Born in 1910 to a Jewish department store owner from Düren, a small city outside of Cologne, Ilse Landau moved to Berlin in the late 1930s and went into hiding in January 1943.
We were very much loved. We didn’t have any enemies there in Düren at all, nobody. As a matter of fact, among my intimate friends were a family who had a Gastwirtschaft [restaurant]. When they had Easter or Communion or any religious things, we were invited and so on. And they would come to my parents’ place too. The father of the family always used to say, “Ilse is my ninth daughter.” Only when the Hitler time came did we notice that people began to change. The elderly people naturally didn’t want to have anything to do with it because it was against their inner beliefs as they were either good Catholics or Protestants. In my father’s Kaufhaus [department store] there were many Catholics and Protestants who didn’t change, for whom there was never a difference. You didn’t notice that there was anything anti-Semitic.
Then, in 1938, the Nazis came to Düren and they were interested in buying the store. So my father and my uncle sold it. When they were talking about things at that time, an interested young man who was with his father-in-law said to my father, “If you don’t give me the store the way I want, you are going to be shot.” So he had no other choice but to give the store away. Then we moved to Berlin.
Where should we move to? There was no work. But in Berlin there was still opportunity and one could try. My father was so German; he served four years in World War I. His life was German. His great-great grandparents were all, since 1700, in Germany.
So we moved to Berlin, but I wanted to get out of Germany. I didn’t want to stay there. I tried to go with my sister, but she didn’t want to leave without my parents. We had no visa. My in-laws wanted me to come to Brazil. So I applied for Brazil. I had already packed to go, but then I was warned that two cousins of my father-in-law had been caught at the border of Switzerland and shot on the German side. So my father said, “No, you are not going.” We then applied to come here [to the United States].
In the meantime, I did war work in Berlin. I had to work for Siemens. I was quite well liked because I did very good work, they always told me. That was in 1941. The people I worked with were all Jewish. Only the foremen and foreladies were German people. They were marvelous to me. As a matter of fact, I can honestly tell you that my forelady invited me to her house to give me some good food because we didn’t have much to eat except potatoes and vegetables. She even wanted me to stay with them, but I didn’t want to bring them in danger. They had a little girl, and I didn’t want that.
I lived by myself in the Nymphenburger Strasse. My parents lived in the Innsbrucker Strasse. The foreman, who was in his fifties, liked me very much. He said that he had never seen anyone do such work as I did; I had to do welding for submarines.
I was so very much liked that one day the forelady even said to me, and I’ve never told this to anybody, “Ilse, I’m afraid that one day they’ll take all the Jews away. When you go home this afternoon and I’m ahead of you, I will drop my passport, my work passport, and at least you will be able to live with it. Maybe it will help you in your illegal times.” And she did it. She dropped her work passport with the picture in it and everything and she applied later for a new one. I never did use it, but I carried it with me because I had to go illegal. We looked a little bit alike. I had blond curly hair like she had. And she was not afraid. She said, “You always can say you found it.”
What do you mean by saying that you had to go illegal?
With my late husband, who was shot in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen [concentration camp] on March 16, 1945, I worked in the underground against Hitler. I helped distributing the fliers. I went underground in January 1943. I lived with the family Bn. until I was exposed by a Jewish girl. She had also been living underground but ran out of money and was caught by the Nazis stealing something from a department store. They promised her that they would let her live if she became a spy for them.
We went underground in January 1943, because we heard from the brother-in-law of my late husband that all the people living on the Bayrischer Platz would be picked up. He was working for the Jewish Gemeinde in the Oranienburger Strasse as an electrician and heard somebody mention this. The Oranienburger Strasse was the registration station for the Jews who were staying in Berlin. He had a friend working there for the Jewish Gemeinde. She had the Kartothek [registration catalog] and knew that everybody would be picked up. But the Gestapo also had their Spitzel [spies] there and they knew exactly where the [Jewish] people were living. They knew exactly that we were five different families living in five rooms—we had already been disqualified from living in our own apartment.
So I went to the family Bn. He had worked for my very best friends when they were still in Berlin and before they went to Brazil. They had a big outfit in Berlin making blouses and dresses for ladies.
Did you stay with this family or did you change the places where you were hiding?
Yes, I changed hiding places. I had friends. My late husband was a manufacturer of leather belts and buttons. He had people working for him and they offered that we could stay with them. A family named Schröder took us in. Also Elisabeth B. helped us. She worked as a salesgirl in the Nymphenburger Strasse in the same street where my parents lived and was married to a Jewish boy. Altogether—not at the same time, little by little, one recommended somebody else—we stayed in eleven different places.
