HOLOCAUST CENTER BOSTON NORTH - Walter J. Wortheimer

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Home » Survivors »Walter J. Wortheimer

WALTER J. WERTHEIMER*

I was born on January 18, 1922, to Selma (Kahn) and Robert Wertheimer in Emmendingen, a suburb of the larger city of Freiburg, in the state of Baden(now Baden-Wuertemberg), Germany, at a triangle of 3 countries, Germany, France & Switzerland. My father, a lawyer, was able to practice law in more than one country. I sometimes use the word “shtetel” to describe Emmendingen, for when I was born, the town had a population of about 12,000 inhabitants. The Jewish community consisted of about 150 members, was very closely knit, loyal and committed. My father was active in both the Jewish and non Jewish communities. He was a delegate to the Jewish Council of the State of Baden which sat in my wife’s home town of Karlsruhe, a distance of about 70 miles to the north.

I was brought up in a typical German Jewish home, very assimilated but still very committed to the ideals, tenets, and practices of Judaism. My father was a veteran of World War l and had been stationed in Russia. He was born in 1883, but his family readily assimilated. German customs became the norm throughout the region. He was the first member of his family to attend the university to study law, and that achievement, plus his accomplishments during the World War I, made his family very proud.

When Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, we experienced much turbulence and trauma. A few months before Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg, there was an accident one night on our street. A Nazi killed our neighbor who was a socialist and a very prominent citizen in our town. Everyone was upset, but my sister Ruth, who is 15 months older than I, and I, were traumatized. I remember my father repeating over and over again, “This is something that will only happen once. This is a phenomenon which will never happen again“. My parents tried to make light of the bad news by constantly reiterating “The German people, our neighbors, were decent people and were, for the most part, educated. We are part of the German people and we have accomplished a lot”. I have never forgotten this incident of our next door neighbor being killed.

Then, at the end of January 1933 the Nazis took over. I don’t personally remember the April boycott that year of Jewish businesses, but I do have pictures. This lasted only 24 hours as the foreign press widely circulated what was going on in Germany. In the evening when the family gathered, there was quite a bit of discussion of this boycott. Fortunately, it had little effect on my town.

Slowly but surely, we Jewish school children were slowly ostracized as the antisemitism surfaced. Boys and girls, Jews and Gentiles, had always sat together in school. Now, the gentile boys kept to themselves during recess. When we had a break to use the rest room, one or another would say to me, “Walter, I talked to my parents the other day and they think you and we should no longer see each other after school.” Within a very short time, the Jewish children were totally isolated and congregated by themselves in group. I was 12 or 13 years old at the time and this affected me deeply as I had some very close gentile friends. It was also thought best for the Jewish children to walk in small groups, rather than alone. In order not to frighten the children, parents made light of this situation

One day, probably at the beginning of 1934, the teacher in one of my classes said to us, “Tomorrow we will go as one class to the Town Hall because the new Gauleiter (the provincial chief), an SS man by the name of Wagner, is coming to town. He is interested in meeting the students and we must be there to welcome him”. We Jewish children just looked at each other. Are we going to participate? My sister and I approached our parents and asked whether we had to be part of this. My father, being a true patriot said that of course we had to attend and to be careful to listen to all that the Gauleieter had to say. We were also told to applaud, if called for, and to sing with the others. Being a somewhat nervous child, I was very traumatized as we had been subjected to such demonstrations in the past and they were always very antisemitic in rhetoric. My mother called the parents of my friends and all seemed to think that we had no choice - we had to attend. My father, who was one of the leaders of the Jewish community, assembled as many friends as he could. All families agreed that the children had to attend. The appointed day came and the entire school marched to the Town Hall.

