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TRANSCRIPTS OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR INTERVIEWS (Page 4)
©2000 Jim Terr / Blue Canyon Productions. All Rights Reserved
EVY WOODS
I was born June 26, 1938 in Berlin, Germany. It was but a few months after my birth that the "crystal night" occurred. That doesn't mean where I'll become famous. Crystal Night was an edict to destroy all synagogues and Jewish owned shops as a prelude for serious anti-Jewish action in Germany. I don't know whether that also went on in Austria. I'm not certain about that. I know that it was all over Germany at the same time-November 8, 9, 10-it was actually 3 days in Germany. And my grandfather, my father's father, was living with us at the time. He was pretty dismayed at what was happening and it fact killed himself on the second night of Crystal Night in my parent's apartment, because he felt he was keeping them from being able to take care of themselves for the future. He saw it as a grim end to Jews and Germany.
For me, I was really born into that. Germany had stripped the Jews of everything they had-financial, in the form of savings, and in the form of privileges that most of us take for granted. Every day privileges, by the time I was born. My father was already without work by then and went into forced labor in late 1939. That was the only way you had any work in order to secure stamps you needed to buy food in Germany. There was no other way. And your stamps were marked "Jew" of course. So, my mother avoided that due to a clerical that was made with respect to her maiden name versus her married name. So they never would have found her and then would have misfiled her card under the first letter "Z" instead of "L". So they would have never found her, never.So my parents, one was at home teaching languages to perspective immigrants. The door was not quite shut yet for some. And the other was busy doing forced labor for (Albert) Speer--a man who was a building designer, architect and whatnot, of rooms and old buildings under Hitler's regime. He was in charge of tearing down bombed buildings that had to be dismantled to make them safe for the public. Jews had to do that without being allowed to wear gloves that he would suffer the punishment of the cuts he would get from handling brick and cement, and all these sorts of things. You were not allowed to protect yourself. Eventually, though, things caught up with my mother and she did forced labor at Graf Zeppelin-you know, those blimps. And I was eventually sent to a Jewish kindergarten because our life had already been so narrowed down by them. The plan really was for Jews to be isolated, starvation. So it's isolation, starvation, and annihilation. That was the three-phase plan. We already isolated, living in a house for Jews only. And in 1943 we finally had to go into hiding in the attic of that building where an elderly couple who had owned the building and clandestinely still owned the building. She was a German lawyer who was cooperating with them. So they had some money at least. They were 70 and didn't have to work for that reason. Anyway, they shared their little attic place with the three of us, and that was in March 5, 1943 that we went into that attic after my other grandfather, Mom's father, was taken from the Jewish hospital in Berlin and my mother's 8-year younger sister and her husband volunteered to go with him to Terezienstat when that hospital was liquidated of all Jewish personnel and patients.
In the attic we were able to stay for about 3, 4, 5 weeks, I'm not sure, but the portier as it's called in German-I don't know what that is called in English-it's sort of a building maintenance person who is actually sent there to spy on people and was rewarded for spying as in, are there chicken feathers in the trash, and if so, why, because Jews are not allowed to have chicken as a meat. So he was watchful and well trained despite his IQ level of who knows how low. People became well-trained in spying. It's a natural thing to denounce people somehow for a reward. We stayed there until the Gestapo came for us, and they broke into that attic. They were really looking for the other couple, but they escaped. At this point, when this happened, I was not quite 5. My birthday was in June, this was March 4, 5, when we went though there. The Gestapo finally was led to the attic hiding place by the "Patyea" who had noticed new plaster where old should have been, and they broke in. And there we were, my father, father and I, and the other couple named Levant, and they wanted to know our last name. They weren't even looking for us, as it turned out, and they couldn't say our Jewish name, Goldstein. One of the Gestapo people hauled off and smacked my father in the face, and I was terrified because they had revolvers. They asked him repeatedly what his name was, and I couldn't understand why he wouldn't tell them. An understanding between my mother and my father at that point. The Gestapo of course were plainclothesmen, at that point dark suits, coats, green hats with the little feather.
