait, no, no, no, no, that was
    when I was in the Petit Lycée in Toulouse,
    which I will get to now.
    From the Santa Barbe I went to the Lycée de Toulouse.
    OK, I want to look back a little bit.
    When your mother picked you up from the children's home,
    was that at the end of the war?
    Yes.
    OK, so it was safe?
    As I said, the Germans had disappeared.
    OK.
    OK.
    And how did you know that your father was no more?
    Because it was too late.
    I mean, he just didn't come back.
    How did you find out where he had been taken?
    Or had you thought he stayed in the same prison?
    I don't know that.
    OK.
    But it was known that everyone from Les Milles--
    Les Milles was a [SPEAKING FRENCH],
    the gathering place for Auschwitz.
    So it was a transit part?
    It was a transit?
    It was not transit.
    That's why it went--
    everybody got to Les Milles.
    OK.
    And then they went to Drancy, and then Auschwitz, one way.
    And did people know of such a place
    called Auschwitz at the time?
    No, after the war they did.
    OK.
    OK.
    In his convoy--
    I'm referring to what's his name?
    Something "deportations de juifs de France," the French lawyer.
    Oh, I know who you mean.
    I met him.
    I know who you mean.
    I think 900--
    Klarsfeld?
    No, no not--
    Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.
    Serge Klarsfeld, and Beate Klarsfeld who was not Jewish.
    Yeah.
    And I think of 991 people who arrived there, one survived.
    I often think of my father's last moments in a gas chamber.
    In the Petit Lycée de Toulouse, I was best in class.
    I was [SPEAKING FRENCH], how do you say?
    I was suffering from scurvy with distorted chest formation.
    Mm-hmm.
    I was different.
    A prescription for scapegoating my bed
    were regularly short changed.
    They did something else with my belongings,
    which just occurs to me now.
    I forgot what it was.
    And one corpulent and tall gorilla loved to push me around.
    And to this day, I wish I could reciprocate.
    I was back there.
    No matter what the cost, even if I broke my wrist.
    I had one friend.
    And we would discuss, at length, the ill state of the world.
    Were you a lonely boy?
    I've always been alone.
    But I didn't feel loneliness because I've always had a goal.
    And I was working on it.
    That is why it would be helpful if I
    went through my school years.
    Sure, we can do that.
    But you're at the Lycée right now in Toulouse.
    Yes.
    Also the-- oh, I'd love to get out of Lycée and into the city.
    These ladies let me loose.
    Also across the place, across Toulouse--
    I think it's called Gare Matabiau, the train station--
    was a huge poster, where probably in chalk
    were the name of the returnees from the camps.
    And I kept looking at it.
    I knew it was much too late, that he wouldn't come back,
    but I kept looking.
    And another thing they did is we had long tables where
    we ate, always the same thing.
    And of course, I was way at the end.
    And the meat was gone.
    But the white beans and the [SPEAKING FRENCH],
    which are weevil beetles--
    they were full of them-- were still there.
    That's Toulouse.
    So and now this is when I meet Fleischmann, my stepfather, OK.
    So meanwhile, when I was going to vacation to Graulhet,
    which was 40 kilometers away--
    or miles, probably miles--
    my mother announced that she met a Mr. Fleischmann, who
    was a painter--
    no, who painted things.
    And he had lots of socks with holes in them,
    which she was darning.
    I became instantly so jealous that I give her
    a copy of David Copperfield.
    And in a few weeks, if not one week,
    I relearned German that I had forgotten every word of.
    Really?
    It was like--
    You were competing.
    I don't know what I was doing, but I was very jealous.
    Only to discover, once I knew German,
    that the two criminals were talking about things like,
    where did you put my Coke?
    And, how is the soup?
    By criminals you're talking about your mother and Mr.
    Fleischmann?
    Yeah, the two culprits, yes.
    Of course.
    Of course, yes.
    Fleischmann did his very best to win me over.
    And he had no trouble at all.
    He first took me to the magnificent Cathedral of Albi,
    which I would recommend to anyone.
    It's a masterpiece.
    The entire inside is painted.
    And every time I went back to Graulhet, I would go there.
    He taught me taste.
    Every time I saw a painting, I would say, is that kitsch?
    What did I want to say?
    Once he found out that I liked his art, I could do no wrong.
    He imitated for me, the cry of the cock, which
    he did absolutely flawless.
    Like a rooster?
    A rooster.
    OK.
    To the point where the entire population of roosters
    in Graulhet would answer the chorus,
    and the police came and told him to desist.
