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Oral history interview with Hildegard Israel

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2017.487.1 | RG Number: RG-50.067.0001

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    Oral history interview with Hildegard Israel
    Transcript
    My name is Susan Hackney.
    And today is March 12, 1998.
    And I am with Hilde Israel.
    And we are going to be talking about life in Germany
    leading up to World War II and her experiences
    during the '30s and '40s.
    And she is here now to begin speaking.
    OK.
    So Hilde, you were born in Berlin, right?
    I was born in Berlin.
    When and where were you born?
    At home in Nazi Germany Berlin.
    OK.
    It was, I would say, a blue collar, you know.
    Uh-huh, blue collar neighborhood.
    Not poor, but blue collar [BOTH TALKING]
    And we had a Jewish butcher, kosher butcher store.
    But we didn't know from any thing.
    You know, political, my parents were not interested.
    I had an older brother who was nine years older than I.
    And his name?
    Herman.
    Herman whom?
    Herman Cohen.
    He was involved you know that.
    He knew sometimes when--
    you know, there were street fights in the beginning.
    Around what date were there street fights
    that you can remember?
    Oh, that was way back.
    That would be when they started out, maybe '28, '29, '30.
    You know.
    Yeah.
    Before that, even, because my brother
    left in 1933 for Holland.
    But he was involved.
    But my parents didn't like it because we
    were not political, but totally apathetic politically.
    And in school, I didn't feel much, not at all,
    as a matter of fact.
    When you say you didn't feel much,
    what are you referring to?
    Well, I mean anti-Jewish.
    Like antisemitism, you didn't feel it?
    No.
    And you went to a public school with mixed children?
    I went to, till I was 10, to a public school,
    and then to a private school.
    And that was a middle school--
    not like here in that sense.
    It was like here high school.
    OK?
    We had languages.
    We had very good teachers.
    But we also had Hebrew teacher and a Hebrew teacher
    in that school, a biblical teacher for the Jews.
    So was it a private school for Jews?
    No.
    No.
    But all of those things were available?
    Yes.
    They were available.
    And it used to be a private school.
    But then it became a state school.
    But it still was the same because we
    had to pay for it and all that.
    And then in that school, I didn't have any trouble at all.
    I mean, we were maybe six, eight Jewish schoolchildren
    in a class of 44.
    But this was a mixed school.
    That means it was private and in a way left
    like the private school was.
    We had Jewish teachers, a principal.
    Not the principal, what do you call it?
    Director or something?
    No, it's the assistant principal was Jewish.
    And she was my English teacher.
    But so there were all kinds of teachers.
    And we didn't feel anything till, I guess,
    was about we was 14, I would have been.
    Let's see, 1917 plus 14--
    like 31-ish.
    Yeah.
    Then the teachers were changed.
    There came in teachers, [? national ?] [? citizens, ?]
    and so on.
    The Jewish teachers were going out.
    OK.
    And then I felt an undercurrent, but still not
    too much in school.
    Yes, sometimes, I had--
    you may call it a debate in classes and so
    on with some of the girls--
    that was an all-girls school.
    Some of the girls had belonged already to the Nazis.
    Oh.
    So the subject of race and all that came up?
    It lasted, in a way, and take, you know, senseless.
    And I would tell them.
    And how old were those children that they were already
    indoctrinated into that Nazi thing?
    How old were they?
    13, 14?
    No, earlier.
    Younger?
    It was earlier, yes.
    It's like kids at the Boy Scouts, you know, very early.
    And that is very early.
    But in this case, it were 14 years old girls,
    just like ever.
    14, OK.
    But in that case, I still didn't feel that I
    had to keep my mouth shut.
    Right, right.
    I had my friends.
    And I thought, yes.
    One time, what hurt me very much was--
    it was in public school.
    I was maybe eight years old.
    And I was invited to a birthday party.
    The whole class, it was a party.
    I thought this girl with my friend in school.
    I went to the birthday party, of course.
    And when I came into the house.
    The girl maybe must have introduced me or whatever.
    And she said, this is Hilde Cohn.
    Now, Cohn is a definitely, in Germany, Jewish name.
    The mother said, I don't want her here.
    I don't want her here.
    Oh, my goodness.
    What happened?
    I went home.
    You turned around and went home?
    I went home in tears.
    Of course, I had already eaten a piece of cake.
    And I told my father.
    And my father, who hated to write,
    somehow, he could, but he hated to.
    He just got a piece of paper. wrapping paper,
    you know in the store.
    And so he wrote a note, put two marks in and said,
    I hope that covers the piece of cake.
    Oh, your father did that wonderfully.
    Oh, yes.
    And he sent that to her.
    Then it turned out, the father of that girl
    was a [? sailor, ?] in the [INAUDIBLE]..
    I didn't know that.
    No of us kids knew that.
    And that was my first real hurt.
    Yeah.
    And that, I was about eight years old.
    I will never forget her name, [? Lieselotte ?] [? Katniss. ?]
    Wait, his name was what?
    Her name was [? Lieselotte ?] [? Katniss. ?] It was
    a girl's name.
    But you don't-- this, I forgot.
    Didn't forget .
    That was my first hurt.
    Where it touched your life.
    Really hurt.
    And then by and by, sometimes, somebody who knew me--
    because I had the looks.
    I could go anywhere.
    All right?
    If anybody not knew me, I could go anywhere.
    Didn't matter.
    But if somebody knew me --
    like in the streets, the school kids and so on,
    they started sometimes to say something.
    At the time, when that happened, again, that was--
    I was maybe 12, 13 years old, and so on.
    But my mother would be out in a jiffy
    and tell the parents of the boys.
    That was only one special who did it to.
    Now, that's if children harassed you on the street?
    Yeah.
    She was very--
    [INAUDIBLE], you know, like--
    --assertive about it.
    She got out there, protected you, or whatever.
    Yeah.
    Anyway, since I mentioned things,
    you know, the Jewish burial, the coffin is a plain coffin.
    OK.
    That is a Jewish coffin.
    We do not normally, if you keep this you
    have a plain coffin, not fancy.
    And they called it an egg crate.
    Oh, dear.
    And they said, you will be buried in an egg crate.
    And that is what a neighbor, mine--
    we were good neighbors.
    The parents were good neighbors.
    And they did [? laundry. ?] And I came into the store
    and told my parents.
    My mother was quick outside.
    She was right at the door this way.
    Had you had a funeral that these children saw?
    No, no, no, no.
    They didn't see anything?
    Just to impress.
    They were just trying to harass you.
    I understand.
    And my mother went to the parents and said,
    hey, this and this happened.
    We never again there were two boys, never again.
    And so you had it some ways.
    But on the other hand, I mean, I don't know, maybe
    it's Hitler's birthday or what, the old school had to march up
    places, like they used to have sports
    events and so on, big paths, at the [INAUDIBLE] clubs.
    And I had to walk with them, of course.
    I was in the school.
    And I had to hear what Hitler had to say and Heil Hitler.
    I mean, things like that happened, of course.
    But the thing when we--
    the worst thing that began in the beginning
    was when that French diplomat was killed.
    And of course, they put it in the Jews.
    And he was killed in Germany?
    Yeah.
    And so they blamed the Jews?
    Of course.
    That was the first time that the mob got together.
    And that was around what year?
    Was around the '30s.
    Mm-hmm, early '30s.
    Hitler became chancellor in '33.
    But he had already Hindenburg, our president.
    I don't know how he could influences
    all these people, the upper crust, Deutsch national, not
    Nazi.
    That were Deutsch national that were
    people that were officers, higher ranks,
    they fell for that.
    If you hear a speech of Hitler today still,
    the way he talked and so--
    and he was totally uneducated.
    He was uneducated.
    And so that was the first time, as far as I remember.
    It was before the Rathaus, what I showed you, you know,
    when they burned that down and claimed
    a Dutch man had done it.
    It was done by the Nazis themselves.
    And that was in 1933, Germany's parliament building,
    the Reichstag caught fire, Nazis blaming
    communists used the fire as a pretext for suspending
    civil liberties.
    Right.
    OK.
    That's from the paper.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    That was in 1933, when Hitler became chancellor.
    And after that, of course, the hate asserted power.
    How was it different?
    When he became chancellor, what was your life
    like as a result of that?
    Well, let's see.
    What changed?
    My father, he had a kosher butcher store.
    He could not be-- my father was a store that
    was known for first quality.
    And I mean first quality.
    The whole neighborhood, non-Jewish neighborhood,
    if they had anything, a celebration, a wedding,
    or whatever, then it had to be meat and so on from my father.
    We had plenty of other stores.
    But for that, there was no question about it.
    Now, anything that was going on like that, all right,
    in the beginning, my father still
    could have put quality meats on.
    Then they came and asked my father, told my father, hey,
    there is a wedding coming up.
    But please, let somebody deliver.
    In other words--
    So that they didn't know from where it came.
    Oh, OK.
    They were embarrassed to buy it from there.
    But it was still the best meat around.
    No, they were not embarrassed.
    They were afraid.
    Oh, they were afraid to support your business, the Germans.
    And I remember that well too.
    Yes, in a way.
    In a way, it is supporting a Jew.
    Now, my father, then, after a while,
    my father could not get the quality of meats
    that he needed.
    And that he was known for/
    And so he, What he got was the worsest kind of meat.
    So if you know, the Jews, they don't only
    use certain sections of beef--
    not all parts are not kosher.
    And my father bought-- then my father
    tried to keep this business up.
    And he bought instead of that, he had to pay through the nose
    to keep that up.
    My brother, my younger brother, he became a butcher too.
    What was your younger brother's name?
    [? Efutz, ?] [? Efutz. ?] He was four years older than I,
    but he was my little brother.
    So that made it very hard.
    Then my father suddenly, early '38, something
    like that, my father had to close the store because he
    had himself spent that.
    There was nothing to be done.
    He closed the store.
    But he lived still behind it in that apartment.
    So he was put out of business by the conditions.
    Yes, of course.
    But nobody came in and said, I own your business now.
    And you have to leave.
    No.
    OK.
    No, no, no.
    Nobody took that over.
    They just made it impossible for him to do business.
    Yes.
    He couldn't exist, which was lucky in a way.
    And so Crystal Night, you've heard about that.
    The Crystal Night, that day-- it's really a day.
    That day, because my father's store was closed,
    I do not know.
    There were, of course, glass panels
    on the side of the store.
    They were still there.
    Kosher-- it's a kosher sign.
    It was a kosher sign.
    So it was up still from the store, as it was.
    I do not know, on that day, if that was damaged
    or not because that was the day I left Berlin.
    And that is the only thing because he
    was not open anymore, this way, it did not really get hurt.
    Right, it's difficult. But I have to say,
    my parents were very popular.
    We did not have, really, from the people that lived there
    any, really, enemies.
    We didn't have that.
    It was just [INAUDIBLE].
    You [? pipped ?] hello to them.
    And they didn't, wouldn't [INAUDIBLE]
    because nobody dared to.
    But that was with my parents.
    Saying that, when I was still--
    going back to the school, when I was 15,
    at this school where I went to, at first you've got,
    I would have graduated with 16.
    The normal school, regular school still went only to 14.
    The private school, of course, you could go further--
    much, much higher standard education.
    But I was 15, about 15 and 1/2.
    Then my older brother was--
    I told you, he knew about politics.
    One day, my parents were home.
    They said, Hilde, what do you want to be?
    And the schools were awful, were awful.
    The teachers that we had gotten, terrible for everybody,
    for everybody--
    terrible teachers.
    All the good teachers were going out.
    And then my brother asked me, Hilde, what do you want to do?
    I don't know.
    Do you want to work in an office?
    No.
    What do you want to do?
    I don't know.
    Then he said, Hilde--
    we talked.
    I told him, what do you like to do?
    I said, I like to talk.
    I like to do hand stitching.
    So this was Herman talking to you?
    Yeah, my brother--
    Your oldest.
    --talking to me, his nine years younger sister.
    Right.
    And he said, Hilde, the school doesn't do you any good.
    Get out of school.
    When I told him that, then he said,
    then you could be a dressmaker.
    I like to talk.
    I like to do these types of things.
    Do you want to be a dressmaker?
    No.
    I had already made clothes in my life, where you do seamster.
    Was not for me.
    So he said, you don't have to do that.
    You get an apprenticeship in good salon .
    So that's when I left school.
    Half a year before I graduated
    So I against the wishes of my parents, of course,
    I left school.
    Against the parents' wishes.
    OK.
    Yeah, because at that time, there
    was still my English teacher.
    She was there as a teacher, not as a principal.
    And my mother went, of course, to see her.
    And she said, please, please don't take her out of school.
    That is the only thing you can guarantee her,
    that she takes with her.
    That is only, the one and only thing.
    But I insisted I left school.
    And I found an apprenticeship by accident,
    an excellent apprenticeship.
    Now, what year was that?
    This was in '34.
    OK.
    That was in '34.
    OK.
    No, '31, in '31.
    So two years before things got really complicated in Germany.
    Yes.
    OK.
    at a very good salon.
    And a couture, accidental, all right.
    And then the first thing that the woman, my boss, she
    said, now, I didn't have apprentice for a long time.
    She was so disappointed.
    But OK, I will try.
    Just try it, that my name was Cohn.
    In Berlin, in Germany, the name Cohn gave you away.
    And she said, well, OK, let's make it.
    We'll try one month.
    The first thing when I came for the first day--
    I heard there were two big girls together to work there.
    I heard another-- the girls talking with each other.
    There was another Hilde.
    Oh, well she was even, yeah, Hilde.
    OK.
    Anyway, I heard, now, you can't talk about the Jews anymore.
    Of course, I was mad, but I didn't say anything, all right?
    This girl turned out to be very nice, never, ever a word.
    So as far as work was concerned, it was fine.
    When it came to the time that I passed the apprenticeship,
    three years later, then it became a big question,
    the whole outfit, which was a big one.
    We had three salons working in the house.
    And it was a big couture outfit.
    And so everybody was, will they let me take my test?
    Except from this [INAUDIBLE].
    I don't know what you call it here.
    Certification, probably, or licensing.
    Certificate, professional.
    Like a licensing?
    Yeah, yes.
    But I had proof.
    Just like you as a teacher, first you
    have to take the Master's and so on.
    It was the same thing, only that it's also
    like you are a professional.
    Then I get permission from the union
    that the tailor belonged that I can take my exam.
    Everybody-- everybody did.
    So finally it turned out, I got lucky because with my name,
    if they would have used the name,
    I could not get a [INAUDIBLE].
    With that-- we got numbers.
    And with a number, I was anonymous.
    And my paper with them, pair, I got it whatever it was.
    In Germany, good, all right, depending
    on what kind of clothes I made.
    And you got it.
    But work was work.
    I got angry at my boss because the dress what I had to make
    was for our high boss.
    It was a condition.
    And she used to make thick material which
    was hard to work with, stupid.
    And she did.
    And I made a good piece instead of doing the best.
    But I got my papers.
    And everybody, everybody was very excited.
    It was hard.
    It was not easy.
    So who is everybody?
    Your family, they were excited?
    The family, yes, especially, but in the business.
    Oh, they were happy for you?
    This is a [BOTH TALKING] See, we had
    people coming from everywhere, from England, from everywhere.
    We made dresses for--
    what was the ice skater name?
    You would get stars and so on, high class.
    Was it Sonja Henie?
    But they were from everywhere.
    Who was the ice skater, Sonja Henie?
    You say there was a famous ice skater you made for?
    Yeah, Sonja Henie.
    Sonja Henie?
    One day, we were.
    Oh, everybody was excited.
    Sonja Henie, it was.
    It's a salon.
    People were excited, including Mrs. Goebbels.
    Who?
    Mrs. Goebbels.
    Oh, Mrs. Goebbels.
    Goebbels?
    How was--
    How she went, I don't know, because the owners were Jews.
    It was a Jewish company.
    [PLACE NAME]
    So how she comes in--
    I don't know.
    We had a very good name.
    She probably wanted the best.
    Yeah.
    We made-- first off, we got French [INAUDIBLE]
    and so on every year, so on, so often, which were beautiful.
    But the work was lousy, very bad, very bad.
    But they bought them all there.
    Even they bought them all there, nobody else could make it.
    So it was a testing.
    I had to go there.
    So how long did you work there?
    When it comes to it, it lasted for three years.
    Now, that would have put you at about what, 16, 17, 18?
    17.
    17.
    Between 17 and 18.
    I see.
    OK?
    OK.
    But then there was a situation that when my parents were still
    at the store at the time, my mother had to work.
    And so they hired a maid.
    But that was normal under Germany.
    Anybody who had to store or whatever
    had a live-in maid that did the housework.
    But then they had cut out a law.
    Jewish people could not get help under the age of 50.
    I don't know if it was exactly, but this age.
    Otherwise, they couldn't get help.
    They couldn't get help.
    Maids.
    OK.
    And with that, the Jewish people couldn't have any maids at all?
    They could have made, but over a certain age.
    Over a certain age, right.
    Maid of a certain age.
    Could they have German maids?
    Yes.
    Non-Jewish?
    Yes.
    They could at that point.
    They could.
    But mostly, these were women in their 50s or in 60s.
    They were not good as a help.
    And so after I was graduated, OK.
    I worked for a little while at another company.
    And then seeing my mother, who had to be in the store,
    she couldn't do everything--
    the house, food, and so on, and being
    in the store from the morning at 7:00
    till 8:00 at night with a two-hour break.
    And so I said OK, I'll stay home.
    Because what we had, the maid we had,
    I think she would have been in her 50s.
    She didn't do anything.
    That left my-- people--
    were the other ones did more.
    She didn't.
    My mother had to do to the housework, really.
    So and then I said, OK, I'll stay at home.
    That is what made the hardship for if you
    had a business of your own or whatever,
    if you needed house help, because Jew they couldn't work,
    couldn't be within a Jewish household.
    We didn't know it.
    If they opened, it's almost like today's situation.
    When they opened the bar that said, the Jew touched me.
    He wouldn't get so through it.
    He would be a goner.
    So he would just be taken.
    Oh, my.
    So that was things that are going on in the private life.
    Then of course, what shall I say?
    You could not, as a Jew, go into a cafe, into a restaurant.
    There were signs of the law, no Jews wanted.
    And of course, you could look like anybody else.
    But if you felt it--
    I would never, never have gone into any of those places.
    You couldn't go to the theater.
    That's it.
    I was a teenager.
    I couldn't.
    But you wanted to see the movies, of course.
    There are certain cubbies that we had,
    but only to these certain cubbies you could.
    You mean a section of the theater?
    Yeah, no.
    No, excuse me, the movie, oh, what sat in our sections.
    We sat where we wanted.
    But they hate us.
    You knew you were not wanted.
    We really didn't know at that point.
    They didn't know.
    It's hard for a teenager, for young people,
    this kind of thing.
    But on the way, you never--
    I went at some time with my boyfriend, who looked,
    supposedly, like a Jew--
    thick, curly hair.
    No hook nose, nothing of that kind of
    features, but he had thick, curly hair.
    I read this as boring for a long time.
    I brought him home.
    I was sure I would come home.
    And nobody would turn me in, you see, because of my looks.
    This boy wasn't safe and boring at all.
    His brother, he was the young one.
    And so the brother was older.
    He ran into a place that he knew.
    But they had the [INAUDIBLE].
    They wouldn't let him pass.
    And since I took him, it was--
    I wished I would remember the name now
    of the house where they took all the Jewish people.
    They took them into there.
    And they kept him for about, in this case, only a couple
    or three days.
    He got for breakfast what they called a hot breakfast.
    That man didn't-- he didn't eat it.
    They called it a hot breakfast.
    And when it came time to be home,
    we were told not to mention that.
    He looked terrible.
    There were rats all over and so on from
    this so-called hot breakfast.
    And he had a non-Jewish girlfriend,
    with whom he went a long time.
    And he was told, if you see her, they better
    tell us that he knew her.
    So that was one case.
    I know that he saw.
    And he did nothing?
    He just--
    Nothing.
    He was walking down the street.
    --he was just walking down the street.
    And these guys attacked him.
    They cut his way off that he couldn't pass them.
    Yeah.
    And they took him then to the--
    I wish I could remember the name of the building
    where they took all the Jews.
    It's a big, everybody there.
    Myself, my boyfriend, one day, we went over the Nuremberger
    Platz.
    That was a theatre, used to be the theatre.
    It had became the Horst Wessel house.
    You heard the name Horst Wessel?
    It was an eagle, it was [INAUDIBLE]..
    And that's it.
    It was picked in the beginning.
    So that was an eagle.
    So that was named after him.
    So my boyfriend and I, we walked across there.
    Suddenly, we hear, and called.
    His name was Leo.
    And he looked what's happening, but kind of standing out there,
    and that girl.
    And he caught him.
    As I said, it was my looks.
    I was 17 at that time.
    So he caught him.
    He knew whom he called.
    They were friends before.
    What is that girl?
    If you ever see this girl with me,
    I don't know if my friends know she's Jewish.
    I was just standing on the side.
    No, she is not.
    Yes, she is.
    So he caught me.
    He has to ask you, what are you?
    I said right away, Jewish.
    No, you're not.
    I said yes.
    And the only piece of ID I had with me was a card from
    the [? U-Bahn. ?] That means the streetcars, now, up and down,
    streetcar [INAUDIBLE].
    My name is Cohn--
    C-O-H-N. People that used to change were Jewish.
    And they changed over way back.
    There was this person [INAUDIBLE]..
    See that their names were Jewish.
    That was my name.
    No, you are not Jewish.
    So you've got the woman.
    If you ever pass by there again, sees out there together again,
    he is a goner.
    I was Jewish.
    So I came home.
    I talked to my father about it.
    We went to the police station that I need an ID.
    I need a passport.
    That was the only ID I could get.
    It was OK.
    Certainly, he knew what.
    We went to the police station.
    Of course, my brother, we were well-known there.
    My father lived there.
    He moved in in 1905.
    And that's what we told him.
    Said, do you know?
    My father said, I got that passport over there.
    Said, do you know what you're up against?
    Now, I could leave any time.
    But I said, yes, I know what I'm doing.
    But I had to have something.
    And I did.
    At that time, it was still on my name only.
    Later on, our passports--
    every woman was named Sarah in it--
    Sarah.
    Every man got the name Israel in his passport.
    As a first name?
    It is your name.
    It was the ID that you were Jewish.
    But the irony, of course, was my husband.
    His name, at that time--
    my husband's name-- later husband, OK, his name
    was Israel.
    So he was Israel Israel?
    So he was Israel Israel.
    Yes, he got his name in that.
    The was with the passports.
    So they tried to also-- and you were attacked.
    You never did know where you could be attacked.
    Now, we're up to what year here, approximately?
    I was 17.
    The was about '34, about '33, '34.
    I was still an apprentice.
    So you were saying that just going down the street,
    you never knew if you were safe.
    If you look what they thought looked Jewish,
    you weren't safe.
    But you said that you had had no incidents
    yourself because people did not look at you and see a Jew?
    Yes.
    So you were protected somewhat.
    I was protected by my looks.
    I was fair-eyed, fair eyes.
    I had the fairest straight features.
    What about your brothers?
    Did they experience any incidents?
    My oldest was, the one that died in Poland, in Auschwitz,
    he looked a lot like me, only that he was brown head.
    But he wouldn't be taken as a Jew, either.
    The other one had a small, narrow face, but also not
    very Jewish features.
    My mother was not very Jewish.
    OK, my father had black hair, but also not the
    features that you were then supposed to have as a Jew.