Some thought that we were bombed out and that I was a Gentile and that my husband was too. First of all, my [husband’s] name was very German and I had big long curls then. Elisabeth B. recommended us to her parents. They lived in Niederschönhausen. They had a little bit of land and were such poor people, very poor people. But they took us in for one or two nights and then when we found other places. My friends, the family Bn., recommended me to Mrs. S. Her husband was in a Russian prison camp. Then we went on our own to Fürstenwalde and tried to get a home there and told a lady who had her own house that we were bombed out and that we didn’t want to go back and sleep in Berlin.
You also distributed leaflets. Did you do it for some political party? How dangerous was it?
For whom? Against Hitler. They were not at all communist. A Justizinspektor [justice official] and his friends produced the leaflets. I didn’t know everything; they didn’t tell me either. They were very discreet so nobody who would be caught should give away the name of the other. I distributed the leaflets in Berlin. The people didn’t know I was a Jew. Sure it was dangerous. I went by train every night.
Actually I did not distribute them myself, my husband did. He placed them on the walls of buildings. I do remember [that they had phrases like] Frieden für den Aufbau [peace for (re)-construction]. They wanted Aufbau, rather than war like Hitler—very intelligently done.
I got caught because I had gone back to the Bornsteins and the superintendent [of their apartment building] had seen me there all by myself. He had been somewhere out in the street and had seen me dressed with a hat and sunglasses in the neighborhood of the Klosterstrasse, near the police presidium. He recognized me and gave that information to the police. But he also went to the B. and told them that I had been seen in the neighborhood and that I must be hidden somewhere. So, from then on, the police, the Gestapo, overheard all of our telephone calls—something we didn’t expect. This was the end of our time, so to speak. It didn’t take long before I had been caught and shipped to Auschwitz.
What happened after you were caught and sent to Auschwitz?
I jumped out of the train! Near Kattowitz they opened up the cattle train. When we had to make our business, we had to go into the corner where there was a pail and a bedcover on a line. They wanted to throw out the excrement, so they opened the door. The man with a bayonet and the other one with a gun were sitting next to the door and talking to the people. It was cold, high snow. So I left my handbag there on the straw and went after the pail, and, when they opened the door, I jumped. The train was going fifty miles an hour and I didn’t know if I’d be alive or dead. I didn’t care, I just wanted to escape. I wanted to get out. I didn’t want to go to Auschwitz.
I then had to walk to the outhouse of the train station. When I got in there, I thought I was getting crazy. I started laughing, crying. I didn’t know what I should do. I was all alone. I couldn’t talk to anybody.
Didn’t the men guarding the train notice that you had jumped off?
They didn’t notice me. They noticed only when they were counting the people at the gate in Auschwitz. That I was told from a girl who survived. Because her mother was Swedish and father was German, they let her live but they didn’t send her back before Auschwitz was closed. She told me that on her return. I don’t know how she found my address; I think she called up the Jewish Gemeinde and found out that I was a survivor. She had given me some zwieback, a little packet, and I lived on these two or three cookies. On my way back I took the first train [that I could get].
I had money hidden in a button of my overcoat. I hid the money in the button, ganz feingefaltet [minutely folded up]. My husband had done this. It was a miracle. The twenty marks were not larger than what a dollar is here. When I got the next train that went in the other direction, the girl [conductor] asked me why I didn’t take a ticket at the Schalter, at the ticket service. I said that I didn’t have time and when I heard the train coming, I ran because I wanted to make the train. She said, “Okay, I will write you a ticket, but not as far as Fürstenwalde/Oder,” and that’s what she did. That was only the first ticket that I got. That was from there to Kattowitz. From Kattowitz I then got a ticket by local train to Fürstenwalde/Oder and from there I telephoned Mrs. Schalkschmidt, who then picked me up in the night at about twelve.
[After a few days] my husband joined me. Because of the way I looked, he passed out from horror. He thought that I was a ghost. He had not known that I was still alive. On the next morning we traveled back to Berlin. We stayed there overnight and I remained there, but my husband then went back to Fürstenwalde. After that, since we knew we could not stay in our old hiding place because the porter had seen me there, my husband called his cousin and asked if we could stay for a night with her until we could find another place to stay. That conversation was overheard.
When we came to the door of the house at nine o’clock and rang the bell like we had made out with them, the SS were already hiding in the bushes. While we were ringing the doorbell, the cousin of my husband asked her husband if we could stay overnight for one night. To this he said, “You would not leave your cousin standing in the street during a bombing attack, would you? Let him come in for one night.” For saying that, he was shot in Plötzensee [prison]. But my husband’s cousin was not shot. She, as a Jew, was allowed to live. He, although he was not Jewish, was a delightful man. I was so sad about him. I couldn’t imagine that he would be shot in Plötzensee at just about the same time as my husband.