    [LAUGHS]
    I have a picture which I gave you.
    It had the window where he would perform.
    How can you not love such a person?
    Well, as I wrote, to have such a man
    in my life for 20 years without ever a bad thought being thought
    or a bad word being between us, it
    was one of the blessings of my life.
    Was he-- I hesitate to say it, but I will ask it.
    Was he, in many ways, the father you weren't able to have?
    No, not at all.
    No?
    He was not at all like a father.
    He was like a very dear friend, as I wrote.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And I sometimes wondered what would happen if my father came
    back, even though I knew he couldn't.
    And even though I felt immense compassion for my father,
    I would feel horrendous if poor Ado had to leave.
    However, it was time now to go to the big city
    where he could exhibit his painting.
    What did I forget?
    You didn't forget a thing.
    I want to ask a few questions about Mr. Fleischmann's story.
    Who was he?
    Where did he come from?
    I'm getting there.
    [LAUGHS]
    OK.
    Mr. Fleischmann was a German painter who did very well,
    had exhibitions, was fantastically
    schooled, among others, by Professor Casper, who's
    now an illustrious unknown, but in those days
    was the man, and others.
    However, at the time of Hitler, he became one
    of the [NON-ENGLISH].
    Oh, one of those decadent artists.
    No, the technical name is--
    [NON-ENGLISH] is--
    I can't think of the word right now, but decadent would do it.
    Mm-hmm.
    And he would be required to do paint kitsch a la
    Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.
    Socialist realism, or whatever it would be.
    Yeah.
    It's not for nothing that the Council for the Arts--
    is that how you call it?
    Mm-hmm.
    Has been defunded, or is going to be--
    Oh, National Endowment for the Arts, yes.
    He was not Jewish?
    No.
    I have his papers going three generations back.
    He's as clean as the driven snow.
    During the First World War, he was severely
    wounded with third degree burns and hospitalized
    for a long time.
    And he became bald as a result.
    But the hardest thing for him was to have to shoot his horse.
    He loved animals.
    Also, he had been in love with a Jewish woman
    from whom he had a child.
    He wouldn't talk about it.
    She went to Cuba, waited for him,
    and wound up in a mental institution.
    The child died.
    That's the one thing he wouldn't talk about.
    How did he meet your mother?
    They were the little hole in the ground, Toulouse--
    Graulhet, that's where they met.
    Oh, so had he lived in exile then in France?
    Yeah, I haven't got there yet.
    Sorry.
    I'm so sorry.
    Because he didn't want to go to war for Hitler,
    and because he couldn't paint there anymore,
    he went to France with the Gestapo at his heels.
    Once in Marseilles-- I don't know how he got himself there--
    he had a-- to give you an idea he was cool also--
    he saw a group of German soldiers walking straight
    towards him, and remembering World War I,
    he talked to them in rough army parlance, probably Heil Hitler
    to them, and went on his way.
    Nevertheless, they caught him, and put him in the Camps les
    Milles, not at the same time, but in the same camp
    that my stepfather--
    That your father went.
    That my father.
    Mm-hmm.
    It so happened, as I was told by Dr. Minchiarini when
    I went to the camp, the story goes that some kind of work
    was being done to Les Milles, which was originally
    a tile factory.
    And some people talked the head of the camp
    into letting them go to another camp, which
    was Chateau something or else--
    the name escapes me, near Nimes.
    Mm-hmm.
    It was an ephemeral camp in the sense
    that it was made out of tents, possibly from World War
    I. I'm not sure of that.
    And quite a few people escaped from there, including
    Fleischmann, carrying all his drawings,
    extensive series of drawings, from Les Milles, all of which
    you have.
    Oh, my goodness.
    Except one I think I gave to my son.
    And one I had given to the first girlfriend I had between my two
    marriages, which was 13 years.
    Big mistake because it should have gone to your museum.
    And also, there's another series of drawings extant of this camp,
    but it's sort of surrealistically.
    Mm-hmm.
    It doesn't show you.
    He did realistic, gorgeous drawings in a [SPEAKING FRENCH],
    in watercolor.
    Have you seen them?
    No.
    From the camp.
    And there is one drawing which I would have loved to have kept,
    but I couldn't bear to look at it,
    was done in Les Milles of a man with a violin.
    It's not the most horrendous, but the saddest drawing
    of the Holocaust I've ever seen.
    His eyes are just like this.
    You have to take a look.
    I will.
    So the next thing I know about Fleischmann
    is that there is a letter from a man who saved him.
    Right now I can't think of the name.
    And Fleischmann tried to go to Switzerland.
