Mischling

In the domestic campaign the Nazis waged to purge Jewish blood from the German Volk, the status of persons having mixed ancestry often became ambiguous. These Germans were labeled Mischlinge, a derogatory term meaning racially mixed, or “mongrelized.” Jews in Germany were well assimilated and a number of members high in the Nazi Party had some Jewish ancestry. Also, the Nazis were always cognizant of the Aryan blood of the Mischlinge. Hence the Hitler government treaded more lightly when dealing with them than with those they classified as Jewish. Enactment of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 gave some definition to what constituted the various degrees of Mischlinge. One with two Jewish grandparents was labeled Mischlinge First Degree and was not considered Jewish unless he or she practiced Judaism; one with one Jewish grandparent was Second Degree and was also not ordinarily to be considered Jewish. People with three or four Jewish grandparents were classified as Jewish. Children of marriages between Aryans and Jews were equivalent to First Degree, but by Nuremberg casuistry they were supposed to be considered as Jews. This was likely influenced by the Nazis’ loathing of Aryans’ living with and having sexual relations with Jews.

As a child of such a marriage, Evi Seidemann fell into a category that might have designated her as Jewish. Yet, she was always considered merely a Mischling. As such she was not eligible for the college preparatory curriculum or even the one that provided training for the trades. But while subject to such discrimination, she was not considered as Jewish. As Evi told her story to me, she emphasized that the Nazi government did not operate as an efficient machine, legislating rules, sorting people into neat categories and then in ordered, rationalized sequence putting their rules into practice. They operated with a great deal of arbitrariness. If they had won the war, she says, and had time to more fully institutionalize their racism, they would have been able to deal more consistently and likely more lethally with the Mischlinge. But Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” lasted only twelve years and was always stressed by the force of circumstances, particularly after the war began. And many of the Mischlinge, as well as some who were wholly Jewish, were able to escape deportation to the death camps, slipping through cracks in the emerging Nazi order.

One of the best examples of such anomalies is the famous Rosenstrasse affair, recently made into a moving German film (Rosenstraße). In that case several hundreds of Aryan women stood in a Berlin street for days demanding their Jewish husbands’ release from a forced labor factory where they had been segregated out for deportation. This was in February, 1943, following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, and possibly to boost the morale of the many Aryan relatives of these men, the Nazis decided to release them, even sending back some who had already been sent to Auschwitz (Kaplan, 193). Evi’s mother, Gertrud, tough-minded and strongly anti-Nazi, was much akin to the women of the Rosenstrasse protest and would inevitably have been one of them had her husband been incarcerated there.

An “Aryan” Catholic, Gertrud Gillmeister had married the Jewish Julius Seidemann, and they had one child, Evi, in 1928. The Nazis referred to such unions as Rassenschande, a term they invented to mean miscegenation, which they outlawed in the Nuremberg Laws. Marriage between a Jew and Aryan was in their minds a particularly heinous form of “racial defilement.” The American parallel was the Jim Crow South’s laws against intermarriage between whites and blacks and white Southerners’ extreme antipathy to any interracial contact between the sexes. In fact the Nazis considered Jewish men to be sexual predators out to seduce and defile innocent Aryan women, much as their American counterparts considered African American men. And both regimes could react with brutal lethality to any perceived contact between the outcast males, and females of the master race.

So why did Evi’s family not fare worse than it did? What helped them immeasurably was the fact that her father went to the United States in 1938 and never returned. As a result, the family in Germany consisted only of Evi and her mother. So the ongoing transgression of “racial impurity” was interrupted. Also while they remained close to the Seidemann extended family, they practiced Catholicism and were therefore not a part of the Jewish community. Evi remained a German citizen and though classified as Mischling and therefore, to her relief, ineligible for the Hitler Youth, she participated in the Duty Year. The government required all youth, upon finishing school, to do a year of service in a family household. After completing her Duty Year Evi was able to obtain office employment, something those considered as Jews were increasingly denied. Overall, Evi and her mother were able to wend their way through the turmoil of the war years with relatively little oppression from Nazi officialdom. The Gestapo did ultimately pressure Evi’s mother into formally divorcing her husband, threatening to remove her child from her custody if she failed to do so.

In terms of religion, neither of Evi’s parents had been observant either in Catholicism or Judaism while they were together. As Nazi anti-Semitism increased, however, her father took her out of public school and sent her to a Jewish one. There she got her background in Judaism. Later, Evi and her mother, after two years exile living among the Jewish community of Antwerp, returned to Germany after the Germans invaded Belgium, and Evi entered a convent school. Gertrud’s sister was a nun, and the convent provided a safe, nurturing place for this at-risk adolescent. There she received instruction in Catholicism, and this became the basis for her becoming an active Catholic and her mother’s return to her ancestral faith.

After immigration to the United States, where she was reunited with her father,Evi continued to practice Catholicism, much to his dismay. A prominent theme of this memoir is the development of her Catholic faith with strong emphasis on the recent Church teachings on economic justice and peace. She attributes her social conscience and tolerant, progressive views to the ostracism and persecution she and her Jewish relatives had experienced in the Hitler years. In the United States she would identify with the liberal wing of the Church, which came into prominence during the Second Vatican Council in the sixties and which reemphasized Christian duty to side with the poor and oppressed. Eventually she would become actively involved in the American venue of an international movement to open the Church’s patriarchal, authoritarian structures to broader participation. Her evolving social conscience would also lead her to work for labor rights in the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, and through that organization she would meet and become friends with its San Diego director, a Reform Jewish rabbi.

As Evi has lived out her life, the Jewish and Catholic sides of her developing inner spirituality and outer involvements have become interwoven. At the same time her German friendships and loyalties have continued to flourish even as she has become a thoroughly acculturated suburban American homemaker. She is today both Southern Californian and Berliner, having returned many times to the city of her childhood to visit old friends and attend church events. The interplay between the dualities of Evi’s consciousness, Jewish and Catholic, German and American, is a recurrent theme of her memoir, giving it cultural richness and depth. And etched deeply into her character are her formative experiences as part of the people designated pariah during the dark, traumatic years of the Third Reich.

As Evi’s life collided with historical events it has been occasionally necessary to provide some background on these events. I have done so using some of the standard general historical and journalistic accounts. On the development of the internal policies and laws of the Third Reich, I used Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich, A New History. NY: Hill and Wang, 2000. My source on the German Jews and particularly mixed families was Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. NY: Oxford University Press, 1998. On the German invasion of Belgium and the Belgian response, I consulted war correspondent William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1960. Information on death camps came from Richard Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz, The Holocaust and its Legacy. Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1987. Background on the city of Berlin was provided by Anthony Read and David Fisher, Berlin Rising, Biography of a City. NY: W.W. Norton, 1994. For geopolitical events and historical sequence on the divided postwar Germany I looked at Stephen Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, American Foreign Policy since 1938. NY: Penguin, 1993.

Information on organizations Evi became involved with in the United States is on various websites. On Adolph Kolping and the Kolping Clubs, see here. Call to Action has a well developed history page. The Center for Policy Initiatives funds the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. A detailed article on Rabbi Laurie Coskey and the work of the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice is in the San Diego Jewish Journal.

Stephen Berk
Emeritus Professor of History
California State University, Long Beach

Chapter One
Secure Beginnings

I was born in Berlin on May 4, 1928 at 8:20 p.m. at the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria Clinic. This was the hospital started by the wife of the Kaiser. And the midwife who delivered me was the one who had delivered the crown prince’s child, so you could say I started at the top. My parents came from the province of Upper Silesia, in Eastern Germany, east of the Oder River. They had met in 1923 in an odd sort of meeting. It was at a night club in Kattowitz (Katowice). My mother was there with a girl friend and my father with his fiancé. The club was crowded and my mother and her friend had no reservations. But they spied a couple of empty seats alongside a couple, and they asked if they minded if they sat down next to them. In Germany if a place serving the public is packed, it’s customary to sit down next to strangers and some fast friendships start up that way. In the case of my father and mother this manner of chance acquaintance led to their falling in love and my father actually breaking his engagement to the woman he was with at the nightclub to marry my mother instead. The wedding was on June 6, 1923.

These were bad economic times in Germany. The Treaty of Versailles, which the Germans were forced to sign at the end of the First World War, with its huge reparations, plunged the country into debt and brought on all kinds of economic dislocations including a ruinous inflation. My parents ran a retail business in which they purchased large amounts of commodities like butter and margarine. The inflation made it hard for them to keep the business going. Eventually they had to sell at a big loss, and at this point they decided to move to Berlin. Many of my father’s family members, including his brother, had already left Upper Silesia and were living in Berlin.

Like my father’s family, my mother’s, the Gillmeisters, had been in business, and her mother had been a successful businesswoman. When my mother was a little girl her parents had had a butcher shop. During her childhood they sold it and went into real estate and stock market speculation. Her father often took her on business trips. They built and sold houses and owned a big apartment house which I was able to see a few years ago when I visited Poland (after the Second World War Upper Silesia became part of Poland). Hence my maternal grandparents had been quite well to do, respected members of the upper middle class community. My grandmother, aside from being involved in the business, was quite busy with motherhood, giving birth to seventeen children, of which only eight lived to adulthood.

My mother, whom I called Mutti, Gertrud Elisabeth Gillmeister, daughter of Julius and Pauline Gillmeister, was born in 1890, in the middle of the birth order. She told me lots of wonderful stories of a secure and happy childhood. My father, Vati, was named Julius Seidemann, but his friends and relatives all called him Lutz. In 1927 my grandmother Pauline died of stomach cancer. She was only in her late sixties. For four years my parents had been trying to have a child, but my mother just didn’t conceive. They were anxious because she was nearing thirty-eight years old and her fertility clock was ticking. The physician had ordered various tests to see why my mother wasn’t getting pregnant. But lo and behold, when they were coming back from grandmother’s funeral and staying with my Uncle Franz in Liegnitz, in Silesia, she conceived, and nine months later I was born. You could say God takes and God gives: Gertrud loses her mother, and coming back from the funeral she conceives her only child. So this is how I came into this world. My father always called me his Gugalieschen, because at the time my parents stayed in Liegnitz there was a garden and vegetable exhibition, or Garten Und Gemuese Ausstellung Liegnitz. They called it the Gugalie. So Vati called me Gugalie with the affectionate diminutive ending “chen.” As a child I never quite caught on to what this Gugalieschen meant, but as children often accept things they don’t yet understand, I just accepted it as an endearing name for me. My father, at the time I was born, was on the road on business quite a bit. It had been calculated that I was due between the first and tenth of May, and I came punctually on the fourth. Vati was on his way home, and Mutti after cleaning their apartment in the Charlottenburg section of Berlin was relaxing in the bath when her waters broke and her labor began. On the way to the hospital the cab she had called got a flat tire and they had to get another cab. This was just as Vati was getting home. Just four hours and twenty minutes after mother had gone into labor, I was born. It was a remarkably short labor for a first child at almost age thirty-eight. She told me that when she checked into the hospital she had noticed all the lilac bushes on the grounds in full bloom, absolutely gorgeous. It was a real joy to see them. But the next morning, when she looked out the window she saw the same lilacs totally covered with snow. That was a very unusual thing, though I have heard that the winters in the late twenties were quite long and harsh.

Shortly after I was born Vati had a business opportunity in Breslau in the province of Lower Silesia. So my parents moved to Breslau and lived there about a year. But if you’ve lived in Berlin this big, bustling German city will pull you back into its orbit, and so they ended up leaving Breslau and going back to Berlin.

My mother came from a devoutly Catholic family. Both her parents were strongly anchored in the Catholic faith and her oldest sister was a nun who would eventually play a very important role in my life. My parents’ marriage was a mixed one, with my father coming from an observant, though not Orthodox, Jewish family. In fact his father was a kosher butcher, a vital figure to the observant Jewish community. Like Mutti’s family, Vati’s was comfortably bourgeois and respectable, but neither family was thrilled to have their child marry outside the faith.

My parents, however, like so many people in urban, secular Western society, were nonobservant, choosing not to practice either Judaism or Catholicism. Though coming from such religious folk they couldn’t quite abide being wholly outside any acknowledgement of God, so they effected a rather odd compromise, having me baptized in the Lutheran Church. My father strongly believed that I should have an upbringing which included belief in God. I believe this was prophetic, as God has indeed always played an important role in my life. My baptismal ceremony, as you might expect, was a curiously interfaith affair, featuring Jewish godparents who were friends of my parents.

The earliest years of my life were quiet and pleasant and normal. In Berlin, as in any of the big European cities and American ones like New York, everybody lives in an apartment house. The flats in Berlin were generally larger than our modern day American apartments, with large, elegant rooms and high ceilings with fancy decorations and tapestries and big balconies. Such rooms made for a very nice, comfortable life. As was the custom in families with comfortable circumstances, my mother had a nursemaid for me as a child whom I coincidentally called Nanny. In Germany they did not use English terms like Nanny then, and I don’t know why I called her that, except that maybe it was her actual name. She would always tell me that if I didn’t do this or that that the boogie man, which she called the Mumulutz, was going to come and get me. So I was always thinking of the Mumulutz, though he did not scare me very much. Even though I had Nanny there, my parents were still very attentive. I can remember having a painful ear infection, and having had five children of my own, I know how bad the nights can be for a child with an ear infection. Vati and Mutti took turns carrying me around rocking and comforting me. I always felt comforted and loved and well taken care of as a young child.

My father spent his life as a salesman. His educational tract was not the college preparatory Gymnasium, but what the Germans call the Middle Maturity degree, or middle level of preparation. Where the Gymnasium graduates you at eighteen, Middle Maturity students graduate at age sixteen and then go into an apprenticeship, and my father’s was in business education. Strangely they put him into a hardware store; he was the farthest thing from a do-it-yourselfer. The most complicated household task I remember him doing was driving a nail in the wall to hang up a picture. But the hardware store is where he first learned retail business. Eventually he got into the garment business and eventually the wine business. This is the business I learned to associate with him.

He did sales for Christ and Co., a big Rhineland winery in Mainz. At that time he had his own car, a DKW, which is the smallest car put out by Auto Union, which made four cars, thus the four rings which you still see on the Audi, their bigger and more luxurious car than the DKW. He and one other cousin were the only people in his extended family to own a car. The Germans had, as they still have, an excellent public transportation system. Berlin had a huge subway net that went way into the outskirts and a high elevated city train snaking through the entire city, as well as streetcars and buses. Hence there was nowhere in Berlin environs that you lacked public transportation, so people did not feel the need for cars, and in the thirties few could afford them.

The letters that a license plate starts with indicates the city: Berlin has the letter B; Munich has M; Hamburg has H. The smaller cities had two or three letters. Vati had the license plate of the city of Mainz, where his wine business was based. I remember him getting up early some mornings and sitting in his house coat calling his customers. His sales were all to large businesses and big landowners. He had a lot of customers in the movie business – producers, directors and actors. Every now and then it was a treat for me to go along when he visited these glamorous people in the film industry. Whenever, he got ready to visit his customers, he would do self motivation, saying “this is going to be a good, great, successful day.” He was always a very positive thinker and very much a people person, important characteristics of many successful salesmen. I have a lot of his temperament and his outgoing personality. While making his calls he would put on his Rhineland accent – he was terrific with accents. He could put on any German dialect; he’d tell jokes in different dialects and have everyone laughing. He’d get on the phone and say “I’ve just rolled in from Mainz and you are the first one I’m calling, and I’m telling you I have one case of this excellent wine, an excellent year, we had just a very small harvest and before I talk to anyone else I want to tell you I’m reserving this case for you.”

“Well Seidemann, you don’t know how much we appreciate it. Of course, have it sent to me.” So he would make these fantastic sales over the phone. He was motivated, he was alive, and it was a wonderful thing for me to experience as a little girl. He would give me his order books and I would write in there. They had no ballpoint pens yet. He needed to make a carbon copy and a fountain pen wouldn’t make one adequately. They had what they called a copy pen or copy stick. It was shaped like a pencil, but it ran ink when you bore down. Vati would give me old order books and I would sit there with him, writing into them with the copy stick, playing that I was taking orders. There was one wine I especially enjoyed repeating because it was saying a bad word legitimately. That wine is called Kroewer Nackt Arsch (naked ass). I liked to say that.

Most every child loves to do or say something “nasty” and get away with it. I also recall the time that my girlfriend Sylvia and I used to walk by a little egg shop on our street. The owner’s name was Schiesser (pronounced Scheeser). Every day we tried to muster enough courage to yell into the store: “Good morning Herr Scheisser” (meaning Shitter). One day we actually did it and of course ran. Sylvia managed to get away, but Herr Schiesser caught me by the scruff of the neck and dealt me a good smack on the head. Since I had my arm in a sling due to a broken clavicle, the pain was excruciating and tears came streaming down my face. Coming home to face my mother in that state was double humiliation. Mutti gave me a severe scolding while at the same time trying to control the grin on her face.

Before Vati would go on a business trip he always performed a little ritual. He would step on a kitchen chair and raise his hands up to the sky and say, “Great Jewish God, give me a good trip.” Now as I’ve said he was not a very devout person. He did not keep kosher, and the only time he prayed officially was in the synagogue on the high holidays. He was nothing like the traditionalist Tevye character in Fiddler on the Roof, but an urbane and worldly modern. Nevertheless every time he went on the road he felt impelled to thus invoke the blessing of the Almighty on his trip. As I think of it today, it gives me a sense of joy that he did this. I have more of a religious temperament than my father did. Years later, when I was sent to Jewish school, I became a religious child. It was expected that I would observe the Sabbath and go to services at the temple, and so I went, and I often got my father to go too, and Jewish observance would seep into the family through me.

My father’s business trips often took him back to Upper Silesia where he had a lot of old customers whom he would see periodically. Whenever he went there he would bring back a wreath of Krakauer Polish sausage. I can still taste that sausage. It was a wonderful smoked sausage, much better than the kielbasa that is common in Polish American communities. As a child I had really weird tastes. I did not like sweets. We had a great many birthdays in our extended family, and the mother of the birthday child would always bake apple or cheese or streusel cake. I did not like any of that stuff. My aunts all knew this and when Evchen was coming, it would be “Come on in the kitchen and I will make you a Schmalz Stulle,” a typical Berliner sandwich of old. Stulle was Berliner slang for sandwich and Schmalz was bacon drippings with little bits of bacon. Whenever Vati would come home at night and I heard him talking, I would go into his room, half asleep, and he would let me open his suitcase and take out the wreath of Krakauer, which I knew he had wrapped among his clothes, take a big bite out of it and go back to bed. I remember the joyful feeling I had when I found the wreath. This was another one of the rituals between father and daughter that bonded us so closely. Years later, when we were starving in Germany during the war and right afterward, I would dream of going to America and buying a big salami, hanging it over my bed, and whenever I would wake up taking a bite of it. That was my great dream.

I entered school when I was six in April of 1934. School started in first grade. The German term “Kindergarten” pertained to preschool. I and many other German children went to preschool, but these were always private. The school year in Germany always started in April, after Easter vacation. I have a picture of me with what looks like an upside down dunce cap full of candy, which was called a Schultuete. Children received this gift on the first day of school. Of course, with my dislike of sweets, I could have cared less about it. That went for Christmas candy too. In Germany it was customary to put all kinds of candy on the tree. When the tree was taken down after Christmas in what was known as the “tree plundering,” it was also the candy was generally divided among the children. In my family I would have gotten all of it, but again I could have cared less about it and my mother always gave it away to the building super.

My memories of early childhood are mostly all quite pleasant. We had lots of family fun times. When my father had clients in the outskirts of Berlin, he would often take my mother and me with him, and while he was visiting customers we would wait for him in a park or in a café, and we might tour an old palace or whatever might be interesting to see in the general area. Berlin has a beautiful surrounding province of forest and lakes and rivers. On Sundays members of my Vati’s extended family in Berlin would often visit with one another. Vati was actually closer to his cousins, aunts and uncles than to his brothers and sisters and would socialize with them more frequently. They lived on the other side of Berlin. We always lived in Charlottenburg, in West Berlin, which would become the British sector after the war. We were near the fancy retail district on Kudamm, which was equivalent to Fifth Avenue in New York City.

My parents loved to go shopping together on Saturdays, when they had open markets. My father knew which stands had the freshest fruits and vegetables and meats and they would always shop at those stands. This was a big source of enjoyment for him, and after we finished shopping we would always go out for Kaffeetrinken. Afternoon coffee is a ritual among the Germans similar to the English five o’clock tea. It consisted of coffee and pastry, not unlike what Americans now get at the local Starbucks or the multitude of individual espresso shops that have sprung up since the nineties. The cafes and restaurants were located on Kudamm. The cafes had individual musicians and bands you could listen to while you ate. The only pastry I liked was a Sahnenbaiser, a meringue with sour cherries topped with whipped cream. My parents would meet and schmooze with their friends at these cafes, and while they were doing that I was allowed to leave the table and look through the newspaper racks at the funnies, rather than sit and be bored by the adults’ conversation.

When I was about nine, in 1937, the last year of my childhood security, the year before everything began to turn around, a New York style automat called the Quik Automat opened at the end of Kudam near the Zoo Station, which was the big hub of West Berlin. They had sandwiches galore. For the equivalent of ten cents you could get an open faced sandwich or various drinks like apple juice (Germany has a wonderful winelike apple juice). Vati would give me one mark and I would feel very adult as I ventured into the big urban hubbub and made my way around the corner to my beloved automat, where I would enjoy my sandwich, my apple drink and my independence.

On Sundays we would go on outings to places on the outskirts of town like Potsdam or Wannsee on the Havel River. At one lovely restaurant by the lake called Schloss Marquardt, my parents and the relatives would sit on the beautiful lawn and have coffee in chaise lounges. While they were doing so I would play at a nearby playground, often with my cousins, who frequently were along with their parents. Berlin is surrounded by beautiful lush mixed forest. Grunewald is the famous one on her Western borders. Many old Berliner songs are dedicated to these famous woods. Later, during the hardships of the war, people would chop down the trees illegally for firewood. But traditionally families went on outings to the Grunewald, where there were big outdoor cafes with large benches, like the beer gardens. They would pay a fee to get in, but would bring their own cheese cakes or apple cakes or the like, together with coffee, and attendants would brew big pots of coffee for them. There would be puppet shows for the children and some adults and children would dance while many of the men played cards. Vati and his relatives were great card players. There were often guests at our house playing cards for money until late in the evening. These tranquil times with their family recreations, especially the Sunday outings to the Grunewald cafes, remain in my mind, delightful memories of a fleeting time of innocence and gaiety in my life that would soon pass into oblivion.

Chapter Two
Jewish Identity

When I was in second grade, in 1937, what the Jews called the risches, or anti-Semitism, was beginning to permeate the German atmosphere. The term comes from a Hebrew word, ra-ash; ra means bad, or evil, and ash means very, so risches meant the great evil. When the Jews talked among themselves, they would ask one another, when you went to that hotel or restaurant, what kind of atmosphere was there? And one might respond that there was quite a bit of risches. Little by little, at first in a subtle way these anti-Semitic attitudes and practices would take over. Hitler’s close associate Himmler, the head of the SS, published a propaganda magazine called Der Sturmer (the Storm Trooper), which was full of ugly caricatures of Jews. I first experienced the risches at school when one girl became very antagonistic toward me. She was very bowlegged, and as I became angered by her hostile remarks, I said you and your dachle (dachshund-like) legs. At this point she lashed out, “You dirty Jew girl!” I came home devastated and cried as I recounted the incident to my parents.

My father felt I would experience more of this antagonism were I to remain in public school, and even though I wasn’t raised Jewish, or with any religion, he and my mother decided to send me to the Jewish school. His reasoning was that if they were going to identify me as Jewish then I should identify with the Jewish community. I would be accepted in the Jewish school and shielded from further anti-Semitism. So I started the third grade in the big Jewish girls’ elementary school near where we lived. I was a little heavy hearted like any child is when she goes to a new school. My anxieties were relieved, however, by a wonderful teacher, whose name was Mrs. Freundlich, whom everybody called Tante (Aunt) Freundlich. At this school you didn’t change teachers; one teacher went with you through the grades. And Tante Freundlich gave me a wonderful secure feeling for the next two years. I felt so cared for, so loved, so protected. The school functioned much like an extended family, as Tante Freundlich went to all the girls’ birthday parties. So I came into this new environment with a new emphasis on religion that I had never experienced before, but it was such a caring environment that it was just natural for me. This was my first exposure to Hebrew and to the Jewish religion and ceremonies. Yet it was all very natural; I never felt very different from anybody else. Immediately I became a part of this community and spent two of the best years of my young life there.

The only thing that disturbed my otherwise blissful existence at the Jewish school was physical education class. My heart still gets heavy when I think of P. E. Compared with third grade P. E. in this country, it was a highly disciplined, intensive experience. We had a big gym with all the adult apparatus: ladders, parallel bars, ropes and rings. It was the equivalent of a regular gymnastics class. And I was a total klotz. I was not coordinated and I had no siblings doing athletics to learn from. I was a city girl who never rode a bike and I had had no experience with any kind of sports. We had high ladders that we were supposed to climb, go over the top and come down the other side. I managed to do it, but I was absolutely petrified. P. E. was a great source of humiliation for me. I am a highly competitive person and had top grades in all my academic subjects, but in gym I would always get a below average grade. It was depressing. P. E. was on Fridays, and every Friday when I picked up my gym bag to take to school I would feel like crying. There was another girl named Eva Berger in the class. Eva, my almost namesake, was slow in every subject. So it was doubly humiliating for me – proud of my academic performance – to be stuck at the bottom of P. E. class with dumb, chubby Eva Berger.

To make matters worse the gym teacher was a nasty person, very strict and demanding. It’s as if this one class in the Jewish school had been invaded by the authoritarian German stereotype most evident in the Nazis. On one occasion try as I did, I just couldn’t mount the parallel bars. Exasperated with me, the teacher said, “I don’t care how you get yourself up. Swing up or climb up.” So as I struggled and struggled to get up there, all of a sudden I heard a crack which resounded, it seemed, throughout the gym. I had broken my collar bone. I ended up with a swelling there the size of a walnut. To make matters worse, the doctor misdiagnosed it, not recognizing the break and thinking it was merely a bruise. His prescription was for me to go weekly for a massage and heat lamp treatment. This proved to be torture. After this trauma I hated P. E. all the more. Even though I was a strong, well liked kid with a generally good self image and lots of friends, my physical failures gave me a certain lack of self assurance that I didn’t completely shake off until adulthood.

My father unwittingly made things worse by focusing on my problems in this area rather than allowing me to compensate for them in other areas. He enrolled me in a Jewish sports club called Bar Kochba. After school on certain days I was supposed to go there. But it was pure torture for me so I roamed around instead of going there and came home late so it looked like I had gone. Vati, who had paid good money for this training, did not know for some time that I was skipping out on it. Eventually he got wind of what I was doing and decided to save himself the money, so that was the end of it.

In attending the Jewish school I was naturally required to learn Hebrew. Since Vati did not know it well enough to help me, he sent me to the house of a woman in the neighborhood who had been a teacher and who helped children with their Hebrew homework. I don’t know what her last name was, but we all called her Tante Margot. In Germany, children commonly call adults who are close but not related aunt or uncle. I would spend the afternoon with Tante Margot and the other Jewish children doing homework and then enjoying play time together. The Jewish school was outside my neighborhood and this after school program gave me the opportunity to get to know Jewish children in my own neighborhood. So here was yet another environment of my childhood in which I could grow and learn and feel good about myself. I spent two very enjoyable years in this little group bonding with Jewish children and learning the rudiments of Judaism.

One delightful experience at Tante Margot’s was the putting on of a little Purim play. One of the most joyous of Jewish holidays, Purim commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people in ancient Persia from Haman, an imperial councilor who plotted to have them all killed. The Jewish Queen Esther, one of the wives of King Ahasueras (Xerxes), influenced by her Uncle Mordecai, was able to successfully intercede for her people. Haman was put to death and the Jews delivered from his plot. Jewish schoolchildren all over the world have acted out these ancient dramatic events yearly amidst much celebration on the Purim holiday. The Purim play was another joyous little project that cemented my sense of Jewish identity during the later years of my Berlin childhood.

The closest friendship I had as a child was with a girl named Sylvia Safir. She lived in the same apartment house that I did before I was even in first grade. We were together in preschool. I first saw her playing hopscotch in the street, and I approached her and said, “Little one, do you want to play with me?” She was a year older and a head taller, yet I said that. It became a standing joke between us as we kept in contact into our adulthood. Sylvia was the person I knew who attended the Jewish school when I began attending. My parents and her parents also became close friends. Sylvia’s family would play an important role in my life a little later when my mother and I first left Germany to go to Belgium in 1938. She would eventually come to the United States, marry a man named Schreiber, live her life in New York and retire in Florida. We have visited one another and regularly communicate. I’ve been thus fortunate to be able to stay in contact with this oldest of my friends over all these years.

Jewish summer camp provided me with yet another bonding experience with other Jewish children. The first year my parents sent me was in the summer of 1936, just before I was to begin matriculation at the Jewish school. The camp, in Potsdam, which I enjoyed thoroughly, would constitute my introduction to the community of Jewish schoolchildren in Berlin. This was my first time away from home, but Potsdam was close to home, and every Sunday the parents came to visit their children. So I never felt lonely. As an only child, I was used to being alone. I must have had gypsy blood in me because I loved to spend the nights away from home. Whenever I went with my parents for an afternoon visit to friends, I would always suggest to my mother that I take my toothbrush along just in case I was asked to spend the night.

The second summer I went to a Jewish Summer Camp in Kolberg, a city in Pomerania on the Baltic coast. Facilities for this camp were all located in one big building. I went there for four weeks and I had a glorious time. The only negative thing was my first experience of asthma and having to spend a week in sick bay staying in bed rather than getting to go to the beach with all the other children. The medical staff didn’t know it was asthma I was suffering from; they thought it was something infectious. It was only later that I found out it was asthma, a trait I would pass on to my oldest child.

Another place I liked to stay was the home of my Uncle Fritz. I actually had two Uncle Fritzes. But this Uncle Fritz and his wife, Aunt Claire, didn’t have any children and they just loved me to visit with them. They spoiled and pampered me and showered me with attention. One thing that fascinated me there was Aunt Claire’s makeup. My mother didn’t use much of any, but Aunt Claire used mascara, which I had never seen before. I was greatly fascinated with it, and every morning I was there, I would say, “Tante Claire, please let me watch you put on the mascara.”

Uncle Fritz and Aunt Claire also came to visit me at the summer camp on the Baltic. They took me out shopping and bought me all kinds of trinkets and nick nacks. Of course nobody was satisfied with the camp food, so parents and relatives commonly brought packages. Most children got goodies and sweets, but I got salami and pickles. The other children thought I got the strangest packages.

After Easter vacation in 1937 I started fourth grade, which was an important dividing point in German education. If you were a good student you could at this time consider enrolling in the Gymnasium, the college preparatory school, which starts in fifth grade. If you do not aspire to an academic career you continue on to eighth grade, and then you can go to the middle school through age sixteen, as my father had. The third option is to go to a trade school and start apprenticeship in a trade after you finish the eighth grade of elementary school. Toward the end of the fourth grade year students with excellent grades in the Three R’s and who want to go to the Gymnasium are given an entrance examination which determines acceptance. I learned that indeed I qualified with a high exam score. So in 1938, toward the end of fourth grade, my parents registered me downtown in the Jewish Gymnasium on Grosse Hamburger Street next to the big synagogue. In those days it was quite safe for a little ten year old to travel on the city train to school. I had to go eight S-Bahn stops to school. The S-Bahn was the electric city train, which along with the U-Bahn subway formed the main public transportation of Berlin. One of my big adventures after the first few train rides was to try out the newly installed and only down escalator of that time at one of the train stops. My friends and I lost track of time, as we could not get enough of the ups and downs. Needless to say, I was in big trouble when I returned home.

I started at the Gymnasium in April of 1938 and had been there only two months when public anti-Semitism began to increase disturbingly. Jews were being harassed and sometimes beaten up by Nazi brown shirts. Synagogues and Jewish places of business were being defaced with anti-Semitic epithets. Vati was able to escape such harassment and his business continued to thrive partly because with his olive skin and dark hair he looked more Italian than Jewish. At this time, none of the Jews as yet were being pulled out by Hitler’s Gestapo. But with the thickening atmosphere of official anti-Semitism, many Jews began to look into emigrating. An advertisement appeared in a Jewish Community newspaper of a four week information trip to New York aboard the French liner Normandie. The Normandie was the next biggest passenger ship to the Queen Mary. In the thirties such travel was much less common for the average family than it is today. But Mutti was concerned that things were becoming increasingly unsafe, and she persuaded Vati to take this information gathering trip. My father had relatives living in the United States and my mother thought this would be an excellent opportunity to cement these connections to facilitate possible future emigration.

Vati left on that information trip in May of 1938. He left just after my birthday. I particularly remember that birthday because I got my first desk to do schoolwork on as a gift, and I was so proud of it. I now felt very grown up going into the Gymnasium with my very own desk to study. I also got a peddle scooter which I loved. Scooters were very popular with German children at the time. That would be the last joyous celebration of my carefree childhood. On the Wednesday morning that Vati was due to return from New York, we heard a loud knock on our door. It was an ominous, frightening knock. We had a bell that anyone coming to our door normally used. But this was a thunder-like banging which scared us. We opened the door and there stood two men dressed in plain clothes who identified themselves as Gestapo. “We’re looking for Julius Seidemann,” they said.

Chapter Three
Flight

The Gestapo officers had come to the door at six a.m. of the day my father was to return home. But they didn’t know this, since they didn’t even know that he was out of the country. Nazi officialdom was not as efficient in keeping records of people’s whereabouts as some might think. While every citizen was kept track of, searching for Jews was randomly done. A top official would simply give an order saying we need to have a hundred or a thousand Jews arrested. But they never did any research on the Jews they were arresting. The documentation was there if they wanted to find it. Every German citizen who leaves one domicile and goes to another within Germany has to de-register in the old place and re-register in the new one. If you were going to leave the country for a length of time like the four weeks of my father’s trip, you had to have a Fuehrungseugnis or verification from your police precinct that there are no warrants out on you and that you’ve never been arrested. But ignorant of my father’s having filed this document, the Gestapo stormed through our apartment and down the kitchen stairs and out to the back courtyard looking for him. This was quite remarkable, since they were the official German state police. Ge-sta-po is actually a contraction of three words: Geheime, secret; Staats, state; Polizei, police. So this powerful, central organization of Nazi officialdom operated in this seat of the pants manner.

At length my mother told them that they could check her husband’s registration, that he was in America and due back the following week. Then she immediately went about the formidable task of getting a warning to him not to return but to stay in New York. After the Gestapo officers left, Mutti immediately called Vati’s relatives. She first called Uncle Fred (Fritz) Wolff, who lived only about three blocks away from us. He was Vati’s first cousin and was the closest to him. She also called my Uncle Polde, and his wife said they had picked him up. This action of the Gestapo was the first official mass arrest of Jews, who had never been arrested randomly, without any reason, before this day in May 1938. I used to wonder why my father was included in the very first action of this sort. But it ultimately proved good for us that he was, because otherwise he might not have been out of the country and we would not have been able to warn him to stay away.

Uncle Fritz was at our house by 6:30 a.m., and he and Mutti decided that they would send a telegram immediately to my father. It read: “Stay there. Letter follows.”

A telegram took six hours to send, but New York was six hours behind Germany. So given the difference in time we hoped to get the telegram to Vati by seven a.m. New York time, hopefully before he left to get on the boat for his return trip. Along with our fears that the telegram might not get there in time we also feared that it would be intercepted by German authorities. But once again Nazi inefficiency worked in our favor. They were entirely haphazard in keeping track of the people they were seeking to arrest. But we didn’t know this, so Uncle Fritz suggested that to be on the safe side that we should go to La Havre, where the Normandie docked, to catch Vati coming off the boat to keep him from taking the train back to Germany. This was easier said than done. Mutti went to the French embassy to get a visa. For my part, I did not go to school but went around in a daze, frightened, worried, and full of catastrophic thoughts. I was the only child present, alone with my fears as the adults all huddled together to discuss the next steps.

Any time you crossed any border in Europe you had to have a passport. Luckily my parents had taken a trip to Prague the year before, in 1937, and so Mutti had a passport. I was on her passport as her dependent even though I hadn’t gone to Prague with her. It was most helpful that she already had this passport, because if she had had to apply for a new one, it might have caused the police to become suspicious. We went to the French consulate and Mutti asked for a tourist visa, but the French official told us that they would have to do some checking before they issued one to us. This process, they said, would take about a week.

As we walked out of the consulate, my Uncle Fritz, who was with us, said, “So much for France.” The next choice that would still enable us to go to La Havre was Belgium. By the time we got to the Belgian consulate it was 11:55 a.m. and they had a sign out saying they would be closing from noon to 2 p.m. for lunch. But they said they would be willing to squeeze us in before they closed. They took the passport and stamped it and my mother and uncle were greatly relieved. It was like a big stone had dropped from their heart, and I picked up on it and immediately felt lighter and more hopeful too. We went home and Mutti and Uncle Fritz called others of my father’s relatives: his brother, my Uncle Max and his wife, Aunt Irma; his oldest sister Helene, whom we called Lene; his other sister Erna and her husband Adolph. Aunt Erna and Aunt Lene lived downtown in an old section of Berlin. Uncle Max and Aunt Irma lived in a northeasterly suburb of Berlin called Weissensee. Before Vati got his car we would take the elevated train, or S-Bahn, which runs through the whole city, much like the El in Chicago, to get to Uncle Max’s. Max and Irma had one son four years older than I was named Kurt. Fourteen years old at this time, Kurt was the only cousin I had on that side. Adolph and Erna had married late and had no children and Aunt Lene, twenty years older than my father, had never married at all.

