Epilogue

Bev Lewyn on the Conversations and
Memories of Bert Lewyn

In every instance in writing this book, both Bert and I were completely committed to making this book as accurate as possible. Dragging out fifty-year-old memories is not an easy or simple process, but we searched for hard facts and for corroboration from the people in his story who were still alive. At every turn when we discovered something inaccurate or incomplete, we went back and corrected the text. The timeline of these memories and all the conversations in the book were written to the best of Bert’s memory.

Bert was able to speak about his experiences quite easily, and he never once broke down even during my intense questioning of these excruciating and heartbreaking experiences. He was lucky to be able to distance himself from the emotions that he obviously felt during these moments. I do think this emotional distance helped him cope and go on to create a very successful life.

Since Bert’s death, I have continued to research his story and have updated and included new information in this edition. Continuing research and additional materials from the Lewins’ lives may be found on www.bertlewyn.com.

Dagobert Lewin

A few days after my arrival in Atlanta, I talked to Rabbi and Mrs. Geffen about the fact that I was now well rested and felt quite strong. It was time for me to find a job. They asked their son Louis to help me. Louis assisted me in getting a job working as a sewing-machine mechanic at the Berger Sewing Machine Company. The owner of the company, Bernie Berger, was a friend of Louis’s. They were both Jewish war veterans and active in the Jewish War Veterans organization.

I started out earning the vast sum of forty-five cents an hour. There were other service men there who were paid more, but the presumption was that they were worth more because they could speak English and communicate with customers. I had no problem with this reasoning since my English was still very limited.

Shortly after starting my new job, I began attending night school on Washington Street. I had never graduated from any school, so the director of the night school thought I should start from the very beginning, the ninth grade. Within a few weeks, I was able to converse quite readily in English. Seven months later, I had earned my high school diploma.

For the next two years, I attended evening courses at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I took English, basic chemistry, algebra, geometry, etc. Meanwhile, I began working for W. P. Childs Machinery Company in Scottsdale, Georgia. The W. P. Childs company manufactured and sold woodworking and metalworking machinery. German equipment was considered to be among the best in the world, and I was able to help them introduce some German manufacturing techniques, which in turn allowed them to improve their machinery.

Life with the Geffens was good. It soon became clear to me that they were an extremely close-knit family. They had four sons and four daughters, each having their own families. All but one lived in cities other than Atlanta, but not a week went by without some or all of the children calling the Geffen parents, inquiring about their health or the latest news of the family.

There were frequent visitors at the Geffen house, and the general atmosphere was always one of warmth and genuine concern and interest. Uncle Tobias had been rabbi of the Shearith Israel synagogue in Atlanta since 1910. I accompanied him to Sabbath services on Friday and Saturday nearly every week. It was a new experience for me, because I had not regularly attended services for many years and those that I attended in my youth were Reform. The Shearith Israel was then an Orthodox synagogue.

An interesting bit of trivia was that Rabbi Geffen was one of the only people ever to see the secret formula for Coca-Cola. He was the rabbi who first certified the soft drink as being kosher for Passover, at the request of the Coca-Cola Company.

A few months after my arrival in Atlanta—as soon as I was able to converse in English—Aunt Hene Geffen decided it was time to find me a wife. She arranged dates for me with several of the young ladies in the Atlanta Jewish community. After a while, I had enough of this and asked her to please stop. She insisted on one more try and, as fate would have it, I met my future wife. Her name was Esther Sloan.

Wedding of Esther and Bert Lewyn, in the presence of the Geffen family, December 23, 1951, Atlanta, Georgia. Left to right, Mrs. Hene and Rabbi Tobias Geffen, Phyllis Simon, Lotti Simon, Bert and Esther Lewyn, Harold Simon, Louis Geffen, Anna Geffen, kneeling, David Geffen.

After making my case, emphasizing that I was not just a poor greenhorn immigrant and that I would definitely make my mark, I convinced Esther to marry me. She did, on December 23, 1951. On our wedding invitation, Rabbi and Mrs. Geffen took the place of my parents, inviting guests to the wedding (along with Esther’s mother, Eva Sloan).

Esther and I had five children: Andrea Jo (named after my mother Johanna), Lawrence David (named after my father Leopold and my grandfather Dovid), Marc Jonathan (who is married to Bev), Cynthia Jane, and Michael Evan. Andrea is married to Edward Krakovsky and they have two children, Jacob Aaron and Hannah Sloan. Bev and Marc have four daughters, Alexandra Eve, Rachel Madeline, Sarah Bena, and Rebecca Anna.

Very shortly after I arrived in the United States, I began to call myself “Bert” in social situations. No one had ever heard of “Dagobert.” After Esther and I married, I became tired of my last name being mispronounced. When I applied for my naturalization papers, I Americanized my name to “Bert Lewyn” in hopes that both names could be pronounced correctly.

During my time at W. P. Childs I did quite well, selling their machinery in particular to the very large US Army–operated Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The Redstone Arsenal used the machinery to make rockets, missiles, and other Allied military items. My knowledge of German came in handy because the arsenal was run by Werner von Braun and his department heads, nearly all of whom were from Germany. The US Army had hired von Braun and his team after WWII for their technical know-how.

These men had extensive knowledge in designing and building rockets, including the V-rockets that caused so much destruction in England. Even though my sentiments were such that I really didn’t want to be around anything German, especially German people, this was business. I was able to suppress my negative feelings in order to do my job. We talked solely about technical things. I never told them about my background, and they never asked.

