Born in 1924 and raised by his divorced mother in Berlin, Armin Hertz escaped to Belgium in December 1938 but was deported to Auschwitz in late October 1942. He also survived Buchenwald concentration camp and one of the death marches near the end of the war.
When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, I was a young boy, barely nine years old. My mother and father got divorced earlier in 1930. I had a brother three years younger than myself. We lived with my mother and we had a furniture store in our family. All of my mother’s brothers and sisters also had furniture stores in Berlin.
After Hitler came to power, there was the boycott in April of that year. I remember that very vividly because I saw the Nazi Party members in their brown uniforms and armbands standing in front of our store with signs: “Kauft nicht bei Juden” [Don’t buy from Jews]. That, of course, was very frightening to us. They marched back and forth all day long. They also put graffiti on the windows of the stores and wrote down “Jude” [Jew] and things like that. Nobody entered the shop. As a matter of fact, there was a competitor across the street—she must have been a member of the Nazi Party already by then—who used to come over and chase people away and say, “Don’t buy here, these are Jews.” After that we continued to run the store, and we went to school—my brother and I went to public school. The anti-Semitism was very vivid in school. In fact, it was so strong that we couldn’t continue to go to that public school. It got very uncomfortable.
Was the anti-Semitism mostly from the teachers or the other schoolchildren?
Both. They were trying to teach us Nazi songs. I vividly remember this song they were marching in the street with. The Hitler Youth, young boys actually of our age, were singing, “Das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt, geht’s uns nochmal so gut” [The Jews’ blood spurting from the knife makes us feel especially good]. They were also singing it in the school. There were not many other Jews in my school, and then my mother took us out of that school and we went to a Jewish school in Berlin. A decree had come out that Jewish teachers were not allowed to teach anymore in public schools. Therefore, there was no shortage of teachers in the Jewish schools. We went to that Jewish school and for us, of course, that was better. This went on until 1938.
During the Kristallnacht, our store was destroyed, glass was broken, the synagogues were set on fire. There was a synagogue in the same street where we lived. It was on the first floor of a commercial building; downstairs were stores, and upstairs was a synagogue. In the back of that building, there was a factory so they could not set that synagogue on fire because people were living and working there. But they threw everything out of the window—the Torah scrolls, the prayer books, the benches, everything was lying in the street.
My mother was very worried about her sister, because she had two little children and in the back of the building where she lived there was also a synagogue. So we tried to get in touch with her by phone the next day, but nobody answered. My mother got desperate and said to me, “Get your bicycle and go to Aunt Bertha to see what’s going on.” As I was riding along the business district, I saw all the stores destroyed, windows broken, everything lying in the street. They were even going into the stores and running away with the merchandise. Finally, I got to my aunt’s house and I saw a large crowd assembled in front of the store. The fire department was there; the police were there. The fire department was pouring water on the adjacent building. The synagogue in the back was on fire, but they were not putting the water on the synagogue. The police were there watching it. I mingled with the crowd. I didn’t want to be too obvious. I didn’t want to get into trouble. But I heard from people talking that the people who lived there were all evacuated, all safe in the neighborhood with friends. So I went right back and reported to my mother.
After Kristallnacht our store was destroyed and it was impossible to stay in Berlin because there was no way of earning a living. We had to get out! My mother had a brother in Berlin who had obtained a visa to come to the U.S. just before November 9. He needed passage to go to the U.S., so he went to Antwerp, Belgium, and he waited over there to go on one of the Holland America lines to New York. So she got in touch with him and told him what had happened. She said, “You have got to help us. We have got to get out of Berlin. We can’t stay here. We have to do something.” So they devised a plan. I was fourteen and my brother was twelve.
My mother went to the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin and bought us a return railroad ticket to Paris. The plan was that my brother and I would go to the Anhalter Bahnhof and take the midnight train to Paris, which made a stop in Brussels, Belgium. My uncle would be in Brussels and take us off the train. When we got to the border between Belgium and Germany and the passport control came to ask for our papers, we told them that we were visiting a relative in Paris for a short time and then coming back. Our only papers were our ID cards marked with a red J to indicate that we were Jewish. We showed that to the two fellows there and they looked at each other and said, “They’re going to Paris. Let the French worry about them.” So we got through the border that way and went to Brussels.
When the train pulled in to the station, my aunt and uncle were right on the platform and they took us off the train and took us to Antwerp where they lived temporarily in a room they had rented in a rooming house until their ship came to take them to New York. The lady who owned the rooming house also had another room upstairs under the roof, and she let us stay there and my uncle paid her something.
My mother couldn’t have gone with us as it would never have worked. [Instead] she went to Aachen, which is on the border between Belgium and Germany, and there she met a group of four or five people and a guide they had paid to take them during the night over the border into Belgium. But they got caught by the German border police and were sent back to Berlin. So she was in Berlin, my uncle left for New York, and we were in a really touchy situation. [We hoped that] maybe there would be another occasion for her to escape, but it didn’t happen because, after that, they tied up the border so tight as there were so many people [trying to escape].
In Antwerp there were many Jewish refugees who had run away and stayed there. The Belgian police were pretty lenient. They gave us a temporary permit to stay there for three months. You could get this as long as the Jewish committee would give you a paper saying that they would support you, that you would not be a burden to the state, and that you were not working. After three months, they would renew the permit.
What happened to your mother?
She went to England in 1939. First she got a document from the Berlin police president allowing her to leave the country. You had to show that you had paid all your taxes, that you did not owe any money, that you were of good character, and that you were in good health. And then, through friends and relatives, she found an English family that helped her apply to work in their household in London, and this is what she did.
We were able to correspond with her from Belgium, but the English government would not give us permission to go there to join her. Although there was a Jewish committee that was helping us, we were stuck and it was a desperate situation. We were still young and we now had nobody there in Belgium. Our uncle was in America, our mother was in London, and we were in Antwerp. And then, on May 10, 1940, the war broke out in Belgium. The Germans overran the Netherlands, Belgium, and France within ten days. So this committee in Antwerp had placed us with another family, a Jewish family. Some of the children were fortunate because they were placed with a nice family with children that wanted to help. But we were not that fortunate. We were placed with a family that was poor and did this for money. Then the war broke out and they didn’t get paid anymore because the committee that handled this had got money from America, from a fund. So we had to leave and we were actually living in the street. It was very, very bad.
So the family threw you out in a way.
Yes. They said they had no money and couldn’t afford to support us. Since the war was on, everything was now rationed and we couldn’t even get ration cards. When we went to the authorities to apply for the ration cards, they wouldn’t give them to us because they thought that we were trying to have some kind of a scheme to get extra ration cards. They could not believe that two young children would be living by themselves. We told them we lived in the street. I did some hard jobs that I wasn’t supposed to do but did anyway to get a little extra money to live on.
[Eventually] we found a place that was inexpensive and we were able to afford with the money I earned. They called it a mansard; it was underneath the roof. It was a terrible place. We were eaten up by bedbugs every night. We had to go begging for food. Then my brother got taken in by a Jewish family that had no children and he was taken care of at least. I was now alone, but I found a job in a bakery and I slept in the bakery, right on the benches where they baked the bread. It was warm in the winter and at least there was always a little bread left over. That went on until June 1942.
In the meantime, the German occupation forces imposed the same laws against the Jews that they had done in Germany: they made you wear the Jewish star, Jews were not allowed to go out in the street after seven or eight, and they started to round up people to send away. At that time we didn’t know anything about concentration camps. We had no idea what was happening in Poland, in the east. They said they were sending people away to work; they would be in labor camps and get their rations there and wouldn’t have to worry. In the beginning people actually volunteered because they had no money and the official rations were very small. To buy extra food on the black market was very expensive and they had no money. They thought that if they would go to work, they would get better food. After a while, we found out that those people who went voluntarily to these work camps never returned. So people stopped volunteering.
Then they started to round people up. They would take a block area, surround it with troops of the Wehrmacht, and they also had help from Belgian collaborators in the Rex Party. In one of those roundups, I was caught. They only wanted men at that time. They sent us by train to France to help build the Atlantic wall, a wall as thick as a house that went from Holland all the way through Belgium and France. They thought that the Allied invasion would come from that side.