So my father used the opportunity-he had a key on him at all times. And they had pre-arranged if they ever broke into the place that he, my mother, and I would be able to make a run for it. He locked the Gestapo, who had gone running after the other couple in the second little tiny room, who had created a diversion, a pretend escape. There was no escape from that room actually. We locked them all in together and made down the stairs as fast as we could to an escape place that we had in the wall on which rubble had been piled. We went down and my father grabbed me, held me, and walked across the post office courtyard. Downstairs of that apartment building was a post office-west 50 I think is its number-it still is its number. And we had to come out of the archway that the postal trucks would drive though and there were trucks with all the people loaded on them. And my father kept saying, "Walk slowly, slowly"…He put me down and I walked between them. I remember not stepping on the lines like every child does. I didn't understand it. But, as it was no one called our name because it is often easy for people who would trap themselves to see someone make an attempt at escape. In this case family Grunstein, to denounce and say "there they go."
The trucks on the street in front of the building were loaded up with Jews that had already been rounded up in the general neighborhood. And, of course, Jews had to live in specified houses. They couldn't live just where they chose. Our house was called a "Jew House", and was so designated. The trucks were going to deport people-first taken to a holding center within Berlin, and then from there, as we learned later, the majority went to Auschwitz direct, and in some cases to other camps and then into the system of annihilation or whatever. It was mostly old people or young people with children who hadn't the means to leave like ourselves, who were a part of that roundup. The healthy, wealthy and wise, and those who had money in other countries due to business relationships say ten years earlier, had left Germany. More than 50% of all German-Jews had left Germany.
No one called out or name, which would have been a dead giveaway. Gaulstein is as Jewish as it gets. Surely people knew us on that block, since my kindergarten was on that block, which I attended six days a week, and we were fed beets there at every meal every day. That was the only food-boiled red beets. To this day, I don't eat beets. We jumped into a streetcar, without money, without a suitcase, without anything but what we had on. But my very creative father who had a Berlin mouth-a Berlin mouth is similar to a New York mouth-and with that mouth he said… "Oh, forgot my wallet at home. Can I give you this silver knife," that he had in his pocket for our fares, "and then I'll retrieve it at the streetcar barnyard." Of course we know it would never go there because people were grabbing hold of anything because it's wartime and all efforts were geared toward making bombs and annihilation mechanisms for either Jews, Gypsies and other groups that were so designated by the regime as well as people in other countries, to destroy them, to dominate people in the entire world.
Which was nearly successful.
And that began our underground life, more or less. We stayed one night, I remember we walked into a cigar store. This was a person who had been a customer of his-a non-Jew of course. Jews had no business. And he had still continued to buy for some time, illegally, cigars from my father's distributorship. And he said, "You can stay one night, but that's all I can risk." Because the penalty was one as good as it was for Jews be sent to a camp for having harbored a Jew. So we stayed. I remember I had a terrible cough. Had that in the attic already to a point where my parents used to put me into a separate attic alone in case somebody heard me cough and found me, and didn't want to give away the four adult people if I was caught. Well, I coughed a lot at the cigar man's that night. From there on we somehow caught up with the people that my father had met in a green grocery that was allowed to sell to Jews. Like collards, and all these kinds of greenery. And that woman's niece was a student at the Humbolt University in Berlin, and she turned to my father who, of course, was wearing a star, and said, "If you ever need a room you can contact me," and handed him a business card. I still have a business card of hers with that original data. Her name was Hildegard Knies. Her father was, unfortunately, a big Nazi, but the daughter the reverse. As is so often the case, children will do the reverse of their parents. That is whom we called in desperation. And she said, "Let me send you to Doctor Elizabeth Abek," who was prior to that time fired by the Nazi's from the university as a philosophy teacher teaching the wrong philosophy.The philosophy professor was pensioned early and was running a quiet little underground operation for Jews. We don't know how many, and we don't know who it was, and in some cases we found out in 1948 when we came back to Berlin long after the war was over and we'd been in Russia for almost 4 years as captives of the Russians. Another regime. We only know that a dress was provided for my mother, some money was provided for the two of them. They were given an address and sent off, and I was taken elsewhere. They said it was too obvious-a man, a woman and a child. And in my case, the philosophy student, Hilde Knies, took me and I was to say I was bombed out, or she would tell people I was an illegitimate child of a fellow students of Humbolt, because Hitler, after all endorsed Kraft durch Freude-Pleasure through free act-and rewarded people for being lovers, so even that was good. But of course, it was dangerous to keep someone like me. I would stay at some people's house I remember, in fact the people-another student-who took me also for a few days, and I said to the student's mother when she took me along to go grocery shopping, "Ohgg, you're buying milk. We're not allowed to buy milk." She didn't know it was me, because her daughter had made up a story, of course, about me. Or, one day we shopped and, this wasn't too far from where we lived in Berlin, which is now Marburgerstrasse12, and I stopped and said, "Well look at that. That house isn't bombed. We didn't get bombed out. Our house is right here." And the women again looked at me, and came home and said, "That's it. Get that child out of here. There's something strange with that child. Wait until your father finds out." Mr. Top Nazi number 2! "We've got to get rid of this kid. There's something strange"
