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3-Kristallnacht

Did Kristallnacht affect you and your mother and sisters?

Oh, it was terrifying! It was absolutely terrifying. Because at first what happened was that at night they came for him and they arrested him. They brought all of the Jewish men and boys, young boys, I think ­ I don't know ­ from about maybe ten on, and took them down to the town square and did all kinds of horrible things to humiliate them. They would make them get on the ground and they painted the streets all white and gave them toothbrushes and shouted at them to clean the streets. They would kick them and,"faster faster!" Sometimes they took the pants off and the underwear off certain men and exhibit them. It was sadistic and inhuman. Then many of the men were dragged off that night. This is now Kristallnacht and anyone dragged off at that point ­ actually that was when my father was arrested. I think that's what I said, isn't it?

What happened was that he was arrested at night and then let go. No, no. He was ­ that's right ­ they took them down to the town square and then later on they let all those people go. And in the morning ­ the next morning ­ my older sister was coming home. She was on the street and she saw a couple of SS officers behind her ­ way behind her ­ walking in the same direction and she had a feeling that they were coming to arrest my father. So she knew a shortcut of getting into the compound, there was a board there that was kind of shaky. She could push it to the side and push herself in. She ran with all her might to the house and warned my father about this and he hid. There is a discrepancy of memories. As far as I remember, there was an alcove in our dining room and we didn't have closets there. We would have a piece of furniture which you would hang clothes and that was standing there. So I remember that he was hidden in the alcove and this piece of furniture was pushed against it. And sure enough, within seconds, they came banging at the door and rushed in and looked for him everywhere and they couldn't find him.

I have to tell you my older sister has another story of where he was hidden. You know everybody has memories and they're different sometimes. She remembers that he rushed outside into a place where there were sort of lockers for people. Some of the people in this compound used to hunt rabbits and after they killed the rabbits they used to hang them up for drying their fur. And there were these lockers where you could actually ­ a person could stand in. My older sister remembers that he ran and hid in one of those lockers. So I don't know which one, which story is right. He hid and they didn't find him. But then they appeared the next morning at five in the morning and there he was in his tallit and tefillin ­philasterriks I think you call them ­ and he was praying, doing his morning prayer and they caught him. That's when they dragged him off.

Did you witness any of this?

I witnessed ­ in my mind I witnessed ­ his being hidden and that was very terrifying. But what happened the next morning, I didn't, because I was asleep at five o'clock, you know, and it was very fast. They didn't say, you know, "Kiss your children goodbye," or "Say goodbye and pack your bag." Nothing. Just grab the man and dump him on a truck.

What do you remember when you woke up the next morning?

Just fear. Tremendous fear. What was going to happen to us? I know that what happened was that I and my younger sister, Lisa, we clung together. My mother and my older sister would talk a lot about ideas, plans, who to talk to, how to find out where he is and things like that. At that time I can say that my sister Nina was then 14 years old and overnight she turned 25, because she became the lead person in the family to do all the work of getting us out of the country. My mother could only speak Yiddish, and she spoke English.

If you have to do something, you do it! If you have to become an adult even though you're 14 years old, you become 25. That's what happened because he stayed in that prison for three months. At that time, while he was in prison, his visa arrived from the United States saying that your number has come up and you are allowed to enter the United States. The visa did not include his family, however, there was a policy in America that if one member of a family ­ which was usually a man ­ would come to the country, he could then bring the rest of his family to the country.

How was your father able to get this visa if he was in jail?

There are a number of things. Not only do you need a visa to enter a country - I can only speak for America - but you also have to have an affidavit - which means that the government wants to make sure that you're not going to become a welfare case. They wanted to make sure someone is going to support this family. So while he was in prison one of the big jobs was that we knew he had signed up for a visa, and hopefully it was going to come. We knew that my sister had to go to a lawyer to find out all the things that would have to be done. We had to find relatives or someone in the United States to send us affidavits. And my mother wrote back to her parents - she had a large family in Poland - to inquire from them if they knew of any relatives in the United States.

