As Jutta stood at the rail of the Queen Mary on that November morning in 1938, gaping at the lights and sights of New York City, she could not imagine what her new life in the United States would be like. Nor could Jutta imagine the fate of many of her friends and relatives who had written in her poesiealbum. Nor did she yet really understand what she and her family had escaped.

Jutta Salzberg, my mother, was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany. Her younger sister, my aunt Ruth, was born in 1930. Their parents, Isaac Salzberg and Rose Kleinert, were both originally from the town of Pabianice, in Poland, near the city of Lodz. In Hamburg, Rose and Isaac were neither rich nor poor, but comfortably in the middle. Though Jewish, Isaac and Rose were not strict in their religious practices. Isaac and Rose spoke Polish and German, but barely spoke Yiddish, the popular language of European Jews. Although they had many friends and a busy social life—dinner parties, theatergoing, playing cards—they were not prominent in the German-Jewish community, and not political.

But beginning in 1933, whether the Salzbergs were religious or not, important or not, rich or not, political or not, did not matter. In that year, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Hitler and his political party, the Nazi Party (for National Socialist Party) made hatred of Jews the official policy of Germany. Anyone who was a member of what the Nazis called the Jewish “race” was considered less than fully human. Nazi Germany began systematically to cut Jews out of German life. Hitler’s goal was to create a nation that was Judenrein—without Jews.

The Nuremberg Laws in 1935 stripped Jews in Germany of their political rights and also banned marriage between Germans and Jews. Other decrees forbade or limited Jews from working in many types of professions and businesses. My grandfather Isaac began the process of emigrating to the United States shortly after these laws were enacted. But things moved slowly with the American immigration officials. The U.S. immigration laws put limits—called quotas—on how many people could come to the United States, and where they could come from. Other countries had similar immigration systems that severely limited how many Jews from Germany could enter their lands. Isaac waited for the officials at the United States consulate in Hamburg to tell him they had visas for him and his family to go to the United States. He waited throughout 1936. He waited throughout 1937. And then it was 1938, the year of my mother’s poesiealbum.

The year 1938 was a critical one for Jews in Germany, particularly for so-called Ostjuden—Jews such as my grandparents Isaac and Rose, who came from nations to the east of Germany, mainly Poland. Although the Nazis had not yet devised their policy of exterminating the Jews in Germany and Austria (and later, Jews in other European countries the Nazis took over), they did decide in 1938 that Ostjuden should be expelled from Germany and Austria. If these Jews did not find ways to leave Germany and Austria, they were to be rounded up and held in concentration camps. Still other Jews were targeted for arrest and detention in concentration camps because of their real or supposed political activities.

Unfortunately, although the United States and other free countries were aware of the dire situation faced by Jews in Nazi Germany and Austria, these nations refused to increase their immigration quotas. Thousands upon thousands of Jews who wanted to flee the Nazis could not, because countries such as the United States failed to open their doors to them. In the summer of 1938, representatives from thirty-two nations held a conference in Evian, France, to address the worsening problem of Jewish refugees. (Refugees are people who are forced to leave their homes in search of other countries to live.) The representatives all agreed that the situation for Jews living under Nazi rule was grave. But, one by one, the representatives also offered reasons why their countries would not be expanding their immigration quotas to let more Jewish people in.

Throughout 1938, Jews in Germany grew desperate to leave the country. More and more turned to suicide—choosing a quick death rather than whatever fate the Nazis had in store for them. So when Isaac Salzberg—my grandfather—put his foot on the sill of the window in the consulate’s office that November morning, his action must have seemed completely believable to the American official who witnessed it. The Americans in Germany knew how despairing the Jews had become.

Such was the atmosphere in which my mother and her friends lived. They were not aware of the exact dimensions of the Nazi threat—no one was. Communications in those days were neither instant nor always reliable. But by listening to their parents talk and by sharing stories with each other, they learned that their world was dangerous, tense, and subject to disruption at any minute.

And yet—my mother and her friends found ways to do things that were at least a little normal. They fooled around and gossiped during recess at school, even though they had to be quiet so as not to disturb the school’s neighbors. They had birthday parties. They exercised at the Jewish Bar Kochba Gymnastics Club. And they wrote in each other’s poesiealbums.

