THE WILLIAM BREMAN JEWISH HERITAGE MUSEUM ESTHER AND HERBERT TAYLOR JEWISH ORAL HISTORY PROJECT OF ATLANTA ABSENCE OF HUMANITY PROJECT (AOH)

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1 MEMOIRIST: INTERVIEWER: THE WILLIAM BREMAN JEWISH HERITAGE MUSEUM ESTHER AND HERBERT TAYLOR JEWISH ORAL HISTORY PROJECT OF ATLANTA ABSENCE OF HUMANITY PROJECT (AOH) GISELA MEYER SPIELBERG SANDY BERMAN DATE: NOVEMBER 15, 1995 LOCATION: <Begin Disk 1> What s your name? ATLANTA, GEORGIA INTERVIEW BEGINS My name is Gisela Meyer Spielberg. Where were you born? I was born in Berlin, Germany, I d like you to begin by telling us a little bit about your family, your background, how many people were in your family, how long your family lived in Germany, and just some of your early recollections. Well, to our family on both sides actually live in Germany a long time. In fact, I just found some pictures of my grandmother s great grandfather and great grandmother and her great grandfather was born in From that time on is our history in Germany. Eventually both my father and my grandmother and mother moved to Berlin [Germany]. Where did you start out in Germany? 1

2 My mother s hometown was Krefeld in the Rheinland and my father came from near Frankfurt am Main which is in Hessen, Germany. And they moved to Berlin my father moved to Berlin after World War One in which he was a soldier in the cavalry, which was called the [German word], and he spent four years of that war in the Balkans with the horses and the cavalry. Then he came back and the French and the English had occupied his home state and he moved to Berlin. Wasn t he the recipient of a bravery medal? Yea, he has an Iron Cross 1 and some other little medals which I don t know what they are, but, my mother and father met on horseback. He loved horses. That s why he was in the war with horses and that s how they met. <Tape cuts and restarts> in <Interviewer pauses> like there? So you were saying that they met on horseback. Right and got married in 1924, March 1924 in Berlin. Berlin. And you were born What are some of your earliest memories of growing up in Berlin? What was life Well, we were pretty middle classed. We first lived in a big apartment in downtown Berlin which, people lived in these big apartments. In 1933, we moved to a suburb 1 The Prussian Eiserne Kreuz [German: Iron Cross] was first awarded during the Napoleonic Wars in It was a standard medal awarded in various classes to soldiers during World War I. Wearing the Iron Cross represented service and valor 2

3 called Grunewald which was right opposite a park, a big park, more like a forest, called the Grunewald. And I mostly remember that, growing up in the suburbs. I went to the it was just my mother, father, sister. I had one sister who was younger, who is younger. My grandmother lived in a big apartment in downtown Berlin. I went to the neighborhood school which was called the VolksSchule [German: People s School ]. Used to walked there, it was within walking distance. But in 1933, of course, was when the Hitler was elected and things started to change. The reason he was elected was because there was this tremendous crash and economic upheaval in power, about the election? Do you remember what your parents were discussing when he was coming to I don t really remember. The election, he only got a third of the vote and got in by all kinds of manipulations. But they [her parents] thought it would be just a passing thing, that he would not stay long, and that things old go back to normal. Not he was starting right away with spreading all this hate propaganda, changing laws and making laws against Jews. What was his occupation? If we could backtrack for just a moment, what did your father do for a living? He was a metal dealer. He dealt in nonferrous metals, which was of course, when Hitler came in, started [unintelligible 5:06] that business got better than it had been before. Did he he owned the business himself? Yes, he owned his own business. Did he have a lot of people working for him? I don t think he had people working he mainly bought and sold metals, and so I think he just worked for himself. 3