So, I went to a woman doctor. The woman doctor, I believe had a child that had died and her husband was in the service, and she said, "I'll take this child if I can baptize her. There will be no heathen over my doorsteps." Ok, baptize. So I have a reservation in several heavens by now. There, the problem erupted, she said, "Now you must say your prayers when you go to sleep." In fact, I have a picture of myself on her balcony. I prayed the only little prayer I knew, which was a simple little Jewish thing, Hebrew thing. And she immediately rang up the people who had brought me there and said, "Get that child out of here, it prays in some gibberish words that I can't understand. I don't know what language it is. But something is suspicious about this child, despite its blond hair and blue eyes." That made people eager to take me, of course. But, apparently I had a mouth that was similar to my father's. An active mouth to this day. And so it was. I'd be on the streetcar with my mother and with one of the students and some Gestapo person would come over and pick me up and hold me up and say, "The epitome of the perfect German child." Because in looks I matched everything and I was easy to hide. I was not a boy. Jewish boys, of course, were circumcised.
Other Germans were not circumcised until probably the 1950's, when it became a health matter. It wasn't for ritual reasons the way Jews did. Since I'm finding out that other groupings-Middle Easterners do circumcision, and even in Africa, do circumcision at age 15 for men, I think. Just read it. So, we got along. My parents got along, but I never really saw them but for 5 or 10 minutes. I really didn't know what had happened to them. I didn't know I was a Jew. I didn't know what a Jew was. And I didn't know what that was until my mother told me in mid-January, 1945, and the last place we were hiding, at that time together. We were not, of course, always together. I was sent away separate from my parents by these various persons who were active in trying to save individuals. There were maybe about 13 people saved by this small grouping of professor and students-women students. There were no men. Men were in the service.
I was sent to East Prussia to a family to be taken care of, who only had the wife there. The father of the family was a Lutheran or Evangelical pastor. He was at the Russian frond tending to soldiers. He'd been drafted in that capacity. The woman had three boys of various ages. She knew about me, but only she. This was a castle that belonged to a Baroness. It was called a castle, it was really just a three-story mansion. And the 1997 calendar of the Washington D.C. Museum has a picture of that, and refers to it as a castle. Slightly exaggerated. It was probably an Estate. What we called an Estate. Huge, huge. And there I existed. I presume my mother and father must have died, or everybody gets shipped off to somewhere when they're six years old or five years old. And one day my mother reappeared there on the front steps. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. But I really wasn't interested in her anymore. So much had happened that I was kind of catatonic in my behavior. Just kind of numb. It had been probably eight, nine months. But I never heard from her, and I had no way to know.
Plus, she was battling the bombs in Berlin, had died her hair to avoid being detected. We also never had fake papers. Some people had money and bought fake papers, but we had nothing like that. So we would be arrested, for instance, just for not having any papers. That's enough to get you into a police station regarding you identity. Everything was checked. Everything was…..And it was all done manually without the use of the kind of equipment we have today that tracks people right and left. It's easier today. You had to report a change of residence within 3 days in Berlin at that time, and still do to this day at your local police station. You just don't take off for somewhere. There's no such thing. My father was pretty good during the time they were still together, at faking his way through. He would go into some place and say, "Hey, I'm a soldier on furlough and I'm here with my girlfriend and we'd like a room. I'll give you some extra money and in a few days I'll get you the ID papers you need. I just don't have all of that with me." That worked for them for a while. Because, you see, there were no men walking around. This man was 42-43 years old. There were no men walking around who were not in uniform in 1943. And that was precisely what cost him. He was arrested eventually in the middle of a street.
I remember visiting once in a place they had rented, like a little pension, a little B&B, where he had rented a room. Talked his way into it. They also would have cake and coffee in Hitler's brother's café in the middle of the busiest part of Berlin, because he reasoned that there they would not look for Jews. Because there were catchers, and some were people like Stella-called the "blond poison" who was promised to become "Arianized"-have her Jewish expunged after the War if she would help them now to catch the people who were hiding. Stella Goldschlag was Jewish, married to a Jew. And the two of them were dressed to the teeth, well fed, and each was allowed a revolver on their person and could arrest anyone.
