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Eric Kahn

I was born in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1929, a few years before Hitler came to power in 1933. My family had lived in Germany for hundreds of years and we were fully integrated into German society. We were Germans of the Jewish faith. My father’s grandparents lived in a house in a suburb of Wiesbaden, which is still standing, in the Town of Wallau. The farmer who lives there now is very friendly to us and recalls much history of my family when we visit. My father’s family practiced Orthodox Judaism. They observed Kashrut, the Jewish Kosher Laws, and were very observant of all religious practices. We belonged to an Orthodox synagogue in Wiesbaden. My grandmother came from Ruelzheim, in the district of the Pfaltz/Palatinate in Southwestern Germany. When we visited there in 1985, I found that the town hall had records of the wedding certificates of my grandparents and my great-grandparents from the 1830’s. My mother’s side of the family was not Jewish. She converted to Judaism just before my parents got married. I’ll emphasize here the Jewish part of my family, although we’re greatly indebted to my mother’s Christian Geib family. They also lived in Wiesbaden during the Second World War, and they helped us to survive. We lived through very tough times and without them, it would have been much more difficult.

My father’s mother died in 1908, a long time before I was born, and my grandfather died when I was three years old, therefore I don’t recall anything about them. I do remember celebrating Passover and Hanukkah and observing all the other Jewish holidays in our family. I sang second voice in the children’s choir in the Orthodox synagogue in Wiesbaden. I have a brother, Gunther, two years younger than I. In my father’s family, there were three sisters and three brothers. The three brothers survived the Holocaust and the three sisters did not. Everyone who lived through this period has a different experience. Fortunately, mine is a story of survival.

I started school in 1935. For the first year I went to a German public neighborhood school. In 1935 the Nazis enacted the Nuremberg laws, which declared Jews as non-Aryans and separated Aryans and the non-Aryans into different races, according to the Nazi theories. They also took away the citizen’s rights of Jews. After going to that Public school for a year, it was decreed that all Jewish children had to go to a special Jewish school that was going to open. It was about two miles away on the outskirts of town. It was quite a hike. As it turned out, it was a good school, probably better than the public schools. We started to learn English in the fourth grade, which was not done in the public schools. We also didn’t have to attend separate Jewish religious school since religion was part of the curriculum. All of the teachers were Jewish and had been dismissed from teaching in the German Public School system. I remember one teacher particularly, Ms. Bernstein, who was deported on June 10, 1942 and asphyxiated later that month in Sobibor, an extermination Camp in Poland. I credit her for my subsequent education and whatever accomplishments I might have made. I believe a lot of it was due to Miss Bernstein’s early discipline and teaching methods. In a small school with an estimated maximum of a hundred students, I had a lot of friends. The school was in a barracks type building. It was cramped for space and because of the small size, two grades shared one class room.

I have a photo of eleven children and two teachers from my class when we were twelve years old taken in 1941. Unfortunately, but for me and Anita Fried, who still lives in Wiesbaden, the others were deported in 1942 either directly to be murdered in Sobibor, or to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia and then shipped to Auschwitz and killed in gas chambers. Whenever I look at that picture, I ask myself why did Anita and I survive? Nothing can explain or justify the horrible crimes that the Nazi’s committed against Jews. They didn’t spare children and they had no pity for old people. Just having Jewish blood was cause for extermination. I remember one friend in particular. I sat next to him in school for seven years. His name was Gunter Wolf. He ended up in Theresienstadt. I found out later while going through some of the records in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem that he remained in Theresienstadt until the fall of 1944 when he was shipped to Auschwitz to die in a gas chamber. He was 15 years old.

Just before World War II started, there were transports of Jewish children to England. Families volunteered to keep Jewish children safe from the Nazis. I was selected to be in one of these transports. My suitcase was at the railroad station in Wiesbaden and I was slated to leave the next morning. My father and mother listened to foreign radio stations. When they heard that England and France were mobilizing troops, they said, “No way! He’s going to stay. Little Eric is going to stay with us.” I was 10 years old. Several other children were saved due to the generosity of these English families.