After six months at W. P. Childs, it became apparent to me that things weren’t going to work out. My boss, Dick Childs, and I began to have disagreements about what he owed me. I left the Childs company and followed two other former W. P. Childs salesmen, Jim Davis and Arnold Goldberg, who had started their own company after having similar experiences with Dick Childs. I left them after about three months, because DG Machinery & Gage Co. was a new company and there just wasn’t enough money to support all three of our families.

Photo from grandson Jacob Krakovsky’s bar mitzvah June 12, 2004. Back row from l to r: Marc Lewyn, Michael Lewyn, Lawrence Lewyn, Esther Lewyn, Bert Lewyn, Jacob Krakovsky, Andrea Lewyn Krakovsky, and Edward Krakovsky. Middle row granddaughters from l to r: Alexandra Lewyn, Rachel Lewyn, Sarah Lewyn, Sloan Krakovsky. Front row: Bev Saltzman Lewyn holding Rebecca Lewyn, and Cindy Lewyn.

In 1952, from the basement of my mother-in-law’s house, I formed my own company. It was initially called the Bert Lewyn Co., but eventually I changed the name to Lewyn Machinery Co., Inc. My company sold woodworking machinery to manufacturers of wood products. With the support of my wife, Esther, I threw myself into the work with an enthusiasm usually reserved for the very young or the insane. Virtually every waking moment was spent in that dirt-floor basement, pounding on my typewriter and organizing my new business. Esther’s mother began to suspect that I might not be entirely rational and harangued Esther about her new husband every chance she got. Undeterred by the criticism, I went on to make a net profit of thirty-four dollars my first year in business.

In the second year my net profit soared to $725 and my third year in business I reached $3,000. I spent most of my time traveling the South in my car, calling on customers old and new. I did well enough to hire my first employee in 1961. In 1963, battling anxiety all the way, I bought a plot of land on Jackson Parkway and built the first ten thousand square foot building to house my business.

For many years, I sold machinery manufactured in the United States, mostly from a company located in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, their equipment became somewhat old-fashioned and it soon was clear that they were reluctant to make the changes needed to remain competitive with the Europeans. In 1975, an Israeli friend, who was an engineering consultant to the woodworking industry, recommended that I contact a German manufacturer, Koch Maschinen. My friend told me that he had extensive dealings with this German company and that they had become friends, both inside and outside the office.

Up to that point, I had steered clear of any involvement with German manufacturers. Then, in 1974, the International Machinery Exposition took place in Hanover, as it does every two years. I attended this exposition along with my friend. He insisted on introducing me to the people at Koch Maschinen, to which I reluctantly agreed.

The long and short of it is that, in 1976, I began a business relationship with Koch Maschinen of Bielefeld, Germany. I introduced their machines to the United States market, sold them, and serviced them for ten years, until finally I was bought out by the Koch family. I remained with the company until 1991. To this day, I still count the Koch family among my friends, something I thought would never happen in view of the fact that I had once turned my back on Germans and Germany for what I thought was forever.

In all that time, I never told them about my background or about my experiences during the Hitler years. I never wanted to talk about what had happened to me and my family. I didn’t want to discuss it with anyone, not support groups, not with friends, not with coworkers.

In the years since I arrived in the United States, I had tried to forget the details of my life in Germany. I told Esther a little about it when we got married and mentioned a few very sketchy details to my children, but that was all. I didn’t avoid the subject, but I volunteered no information and spoke in the most general terms possible. When my children asked me about it, I would inevitably respond with, “I’ll tell you more when you get older.”

Other than myself and my aunt Riva, the only survivor in my family was my first cousin, Dov Levin. Dov is the son of Hirsch, my father’s brother. He was in the Kovno ghetto with Riva and the rest of my relatives. He escaped from the ghetto into the forests, where he became a partisan, fighting the Germans by blowing up their rail lines and committing other acts of sabotage. After the war, Dov walked from Lithuania to Italy. From there, he went by ship to Palestine, the entire journey taking about ten months. Soon after his arrival, he joined the Haganah and fought in the 1948 War of Independence. He became a professor of contemporary Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has authored fourteen books and over four hundred articles. He is the world’s foremost expert on the history of the Jews in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia during the Nazi period.

In 1980, Dov and his wife, Bilah, came with me to Destin, Florida, for a vacation. He insisted that I make some sort of record of my experiences in Berlin during the Hitler years. I tried to discourage him, but he refused to be deterred. We purchased a tape recorder and tapes from the neighborhood drugstore and sat for hours, with him interviewing me, relentlessly dragging out my story. Once the tapes were complete, I made no further effort, for many years, to record any aspect of my history.

I retired from the machinery business in 1991 and soon began to toy with the idea of writing this book. I wanted my children and grandchildren to know my history, as much as I could remember about myself, my parents, and their families. I realized the best way to accomplish this would be to write, but even though I knew that time was rushing by, I never got around to doing much, other than jotting down a few notes.

In 1992, my son Marc and my daughter-in-law Bev returned once again to Destin. On the way down they listened to the tapes of Dov’s interviews from over a decade before. Bev was fascinated with my story and suggested that it should be recorded in book form, for our family and for posterity.

By the fall of 1993, I still had done little to make the book a reality. Bev suggested that we take her upcoming maternity leave from CNN and use this time to write the book. Six years later, after numerous revelations and adventures in self-discovery, here we are, complete at last.

Bev Lewyn

After the book was published, Bert enjoyed speaking about his story to school and community groups around the country.

He had two more granddaughters, Sarah Lewyn (named for Sara Hene Geffen, his aunt who brought him to Atlanta) and Rebecca Lewyn, bringing Esther and Bert’s total number of grandchildren to six. Bert continued to be active in his family’s real estate business until he became ill.