Hitler's brother was named Aloise. He had a café right on the busiest part. Who knows, it was probably a half-brother. I have friends who have papers signed by Himler's brother. Apparently, people had brothers and they happened to have the same initials as the #1, 2, or 3 man like that and could use that as a means for saving people sometimes. Somebody else would say, "Hey, sign this document, I need this document"…So the brother of such a person had powers he wasn't even aware of to prevent say a draft or being forced into Gestapo partisanship or something like that, if you wanted to be exempt.
My mother and father living underground. I have to go back about them living together. My father goes off answering an ad for laundry. They went back into the attic and stole back things they had to leave there, and things in their apartment that had to be left there because the SS seal was over that. The Gestapo seal, I should say. But they carefully lifted that and replaced it by just taking among other things an old pair of work pants into which they had sewn some money. That held them over for a while. Who would pick up old, ripped work pants. It was garbage. The linens that they stole they knew they would be able to sell just to sustain themselves, and they did that. Not to burden the people who were helping them. It was enough if they could help find places when it was needed. My father had answered an ad to sell some of this laundry, and the Gestapo had placed tricky ads in there to catch people precisely like them. They'd have to get money from somewhere. And so in this case, when they went out there on a summer night, they had cancelled once before on intuition. Something didn't feel right, and had gone three weeks later, when my mother remembered what that phone number was about that he had in his pocket. He called it again, made an appointment, they went there. It was this beautiful summer day, end of June, and 1943. And in no time another plainclothesman crosses the street. He's going into the building at an angle. The other man crosses at a different angle so that they meet up at the front door of this apartment building in a community named Zehlendorf in Berlin. We lived there eventually. My mother suddenly remembered where she was on what street and we had to move. She couldn't live there. That's where he was captured.
He goes into the building with that man. Another man materializes from somewhere, and in short, they've got him. They come down a half-hour later from, apparently the apartment they'd been to. The whole thing was a trap. And they had him between them as they walked down the street. And my mother, who had been coached not to give away what was happening-that she was related to him or anything-heard him say, "Well, I live at.." and he named off some fake address, which to her meant you stay away from here and from this situation. But she followed them all the way with a bus that they'd jumped on to. He managed in the crowded bus to slip her the satchel that he had with all of the linens in it. One of those big, old-fashioned, tick briefcases. And they didn't even notice that he had handed her that. That was the last time she saw him. The next thing she heard he was held in custody and, of course, what they do at the police station is, "who are you, where's your ID"…He had none. We had burned our Jewish ID; you might as well have none, as that. The next thing is drop your pants. Ahh, what have we here, a Jew that hasn't been deported with the last action, the end of February. That was supposed to clean out all the Jews from Berlin. So we had escaped to that point. And we know that he attempted 3 escapes from light duty, because they wanted him to tell where my mother was, where I was. They know all this about you. They know everything down to your great grandparents on this ID system. All she knows is that on August 4th there is another transport-one of the few left-leaving from a train station in Berlin.
So my father is designated to be on that transport August 4, 1943, direct to Auschwitz. My mother hears about this through somebody who knows of another transport. And she rushes out there to the platform, as if she can save him. Well that would be the regular train, not the cattle cars that they've been taking these people in, which was on a whole different (train chassis). Way far in the distance she can see a few people standing there. I think it's a transport that only had 99 or 100 people on it as I learned from books recently, when I visited the DC museum I found out about that transport finally. And we know the transport arrived August 5, the next day, boiling hot summer day, and that likely when that arrived, because he had no assigned number, no tattoo number which Auschwitz people got on arrival from the outside, you did not receive a number if you were a transfer in.
Well it turned out that he had no number, he was a short man with dark, curly hair, glasses, 42-43 years old, oh, give that man half an hour, that's about how long it was for the gas chamber, and I just today in a short story read again that people who were not sharp enough to take off their glasses when they arrived at Auschwitz would find themselves in the left, to the gas chambers, immediately. So we know from that that's what happened. He was already, German Jews hadn't seen good food since the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, so they looked pretty emaciated at a fairly early age. A lot of black market buying had to occur to sustain yourself. I grew up without milk, without meat, without fresh fruit. Somehow you grow up. Maybe that's why at 61 I have more health problems recently, I don't know, maybe not.