The families that were not deported from Wiesbaden in 1942 were the ‘mixed marriages’ as the Nazis called us. We were 4 families with five children, my brother and I and three others. We depended on each other. We visited each other’s homes. We had no contact at all with the German population, with German kids. We couldn’t go swimming; we couldn’t go to the playground; we were just dependent on ourselves for several years. Every time we went out of the house with the Jewish star, the Mogen David, we took a chance. Kids would yell, “Jew, Jew!” They screamed and chased us. There were certain streets that Jews, weren’t allowed to use. We had to shop in designated stores at specified hours. Only good Nazi party members were assigned our business. The ration cards for Jews were severely reduced. We didn’t get any meat rations, eggs, butter, or white bread. My father smoked, but tobacco was not for Jews. It was a difficult time, but this is where my non-Jewish grandparents helped us by giving us food from their own meager rations.

We often would go to my grandparent’s apartment and listen to the BBC on their radio. There were AM broadcasts from the BBC in London in the German language for the German Army and Navy. The Nazis heavily jammed those broadcasts, but sometimes you could just hear the voices. I would go home and tell my father what I heard. We could freely go to visit my gentile grandparents. My grandfather was very upset with our listening to his radio because the Germans supposedly had a method of detecting who was listening to the enemy stations. They arrested and executed several non-Jewish Germans for this offense. If these people went to work the next day and told other people about it they could get into serious trouble. You did not have to be Jewish to be executed. Initially, my grandparents visited our apartment, but later a non-Jew was forbidden to enter a Jewish home. We had to wear the Star of David on our clothes, and it was also affixed to the door of our apartment. We had to move from our original large apartment whenever the Gestapo ordered it. Subsequently, we had to move twice again, always to smaller quarters, together with other Jewish mixed marriage families like us. There was a family that lived in one of the building with us that were good Nazis. We had to be very careful around them. We tried very hard to leave Germany in 1938 and 1939. We tried, but no country wanted Jews before World War II.

In the fall of 1938, a law was passed that Jews could only work on road construction and lawyers, doctors, etc were not allowed to practice. My father was a travelling salesman and was fired from his job. He had to train an Aryan to replace him. The date was October 1, 1938. Soon after, on November 10, 1938. the Nazi’s used the assassination of one of their attaches in the Paris Embassy by a Polish Jew, Hershel Greenspan, as an excuse to destroy, burn, and pillage the synagogues and all Jewish stores and to intensify persecution of the Jews. This was called Kristallnacht, a name coined by the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Goebbels. I believe this was an antisemitic play on words, indicating that the Jews owned crystal compared to the ordinary Germans who were not wealthy. All of the synagogues in Germany, Torah scrolls, and holy objects were destroyed on that day. We went to school that morning not knowing what had transpired the night before. I remember the principal coming into the classroom with a policeman. They didn’t tell us what was happening, but just said “You are dismissed for today. Everyone go home quietly. Don’t stop anywhere, just go right home.” I found out what happened when we got home. It was devastating. A few days later, my father and 26,000 other German Jewish men over 17 years were arrested. The Gestapo came one evening and said, “Pack up a toothbrush and let’s go.” My mother told them that my father was a veteran from the World War I, but to no avail. He had fought in the German Army in Belgium and the Balkans, had contracted malaria, and still had a latent sickness, tropical dysentery, that went unrecognized until the 1930’s. He was sent to Dachau, one of the first concentration camps established in Germany, near Munich.

We tried very hard to leave Germany. If you had rich relatives abroad, particularly in the United States, it was possible. My uncle in New York unfortunately wasn’t wealthy and couldn’t possibly supply an affidavit of financial responsibility for all of his relatives in Germany. The United States had a quota system. Our registration number was around 25,000, and immigration never got past 15,000 before the war began. So we were stuck. There were some tragic stories during these attempts at emigration. The American consulate in Stuttgart separated families for no reason. There was no compassion. If somebody was ill, husbands and wives were separated without regard for decency. There were also cases of bribery. For a hundred marks you could buy a lower registration number. Some people did, and they got out and were saved. One of our teachers refused to spend the money…a hundred marks is not a lot, but he refused on principle and ended up in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. It’s these events that make me wonder how and if God arranges fate.

It was a very tough time. As a Jew, my father couldn’t work. He was denied a disability pension to which a non-Jew would have been entitled. He did have medical care, but only from a Jewish doctor in Frankfurt 30 miles away. A Jewish amateur barber came to Wiesbaden since we were not allowed to visit a German barber for a haircut.