It was very heavy work. The supervision of this camp was done by Organisation Todt. We had to build a fence around it ourselves. It was close to the beaches where they had to build defense positions. Our job was to carry water and cement. Sand they got from the beaches, but the cement we had to carry in cement bags. The sanitary conditions in that camp were very poor— for toilets we had to dig a huge ditch. I contracted typhoid fever there. The guards got afraid because of that. There were five of us who had typhoid fever. They then took us to a French hospital and put us up in the basement. That was the first time in weeks that we slept in a clean bed. In the beginning we couldn’t eat because we had such high temperatures.
When we got better after a few weeks the guards showed up again and said, “We’re sending you back to Belgium. You have to go back to the camp now.” We did go back to Belgium, but not back to the camp. They put us on regular passenger trains, with fifteen to twenty people in each compartment for eight, and brought us to Mechelen, which was an old army camp from World War I that the Germans used as an assembly point for all the Jews—men, women, and children—they had rounded up while we were in France. From there they added to our train another train with box cars, freight cars. This was the sixteenth transport from Mechelen. They gave us a card with a string to put around our neck, and we got a number—my number was 569. That was on October 31, 1942. There were 848 men, 94 women, and 41 children. Of the men, 54 returned. None of the women returned; none of the children returned. From 983, a total of 54 men returned.
When we got to Auschwitz, the train stopped and they opened up the cars. Everybody had to get out. Right away they separated the women and the children to one side and the men had to go to the other side. Then we saw some men trying to whisper to us who were working around the train with striped uniforms on and their hair shaved off. They were saying, “Walk!” We couldn’t figure out what that meant, but we soon found out. The camp was a short distance away. Anyone who was tired or felt that he couldn’t walk was to go to the other side and supposedly there would be trucks that would pick them up and bring them to the camp. The people that were able to walk were to march. We got the message and we lined up to march to the camp. The other people that could not walk, or didn’t want to, we never saw again. They went straight to the gas chamber.
When you took the train to Auschwitz, did you know what would happen there?
No, no idea. We had never heard of Auschwitz. We didn’t know that a place like Auschwitz existed in 1942 at that time. They had said that there were shootings in Russia, in Ukraine where the Germans had advanced way back into Russia. There were rumors around in Belgium. We thought it was horrible, but we couldn’t really believe it.
They did not just march us there to the camp and the gate with the large sign over it: Arbeit macht frei. They forced us. They had these truncheons and they hit you over the head if you didn’t walk fast enough. They brought us into a quarantine block. We went into the main camp, Auschwitz 1. In Auschwitz 1 they had brick barracks. Two floors, a ground floor that held about four hundred people and six hundred people upstairs. Then came the barbers and they shaved our hair off. Then they put numbers on our arm—I had number 72552. All that put us in shock because nobody would expect that. They took everything away from us. We got these pajama-like uniforms and wooden shoes like those Dutch shoes, very uncomfortable to work with. And then we got a big speech from a man who was in charge of the block. He said, “You are going to work here. This is a work camp. There is no escape from here. The only way you can get out of here is through the chimney.” We didn’t even understand what he meant by that.
Then they put us into work details. First I worked digging ditches for water lines. There was a lot of construction going on at that time around Auschwitz. They were building factories, they were enlarging the camp, and they were building another camp. It was very hard work and the rations they gave us were not enough to survive on. Every day they gave you a piece of bread that was divided into four pieces. Each one of us got one quarter—that was the ration for the day. Then you had a bowl—everybody had a bowl. Every day they gave you one liter of so-called soup. With the bread, they gave you what they called tea. Sometimes it was so bitter, you couldn’t even drink it. It was made of leaves of trees, whatever they had. It was practically impossible to survive on this.
Auschwitz is in Poland; it was very cold there. This was now going into November and December. In Auschwitz they made a Maurerschule teaching young people how to lay bricks. I applied for it and they took me in because I was young. We got the same rations as the other people who were working outside, but we were protected from the elements because we were working inside. The teachers were all prisoners. In Auschwitz the administration inside the camp was done by prisoners. These prisoners were criminals, German criminals. In Auschwitz there were also non-Jews; these guys were the capos, the block elders. They would let their frustration out on us. That was very bad. Sometimes they were worse than the guards.
After a few weeks, they sent us out on a work commando. They were building a factory. We found out that this factory was actually built for Krupp. When we got there, the bricklayers were Polish citizens working for the Germans who were paid daily by the hour. We had to hand them the bricks and the mortar. These Polish civilians went home every night to Kattowitz or to the city of Auschwitz. They saw what was going on there.
I stayed in Auschwitz for over two years, which was very rare. I knew all the ins and outs. I was like a rat—I was able to run around that camp blind. Then, on January 18, 1945, they evacuated Auschwitz because at that time the Russian army had advanced in the east. We could already hear the bombardments and the artillery fire from the heavy cannons. They marched us toward Germany. That was the death march. Anybody who could not follow was just shot and left on the roadside. There was snow and ice; it was very cold. They gave us double rations when we left. Of course, that was not much because we marched for days and days. We slept nights in open fields and hundreds of people just died, left lying on the road, shot.
Who were the guards on the death march?
Mostly SS guards. If you ran away, you were very obvious. You could be recognized immediately as a prisoner. It wasn’t that simple to just run away. But some people did and managed to hide and get civilian clothes somehow because there were thousands [of us on the death march].
We went to the town of Breslau. There they put us on open cars and we got a lift to another camp, a very big camp. It was way overcrowded, terrible. They put us in a barrack with nothing for us to sleep on. We had to sit down on the floor and we couldn’t even lie down. After a day or two they were looking for workers and we right away volunteered. They wanted about two hundred people to work in a factory nearby. We thought there couldn’t be a place worse than this one was, so get out of it. When we arrived at the factory, it had been closed already for weeks. Soon we found out what they wanted us to do. The next morning they took us out to a clearance in the woods. They gave us shovels and they had us dig there. It was February 17, 1945. We left on February 26. Then they took us to a town named Reichenau. There they put us again on open cars, about one hundred people in one car, with no food and a bucket in the middle for sanitary needs. We rode on that train for about six days and five nights. People were dying like flies. We had no water, no food, nothing. Once in a while it snowed, so we had a little water from the snow.
The train stopped many times en route. Sometimes it stopped near a station on a siding and they left the train standing there for a whole day because they needed that locomotive to push another train, a through train or a supply train for the army. While we were there and when we saw a civilian nearby, we used to scream and yell, but they wouldn’t give us anything. Finally, the train arrived in Buchenwald, Germany, near Weimar. In our car, there were 107 people. Anytime somebody died, we took their clothing off, put it around us to keep warm, and put the dead bodies over to one side. When we arrived in Buchenwald, they opened up the train and the few people that were still alive could hardly walk. I, myself—my toes were frozen—have no toes left; all of them fell off.
In Buchenwald, the administration of the camp was political prisoners, not all necessarily communists, but democrats, socialists, lawyers, and intellectuals who were against the Nazi regime. These were nice people. They really wanted to help us, not like in Auschwitz. They had very little that they could give us, but whatever they had they shared. They tried to do the best they could. I myself couldn’t walk. They had taken off my shoes; they had to cut them off actually because my feet were frozen and my toes almost fell off by themselves. They put us in a barrack, 1600 in Buchenwald in the kleine Lager, a big camp they called “little camp.” We had bunks where four to five people slept in a line with a little straw for a bed; there were four levels. The commandant decided that the sick people didn’t need the full ration anymore because they didn’t work. They didn’t give us any bread anymore. They only gave us that soup, so-called soup. We were very, very sick. If that would have lasted another day or two, I would not have made it.
On April 11, the American army came into Buchenwald. I was so delirious at that time, I didn’t even realize that these Americans were liberating us. I thought these were other guards that were sent in because we heard a lot of shooting going on. We thought the SS would send them out on the front and send others to guard us. But it turned out that these were Americans and they were liberating us. They were very good to us. Right away they took the very sick people like myself out and brought us into Weimar, into civilian hospitals. There were regular beds and German doctors and nurses who took care of us. These nurses and doctors claimed they didn’t know there was such a camp. Nobody knew what went on. But we knew that throughout the years the prisoners from Buchenwald went into the city of Weimar and cleaned the streets, dug ditches there, did excavations, and whatever. If they dropped a bomb, they took them out there to defuse the bombs. So they must have seen them because they also were wearing these striped uniforms. But they claimed they did not know.