(Regarding not taking glasses off): He didn't know, he didn't have the savvy, he was a white collar man. Blue collar workers, people coming from Poland, were savvy survivor types, under their own countries' regimes. They were never citizens like we were in our country. German Jews were citizens of Germany until their citizenship was removed, revoked, and they were much sharper from those other countries.
Another fairly ignorant group, I understand, were Greek Jews. They had no clue what was going on when they would arrive at camps. Simply because they didn't speak any other language. You know, most Europeans speak another, maybe even a third language. Greek Jews could barely read and write. They were utterly poverty-struck as long as anyone can remember, lived on dirt floors, very very poor, very unskilled. You had to say things like "Yes, I'm an electrician." My father didn't know about those things, you know. Most German Jews were not blue collar people, they simply were middle class and upper middle class people and more, in many cases. So we wouldn't have known to take our glasses off, that that could be your death sentence. We weren't even sure about people being killed in those places. A little rumble was heard here and there: It isn't just about work, they may be killing our people in some of these places. Oh, but not in a country like Germany.
And you notice the death camps were never on German soil. The regime was afraid that the German population would rebel at that. It sounded too insane. But you could pull it off in Poland or Czechoslovakia perhaps, some other countries, where they didn't understand all that was being said. So we know that he probably was gassed within half an hour to an hour. He had told my mother: If I ever land in such a place, and if what we suspect is true, then he would go to the electric fence. They had heard that people were kept penned up in an electric fence system, so they couldn't escape. But the conditions were nothing like what a civilized mind could imagine, nothing. So if he hadn't tried to go to the electric fence-and he would have been shot in the back on the way-he would have been annihilated. And friends of mine have confirmed that who were from Berlin, men who survived who were young teenagers at the time, friends of my mother's sister. No one really survived any of this except my mother and me. Her sister wound up being, after their mutual father died of malnutrition and pestilence and scabies and everything else, neglect and hunger in Terazin, Terezenstat, her husband and she were separately shipped to Auschwitz. By the time she got to Auschwitz he was gassed already, having worked in a quarry for about six weeks, that's as long as the people lasted in the quarry called Golleschau; I've had the good fortune to find all this out in the last three years. So she had gone to Auschwitz by herself and, from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen on foot, there was I think a January of 1945 march, on which, I don't know, 9/10 of the people died on these marches.
And how do I know all this? I found a woman in England who married a British serviceman right after the liberation in Bergen-Belsen and she was a student nurse together with my mother's sister. She saw her about four weeks before the liberation in Bergen-Belsen. She had just come on a later transport than my father, as it turned out, far later at the last minute, was caught with her young son, who was the same age that I was at the time, born in the same hospital where both my aunt was a nurse and this boy's mother was a nurse by then, and she spoke to my mother's sister, gave her all this information, and said I can't do this anymore, everyone is dead, my husband's dead, my father's dead, my sister and little Evchen, that would be me, and my father, and everyone that had meaning to her. She was at that time, I should tell you, 22 years old, and life was over.
Another friend of mine saw her, he lived in Chicago now, he was the same age she was, he was a patient at the time in the hospital when it was liquidated, and he had would up directly in Auschwitz because he became well again after his surgery, of course. And my grandfather was only sent with his family to that better camp because he was a World War One decorated veteran. In fact, many of our family members on my mother's side had all been veterans of several different wars of Germany. We were assimilated Jews, that is, just like in America, people come here and become assimilated. When people ask who are you you say you're an American. What religion are you? Jewish. You don't say what country and identity do you have, you don't say Jewish, you say German or whatever country you're from. Well in many countries Jews were not of that country but just Jews, because they were never made citizens the way we had been.
This was a real blow to people who had been veterans and had served. Think of yourself here in America. You're an American, you may be Catholic, Jewish, Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, I don't know, whatever all religions, and suddenly you're put away, and someone says oh we don't care if you were loyal, and you served in the Korean War or World War Two, in the recent Gulf War or whatever, it doesn't matter. It matters only that we don't Catholics or Methodists or whatever, and there you are. That's what it was like for my grandfather. Now my father didn't fit into any war, but his brother served in World War One. He had, however, gone to America, to San Francisco, early, and had been lucky that way, but never did have a way to sponsor our family (to emigrate), it was all too late. So my grandfather on Mom's side had a terrible shock, really never got over that, they thought it was all just a temporary insanity. You know, every old person thought the same thing, it'll go away soon. Every aristocrat in Germany thought the same thing.