    And he told me the dogs pushed them out.
    They didn't let anybody in.
    And this man saved them from the German police,
    and took him to a man named [? Hubu ?] in Limoges.
    Mm-hmm.
    However-- and hid him.
    And he was in the resistance, Hubu's place
    was searched when Fleischmann happened to be out of town.
    I have a letter, which I gave you,
    of this man describing the whole story, and also
    a little card to my mother from--
    her saying-- I can't recall his name--
    has died.
    An angel of the [SPEAKING FRENCH], goodness, et
    cetera, but he left me two children in his image.
    So Mr. [? Hubu ?] was taken to a camp, but he survived.
    And Fleischmann was passed from one person
    to another, all in the resistance,
    until the end of the war.
    So we have now Fleischmann back from Graulhet.
    And he is going to Paris.
    To have an exhibition?
    No.
    No?
    To just reside there.
    OK.
    And I'm racing--
    Oh, OK.
    Do we have time to finish?
    Oh, absolutely.
    OK.
    In Paris, he lived in the Bois de Vincennes,
    the wood of Vincennes.
    Vincennes is a fort--
    Mm-hmm.
    --the other side of Paris from the Bois de Bologne,
    Bologne Woods, at the home of a woman whose husband
    had befriended Jews.
    And then he sort of functioned as a German mousetrap.
    He then denounced them to either the police or the Germans.
    And that was the end of them.
    So at the end of the war he had to go to Spain.
    And our landlady made do with renting the place
    to probably various people, which
    did not prevent my mother--
    partially because she had sort of a sexy
    get up on and partially because of her husband's sin,
    from considering her quite--
    without any evidence-- as a woman of ill repute.
    However, in Paris, my mother, Fleischmann and I--
    in fact, he gave me a copy of every one of his books--
    [SPEAKING FRENCH], got to know, Michel Seuphor,
    who wrote the first significant work
    on Arp and also on Mondrian, an icon, who promoted him.
    And he had exhibitions, the first one being at the gallery,
    Cruze, C-R-U-Z-E. Cruze--
    however that was his first show--
    and wanted the near totality of his paintings as payment.
    And these paintings disappeared as if
    in a black hole because I have never
    been able to trace them since.
    And I'm pretty good at that.
    I'm good at the computer.
    So if there were any trace of them on the internet,
    I would know.
    So it was hard to make a living.
    And he would paint gorgeous silk scarves, which he sold,
    and which my mother sold.
    I'm just checking whether I skipped anything.
    So my parents decided to go to--
    my mother and stepfather decided to go to--
    oh, and let me just mention one thing.
    I frequently went to back to see--
    I mean, not infrequently, Madame--
    who was the woman who hid my father?
    Madame Marty.
    Monsieur Marty, had died.
    And at first he was still there.
    I have some photos, which you have, with Monsieur and Madame
    Marty in the background, my son in a chicken coop
    because he loves animals, playing with a chicken.
    But you just see his head.
    And eventually she was with another gentleman.
    And she probably got tired of the adulation, my adulation
    for her, and made sure to tell me that if it happened again
    she wouldn't do it.
    But of course I knew that she would do it.
    You mean for having--
    That she'd be saving us, saving my mother.
    Yeah.
    And once my mother sent her money for decades.
    And from time to time, so did I.
    So in other words, your gratitude,
    she got tired of your gratitude--
    Of my adulation, thanking her and how wonderful and so forth.
    Right, right, right, right.
    She was a very modest woman.
    Her son went with this ship and his girlfriend to--
    what's the island where Cretus was?
    Where Crete is?
    C-R-E-T-U-S.
    Wouldn't it be Crete?
    I can't think of the word.
    Anyway, an island in the Mediterranean.
    Ah-huh.
    He came back without his girlfriend.
    And he died.
    Oh.
    He couldn't manage the boat.
    And so we are now in--
    Paris, and you're thinking of coming to the United States.
    Yes.
    In Paris, I went to the Lycée Marcelin Berthelot.
    One walks through the woods, and a bus or one short bicycle trip
    away.
    It was understood at the time, the first mixed college
    in Paris, boys and girls.
    And it was the first happy time in my life.
    After the war, I desperately looked for my colleagues,
    schoolmates, even enlisting the help of a college professor.
    A Grandes Écoles professor, the main schools in Paris.
    And he couldn't find it.
    He was the one-time boyfriend of my wife's older daughter.
    But she's now with a different gentleman.
    So you're saying in post-war years you were looking--
    Yeah, in post-war years I tried to find these people again.