We were very fortunate they sent us to this hospital, because the other prisoners that were a bit healthier, who could walk by themselves, they put up in the SS barracks. The SS, they put into the camp. The Americans would not let us hit the SS men. I remember the guy next to me wanted to and the American officer held back his hands and told him, “Don’t do that. If you do that, you come to the same level that they are.” The American soldiers wanted to be good to us. They gave us all the food they had. That was a big problem because many people died because they ate all this food. They could not digest it because their intestines were all tied up. In the hospital they knew how to handle this. They gave us special food—just cereal with water and maybe skim milk. Every day they slightly increased the fat content of the rations that they gave us until we got better. I was there for not too long. On May 5 I was already back in Brussels.
The Belgian government and the Dutch and the French had sent delegations to Buchenwald to find out if there were any citizens there. I told them a little lie; I told them I was a Belgian citizen. There was no way for them to check this because nobody had any papers. The Americans took us on transport trains back to Brussels. In Brussels they put us up in hospitals. I stayed in a hospital for a while. Then they put us in a villa outside of Brussels. I stayed there for almost a year. I had to learn how to walk again.
In the meantime, I got in contact with my uncle and I found my brother. He had survived in Belgium hiding in the Ardennes, the Belgian mountains, and he managed to stay there throughout the war. I also found my mother in England. My uncle who was in the U.S. sent us papers to come here. That’s how we got here. Then I got married and started a new life. I have two lovely daughters and four grandchildren.
We try not to remember. It’s not easy. For thirty-six years, I couldn’t talk about it. I’m able to speak freely about it now. My wife can tell you that for years I used to wake up at night soaked in sweat. When I came to this country, if I saw a policeman on the street, I used to walk over to the other side of the street. It was not easy.
Born the son of a salesman in Frankfurt in 1921, Josef Stone emigrated to the United States in 1939 soon after his father returned from Dachau concentration camp.
I had been in a Jewish school from the very first day in school in 1928. We were liberal Jews; we were not Orthodox. I had neither sisters nor brothers; I was the only son. Germans looked at Jews in a sort of bad way. A Jew was always a Jew in Germany. I remember that even before 1933 when I went to my grandparents who lived in the country, that the general population when I came there knew I was Jewish and always made remarks. Especially children made the remarks to me. It was in such a way that I never walked alone on the streets, even in the little town where my grandparents lived. Children always gave me a hard time. They wouldn’t hit me; they just annoyed me with words and yelled obscene things at me. But, at that time, I was too young to even fathom the whole idea. I didn’t really get involved until I would say thirteen or fourteen. By that time I started realizing what really was going on, and my parents started to say that eventually we would all have to leave, except it was a couple of years more until we finally found our relatives here who gave us the necessary affidavit.
We never felt comfortable. At least I didn’t. And then after November 10, 1938, nobody felt comfortable and we all had to leave. My entire family, except for my parents, perished. My parents were the only people of my family who managed to get out.
Do you remember the Gestapo or the SA walking down the street?
Oh yes, very clearly. I remember when they were having their big parades in the evening, their flags, their music, and torchlight parades at night. We all stayed in and we knew they were having parades. Nobody went outside. No one felt secure, no one. You didn’t trust your next-door neighbor because you didn’t know what they were going to do to you. Neighbors who formerly came to your house, and were neighborly and friendly, all of a sudden refrained from even saying hello to you. They acted as if they didn’t know you. I can’t say that they were really trying to do something to you, but they were afraid that if they would show you any kind of friendliness that they would have a problem. And yet, I would have to say that after the war, after everything was over, a friend of my father’s and a friend of my wife’s tried everything possible to get in touch with us, and they succeeded. They had to reestablish connections after the war. But during the Nazi regime, no one would have dared to do anything.
As a matter of fact, that one gentleman, my father’s friend, he helped my father in getting his restitution from Germany [after the war]. And my wife’s friend is still in touch with us to this day. Even though my wife has passed away, she still writes me or occasionally calls me. When I was in Germany, I visited her. So we sort of reestablished connections because we knew these people were not really against us openly, except that they were afraid for their own lives if they would have shown any sign of friendliness.
What was the Hausmeister [superintendent] of your apartment building like?
He owned the building, and, as a matter of fact, they had a café. Before 1933 we very often went downstairs into the café and had coffee and cake. But later on, even though they didn’t throw us out, there was no feeling of friendship. Again, whether it was forced on them, we don’t know. But we didn’t go back, we didn’t go into their café anymore.
Did you feel proud or ashamed to be a Jew?
I didn’t feel ashamed to be a Jew, of course not. But it was very dangerous. I have always been conscious of it. I would never make a secret out of it. I have sometimes wondered how they could tell who I was. Especially in the city of Frankfurt with over half a million inhabitants, how could they tell who was Jewish? But people still found out.
I remember on November 10, 1938, at the Kristallnacht, that I didn’t know anything about it that morning. Early in the morning I was walking down the street and two SA men came to me and stopped me. “Come with us,” they said. I didn’t know them; they didn’t know me, but they must have known I was a Jew. I don’t know how they knew, but they knew.
So you were arrested by the Gestapo during Kristallnacht?
They kept me for the rest of the day, but by evening they let me go. Then, on my way home, I saw all the destruction on the streets. I wasn’t aware of that in the morning. They had taken us to what, at that time, they called a Festhalle. Now they call it the exhibition [hall]. There must have been thousands of people there, all Jewish people. They lined them up and just said, “Stand there.” Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. They didn’t give us food or anything. We just stood there for the whole day. And I’m sure the others stood there longer. But by late evening or early evening, I don’t remember the time, they called me and asked, “How old are you?” At that time in 1938, I was sixteen and I was able to get out and go home. And that was that.
Did they hit you?
No, I never got hit. At first when they combed the street, they took us to some sort of assembly point where they already had another twenty, thirty, or forty people. I don’t remember exactly how many they marched there. It really wasn’t that far away. While we walked there, and, of course, after the walk, all the people on the sidewalks started yelling at us—normal Germans, children and adults, and women also. There were no exceptions: man, woman, and child. They knew who we were because they walked us down as a group of forty or fifty people [and because those who marched us] wore uniforms, SA uniforms. The people just walking down the streets who saw us coming just let loose with insults. Maybe they were told that we were marching through the streets and that they should just yell at us. But I don’t know, it could have been spontaneous. But who can tell?
What happened to your father?
My father was arrested a couple of days later and taken to Dachau. While he was away, I went to the American consulate in Stuttgart and checked out our papers and I was assured at that time that our number, our registration number, would be called in early 1939. With that information, and with the fact that my father was a Frontkämpfer [frontline soldier] from World War I, I went to the police and gave them all the information, and they said that on that basis he would be released shortly. It still took a couple of weeks. I imagine that he was away for about four or five weeks and then he came home. While we were in Germany, my father never spoke about it. He never said a word. He said, “I’m not talking about it. It’s forgotten now.” But look, we were all glad. Once he came home, we made our entire efforts to get out, to get rid of our things, and to make sure that our relatives who lived in a small town in Württemberg could take over our apartment. We left the furniture; we left everything for them to take over. We left it for them because they had nothing. They had smashed their furniture and what not. But that was a small town—everybody knew everyone. They moved in there as we moved out.
My father was a salesman. He had a business on his own too. But later on I think he became associated with another company. The exact details I don’t remember anymore. But he was associated with another company and that’s where he met the gentleman I spoke to you before about. Whether he was a partner or what, I don’t remember exactly. But that’s where the friendship started exactly. He didn’t help us get out, but he helped us after the war to get back what we could. Before that he was afraid of his own shadow. I mean, he never did anything openly to my father. As a matter of fact, he just kept quiet in his own way. He didn’t try to hurt us. But, after the war, he did try to find us and he helped my father recover whatever could be recovered. It wasn’t very much. But there were certain amounts of money he could collect as restitution. And so he did the paperwork, so my father didn’t have to go to Germany.