All these relatives gathered at our apartment and brainstormed about what our next actions should be. The consensus was that Mutti and I should vacate our premises that night before anything else might develop. The relatives devised a plan for us to bring our valuables to Uncle Fritz’s, and so as not to draw any suspicion I was to stuff them into my doll carriage with a little blanket over them. So I went strolling over to Uncle Fritz’s with these things crammed in the doll buggy, and then I would walk back and they would load it up again and I would walk back to Uncle Fritz’s. As a ten year old doing this clandestine task I felt very important. My father, unlike most German parents of the time with their children, thought it was good to include me in adult doings, and he did not mind my being present during the heated political discussions that went on in our household. During one such discussion when sensitive matters were being broached, one of the uncles suggested sending Evi to the kitchen to get everyone a glass of water. Vati replied, “I don’t have to keep anything from her. She knows that these things stay within these four walls.” When he said this it boosted my child’s ego, and I felt that I had to live up to these adult expectations. Vati’s trust in me increased my sense of maturity and self confidence. Performing my little task with the doll buggy became a part of the responsible role my father had laid out for me.

We had a very large apartment, with two large bedrooms and a smaller maid’s room that served as my playroom, as well as a balcony with garden furniture. The whole place, which was much larger than the typical apartment of today in the U. S., was crammed full of people organizing and packing suitcases for us to take with us. In the middle of this pandemonium the bell suddenly rang. It had been ringing all afternoon with the relatives going in and out. But this time as the door opened, a city policeman was standing there. The city police were known as the Schupo, which stands for Schutz Polizei, or safety police. There they were in their blue uniforms with spiked helmets.

“We are looking for Julius Seidemann,” they said.

Mutti said, “They were here looking for him this morning? Why are the police looking for him? He is not a criminal.”

They gave no reason or explanation. They said only, “We need to take him to the police.”

Seeing a uniformed policeman in my house wanting to arrest my father scared the daylights out of me. I started crying and lamenting, “Why are you taking my Vati?”

The police asked my mother for identification. All German citizens carried identification booklets. Passports could be used for identification, so my mother pulled out the passport. She did so very heavy heartedly because the Belgian visa was in there. As she handed him the passport she was praying, “Don’t let him see the visa.”

He looked at the personal identification data on the first page, checked and verified it and never turned the page, and so he never saw the Belgian visa. This was another wonderful break, a little miracle I thought, that together with all the other narrow escapes that protected our family cemented itself in my mind and made me very thankful. The Schupo, unlike the Gestapo, were not Nazis. They were just the city police and not out to get us. I am sure that this one was aware that something was going on, since the Gestapo had visited us and there was so much commotion at our residence. But to our great benefit he chose not to look further, and so he acted as if he knew nothing, saw nothing and heard nothing. He did notice that we were packing and asked us where we were going. My mother, always the exemplar of discretion, responded, “Oh yes, I am going to my brother’s home in Liegnitz. With all this business about my husband’s going to be arrested I cannot stay here with the child; I am very worried and I need the support of my family.” The Schupo accepted this with the caveat that my mother see to it that her husband report to the police precinct and re-register upon his return. She said, “I will certainly convey that message to him.”

After he left the relatives told Mutti, “You cannot leave this evening, because who knows how the house is being watched. They might observe how much you are taking with you and which train you are taking.” They suggested that if they saw her taking a train west to Brussels instead of east to Silesia, they might apprehend her and hold her as a Geissel (hostage). “Let’s wait another day and see whether they come again.” So we stayed and nothing happened the next day, which was Thursday. When Friday came, they decided this was now a safe time to leave, because if they were watching us something would have already happened. So on Friday evening we would take the night train to Brussels. Before we left Mutti talked to our neighbors, the Safirs, parents of my best friend Sylvia. When we told them of our plight and the fact that we knew no one in Belgium, Mrs. Safir told us she had a first cousin in Antwerp. He was a well-to-do diamond merchant named Fleischer. She gave us the Fleischers’ name, address and phone number. So now we would go to Antwerp instead of Brussels and look up the Fleischers and see what they might advise us to do.

The relatives also warned us to take only one suitcase, so we wouldn’t look suspicious with a lot of luggage. We could only take ten Reichsmarks apiece out of Germany without having to make a customs declaration. And so the relatives advised not to take more than that because we should not have our names show up anywhere at the border. We were to go as inconspicuously and unnoticed as possible. The assumption was we were marked persons and my mother might be held hostage to get to my father. This all turned out to be nonsense. They were not keeping this close a watch on us. With hindsight of course you see more of the true situation, but as we were reacting to the situation we were presented with, it was agreed that we could not be too cautious.

The reason I have such intimate knowledge of all this brainstorming and minute planning that went on is because I was always very much a part of it. I was never treated as the shielded child. And that was a very good thing for me. I never left my mother’s side, never was sent to another room while all of these things were being planned and never felt that I was not an integral part of this whole big scheme. This gave me a much greater sense of security than I would have had if I had been kept in the dark about any of these family ruminations and decisions. My being involved in everything is also the reason why I remember it all so vividly. Because it wasn’t what somebody told me; it was what I heard and I saw and I experienced.

So we left that evening each with one suitcase and Mutti with twenty Reichsmarks in her pocket and the passport. She locked the apartment thinking we would be back in a week. Little did we know that we would never be back. Accompanying us on the train was a man who was not Jewish, an acquaintance whom my mother paid to go with us as far as Hannover, the border town. He sat with us in the compartment so that in case we were apprehended coming out of Berlin, then somebody would know what was happening to us and could report back to our relatives. I could not fall asleep all night. I was just so worried, so scared. We sat there together not talking much. It was a grim trip with our feeling like a dark cloud was hanging over us.

When we got to the border, the customs officials asked a few questions. Mutti answered them, showed the passport and did not have to declare anything. All went smoothly. The train started up and began traveling on Belgian soil and it was like a big stone had fallen off of my chest and also Mutti’s. My whole body relaxed as I put my head on my mother’s shoulder and fell into a deep slumber. We got into Antwerp at about noon and immediately looked up the Fleischers. They lived right across from the city park in a beautiful, modern, luxurious apartment house. We went up, rang the bell and were greeted by Mrs. Toni Fleischer, a beautiful, well dressed lady. The house was richly furnished. They had two children about my age and maid servants. They invited us to join them for the midday meal, but we were so exhausted physically and emotionally from the ordeal we had just been through that we wanted to sleep rather than eat. The Fleischers gave us their own bedroom and said we should sleep as long as we like. We slept the whole afternoon.

After we got up, Mrs. Fleischer told us she would get a hotel room for us until we could go and get help from the Jewish Committee, called the Ezra. It was Saturday, the Sabbath, and so the Jewish Committee Headquarters was closed. So she took us to the Hotel Astor, on the Keyserlei, the main street in downtown Antwerp. A lovely boulevard, it goes from the railroad station to the Groenplatz, the famous plaza of old Antwerp close to the city hall and to the harbor. I was quite thrilled to be statying in this elegant hotel. But when I got up in the morning I noticed the sheets were all full of little blood spots. Quite alarmed I asked Mutti what this could be from and she informed me it was from bedbug bites. She looked under the mattress, and sure enough, there were bedbugs. I had never heard of such a thing in Berlin: insects in your bed! I found out much later that in 1938 Antwerp’s sanitation was quite backward. Also in most houses the toilets were in courtyards or on separate floor from the one where you slept. The apartment houses were small two or three story buildings housing a few families, unlike the large, spacious apartment houses of Berlin. Later on when we were seeking accommodations Mutti would always inquire about whether there were bedbugs.

On Sunday, Mrs. Fleischer took us to the Ezra so that we could elicit help from the Jewish Committee. The Ezra director was named Mr. Teitelbaum. His office was in a large building with a courtyard and a huge kitchen with a big eating area, or mess hall, next to it. He invited us to eat in the mess hall, where there were only about three other German Jewish refugees. The Ezra as a whole was pretty quiet with nothing much going on. But they were of help to us in a number of ways. They gave us some money to help us make the transition to a new country and they also radioed the ship Normandie to help us get in contact with my father. They inquired if Julius Seideman was on the passenger list. The Normandie radioed back that he was not. This was a great relief to us. Now we could rest assured that he was still in New York and therefore safe.

Next Mutti sent a letter to him at the Hotel Atlantic, near Herald Square, where he was staying with the other German Jewish visitors. She informed him that we were now safe in Antwerp and that he could write to us care of the Ezra. The people at the Ezra then got us a furnished room with a local family while we waited for a response from my father and planned out our ultimate destination. They gave us money to rent the room and living expenses, and we ate the noon meal every day in the mess hall at the Ezra. It was always roast beef and boiled potatoes. It was very boring but quite adequate and nourishing fare. We were in the position of poor people going to this soup kitchen, a new and jarring experience in what had been our very comfortable lives. We were glad to be safe at least, and Mr. Teitelbaum treated us very well. He did not make us feel like poor beggars. He told us to come back for more money the following week. Mutti said she didn’t think we would need any more because we were going to join Vati in America. But little did she know that she was living in a dream world. She was wholly unaware of all the legalities, formalities and red tape roadblocks to emigration to the United States. We had both pictured it as just a matter of Vati sending us the money and our booking passage on a ship and leaving to join him in New York. It was a rude awakening when we at length found out what we would actually have to do and how long it would take.

After about a week we got a letter from my father saying he did get the telegram we had sent from Berlin just in time. His luggage, together with that of all the other passengers in the hotel had been already picked up and put on the ship that morning. The ship was supposed to leave in the afternoon and he was supposed to board in the late morning hours. After getting the telegram he got his baggage back off the ship. He wrote that we should forget about the apartment in Berlin and forget about all our belongings there. Forget about everything. Don’t worry. You stay there safe and sound and I will make all the arrangements to get you over here as quickly as possible. But little did we know that there was no such thing as “as quickly as possible.”

The following week we went to the American consulate, which was located on Frankrejklei, an elegant wide boulevard with a grassy middle section with trees and landscaping. It was the street where many of the consulates were located. We walked down the street, and saw the American flag and walked into the consulate. My mother told the officer at the desk: “I want to register and apply for a visa to go to the United States.”

“Well lady,” they told her, “an immigration visa is not just issued while you are waiting. There are quotas, and you will be given a quota number, and you have to wait until your quota is due, and then we will issue you a visa.”

That word “quota number” stuck with me and became cemented into my brain, because it was going to be a long, long time until we would get an immigration visa. My mother was counted as Polish because she was born in Upper Silesia, which was given to Poland after the First World War. So we ended up with a very high quota and the American officials were very discouraging about when it might come due. But being very determined and goal oriented, my mother refused to take no for an answer. And every week we marched up to the consulate to see if our number had gotten any closer to the top. We did this so often that all the consulate employees knew the lady with the little ten year old kid and they were getting tired of us. So they told the guard at the entrance to tell us not to come back for at least a year because our number was far from being due. When he told us this it demolished our morale, and we had to become reconciled to the idea that our stay in Antwerp was going to be an extended one.

Chapter Four
Belgian Interlude

Adjusting to this situation meant that we would have to get a different place to stay. The little rented room that the Ezra had obtained for us on Rolwagen Straat did not even have kitchen privileges. There was no means of our preparing any food. We would have the midday dinners at the Ezra, and for the evening meal Mutti would go to Sarma, a store that sold cheap goods which had a little deli counter. There she would find the most reasonable cold cut, a liver patte, and she would buy two slices and two pistolets (little rolls), and that would be our supper. Wanting her morning coffee, Mutti also went to Sarma, where it was extremely cheap due to the Belgian plantations in the Congo. It was sold by the kilo, a far bigger quantity than the Germans were accustomed to purchasing at one time. Initially Mutti wanted to buy the smallest amount possible, since she thought we would be in Antwerp only a week, and then a month, and when they tried to sell her a kilo she was outraged. “Oh no,” she said. “What am I going to do with all this coffee? I am only going to be here such a short time.” So she asked them to sell her the smallest amount possible, and she would go about getting it ground. In the morning she would make it by pouring the coffee in a little strainer and pouring boiling water over it that she would get in the kitchen from the land lady. My coffee would be with half milk, which Mutti would get from a can. The two little glass cups for coffee were the first augmentation of our meager belongings. After it became clear to us that we would not be getting a visa any time soon, we began looking for a bigger place with kitchen privileges.

While Mutti was always embarrassed at having to depend on the charity of the Ezra, Mr. Teitelbaum had been a means of our meeting others in the Jewish community. The only people eating midday meals with us in the Ezra at the time were four men from Germany. Two were brothers named Levinsky, and two were former medical students who were preparing to do their internships in the Belgian Congo. Those were the first people we actually got to know. Mr. Teitelbaum also introduced us to a German Jewish family living in Antwerp for some time who invited other Jewish refugees to their home for a Sabbath meal every Friday night. They were fairly well-to-do people who were quite Orthodox. They observed the hand washing ceremony and recited all the prayers and we participated along with them and the other guests. Of course, they assumed that my mother was Jewish. But they never asked questions about such things, and they never made us feel like the poor refugees we were. We all sat in the big dining room and experienced this wonderful weekly ceremonial meal. We were grateful to be given this opportunity for sharing the warm conviviality of a family Sabbath. Amidst the hardships of our exiled state the friendship of this family and the weekly Sabbath meals with them relieved our burden, gave us something immediate to look forward to and a sense of relatedness and acceptance in the community.

Meanwhile in New York my father was living with only a temporary visitor’s visa which he would get extended at three month intervals. On this type of visa he was not permitted to work. So whatever work he did was illegal and the money paid under the table, his situation much like that of illegal aliens from south of the border today. With his prosperous upper middle class background, Vati was not at all accustomed to manual labor. In Germany he had always been the sophisticated worldly gentleman, a handsome, slender man of about five foot ten inches tall, hair neatly combed back, and always smartly and immaculately dressed. He had fit in well with his wealthy wine purchasing clientele. But now he was poor and desperate for any kind of odd job he could get. We have a picture of him taken at the time in a photo studio that had burned down. He had been hired to do the cleanup work after the fire. He also served for some time as a butler. From whatever he could scrape together he would send us twenty dollars a month, and that was our meager income. Fortunately, the dollar in 1938 was very strong and traded at a high exchange rate with the Belgian frank. So the twenty dollars a month paid adequately for our housing and food, though meals continued to be pretty thin.

I missed Vati terribly and wrote to him every day with ultra-endearing expressions that I made up, like “my most ardent, beloved, sweet Poppi.” Sometimes I used double diminutives, like “Bobbileinchen,” to connote extra affection. I would dream recurrently that my father and I were reunited, and then I would wake up terribly disappointed. And then I would dream that this time it was not a dream and Vati and I were really together. I’d tell him “Pinch me so I know this is real. I have dreamt this and dreamt this.” And he would pinch me and say “No, this time it’s not a dream”, and then I would wake up and be devastated.

Yet it was a good thing that Vati had stayed in America and that we were out of Germany, because on the night of November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed the worst anti-Semitic event to date. In late October the Nazis seized thousands of Polish Jews living in Germany and dumped them on the Polish border. Poland refused to admit them, thus rendering them stateless and deprived of food and shelter. One Polish Jewish youth whose parents were victimized by this brutal action reacted by seeking to kill the German ambassador to France in Paris. Failing in his attempt to see him, he ended up shooting an underling, Ernst Vom Rath, who was not a Nazi. While Rath’s life was ebbing away in a hospital, Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, decided to use the occasion to provoke collective vengeance against all the Jews in Germany. Goebbels, as much a demagogue as Hitler, gave a speech claiming an international Jewish conspiracy was the cause of Rath’s death and also that of an earlier death of a Nazi at the hands of a Jew. He incited the German people to violent reprisal, and the result was the pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Over a two day period, the SS led an aroused multitude in a thuggish massacre of persons and property similar to the state sponsored pogroms that had gone on in Tsarist Russia. A great many Jews were murdered, synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed, and over thirty thousand were rounded up and taken to sadistic forced labor camps. Jews who could still get out of Germany fled in droves. They crossed illegally over what was called the “green border” into Belgium and Holland, coming across the fields at night. In Antwerp the Ezra mess hall where just the six of us had eaten together was now jam packed with Jewish refugees coming over the green border by the hundreds.

At this time Mutti decided that we should stop going to the Ezra. She had always considered it humiliating to have to go there for food, and now it was mobbed with big families with small children and a lot of young men. It was noisy and rowdy with lots of shoving and yelling, and there were lines to get food and lines to get money. Mr. Teitelbaum, always sensitive to Mutti’s sense of humiliation, told her to send me to his office to pick up our money and food so that we would not have to deal with these crowds. It was at this time also, with Vati’s sending the twenty dollars a week, that we were able to become more self supporting, and Mutti began looking for a better place to live.

We ended up renting a room in a nice area close to the big city park. It was a room in a third floor apartment of a widow named Mrs. Kapellner who had two daughters, Lena and Cecilia, a little older than I was. The owners lived on the second floor and Mrs. Kapellner, rented the third storey and subleased a room to us. My mother particularly liked that room because it had feather comforters. In Germany everyone was used to these “feather beds,” and Mutti had been uncomfortable in the first room we had rented because it had only had blankets. But Mrs. Kapellner, a Jewish woman from Germany, used the feather comforters. The owners of the building, named Zimmerman, were also Jewish and they had a tailor shop on the ground floor. Mr. Zimmerman, the tailor, a scrawny, excitable man, together with a number of employees, made men’s suits. He and his wife on the second floor would yell back and forth in Yiddish.

She would cry, “Send me some money. I have to go and buy groceries.”

“What are you talking about?” he would yell back. “I don’t have any money. I sent you money before.”

“Your veins should burn in your body!” she cursed at him.

“The devil should catch you!” he spat back. On and on it went. And there we were in our third floor room the captive audience of this screeching black comedy.

In this room we still didn’t have the kitchen privileges we had been seeking, but Mutti bought an oil cooker and two plates and two sets of cutlery. When she shopped for chicken it was an entirely different experience from Berlin. This was much more of a country place where you would actually buy the chicken live. She went to the Jewish chicken dealer, and he had to show this city woman how to look for a good fat chicken. He showed her how to lift up the tail feathers to see how plump the chicken was. I was fascinated as she looked at the chickens while they ran around clucking. After she chose one the butcher would kill it quickly in the kosher way, and Mutti would carry it home fully feathered with the neck and head of the dead bird hanging down.

At home we would have to pluck and clean the chicken entirely ourselves. Mutti plucked the feathers and I had the job of taking out the guts and stomach. Mutti showed me how to do these things, and oddly enough, I loved removing the internal organs. It must have been in my genes from my two old butcher grandfathers. When we were done cleaning the chicken, Mutti would cook it over the burner, and that chicken would be a five day meal for the two of us. On the first day she would cook the feet and wings and head, and she would chop up some of the chicken fat from the neck with salt and pepper and flour and stuff the neck and cook it in soup with noodles and big lima beans. I loved that chicken soup with noodles and lima beans. Then she would take the chicken breast and chop it up with a sharp knife and make four hamburger patties from it, and that would be the second and third meal. Then she would sautee the drum sticks and prepare the other chicken parts for meals stretching it to five days. She would cook rice over the burner and then wrap it in a towel and tuck it under the warm feather bed so it would continue to cook. We had no refrigeration. When it was cold we put our cooked food out on the window sill. On hot days God knows how the food kept, but it did, and despite these primitive conditions, I never got an upset stomach or any illness at all while we lived there. But Mutti got sick and tired of having to cook and eat in this way, and we began looking more earnestly for a place with full kitchen privileges.

We spent about a half a year in the room at Mrs. Kapellner’s apartment, from November of 1938, just after Kristallnacht, to the late spring of 1939. After that we moved to a room where we finally were given kitchen privileges. It was the home of a couple by the name of Jaeger. We would be there for about a year, ending our stay when the Germans marched into Belgium. The Jaegers were an older couple with one grown daughter, Ms. Lehmann, who lived with them. Mr. Jaeger was a prompter in the Yiddish theater and Ms. Lehmann was a main player. Every Saturday Mr. Jaeger took me to see the show, and that’s where I became conversant in Yiddish. The plays were Jewish operettas, love stories that were totally captivating to a ten year old girl. I had a huge crush on the main actor, whose name was Witte.

While we were staying in Antwerp Mutti was not permitted to work, and we had to live solely on the twenty dollars Vati was sending us each month. We got by, but we had absolutely no frills. In warm weather we went down by the Schelde River, where there was a little beach called Sankt Anneke. But that was a long haul, an hour’s walk to the river and then through the Schelde tunnel which went under the river to the beach on the other side. We did this exhausting long walk rather than take a streetcar, because it was too much luxury for us to pay money for transportation. In the two and a half years we were in Belgium we always walked, never taking public transportation anywhere.

After the first eight months or so, my father began sending us packages of used clothes donated by friends. I was grateful for this, as I was beginning to grow out of the clothes I had. I felt so proud of those American clothes. I thought they were so fashionable. Even though they were used they were new clothes to me, and they were in excellent condition. And since we walked everywhere, our shoes became all worn out, so we had to buy new shoes. To buy them and other necessities we would go down through Provinciestraat and Pelikanstraat where the Jewish stores were. These were Polish and Lithuanian Jews and they were very Orthodox. The men wore black kaftans and had long curls at the side of their heads and fringes dangling from their waists. This was another place where I developed my Yiddish speaking. We bought the Jewish rye bread which we preferred to the Belgian French style white. One thing that impressed us was that the bakeries in Antwerp all had bread slicing machines, which were not yet present in the Berlin stores. Grocery stores also had potato peeling machines, which we did not have in Germany. You put the potatoes into a drum and turned the switch and the machine peeled the potatoes. These two machines seemed so advanced and modern to my ten year old mind; I was utterly fascinated by them.

Every week we would walk into town to the Keyserlei, where the movie theaters were, and we could go to a matinee for thirty centimes. There would be a newsreel, a cartoon and a feature film. Because we couldn’t afford to buy anything to eat in town, we would make our little pistolets the night before and take them with us, and the movie would be the one luxury we allowed ourselves. When we strolled down the Keyserlei before or after the movie we would look in the bakeries and delicatessens and see all kinds of delicacies that made our mouths water and even the common cheap foods like wieners that we could not afford. I was intrigued by another machine I had never seen before which pushed the wiener into the bun. I would stop and stare at it for a long time, entranced by the machine technology, as children often are. I had never seen wieners sold like that. In Germany, the wieners were sold out of a hot drum with the roll next to it. There was also a wonderful Jewish bakery called Fuchs that had mouth watering blueberry packets, akin to Danish pastries. These were set in the window with many other kinds of pastries. I would stand there with my nose pressed against the glass and watch them place these sumptuous treats in the window. I could smell them, and they smelled so good, and I wanted one really badly. As a parent and grandparent, I have always enjoyed buying things the children want. Mutti must have really suffered because we were so poor that she could never satisfy any of my cravings. She could never buy a blueberry packet because all the money had to be saved for essentials like the chicken.

When we moved to the Jaegers we also met a family whose name was Grau. Mr. Grau, an intellectual, had been a journalist. My mother loved to visit the Graus because they had a very big furnished room where many of the refugee Jewish intelligentsia gathered. My mother was attracted to this kind of gathering, where she could meet intelligent people and enjoy stimulating conversation. We made a lot of friends there.

The Graus always had a full house with lots going on. The warm atmosphere helped everyone to get out of the depressed, poor refugee state of mind. People shared their interesting backgrounds. They exchanged books as well as ideas and opinions, and this helped Mutti to thrive intellectually.

When we went there I would play with the Grau’s little boy Woelfchen. We had no toys, and I terribly missed my toys and my playroom in Berlin, but Woelfchen and I had creative imaginations, and we would make little boats out of newspaper. We would have a regular armada of boats which we sailed in a wash basin. They still had wash basins in the rooms of Antwerp, no bathrooms, and no sewer systems, only septic tanks that they emptied with big hoses, which stunk awfully. While they had potato peelers and wienie pushers, when it came to sanitation they were really backward. People took their showers not at home, as we had in Berlin, but in public bathhouses. I hated this especially in the winter when I would be wearing wool clothes and have to get undressed and dressed in these steamy bathhouses. The wet air would make the wool itchy.

While Mutti was getting her intellectual stimulation from these German refugees, I was receiving mine from the Belgian school, where I learned Flemish, the language of this part of Belgium. Though it is a small country, Belgium is divided into two parts: Flanders, where Flemish is spoken, and Valonie, where French is spoken. If we had lived in Brussels, I would have become fluent in French. But we had gone to Antwerp, which had the big Jewish population, and to which all the refugee Jews went. Flemish, unlike French, has no distinct personality or identity of its own. One-third of the words are of German origin, another third are a kind of bastardized English, with a smattering of French words. If you read Flemish, you can see its hybrid Germanic nature. When it’s spoken it’s a little harder to understand. But I have a facility for languages, and it wasn’t long before I was speaking it fluently. The first few months were a little difficult in school. The academic prowess I had been so proud of in Germany declined initially in Antwerp, as I struggled to get used to a new language and curriculum. The schools in Antwerp had a faster pace than the German schools. In math we were doing square roots and pre-algebra, and we had nothing like that in the elementary schools in Germany. So I had a bit of an adjustment to this new pace of learning.

The recess time in school was also very different from that in Germany. Neither country had playground equipment or organized games at recess then. In Germany, we had hung around in the yard and visited with one another informally. But in Antwerp I found that the children had organized themselves into something like a drama group. They would make themselves into historical figures like Napoleon and Marie Antoinette. The top students would be the main characters, and the rest of us would be soldiers or servants or other kinds of common people. It was hard for me to get into this because not only was I an outsider and new to the fifth grade, but also a foreigner, at that time the only foreigner, who lacked fluency in Flemish. But the overall school experience was not at all traumatic for me. I was not shunned or excluded or ill treated, and I had a way of adapting myself to new situations that enabled me to fit in.

We had come to Belgium in the spring, and the school year in Antwerp, unlike that in Germany, began in September. So I did not have to go to school in the summer, and Mutti would take me often to the city park during that first summer. I think my mother felt sad for me that I now had no toys to play with. I had had such wonderful toys in Berlin: a doll house and beautiful dolls, and a miniature grocery store with little jugs and barrels and tiny produce bags and a scale. I had always had a lot of friends over, and we played with the grocery store with little candies for the commodities. I also missed my books, which included the Nesthaeckchen series about a little girl like Pippi Longstocking. I missed my two dolls, Bridget and Eleanor, and I lamented the loss of them. Mutti felt sorry for me and made me a little rag doll out of cloth. This makeshift doll of course had none of the elegance of my dolls back in Berlin, but it gave me a feeling of possession and I happily took it to the park with me.

Eventually, particularly through our involvement with the Grau family and the others who gathered at their quarters, we became a part of Antwerp’s Jewish community.

We would often go shopping in the Jewish part of town, which was more like the Jewish urban villages of old Europe, personified in Fiddler on the Roof. These Jews were very traditional in custom and appearance, with the women wearing wigs and the men in their bowler hats and beards and flowing traditional garments. Like its counterparts in Russia, it was a rather disheveled and unkempt neighborhood. Also many of the stores stayed open long into the night. This was unheard of in Germany, where I was used to every store closing at seven o’clock and stores never being open in the evening or on Sundays. But in Belgium stores could stay open as long as they wanted to, and some stayed open late and others didn’t.

One store in the Jewish sector, a kind of general store, was open all the time, except on the Sabbath. The only time the store’s open front was closed was when Jonkele, the proprietor, rolled down an awning on the Sabbath evening. Jonkele had a large can, about two feet high, which had once contained some commodity, and he sat on that can all the time. He had no chair. We would say he looked like a petrified eagle as he sat perpetually on the can. He wasn’t clean and he wasn’t shaved and never seemed to go home to any bedroom, or take a bath, or do anything but sit always on his perch on that can. If I wanted to buy a pickle at midnight, I could go down to this store, and find Jonkele asleep on his can, and I’d say, “Jonkele, I want to buy a pickle.” And he would get up and curse “Oy vay, why are you coming in the middle of the night and bothering me to buy a pickle?”

“But Jonkele, your store is open.”

“But can’t you see I’m sleeping?”

“Well I want to buy a pickle.”

“All right,” he’d say. “It cost…” and he would name a price.

And you would never, never pay the price that Jonkele asked for. You automatically had to bargain with him. That was the show. Whatever price he would name, I would say in Yiddish, “That’s outrageous that you would have me pay that for a pickle.” And he would say, “Go away! Go away! The devil should get you.” So I would walk out and then he would holler, “Come back. You still want to buy a pickle? I’ll give it to you for…” and he would name a price a little less.” And I’d say, “You want to sell me a pickle for that outrageous price?” And he’d curse me out again. “This time I mean it. You go away and I never want to see your face again.” And I would walk out, a little farther, and he’d call me back, and we’d haggle again.

The whole process could go on for as much as a half hour. I got a real kick out of doing this with Jonkele and drawing it out as long as possible. It drove my mother crazy.

“Don’t make such a big theater out of it,” she would say.

But it was exactly the theater of it that I liked so much. Jonkele obviously liked it too, whether it was with me or someone else. There was always some dramatic negotiation going on at Jonkele’s, and this way he could draw a crowd and advertise himself. Even though there was nothing special in his store, the word about town was that he was quite well to do. He lived so frugally that he always seemed threadbare, but he was able to provide a daughter with quite a sizable dowry.

Eventually we fell into an uneventful routine as we made a temporary life for ourselves in Antwerp. Mutti checked at the American consulate after a year and found that we had advanced on the quota list, but we were still a long way from a visa. In the meantime Germany had invaded Poland in September of 1939 and World War Two had begun. As a result, tensions began to build among populations in the Western countries: Belgium, Holland and France. Suddenly on May 10 of 1940, we heard gunfire and planes flying over, and we saw little puffs of smoke in the sky from the flak. We had had no warning that this was coming, so we were entirely confused about what exactly was going on. People were in the streets screaming, and when we turned the radio on that morning we finally heard that the Germans had marched into Belgium. We had thought we were safely away from Germany and waiting to go to America, and now suddenly the Germans were there in our midst. The Belgians had been very good to us, magnanimously extending our permit to stay there again and again, something they did for all the Jewish refugees. This was in marked contrast to the way the Dutch government treated Jews who went over the green border from Germany into Holland. Individual Dutch citizens like the people who aided Anne Frank’s family helped and hid some of the Jews. But their government was not at all supportive, ultimately deporting most of the refugees to their deaths.

Belgium was a small country whose army did not compare to those of the Great Powers. But the Belgians set out on the daunting task of defending themselves against the mighty Wehrmacht. Soon announcements appeared in the Antwerp newspapers that all the men had to come and register for the army. They established gathering points in the neighborhoods where they had to go to sign up. There were nowhere near enough uniforms on hand, so when the men came in civilian clothing, some would get pants, others jackets, some rifles, some caps, but no one seemed to have everything. People were going around half in uniforms, half in civilian clothes. And on their feet they often had slippers. It was a common thing for Belgian men and women to walk around town in slippers. Mutti and I thought it was quite a curious and humorous habit of theirs. And it was especially funny to me that men enlisting in the army would sometimes be wearing slippers. But in spite of these odd sights at Antwerp, the Belgians were fielding a well trained and adequately equipped army against the Germans. In the campaign to save Belgium they were joined by both British and French forces. When the English soldiers came in to defend Antwerp, an order was issued that the inhabitants had to evacuate. So people with money, who had cars, drove west to France. Others with less money hired trucks and rode in the backs of them. Those like us who were without money had no choice but to go to the railroad station and ride out in freight boxcars. When we got to the station we found it jam packed from wall to wall with people. Officials told us to just sit there and they would bring trains in that would get us to France. We sat and waited with our suitcases and a big loaf of round, white Belgian bread to eat. First one group would go and then another, and finally they got to us, and amid much pushing and shoving we made it out on the platform where we were herded into the boxcars.

We were packed tightly in there like so many sardines, and we sat thinking we were going to France. The train was only going about ten miles an hour. Some people would get out and run alongside it awhile, getting some fresh air and exercise. All during the ride we could hear the diving German Stukas and the rat-tat-tat of machinegun fire. Whenever things would die down outside people would rush out of the boxcar into the fields to relieve themselves. Finally we got to a station which we all assumed was in France. But we were unpleasantly surprised to discover that we had merely arrived in Brussels, normally a half hour electric train ride from Antwerp. For twenty-four hours we were crammed in there. With only one small opening for ventilation the boxcar smelled awful, and all we had to eat was the one loaf of bread. During the ride some people went out and got eggs from local farms and brought them back to the train. They would make a hole in the eggshell and suck out the raw insides, something I could not even think of doing.

When we disembarked in Brussels it was evening. We had befriended two ladies named Ullmann, who were Viennese Jews. One of them had a son with them who was about my age. Together we all went into a little hotel across from the station to see if we could get a place to stay. When we went inside, the desk clerk said, “Where are you coming from? Brussels is being evacuated. Everybody is checking out.” We asked them if they could put us up for the night and they consented to do that. But it was not a night to get much sleep amid the din of constant shooting, air raids and cannons in the distance.

The next morning the owner came into our room saying, “You’ve got to leave! You’ve got to leave! Everybody is leaving Brussels!” When we went outside we saw that the station was empty and the streets were full of people all walking out of the city. So we merged ourselves into the exodus. One of the Ullmann women commandeered a baggage carrier and we all put our suitcases on and pushed as we accompanied the flow of people out of the city. When we got to the bridge out of the city the British Tommies helped us across, and then they proceeded to blow up the bridge. They were blowing up all the bridges so the Germans would have a harder time crossing the rivers. It was an eerie feeling to have the road blown apart that you just went over. When I heard the big explosion and saw the accompanying dust cloud, I felt as if I were cut off from everything.

We walked on to the next village, which was called Grand Biggard, and passed a big English installation with lots of military personnel. Our little group of three women and two children eventually found a farmhouse where the farmer was willing to put us up for the night. We went to bed, but our sleep was disrupted by gunfire throughout the night. When we got up we heard voices outside. We looked out the window and there were German soldiers washing up and cleaning their equipment to the tune of loud martial music.

The Germans were plowing through Belgium quickly and by the end of May they occupied much of the country, though due to the blundering of Hitler and Goering, the British Expeditionary Force was able to pull off a remarkable feat of evacuating most of their number from the port of Dunkirk across the channel. King Leopold III surrendered personally and unconditionally on May 28, a very controversial act because it was done without consultation with his cabinet. Both the prime minister and the foreign minister had advised against it, and it was bitterly opposed by the British and French. Other monarchs like the Queen of Holland and the King of Norway, when their countries were overrun by the Germans, fled and formed governments in exile rather than becoming a prisoner as Leopold did. But many of the Belgian householders and shopkeepers we met were grateful for Leopold’s surrender because it minimized their damage and losses.

We ended up staying in the farmhouse for a couple of more days, with Mutti and the other two women remaining hidden because they didn’t want the Germans to know of their presence and the fact that they were German speaking. The boy Heinz and I both spoke Flemish, so we were able to go out and around to different farms begging for food. On our way we saw a dead horse lying in the road. Its head had been blown off and was lying next to the body of the horse. “What an absolutely gruesome sight!” I exclaimed. The Viennese often spoke in big flowery, often inappropriate words, and Heinz too spoke in this way. Everything was “herzig,” meaning adorable or darling. He said, “Look at that horse and the head, isn’t that herzig?” “Herzig?” I thought, “I can’t stand this kid. He makes me crazy.” But I had to go on begging with him.

The next day we went back to the major highway and everybody that had been evacuated and wanted to return to Brussels or to Antwerp stood there hitchhiking, and whatever vehicle would give a person a ride they would jump in and be on their way. The Ullmanns were picked up by a hearse. We said goodbye and we never saw them again. Then came a German soldier alone in a private car that he had obviously confiscated from somewhere, and he motioned to us to hop in. So we talked to him, telling him we wanted to go to Antwerp. He said he would take us there and asked us if we had a place to stay. We told him he could stay with us. He was apparently in a precarious, extralegal situation, so we didn’t ask him any questions, where he was coming from and what he was doing, and he didn’t ask us any questions, what we were doing and how we happened to be speaking German in Belgium. We sat there like zombies not saying much at all. We put him up for the night, and in return he took us out to the country and got us all kinds of provisions: butter, bacon, eggs and a ham. This was very fortunate for us, because Antwerp, having been evacuated, was pretty dead, with all the stores empty and hardly any people. Eventually they trickled back into town and the stores were reopened. The next day the German soldier left to reconnect with his unit.