My mother, aunt, and grandparents were incredibly fortunate. They were fortunate on Friday, October 28, 1938, when Nazi police raided homes throughout Germany—including Hamburg—arresting Ostjuden by the thousands and sending them by truck and train toward the Polish border. The Polish government refused to allow most of these people to enter their country. The result was chaos and misery at the German-Polish border, with Jews stranded in railroad stations, sleeping in open fields, and crowded into camps. Seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish boy living in Paris, got a postcard from his sister describing how she and their parents had been expelled from their home in Hanover, Germany, as part of the late October action and were stuck on the border. He sought revenge by shooting Ernst vom Rath, a German official working at the German embassy in Paris. Grynszpan’s action, in turn, helped spur a surge of violence against the Jews remaining in Germany—sometimes called Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, and also known as the November Pogrom—which my mother and her family heard about once they arrived in Paris.

Why did the Nazis overlook my mother’s family on October 28, 1938? It is impossible to know for certain. But one reason may be that my grandfather Isaac, although from Poland, did not have proper Polish papers proving him to be a Polish citizen. This made him, in essence, stateless—a man without a country. Being stateless is not normally a useful thing. But in this case it might have saved his life, and that of his family. Because my grandfather Isaac did not have a proper Polish passport (a passport is a travel document from one’s country of citizenship), he was not registered with the German police as a Polish citizen—and so they may not have had him on their list of Jews to grab on October 28.

Some of my mother’s friends and their families also escaped being arrested, expelled, or murdered by the Nazis. Others were not so lucky. They were imprisoned or killed as part of the Nazis’ grisly campaign against Jews—later called the Holocaust—which continued until May 1945, when Nazi Germany was finally defeated in World War II.

Some of the information about what happened to my mother’s friends and family comes from personal interviews with survivors. In other cases, especially with regard to people who perished in the Holocaust, I have obtained records of their fate from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, Israel. Yad Vashem has collected a vast amount of information about victims of the Nazis and published this compilation as The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. (Shoah is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.) I have also used the substantial research facilities of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Here is what happened to the people of my mother’s poesiealbum.

HANNELORE ASCHER (CHAPTER XII). In July 1942, the Nazis transported Hannelore to Auschwitz, a large concentration camp complex they created in Poland. She was sixteen years old. Auschwitz included three separate camps, including one dedicated to the mass murder of Jews and other people. Hannelore died at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz.

ILSE BEHREND (later Ilse Wesel) (CHAPTER X). Ilse came to the United States from Nazi Germany, escaping the Holocaust. She settled in New York.

ELLEN BERGER (CHAPTER XIII). Ellen died at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz in 1943.

RUTH CARLEBACH (CHAPTER IV). In December 1941, when Ruth was fifteen years old, the Nazis transported her to Riga, Latvia, which by then was in German hands The Nazis created a ghetto in Riga and concentration camps nearby; they also used the Rumbula Forest, outside the city, as a mass killing site. Only a tiny fraction of Jews sent from Germany to Riga survived. Ruth died in Riga at the hands of the Nazis.

ELLEN DAVIDSOHN (CHAPTER IX) came to the United States from Nazi Germany, escaping the Holocaust.

GUY GOTTHELF (CHAPTERS XXIV–XXV). My mother found her Parisian cousin Guy so good-looking and so talented that she predicted he would be famous. Guy did achieve fame, although not the kind my mom hoped for. After Nazi Germany conquered France in June 1940, Guy joined the French Resistance—people who continued fighting for freedom against the Nazis. On August 25, 1944, Guy was killed while on a mission for the French Resistance near Paris. He was twenty-one years old. The Resistance leaders of the town of Yerres, the suburb of Paris where Guy lived, named a street after him in honor of his sacrifice. Rue Guy Gotthelf still exists today in Yerres. Guy’s father, the artist Samuel Gotthelf, was also killed by the Nazis.

REBEKKA HERMANNSEN (CHAPTER VIII). In October 1941, the Nazis transported Rebekka to the Lodz Ghetto. She was fourteen years old. Lodz was a city in central Poland where the Nazis created a large, crowded Jewish ghetto after Germany conquered Poland in September 1939. Many people in the Lodz Ghetto died of starvation and disease. Other residents were transported from Lodz to Auschwitz or the Chelmno extermination camp, and systematically murdered there. Rebekka died at the hands of the Nazis in the Lodz Ghetto.