4 What about the relationships of your family with the German community? Did you tend to stay mainly within the Jewish community in Germany before Hitler or did you have friends in the Christian community as well? Well, I think my parents probably had friends in both communities at that time but mostly probably Jewish people. Most of the Jewish people were very secular, they weren t so terribly religious anymore even though grandparents had been well, my father s family was Orthodox, they still lived in Southern Germany, but my mother s family was more assimilated. They [her mother s family? Her parents?] still kept all the Jewish customs like kosher 2 and going to service and things like that. All the holidays? Holidays, right, yes. Do you remember celebrating the holidays? Yea, I do remember celebrating the holidays, going to services on the High Holidays 3 and going to celebrating Hanukkah 4 and Passover. 5 2 Kosher/Kashrut is the set of Jewish dietary laws. Food that may be consumed according to halakhah (Jewish law) is termed kosher in English. Kosher refers to Jewish laws that dictate how food is prepared or served and which kinds of foods or animals can be eaten. Food that is not in accordance with Jewish law is called treif. The word kosher has become English vernacular, a colloquialism meaning proper, legitimate, genuine, fair, or acceptable. Kosher can also be used to describe ritual objects that are made in accordance with Jewish law and are fit for ritual use. 3 The two High Holy Days are Rosh Ha-Shanah (Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). 4 Hebrew for dedication. An eight-day festival of lights usually falling around Christmas on the Christian calendar. Hanukkah celebrates the victory of the Maccabees in 165 BCE over the Seleucid rules of Palestine, who had desecrated the Temple. The Maccabees wanted to re-dedicate the Temple altar to Jewish worship by rekindling the menorah but could only find one small jar of ritually pure olive oil. This oil continued to burn miraculously for eight days, enabling them to prepare new oil. The Hanukkah menorah or hanukiah, with its nine branches, is used to commemorate this miracle by lighting eight candles, one for each day, by the ninth candle. 5 Hebrew: Pesach. The anniversary of Israel s liberation from Egyptian bondage. The holiday lasts for eight days. Unleavened bread, matzah, is eaten in memory of the unleavened bread prepared by the Israelite during their hasty flight from Egypt, when they had not time to wait for the dough to rise. On the first two nights of Passover, the seder, the central event of the holiday is celebrated. The seder service is one of the most colorful and joyous occasions in Jewish life. In addition to eating matzah during the seder, Jews are prohibited from eating leavened bread during the entire week of Passover. In addition, Jews are also supposed to avoid foods made with wheat, 4

5 Then Hitler came to power and things began to change. What was the first thing that you remember changing? Well there were all kinds of subtle changes. We weren t allowed to have a maid anymore. We weren t allowed to go to restaurants. There Jews when they had a car they would give them a license plate that had a high number. You kept your licenses plate for life in Germany and so they would assign them a very high number so the police would know it was a Jewish car. Younger professionals weren t allowed to practice their profession anymore and so they mostly left and were lucky because they could leave then, and What year was in 1933? , yes. They kept saying Oh, veterans of the first World War will always be welcome in Germany. We wouldn t do anything against them. We ll just doing it against people that come from Eastern Europe, against these young upstarts, and that sort of thing. It slowly, I mean, there was a lot of propaganda and hate material being passed around but as a child I was not aware of that. Then with the Nurem with the different legislation and the Nuremburg laws 6 coming into effect things began to get worse. barley, rye, spelt or oats unless those foods are labeled kosher for Passover. Jews traditionally have separate dishes for Passover. 6 In the years between 1933 and 1939, Nazi Party leaders began to persecute Jews through a series of anti-semitic legislation that included more than 400 decrees and regulations restricting all aspects of their public and private lives. The anti-jewish policies brought radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community. The first major law to curtail the rights of Jews was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in April 1933, which excluded Jews from civil service. Germans also began boycotting Jewish businesses in 1933 and Jews were soon effectively expelled from almost all professions and commercial life. Jews were gradually removed from German economic life. At first, the confiscation of Jewish businesses and property was, according to the Nazis, voluntary. Especially after 1935, Jewish property was forcibly transferred to so-called Aryans (non-jews) in a process known as Arisierung [German: Aryanization]. Jewish citizens found themselves increasingly disenfranchised. In 1933, German law restricted the number of Jewish students at German schools and universities. After Kristallnacht, Jews were barred from all public schools and universities. The Nuremberg Race Laws formed the cornerstone of the German Nazi Party s racial policy and were introduced in September They heralded in a new wave of antisemitic legislation that brought about immediate and concrete segregation. Among other prohibitions, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship. Part of the 5