Half way through the speech, Wagner, in uniform with his arm raised in the Hitler salute, shouted “Sieg Heil”! He then continued. “We are approaching a new era, a new beginning, with new people. We will be the beneficiary of many glorious things. We will overcome all stumbling blocks. We will conquer all who have opposed Hitler and number one on the list will be the Jews.” He continued his tirade against the Jews stating that they were responsible for the loss of World War l, the defeat of the German army, the economic depression and unemployment.” He promised that if all worked diligently with their new Fuehrer, there would be a new Germany. As this tirade continued, some of us stood there totally stunned and cried. Shortly thereafter we were dismissed, and rather than returning back to school, we Jewish children walked home. When we approached our parents, we asked them how they could subject us to this ridicule. To this day, when I get together with some of my old Jewish friends from Germany, we mention this incident. Our parents were in total denial. They could not comprehend how traumatic this incident was for us. As a result, my grades suffered drastically. My parents had only one choice, to send my sister and me to private schools. The following year, my father sent my sister to a private Jewish school in Frankfurt, but I had to suffer totally isolated for another 1.5 years in the local school system.

Our Jewish Community organized social, athletic, and cultural activities. We had a Jewish soccer league and ski league and went swimming together until Jews were no longer allowed to use public swimming facilities. All of this occurred within the span of a year. What we lost in friendship with the entire community we made up by becoming closer to our Jewish brothers and sisters. I personally never experienced violence. I was just isolated and was told that past friendships had to be severed. Some of my Jewish classmates from other parts of town were not so lucky, and they sometimes suffered physical abuse. We lived in a part of town where, for the most part, people were better educated and had not yet joined the Nazi Party or its affiliates.

But things soon changed. I had my Bar Mitzvah in 1934 and, as was the custom, all relatives, especially my uncles who were living in Berlin, came for the celebration. One grandmother was living in Freiburg, the next larger city, while the other lived in my home town. We were a closely knit Jewish community. As we had no Rabbi, our Cantor officiated at the service. Up to this point, we felt equal to our non-Jewish neighbors. My father, university educated, was the typical German Jew. My uncles were very much like him. All were under the belief that the Hitler regime would not and could not last, that this was a temporary phenomenon due to the German and world wide economic depression, and that things would change, sooner, if not later.

Towards the end of 1933, my father often expressed fear that he might be disbarred. Shortly after Hitler came to power, all Jews who had been employed by the government, either on a federal, state, or local level, were summarily discharged from their jobs. Because he had been admitted to the Bar in 1914 and fought in World War l, he was temporarily protected from losing his license to practice law. I still have the letter which for the time being protected him and gave him the opportunity to continue to earn a living. He was overjoyed with the news, but totally misled as to his future. Many of my father’s friends, younger in age, were not so lucky. Doctors, in particular, suffered immediately as they were no longer able to collect insurance money from patients. Many had to stop practicing. My wife’s father, a physician, was still able to practice as long as patients were willing to pay out of pocket expenses. The only change my father had to make at that time was to relocate his office from the center of town.

By the end of 1934, I was no longer able to attend the local school. Since my father could no longer hire non-Jewish secretarial staff, I worked in his office with a Jewish secretary. In order to keep Jews from consulting non-Jewish attorneys, the Bar Association published a directory which listed who was Jewish and who was not. People were very careful whom they consulted. The question of immigrating came up frequently, but was mostly dismissed the idea as one tried to reassure the other that this would all blow over.

Then in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed. One of its main tenets dealt with intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles which was now forbidden. Details of divorce were carefully spelled out. My father was faced with representing couples who had strongly been urged to divorce their Jewish spouses. It became necessary to define what constitutes a Jew, how many Jewish and non Jewish grandparents there were. The Nuremberg Laws also stated that no Jewish employer could employ non-Jewish women under the age of 45. Jews were no longer able to vote or fly a German flag. This should have been the wake up call that German Jews needed to try to leave the country. But for the most part, they held on and continued their daily lives.