Now things were getting pretty rough for us, because with the Germans in control of Belgium Vati could no longer send us money. Mutti had frugally put aside a little each month from the meager amount he had sent. So we had some money to tide us over for a little while. We tried to find the Jaegers, but they had not returned to Antwerp. So we could not return to our room in their house and we moved into our fourth and final quarters in Antwerp on Walfisch Straat. This was with a Belgian family which was not Jewish. We stayed with them for about six months until we left. During this time Mutti corresponded with the relatives in Germany. They told her it was not feasible for us to stay in Belgium at this point. She couldn’t work there, she didn’t speak Flemish, and it would be much too risky to have to go through the German authorities to get anything. It had turned into a precarious, scary, insecure situation. Uncle Fritz wrote and said he would find us a room in Berlin where Mutti could come back and find a job. He thought that since we had been away for two and a half years that the Germans had maybe forgotten about us. We could come back and act as Catholics, concealing all connection to the Jews.

Chapter Five
Completing My Education and the Duty Year

Mutti’s oldest sister, Toni, was a nun in a convent in Pomerania, an eastern province on the Baltic Sea. It had an elementary school and a school for older girls who had finished eighth grade which stressed home economics training. It was a large convent with a good many nuns. Tante Toni talked to the mother superior about our situation and the possibility of our coming back to Germany with particular reference to what to do with me. The mother superior suggested that I be sent to the convent school, and so after all the years of identifying mainly with my Jewish relatives and functioning as a Jew, I was now to be suddenly immersed in the Catholicism of a convent.

It was actually a coeducational school I was entering, but with separate living quarters for boys and girls. With the war on and many teachers in the military, the school, like all the schools in Germany, was under a good deal of stress. Many teachers were in the military, and they had to resort to bringing teachers out of retirement to fill in the gaps. One I remember was a very old lay teacher named Mrs. Weidemann. With the nuns’ full energies absorbed in running the convent, the teachers they hired were all lay persons. Due to the shortage of teachers, seventh and eighth grades were combined. Partly because of its makeshift quality school at the convent was not very exciting. But I suspect schools all over Germany during the war were hard pressed due to evacuations of population from many of the urban areas and so many people being in the military.

But for me the really important thing was not the quality of education but my being sheltered from the activities of the Nazi regime. And for that purpose I was in an ideal place, way out in the country away from the more closely watched population centers like Berlin. In this remote location, where there was nothing but the convent and a few farmhouses, there were no Hitler Youth. And so I was not confronted with having to join any Nazi youth organization while trying to shield my half-Jewish identity. Safely ensconced in this country convent, I received my first exposure to Catholicism. At the time I knew absolutely nothing about Christianity. I didn’t know who Jesus was, nor did I know any Christian prayer like the Our Father or the Hail Mary. But my Tante Toni was a very loving person, and it was she who gave me my first instructions in the faith, and she had a tremendous impact on me at this crucial early adolescent stage of my development. I was only in the convent for fourteen months, from January of 1941 to graduation in April of 1942. But it was a very secure, happy period of my life, completely sheltered from all the political affairs of wartime Germany. We heard nothing at all about Nazis or Hitler or even the war. The food was also quite good and plentiful. Were I in Berlin at the time I would have been subjected to the meager allotments of rationing. The convent, however, was self supporting with its own animals, grain fields and vegetable gardens. The nuns were very kind, and I had none of the negative experiences with nuns that I have heard others complain of. While the nuns as a rule did not teach in this convent, one nun did teach music, and I had piano lessons with her. And for all my schooling and room and board at the convent Mutti did not have to pay any money at all.

While at the convent I avoided any reference to my Jewish background. Since Nazi anti-Semitism had placed us all on our guard, I had grown used to keeping secrets. In Belgium, we had to conceal our German identity, since the Belgians hated Germans. Since returning to Germany, it was most important for me to conceal my half Jewish identity. No one ever actually told me, “Now you must not talk about that,” but it was simply a given that I keep quiet about my personal life. Knowing that I always had to cover up so much of who I was inevitably pressured me, since by nature I was open and outgoing. While the fourteen months at the convent were a happy time for me, I always had mixed feelings due to my having to go against my natural desires and cover things up. But I have many happy memories of life at the convent. In the summer we went blueberry picking. The most blueberries in the forest were always where there were a lot of ferns, and underneath the ferns were tics. So where you found the most blueberries you would also get the most tics. I remember having a little manicure set with tweezers and the other girls would come to me and say, “Evi please pull out the tics that are under my skin.”

My mother would come and visit me during Easter and summer vacations. The second Easter I was there, at age thirteen, I made my first communion. By then I had learned the catechism my aunt had given me. She sat with me and with great loving care taught me the basics of Catholic belief including explaining the mass to me. We attended daily mass every morning in the house chapel and went with the townsfolk to the parish church on Sundays. I caught on quickly, so that by the time I was ready to make my first communion on the Sunday after Easter, I understood the elements of faith and ritual. I was a little self conscious because I was a good deal older than children are when the make their first communion. But none of the other children asked me why I had not done so when I was younger, and I felt very good about not having to make up an explanation.

A year later, in the eighth grade, I graduated grammar school. In Germany at the time, every graduate had to do a Duty Year, or Pflichtjahr. This meant I had to serve in a household for a year. Hitler had initiated this practice as an incentive to have large families. Urban families, to be eligible for this program, had to have four children with two children under the age of six. Farm families did not have any requirements because with so many men in the military, farm labor was in great demand. My girl friend in the convent, who came from the province of Pomerania, asked me to come to her home town where she already had a farm assignment. She said she would talk to her family and maybe they could get me an assignment with another farm family nearby. I discussed this idea with my aunt and my mother. Mutti said it sounded like a much better idea than coming back to Berlin where the food rationing was producing real hardship. In Berlin we also had no farm connections, so it was not possible to go out to the country to get extra food from farmers. So my friend’s family went ahead and lined things up for me with a local farm family.

After I graduated and returned to Berlin and spent some time with my mother, and then I left for my assignment in Pomerania. The train ride was quite an arduous one. I had to transfer from the big train out of Berlin to a little train and then on to an even littler train which took me to the nearest little town to the farm I was going to. The farmer came for me there in a horse drawn milk cart. By that time you actually saw very little motor vehicle traffic. Most of the cars had been requisitioned by the army. In the country people had pulled out their horse drawn carts. Being picked up in such a vehicle was totally foreign to me as a big city girl. They brought me back to a huge farm, with lots of horses and livestock and big fields much like a ranch. As they showed me around the farm, I saw Polish prisoners of war working in the fields who stared at me, making me feel creepy. Then I saw a lot of horses running around, and one got out of the corral and came close to us. I had never been near any big animal, and as this horse came up toward us I just about freaked out.

They eventually took me back to the house where they were getting ready to serve dinner. All the farmhands gathered around a huge table, and I sat down with them. The conversation was animated, with many joining in. Soon it turned political, and they all started talking against the Jews. They railed against the “dirty Jews” and all the troubles they were causing, and they were the cause of the war, and they were the cause of the world trouble, and they should be annihilated, on and on and on. My hair was beginning to stand up on end. I was getting goose bumps of fright and antagonism toward these people. I had never before felt as utterly uncomfortable as I did at that table listening to this hateful talk all around me and being so defenseless. We would read these kinds of things in the paper and hear them in the speeches on the radio, but I had never sat down with individuals spewing hatred against the Jews in this way. When I had been among the adults in my own family, the political talk was all anti-Nazi. In the convent there had been no political talk whatsoever. So despite the hardships we had faced, I had actually been rather sheltered from what the Jews called the risches. Now here in my face was the real world of the day, Germany in the summer of 1942.

My immediate reaction was, “I want to get out of here. I cannot stand it another minute.” I went up into my room where I hadn’t even unpacked my belongings, and I lay on the bed and cried: “What am I to do?” Finally I got up and said to myself, “I can’t stay here. I am leaving.” It didn’t take me long to make this decision. I was just fourteen and I was so determined and so sure of myself that I went downstairs and confronted these people, saying “I am not staying here. I am leaving tomorrow morning.” I gave no reason. But strangely enough they didn’t say anything to try to persuade me to stay. Maybe they thought to themselves, “She’s just a city slicker. She’s lost here.” So they said, “If you want to leave, you’ll have to go with the milk cart tomorrow morning.” And very early the next morning I was ready with my suitcase. I got on the milk cart, which took me to the station, where I went to the station master, telling him, “I want to buy a ticket that will take me to Berlin.” Fortunately Mutti had given me money in case of an emergency, so that I had the money to buy a return ticket. I had never traveled alone before, and there were no telephones for me to call my mother and tell her I was coming.

But I was full of self confidence about what I was doing, and when I bought the ticket for Berlin I felt a great sense of relief.

I took the little train that chugged along to the next bigger station, and then I transferred on to the through train to Berlin. I got to Berlin, went home and found that my mother wasn’t there. I knew that she often visited with friends and relatives in the evening. I thought she was probably at our friends the Levys home, so I took the bus there suitcase in hand, went up to the door and rang the bell. The door opened.

“Evi! What are you doing here?”

“I’m back,” I said.

My mother came out and she took me in her arms and hugged me, giving me a warm feeling of being loved. I said, “I could not stand it there. There was so much risches.” Mutti said, “Good for you.” And what reassuring words those were for a fourteen year old, who had just done such a momentous, self-willed act. Our friends, Uncle Kurt and Aunt Betty Levy also told me they were proud of me. I said I was happy to be home, and I didn’t care if I had to live on the meager ration stamps.

Mutti said she would find me another place for me to do my Duty Year. She wanted to find a place for me herself rather than going to the Labor Bureau, because she wanted to find a family whom she could level with about us and who would be sympathetic. The next day she went to our parish priest and asked him if he knew of a family entitled to have a Duty Year girl.

“Oh yes,” said the priest. “I know of such a family. They have two school children and two preschool. I’ll give you their name and refer them.” The family, named Schmuck, became the one with whom I did my Duty Year. It was a wonderful experience and we became the closest friends. Their baby, Helen, who was called Leni, four weeks old when I went to stay with the Schmucks, remains one of my dearest friends. My whole family today continues to have contact with her. My year with them was the year that I first became anchored in the Catholic Youth, and that was where my journey of faith actually started. The foundation had been laid in the time at the convent, where I had learned the basics from my loving aunt. But my year with the Schmucks began the deepening of my Catholicism into a matter of personal conviction. And the Schmuck family was most important in nurturing this faith through the great sense of love and warmth and security they provided.

They were a family of six. The father’s name was Franz and the mother Helene. They had a boy seventeen named Anton, who was in high school, a thirteen year old girl named Inge, a five year old, Maria, and baby Leni. The priest knew of the Schmucks being eligible for a Pflichtjahr Madchen, or Duty Year Girl, because he had just baptized the baby. We went to their home with a recommendation from the priest in April of 1942. Mutti told them I was a Mischling, a derogatory term meaning mixed or half breed - half Aryan, half Jewish – that the Nazis used. She explained that we were Catholic and that my father was in America and was Jewish. If they had any objections to that, Mutti said, she wouldn’t consider leaving me there. Mrs. Schmuck explained that they were both from Bavaria and that her husband, who was in Civil Air Defense, had been transferred to an office job in Berlin. They were both forty-two at the time, and their last child had been a change of life baby. Helene said she was wholly against the Nazi regime, though Franz had joined the Nazi Party as a young man and had a rather low Party Number. This gave him status with the Nazis, since it designated him as one of the early ones. The Party had first developed in Bavaria, around its main city, Muenchen (Munich) with the Bavarians, or Bayern, being the most ardent participants. Franz had come from Munich. He remained a party member, though he never vocally defended the Nazis at home amidst the family. Helene, for her part was quite vocally opposed to Hitler as was the oldest son, Tony.

Tony was in his third year of high school, in the Gymnasium, and he had to attend regular meetings of the Hitler Youth. After I left he was drafted into the army, fought on the Russian front, was captured and sent to Siberia. He did not come back until 1947, when Leni was five. She did not even know her big brother because she had been only a year and a half old when he was shipped out. One day in her preschool she had a tremendous urge to go from her preschool room to the class that her mother, who taught at that school, was teaching, and tell her that they must go home because Tony was there. This she did, and her mother said, “That’s ridiculous. We’ve heard nothing from Tony. I’m going to walk you back to your class.”

“He’s home! He’s home! Go home!” said the little girl. She made such a scene that Helene took her home, and there was Tony. He had walked and hitchhiked all the way from Siberia. This is what all the German prisoners who had been in Stalin’s Siberian labor camps had to do. Many who had been imprisoned in those camps had died there, and the ones who returned looked almost as bad as the Nazi death camp survivors. I saw many of them myself. The Russians had kept the stronger prisoners, who could still work, and the ones who were weak and sick they sometimes let go. Many died on the journey home, and it took them many months to get back to Germany. They arrived home emaciated with rags instead of shoes wrapped around their feet. Tony returned in this kind of shape but they nursed him back to health. He eventually recuperated, attended the university, and became a respected journalist.

The Schmuck family lived in a nice section in West Berlin. There the older apartment houses had half-sized maid’s rooms. By the World War II period, most Berliners did not have maids any longer, and the Schmucks were no exception. Commonly the duty year girl, whose work was much like that of a maid, would occupy the maid’s room, but the Schmucks were so respectful of me and my mother that they said I could share a bedroom with their thirteen year old daughter Inge, rather than having to stay in the maid’s room. This made me feel more like one of the family, and Helene Schmuck actually treated me as one of the children in the house. I ate better than I would have with my mother alone, because you could do more with the ration stamps with a family of seven than with just two. There were seven meat ration stamps, giving each person 125 grams, or four ounces a week. You could get from double to quadruple the amount if you bought inards. If you got lung, you would get four times the amount, that is a pound of lung for your four ounce stamp. So once a week we ate a lung stew. Mrs. Schmuck took me to the local open market place, only a couple of blocks away and showed me the good deals you could get there on things like vegetables. We were given ration stamps for each category of food we bought, whether fish, rice and noodles, or fat products like butter, margarine or oil.

The Duty Year was the beginning of my having the responsibilities and commitments of a young adult. After Helene, whom I always called Frau Schmuck, showed me how to shop, I did the shopping for all seven of us. It was a milestone in my life for me, a stranger to the Schmuck family, to be given this level of trust. Helene was herself a well educated woman, highly skilled at all the tasks of home economics. Her parents had owned a pension, or hotel with room and board, at Bad Kissingen, one of the many health spas of natural mineral water that people went to for restorative purposes. This background gave her broad practical knowledge, much of which she imparted to me. She took me to the stands for the different commodities at the market and instructed me as to what to look for. One stand she showed me was Frau Matth’s gigantic display of herbs. Herbs were not rationed; they were on the free list. So Helene liked to buy a large quantity every week and cook an herb soup. I learned how to do this, but it was much to my distaste, because I hated herbs. But Herr Schmuck, the typical German father, said that herb soup had to be cooked and eaten once a week, so I had to cook and eat it.

Being Bavarians, the Schmucks were also daily beer drinkers, and so I had the task of carrying a big pitcher to the local pub at the corner and buying the beer on tap. There was regular beer and there was malt beer, the latter having a much lower alcohol content. Malt beer was given to the children, though I had never before had it. We had not had it in our house, though my father would occasionally drink it at a pub or beer garden. But Bavarians all drank beer, even the children, so at the Schmucks I was indoctrinated into drinking beer. And at fourteen, I was not considered a little child any more to be given the malt beer. Actually the malt beer tasted sweet and good, and I would have been happy drinking that, but being a “young adult” at fourteen, I was expected to drink the regular beer. I hated it, but Herr Schmuck thought it was a big joke. “You drink your beer, Evi,” he would say. “It’s good for you.” To this day I don’t like the taste of beer and rarely drink it.

This was a year of real maturation. With the shopping and cooking and other household tasks I was given more responsibility than I had ever had before. When I did the shopping I did not do it off a grocery list. I was given the money and the ration stamps, and I had to make the choices. This responsibility, together with the beer drinking, gave me the clear message that I was a young adult. Having adult expectations placed on me gave me a feeling of competence. The Schmucks lived on the sixth floor of a six floor walkup. I would walk down to do the shopping with my three netted shopping bags, and I would return with the bags bulging and proceed to carry them up six flights of stairs. I had never done such arduous physical work before, and I think carrying all these groceries all this way made me a bit stronger in my upper body.

Buying vegetables was a bit different from buying other commodities. They weren’t rationed with rations stamps, but every household was given a card stating how many members were in the household, and vegetables were available in accordance with how plentiful they were. You did better to buy them at the open air market, because the open air markets would receive the vegetables directly from the farms and they would have more available than would the grocer. All shopping in those days was done at individual specialty shops: the green grocer, the butcher shop, the bakery, the dairy store, the candy store and the like. There were also general grocery stores with packaged and canned goods. What made the open air markets better to shop in than the specialty stores was that you could always get more for your household card. I learned quickly which stands were the best to go to. Some were bigger and some served you a little more generously than the others. If you patronized a stand regularly the proprietor would often give you more. As I think back on it, I was probably the youngest shopper – most were adult women – and I think I frequently got better treatment because I was a young girl coming with a household card for seven people. The different stands I patronized always gave me a little better deal and treated me a little more generously, which in turn always made me feel very proud.

The bigger and fuller my nets and shopping bags were, the more I had to schlep up the stairs, the prouder I felt of my accomplishment. I would be crowing, “And I even got this extra bag of carrots today,” or something of the sort. For my reward Frau Schmuck, when I got back in the late morning, would have tea for me. Under the rationing system, tea and coffee were not always readily available. They would have a special calling for national holidays and on Christmas they would have a special calling of fifty grams of coffee beans per person. With these allotments, we always had more coffee available because most of the people in the family were children, who did not drink coffee. The same applied to tea, so Frau Schmuck always had some very nice black tea stashed away which she enjoyed at mid-morning, and she shared it with me when I came back from the market. She would say, “Oh, Evi, here is a reward for your wonderful, successful shopping.” So I was always looking forward to the privilege of enjoying a cup of tea with the lady of the house. All these little events in my routine had an influence in shaping my personality and my various abilities. And for that reason I am very grateful for the period of the Duty Year with the Schmuck family.

My roommate Inge and I shared a lot together and became good friends. She wasn’t usually much of a help to me in my chores. I wished that with all the dishes I had to do that she would help me dry them. Even though she was a child in the family and I was the maid, I got bold enough to every now and then say, “Oh Inge, come on, don’t you want to help me with the dishes,” and she would sometimes join me. With straightening the bedrooms and housecleaning and shopping, my day was always full. In the evening I was free, and Inge was active in the Catholic Youth group in the local parish. The Catholic Youth or Katholische Jugend, were very strong in Germany. They were action organizations, with groups divided by gender and age. Each group had a group leader, with leaders of younger groups coming from older groups. When I came to the United States later I found the youth clubs in the parishes of Los Angeles were also part of a national Catholic Youth Organization, but they were much more informal and strictly social clubs.

In the convent I had not experienced this division of groups for activities. There we did our activities together, whether it was religious instruction or sport games or fun play. The high degree of organization and division by groups of the Catholic Youth was new to me. I went along with Inge to Catholic Youth meetings and made good friends there. The parish was St. Ludwig, and that became my first actual Catholic parish experience. It was an active parish in a somewhat upscale section of Berlin. My involvement with the actions of the Catholic Youth there had a positive influence on my faith formation. The number of girls in each group was roughly between ten and fifteen. Different age groups would meet on different days once a week with the group leader. Group leaders had to go through leadership formation classes, which involved catechesis. The diocese would put on regular workshops for those who wanted to get into leadership roles. The priest would single out those youths who stood out as doers for special leadership training in faith formation. The dioceses are divided into deaneries, in German called Dekanat. Each Dekanat had a spiritual leader, who was a priest, as well as lay leaders. The lay leadership in the German church has always been very strong and institutionalized in the church structure. When I got to the United States, on the other hand, I would find most church activities under the control of priests and nuns.

Youth were involved in sports activities and singing and songfests, as well as in religious education. Singing played a very big part in every youth activity as in every organized German group activity. Germans love to sing for every occasion: on outings or parties or whatever event, they always sing. I’m very fond of this aspect of German culture, which I have really missed in the United States. Unfortunately when Americans hear of Germans singing, they always associate it with Nazism or the military, but singing and music are woven into the whole fabric of German life. It is true that the German military does do a lot of singing, as we heard them doing during the invasion of Belgium when we were woken up by the marching band and singing voices. But this practice goes back long before the Nazis appropriated it. The Germans have a wonderful tradition of folk singing with beautiful lyrics that goes all the way back to the Middle Ages. It was this rich tradition that we drew upon in the Catholic Youth Organization activities. We sang many wonderful old hymns, as well as many folk songs, some of which were traditional and others newly composed. We never had our weekly group hour without singing.

Once a month we had the Glaubenstunde, or faith hour. This was presided over by the parish priest. The talk would be on faith topics, but it was informal. It was not a Catechism or Bible study. The big Catholic publishing house Herder and Herder put out the song books and prayer books and meditation and study books that we used in the Glaubenstunde. These educational materials made the faith meaningful and relevant to young people. I can remember having long discussions on each of the Ten Commandments and topics like the meaning of truth. These discussions facilitated our thinking and verbalizing abilities as they developed our faith. Thus we learned to participate and to think for ourselves rather than having directions and knowledge simply passed down in an authoritarian manner. In my case this training helped me to develop a well reasoned faith, the ability to see issues with my own eyes and to act based on my observations and my informed conscience. And the foundations of my mature faith and action based on faith were laid in the Catholic Youth beginning in my Duty Year.

Chapter Six
Staying Alive

After I completed the Duty Year, Mutti and I moved back to the Charlottenburg section in West Berlin, where I had spent the first ten years of my life. We affiliated with a parish there called Herz Jesu, or Heart of Jesus. This is the parish in which I was actively involved from 1943 until I left Germany for America in 1948. During 1943, the Allied air raids over Berlin increased greatly. They began to use air pressure bombs, which collapsed people’s lungs and literally blew buildings away. These bombs beginning in about March of 1943 really terrorized us. The first of them fell just three blocks from where the Schmucks lived. Movie stars Magda Schneider and Wolf Albach Retty had their house bombed out, though neither of them was home at the time. They also dropped phosphorous laden fire bombs that started fires all over the city, as well as the air pressure bombs used by American bomber squads. When the air raid warnings came up we would rush to the designated shelters that were in basements of the apartment buildings. We were told to sit stooped over so our lungs would not be blown out. All the same many died from having their lungs blown out by the air pressure bombs. And when we would go out to survey the damage from them we would find not an imploded structure, as with the more conventional bombs, but bare foundations whose houses had been completely shattered and blown away.

In the context of these terrifying times in Berlin, I began the process of finishing my schooling. This was greatly complicated by my being a Mischling, or tainted half-Jewish, status. Before we had gone to Belgium I had passed the test for the Gymnasium and been there a month. But Mischlinge children were no longer eligible for the Gymnasium, so the next best thing was to graduate at sixteen with a Middle Maturity degree, as my father had done, and enroll in the commercial school. The trades in Germany, descended from the ancient guilds, are very well organized. Every trade, from baker or tailor to automobile mechanic, had both education and apprenticeship that went with it. No one can open a shop without a master’s degree in the particular trade, for which you have to pass a master’s exam. This elaborate training is why the German trades people are so respected. I applied to the Hundelsschule, for trade education, but the application came back with a statement that Mischlinge were not permitted to go to these schools. At the Handelsschule I would have been trained in the book selling trade. This being denied me, I applied for the next best thing, training in a publishing house. But I received back a statement that my “Jewish blood would contaminate the German literature.”

Mutti, who was always cleverly trying to work around the rules and restrictions of the Nazi regime, figured that if I was not permitted to enter the publishing trade, then at least I could work as office help with a publishing firm. But this all had to be done through the Labor Department, the office where all jobs were registered. People never just found themselves jobs. In the highly centralized Third Reich, all employment was obtained through and registered with the government. When you went to work you were issued an employment card, or Arbeits Karte. This government control and monitoring of the work force made it easy to haul away Jews from week to week, because the Nazis knew where they all worked. I would eventually obtain the publishing house job, but that would not happen until the following year, 1944. What caused the delay was the great increase in the Allied bombing that would make things chaotic and cause us to focus our primary energies on finding refuge and meeting our immediate physical needs.

In the summer of 1943, just after I completed my duty year, the bombing, which had previously been sporadic, now became much more intense. Goebbels went on the radio and declared that we were at “total war,” stating that Berlin was going to be evacuated. All summer there was talk of evacuation. Since the air raids were coming from the West concentrating in the Rhine and Ruhr areas, most of the evacuees fled eastward, the direction we would shortly take to escape the bombing. There was now a housing shortage in Berlin, and a law was passed that allowed only one room per person. So if a single person had a three room apartment, he or she had to rent the other two rooms. So we ended up renting one furnished room from a woman who was living by herself.

Mutti had a friend from her youth named Magda Schitto. Magda’s daughter had a studio that manufactured women’s clothing. She would give my mother remnants of material which Mutti would send to Tante Toni, who was an excellent seamstress and would make the remnants into dresses and blouses for me. The remnants were very colorful, often bright yellow and green, and my aunt would put together several of them to make the clothing. In the midst of all this stress and hardship I would put on these new clothes, and for the moment I would feel rich and wonderful. We would go over to Magda’s house once a week to listen to their radio, which also had a shortwave receiver. This was the way we would tune in to the BBC, which carried the Voice of America. Of course such clandestine listening was highly illegal, since Nazi Germany was a totalitarian state which kept out all but the official viewpoint. The Gestapo would go through the streets with radar to catch people listening to short wave sets and arrest them. It was from this illegal source that we first got news of the bombing that was taking place in the Rhineland, where the Allies were using a new firebomb. One time when I was sitting there and listening to a graphic description of the bombing, I began to cry uncontrollably. “If this happens here,” I sobbed, “I’ll never live through it.” Within the year it would be happening to us in Berlin, and I remember thinking at that time that I was indeed living through it.

While they were bombing the Rhineland in 1943, there was anticipation of much stronger bombing of Berlin. But with eastern Germany not being bombed at the time, Berliners were evacuating eastward. Magda’s daughter had two children, ages two and four, whom she wanted out of Berlin. So Magda moved with the grandchildren to Upper Silesia, where she stayed with a farmer, while her daughter remained in her studio in Berlin and provided support. With the bombing escalating in Berlin, we left the city in August and set out for the Silesian farm to stay with Magda and the children. We ended up staying there through October. Leaving Berlin for this limited time was considered equivalent to a vacation rather than a move, so we didn’t have to de-register from our Berlin domicile. In traveling outside Berlin we had to trade in our regular ration stamps and get travel ration stamps. With the regular stamps you registered at particular stores, but with the travel stamps you could buy at any store.

Living on the farm with farm animals and without many of the conveniences of urban life was an entirely new experience for me. The little house we stayed in was very primitive and the kitchen full of cockroaches. Cooking was done on a wood stove, which made it uncomfortably warm. Lack of a refrigerator, however, was nothing new to me. In Berlin Magda was the only one I knew who had an electric refrigerator, an American Frigidaire. Also washing clothes by hand was not unfamiliar, since we had no washing machine in Berlin. Mutti gave out wash there to a laundry. The farm house had electricity and inside water, but it had no bathroom, only an outhouse. At night it was too scary to make my way in the dark outside to the outhouse, so I had to use a chamber pot. There was one placed for this purpose under each bed. I was afraid to walk to the little town nearby, because the geese were loose in the streets, and I had been told that the ganders were very aggressive and would chase and peck at me. After a few weeks passed and the newness of the surroundings wore off, I became bored with looking at cows and missed the stores and parks and general hubbub of Berlin.

In late October, about the time we planned to go back to Berlin, the local farmers planned a big pig slaughter. Learning that we could get quite a bit of free food from this event we delayed our plans to leave until after it was over. Everybody who would attend the slaughter was given a job, including Mutti and myself. I was given the unenviable task of stirring the slaughtered pigs’ blood so it would not coagulate. This thoroughly nauseated me, and I ended up spending most of the time throwing up. The amount of meat from the slaughter was substantial. Because of their crops and livestock, farm people had quite a bit better provisions than those in the cities. They had to turn over a certain percentage of the slaughtered pork to the butchers, but much was left over for the farmers. For our participation, despite my incapacitation, we got to take a substantial amount of sausage and bacon back to Berlin with us.

We returned to Berlin in early November. The first Sunday we were back, we went to mass, and on the steps going up to the church I badly twisted my ankle. It hurt so much that I passed out for a moment, and awoke with two people carrying me in and laying me on a back pew. Walking home in much pain I had to hop with people on either side supporting me. Mutti took me to the doctor and he diagnosed a torn ligament. But he did not wrap my foot, or give me crutches, or any medication. In the chronic emergency situation in Berlin at the time nothing was functioning up to par, and everybody, including the doctors, was undersupplied. The doctor simply told me that the ankle would eventually heal. It hurt me so bad that at night I could not even stand to have the feather bed covers against my foot.

On November 22 there began an intense systematic bombardment of Berlin which went on for five consecutive nights. This was the first time we were bombed on that many nights in a row. Prior to that, we were bombed every third or at most every other night. Bombing was still going on only at night because it was harder for antiaircraft guns to see the planes. But in 1944, bombing would go on in daylight as well as night hours. During the night bombings we began going to one of the public air raid shelters that were required in one of the basements on each block. All the apartment houses had basements where people stored coal and extra belongings. The government chose certain of these houses for the air raid shelters, and the people living there had to give up their storage facilities for this purpose. In each shelter, divisions of the basement into individual cellars were removed and one big room about twenty by twenty feet was created. The walls were reinforced and a big vault-like door, called a Panzer door, was created. The door, like a bank vault, was made air tight and the room was reinforced with steel. This made the shelters relatively safe, so that people could survive even if the building above was bombed. Our house was made into one of these public shelters with chairs lining the four walls. Because it was a public shelter, we were always joined by people who happened to be in the streets nearby when the air raid sirens went on.

In Berlin all the buildings were attached to one another. There were no walkways or alleyways dividing them. Emergency exits were carved into the outside walls that were big enough for a person to crawl through, and openings were made from basement to basement in the adjoined houses. These openings were closed up with bricks that were easy to knock away with an axe that was always left nearby. So if your house was bombed and you needed to get next door to the shelter, you knocked away the bricks and crawled through the small opening. For me at this time, it was especially difficult, because my ankle hurt much too much for me to walk on it. Some stronger people in the house would have to carry me down four flights to the shelter. Prior to this time, Mutti and I would always carry a big heavy suitcase, so that if we were bombed out, our apartment demolished, we would at least have extra clothes with us. But in my disabled condition I could no longer carry a suitcase. So whatever we had had to be crammed into my mother’s. During the five nights of intense bombing, as I was being carried to and from the shelter, I was really scared. In each house one resident served as air raid captain, and these captains had to see to it that everyone left his or her apartment and go to the shelter. In our house there was one woman who did not like to go to the shelter, preferring to remain in her apartment during the raids. But she was not permitted to do so. Having all the people in shelters, it was thought, would minimize the need for rescues. So if the captain caught you staying in your apartment he would fine you.
During the bombing, as I was sitting in the shelter, I would hear the air raid warden go up and check periodically for the big flammable phosphorous sticks that were dropped as bombs, and which came through the roof, burst into flames, and ignited whatever was around. During the heavy week of bombing in our area, these phosphorous sticks rained down by the thousands. Before we were attacked so systematically I had heard broadcasts of the bombing of western Germany with the commentators describing people running out of their burning houses into the street only to find that the asphalt of the street was burning too. Now with the phosphorous bombs falling in our neighborhood that November, this very thing was happening to us. I could look out and see the street on fire. In the midst of all this destruction and continuous danger, it was a terrifying feeling not to be able to walk. All I could do was hop on one leg. “What if we had to knock the bricks out of the wall and crawl through one of the holes?” I thought. I couldn’t do it on one leg. I constantly envisioned all kinds of personal catastrophe.

We had daily blackouts to save fuel and the times of the blackouts for each section of the city would be posted in the newspapers. We would have maybe two hours of electricity during each twenty-four hour period. When an air raid was close at hand, a radio announcement might say: “One thousand four engine bombers are entering the airspace of Germany in Westphalia going in the direction of Hanover Baunschweig.” And we knew that whenever they were going in that direction that that was the air corridor towards Berlin. And then the announcement would come: “They are proceeding over Mecklenburg Magdeburg.” Then we knew for sure they were heading for Berlin. Then when the announcement came that they were entering the airspace of Brandenburg province, we would get the pre-air raid sirens. At this time the electricity would go on, and we would have light. But of course this would only be within our drawn curtains inside. If any slit of light was seen penetrating outside your apartment you would get an incredible fine. If you were to walk on the streets at any time of night, whether or not there was an air raid, it was pitch black and you could see nothing. This of course was to keep any stealth reconnaissance of the enemy from being able to see or chart the city. We always dreaded the full moon, because it would light the city and at these times air raids would greatly increase. We would have electricity inside during the air raids so that people could listen to radio announcements, see their way down to the shelter and avoid flying or crumbling debris.

When we heard the pre-air raid signal, which was three sounds of the siren, it was time to start down to the basement. It would take about ten minutes for the planes to enter the city, and by that time everyone would be in the basement. When we heard, “One thousand bombers are over the airspace of Berlin,” and the sirens came on again, we would know this is it, we are the target. They didn’t just drop the bombs haphazardly to get rid of their loads and turn back. They had a very systematic pattern. They would drop what we would call Christmas trees, which were light clusters like clusters of grapes. The air raid warden would come down and say that the Christmas trees are marking the boundaries of maybe twenty square blocks. The scout planes would drop the Christmas trees at the four corners of the square, and the other planes would drop all of their bombs within the square. This was called carpet bombing. As we sat there, the warden would come in and tell us we were in the square of the four Christmas trees, and I would think, “Am I going to be lucky enough to survive?” And then I would hear this incredible drone of a thousand bomber engines. Then would come the explosions, and the loudness of them would tell me how close they were. The warden would go up periodically to see if any of the phosphorous bombs had landed on our building. If they did they would come through the roof into the attic. They might come through to the top floor, or if they came through a window they could be on the fourth floor, where we lived. The wardens checked to see if they had ignited the upper floors. If they did people had to go out and form bucket brigades to douse the flames. I was very much afraid to go up on the ladders even after my foot got better, and it would make me feel guilty to see my mother way up there. These feelings of fear buried themselves deep in my psyche and gave me a deep sense of cowardliness. I never felt very brave at all. Mutti, on the other hand, was a very tower of courage to me. We would be sitting on chairs in the basement, and I would tell her to stoop down so that she could withstand the air pressure bombs. I would always stoop over, but my mother would continue to sit upright. We all had gas masks that we would have to use if the house was bombed because the air would be thick with dust. Also there was fear that poison gas might be used. Aware of these possibilities, I always sat with my gas mask in one hand. In the other I held my rosary, and during the air raids I would continuously be fondling the beads praying each decade, rosary after rosary.

While sitting down in the shelter, people would engage in the most trivial conversations. Most apartment houses in Berlin had stores on the bottom floor. The store on our bottom floor was a coffin business. The owner of it named Kraatz was the biggest Nazi woman I knew. Their business had been very good and the Kraatzes were very well-to-do. Frau Kraatz, a big woman, was always decked out in a fur coat and diamonds. She was a very vocal person, and she would be sitting with us in the basement during the bombing, and we would each be thinking our end could be any second. So with everybody facing up to their last breath, she would be talking this terrible anti-Semitic talk. I remember particularly one rant she was giving, with a few others joining in. But the others just sat there silently and endured it. She would say, “What we have going on here is really the Jewish problem. Why are we suffering? Why is the war? Why do we have all this? It’s all because of the damned Jews!” At that time there were still a lot of Jews in their homes. They had not as yet been all picked up and shipped out. “These Jews,” she ranted, “should all be picked up and they should all be thrown in holes and buried in lye.” Certain words just stick in our minds, and I remember that ugly speech of Frau Kraatz’s. And she would go on and on repetitiously thinking of all the horrible ways she could to get rid of the Jews, because they were the basis of our problem, our war, our suffering. Anything bad that happens to us, it is the Jews. After the war with the Allies occupying Berlin, she became the most eager to curry favor with them.

While she was going on like this I was sitting there stooped over praying my rosary over and over. At that time I did not yet engage much in spontaneous prayer, as I would do in later years. I was very much in the mode of saying the formal prayers the church had given me. But one little prayer of my own I kept repeating: “Dear God, do not take me yet, I have nothing to offer to give back to you for my life. Give me a life that I can give you something back.” And I prayed that like a mantra over and over again during all the bombings, especially when it became very intense and very close and I would quiver and shake and think, “Is that a direct hit over us? Is our house gone and everything over caved in?” And then the air raid warden would open the door and say, “The house is still standing.” Needless to say, there was no roof, there were no windows.

Roofs and windows were wrecked constantly. In 1941 and ‘42 if windows were blown in you would get the glass and replace them right away. But by 1943 they were replaced with cardboard, because that was all there was. In the summer it was no problem because the windows would be open. But in the winter we were miserable as we sat there day after day in rooms darkened by cardboard windows with only candle light. Luckily we were still able to get candles, or we would have been in total dark.