ILSE HESS (later Ilse Bechhofer) (CHAPTER III). Ilse came to the United States in 1940. After World War II, she moved back to Germany with her husband and their children.

FLORA KERNER AND RITA LEWIN (later Flora Adin and Rita Hilton) (CHAPTER XVI). My mother’s cousin Rita and Rita’s mother, Flora, were forced by the Nazis into the Lodz Ghetto. (The city of Pabianice, where my mother’s Polish relatives lived, was only a few miles from the larger city of Lodz. Most Jewish residents of Pabianice were forced into the Lodz Ghetto after the Nazis took over Poland.) Rita and Flora survived the Lodz Ghetto and were transported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. From there, the Nazis sent Rita and Flora to another concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. They survived Bergen-Belsen and came to the United States after World War II. Today Rita lives in Florida.

UNCLE LUDWIG (Ludwig Kerner) (CHAPTER XVI). After the Nazis took over Poland in September 1939, German soldiers arrested Uncle Ludwig. His family never saw him again.

GRANDMA SALKA KLEINERT AND GRANDPA MARCUS KLEINERT (CHAPTER XVI). Grandpa Kleinert died at the hands of the Nazis in the Lodz Ghetto. Grandma Salka Kleinert survived the Lodz Ghetto but was taken by the Nazis to Auschwitz, where she was killed by the Nazis.

FELICITAS MEHL (later Felicity Rose) (CHAPTER XXI). Felicitas escaped Nazi Germany by going to England with the Kindertransport. Today she lives in Nottingham, England. The Kindertransport, or Children’s Transport, was a program organized by citizens of Great Britain after they heard of the terrible Kristallnacht attacks on Jews in Germany in November 1938. The program allowed children (but not their parents) to travel from Nazi Germany to Great Britain, where they lived with foster families, in orphanages, or worked on farms. The Kindertransport ran from December 1938 to September 1939, and allowed nearly 10,000 children to escape Nazi Germany.

ELLEN RIESENFELD (CHAPTER XVII). In November 1941, the Nazis transported Ellen to Minsk, which was a city in the German-occupied Soviet Union. The Nazis killed many of the Jews they sent to Minsk immediately upon their arrival. Those who were not immediately killed were crowded into a ghetto and pressed into slave labor for the Nazi war effort. Ellen died in Minsk at the hands of the Nazis.

EVA ROSENBAUM (later Eva Abraham-Podietz) (CHAPTER VII). Eva went to England with the Kindertransport in December 1938. After World War II, Eva lived in England, Israel, and Brazil. In 1959, she came to the United States. Today she lives in Philadelphia.

UNCLE MAX AND AUNT ALICE (CHAPTER III). Max and Alice Salzberg immigrated to the United States in 1936. They lived in Detroit, Michigan, where Uncle Max worked in the jewelry business. Despite their hopes, they never did have a child.

GRANDMA REBECCA SALZBERG (CHAPTER XVI). The Nazis first forced Grandma Salzberg into the Lodz Ghetto, and later to Auschwitz, where they killed her.

ADI SCHLESINGER (later Adi Fulda) (CHAPTER XIX). Adi remained in Germany until May 1940, when her family escaped to Italy, and from there to the United States. She and her family settled in New York City, where she lives today.

FRIEDEL SCHLESINGER (CHAPTER XVIII). In December 1941, the Nazis transported Friedel (who was Adi Schlesinger’s cousin) to Riga. She was fourteen years old. Friedel died in Riga at the hands of the Nazis.

MANJA AND HENIA STAHL (CHAPTER XVI). My mother’s cousin Manja and her mother, Henia, were forced by the Nazis into the Lodz Ghetto, and later to concentration camps. The Nazis killed Henia at Auschwitz. They killed Manja at Stutthof concentration camp.

LISA STREIT (later Lisa Kohlman) (CHAPTER II). Lisa and her family came to the United States early in 1938. Many years later, when both Lisa and my mother were more than seventy years old, they discovered that they lived five miles apart in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. Lisa lives in Maryland today.

INGE WEISS (CHAPTER IV). In November 1941, when Inge was fifteen years old, the Nazis transported her to Minsk. Inge died in Minsk at the hands of the Nazis.