6 Right. I think the Germans kind of in 1936 the Olympics took place in Germany and I think the Germans waited sort of because the world was coming to Germany in I know my parents were always saying Oh my gosh, they will see what s going on here, what they re doing, because there were already concentration camps and they were doing all kinds of terrible things and they ll see what s going on. But of course they [the Nazis] hid it all very well and people didn t really want to see what was going on. They [the Nazis] sort of held off on the really rough stuff until Some of the more harsh laws came into effect. After 1936 it really got much much worse. What were some of the were you allowed to stay in your school? No. In Germany, the basic school is four years of a sort of an elementary school and then four years a sort of a high school. I had finished four years in this basic elementary school and after that I had to go to a Jewish school, you could not no Jewish children could mix with German children and go to a German school. So I went to a Jewish school. Was that very difficult leaving your friends? Well, the German children were not too friendly. I don t remember having a lot of really good German friends. Maybe one or two, but not a whole lot. They already didn t associate much with Jews. I think I remember you telling me you were invited to only one birthday party? Yea, I remember just one birthday party which was the daughter of the Japanese Counsel. One from somebody besides a Jewish relative or friend, yes. She was the daughter of Nuremberg Law passed in 1935, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor banned marriage between Jews and non-jewish Germans. It also criminalized sexual relations between them. These relationships were labeled as race defilement [German: Rassenschande]. Jews were also forbidden to employ female German maids under the age of 45, assuming that Jewish men would force such maids into committing race defilement. After the bloody nationwide pogrom known as Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) in November 1938, thousands of adult male Jews were rounded up and sent to camps. Antisemitic actions and political violence also followed the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakian territories in

7 the Japanese Counsel in Berlin and she I think it was either her birthday party of her going away party, they were leaving. Your father your parents obviously were becoming more and more aware that the situation was worsening. When did they begin to think about leaving? Well, I think they probably began to think about leaving in 1936 but in order to leave you had to have a pace to go. Most of the European countries did not allow Jews to enter unless they had relatives or some way of getting there. America had a quota and you had to have a number to get in on the quota. The first thing you had to do was get a number, get on the list. I know they got on the list to get a number, which I think our number was to come up in You had to get an affidavit from someone in America who would guarantee that you would not go on what s now welfare and become because there was a worldwide depression and there were a lot of people without work and it was very difficult to get jobs. I remember my father s mother you were also trying everywhere, every place you could to find a way to get out of there and she [her grandmother] found out that Mrs. Felix Warbug was a distant cousin and so she wrote to her. Evidently the Warbug s were very charitable people, had set aside money for any German relatives who applied. She [Mrs. Warbrug] provided us with an affidavit. But then, having a quota number in 1944 meant you had to go somewhere in between to try and get out of there [Germany] as fast as you could. In 1938, my father was arrested for supposedly dealing with some German underground. They had left some books at his house or something and he didn t know some of these people that were more liberal, and there was a small pocket of opposition to Hitler. He [her father] stayed there for about six weeks, but my mother didn t tell us. She said he d gone on a trip to England. You did not know. 7

8 I did not know he was in a prison, no. And when he came back, he actually spoke English. He d studied in prison and he d learned English. Which camp was he was in a concentration camp 7? one. No, that was a prison. He was in prison somewhere in Berlin. I don t know which Why did they release him? I m not real sure. Mother must have used some connections, some bribery, something, some promises to get him out of there. And go ahead. If we could backtrack for just a moment, I know that he was able to still make a living. How was he able to do that with the new laws? Right, the laws didn t permit Jews to have business. I think he ostensibly sold his business to a friend or a business friend, really, who let him operate and take some I think he 7 The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. In Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; briefly KL or KZ ) were an integral feature of the regime. The Nazis differentiated between concentration camps, which were used to contain slave laborers and prisoners of the Nazi state, and extermination camps, whose primary purpose was the systematic killing of prisoners. When the Nazi regime came to power, they systematically persecuted both Jewish and non-jewish Germans perceived to be opponents of the regime. Political opponents (Communists, Social Democrats, liberals) were some of the first victims housed in temporary detention centers like Lichtenburg. Jews, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah's Witnesses, clergy who opposed the Nazis, and any others whose behavior real or perceived could be interpreted as being in opposition to Nazi political and racial ideologies were also persecuted and incarcerated. The Nazi regime refused to tolerate criticism, dissent, or nonconformity from the German people. Non-Jewish German political activists were treated harshly but other political opponents remained potentially valuable members of the German race. The goal behind their internment in and subsequent release from concentration camps was often a kind of reeducation that would see them fall into line with the regime s political and racial ideologies. Between 1933 and 1939, tens of thousands of Germans were sentenced by the criminal courts. If authorities were confident of a conviction in court, the prisoner was turned over to the justice system for trial. If the outcome of criminal proceedings were unsatisfactory, the acquitted citizen or the citizen who was sentenced to a suspended sentence would still be taken into protective detention and incarcerated in a concentration camp. The first concentration camps were established in Various authorities set up the makeshift camps in empty warehouses, factories, and other locations. Camps were established in Oranienburg, north of Berlin; Esterwegen, near Hamburg; Dachau, northwest of Munich; and Lichtenburg, in Saxony. By the end of July 1933, almost 27,000 people were housed in these camps. Most of the prisoners were political opponents of the Nazi regime. By the end of 1934, most of these early camps were disbanded and replaced by a centrally organized concentration camp system under the exclusive jurisdiction of the SS. 8