Bert died at home on January 3, 2016, surrounded by his family. Even toward the end of his life when his short-term memory failed him, he did not appear to suffer from the terrible memories of his younger years as some in his family feared might happen. Though his ability to communicate waned, when he did communicate he maintained his charming wit and sense of humor.

His wife, Esther, says that he spent his time during the early decades of their marriage “trying very hard to forget” what had happened. He threw himself into work. He didn’t join survivors’ organizations. He virtually never talked about years in Berlin, not even with his wife. He only told his children about his past when they were in their teens.

In June 2016 my husband, Marc, and I took our four daughters to Berlin to visit key sites in their grandfather’s life in Berlin and to walk in his footsteps. Some of the newer photos in this edition are from that trip.

On June 15, 2018, Bert’s family returned to 70 Koepenicker Strasse in Berlin to witness the laying of the brass Stolpersteines or “stumbling stone” plaques to commemorate that Dagobert, Leopold, and Johanna had lived there and had been victims of the Holocaust.

Ilse Perl Lewin and Klaus Perl

After Ilse came with me back to Feldafing to receive our get—our religious divorce—Ilse returned to Bergen-Belsen, and we lost contact with each other. She eventually married Harold Nestor Murray, the British soldier she met after the liberation of Bergen Belsen. She had no more children.

Strange as it may sound, in 1993 when we began the writing of this book, I had no recollection of Ilse whatsoever. I did not remember her when Dov was interviewing me in Florida, nor when Bev began a more detailed interrogation.

After a few months of working with Bev, she jokingly commented to me that my story was amazing, like something straight out of Hollywood, but that it lacked a love interest. We got quite a chuckle out of that, but her comment must have jarred something in my mind, because memories of Ilse seemed to appear out of nowhere.

The next time we met, I told Bev about Ilse. By this time, I could recall the incident of meeting her at her aunt’s house, of her seducing me, of meeting Klaus, and then of us posing as husband and wife while we lived at Herr Braun’s apartment.

After that, I remembered nothing except the events that occurred after I visited her at Bergen-Belsen. I incorrectly remembered us seeking a religious divorce because Riva and Rabbi Schlapobersky told us to proceed with it “just in case anyone should have thought we were really married.”

It was only after we started rereading letters that Anni Kusitzky had sent me after the war that questions and contradictions arose. One of Anni’s letters mentioned that Ilse and Klaus had recently come to Berlin to visit her.

This was a startling revelation, since I had no memories of Ilse ever meeting the Kusitzkys. How in the world had Ilse known them? And though I could stretch my imagination to having Ilse meet them once or twice, I couldn’t believe that she would have known them well enough to visit after the war.

Much of the research done to establish my history was performed through archives in Berlin. I had requested several of these archives to send me any documentation they had concerning my parents or myself. Imagine my shock when, included in the documents about my parents, were papers regarding my “wife”—Ilse Perl Lewin—a woman I had no recollection of marrying.

My last memories of Ilse were of us living together in Herr Braun’s apartment in Berlin, pretending to be married. Yet Ilse’s deportation papers, which I now held in my hand, were dated January 5, 1945. This was almost the same day that I recall being arrested by the Gestapo. Coincidence? Before today, I had imagined that Ilse was arrested shortly after our time together at Herr Braun’s, since I had no further memory of her after this period. But these papers clearly established that Ilse was still around after our time together at Braun’s apartment. I was also puzzled that the papers gave Ilse’s last name as Lewin.

There were too many unanswered questions here. I decided to try to contact Ilse. I had no idea whether she was still even alive, but my curiosity would not allow me to rest without at least making the effort to find her.

Anni’s letter had mentioned that Ilse was married to an orthopedist from London, so I put search notices in the journal of the British Orthopedic Association. I called the Wiener Library and the Association of Jewish Refugees, both in London, and ran notices in their publications. I also ran a notice in a journal published by the mayor of Berlin, distributed to Jewish ex-Berliners.

In a book written by Dr. Inge Lammel of Berlin, it was mentioned that Ilse and Klaus were deported to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945. I contacted Dr. Lammel and explained that I was trying to contact Ilse. She did not know where Ilse was, but she gave me the name and phone number of a friend of Ilse’s, a Mrs. Alice Fink of Chicago.

I tried to call Mrs. Fink, but she refused to talk to me. Not wishing to give up on my most promising lead, I wrote to Mrs. Fink, enclosing an unsealed letter to Ilse and asking her to please forward it. The letter explained the situation and asked for her help in answering some questions.

More than six months went by with no word from Ilse. We gave up. We decided to finish the book as best we could, even with the questions and contradictions that remained.

Then, in June 1996, Ilse called. She said that she had heard that I was searching for her but had hesitated to contact me, fearing to reopen a chapter of her life that was best left in the past.

Klaus and his children told her that she owed me nothing and did not need to contact me. Later I learned that she did feel that some type of debt existed between us. Eventually, she said that her curiosity got the best of her and decided to risk a call.

In talking to me and in reading the questions I had prepared, it became apparent to her that I had forgotten much of what we had experienced together.

I was caught entirely off-guard when she told me that we had not been just posing as husband and wife but that we had been legally married. We had gone to the equivalent of city hall and been officially married, with appropriate documentation. This was a complete and total surprise to me. From a copy of a civil divorce decree, Ilse read aloud the date of our wedding, December 12, 1942. That was over two months before the Fabrikaktion of February 27, 1943. I didn’t remember knowing Ilse before then.

She also told me that the Gestapo had arrested us together at the Kusitzkys, when I only remembered myself being there. She mentioned Paul Richter’s house in the country and how she had been there with me, even though I had no recollection of her being present. But she remembered many details that I remembered, plus a few that escaped me.