    You were supposed to have, huh?
    The stereotypes.
    Yes.
    Well, I married that boy.
    When we went over the Brenner Pass
    from Germany over the Brenner Pass to Italy, to Genoa.
    Then we went up to the [INAUDIBLE]..
    I think that was the Crystal Night, that day.
    When we came, it was train there,
    over the Italian train, where there were
    a lot of people from Italy--
    fascists, you know, that came to Germany to work.
    OK, it's true.
    And they went home for the [INAUDIBLE] you get
    or whatever.
    And that was a full train ride.
    Yes, there were only Italian men.
    And these Italian men, my husband--
    then he wasn't my husband--
    he was looking just like them.
    He looked just like them.
    Just like them.
    And what was your first husband's name?
    [? Neil ?] Tsinski
    Tsinski?
    Yeah.
    T-S-I-N-S-K-I. But he exactly like all the Italians
    on the train.
    It startled me.
    It startled me.
    I have seen so many with a SS sign on them.
    You could have made a dozen Jews out of them, Italians.
    And they looked Jewish, but they were SS officers?
    Found that out.
    And that's when, in our neighborhood
    was the nice ice cream store.
    In Germany, it used to be in the summer,
    it's an ice cream store, in the winter,
    it's a [? poultry ?] store.
    It was that they, they had the ice cream stores.
    They had good ice cream.
    And they were-- the Italians made good ice cream.
    That was Italian ice cream and so on at that store.
    Now, I was always sent to that store for my brother's boss
    because I got double portions.
    I don't know why they liked me.
    I got double portions.
    So after this, the first was, it was
    when I was about seven years old,
    the same time about, now, there were two partners.
    One, you could have made a dozen Jews out of him, the pictures.
    The pictures, the coloring, everything, he was a Bavarian.
    The other one had pictures like I would have said.
    But my husband, later husband not
    pronounced except the coloring, red hair.
    That was it.
    And of course, I'd been already with my husband then.
    And suddenly, that store had [? pets, ?] SS [? pets ?]
    in there, I don't know what else, and also, SS signs.
    And we weren't too familiar with that.
    I was not familiar at all with the SS sign then.
    And came my husband with his old friend.
    And all around him there, they wanted to cut up as a Jew.
    He was sent home with the other one.
    And I, of course, pop out.
    What was all that in there?
    And my then friend, he just told me.
    I wasn't familiar with the SS sign then.
    And it's tied all over that store, which I grew up in,
    in that store.
    This was in Berlin, this store?
    Yes.
    It's a good store with them.
    And of course, I couldn't--
    I popped out, you know, what I said here.
    My boyfriend, poor him.
    And he went out of the store very clearly.
    I won't let him.
    He served me like always.
    You know that I had got the extra helping
    because he knew who I was.
    There was no question.
    He knew who I was.
    After all, I had came to that store when I was a kid.
    All right.
    And he knew me.
    And this wasn't that secret.
    Then I thought, well, when we go out, he said, didn't you see?
    I said, what?
    He's an SS.
    That is the symbol if there's a [INAUDIBLE] in front.
    The stormtroopers only a [INAUDIBLE]..
    He's an SS man.
    Then it finally turned out his partner was Jewish.
    So then he was out.
    And he was one that he would have certainty
    he's a Jewish partner.
    Look like a dozen, with all the pictures that you wanted.
    He was a Bavarian.
    It's how Bavarians looked like back then.
    That's all.
    Of course, everybody was inundated.
    And my father said, didn't you see that?
    It's not worth it.
    These things could happen to me.
    People are, they know you, almost every
    from being in [INAUDIBLE].
    And then, of course, there were other things
    you just didn't go into.
    I must say I [INAUDIBLE] this way,
    personally because of my looks.
    I was never, ever checked in any way.
    In the street, nobody would do anything to me.
    But the Crystal Night, I told you about that.
    I was already there.
    Then I lived in my in-laws' apartment.
    Of course, it didn't make sense anymore
    to be taking on your own apartment,
    furnish it, and so on.
    They knew.
    There was plenty of room there.
    And suddenly, my father-in-law, he came, [? Hilde-- ?]
    I was working on the sewing machine.
    [? Hilde, ?] out.
    Out.
    What?
    And then I saw them coming out, a mob.
    A mob.
    A mob.
    How many people?
    Oh, I wouldn't know, too many.
    Did you know them?
    My brother knew them.
    But I didn't.
    They knew my brother.
    No, they came to that apartment Because it was not
    a straight apartment of them.
    They came because they knew the people that lived there.
    So get out as I was.
    Now, I was already--
    we had planned already to leave onto the Netherlands about two
    weeks later.
    You're going to leave Germany?
    Yeah.
    It's a matter of a couple of days before.
    My husband and me, we were the first
    of the family who got their passports.
    You got a passport if you could got prove
    at all that you were leaving.
    That means you had to have a ticket that you were leaving.
    Then you were able to get a passport.
    And where was your ticket to?
    Shanghai.
    Shanghai, China.
    OK.
    The only way where you could go was only into it.
    There was no other open door.
    So we had gotten our passports.
    I had to bring my purse.
    We didn't really expect anything.
    I was in a very old smock.
    You know, we wore always the oldest stuff
    because we had a customs inspection what we could take
    out, what we would have to pay customs on, and so on,
    from the whole family.
    All the good clothes, everything was laid out,
    plus a heap of silk stockings that I had--
    that I didn't intend to take with me, again,
    because we used to go--
    we were planning to go shopping for clothing
    to take more stuff with us.
    But I laid it out.
    It was news that I didn't have.
    And this one, I think-- just we had a packed [INAUDIBLE]..
    It was a corner apartment, Landsberg--
    not Landsberger-- yeah, Landsberger Allee.
    And that was the point.
    The back exit was Landsberger Strasse back.
    I don't-- I'm getting confused now with the name.
    But anyway, that was the building,
    the way that was a corner.
    And we went out through the back.
    My mother-in-law-- me and my mother-in-law
    obviously went as we were.
    I'm telling you, my mother-in-law was lost.
    We didn't know where she was.
    We called, we called.
    We didn't know where she was.
    But we left the building because we had to, all right?
    Now, where were you?
    Was the mob coming up the front?
    At the front, into that building.
    If they were, they fought their way in, I don't know.
    So they didn't see you leave?
    No.
    You got out before they arrived.
    Through the back, through the back door.
    And as I was, whatever finally happened.
    And I had some money in the apartment.
    It was from childhood on.
    My parents always wanted me to have some money on me.
    You know, in case I--
    not much-- if it was a mark, OK, or 50 pfennigs,
    but I had money with me.
    I mean, I don't know.
    Really, I don't know how that went out.
    But that was OK.
    Now, I was ready to work already.
    I had a lot of work to do before we had to leave,
    before our date came up.
    That was on the minds of my parents.
    And our ship would leave on the 23rd from Italy.
    So had plenty of time still, OK, I thought.
    I had very old house shoes.
    I had an old, very old smock.
    But I had a wallet in my purse with my pocket,
    which was lucky.
    My brother-in-law didn't take any money with him.
    So we called a cab.
    It drove down to my parents' apartment,
    where the store used to be.
    And I told my father-in-law to wait.
    It's the house there.
    You know, they have the big, German roads and streets,
    very big.
    I said, you wait there.
    I will see what's going on.
    I'm safe.
    And then here knocked at the door now, my brother
    and his friend, two 24-year-old boys.
    They were playing tough.
    They didn't know anything that's going.
    They didn't know.
    So the first thing I said to my brother's friend, I said,
    Leo, get home.
    He was my brother's friend.
    Leo, get home.
    Don't you know what's going on?
    They've vandalized all the stores.
    And they had a very good leather goods store.
    And from the store, nothing [INAUDIBLE]..
    You know, they ran towards the other upper apartment.
    It was spiral stairs?
    Yeah, into their apartment.
    They were very well-off.
    But they were an [INAUDIBLE].
    They did that any which way.
    I said, get home.
    Just get home.
    Then where's Papa?
    My father had asthma.
    Couldn't believe that wasn't [INAUDIBLE]..
    So we brought them back.
    Found my father, said, Papa, that was it.
    Then I remembered that in my sewing machine,
    my father's jewelry and some money
    was there that had been in safe point at home.
    But I didn't know.
    And I had paid--
    gotten at home 2/3 of jewelry for the tickets.
    My father was poor, so he had to sell.
    And I left that all in my sewing machine.
    I just--
    This is tape two.
    And Hilde is talking about Crystal Night,
    and her leaving her apartment, and rushing over
    to her own home, her first home with her parents.
    And her father is sick in bed.
    Right.
    So I told my father, Papa, I forgot.
    They sent the money but meant the money
    to pay for the tickets as soon as I got the passport.
    I mean, they had paid money down as a proof.
    But they wouldn't pay it before they got the passports.
    So I told my father, I said, Papa, I forgot.
    He said, never mind, very cold.
    He knew it, I was upset as with him.
    He told me later, when I was white as like a sheet.
    Then I asked, where's Mama?
    They didn't have any idea.
    And I asked, where's Mama?
    She's over at the baker.
    So with women, we didn't know about it.
    He got my mother over home to the apartment.
    Then the question-- what do we do?
    They were still upon the store.
    If there would be danger, who knows?
    So I decided to go upstairs in our house.
    Now, you have to remember, my parents lived there since 1905.
    And they panicked.
    So I mean, at this first one woman,
    she was a widow with a daughter.
    We were always very, very, very good friends,
    even if she was much older than I. We were very good friends.
    So I went to her then.
    I said, listen, this and this is going on.
    Can I bring my parents up?
    No, they did not give parents a store.
    Can I bring my parents up?
    No, I'm afraid.
    Safety-- it was risky business, very risky business.
    So I went to another.
    It was a mother and son, which also
    knew my parents from that time that they moved in and went up
    there.
    And I said, so-and-so, this is the situation.
    Can I bring my parents up?
    Bring them up, you know, it can be that you
    are stuck with them for weeks?
    Bring them up.
    You had this and this.
    They I said, you know how risky it is.
    Bring them up.
    So I went downstairs.
    I brought them up there.
    I don't know what happened after that.
    If the store was demolished or anything, I don't know.
    But they went later on back down to the apartment.
    And my passport, later on, in the other apartment--
    now, where are the passports?
    I didn't take them with me either.
    They were in my purse, both.
    Where are my passports?
    I came back to the apartment.
    Now, my husband had gone to the military section
    because he was of the military service age
    that he had to sign to be signed up anyhow, Jew or non-Jew.
    So he had to give them notice that he was leaving.
    So he wasn't in the apartment by that time.
    Only when he came back, he didn't
    have any idea what had gone on.
    But they were front steps.
    Now, that was in a mezzanine apartment.
    Was a mezzanine apartment.
    And that was the [INAUDIBLE].
    Was a mezzanine apartment.
    He saw on the steps my ironing, my iron.
    It had a green handle.
    And he knew that was mine.
    So he didn't call me into there because that
    could have been instant death.
    So he knew that they had ransacked.
    There was something.
    Something wasn't right.
    Right.
    And that was smart.
    And so he went downstairs into the cigar store,
    where we had blitzed a lot, spent a lot of time
    with his people.
    But when I called them from my parents' house,
    when I called them, it said, I can't go back there now.
    You don't know of anything.
    They didn't give us even an answer.
    They were afraid people there at that
    if they don't talk to us, even for this,
    to say that they are still there or what.
    You know.
    OK.
    So my ex-husband, he saw that thing in there.
    He was smart enough that he kept, walked past.
    And then he went to the cigar store.
    And they had been gone already to raid the store.
    And then when I came back with my brother-in-law.
    And then we went into that store.
    Yes, they are gone.
    So we went upstairs.
    I told you, everything was out.
    The customers had spent.
    And there was a difference between me and my in-laws.
    They would put much value on--
    what should I say?
    I don't think.
    What should I say?
    It was, to me, important that my husband was clothed,
    new clothes, everything--
    new shoes, new suits, everything.
    Do you think I still found that?
    All [? cut, ?] all gone.
    Even the shoes, they tore apart so that they couldn't use them.
    I don't know what else.
    I didn't even look in there.
    They tore shoes up that were there?
    Yeah.
    So that they couldn't be used?
    Yeah.
    They took the new shoes away.
    They stole the new clothes.
    And damaged everything else.
    Because in that part of the apartment that we used still
    had all the new clothes, ready to leave.
    But that wasn't so important.
    See, that was a mess.
    They'd thrown everything together,
    and of course, passed through it all.
    Where is my purse?
    Because I wasn't getting--
    he wouldn't give me my purse.
    I had my passport.
    I found it under the--
    I think on that couch, just tossed on that.
    They looked through it.
    My parents, my sewing machine.
    I had a small home where I only worked.
    I had a wardrobe in there, a sewing machine
    by the window, a wardrobe, and a table
    just for working and private customers.
    That's what it was.
    And they had toppled the wardrobe across the room.
    So I didn't want to go through it.
    So that's it.
    The same evening, then we had to go and buy luggage
    because we weren't prepared already.
    It was something that was after the customs inspection,
    after you got your passport to buy because otherwise, you
    didn't know.
    So my husband took a cab to buy some luggage.
    And then the taxi driver said, hey, I'm not driving this way.
    I drive the safe way.
    A longer way, but a safe way.
    So there were people that were using the headlights.
    And then in meantime, I had found the passports.
    So this I had.
    I didn't even look for anything else.
    That was the main thing that we had.
    But you went to your sewing machine, right?
    And you got out the--
    That was there, where my parents' stuff was.
    My personal stuff, I was only 20 years old,
    what did I have already?
    I mean, you had some jewelry.
    What you usually, as a young girl, some own [INAUDIBLE]..
    I never put value on jewelry or furs,
    or things like that because I was still too young for that.
    Then I'd had it.
    You wouldn't dress that [? hiding, ?]
    at 14 into jewelry, and furs, and so on.
    You didn't do that.
    But my parents, they always told me, it was not.
    So did you rescue your parents?
    I didn't see my parents before I left.
    No.
    I didn't know what was going on.
    I didn't know.
    I just hoped that they're safe.
    I couldn't reach them.
    And hoped that they were safe enough that they'll survive.
    And then we left.
    I packed, tossed just in what everyone has,
    including [INAUDIBLE] stockings, the ones
    were there damp [INAUDIBLE] but they are silk stockings.
    And how good are silk stockings once they
    are worn any which way?
    So my sister-- oh, because on the other side, where
    we went out, there was my brother-in-law,
    my sister-in-law, that means my husband's brothers,
    they lived across the street.
    And of course, we went out right away.
    And they weren't there.
    They didn't know anything either.
    Had no warning.
    That was around the [INAUDIBLE].
    That was all.
    Actually, was one of them.
    [INAUDIBLE], really.
    And we went up there.
    And then we walked out .
    And of course, as I told you, I brought old stuff, my stockings
    and all, so my sister-in-law would
    be of these certain stockings.
    And then, of course, we packed whatever we had.
    We had a piece of luggage for one, each for one of us.
    I don't know.
    It was not so difficult. The important thing
    was to have the papers to get out.
    So now, at this point, was your parents jewels
    and the little bit of money still in the sewing machine?
    Yes, it was still in the sewing machine.
    OK.
    So you had already--
    But they got it then from my in-laws
    because it was only my husband and me who could leave.
    I see.
    So then the in-laws came back to the apartment eventually?
    They did, yes.
    OK.
    My mother-in-law had gone out to another apartment.
    But she didn't say, hey, come on.
    Had do be-- I mean, you know, she just vanished.
    I think that we had [INAUDIBLE].
    She had in-- it was a big building.
    And she was gone.
    Then we came back my brother in-law to the apartment,
    finding a mess.
    All of it, all was vandalized.
    Was a big apartment.
    OK.
    All vandalized.
    She was --
    He had found her.
    He had found her, my brother-in-law
    had found her there.
    And as I said, so we tried to pack up whatever was possible.
    The family decided, you have the passports.
    You go today.
    You go as you are, but you go.
    The main thing was I found the passports.
    I didn't look for anything, for anything, nothing--
    my clothes, of course, what I needed, I packed.
    What I could pack.
    I hadn't done one personal thing for me because for the plan --
    I had about two weeks.
    And I figured that I had about more than a week to work
    on my clothes, including my mother's.
    My mother didn't like it.
    I hadn't made anything.
    So we packed, went to the station.
    What we could take with us was 10 marks per person, no more.
    So now, you were leaving the country
    the same day with your parents?
    Without my parents.
    Without your parents, only you and your husband?
    Only my husband and me.
    We were the ones of the family who had the passports.
    I see.
    Without passport, you couldn't leave.
    So that night, you now, you got on a train?
    Yes.
    And you went to Italy?
    Right.
    That night, the funny part is-- what I never understand today--
    I never was much for perfume.
    But on the train, on the railroad station in Berlin,
    I bought a little bottle of perfume, lily of the valley.
    I love lily of the valley.
    I bought that bottle of perfume.
    Maybe I had a few extra marks, which I couldn't bring out,
    something like that.
    Anyway, we left.
    Then we came to Munich.
    The Munich railroad station was swarming with soldiers.
    I do believe we were the only ones from Berlin
    at least later on, when we came to the Italian side.
    We were the only Jews.
    So I told my husband, I said, you
    sit in the corner I sat by the window.
    If anybody looked at me, I wasn't afraid.
    But if they looked in to my husband,
    not anybody could tell, the people.
    All right, we made it from Munich to the Brenner Pass.
    The Brenner Pass, we were checked, separated and checked.
    I had to undress.
    Yes, undress, totally undress, except the only thing
    that I kept on was bra, you know the old-fashioned bras,
    corset-like?
    That's the only thing the woman let me keep on.
    And then she left me alone for maybe 20 minutes.
    I am 100% sure she watched me.
    Oh, I was watched Let's say it this way.
    Because people-- but you could--
    I mean, other things, you could--
    people tried to hide things in their private.
    And then you were --
    But I didn't have anything on me.
    So I told her, as a matter of fact, I told her,
    I can't have that off.
    The woman.
    Well, it's not necessary, you know,
    because then in your corset, you can exit.
    It's fine.
    That's it.
    I didn't have anything on me, only what I normally wear.
    but I didn't really know, a ring.
    It was about the last month that you could still
    take some jewelry with you.
    But you had to have the paper and permission
    to take this jewelry.
    But at that time, whatever I had on,
    if it were earrings or what.
    So when we came to, as I said, the Brenner Pass,
    they also did the same thing with my husband,
    who did the same thing.
    So after we did that, they told us we can get dressed.
    Then one of the border police pulled us over
    to the other side, to the Italian side.
    And he showed us which train we should go on this.
    He was beastly gray.
    You know, you have the feeling.
    He told us, don't come back.
    But you can put it this way or that way.
    Don't come back.
    And I finally, don't come back.
    We knew if we would go back there, we're dead.
    OK.
    And then he told us what trains to take, not
    to go anywhere else, not by accident cross
    the line because it was almost the same building like probably
    [INAUDIBLE].
    You couldn't dare be there, accidently go that way.
    Then my husband offered him a cigarette.
    And he said, uh-uh, you don't know when
    you can buy cigarettes here.
    We had $4.20.
    That was 10 marks.
    It was in the currency, you know.
    He said, you don't know when you can
    buy cigarettes, a decent guy
    That's the way he handled himself.
    The I said, I told you that we came into the train.
    I think we had to wait two or three
    hours, something like that.
    And then we came into the train with all the Italians I know.
    And we could just sit in between them.
    We had to go.
    You know, nobody would look at us.
    But then we came to Genoa.
    In the train, the Italians we talked together.
    I was the only woman in the train in that section.
    And what for?
    And they said, well, where do you go, to Genoa?
    Don't get out on the first station.
    It's not safe.
    And they know.
    We talked.
    And we talked about this money situation.
    We told them, we have only 10 marks with us.
    Get out on the first station.
    They treated us as rats.
    Get out on the first station.
    They couldn't steal anything from us, right?
    It was funny, that.
    Then we stayed in Genoa till the train stopped.
    My parents came.
    My brother came.
    So that happened within two weeks, basically--
    Yeah.
    --that your parents joined you.
    And your youngest brother joined you.
    Yes.
    And Herman was already in Amsterdam?
    He was in Amsterdam.
    I see.
    OK, yeah.
    He felt safe.
    He felt safe.
    Yes.
    Until we got to the [INAUDIBLE].
    We were there from 1933 to '41.
    And he was picked back.
    As a matter of fact, he wanted me to come over to Holland.
    But I was engaged.
    And I said, what is about?
    Well, no one could come because you need to be with a permit.
    And I said, well, every three months.
    And he said no.
    And lucky thing was I didn't sit or eat.
    But we never talked about it.
    He didn't know that my ex-husband--
    now, my ex-husband-- he was a tailor.
    He went through the apprenticeship.
    You know, like you had to have a profession.
    He never worked as a tailor.
    So that's why we did not talk about it.
    So if my brother would have heard he was a tailor,
    he could work too in Holland without permission
    because that was the main export that you needed in Holland.
    It's a good thing you didn't go there.
    Yeah.
    That was my life saving thing.
    That saved my life, really.
    Sometimes, it's harmony.
    When you don't know, you can't predict.
    And the people-- you said earlier
    that the Jewish people, even around,
    just were not thinking of how bad things were going to get.
    They almost couldn't believe it kind of thing.
    Would you talk a little bit more about that?
    Well, the German people and the German Jews,
    we would say we are German Jews.
    We didn't say we are Jews.
    We were German from generations.
    only then suddenly-- see, they couldn't touch, at that time,
    they couldn't touch anybody that had come to Germany
    that was naturalized.
    They kept us at a certain--
    from wherever they came.
    They couldn't touch them at the time.
    I told you about the friend of my brother's
    who they're playing card and they were home.
    His parents were Hungarian.
    The only one who was naturalized was the son.
    So he was the one at the moment who was in danger.
    He was a [INAUDIBLE] man.
    So they could persecute their own citizens,
    but they couldn't persecute the citizens of other countries?
    Yeah.
    Of course, later on, when they went
    into Holland and everywhere, then of course,
    nobody was safe.
    Nobody.
    It escalated--
    Yeah.
    --as the laws fell away.
    But the first ones were the Germans.
    And people didn't know.
    Yes, I would say.
    It was strange.
    People today, they were living there.
    Tomorrow, they were gone, picked up.
    Didn't people eventually start to believe
    it was as bad as it was when they
    saw these pickups going on?
    Or could they just not accept it?
    Or what do you think was going on?
    They didn't dare to open their mouths.
    They didn't dare.
    Now, you're speaking of the non-Jewish Germans?
    Right.
    OK.
    But the Jews themselves, weren't they finally aware enough
    that you would finally try to leave?
    Oh, yes.
    Yes.
    The Jews knew how bad it was getting.
    We knew there were people picked up.
    You knew that they never came home
    because after all, people lived in the apartments
    and whatever, you know.
    They didn't know at first that they're going on trip.
    They didn't know what.
    But then, of course, the people were getting--
    then they were picked up in the middle of the night and things
    like that.
    Yes.
    The people, anybody who had a little bit of brain
    said, hey, what's going on?
    But they didn't dare to open their mouths.
    I was about 16.
    It was in the next house.
    A couple, the man was a fireman.
    They loved children.
    They loved my husband, the woman especially.
    She loved my partner.
    And we had what was like over the store our apartment,
    was mezzanine OK, there was a window, a deep window.
    And my brother would always lay on there and out, you know.