In 1936, with the public schools no longer available to me, my parents took me to a textile high school in Reutlingen, in the state of Wuertemberg. I was interested in that subject as my mother’s three brothers were in the textile wholesale business in Berlin and their work intrigued me. During the interview I was told that they had a number of foreign students and I would be able to socialize with them, but not with the German Aryan students. When I learned this, I told my parents that this was just a repetition of what was going on in my home town and that it was useless to send me to that school. Shortly after that I went to stay with my uncles in Berlin for a four to five week vacation. Berlin was a brand new experience for me. A friend from home came along on the trip and the two of us had a wonderful time together. The world did not look as bleak there as it did in my home town. One of my uncles made inquiries about a school for me. He found a technical school in Berlin that also taught advertising, poster making, window decorating, etc. I was somewhat artistic and this seemed to be what I needed.

By October 1938 my parents decided to send me to school in Berlin. I was not able to stay with either of my uncles as they had all intermarried. One of them found me a room with a nice Polish Jewish family near the school I was to attend. In November, after the assassination of Ernst von Rath, the 3rd Foreign Secretary in the German Embassy in Paris by a Jewish boy, Herschel Grynszpan, the Nazis went on a rampage burning down synagogues and destroying and looting Jewish stores. My landlady thought it best if I did not come home that evening and so I walked the streets all night long. It was recommended that when I needed to go back, I should go to the house of another family where I possibly could stay for a night or two. Since they were elderly, it was thought they would not be bothered. These people lived in the Bavarian Section, a Jewish section of Berlin. During my wandering through the main part of Berlin, I saw that many synagogues were burning. All around me, people were destroying Jewish property, smashing windows, looting, and looking to accost Jewish citizens. I thought I did not look Jewish and hoped to be able to avoid getting beaten. Luckily, no one stopped me. It was incomprehensible as to what was going on. In a large city, you can easily get lost in a crowd and no one approached me. I had heard the word pogrom before, but now I had an idea as to what that meant. When I returned to my temporary house of refuge, I asked it I could use the phone to call my parents at home. When my mother heard my voice, she quickly stated that all of the Jewish men in my home town had been arrested, my father among them. They were all taken to the Dachau concentration camp. She also told me that the SS came looking for me and wanted to arrest me. She begged me not to call again and to wait until a few days had passed for this to blow over.

I stayed a few nights with this family and then tried to go to the home of one of my uncles. He was in a very agitated state and was fighting with his non-Jewish wife. I asked him for some money, went to my original residence, packed my bags and headed for the railroad station. I called my mother from there and told her I was coming home. At the railroad station I saw hundreds of men with shaven heads standing there, surrounded by military police, being transported - I knew not where. I later learned, they were all sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin. I boarded the train for the ten hour ride home. Not wanting to talk to anyone for fear they would pick me up, I spent the entire trip looking out the window, not making eye contact. I don’t remember if I fell asleep or was just plain dazed and upset. When I finally arrived home and walked from the station to our apartment, my mother informed me about all the relatives who had been arrested and taken away. The next day I saw that our synagogue had been totally destroyed. Then I learned that some of the men taken were being returned in caskets to be buried in our Jewish cemetery. Whoever was left in our Jewish community tried to get a “minyan” (required 10 men to recite the memorial prayers) together for the burials. Our Cantor officiated and told us that the ceremony had to be very brief and that we were to ask no questions. It was obvious that the men we buried had been brutally murdered but that was a topic no one mentioned. So we said our prayers, the Kaddish, and went home.

My father was one of the first from our town to be released and he returned a little more than a week later. He was a totally broken man. All the men in Dachau had been cruelly mistreated. I had never seen my father cry and never personally learned what had happened there. My father had been warned not to talk about his time in Dachau for he might be rearrested if this came out. Years later, in history books, the entire story was told. Now the writing was on the wall and we finally decided that we had to get out of Germany. My mother had been an avid Zionist since her childhood growing up in Strasbourg, France, and believed in the pioneer spirit. She wanted to go to Palestine. My father totally disagreed with her and still maintained that staying in Germany was the answer. It was difficult in those days to get into Palestine under the British Mandate, but if you had a large amount of money which had to be deposited with the German government and which would be used to buy goods and services, you possibly were able to gain entry. So, the next idea was to go to the United States.

