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Testimony of Elsa (Heilbronn) Epstein, born in Schmalnau, Germany, 1925, regarding her experiences in Schmalnau, Frankfurt and with foster families in the United States
Testimony
Name of Interviewee: Elsa Epstein
Name of Interviewer: Tami Katz
Cassette Number: VT-9542
Date: March 17, 2009
Name of Typist: Cheryl Balshayi
Names:
Schmalnau
Frankfurt am Main
Allentown
Bethlehem
Baltimore
New York
Philadelphia
Q: (Hebrew) Today is Tuesday, כ"א באדר, תשס"ט, March 17, 2009. I, Tami Katz, am interviewing for Yad Vashem Mrs. Elsa Epstein, née Heilbronn, born in Schmalnau, Germany, 1925. Mrs. Epstein will tell us about her childhood in Germany, about her transfer on the Kindertransport of one thousand children to the United States in 1937, about her life with a foster family in Pennsylvania, about the fate of her family in Germany, about her life in the United States after the end of the war in 1945, about her aliyah in 1972 and her absorption.
(English) Good morning, Mrs. Epstein.
A: Good morning.
Q: Tell us where and when you were born.
A: I was born in 1925 in Germany in Schmalnau in der Rhön, a village of about seven hundred people, in which there were, at the time I remember, twelve Jewish families.
Q: That’s it? Twelve Jewish families. What else do you remember – before we speak of the family, we’ll talk about the family – what do you remember of the place, the town, as a child? What are your memories of it?
A: I remember really a very happy childhood. We lived in the home that dates probably from the middle of the 19th century. It belonged to my mother and to my aunt. We lived upstairs and my aunt and her family lived downstairs. We had a large house. Originally the whole area was a farm and we still had all the farm buildings in which to play. We had a little creek behind the barn and a large meadow behind that and this was land that belonged to us. Some of the land and the facilities were rented out to a local farmer. I come from an Orthodox home and we remembered very happily all the holidays.
Q: We’ll talk about that.
A: I had a very happy childhood.
Q: So you were saying that you were twelve Jewish families. A very small community. People who lived there for years or came…?
A: Yes. I, in recent years, somehow, have had sent to me information about the village. Someone is writing to me in the last couple of years. And apparently the Jewish community, my branch of the Jewish community dates from 1803, something like that. The community was all Orthodox, as far as I know at least. I had a cousin who was our chazzan.
Q: There was a shochet, chazzan? All the traditional professions and jobs of the Jewish community.
A: Yes, yes. As a matter of fact, the grandson of our shochet lives in the area of Haifa today. The man who sold fish was partly responsible for the some of the fish ponds in this country. As far as I know, I think perhaps four, five families from Schmalnau did move to Israel. But my best friend was a non-Jewish girl who lived across the way from us.
Q: We’ll talk about that. Who was your father?
A: My father was Julius Heilbronn, who came from Tann, which was a small town, also in the area of the Rhongeberger (sp?), where I come from.
Q: His parents?
A: His parents were Minko and Eva Heilbronn.
Q: And they were born in Germany?
A: Yes, yes. My grandmother’s family – and actually my grandfather’s too because they were distant cousins – dates back from what I can tell to the 1740’s. And that was about the time that my father’s ancestors, somebody, came to Tann.
Q: From the east, from Poland?
A: Not entirely clear. It’s not entirely clear to me. One of the early ancestors was Natan Ben Yitzchak. And the interesting thing, actually, was, that I had never heard it before, that the ancestor that didn’t have a German name yet, had several sons who took different names and one of them was Heilbronn. And in the community of Tann was somebody else who also had sons who took different names.
Q: And it’s not the same family?
A: No, no. They had different names. And I had never of this, that somebody had a son who was Heilbronn and Fortall or Robinstein or something like this. This was something completely new to me.
Q: And did you know your grandparents from Tann?
A: Yes I did. We visited frequently during vacations.
Q” What did they do there?
A: You know, I don’t remember. Well, I was a little girl when my grandfather was already retired, but I don’t remember what my grandfather did in Tann. My grandfather from Schmalnau I did know.
Q: But from Tann you didn’t.
A: From Tann, no.
Q: But you knew them?
A: Oh yes, I knew them.
Q: They were Orthodox?
A: Yes. My grandmother wore a sheitel, which is something my mother decided she was not going to do. Yes, they were very observant. My grandfather, I think, less so, but she was the frummer in the family.
Q: And your father – what kind of education did your father receive?
A: My father, of course, grew up in Tann. His parents sent him…either sent him or he already was mature enough – he went to Zurich to study business. This was before the war. Exactly what year I don’t know. My father was born in 1886, so he was already before the war a mature man.
Q: Did he take part in the war? Was he in the German army?
A: Yes, my father was in the German army. He lost the vision of an eye in the army and that was the reason…
Q: Do you know where he saved?
A: No, I don’t know.
Q: But he was a soldier in the Germany army.
A: Yes, and he had a brother who fell in the German army.
Q: Your uncle.
A: My uncle, yes.
Q: I see. And so he studied, you said, in Zurich. Business?
A: Yes. I don’t exactly what school. You know, as an eleven-year-old, you don’t ask your parents things like that.
Q: And do you know if he received also a Jewish education?
A: Oh, of course. But in those days they went to public school, but of course. But my father did not speak Hebrew. You know, in the Diaspora we read from the siddur, but most of us didn’t necessarily understand what we were reading.
Q: But did he go to cheder or yeshiva?
A: No. It was an Orthodox family, but not in the way we see today. There were yeshivot, no doubt.
Q: They were very liberated.
A: Yes.
Q: Orthodox, but liberal.
A: Not liberal, no. I had an uncle. His brother was a liberal rabbiner in Nuremberg. He was much more liberal, but what we would call Modern Orthodox today.
Q: So why did your father come to Schmalnau?
A: To marry my mother.
Q: She was from there.
A: My four antecedents, grandparents are Freudental, Heilbronn, Tannenbaum and Kahn. My parents met at a Freundental-Kahn wedding.
Q: So it was not a shidduch.
A: No. There may have been something to do with…, but no. They met at a wedding in Tann.
Q: And who was your mother?
A: My mother was Meta Tannenwald, who was born in Schmalnau. Her mother was a Kahn.
Q: What were the names of your grandparents?
A: My grandparents were Isidore Tannenwald, Yisrael in Hebrew, and Holda Kahn. I have two members of my family that I could not name children after in Israel. Holda and Meta.
Q: Holda is a biblical name.
A: Yes, but Holda is just too close to hulda. And Meta? It is a perfectly good European name.
Q: So she was born there?
A: She was born there.
Q: What did her parents do?
A: My grandfather was a businessman.
Q: Dealing with what?
A: Dealing with everything. I have a postcard of Schmalnau where our house appears and it is listed as…Our house apparently was THE store. THE store was in our house. And as I say, the picture is from before 1907. And my grandfather was Isidore Tannenwald. His father was Seligman and I see this S., Seligman, on that picture.
Q: So they were merchants?
A: Merchants, yes.
Q: What were they selling?
A: They sold almost everything many years ago. By the time I was there, I cannot even remember what was sold. It was still there, but I don’t remember that it still was a store. And I really have to check with my…
Q: You have no recollection of it.
A: No. I have to check with my correspondent, whose ninety-seven-year-old mother is still…she is not confused. What she can tell me about it. I don’t remember exactly, but the place was still there. And the sign as still there on the house.
Q: So they were well-off, both families, you would say?
A: Well, compared to other people in the village, maybe yes. Compared to my cousins in the nearby city of Fulda, they were not. No, life was very simple in a place like that. But we had a telephone and we had a gramophone and a radio.
Q: You had electricity. Not everywhere in the world they had electricity in those years.
A: In that respect it was alright.
Q: And you were three girls.
A: We were three children.
Q: Who was the eldest?
A: The eldest was Edith, who was born in 1920, and my little sister was Margo, who was born in ’29.
Q: And your parents, your father – what did he do in…(?)?
A: My father – an interesting parenthetical story. A few years ago I met a cousin. I found out I had a cousin living in Beit Yitzchak who was born in Schmalnau, whose father owned a little factory for kitchen supplies, and he was killed in 1915 in the war.
Q: First World War.
A: In the First World War, and his name was Karl Steiffel and when my father married my mother, he bought that factory from his widow.
Q: For kitchen utensils?
A: For wooden spoons, wooden bowls and things like that, because we were in an area of woods, of forests. And in the late ‘20s, in the difficult financial times, it apparently went bankrupt and my father became a middleman, selling coffee, selling Columbian coffee. And so he sold to stores.
Q: You don’t remember the kitchen business.
A: No, not at all. No, no. Not at all. I have a picture of the factory.
Q: What kind of education did your mother receive? We are talking about her family.
A: My mother went to regular schools.
Q: German?
A: Yes, sure. But you know what? She had some kind of extra education.
Q: Jewish also?
A: No. Jewish was just a matter of course.
Q: At home.
A: At home, and there was a shul and there was a Hebrew teacher.
Q: She had a private Hebrew teacher?
A: No, there was a Hebrew teacher. We went, everybody went to Hebrew school.
Q: After school? I mean like, or Sunday school?
A: I don’t remember exactly, but we had a Hebrew teacher, strict Hebrew teacher. He had a ruler. I remember him.
Q: In the synagogue?
A: He taught somewhere in the synagogue, yes. And I assume that my parents had exactly an education. She also went to some kind of further education, I think having to do with running a home and things like that, but you know, I’m not sure what it all included.
Q: When you were born, the girls were born, she was at home or she was helping your father with his…?
A: No. My grandmother, my mother and aunt lived in the same house I was born and my grandmother, my grandparents were alive when she was married. My grandmother died when my sister was a month old, as a matter of fact. So they had the family and there was an uncle up the street.
Q: So she basically took care of the children. She was at home.
A: She may have helped. As a matter of fact, I think she did help in the store, yes. And she had help in the house.
Q: In her parents’ store or with your father’s business?
A: Well, my grandparents were no longer alive when I remember, but when they were married, I think my mother did work in the store.
Q: You said your father was a middleman.
A: He travelled some. I travelled with him occasionally when I was older.
Q: He had no store.
A: No, he had no store anymore. He travelled and sold coffee to stores, not privately.
Q: So in their home, after they were married, they also ran an Orthodox traditional home?
A: Oh yes. We had a very, very…the holidays were wonderful.
Q: Okay, so we will talk about it. How was the Shabbat? What do you remember of Shabbat?
A: Shabbat? Shabbat was a lovely warm day.
Q: Friday dinner?
A: Friday night, of course. Our good room was a living room/dining room, with the heavy brown furniture that we had. Oh yes, Friday night and Shabbat was very important.
Q: With Kiddush?
A: Of course. All the things. My father would come home from shul and bless us.
Q: Were there Shabbat songs? Do you remember?
A: I don’t remember that. We had a lot of music in the house.
Q: You don’t remember Shabbat dinner with music?
A: Shir Hama’alot, of course. You are asking questions that I realize we took so for granted. Adon Olam, yes, of course. It’s not something I even have to remember and as you are asking me, of course, I do.
Q: That’s why I want you to give us the picture. And you used to have guests for Yom Shishi dinner?
A: Yes. Well, I don’t remember particularly.
Q: Now, you said that there were twelve families and they had one shul, one synagogue.
A: Yes, sure. Women sat upstairs, of course, but I, as a very little girl, I remember being downstairs occasionally with my father.
Q: And your dad used to go every…
A: My father went Friday night and Shabbat.
Q: Not every day?
A: No. I don’t remember that he went to daily minyan. I really don’t.
Q: Do you remember tefillin? At home.
A: Oh, of course, yes.
Q: Just tefillin, putting on his tefillin.
A: Yes. I remember when my grandparents visited – and they visited especially for holidays – that Orthodox men don’t use a sharp razor, and I remember my grandfather, with his…I remember my grandmother, with her long hair, which I never saw otherwise, and my grandfather with his clippers, going like this, because he didn’t shave with a sharp razor. No electric razors in those days.
Q: And your father, he would go with a kippa?
A: My father did not always go with a yarmulke. That was not common.
Q: He had a beard?
A: Yes, he had a beard. He had what is known as a shpitzlag. He had a little beard, yes.
Q: And Shishi your mother would go also to synagogue, or just the men?
A: Yes. No, no, we went. We went to synagogue.
Q: Also on Shabbat?
A: My cousin was a wonderful chazzan. He had a beautiful voice. I remember more Shabbat than Friday night. I think occasionally I went on Friday night with my father.
Q: Can you tell us about the Shabbat? Describe it?
A: I knew the music, the Ashkenazi music very well and I was very pleased when we made aliyah and came to the kibbutz, that the chazzan we had in the days when I first came here, he sang a lot of the same tunes. It was wonderful. That was very nice. We had a chazzan that was so good. As I say again, we took all of these things very for granted. What was very different fro what we see here today, my parents did not make us wear long sleeves. In the summertime we wore these beautiful little crepe de chine dresses without sleeves, and of course girls didn’t wear slacks in those days in any case, so in that respect we never felt that different. And we went to the regular school in Schmalnau.
Q: What about the holidays? Tell us about the holidays.
A: Of course Pesach was very…Pesach was the very special one. First of all, we had an attic and in the attic were all the dishes and pots and pans and everything for Pesach, so what, of course, we remember, all of us helping, bringing the things down. And Erev Pesach my father going around with a feather and a little pan, and that was not symbolic. I mean, that was symbolic, but the house, of course, was very, very kosher. There was no chametz around anywhere. And then at the end of Pesach all of us helping, taking the things back upstairs. My grandparents came – I don’t know whether they always came to us.
Q: From Tann?
A: They came from Tann.
Q: Your father’s parents?
A: My father’s parents, yes.
Q: They would come for Pesach.
A: They would come and my grandfather sat with the many cushions and the big pitcher and the bowl, and those things. And as I say again, this was not at all symbolic. This was very real to us.
Q: Do you remember the Seder?
A: Oh yes. Very much so, very much so, yes. I still have…I have a couple of things, not much, in German. Not much.
Q: You would read the Haggadah in Hebrew?
A: Yes.
Q: But you didn’t understand.
A: Of course we knew the story. As I say, I didn’t learn Hebrew until we started thinking about aliyah, but we knew the benchen and everything by memory. But the Seder was very, very special, yes.
Q: You had two Seders of course.
A: Yes, of course.
Q: You had guests also, besides the grandparents?
A: Yes. My aunt and uncle lived downstairs with their little boy and they were with us. There were so many relatives of my parents because both families, both grandparents came from very big families. My mother and aunt were the only two children, but my grandfather was one of nine siblings. My grandmother was one of, I think, eight. So there were relatives. I remember family coming. I don’t remember particularly who came. We had people who lived in Hessen. I knew the names of all the little towns in the area. The uncle from (?) and the tante from (?). These things.
Q: Other holidays besides Pesach? What about…?
A: Well, Purim we got dressed up.
Q: Yes? With costumes?
A: Chanukah…German Christmas is wonderful and we were invited by our neighbours to see the Christmas tree, but we had something called the Chanukah menchen, the little man who came with gifts for us. Chanukah was very special.
Q: That was your Santa Claus.
A: Well, that was very Jewish. We didn’t have oznei Haman, by the way. We had Hamaner. They were like gingerbread men and you took great pleasure in taking off the head of Haman.
Q: What was the name of the Chanukah man? There was a name?
A: Chanukah menchen. Little Chanukah men.
Q: That’s what he was called.
A: That’s what we called him, yes.
Q: And you would light the chanukiyyah?
A: But of course, but we also had gifts. That was not just Chanukah gelt. You know, it is very interesting. So many of the names in the family, the Hebrew names, were Yiddish. There was not a sign of anything… Chanukah gelt was Yiddish much more so that it was German. We were an Orthodox family that was extremely assimilated in terms of belonging German, and that, of course, was the terrible thing, that suddenly you were not German.
Q: We’ll talk about that. Speaking of the language, they spoke German or also Yiddish at home?
A: No, there was no Yiddish. Nobody in the family spoke Yiddish.
Q: Did you know it?
A: My parents spoke some French, so when they didn’t want us to hear…
Q: But not Yiddish. You didn’t understand.
A: No. I never knew Yiddish at all until I came to the States.
Q: So German.
A: Yes. I only came across people who spoke Yiddish really when I lived briefly in Frankfurt before I left.
Q: So mainly German. So you were talking about Chanukah and Purim. What about Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. Can you describe, can you tell us about that too?
A: Of course. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, the beit knesset, the synagogue is the most important thing and my father, of course, wore his white kittel. And of course, for Rosh Hashanah and Pesach, we got new clothes and we got new shoes and we got new clothing. This is what impresses children, of course.
Q: You have memories of the traditional food of the holidays?
A: Yes. Well, the traditional foods were not at all, of course, what I came across in the States, which are much more Russian.
Q: Russian, Polish.
A: That’s right, although I knew lox. Lox is, I think, smoked salmon is also German. But bagel we didn’t know, anything like that. But the special kinds of fish and special kinds of stuffed spleen that my mother made. Parenthetically, speaking of food, what I remember about winter was going up to the attic and seeing a broomstick with six or eight geese, plucked geese on it. I don’t know why we did that in our family because we didn’t own geese that I knew, that I remember, but somebody plucked geese to sell to other people, so there were these geese hanging on the broom. It was very cold, of course. We didn’t have a refrigerator. We didn’t need it in the wintertime. So this had to do with Christmas, no doubt, but I don’t know why and I never thought of asking.
Q: It was a rural area, right.
A: Yes, of course, with the farms and a village.
Q: So you had animals also?
A: No. At one time we had a barn. At one time the forebears, and I’m not sure which, because I haven’t been able to find out, had a real farm. We had a ping pong table in what used to be the chicken house and we had hay up in the barn, which belonged to a neighbour and we loved jumping on it.
Q: But when you were growing up there were no animals.
A: No, no. It was no longer our farm, but we still had the buildings.