She told me that she would respond in writing to my questions. “Do you want to know the bad as well as the good?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said, without hesitation. Whatever the reason for my faulty memory, I wanted to know the truth.

When my daughter-in-law Bev learned of this “bad as well as good” comment, she asked, “Dad, are you prepared to learn that there was a pregnancy? Even a baby?” Here, I drew a blank. I had no memory whatsoever, one way or the other.

Sure enough, the next day Ilse informed me that we had parented a baby boy. He was born on May 13, 1945, in the Belsen DP camp, one month after Belsen was liberated. Ilse had named him Gad Lewin. The conditions in the camp were abominable, and Gad did not survive for long, dying on October 4, 1945. Ilse even enclosed a picture of Gad’s grave.

All of this was very difficult to grasp. Nothing seemed to stimulate my missing memories. It was as though those events—the marriage, the pregnancy, the baby’s death—never occurred. It was very hard to make them seem real.

I wanted to meet with Ilse again, face-to-face. But Ilse did not want to tell me where she lived or to give me her address. I offered to come to England, but again, she refused. Her husband was very ill and she did not want to leave his side. Any letters I might have for her had to be sent via Klaus.

There are still questions that remain, but after the death of Ilse’s husband a few months later, she seemed to lose interest in the project. Nonetheless, I am grateful for a source of information I otherwise would not have had.

Bev Lewyn

During the writing of this book, after learning that he had forgotten that Ilse and he had been legally wed and had a child together, Bert pushed the information aside and kept going. According to Esther, he never spoke of his late son again.

Gad Lewin, May 13, 1945–October 4, 1945.

When I recently asked Esther why she thought he could have forgotten the existence of a child, she said that since he lost so many family members, this child would have “just been yet another one lost.” In that context, perhaps it is a little easier to understand.

During the book-writing process, I had the opportunity to consult with Eli Stein, a trauma-specialized therapist in Minnesota. When I asked Stein about Bert’s memory suppression, he explained that exceedinngly painful memories can be likened to a house. To move forward, instead of burning down the whole house, trauma survivors may just throw away the key. Dr. Stein speculated that for Bert, Ilse was the key. And so he “threw her away” by forgetting her presence.

Ilse in center, Esther Lewyn to Ilse’s right, and Ilse’s friend Alice Fink on the left.

Marc and I visited Ilse at her home in England in the spring of 1999. Ilse was very gracious and told us that while it was a marriage of unusual circumstances, she had loved Dagobert. She said the tension was so high while they were living illegally that her son, Klaus (sometimes spelled Claus), did not want her to talk to Bert; he was concerned she would become upset.

Eventually, Ilse, Bert, and Esther met and had an enjoyable time together. There is a photo of Bert on a couch with Esther on one side and Ilse on this other: “his two wives,” the women exclaimed.

Ilse died on September 22, 2010. The notice of her death says that her son, Klaus (Claus) died before her.

Günther Gerson

In spite of vigorous efforts and unlike other people I met during the war years, I have been unable to contact Günther Gerson. I have, however, talked to at least one individual who was with Günther in prison.

Apparently, Günther was arrested while impersonating an SS officer. I was told that he was stopped in a department store wearing an SS uniform minus the uniform hat. A patrol checking for deserters demanded his identity papers, which he was unable to produce. He was taken into custody and transported to the same prison, located in the Jewish Hospital pathology building, where I had been incarcerated.

Günther’s whereabouts after the war ended are unknown. There was a rumor that he was living in Argentina. Wherever he is, I would certainly love to talk to him.

Bev Lewyn

When we first wrote the book, Bert vividly remembered Günther Gerson, his escapades with him, and Günther’s girlfriend and her father. We tried repeatedly to find Günther while we were writing the original book but were repeatedly unsuccessful. In the years since this book was first published, I occasionally tried to search for Günther online but always came up dry.

Until the summer of 2018.

My first breakthrough came a few years prior from Barbara Schieb, a researcher at the Silent Heroes Memorial Center in Berlin. Barbara reported that Günther’s girlfriend was actually named Eleonore/Ellen Stindt—not Ella Berg, as Bert had recalled (the names have been corrected in this edition). Eleonore’s father, Bruno Stindt, was a cameraman in Berlin for Paramount News/Pictures. It seems Bert’s memory about Bruno Stindt having fantastic Nazi connections was indeed correct. In the spring 1977 international film magazine Sight & Sound, director and screenwriter Jonathan Lewis says in the article “Before Hindsight” that Bruno Stindt was “Hitler’s favorite cameraman” and that Stindt supplied not only Paramount with footage but also Movietone and other companies who couldn’t gain access to it on their own.

Bruno Stindt was not Jewish, but according to Barbara Schieb, his wife (Eleonore’s mother) Tilla Stindt, was. Eleonore and her brother, Gerhard Stindt, would thus have been potential targets of the Third Reich. Bruno Stindt was able to use his Paramount contacts to ask Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s private secretary to help get his son Gerhard out of Germany, and Gerhard did go to the United States. At some point Gerhard starting using the name Gary and became a prominent reporter for NBC News.

In July 2018, Barbara shared with me the names of Günther’s parents: Else and Hermann Gerson. Contrary to Bert’s memory that Günther’s mother died first and that his father remarried, she said Günther’s father, Hermann, died in 1931 and his mother, Else, committed suicide in 1937, so neither of his parents were alive while Dagobert and Günther were U-Boats. Barbara also said that Günther had a sister, Senta, who became the foster child of Tilla Stindt after Else Gerson committed suicide. Barbara’s records indicate that Günther’s guardian was his uncle.