With great hope, expectations, and hesitation, we went to the American consulate in Stuttgart, the only place in southern Germany where exit visas were issued. We had relatives in Stuttgart who helped to ease the way into the American consular offices. We were asked if we had passports. The answer was yes. When the official noticed that my mother had been born in Strasbourg, she was told that according to American law at that time, she was considered French and there was no quota for French citizens, whereas there was a quota for people coming from Germany. She was considered French and her children were automatically considered to be French. The official said that he would immediately stamp her passport and those of my sister and mine, and we could leave Germany as fast as we wanted to. When the official noted that my father was born in Germany, he said that it might take until 1941 before his name came up. My father was given a quota number but he had to stay. We wired relatives in Holland and within a week or two, my sister and I got our things together and left for England. My parents stayed behind together in Germany. Our journey took us to Rotterdam, Holland for a few nights, and then we took the Channel steamer to England where we were met by an uncle who had emigrated from Berlin to London. Meanwhile, my father, who had excellent relations with former clients now living in Switzerland, was able to get a temporary visa for Basel, Switzerland, but it had to be renewed periodically. He and my mother took my grandmother, my mother’s mother, along with them.

At the beginning of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and was now at war. Luckily, we were out of Germany hoping for a better life in the future. My sister and I stayed in England for a few months, and in October, 1939, we were able to sail from Liverpool to New York. Meanwhile, my grandmother had died in Switzerland and at her funeral, the Rabbi spoke about how she had marched twice across borders, first from France to Germany, and now from Germany to Switzerland, in search of a new home, in search of freedom. My mother was able to sail from Genoa, Italy, to New York shortly thereafter, but my father had to wait another ten months before he was allowed to make the trip. These transatlantic trips were done during total blackouts as the North Atlantic was heavily filled with German U-boats which did not care if the ship carried civilian passengers.

To this date, I have considered myself very fortunate. I was the beneficiary of affirmative action when I came to the United States. I was a night student at New York University, then drafted into the American Army after receiving two deferments. Although I was shipped to the South Pacific, I was never involved in front line fighting. When I returned home in 1946, I was able to continue my studies under the G.I. Bill of Rights. I was the beneficiary of a lot of good things in this country and I make a point of telling this to audiences whenever I have the opportunity. Who is to say how many Jews would have left Europe in time had they known what was to happen to them. But then, the United States, with its antisemitic State Department would not have allowed them to enter. Our German passports were stamped with a big red J, standing for Jew. In addition, Hitler had decreed that all passports and identity cards had to show the middle name of Israel for males, and Sara for females. This was to make sure that as a non Aryan you were easily identifiable. Historians now tell us that this was really ordered by the Swiss who also did not want all the Jews crossing into their country.

In closing, let me just add a few more worthwhile incidents. In 1938, after Hitler had marched into and annexed Austria to be part of greater Germany, and in March 1939, when he did the same with the western part of Chezoslovakia, my parents and every Jewish family had to fill out a form declaring their entire net worth, including all assets and liabilities. No one quite understood why this was mandated. After Krystal Nacht, it became evident why the Nazis wanted this information. It was used to force the Jews to pay for all damage done to their property. All insurance money that would have paid for clean up and repair went to the German Government. If you were able to leave the country on your own free will, it saved the government later on the cost of deporting you and ultimately killing you. First you had your livelihood taken, then your assets, and lastly your life. My family was grateful that my father was not disbarred until 1938. He was able to earn a living longer than most.

Luckily, we were able to get out with our lives intact, and to start anew here in the United States.

My father, Robert Wertheimer , died on October 11, 1962. My mother, Selma (Kahn) Wertheimer died on November 30, 1958.

My sister, Ruth (Wertheimer) Shurman lives in the USA.Luckily, we were able to get out with our lives intact, and to start anew here in the United States.

*Deceased February 20, 2006