Q: And did they still grow things around?
A: We had a garden, yes, we had a vegetable garden. Behind the creek, in that meadow.
Q: And also fruit trees and things like that?
A: No, I don’t remember that we had trees anymore. We had a chestnut tree in front of the house and a lilac tree in front of the house. Very impressive.
Q: So you were talking about a very small Jewish community, with almost all the institutions of a Jewish community. You were talking about the chazzan, the shochet. Do you remember the relationship between those families? Was it a good relationship? Were they close?
A: Within the families?
Q: Between the twelve families.
A: Oh yes, I think so.
Q: You were close? Were they relatives, or not necessarily?
A: Well, I had an uncle and aunt up the street, the chazzan.
Q: The other families were related?
A: There were other families who were not related to us, no. However, I recently discovered another cousin who found me through Yad Vashem. Her name is the soferet Ruth Almog, who writes…
Q: She writes about your town. She is your cousin, Ruth Almog?
A: Ruth Almog’s grandmother lived next door to me.
Q: Because the name of the town is mentioned in one of her novels. Eretz Gezera. In the ‘80s.
A: Her grandmother, Frau Lump, lived next door to me and in a picture of my house I can see a little bit of their roof.
Q: So they were relatives?
A: I didn’t realize then. Yes, they were, apparently, but I didn’t remember that. But she had a granddaughter who is a year younger than me who is still alive, living in the States. But I haven’t been in touch. I just found out about her. I visited Ruth Almog a few weeks ago and we did a lot of comparing of notes. We have a lot of family.
Q: But she was born already here in Israel.
A: Yes, her parents came in ’33.
Q: She was born in Petach Tikva, I think.
A: Her parents came already in ’33. They saw signs and they left.
Q: We will talk about that. So anything else that you can tell us about the relations in the Jewish community?
A: As I say, this next-door neighbour, little girl, was a friend of mine. There weren’t many children exactly my age, as you can imagine, so my best friend was a non-Jewish girl, Catholic girl, across the road from me. There was somebody by the name of Rosenstark who moved to Tel Aviv, but she was older than I.
Q: The Jewish community has good relations?
A: I think so. Look, I seem to vaguely remember, just like there is gossip about people you know. I’m sure there was. But I remember that vaguely.
Q: But the main thing was the holidays?
A: Oh, we saw each other in shul.
Q: But also Jewish weddings took place there, or you would go…? Jewish ceremonies of bar mitzvas? Everything took place in that synagogue or you would go to the bigger city?
A: I remember going to a bar mitzvah. I don’t know whose.
Q: So they would celebrate together?
A: Some, yes, of course, but a lot of the celebration was in shul. It’s not like it is today. First of all, any celebration that you had was modest, at home. I do remember my grandparents’ golden wedding, by the way.
Q: They didn’t celebrate bat mitzvahs like we celebrate. For girls there was no celebration.
A: No, not at all. By the way, I was eleven when I left.
Q: But your sister?
A: No, there wasn’t a celebration.
Q: For girls…
A: No, not at all.
Q: So when you were a little girl, before going to school, to elementary school, there was something such as kindergarten? Or not really in those days.
A: No. We were very busy at home. We had so much place to play in and to run around in.
Q: So you were home with your mother?
A: We were home, but you know, there was great freedom. There was only one car and that belonged to the doctor, who was the only Protestant.
Q: They were all Catholics?
A: Yes, it was a Catholic community. So you played and your parents didn’t have to worry about where you were. We had lots of time to play.
Q: Did your mother have help around home?
A: My mother had help, yes.
Q: Jewish or German?
A: No, non-Jewish.
Q: Took care of you also, the children?
A: Apparently helped.
Q: Do you remember?
A: I do remember somebody who was a very distant cousin, who, I think, came to help at the time that my little sister was born. It is a very vague of that. But I think she was a distant cousin, that she came to help.
Q: So before going to school, you said, you played around. You remember? You had toys, things like that?
A: But of course, you played with things that were…Yes, we had toys.
Q: Were made at home?
A: Yes, I’m sure. I had dolls, but I don’t remember anything special. I was not a tomboy or anything, but I liked walking around the village. I liked going with my mother when we baked…every two weeks we would bake bread in the village oven. Big, big rye breads about the size of this and they were for two weeks.
Q: And you still are baking bread today.
A: Yes, yes.
Q: Did they also bake the matzos there, or they used to buy?
A: No, no. The matza came from elsewhere. Fulda, which was the nearby city had a very, very large, very Orthodox…Look, most of the Jewish communities were Orthodox.
Q: So you would get the matzos from there.
A: Yes, yes, but I don’t remember how we did all that. But you know, you made many more things at home. I don’t even remember special toys. Isn’t that interesting? But I remember a very happy early childhood. I don’t remember being bored. We all read very early. I listened to music very early.
Q: You got a musical education also?
A: No.
Q: Playing an instrument or anything?
A: No, I didn’t, but we heard opera. We had a gramophone.
Q: Records?
A: Records. I remember the words…You know, opera in Germany was all in German in those days and I remember Mozart and Verdi, in German. And by the way, that has lasted all my life.
Q: Music.
A: My big love, yes. Music, and particularly opera.
Q: So at the age of six you went to school? Six, seven?
A: Yes. Six. I was six in October, and went to school. We had a village school. Our teacher was a wonderful, wonderful woman.
Q: Non-Jewish?
A: Non-Jewish, of course. She was Catholic. She taught several grades. Now, I don't remember much of other teachers. Isn't that interesting? I wasn't that young when I left. I can only realize so much other has happened in my life that the inference…maybe that will be a reason to go back to Schmalnau, to remember things. She was a remarkable teacher.
Q: What was her name?
A: Her name was Fraulein Daite, and I found, from the woman who writes to me from Germany, that during the Hitler times she lost her job because she talked about Hitler being against the Church, and she was reinstated with her pension after the war. She taught a great deal of regular…not just reading and writing. I mean, if I know the story of Wagner, the story behind it, I know it from her.
Q: And you felt close to her? You liked her?
A: Well, not close because there was a distance, you know. A good distance, a kind of thing.
Q: Discipline?
A: No, there was a warmth to the woman.
Q: But generally speaking, the atmosphere was more of…(?)
A: No, she was not Teutonic in her behaviour. If you ask me who my most remarkable teacher was, I would say it was she. In my whole life.
Q: So it was general education. Mainly German culture?
A: German culture, reading, writing and arithmetic. We got a a good bit of extra culture at home. The whole family read. My parents read. We all read.
Q: When you went to school did you study also other languages? Classical?
A: No, I only went to elementary school. I finished fifth grade. Actually, I left Schmalnau around my eleventh birthday and then we moved to Frankfurt, but I only finished…The German system was finishing school in the spring, so I finished fifth grade when I came to the States.
Q: Do you have good memories of the school there?
A: Yes, yes, I do. It is very interesting. I have generally good memories. When my daughter visited, my daughter from Jerusalem, visited me not too long ago – my daughter knows a lot of people who have done a lot of background on Shoah and so forth – she brought me a book, she brought a book telling about the kehillah, about the geminde in Schmalnau. And the size of it, how many people there were, who they were, where people went, what happened to them. And in it she writes that one of the years that I still lived there, that there were some bad nights and you know what? I don't remember them.
Q: Bad nights, referring to…
A: That there was some attack of breaking windows.
Q: Okay, we will talk about it.
A: What is interesting to me, I don't remember that. I do remember the SA, the Nazis marching.
Q: We'll get to that period.
A: But I don't, whether it is denial…
Q: Or you don't remember.
A: Or just don't remember, but I do not remember that, no.
Q: Okay. We'll take a break.
A: It's forty minutes? I have no trouble talking, as you see.
Q: Good.
A: You have people who have trouble?
Q: Sometimes. (end of side)
Q: So we were talking about elementary school. You were a minority as a Jewish girl.
A: Yes, of course.
Q: There were what – three, two, another girl in your class?
A: Something like that. Yes, that's right.
Q: What were the relations with the other students, Catholic?
A: As I said, I had a very good friend.
Q: You felt different?
A: Yes, but that's fact. That's fact. You are different and that's…Sure you felt different. But as I say, I don't know whether I am denying.
Q: In school, from your own experience, did you have any incidents, anti-Semitic incidents? Someone maiming you, calling you?
A: You know what? I don't remember. I'm not sure. As I say, I'm not sure that didn't happen. I don't remember very unhappy times. I wanted to tell you about an incident that happened in my – maybe I'll tell you about that later – that happened in my grandparents' time.
Q: Okay, we'll talk about it. We are talking about school.
A: I had friends.
Q: There were religion classes also? Did they have religion hour in elementary school?
A: Yes, but we didn't have to go to that.
Q: So you went out?
A: Yes. I don't remember, you know that? It was a Catholic school because it was a Catholic town, but it was a public school.
Q: Right.
A: I remember being invited, going to church with my friend. A beautiful church. It was one of these onion-shaped domes, you know?
Q: So were you also aware what it meant to be Catholic?
A: Yes, sure, because we lived in a Catholic community. Catholics have all these holidays, all these saints' days. You know, Ascension Day and all this.
Q: Were you attracted to them?
A: Oh yes, of course. I didn't ever want to be Catholic particularly, but they were wonderful to watch.
Q: You said you had Catholic friends among the girls.
A: My best friend was Catholic.
Q: And you went to her house?
A: Oh yes.
Q: But you kept kosher? Did you eat there?
A: Oh, my first real sin was…he was a butcher. I once - I think I must have been about six years old – I tasted non-kosher salami. My first sin.
Q: Not telling anyone about it.
A: That's right. I never told.
Q: Did your parents say something about…?
A: They didn't know.
Q: No, but were they instructing you if you went?
A: No, but you know, when you grow up in a home like ours, you know these things. They don't have to be told. Yes, you know this. I loved all the things that have to do with ceremony.
Q: But you knew clearly that they were Catholic, I am Jewish.
A: Oh yes.
Q: There was no confusion about your identity?
A: No, no confusion. It was a lot less confusing, I think.
Q: The border was clear, the limits.
A: Look, my mother's family had been there for many generations. You were accepted. I think also we had less problems because it was a Catholic community. I think there was less obvious Nazism there. It was a Catholic community, with devout people, and we had good relationships with our neighbours.
Q: Do you remember the neighbours?
A: Oh yes. I don't remember the names, but I remember.
Q: What were they doing?
A: They were farmers mostly.
Q: Less educated than your family.
A: Probably, yes.
Q: But there was no tension there.
A: No. I'm trying to remember, but I don't remember, who were my parents' good friends. I don’t remember that. You know, I don't, I really don't. My mother and my aunt were close. I saw people, but I don't remember that. If we entertained it was mostly family. And of course, Jewish holidays, being as they are, that's when we had a lot of company.
Q: How was your relationship with your parents? Was there also distance like…most discipline?
A: Well, no. My father was the more serious of the two. I wish I remembered my mother better. My older sister was also more serious, more like my father, and I think I am a little bit more like my mother.
Q: More easy-going?
A: Perhaps.
Q: What were the relations between the sisters? You were three sisters.
A: I was blamed for everything. Oh yes.
Q: The sandwich.
A: Yes, I don't know that I was much of a tomboy, but I was different from my older sister and younger sister. I've been different all my life for some reason!
Q: You were close, though? Would you say?
A: No, not really. My sister was five years older. When she left for the States she didn't kiss me goodbye because I had insulted her in some way a few weeks before. That I remember. My little sister, of course, was four years younger than I. I think we were close-knit in the family. We didn't have fights among the family, but I was blamed. "Elsa did it."
Q: You considered yourself like the "black sheep"?
A: No, no. I think I got into a little more trouble. I can't remember anything serious.
Q: There were punishments? Things like that?
A: I guess so, but I don't remember any serious punishments.
Q: Wasn't very strict kinds of…
A: No.
Q: Very warm and open?
A: I think so. Look, warm and open, but not in the way we consider warm and open today. You know, when I think of teenagers, my G-d, nobody would have thought of behaving that way.
Q: Speaking that way.
A: Yes. Even I, as a foster daughter, also didn't think of behaving like that, although most of friends couldn’t get away with it either in the States. It's a very different time. We're talking about seventy, eighty years ago.
Q: Okay, if we speak about Jewish community in Germany, as a whole – very established community. On one hand, we have the Orthodox Jews, but we also have assimilated.
A: We were orthodox, but my parents felt very German.
Q: Very German.
A: Very German, Orthodox.
Q: Patriotic German?
A: Oh yes. Oh yes.
Q: Is there a homeland?
A: Yes.
Q: I'm talking now from the part of the Jewish life. You had your own small community, but in the big cities, or big Jewish communities, there was an established community with rabbinical schools, with a lot of education or educational organizations. There were political groups. Your father was affiliated with any Jewish organization?
A: If he was…look, we lived very distant…it's not like today. It's sort of distant, even though Tann, where my grandparents lived, wasn't so far, we had to change trains to go there. It took a while to go places. My uncle was a rabbi in Nuremberg. I had an aunt – my father's sister was in Hamburg. My parents were aware of what was going on, of course.
Q: Was he close to any of the political Jewish…?
A: I doubt it very much.
Q: Maybe not active, but do you think he identified with Aguda or Mizrachi?
A: My sister married a man from Czechoslovakia who was part of Aguda, but no, I never of those words. No, not at all.
Q: Or other organizations?
A: No, not all. I never heard words like that. It's interesting. In terms of politics I had, as a child even, pretty good antenna, so I would have been aware, I think.
Q: And what about Zionism? What was your awareness of Eretz Yisrael?
A: We had some relatives…I knew some…not first cousins. Cousins who came to visit, who were talking about going to Palestina.
Q: Thinking of immigrating.
A: This was not my family at all.
Q: This was in the '30s?
A: This was in the '30s, yes. But this was not my family at all.
Q: They weren't affiliated with any Zionist organization?
A: I had a first cousin who was a communist. I had family in Frankfurt, Nuremberg and Hamburg, close family.
Q: And were they…?
A: yes, my cousin Fritz grew up in Frankfurt.
Q: And were they in connection with Zionist organizations?
A: I have no idea. I don't know. He was very much older than I and I was a very adoring cousin.
Q: But you were aware of Palestine, as a kid?
A: Of course, yes.
Q: What did you know?
A: I'll tell you that we're probably the last family that anybody expected to come on aliyah, okay? We knew about Palestina. Ancient history we knew.
Q: You knew of Eretz Yisrael.
A: Yes, of course.
Q: You celebrated Tu B'Shvat, things like that?
A: In America?
Q: I'm talking about in Germany. As a kid.
A: I don't remember. I do not remember. I think we had a "blue box".
Q: You did have a "bluer box" of Keren Kayemet?
A: But I don't know if that memory is only from the States or it is from Germany. Yes, the Jewish homeland and all that, Eretz Yisrael, but it was not at all part of what we talked much about. Yes, ancient history we knew, and all that. We knew of people.
Q: Did you have family in other places in the world? Besides Germany?
A: I did not.
Q: No one in the States? No one in South America? You said not in Palestine.
A: No. I did find out at some point that this Ruth Almog's parents made aliyah in the '30s, but this was not somebody who was close to me.
Q: You weren't aware of it.
A: No, my parents, if they knew Frau Lump, they knew that they had gone, but this was not something I was aware of. Not at all.
Q: And you didn't have any relatives other places in the world?
A: No, not close relatives. Maybe distant relatives.
Q: Was there leisure time, or vacation time?
A: In the summertime we went to visit our grandparents in Tann.
Q: Resorts or other places?
A: I was a very scrawny little girl and my mother took me to a spa, to Bad Kissinen, when I was six years old, to take the baths. And from then on I always had a weight problem. We always figured she took me once too many! But this was apparently because maybe our doctor recommended it or something. No, vacations were with…
Q: Ski? Was there a ski vacation or something like that?
A: Well, no, not for my family, although we were very close to a place called Wasserkuppe, which was a very well-known ski place. My mother took me to Eisenach once to visit her Uncle Yosef and Tante Anna, and of course Eisenach for me was a place where Tannhauser existed, where the opera Tannhauser comes from. So I was very excited about it because we went to the castle and everything.
Q: Did your parents go abroad for vacation?
A: No, no.
Q: This wasn’t common.
A: It was such a different time. Times were difficult. Times were difficult in Germany. We had well-to-do cousins of my parents in Fulda and we went to visit there maybe, but there was not that kind of traveling. Not in my family, anyway. I did not know my uncle very well. I met my uncle and aunt from Nuremberg at my grandparents’ golden wedding in ’29.
Q: In the town were there any activities of youth movements? Of any kind?
A: It was a village.
Q: It was a village. Nothing of that sort.
A: I know that in Tann, which was a town, there probably was much more going. It wa s bigger community.
Q: But you weren’t aware of it.
A: No. We visited and we knew a lot of the people. I had cousins, we had family there, so we got together with the family – most of whom, by the way, got to the States.
Q: Okay. I’ll ask that when we will talk about Nazism. And Hitler Jugend, if there was any trace of that in your village, but we will get to that. So in ’33 actually, when you are eight years old, Hitler came to power, the Nazis. What of that…?
A: Oh, I remember. I remember the radio. I remember the worry. What I remember the most is New Year’s, ’34.
Q: Anti-Semitism is on the rise, obviously. Did you feel it in your own town, the tension growing? Changes?
A: I don’t feel that much. What stands out – what I want to tell you now – is because at that point I knew the tension from my parents.
Q: You could feel it?
A: Yes. There was worry. There was more worry about making a living and so forth and so on.
Q: As a kid, eight years old, what did the name Hitler mean to you? Did you understand what he stood for?
A: Look, I read newspapers.
Q: You were aware?
A: Yes, of course I was aware. I was aware.
Q: You were a small kid yet.
A: Yes, I was a small kid and it’s an awareness that you know it is. You know that he is against Jews. It doesn’t touch as much in a little village.
Q: You talked about it with your parents?
A: I’m sure we did.
Q: You don’t have any memories of that.