Newly armed with Günther’s parents’ names, I searched online for them and soon had a breakthrough. I found Günther’s parents listed on a family heritage website and reached out to the man in charge. I told him I had been looking for Günther Gerson for years to no avail and asked if perhaps I had found the correct family. As luck would have it, he said I had. He explained that Günther had changed his name to Gerald Garson after immigrating to Chicago after the war. That is why we never found him. He also gave me the contact information of Günther’s daughter, Dr. Sharon Garson Glass.

Dr. Glass and I spoke on the phone, and she told me that she only discovered her father had changed his name after he died of a heart attack in Chicago in 2005. She found a letter and some documents that told her more about his life before coming to America.

In 1969, Gerald wrote a letter to a judge in Illinois describing his life. In the letter he wrote that his father, Hermann Gerson, had been partners in a ladies’ garments manufacturing business, not the jewelry business Bert had recalled. While Hermann was alive, Günther’s family was very well off. After Hermann’s death, financial difficulties forced Günther’s mother, Else, to get a job, and they had to move out of their large apartment in Berlin-Templehof into a smaller apartment. Else had difficulty adjusting to the new lifestyle and she was constantly harassed for having married a Jew and having half-Jewish children. Günther’s mother’s German Protestant family cooled their relations with them, and his father’s family began to leave Germany for England, South Africa, and South America. When the situation became even more difficult, his letter says that Else put Günther in the “12th jewish orphanage in the suburb of Pankow.”

This comment that Günther was in the Pankow orphanage was a big surprise to me, as Bert never mentioned Günther being in the orphanage and Bert’s childhood friend at the Waisenhaus, Dr. Leslie Baruch Brent, also doesn’t recall the name. I asked the people presently maintaining the orphanage records and they found no trace of a Günther Gerson. They asked another orphanage in the area about him as well, and they too had no records of a Günther Gerson being in their orphanage.

Günther’s letter recalls a life in the orphanage very similar to Dagobert’s. Günther wrote that he attended school, had his bar mitzvah there, and visited his mother and sister every weekend. The letter to the judge states Günther ultimately stayed in the orphanage for six years.

Once the war began and his sister, Senta, disappeared off the streets, presumably picked up by the Gestapo, Günther, like Dagobert, says he decided to go underground and live illegally. Gunther says he slept during days in bombed-out buildings, fields, or basements, and during the night stole food, breaking into stores to obtain the necessary items to stay alive. Günther’s letter does not mention the Stindts and living with them or working for Bruno Stindt.

His letter then says “soon I found myself in the company of other ‘illegals’ who formed underground sabotage teams, conducting extremely dangerous demolition and sabotage activities against the German military.” Gunther says the group was “well armed,” which was fascinating to read, given that Dagobert was captured at the Kusitzkys with a crate of weapons—and he could not recall why or how he had all those weapons.

Günther was arrested on December 13, 1944, very near the time that Dagobert would have been arrested. Eugen Herman-Friede, a teenager in the same Gestapo prison where Dagobert was held, says Günther was arrested because he was caught wearing a Gestapo uniform without the appropriate hat. Barbara Schieb corroborates that Günther was kept for a time in the Gestapo prison at the Jewish Hospital. Later he was moved to the prison in the basement of the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrecht-Strasse.

Günther’s letter says “in order to make me tell them what they wanted to know, [the Gestapo] subjected me to extremely painful torture and starvation.” The torture included thumb screws, Russian roulette, severe beatings, treatments with a red hot needle, and being hung by his heels and revived with cold water when he passed out. He says that the torture was responsible for him losing 70 percent of his hearing, which diverges from Bert’s memory that Günther was hard of hearing even during the time they were U-boats. Günther’s daughter and Barbara Schieb concur that the hearing loss was a result of the torture, so I have removed from this edition Bert’s descriptions of Günther being hard of hearing while a U-boat. Barbara thinks it is quite likely that Günther and Dagobert would have seen each other in Berlin in the days after the war. Perhaps Bert recalling that Günther was hard of hearing stemmed from postwar memories and not from the time they were U-boats. Photos and documents also indicate Bert’s memory of Günther being blond with blue eyes was also incorrect. I have removed those descriptions in this edition as well.

Gerald’s letter says he escaped from the Prinz Albrecht Strasse prison in February 1945 and became “one of only two survivors of it”—he says he later learned the rest of the prisoners were taken outside and shot in the neck and thrown in the rubble. When the war was over, Günther was granted one of the first immigration visas to the United States and arrived in New York on June 18, 1946.

Günther Simon Gerson at some point became Gerald Symon Garson. He married Evelyn Jorczak in 1952 in Chicago and they had two daughters: Sharon, born August 29, 1959, and Marcella (Marcy), born December 19, 1961. Gerald died of a heart attack in Chicago in 2005.

Günther Gerson’s postwar driver’s license.

Barbara Schieb says Günther’s girlfriend Eleonore Stindt gave birth to Günther’s son, Michael Franklin Stindt, on April 25, 1945, in Berlin-Templehof. Gunther visited Michael in Germany when Michael was ten years old, and he wanted to take Michael back to the United States, but Eleonore said no and so Michael stayed in Munich with her. Günther apparently had little to do with his son. His compensation file does not even mention the boy, nor does his October 2, 1946, application for US citizenship. When I spoke with her, Günther’s daughter Sharon was unaware that her father had fathered a son before he emigrated to the United States. She wants to talk to him, and as of this writing Barbara plans to put them in touch with each another.

Alex and Anni Kusitzky

I kept in touch with Alex and Anni after the war. I went back to visit them in the 1970s with my wife, Esther, and son Michael, but by then Alex had died and Anni had sold the house and moved to an apartment.