My father returned from Dachau in December 1938. Every Friday morning at ten o’clock, until the time we were deported to Theresienstadt in 1945, he was required to go to the Gestapo building in Wiesbaden to sign his name. Many times he was given messages, ‘Do this. Do that’, and they yelled at him. I usually went with him, but waited outside. Jews had to have internal passports called Kennkarte. You had to say ‘Jew…da da da…number etc. and then they would open the door for you. One time I remember he was in there for an extraordinarily long time, an hour and a half or so. I took out my Kennkarte, went up to the door, rang the bell, and went through the ritual. They let me in and said ‘Yeah, your father’s still here’. He was told to go to an apartment of the Hallheimer’s, a mixed marriage with no children. They had been ordered to report to the Gestapo but decided to swallow poison instead. This was on the day before my father had to go there on his weekly visit. Bodewig said, ‘Go to the Hallheimer’s house and tell them they don’t have to report.’ We didn’t know that they had committed suicide the night before, but obviously the Nazis knew.

Everyone dreaded being summoned to the Gestapo because it usually meant you were going to be arrested, sent to jail and a concentration camp. You had no knowledge of what you were accused of. You either went there to the unknown fate, or committed suicide. One day my mother came home from her forced labor and reported that acquaintances told her that they were so happy to see her, because it was rumored that the whole Kahn family had killed themselves. Another time, when they arrested Mr. Schoenberg, the Gestapo told my father to go see his wife and tell her to pack up some things because he was arrested and would not return home. Very good friends of ours, the Lesem’s, lived close to us in Wiesbaden. Mr. Lesem was 15 years older than his wife. He was Jewish, a learned man, a great chess player and he used to play chess with us. Unfortunately, he had heart problems. One day he got the notice to report to the Gestapo headquarters. He decided he wasn’t going to go and instead swallowed pills to commit suicide. He had prepared for this. His wife had known about this plan. She was an amazing woman. She’s still living in Peru and is over a hundred years old. They had a son who was sent to Theresienstadt, eventually to Auschwitz, and just a month before the war ended, was killed in Dachau. We gave our son Mark the middle name Richard, in memory of the Lesem’s son, who was just a few years older than I.

Money was obviously a problem and my mother had to go to work as a sales lady to make a few marks. Before our relatives were deported, my mother, being born non-Jewish, was the only one that could shop and get things because by that time Jews were only allowed to go to a market downtown at noon and everything was gone. My mother would buy as much as possible and distribute it to other Jews and relatives. She was a real hero. Radios had been confiscated from Jews in 1939 on Rosh Hashanah. With no newspapers, we had to fight to find out what was going on. The news in the beginning of the war was terrible. The Nazi’s were winning. France was falling. Things looked bad. I remember the day of the invasion in Normandy, June 6, 1944. I had my ear glued to the wall to hear the sounds form the next room and then Mrs.Voyte, a Nazi living next door said, ‘Hey, the Jews are listening.’ I don’t know how she knew.

The first deportation transport from Wiesbaden was on June 10, 1942. My father’s sister, Emmy, her husband Julius and son Erich were on this transport. They had an apartment next to ours. Erich had a birth defect, one leg shorter than the other, and spent the entire year before 1942 in a cast to try to correct the situation. He was still on crutches when they were notified by mail that on June 10, 1942 they had to be prepared to be sent to a “work camp”. Erich happened to be in our apartment when it was mentioned that they received the deportation notice. It was a pretty bad scene. At the time we thought we were going to be part of this transport too. We had no reason to think that we would be spared. Almost all of my fellow students from the Jewish School and their families were included. The police, not SS, with a sirens blaring, came to pick them up a few days later. They were allowed to take one suitcase. The policemen took them down stairs and gave Erich a shove when he moved too slowly. My brother and I were little boys and tried to stay out of the way. We looked through the geranium plants on the balcony as they moved in the street. They were stuffed into the police wagon and driven to the railroad freight terminal. This was the slaughterhouse of the city of Wiesbaden and it was there that they loaded them into cattle cars. Nobody knew what the destination of this transport was until 2007 when the records from the Arolsen Archives became available. We found then that the transport went to Lublin, in Poland. Then, a few days later, the prisoners were murdered in the Sobibor Extermination Camp. They were asphyxiated with Carbon Monoxide gas.