I and my husband were then arrested in late October 1944 and he and I were delivered to the Alexanderplatz Polizeipräsidium. He was interviewed separately. I only saw him once standing in line there. Then I saw my girlfriend, Mrs. S. She was also there at the Alexanderplatz. On December 16, we were taken to Schulstrassee/Iranische Strasse. I wasn’t transported again from there, but my husband was brought to Oranienburg. I stayed in Schulstrasse/Iranische Strasse and was hired so to speak as a dressmaker and had to make dresses from silk that the Nazis had stolen in Belgium and France; I had to make elegant dresses for them. I sometimes got one half of or an entire Brötchen, a little roll, with a little bit of margarine on it. But I didn’t eat it. I took it into the room where the little girls were and distributed it to them. I said I’d rather die than eat in front of them. I never ate it. They kept me there until the Russians came.
When did you first hear about the mass murder of the Jews? Was it before you were put on the train to Auschwitz or after that?
We had heard already that the other people were murdered in those other, nearer by, concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen and Sachsenhausen. There was a lot we had heard about.
When you were on the train going to Auschwitz, did you know that you’d go to Auschwitz?
Yes.
What did you know about Auschwitz at that time?
That they all would be gassed. Only a few who could work [might survive]. They were to dig the graves, cook for them, clean the toilets, or whatever there was to be done as work. That was the same as in Theresienstadt. My father died in Theresienstadt, and my aunt saw it with her own eyes that they had nothing to eat.
When did you first hear about the gassing of Jews and from whom?
That I can’t tell you.
Was it from other Jews, or from Gentiles, or from the radio?
From radio maybe. But I didn’t listen to the radio, my husband did. I went to sleep. I had to sleep. I wasn’t able to listen. A man is still stronger, you know.
Where did you get your food when you were in hiding?
We went to the vegetarian restaurant, but not each day. They gave us food and some food stamps. There were a few other people who knew that we were ille-gal. So, naturally, we went to restaurants where you could have dinner. It wasn’t so hard if you didn’t want to eat meat. We didn’t eat kulinarisch [high cuisine]. We had potatoes with sauce and salad. We didn’t eat meat because we naturally couldn’t afford that. And, as I said, this friend Mrs. B. still gave us food stamps, carrots, potatoes, or sometimes a can of sardines.
How much did you live in fear of the Gestapo?
Always. Always. There was never a moment where we saw that we were secure, never.
You mentioned spies, even some Jewish people?
Yes, I even have a book here about [a Jewish spy named] Stella. Naturally, I know her. Her parents were killed in the concentration camp where my father was. And there was this girl who had given me away when they picked me up at the Bornsteins. One day I saw her going again on the Jagd [hunt], so to speak, to look for victims. Like always, she had an SS man on her right and on her left. I jumped up and gave her a slap while she was speaking to the two men. I don’t know if I knocked her teeth out or whatever, but I came in solitary confinement because of it. I couldn’t even go to the toilet alone anymore, but I had to do that. That was before I went on the transport to Auschwitz.
Finally, how did you get to the United States?
I just came on the Truman directive after the war. I didn’t want to stay in Germany and then whom did I have there? Few friends survived with me. To whom could I turn? In Germany they didn’t want any refugees, no foreigners. A lot of countries didn’t want any because you take the work away, the food and the work.
I loved Germany, but I wouldn’t be happy to live there anymore. They took my life away. They took everything away. There are some people who went back home because it is very hard here when you get older. But I don’t see the point. I would rather die here than go there. There are only a few people left. Who do we have there? A few in the cemetery to visit, that’s all.
Born to a shoe store owner in a small German town in East Germany in 1921, Lore Schwartz went into hiding during the war but was caught in June 1944.
My parents lived in a small town. We had a shoe store. In 1938 my father was arrested and carted off to Buchenwald. On the second of December he got out because he was an injured war veteran. On the seventh of December he died. In 1943 my mother was deported to Poland.
I was not a very good student and I had what you might say was a boyfriend. He was a Christian boy, as we had few Jews in our town, only a few families. And then he was told, of course, that he wasn’t allowed to do that. I mean, we were only taking a walk together on the promenade. We were so very young.
I was not in school very long during the Hitler period. When I was fifteen years old, I went to a home economics school in Munich for one year where we learned to cook and wash. There were forty students, twenty children whose parents had already emigrated and had left their children there, and twenty teachers. There was no anti-Semitism.