Do you remember how your father looked when he came back from Dachau?
I can never forget that. My father always had a mustache and he never had too much hair. Yet whatever he had was shaved off. His mustache was shaved off, that much I remember. He looked very pale. I do know he never regrew the mustache, but, of course, his hair, whatever he had, grew again. And I remember that when he came home, it was late in the evening. I remember when he rang the doorbell he looked strange to us. Although he never had much hair, he never was completely bald. He was just bald and without a mustache. I had never seen my father without a mustache before that time.
What did your father say about Dachau when you were in the United States?
He never said a word to me that I remember. I figured he just wanted to get this whole thing behind him and that once we were out of Germany all he could think about was how to rebuild his life here. Let me put it to you this way: When I came here in 1939, the first couple of years were very bad, especially for my father, who had trouble finding employment. I was always lucky. I had employment within the first few weeks. And then, of course, I was drafted in the army and I fought in North Africa and Italy in the U.S. Army. Naturally, during the war, it was easy for my father to find employment. But in the first two years or so, it was very hard for him. Luckily, we kept our heads above water.
All I know is that we considered ourselves lucky to come here, and, from the first moment we came here, we struggled to get our relatives out too— that’s my mother’s sister and her children. By that time my mother’s parents had passed away, and my father had a sister who did not live near us. Our entire free time was spent in trying to get them over here. But then the war intervened and none of them survived.
Were you of German nationality?
I had a German passport that I came to the United States with, with a big red J on it. My father was born in Frankfurt, and his parents were born in Frankfurt. I became a U.S. citizen as soon as I joined the army back in 1943. In 1943 I was in the United States Army. I was fighting as an American, for America in North Africa and in Italy.
So you see yourself as an American?
Oh, yes, certainly. As a matter of fact, when I am in Germany, I don’t speak German, not in hotels and not even in stores. I make it my business to speak English only for the simple reason that it is none of their business that I was born there. If I have to write something in German—they sent me a questionnaire for that visit to Frankfurt that had to be filled out in German—I first write it down in English and then translate it. But I can still speak, sometimes with difficulty, and I understand. As a matter of fact, I feel funny when I hear people speak German who don’t think I understand. I understand every word they are saying, but they don’t know that.
What do you think of the Germans today?
I have mixed feelings about them. Frankly, I don’t trust them. But I have very little contact with the German population except for those two people I mentioned earlier in our discussion. I have no further acquaintances, so I am not going to seek out people. But, as I say, when I go over there, I don’t let them know that I was born there. I am an American citizen traveling in Germany.
Do you think there is a possibility to forgive?
That’s a hard thing to say. Some people say you can forgive but not forget. The people who really did all the dirty work, most of them are no longer alive now or are old people and they should have been punished at the time. Now, when you look at it, let’s say they find some Nazi who is by now maybe eighty-five, ninety years old. He’s probably sick and decrepit. What can I tell you? This makes no sense at this point. Forty years ago it would have made sense, yes. Now, these people are so old, they don’t care. So what are you going to do? Put them in jail for the rest of their lives when they’re that old? But mostly they should have all been punished.
How do you think the German people reacted to the persecution of the Jews?
They did nothing, period. They did nothing. They did nothing to stop it. Guilt by omission is as bad as guilt by commission. You can be just as guilty by not doing something as you are guilty of doing something.
And yet, you can’t say all Germans. I don’t know if you have seen the movie Schindler’s List. There you have a man who bribed people. He did everything he could to save twelve or thirteen hundred people. He went through all kinds of little misdeeds in order to save people. If you had more people who stood up like that, things wouldn’t have happened. And he was a Nazi in the beginning. But he saw what was wrong, and he changed it.
Hermann was born the son of a Berlin law professor in 1923, and Elise was born the daughter of a Berlin widow in 1924. They left Germany in 1939 on a children’s transport to Great Britain.
Elise: My mother was a widow from 1936 onward with two young children. A man we knew always promised my mother he would take her out of Germany. He wasn’t born in Germany—he came from either Romania or I don’t know where. He was a watchmaker, a non-Jew, and he was very friendly with us, and he was supportive. On the night of Kristallnacht he went to our business and said to the people, “Look, this is a poor widow with two children. Leave the business alone.” But they didn’t. They smashed the windows and robbed whatever they could get. So he wasn’t very successful in that. But he was the one person I remember that would support us. [Still] many people were friendly to us. We didn’t feel the anti-Semitism directly. They didn’t do anything against us. But maybe I was too young to notice, and I was in a Jewish school.
Hermann: I was in Berlin and I was nearly fifteen at the time of Kristallnacht. As a matter of fact, a few months before I left I was hiding out. I left Germany in April 1939 and my father was still in Berlin. He was a professor of law. He was given forty-eight hours to leave or otherwise he would be sent to a concentration camp. There were many people who tried to go over the border illegally. My mother, my sister, and my brother were in Berlin, and he went probably with a group of people to try to get across the border. But he was caught in Aachen, terribly beaten, and sent home with the idea that he would be collected and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. I don’t believe he ever went to Sachsenhausen, but he came back [to Berlin] and he died shortly afterward. I was not there anymore when he died.
It was illegal [to try to cross the border]. They would not let anybody through. You had to have papers—papers were a lifeline. If you had no papers to go to Holland or Belgium, you were caught on the border. We had an affidavit to go to America, but there was a waiting list for about ten years ahead.
Elise: A religious Jewish organization that sent children to Palestine after a certain training gave us an opportunity to go to Scotland in order to do our training there. Everybody tried to save themselves; it was not a question of age. What mattered was which opportunities one had to leave. We were all supposed to go to Palestine, but the British had set up a certain quota system, so we couldn’t go there.
Before we left Germany, we had received letters from people who had left earlier which said that Lord Balfour had donated a castle to house Jewish children and that there were two hundred children there. The glorious letters that we received said that it was a castle with beautiful rooms, so my mother told me that everything was beautiful and everything was nice there and she tried to make it sound as nice as possible. So we thought we were going on vacation somewhere. I didn’t realize it was really for good. I was fifteen years old.
Hermann: I was already quite mature [by the time of] Kristallnacht and also had seen the treatment of Jews being hunted and beaten up by other young kids our age. So I remember what was going on. We were Zionists and we were thinking about having a Jewish state and we saw that Jews were being treated as outcasts. We were some of the lucky ones to be able to go to England. There were ten thousand children who were saved by the British to go to England. We were two of the ten thousand.
Elise: I knew that some of my friends that had left earlier were in that castle, but that’s all I knew. I thought I would go to somebody I would know. I knew one or two people who had written back and they were very happy there. So I thought, “Okay, I’m going to see a friend of mine.” I didn’t realize that I would never see my mother again or my sister. I knew that they were very quiet when I left, but I couldn’t understand why. My parents told me it was so beautiful there and they packed everything up and put in some of the books of my father—we had a large library and my mother wanted to save certain books. It didn’t really sink in. I didn’t realize this was final; I thought it would be temporary. It didn’t bother me at the time to leave Germany because everybody tried to leave. Some people went to Shanghai, some people went to Palestine. Everybody tried to save themselves somewhere. I was glad to get out.
Hermann: When we left Germany, I was politically quite up-to-date. I knew what communism meant; I knew what fascism meant. I knew what Hitler was doing to the Jews. I became convinced that we had no future in Germany and we were trying to get out of the place. I knew we would end up in concentration camps—my teachers and parents and other people. I was also present in 1938 when my grandfather was deported to Poland—I was at the railway station. I had seen what was going on and I knew there was no future for any of us. I hated the Germans and I wanted to have it out with them and show them how I hated them. I wanted to have the most dangerous assignment in the British army. I was accepted in the tank corps of the British army and became a tank commander, and I stayed in the British army for a considerable time. After the war, I was stationed in Berlin and I was one of the first Jewish soldiers who came to Bergen-Belsen.
Do you continue to hate Germans?
Hermann: Yes. I make no distinction among Germans from my generation. Anybody born before 1945 is detested and hated by me. There were a few exceptions, but I’ve never met them. My blood pressure rises anytime I see any German of my age because I imagine him wearing a Nazi uniform. Even so, I have to draw a line. The line is 1945.