On September 1, 1942 another transport was assembled. The victims this time were elderly men and women. They were assembled in the synagogue for three days before the deportation began. There were beatings. It was very traumatic for them since they came from mostly middle-class comfortable homes. All their possessions were confiscated, leaving them destitute and at the whims of the Gestapo. My mother helped to prepare their food. In the courtyard there were German S.S. and police officers in uniform, and a Gestapo official in civilian clothes whose name was Bodewig. At the end of the war in 1945, rather than face trial, this Gestapo officer shot himself and his whole family because of the despicable deeds he committed. Hilda Katzenstein, my father’s sister, and her husband Bernhard, were on that transport and ended up in Theresienstadt. They were allowed to send postcards several times, but only ten words. Because only one was allowed to write, one of them would write the address in his handwriting and the other one would write the message so that we would know that both of them were still there. From the little we had, we sent a few small packages with flour. They could not write what the conditions were in that camp. They survived in Theresienstadt until sometime in the spring of 1944, when they were deported to Auschwitz and killed.

My family and the other Jewish mixed-marriage families still in Wiesbaden did not know about the existence of the extermination camps in Poland, although there were rumors. It was very difficult to hide and disappear for an uncertain period until the war would end, especially for a family. A few individuals tried, but most didn’t make it because of lack of food and the fanatic zeal of ordinary Germans who would denounce them to the authorities. Many of the Jews in mixed marriages were arrested, put into camps, and didn’t survive. My family was extremely lucky that we made it. One young boy, Rolf Rubinstein, was sent with us to Theresienstadt. His Jewish father was arrested and sent to Auschwitz two years before, put to work, and not killed immediately. As the war was ending, the S.S. left Auschwitz a few hours before the Russians liberated the camp. Herr Rubinstein left the camp area, afraid the Germans may come back. When the Russian caught up with him outside the camp, they put him in a German prisoner of war camp in Odessa.for three years. He was finally released and came home with the German soldiers. The Russians didn’t believe him that he was Jewish prisoner of the Nazis in Auschwitz.

In the fall of 1944 General Patton with some troops advanced ahead of the rest of the American army and we heard distant artillery fire. The Russians were advancing rapidly in the east. We hoped that the war would not last much longer. Yet, in February 1945, my father, my brother and I and the other Jews who were left as the Jewish partners of the mixed marriages in Wiesbaden and vicinity received the order to prepare for a transport to go to a work camp. We walked down to the railroad station. We had to buy our own tickets to go travel with the Gestapo officers from Wiesbaden to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt there was a Jewish community house. The remainder of the 300-400 Jews from the province of Hessia was assembled there. In the afternoon they took us to the railroad freight yards. The cattle cars had a small grate on the top for air, but no windows. You couldn’t look out. They packed us in with the luggage, men, women and children about 40 and 50 people in each car. We ended up in the same car with my father’s sister from Frankfurt. There were people of all ages from babies up to very old. My mother wasn’t allowed to go with us because she was still considered Aryan. We said a sad goodbye to her. We had no idea what was going to happen. This was in 1945 when the German railroad system had been bombed for years and essentially destroyed. Yet, they found the trains and track to deport us. This showed that killing Jews was still their priority.

I was fourteen at the time. I felt sad, but did not have the same concerns as an adult. My father had actually volunteered to go with my brother and me. Because of his disease from World War I, he didn’t have to go but wouldn’t let my brother and me go alone. That’s the second time he had volunteered; first as a soldier in the World War I for the German Army and now for us. It took three days on the train to get to Theresienstadt and we weren’t given any food. We were told to bring sandwiches and so we survived. We had no idea where we were heading. Every twelve hours the train stopped and they opened the doors, which were locked from the outside, and let us relieve ourselves on the tracks. We knew from looking out from that little grating on top of the train the names of stations that we passed, so we knew we were going east. During the heavy air attack on the City of Dresden, the train was stopped. The train crew fled to the woods to get away from the train, afraid that it may be attacked by fighter planes accompanying the bombers. We just sat there in the locked cars, listening to the drone from the American squadrons above. My family and I and the people who were on the transport with us were the Jewish partners of mixed marriages and their children. My aunt Else from Frankfurt, who was a non-observant Jew (never had to wear the star) and married to a Christian, was in the same cattle car with us.