A: No, I don’t because it was so much a part of real life, of course. As I said, we had a radio, we read newspapers.
Q: You said that you could feel it was affecting your parents. Do you remember if there was any thought of changing, going away?
A: My parents sent my sister away a year later.
Q: A year later?
A: Yes, of course. This is what I want to tell you about. We spent New Year’s Eve, 1934, in Tann with my grandparents and the Nazis went on a rampage and broke windows in Jewish homes.
Q: In Tann.
A: In Tann. Including my grandparents’ home.
Q: Do you remember this?
A: Oh yes.
Q: While you were staying there?
A: While I was staying there.
Q: Their home also?
A: In their home.
Q: The windows were broken? They were throwing…?
A: Let me tell you. Luckily, my grandparents had a hatzer (yard). The bathroom was outside. There was a flush toilet, but it was outside. Their building and the succa was in this…the hatzer which was enclosed mostly by cement and so we went out there. The most important part of that was that my grandfather was never the same.
Q: I want to understand the situation. You were sitting at home and all of a sudden…
A: It was at night, the middle of the night. We were in bed.
Q: You went to bed and all of a sudden the windows were shattered?
A: There were windows being shattered. I don’t remember which ones. But there were windows in our house shattered.
Q: And when you got up you realized what had happened?
A: Yes. And you go outside.
Q: You saw people doing this?
A: No, no. We went into that safe place.
Q: But you knew it was the Nazis?
A: You knew what was going on. Yes, of course. You heard it. There were other Jews living not far away. It was not a Jewish neighbourhood.
Q: Do you remember your own feelings? Were you frightened? Shocked? What was your own…?
A: Of course. But what I remember is going outside. You know, when something happens, at least to me, this is just happening and you do what your father and your grandparents tell you to do. I don’t remember whether I was alone. I may have been alone there with my father. I don’t remember. I think I was. And I remember that day, the next day, that my grandfather wasn’t okay, and he was never quite himself again. He was seventy-eight years old then.
Q: It shocked him.
A: Yes.
Q: This was the first time you encountered…
A: Actually, this was the most that I personally really encountered in my home.
Q: And you went back to your own village.
A: We went home.
Q: And in your village nothing?
A: Well, not that I…
Q: Do you recall any changes in attitude of the neighbours, in school?
A: I do remember sleeping downstairs at my aunt’s house. At this point my aunt had been widowed. And sleeping downstairs was a special treat, and being in her bed and reading late at night when I wasn’t supposed to, when I heard marching. You know, marching past our house. I did not hear anything being broken.
Q: Who was marching?
A: The Nazis, the SA.
Q: With uniforms?
A: I didn’t look. I knew who they were. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember anybody personally that I knew who went around in uniform. I’m sure my parents did.
Q: There were also youth organizations? The Hitler Jugend? In the town or in school?
A: Not that I remember. Not in school, no. Not in school. I saw some young people, but I didn’t anything organized.
Q: Were you afraid to go to school in those days?
A: I don’t think so. I don’t think so.
Q: Going out into the street?
A: We probably stayed closer to home. You know, I am amazed. You are trying to get me to have memories that I don’t have, which is interesting to me. I remember being scared that night, when they marched. I don’t remember any windows being broken.
Q: Do you remember talking about it with your parents and they comforting you, saying this will pass, this is temporary? Any talk?
A: We talked about it. Nobody in a million years dreamt that it could continue.
Q: They thought it was an episode?
A: No. I think they already…In 1936 my father could no longer earn a living and that’s when…
Q: But before we get to ’36, let’s talk about ’34, when they sent your sister. How did that happen?
A: Of course. Okay, my sister is fourteen.
Q: This is when they are starting to feel pressure?
A: Yes.
Q: There were starting to be non-Jewish laws? It was before the Nuremberg laws.
A: Which we didn’t feel as much in the town where we were. There was kind of a protection in that kind of a community.
Q: You were more protected there.
A: That’s right.
Q: Your father could still work?
A: My father still travelled. I am sure that my parents spoke a lot more French in those days together, so we wouldn’t hear because, of course, you were trying to protect your children. You didn’t want to frighten them. Again, as I said, the fact that I come from a warm home probably protected us very much. My uncle wrote to my father that he was sending his daughter, who was born in ’16…
Q: Where was he living?
A: My uncle lived in Nuremberg. They had two children.
Q: He was your father’s brother?
A: Eldest. His eldest brother. He wrote to him that he was sending his daughter, who had finished high school, and he was sending her to England, to some kind of schooling. She was born in ’16.
Q: Because of the pressure? Or did he plan to do that in any event?
A: Of course. No, no. I assume.
Q: This was due to the situation.
A: She was already an adult. She was already eighteen years old.
Q: But it was due to the situation.
A: And he was sending Irmgot and he told my parents about the Kindertransport. Now, the first Kindertransport left, as far as I know, in November ’34. My sister left in December of ’34.
Q: So he told your father…?
A: He was suggesting that there is such a thing. He told my parents that there is such a thing.
Q: Okay, it wasn’t known then as the Kindertransport.
A: Oh yes it was. I knew that I was leaving with a kindertransport.
Q: That’s what they called it then?
A: Oh yes. Kindertransport is moving children. I am going to give you a book to read.
Q: What I mean is, it was done in very quite ways.
A: Okay, let me quote a letter which you maybe you can get from OTC. I have a letter, copy from a very important person in the States, writing to another very important person in the States – Jewish, both Jewish – to please quietly start looking for Jewish homes. This is April 1934. It’s early. Looking for Jewish homes, that they were trying to get children out, and this is not to be talked about in public.
Q: Right.
A: It was never known. Nobody knew.
Q: I think, if I understand it correctly, and correct me if I don’t, that it was in two ways that they wanted to keep it quiet. First, in the States, because of the problems of immigration and public opinion about taking people in, especially after the Depression and all that, and also in terms of Germany. Germany at that stage was interested in encouraging people to leave.
A: They didn’t mind, they didn’t mind people leaving.
Q: Right, but also quietly.
A: I went to Stuttgart to get my visa, my American visa.
Q: At that point the Nazis were interested in encouraging people to leave.
A: Yes, so that wasn’t the problem. In the States they wanted to keep it quiet because of isolationism and anti-Semitism.
Q: So your uncle was informing your father about this possibility.
A: Yes.
Q: And your parents were considering it.
A: My parents considered it, yes, and my sister left in December, right after (?).
Q: How did they explain it to you, to her? Do you remember?
A: No, I don’t remember, but we talked about it openly. Look, we knew the situation, but you talked about it. I think my uncle read to my father, you know, “You send her to the States. She’ll get an education.” A couple of years. You know, nobody dreamt in their worst nightmares that something would happen as it did. So that is also how we, I guess, talked about it at home.
Q: And you remember that?
A: Yes, I remember that. Sure.
Q: How did you feel about her going? Were you jealous?
A: No, I wasn’t jealous. I was too young. I was nine. She was fourteen.
Q: Right. How did you feel about it? Do you remember any feelings about her leaving? What did you know about the States at that point?
A: Well, (German). That was “Wonderland”! That was exciting!
Q: It was an exciting place.
A: Sure, of course.
Q: Do you remember her reaction to the suggestion? Did she resent it? She accepted? She was happy about it?
A: As far as I remember, she accepted it.
Q: Do you remember talking to her about it?
A: No. Look, I was little. A fourteen-year-old, a teenager, talking to her nine-year-old sister about things like that? Beside, we had trouble getting…
Q: Together, along.
A: Yes, she blamed me. I don’t know what she blamed me for!
Q: And do you remember how your mother felt about it?
A: Oh, come in. My parents didn’t tell me about it. When you think about sending your child…
Q: You don’t know what went through their minds.
A: They were so courageous.
Q: Letting her go. So do you remember the day that she left?
A: Sure.
Q: Can you describe that? We’ll talk about the day you left.
A: No, I can’t describe it, but sure I remember it.
Q: You went with her to…? They took her where to?
A: I think my father took her to Hamburg. I had family in Hamburg. As I told you she wouldn’t kiss me goodbye. That’s what I remember.
Q: Did she go straight from Hamburg to the States, or through other countries?
A: Yes, she went to the States. These Kindertransport were only to the States.
Q: Straight. Not through Spain or Belgium or…
A: No, that was much later. Some of the later children, came in the ‘40s, came by…
Q: With the ship, right?
A: Yes. Large German ship.
Q: Where did she go to?
A: Well, she ended up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which is a couple of hours from New York, and hour or so from Philadelphia today. And she went into a Jewish home.
Q: Foster home?
A: A Jewish foster home. Her foster mother was in her 60s, with grown children.
Q: What was their name?
A: Their name was Benyof. A Russian family.
Q: Is it the author David Benyof? That family?
A: No. I checked, because I am very close to the Benyofs. No. He changed his name from something else to Benyof. No. I checked recently. I came across an article in the paper.
Q: So she leaves…
A: And she writes to us.
Q: What was the feeling after she left, at home? Were the parents kind of…was it a feeling of relief, that at least she is there?
A: I have no idea. Parents don’t tell, don’t let you know, tried not to let you know these things.
Q: What do you remember of these letters? She was happy?
A: Oh, the letters. She was alright. Look, you are big enough when you go that if you are unhappy, that you don’t write this to your parents. Okay? You write about all the new experiences. She now moved into a Conservative home and she wrote about…she wrote about going to synagogue on Shabbat. In the beginning she didn’t write about driving to it. She wrote about people throwing their socks and stocking away when there was a hole in them.
Q: Which you were not used to.
A: Yes. She wrote about going to a movie. We didn’t have movies where we came from. She wrote about school. My sister was a good student, a serious student.
Q: Did she know English before?
A: No.
Q: So she had to learn the language. She wrote about how she was accepted, how she felt?
A: She wrote, as I did later on, what doesn’t bother your parents.
Q: Okay, so she left and your life continued there.
A: You continue going to school. Life goes on.
Q: But in ’35 we have the Nuremberg Laws.
A: But I don’t remember that.
Q: Everything is escalating in terms of anti-Jewish laws.
A: Yes. That’s probably when my father lost his living, making his parnassa.
Q: He couldn’t continue.
A: But these are not things that I know about.
Q: So once he lost his job what happened?
A: Okay, what happened? Well, he was a private businessman and he lost…he couldn’t make a living anymore for whatever reason.
Q: He had savings?
A: I have no idea. We lived, by Schmalnau standards, we lived okay.
Q: What happened once he didn’t have his job?
A: Well, my parents decided to move to Frankfurt and they got a job as house parents in a boys’ children’s home.
Q: Jewish children’s home?
A: Of course.
Q: It was still running?
A: It was needed. We moved.
Q: What year was this?
A: October ’36.
Q: So it was two years after your sister left, one year after Nuremberg Laws.
A: Nuremberg Laws mean nothing to me, nothing at all. I maybe knew about them, but…
Q: You didn’t feel it in the village.
A: No, no. So my parents got this job as house parents, but what happens to us? So we went to a girls’ children’s home.
Q: So you left Schmalnau and the house, what, you closed it? What happened to you house?
A: You know what? I don’t know.
Q: Do you remember what you took with you?
A: Sure. You took your personal belongings with you.
Q: You took everything?
A: My parents had a little place…
Q: They moved because they had to make a living.
A: They had to make a living and they couldn’t find any work.
Q: Do you remember leaving the town?
A: Oh yes. I remember leaving, but I don’t remember what we took. I took my personal things.
Q: How did you feel about it?
A: I was sad.
Q: You were sad. It was hard.
A: Sure. Sure it was hard.
Q: Do you remember the reaction of neighbours, the Catholics?
A: No, I don’t remember.
Q: Do you remember any change in their attitude during these years?
A: If it was, maybe it was gradual. We still got along with our neighbours. I still got along with my girlfriend.
Q: What happened to the rest of the family that lived with you? You talked about your aunt. Your grandparents.
A: My grandparents weren’t alive anymore.
Q: They weren’t alive anymore.
A: No, my grandparents died when I was very young.
Q: But you had an aunt, you said.
A: My aunt, you know, my aunt also got a job, but I don’t remember where.
Q: Not in Frankfurt.
A: No.
Q: Did you have relatives in Frankfurt?
A: No.
Q: It was just where they could get a job
A: My aunt had a retarded child and you know what? I don’t know exactly, I don’t remember now, which is strange because we had a good relationship. Some of the memories are difficult.
Q: Okay. I want to ask you. Your sister went to the States. Your father lost his job. Things are getting really rough. There is no thought of leaving Germany? Either to the United States, where your sister was, or to Palestine?
A: You know what? I don’t understand it to this day. But of course a lot of people that I know never discovered until after Kristallnacht.
Q: ’38.
A: After Kristallnacht, that they should leave.
Q: But Nazis were at that stage…
A: Yes, of course.
Q: Encouraging people to leave. And there were a lot – maybe not a lot – but there were incidents of people committing suicide. Things like that. Were you aware of that? No.
A: Possibly. I knew that there were tragic things going on, of course. I was an eleven-year-old.
Q: Right. But from the close family, your relatives, people were immigrating?
A: Look, there were a lot of people who left. My grandmother’s sister had nine children, two of whom went to the States in the late ‘20s, and they brought all of their siblings to America.
Q: What I mean is, your sister was there already. They didn’t think of following her, or it wasn’t possible?
A: I don’t know why. I don’t know. My father in the end couldn’t get a visa because he was blind in one eye. But that I don’t really know because again, you are not aware of these things at this age. Why they were willing to send me, but didn’t think of going themselves. That’s right.
Q: Is it something that, as an adult, later years, is it something that you thought about? Did you have any anger feelings about that? Frustration?
A: No. Look, we put a lot of that away. I once had some counseling for a particular problem, for brief. And my counselor thought I might do well to go into it more profoundly, into my life more profoundly. I said, “Oh no.” It stayed. I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Q: So you moved to Frankfurt. What was it like to move?
A: Oh, Frankfurt was wonderful.
Q: Where did you live?
A: We lived in a children’s home, a delightful place. You know, you say, “Oh, how sad.” It wasn’t. It was a delightful place.
Q: Your parents ran the place?
A: No. We lived in a girls’ children’s home. Not near my parents. And we saw them once a week, on Sundays. My parents were in one part of Frankfurt, we were in another.
Q: What were their duties?
A: Their duties were, they were house parents.
Q: For the boys.
A: For the boys there were two different homes.
Q: They were Orthodox?
A: Yes. Not Orthodox. Suddenly I am going to an ultra-Orthodox Hebrew day school.
Q: So you and your sister were put in the girls’…and they lived with the boys.
A: That’s right.
Q: And who took care of you there?
A: Oh, it was a wonderful place.
Q: You liked it? But it was a big change from living with your family in a small village.
A: I am a very adaptable woman.
Q: Since then? Good. You liked it?
A: We had a wonderful time.
Q: You didn’t miss, on a daily basis, your parents?
A: Yes, of course we missed our parents, but I think what happened at the time, I think orphanages, what used to be orphanages, were turned into children’s homes because my parents were not the only ones that were in these circumstances.
Q: So they were employees of the Jewish community actually, your parents?
A: I don’t know whose employees they were. I really don’t know.
Q: Did they have any contact with general Jewish committee of German Jews, Leo Baeck? People like that?
A: My parents were trying to earn a living.
Q: To make it.
A: Yes. They were trying to earn a living. They were trying to be able to support us. I don’t know. There are many things that children don’t know what their parents thought.
Q: So in this orphanage, or children’s house, how many girls were there?
A: I don’t remember, but it was delightful place, with a woman who looked, you know, so forbidding and was a wonderful woman.
Q What was her name? Do you remember?
A: Frau Ober.
Q: She was in charge.
A: Yes! With the accoutrements, you know.
Q: And you lived, how many girls in a room? It was comfortable?
A: Oh yes. Look, we had a good education. Suddenly I am in this very Orthodox (?) alshuler where I am learning Hebrew. A Hebrew day school.
Q: That’s where you started Hebrew?
A: Yes. And we went to the most Orthodox synagogue. The Breuer Synagogue, yes, which anybody who is German will know what I am talking about. But it was not an unhappy life. We again celebrated holidays. We did things together because a lot of us were in the same boat and I don’t even remember our telling each other what. You would think that I would remember that. I do not. I don’t know how extraordinary I am among people that you have interviewed, that I don’t remember. I don’t know.
Q: We will take a second break. (end of side)
Q: So in this children’s home, where you were staying, you felt kind of sheltered, protected from what was going on outside, in Germany?
A: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Q: And how often did you see our parents?
A: We saw them at least once a week.
Q: They came to see you?
A: Yes. Or somebody took us, we met.
Q: Did it bring you and your sister closer, that now you were staying?
A: I was older than she was.
Q: You took responsibility? Did you feel like you were the oldest, you were taking care of her?
A: Yes. I think that in the years that we were growing up, my older sister’s personality and mine, of course we were very, very different, and I think that was more difficult. Yes, I think so. I took her under my wing. But I was not very much the older sister.
Q: And you said you remember these times in Frankfurt – it was a half a year – and you say you felt comfortable, even happy?
A: I knew already that I was probably going to go to the States.
Q: You were aware of that?
A: I was aware. I don’t know exactly when the decision was made, but I was aware, yes, although I did not feel particularly temporary there.
Q: Now, we are talking ’36 when you were in Frankfurt. What did you hear about what was going around with the Nazis, with Hitler? Did you know?
A: I knew, but you know what? I must have absorbed it as whatever and I don’t go around...we weren’t wearing things that said Jude yet.
Q: There was nothing of that.
A: No. That makes a difference.
Q: Did you hear the radio there in the home?
A: Yes, we heard the radio and we knew what was going on.
Q: Now, I am trying to see you…it’s ’36. You are eleven.
A: I am eleven and I have what I leave (?).
Q: So you are about eleven. When you hear this man Hitler, when you read about it in the newspaper, what does it mean for you? What do you think of this man?
A: It is something I have been living with since 1933.