    And in the morning, when that woman came around,
    when we were small he would always say,
    Tante, did you have your coffee already?
    In child's voice.
    OK?
    We're all right.
    She loved him.
    So when I was 16, I was young then.
    And one day, she had him pulled him into her house.
    And said to him, I can't talk to you anymore, tears in her eyes.
    I can't talk to you anymore.
    He was a fireman.
    But see, if she was seen talking to us, it meant already alarm.
    But she told me, she asked him not
    to come in, you know, around the corner when she did see me
    or what, with tears in her eyes.
    And my friend, girlfriend, and we were like sisters.
    We were about the same age.
    She was about not quite a year younger than I.
    We were like sisters from birth, of course.
    And when I went to Shanghai, I met her sister.
    She was a late baby.
    And her sister lived in our building.
    And I saw her on the street.
    And it was really--
    I knew that I was leaving.
    And I said, Frieda?
    I'm going on to Shanghai.
    She said, OK.
    Goodbye.
    I hope everything is good, turned around,
    and I told her, uh-uh.
    I pulled her by the arm, the tears
    were just streaming down the face.
    Her face.
    But I was--
    So this girl was upset that you were leaving.
    And you were three or four months in Shanghai
    when what happened?
    A couple that I didn't even know that
    had moved into our building, my parents building,
    into that building.
    I said, how are--
    the Kaufmans was their name.
    The man was a streetcar driver.
    They wouldn't join the communist party.
    No way.
    And he was maybe, I would say, maybe mid-30s,
    maybe a little bit closer age difference between the sisters.
    And that's it.
    I asked how they are.
    He's dead.
    That man didn't die.
    He was killed.
    They couldn't get him into the party.
    They couldn't get her into the [FOREIGN WORD]
    the woman's organization.
    I remember that I came up with my friend to the apartment
    one day.
    And they opened the door.
    There was a picture, a double frame, of Goebbels and Goering,
    you know them, in the frame.
    I'd see the picture of course and I almost ran back.
    HIlde, please come in.
    That is what my co-workers did to me.
    I had to have certain ones.
    They gave it to me because they knew they couldn't touch him.
    He wouldn't join the party.
    He didn't want anything to do with them.
    Three or four months afterwards, after I was in Shanghai,
    he was dead.
    So would you believe that he died, a man in good health?
    So were not only the Jews.
    If you were not with them, you were enemies.
    And he was a non-Jewish German?
    Non-Jewish, no.
    Any political enemies were in danger too.
    Totally.
    If you were not with them, you're against them.
    If you opened your mouth the wrong way, you were gone.
    So really, it sounds as though everybody was afraid.
    Like the Jews were afraid for one reason.
    The non-Jewish Germans were also afraid of not
    supporting the Nazis.
    And the Nazis had everybody afraid.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Everybody-- nobody dared to open their mouth.
    That was the trouble.
    And people were afraid for their families, probably, too.
    For everybody.
    If they were to say something and protest something--
    Yeah.
    --their whole family could be taken.
    If they were in danger, it's the family was endangered.
    Oh, my.
    I was lucky.
    I didn't see a concentration camp from the inside.
    Also not my younger brother or my parents.
    Now, you had mentioned before that you lost aunts.
    You've wondered about aunts and uncles--
    Yes.
    --and what might have happened to them, they're gone.
    I didn't know, were missing.
    They're not.
    And you don't know anything?
    Not at all.
    But you learned recently about Herman.
    I found that out now thanks to you.
    I found that out now, that he stayed and died there.
    I didn't know that til now.
    Now, didn't say, too, that you knew
    that he was sent to some really long-named place?
    Didn't you say that you had heard
    that he had been sent to some place, but you didn't know?
    After 1945, after the war was over.
    You learned?
    Yes.
    I had written to his fiancee, the one he couldn't marry,
    that had followed him, I told you about.
    She had followed him.
    And I remember, the address for her parents.
    I hardly knew her.
    I remembered that.
    And I wrote to her.
    And I got an answer back to Shanghai.
    And I think it was to Shanghai.
    I don't for sure I was here already.
    Anyway, she wrote back that she had been taken in.
    And it took her seven months after she
    wouldn't join the [INAUDIBLE].
    It took her seven months from one prison to the other,
    from Holland in Amsterdam to Bremen--
    seven months.
    And then she was warned not to get in touch with my brother.
    And she was a non-Jew.
    She was a non-Jewish German.
    And he was Jewish.
    And the government was punishing her
    for her involvement with a Jew?
    Yes, because in Holland, she followed him to Holland.
    I told you, my brother picked her up on my 16th birthday.
    I remember.
    And that was the last time you saw him.
    Yes.
    This was the last time that I saw him.
    And he told me that he was picking her up.
    She was waiting for him.
    He was picking her up that day.
    She wanted to follow him because they wanted to get married
    in Holland, but they couldn't.
    That was the law, contract, whatever you wanted,
    against it.
    As in Holland, they couldn't get married either,
    so they lived together.
    But she wrote in that letter that he was picked up in '41,
    I don't know what month in '41.
    And he was taken to concentration camp.
    I didn't remember, a very long name.
    But there were two names.
    Could it be Sachsenhausen?
    Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, or--
    You can't remember which one, though?
    No.
    Because those are the longest names I know.
    Yeah.
    But the first one is in [INAUDIBLE],, to Auschwitz.
    It's a big compound.
    And he died on August 10, 1942--
    Yes.
    --according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
    Yes, yes, which I didn't know up till now.
    And it does not quite jibe with the dates
    that I got from the Germans because I
    was informed that he only lived three months after he
    was picked up.
    That would have been '41.
    But as I said, when I heard he lived only three months,
    I was glad about it because that was in '41.
    We hope that that's the right information.
    Well, I mean that this was, I figured,
    till '45 in concentration camp.
    No.
    The date that the museum gave us was 1942.
    Yeah.
    Yes.
    So it would have been just a few months over.
    It would have, maybe.
    Maybe it was.
    Maybe six, three to six months is there.
    Somewhat longer than I got the information from Germany.
    And that information, the museum told me
    that they had referenced that from the Netherlands.
    The information came from the Netherlands.
    Yeah.
    They had some kind of record of those arrests
    that was given to the museum as a gift the reference materials.
    And that's where they took that from.
    I see.
    Now, my brother, he lived with a Dutch couple.
    And they treated him like their son from 1933.
    And this couple, and my almost sister-in-law.
    They begged him to go underground.
    He says, why should I go underground?
    If they want to kill me, they will.
    He just couldn't imagine more than that.
    No.
    That seems to have been typical of a lot of people.
    They just couldn't believe it.
    They just could not.
    No, they could not believe it.
    And your imagination doesn't want to go that far.
    You just say, oh, this can't be happening.
    They wouldn't do this.
    You don't believe.
    I know, yeah.
    I mean, in Shanghai, there's quite a few people that
    were in concentration camps.
    You don't believe as a people, woman,
    told that they went through.
    The things they told.
    But you can't believe that the babies or what, newborn babies
    were caught.
    They can't survive.
    They tore them apart.
    Would you believe it that human beings can do that?
    No.
    That is hard.
    That's hard.
    It was true.
    All those gruesome things they did.
    The more I read and learn, the less I understand.
    You cannot believe that people, normal,
    decent people would be that way, could be that way.
    No.
    It's a frightening thought, isn't it?
    It is.
    And you would think that things like that
    would happen with a person who was insane.
    or a criminal mentality.
    Yes.
    But to take normal people and turn them into murderers,
    it's almost inconceivable.
    You can't even think of it.
    Yeah, you can't believe it.
    You can't believe it.
    The animal in human beings, you can't believe it.
    Can you?
    I can't.
    The more I read, the less I understand.
    Yes, it's true.
    That's true.
    That's true.
    See, I told you, too, that my friend,
    my sister, as it would be, I sent one letter to her
    from Shanghai.
    I never got an answer.
    But then it dawned on me, if she gets a letter from me
    from Shanghai, why do you get that kind of letter?
    From whom do you get it?
    She was not living a free life.
    No.
    She couldn't do it.
    She couldn't do it.
    Yes, I understand.
    I could hardly agree with that.
    I had to use my head.
    But even the second letter that I wrote--
    I wrote a second letter.
    I knew what the danger was.
    You didn't get the letter.
    That is a private thing.
    And they would come to you.
    And they would claim they weren't
    interested in the stamps.
    And then you were in for that thing.
    That you lost all privacy.
    You lost your privacy.
    Yes, totally.
    Your private life.
    Everybody, everybody.
    Everybody.
    Now, when you got to Italy and you got on the boat,
    you were safe, basically?
    Yes.
    Did you feel safe?
    On the boat?
    Yes.
    The moment we crossed the Brenner Pass.
    The moment you crossed the Brenner Pass,
    you felt a relief.
    Yeah.
    At that time.
    At that time.
    And as it happened, my brother, he got his passport after me.
    And my parents-- his ticket was a ship, which you had to have,
    had all three names on it, my parents' name and my brother's.
    So when he came to the Brenner Pass,
    he was told he couldn't leave.
    He has to have his own ticket.
    So I think he went back to Innsbruck and sent a telegram.
    And my parents did hear, and so on, so on.
    And they got that all right then his own one, you know?
    My parents still didn't have their passport.
    And then he came back to the Brenner Pass.
    Well, he had been there.
    And one of the customs guys said, that's the guy.
    That's the guy.
    There was one guy who went.
    He was going through the customs and went over
    to the Italian side and opened his mouth, his trap, right.
    But the part in Germany, [INAUDIBLE]..
    They put it here in that because there was only
    [INAUDIBLE] involved.
    He didn't use his head at all.
    And that time, this guy says, hey,
    that's the one to my brother, calling at him.
    And later on, I met this man.
    And he looked totally different from my brother.
    He was blond, my brother had dark hair, bilack Now,
    no one's here.
    And I believe, funny enough, my belief is the same customers
    officer the borders over the border in this way.
    And somehow, I believe that was the same guy.
    Said, no, this guy is long gone.
    This man had nothing to do with it.
    God.
    That would have meant my brother would been ended up
    in a concentration, maybe even not ended up there .
    This customs officer said, no, this guy
    is a long way gone already through the part [INAUDIBLE]..
    He brought my brother over to the other side.
    He gave him the name.
    He told who my brother was, and said,
    if he run into this guy, just [INAUDIBLE]..
    But he doesn't know what he did, what's going on.
    He didn't know what he was doing.
    Anyway, in Genoa, of course, we were spending our time as good
    as we could.
    The Jewish community there gave us a room where we could stay
    and a boarding house where we could eat, very decent.
    But anyway, always somebody went to the station
    to see if other people were coming.
    And who was at the station?
    My brother came.
    This guy.
    This guy picked my brother up from the station
    and brought him to the boarding house.
    I don't know.
    I don't know if he ever told him anything.
    But I remember my brother standing at the door there.
    It was no time.
    And we spend there our time too.
    And my brother was a big room, a very big room in that house.
    And that was on the other side.
    And still today, when I think about it, you know,
    I feel suddenly like a mask come over my face
    when I saw my brother.
    Now, there's another thing that we did.
    And that made me--
    I don't want to wash people clear.
    But my brother was stupid.
    When he got his passport, he didn't want to leave yet.
    Supposedly, he wanted to wait for my parents.
    He just didn't want to leave them.
    And there was something going on that the Jews were
    fined so many million marks.
    They had to come up with that.
    They were fined for Crystal Night.
    I don't know if it was from Crystal Night.
    I read that in a book.
    They were fined for all the damages and the cleanup that
    had to be done.
    Oh, that was why fined.
    They were fined as though it was their fault.
    I remember that fact because it seems so ridiculous.
    I know.
    There was-- of course.
    Everything was ridiculous, whatever
    they pulled out of their head.
    Anyway, so that was going on.
    Now, these two boys that took us, one, the age of my brother.
    The one was a little bit older.
    These two [? girls, ?] you won't go?
    He had gotten his passport.
    You don't go?
    Ah.
    And my brother's friend--
    I mean, we grew up with him.
    He was in the army in uniform.
    They picked his clothes.
    Now, this was German soldier friends of your brother's?
    Of my brother's.
    These were non-Jewish Germans?
    Yes.
    These were non-Jewish Germans who
    were friends with your brother and made sure he left
    because they cared about him.
    And not only made sure he left, they packed this clothes.
    They brought him to the train.
    I mean, they bought the ticket.
    But who paid for it, I can't tell you.
    But they bought the ticket and made
    sure that he was on the train.
    They were friends.
    They were friends who were in the German Army?
    Right.
    One was.
    Isn't that something?
    I don't know.
    Isn't war bizarre and strange?
    So there were people who--
    That were just normal, good people who
    got swept into the craziness.
    Now, I told you, I didn't have time
    to do anything preparing things, clothing for myself.
    I had so much fabric there, you don't believe it
    for all, to get ready, and the fabric for my mother's clothes.
    But she needs, my mother would tell me,
    she couldn't just go and buy a dress.
    There was a sister to them who took us.
    She had made the dress for my mother.
    She made the dresses that I couldn't make.
    Now, that was made by?
    By the sister of the one, the guy that was in the military.
    So this was a German woman, non-Jewish German woman
    helped your mother?
    Your friends.
    They had grown up together.
    They lived in the next house.
    Of course.
    Isn't that something?
    And so some people didn't lose it, their humanity,
    even that they knew what was going on.
    So my mother's dresses, when she came to Shanghai,
    I had to take them apart because they were terrible,
    with big stitches.
    Only that she had dresses that she didn't take the materials
    with, only dresses to Shanghai.
    But that meant a lot.
    These were two brothers when we got out.
    I mean, they grow up together, especially
    with the one in the army was my brother's close friend,
    same age.
    So there were people, there were people that has sense
    So this, I believe, that there are always
    some people that are decent.
    Some did it for money.
    Other ones did it just for the goodness.
    But you didn't know.
    You didn't know.
    There was so much fear in the air in every direction.
    In every direction.
    It would be hard to know who to trust.
    Look, it was not only the terror.
    The odds were, if there were kids,
    you would talk in front of your child what you don't like.
    If the parents did that, kids would go to the party
    and tell them.
    Didn't take long for [INAUDIBLE] to beat that.
    They were taught, first is the party.
    First is party.
    Family didn't count.
    I wonder how the children felt when
    their parents were picked up.
    Hard to say.
    At that time, the things [INAUDIBLE]..
    They really-- they had it in their mind.
    They had them so--
    Brainwashed.
    --yes, brainwashed that this, they thought, for sure,
    they did the right thing.
    That was their duty.
    So you could not, even if you close the door one
    room to the other.
    When they heard, there could be an answer.
    There would be an answer.
    That was the horror.
    I had a funny experience when I was
    in school, professional school.
    You know, in Germany, when you're an apprentice,
    you have to go to school twice a week, professional school,
    from till 2 o'clock, or something like that.
    And they knew that I was already ticklish, very ticklish.
    so in my class too there was one girl who would take that was
    you know, that would you know talk about students .
    At that time, I still could open my mouth
    because I didn't think.
    I was only maybe 15, 16.
    The funny part was it was a pretty big class.
    Half of the class I knew--
    not so sure.
    And there were very good friends in that class too.
    You had this friend that way.
    And then the teacher wouldn't say a word.
    We debated that there weren't any.
    I didn't know I could do it.
    But later on, I knew I debated.
    And I just didn't hold back.
    Then the principal of the school was standing in the doorway.
    At that time, otherwise, she would have
    been supposed to shut me up.
    But didn't answer me at that time.
    But I wasn't bright enough to think about that.
    There, I had several teachers and the principal standing
    in the doorway not saying a word.
    Even there, lots of people talked.
    You know, the people talked.
    I say, would it be Nazis, they would have taken me out
    of school.
    These are things that you remember.
    But this girl, she was totally Nazi.
    At that time, they were on that get used to that.
    So then I'd sing sometimes.
    One day, if you looked back, you knew the words.
    You were doing something that you didn't know did.
    You were.
    You were because this [? girls ?] were all.
    Anyway, that school was till 14.
    Because these girls were all between 15 and 16.
    But you were still not for the party.
    We were very [INAUDIBLE].
    But they didn't do.
    But you knew this way and that way.
    If I could be in that house where I grew up, could go in
    into that house and see he stood there and wait for me,
    I'd say that was in this clear.
    Well, I don't have to be afraid in this house.
    You felt very safe in that home--
    Yes.
    --with all those neighbors and everything.
    Yes.
    I mean, there may have been--
    You were a Jewish family.
    --well, besides us, but I don't even remember.
    But what's it called?
    What it called here--
    five stores, you know.
    But it's not [INAUDIBLE].
    Five stories?
    Yeah, five to six stories at the Berlin house.
    So it was a big house.
    And it was home.
    Yeah.
    It was home.
    I was 10.
    It's an amazing thought to think that
    later on, had you stayed there, it wouldn't have been safe.
    No.
    No.
    Even that house that you grew up in
    would no longer have been the safe place
    that you knew and felt.
    Well, you have to think that was in 1938,
    when I left my parents with those things.
    And things, I guess, didn't go completely crazy
    until '41, '42.
    Well, no, even earlier.
    Was it right in there?
    Earlier.
    '40, so like that.
    Yeah.
    I wasn't there anymore.
    That's right.
    That's right.
    But it was earlier, especially the people got scared.
    There were people, yes.
    He was a couple that I know of from then, Germans, that
    came to States after the war.
    And my husband and the man were pretty close friends and yes,
    they told us .
    They were not on that thing.
    I don't know where they came from, a little town.
    But they saw from the house from the window,
    across the building, there were a yard.
    And there were things going on that they couldn't figure out.
    People in town, what they picked up.
    So they saw.
    But they didn't know what was really going on,
    why the people were there.
    Right.
    They weren't thinking past that to what was really happening.
    No, they couldn't understand it.
    They couldn't understand it.
    Well, at first, as I've been reading,
    they couldn't believe it.
    That's it.
    Even when people told them, this is what we heard happened.
    We saw this.
    We heard.
    This person told us this.
    They still would say, nah, you can't be serious.
    They couldn't.
    They would not.
    Not us.
    We wouldn't do that.
    No, that was things that were beyond anything.
    I mean, these people couldn't figure out.
    My name is Susan Hackney, and Hildegard Israel
    will be talking about her experiences
    leaving Germany and going to Shanghai on Kristallnacht.
    And today's date is March 19, 1998, and here is Hilde.
    I was-- my father had arrived in Genoa,
    where we waited with the help from the Jewish community.
    And we were only--
    all we had with us was 10 marks or 420 in our pocket.
    We were not allowed any more money.
    And so we needed the help of the community,
    and they treated us very well there.
    We had a heck of a time--
    heck of a time to find them.
    Of course, I spoke English and German,
    but nobody understood me.
    When we got-- after we arrived from the train until I finally
    hit on the--
    I had an envelope with me.
    I drew a Magen David on it.
    And I wrote every name that I could
    think of of the Jewish community, people, synagogue,
    anything I could think of.
    So finally, I held it, have it in front
    of the noses of an military and he looked at it.
    And he said, oh, Hebrew put [INAUDIBLE]..
    He will put [INAUDIBLE].
    That was the name of the synagogue in--
    you know.
    We will Hebrew [INAUDIBLE].
    And then he gave us some directions.
    He didn't speak English, but somehow we found it.
    And then we landed in--
    that Jewish community they gave us
    a room And gave us this room, and that is where we could eat,
    otherwise we couldn't have survived
    till the 23rd of November because when I left in--
    I arrived there on the 10th of November in the morning
    in Genoa..
    So then when my brother arrived--
    he arrived about, I would say, five days, six days after me
    without my parents.
    And which brother was this?
    Your youngest?
    The younger brother.
    The older brother was in Amsterdam.
    And so we waited for my parents.
    And we couldn't do anything.
    Even in Genoa we couldn't see anything.
    We walked, and walked, and walked,
    and walked because we couldn't afford a bus, or streetcar,
    or something like that.
    We couldn't afford for it.
    We just walked.
    And so finally my parents arrived
    on the 22nd of November, the night before the ship left.
    They came-- they arrived safely, my parents,
    but I also had my in-laws.
    My in-laws' family was there, too, with us.
    And it was a mother-in-- my mother-in-law
    and my brother-in-law.
    So we were then--
    the ship went--
    [PLACE NAME] it's a country [? line. ?] [INAUDIBLE] was
    the ship where we went on.
    the accommodation where there was none--
    it was not the cruise But our ship
    had quite a lot of refugees on it.
    And we were-- when we came to Shanghai [INAUDIBLE]..
    Yeah.
    The arrival when we came up the Yangtze it was horrible.
    The arrival was horrible?
    The arrival when we came up with the ship, the Yangtze.
    The Yangtze River?
    It was terrible.
    Why?
    It was war zone.
    [GASPS] The Japanese and the Chinese--
    it was a war zone.
    There was so much destruction.
    You only saw the--
    from factories or whatever it was only
    the iron that was left.
    It was horrible, really.
    People did just cry because how awful--
    but I said at that time--
    I was young enough.
    I said, what do you want?
    You are out of Germany.
    I tried to get some sense to them,
    but it was hard [INAUDIBLE] all the way.
    We came up the Yangtze for an hour, hour,
    30-- came into Shanghai.
    When we arrived in Shanghai, we were--
    as far as I remember, we were picked up from the Shanghai
    community probably.
    I can't say.
    It was too much that I could remember.
    But we were-- we were taken down off the ship
    and on trucks, which reminded us,
    of course, how the people were taken away
    in trucks in Germany.
    Trucks?
    In trucks.
    Oh, yeah.
    Oh, dear.
    Yeah.
    Trucks.
    We were standing on the trucks.
    We were standing.
    But if you remember that you saw the same idea in Germany, only
    we were brought to an office building and the other office
    building, temporary put up cots and so on, temporary.
    And they were--
    I don't know.
    That thing is a little bit fuzzy because--
    yes, we all found rooms, rooms, single rooms
    where we could that we could rent and so on.
    But the committee already--
    committee-- they gave us some money
    so that we could rent over there.
    And our-- my--
    it's hard.
    I remember we were at a--
    we stood with the Japanese people.
    They lived in Shanghai.
    My parents rented a room, Chinese, primitive.
    But we had our rooms.
    Then after that we had bombed-out schools.
    They said we could be there for the rest of people that came.
    We were the first--
    of the first 500 people that arrived there.
    You were?
    Yes.
    In the first 500?
    Yes.
    You got an ID, the so-called [INAUDIBLE] pass.
    And that-- I had something between 3 and 4, my number.
    And they helped us to get rooms in town.
    But they formed a kitchen that we could get food,
    and that we were, in principle, on our own.
    And we were under Japanese occupation.
    At that time when we arrived, there were still
    English there, the French.
    They were still there.
    In Shanghai there are different sections
    where the people lived, and the officers' famous band
    that was English, American that is famous.
    And they were still there.
    I remember crossing the bridge over to the--
    and we lived in the Chinese section.
    You lived where?
    In the Chinese section.
    I see.
    In Hongkou.
    It was what we could afford.
    We lived from hand to mouth, of course.
    But in the-- the sections were there the German, the Russian,
    the English, the French.
    [NON-ENGLISH] Office-- the Bund, of course, is world-famous.
    It looked like it could be in America, high office
    buildings and so on, beautiful.
    The French had more living sections-- not to--
    like the Americans did.
    But then I remember crossing the bridge
    to the English section at the Bund,
    and there were still guards standing
    from the English and Scottish uniform.
    And I didn't understand or hear.
    I didn't know about--
    I walked along the walkway, I think.