9 probably shared whatever the profits were. There wasn t that great of a living anymore. It was very difficult in those days, trying to make a living. But that s what he did. What about your home? Were you able to stay in your We didn t own a home. We rented a house from, we lived in half of a duplex with a German family and then in 1936 when the bad laws came in, they didn t particularly want us to live there anymore. So we found another house in the same suburb, maybe a half a mile away, a mile away, something like that, that was owned by a socialist German who didn t care whether Jews lived in his house or not, because he was already persona non grata then, he didn t have a job. He just kinda lived on his investments or whatever it was his financial income and existed there. He rented us a house in this other part of Grunewald. Eichkamp was the name of it. and How aware were you and your sister of what was going on? You were very young Well, we were aware. We didn t know some of the terrible things that went on but we knew we were trying to get out of there and that it was very scary and that the Nazis were doing terrible things against the Jews. We hardly ever went to downtown. We lived in the suburbs and we hardly ever went to downtown Berlin. Hardly ever went to the stores. Can t even tell you were the stores were. My grandmother lived sort of in a part of Berlin we used to go and see her in her apartment. But that was we did go to the zoo sometimes which was near where she lived. And some of the museums. We just stayed mostly at home or went to school, saw friends. We didn t And by this time you were forced to leave the public school and go to stayed until left the public school in 1936, right, and went to the Jewish school where I 9

10 How did you feel having to leave the school you ve spent so much time at? I know you said you weren t that friendly with the German girls. Well, it was kind of the end. Four years was kind of like graduation. And most of them went to this other school which was also in the suburb, but we just didn t go there. We went to the Jewish school and that wasn t really a terrible part. The terrible part was trying to find a place to go. I knew my parents were really searching and desperate to find a place to go and leave Germany and get out of there and you just couldn t do it. Finally, in 1938, November 9 was Kristallnacht 8 and all Jewish men were arrested and put in concentration camps and a lot of all the synagogues were burned and Jewish stores were attacked. All the glass was broken, that s it why it s called Kristall, broken glass. Somebody had warned my father, he wasn t at home. He came home the next day, which he shouldn t have done. I remember the officers from the Gestapo coming to our house and knocking on the door, two men, very ordinary looking men, and asking for him. He said oh my gosh, seeing they from the Gestapo, I still have some work to do, will you wait for me? They sat in our living room waiting for him about an hour while he finished his work and then they took him off to the concentration camp, where he was lucky. He only stayed about two weeks. Most of the other men Which camp? 8 On November 7, 1939, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris, shot German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath in Paris. Grynszpan apparently acted out of despair over the fate of his parents, who are trapped along with other Polish Jewish deportees in a no-man s-land between Germany and Poland. The Nazis used the shooting as antisemitic propaganda fervor, claiming that Grynszpan was part of a wider Jewish conspiracy. When Vom Rath died two days later, the Nazis used the incidence to fuel violent pogroms. On November 8 and 9, 1938, the Nazis started a state-sponsored nationwide pogrom. Across the country (and in Austria) Jewish synagogues, homes and businesses were looted and burned, Jews were attacked on the streets and 91 were killed. Thousands of Jewish men were sent to concentration camps for several weeks and released only when they agreed to leave the country as soon as possible. The Jews were made to pay for the damages to their premises. The pogrom was called Kristallnacht, which means Night of Broken Glass, because of all the damage done to Jewish shop windows. Thousands of German Jews and close to 6,000 Austrian Jews were arrested after Kristallnacht and deported to the Dachau or Buchenwald concentration camps in Germany. Most were released within a few weeks, but only if they promised to immigrate immediately, leaving their property behind. 10