We ended up in Czechoslovakia on the 18th of February, 1945, at Theresienstadt, an old fortress about 40 km north of Prague, in a garrison town built 200 years ago by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and named after Maria Theresa. Terezin (in Czech) was a natural fortress with moats and steep embankments so that it could be used to defend any approaches to Prague coming from the North. The first thing we wanted to know was what happened to our aunt and uncle and our friends who were sent to Theresienstadt in 1942. None of them were there anymore. They had either died of disease and starvation or had been deported a second time. The destination in almost all cases was Auschwitz and the gas chambers.

I remember my brother and me being pulled away from my father. Kids were separated from the adults and sent to what they called a youth home. There was some supervision. Theresienstadt was not an extermination camp. It was a transit camp, a way station en route to the death camps. Except for isolated cases, no killing took place there directly. A gas chamber was under construction but not completed before the end of the war.

In the youth home where my brother and I stayed, the sanitary conditions were awful in accommodations that were very cramped and dirty. I remember the ceiling corners of the room were full of black bed bugs and there were fleas all over the place. We all had impetigo, a skin disease. It took six months after we came home for everything to heal up though we were left with scars. Sometimes people say that Theresienstadt was a model camp and for children only, which isn’t true. About 35,000 Jewish people died there from disease and starvation. A total of about 140,000 went through the camp between its establishment in 1941 through 1945. 80,000 were deported from there, mostly to Auschwitz.

There was very little food and it was very bad. It was basically watery soup, dried vegetables, and carrots, reconstituted and boiled into a soup without meat. Soup and some potatoes were all we were given. Everything was cooked in big community kitchens. At meal-time we went to get the soup, usually in one of the huge barracks where soldiers used to live. Three times a day we stood in line, rain or shine with our little pot, got soup and took it home to eat. We assembled for work in a stable where they kept horses that got more food than we did. There were some kernels of corn that dropped on the floor. I remember scrambling after them and making popcorn over a hot stove plate. Whenever we found some dandelions, we cooked them like spinach, but you couldn’t eat too many of them. And also they had nettles that give you a burn if you’re not careful. I had two jobs. First I ran some sort of a mimeograph machine in an office. I don’t remember what we were running off, but my hands got dirty. I also worked pulling up weeds and planting flowers, which seemed ridiculous in such a place.

Theresienstadt was a small town originally built for 7,000 people. During the war there were as many as 80,000 inmates at one time. Every nook and cranny had wooden bunk beds and a stove. Each building had its own appointed Jewish supervisor. All official actions went through him. There was a Jewish Elder of the Jews whose name was on the money bills that were printed just for the camp. Jacob Edelstein was one of Elders. Only the last one survived. The S.S. appointed Jews to administer their own affairs even though there was nothing to administer. The chief job of the Jewish Ghetto management, if you want to call it that, was to prepare lists of people for the next transport to Auschwitz. This put them in a terrible position. I didn’t have direct contact with any of them. Over the years in Terezin there was a certain privileged class that built up around these people. Obviously there were a lot of people who were very upset when they were notified that they or some relatives were on the next transport. There was favoritism among the many nationalities, Czechs, Germans, Hungarians, French, and Dutch. The Germans and Czechs didn’t get along. The Czechs blamed the German Jews for what happened to them. The German Jews obviously couldn’t do anything about what happened. They weren’t Nazis, but they were treated like they were. The German Jews were considered the cause of all the problems because the Nazi’s came from Germany, not from Czechoslovakia. The fellow who ran the youth home was Czech and was a great guy. He certainly didn’t have these feelings. But you could feel that undertone. There wasn’t unity.

My father was not feeling well. Along with his other troubles, he suffered from diabetes and normally should have restricted his consumption of carbohydrates. Yet potatoes and bread occasionally were all he had to eat. He suffered. There was no insulin that he had injected for several years in Germany.

Just before the end of the war, trains with prisoners from other camps like Buchenwald were brought in. These people were really emaciated. As the cattle cars were opened, dead and half-dead skeletons emerged, most of them sick with typhoid fever. My brother and I, together with other children, formed hand-held lines to make a walkway to keep these emaciated people together and guide them into a designated area. They were in bad shape. The ones who had not died in the cars and survived were in rags with no food and began grabbing things. That was about the worst experience I ever had.