Catholics tended not to be Nazis because they put God before a leader of their country in that loyalty, that hierarchy is different. Under Hitler, you put Hitler on the top, family and all that comes perhaps next, and then comes God, so you've scrambled up all the hierarchy of what matters, what you serve and whom you serve. In fact, in German I remember boys turning in their own families, can you imagine the tragedy of children my age playing "Abholen" -- "Abholen" in German means to pick up, or make that, round up. So that's what that word was that had developed under the Nazi regime at least in Berlin, and so we children from the Jewish kindergarten where children were picked up regularly, would play "Apolen", and on a Sunday when my friends and their parents came to visit my parents, the only day off they had, we'd say okay, let's play "Apolen" and I'll be the Gestapo and you be the people that we're gonna pick up. In Auschwitz, people played that, I read that, children played insane games like that. Reality becomes the game that you play, if you can imagine. We did use fake names when we lived illegally and underground, like parents had coached me and said your name's not Goldstein -- Holstein -- because a province in Germany, a type of cow variety here, Holstein. And I kept saying, no, no, and my father kept saying you will do what I tell you. And I remember at play once in one of the hiding places where my mother happened to be also, in Prussia, she was talking to a Nazi woman whose husband had been instrumental in rescuing Mussolini, who was temporarily kidnapped by Allies, and he participated in the retrieval of Mussolini, and this was his wife and their two children, I ran up in play in the sandbox and said to my mother "I must whisper, I must whisper to you."
Of course, whispering is rude, we're the country of good manners, remember, you don't whisper in front of another person, and the woman felt sorry for me and she said that's okay, she said to my mother, let her whisper. And I whispered, I still remember what I was wearing even, it's so real, I said can I just once say my real name, Goldstein? My mother paled and to this day uses that little finger and said "Don't you ever say that word again." So this woman of course presumed I was uttering some four-letter word, and my mother made it sound exactly like that. But you had to be fast on your feet, you had to be very fast, very fast-thinking. And of course I've been on alert all my life. Everything is an alert for me, too much so.
My mother is still alive. The Russians were our liberators and it was a big disappointment. We knew nothing of Stalin policies but we have become expert on it, almost as good as the other systems. We were held with other civilian Germans and military Italians in camps. First we were schlepped around with the front, the Russian front, advancing toward the west. They kept all of us with them, we had to walk, the front, in January. In fact Solzeneitzen came and liberated that part of Germany that we were in, East Prussia, his particular platoon that he was in, in the Russian Army.
And the Russians were something else. One cannot always be prepared for what comes. Not only was it all primitive, there was a language problem, we wanted to try to save the people with whom we had last stayed and they wouldn't listen to us. In fact they said we weren't really Jews, they had told my mother "All Jews kaput!" And my mother said no, no, no, that's not true. They said yes, all Jews kaput -- they were right. Two out of three German Jews were exterminated during that Holocaust. Imagine if three people are sitting there and only one of you survives. That's what it meant. At least as best they know from the figures.
Well they detained us and my mother wasn't going to give in to a regime that was as murderous as the other one. When they said to her "You go out there into the camp and listen and name us, I don't know, ten German Nazis every week, and then we'll take good care of you and your daughter." She said I don't know these people, I can't do that, I don't know if they're Nazis. She said you name ten people or Sirbihutsis, which means do you want Siberia? So we became acquainted with that whole insanity of what went on in the Stalin era. And we didn't know the Stalin order was "If it speaks German, looks German, and acts German it is German. Do not fall for anything. When in doubt, shoot." My mother nearly got herself killed trying to explain who we were. It was chaos, they were very simple people from the outermost Russian regions, we all watch enough TV to know that not everything is New York and Paris on this planet. Primitive people, the most primitive that you could imagine, were sent out at the early front. People from Outer Mongolia. Hey they don't even ask questions after they kill. Kill first, ask no questions ever, move on. So we had a very bad time, so to me the more physical threatening stuff really goes with that part of what came after. By then I was seven. Hey I've made it to seven! And eventually the Russians dragged us around enough that my mother dug her way out of the barbed wire, gave her last piece of jewelry to a Russian soldier.