Q: But what do you think of this man?
A: I don’t know…I know what is going on. I know how many people have been arrested. In the meantime I had a cousin who was arrested for being a Communist.
Q: Because they were persecuted just as well as the Jews.
A: I personally otherwise did not know personally people who had been sent to Dachau or one of those places.
Q: People were sent in those days.
A: But this was so much part of my life that you go on. I was with the Jewish community. We went someplace, we were with adults. We went places. As an eleven-year-old in a big city, you didn’t go by yourself.
Q: But you go out of the…?
A: Yes, I know, but you didn’t go out by yourself.
Q: No, but in the children’s home did you go out on journeys?
A: Oh yes.
Q: Did you go out on the street?
A: We had a garden. We had a place.
Q: But you were still protected. I mean you were not on the street where…
A: In a big city you didn’t go anywhere by yourself.
Q: But you didn’t go to public gardens. Things were starting to be forbidden for Jews. You were not allowed to go to certain places.
A: Look, we went to the opera. We were supposed to go to the opera.
Q: And you wanted to say something?
A: And I saw my first movie.
Q: So you were still able to go to these places.
A: Yes. I saw Laurel and Hardy.
Q: Do you remember any incidents on the street? Anti-Semitism that you felt? In Frankfurt.
A: I don’t remember. Possibly there were, but I don’t remember. We were not being identified yet in the way that somewhat later you were.
Q: And your parents at this stage were trying to make it.
A: Look, my mother already looked older in 1934. My mother looked so much older. When I think that my mother was younger when I left than my younger daughter is…
Q: Trying to imagine what they went through.
A: Yes. You don’t know. But you don’t tell your children things like that.
Q: I was asking you about Hitler and the Nazis, but do you recall at any stage…you said you took it as “that’s life”. That’s just what you knew.
A: No. I mean we knew he was a threat to us. We knew they didn’t want Jews.
Q: Right, but do you recall any moment when you are asking yourself or adults, “Why is he doing this? Why are they doing to us?”
A: Maybe I did, but I don’t remember.
Q: Thinking about it, “What have I done that I deserve this?”
A: I don’t know. I don’t remember doing that.
Q: And anything more about the Jewish community in Frankfurt that you remember?
A: Frankfurt is a very strong Jewish community and suddenly we were in the very Orthodox part of it.
Q: So I am talking about your experience in six months. You mentioned the synagogue.
A: It was a very beautiful synagogue and a very large community.
Q: Other things about the Jewish community?
A: No. We still went into shops. Not much, but we did.
Q: You could go?
A: Look, Frankfurt is a beautiful place. Frankfurt is a very ancient city and yes, we went to see the ancient parts, yes.
Q: And you could go to the shops at that point?
A: Yes, I remember the ancient parts. I don’t remember that we went into shops very much, but we did some site-seeing. You know, going in the old Roman city, sure.
Q: Okay, so the next thing you know, that they are sending you also to America.
A: Yes, and I was very excited because I was going to go to America and I was going to see my sister.
Q: First of all, it didn’t come as a shock because your sister went a few years before.
A: I don’t remember just when we started working for it, but I did know.
Q: How did it come about?
A: Well, as a result of my sister being there my parents already knew.
Q: They had to assign you and there was a waiting list?
A: I don’t know.
Q: Do you know how the techniques of it worked?
A: No. I would only find this out from today from what the organizations said.
Q: What do you know today about it?
A: I’m not even sure whether it was HIAS, for example. All I know today is that there were so many organizations…
Q: It was HIAS…
A: I know from One Thousand Children.
Q: GJCA.
A: The American Quakers were involved.
Q: Were helping.
A: There were Jewish organizations in Germany that were involved.
Q: There was the Jewish…for German children.
A: That’s right. But I don’t know. You know, as a child you don’t know what is going on, what your parents have to sign.
Q: But today do you know? You don’t know. A: I don’t know all the details, but I’ve read a book, which I’m going to give you the name, by Judy Taylor Bauman. Have you read it?
Q: I know about it.
A: All the tears I’ve never shed I shed when I read that unemotional book.
Q: This is about your experience actually.
A: No, it’s about the brakes that were put on every time. Every time they were going to change the laws, somebody in the State Department or in Congress put the brakes on. That really hurt.
Q: It was very difficult in the States to do this. But you don’t know the details of how your parents.
A: I don’t details at all.
Q: You think there was a waiting list? You would assume that there was a lot of pressure, a lot of parents would want their…
A: I don’t know. Look, I know so many people who only left in ’39. So many people. Of course here I know people who were Zionists and who came here early.
Q: And you know that Jewish families in the States, they would have to guarantee.
A: I knew that they were looking for a home for me.
Q: And the general thing is that they had to provide for the children until, I think, age twenty-five?
A: They got a stipend. Eighteen.
Q: Eighteen or twenty-one?
A: I think eighteen. I would have though eighteen, till high school is over.
Q: Right. They had to take care of them, their education. They were responsible for all that.
A: But the organizations – I’ll tell you a little bit about what happened to me.
Q: So what next? You were registered and they told you that you were going to leave soon? How soon?
A: I don’t remember how much time I had, but my mother took me to Hamburg. Anyway, I had to go to Stuttgart to…Listen, I have to remember, when I think of what my grandchildren react to, what was exciting about it. I went on a schnellzug (?), I went on an express, wonderful train – I loved trains – with my father to Stuttgart. It was exciting?
Q: For you everything seemed exciting. You were going to the States.
A: Yes,.
Q: So it wasn’t very difficult from that point of view, that they had to convince you, that you didn’t want to go. You were enthusiastic about this.
A: Enthusiastic, look, with holding back, no doubt, all the feelings having to do with leaving your parents.
Q: But thinking that you are doing it for a while until things would get better. You would get a good education.
A: Or something like that.
Q: And then you were going to come home. This was like a long summer camp or something or that sort.
A: Or something like that. Maybe.
Q: That was in your mind.
A: Yes. Something like that when I left.
Q: You didn’t realize, at that point, as a kid…
A: No, of course you don’t realize.
Q: But you didn’t realize how things were so bad in Germany. The magnitude of it.
A: They were getting worse. The magnitude got much worse the next year. You understand?
Q: This is ’37 we are talking about.
A: This is ’37, right.
Q: So tell us about…
A: Well, so my father took me to Stuttgart where I got my visa and of course I got my passport and a very formal picture taken of me. These are all very impressive things for eleven-year-old girls. In a very dressy dress.
Q: You were not frightened even of the unknown, this America?
A: Maybe yes, maybe yes. I seem to be very good about sticking things someplace else.
Q: You knew at this point that you were going also to where your sister was going to be, or it wasn’t…
A: I was going to live near her.
Q: So it was known from the beginning.
A: I was going to live her, not the same place.
Q: But near. It wasn’t that you were going to St. Louis now.
A: That’s right. I was going to live near her. Anyway, my mother took me to Hamburg.
Q: So your mother took you to Hamburg. You said goodbye to your father and sister?
A: I said goodbye to my father and sister.
Q: What do you remember of that?
A: I don’t remember anything. Nothing. Nothing.
Q: Your little sister – did she want to go too?
A: You know what? I don’t remember anything and I’m a big girl. I was eleven and half years old. I mean, I have a daughter who remembers things when she was a year and a half.
Q: So you don’t remember parting from your father and sister.
A: No. What I remember is, I visited my Tante Ela living in Hamburg and her son, my cousin, whom I knew well, older cousin, was no longer home. He was elsewhere. And my grandmother lived with her, so I was able to say goodbye to my grandmother.
Q: This was the grandmother from Tann?
A: From Tann. That’s right.
Q: They were still alive.
A: My grandfather died in ’35.
Q: But your grandmother.
A: My grandmother was alive. My grandmother…in retrospect, I was always so happy that she died of pneumonia six months later. I was always so happy that she didn’t go through that. So my mother took me to the boat.
Q: What boat was it?
A: The Hanza. German…big German ship. And I don’t remember our escort. You know that? A woman.
Q: Do you remember what you were taking from home?
A: Let me see. A brown blanket, which the mice got at only a couple of years ago, outside in the closet.
Q: You still kept it all these years? From home?
A: Oh yes. An inherited sweater, scarf and hat, which I inherited from my cousin Irmgot from Nuremberg, which I inherited from my sister because she had outgrown it, which I took with me. This scarf I still had when I made aliyah and found here the daughter of the people from the factory that had made it. Here on the kibbutz. Anyway. I brought a couple of favourite books. My mother had things made for me – new pyjamas and clothing and stuff. Just ordinary things.
Q: Something very personal?
A: A piece of jewellery that my mother put into toothpaste. Ten marks – all I could take.
Q: There was a restriction about that?
A: Oh yes. That’s all you could take out. Now, if I’d been an adult, with furniture, I could have take that out in a lift, but money you could not. An album with pictures. All the pictures except my father’s father, I’m sorry to say, which I was not aware of at the time. Pictures of everybody. And just, you know, my mother supplied me with. Things I might need, which, of course, were so different from what anybody had in the States. I didn’t cry when I said goodbye to my mother.
Q: Did you know English?
A: I’d had some lessons.
Q: They prepared you.
A: A little bit, a little bit. Very, very little, very beginning, yes. Very little.
Q: Did your mother talk to you and instruct you how to behave?
A: I think she did, yes.
Q: Do you have any recollection of that?
A: Yes, but y mother did. I don’t remember exactly when and what, but yes, about always being…
Q: You were in a very, very sensitive age.
A: Oh yes. When I see now in my grandchildren, it is a very…
Q: Turning point.
A: We think it is an easier age than later, but in many ways it isn’t. I remember her when she was eleven and a half. I remember my granddaughter.
Q: So she took you to the boat. Did you know anybody else?
A: No, I didn’t know anybody else.
Q: You met there other children?
A: I met there other children.
Q: How many?
A: I think we were eleven.
Q: All in all eleven children?
A: That’s all.
Q: Where were they from? Do you know?
A: All over.
Q: All over Germany?
A: Yes, Germany. I was among the younger ones. There were more teenagers.
Q: You were one of the youngest. And you say you are leaving your mother. You don’t remember…
A: I didn’t cry.
Q: Your mother – was she crying?
A: She didn’t cry.
Q: She held herself.
A: I didn’t cry. I was excited. You don’t realize.
Q: You think that also for her she thought, okay, the bad years will pass and we’ll get together?
A: Yes. Sure.
Q: She couldn’t have known what was awaiting.
A: Look, there are many people, people from Iraq sent their kids to Israel.
Q: That’s the way she felt probably. Who was escorting you?
A: I don’t remember her name.
Q: She was from the States?
A: No, we had – I’m trying to remember. She certainly spoke German.
Q: Because sometimes the escorts came from the States.
A: I think at Ellis Island somebody English-speaking, met us, a social worker.
Q: A social worker. From HIAS, you think?
A: Probably. I’ve never been able to figure out what organization from Philadelphia. They were in charge of me, the irgun, the organization from Philadelphia. My social worker came from Philadelphia.
Q: Sending away the kids was not…the parents did not have to pay anything, right? As far as you know.
A: I doubt it.
Q: It was voluntary.
A: I would think so.
Q: The Jewish organizations paid.
A: I don’t think my parents were in very good shape at this point. It’s funny how we didn’t talk about money.
Q: Obviously your father lost his job.
A: I don’t think we got paid for our house.
Q: We’ll talk about that. So you got on the boat with eleven other kids.
A: And it was beautiful and it was big.
Q: What was the range of ages? You said you were one of the youngest.
A: I think the oldest was sixteen. I think. Yes. I don’t remember. One of the reasons I don’t remember – I had one meal on the boat in the English Channel and I became violently seasick and I was violently seasick until the day out of New York.
Q: How long did the whole trip take?
A: Eight days.
Q: Eight days, and you were sick.
A: Isn’t that terrible?
Q: Some kids had memories of the fantastic food.
A: Oh, I did. That first evening. I had never seen a grapefruit before. It was extraordinary. I was looking forward to it.
Q: Ice cream, jello.
A: One of the terrible things about being seasick was not having any of it.
Q: There wasn’t in Germany a shortage of food at that time.
A: It was a different kind of food. This was luxury.
Q: Now, the people around you in the boat, did they know who you were?
A: I don’t remember. I would assume so. It was a German ship, but I don’t remember. That. I told you, I even don’t remember much about the kids because I was so seasick. I managed to forget most of that.
Q: So you don’t remember the kids. There wasn’t enough time to become…
A: From OTC I got a list of who we were.
Q: The eleven that were with you.
A: Yes.
Q: I thought you got a list of all the thousand…what was it? A thousand four hundred?
A: No, I don’t have a list of them, but the people were on the list.
Q: But all in all there were about a thousand four hundred?
A: There were about two hundred and fifty that later on came by way of the Pyrenees and Lisbon.
Q: Right. And also a few, very few who came with the English kids, but very few. Later on.
A: The English kids – there were ten thousand that came to England.
Q: No, I am not talking about the Kindertransport to England. There was a period that the British were sending English kids to the States.
A: That I didn’t even know. That was not with this…
Q: That was much later, during the war. So you arrived in New York.
A: We arrived at Ellis Island.
Q: The one who escorted you was taking care?
A: I have a cousin who was there earlier, who met me at the boat.
Q: In New York?
A: They were able to visit. In the meantime, of course, the papers and check on health and so forth and so on.
Q: Do you remember that?
A: Very vaguely, very vaguely, because we were sort of protected.
Q: Do you remember Ellis Island?
A: We didn’t even get off, I don’t think.
Q: So you were on the boat.
A: We were very protected because we were a group and our social worker took care of the paperwork. A cousin met me at the boat briefly, whom I saw later.
Q: And you knew this cousin from home?
A: Yes.
Q: A girl?
A: Man.
Q: What was his name?
A: Eddie. Oh no. I’m sorry. He didn’t meet me…No, it was my cousin Eric, who was two years older than I. My cousin from Nuernberg, whom I’d only met…oh, what a nice boy. And he met me. He was staying temporarily…
Q: It made it easier on you. You saw someone familiar.
A: Yes. His parents didn’t make it to the States until ’39, though. He was staying with…I’m trying to remember who he was staying with and I don’t remember. But he was not part of the Kindertransport. He had come earlier. He was killed at Monte Casino in Italy, in the American army. Very painful. Very painful memory. I met my social worker. We were taken to a hotel in New York.
Q: What was your first impression of New York?
A: It was remarkable.
Q: You were shocked?
A: Well, of course we had seen pictures.
Q: Overwhelmed?
A: Yes, of course. But of course there was so much going on that you could hardly grasp what was going on.
Q: And still enthusiastic or starting to be homesick at this point?
A: I don’t remember. I knew that I was going to be seeing my sister in a couple of days. I don’t remember. It was exciting because there was so much going on.
Q: Also a feeling of relief that you left Germany?
A: No. I don’t think so. No. I don’t think so. I don’t remember. I cannot believe how many times I have to tell you I don’t remember. Interesting.
Q: It’s okay.
A: In the morning a social worker took me to Philadelphia and from Philadelphia I was taken the next day…there used to be tram that went from Philadelphia to Allentown, which no longer exists, and we went about an hour’s trip to Allentown. I got off the tram and a young girl looked at me and said, “Are you Edith Heilbronn’s sister?” A classmate of hers, or somebody she’d known in high school. I didn’t realize we looked that much alike, but we did.
Q: She recognized you. You were able to communicate in English at this point?
A: Oh, a few words here and there.
Q: But you understood what was going on?
A: Yes. A little bit. Look, it was very hard.
Q: The social worker spoke German or you had to communicate from the beginning only in English?
A: No, she spoke some German.
Q: And of the eleven kids, everyone was spread.
A: I have no idea where anybody…I never stayed in touch with anybody.
Q: But nobody came with you to Philadelphia.
A: I would assume that some of the older kids probably stayed in touch with one another. You know, when you are a teenager and so forth.
Q: But no one came with you to Philadelphia.
A: No. Look, I came already to a chosen place because my sister was there. And my new foster home…
Q: What was their name?
A: Their name was Salzman, Louis and Mary Salzman. Immigrants from Poland years ago.
Q: How old were they?
A: You know, I’m not sure. I don’t remember. I would say they were in their middle thirties. My sister was with a family who made furs. They were furriers and they found this family who worked for them. This man worked for them, and they were willing to take a foster child.
Q: They had children of their own?
A: They had a son a little bit younger than I.
Q: One son?
A: One son and a daughter. A little younger than I was.
Q: Both of them?
A: No, he was younger. He was a year younger, I think, and she was about three years younger.
Q: So you were the oldest. So they had two children.
A: They had two children. I think he was eleven and she, I think, was nine. Murray was eleven and Shirley was nine.
Q: What do you remember of the first day you walked into this house and met them? How did they receive you? What did they say to you?
A: They had a nice house. I don’t remember. Okay. I’ll tell you right now that this was not the ideal family for me. Nothing terrible, by the way. They were perfectly decent, nice people, but we were not a good match. I was not a good match for them, for her particularly, and she was not a good match for me.
Q: Because?
A: First of all, they…I once overheard her telling somebody that the German Jews had it coming to them. Look, the Eastern Europeans suffered from the German immigrants, the Shtolz German immigrants. But actually it was a Jewish home with little tarbut (culture). Q: Can you describe the first day that you were there?
A: No, I cannot remember the first day. Everything happened so much…
Q: The first night?
A: No, nothing. I was in a room with the little girl and of course I was exotic, somebody from abroad. You know, for children.
Q: The apartment – how big was it?
A: It was a house. It was a house in a Jewish neighbourhood. Fairly new houses. Three-bedroom, nice, you know, living room, dining room, decent kitchen. I am talking about the ‘30s.
Q: Kind of a suburban…?
A: No, it was in the west end of Allentown, which at that point…not the very plush west end, but perfectly nice west end, with a lot of people in the same age group and moving in the same…A lot of Jewish kids in the school.
Q: And their English was fluent?