After this I went back home in 1938 and went to Leipzig in order to learn dietary cooking in a Jewish hospital. Of course, that was a terrible year. That year my father died after the ninth of November. My brother was in school in Leipzig too, in a Jewish school. After the hospital closed, I went to Berlin. There, again, I was [working] in a Jewish hospital run by Jewish doctors. I was only allowed to take care of non-Aryan patients. After that, I was on the road.
[During the war] the Gestapo was in that hospital. In fact, Eichmann had us come down to the Jewish hospital. He wanted to select people. For everyone who escaped, ten people were shot. But I escaped from the hospital with an ambulance. They were putting the transports for the concentration camp together. Every time a doctor and a few nurses had to go to one of those centers (Sammellager) where they sent them away from. It was during what they called the Fabrikaktion [factory operation of February–March 1943], when people from the factories were immediately called and sent to the concentration camp. I was supposed to be in one of those transports.
They were looking for me at the hospital. The hospital in Berlin was concentrated with all the Jews who were left. The big shot in the hospital was Dr. Lustig. After the war the Russians caught him and got rid of him, because, even though he was Jewish, he was a terrible, terrible, terrible man. He worked with the Gestapo. He was looking for me, all right?
Did you know that he was working with the Gestapo at that time?
Sure. The Gestapo was right in the hospital, in the laboratories in the back. Dr. Lustig was looking for me because I didn’t show up to go on the transport. I had left with the ambulance through the gates and I was gone. I went at first with my fiancé’s sister to a farmhouse near Danzig. She had connections there. I didn’t know where to go and I had nothing. It was a big farm and we stayed with the gardener from that farm.
Did they know that the Gestapo was looking for you?
Not at this point. They asked who we were, and friends of my fiancé’s sister said that we were friends of theirs from Berlin who were bombed out. On Sunday mornings we went to the church there. One thing I could never do was to kneel down. I just could not. I just bent my head. I’m not a religious Jew, but I just could not kneel down. The farmer there wasn’t very happy about that, so we left.
My fiancé’s sister then went to a sister in Gleiwitz who was married to a non-Jew. Her brother, my fiancé, and her husband had been sent away and were in the concentration camp already. I [went back with her on the train as far as Berlin] and then I stayed in Berlin for a while, [while she went on to Gleiwitz where] she stayed throughout the war with her sister. Of course we were in touch, and I was there in Gleiwitz after that at one time or another. But I stayed mostly in Berlin. I stayed away from her most of the time. We never got on anyhow. Even at that time, we didn’t get on.
Where did you hide in Berlin?
You wouldn’t believe it. Above all, my friend in Troisdorf helped us with everything possible, with all kinds of food coupons and things. She was half Jewish. Her father was non-Jewish, her mother was a Russian Jew, and her sister was Aryan and was with me in Berlin at the hospital. But later she went home to Troisdorf.
When I came back to Berlin, I met somebody on the street who was apparently a communist and I went with him to his house and stayed with him for a while. But I had to work because I had no money. At one time I worked in a restaurant on the outskirts of Berlin cutting spinach. Sometimes I slept there too, but I couldn’t remain there because people started asking questions. Others worked there as well, like a woman from Ukraine who was an Ostarbeiter [Eastern European forced laborer].
The boss was in love with the owner and she was pregnant from him. She thought that I was in love with him too. Even though he was the ugliest thing you could ever see, she was suspicious. This restaurant was in an apartment house and he was the Luftschutzwart [person in the building responsible for enforcing the blackout during bombing attacks]. He asked who I was, and I told him that I was just working there. He wanted to know where I lived. So I gave him the address of my fiancé who wasn’t there anymore. He then [made inquiries to find out if in fact] I was registered there—in Germany you had to be registered with the police—and found out that I wasn’t and he was suspicious. So I told the boss lady who was pregnant, very highly pregnant, that he had got me in trouble.
I then left and I went to Cologne, where I stood in front of the cathedral and called my friend in Troisdorf. After that I went there and she put me up in a hotel in Bonn and paid for it.
Didn’t you have to register with the police?
No. For women, it wasn’t that hard because you didn’t have to go to the army. I said that I lived in Berlin and that I was bombed out—the more bombs that fell, the better I felt about it—and after that I was able to get ration coupons and money. I lived in the Sternstrasse in Bonn and I was registered there under the name of Hertha Berger. Whatever name I used always had the initials HB. [While I was in hiding,] they called me by four different names. I had to survive. That’s the way it was.