    It was a big bridge.
    And then I got a [? dunce ?] from a Scotchman--
    [? listen-- ?] because I was walking where I shouldn't walk.
    But there were -- the English there at that time.
    Then afterwards, the [INAUDIBLE] [? was ?]
    Japanese, only Japanese there.
    And we lived in a--
    we had then, of course--
    they knew where to--
    and so for a while then--
    [INAUDIBLE] but then there was Ghoya,
    who was something like governor over our area.
    He lived in Hongkou, and he was the devil.
    Now, he was what nationality?
    Japanese.
    I see.
    And he was the administrator of the neighborhood where you--
    Of the Jewish area.
    Of the Jewish area?
    Yeah.
    No, I mean the Jews lived with the Chinese.
    I understand, So just the neighborhood.
    Yeah, the area on--
    it was Hongkou.
    Like here, [? Sugar ?] House--
    that was Hongkou.
    We lived on our own, and you could go where you want.
    You can walk in the English, or Russian, or whatever section,
    at least for a while.
    And then after my--
    I can only-- we didn't see it.
    The Germans insisted that the Japanese should put us
    into a kind of ghetto.
    How did the Germans have any authority in China?
    No, they didn't have any.
    They put the pressure on the Japanese, the Axis.
    That was the Axis.
    The Axis, the Alliance, the Allies.
    The Japanese, yes.
    The Japanese--
    I see.
    OK.
    OK?
    Yes.
    And they put pressure on the Japanese government
    to put the immigrants there, the refugees,
    in a certain designated area that later
    would be known as a ghetto.
    We could not be--
    we were on our own, but we could not leave the area.
    If you wanted to get out for some reason, business reason
    and so on, we had to go to the office that Ghoya was.
    OK.
    And he was terrible.
    For no reason he would jump on the table and smack that--
    slap the people if somebody came.
    And he was tall, good-looking.
    He slapped them.
    He put them-- for no reason at all,
    he put these people then outside on the balcony in the sun
    for hours.
    He [? asked ?] [INAUDIBLE] whatever hit him.
    We were offered [INAUDIBLE] if you had to go there.
    But you had to go there.
    Either you got a pass, a button that said, only for a few hours
    or for the full day by color, but you
    had to have that button.
    And who is this administrator again?
    Can you say his name very clearly?
    Ghoya.
    Ghoya?
    Ghoya.
    I see.
    OK.
    He was Ghoya, and he was terrible.
    And yes, we were there.
    Of course, there were soldiers, Japanese soldiers and so on.
    In some ways, they were very nasty but not--
    what shall I say?
    They didn't attack you or anything.
    Yes, nasty, OK, maybe some people got attacked, too.
    We were a big--
    we were about 23,000 refugees, so you didn't know everything.
    And we ourselves lived opposite--
    near was there underground that--
    any metal, melted it, whatever they did with it.
    It was underground, and it was very often
    attacked by the planes from the Americans.
    It was a ticklish location.
    To live in?
    Very ticklish.
    Oh, my.
    Ok But I only had to go with my boss.
    I was a dressmaker, and he made blouses, export blouses
    before that was shut down but still had a connection
    to their blouses in Shanghai.
    And he had to bring us as proof that he needed the passport.
    And we [INAUDIBLE] check my colleague and I.
    We were three girls.
    We had to go with him.
    [INAUDIBLE] was checking.
    When he was released, he got the passport on the button.
    Then we were just--
    When we left that building we were--
    --relieved.
    --relieved.
    And this was Ghoya's building?
    Yes, that was that government building in--
    So your boss basically helped you get what you needed?
    We had to go there, yes, into the building,
    and he didn't know how he would treat our boss.
    It was a horrible feeling.
    And the Japanese-- they did as they pleased.
    OK?
    They did as they pleased.
    Now, the Germans had decided they should put a concentration
    camp up in Shanghai for the German, German or whatever,
    Hitler refugees.
    And that, as far as I understood,
    was that Germany said no.
    They didn't go with that.
    They wanted to put also--
    open [INAUDIBLE] in there.
    And we didn't know--
    how much in danger we were we didn't know.
    We lived in the houses that we rented.
    That means homes.
    You didn't own anything there in China.
    If you own a house that is owned for 99 years,
    then it goes back to the government,
    but of course we rented a house.
    There were several of us living there, of course.
    And my husband had started a business there,
    this woodworking--
    because the import of buttons or anything was gone.
    And the industry in Shanghai was very much
    knitting sweaters and things like that,
    so they needed buttons.
    And my husband started that, very primitive at first,
    and afterwards he developed, I would say,
    not a big business of it but he lived--
    we survived on that.
    I myself worked, of course, as--
    I made blouses, as I told you, but they took all this
    without much.
    And we lived from day to day.
    You did not know--
    if you bought today--
    you went to the market and bought,
    let's say, a pound of potatoes and maybe,
    if you are-- and onions.
    There were onions.
    And maybe for two people two ounces of bacon
    or an equivalent to this.
    We ate quantities, big pots of what we cooked, big pots.
    But, just to be fed, not quality.
    And it's a funny thing.
    There was-- we had a salesman, and he asked us one evening--
    small Chinese noodles, which are always fresh,
    and fresh noodles-- you get always this kind of flour.
    He asked if he could use that water as a soup.
    That is the situation.
    I saw that many people could not even
    think of buying any soup and so on.
    I wouldn't say of starvation because you could fill up.
    Then the Japanese later on--
    when the Japanese decided they wanted to be good to us,
    showing up with the Red Cross international.
    We got eggs and potatoes.
    What we got were rotten eggs, and what we got
    were rotten potatoes.
    But we had to pick them up.
    We had to pick them up because they didn't like to be--
    if you had [? two people. ?] That's all rotten.
    You couldn't even eat it.
    So you were just having to make an appearance there
    to make them look good?
    Yes, yes.
    And we were opposite-- as I say, there was a metal factory.
    They were metal welders.
    There were-- as a matter of fact, [INAUDIBLE]
    came up with, it did, of course, was from very different.
    Also they started [INAUDIBLE],, and when you heard--
    the [INAUDIBLE].
    They were like bamboo fences and things like that.
    The bamboo pickets when it burns back there.
    Like this just shooting overnight.
    You never knew what was going on.
    And then the Japanese started to congregate
    in a certain area in the center where the refugees lived
    because they figured they wouldn't bomb it,
    they were poor And were poor, too.
    look at in that they had something like stations, radio
    and all that--
    that was going on in that area.
    And the day came of course, that they bombed that area.
    And there were quite a few people
    that were hurting and hurt and so on.
    At that time, I have to admit my husband wouldn't
    let me go there.
    I was pregnant, and he didn't want
    to let me go into the area But they--
    they knew there was a radio station there.
    There was everything military important.
    So they had to, the Americans.
    Had to.
    And things like that.
    Of course, food situation, as I say--
    we lived from the day to day.
    I could buy a pound potatoes with a few onions.
    And a little bit nap but only know little bit
    so that you had a taste on.
    The next day I couldn't even buy the potatoes.
    It was an immense inflation.
    People don't know what an inflation is.
    Three times in the time that we lived there.
    Three times the money was deflated again.
    4 million?
    But the lowest value on area.
    Down to one but we got Chinese dollar, so it's a yen,
    down to one yen deflated but you bought
    two yesterday for a million suddenly was a bad yen.
    Three times we went through that inflation.
    And I have seen people there that suffered a lot.
    The worst thing, Of course, were the intellectuals in Shanghai,
    they could not adjust they could not adjust.
    I didn't know-- one day-- and I remember
    I came down from the office building where we worked.
    And there was a man selling newspaper.
    He looked really-- he had a coat on, just cut off,
    and he really looked To our eyes, terrible.
    And I was asked then if I knew who he was.
    I said, no, I don't.
    I was told it was a very famous lawyer
    standing on the street corner in Shanghai selling newspapers.
    A very famous lawyer, I was told, of course,
    he was not the only one.
    We had to try to adjust as much as we could, even know we never
    knew what would be coming up.
    And to some people-- my husband thought, I'm not going.
    It was-- of course it was time, and the Germans, of course,
    [INAUDIBLE] to go underground and so on.
    I don't whatever they did there.
    They had to go.
    And he maybe put explosives here or there,
    whatever, because he never told me.
    So there were people, of course, also underground and lots
    of people that never lived anywhere
    else but in these camps, the school type--
    that's it-- in big rooms.
    Division only-- the division between the families
    were only blankets, old blankets.
    There were also the kitchen where they could cook anything.
    [INAUDIBLE] terrible, primitive, dirty because there
    was no possibility.
    They caught dogs in Shanghai.
    They had [? products. ?] Because the wild dogs in Shanghai--
    it was--
    one time I was pregnant, and I went over to the store,
    and there was something laying on the street.
    And I didn't see what it was before I came close to it.
    It was a baby's leg, a baby's leg, a poor, fleshy baby's leg
    laying on the street.
    [INAUDIBLE] you know how [INAUDIBLE]..
    The point was I was pregnant.
    That is not something to see when you are pregnant.
    That was Shanghai.
    In Shanghai, if people died, they didn't have the money,
    they just rolled them up in a mat, bamboo or doormat,
    and left them outside.
    And that's why the dogs were called the [INAUDIBLE]
    of Shanghai.
    The what?
    Were they called?
    [INAUDIBLE] of Shanghai because they
    ate, and they ate the meat.
    They ate [INAUDIBLE].
    They ate anything, like I said.
    They were wild dogs.
    Oh my God.
    And that's upsetting.
    To me, that was my personal experience with the baby leg
    that was shocking.
    We are resuming this interview on May 19, 1998.
    It might be interesting to know how
    I get my baby clothing, which I couldn't afford otherwise,
    in Shanghai.
    I was told by other people that there
    was a junkman who bought up all the clothes, old sheets,
    everything, and he was a junkman,
    that he had lots of baby stuff.
    So I went there, or we went to, my husband and me,
    and asked him.
    And he said, oh, yes, , I have.
    --little bit.
    He brought out a box full of baby clothes, baby clothes,
    bandages, shirts.
    What else?
    Everything you could think of.
    Of course, that was precious because we could not
    get it in Shanghai.
    You couldn't even get anything almost like it.
    So my son was dressed from the day
    he was born in junk clothes, but it was pretty.
    I have to say that.
    Honestly, I did--
    I was just delighted to get the stuff.
    The reason was there was a woman.
    She was pregnant, and she had born a child
    with a cord around-- the child had a cord around the neck.
    It was dead.
    So she had everything beautiful, everything
    from America that you can imagine,
    just the most beautiful stuff.
    And I felt a little bit like [INAUDIBLE],, you know.
    And so she bore another child just before,
    while I still was pregnant, and she bore another child.
    And when I looked in the beautiful carriage,
    it's a beautiful blanket and everything, beautiful baby
    clothes.
    And I thought--
    I thought I saw a skeleton in there, a baby,
    just almost newborn baby--
    she looked like a skeleton.
    After that, I was very happy with my junkman's clothes.
    You felt grateful for your son and his [BOTH TALKING]
    I was very happy because I thought, I didn't need that.
    You needed--
    I had a healthy child.
    You had the healthy baby, and that--
    In Shanghai--
    --was fine with you.
    --you didn't know-- that was the biggest worry in Shanghai.
    You didn't want a child that you couldn't feed right
    or whatever.
    Speaking of couldn't, he died.
    He never got fresh milk because for the reason fresh milk,
    the cows were all to-- had all tuberculosis in them.
    You could not give a child a bottle of fresh milk.
    I had to feed him--
    after I couldn't breastfeed him anymore,
    I had to use the [INAUDIBLE],, we call it [INAUDIBLE] milk--
    but fresh milk.
    It was out.
    Let's see--
    Why would the [BOTH TALKING]
    The cows had tuberculosis.
    The cows had tuberculosis?
    Oh my.
    She didn't want to feed that to the kids.
    In Shanghai that was really something you didn't need.
    That was something, when the Americans checked us for the--
    for the DP quota, that we-- for the States,
    that is something that they wouldn't allow in
    into the States.
    Was tuberculosis?
    Was tuberculosis.
    Anybody who had tuberculosis had to be healed first,
    and that was very easy to get it in Shanghai.
    So I was-- but as I say, I didn't need
    any American clothes anymore.
    I didn't need any baby buggies.
    I was happy with my child.
    There you go.
    I was very, very much healed without that.
    I didn't want it anymore.
    But yes, we had to make do.
    We had a very high-ceiling Chinese house.
    It did not have a ceiling itself.
    It had height-- how should I say it?
    It's a roof but high.
    Steep?
    Steep.
    Steep.
    Steep, concrete, but no ceiling in between.
    So when my boy was born, we took sheets, old sheets,
    and he put them--
    made a ceiling out of the sheets to keep the draft out.
    Oh, keep it warmer.
    We couldn't heat that--
    we didn't have heating.
    Oh my.
    What was the winter like over there?
    Luckily the first year he was born it was a mild winter.
    But still, a mild winter mean cold and wet,
    so you had to do the best that you could--
    So damp?
    --to protect him yes.
    Even the [INAUDIBLE] we had-- when we went to bed,
    the truth was that we got first to go to bed.
    We had feather beds, downs, feather beds.
    It wasn't warm enough.
    Nope.
    I've wore woolen socks at night.
    The old-fashion swimsuits with a skirt--
    I got a hold of one of those, and I cut the skirt--
    the pants off.
    And that was my underwear, underwear, and also going
    into bed we tried a pajama to keep warm.
    I couldn't get warm.
    In the summer was something else again.
    We were dripping.
    My husband was dripping.
    He dripped, literally.
    As we didn't have the furniture as we have in the States,
    my husband slept on a military cot.
    And he dripped so much.
    Sweat, huh?
    Sweating at night.
    And besides that, we had to have the mosquito coils
    under the bed so that we wouldn't be
    bitten to death by mosquitoes.
    Mosquito coils, you said?
    Mosquito coils.
    What is that?
    They are coming out now with all in a new pottery barn
    that they put in a mosquito coil.
    But people don't that, that it's really Chinese.
    You light it, yes.
    It smokes until it's finished.
    I see.
    A coil, green coil.
    Interesting.
    But we had to have it under the bed because we didn't--
    we couldn't have screen windows.
    The screen window would take the air away from you,
    so you had to have some air.
    Oh my.
    And mosquito netting-- the same story.
    We didn't have that luxury either.
    The men-- the foreigner--
    as we were the so-called [INAUDIBLE]----
    the men could-- the Chinese would sleep outside at night
    in the summer, but the woman couldn't do that.
    So I slept on my table--
    I had a big table--
    on my table so that I got a little bit drafts
    from the stairs to the window that I could sleep.
    Women-- it was not--
    it was out of the question.
    Otherwise, you lost face.
    Woman couldn't do that.
    Men could.
    You lost face?
    Lost face.
    What did they say what's going on
    if you were sleeping outside?
    Why would they--
    You would just be done.
    They would think you are a cheap woman or whatever.
    A cheap woman?
    Yeah.
    For sleeping outside.
    You couldn't do that.
    And there was still lots of limitations
    what a woman couldn't do, or let's say
    a foreign woman couldn't do.
    Did you have less privileges as a foreigner
    than the Chinese women did?
    Were you lower in privileges than the Chinese women?
    No, no, no.
    No?
    But it was just a--
    Right.
    If I would have slept outside or, yes,
    lived like the Chinese women, yes, I would be below.
    But the men could do anything.
    That is what you call losing face.
    Did the Chinese treat the Shanghai Jews
    in a way that reminded you of Europe?
    Or did they treat you casually and just like a person?
    Or were--
    No, no.
    Did you feel like you were different--
    No, no.
    We lived in between the Chinese, and living in
    between the Chinese, they adjust to you
    to be seeing the people around.
    It's always like in every culture,
    if there is something different to your own culture
    they can't get it that you are different.
    But we are good neighbors, and I couldn't say that I was--
    that we were mistreated.
    We were not.
    Did you sense any kind of antisemitism among the Chinese?
    They didn't know that.
    Oh, yes, there was one time--
    not just the Chinese.
    There was at one time-- it was right after the beginning
    after we came to Shanghai.
    Let's say in Shanghai-- we were in Shanghai in '38, '39,
    maybe even '39 in the summer, maybe a little bit later.
    One day, the camp came Nazis, a whole troupe of Nazis.
    There was a whole section of German.
    They came, and they would start throwing the swastika
    on the street.
    Now, these were Germans who came to Shanghai?
    No, they were huge-- they were Germans that lived in Shanghai.
    There was a German community.
    But like everywhere else, they had the uniforms
    and everything, too.
    And when that happened, the young men, Jewish men--
    they had enough, and they started to fight with them.
    Oh, good.
    So then there was that tension?
    They started to fight with them.
    I personally hadn't seen it.
    I only knew from my husband who was in the middle of it
    afterwards.
    I knew him at that time, but he wasn't my husband or anything
    else.
    And from him I knew that the police came.
    They took them to jail, the whole group.
    Both?
    The reaction--
    Both, both, and then they had to come in front of the judge.
    And the judge said, OK, first off, you have to shake hands.
    You have to join.
    You eat together in a restaurant.
    You have to [INAUDIBLE] together,
    and they had to pay a little fine, too.
    And that is it.
    But luckily, we had good, strong, young men there,
    including [INAUDIBLE],, championship boxer.
    And they really hit.
    So after that-- that was the judgment.
    They had to shake hands.
    They had [INAUDIBLE] together, in principle, and that was it,
    and to pay a fine.
    Of course, my husband's then-girlfriend,
    who spoke perfect Chinese--
    she was born in Shanghai--
    and she had to bail him out.
    She had to do what?
    Bail him out from the jail.
    Oh.
    So he was in jail?
    They wouldn't let you go-- let them go out free.
    They had to be bailed out.
    So that-- but that is what happened.
    After that, the German didn't dare to come in again.
    Because there was resistance, and they knew it?
    They found a resistance that they didn't expect.
    But they had had enough.
    Yes.
    They would not come--
    they would not come again.
    The good were beaten up.
    So one thing you had to say for the Japanese--
    when we were in the ghetto areas that we could not go out,
    there was a-- s we had to furnish the kind of police
    force that the men had to take the that
    certain job for several hours every time there.
    But they couldn't so that our people wouldn't
    leave this area.
    And we found out then--
    we didn't know what was going on,
    but we had-- when we had to go move into the ghetto,
    then we didn't know what would be happening to us.
    Later on we found out that the Germans
    had insisted that they should--
    the Japanese should put us in camps.
    And there were camp areas prepared,
    but the Japanese would not do that.
    But we had a kind of governor, if you want to call him that.
    His name was Ghoya and he named himself the King of the Jews.
    He was a little guy, but the people,
    when they had to go there to get permission
    to leave for two or three hours or a day,
    they had to find proof that they needed to get out.
    So everybody was shaking who had to go to him.
    He was a little guy, and he asked--
    if some good-looking, tall guy would come to him,
    without reason at all, he even would
    jump on the table and stuff, that guy.
    Slap him?
    Slapped him, put them out on the balcony
    in the blasting sunshine for hours in tropical sun.
    And he was Japanese?
    He was with the Japanese government?
    He was a Japanese, yes.
    And they had taken over the city?
    Yes, and not only the city.
    In the war.
    It was Japanese-- all China was almost under Japanese--
    what do you call it?
    Under Japanese-- not observation.
    Jurisdiction?
    Jurisdiction.
    So when we came to Shanghai, they
    had just taken Shanghai over.
    So after-- that took a while, too.
    We had to move into the district.
    In other words, when you lived in a certain area
    outside that district you had to move into that district.
    Like we had-- we had a house rented.
    We were three couples living there.
    But we had to trade that house with the Chinese
    who worked, by the way, at the jail.
    And it was much smaller.
    You couldn't take the people with us.
    They had to find new living quarters,
    and you had to buy them in dollar value.
    Even if it was only $10, it was too much.
    People didn't have that money, and US $10 was high money.
    You couldn't-- I couldn't afford another room.
    But it's-- that's the way we had to move into that district.
    We didn't have a choice.
    And yes, we--
    Now, this district-- was this a ghetto in a way?
    You did your own-- you lived the way you--
    normal life, only you couldn't go out of certain area.
    OK.
    So it was just a restricted--
    Like you live-- like take it here
    Sugarhouse, Sugarhouse area.
    That's where we made a district that you can't leave.
    Right, OK.
    You go follow your--
    you follow your own life as far as you can, work, whatever.
    But you couldn't go outside of that?
    But you could not leave the area without special permission,
    and that's where this Ghoya came in.
    OK.
    OK, now Ghoya at the end, after the American came in--
    after the war was over, American came in,
    and they told the Jewish people, the people-- the refugees
    in Shanghai, we give you Ghoya.
    You can do with him whatever you want, but don't kill it.
    So the Americans took the authority away from him?
    They don't protect-- they didn't protect him.
    OK, they wouldn't protect him.
    What happened to him?
    That's what it was, that they didn't give him any protection.
    But this mean you could hit him.
    And yes, they treated.
    They gave him back whatever they could.
    But no, they did not kill him, and he
    didn't make any broken bones or anything like that.
    But I don't know if you can understand how
    the feeling after--
    at least that-- that was about three years,
    something like that, when he was the King of the Jews.
    Later on, he was very humble, and he apologized, very humble.
    It's in one of the books.
    You showed me the book.
    In that book there is that picture, too,
    where he is very humble.
    And that was living in the ghetto.
    But yes, we could work, follow our lives as far as we could.
    We didn't know what was outside.
    Now, in one of the new movies now
    that you have probably seen it shows
    where the English people from the English section,
    and French section, and so on--
    were, yes, they had concentration camps for them,
    which we didn't know.
    I don't know about that.
    There were two movies--
    I don't know if I remember the title now.
    They were very, very, very popular here--
    about what went on, how they came in here into Shanghai
    and how they reacted and how they took the people out
    of the English section.
    I don't know if the Americans--
    the Americans, I guess--
    they were taken out before.
    But the people that stayed here--
    stayed there, sorry-- stayed there were taken into camps.
    There was a very good movie done over that.
    Now, those camps-- they existed the more--
    Not the districts.
    They were taken into a camp.
    A camp outside of Shanghai?
    Yeah.
    And
    What was the life like there?
    Did you hear rumors?
    Like a camp, concentration camp.
    It was a police--
    A police camp with all the--
    they couldn't-- no freedom.
    No freedom.
    No freedom.
    Were they as brutal as the camps in Germany, or was it
    a containment--
    This--
    Did you hear-- do you--
    I saw it in the movie, OK?
    And I did not know that that existed.
    When you were there you mean?
    While we were in Shanghai.
    You did not know.
    In our ghetto.
    This was not in that-- a camp in that way
    because we lived our normal life.
    Right.
    You were just contained.
    You couldn't really get out easily.
    Right.
    I see.
    That is one thing the Japanese did not
    go for is an alliance with Germany.
    They did not go for that.
    They did not accept their treatment of you.
    No.
    It was not like a--
    it was not like a concentration camp or anything like that.
    But it was-- if you don't have the freedom to go wherever you
    want to go, in principle--
    but it was there.
    It was there.
    But I do not know if it had to do with the Japanese emperor's
    own brother had converted to Judaism.
    Oh, you didn't know that?
    The brother of the emperor had converted to Judaism.
    I don't know when, but not after the war,
    already before somehow.
    And maybe that may have influenced that.
    I don't know.
    But this part of the movie, I believe, it showed--
    it showed the whole [? template ?]
    in Shanghai, areas that I knew where,
    the Racecourse, Bubbling Well, and so on,
    and the beautiful houses where the English lived.