    And then they had a site on the internet, [SPEAKING FRENCH]
    Buddies of Yesteryear.
    And bingo, there they were, all eight
    of them still alive, with exception of one
    who married a much younger woman,
    and won't have anything to do with old people.
    [LAUGHS]
    Takes all kinds.
    It does.
    And one Jean-Paul [? Carvalho ?] I still frequently write, email
    him, or call him.
    I can no longer travel now because of arthritic complaints.
    So these would have been classmates from the--
    The Lycée in Paris?
    Yes.
    And I asked Jean-Paul [? Carvalho, ?] what
    was I like in those days?
    And he said, "brilliant, you always know the answer,
    always raised your hand, but painfully shy."
    End quotes.
    And one more thing, "keeping to yourself so that we never
    invited you to parties."
    And that made me so sad when I heard this,
    because I thought I had sort of-- not friends, but--
    I remember also that the son of the dentist of Charenton,
    the huge, sprawling French--
    you nod your head.
    You know of it--
    a French mental hospital.
    Clearly a psychopath invited me to his place one day,
    which was, as I remember, a tiny little house in the huge grounds
    of the place.
    And he showed me some X-rays.
    And he told me that he would have a girl come
    to his little place.
    And it being noted that in those days sexual favors were not
    dispensed with the enthusiasm with which they are nowadays.
    And he would say, well, you see, this is an X-ray of my head.
    And I have a cancer on the brain.
    I'm going to die, so do something for me.
    [LAUGHS]
    Years later, in New York, I chanced upon the PR blurb
    from the French Consulate.
    And here he was, cutting out of their--
    oh, before that I should say that I would take my classmates
    to studios of painters who Fleischmann knew, and taught
    them a little bit.
    So this fellow who had been on this trip, obviously,
    cut out of their frames some well-known paintings,
    rolled them up, and hid.
    And he was going to leave the next day.
    They caught him.
    There was a trial.
    My philosophy professor-- no, father of the boy
    testified and cried.
    The boy testified and cried.
    Oh, by the way, he'd given my name, which he misspelled,
    as his own.
    And Bernard Guillemin, my philosophy professor
    testified, and did not cry.
    And the boy got off free.
    Typically French.
    [LAUGHS]
    It's the only country where you kill your wife
    and you get away with it.
    Yes, what a crime.
    It occasionally occurs.
    Anything else about Paris?
    No.
    From Paris my-- oh, already in Font-Remeu,
    I was torturing myself with--
    since I was always anxious about something,
    and I'd better not be anxious about the real thing
    because it would destroy me--
    I tortured myself with what am I going to be.
    And I chanced on--
    I decided I would be a psychologist.
    I want to stop just for a second.
    You just said, "I tortured myself about something,
    if I did about the real thing, it would destroy me."
    What was the real thing?
    I was aware that I was in danger, but I wasn't.
    And this is while you were still in danger?
    No, no, no, no, I torture myself--
    that was-- yeah, at the time.
    But I had not decided yet that I would be a psychologist.
    That happened at the end of my lycée.
    And Bernard Guillemin, my professor,
    suggested the Institute Nationale des Sciences
    Politiques, where there was a psychological branch,
    industrial psychology.
    Now, I have a tendency to trust, and be eternally grateful,
    to any one who was good to me, without any critical--
    Without reservation?
    Yeah, and it turns out there wasn't such a thing.
    I was there, but there was no psychology.
    And that just reminded me of one thing I have to add.
    When I first came from the mountains,
    the Pyrenees mountains, my parents--
    my mother and stepfather--
    got me to a beautiful home, where
    they put children like me who had been traumatized by the war,
    or came back from the war.
    And I went into an absolute panic.
    And nothing and no one could convince me to go there.
    They were perfectly nice people.
    The place was very nice.
    It was as if a terror that I've kept in check was let loose.
    So from the Lycée Marcelin Berthelot,
    then he also suggested that I go to the faculty of law
    at the same time, which I did.
    And it was impossible to do both.
    Apparently Frenchmen did it.
    But I couldn't.
    So fortunately, I got the visa to New York, and just in time.
    And you were how old by this point?
    19 when I came here, when I got the visa.
    So that's in 1951?
    '52.
    '52, OK.
    I guess as you can add, but God can't.
    [LAUGHS]
    Always it's abstract.
    Well, you know, I took more math classes.
    That's right.
    If he had--
    If only he had taken--
    If he had gone to the right school, what's going on
    wouldn't happen.
    That's right.
    So without connections in France, in being a foreigner,
    I couldn't have made it.