After staying there for a while I couldn’t overstay my welcome, so I went to Gleiwitz to visit the other side of the family, to the one who was hidden there and the one who was living there. I stayed in Gleiwitz in her apartment because she had to go to do forced labor. The sister who was hidden there was hiding behind the piano.
When I was in Gleiwitz, I knew that my fiancé was in Auschwitz-Birkenau. You will think I’m crazy, but I went by train to Birkenau, which is only a jump from Gleiwitz. I went into the concentration camp and said that I had promised a lady in Berlin to look for her son. I had noodle soup with the SS there, with the guards, and they said to me that they didn’t think that he was there, but why don’t I come back tomorrow. I gave the guards cigarettes and schnaps and then I left. But I went back again the next day—I could see women without hair carrying stones—and told them the same story again. The next day there were, of course, completely different men there.
Which year was that? I didn’t know that it was possible to visit people in Auschwitz.
It was between 1943 and 1944. I just played dumb. If I tell the story to someone, they think I’m absolutely crazy. I was just in the guardhouse; I wasn’t in contact with the prisoners at all. Then I went home to Gleiwitz and that was the end of the story.
After that I went back to Berlin and stayed with a woman whose husband was apparently an SS man and also a pimp in the Lothringer Strasse in Berlin—the worst. If you asked me today how I got to them, I don’t know, but I stayed there. I had met this woman on the Kurfürstendamm who also was in hiding and she told me about a woman who had a massage parlor and she protected me. She had a little doggie and a massage parlor. The things I did there, I don’t regret today because I had to live. In any case, I came out of the war a virgin. But it was terrible, absolutely terrible what was going on. She had a sign saying “massage, health massage.” The men came there just to, very crassly stated, get a hand job. The real thing, I had no idea about whatsoever. Anyhow, I stayed with her for quite a while. She had a young housekeeper there, the other masseuse, who really was licensed, but she also did the same things.
Somebody then came from Gera “to satisfy a special patient,” and she knew who I was. But nothing was ever said about it, never, never. In fact, we were going to the movies together to see Marika Rökk, but we never made it. It was the worst bombing attack there ever was. From there, I don’t know how I got to the Lothringer Strasse to the pimp, a huge pig. He got me a job in a laundry with some very nice people, who also knew who I was. That was the way it always was, either they threw me out or they kept me. Anyway I slept there and I learned how to eat horse meat. The woman there was very good to me and that was in June 1944.
I just wonder how it was possible to find people who would hide you.
They were afraid, most of them. Thank God, except in that one case I mentioned, nobody checked up on me.
[Anyway, when the woman with whom I was staying went on vacation,] I met a friend at the beauty parlor on June 16. At that time, we were six people in constant contact. Five of the people were hidden not far from the beauty parlor near the Anhalterbahnhof. You had to make a certain Klingelzeichen [signal with the outside doorbell] in order to be let in. Somebody from upstairs then screamed out the window, “Didn’t you know Frau Krause had Jews and they were nabbed yesterday?”
I then met a friend at a hotel not far from Anhalterbahnhof whom I had met in the massage parlor. I didn’t do anything with him. He just gave me money and left. There was also another one like this who also gave me money and who also knew who I was. I said to him, “Look, the older people from Frau Krause got caught. I’m afraid it’s now my turn, too, because I have a terrible feeling.” My clothes were all in a locker in the Bahnhof Zoo. He said, “Look, the inva-sion has just started. Do you think that in all this commotion that they will take such big trouble to look for a little girl like you?”
[What had happened was that another Jewish man had been caught and he turned the five Jews in to the Gestapo.] He was caught and then he mentioned the five people—two dentists, an old lady, a young lady, and a child. He got caught and he was told [by the Gestapo], “If you tell us about more Jewish people who are hidden, you’ll go to Theresienstadt. Otherwise, we’ll send you to Auschwitz.”
Was it known at that time what Theresienstadt and Auschwitz meant?
We did know, because we had worked before in those transport camps. The old people and the war wounded and the Jewish community employees went to Theresienstadt, so you knew that there was a preference, that there must have been something special about it. Auschwitz, I was there, so I knew. I was there as a visitor. I also knew that my father was in Buchenwald and that he died a few days after he was released. We knew that it was no picnic whatever was there. How much the Germans knew, I don’t know. But I can tell you that later on when I was in a work camp that you marched there in the wintertime without hair and without clothes. So they must have known, too. Definitely! If anybody tells me they didn’t, they did.
How was it that you had to go to the work camp?