As I sat in the shelter, praying and listening to Frau Kraatz’s vile talk, the only thought going through my mind was that I was preparing for and facing death. Any second, I thought, it could be me. When the constant drone of the planes and the explosion of the bombs finally ceased we would then get the ALL CLEAR sound: one long uninterrupted siren sound. If the house was still standing, which ours always was, we would go back up again. From 1944 until the end of the war, we would often have a second and even a third air raid in the same night. Needless to say, we never took our clothes off. We always needed to be ready to go down to the shelter at a moment’s notice. Sleep could be interrupted at any time. I don’t remember particularly having nightmares at the time. But I have had them frequently since the war, even to this day. They are always about dangerous things: thugs, robbers, killers after me. In one dream I was driving a car along a cliff, with two wheels hanging over the edge, or animals like great big horses after me, trying to get through the window. I annoy my husband, Reuben, frequently with my screams in my sleep. Most of the time when I scream, I am screaming in German: “Hilfe! Hilfe!” (Help! Help!). Sometimes I just shiver and quiver and make fearful sounds, and he has to shake me awake. Sometimes the dreams are so stressful that when I wake up I can feel my heart beating hard in my chest as if these things are really happening to me.

Living in Berlin during the bombing I am sure is what planted these deep fears in me that come to the surface in my sleep. And the worst of the bombing was that five day period from November 22 to the 27th, from Monday through Friday in 1943. The area where we lived had a big broad two mile thoroughfare called the Berlinerstrasse. There was the old Charlottenburg City Hall with its famous clock tower near where we lived, Schloss Charlottenburg, the old royal Palace, at one end of that street, and at the other end was a big traffic circle called the Knie. All the buildings on this street were on fire. Each night there was more bombing and more fire, and the more fires there were, the less oxygen, and they ignited even faster. The whole Berlinerstrasse, which we were two side streets away from, was an inferno. The fire engines would no sooner get one building under control when another would ignite. And a big wind whipped up, created from the lack of oxygen. The asphalt was burning and people were picking their way around it trying to find shelter. By Friday we were worn out nervous wrecks, and we didn’t know how much longer this would continue.

At this point, my mother said, “Sooner or later it’s going to hit our house. We’ve got to get out of here.” So we got our suitcase. I still couldn’t walk because of my ankle. I had become a super hopper. There were three huge public bunkers that had been built in three different sections of Berlin. The one we were closest to was two subway stations away. This is still a famous intersection in the city. It is a big railroad station called Bahnhof Zoo, because it is across the street from the Berlin Zoo. It is a big shopping and business center of the city. Next to the Zoo they had built a great high rise bunker, about five stories high. It held several thousand people and was one hundred per cent safe even from direct hits. On top of it they had anti-aircraft guns, or Flak (Flieger Abwehr Kanone). Hundreds of people were lined up all day in front of the bunker, which didn’t open until the air raid pre-warning. We waited and entered with the others and filed into a huge room where we were all packed tightly together.

After a difficult night in the bunker Mutti decided we would go to Liegnitz in Lower Silesia to stay with her brother Franz. When we got out of the bunker we went to the train station, hoping to get a train there. When we got on the train we were thinking we just want to get out of Berlin. We had been back from the farm only a couple of weeks, but we felt we had to get to a place of safety. While sitting on the train that morning we heard the air raid siren. This was really scary, because we were virtual captives in that railroad car sitting in the station near the bunker. Fortunately it was a very short air raid. Many times that the planes would reach Berlin the Flak as well as the German aircraft would offer enough resistance that they had to turn back. Perhaps this was one of those times. So we were able to get out of Berlin. We had not contacted my aunt and uncle, so they were very surprised when we arrived in Liegnitz. Their son Horst, who was eight years older than I, was also with them. We told them of the horrors of the bombing of Berlin and asked if they would put us up for a time. They consented and we slept on the couch in their living room. We got there on November 27th and stayed through the holidays.

We had no ration stamps, since we had left precipitously without making any of the official changes that we had when we had gone to the farm with Magda. Mutti, who felt obligated to get us some kind of support since we did not want to eat out of Uncle Franz’s ration stamps, would go begging from farm to farm. Farmers would give her bacon and eggs and chickens. As the weeks passed by we were hoping for some positive change in the war situation that would make Berlin more inhabitable. We had almost a blind hope that things would get better, as we lived from day to day, week to week. Under the chronic emergency conditions we lived in, all we could think was, “Today we are safe. We’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow.” But by the time Christmas had passed we began to feel like intruders camped there in our relatives’ living room. So we began to look for other living arrangements.

My Tante Toni had been transferred to a convent that was an old age home in Gorlitz, which was also in Silesia. Mutti and I went there and asked the nuns if there was anyone in town who could rent us a room. They would learn of such things through contact with Catholic parishioners in the town. Sure enough they told us about a woman in the town named Bischof who could rent us a room. She was a widow who needed some supplementary income and she gave us the room at a decent price. Mutti had money to pay for it from wages she made working in a coffee store in Berlin after we had returned from Belgium. But this woman was a fanatical housekeeper who drove my mother to distraction. She told us that we had to sweep and wash the linoleum floor every day. And to be sure we did so, she also came into the room and showed my mother how to sweep into four piles. There was not enough dirt for one pile, but we were supposed to sweep it into four, so the piles became imaginary.

We stayed at Frau Bischof’s clean quarters for about two months in early 1944. During the days we would often go to see Tante Toni in the old age home. For me this was very boring. But I did become involved in local parish youth activities there. This gave me the opportunity for fellowship with young people, so I could escape from hanging out in the old age home with my mother and aunt. I found these young people in the Catholic Youth very warm and friendly, and they gave me a much needed sense of belonging. This was the first experience I had connecting with new people through a group. I valued these girls’ friendship and corresponded with them after I returned to Berlin. My involvement with these parish youth made these two months in Silesia an enjoyable, peaceful respite from the terrible stress of the war.

During this time I did actually visit with some of the people in the old age home. Some of them were semi-active and some very sick. This was the first time that I was present in the room when someone died. I was there saying prayers with others for him when I witnessed his dying. Another person I visited with there was an old baroness from a well-to-do background. She had a classy air about herself, but she suffered from dementia. In conversation her mind would go off on crazy tangents. She would walk around hallucinating and talking to imaginary people. There were other young people there who were visiting or helping with some of the residents, and together with them we made the baroness an object of our entertainment. Making fun of the behavior of the very elderly is something that teenagers commonly do and years later feel bad about. We would go in and talk to the old baroness, and she would at first welcome us graciously, but soon she would go off into her own world. We would go along and talk crazy with her, and this would agitate her, and she would get angry and say, “I don’t want to talk with you any more. Now you go on and get out of here.”

One day they were giving her lunch, and she kept saying she was still hungry. Other old people, who didn’t eat very much any more, would turn their sandwiches in to the station where my aunt was, and the staff gave the sandwiches to the baroness. In one day she consumed some thirteen sandwiches, and we thought how strange this was, and that night she died. She didn’t die of overeating; her body was failing and she felt empty and hungry, and so she kept asking for food. Many years later when my own mother was dying she would say that everything felt empty inside, and that caused me to think back about the baroness that she had felt the same way, causing her to eat.

In February we got notices from the Labor Office saying that with all the time we had been gone we were no longer fulfilling our requirement to be in the labor force and that we would have to come back and register. Since I was neither in school nor working I was required to return to our domicile in Berlin and get registered and placed in the working world so that I could be contributing to the war effort. So we decided, for better or worse we had to go back. Also my mother had to get back to what had become her regular job. She had taken this job in 1941 when we had come back from Belgium and I had gone into the convent school. My Uncle Fritz, Vati’s favorite cousin, had written to Mutti in Belgium that if we would come back to Berlin he would find us a place to stay. While I was in the convent he had gotten her a small room, and at that time she applied for a job with a big firm called Julius Meinl. They were a big coffee seller with stores all over Germany. But these stores were not like Starbucks, where you come and drink coffee. They were coffee grocers who sold packaged coffee, tea, candy, jams and the like to the public.

When Mutti applied for a job at one of the Meinl coffee stores in Berlin, she stated that when she was a young woman she had worked for Butterhaus Roland, Hamburg, whose dairy products were sold throughout Germany and who also had chain stores in Upper Silesia. She had grown up in a family that had owned businesses and always had good business connections. She too had a keen business mind and was interested in running a store. She had taken the Butterhaus job shortly after the First World War, and eventually she became the manager of seven stores in the whole Upper Silesia area. She would ride back and forth by streetcar among the different towns to manage the different stores. In those days it was quite significant for a woman to have such a high managerial position. To qualify for her first dairy store job, she had to have a good knowledge of dairy products. When she first interviewed they had asked her, “And can you cut cheese too?” This referred to the skills of carving wedges out of the huge wheels that cheese came in. She in fact did not know how to do that, but she told them she did and was able to adequately fake it until she knew how to do it. She told this story to me many years ago and I have told it to my children, and they to their children. In our family, “Cheese I can cut too,” has become an expression we use to mean that we are self confident and have the will to learn a new skill. So when Mutti first applied for a job at Julius Meinl she still had in her possession a strong recommendation from the Butterhaus firm. She had been out of the business world from 1928, when I was born, until 1941. Meinl gave her the job and she worked there until the end of the war. Her work there enabled her to frugally put aside the money that sustained us when we spent time away from Berlin during the evacuation. When we went back to Berlin in March of 1944, she returned to Meinl and worked there to the end of the war.

Chapter Seven
Matters of Faith

After we returned to Berlin during the last year of the war, I became very active in the Catholic youth activities of our local Charlottenburg parish. During the Nazi period the Catholic Youth organization was technically abolished. The Nazis wanted everyone in the Hitler Youth with no countervailing sectarian loyalties, and under Nazi law the Catholic Church was supposed to be restricted to purely religious affairs. Catholic Youth had traditionally had sports activities and outings of various kinds. But our activities during the war were strictly limited to parish grounds. So we met together to discuss matters of faith, and at the same time Catholic youth were required to be in the Hitler Youth and attend its activities and indoctrinations. I of course did not attend the Hitler Youth because of my Mischling status. When I attended youth activities in our Berlin parish, none of the other young people ever talked about the Hitler Youth activities. I’m not exactly sure why this was so.

On the surface the Catholic Church complied with the law and Catholic Youth did strictly religious things during the Nazi era. In our parish, one of the Sunday masses was a youth mass, which we organized and participated in. That mass was actually done in the vernacular, and this was over twenty years before Vatican II would dispense with the Latin Mass, enjoining nationalities around the world to write vernacular liturgies. The Germans were actually pioneers of these new liturgies, and they were instrumental in bringing about many of the changes that would happen during Vatican II in the sixties. It was the German Benedictines that played the key role in modernizing the liturgy. At our youth masses, we all wore outfits of blue and white with both boy and girl groups carrying banners. We made these large banners ourselves with symbols standing for our name, which was the Liebfrauen Jugend, or Our Lady’s Youth. Every year on December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we always rededicated ourselves to Our Lady. That ceremony gave me an inner sense of belonging to Mary, which fostered a devotion to Our Blessed Mother. When I was in such mortal danger during the bombing of Berlin, I really felt the protection of Our Lady for the first time. And from that time onward, December 8th retained very special meaning for me. There is a beautiful German prayer to Mary called Unter Deinen Schutz und Schirm, which means Under Your Protection and Umbrella I put myself. During the bombing this prayer was ever on my lips as I sat in the shelters, and in these drastic conditions it gave me a sense of security and hope.

On the eastern outskirts of Berlin at a place called Alt-Buchhorst is a Catholic youth hostel called Christian Schreiber Haus, named after Bishop Schreiber, who was instrumental in dedicating it for all the youth in the Archdiocese of Berlin. Despite the fact that it was officially forbidden, youth groups from each parish would go there for activities like sports and singing competitions. Religious retreats and a broad range of secular activities also were held there all during the war. A large Madonna statue, known as the Schutz Mantel Madonna, stands in the chapel of the Christian Schreiber Haus, a beautiful, simple carved image rendered by a modern artist. She wears an open coat, and inside the coat she is holding, sheltering people. During the bombings and at other times of crisis I would pray to the Schutz Mantel Madonna. Our youth group had pictures of that Madonna with her safety coat around her children. Coming to her in prayer was an act that held great emotional resonance, helping to sustain me.

This Madonna and our retreats in Alt-Buchhorst, or A. B. as we called it, together with the prayers and youth masses and other devotions I learned at the time all worked to form my identity as a Catholic in the context of the war trauma. I feel fortunate today to have had these meaningful things to contribute to my youthful faith formation. Whereas in our society teenagers often rebel and push themselves away from their ancestral religion and values, I as a teenager received great nurture from Catholicism. The chronic emergency of the war worked to make me a firmer Catholic. Moreover, becoming a Catholic and learning the elements of Catholicism as a teenager was, I think, more meaningful for me than it is for many cradle Catholics who learn to parrot doctrines and devotions long before they really understand or experience them. I was very fortunate that I learned my faith experientially, and it thus left a much deeper impression. The times I have experienced God in my life I call my epiphanies, and these vital moments of faith could not so easily be dismissed later on. I cannot discount faith as so much mythology or nonsense, as some do as they grow older, because the epiphanies I had during the war and others I have had since make my Catholic faith very real and vital to me.

To keep from being apprehended, we took our trips to the A. B. House not in big groups but as a few friends going on a weekend outing. Since I had not experienced the Catholic Youth organization before it had been outlawed, I never knew the experience that others had had going there in large groups previously. In those times our parish group would wear their blue skirts and white blouses and blue cords and white shirts and carry their banners, and they would meet other groups with other colors and banners, and they would all march and sit together in various activities. It was a public, official display of their belonging. The songs they sang at these gatherings recalled medieval Christendom, as they sang of themselves as young knights in solidarity for Jesus Christ. I learned these songs, which spoke of us as an army of faith fighting to bring the truth of Jesus to the world. Germans liked to think of themselves in these military terms. The martial imagery gave them a sense of strength and comradeship. Of course during the Nazi period they could not march in solidarity for Jesus Christ and his teachings. They had to march in solidarity for Adolph Hitler and his teachings. So the youth outings that I remember all had to be subdued and camouflaged as informal groups of friends going on a weekend jaunt.

In the A. B. Haus, we would have ball games of what we called nation’s ball, which was akin to what Americans call dodge ball. Of necessity there were no leagues or formal teams. We just played for fun. In addition we held faith formation meetings and had prayer time and mass together there. We also prayed the Saturday night Compline, the traditional church night prayer of the hours. Of the contents of the Compline, the part that has always stayed with me is Psalm 91, which asks God’s protection upon us during the night, and which we sang together in Gregorian chant. We did not do any Bible study, because no lay group in the church at the time was allowed to do Bible study. And if any Bible text was brought into discussion in any of our gatherings it was only done by the priest. But if someone were to ask me if any scripture from that period in my life remains with me I would say Psalm 91. I have used it personally in all situations of my life in which I felt insecurity.

Today when I go to scripture I feel more drawn to the Old Testament, particularly the psalms. They have a message for every frame of mind I’m in. I have often wondered if it was my early Jewish upbringing that draws me to the Old Testament. In my first two years of public school I had attended the Jewish religion class. At that time there was no Catholic influence in my life at all. When the girl called me a “dirty Jew girl” in the second grade, it was because I was attending the Jewish religion class. Religion as a subject was part of the traditional public school curriculum. Every child in Germany to this day attends a religion class. We did not at the time do anything ceremonially Jewish at home, nor did we go to the synagogue. But in my public school second grade religion class, which was taught by a Jewish man, I particularly remember and continue to love the Exodus story. Maybe that is the story that has stuck in my mind and draws me back to the Old Testament.

Nineteen thirty-six to eight, from age eight to ten when I went to the Jewish school, were the only years of strong Jewish influence in my life. Coupled with the previous public school teaching, these years gave me an identification with the Jewish people that seeped down deep into my unconscious. It lay dormant in all my years of Catholic living, but it influenced my consciousness in many intangible ways. Recently I have been active in the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice in San Diego, California. The director, Rabbi Laurie Coskey and I have become good friends. We have marched on many a picket line together, and I have told the story of my war years in her temple. This new relationship has put me once again in touch with my Jewishness. This was the seed that was planted in my childhood and grew slowly and now comes to full bloom, connected with the Catholic religion. I have often told others that having both Jew and Catholic in me makes me feel like a richer person.

I am hungry for as close and rich a relationship with God as I can get. In the past couple of years I have begun journaling my thoughts toward God and I find myself most inclined to address Him more as Abba, Father. And I think these are my Jewish roots speaking. At the same time I have a Catholic appreciation of the Holy Spirit that began when I was at school in the convent. We had a teacher there who was especially devoted to the Third Person of the Trinity, and she taught us a prayer to the Holy Spirit that I have reiterated many, many times throughout my life. From my days in the convent on I developed a close tie with the Holy Spirit. I can share many epiphanies I have had on occasions of my life when I did not know what to say and I would always call upon the Holy Spirit and be instantly enlightened with the right words. In my middle years I began to refer to the Holy Spirit as my buddy. Sometimes I felt a little guilty that I had this seemingly casual attitude, but it was wonderful, full of life and joy and hope. I believe it is the Holy Spirit that now nudges me to put my experiences down in words so that I am not just hoarding these riches to myself but sharing them with whomever might read this.

My relationship to my Abba God and the Holy Spirit weave together the two faith traditions that are at my roots. Today as I continue to feel drawn to the Hebrew Scriptures, I have also discovered how many of the Jewish ceremonies and religious acts are incorporated in Christian Catholic liturgy. These things often pop out at me in the Mass, and I feel their Jewish origins, and they draw me and enliven my worship. My growing friendship with Rabbi Laurie has led me to think back of all that is in me from my Jewish heritage. Part of this has been to think back about all my father’s relatives with whom we were so close in the war years and in pre-war Berlin and to think about what happened to them.

Chapter Eight
Kaddish

My paternal grandfather died just after World War One. He and my grandmother were observant Jews who were unhappy when their son chose to marry outside the faith. After my grandfather Jakob Seidemann’s death, my grandmother Auguste, called Gustl, moved in with her oldest daughter, my Tante Lene, who was unmarried. She died at age eighty in 1933. When I knew her she was weak and bedridden. She was always sweet and affectionate to me. She would kiss me and call me “Evi, my little goldfish.”

Vati’s two sisters lived in Central Berlin and his brother Max lived in a Northern Berlin suburb. But his cousins lived close to us in Charlottenburg in the West. These cousins were all from his mother’s side. His mother’s maiden name was Wolff. Her mother had had four children in her first marriage, and when her husband had died she remarried a widowed man with several children. In this second marriage, they had had more children together. So my father had a lot of aunts and uncles, some of whom lived in Berlin. The youngest uncle from the second marriage was his Uncle Polde (Leopold), an avid chess player who played often with my father. I always had to tiptoe around quiet as a mouse whenever they played. The one we were closest to was Uncle Fritz, because he lived only five blocks from us. It was he who had helped us vacate our apartment after the Gestapo had come demanding to see my father. He was a watchmaker making a modest living. My father who was always the dapper dresser and more prosperous would often buy new shirts and ties and give some to Uncle Fritz, who was very appreciative.

My Uncle Fritz Kasstan was the son of my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Dora, who lived near us. This Uncle Fritz and his wife from the Rhineland, Aunt Claire, had no children and they constantly showered me with love and attention. When I slept at their apartment, they would let me sleep between them in the middle of the bed. Vati’s cousins all used to hold big birthday celebrations for both the adults and the children. So there were always big family feasts with home baked cake in the afternoon. The woman of the birthday family would bake apple cake and cheese cake and strudel. And of course I would always get my sandwich instead of the cake. So when everybody was eating cake, one of the women would say, “Oh, Evi, you come, I have a Schmalz Stulle for you.” At these gatherings the women would schmooze together, the children would play together, and toward evening the men would start to play cards.

When the whole family got together there would always be card playing. It was common for couples in the family to visit with one another on a Saturday night, and the women would sit and drink tea together and the men would play cards. The children were usually there also because in those days nobody in Germany used baby sitters. The relatives often gathered at our place. My father, always outgoing and hospitable, loved to have them. With one of the few cars in the family, he would often go and pick up one or more of the cousins for these get-togethers. I remember one evening my parents went out to play cards at Uncle Fritz Wolff’s. The women played a game called Gottes Segen Bei Cohn (God’s blessing by Cohn), and the men played pinochle or poker, and there was money at stake in all the card games. That time, because Uncle Fritz’s was close by, I was tucked in bed at home. My parents usually got home before midnight, but that night I woke up and my clock said two and they weren’t home yet. I became frantic with worry and called Uncle Fritz’s. When they put Mutti on the phone, I asked “Why aren’t you home? What’s going on?” My mother, embarrassed and humiliated by this incident, ended up questioning why card playing has to go on into the early morning hours. She decided that parents’ staying out so late with a child left home alone was really not right, so after that they always returned before midnight.

There were four siblings in the Wolff family: Fritz, Erich, Friedl and Hanne, the children of my grandmother’s brother. Hanne had emigrated to Argentina long before I knew any of them. But we often got together with the other three and their families. Erich’s wife Paula was a Polish Jew. She was the only one of the relatives who spoke German with a Yiddish accent. But like all the other relatives of my father’s generation, she was wholly secular. She was a sophisticated, smart and good looking woman with a terrific figure, something unusual in Germany at that time. My mother, like Paula was well dressed, but she was only five foot one and a little on the heavy side. The only other of my aunts who was sophisticated and stylish was my Aunt Claire, whose mascara so fascinated me. Aunt Paula liked to throw parties where there would be high stakes gambling. Always very clever, Paula arranged that as hostess of the evening she would receive a certain percentage of the winnings, and this would go into her kitty. Eventually, when she and Erich and their son Harry went into the underground to escape the Nazis, this money paid for their whole last year.

Uncle Fritz Kastan and his sister Lotte were among the many relatives who often accompanied us on Sunday outings in the Grunewald, where we would brew coffee and eat cakes at the cafes along the Havel River in Potsdam. One childhood observation of Tante Lotte on one of these outings sticks in my mind. In the thirties, good women’s clothes in Germany were never bought off the rack. They were always tailor made. One day when Lotte was with us my mother was wearing a beautiful gray gabardine suit with a navy silk blouse under it which had a round Peter Pan collar. Lotte was also dressed in a gray suit, but she was wearing a shirt with a man’s collar, and I thought it looked so smart and fashionable compared to Mutti’s round collar, which looked a little frumpy to me.

Tante Lotte would get out of Germany and go to London before the persecution accelerated to the point that Jews couldn’t get out. The Nazis would eventually force my mother to divorce my father, and their marriage would not survive the long separation. I found out that after the war that Lotte had advertised in the personals in the Jewish newspaper in London. Vati saw the ad and responded to it, only to find that it was placed by his cousin. This was one of those strange, sad coincidences brought about by the displacements of war.

Another cousin, Felix Dresdner, was the only one in the family outside of Vati to marry a shiksa, or non-Jewish woman. Her name was Emmy. They had a little girl named Renate. When I was eight she was two and she was the only cousin younger than I. She was the only small child I was exposed to, and I was totally in love with her. I wanted a sibling so badly I used to drive my mother crazy with it. Children at that time used to put sugar out on the window sill thinking the stork would come and take it. If the sugar would disappear that meant a baby was on the way. I would put the sugar out faithfully, and my sugar would never disappear, and I would be so sad. One year I bugged my mother so much that I wanted a baby that to get me off her ear she promised me we would have one. Years later I wondered how my mother could give me such false hope when she was already in her middle forties. Little Renate would be my consolation for having no sibling. I remember when Vati would pick them up to go on a Sunday outing with us, and then we would take them home, and I would go into her room and she would be falling asleep and singing, “Riding in the car, yes, going to sleep, no.” I thought it was so cute. I was transfixed, totally fascinated with that child.

Others of the cousins had children that were closer to my age. Uncle Fritz Wolff and his wife, Aunt Erna, had a daughter Lieselotte, a year older than me, and Leo, whom they called Leochen, a couple of years younger. Uncle Erich and Aunt Paula had one child, Harry, two year younger than me. He was the epitome of a spoiled brat. He would have temper tantrums. One time when he was at our house for a birthday party and his parents told him they had to go home, he had an absolute meltdown. He screamed and stomped so much on the floor that my father, becoming angry, said, “We are going to have so many complaints from the people downstairs. We can’t tolerate this behavior. Our child never does anything like that and wouldn’t get away with it if she did. We aren’t going to let him come to our house unless his behavior improves.” And they never came again.

Another time my father went on a business trip for wine sales to the home of a nobleman who lived on the outskirts of Berlin. He took me along as he often did, and that time Harry accompanied us. I was about nine and Harry about seven. I had on a dress with a ribbon in the back tied in a bow. Harry would walk behind me and constantly undo the bow. Someone would retie the bow for me, and Harry would sneak up and untie it again. Finally I got so mad that I turned around and gave him a Backfeife, literally a “cheek whistle,” or a slap in the face. He was so stunned that after that he never bothered me again. I was proud that I took care of this annoyance myself rather than whining to my father about it.

Other cousins who were a part of my life at the time were the relatives of Fritz Wolff’s wife, Erna. Fritz and Erna were actually cousins who married. Erna’s parents, Benno and Zilla, lived in Berlin. Her father had been a movie producer in the silent era, and they had very classy furnishings in their apartment. When I knew them they were old and much less prosperous than they had been during their years in the film industry.

Along with Erna they had a daughter Ilse and a son Richard, who were also included in some of the family celebrations. I don’t know what ultimately became of Richard, but Ilse would play an important role during the persecution time.

My father’s extended family stretches out from the cousins to the spouses of the cousins to the in-laws. This big family that was so close really enriched my life. But the ones we always socialized with were the cousins. Vati’s brother and his two sisters were hardly ever included in the many family gatherings we had. It was as if they were a different branch of the family. Vati was a change of life baby, born in 1895. His siblings were all much older. Helene was born in 1877, Erna in 1880, and Max in 1885. As might be expected, given this age gap, they all had more staid, conservative lifestyles than did he or the cousins like Fritz Wolff, who were more his age. We did have fairly frequent contact with his brother, my Uncle Max, and his wife Irma, who was a homespun and to me rather boring woman. They had a son, Kurt, who was four years older than I. We visited them more than they visited us, since they did not own a car. I can remember Tante Irma in her bottle thick glasses singing Kurt to sleep while playing the guitar.

Erna, the middle sister, married quite late and thus had no children. Her husband, Adolf Lewin, was somewhat older than she. They owned a huge old apartment complex on Barnimstrasse, near Alexanderplatz, in downtown Berlin. It had the customary Fronthaus and Backhaus with a courtyard in between. Adolf was already retired and would wear a silk dressing jacket with a scarf around his neck. This impressed me as very old fashioned. My father, who wouldn’t be caught dead in such attire, saw it as a symbol of stodgy conservatism. As a child I was so used to newer, more modern things that the old fashioned atmosphere at Tante Erna’s house seemed very strange and stuffy to me. But she redeemed herself by making the most delicious lokshen kugel (noodle pudding) with raisins. When she knew we were coming she would always make it for me. It was far better than the cakes that were the more common fare of relative get togethers.

Lene, the oldest, was to me the stereotype of the old spinster aunt. She had lived with her mother, my grandmother, and after her death, Mutti would say that we ought to invite Lene over for Friday Sabbath dinner. Not that we ever did any Shabbos prayers or anything ceremonial, but my mother always made a Friday night dinner, and Lene would come over and go home on Saturday. Regardless of what my mother cooked for dinner, Lene would always say in a humble little voice, “I don’t want to eat too much, or I will get an upset stomach.” I thought she must have picked this up from her mother, who in her last years was always complaining about some bodily ailment. But despite her delicate stomach, she would always end up taking second helpings of everything. And my parents would look at one another with eyes rolling upward. When she finished eating she would always ask my mother for some baking soda to ward off the upset stomach. She was a sweet, quiet lady. She and Max and Erna all had much more subdued temperaments than my father, who was the family live wire. His much more extroverted, fun loving temperament, together with his much younger age, is what drew him away from them and toward the more likeminded cousins.

From 1941, when we returned from Belgium, we became aware of more and more arrests and disappearances and killings of Jews. The first of my relatives to fall victim to the Nazis was my Uncle Max. He was picked up and shot in a big action in 1941. At the time the Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union and Goebbels was riling up the German people with hatred of the Russians. In the Berlin Lustgarten, the big open space in front of the royal palace where all the big rallies took place, he placed an exhibit called “Soviet Paradise” depicting the misery of life in the USSR. The exhibit was burned down by the underground Communist movement. But their secret gatherings were all covered up as “Nazi” meetings, since all these underground communists had joined the S. A., the Brown Shirts, to cover their true identity as Communists. The tailor my father went to, whose shop was across the street from us, was a Communist, and when Vati saw him and said, “How are you?” he would always answer, “Like a steak, outside brown and inside red.” Because of their brown exterior the Communist underground was undetectable to the Nazis. So the Nazis resorted to their common tactic, blaming the Jews for the action. Any bad thing that happened in society or the economy was always the Jews’ fault. Goebbels ordered the arrest of a thousand Jews. They were brought to the Police Presidium and shot on the spot.

My Uncle Max was among their number. He was the first one of my father’s close relatives to be killed. During that period the Jews had all been put into forced labor in establishments such as ammunition factories to aid the German war effort. Max was placed in a lacquer factory, and he worked very diligently there. He said to my mother, “I don’t have to worry about disappearing, because I am such a hard worker.” In the winter he was sick with the flu and he dragged himself to work no matter what. He said, “I have never missed a single day of work.” But this did not stop him from being among the thousand blamed for burning the anti-Soviet exhibit. They were picked up at work, loaded like cattle onto the trucks, taken over to the Police Presidium and shot instantly. Aunt Irma was called to come and pick up an urn of ashes alleged to be her husband’s, though they were probably not. They were placed in my grandmother’s grave at the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, the section of Berlin where they lived. Mutti accompanied her to the grave.

During this time my mother was working at her job in the Meinl coffee store. Whenever there was a holiday they would have what was known as an “extra calling” beyond the ration stamps. For example there might be a calling of fifty grams of coffee beans for Christmas or Easter. The night before the holiday, Mutti and the others working at the store would weigh off and prepare fifty gram bags of coffee beans for whatever customers were registered with them. My mother and the others would each take two beans from each bag and they would add to their coffee ration this way. Mutti was always a big coffee drinker. She hated the ersatz coffee, chicory or other grain that often served as the staple during rationing. This tasted horrible to coffee lovers like my mother. From the coffee she took for herself she would set some aside to take along with other groceries to the Jewish relatives, who were living under greater and greater deprivation.

After Max was shot, Irma lived alone and was quite miserable. Mutti would go often to see her, bringing her coffee and provisions. One day when she had set out to visit Irma, she came back totally depressed. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me that Irma was gone and her apartment had been sealed. She was the first of my relatives to disappear. We never heard anything about what happened to her. The same thing happened to Mutti’s close friends, Ruth and Kurt Levy, whom she had been visiting when I came back to Berlin, fleeing rural anti-Semitism, during my duty year.

Max and Irma had sent their son Kurt to Sweden during summers when he was a child. Through the organization that sponsored these summer vacations, they knew people in Sweden, and when the persecutions accelerated, they sent him to Sweden. So when his father was shot and his mother deported to her death, Kurt was safe in Sweden. He was one of a number of children that German Jewish parents managed to send out of the country to safety. Others were sent to places like England and Palestine, where there were large Jewish communities to receive them.

Not long afterward, my father’s sister Erna and her husband Adolf were sent to the Warsaw ghetto, a walled off part of the city set up by the Nazis to receive Jews from all over Europe. A place of great deprivation, it served as a holding tank for Jews who were eventually shipped in boxcars to the death camps. From there my aunt and uncle were deported with the transport of April 2, 1942 to Twarnici near Lublin, Poland to their deaths, recorded as April 15, 1942. The camps were proliferating in Poland and Czechoslovakia so that millions of people could be efficiently exterminated. This is when they added the gas chambers at Birkenau, next to Auschwitz and the crematoria. While death factories like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka were performing their grim task, other Jews slated to be sent there were being held in the ghettoes. We received a letter from Aunt Erna and Uncle Adolf while they were in the Warsaw ghetto. They said they were sleeping on one fifty centimeter wide cot together and that they both had pneumonia.

My Uncle Fritz Wolff, his wife, Erna, and their children were all picked up and deported to Auschwitz. Upon their arrival there they were separated. At Auschwitz the women and children were sent one way and the men another way. Because he was a watchmaker, Uncle Fritz was set to work on the mountains of watches that were taken from the Jews being murdered in the gas chambers. He had to go through each and every watch, repairing the ones that were not working. Having this task saved his life, but his wife and children were “sent to the showers” and gassed. My cousin Liesalotte was sixteen at the time and her brother Leochen was twelve.

My Tante Lene was picked up in a large action on January 13 and sent to Riga, in Latvia, where Jews were being ghettoized, massacred, or sent to one of the growing number of death camps. They traveled there in the bitter cold in open railroad cars normally used for coal. Some of the relatives have said she ultimately died in Theresienstadt, the ghetto that the Nazis set up in Czechoslovakia to look like a model community to impress international agencies with their “humanity.” There were things there like symphony orchestras, but also great deprivations of basic necessities such as food, and most of the people sent to Theresienstadt either died there or were sent to one of the death camps.

Fritz Kasstan, his wife Claire and their sister Lotte all managed to escape the Nazis. Lotte got to London and was joined by Fritz and Claire, who ultimately emigrated to the United States and settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They had left while we were in Belgium during one of the last windows of opportunity before the deportations began.

Uncle Polde was picked up on the same day they had come for my father in 1938. There were no concentration camps that early, so they held him in existing prisons where they held political prisoners beginning when Hitler took over in 1933. He was held in Oranienburg Prison on the outskirts of Berlin. When he was sent there the Jewish Committee still existed and was still able to do things for people. One of the things they did was to get some of these early detainees out of prison and onto a ship bound for Shanghai. Uncle Polde spent the entire war there, returning to Berlin after the war as an old man.

Fritz Wolff’s brother Erich and his wife Paula, having saved a lot of money from their high stakes gambling sessions, went into the underground along with their son Harry. They were part of a group of eight people who networked, meeting weekly at safe houses and making connections to buy on the black market. People with significant connections who wanted to aid the survival of those who had gone underground would network with one another. They also had to let each other know if anyone under ground had been caught. If it was discovered that someone had been caught, it would be cycled through that network that that place of hiding or gathering could no longer be used.

My mother, through her interest in Erich and Paula, offered her home as one of the meeting places. We were subleasing from a lady in a fourth floor apartment and were surrounded by other tenants. The Gestapo and the Nazi Party, always called the NSDAP, made sure that they had informers in every apartment house. One never knew who these informers were, but living on the fourth floor, we knew it was someone below us. We had a hunch who it might be. There was an older woman who was a busybody, always snooping around, always gossiping about the neighbors. She was very nationalistic and always talking in strident, nasal tones about how we were having one victory after another, a regular toot horn from Goebbels. She lived on the second floor, and we thought she was the one, but we were not sure, and we knew we had to be extremely cautious with virtually everybody. The only ones you trusted and could talk to openly were old friends and relatives. To neighbors, casual acquaintances, storekeepers and the like, you would never dare to say anything oppositional toward the regime. Because if you did, you might well be arrested and prosecuted. My mother hated the Nazis so much that she had trouble controlling her speech, and if she heard an abundance of pro-Nazi talk, she would always be tempted to throw in a “but.” I tried to keep her from doing so. At the time I was always scared: scared of the bombing, scared of the persecution, scared to open my mouth about anything that might be interpreted wrongly. And I was scared for my mother’s sake that she might one day say too much and somebody would turn her in, and she would be picked up. And there was my mother offering our one little subleased room to have as a meeting place for the underground group of which my Uncle Erich and Aunt Paula were members.

Every Thursday at noon they would come to meet at our place. I was never at any of the meetings because at the time I was working at the publishing office. How they managed to come up there without being detected I will never know. During the period when these meetings were occurring, I came home from work one Thursday and found my mother beside herself. She was having high blood pressure that was so bad that when she was under great stress she would become very flushed, and now I saw her there red as a tomato. She told me that just as she was waiting for the group to come, the doorbell rang and she thought it was one of them. But when she opened the door there was the Gestapo. “We are here to look for Erich Wolff and [named all the other people too].” My mother always had a presence of mind. She knew how to keep her cool, something I thought was just so admirable and courageous and prudent.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.

“We understand that they meet here every Thursday at noon.”

“I never heard of such a thing. This is something that somebody fabricated and gave you my name. There is nothing of that sort going on.”

“Then we will just sit here and wait and see if they come.”

For an hour the Gestapo officers sat there in total silence with my mother in that room.

My mother’s blood pressure must have been going through the roof. But she had to stay cool on the outside and just go about her housework. In her mind she was thinking, “They’re going to ring the bell any minute and it will all be over.” The minutes became like hours as they waited. The tension was all but unbearable. But as the minutes ticked away and the hour finally elapsed, nobody had shown up. We found out later that they had apprehended one member of the group, and so the group had dissolved. When people in any of the many underground groups were apprehended, it got back to the others and they had to change their meeting places. The one of Erich’s group who had been caught had given up our address, but the others had been alerted not to come. So the Gestapo waited, concluded they were not coming, left, and never returned.