    So my uncle suggested I came to New York.
    And he picked me up from the Queen Elizabeth--
    there's Elizabeth and Mary, from the latter of the two.
    I think it was Elizabeth.
    Mm-hmm.
    And while we were going on the West Side highway
    to his home in Washington Heights,
    he made sure to point out to me that there
    were no cars to be had.
    This was after the war.
    But he secured a Nash car.
    And while he was driving the Nash car, that he always
    looked behind him so he wouldn't be caught speeding,
    which he always did.
    A few words about Fred Meyerhoff--
    He had moved from Kansas to Washington Heights?
    No, no, this is a different Fred.
    This is my mother's uncle something or else.
    OK, so not that uncle.
    No.
    He was a lawyer in Germany, and no longer allowed to do law.
    But nevertheless, people would still come to him.
    He was very gifted.
    He tells me also that one day he was at an early Nazi meeting
    where a woman would talk about the blood libel, which
    for the uninitiated, is the Jews killed children for Passover
    with variations like they use the blood for making matzos--
    I guess they must have had red matzos in those days--
    and so forth.
    And the woman said, [SPEAKING GERMAN],
    it says so in the Bible.
    No, no, no-- or either that or he asked her how she knew.
    I forgot exactly.
    And she said, [SPEAKING GERMAN], it states that so in the Bible.
    [SPEAKING GERMAN], but where in the Bible?
    And then she said, [SPEAKING GERMAN],
    if you keep carrying on like this,
    you will bring upon yourself the--
    Suspicion.
    --the suspicion that you belong to this damned race yourself.
    He said, [SPEAKING GERMAN], but I do.
    The next thing you know is two uniformed characters
    carrying him out.
    Then in New York, he learned accounting
    while essentially standing on one
    foot because the other one had poliomyelitis.
    Oh, my goodness.
    And then later he helped people with Wiedergutmachung--
    reparation, money reparation.
    So did he practice law here in New York?
    Only that kind of law, German law essentially.
    OK.
    And then there was his sister, Lotta Licht,
    who had a PhD or a doctorate in economics from Germany
    and a masters in social work from New York,
    and who could recite the first, I
    think, three pages or the entire introductory soliloquy,
    of Goethe's Faust.
    I can only go the first page or a quarter of that.
    I mean, 2/3 of-- no, no, not the whole page, about eight lines,
    plus a few other things in Faust, which I've taught myself.
    And Gerard de Nerval's translation, of one of them,
    because my mother recited it to me.
    That's the one about the king who has a flea that he loves.
    And he makes a minister out of him.
    But everybody gets bitten in his court.
    [LAUGHS]
    So you're with-- they sound like very colorful and also
    accomplished people, you know--
    Yes.
    --this uncle of yours.
    Yes.
    So he's driving in his Nash, where he's speeding and looking
    over his shoulder to make sure that he's not being followed.
    Yeah, yeah.
    And that's your first day in New York City, right off
    of the boat.
    Yes, but it didn't affect my compulsive honesty.
    So where am I?
    You're in New York.
    You've come over.
    Yes.
    And my question is, do your mother and your stepfather
    come with you, or do they stay behind?
    I came just very shortly before them.
    OK.
    And from there, I went to Kansas City, Missouri.
    Mm-hmm.
    And I was offered two scholarships, one at the state
    college, and one at--
    especially since I'm racing, I don't have that much longer.
    Don't race.
    The Jesuit school, they were wonderful people,
    Rockhurst College.
    OK.
    And the dean of the college, although he
    was supposed to be extremely stern, was a wonderful man.
    And the good Fathers never tried to proselytize me.
    They just wanted me to believe in a god of my choice.
    But when I grew up here, he was on vacation
    and I never got a chance to meet him.
    So I don't know who he is, God.
    So you don't have a faith in other words?
    A faith?
    You don't have a faith?
    I'm agnostic.
    Maybe I was totally atheist.
    I mean, what anthropomorphic being could
    allow what happened to exist?
    And at that time, I wanted to make a lot of money,
    so I went into economics.
    Not realizing that this had nothing to do with making money.
    And so eventually after a year, I went to New York.
    But before I say that, let me mention
    that I did pretty well there.
    And with this exception that I didn't speak the language well.
    So I always took too long to write my essays in examinations,
    until I finally wrote the entire examination
    in French, at which point the good Fathers relented.
    I would never have the chutzpah to do this now.
    Oh, my goodness.
    And I also showed some of my gratitude
    by translating some Heidegger for them, for one person,
    and doing graphological portraits for them.