I have been unable to trace Elli Lipka, Friedl Lipka, Ruth Sperber, Cilly Seligmann, and Ilse Stern. As they are not listed in any of the compilations of names, or eyewitness accounts, of Holocaust victims that I consulted, I can only hope that they escaped Nazi Germany and moved on to enjoy long and happy lives.

As for my mother and her family, they split up almost as soon as they arrived in New York. Isaac Salzberg’s two brothers, who lived in Detroit, urged him to come to that Midwestern city. However, to ease the burden on the family, my mother was sent to live with a childless aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C. They only spoke Yiddish; my mother only spoke German. She was desperately lonely. After several months of separation, the family reunited in New York City. There they rented a tiny tenement infested with bedbugs and visited by the occasional rat. My grandfather earned money by selling buttons and ribbons door to door.

My mother went to a public elementary school in New York, near the family’s apartment building. Because she could not speak English, the teacher sat her in the back of the classroom. Mom did not make many friends during the several months that she attended this school. Her closest schoolmate, May Corbitt, was also forced by the teacher to sit in the back of the room. This was not because May was Jewish or foreign—it was because she was African American.

Some of my mother’s classmates in her New York City school wrote in her poesiealbum in June of 1939. For example:

The teacher is a good old soul,

She goes to church on Sunday.

She prays to God to give her strength

To kill us kids on Monday.

Or:

I love I love I love you so well:

If I had a peanut I’d give you the shell.

Clearly, as my mother found, American girls had different standards for their autograph albums than she and her friends back in Germany had for their poesiealbums.

By the fall of 1939, my mother and her family had relocated once again—and together—to Washington, D.C. My mother’s father changed his name from Isaac to Edward. He thought it sounded more American. For a while, the adults in her life urged my mother to change her name, too. They tried Yetta, Henrietta, Julia—anything but Jutta, which Americans seemed unable to pronounce. JUH-tah. JEW-tah.

My mother resisted. Enough had been taken. She kept her name: Jutta. When she met my father—Harold Levy, an American serviceman whose medical treatment of wounded men while under German attack earned him the Legion of Merit medal during World War II—he had no problem at all pronouncing it. In 1952 they married, and my mother became Jutta Levy. They lived in Maryland and had two children: myself and my sister, Sharon. My mother’s sister, Ruth Horwitz, also settled in Maryland with her husband and had two children.

In 1998, my mother heard that one of her Hamburg classmates from the Jewish School for Girls was living in Chicago, Illinois, the city where my husband’s parents lived. Not only did this classmate, Irene Bettink (now Irene Biro), live in Chicago—she lived across the street from my husband’s parents. My mother promptly invited Irene and her husband to visit Washington, D.C. A few months later the two old friends were hugging in front of my parents’ home.

“As we were saying…” Irene began.

“…before we were so rudely interrupted,” my mother completed the sentence.

They continued their conversation as if exactly sixty years had not passed since the last time they spoke.

Around the same time, I wrote an article for The Washington Post about my mother and her family’s departure from Hamburg on that midnight train. Two more of the girls—now women, of course—who attended school with my mother in Hamburg and who immigrated to the United States, saw it. They called one another to ask: “Is this”—the Jutta I wrote about in my article—“our Jutta?” (You can be sure that they said YU-tah.) After concluding that my mother was their Jutta, one of them—Lotte Heilbrunn (now Lotte Blaustein)—wrote a letter to me saying, “I immediately dug out my old Poesie Album and re-inspected the class picture. Sure enough, we’re all there way back in 1938 at the old school.…”

Two years later, in 2000, seven of the “girls” from the Jewish School for Girls in Hamburg reunited in Washington, D.C. Besides my mother (now Jutta Levy), they included two people who wrote in my mother’s poesiealbum—Lisa Streit (now Lisa Kohlman) and Eva Rosenbaum (now Eva Abraham-Podietz). The other classmates were Irene Bettink (now Irene Biro), Lotte Heilbrunn (now Lotte Blaustein), Gerda Irene Seckel (now Irene Rehbock), and Celia Horwitz (now Celia Lee). Celia traveled the farthest to reach the gathering, flying in from England.

The women brought photographs, letters, documents, and articles to their little reunion. They brought poesiealbums. They sang snippets of songs they remembered from their school days in Hamburg. For three days straight, these seven women talked and laughed and cried together as if they had known each other their whole lives—which, in a way, they had.