    Now, in the 10 years you were there,
    how many years did you spend in your first home and then you
    had to move to the district?
    How many-- did you have to move more than twice?
    No.
    I lived at first in a--
    where always homes are only, OK?
    Down-- a big room and so on.
    I lived there, tried to live, work.
    Luckily that's making-- you always had-- you can get work.
    But then after that, I moved into one more one smaller room,
    and from there I moved into my husband's house.
    And then we moved into.
    We had to go and live there.
    So it was about--
    I think it would have been about two years, something like that
    after we [INAUDIBLE].
    Then how many of the 10 years did you spend in that district?
    In the district?
    Well, at the first district I would say about three or four
    years about.
    I can't forget it.
    I don't know the dates anymore, but until after the war was
    over.
    That was the moment when that was over.
    So the restrictions stopped when the war was over?
    The moment the Japanese were-- had lost, that was it.
    Oh, when the Japanese had lost, that was it.
    Right.
    I see.
    And then for the last couple of years
    you were relatively free in Shanghai?
    After the war-- after the war we were
    free to go wherever we wanted.
    I see.
    So that designated area--
    that was the way they called it--
    that was done, finished.
    Now, why did you eventually leave Shanghai?
    What happened in the world that made it so that it was
    time for you to leave Shanghai?
    Weren't you guys actually--
    The war was finished.
    Then--
    In Europe or in China?
    Germany.
    So in Germany, the World War--
    World War II is over?
    World War II was over.
    Germany and the Japanese were allies, right?
    OK, all right.
    So that finished it.
    OK.
    So the Japanese left, and then you
    were ready-- you were able to leave
    to go anywhere you wanted to?
    If you had a chance.
    You didn't-- it was still the same position we went
    to Shanghai because we didn't have another way to go anywhere
    else.
    Now, at that time, my husband had a cousin in Australia,
    and everybody, not only us--
    everybody tried to think of people there what
    they knew that were in Australia, or in America,
    or Africa, or whatever that they could
    get a sponsor to get them out.
    You had to have a sponsor to come to the States.
    Now, the people that were lucky--
    just like that unlucky woman who got all that American stuff--
    she probably had sponsors from over there,
    from the States because she had a sponsor who
    guaranteed five years that you wouldn't fall on welfare
    or whatever.
    Then you could get the-- could leave.
    But our case was different.
    We didn't have a sponsor.
    We were under the so-called displaced person quota.
    So I said-- as I said, my husband's cousin in Australia--
    they had started to work to get us out to Australia.
    But unluckily, the man had a heart attack or whatever.
    He got sick, and the woman had to take--
    they didn't have the time to go from where
    they lived to the capital city to put that and keep
    that going.
    First came a hospital, of course.
    So in the meantime, the Americans
    came out with the DP--
    displaced persons quota.
    They threw all
    Now, what were you saying about the Displaced Person Quota?
    The displaced-- it was--
    the so-called DP quota was thrown to Shanghai.
    It was not used from the German quota.
    The German quota was always big during the war,
    but that didn't happen Jews let through to Shanghai.
    The reason was Mao Tse Tung was communist,
    and the Americans tried to get everybody out.
    So when we told them that we had a chance to go to Australia,
    we were German-born, they said, no, you don't.
    You go to the States, which of course, we did prefer.
    And you go to the States.
    We need the other smaller quotas for the Polish, Hungarian,
    and so on that have only a very small quota
    to go to the States that had no way, otherwise to get out,
    we need to open doors for them.
    And that's how we came to get on the DP quota, Displaced Person
    Quota.
    And I think they got everybody out.
    I wanted to ask you, after World War II was over,
    did China ask you to leave, or did you just-- everybody just
    wanted to?
    No, no, no, no.
    No, we wanted to.
    We couldn't have stood that for much longer.
    Right.
    Did a lot of-- did some of the people return to Germany?
    You said your mother--
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    --returned to Germany.
    Oh, yes.
    There were quite a few people, to my surprise, that went back.
    What do you think was their hope or their motivation?
    Were they trying to connect with family back there, or--
    They had their family there.
    When they came back they got reimbursed.
    They got settled by German government.
    By the new German government?
    Yes.
    And some were so old to go into another country
    where they don't know the language.
    There were quite a few that never
    learned English and too old, so they went back to Germany.
    Some went by choice because maybe yeah,
    they came out now with a Swiss bank account.
    They figured they had money.
    That may have been out of Germany, but they went back.
    Do you know how they did?
    Did you stay in touch with any people who went back?
    Did you ever find out, for example, how was it for them
    when they went back to Germany?
    Well, they started them on-- let's
    say they started a normal life.
    They were settled in apartments.
    They got aid from the German government as reimbursement
    for all they went through and money.
    And if they get older, they got the Social Security,
    which they had to--
    a birth right to.
    When you lived in Germany, you had to pay in,
    and they still paid in, even without that, only
    a little bit.
    The 10 years in Shanghai were counted in.
    But they should be [INAUDIBLE].
    They were counted in.
    So they had a right to the security.
    So they didn't lose their years--
    No, that is the--
    was [INAUDIBLE].
    And people adjusted again, readjusted,
    let's put it this way.
    They were-- I had in-laws that survived in Belgium,
    my husband's sisters.
    They survived in Belgium, and in--
    they went right after the War one
    couple went to South America.
    But when the husband died, and then she went back to Germany,
    she got her social security.
    She was settled in an apartment, and she was very healthy,
    yet Germany's got this health problem.
    It's not like here.
    For sure, they call it social medicine,
    but it's really not clear.
    Because if you get sick, you go to the doctor.
    You will be treated with anything that is possible,
    even which I--
    we almost laughed about.
    They get sent every year or every second year
    to a spa for two, three weeks.
    Can you imagine that here, picked by the government?
    So they were not-- they weren't too bad off.
    Now, you said to me a few weeks ago
    that your mother could not immigrate with you
    to the States.
    No.
    Could you explain that again?
    Because she wound up splitting off and winding up in Germany,
    right?
    And your father died in Shanghai.
    That's right.
    My father died in Shanghai.
    My mother was German, but she was
    born in a section that's so-called Posen, Posen
    or Poznan.
    That was sometimes German, sometimes Polish.
    That always-- it was a [INAUDIBLE]..
    The border changed a lot.
    Yeah.
    And my mother-- my parents or my mother at the time after
    the First World War--
    they stayed with the German side.
    They were German.
    They could decide if they wanted to be Polish or German.
    At that time, the whole family stayed German.
    But when it came to come to the States--
    because the quota system was, I think, in 1919,
    after the First World War, that that was settled
    So Poznan was Polish at that time,
    after the First World War.
    My mother was born there.
    My father was born in Germany, but they-- in the--
    close to Berlin.
    But because he died, she fell back on her own quota
    and got put up in the Polish quota,
    and we couldn't take her out on our tickets because of that.
    So she fell back on her own quota
    and got repatriated to Germany, Munich, by the Americans.
    She was-- I don't know about the--
    what it was. it must have been a very good place for old people.
    And so that's why she couldn't come with us.
    What was her feeling about that at the time?
    Did she want to return to Munich,
    or did she want to come with you?
    Well, my mother said, if your husband
    gets the chance to go even when we had the table.
    She was a good mother.
    And I remember that I gave my father hell
    because he hadn't taken her on the sheet-- you
    know, on his papers.
    Years later, he couldn't because he was German
    and she was Polish after the quota system.
    That's right.
    And my father was in Shanghai with us.
    He could come to the States, too, but not my mother.
    That was it.
    And she was repatriated to Munich,
    Munich has a dialect totally different.
    Than Poznan, right.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    So then she remained there, and she was not
    doing well in health.
    It that right?
    When she went there, wasn't she kind of going to a nursing home
    when she got there?
    It was kind-- must have been kind of nursing home, yes.
    Was there any way to bring her over here from Germany?
    No, not under the quota system.
    You mean the number of people America would accept?
    It would have been taken quite some time.
    to put her, bring her over.
    And then she passed away, didn't she?
    But at that time, right after she was brought back there,
    I wrote to the doctors, and they informed me
    that I could take care of her for 24 hours a day, yes.
    So she was quite ill--
    Yes.
    --at the time.
    She was.
    I don't know if it was Alzheimer, if it was aging.
    She was old for her age.
    Through all what she went through,
    she was old for her age.
    But I would not say that she had anything-- any sense
    of Alzheimer.
    She just got old.
    They took her all the time.
    Now, your father who emigrated from Munich--
    no, from Berlin-- with you to Shanghai--
    he passed away there?
    Yes.
    What happened to him?
    Was it old age or stress?
    No, my father had asthma.
    He what?
    Asthma.
    Asthma.
    And if his asthma attacks.
    Oh, yeah.
    This is not all--
    My father literally was cured from the asthma.
    He couldn't take the climate.
    I remember my father only crying two times in his life.
    One time he had an infection on his hand.
    And we had a kind of hospital in Shanghai, and he was in pain.
    It was-- my father was a butcher,
    and probably a sliver of bone inside in the flesh
    or whatever--
    it can take years before it comes out.
    And he said [INAUDIBLE] very badly,
    and that was the only time that I saw him cry, the first.
    Then they made a mistake.
    At night, they bathed my father's hand
    in the bath to stop the infection, and they forgot.
    All night he was sitting in the bath.
    In the bath?
    Yeah, in the bath, you know, a bowl with water or whatever.
    They forgot about it.
    The effect was that my father's hand got operated on,
    the right hand, got operated on, and the hand was like cloth.
    It did not come back to normal.
    So he was disabled.
    He couldn't do his job, anything with his profession.
    And then the second time that I saw
    him cry was when I ran into him on the street
    and he had just laid himself on the stair and stood there.
    And he was crying.
    He weighed 100--
    I think, under 100 pounds.
    He had on a very heavy fur-lined coat,
    and he weighed under a hundred pounds.
    That was the second time when I saw him cry.
    Now, was that during the years of Shanghai
    or right after the liberation?
    That was in Shanghai before he--
    --before he passed away with his asthma.
    [INAUDIBLE] that he couldn't-- he died over there.
    It was asthma killed him.
    So he basically was sad because he
    knew that he was really sick.
    Yes.
    He couldn't take the climate.
    As a matter of fact, when we were
    asked for help, financial help, to leave Germany
    to go to Shanghai as a family, we
    were refused because of my father.
    They couldn't help us because he couldn't take the climate.
    But we were seven people.
    And if he wouldn't--
    if he would have stayed in Germany,
    you know what would have happened.
    So one way or another we didn't have a choice.
    Yes, he could not take the climate.
    His normal weight was 160 German pound.
    That means 160 10% percent in English pounds.
    It was his normal weight.
    He was not tall.
    He was not big.
    But he was tough.
    But in Shanghai, that's when he died.
    And with that heavy coat, winter coat,
    fur-lined, under 100 pounds.
    That, of course-- it didn't take long then after that he died.
    How old was when he passed away?
    He was-- he died in '45, December of '45, so he was 67.
    And what was his name?
    Hmm?
    What was his name?
    His name?
    His whole name, yeah.
    Alex [? Holtz. ?] He did-- that was the full name,
    Alex [? Holtz. ?] He was buried in Shanghai, and--
    one month before my son was born.
    And he-- I don't know.
    He was in such a bad shape, and I was--
    saw him for the last time.
    He said something, and I could not
    understand what he was saying.
    But I guess it was take care of Mama.
    And it was a terrible, terrible state
    in which you can't breathe.
    The worst thing for me was he would
    try to inhale from some stuff.
    He would light it, and it would grow.
    And he had to inhale that.
    And then my mother would say something,
    or he would say something to my mother.
    And she had hearing loss, and she was in tears
    because she couldn't understand what he was saying.
    And he had a hell of a time--
    [INAUDIBLE] have a bad time to bring the words out.
    So they couldn't communicate, really, after that?
    [INAUDIBLE] Yes, she could communicate,
    but then when there was an asthma [INAUDIBLE],,
    he couldn't.
    It was too hard.
    At the Shanghai ghetto, he was there.
    Was born in '78, in '78.
    Yeah, he was 67.
    It was-- what did--
    And then your son was born three months later?
    One month later.
    One month later.
    And what year was that?
    What's your son's birthday?
    My father died, passed away, December '45,
    and my son was born January '46.
    And he was looking forward to that.
    How old was your son when you came to America?
    Two years, exactly, on the ship.
    So when did you leave for America?
    In he was two on the ship.
    That was in December, December '47.
    December of '47.
    End of '47.
    What is the name of the ship?
    Do you remember the ship you came on?
    The Bianca [INAUDIBLE].
    Italian ship.
    No.
    I'm sorry.
    That's was the ship we came to.
    Not the ship you arrived on.
    Yeah.
    The Marine Swallow.
    It was a commercial ship that had been remodeled for the war,
    for troops [? on ships. ?] And it
    was on its last trip to the States
    before going commercial again.
    I got to [INAUDIBLE].
    And--
    Were there a lot of people from the Jewish community
    in Shanghai on that ship heading out with you?
    Oh, yeah, quite a few.
    I think mostly they used it for troops
    to get it out of the States.
    We had to go by ship.
    We didn't fly.
    We had to go by ship.
    So we were in big cabins.
    Mothers and children cabins that would take a bed.
    You know the bunk bed type?
    Each mother had the bunk bed with the big, you know?
    So was there a Jewish cemetery in Shanghai
    where you left your father?
    Or did you have to buy a plot in whatever cemetery
    they had for your father?
    You said he was buried in Shanghai.
    He was buried in Shanghai, yes, but I found out now,
    during that time, they had taken the dead out
    from that cemetery.
    I do not know where to they had transferred it,
    made other arrangements for those guys, so I don't know.
    So you don't know what happened?
    Oh my.
    No, no.
    I only know that it is--
    that that happened.
    They transferred the whole cemetery.
    Now, I hope-- the Chinese had always
    a high respect for their dead and their graves.
    I hope that they have the respect for these graves, too,
    but I don't know.
    Did you know of any people in the Jewish community
    of Shanghai who chose to remain in Shanghai?
    Yeah, there were a few.
    They got married to Chinese.
    They did.
    But I don't know what happened to them.
    They left, left me just--
    they were [BOTH TALKING[
    Coming back-- I interrupted you.
    Coming back to the ship, when you were on this ship,
    what was the journey like out of China?
    The journey was in principle nice.
    We didn't have a luxury--
    it wasn't a luxury trip, but we were treated very well.
    We had, of course, a division between--
    the men had to sleep--
    [INAUDIBLE],, you know, it's a big--
    in the ship on there.
    You know, they had the bunk beds like the soldiers,
    and while we had supposedly a bunk bed with the cabins,
    you know, where maybe officers or whatever slept.
    You know, but the luxury wasn't there.
    There was no luxury.
    But they were very nice to us as far as that was concerned.
    Now, this was an-- was this ship American?
    I don't--
    American.
    It was an American ship.
    So was the crew a bunch of Americans?
    All American.
    All American.
    What I liked and what I never will forget
    was when my son's birthday, as I said,
    was on the ship, his second birthday.
    And as a woman were eating separate from the men,
    we were given food for the kids first, the babies, children.
    And then the woman got the food afterwards
    so that we could eat in peace.
    And on my son's birthday, I was not prepared at all for it.
    And I was told by the nurse or whatever
    she was that I should wait after everybody goes,
    after they all have eaten.
    I should stay at the table.
    And I didn't know why, but then came
    one of the higher offices of the ship with a little birthday
    cake with a candle on it.
    "Happy Birthday to Kevin."
    It was his second birthday.
    But the point is that, suddenly, I felt
    like a human being, recognized.
    This I'll never forget.
    He can't remember that, but I do, that little birthday cake
    in blue, just little.
    But it was then--
    and it was -- normally --
    I never mentioned anything because you
    don't expect anything under the circumstances.
    If they had marked that--
    figured it out from the papers or whatever--
    but I never, ever forgot.
    The feeling is-- suddenly you feel you count.
    That was it.
    I can tell you at the time, when they came up
    with "Happy Birthday," I had the feeling
    like a mask was coming over my face.
    I never forget it.
    And whenever I think about it, it's still the same feeling.
    Not only my husband wasn't-- had to deal with me because he was
    eating downstairs with the men.
    OK.
    But I never forgot that, his second birthday.
    And then when we came to the States--
    what is that-- how was it?
    Is there?
    Where were we brought?
    First we were brought somewhere to an empty building.
    But I really--
    I have to think about it.
    First when we came from the ship--
    oh, now I remember.
    Where did you land?
    Where did you disembark?
    No, no.
    It was in San Francisco, in San Francisco.
    I was thinking back to Shanghai, almost got mixed up,
    coming into Shanghai.
    No, we had friends, my sons' godparents.
    They waited at the harbor in San Francisco.
    And the first thing--
    they brought me to their apartment.
    They lived in Oakland.
    Their apartment-- they had left a little bit earlier.
    than, from us.
    They picked up me to their apartment.
    They took care of everything else.
    And then we had I think they have a special office.
    It was a special office, like special workers and so on.
    It was specially put in for the refugees, not only for us.
    The rest came later from Shanghai.
    But there was an office, and we were
    given hotel rooms, Market Street, as far as I remember.
    And we were given money that we could eat.
    And you could take a bus and so or whatever
    what you needed, and we had to go in sometimes, you know?
    They took care of us.
    Do you have any special memories of what it
    felt like to land in America?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    When we came in, first off, we came under the Golden Gate.
    Of course, we threw our money and--
    not all the money, no, but we--
    if it's for luck.
    It's [INAUDIBLE].
    And then we had the one young woman.
    She had a beautiful voice, and she started
    to sing "San Francisco."
    Do you remember that song?
    Yes.
    She started to sing "San Francisco,"
    and yet you couldn't wait until the next morning
    when we got down from the ship.
    There were the guide boats, you know, that kind of thing.
    Yes, it was very exciting.
    That was exciting to come under the Golden Gate.
    Did you have a sense--
    any kind of sense of safety or like you
    had arrived in a safe destination
    or anything like that?
    Did you feel--
    We were very optimistic.
    Let's say it this way.
    We were looking forward to it because you could start
    another life, a normal life.
    We didn't know what would be coming up.
    We wouldn't know where we would land because we didn't
    --sponsors.
    We didn't have any sponsors, so the government was our sponsor.
    And after several weeks, about four weeks, we went--
    or rather to say, my husband went along to the office
    to talk to our social worker [INAUDIBLE]..
    And he told her he did not want--
    he wanted to make plans where to go.
    We wanted to get settled.
    We were told to keep in person, displaced person,
    government-sponsored.
    We were told not to stay in San Francisco,
    in the San Francisco area because there are too many that
    had their own sponsors.
    They didn't in San Francisco in that area, is my point, OK?
    But if you had to-- were under this present order
    that they could [INAUDIBLE].
    And of course, our friends that we had in Shanghai--
    they were two, three families around San Francisco.
    And he wanted to stay close to them.
    So my husband said, we want to get settled?
    The boy-- we have a two-year-old boy in a hotel room.
    Of course, after Shanghai--
    the hotel room was pretty good because it was not
    spacious room.
    It was a good hotel, not an luxury hotel but a good hotel.
    And we could do all day whatever we wanted to.
    And then my husband came to the--
    our social worker.
    She said, what's your hurry?
    Take your time.
    Went up from Shanghai.
    But we wanted to go, and she gave us a choice, a choice--
    not that we had to take the choice.
    If we wouldn't have taken any old place
    we would have gotten out of there.
    We were not forced in any way.
    But the choice was Salt Lake City, Texas--
    I think Houston-- and I don't for sure,
    but I think somewhere, Colorado.
    I don't for sure.
    So but then my husband said he wanted to talk it over with me.
    And she said, OK then next time when
    you come in, let me know also.
    But our social worker got sick.
    So in the meantime, my husband talked to several people,
    and he said, Salt Lake City--
    I would take that either way.
    They knew about the area, which we didn't.
    We didn't know anything about the place or anything.
    We didn't know anything about that.
    But the area-- so we decided--
    he wanted to stay to there as close to San Francisco.
    as possible because we had our so-called family,
    our friends, right there.
    That's why want-- why we went to Salt Lake.
    He didn't have any idea about the place or whatever.
    And then, of course, we could take it.
    You are going to Salt Lake City.
    Aren't you scared?
    You know.
    But he didn't know really the story of it.
    But I had told my husband, and we had decided on that.
    He wanted a middle town, which I wanted.
    I did not want to go to a town like Berlin or Shanghai again.
    Berlin had plenty of lesser parts and so on,
    but it still was what I call a stone city.
    So I didn't--
    I wanted to get into a smaller area.
    Four seasons, of course the possibility to work.
    And I had already gotten wind at that time that the--
    they were sent-- when they sent you, let's say to Denver
    or wherever, there was an apartment where you moved in.
    But if you had a kid, they would say, no kids.
    So you had to start apartment-hunting,
    and I said, I don't want that.
    I wanted to know that I have an apartment, that you
    get into an apartment where we can stay.
    So to my surprise, this social worker said OK--
    about 11:00 in the morning, after she got back from being
    sick--
    I will call Salt Lake City and find out
    what kind of conditions there were with the apartment
    and so on.
    And I told her I don't want it.
    If I have to move outside of it, I
    don't want to get apartment there.
    It was hard for most of the people.
    And so she said, OK.
    Come back at 1 o'clock.
    She would call for us long distance.
    At that time, that wasn't in the book.
    You mean?
    Long distance phone to Salt Lake--
    But you mean the treatment you say you weren't
    used to that kind of treatment?
    No, no.
    Not treatment.
    Or long distance technology?
    Yes, because of the apartment to find out
    if we would have solid apartment, where we can
    stay with a boy, with a kid.
    That is all I wanted to know.
    All right?
    And she said come, back at 1 o'clock.
    After that, I will find out.
    It was something long distance.
    At 1 o'clock, we came and she told
    us, you will not have to move, they
    said that they like children.
    But you even will have a small house.
    Yes.
    So we said, OK then.
    Can we go?
    What is your rush?
    I said we want to get settled.
    All right.
    So we only wanted to stay over the weekend with our friends.
    And then-- so when--
    now, I was unlucky in so far because he had guests then too.
    Otherwise, we would have gotten sleeping compartments.
    On the train, they gave you, saw to it that you
    had sleeping compartments.
    So it was January, end of January.
    No, that was already February when we came to Salt Lake,
    and at night.
    And that little rascal of mine would not sleep.
    So I stood all night.
    I took him first to the smoking section.
    But I couldn't keep him there.
    So I stood all night, it was a really black night,
    in the walk of the train, the walkway.
    He would have kept all the people awake
    in our compartment.
    So I stood there all night.
    And then I saw white something that
    looked-- sometimes I thought that looked like frost to me
    but I wasn't sure.
    It was snow on the ground that was.
    So I took at that time I think by train
    I took at that time, 20 hours.
    So we arrived in Salt Lake City at 8 o'clock in the morning.
    Got picked up from Mrs. White and another lady,
    and they brought us to the supposed house.
    This house wasn't-- that was not a house.
    It was an apartment. a small apartment.
    So living room, a big living room, with a small bedroom,
    with an arch divided only by an arch.
    Of course, I was tired.
    And I was disappointed.
    But we did not have to move.
    As a matter of fact, we stayed in that apartment
    for four years.
    But we entered another apartment on the same floor,
    and made it a big apartment.
    That we had bedroom, living room.
    You know, it was cheap.