A: Oh, their English was fluent.
Q: They had an American accent?
A: I don’t remember.
Q: Did they have an American accent?
A: No.
Q: Polish.
A: No. She particularly had an accent. And I understood Yiddish because I understood German.
Q: So they spoke with you English?
A: Oh, English, of course, yes.
Q: English or Yiddish?
A: No.
Q: Among themselves they spoke what?
A: The Yiddish helped me a little bit.
Q: But the husband and wife, between themselves.
A: They spoke German most of the time, yes. I mean, they spoke English.
Q: But with the children?
A: The children were born there.
Q: Yes, but they spoke with them English or Yiddish?
A: English. They were born there. I don’t know just exactly when they came.
Q: They had other relatives also?
A: They had some relatives in the country. I didn’t know them well.
Q: And he worked for the furriers and she?
A: She was home. She was a homemaker. And the kids…it was a neighbourhood of lots of kids, a lot of youngish families.
Q: And they were what? Orthodox too?
A: No.
Q: Conservative? Traditional?
A: No, not very. But it was a kosher home.
Q: Shabbat?
A: Nothing much.
Q: So it was very different from your upbringing.
A: Yes, of course very different.
Q: They didn’t go to synagogue?
A: On the holidays. This is what is mostly true in a Conservative community in the States.
Q: When did you see your sister for the first time?
A: Well, first of all, my sister met me…I got off the tram and my sister met me.
Q: Oh, she did? You didn’t mention.
A: She met me, yes, yes. But this first thing is, my sister hadn’t arrived. I think the tram came early or something. My sister met me.
Q: Do you remember anything of that?
A: Oh yes, that I remember. It was a very warm…very emotional, yes, although, as I say, we are not…
Q: How was she? How did you find her after three years? It was three years.
A: Well, my sister was already a young woman.
Q: Had she changed?
A: My sister was fourteen and she was now sixteen and a half.
Q: So she had changed and you had changed, but did you see her as an American young girl?
A: Well, of course, we spoke German together.
Q: Yes, but the way you saw her.
A: Shortly after, as I saw her with friends and saw her in her family, yes, of course. Her English was impeccable. We lost our accents very fast because we weren’t with our families.
Q: As far as you know, was she happy with her foster family?
A: Reasonably. I think so.
Q: More than you were?
A: I’ll tell you. It was very different. I wasn’t unhappy, by the way. I’ll get into that in a minute. Her foster mother was then in her late sixties.
Q: So she was much older than your foster mother.
A: Yes. And she was of the old school. Now, she had grown children. Not only grown children – really grown children. I mean, adults. And two of them were bachelors, okay, living at home, with their own apartment upstairs. Okay, the fur industry was downstairs, and then there was the home and then there was the apartment upstairs.
Q: So the foster family of your sister – they were well off?
A: Yes.
Q: And your foster family was less well off?
A: Less well off.
Q: Now, if you know today or were you aware then why they were doing it? Why they chose to become a foster family?
A: Look, I think they were perfectly willing.
Q: Do you think it was for economic reasons?
A: To this day I don’t know what the stipend was.
Q: But you think it was for economic reasons or something in their personality? They were humanistic?
A: I don’t know. I think they were asked to do it. And I’ve never found out…I don’t think I’ve ever found out really, the details.
Q: You didn’t know what the amount of the stipend was.
A: No.
Q: But were you aware that they were getting money?
A: I knew there was a stipend, but it was not money with a capital “M”.
Q: It didn’t bother you in any way.
A: No. Look, it was a home. These people were perfectly willing to…It’s just that…I don’t know whether she ever complained about me and I don’t know that I complained about her. But I was there for a year and four months. I think my social worker became aware…Look, in many ways it was alright. I never felt that there was anything wrong.
Q: But there was a gap.
A: But it wasn’t a good match, which I discovered many years later when I took a Cuban foster child.
Q: We’ll talk about it. You’ll tell us about that. Try to describe the first days, if you can remember.
A: The first days were just so amazing.
Q: You were shocked?
A: In every which way. Shocked, not necessarily in a bad way. Look, you had all these people who think, you know, here is this child from another country. Just remember, this was a time when very few people were coming from another country.
Q: So you were an attraction.
A: Yes, I was an attraction. I was the only non-American child in my school.
Q: There weren’t other refugees or kids?
A: No. This was the very beginning.
Q: You were still in elementary school?
A: Okay, I had just finished fifth grade in April. I finished fifth grade.
Q: So you arrived, what time of the year was this?
A: April.
Q: So it was still the school year.
A: I had just finished fifth grade.
Q: But in the States they were still studying.
A: I spoke very little English.
Q: So immediately they took you to school?
A: Very soon. I spoke very little English. They didn’t know what to do with me.
Q: Do you remember entering the school class?
A: Oh, I remember. Look, everybody was very nice and of course my English was very…
Q: It was a Jewish school?
A: No. It was a public school. It was an elementary and junior high school.
Q: Who were the other students?
A: All kinds, with a fairly large Jewish population because it was in that part of the city.
Q: Afro-American?
A: No. Come on. Afro-American in the west end of Allentown? Nothing. I was the only foreign child in the school.
Q: All WASP?
A: No, not WASP. Probably Jewish and Protestant, yes, because there were Catholic school. They didn’t quite know what to do with me. The whole school, the principal. I am now going to take you through this. They decided to put me in first grade and the kids were like this and the chairs…
Q: And you?
A: Well…
Q: Were you insulted by this?
A: No, no. Look, I spoke no English.
Q: So you weren’t offended.
A: Everybody looked at me, you know. The chairs were awfully little. So I spent two days in first grade.
Q: And you weren’t offended?
A: I don’t think so.
Q: Treating me like I am a baby or something?
A: No, but they didn’t quite know what to do. But I wasn’t offended, or I don’t remember being offended because I became successful. I spent a couple of days in first grade and then they put me for a few days in second grade and so on and so forth.
Q: Till you reached…
A: And in June I finished fifth grade with the rest of the kids. And a year later, in sixth grade, I won the spelling bee. I was the best speller in school.
Q: So you were a very good student.
A: Yes, I was a very good student.
Q: And you said you had the ability to adapt yourself.
A: Yes, I was a very good student. Look, I’m still something very different. People were very nice.
Q: Any…in the States.
A: This was a school with a lot of Jewish kids. So there was no problem with that.
Q: No anti-Semitism.
A: And it was still teachers of the old school and very helpful.
Q: You had certain expectations. You had this fantasy that you were going to America. The reality? There was a gap there? You were disappointed or it fulfilled your expectations?
A: Look, there was so much going on. You had all these kids in the neighbourhood when they met you. I was twelve years old, twelve and a half years old. There were parties and they were playing “spinning the bottle”. Somebody wants to kiss you. You know? I’m a little overweight little twelve-and-a-half-year-old, I might add.
Q: And you became socially involved with the kids?
A: I was different.
Q: Kids came up to visit you or you went to their home?
A: Yes, but I was different and I knew I was different. I was different.
Q: How was their attitude toward…They allowed you to do things, the parents, or they were…? They were strict with you?
A: No, not very.
Q: There was a point that you said to yourself, “They can’t tell me what to do. They are not really my parents”?
A: And if I really felt that way…I was smart enough to know that you didn’t do that.
Q: But do you remember any feelings of that sort? They are not really my parents. They can’t tell me what to do.
A: No. In that respect they weren’t strict. Really. Look, suddenly I was going to the movies on Saturday afternoon, right?
Q: You liked it?
A: Oh sure. There were stores, places to go to. Again, on one hand I was a pretty grown-up eleven-year-old. But all these things, all these new things, some of which my sister…I got to see my sister regularly. My sister took me shopping.
Q: How often?
A: Oh, quite often. Weekends. She was still in high school. But we were in the same town.
Q: So on the weekends.
A: I would see her once in a while during the week too. But she lived in a different part of town.
Q: You got your own pocket money or something?
A: Yes, I guess I did, but I don’t remember. Yes, sure.
Q: In the beginning, when you arrived, there was a point where you were sorry that you came? You felt homesick? You remember yourself crying, “I want to be with my mommy and daddy”?
A: I managed to put it away from me very nicely.
Q: From the beginning?
A: Yes.
Q: And you went to school.
A: I missed them. We had already been living separately, which probably, in this case, was helpful for me because I was three years younger than my sister was when she left.
Q: You started writing home and you got letters. This is ’37. What month was it?
A: April.
Q: What did you hear from home?
A: We got very regular letters. I only recently, about three years ago, had the courage to go to my letter box. Around the time that I wanted to let Yad Vashem know where they last lived. And I read the letters and the letters were so banal. I don’t know whether that early on, but later on they had things cut out of them. They were censored. The letters were just, “We’re fine.” “We did this. We saw Margo. We went here. We went there.”
Q: They were still in Frankfurt?
A: They were still in Frankfurt. And of course they didn’t worry us and if we were having a rough time now and then, we didn’t want to worry them, so the letters…
Q: What were the kinds of worries that you had that you didn’t want to trouble them.
A: Something you might tell your mother the kind of thing about fitting in. Look, the peer group becomes very important, of course. And I was different.
Q: You kept feeling that you were different.
A: Yes. Not all the time. In school I was a star.
Q: But socially?
A: Socially I knew that…and this went on for many, many years.
Q: There was a certain point where you felt, “I am at home. I am at ease”?
A: I was at home, but I expect that I must have had many of the worries that teenagers simply have because the peer group becomes so important.
Q: Okay. A third break. (end of side)
Q: So you were telling us about the letters and you said that looking at them after many years they seemed quite banal and they were censored.
A: I don’t remember from just at what point I noticed that they were censored, they had things cut out of them.
Q: What year did this stop, the letters?
A: The letters stopped in 1941. Now, the letters stopped at the end of 1941.
Q: You were already four years in the States.
A: That’s right. Now what is remarkable about the end of 1941, that Pearl Harbour was on the 7th of December. And all those years we thought that the letters stopped because America was at war with Germany. The truth of the matter is, I only discovered a couple of years ago, when a cousin, who has done a lot of Shoah research, went to the Leo Baeck Institute and found the date when my parents were sent east. November 1941.
Q: That was the year they were sent. And you thought it was due to the war.
A: That’s right. We didn’t know then. From Frankfurt.
Q: We’ll talk about that. So you went to school. You said you were a teenager also. You felt kind of a split identity? You felt that you were German and American? At any point did you feel American?
A: I have this problem with America and Israel. Look, I very quickly felt quite American because as a child, I think, the language came pretty easily to me.
Q: And obviously you probably in school learned about American history.
A: Yes, of course. I am an avid reader and I read quickly.
Q: By the way, did you continue reading also in German?
A: No, no. For my age I was a pretty sophisticated reader in German and I started English very soon.
Q: You went to the library?
A: Oh yes. Oh, the library was home, a sanctuary.
Q: And you were into American culture?
A: Of course. The family was invited to weddings and to a bar mitzvah and so forth and so on.
Q: And you were with them, everything?
A: Yes, I was with the family.
Q: You were part of the family.
A: I was part of the family.
Q: You know, some of the kids very painfully describe a different experience. Some of them felt that the foster family used them as…they weren’t allowed to do certain things and they were almost like maids and things like that. But you didn’t have that.
A: No, this was not true. I helped, perhaps not enough, you now, like kids don’t. I was pretty good, I think. But possibly not enough.
Q: And Your relationship with the kids?
A: I was the eldest. I got along with the kids, better with the boy than with the girl.
Q: They looked upon you as the oldest, as the elder sister?
A: The little girl, you know, here she had a room of her own and I had to move in with her. This kind of thing. I went through this a second time. I had a second foster home.
Q: So why did you move from there? You said after a year and a half or so?
A: This was August the next year. Anyway, I think things were going reasonably well, but my social worker came to visit every month.
Q: What was the relationship? Did you feel close to her? Were you able to expose things that bothered you?
A: You know, not that much, but I think it was very clear. I don’t remember all I told her and I don’t even remember her name. She was very nice. I think she became aware very quickly, what the differences were, what was important to me. There was a kind of…there was no music and there were no books.
Q: No culture, as you said. Very simple.
A: The people – I called them “Aunt” and “Uncle”. They were perfectly nice people. Certainly I wasn’t mistreated.
Q: You called them “Aunt” and “Uncle”.
A: Yes. And I had a decent social life. The kids, you know, that age, a lot of the kids get together. And down the street and up. You know, kids still played outside, the boys, and you went next door.
Q: Was there any activities of youth movements?
A: No. This is very young.
Q: Summer camp?
A: No, I didn’t go to summer camp. There was, but I didn’t go. I read.
Q: They didn’t send you.
A: No. We went to the swimming pool. This is small town life, middle, late ‘30s, in the States. Not such a small town – about eighty thousand at that point.
Q: You said you read a lot. Literature mainly?
A: Yes. I read, you know, teenage things, early teenage things. Went to the movies.
Q: Were you also aware of American politics, things like that?
A: Oh yes, sure.
Q: Involved?
A: I have always been aware of politics.
Q: You were aware.
A: Yes. I have always been a newspaper reader, even as a child. I used to go to the movies and suddenly you have Errol Flynn that you want to put over your bed, and Nelson Eddy. Nobody here knows who Nelson Eddy was. He was a music star. There were a lot of operettas in those years. There you get your crushes on actors and so forth and so on.
Q: You went to Philadelphia as well?
A: No. The husband (?) had some family in New York and not often, but we to New York to a couple of things.
Q: You didn’t travel in the States yet.
A: No, not really.
Q: These are post-Depression years.
A: Not yet. Post-Depression is really the beginning of the war in Europe. Oh yes, you were just slowly coming out. But we went to the swimming pool regularly.
Q: Were you aware of that?
A: Well, I wasn’t aware of it because I wasn’t there during the Depression. There were a lot of goodies around that were unbelievable to somebody who came from a village.
Q: But for the Salzman family it was…
A: I don’t know how well they did. They did the things a lot of people around us did. They owned their own home.
Q: I was asking you if there was a split in your identity as German and as American. You said you felt American. In terms of your attitude towards religion, did you feel there tension?
A: Well, there was a big switch.
Q: Did it bother you?
A: I amazingly didn’t feel guilty for very long.
Q: Wasn’t as if you were betraying the way of home or anything?
A: No. Of course, religion was my way of life.
Q: But you were brought up Orthodox and here it was probably different. Did it create a conflict within you? That is what I am asking.
A: For a very short time. I am amazed to say. Again, this is what was.
Q: You accepted things as they were.
A: This is what was.
Q: Now, during those years – we are talking about ’37, ’38, ’39. World War.
A: I moved to Bethlehem. I moved to another city.
Q: Why was this?
A: Okay, alright. I know that my social worker must have been aware of what was going on. I don’t remember complaining bitterly because nothing tragic happened. In the meantime, there was a family in the next town – where one city ends, the other one starts – that had heard from the pulpit, probably the year before, that they were looking for Jewish homes. And my family was the Lehrich family, whom the agency found. I don’t know how. I think I must have known, but I don’t think I asked questions in those days. I don’t even remember. I just know that it was from the pulpit, a rabbi who spoke. And they decided that they were willing to take a foster child. And so, on August 21, 1938, a week before school started, I moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Q: How far was that?
A: Five, six miles.
Q: Pretty close.
A: We were one city. It is a smaller town. It was the home of Bethlehem Steel Company, which was internationally only the second biggest steel company in the world.
Q: Who were they?
A: They were a couple, Arthur and Betty Lehrich. He was eight and a half years older than she. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, of German-Austrian parentage. Betty was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, of Russian parentage.
Q: How old were they?
A: She was only twenty years older than I. I was thirteen, she was thirty-three. They were married the year I was born.
Q: Did they have children?
A: They had two children. Into this home – I am now thirteen years old, pudgy, overweight – not obese, but overweight – and I came into this home where there was a little boy who was six and half years old and a little boy who was a year and a half old.
Q: It was a house, an apartment?
A: It was a modest home, about the same size as where I had lived in Allentown.
Q: A house, with a yard?
A: Yes, a house, in a not particularly Jewish neighbourhood. Bethlehem is a different kind of city from Allentown. Allentown was a much richer city. And I moved into a room with a maid.
Q: She was Jewish too?
A: No, she was not Jewish. Let me give you a little bit of background. I called my foster parents, these foster parents, also “Uncle” and “Aunt” for many, many, many years. Only as an adult I started calling them “Mother” and “Dad”. So I will refer to them as “Mother” and “Dad”. But it was many years.
Q: How were they? Can you tell us something about them? What were they making a living of?
A: Okay. Dad had an aunt living in Bethlehem when he came there as a young man. He came from Newark. And he had a water and beer company. It was soft drinks. He had the use of a spring for the water company. Water was not like today, that everybody bought water. And he sold beer with his own company. Mother was a housewife at that point. She was the daughter of a jeweller who had come to the States with nothing, moved to Pennsylvania and had a jewellery store in Allentown, a successful jewellery store. She had a mother who was a very young bride. She was a very young mother when she was born.. They both had come from Russia. There was this tremendous immigration from Russia in the late 19th century. She was born in 1905, Betty, Mother.
Q: In Pennsylvania?
A: In Allentown. Mother was born in Allentown. She was brought up in a home where education was important, because this is what happened then. The first children – education is important. And she had gone to Allentown High School and gone to the local college.
Q: So they were more educated.
A: Well, the father, who didn’t have that much opportunity, but education was important, yes, very important.
Q: More culture that you were looking for?
A: Yes, they were more.
Q: Did he know German from his home?
A: No.
Q: Because you said he came from…
A: Dad? No. Dad came from, he came from difficult circumstances. His mother died when he was born and his father remarried. He was the baby. I’m trying to remember. No, I’m sorry. He had two older sisters and he was the baby. I’m confused. His mother died when he was born. His father remarried and there was a big family, there was a big branch. But he wasn’t comfortable at home. He left home.
Q: Before we go into your life with them, how was your leaving the other family? Was it on good terms?