Erich and Paula and Harry were never captured. They survived the underground to the end of the war. They were the only ones of all my relatives who lived underground and survived. When the war was over they came to us and spoke about their survival. Erich’s sister Friedl, however, was not so fortunate. She was picked up and we never found out what happened to her. This also happened to Fritz Wolff’s sister-in-law, Ilse.

Felix and Emmy and their little girl Renata, whom I loved so much, were a mixed family like us, since Emmy was not Jewish. When we came back to Berlin for the last time during the war they were gone, and we never learned what happened to them. We thought they might have gotten out of Berlin and gone to live in a more remote place.

When the war was over, the Jews who had survived the death camps went to the Allied forces, identified themselves and were given housing right away. Fully furnished luxury apartments on the posh Kaiserdamm that had been occupied by the Nazis were given to the survivors. These apartments became a central gathering point for Jews coming out of the underground as well as those who were coming back from the concentration camps. A Jewish Committee quickly organized there and became a central communication bureau for the Jews coming back to Berlin. That was how my Uncle Fritz, coming back from Auschwitz, ended up in one of these apartments.

Fritz and Erich both got involved in black market activities after the war, and through them my mother also became involved. She needed a way to support us, since the Meinl coffee store had ceased to exist. The goods she sold were things of value that Berliners had managed to rescue from the bombings. As liaison between sellers and buyers she spent much time running around Berlin networking. This was not easy to do, with public transportation in postwar Berlin largely bombed out. But all the walking she did to facilitate these deals probably helped lower her blood pressure. At this time Fritz’s jewelry store served as the front for dealing in black marketed Persian rugs, oil paintings, jewelry and other valuable commodities.

Living in the apartments on the Kaiserdamm and meeting in Erich’s big apartment, Fritz encountered an underground friend of Erich named Margot Mossberg. Both Fritz and Margot were sole survivors, their spouses and children having perished in the camps. Having this grief in common, they became close and married within a year and then had a child named Angela. Fritz and Erich and their families all migrated to the United States and opened a jewelry store in New York where Fritz, now known as Fred, continued to repair watches. In the mid-fifties Fred and Margot moved to New Jersey where for a time they operated a chicken farm. After Fred died Margot moved to Philadelphia, where she still lives in her nineties. I talk to here periodically, and recently I viewed the tape of her story as a Holocaust survivor, which she made in the eighties for a Jewish organization.

When Mutti was going over to the Kaiserdamm apartment to arrange business deals, I often accompanied her, and we heard many horror stories from death camp survivors. One man told a story that gave me nightmares for weeks. The S. S. had forced him to watch as they picked up small living children by the legs, as one might pick up a chicken, and smashed them against the big iron ovens, then stuffed them into the ovens alive. It was indescribably horrible for me to picture this. I heard many such gruesome stories from camp survivors, stories that left a deep impressions on me and which seared the survivors’ memories causing them untold grief for the rest of their lives.

Survivors of my father’s big extended family whom we kept contact with in the United States included Uncle Fred and his brother, Erich, and his wife, Paula and son, Harry. With Fred and Margot staying on the East coast, Erich and Paul and Harry made their way to Los Angeles, where we established contact with them. Within the past ten years all three of them died: first Uncle Erich, then Aunt Paula, both very old, and then Harry in 2003. Harry had worked in family businesses his father had opened and always suffered from bad health. Yet he was more prolific than most modern Jews, marrying a Berliner named Ella and fathering five children.

Another casualty of the Nazi persecution was my parents’ marriage. In 1941, shortly after we had returned from Belgium my mother was summoned to Gestapo Headquarters on Alexanderplatz and was told in no uncertain terms that she, an Aryan woman, was expected to initiate a divorce from her Jewish spouse. She replied that she saw no reason whatsoever to dissolve a marriage of nearly twenty years. They did not press her at the time, but as they separated out Aryan from Jew to create their purified racial order, there was no way they were going to let this matter drop. The following year, Mutti received another summons and they repeated their demand that she divorce my father. Again she resisted divorce, and as a result we endured having our household ration card cut to the less than adequate level of a “Jewish family.” We were allowed less coal for heating in the winter and fewer of certain commodities, such as potatoes and vegetables.

Early in 1943, the Gestapo once again ordered Mutti to appear before them. Later she told me that it felt like entering a lion’s den. Again they demanded the divorce, and again, outspoken as ever, she repeated that she saw no reason to divorce her husband, boldly letting the interviewer know her feelings on the matter. This time, however, the Gestapo grew considerably harsher in the threats they hurled at her. They said that as the wife of a Jew, she would not be considered trustworthy to raise her child in the National Socialistic spirit, and therefore her child would be removed from her custody.

Of course, this devastated her, and on returning home she immediately called together the Jewish relatives who had not yet been sent to concentration camps and were still in Berlin. They persuaded her that to keep me from being taken away, she must accede to the demand and initiate the divorce. My father, they said, would probably not even find out about the divorce, since the war had cut off mail service between Germany and the United States. So Mutti filed for divorce, and in March she received the final papers. Feeling a sense of relief, she put the matter aside as coping with the daily stress of war absorbed her energies. In fact the German government somehow did manage to notify my father, and this would eventually have serious repercussions.

Chapter Nine
The Russian Occupation

The final battle of the War in Europe took place in Berlin. Along with the bombing and the incessant hammering of heavy artillery came horrendous street battles. We never saw the shootouts between tanks and other ground fighting that took place because we were huddled in the basement shelter. But we heard the continuous gunfire of the Germans and Russians fighting it out. The twentieth of April, 1945, Hitler’s last birthday, was also the last day I went to work at the publisher’s office. As the battle sounds exploded around us everybody got ready to grab their belongings and provisions and situate themselves in the cellars. Our apartment house, which I mentioned was a public air raid center, had individual places where each household stored such things as coal and foods like potatoes. Under this state of siege we all now made arrangements to stay in our individual storage areas for a long time. So we went about making them as comfortable as possible, adding such things as couches and upholstered chairs to make something like a living room in each combining several household spaces. We anticipated a very severe final battle, with West Berlin, where we were, the final stronghold, since the Russians were coming in from the East.

The battle went on with us huddled in the basement for about a week. Between periods of shooting, there would be lulls of about ten minutes taken to reload or whatever. During these periods we would rush upstairs to go to the bathroom or get something we needed and rush back down again. Periodically we also had to get water, and down the block was an old fashioned iron water pump from horse drawn carriage days. Even though it was no longer used, the pump still worked. With the water in the apartment houses all turned off, each family took turns sending someone to the pump to get a bucket of water. When it came our turn, Mutti and I took the bucket and ran to the end of the block, and just as we were pumping the water into the bucket we heard the clak-clak-clak sound of an artillery shell very close by and then the explosion. We ran as if lightening had struck us, spilling most of the water from the bucket, back to our shelter. This was the closest I had been to actual cannon fire, quite a nerve shaking experience.

When we had been in the shelter for about a week, on April 28, the first Russian soldiers came in. Having been cut off from communication with the outside world, we didn’t know what the state of things was. Fighting was still going on, but less intensively. At this point some Russian soldiers appeared at the basement door. As our neighbors reacted in horror, Mutti and I imagined that our liberators had arrived. Little did we know how those conquering troops were about to behave. The first one who approached us had his whole arm full of watches. He kept saying, “Uhry, uhry,” by which he meant watch, Uhr in German. So everybody who had a watch had to give it to him to add to the fifteen or so already draped on his arm. The whole little group of Russians seemed interested only in collecting watches from us. We now became frightened, as we began to see that to the Russian soldiers we were all part of the German enemy who had invaded their country and killed so many millions of them.

Next came another group who wanted to take some of the women out, saying, “Komm Frau, Komm Frau.” While they didn’t take anyone yet, they kept saying that and scaring us to death. As a young woman I was particularly vulnerable, and we all decided it was going to be necessary for the young women and the girls to hide. Previously the residents of the building had each been sitting in their own little group in their own part of the basement. At this point we decided we needed to come together in one group. There were about fifty of us, predominantly women, and our strategy was to gain some strength of numbers just by sitting all together. So instead of sitting in our individual storage areas we went back to sitting in the big room where we all had sat during the air raids. We placed chairs around the four walls and people sat there together. In one of the side rooms there were bunk beds where some of the girls hid, either underneath or under lots of clothes piled on top. This gave Mutti and me the idea of using clothes we had brought down. We sat on two straight chairs with a big pile of our clothing around us. At this point the Russians were coming down one to three times an hour to look for young women. When we heard their boots tramping downstairs, I would lie across our two chairs with a huge pile of clothes covering my upper body and Mutti sitting on my legs. So it looked like one chair had someone sitting on it and the other had a pile of clothes lying on top.

Since there was no electricity, we sat in pitch black darkness, except if we needed to do something, when we would turn on a kerosene lantern. As we were sitting in total darkness, the Russians would come down with their flashlights. They would flash them around to see whom they wanted to take out. The women all made themselves as grim and ugly as possible with kerchiefs covering much of their faces. When the Russians would come down saying, “Komm Frau,” they would each go into their different laments about how sick they were. One woman would cry, “Diphtheria!” My mother, who used to have real gall bladder attacks, would fake one of them. When the Russian soldier came up she would be lamenting and yammering and screaming and crying in pain. These men were mostly simple peasants from the Russian hinterland, and they would be frightened and put off by all the theatrics.

During the intense street battles and especially after the Russians took over our building, we were afraid to go upstairs to the bathrooms. So things became more and more unsanitary, as we were unable to wash and we had to use a big garbage can to relieve ourselves. These had been placed in a closet in the basement to be used during the air raids, though no one ever used them then. We all held out until we could get back upstairs. But now, with the Russians there, we had no choice but to use the cans. And with all the people down there day after day they were beginning to fill up, and they were beginning to stink horrendously. We had no air vents or windows and the big main door was closed, and as the air became more and more fetid, we became more and more miserable. We were stuck in that hole in these deteriorating conditions from the twentieth of April until the first of May when we collectively decided that we must get out of there.

For food we were eating what was left of our meager rations. By the last part of April we had exhausted our canned goods and were pretty much starving. On May 1, the big Communist labor day, the Russian soldiers were all given liberty and all the vodka they could drink. The orders that had come down essentially said, “You celebrate, it’s your great victory, anything goes.” Early in the day they came down and told us that the women could all come upstairs and get food. This was all being prepared as a soup or stew in one gigantic pot. They said that if each of us would bring up a pot or a bowl we would get food. This was actually a ploy they used to get an accurate count of how many women there were in the basement, something they could never tell with their flashlights amid all the commotion we were raising. My mother and others told me and the other young women not to go up because we would be dragged off right away. So the older ones went up with their pots and got some food. We were so starved that we gobbled that food, which was the most awful concoction that you can imagine. It was big chunks of fatty, greasy bacon with potatoes and noodles. This was their normal fare, though it would normally have been repulsive to us were we not so hungry. We had been starved for over a week, and then we ate this terrible stuff, and many of us began to feel sick.

I had been given the food while in my hiding situation, because the Russians were coming down constantly every ten minutes or so, one contingent after another. If you were one of the young women hiding, you would no sooner get up and stretch your legs after one group of them left, then you would hear more boots on the stairs and had to get back into hiding. There I was lying uncomfortably stretched across two chairs with my mother sitting on my legs and all the clothes on top of me, and I couldn’t get up, and I got so nauseated and sick that I had to throw up. Now I was in a real dilemma. I could not just throw up on the floor when they were sitting there in front of us trying to find suitable women to take out. So as the food began to come up, all I could do was what I instinctively did, swallow it all again. And it would come up repeatedly, and I would keep swallowing it.

That terrible night of the first of May capped three days that the Russians had taken over our building and were coming into our basement. We all felt that we could no longer live this way, and so we all decided we must go upstairs and go together into one apartment. This we did and when the Russians came and banged on the door and forced their way in, we all screamed in unison as loud as we could. This caused them to leave, since they had only received official permission to go wild on May 1 and now they were afraid of getting in trouble. They were supposed to keep to rules that made it off limits to molest us. The house across the street from us had been made a local headquarters for their commanding officers. Mutti told me that she wanted to go there and tell them that she and I were not Nazis, but were in fact under persecution from them and in need of protection. She went with an interpreter and talked to the commander, saying she wanted protection for her daughter. They responded that they understood and that she should just bring me right over and I should stay with them and they would protect me. Of course, Mutti recognized what they were really about and did not take me over there.

On May fourth it was my seventeenth birthday. The Russians were continuing to come and search the apartment, hoping to find young women they could take out. In the hall of each apartment there was a storage shelf built near the ceiling with a curtain over it. When we heard the Russian soldiers coming I would immediately use the ladder placed next to the shelf to climb up there and put boxes and things in front of me and draw the curtain. Others helping me would then quickly take the ladder away. If the Russians were to open the curtain all they would see would be the suitcases and boxes that I was wedged behind. After they were gone one of the ladies would put the ladder back and I would climb down. On my birthday morning the Russians posted an order that everyone in the houses had to come down and start cleaning up the rubble. There were now mountains of debris from walls having been knocked out of the buildings, and the streets were piled high with rubble. We were supposed to clean this up so that the streets could be freed for passage. So the women went down to shovel bricks, but my mother told me that under no circumstances was I going to come down and join them. Instead I spent my entire birthday up on the shelf behind the boxes and suitcases hiding from the Russians.

There were stories of their coming by with trucks and loading the women on and taking them away. And in fact a great many German women were kidnapped and raped and otherwise abused. As the conquering army, the Russians were eager for revenge against the Germans, who had invaded their country, destroyed much of it and killed many millions. Once they got to Berlin they would treat us all as so many spoils of war. As I crouched up there on the shelf behind the curtain my mind would race and I would see all the women in the street including my mother being carted away and my being left all alone. What would I do? Where would I go? As bad as the bombing had been, as bad as it had been lying across those chairs in the dark and swallowing my own vomit, those hours I spent on my birthday all alone on that high shelf were some of the worst yet. With no one to talk to and not knowing what was going on, I was in a continuous state of terror. To my great relief, they all came back in the afternoon and I had never felt more thankful as when they put the ladder up to the shelf to help me down to go to the bathroom.

After this, things began very slowly to return to a better state. The streets were slowly being cleaned up, people were beginning to start to go about their business and walk to other parts of the city. In some areas the subways, on an extremely limited basis, were beginning to function. Most of the thoroughfares had been bombed out, but if you were lucky you could go from one station to the next, and then you’d have to get out and walk for awhile, and then you could ride to another station, and so on. They were beginning to put some of the buses back in service, and you could cobble together a ride and walk and ride again to your work place, if you still had one. Some of the stores were beginning to get limited amounts of commodities. The Russian Army was providing some flour to the bakeries, and you would line up at night hoping to get a loaf of bread in the morning. There were lines everywhere: in the stores, on the bus stops. A bus might come every hour, but there were too many people for it to accommodate, so you might be waiting for three hours before you would finally get on a bus. The really scary thing about waiting in the lines is that often the Russians would come driving by and grab women out of them. There were very few men around, because most of them were still in the military.

If you had a place of work that still existed and your job still existed, you were permitted to go there, if you could get there. Otherwise, you were required to join one of the cleanup crews. If you look at the newsreels of Berlin in the postwar period, you see little else but people in the streets picking up rubble. And if you were out there on the street, there was always the risk that you might disappear. I was scared all the time, and if I would walk down the street and see a Russian soldier coming my way, I would immediately go around the corner and take another street. I avoided even passing one.

The Russians especially liked to steal bicycles, watches and clocks. The Germans were known for having public clocks everywhere, every Platz, every subway station. But once the Russians were in Berlin for awhile, you would not see any. Every clock was dismantled and hauled away. Most of the Russians had not had bicycles in their own country and they were not adept at riding them. Once I saw one of them trying to ride a very nice bike, and he was unable to. Then he saw a little boy riding his dilapidated bike, and thinking it easier to ride, he traded his good bike for the boy’s. The boy took off immediately on the nice bike, leaving the Russian trying without much success to ride the dilapidated one. Most of the Russian soldiers had come from rural places without running water. They would use pots and pans from the cupboards for toilets. To wash they would go down to the courtyard where they had placed a big bucket of water, suck the water into their mouths, and spit it on their hands. Unaware of the faucets by the sinks in the apartments, they made their mouths into faucets. Some washed themselves in the toilet because they thought it was a wash basin.

The Russian occupation of the whole of Berlin lasted for several weeks before the U. S. and British forces arrived. According to the agreement Eisenhower had made, they all waited at the Elbe River. So the Russians had free rein to do as they pleased as they occupied Berlin without having to account to the other Allies. After about six weeks, we began to hear that the Western Allies were going to come in. This came to us simply by word of mouth, since there were no newspapers or radio stations functioning. We had no idea when or how the other Allies would join in the occupation. We heard that Berlin was going to be divided into British, Russian, American and French sectors, and we wondered which sector we would be in. We were praying that we would be under one of the Western Powers. After seven weeks the agreement was finalized, and our sector in Charlottenburg became British. The Northern part became French, all of downtown and East of downtown became Russian, the Western part became British, and the Southern part American.

Chapter Ten
Life in a Divided Berlin

One day, as Berlin was transitioning to its postwar status under the Four Powers, I ventured downtown to see what had become of the publishing office where I had worked.

The only reason that publishing house had continued to exist during the war was because they were publishing literature on generating fuel from wood for military transport. The publications were in the form of handbooks and pamphlets.

In 1944, when Mutti had succeeded in getting the job for me there, she had found out that the head of the company, a man named Kasper, was a Nazi bigwig. He was, however, usually absent from the office where I would be working, and Mutti had subtly sounded out the manager, Friederich Unger, to see where he stood politically. When she had one of these political conversations with someone we did not know, it would make a nervous wreck out of me, because if whoever it was had turned out to be a Nazi, she could have been apprehended and carted off on the spot. I told her I hated for her to get into these political conversations, because I feared I would come home some afternoon and she would be gone. In fact she sought out an anti-Nazi network because she yearned for sources of information outside the official ones. When she made a connection of this sort, she would feel a sense of kinship with others of like mind, and this became a source of hope and courage.

It had turned out that Herr Unger, while running a Nazi firm, had anti-government sentiments. So Mutti had taken the calculated risk of confiding in him, telling him that I was a Mischling with a Jewish father. His response was to tell me that I must be extremely careful never to mention this to anyone in the office, particularly the human resource person, who did the payroll and who was also a Nazi. So here I was again in major denial of my Jewish background. Both Mutti and I hated having to live a lie in this regime that was so filled with lies. To hear the truth, we would listen, during this time, to the weekly broadcasts of the Voice of America on the BBC. They always began with the Morse code that sounded like the three notes at the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Those dramatic three notes always gave me goose bumps. They meant that now I was going to get the truth. We would hear what was really going on in the war, that the Germans were being defeated in Stalingrad and retreating, not winning the endless string of victories of Goebbels’s propaganda stories. After hearing these broadcasts I would come in to work the next day and Herr Unger would call me into his office to tell him what they had said. There were other apprentices there who had seniority over me, and they would be green with envy and could not understand why I was so privileged to be called into the boss’s office. Having had this ongoing secret between us had made me feel especially honored and privileged.

After the war, when I discovered that the office where I had worked no longer existed, I remembered where Herr Unger lived and decided to go to see him. He lived in Berlitz, a far southern suburb of Berlin way at the end of the subway line. But since I did not want to have to shovel bricks in the street, I took the half day to make the trip to see him, hoping he could help me find work. Normally this journey would have taken a half hour on the subway, transferring at a couple of stations. But with conditions as they were, the subway ride was interspersed with bus rides and a great deal of waiting and walking. When I finally found Herr Unger’s residence, he was delighted to see me. He told me that he wanted to try to establish himself in a publishing firm of his own under the Allies. He lived in the American sector, and he hired me to come out twice a week and take applications to the Americans so that he might get some kind of a license to publish. But this turned out to be a futile attempt because there were no licenses being given out and no new businesses being authorized. But Herr Unger, who was an older man dreaming of getting back in business again, would continue to dictate letters to me addressed to all kinds of offices and agencies. This was frustrating to me because I could see its futility better than he could. But at least I had a certificate that I was employed somewhere, which kept me off the rubble piles. He paid me the minimal amount, which amounted to mere pocket money.

While I was going out to the American Headquarters to the various offices with Herr Unger’s applications, Mutti and I decided that we should use the opportunity to ask the Americans to help us reestablish communication with my father. So I carried with me a notepad which I used to make several copies of a message to my father at the last address we had for him saying that we had survived the war and that we now lived at 32A Scharren Street. I would approach various G. I.’s and in my very poor English ask them if they might be willing to send out the note. My heart would always be beating as I did this, because I did not want to seem like I was trying to make a connection with one of these men. I was well aware that some of the German girls were selling themselves to the American or English or even Russian soldiers in order to get food or cigarettes or chocolate and the like. These women were known as Amie Liebschen. The last thing I wanted to do was to give anyone the impression that I was looking for that kind of connection. So I would look for guys who looked older, fatherly, or less attractive. The young, good looking ones I would stay away from.

The “Amies” (what we called the Americans) occupied the most upscale section in the outskirts of Berlin and quartered themselves in the spacious villas there. On the big front lawns I would often see these men throwing baseballs to one another. I could not figure out why grown men would be doing that. But I thought, if they are throwing balls, like so many children, they must be nice and wholesome. In fact I never had any untoward experience with any of them. No one ever came on to me, probably at least in part because I always approached them in a strictly curt, business manner. I never engaged them in much conversation and with my scanty knowledge of English could not have done so anyway. Most of them were hard for me to understand, with their unfamiliar accents and frequent southern drawl. It often sounded to me like they weren’t saying anything except “waaal, waaal, waaal waal.” I was most comfortable when I just handed one of them a slip of paper and was gone.

At length one GI named Musselman, probably the only one who actually sent the note out, received a reply from my father. He sent us a note in English saying he had a letter from my father and giving his address for me to come and pick it up. I got on the subway, went out to the American zone, and he gave me a one-page letter my father had written to him. It followed the protocol set by the occupation forces that such communication had to go through them. So it began, “Please tell my daughter. . .” He handed me the letter and as I read it only one phrase stuck out: “I am married again.” Those words went through me like a knife. They kept echoing in my head. I tried to control my emotion in the presence of the American soldier, though he must have sensed that something I read had hit me hard. I took the letter and left and sat down on the subway and began to cry, and not caring that there were people around me I just sobbed and sobbed the whole way home. How was I going to tell Mutti? I walked around and around the block steeling myself, trying to plan how I was going to tell her this wretched news. I plodded up the stairs heavy hearted, opened the door, handed her the note and broke down again. Seeing me like this, she guessed its content, and she took me in her arms saying, “I know, I know.” At the time I was amazed at her prescience, but I am less so today, since I’ve often had similar precognitions with my own children.

As I calmed down, my secondary reaction was anger at my father that he would betray us in this way. As a teenager it was easy for me to go quickly into judgmental anger. At first I thought, I don’t want to have anything more to do with him. So I did not write back to my father. But shortly we received news of my parents’ good friends the Plotkes. Kurt Plotke, who had done business with my father, had emigrated to the United States, run into Vati there and renewed the friendship. Their son, Jerry, a few years older than I, had become an officer in the American Army and was now stationed in Berlin. He paid us a visit one day, told us about his parents, and offered to act as a conduit for messages to and from my father. He invited me to come to his place on the American compound and offered me a good wage if I would help him with a voluminous correspondence he was doing reconnecting surviving Jews. In this endeavor, a great many friends of his father were using him as a mail courier. I was delighted to help him with this task and the money supplemented the meager amount I was making with Herr Unger.

Jerry had an older, married German man who was serving as his butler. When he was gone, he would leave directions with the butler as to what I was to do. I would have long, enjoyable conversations with this butler. One day I was talking with him, expressing some frustration that Jerry had not taken me to the USO for dinner, not because I had any romantic interest in Jerry, but because in postwar Berlin we Germans never got enough to eat and were mainly concerned about getting a decent meal. In fact I was so focused on these kinds of essential needs that I was not thinking at all about socializing let alone having a romance with any man. When I complained thus to the butler, he told me that I should be glad he did not take me there, because that showed that he respected me. In my naivety I did not know that the USO was mainly a place where GI’s would go to meet German women with whom they could have easy sex in exchange for gifts.

As regular mail service gradually returned in 1946, the stenographic and courier work I was doing for Jerry Plotke ended. I was also getting tired of carrying messages for Herr Unger, and I wanted to do something more engaging. The work I had done for Unger, boring and futile though it was, was invaluable to me, because he gave me the certificate stating that I had finished my apprenticeship. I could now go out and use this status to obtain a more skilled position in publishing. I heard at my parish church that the Catholic diocesan publishing office was being reestablished. They were in a southern suburb called Neukolln. I went out there one day where I found them in a storefront they had leased. They had gotten a permit to publish the diocesan newspaper again, and they had about a half a dozen people there in this early stage of their reorganizing. The publishing office was called the Morus Verlag, after their patron saint, Thomas More. The diocesan paper, which was just starting to come out again, was called Petrusblatt, or St. Peter’s Paper. This firm was favorably impressed with my credentials and I was hired on the spot. I was now employed in Catholic surroundings in a very reputable publishing firm, a nourishing and rewarding place for me to be. I would remain there during the rest of the time I spent in Germany.

The head of the firm was the General Vicar of the diocese, Msgr. Adolf. I was assigned to work in the section that handled the distribution of the weekly paper to the parishes. Soon the firm would obtain permits to publish accounts of the work of the Catholic Church in Germany during the Nazi period. They did not have the resources yet to publish books on this subject, so they commissioned a number of pamphlets. These focused on the martyrs who had given their lives as they stood up for righteousness and justice during the oppressions of the Hitler regime. One of the best known was Monsignor Lichtenberg, a canon lawyer with the Cathedral. He would take cases to the Roman tribunal to get excommunicated people reinstated in the church. In fact he was instrumental in getting my mother, who had been excommunicated for marrying outside the church, reinstated. The Monsignor, a very personable and compassionate man, was also very outspoken about the Jewish persecution. One day the Gestapo stormed into the Cathedral and took him right out of the pulpit. He was shipped to Dachau and eventually killed.

As they produced these pamphlets, I was given the position to oversee their distribution to Catholic bookstores and parishes. At age eighteen I was thrilled to be given such a responsible position. The bookstores were given quotas of pamphlets according to the size of their parishes. Out of the figures given to me, I had to calculate how many each store would be allotted. In going about this task I got to know all the bookstore owners, who would come in person and confer with me. They would bring me books that had survived the war in their stores and warehouses as informal bribes to give them better quotas. Many of the high quality German books which I have to this day were ones that they gave me. Being in such a position that bookstore owners would so pay homage to me made me feel quite powerful. The department I headed was called Vertrieb, or the giving out of books and papers. The weekly task was the distribution of the diocesan newspaper to the individual parishes. Each parish would send someone to come and pick up its pile of papers. Shipping was not possible in the primitive conditions we had been reduced to in the immediate postwar years. My department consisted of four young women and one older lady, who was the supervisor. We younger ones became very good friends, and after more than fifty-five years I still remain in touch with them. Whenever I go to Berlin, one of these women, Edith, organizes a reunion. And I have visited with another, Regina, both in Munich and the United States. This enjoyable job I had with the diocese, together with my continuing involvement in Catholic Youth, nourished me in the postwar years and aided my recovery from the trauma of the war.

During the time I was working for Jerry Plotke, and through his instrumentation I began regular communications with my father. Vati suggested that I think seriously about coming to live in the United States, since he was now a citizen, and as his child I could easily gain admission. Still angry about his remarriage, I said that I would never leave my mother and come to live with him. But as time went on I began to heal. My father was such an outgoing man and such an excellent letter writer that some of my old feelings of affection for him began to return. Understanding my feelings, he exercised a good deal of patience and tact with me. These were days of great hardship in Berlin, hardship that would contribute to my eventually changing my mind about emigration. So slowly was the city’s commercial base returning that there was hardly anything for us to buy with the money I was earning.

Mutti, in those difficult days after the war ended, was making her money working with Uncle Fritz in his black market trade. She took on the role of a middle person between people who needed to sell valuables and people who wanted to buy. One big American buyer she dealt with was a real wheeler dealer awash in cash and able to buy lots of items including bolts of material for suits and jewelry with precious gems. From his position in Army Intelligence he was also able to requisition choice items from the former Nazi mansions. And when he returned to the States, this gentleman was very well off indeed.

Mutti was often the contact person who had the network which could provide him with whatever goods he wanted. One item I remember her getting him was a fine leather briefcase. During that time I had some big conflicts with my mother over her involvement in the black market. I had a youth’s exaggerated sense of justice, and I thought it terrible that she was earning money in this way. Thinking about how strongly and vocally I condemned her at the time now makes me embarrassed. What did I really know about doing business and surviving in postwar Berlin? I begrudged her the little income she took by marking the items up slightly to gain her commissions, thinking the whole process very shady. At the time I never gave a thought to the miles and miles she trudged every day to do her little business transactions. Nor did I think about the high blood pressure and heart disease that had begun to afflict her. I did not think about the fact that what she got for her trouble was her whole source of income, from which she was able to get us the few commodities from the black market that we needed to live. She got a little butter or meat or her beloved coffee in this way.

Eventually, by 1947, Vati supplemented these hard to obtain goods by sending Care packages. As regulated by the U. S. government, these kinds of packages had to be strictly food items; non-food items, including cigarettes, were disallowed by law. My father figured out a way to cleverly conceal packs of cigarettes in raisin boxes, placing raisins above and below to conceal them. Each raisin box held four packs of cigarettes. These were very hard to come by in postwar Germany, and Mutti would sell the ones Vati sent by the piece, not the pack, on the black market. At one point I remember one cigarette was going for as much as twelve marks. She also traded cigarettes for foods with a neighbor who lived above us. A couple of cigarettes might also buy a loaf of bread on the black market. They were as good as currency. Selling and trading these valuable cigarettes along with other items enabled Mutti to keep us in food and pay the rent.

While Berliners as a whole suffered much deprivation in the postwar period, conditions were distinctly better in the Western sectors than in the Soviet one. The Americans shipped in bleached Canadian flour. We had had white bread before the war, but none of us had ever seen bread this white. We were all very excited about it and would rush right down to our bakery and get into long lines when we heard a new shipment had come in. One of the reasons we loved this bread so much was that our regular rationed bread was loaded with fillers. We thought it might even contain wood shavings. This bread always had an unbaked streak through it that tasted absolutely horrible. Mutti couldn’t eat it at all, and she would give it to me. She had always been on the chubby side, but in these years, due to the shortages and lack of availability of good food, she lost a lot of weight.

As bad as things were for us in the Western sectors, people in the Soviet sector were becoming increasingly aware that we had things better than they did. So people living in that sector would try to move to the Western sectors, or if unable to do that, get work there. As Berlin was divided into four sectors, so was Germany divided into four zones. The whole area east of the Elbe River was made the Soviet zone, and Berlin was like a little island in the middle of the Soviet zone. People living in East Germany and East Berlin disliked living under the repressive want of Soviet-style communism, and they would often try to get out by going to West Berlin. The Russians ultimately reacted by passing ordinances against this migration. The situation was exacerbated by the Western Allies’ move toward creating a West German state. The Soviets then moved to sever connection between East and West by setting up a blockade cutting off all ground and water traffic into Berlin. A Western counter-blockade then shut down all traffic from West to East.

To supply Berlin, to which ground access had now been totally shut off, the Western Allies resorted to an airlift. Under the airlift, which went on for over a year, conditions got worse in an already deprived Berlin. Day-to-day life became a drab, pinched affair, with little pleasure and the people reduced to bare essentials. Mutti encouraged me to take advantage of the opportunity to emigrate to the United States. She said I could go and then send for her, and we could both then enjoy a better life in America. At length I agreed and went to the American consulate to begin the process of applying to emigrate. Because Vati had become an American citizen, I was no longer subject to the quota. Others who were under non-quota included displaced persons, many of whom were concentration camp survivors, women who had married Americans, and parents, children and spouses of Americans. One ship a month, laden with such passengers, left from Bremerhaven. Soon I was registered, approved and ready to go as long as there was room on one of the ships. By May of 1948 I had all my papers in order to leave. I received my papers from the American embassy, and all that remained was for me to get a place on a ship. Initially I was scheduled to depart in September. That left me with a few months to wrap up my affairs and say my goodbyes in Berlin.

As soon as I got my papers and set up a time to leave, my friends and business associates had a number of farewell parties for me. These were combined with my birthday, and I never had such a wonderful birthday. It was a far cry from the one I had spent three years earlier crouching on the shelf behind the curtain to escape the clutches of Russian soldiers. May is the blooming time for tulips, lilacs and lilies of the valley; I received several bouquets of each. There were so many flowers that our room smelled like the showing room of a mortuary. The youth of the ten parishes in the local deanery held a yearly spring fiesta with a dance, and that year was the most wonderful one for me. We danced all night through and went right from the dance to six o’clock Sunday mass.

Members of Catholic Youth in the different parishes of the deanery all knew one another and had a tremendous sense of community and belonging. We had an annual deanery Youth Day together, and an annual diocesan Youth Day that was held out at the Olympic Sports Arena, a huge event with singing competitions and plays and workshops and a Eucharistic celebration. And every parish had its banners flying. Those were wonderful times together that forged and strengthened our faith and friendships. These gatherings were great sources of bonding. They filled me with joy, spirit and energy, and they helped lay down a strong faith formation in me. I felt not only a strong sense of belonging, but also a sense that my faith was meaningful because we all confessed it publicly together. That May the glorious youth celebration and my party came at one time and were particularly moving and meaningful to me because I knew I was going to leave soon. I had a big farewell party at Morus Verlag as well. The staff put together a photo album for me which I still have. It was done beautifully with professional photos of all the different departments and every employee, with each one writing me a poignant little note.

As difficult as the postwar years had been for us, the close experiences with friends in church and at work made those years very special for me. We cared for each other and had beautiful times together in spite of the continuing miserable conditions in Berlin. In terms of material things we all had nothing, so what mattered and what we treasured was the relationships and the things we did together. By the time I left, Berliners were beginning to put their rich cultural heritage back together. My beloved Berlin State Opera was now having regular productions again, and I enjoyed them immensely. Compared to what they had been before the war, these productions were primitive because their facilities and the sets and costumes had been largely destroyed. But people were gamely performing with what little they had and bringing out the best in one another. I heard the most wonderful opera performances with the most Mickey Mouse sets and the most unimpressive costumes, but it didn’t matter. We treasured the voices. It was the same with the plays I went to. I saw some fantastic theater productions with top actors and really began to appreciate the unique gifts of each actor. There was a wonderful rapport and sense of fellowship between play and opera goers and the performers on stage. Relationships of all kinds went deeper in those difficult times, and we depended on one another more and bonded more closely than in more prosperous days. With performers or with one another, we did not stand on ceremony or exalted expectation, but appreciated whatever people had to offer to each other in whatever setting.

Our collective experiences and the deep relationships that grew out of them enabled us youth to prioritize the things of life, sifting out what really mattered from the more trivial. As a result of my early experiences, the way people and things look, for example, have never held much importance for me. Wearing fashionable clothing has never mattered much to me because at this formative time in my life there was simply no such thing. Rearing my own children in American suburbia, this attention to character over looks has cut both ways. As adults my children have told me that they missed my praising them for how they looked or presented themselves as children. Growing up in looks conscious America, they experienced my lack of attention to their grooming or dress as a deficit. I feel sorry for this now and try to rectify it with my grandchildren. As I think back on how rough my youth was, with the war and persecution and physical deprivation, I have never envied my children’s or grandchildren’s easier lot, nor resented their less grave concerns. Instead I’ve recognized that out of that trauma came bonding that was so close and relationships that were so rich that they have endured across an ocean and many thousands of miles to this day.

Before I left Berlin, the last and most painful thing I had to do was to say goodbye to my mother. All the things we had gone through together had forged a great depth of closeness. We had the typical mother-daughter frictions, particularly in my late teen years, when I thought I had to stand up for my ideals. At that time I found her not as idealistic as I, as we argued about the black market and her not being as expressive of her faith journey. Now I am more aware of what she was going through, both in terms of getting on in postwar Germany and in coming back to the church after twenty years. But our differences were only the minor kind that all youth have with their parents. Because we were so close and had so depended on one another, the thought of parting from her was extremely painful. That became the one sad note I could always hear through the music of good news and a new good life that were coming to me as I left to become an American. Our parting was a little relieved by knowing that once I became established in the United States, we would eventually be reunited. We hoped it would be only a year or two, but as it turned out it would be three years.

Mutti was as unselfish with her emotion and supportive of my leaving as she had been in 1938, when she had been so instrumental in Vati’s going to New York. She generously encouraged me to go because she wanted a better future for me. And as I made preparations to leave she kept her own sad emotions about my leaving at a low key. One thing that helped her through the pain of parting was the solicitous attentions of my close friends. They went to the airport with her and visited her and invited her over. She also had good friends of her own whom she saw regularly, but the fact that mine kept such close touch with her served as a link to me and helped her through a difficult transition.