And sure enough they did. My grandmother's cousin - first cousin - lived in Boston. She even had the address. So we wrote to them and they immediately got to work to do the necessary work for sending an affidavit. Once the visa came through, and then my sister - and lawyers telling her what to do - rushed to the jail and showed them that he had a visa and that he had a right to leave Austria. There was no declaration of war between countries yet, there was no World War II. So they released him. Now this would never have happened had he gone to the other two holding centers. Never. They would have never released him and he might have been dead by then anyway or shipped out to a concentration camp.

So he was very lucky they released him. My sister and mother conferred and immediately got him a passage to sail to America. Within two days he was out of the country. And a good thing, too, because he would have been rearrested and then that would be the end. The SS were all over the place and to see a Jewish man walking around, "Hey, what are you doing here?" You know? So once he got out of the country - he was released at the end of January, he was imprisoned in November, so he was there three months - the rest of us four left Baden a month later.

We left in March [1939]. My mother had made arrangements to rent a room from a family friend's mother who lived in Vienna and so that was all arranged too. There was a lot of work to do to get that all managed. The family took only what they needed in a few suitcases and left everything behind and sort of snuck out of town, got a taxi at night - and it was snowing then - and got us to the railroad station and took a train to Vienna.

What was that trip like?

I don't remember the train ride but it was all very terrifying. I know that I got pneumonia during that month when we were still there. It was during the time that my father was actually in prison - and I got pneumonia. And there were no antibiotics in those days and even to get a doctor was a very difficult thing. But a doctor did come and there was no medication and I was young. It was a matter of my surviving or not. And so I survived it. I went through the high fevers and all of that.

I have to tell you one thing which is humorous now, but later on I will refer back to it and it will connect. Before we left this apartment there was a pair of red velvet drapes that separated the dining room from the kitchen, I believe. And my sister, Nina, who was a very beautiful girl, she tore down these drapes and lay down on one of then and drew an outline of herself on it. She cut it out in two pieces and asked the neighbor upstairs - who was not Jewish, but very friendly with us - would she please sew that up. It was a dress that she made for herself. She was quite a flamboyant young woman. I'll tell you about that later on. That dress went into her suitcase.

So we went with three suitcases out of the house and left everything behind and snuck out of there. We went to live in Baden, in Vienna. Vienna was a city sort of divided up into districts - we have districts here too, like the Richmond district - there they were numbered. We lived in the Second Bezirg, like a section, it was almost the ghetto. It was a heavily Jewish populated area. We moved into this big apartment house, six floors high and about three apartments - four apartments - on each floor. We moved in and lived with Frau Strauss, Mrs., Strauss. We had one room that the four of us lived in. There were two beds, so four of us lived slept in those two beds.

And while living in Vienna the work was - my father had already arrived in the United States and he sent us affidavits and my mother and sister - my sister doing all the work - then booked us on the Queen Elizabeth. We were to leave Vienna on September - I think it as planned for something like Sept. 15th [1939] or somewhere in the middle of September - to leave. But then a very terrifying situation presented itself.

Jews were not allowed - Jews did not walk around the streets. It was patrolled all the time and any Jew making trouble disappeared. You weren't allowed - Jews were not allowed to go to the Kurpark, to the Prater, which is a big amusement park - it's a very famous amusement park - they were not allowed to go to any park. Dogs and Jews were not allowed to enter or sit on benches or all that sort of stuff. And she was a teenager, right, she was 14 years old. She had a group of friends, wherever she went she had a group of friends. And one day they decided they were going to get dressed up and go to the Prater because none of them looked like Jews, so "what the heck," they wanted a little fun. They didn't want to stick around the ghetto all the time. Nobody wore yellow stars yet, this was not there yet.