A: It was decent terms, yes, but I should have been a more gracious child. I should have been in touch with them, even if they weren’t in touch with me. I felt, as an adult I felt that I made a mistake.
Q: They were sorry that you were leaving?
A: I don’t know. I think is possibly was alright for both of us. But nothing terrible had happened there. But I walked into this home and…
Q: You felt different?
A: Oh yes. I felt different. There was a baby grand piano in the…which I never learned to play, by the way. There was a baby grand piano and lots of books.
Q: And how did they treat you?
A: They treated me just fine. Listen, I am a foster child. I know that I am a foster child. You don’t act like a terrible teenager.
Q: You always have to behave yourself.
A: At least you feel that you do. Mother was…she only died ten years ago, eleven years ago.
Q: But you felt that they accepted you as their child?
A: No. They accept you as their family. Sure. Look, I’ve just come. It’s scary. It’s scary as a foster parent, what you’ve taken upon yourself. Ira was only six and a half and he wondered why on earth…what is she doing here? Ira was the only child, grandchild and great-grandchild until his nasty little brother was born.
Q: And then they brought you.
A: They brought me. “What on earth are my parents doing?” So I think he had a very rough time with me.
Q: And you moved to a different school?
A: Of course. I started junior high school.
Q: And this was already easier.
A: I started junior high school. I was new, but everybody else was new, starting junior high school.
Q: Did they realize that you were a refugee from Germany?
A: It was obvious, sure. At thirteen I also still had an accent. At fifteen I didn’t have an accent anymore. Again, I was very exotic.
Q: You were?
A: Yes, oh yes.
Q: The kids in school, did they question you, did they ask?
A: Oh yes. “Oh, say something in German.”
Q: But did they ask you about your family? Did you talk about your family in Germany?
A: They didn’t ask much.
Q: Did they ask why you came?
A: They may have. They probably did. I don’t remember.
Q: And you said that at this point you still had…you got letters from your parents.
A: Oh yes. And I wrote.
Q: It seemed like everything was okay. Were you worried? Do you remember being anxious, very worried about what was happening there?
A: Okay, look. This is still not Kristallnacht. This is just before Kristallnacht.
Q: Kristallnacht was November ’38. Did you feel the difference after?
A: Myself? Look, I knew what was going on.
Q: You read about Kristallnacht?
A: Yes, of course. It’s not like today when you see it, you see everything…
Q: Immediately. You read about it.
A: My parents didn’t write anything of course. They were very, very careful.
Q: But when you read about it, what went through you mind?
A: It was very frightening. We started wondering how we could get them out.
Q: That's what I wanted to ask.
A: Look, we were children. I was thirteen and my sister at this point was eighteen. You know, in retrospect you say we tried. We went to visit our family. We tried. We went regularly to New York because we knew family in New York. I had all kinds of second cousins in New York and everybody else was struggling, because you have to sign, guarantee something. Let’s put it this way. I am sure if anybody any inkling of how difficult things were going to be once war started, my foster family, anybody else, we would have turned…
Q: You still didn't realize that it…
A: Of course not. We didn't know.
Q: But there were attempts and efforts to try to get them to the States.
A: But if anybody had any…I don't mean to the degree that things really happened. As a retrospect, later on, I felt, you know, my sister was an eighteen-year-old girl, with nothing of her own.
Q: You weren't in the same town anymore.
A: Yes, but we saw each other. Yes, we saw each other regularly. And she was very much the older sister. The family was very fond of her and so forth. But of course, things were not easy. I was a teenager. I remember Ira, little Ira and me, a couple of years later, having a fight in the kitchen. He was so angry with me, he didn't know what to do with himself. This was my second family.
Q: So you were careful.
A: No, I am talking about today. We are still very much in touch.
Q: You are talking about those times.
A: Mother was a teacher. She studied teaching and she had taught very briefly. She was married very young, she was married at twenty. But she was very much a teacher and she very much knew how somebody should behave and made it very clear. Any time any of us didn’t behave, it was the kind of thing that you tell Dad when he comes home. So she was the one, she was the real power in the family. Dad was a lovely, lovely man who was easy-going in many ways and was perfectly happy to have her do the heavy work with the children. You also have to remember the times. We are talking about the ‘30s. Father went to work in morning and came home in the evening, as did my husband, I might add.
Q: Economically they were okay?
A: They were doing alright and in 1940, on my fifteenth birthday, we moved to a big, old house. Mother was pregnant with Paul, the third child, and we moved to a big, old house, with lots of room. We were doing okay. Never wealthy, but…By the way, you never talked about money. People in the States, you don’t talk about money.
Q: No, but I asking how you felt.
A: How I felt. I then had a room of my own. Again, at school I was doing well. Socially, kacha.
Q: But you always felt that you were in debt to them?
A: Yes, to some degree. Sure. You don’t let got with your foster mother like you would let go…I probably wouldn’t have let go with my own mother like that. She probably wouldn’t have let me. Look, there were constraints. There is no question about that. But I was in a good home.
Q: They were warm with you? They hugged you? They kissed you? Close relations?
A: No. It was not that kind. No. It was not that kind, but that was alright. I don’t think I even expected that. The boys got very used to me and the littlest one, who was born, I was like his mother. I was a fifteen-year-old who was also a babysitter, took him for walks and so forth. So I became closer to the two younger ones, very close.
Q: Now, ’39. You moved to the in ’38?
A: ’38. September 1st, 1939, it was Labour Day weekend, which is a holiday weekend in America and we are at the shore. We were in Atlantic City, which is a shore…
Q: By the way, they were also Conservative. They did not have a kosher home, on the other hand, did also not serve shrimp or pork, but it was not a kosher home.
Q: And did they celebrate the holidays?
A: Yes, but in the way that Americans celebrate the holidays.
Q: More traditional.
A: I’ll tell you. Once the kids went to Hebrew school and so forth, there was one…my mother was a very, very good mother.
Q: Did you go to Hebrew school?
A: No, I didn’t go. No, I went to confirmation classes. I was confirmed because there was no bat mitzvah and you wanted to give the girls something, so when we were fifteen I was in a confirmation class on Shavuot.
Q: And you studied Hebrew in any way?
A: Yes. More history and things like that. Look, I knew how to read Hebrew. I knew more about Hebrew and stuff like that than the other kids did.
Q: But you weren’t really leading a religious life like you had in Germany.
A: No.
Q: And it was okay with you at this point?
A: Yes. The folks also had some friends, not intimate friends, but friends who were ardent Zionists.
Q: And your family?
A: No.
Q: Did you have any guilt feelings about the Orthodox or…
A: No, not at all. I’ll tell you something a little bit later.
Q: Thinking what your own parents would think about your life?
A: Oh, guilt? No. I didn’t have guilt feelings. I had worried feelings, but not guilt. Not knowing what was going on and on the other hand, most of the time, which is so hard to admit, leading a normal life.
Q: You were a kid. You had your own life.
A: As I am talking about it, it has to remind me how my teenage grandchildren feel about things because our expectations are always so high. Our expectations of children are so high. You are really, in so many ways, so self-involved, and I was a good kid. I helped at home.
Q: You learned to be independent.
A: Yes, Look, I helped at home. I learned a lot of things. Mother was a very, very good mother. I mean, she was nursing babies when nobody else was nursing. Breast-feeding. She belonged to a bridge club and the people she played bridge with, their bridge was much more important than their families, I had the feeling. Hers wasn’t. The family came first. And if I was in anything or anything, she came to see it.
Q: You could trust them.
A: On yes. Confide is another story. But again, that is a teenage kind of thing. She was really quite demanding of me.
Q: You felt secure.
A: Secure physically. Emotionally…
Q: Difficult.
A: Because I think she…she accused me one time of how angry I got. She didn’t even know how angry a girl could get because that I must have controlled.
Q: Did you ever speak to them then, in those times, about your childhood?
A: When I was forty-five years old we had a set-to.
Q: But in those years you never told them about your own family?
A: Oh yes, sure. They were very concerned. They wanted to know what my parents wrote.
Q: Did you speak to them about your childhood in Germany?
A: Yes, oh yes.
Q: It was something that you were talking about.
A: Oh yes. They were very concerned about my parents. They really tried. Look, they didn’t have money. They didn’t have money to guarantee somebody to come over. As I said, on the other hand, if anybody had any clue how terrible it was going to be, you would have turned the world upside-down. But my parents tried.
Q: But it’s not that you put your parents, your family in Germany aside. You were talking about them.
A: My parents tried and my father was rejected, couldn’t get a visa because of his eye.
Q: You know this?
A: Oh yes, I know this. This was before the letters stopped.
Q: How did you know? Because they wrote you about it?
A: We wanted to get my little sister out and they would not give her a visa because of curvature of the spine, scoliosis. Can you imagine? Well, they were practically storming the American consulates.
Q: But the Kindertransport?
A: I am talking about getting a visa. Yes, she could have come by Kindertransport. The Kindertransport lasted.
Q: So how come they didn’t send her with the Kindertransport?
A: She couldn’t get a visa to America. Look, have you read Baumel’s book? It is worth reading, because if they had loosened things a little bit for children, not for adults, she would have been able to come.
Q: The Americans. You are talking about the Americans.
A: Yes, the Americans. Of course.
Q: So did you have these ambivalent feelings towards the Americans?
A: Oh, well, when I read that book.
Q: I mean, you felt America gave you a home and yet she denied entrance to…
A: I felt really very bitter.
Q: Bitter about it. Couldn’t save your sister.
A: Yes.
Q: So you started telling me about when you heard…1st of September, 1939, the World War broke out.
A: We were at the beach and it was raining and war was declared.
Q: You were aware of the tensions before?
A: Oh, of course. Oh listen, I followed the…
Q: The Czech, the Anschluss.
A: You didn’t have T.V. You used to get news when you went to the movies. I was very aware. I was fourteen years old.
Q: Do you also have this feeling of…you are in America, you are German. Did you feel ashamed of Germany?
A: Not any more. I felt no responsibility. No.
Q: That this was your country?
A: No. This is what Germany did to me and to my family. Look, at this point you think of things.
Q: So you weren’t in the position that you had to apologize in America for what Germany was doing.
A: No. Look, I had to report until I was a citizen. I did have to report regularly.
Q: Right. Because you were a citizen of an enemy…
A: I was essentially an enemy alien.
Q: But you didn’t feel it in everyday life.
A: No, I didn’t feel that. No, not at all.
Q: This was just a technical thing.
A: No, this was technical.
Q: But you didn’t feel it emotionally, that you were treated as an enemy.
A: No, not at all. I only became a citizen when I was twenty-two.
Q: Right. So you heard about the war breaking out. What did you feel at that point? At that stage America was not part of the war.
A: No. It was so frightening. The only thing was, there was nothing…What was I going to do? What was anybody going to do? That’s just it. We tried to get my sister out, if not my parents.
Q: And you were still in contact with them?
A: I was still in contact until ’41. Yes. Until December ’41.
Q: So it was two more years that you still had contact. They were still in Frankfurt?
A: They were still in Frankfurt.
Q: Still working in the children’s home?
A: Still working in the children’s home. Yes. And they didn’t write too many…As I said, I went through a lot of letters a few years ago. They wrote about everyday things. They were very careful.
Q: Also during those years? The last years?
A: Yes.
Q: ’39, ’40.
A: Those were really censored.
Q: After the war broke out. Do you think they were aware what was going also in ’41 in Poland with the Jews? With the ghettos? With the concentration camps?
A: I doubt that they…
Q: Auschwitz?
A: Look, they were sent already in ’40. They were sent east. They must have know other people who were deported. I’m sure they were. I am talking to this second cousin in New York and she tells me that she got this information, which Yad Vashem didn’t even have. And you know, you say, “My G-d.”
Q: What was the information?
A: The information that they were deported to the east.
Q: Where to?
A: I found out from Yad Vashem. They died in the ghetto of Riga. You know, the Latvians and the Germans had killed all their Jews and made room for the ghetto of Riga. I only found this out three or four years ago.
Q: In the ghetto of Riga. Your sister as well?
A: Yes.
Q: The three of them.
A: My aunt, we don’t know when she died.
Q: This was in ’41 they were killed there?
A: We don’t know. They were deported in ’41.
Q: To Riga?
A: To Riga. Well, they died in Riga. We don’t know anything else. All I know is my daughter went to…the day I got the mail from Yad Vashem, that now I know where they died, because I never wanted to know. There were rumours and I never knew. And I never wanted to know. I was scared to know. My daughter went on the ‘net that night and she said, “Mom, don’t look.” Things were very bad in Riga. Cold. Terrible. I think people died of exposure.
Q: Yes. Sickness, cold.
A: Hunger. So I never looked.
Q: Very harsh conditions.
A: I think the first movie I ever saw about the Holocaust was Schindler’s List. I have seen many since.
Q: You didn’t see Claude Landesman’s Shoah?
A: No. I wasn’t ready yet when that first came out. I don’t know whether I am ready now either. But my family knew that I wanted to be protected and they protected me.
Q: So till ’41 you followed what was going on with the war?
A: Oh, very much.
Q: Was it something that people in the States talked about, or the war seemed far away?
A: Oh no.
Q: Because America was not involved yet.
A: America was not involved, but it was very much talked about. There were even some volunteers who went in the Canadian Air Force. American volunteers.
Q: You were still in school, right?
A: Yes, I was in school.
Q: Did you get more sympathy, empathy from people around you because your parents were there?
A: Yes. You know, there were people who knew much more about me, and there were people who knew less. In the Jewish community I was known as “Betty Lehrich’s Elsa”. Only in school did everybody know my last name because my foster family had a different name, of course.
Q: Did you take their name as well?
A: No.
Q: You remained with your original name.
A: Sure.
Q: So ’41. You mentioned Pearl Harbour.
A: Horrendous.
Q: Tell me something about it.
A: I was with my sister. It was her twenty-first birthday.
Q: You were still in high school?
A: I was still in high school. ’41. I was sixteen years old. We were at a hotel in Allentown, where her social group was having a party and honouring my sister for her twenty-first birthday. It was that day. And we heard that war had broken out. And my sister also tells me the same day…
Q: This is ’41. You mean the Americans.
A: That Pearl Harbour was attacked.
Q: Were you scared? Personally, were you scared? Felt threatened?
A: No, not personally threatened. You know, Americans feel very safe. They have these two oceans.
Q: But you, as being a refugee from Germany. Now your new country was at war. Were you scared?
A: No. Not personally scared. Horrified at what they did. Not scared. No, not scared, because Americans feel very safe. And I didn’t have anybody personally who was going to go into the army. I didn’t have a brother or a father who was going to be called.
Q: So war continued until 45. By that time you had finished high school?
A: I finished high school.
Q: And since ’41 no more letters from your parents.
A: That’s right.
Q: And you assumed it was due to the war.
A: And there started being all kinds of things being written, rumours, I ’43, about what was going on in Europe.
Q: Did you hear about concentration camps, about Auschwitz? Treblinka? In the States.
A: In ’43 you started hearing these things and I must admit that I didn’t want to look at anything. I closed…I knew of it. Of course I knew of it.
Q: You were just waiting for the end of the war to hear from your parents. That was your assumption.
A: Yes. We had no idea. We heard somehow, somewhere, and I don’t know where, but nothing official, that maybe they were not alive. But we didn’t know that.
Q: But it was a possibility that was in your mind already, that maybe…?
A: You started hearing about all these…you started hearing more and more about all the people being shipped to Poland, being shipped east. Okay. In the meantime my sister got married and she married a man who came from Czechoslovakia who then was drafted into the army and became and interpreter. They were in need in the army in the States and he became an interpreter in Europe for the American army, for prisoners.
Q: So he left for Europe and she was in the States?
A: Yes. And after the war he started looking, trying to get information.
Q: What about yourself? You graduated?
A: Well, I graduated high school and three days before I graduated high school I started a nursing course. I didn’t even go to my commencement. I am a nurse.
Q: You wanted to be a nurse?
A: Yes, very much. My mother thought I ought to try for medicine.
Q: So this is something you were carrying from childhood, from home, the idea?
A: No. My foster mother. She thought I ought to try for medical school because I was a very good student. In the meantime, I took secretarial courses in case – we were still optimistic – in case my parents would get out, so that I could go right to work. So I took the sciences and I took Latin and I took…
Q: You were pretty practical. You were thinking “How would I help support them?”
A: Of course. You still hoped because you didn’t know anything. You really didn’t know anything. Anyway, it was interesting. I applied to the various nursing schools in Philadelphia. I did not want to go to a Jewish hospital. I wanted to go to a university hospital and I wrote to three medical schools that had hospitals and I was rejected by all of them. There was no…
Q: Another break. (end of side)
A: I was rejected by all three of the nursing schools.
Q: How come?
A: Well, my grades were so good that I thought, we figured out that it possibly was that they didn’t particularly want a Jewish…There may have been anti-Semitism or quota or whatever the reason was.
Q: It was the first time you felt that? Or there were other things that you felt in the States?
A: No, but that was…I decided to write to THE hospital in the country, the first hospital in that day in the country. I started to write to…decided to write to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and I was accepted. And I was probably accepted because they prided themselves on having students from other countries. So you see? I would assume, because I…I would assume. And that’s where I went to nursing school.
Q: For how long? How many years?
A: A three-year course. Actually, many of my classmates had been to university.
Q: So you moved from home.
A: I moved from home.
Q: What? Dormitories? How was it?
A: Yes, in Baltimore.
Q: You felt dependent?
A: Well, I was the only Jewish girl in my class.
Q: Who provided you with the…?
A: At that point there was a shortage of nurses because many nurses had gone into the army and navy corps, and they decided they wanted to build a pool of nurses, so they started something called the “Nurse Cadet Corps”. They would pay for your education and give you a twenty-five dollar-a-month stipend and a uniform, a dress uniform. And so that year there were three different classes at Johns Hopkins.
Q: Did you like it? Did you enjoy it? Were you happy with your choice?