11 It was Sachsenhausen. 9 Most of the other people stayed about six weeks, and it was cold winter and they didn t give them very warm clothes. He was pretty lucky in getting out. After he got out, then the Gestapo, the secret police, said to him: You better get out of here by March 15. If you are not gone, you will have to report to us everyday. Well that meant, the end, cause then he would just disappear. Somehow they [her parents] managed to get a visa for England where we had some friends. You know how they managed to do that? Well, they just I think maybe the Jewish organizations helped, the organization in England, some friends we had there, some friends we have in Holland. He [her father] got a visa to go to England and he left actually on March 15, the day they had told him, on a plane, which was actually very unusually in those days to get out of there by plane. My sister and I left in April on a Children s Transport 10 which the British had put together. I think they were feeling a little guilty about not letting hardly anybody come into their country and all 9 Sachsenhausen was established as the principal concentration camp for the Berlin area in Germany. It was located near Oranienburg, Germany. When the camp was opened in 1936, it housed mainly political opponents, criminal offenders, homosexuals, Jehovah s Witnesses and other asocials such as Roma and Sinti and, later, Soviet civilians. The camp ultimately included more than 40 sub-camps concentrated around the armaments industries of northern Germany. Prisoners were forced to perform hard labor. SS doctors conducted medical experiments on prisoners and a gallows, shooting gallery, and gas chamber allowed the SS to directly kill prisoners in Sachsenhausen. The number of Jewish prisoners varied over the course of the camp s existence, but most Jewish prisoners were deported from Sachsenhausen to other concentration camps, most often Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the beginning of 1945, there were approximately 11,100 Jewish prisoners. Soviet forces liberated the camp on April 22, Kindertransport is the name given to a series of rescue missions that assisted Jewish children in leaving Nazioccupied Europe. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany and the occupied territories of Austria, and ex-czechoslovakia. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, and on farms. Some transports were organized by Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) in France where German-Jewish children were put up in a series of OSE children s homes. Beginning in March 1939, several transports brought children from Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt and other places in Germany to France. When the Germans occupied France, the 144 children, in two separate transports, were smuggled out of France into Portugal where they caught a ship to the United States. The first transport left on June 21, 1941 and the second on September 1, Altogether the OSE sheltered and assisted in getting nearly 1,600 Jewish children out Nazi-occupied areas. 11

12 these desperate Jews in Germany. They said We ll save about 10,00 children. We got onto this children s transport and both of us were sort of taken in by English families. How old were you when? 1939, I was 12, 12 and a half. My sister was eight. We were very lucky we had I had a very wonderful family in England who sent me to a boarding school. My mother, the only way she could get out was to take the only jobs the English would allow people to take, because there was all this unemployment, was domestic. She got a job as a domestic in an English family, to take care of the children in the house while the woman, man, worked. She left Germany August 28, Which was, as you know, three days before World War Two started, before Hitler invaded Poland. What about your grandmother? Well, my grandmother was left in Germany, all by herself. She really didn t have any other family. Her parents were dead, her brother wasn t there. Most of the relatives had left and she was left there all alone. She was very determined woman. She stayed in somebody s basement room in this suburb where we were where people were nicer than most of the other Germans. She worked in some sort of a lunchroom for her food and she said, when she finally got here, she said: My only daughter and my two grandchildren had gone and I was going to join them. And she did. What she did, somehow, I don t know exactly how she did it, she got a ticket on the Trans-Siberian Railroad 11 and left Germany about September, I think. Beginning of September Travelled for two weeks through Russia. Then crossed over to Japan and got on a boat in Yokohama, Japan and this boat was full of refugees. The boat went all the way to San 11 The Trans-Siberian Railroad is a rail line stretching all the way across Russia and over through China to Manchuria. It was built by Tsar Alexander III and still exists today with several different railways sprouting off the original, main Trans-Siberian line. 12