Elise: I don’t feel that way. I feel definitely that I would not like to associate with the older generation, but I feel that the younger generation we have met are very friendly, very nice, and different than their parents were.
What were your school years like in Nazi Germany?
Elise: We didn’t associate with non-Jews. In 1933, I was nine years old. You felt already at that time that you were different from the rest of the Germans. The Germans didn’t want anything to do with us either. I was in a public elementary school, and there the Jewish children were always the better students, and, whenever it came to Saturday, the teacher would say to us that it was Judenfeiertag [a day off for Jews]. They were always friendly. But there came a time when they couldn’t give good marks to Jewish students anymore. That didn’t happen to me because I left before that. But I had a cousin who was told that she should find another school because they were afraid to give her always the best marks in class. They were afraid because she was Jewish. In Gymnasium I went to a Jewish school. Our friends were all Jewish. At that time, Jews were already looked at as something second-class. Still I knew I was a Jew, and I was in a way very proud to be a Jew.
Hermann: You must understand that you are talking to two people who had a very religious upbringing. We were not assimilated. We had a Jewish education. We were conscious of being Jews. Of course, like my father, we were also very proud that we were German, which, of course, I lost after Hitler came. But the Jewishness and its self-consciousness were instilled in us. People who came from assimilated backgrounds couldn’t understand why all of a sudden they were called Jews and had a much harder time coming to grips with the matter. I knew Jewish history; I knew how we were persecuted. But I’ve had German Jewish teachers who were more German than the Germans and these people I detested, because after a while I saw what was going on.
Ninety-nine percent of the German population either were anti-Jewish or they were Mitläufer [fellow travelers] and continued going along with it. They saw us getting beaten up in the middle of the street. They saw us being sent away. You were treated in a most cold manner. I’ve seen truckloads of people being taken away to concentration camps. I’ve seen people come back from concentration camps with their hair completely shorn off. I had a teacher who gave us a report about what happened in Sachsenhausen. I was one of the lucky people who was in a Jewish school. My brother was thrown out of a Christian school. He couldn’t go there after 1937. Jewish children couldn’t go to any school, so we had our own. We could not go to theaters or movies or anything, so everyone concentrated on emigration, wherever they could go. Unfortunately, America did not do what they should have done. Many other countries did not do what they should have done. They could have saved many of our people but didn’t. That’s the end of the story.
As children, fifteen years old, we were thrown out into a world where we could not speak the language. But we adjusted very quickly. I didn’t speak a single word of English when I came to Britain and I learned it very fast. We also had the idea of going to Palestine, but then the war broke out and we were restricted.
I was then interned as a German, together with German seamen. We were sent to a German camp outside London. We were a group of forty boys from that place in Scotland, all German or Austrian and all Jewish boys. We marched into this camp and we had to stand at attention. We stood guard. We wanted to protect ourselves from the Germans. At night the British soldiers moved out. We went on a hunger strike because we wanted kosher food even though about half of us were not interested in kosher food. But after a while we just wanted food. In the meantime, we had people working on the outside to get us out of the camp because we were not really Germans. We were then sent to Liverpool, where ships were going to Canada.
There was a famous boat called the Andover Star, a British boat that transported German and Italian prisoners and civilians to Canada. Just a few hours before we were to board this boat, a telegram came saying that we had certificates to go to Palestine and we were taken off that transport. As it turned out, that boat was torpedoed and I think 80 percent died. We were released after that because the British understood that we were not really enemy aliens and we were sent back to Scotland to work.
How do you feel about the Jews who remained in Germany and survived or returned to Germany to live after the war?
Hermann: Many of the survivors are not always good people. Quite often the scum survived. Why? Because they were strong enough to go over other people’s dead bodies. Those German Jews who live in Germany, I call the scum of the earth. You can repeat it to them. They are people who have no honor. After they have been thrown out of the country, to go back, to stick there because they get a pension!
Elise: They said they didn’t want to learn a new language. They didn’t want to start from scratch. You can’t judge. They couldn’t start again.
Hermann: I would not allow my children ever to set foot in Germany if I can help it. You would say I must be very hateful to them, very vicious. I am not. I understand German culture. I was brought up in Germany. I know Schiller and Goethe and Heine. All these people I’ve studied. But it has nothing to do with me anymore.
Elise: Our children aren’t interested. But, if they wanted to go, I would let them.
Hermann: I told them I don’t want any of my children or grandchildren ever to set foot there. You forget one thing. When Jews were taken out of their apartments and deported, who were the first ones in the apartment? The neighbors! When I was a soldier, I came back to Berlin after the war in 1945. I went to the house where my parents lived. I went into our neighbor’s apartment and I saw my parents’ candelabra. I didn’t ask them any more questions.
Didn’t the Jews have to turn over their property to the government when they left?
Hermann: The procedure used to be that the Gestapo sealed the apartment and took the stuff out. Where they put it, I don’t know. But on Kristallnacht, which was a complete organized plundering, who came? You think the police came to get it? It was the neighbors who came into the apartment and smashed the glass and smashed the china and took whatever they wanted. It was a mixture of SS guys and neighbors. People saw an opportunity to get things that they didn’t have. That’s it! Do you think they asked our permission to take something?
Did you ever feel that your family was being watched?
Hermann: Yes, of course. You just had to be careful in everything you did. Being a Jew, you were marked. The common people, they were watching you. They were all detectives in civilian clothes, like the FBI in a corner watching you. The Gestapo only came in after you were handed to them. That was before the war. After the war started, the Gestapo had organized razzias.
I’ll tell you a funny story, a true story. Many Polish Jews were peddlers. Some of them also tried to get people together to marry. So we had one particular old Jewish man who always had a pocket of photographs of young girls, Jewish girls. And when he came to somebody, he said, “Look here, would you like to meet this girl and make a wedding?” Well, they picked this guy up outside our house. He was a harmless little guy who was trying to bring people together and they accused him of Mädchen handling, a kind of white slavery, and the poor guy was taken away and never heard of again. This just shows you how the mentality was; how they were thinking of every conceivable way of prosecuting a person, a harmless person. He was trying to make a living. Because many Jewish young men could not go out and meet other girls, we tried to meet them in other ways. He was a matchmaker. They did everything possible to make our life a misery in every possible way. They wanted us to disappear.
Did you ever wish that you were not Jewish at that time?
Hermann: Correct. I had a very bad experience. There were people going around getting people to join the Hitler Youth. I saw these young people in uniforms, playing the drums like in the Middle Ages. There was one guy who came up to me and said, “Why don’t you want to join?” They wanted to enroll me. I didn’t tell them I was Jewish—I disappeared. I thought many times to myself, “I wish I was them,” because who wants to be persecuted? You don’t want to stick out.
Elise: You want to belong.
How do you feel about being Americans?
Hermann: I’ll give you an answer that I think many people would give you. I have been German, I have been stateless, and I have been British. I am now American. But I was always a Jew, and always will remain a Jew.
Elise: A Jew first. Because we found out that if you were a German Jew, you ended up in the alley. If you were an English Jew, they were very nice to your face. But behind your back, you were a refugee and you could never really be English. But I’ll never forget that we are thankful to the English people that they saved us. But I’m foremost a Jew, and then English. I’m foremost a Jew, and then American.
Hermann: Ninety-nine percent of all Germans were Nazis or followers of Nazis. My wife may feel different, but I don’t. And to that 1 percent, I give the benefit of the doubt. There were some exceptions, but it’s so minute.
Born in 1926 and raised in a Berlin working-class family of Polish extraction, Rebecca Weisner was forced to go to Poland in July 1939, was deported to Auschwitz in October 1942, and escaped from one of the death marches near the end of the war.
I was born in 1926. My first memory is from 1932 or 1933, when I used to go to the park to play with my friends. It was different in Europe in those days. You could go in the street and nobody harmed you. But I did see the Socialist and the Nazi Party fighting and shooting in the streets. This was how we grew up there.
At that time, we lived in a working-class neighborhood in East Berlin, a few blocks away from Alexanderplatz. Both of my parents were from Poland. My parents were religious; they were Orthodox. Near to where we lived there was a police station. I remember they were barricading it every night and there was shooting going on just below our window. We were on the first floor. My mom kept my brother and me under the window in case a bullet came through.