    With this tendency I have to show eternal gratitude,
    as if they had saved my life, to anyone who is kind to me,
    I sent packages of food to Father Gough for many years,
    even when he went in a Jesuit retreat
    where this seemed to relieve the gastronomic monotony
    of the place.
    Until one day, he no longer answered, having, as I
    wrote it in my donation to your museum--
    what did I say?
    Ascended to the beatific lands reserved
    for those who believe in the deity, whereas the rest of us
    remained interred, scattered or interred,
    and wondering what it was all about.
    [LAUGHS]
    Yes.
    I actually said it a little better then,
    but I don't quite remember.
    So my desire to become a psychologist reasserted itself.
    Why psychologist?
    That was my question.
    How do you know my questions before I ask them?
    Because we're both equally smart.
    [LAUGHS]
    Why psychology?
    The way I explained it to me is I
    wanted to know what people were thinking, which still people
    absolutely fascinate me.
    And also, it was probably a way of putting order into chaos
    in which I was living.
    So I went to New York, to the City College of New York, which
    I knew was free.
    Mm-hmm.
    Everything else I went on scholarship,
    except Clark University, where I had a scholarship, fellowship,
    and teaching fellowship at the same time.
    Wow.
    So where was I?
    You were in the City of New York studying psychology.
    Yeah.
    So I went to apply, and not realizing you had to register.
    What's register?
    I had never registered.
    And they threw me out.
    I went to the dean.
    And he threw me out.
    Then I went to the head of the psychology
    department, the good Dr. Barmack in Westchester.
    Right now the name of the town escapes me.
    And he got me into there.
    And I'm the only student--
    well, I finished my bachelor's in two years.
    And I am one of the two people who finished their--
    I don't have that in my donation because I figured I shouldn't
    flatter myself, it's not nice.
    Tell us.
    Who finished in one year--
    I guess I was in a hurry-- while working at the same time.
    And then I was accepted at Clark and Chicago University.
    And I went to Clark University.
    And that was to pursue studies in--
    PhD in clinical psychology.
    OK.
    I much enjoyed the student body because Clark
    was a working class--
    Worcester was a working class place.
    That's right.
    So it created cohesion among the students
    because there were not too many other people to discuss things
    with.
    Everything went swimmingly there until my PhD thesis.
    In the meantime, I had concurrently--
    how did it work exactly?
    Yeah, while I was writing my PhD thesis,
    I did Boston University Medical School internship.
    And I was beginning my psychiatric residency.
    So you wanted to go further, not just psychology,
    but actually psychiatry?
    Yeah.
    OK.
    I didn't know-- you know.
    Only when you climb one mountain,
    you realize there's worse ahead.
    So I had to write my thesis 19 times.
    And at the 17th time, the dean of my department,
    obviously jealous, said to me that,
    what do you need a PhD for?
    You have an MD.
    And then following that, my advisor left,
    went on sabbatical without providing for a replacement.
    And I went to the--
    I wrote a letter of complaint to the dean of the school.
    I don't know how I could do these things.
    I couldn't do it now.
    That's, I guess, youth.
    And he said that he didn't understand
    how a graduate student could misspell the word, medicine,
    which I spelled the French way.
    So he was apprised of my social status.
    And the head of the department got on my case,
    and in two more revisions--
    so then that was 19, I think, revisions.
    And then came the time to present my defense, which
    is sort of pro forma.
    What was your thesis topic?
    The original thesis that I wanted to do
    was learning magic, which I did for the purpose
    in presenting it to a schizophrenic,
    and asking him to explain it.
    No.
    Yes.
    So they had two kinds of explanations.
    It is because of this concrete thinking--
    OK.
    --or invoking some kind of magical, supernatural entity.
    But my thesis advisor, quite correctly-- he was right--
    pointed out there was no theory behind it.
    It's not enough to be cute.
    That doesn't make you a scientist, unless you
    work for the government.
    [LAUGHS]
    At which point you get a grant, and a rather hefty one.
    Right.
    So you had another thesis.
    Well, I also had a master's thesis at City College,
    where I compared the ability of laymen and not
    laymen to judge not character, but temperament,
    from handwriting samples.
    And I got positive results.
    But I must have made an error because it's
    more and more shown that graphology just doesn't work.
    So there was something wrong with my thesis.
    OK.
    The day of the presentation of my thesis defense,
    I dictated it in New York, on a little Craig
    recorder, which was rated number one by Consumers Report.
    And all the way between New York and Worcester,
    being driven by my wife, I played this to myself.