    But I was horrified by the furniture,
    the type of furniture, the kitchen furniture,
    it was the type of furniture that we
    had thrown out in Germany, because the old-fashioned
    and so on.
    I was surprised.
    But I was tired.
    And the next morning, when I woke up,
    I looked out of the window.
    And that was in part across [INAUDIBLE] area.
    And the weather was beautiful, clear blue sky.
    And that moment, everything, my disappointment was broken.
    It was really a good feeling.
    That was our first apartment.
    Then we stayed with that apartment for four years
    before we bought a home.
    In four years we bought a home.
    Now, you came here without jobs, right?
    No jobs.
    So you just basically arrived.
    What did your husband kind of quickly pick up and do?
    What did he-- that must have been an interesting period.
    My husband, oh me, almost he made me paint.
    He came, I said there was a Mrs. White that picked us up
    from the train.
    All right.
    And there was another thing.
    When we came into the apartment, there
    was a closet door with shelves.
    There was flour, there was sugar, and all that stuff.
    And then an icebox, there was milk.
    There was everything, you know, with some food and so on,
    everything so that we had food there.
    Now you have to know I came from Shanghai.
    In Shanghai, they didn't have spoilable food,
    more than one day.
    We didn't have any freedom.
    I came from Shanghai.
    So when I saw the icebox, an icebox with milk, butter
    and things like that, I don't know exactly what was there.
    But it was that we had food for the next couple of days
    at least.
    And then that shelves, gee, that made me feel really good.
    You know?
    I was from Shanghai.
    And that make me feel good.
    But your question about my work, the next day, we had to go.
    We get up, and we had to go to Mr. White's office.
    He was a lawyer.
    And he came there, and he asked us questions.
    What my husband could doing, what I, and so on.
    And--
    Now was this-- excuse me.
    Was this was a connection that had
    been made with the social worker in California?
    No, no.
    That was here from the community.
    From the community.
    That was here Salt Lake community, so
    that we had an apartment.
    OK, that is what the community took care from.
    The moment we arrived here, we had
    nothing to do with social worker anymore.
    OK.
    We had only to do with the community, Jewish community.
    The Jewish community?
    The Jewish community?
    Yes.
    They kept always in that apartment building,
    an apartment open.
    As soon as there was one empty, because it was a very cheap
    apartment building.
    OK.
    It was on Park Street.
    So they were basically the Jewish community here
    in Salt Lake had mobilized to help refugees.
    Right.
    They took one family a month.
    That's what they did all over.
    The communities of the people that
    didn't have any [BOTH TALKING]
    So then this Mrs. White and Mr. White,
    were they part of the Jewish community?
    Yes.
    And then you went to him the next day.
    But let me tell you now.
    Mr. White, he asked us questions and so on.
    And then he said, educated us who was very outgoing.
    I always said to he could give him and hand him at the bottle.
    He wouldn't cry.
    He was very outgoing.
    But a very outgoing boy, good looking.
    Yes.
    You have seen these pictures.
    And he asked, what do you want for the boy?
    You know, what do you want for him?
    I said, not for a million.
    I didn't know that man could sit down and write a check about 4
    million, just like that.
    Mr. James White was one of the richest people in Salt Lake.
    I didn't know that.
    I mean how funny.
    You give an answer and you don't even
    know that you could say, hey, yes, come on.
    Yeah, right.
    No, I wouldn't.
    But it was joking on that part.
    And then he asked my husband what he could do.
    And my husband was a department store show window decorator.
    A specialty-- he had a specialty, of course,
    to have he had that, there on the carpets.
    That's what he was training.
    And he said floor covering, what he could do, floor covering.
    You could have just blown me over.
    He was a window decorator.
    So why he didn't tell him before but what he was then.
    Oh, he would say anything.
    OK.
    Now you have to know in Germany, show window decorating,
    it's a very respected job, like architects and so on.
    They are very respected.
    So when he told him that, of course, I didn't say anything.
    And then they asked me.
    I said I'm a dress maker, and I could work again.
    He said, no.
    You have to take care of the boy.
    Don't even think about working.
    OK.
    That was the way.
    Then that take my husband to one store, furniture store,
    that there was furniture and carpeting.
    And they offered him a part-time job.
    And my husband said, I'm sorry.
    I mean yes.
    Yes, [? Karina. ?] He said, I'm sorry.
    I need the full-time job.
    I have a family.
    I guess they didn't expect that he would say anything
    like that.
    That he might say, hey, oh that's fine.
    But so the next day, he went here
    to the company that was called I&M, a big company.
    And they told him what--
    and they said, OK.
    Talk to him.
    Ask him questions.
    And of course, my husband knew everything
    about oriental carpets.
    But he never had laid a carpet, never had laid a floor.
    So he told them that in the time in between Shanghai 10 years.
    I don't know anything about tools anymore.
    Give me time that I can work with one of the layers.
    And then I get the tools that I need and so on.
    He didn't tell at the time, that he didn't know anything
    about laying, not only carpet, but it
    was at time linoleum and tiles.
    At that time asbestos tiles and that we--
    but that we didn't know asbestos so any which way.
    They said, OK.
    You seem to know about carpeting and so on.
    You seem to know.
    OK.
    Start tomorrow.
    And we want to start that amount.
    And at that time, it was $0.75 an hour.
    And of course, layers make much more.
    But they told him they'd make it,
    they'd even it out for him with overtime.
    They said he worked about 20 hours a week overtime.
    But it was hard on him.
    But it was, I mean the job was hard on him, because he wasn't
    used to that kind of job.
    But to learn it, and take it didn't take him long.
    On the first day of his job, he had
    learned to drive in Shanghai, driver training.
    So when he came to the states, of course,
    they asked him if he could drive.
    He said, yes.
    But he would have to have a driver's license.
    Now at the job, but they need it the first day.
    They needed something from the store.
    And so the other layer told him to drive down to the store
    and get some stuff.
    He said, I don't have a license.
    I never drove here.
    You'll get by.
    That was the best day at the time here in Salt Lake.
    At first we were scared to death that he might be caught
    driving without a licence.
    That first person, that he was introduced to driving.
    But it didn't take too long.
    We adjusted pretty well, as I say, and I'm adjusted well,
    you know, here.
    And we knew what we could do, what we couldn't do.
    But the way it started, that we had that--
    the apartment was-- what do you call it now with the--
    only a studio apartment, maybe a bigger studio apartment.
    So we had a kitchen, a carpet and eating in the living room.
    My husband didn't like that.
    So we got after a short while, our landlord
    said he bought a refrigerator.
    So and there was a kitchen, the furniture where
    you put the dishes and so on.
    And he moved that along.
    There was lots of windows in that apartment.
    He moved that along the wall, so that I had not a big kitchen
    but I had a kitchen.
    All right.
    Then he found wallpaper.
    So he put that in the back, and the refrigerator
    that was covered.
    And we had a kitchen, to the surprise of the ladies when
    they came the first time.
    What did you do?
    We had an apartment instead of a studio.
    And then, well, then I had made it a point for my son,
    he was used to only German speaking.
    Here his name is K. And that is a German name.
    So when he was first born, what's his name?
    K.
    K is not a name.
    What's his name?
    It's a letter.
    Initial.
    K.
    So we started to call him only by his nickname.
    So he did speak really only German.
    But the moment I arrived here, and I said [INAUDIBLE]
    something that I made a home for myself.
    I started to speak to 75% English, 25% German.
    And I repeated what I told him.
    So that I had him already in summer that he
    could play with the kids.
    Because I felt children are cold.
    I didn't want him to stay there September.
    And we had in that apartment building about 15 children.
    So, that's how I remember that.
    But he was really what--
    he was a big talker, a small boy, but a big talker.
    But after a short time, he stopped talking.
    It confused him.
    It confused him.
    He had a nickname for the poem in German, [NON-ENGLISH]..
    You talk.
    [NON-ENGLISH] is just talking, you know, on the phone.
    And he got the nickname [NON-ENGLISH],,
    because he was always talking.
    So that's why we called him with that.
    His name, nickname was another one.
    But we called him that.
    And he would-- but then he stopped talking.
    And when my father came, he came about four or five months
    after us, he said, what's with the boy?
    Take him to the doctor, because he didn't talk.
    And I had in the meantime talked of course with the doctor.
    And the doctor told me, don't worry about it.
    He'll pick it up again.
    Don't worry about it.
    And I had a lady in the neighborhood who had a boy.
    She was from Germany.
    She came over to this date, and she
    said, the same thing happened with her,
    that her boy wouldn't talk.
    After a while, [INAUDIBLE].
    Then by and by, he talked German.
    And then about when he was about five,
    he would answer in English.
    He understood German.
    But he would answer in English.
    And then there was my sister-in-law
    who came to the first time from Germany
    to see my husband after all that happened,
    33 when we left Germany, not 38 when we left Germany.
    And that was '52, already and she stayed with us.
    But he still understood what she was saying.
    He lost that totally.
    I mean I didn't undermine it.
    But I wanted him to be fluent first in English.
    And I succeeded with that.
    But--
    Now, does he speak German now?
    Very little He took German in school.
    But that was something I insisted on.
    Because the family and so on, I didn't
    know that if he ever could get in contact with the family,
    that spoke German.
    So I insisted on German.
    He wanted to take French.
    But luckily, he had a teacher that spoke in dialect.
    Not Pole dialect, but Bavarian dialect.
    And she didn't--
    I used to beg a teacher, and we didn't want to end up here.
    So we went back with that.
    But yes, I think he took two years German in high school.
    But then, if he doesn't speak it--
    he understands a lot.
    He also could read and write.
    So now how long--
    did your husband basically build a business out of flooring?
    Did he ever leave the field of flooring?
    Or--
    No, no.
    He kept that field?
    No after about, it was about three years or so,
    that was the company had 28 layers.
    And they were after the war.
    But at the moment he finally came in again,
    the people couldn't buy linoleum or carpet.
    It wasn't there.
    I spent it first for all for all for that.
    So the people are waiting for new stuff.
    That's why they needed more layers.
    So after I think about three years,
    he was laid off, not fired or anything.
    He just was laid off.
    But as it happened, we had at the time
    when we came over there were--
    you could not have private phones, only
    two lines, two families.
    Party lines.
    And he said, OK, you want a private phone?
    Make a business phone.
    And we have that number from that time on.
    But this number, he got when he was laid off,
    he got phone calls out of the phone book.
    And he was better off than he was working.
    Oh, so he could--
    That's how he started this business.
    So he started his own business based on that layoff.
    On the phone calls.
    And he just kept on going.
    And the phone calls.
    He didn't even wait for him being called back again.
    So he just kept on going then, and he formed his own business.
    And what was the name of his business in Salt Lake--
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Wonderful.
    Now you mentioned before to me conversations that every now
    and then you would run into antisemitism here in Salt Lake.
    But it wasn't as big a thing as it was in, of course,
    Germany or elsewhere.
    No.
    Oh I can't really say that, really,
    that I met too much antisemitism.
    Just but let's say there was another couple that it was
    probably you were thinking of.
    There was another couple that had come from Germany.
    All right.
    And we were invited by a friend that we had met through--
    it was about the first or second week when my husband started
    to work for the I&M. They [? carpet-- ?] here today
    [? carpet sales. ?] And they were German, from his hometown.
    We are continuing on May 19, 1998,
    and you were saying about the story about another couple who
    came from Germany.
    We had made some friends with a German couple, formerly
    German couple, and they tried always
    to get us together with people, introduce us to other people,
    made friends or whatever.
    They were LDS.
    That didn't matter.
    It was a couple that, at first, the first day when
    they invited us, they talked only about the church.
    The men-- they talk only about the church.
    And that's the LDS Church?
    The whole evening.
    He picked-- come on--
    came unexpected to pick us up for a cup of coffee--
    LDS-- for a cup of coffee.
    And then the whole evening he was talking only
    about the church.
    So of course, we had to invite them, too, and I did.
    Or we did.
    And I told my husband, if it's going on that way,
    forget about it.
    The second time in our apartment they came to us,
    not a word anymore, not a word anymore.
    And this man, it turned out, if I had ever a question or we
    ever had a question, , he would answer totally honestly.
    You could ask him anything about the church.
    It had been a good--
    they became good friends to us.
    But I could ask this man, this couple, any question,
    whatever came up, which most of the time you can't.
    But I discovered I could.
    But now, coming back to the--
    that they invited another couple that had come from Germany,
    were my age--
    my age, I think, because they were younger than my husband,
    so they fit in more my age.
    The more LDS couple, our friends--
    they were 20 years--
    over 20 years older than we were.
    All right.
    So they introduced us to that couple.
    Now, there was one thing that I, yeah, couldn't accept.
    The first thing she said, the woman said--
    we didn't know anything about what was going on.
    It was a total giveaway to me.
    Now wait a minute.
    Does that German couple--
    But that's going-- yes?
    This German couple, though-- they were not Jews?
    No.
    OK.
    So they met you, and--
    We were introduced to them.
    --they knew you were Jews.
    And the first thing they said--
    The first thing.
    --was, we didn't know anything about the Holocaust?
    About what was going on.
    In Germany?
    In Germany.
    Got it.
    OK.
    That was the moment, unacceptable.
    You just felt you couldn't hear that?
    Anybody I get introduced, shake their hand,
    and get that he knew.
    Because that's a bad conscience.
    That's true.
    It is.
    It's guilt.
    My feeling.
    It's guilt. Something's wrong.
    It would have been marvelous if I could have made friends
    with my age.
    I mean, we were still searching, and a boy
    about the age of my son.
    But the moment that came out--
    That was it.
    Anybody else-- yes, we had quite a lot German people, friends
    that we got together with.
    I never had any trouble with them.
    Most of the time they didn't--
    they weren't prepared for anything.
    And if they were American already,
    they were really-- they had no idea.
    They didn't question that.
    You didn't feel that same feeling?
    No.
    Only that feeling was-- the moment that woman--
    I just say hello, and she says, we
    didn't know anything, that was difficult to me, to me.
    Even if they only questioned what
    was going because any normal person which question
    what was going on in Germany--
    you have a store, a Jewish store.
    Today it's open.
    Tomorrow it's closed.
    Nobody there anymore.
    People left overnight or were picked up.
    What do you mean picked up?
    Any normal person would say, they
    lived here 20, 25 years in the same area.
    Where have they gone without saying goodbye,
    without saying anything?
    So anybody would question what's going on,
    but they couldn't do anything.
    They couldn't do anything.
    But the truth is the truth.
    We have here-- my husband worked for an outfit, a cleaning--
    office cleaning outfit.
    They made very good money, by the way.
    And they were German, and they came after the war.
    I think in '50, '52, something like that.
    And they said, well, there was something funny--
    they were from another city, not Berlin.
    There was-- something funny was going on.
    There were people in the yard.
    You know, closed-off yard.
    And the people saw.
    They couldn't make out what it was or why.
    In other words, that was where they pick people up and put
    them in there, in the yard first,
    before transportation, things like that.
    But anybody with little brain have observed what's--
    What's going on?
    There's something strange happening.
    What's going on?
    If you don't say goodbye--
    you had always some friends, they say goodbye.
    Yeah.
    It's not normal to just disappear.
    No, no.
    Not normal.
    No.
    So that people had to ask themselves,
    but they couldn't say anything.
    The danger was, if they would talk in their homes
    in the circle of their family, they weren't sure
    if that there wouldn't be somebody who would report it,
    their own children.
    That is the truth.
    That's the truth.
    That was the condition.
    That was before I left Germany.
    That was the condition.
    Now, if-- I do not know how many people said goodbye
    or whatever, but there were several people
    that would at least know.
    My friend, girl friend--
    she was a sister to me because we grew up together.
    She was about a year older than I,
    but we were-- from babyhood we were together.
    She was probably Lutheran, evangelic.
    I was Jewish.
    There was never anything.
    So on the day that I--
    we had made up our mind somehow.
    I don't know if it was a--
    I don't know.
    It was a [INAUDIBLE].
    But one day, I ran into the sister, my friend's sister,
    who was quite a bit older, and she was always friendly, nice.
    And I told her, I said, [? Trude, ?] we
    are leaving to go to Shanghai.
    Oh, OK, goodbye, turned around.
    Now, she knew me from way back.
    OK?
    And it didn't sound right to me, so cool, goodbye, turned away.
    I pulled her by her arm.
    I turned her around.
    The face was wet with tears.
    So you had to always-- you had to say to somebody goodbye.
    You had to say, [? Trude. ?] And I'm sorry to say,
    this woman, the couple, was childless,
    and they lived in our same building.
    And one day--
    The German couple?
    Hmm?
    You mean the non-Jew German--
    Non-Jew.
    That you met that you decided not to be friends with?
    They were non-Jews.
    They were Lutheran, American Lutheran.
    And I remember one time he was a streetcar operator, and one
    day--
    but not politically involved, not at all, totally anti-Nazi.
    So one day, I came up with him with my friend
    and knocked at the door that he opens the door.
    And suddenly I see a terrifying picture,
    Goebbels and [MUMBLES] what is his name?
    You mean you went into the apartment?
    Yes, going in.
    And you saw a photo on the wall of--
    Two photos.
    Of Goebbels and Himmler?
    A double-frame.
    A double-frame of Goebbels--
    Himmler maybe?
    --and that--
    Goering?
    Hmm?
    Goering?
    Goering.
    Goering.
    On their wall?
    On the wall.
    Now, the moment I saw that [INAUDIBLE]..
    I didn't put it there.
    My colleagues tried by playing me a [INAUDIBLE],,
    and I have to keep it on the wall.
    But--
    In America?
    Oh, no, Germany.
    Oh, this was-- OK, we switched back.
    Back in Germany.
    We're back in Berlin now before the war.
    Back.
    In Berlin before the war.
    And this was a friend who happened
    to be a non-Jew German?
    That was the friend, my closest friend
    I had in Germany, kind of my sister.
    [? Trude? ?]
    The girl.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Hmm?
    The one you just talked about, about the Lutheran girl?
    No, that was her little sister.
    That was my friend.
    She was about maybe 12 years old.
    This was there house where--
    No, in the house where we lived in, apartment house.
    And of course, I pulled back, you know?
    You could see it.
    He said, please-- it's not--
    I hate it, but they'll [INAUDIBLE]..
    I have to put it on the wall.
    Because he wouldn't go into any of the organizations.
    They couldn't get him into anything.
    And I'm sorry to say about I was in Shanghai maybe
    three or four months, and I ran into a woman
    that I didn't even know and found out
    that she had moved into the house where
    I lived in Berlin, a Jewish woman [INAUDIBLE] Shanghai.
    And I said, how are they, the Kaufmanns?] She said, oh,
    he died.
    He died.
    The man didn't die.
    I would put anything on that, that he
    didn't die a natural death.
    He was no Nazi.
    They couldn't do anything with him.
    And he was, well, I would say, that one, the wife
    was about 32, something like that.
    So he was about 40, maybe younger.
    He didn't die.
    He was killed, I'm sure.
    And he was not Jewish?
    No.
    But he was just not willing to become a Nazi?
    And that's basically how much social pressure there
    was on people--
    The pressure was on.
    He would become a Nazi, but he wouldn't.
    I knew that.
    That is it.
    We're beginning this interview on July 15, 1998,
    and this is Hilde Israel.
    That's right.
    So your family's here in America.
    You basically kept on keeping on.
    Your son is now raised.
    And what do you have to say about all of this life?
    All of this time?
    Well, all of the time I consider myself lucky
    because we made it.
    We are here.
    I do not have a number on my arm.
    I never saw a concentration came from inside.
    That I lost my family--
    that is something else.
    I don't know where everybody was.
    I do not have any idea.
    But the thing that I have to say is
    that I do not understand, like most of us,
    I guess, with all the fighting, with all the prejudice
    everywhere, Third World and everywhere, I don't
    think people have learned.
    They don't learn.
    They think, all right, it's over there.
    It won't happen here.
    But that is what we have said.
    That's why-- I was there in Germany in 1938.
    You couldn't believe it.
    The Germans-- we called ourself German, German Jews,
    but German.
    Right.
    You considered yourself one of the guys you were not separate.
    Yeah, we couldn't believe it.
    We couldn't-- we saw so many things.
    We saw things, but it just didn't
    sink in that it could touch us personally, till, of course,
    not to the last moment in Germany,
    but until '36 and so on, when all the things were happening,
    book burning and all of that.
    And picking up people in the middle of the night-- you
    didn't know where the next morning where the people were.
    It was unbelievable, and I'm kind of a skeptic.
    I hope it won't happen.
    With what's going on and the protection
    that these people get here also in the States,
    the Aryan and so on.
    It's the same thing.
    They think-- they think [INAUDIBLE]..
    We had the same experience.
    Really.
    Of course.
    Who would have believed it?
    You felt that there were only a few fanatics out there.
    Yeah.
    That it couldn't happen to you and that's just the way it is.
    Yeah.
    That is the way it works.
    There are just like--
    I hate to say politically [INAUDIBLE] and this type
    people--
    they only see their--
    what they think this shouldn't be, not other people.
    If there is a right and a wrong way, they don't see it.
    They only think.
    They have blinders on.
    They see only what they want to see,
    and that is the same thing.
    They don't believe it that they are that way, but they are.
    Do you think that at this point in history
    that the Holocaust taught us enough
    that if we saw the signs happening again
    we could stop it or we would stop it?
    I'm afraid.
    You're afraid?
    You're not completely secure?
    I'm afraid.
    The people don't want to believe that it happened
    and it could happen again.
    They just don't want to believe.
    That's why that, supposedly, it never happened comes up.
    They don't want to believe that it could happen.
    But it did.
    And the people who are the true victims
    are no longer with us to defend the truth.
    In a way, we're left--
    we're left having to be their witnesses
    and their representatives, but--
    No, but even--
    --even that is remote.
    It's-- now and 50 years afterwards,
    over 50 years afterwards.
    The youths-- I think that they could not feel that bad.
    Even the Jews say that?
    No, the youths, young people.
    The youth?
    Oh, I see.
    Yes.
    They just can't believe it.
    Yes.
    And the Jewish people in this generation, this newest
    generation that we're living with now who are teenagers--
    do they believe it?
    Do they believe it?
    Or are there doubts?
    Or are they just sick of it?
    Or what do the young people--
    I would think if they're hearing that from their elders
    they may believe it, but they think, too, could it?
    Youth doesn't want to hear.
    Youth doesn't want to, not Jewish, young people.
    They don't want to believe it.
    It doesn't fit into their rosy world
    where everything's fine and everything's great.
    Everything's fine, no.
    Yes.
    Financially, everything-- economically and so on.
    But you never know.
    Give it time, and wait and see.
    I've often heard the expression people will say,
    if something really primitive happens or something, they'll
    say, what's the problem here?
    This is the 20th century.
    Yeah.
    As though we're supposed to have arrived
    at some level of achievement and morals
    that is superior to all the previous centuries,
    and yet look in the middle of this century,
    in the 1930s and '40s, this happened.
    It's not that long ago.
    It just happened right under our nose
    is in the alleged 20th century, the perfect century.
    Then this happened, and it's just amazing to me at times.
    And I believe--
    When I was a kid--
    --it's a warning.
    --nobody would have believed it.
    I did not live in the Jewish community.
    I did not-- how should I say?
    We were not closed like an area like in New York
    or Jewish communities here.
    Right.
    Like a neighborhood or something.
    That I didn't live in it.
    I didn't grow up in it.
    So it was totally--
    it was not even a question that anything could be--
    true, sometimes you heard a remark.