Anyway this was my first experience as a Jewish kid. In 1933 I entered a German school, a little German Protestant school, because we lived at the time in a working-class Gentile neighborhood. I remember having Hebrew lessons three times a week in the first few months in the first grade. The teacher came in to teach us Hebrew in the German school. I was one of about seven Jewish kids there. I remember with Germans I had a lot of fights because they called me “Jew, dirty Jew” and things like this.
When I was six, Hitler came to power. I started school in April 1933, just at the same time. I remember that we were the only Jewish people in that apartment house and there were some German girls I was friends with—we grew up together—and, all of a sudden, one day I come down and they call me “dirty Jew.” My friends, the friends I grew up with!
I couldn’t comprehend it. I would say to my mother, “Why do they call me dirty? I am not dirty.” And she said, “You had better get used to it. You’re Jewish, and that is what you have to learn. So just take it.” But I didn’t want to take it. I fought. I fought in school in the first grade and I remember my aunt told me that I once locked up a girl. I don’t know how I locked her up in the bathroom at school, but she missed her whole hour and they were looking for her and I didn’t say anything. Well, during the pause they went into the bathroom and they heard her scream and so they found out it was me. They then kind of punished me. They put me in the corner and they gave me a note for my mother to sign. She kept saying, “Hey, listen. If you are going to be like this, you are going to cause us a lot of trouble.” I said, “Why? Why is it different for me?” I couldn’t comprehend why I should be different. It was me.
After the first grade was finished my mother sent me to a Jewish school. These were all private, but those who couldn’t afford them were supplemented by the Jewish Gemeinde. It was a regular school like the German one, but it wasn’t German. Every day we had one hour of Hebrew. But everything else was like any other school. And we had other languages too, like English, because we were being prepared. It was 1934 when everybody was thinking about emigration.
Did you have Gentile friends after you went to the Jewish school?
No, they were never allowed to play with me. They wouldn’t talk to me. They called me names like “dirty Jew” and probably some other things.
I was very upset and I caused a lot of trouble for my parents. Luckily they were Polish citizens. Because of me my mother was arrested twice that year and had to stay overnight at the Gestapo. The teachers called the Gestapo and said that I was not well behaved, that I reacted too violently. So my father said, “Look, you have to keep quiet. You cannot do anything. You cannot say anything.” And I couldn’t accept that; there was no way I could accept that. And then it happened a second time, and, if she would have been a German citizen, she would have been already somewhere else. But, because of the Polish passport, they had to release her. At that time you were still protected by Poland. And so after this I learned to keep quiet more.
Then we moved into a Jewish neighborhood in the Lothringer Strasse. We were close to that famous religious, Jewish street, the Grenadier Strasse. That is where you had all the kosher stores and you had all kinds of Jewish things that you couldn’t get in other stores. There, where we lived in Berlin, each city or town of Poland had their own little synagogue.
So I started the Jewish school and then things went better for me. But we had a German school across the street and we had a lot of trouble with German Jewish kids. They were always taught that they were better than the Eastern Europeans and they looked at us like we were from Eastern Europe even when we were born in Berlin. So there was a lot of fighting between the two sides. There was a lot of resentment from the German Jewish people.
There are so many incidents. We weren’t allowed to go swimming anymore [in the swimming pools]. Jewish kids were not allowed to mix, so we never learned to swim really. But we used to go outside of Berlin with the subway and the train and we, by ourselves, went bathing in the Wannsee. And we had only one Jewish sports stadium left. I belonged to a Zionist Jewish organization and we were very into sports; sports kept me going. We had competitions every few months, and in school we had a lot of sports too, indoors and outdoors. So we were always into sports and we had a lot of friends, all Jewish friends, but all from Eastern European backgrounds.
Do you remember seeing many signs and symbols of anti-Semitism?
Oh, I do. I saw the Stürmer newspaper. It was all over the place; it was on every corner, you couldn’t miss it. There were the Jews with the big noses and all that. I could not understand that anybody could imagine that Jewish people could look like this. I guess you could say I was a little angry with that; there was a lot of anger that came out later.
Also I remember that there were Christmas displays in one of the big department stores. I used to love it. In ’37 I said to my mother that I wanted to go to see the display. Now my mother was dark blond—she didn’t look Jewish. But I was very dark like my father. So she said to me, “You can’t go there. You look too Jewish.” And this gave me another complex—I looked Jewish. I said, “Now how am I supposed to look?” She said, “Well, you are a Jewish kid and you look Jewish, so you can’t go there.” And then there were the Germans who gave us a lot of trouble. There were so many minor incidents. But, all and all, I must say that with all this anti-Semitism, me and my Jewish friends, we had a pretty good childhood. We belonged to Jewish organizations, belonged to Jewish schools. We knew we had to accept it and that was it.
What did you think when you saw Hitler Youth walking around?
Very, very afraid. Now, I used to see Hitler sometimes. He used to come by in an open car especially on Unter den Linden by the Brandenburg Gate. One Saturday my mom and I were out walking on Unter den Linden because that was the thing to do and we could still go to one Jewish café [near there], but no Jews were allowed on the left side of Unter den Linden because Hitler lived in the Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse and we couldn’t walk there. On Unter den Linden we saw Hitler come by in an open car with his arm raised up and everybody had to raise his arm back. So my mom said, “You better raise your arm. If not, everyone will realize that you’re Jewish.” And I said, “No, I can’t do that.” She said, “Do you want to get me arrested again?” So I had to do it. But I always rebelled against it.
Now I will give you an incident that happened in 1936. There was one café in West Berlin that was called Café Dobrin. I was too young but my brother went there. Many young Jewish people in their later teens went there to meet somebody—it was a hangout—and the Gestapo used to come by every few weeks, unannounced, naturally, and just take everybody in. Among them there was a cousin of mine who was maybe eighteen or nineteen. He was born in Berlin, but his parents were stateless—they were from Poland. Anyway, he had no country and he just disappeared. His name was David Adler. It didn’t take six weeks until the postman came and gave my aunt a box and she had to pay twenty-five marks. She opened it and it was his ashes from Buchenwald. This was an incident that I had witnessed in 1936. He was taken from that restaurant, that café, where they were hanging out. He didn’t do anything. They just came and took you.
That wasn’t the only incident. How do you think so many Jewish people from Germany wound up in Buchenwald way before 1938?
What do you remember of Kristallnacht?
On October 28, 1938, they took my father out of the apartment. All the Polish Jews were rounded up and it took something like twenty-four hours to round them up. My father was taken and my brother was taken (he was just sixteen) and my grandfather was taken; my mom and I and my grandmother were left behind. They took them to Poland, but we didn’t know that for three days. Now my mother’s sister lived in Stralsund, which is near Stettin and Rostock by the Baltic Sea, and I had just been there that summer helping my aunt with her little baby girl. In that little city lived about twenty Jewish families, all immigrants from Poland, but all related. I remember well how my mother then put me on the train and my aunt took me off the train and how, at age twelve, I went there and they all were beaten up. They were already beaten up on the streets by the Germans. I don’t know how they knew they were Jewish, but being that it wasn’t such a big place, maybe they knew that. They didn’t arrest them, but they were beaten up. This happened in every small town in Germany except in Berlin.
Now, what happened to my father was that he somehow got out of that internment camp on the Polish side of the German border and went to the town where he was born, where he still had sisters and brothers who remained there. And then he called us from there and said that everything would be okay and that we shouldn’t worry.
I went to Poland because we had to leave in July 1939. We got from the Jewish committee an apartment with a room and a kitchen in a small town in Silesia near Krakow, about half an hour away from Auschwitz by car. I was there when the German army marched in. It was six in the morning when we heard on the radio that the Germans had marched into Poland. By nine o’clock they were in the town. My father’s brother was like a big shot [in that town]. I think it wasn’t more than two days that the Germans were there before they arrested him. But he ran away and they sent the dogs after him and they killed him. Every few weeks they rounded up people and shot them. That was before they even had camps [in Poland]. In 1939 I was just thirteen, August 11 was my birthday. I never went to school after that; I had finished just barely the sixth grade in Berlin.