13 Francisco [California]. They [the Americans] wouldn t let anybody land. Most of these refugees had visas to other South American countries but those countries sold their visas so they weren t really very good. But, they allowed them to get out of there anyway. This boat with all the refugees went all the way down to Chile. Nobody would take them. Finally, I think, the Joint Distribution Committee [?] got a visa for everybody for Ecuador and she landed in Ecuador. And [unintelligible 21:57, something about harbor] is very very hard because it s on the equator. What she did there I think she got herself a job as a domestic, its what a lot of refugees did, they worked as governesses or domestics or something like that. She got that and then she applied in Quito she moved on to Quito, which is the capitol of Ecuador. She applied at the American council for visa for America. She did have an affidavit from the same Mrs. Warburg. We had already settled in America. We stayed in England a year and a half and we had arrived in New York September 10, 1940 and then we had moved on to Atlanta in October. So, we had sort of settled there and my parents, I think, sent her a visa. It just so happened the counsel in Quito was from Macon, Georgia. Since she wanted to go to Atlanta, Georgia rather than to New York, where most refugees went, he gave her a visa very quickly. She came to Atlanta via New Orleans in March of The rest you were all reunited in England? Well, we were all in different places in England. My sister and I were both in families, my father stayed in a boarding house in London, he just kind of lived there, he wasn t allowed to work, and my mother was near Oxford in a family as a domestic. We stayed there about the family I was assigned to sent me to a boarding school in Derbyshire. In August, end of August 1940, our number had come up, our quota number, because a lot of people of course, with the war in Europe had been cut off from the quota and our number had come up more 13

14 quickly. So we got passage on a ship to America, August 31, We went from Glasgow to New York. It took us about ten days. The war in the Atlantic was already going on and I think the boat, we were not in a convoy, we went a very northern route, and the boat before us and the boat after us were sunk. After this, I don t think they allowed anymore refugee boats to cross into New York. The name of the boat was the Cameroonian from the Anchor line. Again, to backtrack for one second, were your parents able to go to any of their Christian associates or friends to ask for help? Did they try to do that? I think they tried somewhat, but most of the Christians were pretty scared to help in any way. I just remember one family that used to invite us they had a sort of estate outside of Berlin and they d sometimes invite us over. These neighbors of ours who belonged to the International Socialists Organization were friendly and helpful in that they introduced my mother to some English socialists who found a place for my sister in a family in England and also found her [her mother] the job as a domestic. There were some gentile Germans that were helpful, but most of them no. And then you how did you end up in Atlanta? Well, we have family in my father s two sisters and their families lived in Birchfield, Connecticut and we went there first and stayed about a month. Then the Joint 14

15 Distribution Committee 12, which is now the Federation 13, said: Well, would you all like to go to Atlanta. We have some places there and it seems to be a good place. My parents said: Well, all we know about Atlanta is Gone With the Wind. Sounds good, we ll go. So we went. But we really didn t have any connection to Atlanta. Then your grandmother came in Japan started in December. She came in 1941, in April. Wasn t she on one of the last, right before Well, she came via Panama. So, she came in April and of course the war with Do you want to talk about any of the other incidents that come to mind? Oh gee, it s hard to remember all the incidents that happened. Can t think of anything right now. Do you remember something I ve told you? <Interviewer and Memoirist break into laughter> 12 A worldwide Jewish relief organization headquartered in New York. It was established in Before World War II, it sent funds to subsidize medical care, schools, vocational training, welfare programs and emigration efforts to beleaguered Jews in Europe. During the Nazi era they tried to get Jewish refugees out to anywhere that would have them including the United States, Palestine, and Latin America. When war broke out they helped thousands of Jews in Poland with shelters and soup kitchens, hospitals, and educational and cultural programs. When the United States entered the war in 1941, the Joint shifted gears since it was not allowed to operate legally in enemy countries. They used international connections to channel aid to Jews in conquered Europe. Wartime headquarters were set up in Lisbon, Portugal from which the Joint mounted rescue operations for desperate refugees including sponsoring a program to get 15,000 Jews from Europe to Shanghai, China. After the war, the Joint provided desperately needed supplies and necessities to survivors. More than 227 million pounds of food, medicine, clothing and other supplies were shipped to Europe to survivors inside and outside of DP camps in Eastern Europe, Hungary, Poland and Romania. 13 The Jewish Federations of North America represents 153 Jewish Federations and over 300 network communities, which raise and distribute more than $3 billion annually for social welfare, social services and educational needs with the objective of protecting and enhancing the well-being of Jews worldwide. After the Holocaust, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint, or JDC), the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and other philanthropic organizations that later merged to form the JFNA worked together to support Jewish survivors. Refugees from displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy received funds to help them resettle in places like the United States or Palestine and create new lives. 15