Chapter Eleven
Reunion

On the North Sea, in Bremen, a camp had been set up to house the passengers who were scheduled for each monthly embarkation to the United States. The American embassy handled all the booking, distribution of papers and tickets, since ship lines were not yet in operation. I was directed to check into the camp in early September, and I went there about a week before I was scheduled to depart. When I got there and registered, the official said that that ship was already full and I would have to wait until October. I said to myself, “I’m not going to sit in a stupid camp for a whole month.” It has never been my practice to accept a situation that I judged negatively without looking for alternatives. The camp was actually not so bad. It had dorms for both men and women and a mess hall with pretty good food. I even met some nice people there, including a young woman named Wilma, with whom I still have contact. Were I more of a compliant type I might have stayed in the camp and waited out the month. But I kept thinking that this camp was nothing I had chosen for myself and I was determined not to spend a whole month there. I saw it as a chance to travel a bit and to visit friends and have some fun.

Before I left Berlin for the camp, I spoke with my friend, Felicitas, the diocesan leader of the girls’ Catholic Youth. We had become close because as youth leader of my parish I had a good deal of contact with her regarding Catholic Youth business. She gave me the phone number of friends she had in Frankfurt, suggesting I visit them before I went to the camp. This then was where I went first after I flew out of Berlin on a British Airlift flight. While planning my Frankfurt visit I became aware that in nearby Mainz, they were holding the first postwar “Catholic Day,” a big special occasion attended by people from all German dioceses and featuring workshops and seminars and liturgies. So after my visit with the two women in Frankfurt, the highlight of which was a scenic boat ride down the Rhine, I took the train to Mainz and attended the “Catholic Day” celebration there.

I still had plenty of time before I had to be in the camp and I was anxious to see my very best friend, Gertrude. She had been my leader in the parish Catholic Youth chapter and now she was engaged to be married. She had had her own recent adventure, migrating illegally out of Berlin to West Germany about six months before I left. She was now living in Palenberg, near Aachen, on the Belgian border and was working for a newspaper there. I phoned her to see if it would be all right for me to visit, and she said she was eager to see me. I stayed with her for some days in her rented room, met her fiancé and his family and had an overall splendid time.

In the midst of wartime and postwar hardships and dislocations, I had not had the chance to travel on my own, and these visits whetted my pent up appetite for more. A few weeks still remained before my ship was scheduled to depart. Wondering where else I could go to avoid the boredom of the camp, I hit upon the idea of visiting the family from my Duty Year, the Schmucks. At that time they were in Bad Kissingen. I wrote them asking if I could stay with them. They replied immediately saying they’d like very much to see me. In planning my trips and staying with all these different friends I did not consider that I had no ration stamps. With all the shortages, rationing was still a big necessity. Had I chosen to stay in the well provisioned camp, I would not have needed ration stamps. But trekking around as I was, I found myself sponging off the ration stamps of whomever I was staying with. When I went to stay with the Schmucks, I wanted to do something in return for their largesse. So Herr Schmuck gave me a Roloflex camera to sell when I got to America and with the proceeds put together a few packages to send back to the Schmuck family. They lovingly put me up for a couple of weeks and I had a good time visiting with the family. As little Leni, who had been a baby during my Duty Year, grew up, we became friends and we have been ever since. I as well as my children have visited her in Munich.

While I was staying with the Schmucks, I got a notice from the camp saying that I needed to check in at least a few days before my ship was to leave. It was not possible for me to return there on the very day of departure. Much as I was enjoying my travels and visiting with friends, I now was compelled to return to Bremen, cool my heels and wait to board a ship for America.

The ship, a naval vessel called S. S. Marine Shark, was a military transport that the Americans made available for displaced persons, American citizens stranded in Germany by the war, and people who had relatives who could send for them. Recently converted from military use, it still had the round gun emplacements on deck. Several of us young women who had become friends in the camp now hung around and bunked together on the ship. Some were Army brides, and one girl, Wilma, held dual citizenship because her parents had emigrated to the United States. She and her mother had gone back to Germany when her father died and now they were returning to the United States. We ate together in the big dining room and slept in close proximity in the Navy dorm-style accommodations.

My father, who had moved to Los Angeles, wrote me shortly before I left, saying that he would not be able to come to New York to pick me up. He advised me to go to Traveler’s Aid, and they would help me get on the El Capitan train that would take me across the country. After ten years of not having seen him and then trying to swallow his remarriage, all my anger and frustration with him began to resurface. How could he not put himself out to meet his only daughter whom he hadn’t seen in so long? But upon boarding I found money he had deposited for me with the ship’s bursar along with a letter he had written me. The letter said he had been able to work out a business trip to see his old customers in New York. At that time he was in the custom made shirt business. Upon receiving this communication I was greatly relieved. The first thing I bought with the money he had sent was a whole carton of little Hershey bars. I had not seen chocolate available in such quantity for many years. Of course I had not liked chocolate as a child, but I developed a taste for it as it was becoming harder to get.

The voyage was supposed to last five days, but it turned into six because of a big storm that the captain had to maneuver around. We passed the time together sitting on deck in the round gun emplacements, singing songs, telling stories and having a great old time together as if this were summer camp. Since we were all starved from the years of rationing, we were all determined to stuff ourselves. I did eat some foods on board that were healthier than Hershey bars. This was the first time I had ever seen or eaten celery stalks, and I liked crunching on them. But my resolution to eat to my heart’s content was frustrated by seasickness which I began to feel the effects of on the second day. It was October and the air was cool, and to get any relief I had to go up on deck and lie there under a blanket. If I went below, and especially if I smelled food, the nausea would return and I would start throwing up. It has never taken much to get me this way; over the years it has plagued me on ships as well as in my five pregnancies. So while others were having a good time I was up on deck lying around like a corpse. My friends would bring me oranges and it was the only thing I could keep down. I consoled myself with the abiding thought that my father would be there to pick me up, and I would not have to find my way around in New York and get myself onto the train to California.

When we got into the vicinity of New York Harbor, they called us all on deck and told us that we would shortly be able to see the Statue of Liberty. A chilly fog enshrouded the harbor as I just began to glimpse the Statue’s outline from afar. This was a very emotional moment for me. The only thing I can compare it to was a time a few years ago, on an Alaska cruise, when we first spotted a huge glacier. It was such an awesome sight that it brought back the feelings I had had as we made our way into New York Harbor and I first saw the Statue of Liberty. For me, after living my childhood and youth under Nazi repression, the great lady holding her torch aloft really did represent the idea of freedom. It would take many years for me to put flesh on that idea and really learn the meaning of the word. As I looked at the Statue for the first time, I thought about the new, free life I would be able to live in America and felt very happy indeed.

When we came to Ellis Island we were first informed that immigration officers would be checking us there. Then we were told we would not after all be filing into the great hall where so many had gone before us, but that the immigration officers would be coming aboard ship. We were then dispersed into lounges and rooms where we were quickly interviewed. This was a routine experience. As immigrants we were in no need of passports. I carried only a primitive identification card that had been issued to me with my immigration visa from the American embassy. After we were okayed by the immigration officers, we floated into New York Harbor, and my heart began pounding as thoughts of seeing my father after all these years raced through my brain. What was he going to look like? What would our reunion be like? As I scanned the faces in the crowd of people waiting at the dock, I broke out in a broad grin as I first laid eyes on my old Vati. He appeared a little older, but still very much the same as I remembered him, with his slicked back brilliantined hair that would be that way until the day he died.

He was always so finicky about his hair and about having a shine on his shoes. I remembered when I was little, his waking up from a nap on the couch and calling me over to cuddle with him. “Kleine suesse Motte” (little sweet moth), he would say. “Come here.” And he would throw me up in the air. I could mess up his shirt, and that was all right, but if I should mess up his slick, shiny hair, I would be in trouble. And for many years after he had painstakingly taught me I was always careful to polish my shoes.

As I came off the ship and fell into his arms we had a very emotional, loving reunion after ten years of being apart. While he didn’t look much different to me, of course I looked a lot different to him. When I had last seen him, I was a girl of ten, and now I was a twenty year old woman. I didn’t really look my age, though. I didn’t use any makeup - didn’t believe in it – and I wore modest, unsophisticated clothing. He had sent me most of the clothes I had after the war. And he had sent the first and only pair of high heeled shoes I owned. With a hobbled and now blockaded Berlin bereft of any new, stylish attire or much of anything else for sale, receiving these chic navy blue heels had been a great thrill to me. I had gone to see The Flying Dutchman at the Berlin State Opera proudly wearing those shoes. It was in the summer and hot, and the shoes were a little small for me, and during the long Wagner opera I had taken them off. When it was over and we were getting ready to leave, I bent down to slip them on and was mortified to discover that I could not squeeze my feet back into them. Even so I carried them across the Atlantic with me along with the other clothing Vati had sent. One thing I did not have, however, was a bra. I had never worn one. At the time, though I was full grown, I didn’t really need one. My mother had always called me a board with two thumbtacks.

Before we did anything else, Vati said he was going to show me the town. For our first stop, much to my satisfaction, we went shopping to buy me a new wardrobe, so that even though I had just come off the boat, I would feel less as if I had. I was completely ignorant of the famous name New York department stores and am not even sure which one we went to. I suspect it was Macy’s. My father, always a dapper dresser himself, with a very good sense of fashion, picked out my clothes. He got me a black taffeta skirt of ankle length, the style in 1948. It was the first article of clothing I had of that length. I also got a white nylon dress blouse to go with it and felt quite elegant in the combination. It was a smart outfit, because it was not so formal that I would be overdressed at a non-dressy occasion and it was dressy enough for a more formal occasion.

After suitably outfitting me, Vati took me to visit his cousin Arthur Becker and his family. The Beckers were the cousins who lived in New York whom he first had visited on the information trip he had taken in 1938. In order for him to emigrate he had to acquire an affidavit of support from an American citizen who would take responsibility for him so that he would not become a public charge. The American government gave would-be immigrants the choice of posting a bond of several thousand dollars for themselves or getting an affidavit from someone of means who would vouch for them. Having spent all his savings on the voyage over on the Normandie, Vati did not have the bond money, and so he had gone to his cousin Arthur Becker, who was a furrier. In the last telegram he sent to us while on that trip he had said, “Affidavits materialized today. Looking forward to healthy reunion.” But of course that was not to be.

The Beckers were lovely people of about the same age as Vati, who was fifty-three at the time. Mrs. Becker invited me downstairs into their studio and had me try on a beautiful beaver coat. “We are making this for a customer of about your size and we want to see if the length and sleeves are okay.” And I, not suspecting anything, tried on the coat. She noted adjustments that she said would have to be made and then disappeared. I went back upstairs, and when Vati and I were about to leave and I was putting on my jacket, she came out and said, “Hold it, hold it. Don’t put on your jacket. This is what you put on.” And she brought out that gorgeous coat and handed it to me. I was utterly flabbergasted. I had no idea when I tried it on that they were actually measuring it for me. As thrilled as I was to get it, after going out to California I found the climate there was much too mild for it. I put it in storage for awhile and ended up sending it to my cousin Irma in Germany. She was so grateful and absolutely delighted with it, as I could see in the photo she sent me of herself wearing it.

While we were in New York, Vati enthralled me with the city’s wonderful night life and its sumptuous and ever abundant food. We went to Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center, at that time one of the first of every tourist’s stops. I sat and watched the variety show there totally captivated. We went to a night club that had a buffet. I had never before seen such a thing. It was like something out of the Garden of Eden. Vati said, “I am taking you here because you can go back to the buffet table as many times and eat as much as you want to.” Because of so many years of deprivation, eating, at that time, had become my number one priority. We went to the Jewish deli, and Vati bought me salami and my very favorite sausage. For me this was Schlauraffenland, a land of fairies where all the tastiest foods grow on trees. Next Vati took me to a place with music and dancing and it felt so delightful to dance with my good old dad.

We were only in New York for three days, but we packed a great deal into that time. The high point for me was my reunion with my childhood friend Sylvia Safir. The Safirs were the ones who had given us the name of the Fleischers, the diamond merchants who had helped us while we were refugees in Belgium. At one point they told us that the Safirs had also come to Antwerp. I was very excited that I would now be able to see my oldest childhood friend. They lived quite far from us, and we had to walk everywhere, so we had not been able to get together very frequently. When Antwerp was evacuated in 1940 and we went temporarily to Brussels and then back to Berlin, we lost track of them.

Sylvia’s father had money from the sale of his haberdashery store in Berlin, and they were able to get a truck to take their belongings to France. From there they went to Lisbon, where they applied for and received visas to go to the United States.

After the war Mutti had gone back to the Charlottenburg neighborhood to make one of her black market deals with Frau Stein, a local grocer. Frau Stein told her that she had seen Eddie Safir, Sylvia’s older brother, who was now in the American Army. He told her that he and his family now lived in New York. Remembering that when I was in New York with my father, I suggested we look them up. He opened the phone book, found their listing and dialed their number. “Safir,” he said, “How are you? This is Seidemann.” The Safirs turned out to be on a very tight schedule and only had a short time to see us, Vati arranged for us to meet them at a Horn and Hardart cafeteria. Going to a cafeteria was a brand new experience for me. As I went through the line, there were so many things to eat that I could not make up my mind what to put on my plate.

Seeing Sylvia had to be the high point of our brief stay in New York. I have kept in touch with her ever since. When we started our lengthy correspondence my English was very poor. But I wrote her very long letters and persuaded her to send them back to me with corrections. Fifteen years later, when both of us were married with families, we visited Sylvia and her family at their home on Long Island. She married Martin Schreiber, a recognized artist, who was also from Berlin. He did geometrically structured paintings and later sculptures, which fascinated my husband Reuben, who does bronze molded sculpture. Over the years our families have kept very much in contact and have visited one another often. Sylvia and Martin eventually left New York to live in Florida, as do so many older Jewish couples, and Martin recently passed away.

After seeing the Safirs, we left New York and went to Cleveland, where Vati had appointments scheduled with wealthy customers in the posh suburb of Shaker Heights. He went to see several of them in a big villa with long driveways and a number of entry gates. It turned out to be an illegal gambling operation, but this did not dawn on me until some time later when I saw a similar setup in a Hollywood movie. We entered the mansion through a number of doors with little windows in them. Each window would open, a face would appear, and Vati would mention the name of the person he was there to see. This all seemed the height of mystery to me. After many doors and corridors we finally got to the main interior of the house, where I saw a number of spacious rooms with couches and chairs and tables with people playing cards.

I sat down and waited for my father to do business with this well heeled clientele who would order many of the fine custom shirts he was selling. While I was sitting there, a lady came screaming through all the rooms. With my lack of English, I couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying, something like “Police!” or “Raid!” Immediately, like lightening, all the cards disappeared, and all the guests now sat around visiting, smoking and munching snacks. The police came in, and it was a raid, but they failed to find anything and left. For me, with my experiences of the Gestapo, this was a very scary and uncomfortable experience. My discomfort was added to by my complete lack of knowledge of what was going on. I couldn’t figure out what was the wrongdoing. I remembered my relatives in Germany had played cards for money and it was not illegal. Some time later, as I became more knowledgeable, I realized that this place where my father was selling shirts had been an illegal public gaming house and not just a private residence with people who knew one another had been playing cards for stakes.

Vati had gotten into the custom shirt business through his friends Kurt and Liesel Plotke, the parents of Jerry. Kurt had a background in haberdashery in Berlin, and when he got to New York, he started this shirt business with my father doing sales. During the war, they went cross county together, liked it and decided to move there. In Los Angeles, Vati had a wealthy clientele, many of whom were in the movie industry. They would place large orders for expensive monogrammed shirts in fine woven fabrics. For Vati, this became for a time the American equivalent of his selling wine to the German movie stars. Los Angeles in those days was less informal than it is now, and Vati was able for a time to do a good business selling gabardine shirts in summery pastels to men of means. These were often worn without a jacket in casual elegance. The tailor whom he ordered from, a man named Harris, was a thoroughly obnoxious person. I went occasionally with Vati to his large tailor shop, where I would sit and listen to my father and Harris screaming and cursing each other out. Harris never had the shirts ready on time, and often there would be something wrong with them. These kinds of aggravations, as well as the lack of real lucrativeness in this business eventually caused Vati to get out of it.

Before we left Cleveland, Vati took me to a big, luxurious ice cream parlor that was renowned in the area. I had not had ice cream since before the war, and I had never seen it sold in such a place. The proprietor was an Italian and a customer of my father. Vati said, “This is my daughter who just came over from Germany, and she hasn’t had ice cream in many years. And I want you to make her something really special.” He concocted a banana split that was so big and elaborate that I thought he had put everything in the store on it. Much as I liked the ice cream and all the toppings, it was just too big for me to finish.

We also went to Borsolino’s, one of Cleveland’s best night clubs and saw Victor Borg, the Danish pianist-comedian, who was at that time at the height of his popularity. But when Vati excitedly told me we would be seeing him, I responded with a blank stare because I had never heard of him. This happened to me often after I came to the United States. I would not know who some well known celebrity was whom everybody else was all excited about, and it would be most embarrassing to me. After I got to Los Angeles and was working at Canter’s delicatessen, one time I heard others buzzing around saying “Jerry Lewis is here!” And I just stood there with a dumb expression on my face, because I didn’t know who that famous comedian was either. . Being in wartime and postwar Germany had been an all-encompassing and isolating experience. Embroiled in that continuous crisis, we heard little of the wider world, particularly in the realm of contemporary arts and entertainment. But in the open, dynamic atmosphere of postwar Los Angeles all this was going to change quickly as I learned to shed my Old World habits and attitudes and transform myself into a forward looking American.

Chapter Twelve
Perils of a Dual Identity

Leaving Cleveland, we took the El Capitan to Los Angeles. It was an enjoyable experience, though my English was so poor that as we sat in the lounge and someone announced the different sights we were seeing, I could not understand his narration. It took me close to a year before I could understand fluent conversation, especially one not directed at me. From the time that we started our journey to Los Angeles, my father indoctrinated me with the idea that my number one priority must be learning English. In that endeavor I was not to speak with him in anything but English. This was extremely disconcerting to me, because it frustrated and further isolated me. I felt like my freedom was being undermined. Vati wanted to know about the events of the ten years since he had left Germany, and I very much wanted to tell him about my experiences, but he would not let me speak German to do so. So for a long time I was unable to tell him very much. Years later I felt grateful that he insisted on my speaking English instead of my native tongue, because it had helped me learn it a lot faster.

My father had always been very autocratic. He had rules that Mutti did not. While he was always affectionate to me, he was also always a strong disciplinarian. My mother treated me entirely differently from the way he did. She was neither demanding nor overly managerial with me but gave me a lot of freedom to make my own decisions. Years later when I asked her how come she had given me such control over my own development, she said she had done so because she knew that I had good life values and she could trust me. But Vati was totally opposite from that. Fortunately for me and my freedom, he would be gone for days at a time, sometimes a week, on business trips. So I was left largely with my mother during my school years, and if there was some food I didn’t like, she would not insist that I eat it, or if it was just the two of us there, she would not cook it. But if Vati was there and I made a sour face at some food she had cooked, he would say, “Any food your mother puts on the table has to be eaten. It’s good.” When he oversaw any of my school work, he was always very judgmental and critical. Once when I was in first grade, I had an exercise in my workbook in which I had to fill an entire page with the number two. It did not come out as perfect as Vati wanted to see. He said, “That is not acceptable,” and he took a red pen and crossed the whole page out. And I had to take the workbook back to school, and when the teacher saw that page, I was deeply humiliated.

In another assignment when I was in second grade, I was supposed to learn spelling and punctuation by writing down a story the teacher dictated. My father made a contract with me that if I did six consecutive dictations perfectly I would get my first watch. We had a dictation once a week. I had completed five dictations and the sixth had one mistake. Never mind, I had to start from scratch. This went on for several months. All the relatives knew about this contract and asked me how I was doing with my dictations. And I would have to tell them I messed it up after three or four or five perfect ones, having to start over again. “Give it to her after five dictations. She already deserves to get that watch,” one of them would say to my father. “No,” he would reply, “It’s a contract and I’m not bending.” Finally I got six perfect dictations in a row. It was a huge challenge for a little child, but it really did something for me. I became a person who could take challenges in life and many times I would challenge myself. So the dictation experience actually helped me to become more persevering, and I derived something positive from my father’s rigorous demands. Now when I first came to the United States, and I was twenty years old, it was like doing perfect dictations all over again. Vati had unbendable expectations which often made me miserable. But looking back on it, I can see that I responded to him as I had when I was a child, by instilling the expectations in myself, and taking on the challenge of perfecting my language. I would tell people to please interrupt and correct me when I am saying something wrong. I had an easy time with pronunciation but my sentence structure was not often accurate. The Germans have the verb at the end, and they make tapeworm sentences, interjecting all kinds of phrases in the middle. And this kind of sentence structure was the hardest thing for me to undo.

When I was dating my future husband, Reuben, in the early fifties, there was a popular song that went, “I warm so easy, so dance me loose, it shines so bright the moon.” That is sort of a German sentence structure. Whenever I would phrase a sentence awkwardly, and he would correct me, he would always add jokingly, “It shines so bright, the moon.” To help myself learn, while sitting on the bus, I would listen to people’s conversations and read the advertisements along the sides of the ceiling. The ads were phrased to be catchy, and so they were often not normal sentences. This made them hard to understand. And many of the words I saw I mispronounced when I subsequently asked what they meant. For example, one of the ads said that something was dependable, but I made it into depend-able. When I asked people what depend-able meant they had no idea what I was talking about.

My father thought I could learn English faster if I went to L. A. High School and took a night course in English for foreigners. I went a few times and quit because it was so elementary that I found it boring. The students were mainly Latin and Filipino men, very few women, from very humble backgrounds. The instructor taught on a very basic level, going so slowly that I lost interest. I thought I would have learned more if my father had enrolled me in the regular high school or junior college classes. But having no academic background himself, Vati did not know how to find out the appropriate place to send me, nor did he know about getting academic counseling for me. I ended up learning English pretty much on my own. I would listen to the radio and I would check out books from the library. The newscasters were frustrating to listen to because they spoke so fast. I would understand a few words but not the overall gist of what they were saying. Telephone conversations were also hard for me at first, because I could not see the person I was talking to. I got more from television, in its earliest stages then.

Once when I was listening, my father was phoning his wife, Ilse. When she answered, he said, “How are you honey?” I said, “What did you call her, honey?” I had never heard anyone call someone a food product before. To my thinking he might as well have called her “Marmalade,” or “Jelly.” I thought, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. Ilse was a German Jewish refugee like Vati. She acted very friendly and kind to me. But I had only hostile feelings towards her, because to me she was the one who had taken my father away from us. After staying a few days with them in their little apartment, I felt extremely uncomfortable and demanded that my father rent me a room.

So he rented me a room in the Wilshire district, which at that time was quite upscale. The homes there were good sized and very well kept. My room was in a house on Gramercy Place, between Fifth and Sixth, two blocks north of Wilshire, and just three blocks from my father. The owner, Mrs. Gold, rented out other more expensive rooms upstairs. Mine was only fifteen dollars a week with kitchen privileges. It was downstairs and had a glass sliding door.

Mrs. Gold was a friendly Jewish lady with a good business mind. Her other renters, in the upstairs rooms, were ordinary American students and working people. My immigrant status made me the one who was different. The others never used the kitchen, so I had pretty free rein there and cooked some little thing for myself most every day. Adjacent to the kitchen was an apartment where Mrs. Gold’s daughter, Belle, lived with her husband and two toddlers. Since I had demanded that my father get me this room, I felt the pressure to get a job and thus relieve him of having to pay my rent. I wanted to work anyway, since I desired money of my own and the independence that went with it. Mrs. Gold told me that Belle and her husband owned a machine that sewed monograms on shirts, and while doing this work they needed someone to look after their children. If I could do that, she told me, I would not have to pay rent.

Even though I knew nothing at the time about rearing children, I decided to take on this task. Taking care of two toddlers took up a great deal of time and energy. Soon added to this were having to clean and shop. I was now beginning to feel like a maid, and I did not like it at all. I lasted barely a couple of months in this work. My strong preference was office work like the work I had done in Germany, and I resolved to find work of that kind in Los Angeles. I had my father call the employment office and make an appointment for me to take a test of my clerical skills. I didn’t know English shorthand, but I did have skills in business math, bookkeeping and typing. I did all right on the tests in math and bookkeeping, but I had problems with the English typewriter, which was quite a bit different from the German one. Also not being fluent yet in English slowed me down a great deal. I had to spell out each word in my head before typing it, and so of course I flunked the typing test. The employment counselor told me that I had done well on the tests that did not demand English fluency, and he encouraged me to come back and retake the typing test after I was better at English. My father said, “It’s going to be hard for you to pass the typing test.” But recalling Mutti, I thought, “Cheese I can cut too.” I told him I was challenging myself to pass this test and get a good office job.

For the time being, however, I needed another job. My father, who always had a network of useful contacts to draw on, told me he knew the people at Canter’s delicatessen, in the heavily Jewish Fairfax area, and he said he would ask them if they had an opening. “They have a restaurant there, and you can wait on tables, and you’ll make good money and good tips,” he said. But to me waiting on tables had the lowliest and most disreputable connotations, and I refused to take that kind of a job. I thought that waitresses in Germany were often women with low morals who commonly got propositioned while working. Of course this was not at all true in the United States, but as an immigrant I was filled with prejudices I had formed in the old country. My father told the people at Cantor’s about me, adding that I did not want to wait on tables, and they said that was fine, that I could work at the bakery counter.

So I went to work in Canter’s bakery for a dollar an hour, and I became for the first time a union member. In 1949 a dollar an hour was very good pay and I could do a lot with it. In little time I was familiar with all the baked goods and all the ins and outs of the job. Canter’s bakery was a very, very busy place, so the work was generally quite hectic. I shared the counter with three other women. The cash register had drawers for each of us, and we were each responsible for balancing accounts in our own drawer, something I always did with no problem. Overall the job was a satisfying one. The people I worked with liked me and treated me well. It could be exasperating at times, with picky, demanding customers and the great crush of people at peak times like Sunday mornings. They would line up outside, snaking all the way around the corner and down the street. I worked odd hours and late hours, often closing at midnight. The times that I closed, my dad would pick me up, thus saving me a bus trip with transfer back to my Wilshire neighborhood.

I worked at Canter’s for two and a half years. By that time I was quite burned out with the bakery routine and was once again longing for an office job. There were also problems caused by the completely Jewish environment in which I now worked and lived. All the people around me knew my father and thought I was Jewish. When my father first introduced me to Mrs. Gold, he had said, “Here is my daughter, who I just brought over from Germany. She survived the Jewish persecution…” And at work it was the same thing. Knowing this about my background, everybody treated me warmly and compassionately. So there I was, the little immigrant girl from Germany, surrounded by well meaning Jewish people all wanting to take care of me. Of course, I had remained an active, observant Catholic, but I felt that if I told this to any of these people that I would be betraying my father. So I was in an awkward position which became more awkward as time went on and relationships grew.

I ended up leading a kind of double life. A member of St. Brendan’s Parish, about five blocks from Mrs. Gold’s, I would ever so quietly sneak out of her house very early Sunday mornings, walk to six o’clock mass, leave promptly after communion, catch the bus to Fairfax, and show up to work at Canter’s at seven o’clock. Both where I lived and where I worked I was in a total Jewish environment and I felt I had to keep my Catholicism secret, and this caused me sometimes to have to sneak around. Canter’s was run by their whole extended family. Sidney Fish, together with a coterie of his relatives, ran the bakery. He was co-owner with Selma Canter Price, who with her husband Harold Price, ran the restaurant. Selma was the daughter of the man who had opened the original Cantor’s at Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. At that time the Boyle Heights store was still open and Cantor’s Fairfax was only a few years old and just beginning to make a name for itself. Fish relatives and Price relatives and relatives from Boyle Heights were working in Fairfax together. Some were cooks, some cashiers, some in the bakery, and some in the delicatessen. It was a great big, close family enterprise. And they were all very fond of me and wanted to be good to me. I could have just melted into this community, but as it was I had to hold them at arm’s length. They invited me so many times to family gatherings at their beautiful homes, where they planned to introduce me to well-to-do young Jewish men. And I always found some reason to turn down their invitation. My father had visions of my marrying one of these wealthy Jews and being thus well set up for life. As was typical of the time, he didn’t think of me as succeeding on my own but of marrying well and settling down to raise a family.

One of the first Canter family events I got invited to, not long after I started working there in 1949, was a wedding shower. Rebecca, one of my coworkers in the bakery was getting married. Mrs. Price, Mrs. Fish and all the other relatives were giving her a bridal shower. When I got the invitation I felt totally stupid. I didn’t know what it meant. Why did she have to take a shower at Mrs. Fish’s house? I went to the bosses and said, “I appreciate the shower invitation, but I need you to tell me about this Jewish American ceremony. Why does she have to take a bridal shower? Is it like mikvah bath? If it is, why does she have to take it two weeks before the wedding? And why can’t she take it at her own house instead of Mrs. Fish’s house?” They all burst out into hilarious laughter, thinking it was the cutest thing they had ever heard. And then they explained to me what bridal showers and baby showers are.

Another funny thing to them was the way I would pronounce some words. By eleven o’clock at night things slowed down enough so that there were just two sales girls in the bakery. And one had to go in the back and wash the great big pans that were used for carrying baked goods to the counter. One evening I came out, having done the washing, and wanted to know if they wanted me to do anything else before closing. I said, “My pants are all washed. What else do you want me to do?” Everybody left in the store broke out in laughter, and they kept teasing me about my “pants.” Whenever it was close to closing, they would say, “Well, what about your dirty pants? Do they need washing again?”

The women at Canters were always wonderful to me and they kept trying to include me in family events, but I ever resisted becoming personally involved with them. I was going regularly to St. Brendan’s, but I had joined the Catholic Youth Organization club at neighboring St. Basil’s, since St. Brendan’s did not have one. At St. Basil’s I learned of a very lively youth club at Blessed Sacrament parish on Sunset Boulevard. Young Catholics from all over Los Angeles who wanted to socialize and meet eligible fellow Catholics went to Blessed Sacrament’s Fifty Fifty Club. I started going there on the bus and joined the club and became very much a part of this large Catholic youth community, attending a great many of their events. This was all while I was continuing to work at Canter’s and living with Mrs. Gold. Mrs. Fish and Thelma Price were young women with young children, and they were very fond of me and very much wanted me to have some kind of social life. They were always wanting to introduce me to people. “What are you doing for social life?” they would say. “You need to go out. You need to meet young men.” They would suggest various Jewish clubs, and I would have to come up with excuse after excuse after excuse. But I carefully avoided all social contact and managed to keep my relationship with them strictly a working one. They must have been pretty perplexed at my standoffishness, because most any Jewish girl would have jumped at the opportunities they were offering me.

Because of the odd situation I found myself in, of having to hide my Catholicism, I avoided letting on much about my past to anyone at Canter’s. In responding to their inquiries, I would never lie. The same scrupulosity that caused me to think I must always get up for mass, regardless of exhaustion, also kept me from telling lies even of the little white variety. And so I would find ways to give cloudy but not untruthful answers to questions about my previous life in Germany. In the situations we had so often found ourselves in Nazi Germany, I had gotten very good at covering up, or revealing a little but not enough to make a difference. I did tell the people at Canter’s that my mother was still in Berlin and that I was trying to bring her over, but I never let on that she was not Jewish. So they never had any idea that I was not completely identified with the Jewish people, as my father was.

Working at Canter’s was always physically demanding. You had to carry big baskets of bread and rolls and huge sheets of cakes and cookies. We had no carts to wheel things around as they do today. We were union and the union steward would come in from time to time and check on things, but he never made an issue of the heavy lifting we had to do. It was a very stressful job because it was a very busy place, and the Jewish clientele was very demanding. After putting in eight hours there, I would always be very tired while riding home on the bus. In my early Sunday schedule, after getting up at five to go to mass, I would be there by seven, and I wouldn’t leave until four in the afternoon. Because I had an active social life and often had a date or something to go to on Sunday nights, I would nap after getting home from work. With a radio program on I’d fall asleep and sleep so soundly that I always had to set an alarm if I was going to get up and go out. Saturdays were much the same. I would work all day, and if I had a date on Saturday night I might get home at two o’clock in the morning and then get up at five to go to mass. So by the end of these full weekends I would always be really bushed.

One day after I had been working at Canter’s for two years the stresses of my life all boiled to the surface. Nothing immediately untoward had occurred, but as I sat down in the back of the restaurant at lunch hour, I found I couldn’t even eat my lunch. I welled up inside and just broke down in sobs. I could not figure out why I was crying, and my bosses couldn’t either, but they were wonderfully understanding in their response. Both women went together next door to the drugstore and got me a big beautiful package of Richard Hudnut cosmetics powder and lotion and bubble bath. They sent me home and told me to take a nice bubble bath and put on the lotion and powder. I would never have bought such a thing for myself because I had grown up having to make do with little. The frugality I had learned during the persecution and the war I had continued in America. Even if I was buying apples for myself, I would always buy the cheapest pippins. The delicious were always more money, and so I did not buy them. Also I was very intent on saving at the time because I was sending big packages to my mother. Every Tuesday, my day off, I would spend shopping and schlepping groceries home on the bus, and making a package to send Mutti and taking it on the bus to the post office. Much of what I sent her she sold, and she used the money to help support herself.

I went home from work, took the bubble bath and pampered myself with the cosmetics, went to bed and got lots of sleep and felt a lot better when I went to work the next day. A few days later I got a letter from my mother telling me that she had had a heart attack and was in the hospital. The heart attack had occurred on the day I had broken down in tears at work. I was so connected to her that I must have had an intuitive sense of what was going on. It had seemed like my breaking down had been out of a blue sky. I did have a lot of stress and worry about my ongoing situation and felt I needed to make a change. But it all manifested itself the day my mother had her heart attack. It was hard not being able to go and see Mutti in the hospital, but she told me that she was recuperating well. She had had a problem with high blood pressure for many years, and there was no medication she could take for it. After she came to the United States, I took her to a doctor, who put her on medication and finally got her blood pressure down. But she would have later heart attacks also, the product I think of all the years of severe stress she had gone through in Germany.

After my crying episode I became convinced that regardless of how nice everybody was to me at Canter’s, I needed to lessen the tensions in my own life by getting a different job. I still wanted to work in an office, but I wasn’t sure what industry to try, so I went downtown to Seventh and Spring Streets. There I saw the headquarters of the three major California banks: Bank of America, Security Bank and Citizens Bank of California. I went into the Bank of America, filled out the application form and left it with them at headquarters. Then I went to the other two banks and followed the same procedure. When I got home in the early afternoon, Mrs. Gold told me the Bank of America had already called me and that I was supposed to call them right back. I can’t believe it, I thought. I called back the personnel office and the director said, “We have an opening in the stock transfer department and we’d like to send you for a physical tomorrow.” I almost fell over. I said, “What is your typing requirement?” I was worried about this, since I had flunked the typing test a couple of years previously and was still not accustomed to an American typewriter. Of course I didn’t tell him that. He said, “Yes, new stock certificates will have to be typed. What do you type?” Thinking I can cut cheese too, I said, “Sixty words a minute.” If I can’t cut the cheese, they’ll soon find out. “That’s fine,” he said. “That’s all we need.”

So I went for my physical and I was hired. As I gave my notice to Canter’s, I couldn’t help but think that I would be taking a pay cut. Of course banks are notorious for paying lousy wages, but it didn’t matter to me. I felt I had to get out of Canter’s and get a decent, respectable job that wasn’t so physically demanding on me. I had had enough of hauling bread out of the bakery and selling bagels and coffee cake. It was really wearing me out. It didn’t matter to me that I would be hired at a hundred sixty dollars a month, while I had been making a hundred seventy-five or eighty at Canter’s. I’ll get regular increases, I thought. I’ll advance quickly. And I knew how to budget with my hundred sixty dollars, so it would be okay. Soon after I gave my notice at Cantor’s I started going downtown to work in the trust department of Bank of America. I had never heard anything from the other two banks. “I guess I’m supposed to work at the Bank of America,” I thought. It turned out I fit in well and was very happy there. I would end up continuing with B of A until retirement, except for a fifteen year hiatus being a soccer mom and raising my five children.

Chapter Thirteen
Making My Way in the Catholic Community

The hub of my social life in these early years in America was the CYO Fifty Fifty Club at Blessed Sacrament on Sunset. It was in that context that my first dating life developed. I had grown up thinking that I had to always do things the right and proper way. When I first joined the club I was a bit of a wallflower, not because it was my nature, but because my English was not yet fluent. I didn’t know enough idiomatic Americanisms to joke around, and that is always such an important thing to break the ice and get on socially. To further complicate matters for me socially, I was also quite a serious person at this time in my life. At Canter’s people used to tell me to smile. Once when someone said that, I said, “Why should I smile?” To my German way of thinking, you smiled if something funny or pleasant happens. You didn’t smile if somebody just looked at you. Especially if it was a guy, because that meant you were coming on to him. A smile meant flirting to me, and I was anything but a flirt.

I felt myself in a continuously strange situation, not knowing what the appropriate behavior was or what the typical American behavior was in any given instance. I felt, however, that I was my sole guardian, that I had nobody who would take care of me or caution me. I did not rely on my father for these things, because his domineering ways would cramp my independence, and his remarriage and the religious issue had created a canyon between us. So I had to exercise my own judgment and go according to my own conscience and feel for a situation. With my habitual strong will and the self protective sense I had developed in Germany I was confident that I could indeed look out for myself. But on my own as I was in a new country, I was inevitably very cautious. Years later I asked my mother if she had ever worried about me, that I might get into trouble being on my own in a strange place. She replied that she never did because she knew what kind of girl I was. It felt good to hear that from her.