In almost all of our contacts via letters and in person, Anni begged me to come back to Germany and never could understand why I did not wish to live there. “I’ll take care of you,” she would say. She wrote me long letters, filled with much emotion. Here are excerpts from a few letters, translated from the German:

I don’t understand this world and don’t believe in it. I can well understand that [your] Auntie [Riva] Gutman feels lonesome. She will very often think about her dear ones who have perished so terribly. I hope that the scoundrels who have committed these crimes will have received just punishment. All guilt will be weighed on this Earth. We don’t want to think about the terrible deeds committed, when we do, we must shame ourselves to be German. Now, dear Dagobert, you don’t stand alone in this wide great world and that you have a dear good woman who understands you and loves you. That I wish for you.

Tell me dear Dagobert, don’t you long for your home where you lived your childhood and youth? . . . How did you ever have the thought of going to America, such a strange and foreign land, so far away. I cannot understand this. Here, with us, are so many possibilities to advance and improve. You are not a blockhead and could obtain a highly respected position and make a lot of money. But then again, you were very young and maybe you were intrigued by the lust for adventure . . .

Dear Dagobert, I don’t understand you at all. Why have you landed in such a faraway strange and black part of the Earth. After all, you are a German and will remain a German and your mother tongue is German. For all the things in the world, I would not have gone to live [in America.]

Yes, with what then happened one must be ashamed to be a German. But dear Dagobert, the loving God has saved you from this terrible fate, the annihilation. Do not forget to thank him for having saved you, that you live and can enjoy the beauty of the world and that you have healthy limbs and body. The almighty will judge and deal with those who are guilty and have brought on all the misery.

You really have no business living in the South of the United States because you are not accustomed to the hot weather and you don’t really understand these people. You’ll never be satisfied and you shouldn’t be there. I want to urge you to come back to Berlin. I will help you to build a good life and things are much better here now than they used to be under the Nazis. Besides all of that, you are a German. You are not an American. Don’t dawdle just pack your bags and come back here.

Anni later wrote that she had hidden me because it was the right thing to do. She said she was not interested in gaining glory for what she had done. “God alone knows what I have done and he will handle it.”

Anni felt it was her mission to help the sick and incapacitated. She sponsored families from Siberia and Russia and helped them emigrate to Germany. She also spent much of her time with the needy or people who had been disabled by medical conditions, keeping them company, shopping for them, doing their laundry, etc.

She also spent a few years helping her son, Heinz, who was injured in a fall from a horse when the Germans were retreating from the advancing Russian army. After the accident, Heinz suffered from epileptic seizures, which troubled him for many years. It was very hard on Anni to care for him and to see him go through such a horrible period.

Anni died in 1979. I was contacted in 1995 or 1996 by an author in Lübars who asked me to send information about Anni and Alex and how they protected me during the war. The book, Lübars Bilder Buch (Lübars Picture Book) by Diesbach and Hensel (published 1997 by Haude and Spener) has pictures of Anni and her house and mentions her as being a hero for what she did for me. The author requested my photograph in 1997, which he incorporated in his book with these comments, translated from the German:

Bert Lewyn moved away in 1949 after miraculous rescue from the murderous land of Poets, Thinkers and Cowards, who paid no heed to the warnings of what was happening. Afterwards, they never knew anything about it.

Bev Lewyn

In June 2016 my husband, Marc, and I took our daughters to Berlin to visit the sites where their grandfather lived, worked, or hid. We went to Lübars, now a lovely suburb in the horse country outside Berlin. It was very difficult to find the original Kusitsky house on Benekendorfstrasse as the land has been subdivided and the house is no longer visible from the road. Eventually, a neighbor helped us find it and we walked up the same hill Dagobert had walked, past the gate, and up the stairs. Halfway up the hill, next to the walkway, was a beautiful pond. The man who lives in the Kusitsky house now explained that a crater made in the ground from a bomb during the war had been turned in into a pond. And so something lovely came out of that terrifying day.

Crater from the bomb in the Kusitskys’ yard is now a lovely pond.

Heinz, Horst, Jenny, and Leo Lebrecht

After the war ended in May 1945, I moved with the Lebrechts from Lorenzstrasse (the tiny apartment in the bottom of the Nazi headquarters building) to a larger place at 95 Ringstrasse. Shortly thereafter, I left them to go live with the Kusitzkys.

I had no subsequent contact with them until 1997. After we began working on this book, I started trying to locate them. After several failed attempts, I spoke with Barbara Schieb, an author who has written about wartime Berlin. She suggested I send a letter to Heinz in care of the Central Kartei (Central Records) office in Berlin.

I asked them to please forward the letter to Heinz. They did this and in 1997 I received a call from Heinz, now Henry. I met with him at his home outside Los Angeles the same year. He is married and has a daughter and grandchildren. Henry is retired from his emblem manufacturing business and is also writing a book on his experiences during the war.

The Lebrecht boys came over to the United States in the 1950s with their parents, and they all lived in California. Their parents died there.

Horst Dobriner

Horst Dobriner, my friend from the orphan’s home whose mother and stepfather hid me while I was a Uboat, was transported to Auschwitz in 1943 and was murdered there by the SS. He was twenty years old.

Riva Levin Gutman and Dov Levin

When she first immigrated to Palestine in 1947, Riva lived with her brother and sister-in-law in Tel Aviv. After learning Hebrew in an ulpan (an intensive course), she then became a social worker in Nes Ziona, a town about an hour from Tel Aviv. She worked with children, either orphans or children who were somehow disturbed. Eventually, she became the director of the institution.

After her arrival in Palestine, Riva found my first cousin (and her nephew) Dov Levin. Riva became for Dov what she had been to me, a surrogate mother. Dov and his wife, Bilha, had three children: daughters Nitzana and Basmat and a son, Zvika. All three children grew to consider Riva as their grandmother. Riva remarried very briefly but the marriage only lasted a few months.