    And the jury, my professors, not realizing
    that they were listening to a well-trained, sophisticated
    parrot, were impressed.
    [LAUGHS]
    I'm sure they were impressed anyway.
    Thank you.
    After that, I practiced in New York.
    A private practice?
    A private practice.
    And I worked for lawyers, Worker's Compensation
    Board, various other entities, including the German consulate.
    I was their psychiatric consultant.
    And tried to get them either more money,
    or some were just the German doctors
    couldn't see any psychological effect from the concentration
    camps.
    You can't make this up.
    Well, that is exactly the kind where you can't make this up.
    But I must say that everyone I met at the German consulate--
    they must have been chosen that way--
    were very, very nice people.
    And there was no--
    I pick anti-Semitism up across the street.
    Yeah.
    And there was nothing like that ever.
    But some Germans, probably old school Germans
    didn't know better.
    Yeah.
    But they're not in New York.
    And of course, the people who were being interviewed always
    complained about us.
    And they considered me--
    especially when I would tell them
    where they would start to cry and ask them
    to compose themselves, and when they feel better to continue
    with their terrible story--
    and they considered me like some agent of the devil.
    And would complain about this, not realizing
    that I was about to cry myself.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    When you would interview and speak with these people--
    Yes?
    --was there a commonality that you found
    in what they suffered from?
    I mean, because people are so individual,
    and they experience things in individual ways.
    Oh, I mean, I'm a textbook case.
    I'm prone to anxiety.
    I'm in the catastrophe business, something horrible
    is going to happen, and is always pessimistic.
    And I can't leave anybody.
    I can't fire anybody.
    I had somebody work for me who practically
    begged me to fire her.
    I guess she wanted to get-- and I can't do it.
    Because I put myself in their place, and it would hurt.
    And I know exactly where it comes from.
    But it's built in the system.
    You can't get it out.
    I'm just about finished.
    Let me see.
    And you would see that in the people that you would talk to?
    Oh, yes.
    And I mean, you see the whole symptoms
    of the survivor syndrome.
    And I have enough distance from patients that--
    sometimes it brings up something in me
    like that, which makes me sad, but otherwise I
    keep emotionally at a distance.
    But you have to do that, while at the same time, empathizing,
    like you do.
    Otherwise you go crazy.
    You feel what they feel, but not to the extent that they do,
    but enough so that you know what they're going through.
    That's what makes a good interview.
    So I think I have everything.
    Yeah, the one thing I wrote was that I
    was struck by this paradox that although I
    went through a period of unmatched evil
    and sadism, the persons to whom I had the privilege of being
    close, were remarkably heroic, and giving, and wonderful.
    Because this kind of cataclysm brings up
    the best and the worst of which human beings are capable.
    So I have not intentionally talked
    about romantic relationships.
    That's OK.
    At that point you adjust the machine.
    [LAUGHS]
    I tend to choose partners who form intense relationships
    rapidly, either willfully as a matter of willed behavior,
    or because of their personality structure,
    as if I wanted to prove that they will never leave me.
    And without going into a second psychological treatise,
    suffice it to say that this is not prescription for happiness.
    I have a question here.
    Yeah?
    You have children?
    Yes.
    How many children do you have?
    Two.
    That was coming next.
    See, you anticipate my questions.
    Girl?
    Boy?
    Both?
    The way I conclude the last paragraph of my donation
    to the Holocaust museum is--
    Your memoirs.
    --my memoirs, combined memoirs.
    To end on a happy note, my son, who is a chef,
    and has three dogs, and my daughter, who has a son,
    are both happy, married, and very, very good.
    That is an achievement.
    I only have one more sentence to go.
    Oh, but I have questions.
    But wait a minute.
    OK.
    Don't interrupt.
    Then which there is no better gift,
    and I end by saying, [SPEAKING FRENCH],
    happy people have no history, and vise versa.
    Questions?
    Well-- well, thank you for sharing your history.
    Thank you very much for sharing your history.
    You mentioned something earlier when you were talking about--
    when your mother took you back from the children's home
    and wanted to send you to another.
    And you absolutely didn't want to go.
    I didn't know why.
    And it was like you had held this terror inside.
    You had kept it in check.
    And all of a sudden, it--
    That's the explanation of an analyst who stays at a distance.
    I have no awareness of that.
    But what my question is, can you describe for me
    who the child, Peter Abendstern was?
    What kind of a child was he?
    What kind of personality did he have?
    Oh, well, as I said, this Madame Grumbach,
    the sister of Mendes France, said that everyone liked me,
    which I don't believe.