Feeling my way around the social scene at the Fifty Fifty Club, I was well aware that dating and pairing of likeminded Catholic youth was its purpose. But to protect myself and keep myself from making rash decisions, I devised a plan to give myself a year to get used to things at the club. I had been doing this since coming to the States. When I was living with my father, I had desperately missed my friends in Germany and resented his remarriage and his attempts to dominate me, but I resolved at that time not to act precipitously. That was the first time I had told myself, wait a year and if you still feel lonely and miserable, then you can go back. And after a year I had become acclimatized and felt a lot better. Applying these same wait and see principles at the club, I said to myself that since I don’t know what the expectations are I will be cautious. I was told that if you have a date and he takes you home, that when you get to the door it is expected that he would kiss you. To me, a kiss was an expression of fondness, and I wasn’t going to throw away a kiss, even a platonic one, on someone who just took me out to the movies. Feeling this way and not wanting to get into an awkward situation, I decided I would avoid seeing anyone individually for a whole year.

In November of 1949, a fellow from the Fifty Fifty Club asked me out to a show. He was a very nice guy, attending the university, studying to be a stock broker. Having been in L. A. a year, I gave myself permission to accept the date. We went to the show, and he drove me home to Mrs. Gold’s. While we were parked in front of the house, he reached over and put his arm around me and said, “May I kiss you goodnight?” I sat there and gave him a big lecture about what a kiss meant to me and that I had absolutely no intention of giving him one. I said, “I had a wonderful evening, but I don’t owe you anything. I don’t even know you, so how can I consider kissing when I don’t even know you?” He was very nice; he wasn’t annoyed, and we ended up sitting in front of the house and having the liveliest conversation. After about an hour he said, “We know each other better now. How about a kiss now?” Needless to say, he never asked me for another date.

Little by little I began to mellow out. I came to realize that these were not bad intentions and that a little kiss is not going to lead to anything else. I became more adept at handling myself in a social situation and not being so blunt. Eventually I had a normal dating life, meeting a lot of men, going to dances and having a wonderful time. Something that worked in my favor was my habit of immersing myself fully in whatever group or organization I’m involved in. As with the Catholic Youth in Germany, so with the Fifty Fifty Club, I became very active, even writing articles for the newsletter. As I found my footing and became surer of myself I began to seek out other points of involvement beyond the Tuesday night meetings. We had beach parties and grunion hunting parties at Santa Monica and Zuma Beaches. We had campouts in the deserts, hayrides in the Lucerne Valley, snow outings with toboggan riding at Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead. We had an annual formal dance in posh surroundings, like the Bel Air Hotel or the Beverly Wilshire. We had annual retreats and monthly communion breakfasts and talent shows. It was a full life and it integrated me fully into the lively social life of the Catholic youth community.

But now there was more to my life than social events. I began to associate with some other young women who were members of the Kolping Club. Adolf Kolping was a nineteenth century German priest who started these societies or “Families” to improve the economic, cultural and religious lives of craftsmen at a time when they were being pressured and altered by the industrial revolution. They became close, loving support organizations and spread worldwide, often maintaining Kolping Houses. Kolping Family sections were created for married men, women and young adults. Since the Kolping societies were strongest in Germany, I was well aware of them and delighted to hear that they existed in the United States. The head of the Kolping Club in Los Angeles was a Jesuit Priest named Karl Benecke, a native of Germany who taught economics at Loyola Marymount University. He had come to the United States with his parents when he was ten years old. Our mutual German origins and interests gave us much in common and we soon became good friends. Fr. Benecke introduced me to Gertrude Rice, a woman four years older than I, who came from Vienna. She was also a Catholic whose father was Jewish. The Kolping Club became an additional source for my meeting many such active, involved Catholics.

Two people whom I became close friends with, Janet Bold and Alice Mosher, were members of both the Fifty Fifty Club and the Kolping Club. Both women were college graduates involved with another Catholic group called the Young Christian Workers. This organization had been started by French priests during the time of the German occupation. They joined the underground as factory workers in the worker movement. Known as the working priests, they were closely identified with the Jeunesse Ouvrier Chrétien, or JOC. In Germany the same movement existed and was called Christlische Arbeite Jugend, or CAJ. In English, it was the YCW. It was a European movement that had just come to the United States and established its American headquarters in Chicago. This international organization was always called “Christian,” rather than Catholic, because other denominations were also involved. Janet and Alice, who were connected to Chicago headquarters, came to Los Angeles and established a YCW chapter with young people from the Fifty Fifty Club. The YCW as well as the Kolping Club gave me more serious and socially conscious Catholic environments than existed in the purely social Fifty Fifty Club. Just before I left Berlin, through the Catholic Youth, I had first gotten involved with the CAJ movement. The motto of the movement was, “See, Judge, and Act.” Those words took deep root in me and became the motto for major decisions I’ve made throughout my life.

Many of the Catholic activists who joined the Young Christian Workers would become participants in the Christian Family Movement. Two of the best known were Patty Crowley and her husband Pat, who participated in Vatican II, the great reforming council convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962. They were members of the papal commission to study the whole artificial birth control issue. That commission would make liberalizing recommendations which would ultimately rejected by Pope Paul VI when he issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1967.

The YCW was the first organization I joined in the United States that really ministered to my abiding search for a social action oriented identity. At our YCW meetings we used workbooks published out of the Chicago office that were disseminated across the country. Becoming a part of this growing movement was actually a continuation of an involvement I had begun to have in Catholic social action in postwar Berlin. There the Catholic Youth had seen the importance of having debates and discussions with the Communist youth. These were organized around the topic of workers’ rights and justice. They became an important forum where socially conscious Catholic young people could present their believing point of view in contrast to the atheistic one of the Communists. A Jesuit priest, Joseph Michelka, was the leader of the girls’ section of Catholic Youth. Under diocesan auspices he organized training sessions for leaders in which I took part. I was a youth leader for the age group of fourteen to eighteen, while at the same time I was a member of a group for young adults. In that group my closest friend to this day, Gertrud Dluzewski, was the leader. She met a man named Albert Singer at a social justice retreat, they left Berlin and settled in West Germany, marrying in 1949. It was they whom I had visited just prior to coming to the United States that year. Gertrud had been the youth leader for all the parishes in the western deanery. When she left I took over that position until I left.

We developed close relations with the Lutheran youth, sharing the common ground of debate with the Communists. When we engaged in these debates Fr. Michelka accompanied us in civilian clothes, something quite daring at the time. A young padre with a brilliant mind, he fit well with the youth, and he coached us masterfully. We got hands on training in workshops and seminars and then the exciting action of the debates with the Young Communists. This experience gave us a real education in Christian social ethics and the teachings of the Catholic social encyclicals. We thrived in the new atmosphere of free inquiry and free exchange of ideas, something impossible in the Nazi era and impossible in Communist East Berlin. It was in the Catholic Youth in postwar West Berlin that I first developed my commitment to economic and social justice. It was there that I first heard the Young Christian Workers’ motto, “See, judge and act.” We would search out a situation, judge what action was the appropriate action to take, and then go and participate. This had been a pivotal time of opening up to new focus that had occurred just before I left Germany. It became a seed that lay dormant as I coped with all the stresses of adjusting to life in a new and totally different country. After I had learned the language and gotten my footing I was ready to resume my involvement with Catholic social action, and this I did when I met the two women in the Kolping Club and shortly afterward was introduced to the Young Catholic Workers. And it was with the YCW that I first became aware of and studied the Church’s social encyclicals, Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.

The YCW was a pioneering youth effort in the Catholic Church in reaching out to the marginalized. We would work at a soup kitchen on Main Street in Los Angeles on skid row. The leader of the soup kitchen with whom the YCW made arrangements was a man named Larry. It was during the period that we were working there that I met my eventual husband, Reuben, at the Fifty Fifty Club. Reuben was not involved with the YCW and didn’t know about our skid row mission. Once when we were riding through that area together, I saw a man walking whom I recognized as Larry. I said, “Oh there is Larry. Hi Larry, Hi Larry,” I yelled out of the car window. Reuben wondered out loud what on earth I was doing yelling to a guy in this part of town. I think he thought I was a little crazy.

During this period when Catholic youth and singles activities were playing such a central role in my life, I moved out of Mrs. Gold’s house and into my own apartment. Father Fogarty, the priest at St. Brendan’s, told me of a mother and daughter from Berlin named Schlesinger. The daughter, Eve Schlesinger, four years older than I, had also had a Jewish father. Unlike my father he had not gotten out, and when he had heard that he was about to be sent to a death camp, he had committed suicide. Eve and her mother were now living on Alta Vista off Hollywood Boulevard. They rented an apartment in a little house in the back of a bigger one. Eve was engaged to be married and was looking for a larger place. I became very interested in taking over her apartment, as it was very nice and situated conveniently for most every place I wanted to go. But to be able to afford it I needed someone to share the rent. At a breakfast at the Fifty Fifty Club I got up and made an announcement that I was looking for a roommate. A number of male voices shouted their willingness to move in with me, and after the room dissolved in laughter, I corrected myself, saying I would like a female roommate. One of the single women present, Billie Croninger, an elementary school teacher from Ohio ten years older than I, answered my call, and to cut the rental costs further we would add a third woman, Pauline Lavendier. Billie and I shared one of the bedrooms and Pauline occupied the other one, while we all shared kitchen, living room and bathroom.

As Fifty Fifty Club members, we had a good deal in common and shared most activities, including ones with the Young Christian Workers. Living with Billie and Pauline I felt like my life was really coming together. I had left Cantor’s for the Bank of America, and I had left Mrs. Gold’s for my own place. I was finally a completely free person doing my own thing openly without having to make up excuses and stories. When the three of us had been living together for about a year, my mother came over. Billie moved into another little apartment upstairs and my mother and I shared the bedroom for awhile and then began looking for a place for just the two of us. Eventually we moved to one a few blocks over, but in a different parish, St. Ambrose.

Chapter Fourteen
In a Family Way

As I socialized with the Fifty Fifty Club and dated some of the men who went there, I found myself becoming especially close with Bob Odell. He lived near us and was also a member of St. Ambrose parish. As we dated, we grew fond of one another and his intentions toward me grew serious. He lived at home in a large family with parents and sisters. I got along well with all of them and they invited me to the house many times. He had epilepsy, and I witnessed several of his seizures, and that was a problem for me. The medication at the time for epilepsy was not nearly as effective as it is today, and I was really torn about marrying someone with this condition. At length I decided that I could not marry him, and so we ended up breaking up.

I started going to the Fifty Fifty Club gatherings regularly again, something I had not done during the six months I went with Bob. The first night I was back I met a new guy who had just joined the club. He told me later that it had been his intention to dance with and get to know every girl in the club. While engaged in this ongoing feat, he danced with me and introduced himself as Reuben Quijano. Most of the women did not have cars at the time, and I was no exception. While we got ourselves to the dances on the bus, it was a given that men with cars would chauffeur us home. Reuben drove home several of us who lived near one another. After the first night I met him and he drove me home, we went on all kinds of outings together and got to know and like each other.

Once a month the CYO Clubs would go to Our Lady Queen of Angels, the mission church of Los Angeles, on Olvera Street, where they had perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Whoever wanted to go, always just a few, signed up with the club to go for an hour. On February 19, 1952, the Fifty Fifty Club was scheduled to attend the adoration during the midnight hour. Reuben was the one who drove us to it. He wasn’t especially interested in the adoration, but he liked the idea of driving a car full of women to and from the church.

On Thursday nights the club would go ice skating at the nearby rink on Gower and Sunset Boulevard. Reuben, who worked at Douglas Aircraft during the day, had night classes at USC, where he was finishing his degree. After class got out, he would swing by and pick me up at the ice rink. Sometimes he would skate a little with us and then take me home. Most of the early times I saw him were not single dates but club events where we were together with the group. I liked this arrangement because you could get to know somebody before going on a single date with him.

The following summer, I went on a vacation with an older widower named Fred Krenwinkel. I had gotten to know him while I was in the process of bringing my mother over from Germany. Part of that procedure was the requirement to have a sponsor for her. I asked the parish priest if he could suggest any names to me. He suggested that I get in touch with Catholic Charities, which I did, and they placed an ad for me in the Tidings, the local diocesan newspaper. It said: “German girl looking for a sponsor to bring her mother over from Germany.” Mr. Krenwinkel was the one who responded to it. He was a pretty well-to-do retired man who lived in an old but at that time nice neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. I visited him at his house where he did the paper work that made him my mother’s official sponsor. He became my friend in an avuncular sort of way, and in the summer of 1952 he invited me to come to Mt. Angel, a Benedictine abbey near Salem, Oregon, where he had a priest friend whom he visited annually. So I went by train with Mr. Krenwinkel for two weeks to Mt. Angel. I stayed with the young woman who was the parish secretary. It was enjoyable to stay in this tiny town in the midst of green Northwest farm country. My vacation was marred, however, by the hay fever that had me sneezing and rubbing my itchy eyes the whole time I was there.

In the meantime Reuben and I had grown very close and were in love, and while I was in Oregon I got the most wonderful love letters from him. The two weeks of separation brought us closer, and when I came back home in July we were an item. On the sixth of July we went walking together in Plummer Park near where I lived on Fountain Avenue, and under a pepper tree Reuben proposed to me. It was the feast of St. Thomas More, always my favorite saint, which made it seem even more appropriate. I wouldn’t say yes right away. I felt I had to pray and talk to my mother about it. When I came home she woke up and I told her about the proposal and we sat up until five o’clock in the morning talking, talking, talking. I thought it was wonderful that I had the kind of relationship with my mother that we could do that.

Reuben would customarily take my mother and me to church and then on some kind of an outing on Sundays. The Sunday after he proposed to me he came and took us to church and then we went to the San Fernando Mission afterwards. I had prayed hard for discernment, asking the Holy Spirit to give me a calm heart to make a decision. After we had gone to mass and had breakfast and were walking in the mission, I told him that my answer to his proposal was yes, and he was really happy. In the subsequent years of our marriage, when sometimes things would become stormy and I might question my decision, I always went back in my mind to that day, affirming to myself that it had not been a frivolous decision, that I had really sought the guidance of the Holy Spirit, with whom I always had such an intimate relationship. And so I believed and still believe today that our marriage was based on God’s providence, something for which I’ve always been very grateful.

We planned our wedding date for the following year when Reuben was going to graduate from USC. Our original date was August 15, but when we found out that my friend Janet Bold was getting married on the fifteenth, we changed it to the twenty-second. The prospect of our wedding brought out all the latent conflict I had over religion with my father. He declared he would not set foot in a Catholic Church, and so I had to get Mr. Krenwinkel to give me away.

My father’s issue with my Catholicism had very deep roots, so it was very difficult for him to lay aside. During my childhood he was never a religious man, but he was a believer. He would stand on the chair and invoke the Grosser Judischer Gott before going on his business trips, and that left a strong impression on me. And even though he had said it almost lightly, it must have taken some kind of a deeper sense of belief to even come up with something like that. Somebody to whom God didn’t matter would never have even thought of such a thing. When he left in 1938, he had left me in a strongly Jewish environment, in the Jewish school, attending the temple regularly, and even getting him to participate more in Jewish ceremonies. In our correspondence we had never mentioned religion, but when I was completing my education in my aunt’s convent after we had returned from Belgium, he wrote: “I’m so glad you are having a good time with Tante Toni. Please don’t forget Tante Freundlich.” This was the kind of coded language we wrote in during the Hitler time, and I had learned to read between the lines well. The reference was to my beloved third and fourth grade teacher in the Jewish school and was to remind me of my Jewish identity as I was being immersed in Catholicism. This held no special mandate for me as I had read it at age twelve. I was just beginning to learn about Catholic teachings and liturgy and doing what I was instructed to do.

As the years went on my tie to him and to the Judaism he represented would fade. In my correspondence with him during the postwar years before I came over, I wrote quite openly and with conviction about my Catholicism. I told him that there was nothing Jewish going on in my life, that I was very much a Catholic and had no intention of giving up my Catholic religion. But Vati must have told himself that when I came to America and had the chance to talk about it, things would be different. While I was staying with Mrs. Gold and working at Canter’s, while quietly going my Catholic way, we had a number of strong confrontations. My postwar Catholic education, tempered in the debates with the Communist youth, had given me the means to strongly defend my faith. As I did so in our heated discussion, my father became particularly distraught over the level of my Catholic commitment. He had thought I was just mouthing the Catholic teachings and that I couldn’t be all that deeply committed to them, and that he would be able bring me back to the Jewish religion. But he didn’t realize how hard it would be to do so. He was at a disadvantage also because his remarriage had broken my childhood emotional bond with him. So my attitude toward him at this time was neither loving nor understanding. I was on a power trip to assert all my ways with him. I wanted to be independent, with as little influence from him as possible. I felt a chasm had opened up between us that became wider as we wrangled over religion. His challenging my religious convictions only served to make them stronger and make me more defensive.

While I was working on bringing my mother over, my father was divorced from his second wife, Ilse. He began to think about getting back with my mother. But now Mutti said that she would only remarry in the Catholic Church. She had come back to the Church after twenty years out of it, and she was not going to give it up again. My father could not understand how the wife he had married twenty years before and lived with for fifteen years now also had these Catholic ideas. Before she came over he held onto the idea that he might be able to get her to change her mind. But after he saw her again he had to face the now deeply committed nature of her Catholicism as well as my own.

As I think about these things today, I can see more of where he was coming from than I could then. European Jewry had just been through its worst trauma in history. Vati had managed to escape Nazi Germany, but most of his relatives had perished in the Holocaust. He had lost his country and his family and now, he thought, even his little girl. Like most European Jews, what he knew of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular was their long record of anti-Semitism. And he may well have equated my being so strongly Catholic with my being somehow influenced by the Nazi mentality. A large number of Nazis, including Hitler, had come from Catholic backgrounds. His antagonism toward my being Catholic would probably never have been the case with an American Jew whose daughter became a Catholic under normal conditions. The fact that I had survived the whole Nazi era and come out of Germany a Catholic might have caused him to make the connection between Catholicism and the Nazis in the back of his mind, and this increased his antagonism. My devout Catholicism hurt him and made him feel estranged from me. He accused me as being a traitor to my childhood Jewish faith, thus causing me great hurt. As he threw his accusations at me I felt I had to defend myself all the more strongly, and as I did so, I developed feelings of martyrdom, which pulled me further from him.

Eventually he began to see that I was not going to change and that there would be no meeting place of our minds and spirits on this matter. After he said he would not set foot in a Catholic Church, I proceeded with our wedding plans without his inclusion. Our reception was going to be at Tiny Naylor’s, at the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine. But as Reuben and I were both just getting started in life, we could not afford a big reception, so we planned to have just cake and punch. As the wedding day approached my father softened and said he would come to the reception and that he would be happy to pay for it. But he remained resolute in his refusal to enter the church, and so Mr. Krenwinkel gave me away. Today I can put myself in my father’s mindset, but at that time of course I could not.

As the years went on and we had children, he mellowed and our relationship improved. We avoided the topic of religion, we moved back to a civil relationship with one another, and he became more involved in our lives. We would remain on good terms for the rest of his life, if not overly affectionate with one another. My mother lived with Reuben and me for the first five years or so, and my father would often come to visit with us and participate in activities with the grandchildren. My mother and he had a marvelous time laughing and reminiscing together, but nothing more developed between them.

Before the wedding Reuben and I realized that the little one bedroom court apartment my mother and I were living in would be much too small, so we had begun looking for a house. We found a little one that we could rent on Lexington Avenue, near Western and Hollywood Boulevard. It had two bedrooms, a living room and a porch in front. I moved in shortly before the wedding, and we bought the furniture we needed to furnish it. I wanted to be a June bride but Reuben would not be graduating until August, and he was adamant about graduating from college before he got married. He had been an International Relations major, but when he knew we were going to marry he enrolled in education courses so that he could get a good job locally.

He completed secondary his state teacher education requirement and took his first job at a junior high school in Willowbrook, near Compton. We moved out of our house, renting a place in Linwood, much closer to Willowbrook, where we ended up living for a year. Willowbrook was a very poor neighborhood that had become a black ghetto. Coming from a middle class Hispanic background, Reuben was wholly out of his element in such an environment. He did not have the experience necessary to handle the distinct stresses of teaching there. He suffered measurably, becoming very thin from loss of weight, and he applied elsewhere. Fortunately, as Southern California was in its great postwar expansion, teaching jobs were plentiful. He was soon offered one at the brand new La Habra High School, part of the Fullerton Union High School District in inland Orange County.

Reuben and I would now join the great movement of young couples to the new suburbs that were opening up south of Los Angeles during the expansive fifties. In 1955 we bought our first house on Dogwood Avenue in Anaheim. It was a four bedroom, two bath ranch style house with a huge back yard and a two car garage. It cost less than twelve thousand dollars, and under the GI Bill we were not required to make a down payment. Our mortgage payment, including taxes and insurance, was only seventy-four dollars a month. With this affordable, roomy house in a desirable new suburb we felt quite fortunate, and I was now in a position to begin nesting in earnest.

Our first child, Thomas, was born on May 26, 1954. At that time, you could not look pregnant and continue working, so I had to quit my job when I couldn’t hide it any more. The actual rule was that you were required to quit a minimum of six weeks before your due date. This actually worked to my benefit, since Tommy would come a month early. I had just enough time to get ready for a new baby, buying the layette. There were no discount stores for baby’s items at the time. We bought them all totally retail at the May Company. After Tommy came Juliette on May 12, 1956, and then Barbara two years later on April 30, 1958. With three children, Reuben began to think it would be advantageous when they got to school age for us to live in the district where he was teaching. So in 1959 we sold our house and moved to nearby Fullerton, where we lived until 1965. Our fourth child was born while we were living there, on September 13, 1961. She had been conceived on Christmas Eve, and thus we named her Christina.

Julie was the first child with whom I had a natural childbirth. I had been disappointed that the obstetrician had given me a saddle block with Tommy and had vowed that my next child would be born naturally. When I was pregnant with Julie, Dr. Reiswig told me he would be happy to do a natural childbirth. Late in my pregnancy he told me he was going on a trip and that if I delivered, Dr. Neslund would take care of me.

I had contractions, and Reuben said jokingly that because my friend Frances had just had a baby, that I had to keep up with her. I went to the hospital and Dr. Neslund, wanting to be on top of the situation, spent the night with me. He said we would try to go natural but would do whatever he thought would work out best for me. As it happened, I had the natural childbirth, and it went like clockwork. The next day was Mother’s Day, and I received a rose on my food tray. Dr. Reiswig came and asked, “What did you have?”

I was so proud of myself. I said, “I had nothing, doctor, absolutely nothing.” His mouth dropped open. He had not been asking about the anesthesia, but whether it was a boy or girl.

During my pregnancy with Barbara, I had a dream that I got up in the morning and Reuben was with his briefcase under his arm ready to go to school, and I stopped him, saying “No, no, no, we have to go to the hospital now.” Later, a month before the due date, I woke up and my waters broke, as happened with all five pregnancies. Reuben was standing there at 7:30 in the morning, briefcase under his arm, ready to go to school, exactly like in the dream I had had five months before. Barbara was born on the last day of April, but her due date had been May 26, Tommy’s birthday. My mother had always joked that the third child would change the pattern and be born in June. Instead she was born in April.

Chapter Fifteen
Europe and Back

In 1963, Reuben was eligible for a sabbatical leave. It was easy to get a sabbatical approved, but the drawback was that you got only half your salary, so very few teachers applied for it. Reuben’s salary at that time was six hundred dollars a month and there were few places we wanted to go where our family of six could live on three hundred. We knew, however, that Spain was the country in Europe where it was possible to live very, very cheaply. Reuben was fluent in Spanish and teaching in the Spanish department, and I had a great desire to get to know Spain and the Spanish language. So we decided to go and live in Spain for a year. We both took courses at the University of Barcelona. He took them on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, while I took care of the children, and I took them on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, while he stayed with them. We had a glorious year in Spain, with me and the children learning Spanish and drinking up Spanish culture.

In the summers before and after we lived in Spain, we went to Germany. At the beginning of the first summer, when we flew over, we stopped first in England. Flying across the ocean was quite a bit different in 1963 from what it is today. At that time if you went on a plane you got dressed up. Nobody then would go on such a trip in jeans with a back pack. That just was not done. So when we left, we were all dressed to kill. I wore a hat and gloves and heels. The girls were dressed in beautiful dresses that my mother had bought, like little Cinderellas going to the ball. And Tommy was in jacket and tie. From England we took a ferry to Germany and then a train to Berlin. When we got there, Reuben went to Stuttgart and picked up a Mercedes that we had purchased in the United States. Taking European delivery saved us a great deal of money. We paid only twenty-four hundred dollars, the price of a Ford at the time. We had had the bucket seats taken out and a special bench seat put in the front, and we sat three in front and three in back, with a rack on top of the car carrying much of our luggage. And that is how we traveled down through France and Italy and finally to Spain.

In Germany our base of operations became the Berlin home of my friend Gertrud, who now had five children, the oldest a little older than Tommy. When we all went out together, with our four and their five, Reuben would look at the crowd of children and say to Gertrud, “You really have a big family.”

“Well don’t forget,” she replied, “four of those are yours.” It was wonderful for us that they welcomed us and had us there with them for such a long time. With that many kids running around their house it was a bit of a madhouse.

This was the first time I had been back to Berlin in fifteen years. When I went to see many of my old friends with my four children in tow, I was slim, dressed fashionably, looking and feeling wonderful. But they would look at me with long, concerned faces, and say, “You must really have a hard life. As a mother of four you are so thin.” They thought a mother of four ought to be zaftig, with some meat on her bones. If I was thin, then I must not have enough food and I must be suffering. When they said this to me my ego just deflated like a punctured balloon. I had always had a tendency to be chubby, and I felt so good to go over there thin and in my American book looking terrific. And here they all thought I was poverty stricken, without enough food to eat. The German women, who had really known want, had the values etched deeply into them by the extreme hardships of the war and the difficult postwar days. They could not imagine abundance so great that people had to diet to be thin and thinner was better.

In the summer of 1963, the Berlin Wall was the most glaring fact of life in my old home city. It was the symbol of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the ongoing division of the East and West. And of course it divided people, often relatives, in this once proud city from one another. While we were in Berlin that summer, we decided to visit the East. During the three years between the end of the war and my leaving for the United States, I had not crossed over into the Russian sector at all. My mother and I had no desire to be in the Russian territory because it was simply too dangerous to go there. During the weeks prior to Charlottenburg becoming the British sector, I had avoided being on the street as much as possible, given the brutality of the Russian soldiers toward German women. Later on when an actual border between West and East was established, people without proof of residence or working permits had not been allowed to cross over to the Eastern sector, and after the wall was built no Germans were permitted to cross.

We crossed over at the famous checkpoint Charlie, which was by the railroad station of Friedrichstrasse. The guards searched our car, which gave me some cause for concern since we had our camera and some boxes of developed slides of our trip in the trunk. Fortunately, having American passports, we were processed pretty quickly and without harassment. We only stayed in East Berlin a short time and saw very little. Having four children ages two to nine was not conducive to a longer stay in such a highly monitored and restricted area. The threat, whether real or imagined, of being detained on some trumped up charge also made us nervous. And we didn’t know anybody there whom we could visit or who could take us around. So we simply looked around a bit and returned to the West. But we felt like we had had an adventure and had accomplished something having merely crossed over.

I had a longer visit to the Eastern sector of Berlin in 1982, when I went back to Berlin alone for two weeks. I stayed with Gertrud and made a number of nostalgia walks through my old hometown. This time I spent a whole day in East Berlin. I walked around in the old heart of the city, walked down the Unter den Linden, and stopped in some shops. I had to exchange the ten West Deutschmarks into East ones in order to buy anything, and I now had to spend all the money, since it could not be used anywhere else.

Though the West German Mark was worth far more than the East German currency, the exchange was done as if their value were equivalent. I bought some souvenirs and trinkets. Browsing in a music shop and a travel bureau, I noticed that the only recordings were of Soviet bloc musicians and the only trips to Soviet bloc countries. Since employment was universal, the people all had money to spend, but commodities were few and often hard to come by.

I stopped in a famous old red brick Rathaus (city hall) and treated myself to a modest lunch in a typical Ratskeller restaurant found in all German city halls. Along the long tables and benches I found myself an available seat, joining an already seated group, as is customarily done. Sitting down with three young couples, I greeted them and soon joined in their conversation. I was not surprised to find them dyed in the wool Communists and willing to defend their views fervently. The point they most harped on was that in their wonderful, benevolent regime there was no such thing as unemployment, as existed in capitalist countries. After the wall came down in 1989, it would become well known that their one hundred per cent employment condition masked the fact that there was never enough work to go round. Labor was never efficiently utilized and employees would go to medical, dental, parent-teacher, and hair dresser appointments or they would go shopping, all during work hours. This lack of productivity would become a source of conflict between the old East and the new West after reunification.

During this visit I also walked over to the place where my Aunt Erna and Uncle Adolf had owned their apartment complex. It was located a few hundred yards north of Alexanderplatz, called the Alex. I had to stop in more than one store to get directions, since the street names had been changed to names of Communist heroes. When I finally got there, I discovered that the big apartment house, having been demolished during the war, no longer existed. The ones that did exist were everywhere drab and unrenovated from war damages. The beautiful lace curtains I remembered that had always been the pride of Germans were missing, as were the colorful window flower boxes.

Stopping in a couple of grocery stores – there was no such thing as a supermarket – left me feelings of first disbelief and then disgust. The butcher’s display window was empty. I was told a shipment was due in a few days. Looking at the grocery shelves, I noticed that there was only one brand of each item, and only a few cans standing forlorn in the front of each shelf. I learned that commodities of all kinds were in such short supply that the people were still using ration stamps. As I traveled back across the checkpoint late in the day, I sadly thought, “What has become of my beautiful old Berlin?”

Returning on the S-Bahn at Friedrichstrasse, the only transfer point between East and West Berlin, was less stressful than going east, when I was herded through passport control. I had been cautioned ahead of time not to engage in any conversation with the Vopo, or Communist people police, and to avoid smiling, as any facial expression could be interpreted as some sort of signal. I figured that they’d been instructed to treat people entering from the West with very rude, demanding voices. I saw this as an indication of the totalitarian society they represented. Before heading for Barcelona for the school year, we stopped in Stuttgart and stayed with the Schmucks for two weeks.

In returning from Spain in 1964, we needed to find the most economical way to get our car across the ocean. Reuben did the research and came up with a Spanish passenger freighter that would take us with the car from Barcelona and a number of Spanish other ports across the Atlantic to Venezuela. After docking in La Guira, we took a taxi to Caracas, where we enjoyed ourselves sightseeing. Then we docked in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and in Vera Cruz, Mexico, where we got the car out and traveled from Vera Cruz through Mexico City and on up to the United States.

During our stay in Barcelona, Tommy had become very sick with asthma. On our way up to Germany in the summer of 1964, we stopped in Lourdes and participated in the procession, a very beautiful, emotional ceremony. We prayed for a healing for Tommy. He was ten and big for his age, but he was so sick that Reuben had to carry him through the whole long procession. He got some relief during the three weeks we spent on ship, but as soon as we got back on land he got terribly sick again. It was so bad that it would cause him to miss half of his fifth grade year. After we got back to the United States, the pediatrician we were taking him to said his case was too acute and serious for him to take care of him. He referred us to a renowned allergy specialist from Boston, Dr. Piness, who had developed a new form of treatment which involved injecting antigens into the bloodstream. I had to take Tommy to his office in Beverly Hills six days a week for four solid weeks to receive this treatment. He got eight hundred tests, from which they prepared the antigens, and our doctor in Anaheim had to give him shots regularly for four years. But by the time he was fourteen and starting high school in 1968, he was without any asthma symptoms, and he has remained so ever since. I always thought that our referral to Dr. Pinesse and the treatments he received from him and subsequent healing were an answer to the prayers we said at Lourdes.

Tommy’s feeling a lot better when we had been at sea told us that the sea air was good for him, and after we got back home, to accommodate his need, we moved from inland to coastal Orange County, the city of Huntington Beach. Our house was just three miles from the ocean. We lived there for twenty years and I became very active there in the Franciscan parish of St. Simon and Jude. I taught confirmation class for ten years and was also involved with a co-op preschool program. Parents with children in the program were participants in the program and were all required to take child development and child psychology courses. At that time I got my Associate of Arts degree from Golden West College there in Huntington Beach in the field of preschool education.

A few years after we had moved to Huntington Beach, with Christina just starting kindergarten, I now had all the children in school. Ten year old Julie began saying, “We want a baby.” I thought, “I’m going to be thirty-nine. I don’t think so.” One night we were having evening prayer together and Julie added spontaneously, “And dear God, give us a new baby in the new year.” Strangely I had been throwing up, which had always been a sign that the bell was going to ring again. Reuben and I had been watching the calendar and trying to practice the rhythm method, something which certainly was not conducive to a vibrant marriage. I was beginning to question many of the teachings coming out of Rome. A great many American Catholics at this time were beginning to find themselves more and more at odds with Rome in matters of sex and reproduction. Now some eighty-five per cent confess to going against Church teachings in using some kind of artificial birth control.

Finding myself pregnant for the fifth time, I began to see it as a blessing rather than a curse and looked forward to the due date, which was close to our August 27th wedding anniversary. We had acquired a habit over the years of buying each other cards with bunnies on them and calling each other the endearing name, “Hasi,” or bunny. I bought Reuben a funny bunny card that year. When I went into labor, I had seven hours of intense pain, with Reuben there rubbing and pressing my back. We had our fourth girl, and in choosing our new daughter’s name we thought of the saints’ days of our own birthdays, Elizabeth and Monica, and chose the name Monique.

This had been quite a significant anniversary present, and though we were in something of a state of shock at having a child at this time of life, we felt privileged and blessed that our new baby had entered our lives when our hair was already graying. Today it is common to have a child at thirty-nine, and many are even having them in their forties, but at that time it was unusual. One day some years later, when we were taking Monique for a walk in the stroller, a neighbor said, “Isn’t that nice, grandparents taking their grandchild for a walk.” With that I started coloring my hair back to its original brown, only to let it go gray after the kids were grown.

Chapter Sixteen
Working in the Church Reform Movement

During our sabbatical in Europe, in 1963, while on our way to Spain, we stopped for some days in Rome. We visited the Vatican and St. Peter’s and saw them setting up for the meetings of the Second Vatican Council, a momentous event that would begin in that year and conclude in 1965. We couldn’t get a really good view of St. Peter’s at the time because so many areas were cordoned off or being worked on in some way to accommodate the forthcoming events. The upcoming Council was a much talked about subject among Catholics. I would find the post-Conciliar years, when the documents were being published and the information being disseminated slowly to the parishes very exciting. It actually wasn’t until the seventies that we on the parish level were beginning to find out what had gone on in the Council. At that time the main aspect of the Council that the laity would be exposed to was change in liturgy. Whenever there was public talk about changes in the Catholic Church it always had to do with liturgy. And there were big changes in the liturgy. It became much more participatory, the language changed from Latin to the vernacular, the Host placed on the hand and not directly in the mouth. And there was far more lay participation in the mass, including the actual distribution of the Eucharistic elements.

These and other liturgical changes were momentous for American Catholics, but for me, a German immigrant who had been active in the Church in Germany, they were not entirely new. In our youth movement we had had a dialogue mass in German. We had participated fully in the mass. Liturgical renewal was in full swing in Germany in the postwar period, having ushered from the big, well known Benedictine abbeys there, like Beuron. But such changes would not occur in the United States until after the Council had ended. When I came to the United States, I had in my possession the Missal that all the German lay people used to pray the mass. As I went to mass in Los Angeles, I found people praying the rosary to themselves during the mass, and I was appalled. When I was in the Fifty Fifty Club I wrote an article for our newspaper about people praying the rosary during mass. Nobody here was aware that that was not the right thing to do, as there was no lay participation in the mass. Women had to have their heads covered, an ancient orthodox tradition long abandoned in Germany. These were influences from the old Latin Rite that had already been much modernized in Germany.

It was not until twenty years after Vatican II, when the American bishops came out with their pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All that we parishioners were first exposed to ideas and actions of the Council other than the liturgical ones. When I first heard about it, that particular document would become an action call for me. In the wake of the African American Civil Rights Movement, the United Farm Workers’ movement, and the federal antipoverty programs of the sixties, the Church was finally acting to commit the faithful to the quest for economic justice. In the eighties increasing numbers of priests and laity were becoming involved with peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua trying to build a more equalitarian society in the face of murderous military elites supported by our own government. But little of this new activism was filtering down to the parish level where most of the emphasis continued to be on liturgical issues.