    Antisemitism was always there, worse in Poland,
    and Russia, and also in Yugoslavia,
    that's all this countries.
    It was worse.
    But where I lived, somebody said something to me,
    I went into my--
    back to my parents and told them,
    and my mother was out to the parents.
    And the kids never would open their mouth again to me.
    You could undermine it, how far or how long and under that time
    how these were already involved.
    We couldn't know, the kids, not the parents.
    Well, maybe the parents were better at being sneaky--
    The parents--
    --with their politics and their beliefs.
    They would be more--
    Yeah.
    They Told the children, hey, no way, whatever I was told, OK.
    No way.
    We don't say that.
    OK.
    It's like neighbors, people that you wouldn't--
    parents were decent people.
    Kids were really decent, too, and were raised decently.
    But was there already an influence?
    They get the kids young, and that is the trouble.
    And that is that shooting and all that and with the guns
    and so on--
    that is thing that makes them--
    they are the police.
    They think they have it.
    Youths-- they catch them with that kind of thing.
    You are an Aryan.
    And are white.
    You are this.
    People will never be colorblind.
    I don't think that.
    You don't believe?
    No.
    What do you think the answer, then, is to living together?
    What would help?
    What would help them?
    We'll always be different colors.
    We'll always be different religions.
    Always.
    What kind of teaching would help them live with that peacefully?
    The only thing that I can see is if they learn to say,
    OK, the skin color is different, but they are people.
    They're the same people.
    They're just thinking-- fighting for life,
    raising their families.
    They want a future for their family.
    They all are the same way.
    The skin doesn't make it different.
    But people can--
    I don't know.
    I really don't know.
    So possibly education to be tolerant?
    Oh, yes.
    Like tolerance is the way of life.
    Diversity is going to always be there.
    We just need to become better people and tolerant.
    If you equalize the education so that everybody
    can get an education.
    We can get-- it's for possibilities for children.
    It doesn't make any difference.
    There is no race that is dumber than the other.
    I don't believe it.
    If they are not that much-- that educated, what do you expect?
    They have to learn first.
    That's my view.
    So education could actually turn the course
    of the way we live together?
    Yes, I do believe that if the--
    speaking now of America, the races, colors--
    it doesn't make any difference if they
    get the ability, the chance to get their education,
    to believe in themselves.
    That is what I feel.
    I look at the way the Germans educated their youth,
    and they have-- historically, they
    have a very good school system.
    They have all of the resources needed
    to do a beautiful job with their education.
    And yet look at what happened with the Hitler Youth
    and how easily they were swept--
    How easily they--
    --along into the wrong thing.
    That is what I say.
    They were swept away.
    Yeah.
    And it's amazing when you think about--
    Think about it.
    --the power of education, that there
    is an example of a powerfully negative message
    that they put into those children, and the children came
    ride along.
    On the other side, you could put in a powerfully positive bunch
    of knowledge, and it seems like they would also follow along.
    It's a matter of choice.
    Let's say it this way.
    There were in Germany in my time of growing up--
    and there was lots of economical trouble.
    That is a time when Hitler came in.
    Yes, yes.
    I know about it.
    That's when they-- they made-- had [INAUDIBLE]..
    They promised work.
    They promised all of that, and power, and so on.
    And of course, they had to have somebody
    that they could beat up on.
    Why-- that's a weird connection.
    Why did they feel this need to include--
    It doesn't matter.
    --the war against the Jews with their whole thing.
    It didn't matter.
    They just needed somebody to beat up on for some reason.
    They were not only the Jews.
    There were also other, [INAUDIBLE] Gypsies.
    Gypsies were absolute scum.
    And so many different thinking that wouldn't occur under,
    they were.
    It was not the only Jews.
    And that it was.
    There were maybe six million Jews,
    but how many more non-Jews?
    That is the point.
    The projection that they have now
    is anywhere between 10 to 12 million people
    altogether were murdered.
    Oh, yeah.
    Polish Catholics were a big target.
    They hated the Polish Catholics.
    It didn't matter.
    Are you not with me, you are against.
    And just--
    That was it.
    From the common man along the road to Gypsies,
    and homosexuals, and cripples.
    Oh, homosexuals, yes.
    Crippled people, retarded children.
    Homosexuals-- I don't know if you ever
    heard the name Rohm, Rohm.
    It was one of the old guard, Hitler's close circle.
    One day, the news--
    he got shot.
    I don't know if Hitler himself shot him or one of the--
    Goering, Himmler.
    He was from the Germans.
    They found out that he was a homosexual.
    They just shot him.
    And he was part of the Nazi higher-up?
    Yeah, close old circle.
    The circle of major leaders.
    Yeah.
    I don't know if they didn't find it out before or what,
    but they claimed, of course, whatever the claim was.
    But that was the reason.
    He was executed?
    They just shot him.
    And of course, anybody else--
    if they were
    We were just talking about human nature
    and wondering, well, what could we
    do for the future that would prevent this kind of stuff.
    And we decided education was primary.
    Primary would be if you want prevent it.
    You have to start from babyhood.
    And you have to have everybody agreeing, too.
    You can't have--
    Yeah, but you never will have a clear field for that.
    Never.
    That's a big problem, yeah.
    There will always be the people that--
    should I-- should I say boorish?
    They feel hatred.
    They cling-- you know, the rednecks and so on.
    They feel prejudiced.
    They fear.
    That is right.
    That is what they should do.
    The hatefulness.
    You know, you never get rid of these.
    Or if you want to get rid of these,
    then you do the same thing.
    Then you are the Nazi.
    Right.
    Yeah, that's true.
    That's true.
    That is it.
    I mean, in principle.
    I do not think that will ever totally go away.
    So it's something that's just in human nature--
    It is human nature.
    -- to discriminate and segregate.
    It is human nature from way, way back.
    They were always types that thought
    one type is the other, one power with the other,
    always did it by destroying the weak.
    But as I read more and more about the Holocaust,
    I can't help but feel that this was the most unique.
    Yes, it was unique.
    Uniquely horrifying thing that we've pulled on each other
    so far.
    Well, I think-- what I think is the Holocaust was,
    as it is now, you are-- any news,
    you aren't get every news.
    You didn't get that much news before the time.
    Mm-hmm.
    Till that even some that think in that was going on.
    OK?
    Think even FDR, he didn't believe it.
    He didn't want to believe it.
    Mm-hmm.
    OK?
    He didn't want to believe it.
    And what's more scary to me is, once they
    knew the truth, concealing the problem
    so that they wouldn't have to deal with all these refugees,
    actually allowing what was going on to continue--
    Yeah.
    --because the alternative would have been problematic.
    All these refugees coming into the country
    would have been a huge problem for the country at that time
    they felt, and allowing it to continue because they didn't
    want to deal with the rescue.
    Make the problem bigger.
    That just appalls me.
    It just appalls me.
    It makes the problem bigger.
    I don't know if you have seen "Ship of Fools."
    I've heard it was excellent.
    The pretend-- the people you know, first off
    is the people that have money.
    You know, first class person.
    You know, poor people on that ship,
    and they took care of their--
    when they left Germany, they were--
    and then they couldn't land anywhere
    with all the money they had.
    OK?
    They couldn't buy themselves their freedom.
    They couldn't buy.
    From the British, they wouldn't let them--
    let them-- let them land I don't know where,
    OK, including Palestine.
    They wouldn't let them land.
    And the final end was that they had to come back.
    Now, you have in that "Ship of Fools,"
    you have an example of all the people.
    But I mean, there was some [INAUDIBLE]..
    OK.
    He knew if he comes back he will live another day.
    OK.
    Anybody misshapen, when they were picked up,
    they never came out.
    Never.
    Anything that was in mind wrong, OK, didn't come out.
    They didn't live long.
    I had my own cousin who was in the First World War.
    And he was a soldier.
    And he was--
    I don't know what you call it now.
    You know the ranks what they build for the soldiers?
    What they could shoot from?
    What is it?
    What is it called?
    Pillbox?
    Hmm?
    Pillboxes?
    Bunkers?
    Yeah, bunker.
    Bunkers in the ground, OK?
    Underground bunker.
    Yeah, his tough luck was He was a young man, very young.
    He was in that bunker apparently.
    He was covered by ground and the dirt, OK?
    He became-- he was disabled only insofar--
    not normal anymore.
    He got oxygen-deprived?
    His brain got damaged?
    Yes, he got it--
    He was buried.
    He was an epileptic through that.
    Oh.
    OK?
    A very good guy.
    You could trust him everything.
    But he was damaged, brain damaged.
    OK, now what was it things from Hitler.
    When my-- this cousin of mine, he was at a brewery.
    You know, that delivery things because he was a strong guy.
    And then finally the brewery said they're not sure if he
    didn't--
    wouldn't fall, get a seizure and would fall off.
    You know, the brewery cut things.
    At least they used that excuse.
    It didn't take long.
    Then he was picked up for a safe--
    a home.
    It didn't-- it didn't take long and my cousin was gone.
    You mean the Nazis collected him.
    Of course, of course.
    For selection, as they called it, selection.
    Of course.
    Anybody who was deformed--
    I had in our building, a woman.
    She had a hunchback.
    A hunchback.
    That was all what was wrong with her--
    a hunchback.
    And that's very popular, very popular,
    especially with those children.
    OK.
    One day after the Nazis, I don't know, she went into her home.
    How long did she live?
    Not long.
    She was then must have been in her 50s or so.
    She had a good family.
    She had a good background.
    She had everything.
    The family cared for her.
    Who could-- was able to care for her.
    It didn't take long either.
    That was it.
    That was-- anything that was not Aryan.
    Perfect.
    Perfect.
    Perfect model of something.
    The ideal.
    Their ideal--
    Yeah.
    --in their minds.
    When there were people that were dwarf-like and so on,
    the same thing.
    Didn't matter.
    I think one of the most upsetting exhibits
    in the Holocaust museum to me--
    Yeah.
    --among the many upsetting things--
    Yeah.
    --but the most-- I think the most intensely emotional things
    for me was the fact that they destroyed young children.
    They experimented on young retarded children,
    and then killed them and--
    Yes.
    --incinerated them in this factory-like hospital that they
    had appropriated from another--
    I just-- and some of the photography there was
    of the cruelty of the people--
    Yes.
    --upset me deeply.
    Just-- just the idea.
    Would upset any normal person.
    I mean--
    You couldn't believe that when you heard it from people
    that saw it in the camps.
    That means former camp people.
    OK?
    Mm-hmm.
    They saw it in front of their eyes.
    You mean friends of yours over in Shanghai that had--
    There were people that come out to Shanghai.
    Come out of the--
    That were in concentration camps.
    Did they tell you their stories?
    They talked about it when they were--
    in fact, there were young people, like a young woman.
    She just-- she just couldn't hold it down there.
    She was wild.
    You know.
    She-- the woman, the refugee woman?
    No, no.
    That saw all these things.
    She lived-- was in a concentration camp.
    Oh, OK.
    And she saw the men just hurting the babies, pulling--
    Ripping them.
    They pulled them apart.
    Pulled babies apart?
    By the legs.
    By the legs?
    Oh my goodness.
    They smashed them against the wall.
    Whatever.
    You had terrible-- and that is not a lie.
    That was the truth of what they did.
    And of course, that woman had to get--
    she was at that time when I knew her in Shanghai,
    she was maybe in the early 20s, just my age,
    when I heard wild stories that she told.
    How was that woman's sanity?
    Was she--
    Who knows?
    I don't know what happened to her.
    She was able to continue, though,
    but she was-- she was there.
    So too these people couldn't get a hold again on life.
    You know, they always did.
    I think-- I do believe that these people always
    will have nightmare.
    Yes, until they are dying.
    So the thing is inhumanity to man which you can't believe.
    Mm-hmm.
    This is the worst thing of the Holocaust--
    the inhumanity.
    If they didn't like your nose, in you went.
    It is-- I don't know if I mentioned it,
    but at the time when I was engaged in Berlin,
    I brought my fiance home all the time because I felt,
    and they looked at me, they didn't know.
    They looked at him, and he looked really--
    I think I mentioned it-- like an Italian
    when we were on the train.
    Yes, you did.
    OK, he really looked like an Italian, totally.
    Features, good features, curly black hair,
    but I felt safer to bring him home.
    And then I walked home at night by myself, a 20 minutes walk.
    That was it.
    I guess it was all a good thing.
    My looks didn't give me away, but that was luck.
    That was totally luck.
    So and I believe that happened to other people,
    too, of course, lots of people.
    If you crossed on the street you passed--
    there was a group, let's say, in uniform you went the--
    if they came grouped in uniform, you would cross that street
    to the other side.
    You wouldn't stay on the same side.
    But if they couldn't do it, they would sometimes--
    they wouldn't let you you know.
    That is also something that happened to my brother-in-law.
    They just wouldn't let him pass by.
    You know how-- how they make--
    Intimidation.
    They make it, you know, the human wall.
    any which way you tried to go through,
    they couldn't escape these people.
    They had their army.
    They wanted to upset you.
    And they did.
    And they had fun.
    That's why I think that it's something that's in some humans
    and that is uncontrollable.
    It has been a question for me as I'm reading all these things
    and learning and listening and stuff.
    I think to myself, how revolting this is, these horrible things.
    I'm revolted by them.
    Yeah.
    I am absolutely emotional about hearing it.
    It's so revolting to me.
    Yeah.
    And it's something that my imagination would never
    have dreamed up, even on a bad night.
    You know?
    Even in a bad nightmare, I don't--
    I've never had such a violent way of thinking.
    And I wonder how much of that is my culture
    and how I was raised.
    Yeah.
    And how much of that is somehow in my nature
    that I'm not that way.
    Well, that is--
    And you wonder, on the other side of the fence,
    then how can these really violent people live with that,
    and do those things, and continue
    living after they've done those things and feel no conscience?
    You wonder how much of it is culture and how much of it
    is nature in a person?
    I think it's a lot of nature.
    Like what they were born to be like--
    Human nature.
    --or something.
    Because culturally, personally, I
    mean, physically, it revolts me.
    It can make me positively sick to my stomach
    to think about it.
    And yet, some people are so comfortable with this
    and doing these things.
    Well--
    That's a scary thing to me.
    I do believe that these are people that physically get fun
    out of doing this sort of--
    they don't care what comes out of it, what's behind.
    The background may be first class,
    but there are always people who would surprise--
    surprise how could they.
    But if you see today with the shootings in families--
    Mm-hmm.
    Elie Wiesel said something very interesting
    about that, because he had been--
    he couldn't believe that some of his research
    led him to learn that college professors
    and people with PhDs, highly educated people,
    were put in charge of Einsatzgruppen,
    going around the countryside, wiping out villages
    by gunshot fire and these mass graves.
    And many of the administrators right in the field,
    right there watching this stuff, were college graduates
    with fine educations from German universities.
    PhDs!
    Didn't make any difference.
    They were put into service and sent out
    to wipe out whole villages-- men, women, children, grandmas,
    and grandpas.
    And they were comfortable with this.
    Yes.
    He could not understand that.
    And I'm so relieved that he couldn't, because I can't.
    No.
    And if he can't, then I feel comfortable
    with my own groping.
    And to know when it all--
    I don't get it.
    And to know when it all ended, then they all said,
    we had to follow orders.
    Yeah, yeah.
    OK.
    I guess that's enough of that.
    I think that's enough of it.
    Isn't that something?
    Yeah.
    There's a new--
    Because you always come back to the same point.
    You come back to the same--
    How?
    How?
    How could anybody go that low?
    Yeah.
    And especially with backgrounds with integrity, allegedly--
    alleged backgrounds of integrity.
    No, I don't believe in that kind of integrity.
    Because you have people that are poor like anything,
    can't get most things what they need in,
    and they wouldn't do anything like that.
    You couldn't get them to do it.
    OK?
    And as you say, highly educated, they would excuse them,
    make their own excuses.
    Find a way around--
    It has nothing to do with their education.
    --accountability.
    I do not believe in that.
    Interesting.
    I do not believe in that.
    You just-- you would like to believe
    that a person who has come into an education has along the way
    become a thinker.
    Yes, I understand what you are--
    And somehow a thinker also has high values
    and high moral standards, but that isn't necessarily
    a conviction.
    No, it ain't necessarily so.
    It's just amazing.
    And another thing that upset me very, very deeply,
    because I've been raised as a Christian, OK,
    was when I'm reading that Elie Wiesel himself--
    this is in his biography--
    had learned to be afraid on the Eve of Easter Sunday
    and on Christmas Eve, when the local Christians--
    and he was raised in Transylvania,
    Romania area there--
    the local Christians, the rowdier ones I'm sure,
    would actually put on costumes, and go out in the street,
    and harass any Jew they could find--
    Yes.
    --and parade around with devil's horns on and stuff--
    Yes.
    --shaking their fists at the Jewish community--
    Yeah.
    --on the eve of these holidays that I was always trained
    were spiritual celebrations that-- where
    peace was reigning.
    Peace was there, and you were just so full of this--
    this religious fervor--
    Yeah.
    --that was very peaceful.
    In my own home, it was never a directed outward hatred
    for anyone.
    You wouldn't think about it.
    It was a private religious appreciation
    of some history, some stories, some traditions, a good dinner.
    Yeah.
    Easter basket, whatever your family has.
    You know, it was a holy day.
    Innocent!
    You weren't supposed to be--
    Innocent!
    A holiday of innocence and just love.
    And of course--
    When I heard that--
    From this period I don't know.
    I felt like something hideous had
    been taught to those people.
    Because nowhere in the tradition have I ever
    seen this taught or encouraged or--
    Yeah.
    Nowhere in any holy book or any history of a saint
    did they ever say, well, now I want you on Easter Eve
    to go out there and harass the nearest Jews.
    No.
    Never!
    This must have been the most horrible region
    of the world for the Jews.
    And yet, it was their big population there,
    in Poland, into the Ukraine, and into the Russia
    there at the border.
    That was the largest Jewish community,
    I think, at that time possibly on Earth.
    Well--
    In terms of numbers, I think that America and Poland
    and the Ukraine were the two huge Jewish communities
    in the world.
    Yes.
    And then some in Israel.
    This was before Israel became a nation.
    That was the heartbeat of the Eastern Jewish world.
    Of course.
    And it amazes me completely to hear that Christians--
    it makes me ashamed to even say it--
    went out and harassed these people
    and then felt good about celebrating
    their holy day the next day and felt completely comfortable--
    And then you go and buy a goose.
    --with their crimes or whatever they were up to.
    That just does not fit what I was raised in.
    Yeah.
    And I am so ashamed personally.
    Yeah.
    And I can't make that go away.
    That's the way they learned.
    That's the way they were trained.
    Of course.
    These kids were trained into that.
    Look, if you are a child and you find your elders doing it--
    Oh, yeah, sure.
    --you do it, too.
    Well, where did they come up with this, though?
    It has no basis--
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    --in what I understood as Christianity.
    I don't know.
    That is also the basis of the pogroms and all that.
    I read somewhere it said that you have
    to understand that region--
    Yeah.
    --had been inculturated over 1,000 years of hate.
    From the Middle Ages, that region
    had been soaked in hate for the Jews.
    Yeah, I know.
    Just drenched in it, inculturated, taught.
    It was taught.
    It was hate.
    A 1,000 year tradition of hatred.
    Yes.
    And scholars are not that amazed that it got that ugly
    in that part of the world.
    Yeah.
    And I think--
    It is-- the whole how that came together from the beginning,
    I don't know.
    OK.
    Middle Ages was a strange time.
    I read of many strange book pogroms
    where a whole city would decide to wipe out
    its Jewish population.
    Yes.
    With the blessing of the Church.
    Yeah.
    And during the Reformation.
    Yes, that--
    That's the scary part.
    And during the Reformation, Martin Luther in Germany--
    Yeah.
    Martin Luther had all kinds of hate for the Jews,
    and he told those Christians what to do with those Jews.
    Yeah.
    Burn down their houses, smash them up.
    If they don't cooperate, kill them.
    Reduce their place to dust, and don't even have a sign of it.
    But that was also in-- that was also in Russia.
    That was also in the pogroms everywhere.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And this hatred was hundreds of years old by the time
    Hitler took advantage of it.
    Of course he took.
    He knew it was there, and he just fanned it.
    Of course.
    Like a flame.
    Of course.
    He took a little, tiny coal, and he just
    fanned it until it became--
    Yeah.
    --a Holocaust.
    Yeah.
    Until they couldn't handle it anymore anywhere else.
    OK.
    But the basic people, that they were good,
    take again, Schindler.
    He didn't give a damn about the Jews.
    Not really, but he didn't hate them either.
    No.
    He didn't love them, and he didn't hate them.
    To him-- to him, they were just people.
    He didn't know.
    He wouldn't want to offend them.
    You know, to do with them personal business
    it's different, but otherwise forget about it.
    But even he was basic.
    He was basic good.
    Otherwise, it wouldn't have hit him.
    And, you know, that's an interesting thing
    you just said because we're talking
    about nature, human nature.
    Somewhere in his nature--
    Yeah.
    --was a kind of compassion that couldn't
    tolerate what he was seeing.
    No.
    Combined with a schemer and a dreamer--
    Yeah.
    --who had the tools--
    Yeah.
    --up here in his head to go out and manipulate the Nazis.
    Well, one--
    He had a lot of gifts that were interesting.
    It's a personality of Schindler was that he wants his shop--
    you see once, and you turn around,
    and you see the same thing, but you didn't notice before.
    OK?
    And then you get-- once they get alerted
    to this what they feel it's wrong, it shouldn't be,
    OK, then they get alerted.
    Then they see that with any kind of scheme, right?
    Because he put the companies.
    He had companies and friends with whom
    he drank and so on to get to what he thought was right.
    Mm-hmm.
    But that is in a person.
    That is in a person.
    At any time, they could have uncovered it,
    and looked at him, and just shot him.
    If they could shoot their own cabinet
    member who was their friend--
    Cabinet?
    At that time, it was the basic circle.
    OK?
    That was Goring--
    Goebbels.
    Goebbels, Rohm, that was the one that was shot.
    And also the one who was in Spandau.
    He used to be in there, you know.
    Hess.
    He had the youth.
    He leaded the youth.
    He had the whole.
    He was a top man.
    OK.
    But some we saw a little bit in life.
    But they didn't know how to get out.
    OK.
    But this was the original group.
    That was the original group.
    And I do not know what kind of charisma
    Hitler had because this Goebbels and Goring were
    educated people.
    Rohm, I don't know.
    That proves that-- it just proves that education does not
    necessarily make you a better person if you ignore its gifts.
    No.
    You can ignore its gifts.
    Education doesn't tell you--
    The character.
    --right from wrong.
    Values training, it's what is important training.
    It's values.
    It is like you know somebody and you hate them.
    OK?
    Now, if you hate that person, really hate that person,
    you may be feeling like, hey, get rid of him.
    OK, if you can.
    That is in you.
    That is not--
    I think that's really true.
    Because in my own experience, I've
    had people who have really tormented me,
    like that last boss I told you about.
    Yeah.
    Where he was very racist.
    He offended me morally--
    Yeah.
    --and then he went on to offend me personally.
    Yeah.
    And I can honestly say that there
    have been times when I have felt hate for this person.
    Yeah.
    Yes, but never in my worst fantasies did I ever think,
    wouldn't it be great if something horrible happened
    to this guy and he were dead.
    Yeah, yeah.
    I wouldn't feel good if I heard the news
    that he had been killed in an automobile accident.
    I would have felt very bad.
    You just want him off your back.