Riva and I remained very close after I went to the United States and married. I visited her in Israel when I could. She still used the furniture I had bought and shipped to her when I was in the DP camp.

Riva died in 1979. After her death, Dov discovered that Riva had saved the letters I had written to her, including those I had written from Feldafing. After Dov forwarded the letters to me, I translated them from Yiddish into English. Some of these translations are included in this book.

My granddaughter Rachel (daughter of my son Marc and daughter-in-law Bev) is named for her.

Boris Levin

Original name Ozerac-Beras Davidovich Levinas, Uncle Boris’s name, occupation, and reputation saved my life when the Russians burst into the Lebrechts’ apartment.

His daughter, her husband, and their grown children now live in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and are members of a synagogue where my cousin, David Geffen, is the rabbi. David met this woman, recognized her name, and made the connection to me. We’ve been in touch since I began writing this book, and she has sent me many translated documents about her father and his career.

It was through these documents that I learned my uncle Boris had fought and been wounded in the battle at the village Kosino. He and his Red Army comrades fought the Germans as they tried to advance toward Moscow.

After finishing his education in France, Boris moved to Moscow in 1930 and worked as the senior engineer at the Central Administration of Power Economy. In 1937 he was the head of testing of electrical equipment for large-scale industry. He authored several books for use in electrical engineering courses in educational institutions. After WWII, he was instrumental in the engineering reconstruction of power plants and related industries in the USSR.

My Parents: Leopold Lewin and Johanna
Wolff Lewin

For nearly sixty years, I had no confirmation of what had happened to my parents. I had the postcard that had told me that in 1942 they were in Trawniki, Poland. But I had nothing else. In all that time, I had never met anyone who had been in Trawniki.

Then, in January 1994, my daughter-in-law Bev went to Jerusalem to the research library of the Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. There she was shown a copy of the Gedenkbuch (Remembrance Book), a large compilation that details the fates of Berlin Jews deported to the East. She looked up my parents and brought back Xerox copies of the pages that concerned them. Below is a translation of the relevant section from the Gedenkbuch as well as a reproduction from the German.

Lewin, Leopold

born September 7, 1891 in Kovno, Lithuania.

address before deportation: Berlin S.O.16, Koepenickerstr, 70. Deported 3-28-42, [transport] No. 11.

Place of Death: Trawniki, Poland.

Fate: declared dead

Lewin, Johanna (nee Wolff)

born July 29, 1897 in Natkischken, District Tilsit, East Prussia, Germany.

address before deportation: Berlin S.O.16, Koepenickerstr, 70. Deported 3-28-42, [transport] No. 11.

Place of Death: Trawniki, Poland.

Fate: declared dead

It was the first and only official word I ever had on them. This was the only documentation that existed that revealed that my parents had been murdered.

But why was there so little known about Trawniki? I had inquired of different people over the years but could find no one who knew anything about it. Why were there no survivors telling their tales of that concentration camp? On August 24, 1997, I finally found out why.

I was reading Letzte Spuren (Last Traces), edition Hentrich, a book in German published by a German publisher, from whom I had ordered several Holocaust-related books. Part of the book is a reprint of the diary of Rudolf Neumann, the manager of the factory of the Schultz company. Here is what I learned:

Trawniki was a forced labor concentration camp directly next to a training camp for Ukranian SS troops. These Ukranian SS were the ones who guarded the Jews.

Trawniki became, in essence, a commercial enterprise not unlike Schindler’s factory from Schindler’s List. Unfortunately, there was no Schindler to save the Jews from being executed. The German company Schultz—formerly located in Warsaw where it had used the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto as laborers—relocated to Trawniki after the Warsaw ghetto was burned down following the famous Warsaw ghetto uprising.

Some of the Warsaw ghetto Jews were relocated to Trawniki with the Schultz company. Others were shipped in from other locations, including Berlin. The Schultz company also moved their equipment and machinery from the Warsaw ghetto area to Trawniki.

The Jewish slaves were forced to work in Schultz’s production of clothing, including making fur coats, fur hats, shoes, and other things, all destined to be supplied to the Wehrmacht of the German Reich in their ongoing war against Russia and the cold, cruel weather.

I believe that my parents were sent to Trawniki because of my father’s experience with machines. I suspect he was forced to maintain the Schultz machines.

The manager of the company, a man by the name of Rudolf Neumann, was quite humane and friendly toward the Jews working there, and the Jews there held him in high esteem. Neumann wrote in his diary about Trawniki and its last days. From reading excerpts of his diary, I have been able to piece together a picture of the last days of the Trawniki camp.

The number of Jews working varied slightly but hovered around six thousand, about half men and the other half women and children. On November 3, 1943, between 5:00 AM and 6:00 AM, an unfamiliar contingent of SS guards appeared, blocking entrances and exits to the camp.

They chased the Jews out of the barracks and into an adjacent area. There, the SS forced the Jews to take off their clothes and to throw them onto piles, then to run to previously excavated ditches. The new victims were forced to lie down on the already executed victims in the ditches. Several of the SS commandos—each consisting of four to five soldiers, positioned along the ditches—shot the victims with their machine guns.

The excavated ditches were not quite enough to hold all the victims. The SS took the several hundred remaining Jews to a sand excavation site next to the ditches and shot them there. All the while, several trucks equipped with loud speakers were blaring music so as to drown out the screams of the victims and the constant shootings.

By 4:00 PM that day, six thousand men, women, and children had been murdered. My parents may have been among them.