And even the liturgical changes, when they finally came, proceeded very slowly in the United States. In 1970, when my mother died, I requested of Fr. Frank, a Franciscan pastor of St. Simon: Jude, that he incorporate the Vatican II changes into her funeral mass. He said he hadn’t gotten all the official diocesan orders on implementing the new liturgies, but he would be delighted to substitute a new resurrection mass with white vestments and joyful songs for the old black requiem mass with its lamentations. I was so delighted to hear him say that that it worked to ease my very sadness and sorrow and mourning over losing my mother. I chose old “praise God songs” from the psalms that Mutti had loved to sing in German, and as I put together this resurrection liturgy I felt like I was making a real statement.

This period a few years after the Vatican Council became a very significant and meaningful time in my spiritual journey. I was energized by the changes that were occurring in the Catholic Church. Since my youth years I had been aware of wanting to be open to new ideas and new ways of understanding and doing things. And the Post-Conciliar period, when the modernizing ideas of the Council were first being disseminated to the dioceses and parishes was a time that excited my imagination and enthusiasm. I liked the stimulation and the challenge of it all. The Council did open new windows and let fresh air in, as Pope John XXIII had said he wanted it to when he called it together. And I was always a fresh air person. Reuben kids me about tearing open windows every morning and letting fresh air come into the house. I had that same desire for the whole collective life in the Catholic Church. I felt an intense desire for teachings with more meat on them to stimulate deeper understanding in me. I was not the kind of person who adheres to ancient beliefs and procedures merely because they are ancient beliefs and procedures. This is why I liked the questioning and reappraisal of Church practices that was very much the spirit of Vatican II. Others were afraid or temperamentally opposed to such open, inventive spirituality. But not me. I was ever searching, waiting and eager for positive change to happen.

In the seventies, as the children were growing up and going through their teen years, we experienced new challenges and difficult situations, as nearly everyone does. Reuben and I did not always see eye to eye in child rearing, and I was always praying for the Holy Spirit to guide me, so that I would exercise my motherly obligations in a good and healthful way. It was a very difficult time for me, but I was able to draw great strength through the charismatic renewal that was surging through the Catholic Church at the time, enlivening the faith of parishioners all over the country who joined together in prayer and healing groups meeting at one another’s houses. One night at home I got into a big confrontation with one of the children. At my wit’s end, I left the house, got in the car and started driving. I drove about a mile to the house of some people I had met in the church who were in the charismatic renewal. Their names were John and Judy Davis, and they had urged me to go to their prayer meeting. When they told me I would receive strength and receive the Holy Spirit if I attended their meeting, I had been entirely put off, because I was convinced that for many years I indeed had the Holy Spirit living within me.

But now I was so frustrated and depressed by my argument with one of our children that I drove to their house at eleven o’clock at night, walked up to their front door and rang the bell. Normally I would never have done such a thing with a couple I hardly knew at such a late hour. But something in me had urged me to go. Both of them came out in their pajamas. “Oh, Evi, Praise God that you are here.” They instructed me to kneel down, and they laid hands on my shoulders and prayed fervently. They told me to let my tongue loose and say whatever comes up. I found myself letting go and then sobbing uncontrollably. Then suddenly my tears dried up, and I experienced a wonderful joy and lightness and sense of God’s presence in me, and I raised my arms and sang God’s praises. We hugged each other and I thanked them. I felt I had experienced a renewal of the Holy Spirit in me in a more tangible, physical way than I had felt before. My worry and sadness were gone, replaced by a wonderful inner calm, and I came home happy and lighthearted.

After that I started to go to the prayer meeting, and I enrolled in Bible Study Fellowship, a five year nondenominational study program. We had many intense charismatic prayer meetings with physical and emotional healings and other exercises of the gifts of the Spirit. And I just bathed and renewed myself in the Spirit at charismatic masses, retreats and the like. This was a new and different dimension of spirituality that I had not known before, and I sopped it up eagerly. I now experienced a new spiritual freedom that allowed me to pray spontaneously on my own, rather than just reciting rote prayers, and this ability became a permanent asset in my spiritual life. I never went back to the old ways, which now felt cramped and constrained to me.

I was beginning to really feel the presence of God in my life, and this led to my experiencing a number of epiphanies. One of them actually occurred on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1985. We had sold our big house in Huntington Beach and bought a smaller one further down the coast in Carlsbad. But we delayed the move because Monique had to finish high school before we left. So we rented out the house we had purchased in Carlsbad and moved into an apartment for that year in Huntington Beach. It was an unhappy, frustrating year, full of friction between my teenage daughter and me, and Reuben and I were also in frequent disagreement. At the time our daughter Christina, then in a master’s program at Loma Linda University, gave me an inspirational book which she thought might give me inner strength. I hadn’t been sleeping well, and early in the morning of the Feast of the Epiphany I got out of bed and went to the living room and opened the book to a chapter on “taking a trip into nostalgia.” The author said that if you feel depressed and defeated, you might journey backward in your life, getting in contact with memories. He recommended contacting an old friend from way back or planning a trip to your home town where you might visit childhood friends.

As I was reading this, suddenly the telephone rang. Who in the world could be calling me at 6:30 on Sunday morning? Lo and behold, it was Frau Nebelsieck, a woman from Germany, whom I hadn’t heard from in thirty years. She had been one of my supervisors at the Morus Verlag just after the war. I would send my annual Christmas letters to my friend, Edith, the one person from that company with whom I still had contact. And Edith in turn would send it around to the others I had known, one of whom was Frau Nebelsieck.

“Miss Seidemann,” she said, addressing me in the formal German manner. “Every year I get this letter and read about your wonderful doings in America. I wanted to call and remind you of how happy you used to make us all, with your wonderful, joyful nature at all our parties and feasts. Whenever I got your letter from Edith I thought I wanted to talk to Miss Seidemann, but I never had your phone number. Now I’m in my eighties, and I vowed that this year I would call information and get your number. And I just want to tell you what a lasting impression you in your youth days made on me. I will always think of you as a life giving, joy giving person.”

I was completely speechless. I thanked her profusely, saying “You have no idea what this means to me.” I hung up and offered up a great prayer of thanks to God, that He would talk to me in the voice of Frau Nebelsieck. Shortly after this call I got a note from Edith in Berlin that she had passed away. I had wanted to make an audio tape for her, as she had said how much she liked hearing my voice, to tell her how much this phone call had meant to me. The fact that she died before I got around to it gave me a strong lesson that I must not put off things that I feel strongly called to do. This has served as the mandate for me in guiding all the actions that I’ve committed myself to over the past twenty years, in particular actions for justice.

When we moved to Carlsbad that year I found myself in a new parish, St. Patrick’s, that was less progressive than St. Simon and Jude. I continued to strongly believe in the progressive changes I saw as mandated by Vatican II. I wanted more lay participation and more social justice advocacy and involvement. And these things were not happening in our church. By 1993 I felt I needed to talk to someone about my frustrations with our church format and decided to unburden myself to Sr. Maureen Brown, our associate pastor. We have since become very close friends, and I consider her my spiritual advisor. At the time I didn’t know her well, but I remembered she had once said she would tell me which priests were presiding at which masses. I took this as a sign that she might be open to where I was coming from, and so I made an appointment to see her. Telling her of my frustrations with the glacial pace of progress in our parish, she responded that what I was saying was a breath of fresh air to her. We began to talk openly and found ourselves of one mind in our progressive views of the Church and the spirit of Vatican II. We both had a sense that others were much less enthusiastic about these things and even desirous of rolling reform back.

Just prior to our meeting someone handed me a flier advertising a conference of a new group called Call to Action to be held in Chicago. The conference agenda focusing on church reform interested me greatly, but the Chicago venue seemed remote. Wanting, however, to show something constructive to Sister Maureen so that I would be doing more than complaining, I had brought the CTA flier along with me. She read it and waxed enthusiastic, saying “This is wonderful. If you’re going I will certainly come along, and I’ll publicize it with our parish staff and our pastor, and we’ll get others to come.” I now felt a strong calling to go which I had not even remotely felt before I showed the flier to Sister Maureen. Our pastor, Father Raymond Moore, ended up going to that conference with us, along with several other nuns and people from the parish. One of the focuses of the conference was the movement to develop small faith communities of lay people to meet regularly, grow spiritually and do social outreach together. These groups were starting up at St. Pat’s at the time and our conference attendees wanted to learn more about them. When they went to the conference they became exposed to the whole spectrum of reform issues.

When I learned how Call to Action had come into existence, it really spoke to me because it addressed what had always been the center of my concern: peace and justice. After the Vatican Council had ended, Pope Paul VI had stated that the laity had received a “call to action” to create a more just world. In support of what the pope was saying, the International Synod of Bishops issued a document stating that the gospel enjoins the whole Church to prioritize the pursuit of justice in the world. In order to do so, the bishops said it was necessary to inventory the Church’s own structures and practices to see if they were just and to make the necessary reforms where they were found wanting. In response to this statement, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops began to hold fact finding hearings on the state of the American Church. The clergy were instructed to disseminate a call to all the various lay associations in the Church, including parish councils, schools and colleges. The individual parishes and organizations were supposed to call together the active laity to create dialogue to establish a format for stronger active lay involvement in the Church. This included women’s clubs, men’s clubs, youth organizations, religious communities, catechetical training groups, religious communities, school and college staff, and charitable organizations like St. Vincent de Paul and Catholic Charities. Through my ongoing friendships in Germany I had heard of this call for increasing lay participation also going on there.

For two years the American bishops listened to the testimony of some 800,000 people. Out of these hearings came the U.S. bishops’ Call to Action Conference, to be held in Detroit in 1976. The conference, dominated by reform oriented clergy and lay people, issued a statement declaring that the Church must challenge the sexism, racism and militarism prevalent in American society. And more controversially, it declared that to do so effectively, the Church must address justice and governance issues festering within its own structures. They were to do so by moving to liberalize policies on mandatory priestly celibacy, opening ordination and the full range of Church ministry to women, liberalizing Church policy on birth control and sexuality, decentralizing the selection of bishops by going back to the ancient practice of including laity and parish priests in the process.

Because the conference made such recommendations for liberalization, many of the bishops, fearing a loss of power and authority, began to back away from support of reform. An increasing movement toward retrenchment would be confirmed and heightened by the long papacy of John Paul II. During that twenty-six year period liberal bishops would be replaced by conservatives, and while the Church would continue to verbally support peace and economic justice in the world, it would severely dampen talk of Church reform. The Vatican II preferential option for the poor also ceased to be an active aspect of Church policy, as the Latin American liberation theology was condemned and bishops who had established base communities with the poor were gradually replaced by traditionalists who identified more with economic elites.

Because the Church was now backing away from many of the reforms mandated in Vatican II, Call to Action as an organization would come into existence as a progressive lay movement providing a vibrant, more inclusive alternative vision of what the Church could be. In 1990 the a group of lay people in Chicago, together with some liberal clergy, issued Call for Reform, a document published in the New York Times with twenty-five thousand signers reaffirming the appeal for institutional church reform encompassing all the issues raised by the bishops in1976. A precipitous decline in vocations to the priesthood had occurred since that time, causing an acute shortage of priests and the eventual closing of thousands of parishes. Thus the need to open the priesthood to married men and women had become more relevant than ever. In 1986, the bishops’ pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, had made a strong call for lay involvement in justice issues, something actively advanced by the lay leaders who had written the Call for Reform.

Out of this coalescence of reformers, Call to Action was created, holding its first national conference, the Chicago conference I attended with Sister Maureen and Father Moore, in 1993. Since that time it has grown into an active national forum advocating the full spectrum of church reform, coupled with support for peace and justice issues, such as the banning of land mines and ending the death penalty. It supports these causes in solidarity with international organizations such as: Pax Christi, a peace fellowship; Network, a political lobby, Women’s Ordination Worldwide; Dignity, the organization of Gay and Lesbian Catholics; and Corpus, the organization of laicized married priests. I always feel hope and confidence when I think that I am a part of this network of over twenty-five thousand Catholic people all over the United States working for progressive change in our church and our world.

The foundations of my interest in social justice had been laid in my youth in Nazi Germany, where I had become keenly aware of what injustice in society really means. I had seen the marginalization of a minority group which had lived a life of total acceptance and equality. We had experienced sudden ostracism decreed by a dictatorial regime solely because of our ethnic and religious background. And that ostracism had quickly developed into the persecution and annihilation of the Jewish people. As I developed my Catholic faith during the war, I became aware of how the persecutions by the Nazi regime were spilling over onto Catholic clergy who were proclaiming the Church’s teaching on justice and openly pleading for the Jews. I was horrified to hear that Msgr. Lichtenberg had been taken from his cathedral pulpit in the middle of the mass, as he admonished Catholic Christians about the persecution and slaughter of their Jewish sisters and brothers, and then sent to Dachau to be murdered. Lichtenberg became the best known German Catholic martyr in defense of the Jews. I also heard of a good number of other clergy who followed suit and similarly ended up in the death camps. These awful occurrences had a profound effect on my conscience formation, planting the seed of a growing passion for social justice.

My early involvement with Catholic Youth in Germany and then the Kolping Clubs and Young Christian Workers in the United States had served to water this little seed. As it grew slowly, I became more and more attuned to those calling for justice and more and more desirous of becoming involved in movements for social action. In 1986, when the bishops published Economic Justice for All, I felt a strong nudging to organize a study group to consider that document’s implications. I organized one in our parish, but it did not take root. The few participants who had signed up for it did not have sufficient enthusiasm to really examine the implications of the document for their own lives, and the group soon fizzled. Seeing such apathy always was a painful experience for me. After the collapse of the study group I prayed earnestly for guidance about how I could serve and what action I should take. I asked God to nudge me in the direction where my talents could be used and shared with others.

After attending the first national Call to Action conference in Chicago in 1993, I became convinced that CTA had to be put on the map in California. I joined with Ellen Turner from the Northern California area and we talked to the national CTA leadership, got names from them, and divided them into Northern and Southern California. I personally called all the people in the San Diego area, invited them to my house, and we had our first meeting with nineteen people in February of 1994.

Chapter Seventeen
Supporting Worker Justice

In the nineties, as CTA became involved in a number of social justice campaigns, I found my eyes being opened more and more to injustice going on all around us. One situation that began to draw my interest, as I became aware of it, was the outsourcing of U. S. labor to the corporate maquiladoras in Tijuana, among other Third World locales, and the deplorable wages, working and living conditions of those Mexican workers. Although I had participated in reaching out to our sisters and brothers on the other side of the Mexican border in annual Church sponsored La Posada events, I had been unfamiliar with the sordid details of the Mexican workers’ plight. At a CTA meeting I listened to a worker named Juana describe how she worked at electrical equipment in a building full of rain puddles, thus risking electrocution. It brought tears to my eyes as I heard her, and I began to realize how much I had to learn about existing labor injustices more and more prevalent in the globalizing corporate economy. I thought about my need to immerse myself in these labor issues so that I could work to do something in support of workers and make others aware of their plight.

I was reminded of the old YCW motto: “See, Judge, Act.” The “See” and “Judge” part meant educating myself and others. And I knew that gaining the knowledge would inevitably lead to taking some concrete action. In the process of educating myself and thus finding out what was really going on in the sweatshops and maquiladoras of today’s industrial world, I sought out others concerned about the same issues and began working with them in solidarity. I got to know people in other organizations whose justice goals and commitments paralleled those of CTA. One of these was the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice.

I first became aware of the ICWJ when I became involved in a support action for striking press workers at San Diego’s newspaper, the Union Tribune. These workers had suffered with inadequate benefits and no pay raise in a great many years. When management refused to continue to bargain with their union they had gone out on strike. Hearing of the workers’ plight, I drove down to the Union Tribune building one warm summer day in 2001 with my friend Steve Berk, where we joined a large force of union workers and people from the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. We marched around the building with the workers, chanting: “What do we want? A contract! When do we want it? Now!” While engaging in this action we began to talk with the people from different faith backgrounds who were there marching behind a banner identifying them as the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice.

Leading them was an animated brown haired woman in sunglasses carrying a bullhorn. She was Rabbi Laurie Coskey, the Interfaith Committee’s new director. We talked at length with her after the march. I told her that I was a practicing Catholic, but when I also mentioned my half Jewish background, she said, “Evi, you are a Yiddisha madele, aren’t you?” That remark pushed a certain button in my soul.

“Yes,” I said, “and my Jewish name is Chave.” Our eyes met with a certain gleam, and better yet, our souls met. From that moment I knew Rabbi Laurie and the Interfaith Committee would become an important part of my life.

Of all the organizational activities I’ve been active in, I can honestly say that none have been as enriching, inspiring and energizing as the monthly meetings at the Interfaith Committee. I had always longed for more connection with other faiths, particularly, given my roots, with the Jewish religion. When I had taught religious education for the confirmation classes at St. Simon: Jude and had attended the annual Catholic religious education congresses at the Anaheim Convention Center, I had always made a point of attending any workshops given by a rabbi, or other clergy from a different faith orientation. And now at the Interfaith Committee meetings I gained exposure to clergy and lay persons from a broad variety of backgrounds. I was inspired there by Rabbi Laurie’s warm enthusiasm for labor’s cause, as well as that of the others.

The first Friday of the month is a day that I truly look forward to. I drive some forty miles south to Christ the King parish, an inner city church in San Diego’s North Park, a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood. Christ the King has the reputation of being the most progressive, multi-ethnic parish in the diocese. Two of the Anglo members are Janet and Ed Mansfield, leading figures in our CTA chapter. Eddie Samaniego, a Jesuit priest who was for many years the pastor of Christ the King, was also a key organizer of the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice in San Diego. Walking into the parish hall, you see tables placed in a large hollow square to seat some thirty people. It’s a humble place that vibrates with warmth and hospitality. Rabbi Laurie leads the meetings with sensitivity to the various participants, many of whom are workers involved in ongoing job actions.

There is close friendship and camaraderie among the people at these meetings. When I walk into the room I am greeted by enthusiastic hugs from Laurie and many others. There’s a side table with coffee and pastries and fruit, and we all socialize for a time as we eat and drink. One person who is always in attendance is Rev. Wayne Riggs, minister of the nearby Plymouth Congregational Church. Wayne is a member of the board of the ICWJ and one of its most powerful local spokespersons for the rights of labor. A retired Navy chaplain, he told me how working and sharing deeply together with clergy of other faiths had greatly broadened his outlook and given him an appreciation for religions other than his own. As Wayne told me of his experiences, I thought of how fortuitous was the chance I now had to work with others of diverse backgrounds on the Interfaith Committee. Participating with people of different faiths as we pray in solidarity for specific worker justice issues is a strongly unifying and elevating experience.

The lay people present include representatives of various religious organizations as well as union members and leaders and workers from labor unions and movements that the ICWJ supports. During a big Southern California grocery strike caused by the big supermarkets’ plans to lower wage scales and benefits so they could compete with Wal Mart, some of the striking workers attended our meetings. Two of the grocery workers, Esther and Michelle, told us stories of economic deprivation that they and thousands of their fellow workers had to endure during the long strike. Many of us went to the stores and supported them on the picket lines with encouraging words and coffee and hamburgers. Esther and Michelle became members of the ICWJ with strong commitment to our work. They and other workers who meet with us regularly provide the all-important worker’s viewpoint.

The Interfaith Committee was brought into being in 1998 by the Center for Policy Initiatives, a modestly funded progressive San Diego area think tank. CPI was founded the previous year by Donald Cohen and Mary Grillo, who were concerned about the worsening plight of increasing numbers of temporary, transient and non-union workers, largely in the service industries. Their research documents the impact of low wages, degraded living conditions, and the lack of availability of medical care and other benefits on these workers, as they struggle to survive in a sunbelt city with astronomical rents and an increasingly high overall cost of living. CPI is unusual in its strategy of pressuring for labor justice through interfaith cooperation. Rabbi Laurie Coskey, appointed executive director of the ICWJ in 2001, and two members of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps receive their salaries from CPI. The actual founder of the Interfaith Committee was Moshe Levin, a San Diego area Reform rabbi who played a mentoring role with Laurie.

Bringing pressure on intransigent management of remote corporations through the presence of representatives of a broad cross-section of faiths is turning out to be a great asset to embattled workers and their unions. In a growing number of labor causes Rabbi Laurie, joined by the others on the Interfaith Council, have been able, through marches with workers and attendance at bargaining sessions, to turn a public spotlight on deadlocked disputes. Corporations, always conscious of their image, hate bad publicity, and the ICWJ, under Laurie’s positive, vocal leadership, has been able to arouse public sympathy for the workers. With corporate greed and lack of fairness toward workers being publicized, management often becomes motivated toward bargaining and making significant concessions. This is not an overnight accomplishment. It can take years, but I have now seen a growing number of important worker victories.

As seemingly hopeless causes began to turn around in favor of the workers, I got a wonderful new sense that I am participating in something really significant. The dispute at the Union Tribune was the first one Rabbi Laurie became involved in after assuming the ICWJ executive directorship. The newspaper had stonewalled the pressmen’s union for over a decade, refusing to recognize or bargain with them. But after the Interfaith Committee became involved, and Rabbis Coskey and Levin met with representatives of the newspaper, management finally met with and ultimately recognized the union, giving the pressmen a new contract. Another seemingly intractable case was the prolonged dispute of a janitors’ union with Westfield Shopping Town, the world’s largest operator of shopping malls. The owner, worth over a billion, is an Australian, Frank Lowy, who also happens to be an Orthodox Jew.

Westfield’s practice has been to outsource janitorial services to separate janitorial companies and then pass the buck of labor relations to these often marginal subcontractors. The subcontractors complain that Westfield does not pay them enough for their services for them to offer a living wage and benefits to the janitors. One company, Building One, ended up going bankrupt. The dispute between Westfield and the janitors dragged on for years. We marched with janitors through malls in my hometown of Carlsbad and at the University Town Center in the wealthy San Diego suburb of La Jolla. Clergy wore their clerical collars and stoles, kippas (skull caps) and talises (prayer shawls), and we all chanted and sang for worker justice.

Laurie has been especially effective in publicly dramatizing labor issues. She has the facts of each labor issue at her finger tips due to CPI’s copious research. In the Westfield case she organized a series of prayer vigils and a march of over a hundred clergy in December 2004. Levin wrote to Lowy, receiving a response, and Levin and Coskey went to Los Angeles to meet with Westfield executives. When negotiations began between Westfield and the janitorial company that succeeded Building One, representatives of the ICWJ sat in. When members of the Interfaith Committee sit in on negotiations in this manner, they do not actually participate, since they are not the bargaining representative. But their silent presence builds the pressure for a settlement. Ultimately Westfield signed a contract with the janitorial company that would enable them to give workers decent wages and benefits.

To dramatize the issues and make the ICWJ presence felt in these labor disputes, Laurie likes to use symbols she gleans from Jewish history. If management is acting intransigent, refusing to bargain or making inadequate “last best” offers, she leads us in a march on their offices, carrying a plate of “bitter herbs,” the ancient Passover symbol of Jewish slavery in Egypt. If the company bargains in good faith with the union, giving them a fair contract, she leads us back to their door carrying “milk and honey,” symbols of entry into the Promised Land. We accompanied her as she carried these symbols to Westfield headquarters and also as she used them with a corporation called KSL, owners of the exclusive La Costa Spa, located in my home community of Carlsbad.

KSL is a faceless transnational hotel and resort management corporation. Recently it took over La Costa Spa as well as the historic Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego. In both places KSL immediately moved to make economies at workers’ expense. At the Del, housekeepers and janitors had won a favorable contract from the previous corporation, but when KSL purchased the hotel, the workers found themselves back at square one. The ICWJ took up the workers’ cause at both hotel resorts. At La Costa KSL moved to obliterate modest gains a union had made with the former managing corporation. Workers making between $6.75 and $10.00 an hour, while not receiving raises, would now have to pay for medical coverage as well as lunches they had previously been given free. While spending fifty-five million dollars to upgrade La Costa Spa, KSL was doing everything it could to minimize employee pay and benefits. The dispute went on for two years, with the company refusing to bargain with or sign a new contract with the union. La Costa has world class golf and tennis facilities and hosts frequent televised tournaments. During these times we attempted to embarrass the corporation by marching around the big entryway drive with the workers. As luxury cars drove up and nattily dressed, immaculately coiffed owners emerged, they had to pick their way around marching workers and Interfaith Committee friends. As we marched, our chants and signs publicly accused KSL and La Costa Spa of corporate greed and unfairness to working families. At one point in the long dispute, we marched with Laurie to the corporate office where a most unfriendly representative received our bitter herbs. At that point the cause seemed hopeless, but in 2005 KSL finally settled with the union, restoring benefits and giving a modest raise.

Hotel and resort corporations, exposed to the media and public as they are, try to avoid adverse publicity. If their well heeled clientele discovers that workers who serve them in their rooms, in four star restaurants, on championship golf courses, tennis courts and cabanas, are impoverished, they may be unfavorably impressed. Despite increasing disparities of wealth, most Americans still believe we are the land of opportunity.

When KSL took over the Del Coronado, they first fired all the workers, thus invalidating a contract with decent wages and benefits it had taken workers years to obtain. A good number of the workers were rehired, but it was with a new contract that brought these workers back to starvation wages and no benefits. On a hot Saturday afternoon, we drove down to the Del for a very lively and large action. We were honoring two ICWJ members who had just done civil disobedience with worker representatives at an action on behalf of embattled Head Start workers. When Katie and Rich described how they had been arrested in the demonstration, I was very moved by the depth of their commitment. We marched into the elegant lobby of the old hotel, whose walls were filled with the pictures and autographs of famous politicians and movie stars, to request to talk with somebody from management. Not at all to our surprise, we were quickly escorted out so we would not create a disturbance that might annoy guests. We loudly proclaimed what our presence was about and then marched out.

A similar action involved janitors at San Diego’s Lindbergh Airport. Their contract had expired in April of 2004. The airport authorities refused to renew it on terms favorable to the janitors’ union, the Service Employees International (SEIU). As a result the SEIU planned a big demonstration at the airport and was grateful for the Interfaith Committee’s participation. About seventy people gathered on a bright Wednesday afternoon in June at the Lindbergh statue at Terminal Two. We walked with the workers as they carried their picket signs, chanting the old United Farm Workers’ slogan, Si se puede! (It is possible!). We marched all the way to Terminal One and gathered for a big rally inside the terminal at the baggage area. Befuddled passengers milling around readily accepted the leaflets we passed out. The San Diego Harbor Police presence was in force and a group of seven demonstrators prior to the action had agreed to do civil disobedience. There were five union members and two of us ICWJ members. Katie Wheeler of Carlsbad’s Pilgrim Congregational Church, another caring grandma, and I were the other two.

I had previously rather impulsively volunteered to participate in a civil disobedience exercise, the one carried out on behalf of Head Start workers. At the time I had not fully comprehended what that would entail. When that action was about to occur I became quite nervous and worried about it. I remember praying quite fervently the night before that if God would keep me out of it how grateful I would be. As it happened, Reuben had been scheduled to take a cardiac exam and I had to take him to the doctor. I breathed a sigh of relief that I was off the hook. On the morning of the civil disobedience for the airport workers that I was now committed to participate in, I took this action to prayer, as I always do, and in my morning readings I came across the passage, “Be not afraid. I am with you. I will see you through it.” It was a balm in my heart. I was so at ease. All the worries I had experienced leading up to the previous civil disobedience had left me. I was as light as a feather. I drove to the airport with no butterflies in my chest.

When the police ordered us to leave, we remained, arms locked. The police told us, “You are trespassing. If you continue, you will be arrested.” I spoke briefly on why I was there as a non-worker. We were told we would be handcuffed and booked. Union Tribune reporters interviewed me. I told them I was appalled at the poor wages and denial of a contract to workers who kept the heavily trafficked airport bathrooms spotlessly clean. I was quoted in the paper the next day. The six of us were handcuffed and escorted to a van and driven to the station. The police were courteous in getting us out of the van to the conference room. Officers attending me whispered, “How old is she?”

“Seventy-six,” I said. “I make no secret of my age.”

Then a mug shot was taken and I was fingerprinted. For this occasion I had taken extra medication for my high blood pressure. That and God’s grace helped me through the experience. We returned to the group waiting at the Lindbergh statue, and they cheered and applauded us. I felt like I had passed another milestone in my life. I hoped the experience would give me the courage to go on seeking justice for the needy and marginalized in our society. Not long afterwards I learned that a very decent, acceptable contract had been signed, giving the workers an increase in wages and health benefits. I felt proud to have participated in my small way in their struggle and hoped my action had been of some help to them.

Chapter Eighteen
Dualities

The sum total of our experiences creates our identity. Many people live out their lives in the same place, speak the same language, and relate to one or no religious tradition. Whatever may be the content of their life experience, they have this singularity of identity. Others like me have lived in two countries and hence have bicultural experiences and loyalties. This is the common experience of immigrants. In addition to my dual nationality, I have also a duality of religious background. Sometimes it is possible for a person who is the product of a mixed marriage to practice one religion and forget about the other one. While I have been an active Catholic all my adult life, the experience of having a Jewish father and aunts and uncles and cousins and attending a Jewish school in Nazi Germany is something one does not forget. I am a believing Catholic, but I am also Jewish, a Yiddisha madele, as Laurie Coskey so aptly put it. I could shelve this aspect of my identity for many years, but it was always there and very much of what makes me who I am. The older I get the more I want to celebrate the rich life I have been graced with by embracing all of who I am in all its complexity.

Despite my memories of the horrors of the Hitler time, the trauma and deprivations of the war and postwar years, I still retain a deep affection for my homeland, especially the city of Berlin and its resilient, good humored people. While I live in the farthest point of the United States away from Germany, I have made many trips back there, and I am always thrilled to walk the old streets and reunite each time with many of my old friends. It is amazing to me that I have been able to continue these old friendships even though I have lived over six thousand miles away from all these people since 1948.

My trips to Berlin since the infamous wall came down in 1989 have been especially gratifying. The first was in 1993. I marveled at the differences four years had made. I saw a great deal of rebuilding and restoration and construction going on as the reunified German state took on the mammoth task of restoring an Eastern sector that the Communists had made decrepit. I was invited by the choir members of my former parish, Sacred Heart of Jesus, to join them on an outing to the Baltic Sea on the bus. It was heartbreaking to drive through the once lovely outskirts of Berlin and the Mark Brandenburg. The little towns with their cobblestone streets still looked as disheveled as they had nearly fifty years before at the end of the war. Enormous revenue would be required from heavy-taxed Western citizens for the rebuilding. The once lovely royal palaces that dotted the countryside, which were formerly used as common community facilities, were at the bottom of restoration priorities. Bad enough that the great metropolis of Berlin had been so heavily damaged during the war, but the entire Eastern sector of Berlin and East Germany as a whole had suffered immensely under Communism. Materiel had simply not been available, and therefore what had been damaged would end up being demolished.

The return trip from the Baltic Sea resorts to Berlin on the bus will always remain a most memorable event for me. As the dusk was beginning to fall over the late evening sky and the glorious sun was dramatically setting in the West, we began to intone some of our lovely and so meaningful tunes from long passed youth days. I joined enthusiastically, trying to suppress a lump in my throat, and with tears of emotion rolling down my cheeks.

My most recent visits were in 2002 and 2004. Both times I went over alone, as they were reunions with much German conversation, which bores Reuben. In ’02, I went for the 125th anniversary of our old parish, with a whole week of events, some of which I participated in. There were receptions and masses with dignitaries and of course visits from old members from out of town. I, being from the U. S., had come the farthest, the next being Gertrud’s sister from Italy. Some of the speakers were renowned German theologians with rather progressive ideas. In general I found all my friends from youth days to be liberal in their Catholicism and still active parishioners. They all welcomed me warmly.

In 2004 I went as a surprise guest for Gertrud’s eightieth birthday. Her daughter, my godchild, Birgit, picked me up and I spent the night at her place in Cologne. A big elegant reception was planned for the next day, at which time I was hidden in a large, beautifully decorated box which Gertrud had to open, and I popped out as the big surprise. She was honored and roasted lovingly by her children, siblings and friends. I offered a poem for the occasion, to everyone’s surprise in flawless German.

On these two visits I was astonished at the tremendous changes engulfing the city of Berlin. I found the entire old city center now flourishing with a hustle and bustle like any great capital in Europe. Unter den Linden was replete with fantastic hotels, restaurants and Konditorein, the luxurious pastry coffee shops I remembered so well from my childhood. The once famous commercial and trade area of Potsdamer Platz on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate has been restored and features a row of embassies extending into the Tiergarten area on the West side. The elegant architecture of each of these buildings is indicative of the nation it represents. All the glorious old edifices, the pride of German culture in Berlin, have been restored, except the Royal Palace, which had survived the bombing but was ultimately dynamited by the Russian troops.

One of the most enjoyable outings I went on the last time I was in Berlin was a boat ride on the Dampfer, one of the many little passenger steamers which travel down the again navigable two hundred kilometers of waterways in Germany. This trip was down the Spree River and its canals. It took us under a great many famous old bridges, more plentiful in number than in Venice.

I remain proud of my old home town and much attached to its people and culture, despite the sadness and hardships I experienced there in my childhood and youth. Berlin and the close friends and memories it holds for me will always have an indestructible place in my heart.

As I look back and reflect on the dualities of my life, Catholic and Jewish, German and American, Berliner and Southern Californian, I marvel at the strange and round about ways in which God has taken me to the place I am today. Each of the turns and zig zags of my eventful life, painful though many of them have been has brought new insight and revelation. I feel the richer for having gone through the tortuous journey that has been my life. I have an abiding sense of God’s presence in my life that has increased as I have grown older. I look back and can see God even in the most difficult times of my early life. This does not diminish the sorrow I will always feel as I think about the inestimable losses of the Holocaust. The hellacious events we endured after returning to Berlin in 1941 are seared into my memory. And I’m not talking only about the bombing of Berlin and the subsequent Russian occupation that left painful impressions on my psyche, but the tremendous grief I felt at the disappearance and murder of most of my dear relatives of my father’s family. After all these years I can still feel the old pain and sorrow when I reflect on that great loss. A part of me is always silently saying a Kaddish of my own making, committing the Jewish martyrs who were such an integral part of my life, as well as all the others who died in the Holocaust to God’s eternal grace and peace.

My Aunt Margot, who survived Auschwitz and married my Uncle Fritz, who had lost his family there, has been a wonderful inspiration to me. I first met her just after the war when she was still in a semi-catatonic stupor from all that she had been through. Her memoirs of those terrible events and of her subsequent life have been videotaped and placed in the Holocaust Museum in Washington. As did so many Jews, she went through a period of thinking, “If there is a God, how can he allow this to happen?” Some came out of the Holocaust trauma with a loss of their faith in God, but other survivors like Margot would end up affirming God’s presence in their lives. As she recovered she began to reassert her faith and her abiding warm and giving nature. Margot, still alive in her late nineties, remains a great model for me of how one’s defeated psyche and spirit can be restored. She hates none, has a peaceful heart and is always reaching out to others with a helping hand.

I have another friend, a Polish Jewish woman I met recently who went through similar horrors, suffering immeasurably in Nazi death camps as she lost most of her family. She has recorded these things in a book of her own. She too is an open person with a peaceful heart, retaining her belief in God and an absence of malice or hatred toward others, particularly Christians, who participated in these slaughters. Yes, some people believed God had abandoned them and others are convinced that God always leads people through the “Red Sea” in situations in their lives. What happened in the Holocaust cannot and should not ever be erased from our minds. But it is my sincere hope that humankind will never hold God responsible for such an evil. It is human beings who generated the conditions that led to the Holocaust. We were all created “in God’s image,” as we read in the Hebrew Scriptures, which means we have a free will to make our own decisions, and we end up making many of them outside the will of God.

In my own experience during the war and subsequent occupation, I was fortunate that my mother was able to keep me shielded from the worst of the horrors happening around us. I look back now over the winding road that a Mischling traveled. What did it hold for me? I think of the wealth of influences that shaped my views and attitudes toward my God and my fellow human beings. Indirect parental influences played a large role. I say indirect because neither my mother nor my father was very verbal about religious beliefs. Yet both were deeply anchored in their connection with that one great Creator God of us all and both had a strong sense of justice and equity. They imparted to me an openness and tolerance that enabled me to blend harmoniously the visions of both faith orientations, Jewish and Catholic. I gained an eagerness to accept and befriend people with backgrounds very different from my own. And this became a frame for my drive to advocate for the underdog, the poor and outcast, which as a Mischling I had felt myself to be in my formative years.

As I journeyed through life, stepping over many a jagged stone in the road, I almost instinctively focused on the beautiful flowers at the side of the road instead of the rocks and gullies I traveled over. And here I am now holding the bouquet of diverse, exotic and fragrant flowers that have been my life. God is asking me, as he did Elijah, “Why are you here?” My answer is, “I have always worked hard for you my Lord.” Acknowledging God’s presence in my life and working for God’s justice and peace has been the source of the steady stream of joy and hope that continues to actuate my life. This is the theme I have most wanted to share as I have told my story to others.

Mischling

The Story of a German Jewish Catholic Woman by Evi Quinn with Stephen Berk

Table of Contents

Chapter One Secure Beginnings

Chapter Two Jewish Identity

Chapter Three Flight

Chapter Four Belgian Interlude

The Story of a German Jewish Catholic Woman
by Evi Quinn
with Stephen Berk

Chapter One
Secure Beginnings

Chapter Two
Jewish Identity

Chapter Three
Flight

Chapter Four
Belgian Interlude