You have to know that the Russians treated their own people no better than the prisoners. Their own people were starving as well. We all know that now. You know, those Siberian cities were built by Russian prisoners, under the Stalin regime. They weren't built as free enterprise projects, you know. Today you hear oh beautiful city in Siberia. They forget how many lives that took of their very own people. They also hated Jews, that was beside the point, they also had that condemning of Jews to Siberia, plenty of stories have now been told after the fact, so we were living illegally and found ourselves next thing in Vilna. Used to be when I said Vilna, I was in a Jewish orphanage in Vilna, they'd say where is Vilna.
Well thank heavens that the (Iron) Curtain has come down and people now know that it's the capital of Lithuania. And it was a very modern city prior to the war. And so she kept me there while she worked for some Jewish Russian woman judge. She had to send up 100 people a week to Siberia to meet the workforce out there. So on trumped-up charges people were condemned there. My world was so upside-down that all rights were wrongs, you have to realize, and all wrongs were right. Criminality ruled. If you had a straight person in a straight mind and an honest character, there was no place for you in either regime. And of course my mother said we're going back to Germany, there's three repatriation trains, I have to get away from the NKVD, they keep calling me for interrogation, tell us more Nazis, we don't care, what they did or if they're real, tell us more Nazis.
Article 58, something like that. Solzeneitzen can teach you about that regime, you just read a book called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and you will have understood that system. So we were pretty mixed up. We did get on a cattle train and I'm sure it was the same cattle train, it was just hosed out once. We went back with fellow Germans who did not become friendly to Jews you understand, overnight. They still felt that everything was our fault, whatever happened. And we were on a train that was loaded with typhus. And of course when there was a stop and they would open the outer doors, we would throw the deceased people right out of the train, so we were in an infected train.
We had no food, people drank locomotive oil to have something to drink, just bizarre things. Somebody stole my coat, I had a coat somebody had handmade out of a blanket, stole it off my body while I was daring to fall asleep, by now I'm ten years old, I'd been in various places with my mother and a Jewish orphanage, the war has been over for three years and we're still not home. She said wait til we get home. And of course before the Russians had come she sat me on her lap and said I want you to know why all this is happening. And of course my answer was all what? I thought this is life. This is life, this is how it works. People often ask weren't you scared, well scared of what? Isn't this how all life is? You just presume it's like this. She said well we're Jews and this and that and I said what is it? Is it bigger than a breadbox or what? I had no clue, I had no clue about religions. I didn't even know when my birthday was, I was ten years old. So she said well we'll get back to Berlin and our family will be there and that's why we have to get back to Germany, away from these eastern European countries, we cannot live here, this is not our kind of life and culture.
By then she had understood the Stalin system. And we were put in quarantine with our little train, and again the same people who had helped us sent us train tickets to there, and again we escaped without benefit of that health certificate. If we hadn't gotten typhus by now, we were fortunate to be immune to it. So back to Berlin, and by now it's the end of 1948. Other people have already celebrated the end of the war, have gotten back on their feet, and we're just arriving. And of course nobody was there for us. In fact we couldn't even get good data until, as I mentioned earlier, lastly here in the last few years, did I know my mother's sister died in Bergen Belsen.
These photos are of some of my military family people. This is the grandfather. I don't have anything of my father except the wedding picture. Another paternal grandfather. This is where I stayed with the German doctor who had to baptize me, and I was playing with her deceased child's toys and clothes. I was then 4. In fact, it says on the back. During the underground time. And that's why it was hard to find a child like me out. That was in East Prussia with the people I was staying with. That picture is pretty dead. It's about had it. It's an enlargement. Different relatives had different copies. And this is my parent's wedding picture. This was in July 1937, when they were married in Berlin. Both grandparents to the left. My father's to the right, my mother's. A circus performer to hide injuries. Here's something just of interest. It'll be hard to define, but Heinz, Israel, Levy-we all had these names, Sara and Israel in every document. He left in January 17, 1939.
This is Doctor Elizabeth Abegg who's been honored at Yad Vashem. And people can find her in some of the rescuer books and in the cover of some rescuer books. She was a powerhouse. Gay We learned that later. My mother didn't know what gay was. She saved 13 Jews. I think for a single person, my mother talked hatefully and said the Nazi's. She said, "My dear, you wouldn't understand. Even the Nazi's …Every human being does something. You may not know he or she are doing something good. She would get information from her Nazi contacts. We didn't know they were giving her information. She was teaching philosophy to German minds which was not the kind of philosophy they had in mind.
The student Hilde Knies was mentioned as giving my father the card, saying, "If you need a room." And certainly worked.