A year later I described that day in the following verse:

The street is filled with darkened ghosts

Bent over apparitions

They sway in rows

Yielding to inhuman cries

With yearning eyes, staring, destructed faith.

They fight over the foul rotten garbage

Fling it down their swollen mouths

For everyone in the bare foot gang

For weeks tasted only grass.

Deadened senses

Fear in their faces

And the sun burns down on them without mercy

They stumble up the barracks stairs

On earth trampled with black slag

They shout, they cry, they stare and fall

They die in the aprons of their helpers.

The day the war ended, actually the last day of the Second World War, May 8th, 1945, there were still pockets of S.S. outside the camp. I remember we went out to work. I was on a clean-up detail on the roof of one the fortifications that were covered with earth and grass. We were picking dandelions and all of a sudden heard shots so close to our heads, we could hear the whistle of the bullets. I didn’t know if they were shooting at us or where the shots came from, so I just fell down on the backside of the building away from the street area. After a while it was quite again and I could hear the bees humming and the birds singing just like on a nice early summer day in May. When nothing happened, we crawled out. There were some artillery shells fired by the last retreating Germans, killing a few people. That evening the Russian Red Army showed up with no big ceremony, just trucks and some Russian officers who went to the S.S. commando building. Of course the S.S. were gone. They had fled the same day. We were jubilant, but the jubilation was diminished by the suspicion that all of the people we knew were gone and probably killed. All during the war we always had hope that we would be lucky enough to survive. Fortunately that’s the way it turned out, although we were not any more deserving than our missing family and friends. I particularly remember one incident after the Russians came in. The food situation improved tremendously. A few days later, Russian trucks arrived full of half or quarter loaves of bread and the soldiers just threw the bread out. I caught a piece and was so hungry I didn’t even stop to give any to my brother and father. I felt terrible about that. It just shows you what hunger can do to you. Hunger really was the worst part, since the transports out of Terezin had stopped before we got there. There was no food. We hadn’t heard from my mother all the time we were there and we were worried how she survived.

We were quarantined after the war because the prisoners that came from Buchenwald and other places brought typhus with them. There was an epidemic among certain groups and so they isolated everybody. Nobody could leave for another month. We left in June. It took us ten days to get back to Wiesbaden using public transportation whenever we could find some, on a horse drawn carriage, an UNRA jeep (United Nations Relief Organization), and even a short distance on a train. My mother had no idea whether or not we survived until we showed up again in Wiesbaden. The homecoming was quite emotional. She was living in a different apartment. We were then given a furnished apartment that had been occupied by the wife of a SS-officer who was in a prison camp. We stayed there for about a year until we came to the USA.

Many gentiles in Wiesbaden came by to say how opposed they were to the Nazis and how they had helped us during the Nazi period. They had no shame. They were all looking for some Jewish connection to indicate that they were not bad guys. People came, wanting to open a business with my father. We were certainly catered to. There was contrition, at least in certain places, just like there is today. I have been back to Germany many times. I am often asked how I feel about the past and I reply that I am especially incensed if somebody doesn’t acknowledge what happened. There are a few Jews, such as the other children who were in Terezin with us, who grew up with us, who never left Germany and are still living there. There’s a Jewish community there again. But with a few exceptions, Jews that live in Wiesbaden now are not the original German Jews from before the war. Approximately 1500 of Wiesbaden’s Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Today’s Jews immigrated from Russia or Poland; some came back from South America where they spent the War. A few elderly people returned to collect pensions. When you are older and don’t speak the language in a foreign country, when you have the opportunity to go back, you go back. Basically they are not unhappy. There is a certain amount of antisemitism, but when I was there, I didn’t feel it and our friends who spent the time in Terezin with us and still live in Wiesbaden appear to be happy there.

In 1985 my wife and I visited Germany. We went to Prague and took a city bus to Theresienstadt, spending an afternoon there. Going through the town now, there is absolutely no reminder of what happened, no memorial. The buildings have Czech people living in them again. Soldiers are back and it is still a garrison town. The only thing I noticed was a memorial plaque in several different languages hanging on City Hall where the SS had their headquarters. It thanked the Red Army for coming in and stamping out the Typhoid epidemic.