Did you know about any other shootings of Jews?
There was no way of getting any news. But, yes, we did hear some things from some people who traveled, from the ones who didn’t look Jewish. Some of them had Gentile papers, if they were blond and spoke a good Polish without a Jewish accent. My uncle from Berlin from my mother’s family wound up in the Warsaw ghetto, but I didn’t know much about it until after the war. Near the end of the war, I myself escaped from the death march. That was a tough thing.
Anyway Auschwitz wasn’t ready yet. One day I was walking down the street with a friend and two German officers from the Nazis stopped their car and said, “I take you with me. You come here.” Like a kid with a big mouth, I then said to them in German, “You can’t take me. I am too young to go.” He gave me right away a slap on the face, a big hard one, and said, “You come with me.” And then they took me and the girl who had walked with me into the school. Later on they rounded up a lot of Jewish girls from that town, I think about forty, and we were sent to a Durchgangslager [a transport camp]. We were there a few days. It was hard for me there; it was like I couldn’t cope with it. It was in January or February 1942.
[Then we were sent] to a women’s camp near Breslau in eastern Germany. At the beginning, we were not too bad off. But sometime in September or October 1942, my brother, my parents, my grandparents, and my cousins were all taken to Auschwitz and nobody ever saw them again. Then they came at the same time to my camp; maybe it was a few days later [and we were sent to Auschwitz].
Did you know about Auschwitz already, about the gassing of Jews?
We already knew by late July, August. One came from this camp, one came from that camp. Somehow we knew those things were more or less going on— that there was Auschwitz and that they had gas ovens to gas all the people, children and so. We knew that.
I cried for maybe two days because I knew that I was all alone. I only had one brother and I really didn’t want to live at that point. I never cried again after that time. Until today, I still cannot cry and I have had a lot of emotional problems because of all those things. I can’t cry; I choke, but I can’t cry.
You know, they were young—my mother was forty; my father was forty-four; my brother was just barely twenty—and this was something that I had to live with.
What was it like in concentration camp?
They took away whatever we had—our watches, clothes, and everything. They shaved our hair. It was tragic. You know, you’re a young girl and they shave your head. We didn’t get any food anymore. If you asked me what was the worst in the camp for me personally, it was hunger. It was also cold; we didn’t have much warmth. We slept in an old factory hall, in bunk beds, up and down in wooden bunks and straw. It was like an outdoor, not an indoor, house, with little holes in the middle.
All my life I had to run around in the middle of the night. I still do. Over there, where you were walking, you had people screaming, and people crying, and people praying. It was so weird! It was so frightening! I’m still trying to figure out today how they cleaned it all up. There was no water, no paper. In ’44 it went from bad to worse for us in the camps. We were exhausted. Once I was beaten in the lower back, and I have had to have surgery from that. Twelve years ago I was paralyzed. It was a long story. Also I have had psychological difficulties. I’ve had psychiatry on and off for twenty years now. I finally gave it up because it didn’t help me. They were not qualified to help a survivor.
How do you feel about Germany today?
I have a big problem with that. I blocked the German language completely. Until recently, I practically didn’t remember a word. I just didn’t want to hear about Germany.
In 1977 I got an invitation from Berlin to come for a visit with my husband. If I would have gone much earlier, I would have gotten all this restitution money, but I just didn’t want to hear or know about it. When we went there in ’77, I said to my husband, “They’re paying. This isn’t our money. Maybe we should go.” I felt that maybe I would get over it if I went there.
I met two school friends on the plane and we landed in Berlin. They gave us a hotel and a few marks. One day we decided to visit our old home in East Berlin. We took the subway and got out on the Alexanderplatz. Then we walked to where we used to live, and what do you think happened when I came to the house where we lived? It was gone. The house I had lived in was leveled to the ground. Apparently it had burned. This was the instant that I acted like a maniac. I felt like I don’t come from anyplace—no background, no home, like out of the thin air, nothing to look back at. It was a very weird feeling. You come to collect something from your childhood and this is gone.
Going back to your life in Nazi Germany, how did you get out of the concentration camp?
I liberated myself I guess. I ran away from the transport in January or February after New Year’s in 1945. It was the coldest winter in Europe in 1945. We didn’t have much clothes or shoes. We had to walk in that cold weather and we had no food after the first few days. If they were in a good mood, they put us in a barn. It wasn’t warm, but it was better than the snow. But most of the nights we were outside sitting or whatever—it was so cold! Then I said to myself, “I’m not going to make it.” I was near the end. We were Auschwitz girls; there were like three and a half thousand girls. I remember that when the girls sat down, they were shot. They couldn’t walk; they would sit down and were shot. So I said to myself, “What can I do? I am not going to make it either way, so I’ll take a chance.” And when we walked by a certain woods, somehow I had the chance to run into the woods. Some girls followed me and they were shooting at us. But instinct told us to hide behind the trees and I guess they gave up on us.
That was a lucky thing because the Germans were evacuating east Germany already. They were going west, so we went east. At night we were walking and in the daytime hiding. Then we said, “We have to get some food.” So we took a chance, and a farmer found us in a barn sleeping. He was nice and gave us food. We had prison clothes on—girls from Auschwitz completely in prison clothes. There was no way we could take our clothes off; it was too cold. Anyway, he gave us some food and said, “You can sleep here. But, in the morning, you had better go.” Our only hope was to get to the Russians. It took us two weeks, and then we got to the Russians.
Born in 1914 and raised in Stuttgart, Joseph Weinberg emigrated to the United States in June 1940 and returned to Germany at the end of the war as an interrogator for the American army.
My parents originally came from Austria. In 1928 my parents separated and my mother had her own little business in the Städtische Markthalle [city market hall] in Stuttgart. I went to school in Stuttgart—to a Realschule [secondary school] and then to a Handelsschule [business school]. When I was finished, I became an apprentice in a Jewish firm.
While I was in school, I didn’t notice very much anti-Semitism, except that, of course, I was always with Jewish men. We had religion in school, but I had this along with everybody and did not have much trouble. I joined a German sports club in 1934 where I did running. I liked long-distance running, 1,500 and 3,000 meters. In 1936, I think it was, I was told that I couldn’t stay in the club anymore because I was Jewish. Then I joined the Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten [Reich Association of Jewish Frontline Soldiers], which had a sports club. We, the Jewish people, had our own Jewish Olympiad in Berlin. I was elected to go there because of my talent as a sprinter. I also belonged to another youth organization called the Bund deutsch-jüdischer Jugend [Association of German Jewish Youth].
I grew up in Germany. I tried to connect with people. We had good friends who were German people and who were very nice. We did not feel, especially in Stuttgart, the anti-Semitism. It was not so bad in Stuttgart as in other towns further north. After the apprenticeship, I was kept in that firm, a Jewish firm, and stayed there until 1937. When they closed, a German man came and said, “Jew, we cannot keep you because we will not get any orders from the government.” So I had to leave the firm. There was no problem, except that I was Jewish. So they were very sorry about it.
Do you really think they were very sorry about it, or did they just say they were?
No, they were. There was one fellow who actually brought me in as an apprentice. I stayed in touch with him after the war. Then, of course, I had no job and I got these little jobs. My mother had a stand in the Städtische Markthalle and she was very well liked. She was always called Mama Winterchen. Strangely enough, there were only two Jewish people in the Markthalle.
In 1938, when November 9 came, I came home from a job I had temporarily. I heard on the radio that the synagogue was burning. It was around six o’clock. I took my bicycle and went over to the synagogue. We lived in the center of the town, so it wasn’t very far from there. I drove over there and saw people standing in front of the synagogue. There were two fire engines and screams of “Fire!” The left and the right sides of the synagogue were burning. The people were just standing there and just looked. I don’t know whether they were sorry. It was so quiet. I went home and told my mother what happened there.
In the meantime, we found out that was the Kristallnacht. The next morning I went to the Markthalle with my mother and sister. When we walked upstairs, all the doors were ripped out; all the food was smashed together and lying in the center of the store and the money and everything was taken away. All we had—butter, flour, herring, everything—was piled up there. My mother, of course, cried, and we also cried. There was nothing we could do. We just walked away and never could come back to the place to see it. It was the end of my mother’s place and she had no more work to do there.