So they went to the Prater and she put on her red dress. And there was a swing and she got on the swing and started to swing herself. Suddenly a cameraman appeared and he started shooting pictures of her all around. Then he said, "Fraulein," - you know, he was very friendly - "would you go on this amusement" - whatever it was - "on the ferris wheel" - just to sit on the seat. And she was flattered, you know, he was this man taking pictures of her. Wow! He had her pose in all kinds of different places and she thought she was an actress, you know. He was shooting and her friends were in a state of terror. They disappeared, they just moved out of this area, moved out of the park. And then it suddenly hit her, what is she doing. "My God!" And her friends weren't there. Then she put on this act and she said she's very sorry and she has to go home now. He then presented her with a card which introduced her to a very important chief photographer of a weekly magazine.

So she took the card - and she was really confused - and ran outside the park. There were her friends and they were screaming at her in a hushed way. "What did you do?" "You know you could have lost out, you could have endangered us!" She was really frightened so they all went home as fast as possible. She told my mother about this and my mother was nearly - my mother turned white. She said "Oh my God! Do you realize that in a week you could suddenly be on the newsstand and people around here could recognize you and report you to the Gestapo?"

So they moved very quickly. Now my mother was giving orders.The passage to England for the Queen Mary was canceled and they got the money back and bought a ticket to go to Genoa, Italy and to sail from Italy within a few days. They had all of their papers it was just a matter of getting out of the country as fast as possible.We were to sail a ship called Di Conta de Savoya - the Count of Savoya - from Genoa on August 13th I believe.

So we took the train from Austria to Genoa. It was a very frightening trip because every station the train would stop, SS officers would rush in and search your pockets - everyone was allowed one suitcase and that's it - search everything and try to intimidate you and terrify you. I just remember I didn't want to look at them, I had my face, my nose and my forehead crushed against the window. That's all I did was look out. As we traveled along I would look at the tracks and talk to them to take us, go faster, "schneller, schneller" I would say to the tracks. That was very vivid.

We got to Genoa. We knew that at a certain point at a pass in the Alps there we would leave Austria and get into the country of Italy. From then on we would be safe. Italian soldiers came onto the train and the whole feeling in the train changed just like that. They were warm and descent and human and all that. Of course the other strange and terrible thing is that we were entering an Axis country because there was Mussolini and he was a friend of Hitler. But there was no other way to get out of the country.

So we arrived and stayed one night in a hotel. The next day we boarded the ship and the ship wouldn't leave. We were sitting in the ship for three days and no one told us why we weren't leaving. I have to tell you that the ship was composed of a very small group of Jewish refugees - the others were not refugees, I will tell you about that later. So we were taken off the ship by members of a Jewish community from Genoa. They heard about us and they took us under protection and put us into a few little hotels along near the harbor. And so we stayed there a whole month. We moved into September.

On September 1st Germany invaded Poland, and soon after England and France declared war on Germany. It was the beginning of World War II. So the shipping line didn't know what to do. Could they send this ship of people out to sea and the war had been declared? So we stayed in this little hotel for a month.Then they decided they'll go, things are calm, things were quiet again. It was really a miracle that the Fascists who were around - they were everywhere in Italy, also Black Shirts - that they didn't bother us. It was an entirely different scene at that point in Italian history. Later on the Italian government went after Jews and deported them and they were sent to Auschwitz. But at this time we were lucky. Mussolini didn't care, he wasn't playing games with Hitler at this very moment.

So we sailed a month later. We were on the ship just for half-a-day when my mother took us all to aside and she told us that the ship was filled with Americans who were pro Nazis. They had all been working in either Germany or Austria and in support of the Nazi regime and they were fleeing to save their skin. They were going home. But we should be very quiet and behave very, very timidly because they could hurt us - the people who were surrounding us. So we did. We also heard them calling us "drek Juden" dirty Jews.

So we arrived in New York three weeks - no, 7 days - later. We arrived toward the end of September in New York.