There had been rumors that a gas chamber was being built in Theresienstadt. When Rahm, one of the last S.S. commanders, saw the end was near, he slowed things down. With the Jewish administration helping him, they managed to drag things out. Had they finished it, in maybe another few months, it would have been too late for us. Fortunately the war ended just in time. Unfortunately my father’s health deteriorated. Even though together we made it back to Wiesbaden and to the United Sates in 1946, he died three years after our arrival in New York.

My parents tried to come here before the war and after all that happened to us, we didn’t see a future in Germany living among the same German people. Actually, my father and my mother sacrificed for the sake of my brother and me, because my father was a sick man; he would have been much better off staying in Germany. He would have had his pension after the war. He would not have had to be a superintendent on 1st Ave. in NY City and struggle to earn a living. They came here for my brother and me so that we would have a good education and a normal, better life. My mother’s family stayed in Germany. They weren’t Jewish so there was no reason for them to leave. In the meantime, they have passed away. My mother’s sister is 86. My father’s three sisters and their families didn’t survive except for the one boy who went on the transport to England where he stayed. He’s been living here in the United States for the last 20 years and has grandchildren.

When we first came here, we got off the boat and took a street -car down 42nd street right into Time Square. With all of the bright lights after coming from the drab and dark world in the destroyed cities of Europe it was a pleasant shock. My father’s brother was still living here so we stayed with them for a while. Right after World War II it was very difficult to find apartments in NY City because all of the returning GIs were also looking. There was no construction during the war. I went to school and immediately started to work after we arrived. I told my wife the other day that I’ve been working 42 years already. If I had joined the Army, I could’ve retired twice. I worked repairing cameras and took the subway for an hour and half to Mt. Vernon from downtown Manhattan. I went to high school at night and then City College where I studied Mechanical Engineering. That’s how we made it.

Our survival was just a matter of chance. It certainly had nothing to do with anything my parents or I did.

That’s the only way you can put it. I can’t believe that God looked out for us more than some of the other children who were murdered. It had to do with where I happened to be and the fact that my father married an “Aryan” woman. She converted to Judaism. Actually, we could have escaped a good portion of the Nazi persecution if we hadn’t been brought up in the Jewish faith because in the mixed marriages, where the kids weren’t brought up in the Jewish faith, they didn’t have to wear the Mogen David. They got their full ration cards. My mother is always a little queasy about the decision they made when we were small children to bring us up as Jews. I think the Jewish religion is beautiful. I’m glad that they made that choice. After all, Nazism between 1933 and 1945 only lasted 12 years, 12 terrible years. It is inexplicable that the Nazi government committed their murderous crimes against the Jews in such a cultured society where it certainly wasn’t expected. No one would have predicted the Holocaust or the ability of the Nazi propaganda machine to turn the population against the Jews in Germany. They might have expected this to happen in France where there was greater antisemitism.

In Germany, my father and mother had many non-Jewish friends and they got along very well. Due to the economic effects after the World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression, Hitler was able to connive and convince enough people that he was a savior and blame the Jews for this disaster. He claimed that the Treaty of Versailles was a stab in the back and the Jews were the cause of Germany’s loss in World War I. It is also a fact that the Nazis had the guns. In Europe, most people did not have guns. Those with the gun had the power; that's basically what it amounted to. By the time people realized what was really happening, it was too late. Not all Germany believed in the Nazi ideology. The Jews believed that Hitler and the Nazis were a transient phenomenon. Some Jews left in the early 30’s right after Hitler came to power and went to Israel or to the United States, but most didn’t. They could not believe this disaster was going to happen and thought it would go away very quickly. The German culture and good sense were going to win out and get rid of Hitler. They were wrong. Nobody believed what he wrote in ‘Mein Kampf’ where Hitler outlined his plans for the Jews. In our case, my mother’s family lived in Germany and there was a natural tendency not to be the first to go and not to believe that anything terrible could really happen.

I don’t think that the Holocaust has had any effect on the way my wife and I brought up our children. They are aware of the background, but I think they are just like all other American Jewish kids who sometimes resent Hebrew school, but somehow made it through. But deep down, you really don’t know what your kids believe or feel until they are older. Hopefully my wife Ruth and I brought them up to be good citizens of America and the world.