We had an apartment in the center of Stuttgart until 1938. After Kristallnacht, we had to move out. We had to go into a Jewish house where only Jews lived. We got an apartment on the third floor; it was a five-room apartment. My mother then started to rent rooms to make a living.
At that time, I looked around at what I could do. I was connected with the Jüdische Gemeinde, which organized things for the Jewish people to do, and there was a choir I belonged to. The man in charge was called Director Adler. He was originally in the Stuttgart school of music. Of course, he lost his job and that’s why he started that group. So I joined that choir and we were singing. It was wonderful—we were all Jewish people together there. But, after a while, they closed up that group too and we were not allowed to sing anymore.
Then he opened up an office where he helped Jewish people. When they had a visa to organize, he saw to it that they got the proper visa. He had connections with the American consulate. The American consulate spoke to him and said, “What you can do is screen the papers.” Before anybody came to the U.S. you needed a visa. You needed certain papers and they all had to be put together. Soon after that, he asked me to come and help him in that office to screen the people. We advertised that whoever needed papers should come to us and we’d tell them what they needed.
When you wanted to emigrate, you needed permission from the Gestapo to get out of Stuttgart. So the Gestapo opened up an office next to us in the same building. That means there were two offices. We had an office with a door to the Gestapo. When the papers were finished, we went into the office of the Gestapo, showed them the papers, and they gave the okay that the people could emigrate. It was a complicated situation because the Jews and the Gestapo were sitting there together. We also helped after 1938 when some Jews were taken to concentration camp and came out with a permission that they had to leave the country within two weeks. We helped these people get papers as soon as possible from the higher-ups in New York who could get them to the U.S. It was a complicated thing, but Director Adler had wonderful connections.
Wasn’t it already difficult at that time to get a visa to go to the United States?
That’s right. He organized it wonderfully and we all helped together. We had nobody in the U.S., but he said to us, “Stay here. If the time becomes bad, I’ll help you to get out. Don’t worry about it.” I lived with my mother and my sister. We tried to write some people in the U.S. to help us, but there was no way. So I stayed right where I was.
I, otherwise, had people in Stuttgart like an English teacher. She was German; she helped me learn the English language. She was seventy-five years old and she wanted to drive a car. As a Jewish man, I couldn’t drive, but she asked me to show her how to drive anyway. She said to me, “Help me learn how to drive the car and I will help you with the food.” It was difficult for Jewish people to get food because you had a ration card and you only could buy food in Jewish places and that was very short sometimes. So she gave us food sometimes. What I want to say is, there were people who went out of their way to help us.
I was also fortunate in that my mother came from Bukovina and was considered a Romanian citizen at that time. Also I personally had a special document which said I could go out and go wherever I wanted. The Jewish people could not go into the city after eight o’clock. They had to stay home. But I was authorized because of my job to go out after eight o’clock. The SS gave me a special permit that said that I had permission to stay in the street after 8:00 P.M.
Did the Germans you knew stop having contact with you because of their anti-Semitism?
No. It was the fear of others seeing that I had been in touch with them. Of course we noticed that more people all of a sudden were gone and that the group of Jewish people was getting smaller and smaller.
The war broke out in 1939 and we didn’t know what was going on. My uncle, in the meantime, was in the United States and wrote to us about what we could do. But he had no money and there was no way he could help us in the United States. I then spoke to Director Adler and he told me not to worry about it. [But then,] in May 1940, the Germans conquered Holland and there was no way of getting out over Holland to the U.S. and Director Adler then said to me that it was the last time for me to leave. Soon after that he went to the American consulate and within two weeks I had my American visa.
That was the last time I saw my mother. I went to the station and I said farewell to her there. I left at the end of May from Genoa. I went to Genoa with ten marks and with two other people who were also in the office where I worked. We arrived on June 1 in the U.S.
What happened to you in the United States?
My uncle picked me up and I started off with a job in a bakery where I cleaned plates at night. Then I went to a fur place where I worked for $12 a week. After that a friend of mine who was a baker in Jersey said that there was a job there and that he would make me a baker. So, in January 1941, I went to Jersey and started to become a baker. At that time, there was a draft and everybody here in the U.S. who wanted to become a citizen had to sign up for the army. So, in March 1941, I got a letter from the army that I would be drafted in three months.
After I was trained in the U.S., I was brought in 1944 to a camp which is today called Camp David where they took German-speaking people and trained them to interrogate prisoners of war. Then I was sent to Belfast, and, after D-day, to Paris. I got a jeep and was assigned to different divisions that were in front to get the prisoners of war. I was caught in the Battle of the Bulge when the Germans encircled us. But it was just for a short time because we were so strong. Eventually we got out of that and continued on further toward the Rhine. While we were at the Remagen bridgehead, I interrogated the man who was in charge of exploding the bridgehead, but never did. That man gave himself up. He didn’t want to do it. He said he would rather be a prisoner. I myself crossed the bridge while the bridge was still standing there. It was destroyed, but we could walk on it. The next day twenty-four of our boys crossed that bridge and at that moment the bridge collapsed and they were killed there. German flyers came over and bombed it several times; they never got a direct hit. But, of course, they came pretty close, so the bridge eventually just collapsed.
What was it like to interrogate these German prisoners of war?
I personally asked questions like: “How do you like Hitler?” Strange enough, I found that most of the prisoners were all pro-Hitler. They believed in Hitler. There was one guy I still remember. He was a nice guy. I said to him, “Look, you see what’s happening. Why are you still so pro-Hitler?” “Well, we believe he did the right thing,” he answered. That night he tried to grab the gun of one of the guards, but the man was aware of it and shot him. The next day he was dead and I never had a chance to continue talking to him.
Did you ever get back to Stuttgart?
At the end of the war I found out that Stuttgart was liberated by the French army and I said I’d like to go down to Stuttgart and see whether my mother was still alive. I hadn’t heard anything. I took a jeep and it was quite a trip from Leipzig to Stuttgart. I went to Stuttgart three days after Stuttgart was liberated. The house where my mother lived was completely destroyed. It was in the center of town and there was nobody around I could ask. But I had some names of people I could ask. I found the street where they lived in an address book and then went to that street outside Stuttgart, which was still standing there. The man was Jewish and his wife was Christian, so their daughter was half Jewish. I had my uniform on. So when the wife heard somebody outside, she looked and she yelled, “Go away, soldier!” They were afraid that we wanted to rape her. I took off my helmet and said, “I’m Sepp from Stuttgart.” She couldn’t believe it. The daughter was in the basement hiding. Then they recognized me.
That’s how I found out that my mother was taken away in 1943. They didn’t know where to. They said it was to a Czech camp and I only was told later that she went to Auschwitz. My sister was taken too, but they were not sure where they really went. That person who had taught me English was also still alive. She was now about eighty years old.
Could you explain more about the Gestapo officers you once worked with in Stuttgart?
In Stuttgart, the Gestapo was much more lenient than the SS, which was more strict. That’s why my mother got away with a lot of things; they left her alone. When I went back to Stuttgart, I found out that the Gestapo and the SS were sent to Ludwigsburg by the army and by military intelligence. I went there and somebody told me that the man who was in charge of the office where I had been was there. I went there and asked whether I could speak to him and I was allowed to because I was in military intelligence. When I asked him questions, he said he could not remember all these things anymore. I said to him, “You know, it would be very easy for me just to shoot you down.” Anyhow, he didn’t answer very much and there was not much I could do. It was a very strange situation. I didn’t really know what I should ask him. We talked about fifteen minutes. It was hard for me to ask him questions.
Had he been in charge of the deportation of Jews in Stuttgart?
I’m not really aware who was in charge, because I really had nothing to do with it when they were taken away. But always the SS were the bad people. The Gestapo more or less just did their job. That was in Stuttgart. I know the Schwaben were much more lenient than further north in Prussia and Hessen. They were more anti-Jewish there than in Stuttgart. I must say that the situation in Stuttgart wasn’t so bad. They just obeyed orders more or less. I knew many people who didn’t do the Hitler salute, who just held back.
I had no other contact in that respect with the Gestapo. You stayed away. Also they didn’t want to have any contact with the Jewish people.