The SS contingent left the camp later that same day. The dead corpses were burned. It took three weeks to accomplish this and was done by Jewish prisoners brought there from another concentration camp in the area. Ukrainer SS troops supervised and watched the Jewish prisoners while they were burning the corpses. Once the grisly deed was done, the Jews themselves were shot and then burned by the Ukrainer SS troops.

It appeared from reading Neuman’s diary that the Schultz company had not known this was going to happen.

And this is why I had never found any Jewish survivors who knew anything about Trawniki. They were all murdered. There was no one was left to tell the story.

Bev Lewyn

In 1993 when we began writing this book, I went to the research library at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and found the first proof of what had happened to Bert’s parents. That Gedenkbuch (or memory book) contained the records that the Nazis had kept on every victim, and it listed Leopold and Johanna Lewin’s destination as the Trawniki concentration camp and said they were declared dead.

Years later, once the USSR fell, historians got access to more information that had previously been unavailable. That new information led to the publishing of an updated version of the Gedenkbuch.

We now know that that Johanna and Leopold Lewin were deported on March 28, 1942, and were made to leave the train at the Trawniki station. From there they were made to walk twelve kilometers to a ghetto near Lublin called Piaski. They had to live in the Piaski ghetto under horrible living conditions with no proper rooms, scarce food, no sanitary facilities, and hard work. Since they were both deaf, it would have been difficult for them to hear and therefore to comply with shouted instructions from the Nazi guards.

Remembrance book (Edition Hentrich), page no. 871 out of a total of 1,400 pages, listing fifty-five thousand names of deported Berlin Jews. My father, Leopold Lewin, is indicated by the horizontal lines.

Remembrance book (Edition Hentrich), page no. 870 out of a total of 1,400 pages, listing fifty-five thousand names of deported Jews. My mother, Johanna Lewin Geb. Wolff, is indicated by the horizontal lines.

There was a transport of two thousand Jews from Piaski to the Belzec death camp on April 11, 1942. The next transport from Piaski was sent to the Sobibor death camp on July 22, 1942. In November 1942 about one thousand Jews were shot to death at the local Piaski Jewish cemetery. We do not know whether Johanna and Leopold died in Piaski, Belzec, or Sobibor.

Levin Family

Not shown in this picture are my parents, Leopold and Johanna Lewin, who were living in Berlin, Germany, and my uncle Boris Levin, living in Moscow, Russia. Front row: Basva, Chana, Sarah, Mordecai, Dov-Berl. Middle row: Chave, Hirsh, Minne, Emanuel, Dovid, Benjamin, Riva. Back row: Chaim Tevye, Bluma, Gerson, Golda, Chapse, Chasia, Moses, Meier Gutman.

My family in Kovno, Lithuania. Only four of them survived the Holocaust.

This photograph, along with others, was originally sent by my grandfather Dovid Levin to Rabbi Tobias Geffen in Atlanta. When Rabbi Geffen passed away, the Geffen family transferred Rabbi Geffen’s archives to the American-Jewish Historical Society in Waltham, Massachusetts. My son Marc Lewyn requested and obtained various papers from these archives including several photographs that are now in my possession and are included in this book.

The only survivors of the Holocaust of those listed are:

Benjamin, who had emigrated from Kovno to America before Hitler’s rise to power. Riva, who survived the concentration camps. Dov-Berl, who had escaped from the Kovno ghetto, joined the military partisans and their operations against the Germans, survived the war, and undertook a ten-month journey, mostly by foot, to Palestine (now Israel). Chapse, who emigrated to Palestine before Israel became a state and before Hitler’s rule in Europe.

Wolff Family

My grandmother on my mother’s side was Henriette Wolff, who lived in Heydekrug (when it was German and Silute when it was Lithuanian).

My mother had three brothers—Herbert, Salli, and Alfred—as well as one sister, Irma.

Herbert, Salli, and Irma were deported to the ghetto in Kovno, where they were murdered by the Lithuanian SS. Alfred managed to escape and made his way to America with his wife, Susie, and son, Peter.

Other than Alfred, no one in my mother’s family survived. They all perished in killing camps or in the Kovno ghetto. I have documentation of the murder of my uncle Salli, my mother’s brother. Lithuanian uniformed SS robbed him, raped a woman with him, and murdered them both in Uncle Salli’s room in the Kovno ghetto. The Jewish ghetto police made a horrific, detailed report of the events. The original report, written in German as well as the translation into English, are in my possession.

Leslie Baruch Brent (born Lothar Baruch)

Bev Lewyn

After the original publication of the book, the new owners of the building that housed the Judische Waisenhaus restored the building and organized reunions of the surviving residents who had lived at the home. Bert and Esther attended a few of them, and this allowed Bert to become reacquainted with some of his old friends from those days. Chief among them was his friend Leslie Baruch Brent (born Lothar Baruch), who tells me they were best friends there and ran up to the orphanage attic together to hide when the Hitler Youth attacked. Leslie Brent went on one of the first kinder transports to England. He grew up to become a British immunologist and zoologist and is the codiscoverer with Peter Medawar and Rupert Billingham of “acquired immunological tolerance,” which became fundamental to the practice of tissue and organ transplants. Medawar shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery. In June 2016 Marc and I took our daughters to Berlin and attended a meeting at the Waisenhaus and met with Dr. Brent. He had vivid memories of that day the Hitler Youth attacked the orphanage, and I have added his detail of running into the attic to this edition.

Oskar Klimt

Bev Lewyn

While this cigar-chomping, tool-stuffed, odd-English-phrase-speaking man did exist and Bert vividly remembered him and his experiences working for him, Bert drew a complete blank in regards to his name. We used the name “Oskar Klimt” as an ode to Oskar Schindler and Gustav Klimt.