I went to the Ku’damm and I met a neighbor of my aunt who had already lost an arm in the war. Too bad he didn’t lose the other one. We went out for dinner to Café Kranzler and then I went to the Bahnhof Zoo to call Troisdorf. When I came out, he had called the Gestapo. That was it—I was caught. I never found him again after the war. Maybe he was killed in the bombing—I hope so. I was caught and I was put into Oranienburger Strasse where all the Ostarbeiter were. They had got caught because they didn’t want to work.
I was picked up by an SS Scharführer who was working in the Sammellager for the Gestapo. His name was Gustav. He knew me from there. So I was where I started off from. They then sent me to Theresienstadt. I was in Theresienstadt until October. Then I was sent to Auschwitz like everybody else. But I was only three days in Auschwitz because the Russians were already not far from there. And so I was sent to an Arbeitslager [work camp] in Kurzbach near Breslau. We had to carry trees. It was winter, bitter cold.
The commandant was very reasonable. He got us some warm clothes. From there we were marched toward the middle of Germany. First, we stopped in Gross-Rosen, in one of those other camps, and stayed there for I don’t remember how long. We marched and marched. Finally we ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where I was liberated on April 15, 1945. That’s it.
Apparently there were a lot of people hiding in Berlin. Had you known a lot of other Jews who were in hiding?
Quite a few. I don’t know where they were hiding, except for one or two. One was named Gabriele. I don’t even know if she survived. There was an apartment in Charlottenburg in the middle of the city. I never could make head nor toe out of what happened there, but I know that there were Jews hidden there.
You must have lived in fear all the time.
No, not at all. Nothing would have happened really, except that they sent you away. I knew that I couldn’t live through the war through what I did. I had the feeling—I don’t know how to tell you this—that I had nothing to lose but myself. I was all alone. My mother was away, my father was dead, my brother was in England, what else could have happened?
What did you know about Gestapo spies while you were in hiding?
There was a whole group in Berlin. You had to watch out. I don’t know if you’ve read the books about them, [like about] Stella; she was in Berlin. Yes, we knew about them, about Stella and her friend Jakobson, something like this. And there were some in the Jewish hospital. I mean, they weren‘t giving out their names in the hospital, but you had to be careful. Lustig was married but he had two nurses who were his girlfriends and they were spies. They also collaborated with the Gestapo.
It’s amazing that you had lived in hiding, but you still were walking around and going out to caf’s.
Too many times actually, because I got caught at Kranzler’s. Otherwise, I really lived a free life. I was bombed out several times, but I had money at all times, and food ration coupons, and I was called by four different names.
Born to a tobacco store owner in Magdeburg in 1924, Rosa Hirsch survived the Holocaust in hiding with her parents.
In 1933 my parents had a wholesale tobacco store in Magdeburg. The SA brown shirts were standing in front of it and said, “Don’t go in. Don’t buy from Jews.” So my father decided that this was not a life to live here, and, in early 1934, we emigrated to Paris. Unfortunately he lost most of his money there and his two sisters from Berlin wrote to us: “This man [Hitler] cannot last. This man cannot last. It’s not so bad. Why don’t you come back?” Even though he originally wanted to go to America, they persuaded him to return to Germany. Also my grandfather was still alive. So we went back, unfortunately, in 1935, and we were never able to get out again.
When we came back in 1935, we went to Berlin, not to Magdeburg, and I had to go to a Jewish elementary school. It had already started: You could not sit on benches; you could not go into these stores anymore; there were these signs. And then, of course, we had the Kristallnacht. That was the beginning of the end.
Shortly thereafter they closed all the Jewish schools and I went to work for a dressmaker. Quietly, so that nobody should know, she showed me how to cut dresses and how to sew. At least in this way I was occupied during the day. She certainly was not a Nazi, and neither were the other people that were working there. But then it started. It would have been 1938 when men were deported to the concentration camps, right? Luckily my father was never picked up, but my uncle was. Since he lived in a small town in southern Germany, he went to Dachau along with the rabbi of the town. The rabbi died in the concentration camp, therefore you knew already then what was happening. My uncle, however, was able to get to America in 1939. But we got stuck in Berlin.
Then the war broke out in 1939. Before that already I had some girlfriends whose fathers were from Poland and they were sent back to Poland—first the men and then the families followed—and I never heard from them again. Even after the war, I tried to find them. But I couldn’t. They probably perished somewhere. Then, little by little, we knew that people had got picked up—in 1941, if I remember correctly. We knew somehow through word of mouth who was going to be picked up. Somehow things leaked out and all of a sudden we found out. My father worked at an ammunition factory and I did some slave labor. My mother didn’t work, she was ill. And then we found out that we were on the list, that we would be picked up. I honestly don’t remember how, but somehow we found out.