A: I was happy with my choice in many ways. It was hard. Everybody else was the top of her class too, or near the top of her class.
Q: You had to compete.
A: Suddenly I was not an “A” student anymore. I had to work much harder.
Q: How often did you go home?
A: I went home reasonably often. I forget exactly how often. Took the train home, and it was very good to get home, but also…Look, we had a summer program at university.
Q: They supported you as well, the family, or they didn’t need to?
A: I don’t think they ever took the stipend. I don’t think they ever took it.
Q: But were they helping you out also, or there was no need, with the stipend?
A: Well, some, but there wasn’t much need because the twenty-five dollars in those days was pretty good.
Q: So this was from 1941 to ’44?
A: No, this was from ’44 to ’47.
Q: Oh, this was already ’44.
A: I graduated high school. I was eighteen. Actually, I was nineteen in the fall, because I was a little older than most of my classmates.
Q: Okay, so let’s just for one second go back to ’45. The end of the war. First of all, do you remember the day that you…?
A: Of course.
Q: What can you tell me about your feelings? What happened?
A: First of all, it was wonderful that the war was over.
Q: You heard over the news? There was an outbreak of happiness, joy?
A: That the war was over? Look, at this point we knew many people…
Q: Where were you? At home?
A: No, I was at school. I was working. I was already a second-year student. I was working hard.
Q: Do you remember your own feeling, hearing the war was over?
A: Of course. And now you think, well maybe now we can find out.
Q: You were still hoping to find your family alive?
A: I knew that…my sister had asked of her husband to go to wherever he could. There were letters written and so forth and there was just no sign of them. On the other hand, there were rumours. I had heard somebody, some distant cousin told somebody that my little sister died in Theresienstadt of typhus. The truth of the matter is, I was terrified of knowing what happened to them.
Q: And in your own mind, you were still putting aside, thinking one day…
A: You were still hoping.
Q: For you, they weren’t dead. You didn’t come to terms with that.
A: No.
Q: Not at that point.
A: Anyway, my brother-in-law came back in ’46 and it became very clear that they had not survived. Now, there are people who always wanted to know everything and I didn’t want to know anything, and neither did my sister. We barely talked about it.
Q: You buried it. There was no time of mourning or any such thing?
A: Well, you know, when you do that…
Q: You accept it. And you went on with your life, hoping, one day…
A: Yes.
Q: Did you dream about them? Did you have dreams about childhood, about them?
A: I had good dreams.
Q: Good dreams. Today do you dream about them?
A: Very occasionally. No, not today, but not too many years ago.
Q: Okay. So you finished your training as a nurse.
A: I remained in Baltimore for another year.
Q: Working as a nurse?
A: Working as a nurse.
Q: In what field?
A: Internal medicine. That was my favourite.
Q: And then?
A: Well, I am now twenty-two years old. I became a citizen in Baltimore.
Q: How did you feel about that? You were happy?
A: I was excited, sure. It was an exciting thing to happen. Look, America had been very good to me.
Q: Yes. And you were happy. You were excited.
A: In the meantime, I was twenty-two years old. I was dating very little. And I had friends who had boyfriends and fiancés, and nothing really is happening. And the chance of meeting somebody…there were not that many Jewish men around…not in the circles in which I moved.
Q: Your friends were Jewish, non-Jewish?
A: I had one Jewish friend from another class. We were the only Jewish kids in our classes.
Q: What was the atmosphere after the war? GIs coming back.
A: Oh, it was wonderful. The GIs were coming back and then everybody had to settle down with men who had been soldiers and in the hospital…I worked in psychiatry. When did I go into psychiatry? In late ’45, early ’46, and you had men coming in who couldn’t find their way because of the war. Something very interesting happened and a very interesting conversation happened in 1948. I went home to visit sometime in ’47, deciding what I wanted to do with myself. Probably wanted to go someplace where I could meet some Jewish men. And where did you do that? You do that probably in New York.
Q: It was important for you that it would be a Jewish man?
A: Yes, oh yes. No question about that. And these things were going on in Israel. And Mother said to me – I wasn’t calling her “Mother” then yet either – she said to me, “Would you be interested in going to Israel?” I said, “Israel?”
Q: This was ’49?
A: This was ’48.
Q: After the declaration of the State or before?
A: I was a nurse.
Q: So it was the Independence War here.
A: Yes, the Independence War. It was the last thing in this whole world…
Q: How come she asked you this question?
A: I don’t know.
Q: Because you said they weren’t Zionists.
A: No. Look, first of all, Jews were getting very excited about…we were excited in November ’47. Of course. And things were happening. And now I don’t know whether she would have said this to her own daughter. I’m not sure. I said, “No.” This was about the last thing in the world I’d want to do, which today interests me, of course. Anyway, I went to New York and I worked at Mount Sinai Hospital. Now I was at an all-Jewish hospital, with lots of Jewish men around.
Q: One more question I want to ask about the war. Any other survivors from your family that you found after the war?
A: I didn’t find anybody. I knew a lot of people. My uncle and aunt left very late in ’39, before the war.
Q: To the States?
A: To the States. They were in New York. This was my real uncle.
Q: Your father’s brother?
A: My uncle the rabbi.
Q: And you kept in touch? You were close?
A: Oh, we kept in touch and he died in ’43 and his son was killed in Italy in ’44. And my aunt, Frau Doktor Rabbiner Heilbronn, my aunt lived to be eighty and yes, I was in touch with her. We went to visit her, yes.
Q: Others? I mean, were there survivors after the war? They came before the war.
A: I don’t know of anybody. Not that we know of. And not of any extended family. I knew a lot of extended family.
Q: So you moved to New York and…
A: I moved to New York. I lived in the nurses’ home for a while. I was a graduate nurse and I was working on a medical women’s floor. And it was a very interesting hospital, very different from Johns Hopkins. A good hospital. And I sort of got tired of living in a nurses’ dorm. I went into an apartment with a couple of girls, other nurses I had met. In the meantime, I became head nurse of that department.
Q: You liked your job?
A: Yes, I liked my job. I was good at it. I liked it. I was good at certain aspects of it and not so good at others, but I liked it and I found it very satisfying. Anyway, my first set of friends in that apartment, it didn’t work out and then I moved into an apartment with another friend, who was non-Jewish and who became the best friend I had ever had. Anyway, we lived together in New York and in the meantime, you know, people were meeting people. Yes, I went out some and so forth, but nothing much was happening. And everybody beginning to think about getting married and here I was twenty-five years old and I went home to Bethlehem and everybody said, “Nu?” I had a long holiday weekend and I decided to visit a married friend of mine in high school, in Ohio. Took the train to Ohio and had a lovely weekend with her and on the train coming home I met my first husband.
Q: Who was he? What was his name?
A: His name was Burt Hafkin, who was a lieutenant in the American army who had just been recalled because of the Korean War. He had gone all through the Second World War.
Q: So he was born in America?
A: Yes, out of Russian parentage.
Q: He was from where in America?
A: He was from New Jersey. Passaic. Northern New Jersey.
Q: And he was born there?
A: He was born there.
Q: He was drafted? This is what? You are talking about ’56?
A: He was not drafted, but recalled. He was in some kind of reserves that don’t always get called, but he was called. He was a lieutenant.
Q: This was ’56?
A: This was ’51. War with Korea broke out in ’50, June of ’50. And this became a great romance and we were married…I met him in February and we were married in June.
Q: Where?
A: At my folks’ home, at my mother and dad’s house. Beautiful wedding.
Q: How did you feel that your family, your parents from Germany…were you thinking about it? When you got married?
A: You know what? Those thoughts got so pushed to the back, I cannot tell you. Really, truly.
Q: So you got married. This was ’51?
A: June of ’51.
Q: And where did you live? In New York?
A: We lived temporarily…No, we lived near his base in New Jersey for six weeks.
Q: You continued working?
A: No, I stopped working.
Q: And when was your son born?
A: Wait, wait. He was shipped abroad…we were married in June and he was shipped abroad in September and he was killed in October.
Q: In October. So you had lived together for how long? Half a year?
A: Yes. Something like that.
Q: Where was he killed in Korea? When did you learn about that?
A: Three weeks later. Three weeks later I got a telegram. I was pregnant. On purpose.
Q: And you built a family of your own and your life was shattered once more. What were you thinking? “Why is this happening to me?”
A: No.
Q: Were you angry, blaming someone for your…?
A: Who was there to blame?
Q: I am asking you.
A: There was no one to blame.
Q: Were you thinking, “Why is it happening to me?”
A: Sure. But it was very fortunate that I was pregnant.
Q: Who helped you during those…?
A: I moved back to Bethlehem.
Q: To your parents?
A: yes. I moved back to the family and I was with them until my son, whom I named Burt…
Q: Where was he born?
A: In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Q: And when? ’51?
A: No. He was born in ’52, April ’52.
Q: So he never knew his father.
A: No. So I stayed with my folks for two months and then I got myself an apartment.
Q: In Bethlehem?
A: In Bethlehem.
Q: And you got a job?
A: No, I didn’t. I was very well provided for by the government, yes.
Q: As a widow.
A: Yes. Anyway, also I had the plus of having my dad and my brothers, who, you know, were wonderful uncles.
Q: And your sister? Where was she?
A: My sister, in the meantime, my sister had gotten married in ’43. My sister married a very religious man. She was living in Allentown until 1948 and then she moved to a much more Orthodox community in Pennsylvania.
Q: But you were in touch?
A: Of course we were in touch.
Q: She was supportive?
A: We were very much in touch. Yes, of course.
Q: When you became a widow and you were pregnant and having alone, on your own.
A: Between the family and my sister. My sister at this point was living in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Q: So you raised on your own your son. You were on your own.
A: Yes, until I met my second husband.
Q: When did you meet him?
A: I met him in ’58.
Q: So your son was six years old.
A: Yes. He was seven when we were married in November. We would be married fifty years this year.
Q: You went back to work?
A: I moved to Philadelphia for some of the same reasons that I moved to New York. I really did want to get married again. My husband was a Philadelphian, born in Philadelphia.
Q: What was his name?
A: His name was David Epstein. And this is one of his granddaughters.
Q: And what was he doing?
A: He worked for IBM. He became a systems analyst and he became a very sophisticated computer man.
Q: And you lived in Philadelphia.
A: We lived in Philadelphia and we had two children, two daughters. Margo, whom I named after my little sister. She was born in ’61, and Ruthie was born in ’63.
Q: And you went back to work as a nurse?
A: I had gone back to work when I went to Philadelphia, sure. It was not so much that I needed the money, but because I needed to be out. And I worked for a while in a hospital and then I became a school nurse, so that went very well with having a child in school.
Q: Your second husband – he was born in the States?
A: That’s right. His parents, not only Russian parentage. My mother-in-law spoke beautiful Russian and he came from a very good, close family.
Q: You ran a traditional home or how was it?
A: My husband had had no Hebrew school. He had had Yiddish school and that kind of thing because they were socialists.
Q: Bundists?
A: Something similar. Very Jewish, but not from the observing…
Q: Not Zionist.
A: His father really…no only not Zionist.
Q: Sounds like the Bundists.
A: His father really was not interested in the subject of rabbis and synagogues.
Q: And you yourself, what kind of life did you…?
A: Well, my husband for the first time ran a Seder in English after we were married.
Q: That was important for you.
A: Oh yes. I think…I lose my words in three languages. I think the Kiddush and the Seder and the observance of the holidays adds great warmth to family life. I very much believe in it.
Q: It was important for you to raise your children also in that kind of atmosphere.
A: Very much so. I did not really have a kosher home in the States. When we made aliyah I was perfectly willing to have a kosher home, but we ended up on a kibbutz.
Q: So you lived in Philadelphia until 1972?
A: That’s right. We had a good life, interesting life.
Q: At that point you had come to terms with the fact that your family would not return?
A: Oh yes. Come to terms with it for a long time.
Q: Did you go to Germany?
A: No.
Q: During those years did you ever visit?
A: Our first trip to Israel in ’67…
Q: After the war?
A: Right after the war. Of course. That’s when American Jews really became involved. Our first trip here, we were at the airport on the way home with our…our son had gone with a youth group here, had come here. He was at a kibbutz and we were on the way home with the children, with Margo and Ruthie. We were getting our tickets and I saw that our trip was seventeen hours. I said, “Wait a minute. I thought it was something like twelve hours or fourteen hours.” She said, “Well, you are stopping in Athens and Munchen.” I said, “I am not going to Munchen.” I became hysterical and I burst into tears. First time my children saw me cry. That was my reaction.
Q: You didn’t want to go to Germany. And did you go?
A: No. I’ve never been to Germany. I am perfectly willing emotionally to go now.
Q: But you did not go?
A: I did not go. By the way, I was not the first person who wasn’t willing to land in Germany and they rerouted us on an Air France plane. They knew very well what I was talking about. My children had never, never seen me cry before. We had an exciting trip in ’67. We had a wonderful guide and something happened to us.
Q: It affected you.
A: Completely unexpected. We were not Zionists in the least little bit. Cared about Israel, of course. So we came back in ’69.
Q: Did you have any relatives here?
A: I had cousins. My cousin from Schmalnau was here. My mother’s cousins, yes, but not close relatives. And there are some others that I have discovered since. And we came back on a trip in ’70 and in ’72, unbelievably, we decided one evening to it and the next morning we stuck to it. We would always decide to come and then say, “That’s crazy.”
Q: What made the change in ’72?
A: I don’t know. I’m not sure. We had been talking about it for a very long time. We were very involved in the aliyah movement. At this point my husband was head of the aliyah group in Philadelphia. Had a very good shaliach. That helps. Very good shaliach. I’ll tell you his name. Calingold, Asher Calingold, whose sister, Esther, was killed in ’48 in the Old City.
Q: So ’72 you decided to make aliyah. How old were your kids?
A: We decided in February. Margo was just eleven.
Q: Your son was twenty?
A: My son was twenty.
Q: He came with you?
A: He decided not to come with us. He was in university and he decided not to come with us. We knew if we were going to do it, we ought to do it now, before we were older or the girls were older. One of them was eleven, the other one was nine. And we made aliyah in June, ’72.
Q: You sold everything in the States?
A: Sold a lot of things, brought this, this, the coffee table for sure.
Q: Thinking you were going to come and do what?
A: Well, I was a nurse and he was a computer man. We were both good at what we did. My husband was forty-five and I was forty-six. We went to Mevasseret. What a seven months that was!
Q: To a mercaz klita.
A: Mercaz klita. What an exciting time it was! A lot of people came and were concerned, “What am I going to do? How am I going to earn a living when we come?” We knew we had professions. Maybe nobody was looking for us, but we knew we could earn a living.
Q: You knew a little bit of Hebrew at that point?
A: We were learning.
Q: You were learning in Philadelphia?
A: My husband’s work was in English in any case.
Q: Your daughters – were they happy to come or rejected your move?
A: Well, this is something that you don’t ask your eleven-year-old and your nine-year-old. You ask a twenty-year-old.
Q: It’s the same year almost that you left Germany.
A: Exactly. You’re telling me!
Q: Were you thinking of the parallels?
A: Yes, but I’m going with her.
Q: It’s a big difference.
A: But listen, but it was hard for her. They didn’t always admit to us how hard it was for them.
Q: And was your feeling towards America? Leaving the States who took you in.
A: We were not pushed. We were not pushed.
Q: No. You, with your personal background.
A: I had no feeling…I had friends.
Q: America saved your life.
A: I had friends who could not accept that I would reject all these things I really cared about in America. Philadelphia is a marvelous town. I had a wonderful life.
Q: But thinking about your personal story – America saved your life in a way.
A: Yes, but you don’t think about it that way.
Q: You didn’t think about it that way.
A: No. Not at all. I was not rejecting and I was not leaving America because I didn’t like America. I had a wonderful life in America. I was being pulled for some reason, which is…
Q: Your Zionist…?
A: No. I didn’t know what it was. My husband said we were crazy. Because my mother would say, “Oh Elsa, David wants to go, doesn’t he?” And David’s mother said, “Duvidle, Elsa really wants to go, doesn’t she?” It wasn’t true. We both decided. It was very hard for them.
Q: How was your encounter with Israel, Israeli society, the Sabras.
A: Look, we were amazingly well prepared. We had a marvelous shaliach. We had been here three times. We had a wonderful shaliach and because we were so involved in the aliyah group, we had known and read a great deal. The shock was not nearly as great as you might have thought. The ulpan was great. You are giving me something I never realized. I guess I am an extremely adaptable woman. We had had a very large home and we walked into this apartment – we sort of fell into the kibbutz.
Q: Tell me how it came about that you got to the kibbutz. You came to Mevasseret and…?
A: We were in Mevasseret and we wanted to show our son, who was coming to visit us – we wanted to show him the north, and we already had friends who had moved into Rosh Pina, into a tiny apartment.
Q: Friends from the States, or Israelis?
A: Friends from the mercaz klita. We were beginning to find our place. And we decided to stay at the guest house. We had eaten lunch at the guest house in ’67.
Q: In Ayelet Hashachar.
A: Yes. And we got to the guest house and at the desk we met somebody whom we had met through the aliyah movement. And my husband said to him, “What are you doing here?” He said, “I am going to become a member here.” They invited us for coffee. I am telling the story in the shortest way possible. My husband knew to tell it in a long way. They invited us for coffee and my husband asked him, “How do you get into this beautiful place?” He said, “Look, I’ll ask.”
Q: Both of you liked the place, were impressed with it?
A: We had bought a house in Rechovot already. He had had a job offer at Weizmann already.
Q: Did you know much about a kibbutz? The kibbutz in general.
A: Everything we had read about the kibbutz.
Q: I am not talking about Ayelet Hashachar. The kibbutz as a kibbutz.
A: But not that much. And this guy says, “I’ll ask.” And whom did he ask? The head of the workforce and the head of the new factory that we had just built. We got the message in our room, “Mr. Sasson and Mr. Ziv will be happy to see you at nine o’clock in the morning.” And they wanted to talk to him about what he did. They needed a computer man, but they didn’t need anybody as sophisticated as he was. And they offered him a job.