    And that's an interesting, thing because he pushed me about as
    far as I've ever been pushed--
    Yeah.
    --by a person whose values I disrespected, and who I felt
    was cruel and stupid.
    Yeah.
    And he pushed my emotions as far as I think I've ever gone.
    I don't believe I've ever disliked a person more
    than I've disliked him.
    Yes.
    But at the same time, for me, my own instincts
    would not lead me to murder or would not
    lead me to wanting anybody else to murder him.
    Yeah.
    I would feel very sad if I heard that he
    had been a victim of something.
    Yeah.
    No.
    No, it is in the people.
    That is amazing.
    And what scares me is that it was in so many people.
    When I think of the country of Germany,
    and I compare it in size to the nation of the United States--
    Yeah.
    --it is not that huge a place.
    It was the home, though, of millions of people--
    Yes, of course.
    --with an extremely high standard
    of living compared to many other places.
    Yeah.
    And a good educational system.
    Yes.
    And a very organized kind of society that got things done,
    and was neat and tidy, and did their homework, and did their--
    they took their baths, and you know
    what I'm saying there, where they
    seemed like your basic civilized nation.
    And it amazes me that they found so many people willing to do
    such horrible things.
    Yes.
    And that the government never had a shortage of volunteers
    for these killing squads in the East,
    for the people to work in the concentration camps.
    They never had a shortage of fresh volunteers
    to replace the exhausted murderers when they were
    done with their tours of duty.
    Let's say [? diffident, ?] too.
    That--
    Even if they didn't have the volunteers,
    if they were in the party, stormtroopers or whatever.
    --to their thinking.
    So that is what I can't understand.
    You mean, how people can be trained to--
    Yes.
    --to think--
    Pours into.
    --in such a horrible way?
    I mean, the only-- the thing that
    bothers me most now is the Third World all over.
    It's burning all over.
    Oh, yeah.
    Small or large countries, it's burning all over.
    Racial and religious tension.
    Yeah, I know.
    Yeah.
    Including the Islam.
    Oh.
    I was reading, with Elie Wiesel's biography,
    how he was very upset with a man named Mauriac, who he was
    speaking with about writing.
    Mauriac was a great French writer.
    He visited him, as a reporter, and they
    started speaking together.
    And Mauriac was speaking about the love of Christianity
    and what a loving religion it is and talking about Jesus, Jesus,
    Jesus, constantly, while Elie was sitting there.
    And Elie finally got so exhausted by him
    and so sick of it that he just basically stood up
    and he kind of told the old guy off and said, excuse me,
    but I have been in the camps where
    I witnessed practicing Christians murder
    other human beings and considered themselves active
    and practicing Christians, at the time they
    were doing all of this.
    The Christians--
    So you can't do this to me.
    You can't tell me about Christianity.
    Goodbye.
    And of course, their relationship proceeded on.
    And Mauriac, in fact, brought him out as a writer.
    Ellie didn't want to talk about it.
    And it was this man who urged him to tell his story on paper.
    And that was the beginning of Ellie's writing career.
    Well, that's a separate story.
    But it placed, in my mind-- that conversation placed,
    in my mind, a stress.
    There's a terrible tension, there, in my mind, about,
    how could a person who was indoctrinated
    into Christianity-- which, in my experience,
    has been a gentle religion--
    in my experience--
    It's supposed to be.
    --you know, passive, gentle, you know, turn the other cheek,
    don't kill anybody.
    Here are the Ten Commandments, straight from Judaism.
    These are your rules.
    These are the rules that God gave us!
    Right.
    All right?
    OK?
    So there's a relationship there.
    And I can't reconcile that tension
    of, how could these people, with all this Christian upbringing,
    do this and still claim that they were Christians
    and be proud of their faith, and--
    It's just the opposite.
    I don't--
    They claim they act so Christian.
    They can't do anything wrong.
    Whatever they do is right.
    So they've given themselves permission somehow,
    through their twisted thinking--
    Right.
    --to say, well, yeah, there's the Ten Commandments,
    but Jews don't count--
    Yeah.
    No.
    --or homosexuals don't count.
    They're not under that umbrella that is included
    in the Ten Commandments.
    We have to get rid of the scum, and then we'll
    have our perfect world or something.
    I don't understand that-- that tension, there-- how
    they could do what they did.
    No it never can be one group of people that are totally wrong,
    you know, that don't--
    aren't fit to, you know.
    That's the way that they put it.
    They are not fit to live.
    Right?
    Yeah, that's the message, there.
    That gives the-- that's the message
    they give the young people, now, the gay clubs and so on.
    You know-- gay are not fit to fit in the world.
    I have known a few.
    They were not any different than anybody else,
    like decent people.
    And I couldn't say anything more about it.
    They never made their own move or anything.
    But, see, somewhere in your life,
    there must have been tolerance training.
    Yeah, I don't know.
    Somewhere in your life, or in your nature,
    there is that tolerance.
    And you wish you could teach it, because I'm
    about to start teaching again in the fall
    and I think to myself, gosh, what did I--
    Pass it on?
    --pass on?
    What could I pass on, from all this knowledge
    you helped me come to?
    What could I do, to help these children
    kind of embrace each other?
    And where could I teach tolerance?
    It is only-- it's really, if you are tolerant as a person--
    you have children, you can only teach them.
    OK?
    People that are intolerant, they will teach their children
    the same thing.
    That's the way the world does this.
    That is the way it is.
    So from your experience, do you have any hope for the future?
    Do you think the world has learned anything
    from what it's trying to do, to come to understanding--
    I mean, even you and I sitting here
    with this tape machine is an effort to try to figure it out.
    There always was time to educate the youth, the young people,
    and to clear their head.
    This is the way it was.
    And this is the way it should be.
    But in the people you can't say nothing..
    You know, if they do have a young person that
    loves to kill dogs and cats, you can't do anything about it,
    because that's the way they are.
    And that are the people that when they grow up--
    oh, well, they're kids.
    OK?
    But then they're grown up, then you don't
    know what comes out of it.
    That's true.
    That's the way I see it.
    That is the way I see it.
    What do we do with the bystanders, the people who
    stood by and knew that their neighbors were being taken away
    from their neighborhoods in Germany
    and shipped off to who knows where,
    probably to some horrible end?
    What do we think about them?
    What do we know about these people who weren't themselves
    murderers but who tolerated and allowed their lifelong friends
    to disappear?
    What do we know about them?
    What do we think of them?
    What--
    Well, I have to say, if you speak from Germany,
    people disappeared and so on, but they didn't dare to ask.
    They didn't dare to ask.
    But even [INAUDIBLE] were asking.
    Why not?
    Because they didn't want to be picked up.
    They were frightened, too.
    If people ask questions, sometimes you get an answer,
    but the answer may get-- be not what you want to hear.
    You will be the next one.
    They were afraid.
    In families, if they ever-- they were
    afraid to talk in front of the children,
    because they didn't know.
    OK?
    The children hear something, they go--
    went right there and said, my parents said that-and-that.
    They didn't know.
    The kids didn't know that they put their folks
    in danger themselves.
    They were so indoctrinated, indoctrinated--
    that they didn't know anything.
    That was the way it had to be.
    Mhm.
    Indoctrination was incredible.
    After the war, when the German people learned
    the true horrors of the camps--
    which were far away from Germany, actually.
    Yeah.
    They were mostly in the East.
    They were not that far away.
    They told-- in a book I was reading,
    they were saying that they started to--
    they started the concentration-camp system
    in Germany, but such an uproar came from the German citizens
    at the closeness of some of these camps
    and some of the things they were hearing and learning,
    and the smell, and they were just
    starting to understand that this was pretty horrible.
    But apparently the German citizens
    really hollered about it, and so what they did,
    after that, was they built most of their camps in the East,
    because the Germans-- it was far from them.
    It was far from their nose.
    They didn't have to--
    they didn't really know, so they sort of didn't bother anymore--
    They didn't want to know.
    --and they didn't want to know, and all that.
    And it was--
    The point was, they didn't want to.
    Germany stayed neat and tidy, and all the dirty work happened
    in Poland and along the--
    Where I was, it wasn't so far.
    It wasn't--
    That many of the camps were pretty close to population.
    Right.
    I don't say to German, absolutely--
    Right.
    --but Poland and on the-- over there.
    But what did the average German citizen,
    who had fooled themselves into believing
    that the Jews sort of just disappeared, but they really
    didn't know the details--
    No
    --after the war, when they found out the details--
    do you know anything about what these people thought?
    No.
    I wasn't there.
    I couldn't say.
    Were they horrified?
    Were they ashamed?
    You know, I wonder about that.
    You wonder, yes.
    It's just some--
    I'm talking about your average neighbor
    person, who was no murderer, just a normal person.
    Were they appalled?
    Were they upset?
    I would-- I couldn't tell you--
    for the plain reason, I wasn't there.
    There was nobody that I had a contact anymore in Germany.
    I wouldn't lie.
    If I could, I'd say they were upset.
    You wouldn't--
    I knew people that I would figure that would also
    be appalled by it.
    But I wouldn't know.
    But you wouldn't know.
    Your mother never talked about that?
    She went back to Germany.
    That was before.
    And my mother wasn't in the city.
    She was not part of the street life anymore.
    So she--
    Not at all.
    --did she ever talk about the Germany after the war--
    Not at all.
    Not-- she wouldn't have known anything at all.
    My mother was-- not Alzheimer's, but she
    was aged beyond her years.
    She suffered.
    She was an old, old woman.
    OK, when I saw her the last time,
    she was about 70 years old, but she was an old, old woman.
    Mhm.
    OK?
    So, no, she wouldn't anymore.
    And she would never known about it.
    Do you think that--
    how did-- the refugee population,
    coming out of this horrible time, the displaced people,
    the people who lost everything, did they
    do a lot of talking about it?
    Or were you surprised at how silent they were about it?
    Was there any kind of--
    No, the people talked about it, but that was an experience
    that they couldn't just write out.
    So you had to live with it.
    Right?
    Mhm.
    And the people that went back, I couldn't tell you about it.
    OK, they-- the compensation was from the Germans, you know.
    They got them apartments.
    They get them--
    I don't know-- jobs--
    I don't know.
    Moneywise, they got the compensation and so on.
    But I don't know.
    I couldn't have gone.
    I wonder how they lived in the same country that,
    only almost minutes before, had sanctioned doing this to them.
    I find it amazing, that they wanted to go back there.
    Well, I didn't want to go back.
    So that's why it took us until 1970.
    Wasn't it interesting, in that Oskar Schindler biography,
    that when he went back after the war and his story got out,
    what he was up to during the war, that the Germans
    themselves rejected him in shops and stores--
    Yes!
    --he got life threats.
    He got stoned in the streets sometimes.
    You wonder what it would have been
    like to be a Jew going back to live in that environment.
    I don't know what would attract somebody.
    I do not know.
    I do not know.
    And here he was a German, who had helped the Jews.
    You can see the antisemitism in the way they treated him!
    I could not tell you anything.
    It's amazing to me going back there and looking.
    Yes, I just-- I had family--
    my husband's family.
    That's why we went back to Germany, as long
    as they were still alive.
    But we, my husband and I, we would never have gone back.
    I would be afraid.
    When I read the Maus books that you gave me--
    Yes.
    --the Maus II edition said that one
    of Vladek's friends after the war went back to his town
    and went back to his house, expecting to go home,
    and arrives to find a family living here
    that had appropriated all of his belongings in his home,
    in his world.
    And he basically walked up and said, hello, this is my house.
    Kind of a-- well, [LAUGHS] it's time for you to leave,
    kind of thing.
    And they went crazy.
    And he made the mistake of trying
    to sleep in his own barn.
    And they came in there and beat him to death and hung him--
    Yeah.
    --in his own barn-- in his own house.
    Well--
    I just-- when I read that, I thought,
    what would all these people do?
    Where would they go?
    How would they go back to their property,
    when they had a hostile person or family living in that house?
    You'd just be-- that would be the end of it!
    To the other people living there, it's like--
    Like you're a ghost!
    You're a ghost, returning to your world and--
    Let's compare to the Palestinian.
    OK?
    They say, Israel, that is our property--
    where they live now, the Israelis.
    Right.
    It is safe.
    We lived there.
    That was our home before we [INAUDIBLE]..
    OK?
    So who is right?
    I--
    My brother's fiancée, I told you, the girl,
    she wanted to marry [INAUDIBLE].
    And after the war, I wrote to her.
    And she wrote back that the house where I grew up--
    that means where my parents had the butcher shop
    and I grew up--
    that was standing.
    She could get the apartment only back.
    I said, no, thank you.
    If I wanted to come back.
    No.
    I didn't want to.
    Why?
    Everything was gone.
    I could only remember the bad things.
    That's true.
    The house, in a way, was contaminated--
    Yes.
    --by what had happened.
    I couldn't--
    There was no way--
    I think I couldn't have lived there.
    I wonder if you could even ever feel safe in it again.
    It seems, yes, my in-laws, my sisters-in-law,
    in that area Hamburg, they were pretty safe.
    But I'm speaking of a different kind of safety, like--
    It was not my thinking, I couldn't just--
    Like it wasn't, really--
    it wasn't yours, safely, really, anymore.
    It could just be taken away from you.
    No.
    You just experienced that, and it
    would be hard to believe in your own territory again.
    No.
    I had the feeling, after I left Germany--
    I grew up in Germany.
    OK?
    Mhm.
    I had friends, I had family, and so on.
    But I didn't have one day feeling of loss
    when I left Germany.
    I never had one day's homesickness.
    That answers you the question?
    Why should I go back to something that
    leaves me blank in my feelings?
    That left me blank!
    Mhm?
    I was 20 years old.
    OK?
    But it--
    I think what gives me a feeling of community, wherever I am,
    is the people around me.
    And if all those people were deported and murdered,
    and it was a horrible memory of a place,
    I think I would feel the same way, like it had been erased.
    Yeah.
    The place was no longer.
    It-- it isn't home.
    Mhm.
    It wasn't home anymore.
    When you finally came to this country,
    did you sense the ability to have that feeling of home?
    Well, the same way the wish and the
    hope that we can start anew.
    OK?
    That you can start your life over.
    If you're lucky, you can make something.
    If you're not lucky, you are poor, and you stay that way.
    [LAUGHS] But yes, that was, of course, our hope, naturally.
    And now, years and years after you've lived here,
    do you feel at home, here--
    Oh, sure.
    --in terms of--
    Oh, sure.
    That is my home now.
    I wouldn't even think about Germany as home.
    Oh, yeah.
    That was-- past.
    Once, you-- to me, the people still wanted to tell it,
    oh my god, Germany was so beautiful and so on--
    to me, it's something I can't understand.
    Mm.
    Because it wasn't [INAUDIBLE] beautiful.
    OK?
    I've personally, myself, I can only talk about myself.
    I haven't seen the concentration camp.
    I haven't been attacked.
    All right?
    But I knew what was going on.
    OK?
    I knew I wasn't safe.
    That's all I can say.
    Why?
    I was a decent person.
    My parents were decent people.
    Yes, I had-- as a kid, I had a good life,
    you know, till that point.
    We never have thought anything could happen like that,
    but it did.
    So why should I be homesick or want
    to live there, build there something after?
    With-- if I had people there, maybe, but I didn't.
    If I would know where my families are, who knows?
    How many relatives do you think you lost?
    I mean, you said you had older relatives around you,
    like the old aunts and uncles and things like that.
    Of all of those people, how many survived?
    Or you don't even--
    I wouldn't know.
    You don't even know what happened.
    No idea.
    It was a total loss.
    No idea.
    Because I left Germany, and I went to Shanghai.
    Where, if they left, they're lucky enough
    to be all survivors, where did they go?
    It's a staggering disruption--
    [INAUDIBLE]
    --of normalcy.
    I mean, when you look at how families and extended families
    live, to just suddenly have all those people
    disappear out of your life--
    Yes.
    --would be such a terrible shock.
    It is.
    And young people are more flexible than the old people.
    Yeah.
    And when you think of the old people, who
    had lived for years and years and had all this family
    and friends, I mean, it must have
    been the most horrible period of erasure of everything
    that they have built and known and--
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Yes, of course.
    Utterly amazing.
    I had a family.
    It was a big family.
    We weren't very close, but it was a big family.
    All right?
    Now, from the children, from my aunts and uncles, my cousins,
    I was about the youngest.
    So my cousin--
    Some of the cousins, I didn't even know.
    I only knew of them, because they were already mid-30s
    when I was a 7 year old girl.
    All right?
    So-- what happened to them?
    Where did they go?
    Did they make it?
    Who knows?
    You just can figure that passed.
    They're gone.
    Yeah.
    Well, you'd think that, after a war,
    anybody surviving would try to find everybody else--
    If you are there, yes.
    --you know, with-- with--
    I mean, even in the newspaper listings
    or in the postings on the--
    In the beginning--
    --community center or the-- you know, the survivors--
    --in the beginning, we didn't even know where to write to.
    You know.
    Oh, sure--
    There were organizations, afterwards--
    Right.
    --where we could-- in Shanghai, there were names lists.
    Every day, we looked--
    names that were familiar.
    You know, we got lists there but [INAUDIBLE]..
    But there were none of mine.
    And it's hard to know the data, too,
    like, all the old birth dates of these old, old people
    that you were just growing up with.
    And I don't know all that about my own family--
    my own aunts and uncles.
    I don't know the exact--
    We didn't know.
    We didn't know.
    --year they were born, how to find them.
    I didn't--
    And research would be difficult, without more information.
    Yeah.
    Well, I have a cousin.
    She got married.
    I don't even know her name.
    She went to--
    I have a cousin, yeah.
    OK?
    So what good does it do?
    I know her name.
    I knew her only maiden but not her married name.
    Mhm.
    I don't know where she went.
    Right.
    And when you're living a natural, normal, carefree life,
    like most of us get to do, you don't tend
    to write all that stuff down.
    You just live with them.
    Yes.
    They're just there.
    Well, you have to bury it.
    You have to bury it in your mind, I think.
    If you want to live with it, you can't, you can't do it.
    For me, wouldn't [INAUDIBLE].
    I have to--
    I wouldn't say totally lose it, but you have to shake it.
    You mean shake--
    But you can handle it.
    You mean, shake the history?
    Yeah, you have to--
    that you can handle it.
    You have to figure out a way to live with it.
    Yeah.
    If you have it all the time on your mind, [INAUDIBLE]..
    So how do you do that?
    How have you managed, after the war, what--
    how did you go about rebuilding Hilde Israel
    into a person who could keep on and not dwell on--
    The--
    --that horrible period?
    Do not dwell on it.
    If you dwell on it, you can't live.
    You can't live.
    OK?
    I could never--
    I could never have said this is German.
    I don't want to have anything to do with them.
    As a matter of fact--
    I think it talked about it.
    The first people that came, they were from Germany.
    But they had left Germany in, I think, '23.
    OK?
    They were German.
    Now, should I push them away because they are German?
    I knew they were good people.
    I knew they were good people.
    And if you know they were good people, OK,
    they didn't say, no, we can't do that or anything.
    But they also talked about--
    about my parents up to the family in our house
    on the 9th of November, you know, with all
    that what's happening.
    I brought them up.
    And that was the day that I left Germany.
    OK?
    And I asked people there.
    But can I bring my parents there?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Bring them up.
    But you know how [INAUDIBLE] this is.
    Bring them up.
    So you have people like that.
    I brought my parents up there.
    All right?
    I don't know how long my parents I
    had to stay with them-- maybe only a day or two that they
    could go down again.
    It was the same with them, OK?
    But there were people that took the risk.
    And that was in Germany.
    In Germany.
    That knew you from birth, OK, and took a risk.
    But my brother's friends next door,
    next house, family was not a very rich family or anything
    but were a good family, very blue collar, as far as I know.
    But there is one, I told you.
    They packed my mother's suitcase [LAUGHS] and took with
    clothing-- whatever we could pack--
    and said you are leaving tonight.
    Right.
    They rescued their own friend.
    Right.
    So you would meet all times.
    They risked it.
    One, here's my brother's friend that was [INAUDIBLE],, the guys,
    was in uniform, military uniform.
    What do you think could have happened
    to him if they caught him?
    All right?
    You had all kinds of people.
    And I tell you, they didn't have anything out of it.
    OK?
    Like in the Maus books, there were
    people that risked everything for the money.
    OK?
    But these were people that didn't have anything out of it.
    No profit from helping.
    Nothing.
    So, what do you-- what do you want to make the people
    responsible-- everyone?
    You couldn't do that.
    I can't say say I wouldn't go to Germany.
    This country, I don't want to see.
    It is a beautiful country.
    I may not like all the people, but it's everywhere.
    You know, if you--
    how should I say--
    if you come to the States, like it's going now
    the big questions-- immigration question, yes.
    OK?
    They want to [INAUDIBLE].
    Why?
    The plain reason is because the first and second generation
    is usually the ones that comes back.
    They work for it.
    They strive to get somewhere.
    OK?
    Because that's this.
    And the American-- once they are settled as American families,
    OK, really I don't know how many generations back--
    All right.
    OK.
    As we--
    We are coming to the end of the trail.
    I want to come to the end of the street
    because I figured on one or two tapes.
    I didn't figure on that long a tape.
    Whatever came out, I want to say to my family, Kay,
    that I'm sorry that you never knew much of my family.
    I hope you get a little inkling of my background,
    of your background, and every word's true.
    [? Julie, ?] I hope I didn't make
    a mistake in talking that way, but believe me,
    I love you, too.
    And Carrie and Josh, you should listen to it.
    Yes, it is what I said.
    It's my background, my own experience.
    I was lucky.
    Personally, I was lucky.
    But there are so many people who were not as lucky as I was,
    including family that I had left and you never heard about,
    and I can tell you about it.
    But I tried to tell a little bit of my background and experience
    and through happening, and Marsha told it to you.
    So I hope you can listen to them once and find
    the few things that were important to me
    that I experienced, like and dislike
    Maybe it will be a little bit boring I
    can understand it is too long.
    But it was never intended to be that long.
    So I hope you can make it through.
    I love you all, and I know Dad loved you, too.
    That's all I can say.
    And I know my mother would have loved to see you grow up
    [INAUDIBLE].
    Because [INAUDIBLE],, you were two years
    old when she saw you the last time, two
    years the only grandchild.
    So I wish you would have known also my father.
    I did not know Dad's parents, Dad's family,
    besides his sisters [INAUDIBLE].
    But this was my family.
    They would have loved you.
    I know that.
    So that is all I can say.
    Take care of yourself, and I hope you never witness
    the experiences that I had.
    And still-- I still call myself lucky
    because, in my experience, they're not
    the ones that many people had.
    So take care.
    I love you.

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Hildegard Israel
    Interviewer
    Ms. Susan G. Decker
    Date
    interview:  1998 March 12
    interview:  1998 May 19
    interview:  1998 July 15
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Susan Gerger Decker

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    6 sound cassette (60 min.).

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    No restrictions on use

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Israel, Hildegard.

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Susan G. Decker donated her interview with Hildegard Israel to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in December 2017.
    Related Materials
    Additional Accession Number: 2018.60
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:10:37
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn592650

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    Also in Ernst and Hildegard Israel Collection

    The collection contains a painting done by Ernst Israel, dated c. 1951, that depicts China where he was during the Holocaust, and an interview to Susan G. Decker.

    Painting

    Painting

    Object

    Painting done by Ernst Israel, dated c. 1951, that depicts China where he was during the Holocaust,

    View All 2 Items in the Collection