16 Tell me a little bit about your can you go back and tell me a little more about your family and the genealogy and how long they were in Germany, because that was so interesting when you showed me the genealogical chart. Well, my mother s family lived in the Rhineland which is of course very close to Holland and many of their relatives were Dutch and many of them came from Holland and intermarried there. As I said I ve found this great grandfather of my grandmother s, I don t know how far that is from me, was born in 1783 in that area. The town that they lived in for many years is called Krefeld which is near Dusseldorf in Germany. They established one of the earliest wholesale fabric concerns [?] in Krefeld and I think it traded all over Europe in fine fabrics. Widely known it was called Gebaude Michiales [?]. It existed until the crash after World War One, about 1920, and then the whole economy crashed and we had terrible inflation in Germany. That was my grandmother s family. My grandfather s family is from the same area and I have a cousin, a distant cousin who has traced that family back to the Spanish Inquisition. They came to Holland and then they came to Germany quite early on, in 1700s also. My father s family is from Frankfurt am Main, near there, a small town. They also lived there quite a long time but I don t have the background from them. Nobody kept the records as well then. And you mentioned that under the Nazis regime that World War One veterans were promised safety. When did that change? Well, I think probably everything changed in 1938 when this young man supposedly went to the German consulate in Paris and killed one of the attachés and he was supposedly a Jew. To take revenge they [the Nazis] really started the whole business of persecution, burning down the synagogues and that sort of thing. What do you remember about Kristallnacht specifically? 16

17 In our suburb it was very quiet. Nothing happened there except that these men came the next day to arrest my father, because there were socialists and, what people called communists, workers living there and they were not rabid fascists as in other parts of Germany. I know my aunt s family, my cousin s family, they [the Nazis] came to their house and threw the furniture out the window and roughed them [her aunt/cousin s family] up in this small town where they knew all the Jews. But they [the Nazis] pretty much left us alone and we heard all the terrible things that happened downtown, all the stores were burned and trashed and that sort of thing. <End Disk 1> <Begin Disk 2> Did you pretty much stay close to the house after that? Yes Were you able to bring anything with you when you left Germany? Well, what we did is, we had furniture that had been handed down for generations and all kinds of nice things and we didn t know where we were going so you couldn t send it. What we did was, what my grandmother and mother did, they put it into what they called the lifts which are containers and had it stored at the docks in Hamburg (Germany) and paid in advance for shipping so that when we settled somewhere in America we could send for it. But the war came in between and we never could send for it and by the time the war was over the rent that we had paid on it had run out and they told us all the furniture had been bombed to pieces anyway. We took some things, they took a few little things, which were not the good things, some of the everyday things. Of course we took clothes. My grandmother had a basket with all the 17

18 keys to all the furniture. There s this whole basket of keys and each one is labeled to which piece of furniture it belonged. And she has that but doesn t have the furniture. We took pictures. They [her parents] did take their pictures and that s how I have some of the pictures I have. They took some mementos. My father took his spurs that he used when he rode his horses which he loved and he took his Iron Cross and a couple of other decorations and there are few things like that that we took with us. I don t even remember I took a couple of books, children s bible stores that I loved and maybe some toys but I can t find them anymore, we don t have them anymore. Really nothing much. We didn t take very much with us when we left Germany. We left it there and hoped it would come. Were you taxed very heavily to bring these things out? Well, you were not allowed to bring any jewelry. I think probably we smuggled a little bit out of the jewelry. But you weren t allowed to bring any jewelry or silver or anything like that so we didn t have anything like that. And of course you had to pay very high price for the shipping of the furniture and you paid it all in advance and of course never got any of that back. There were some reparations after the war that the German s paid. You had to pay for your visas and all your exit visas from Germany too, from the police. Stamped your passport. I have my grandmother s passport with all the stamps and my father s too. Those were the sort of things that I remember about Germany. <End Interview> 18