Q: Here in Ayelet Hashachar.
A: Because the computer man was crazy and they wanted to get rid of him.
Q: In Ayelet Hashachar.
A: And this is how your life changes.
Q: Did they also have a job for you, as a nurse?
A: This was just the beginning. My friends tell me that I turned white because this is not what I had planned for ourselves really. We had bought, we were in the process of buying a very nice apartment in Rechovot.
Q: So you came to the kibbutz and you started your lives as kibbutzniks.
A: And the place is beautiful. A few weeks later they called us, so we decided, “Do we really want to do this? If they want us, do we want to do this?” And they called us. “The assifa decided that they will take you as candidates.” And David was already forty-six then and I was forty-seven, which is over the age that kibbutzim take people. Anyway, we got a call and they wanted us and so we talked about it and we decided to be adventurous. And that’s how we ended up on the kibbutz.
Q: How was it in the beginning? Was it difficult?
A: Well, my husband was here for a month with me and then they sent him to Italy, to Pirelli, to learn the machine that he was going to be using. I was left alone here with my girls.
Q: How did the kibbutzniks treat you, accept you?
A: Oh, they were very nice. My age group ignored me completely. They were the first children of the kibbutz. They were not interested. The people who were older than me, the yekkes who had come in the middle ‘30s, were delightfully helpful.
Q: Did they see you as a yekke also?
A: Well, I’ll tell you. The fact that I spoke German was very helpful in the beginning.
Q: All these years you remembered the German, you used German?
A: Not great. No, I didn’t use German. Didn’t write German. I didn’t want to write, but I can get along, sure. I can get along.
Q: How did your daughters adjust in the kibbutz?
A: Well, I probably did better than anybody else because my daughters didn’t tell me all the problems they were going through. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
Q: So actually they grew up here/
A: They grew up here, yes. Sure they grew up here. But my daughter Margo is a raftanit, was a raftanit until a few months ago. So the fact that she could work with animals…
Q: And when did you become a member of the kibbutz?
A: Two years later. Look, we had decided we would stay, but if anybody felt that it was not something we could live with, that we would leave. But when we brought it up when we came up for membership, we discussed it with the girls. The girls did not quite tell us what a hard time they were having. And we became members.
Q: Some parallelism?
A: By the way, the Yom Kippur War broke out, you know.
Q: ’73.
A: Eight months after we had gotten here, the first question my daughter asked when she heard the siren, she said, “Mommy, this wouldn’t make us go back to the States, would it?”
Q: Did you ever regret?
A: Never. Hard to understand why. I have a lot of criticism of our country, but no, we have never regretted it.
Q: You felt at home.
A: In many ways. In other ways, not. Because it is really very hard to be from one country and to move to another country.
Q: This was the second time you were doing this.
A: And every book I’ve read, whether it was written by somebody Bengali or somebody from Afghanistan who has to come to another country, I identify with it.
Q: As an immigrant? First you were a refugee and an immigrant. You have been through that.
A: That’s right. I, to this day, can’t really quite understand how we made the decision, but in many ways…I have two wonderful sons-in-law.
Q: Israelis?
A: Yes. One from a German family and one from a Rumanian.
Q: Okay. I want to ask you a few more questions and then we will wrap this whole thing up. When you were in the States, 1960, in Israel, they caught Eichmann and there was the Eichmann trial. Did you follow that?
A: I followed it. I just didn’t follow whenever they showed pictures.
Q: Also, actually before that, the end of the war, ’45, were the Nuernberg trials. Did you follow that too?
A: Only to a degree. I was horrified, I think, of having nightmares all the rest of my life. I was so scared.
Q: And also with the Eichmann trial? It brought out…What did it bring out? Just fears or was there any feeling of…?
A: I just couldn’t look at it. I just couldn’t bear. I couldn’t look. To hear, maybe yes, but to look at it, no. Couldn’t bear to look at it.
Q: Any feelings of revenge or…?
A: Look, you know, he got what he deserved, but…
Q: Justice.
A: Of course justice. And I have read the book about how he was caught and so forth.
Q: Did you also read the Hannah Arendt book of the trial?
A: No. She also wrote about him? No, I didn’t.
Q: It is called “Eichmann in Jerusalem”.
A: No.
Q: During those years, did you read things about the Holocaust? Were you interested?
A: No.
Q: Research? Literature?
A: No. I’ve done all my Holocaust reading in recent years, only in recent years.
Q: How come?
A: I was ready. I was emotionally ready to handle it.
Q: To handle it. And then you started reading things.
A: Yes. And I would never watch a program about the Holocaust. My children always said, “Mom, this is not for you.” Or David would tell me, “This is not for you.”
Q: Also in Israel – you weren’t here, but I don’t know if you were aware of it. Also during the ‘60s – there was a big public debate about the compensation money.
A: I was aware of it. I read about it.
Q: Did you have an opinion about that? What did you think about it?
A: Since I wasn’t here…
Q: But it has to do with survivors.
A: Yes, let them pay. By all means.
Q: Now, what happened to your house in…
A: You know, I had a recent letter from the woman that writes to me.
Q: How did you establish this contact?
A: I wrote to the mayor of Schmalnau a few years ago. I told her who I am, my name. I was toying with the idea of making my first trip to Germany.
Q: You were thinking about it.
A: I was toying with it.
Q: This was when you were in Israel already?
A: Oh yes. This was since talking to the children about their background. And I just wondered…I said, “Can you give me any information? Can you tell, is our house still standing?” And she wrote me back right away, that she said, “Look, I am only thirty-eight years old. I don’t know much about your house.”
Q: This is the mayor? Who is she?
A: The mayor.
Q: She is a woman?
A: Yes, a woman. “But I know somebody who can give you much more information than I can and who also writes in English.” So she put me in touch with this woman, who has done this for some other people. By the way, a relative of mine wrote to her years ago.,
Q: What is the name of this woman?
A: This woman is Brigitte Fuller…I am running out of it.
Q: German Catholic?
A: She is German. She is a teacher who is just retiring, whose ninety-six-, ninety-seven-year-old mother remembers my father and my sister. We started writing to each other. She sent me pictures of our house, of the cemetery, which is in good condition, by the way, because I have a lot of ancestors buried there.
Q: What happened to the house?
A: What happened to the house – she wrote to me recently. She said, “I don’t know if this will make you feel good or bad, but your house is for sale for a hundred and ninety-five thousand Euros.” The only thing is, just now, with the changes in the economy…. “And the woman who is selling it, who inherited it, is having trouble selling it because of the economy.” So the woman who in inherited it…She is the one who inherited it. She is younger than I am, so she is not to blame.
Q: Yes, of course.
A: But exactly what the…My sister and I did get some monies. Not much. Over the years.
Q: From Germany?
A: Yes.
Q: Your sister is still alive?
A: My sister died sixteen years ago. In Jerusalem. They made aliyah in ’78, yes.
Q: After you she came.
A: Yes. They lived in Bayit Vegan.
Q: She was more Orthodox.
A: Oh, they were Aguda. She married a man who wouldn’t have married her if she hadn’t been willing.
Q: And when did your second husband die?
A: My husband June, six years ago. June 2003.
Q: Now, in 2002 I believe, from what I read, there was a conference, a reunion of the One Thousand in Chicago?
A: We were in the States and the date of a wedding of one of my nieces.
Q: So you did not attend.
A: No, we didn’t go. But I was very much in touch with the woman who was running the organization and I met her.
Q: Tell use something about this organization?
A: One Thousand Children. It was formed by a couple of women who wondered was there ever a kindertransport to America, started looking and couldn’t find anything, and Judith Baumel’s book helped them. They started that organization and it has…
Q: And then they found out that there were about one thousand, four hundred kids.
A: Yes. I think a thousand, two hundred and fifty.
Q: Who came that way to America.
A: Yes. And when I called her up, when I heard about it, she told me the date that I arrived in the States.
Q: Gave you information.
A: Yes.
Q: You didn’t know before that?
A: No, I didn’t know. She had our names.
Q: Okay, last break. (end of side)
Q: So we were talking about the One Thousand organization, and children. Did you hear about the reunion?
A: I had heard about it through my macheteneste (mother-in-law) who sent me an article from the Jerusalem Post about it. I immediately called this woman in Washington and she put me on the mailing list.
Q: Did you ever meet other kids from that…in Israel, in the States?
A: I happened to know one, years ago, but I have not been in touch with him.
Q: So you never shared your experience. Besides your sister, you never had the chance to share your experience with others.
A: I’ll tell whom I’ve shared it with. In recent years I have met people just like me.
Q: From the Kindertransport to England?
A: In Israel there is a story about everybody. I go to Beit Vatikei HaGalil, which is a remarkable place, by the way, and I have friends my age. We have gone through all kinds of different things. And I was part of a drama group a few years ago and fourteen of us, thirteen of us were immigrants. In a rather big age range, but most of us were from Germany, Austria, or something like that. And we had the opportunity to do improvisations and stuff with our experiences, and that was extraordinary.
Q: You feel that you opened up then and you were in touch already with things that you have had buried?
A: Indeed I did. Absolutely. We were some of the most ordinary-looking people you can think of and several people there were such marvelous actors…I don’t know what people see when they see me. I could not believe how you become somebody else in doing something like that. It was something…opening up is the right word. It was very good for me.
Q: You think you were more able to cope with it?
A: And other people have gone through these same things. If you have always just known people…people in the States have lived a very protected life.
Q: Did you seek any psychological help during the years to deal with…?
A: Not to deal with that. As I told you, I once had some counseling for other things and she…
Q: No, but I am talking about for these.
A: And she thought because of this, that it would help me. I said, “Oh no. I am not willing to open all that up.” And I think for me I did the right thing because I’ve had a very happy life. I have a wonderful family, I have a happy marriage.
Q: And during the years, thinking about your parents and sister, who didn’t make it, did you have guilt feelings that you made it and they didn’t?
A: Look, in German there is the word (?).
Q: Which means?
A: Saved. I think I looked it up in the dictionary and it said “salvaged”, which is not…I think of salvage as equipment rather than people. I know I am one of the saved ones, sure. No, I don’t have guilt feelings.
Q: And what did you think? It was just a matter of luck that you were saved? It was a matter of what? What made it possible for you and not for them?
A: Yes. Lucky that my parents heard about it and an uncle that knew about it. My parents were no unsophisticated people. Look at all the things that happened to me. Luck, truly luck.
Q: And during all kinds of events during your life, when you got married, when you had your first baby, you had grandchildren, are they there, your parents and sister? Are they part of your life?
A: Oh yes. My daughter Margaret – I am sorry you can’t meet her – looks like a particular branch of the family and I have cousins – I had cousins that I knew that came to the States also – she looks like one of them, under certain circumstances. I only got the pictures when my mother was young recently, when I met this ninety-six-year-old cousin in Beit Yitzchak, and my eldest granddaughter has cheeks like my mother.
Q: She resembles her.
A: Yes.
Q: Can you tell us something more about the character of your parents and your sister? Something that you remember of them? That for you, the memory goes with you when you think about them.
A: You know, you take your parents so for granted when you are a child.
Q: What do you carry with you?
A: I take with me Shabbat afternoon at my aunt’s house downstairs. Something warm, with the family together. That’s one of the things I bring with me. I wish I had known my parents better. You regret that you missed out. It has so much to do with atmosphere and feelings. I think I am very affected by atmosphere that I am in, warmth or not. And that is one of the good things that stayed with me – the holidays, the summertime out in the meadow, in our summer dresses, with our mother. I remember picking forget-me-nots for my mother. Germany had a Mother’s Day too, and Mother’s Day was in May also. And I remember picking forget-me-nots for my mother at the banks of the creek.
Q: The flowers.
A: The flowers, yes.
Q: Now, when your children, when they were small, did you talk to them about what happened?
A: No.
Q: The Holocaust, the war.
A: No. Not at all.
Q: Your experience.
A: Margo, I said, “Margo.” She said, “Mommy, I always knew.”
Q: When did you talk to them about it?
A: They knew that I came from Germany.
Q: But what happened to the family?
A: They knew that I had lost my parents, but we never talked about it. Like many people I know, by the way.
Q: You never talked about it.
A: No, never.
Q: Not also about your experiences? The Kindertransport?
A: No, no. Look, once in a while I wanted to talk about experiences as a child having nothing to do with that. Children aren’t always interested in hearing about what you experienced. You can only tell then when they want to ask you.
Q: They weren’t interested or you weren’t interested in telling them?
A: No, no. I am talking about ordinary experiences that you want to tell, not necessarily from the Holocaust. Of anything that happened when I was young.
Q: You wanted to protect them, or you couldn’t deal with it yourself?
A: No, I think children are very self-centred. I think I was and I think most children are. And they want to hear something when they want to hear it. Not necessarily when you want to tell it. But I never did want to talk about the Holocaust.
Q: You didn’t want to talk about it.
A: Now, this generation is hearing it.
Q: The grandchildren.
A: That’s right. They are the ones that are hearing it. I hear this from so many friends of mine.
Q: So you talk about it with your grandchildren.
A: If they want to hear it. Yes.
Q: The oldest of your grandchildren?
A: They are both seventeen, both going to be eighteen, one in May and one in June.
Q: Did anyone go to Poland?
A: No. This family is not for going to Poland. My husband would say, “I am not going to give those Polacks my Jewish money.” No. There is a group that just left…
Q: And you resent that?
A: No. We never had the feeling. First of all, my children don’t need it because they…we may not have talked about it, but they know. They know who they lost.
Q: I want to ask you something about…not about religion, but about belief, faith. Okay? We know that people who went through the Holocaust, experienced it, some, it totally…what’s the word? Shook their belief. Others, it strengthened their faith, belief. Can you say something about that vis-à -vis yourself?
A: No, not for me. I’ve never had a strong belief. I was a little girl in a religious home and it was a warm home. My sister was extremely observant.
Q: I am not talking about the religious. I am talking about your own.
A: No, I don’t think so. I think it’s…oh, sometimes you say, “How can there be a god?” You think it very often, not only for yourself, but for all the things that happened. My religious belief has never been very strong. On the other hand, I am not at all against. I do believe that the best thing that we can give our children is warmth – and each one of us in the way that he or she can give it. And I think my grandchildren are getting it. I hope my children got it, although you hear sometimes of the things you did wrong!
Q: When you think of your life, your personality – how did the past, your childhood, what you went through, being a refugee, losing your parents – how did that shape your personality? How did it shape the way you brought up your kids? How did it shape your view of life? Do you see the connection between things?
A: Yes. I think, first of all, I probably have some survivor genes.
Q: It made you strong? It strengthened you.
A: Apparently. I don’t say I decided to be strong. I think I have been very lucky that I was born with that. That I must have gotten from my parents. The reason that I did not want to become a doctor, by the way, was because I knew I wanted family. Very much so. Very important to me.
Q: So it was very important for you.
A: More important than anything else.
Q: Family. To have your family. To be a mother.
A: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Look, I mean becoming a grandmother was the most marvelous change in status that you can think of.
Q: And how did it affect the way you look at life, the way you educated your kids? Was there any connection there?
A: I would love to ask that question of my children.
Q: But from what you feel or think.
A: Look, somewhere along the way you get…I don’t think we are table erase when we are born. Not by a long shot. Somewhere you get, and some of what I got is from my foster home. Betty Lerrick was a very, very extraordinary woman. I didn’t even begin to tell you how extraordinary she was.
Q: Did they visit you here, when you came to Israel?
A: Yes, they did.
Q: You kept in touch all those years.
A: Oh yes, of course. She was a wonderful teacher of other people’s children and of her own children. And by her example, she did remarkable, remarkable things.
Q: And it affected who you are today?
A: I think so, yes. I mean, what is it? The birth or the environment. Oh, I’m sure she helped make me. So I was lucky.
Q: You were lucky. Yes. Okay, Elsa, we actually are finishing. Is there anything else you would like to say, to share with your children, grandchildren? Anything?
A: No, I think not. I think I’ve said a lot. I think I’ve said enough. They know how I feel about them.
Q: So I want to thank you very much for giving us this interview, on behalf of Yad Vashem as well, and I wish you all the best.
A: Thank you. And I am hoping that this will be helpful to somebody. In any case, it would be very nice to have it, but my goodness, who is going to listen that long?!
Testimony of Elsa (Heilbronn) Epstein, born in Schmalnau, Germany, 1925, regarding her experiences in Schmalnau, Frankfurt and with foster families in the United States
Her childhood in Schmalnau; life during the Nazi rule.
Move of her sister to Pennsylvania, 1934; increase in displays of antisemitism; imposition of anti-Jewish decrees; her father is forced to leave his place of work, 1935; move of her family to Frankfurt; life in the children's home [in Frankfurt], 1936; move to the United States with another 11 children; separation from her family in Germany, 1937; life with a Jewish foster family in Allentown; move to a Jewish foster family in Bethlehem [Pennsylvania], 1938; studies in a nursing school in Baltimore.
Receives knowledge regarding the fate of her family; her husband is killed in action during the Korean War, 1951; [remarriage and] starts a family in Philadelphia; aliya to Israel and Kibbutz Ayelet HaShahar, 1972.
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item Id
7773398
First Name
Elsa
Elza
Last Name
Epstein
Maiden Name
Heilbronn
Heilbrun
Date of Birth
1925
Place of Birth
Schmalnau, Germany
Type of material
Testimony
File Number
13142
Language
English
Record Group
O.3 - Testimonies Department of the Yad Vashem Archives
Date of Creation - earliest
17/04/09
Date of Creation - latest
17/04/09
Name of Submitter
Epstien Elsa
Original
YES
No. of pages/frames
131
Interview Location
ISRAEL
Connected to Item
O.3 - Testimonies gathered by Yad Vashem
Form of Testimony
Video
Subjects
Dedication
Moshal Repository, Yad Vashem Archival Collection