    Because the lady who--
    but I had no interpersonal difficulties in that place
    whatsoever.
    And then she said I was even-tempered
    and trying to be helpful, or liking to help,
    something like that.
    I was, I guess, shy--
    I don't remember too well--
    desperately wanting friends, not conceited.
    But you know, you were born at a time where if, even if,
    you might have had one year of life in safety,
    all of your formative years were not in safety.
    I know.
    That's why I'm the way I am, which I just described.
    But you asked me how I was when I was little.
    Well, I'm asking what kind of a person
    were you when you were little.
    And that's how you were.
    I remember very little.
    OK.
    I remember what I did, but I don't remember how I felt.
    OK.
    And maybe this sounds like an obvious question.
    But did all of that shape you to the way you are?
    Are you kidding?
    OK.
    I'm a walking survivor syndrome.
    But it's covered up.
    There are people who have various forms
    of psychopathology, and they hurt others.
    It's all inside with me.
    I try never to hurt anyone.
    But you carry a lot of pain.
    Well, I want to say that I am very, very grateful that you
    decided to share your life with us today,
    and to have donated so many materials to the Holocaust
    museum.
    I know that there is a cost.
    I know that there is a cost.
    Oh, that's OK.
    Yeah.
    Is there something else you'd want
    to add at this point to what we talked about?
    No, I just remember the Mr--
    was it Wasserman?
    Mm-hmm.
    Who was a very, very nice man, and erudite, too.
    He was especially impressed by my missile.
    Oh, we only have two, or something.
    That is a rarity?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    I see.
    Yeah.
    Oh, are you interested in what happened to the other people who
    were hidden with me?
    Who were?
    Hidden with me.
    I forgot that.
    Well, these would be the children who were in the--
    In Font-Remeu.
    I thought you had told me about them, the Grumbach--
    After the Grumbach, I stopped.
    I forgot what I was talking about.
    OK.
    Then there was the Lonquers.
    OK.
    The boy-- well, I searched for these people forever, the three
    Lonquer children, until I got Skype.
    And I put Daniel Lonquer, and bingo, there he was.
    I met him in Paris.
    Mm-hmm.
    He's a man who suffers a great deal.
    He doesn't talk to his family.
    He's very angry at women.
    He had to leave one year before I was liberated.
    And apparently in that place, I was
    told he might have been not treated well.
    And the war left a terrible mark on him.
    Then there was Amelia Lonquer, who
    after the war, just as I was getting
    married to my first wife, she sought help from me to free her
    from this man of North African origin who was behaving badly
    towards them.
    But I couldn't.
    I was about to get married.
    And we couldn't find him anyway.
    And she practiced a self-styled form of medicine,
    including on her own cancer of the breast, which killed her.
    I got her husband on the phone just as she was dying or about
    to die.
    Oh, my gosh.
    I couldn't get to talk to her.
    I talked to the third sister, Rachel and to her daughter.
    The daughter and I are now Skype conversants.
    Then there were Berges or Bergesse, some wealthy Parisians
    in the cloth business or--
    Textiles.
    Something like that.
    And I went to see him after the war.
    And they didn't seem to show much interest into their poorer
    relation.
    I remember him being embarrassed about my clothes.
    And the daughter was of such beauty
    that I just couldn't wait to get out of there.
    And then there are the two Grumbachs,
    Mendes France's nephews.
    That's it.
    Here's a question from--
    Excuse me.
    A question that goes personally, but also
    to your professional knowledge.
    When someone who has no knowledge of the history
    of the Holocaust, meets a Holocaust survivor,
    what would you say they should know about that person
    and what they went through?
    What is it that they should be aware of and censored if--
    Well, why should they know anything?
    I'm not following you.
    OK, my question is--
    Why?
    Give me an example of a situation
    where this would obtain.
    OK.
    You want this on?
    Let's cut for a second.
    I have to think a little bit.
    OK, you understand now more of what
    I'm trying to get a sense of?
    Yeah, but one shouldn't walk on eggshells with anyone.
    Everybody is responsible for their own pathology,
    for controlling it, you know.
    Do you think that--
    I don't expect anyone to treat me differently because of what
    I went through.
    That never occurred to me.
    That's not my--
    I understand that my question could--
    Be interpreted that way.
    Yeah, could be interpreted that way.
    That's not really what I meant.
    Is it how you should act towards someone who
    has gone through the Holocaust?
    I'd say it's what should we know about--
    the real issue is what should we really
    understand of the price of having gone through this that
    lasts a person's whole life?