We lived at that time together with some other people, including a cousin of ours who was already in hiding. One day the doorbell rang and we didn’t open the door. They kept knocking, and, all of a sudden, we saw them go back to the super and then come back with a key. So my mother had no choice. My cousin and I went to the back of the apartment and my mother must have looked like this wall. Luckily, however, they had only come for the furniture of the owner of the apartment who was also a Jew. But he wasn’t there. I think he had died earlier or something. Anyway, I had met actually a Nazi who wanted to help me and I told him that if he wanted to help me, he had to help the whole family. It was either all or none. So we went into hiding, at first in the basement of our own building. The super, who certainly was not a Nazi, provided us with the cellar actually.
One day at six o’clock in the morning or earlier, even before we had gone into hiding (you know, you had to wear the yellow star), I was at the subway and we were not allowed to sit down. But there was a sort of fire extinguisher there and I was sort of leaning on it. All of a sudden—I must have fallen asleep—someone yelled, “Get up, you Jew.” Nobody said anything. They could have defended me in that I wasn’t really sitting down or anything. But people really didn’t come to your defense. Naturally, there are always some people that try to help and be nice and kind, but, as a whole, they believed Hitler when he said, “Listen, if this Jew doctor doesn’t have a practice, you will get it.” So it was to their advantage.
There was a musical here in America many years ago called South Pacific. In it there is a song that says you have to be taught to hate. And that’s what he did. He really taught people to hate and to be nasty. Because, by and large I think, before Hitler there were not that many anti-Jewish feelings. People lived very happily together. I was a small child, but I had non-Jewish friends. My parent had non-Jewish friends. But then, all of a sudden, they disappeared. They were gone.
But we were very fortunate, my parents and I. In Berlin, through the help of one man, we met the manager of a shoe outlet, who was a White Russian. He had grown up as an anti-Semite. You know, his parents had told him never to sit by a Jewish child, that they smell differently and so on. But then he found out that they were not any different from other people and most of the friends in his life ended up being Jewish people, because he really appreciated them. So he made up his mind to try to help as many people as he could and he helped my parents and myself and hid us in his house. Unfortunately, while we lived in his house during the war, he died at the age of fifty from a heart attack. But his wife continued [to hide us]. They were definitely communists and they definitely helped and supported us, so we ended up being saved by the Russians. And, even before we got to their house, we had stayed with a poor woman who was a communist and she fed us and so on.
Since you had blond hair, could you have not worn the yellow star when you went out?
Well, you could and you couldn’t. You were afraid. Because once they catch you, they shoot you right away. As a matter of fact, it had to be sewn on. The stitches had to be so close that you couldn’t put a pencil between them. They checked that you could not put a pencil between the stitches, because some people tried to sew them on very loosely and then at one point pull out the thread. You sort of tried, but somehow you were afraid. The consequences of being caught were too great. If they asked for identification, you were then caught.
The indignities that we had to live through. You were not allowed to own any jewelry, except the wedding bands of wives and husbands. You were not allowed to have any pets: no birds, no fish, no cats, no dogs. You were not allowed to have a phonograph or to play records. I think, also, no radio. But some people, you know, kept the radio. All these little things, little by little, lowered your self-esteem, like you were not a human being anymore.
Do you feel a sense of hatred toward the Germans?
Let me put it this way. When we came to the U.S., even though my parents never spoke English too well, we certainly didn’t speak German at home. I mean, certain phrases you can’t help. Even today, you use certain phrases, certain expressions. But the thing is, you really made an effort not to; you didn’t want to have any connection. Even today, to be very truthful, I am not a lover of Germans or Germany. I do not trust them. I always feel there are anti-Semites everywhere in this world. People have prejudice everywhere. But nowhere in the world were 6 million people killed systematically just because they have a different religion. And nobody did anything about it. So they all accepted it, silently. Maybe they made a fist in their pocket, and so I wish, but nobody really did anything. There are a few exceptions. Quite a few people were hidden. Maybe a thousand. What is a thousand? It’s nothing, right? So there were some people that tried to help. But they were such a minority. But I really don’t trust them and I really have to say today that every child is a product of their parents. There are very few exceptions where children think differently than the way their parents are. So it’s inherent.
