My Journey through the Holocaust - Chapter 1

I was born and raised in Germany under Hitler and rejected by the German government because I was a Jew.  On November 9, 1938 was Kristallnacht .  On this night SA (abbreviation of Sturmabteilung, German Assault Division) men came to our door at four in the morning and smashed the front glass entryway.  They claimed they were here for a million marks that we possessed.  My father and I walked into the living room where he had a desk, which contained a cash box.  He gave them all the money contained in the cashbox, which amounted to 100 marks.  No where did we ever have a million marks.  They marched through the whole apartment and then beat up my father in front of me because he was unable to produce this sum of money.  Since it was the beginning of winter one of the SA troopers followed me and said "get dressed warmly, you have to report to the police department".  Instead of reporting to the police department my father and I went to the railroad station (on the train where my mother celebrated my grandfather’s birthday) and then to my grandfather’s residence in        .  We walked past a synagogue which was burning and found that all the Jewish homes in the neighborhood had been effected.  We caught the train to Bamberg hoping that no one would notice us whom we knew.  As we got off the train in Bamberg we saw that Storm Troopers were going to homes and taking many individuals as prisoners to send to concentration camps.  A few days later my parents returned to our apartment in Nuremberg to find destruction of glassware and removal of all the silverware.  They tried to clean up after the destruction of many of the items.  A few days later my parents and other families attempted to escape.  This was difficult but they did find that the British Parliament were willingly taking refugee children in what was called a Kindertransport that would take them to accommodating British families or group homes.  I was separated from my parents and taken on the Kindertransport to England where I lived in a group home for seven months.  WWII broke out 5 days after my arrival in England.  We had air raid drills in the group home and I attended the Church of England School where the Oxford English I had learned in Germany was critiqued .  When I arrived at the group home they served me dinner in the basement.  There was a curtain across the window.  I inquired, “what movie will you be showing?” and they told me that this was a blackout curtain.  Were going to be going to war in the next few days.  And sure enough WWII began.  Great Britain went to war against Germany and vice versa.  Almost all the children in the group home came from Austria.  They blamed me for the persecution of Jews in Austria.  

The United States had a quota system which permitted me to come to the United States.  I was able to get a Visa by  appearing at the American consulate in Great Britain.  In order to come to the United States you had to meet a quota number that was assigned to you by the American Government.  Seven months after I arrived in England the quota number was called for my parents who were still in Germany and for me in England.  With war going on and passport in hand I travelled on the Britannic from Liverpool in England to New York City on the Cunard Star. When I arrived in New York I called my brother who lived in a boarding house.  When I called and asked to speak to my brother the owner of the boarding house yelled in her best New York accent, “Werner!”, Since I could not understand her English, I asked a waiter on board ship to translate for me.  I asked her to tell my brother to come and call for me, that I had arrived.  My brother finally arrived at the end of the day, 4:30 pm and I was sitting on my suitcase.  I went through customs and then on to my brothers boarding house.  The house was run by Mrs. Weiss who came from Hungaria.  A few weeks later my parents arrived and joined us at the boarding house.  And so we were reunited as a family.  Since we all lived in one room we looked for and found another boarding house where each of us could have rooms.  Miss Schwartz ran this boarding house.  Some of the residents lived with her in Germany before coming to the United States.  I do remember Kurt Burain, an accomplished pianist, who played in nightclubs in New York City.   All these happenings were too much for my mother who suffered mental breakdowns.  

As soon as I graduated High School in 1944 the next day I went to Fort Dix in New Jersey and became  an infantry man learning to shoot rifles.  I was transferred to Camp Wheeler Georgia and trained as a rifleman.  Seventeen weeks later I was shipped as a rifleman to a replacement depot in Northern Italy and from there was sent to join the 85th Custard Division.  Since I was fluent in German I became an interrogator of prisoners of war.  And after the war peace treaty was signed I assisted in the detail interrogation for the Nuremburg trials in Gmunden, Austria.  

Upon return to the United States the GI bill of rights gave me the opportunity to get a BS degree as an elementary school teacher in elementary school.  I went on to get my doctorate degree and was then offered to go to Afghanistan as a Methods and Materials Specialist.  It was an undefined position which I had to create based on the needs of Afghan schools.  There were no blackboards in classrooms, no lighting, simple mud block with mixed straw school buildings and classrooms.  We mixed mud with cement to make the blackboards.  It was there that I learned about indigenous resources and that they must become part of the teaching/learning process.  Perhaps the best illustration of this is the fact that we would go to schools and ask children to bring rocks from their own neighborhoods back to the classrooms in order to tumble them and see whether we could get chalk from calcium rocks.  We tumbled other rocks to get browns and yellows and we made weekly murals on the mud walls, outdoors and indoors.  I also learned with the children about energy transfer.  We built a merry-go-round on the playground of several schools and stored the energy of the children pushing the merry-go-round in one direction and feeding storage batteries with their energy.  Thus, the storage batteries could be used in the classrooms.  One of the teachers began to cut down the concave and convex bottles bottoms and created a sunlight filmstrip and slide projector.  The white calcium rock formations were tumbled to begin to produce chalk for the schools.  (the cannonballs of one of the wars were used in the tumbling of the rocks)  The queen of Iran had Benjamin Sparks book, Baby and Childcare translated into Farsi, spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.  We adapted many of the recommendations by interviewing mothers about their ways of addressing some of the issues dealt with in baby and childcare e.g. what do you do about teething of infants?  Only to find out that they used chicken stomachs, boiled when infants were teething.  (Dr. Spark in his book, suggested “go to the corner drug store, buy a teething ring, freeze the teething ring and give it to your infant.  At the time we were in Afghanistan there were no corner drug stores.  Nor teething rings, nor freezers.)  Again, the ingenuity of the human being finds ways to adapt him/herself to the given environment.  

Through my work in early childhood I discovered that I had experienced great deprivation in the area of play i.e. not being allowed to play in a sandbox, go to local parks in Germany, go swimming etc.  All of these were forbidden.  The question arises, must one undergo such experiences as I did in order to turn them into goals of healing to achieve for others as well as for myself?  I welcome all of your thoughts and comments on this question.