I once went back to Germany myself when my son was thirteen years old. We took a trip instead of making a big celebration here for his bar mitzvah. My hus-band was from Mannheim and he wanted to go back, but I didn’t. For two days we stayed in Mannheim and we met some old school friends. One of them had become a banker. In the course of the conversation, he said that he had been several times to America already. And this was our first trip overseas. Here I am struggling, scratching money together to make this trip with my family, and here’s this guy who became a banker, who has been several times to America. You know, it got my gong. I couldn’t wait until I left Germany. It was like hot coals under my feet. I wouldn’t want to go back for anything. They could invite me. They could do anything and I wouldn’t go back. I just don’t want to have any part of it. My parents, my grandparents, and generations back, they have all been from Germany. But I don’t even want to eat cake in Germany. I want to have dry bread in America or anywhere else. I don’t want any part of it. I have no friends and I have no family there. Whatever family I had in Germany got killed in the concentration camps.
Can you remember having non-Jewish friends when you were still in Germany?
Before we emigrated to France, I had non-Jewish friends. But I had no contact with them afterward anymore. I didn’t have any non-Jewish friends in Berlin. It depends what year you are talking about. If you talk about 1935 or 1936, we only had Jewish friends. At that point you could still walk around and go anywhere, but you really didn’t have many non-Jewish friends. You may have had one or two, you know, and some of the neighbors were okay at that time.
In the 1940s, did your relations with your neighbors change or did they remain okay?
Well, they were afraid. But some of them stayed [cordial to us] and gave us some ration cards and helped us out with some kind of food. For instance, there was a neighbor in our building who was always very friendly. He also used to like to drink and he came home very late. One time when my father came back early in the morning from the night shift, this man came home with a big salami under his arm. My father’s eyes popped out and he took it and paid him for it. A few weeks later he saw him again and said, “Listen, if you ever have another salami . . .” Even though it was horse meat, it tasted very good. Only when we knew it was horse meat, it wasn’t so good anymore.
Was this really important help that you received from the Germans?
Yes, it was. Yes, because we only got a minimum of food. I mean, you could only shop at certain hours, late in the afternoon, and then we had to be off the street again. It’s the indignities that one had to suffer—they were really terrible.
It is a little bit of what one person could do. People were really afraid at that point, because they could wind up in a concentration camp just as easily as anybody else if they would get caught. So at least at that point they were afraid. In the early years, they could have done something. They could have protested or something.
Why do you think that they didn’t protest or do something in the early years?
Because they really believed it; they really believed what they were taught. If they lived by the law, they didn’t have to be afraid. They were taught that a Jew is not a human being, a parasite, so you leave it alone. They had nothing to be afraid of. But if they had been thinking that these people used to be my neighbors and we were friends, well, maybe not close friends, but we were acquaintances, and all of a sudden they are parasites, they are not worth anything anymore, then something isn’t right. But, as a whole, the Germans do not think for themselves. They are followers. They are not leaders. You see the difference here for instance in America. Somebody comes along like a McCarthy and all of a sudden people get mixed up. But then they come back to themselves and they say, “That man is crazy.” They think for themselves. They are not followers. They are not like sheep like the Germans are. The Germans follow anybody.
Did Jews in Germany know about the mass murders during the Holocaust?
In the beginning, you really thought they were going to work camps. I guess they didn’t want to admit it to themselves. Nobody knew for sure. I mean, at least nobody of the people I knew. We knew that it was something horrible. When the mail came back from my aunt’s with address unknown, we knew they were not alive anymore. But nobody knew about gassing. I don’t think anybody knew that. I mean, maybe they thought they died of hunger or maybe they died of something else. We didn’t know.
Did you know about any spying being done on you?
No. I’ll tell you something. You always were afraid. You didn’t talk to other people. Even among yourselves, you only whispered because they say walls have ears.
Do you think 1945 came as a liberation for the non-Jewish Germans?
No. If somebody was not a Nazi, okay, for them it was a liberation. But for the rest, they were happy when Hitler was invading left and right on the western front or on the eastern front. But when Stalingrad happened, it then hit home all of a sudden. Before that point they were happy. They were winning.
But when the bombs were falling in Berlin, I was happy even though they could have hit me just the same as anybody else. I didn’t care at that point. I rather felt, “Let them destroy it.” If they would have wiped out all of Germany, I wouldn’t have cared.
When I came back to Berlin [at the end of the war from being in hiding] thirty-five miles outside of Berlin, I felt like a stranger, like an alien dropped onto this earth. They were not my people anymore. I spoke the same language, but I had no more connections to them. It was only two and a half years that I was in hiding. But in those two and a half years, I wasn’t part of it anymore. I couldn’t talk to them. I couldn’t. If I would have been in the Amazon, I couldn’t have felt stranger. After the war ended, we got in touch with the American army and we were on the first liberty ship that came to America. I couldn’t wait.