How Mother led us out of Germany by Henry P. Kramer

        Memory creates legends. The story of my mother is a heroic legend.
        Mother was born in 1896, the daughter of a rich man of property in Berlin, Professor Dr. Paul Oppenheim, who spent his time administering real estate holdings for the benefit of his family including his brothers and sisters. His real vocation was the study of paleontology in which he was a scientist of international repute. He had a large house full of fascinating objects, a statue of a life size Chinese idol with frightening red glass eyes, a collection of fierce weapons, bows and arrows and spears, from the South Seas displayed on a wall of the imposing entry hall, a family tree with trunks and leaves of silver kept under an inverted glass urn, an upstairs sitting room of my grandmother's with delicate rococo furniture, the third floor guest rooms under the eaves with florid cabbage rose adorned wall paper where we visiting grandchildren slept, and the first floor winter garden where most meals were taken with large windows to make it airy and a profusion of plants that gave the room its name.
        The gabled and timbered house stood in a large garden in a distinguished suburb called Berlin-Lichterfelde. Every fall the garden produced many barrels of apples and pears. We were sent wooden boxes full of this carefully wrapped fruit every winter. My grandfather's great pride were his two glass green houses, maintained summer and winter at jungle like humidity and temperature. Here he raised orchids for his pleasure. Every morning after breakfast, my grandfather would take a tour of the garden and the green houses with his gardener, Herr Rotzki, and they would discuss the status of all the plants, identifying them pridefully only by their proper Latin names.
        For the sake of fresh eggs, there were chickens under my grandmother's supervision. Each morning they were fed a mash cooked up in a huge kettle in the enormous tiled kitchen of the half-basement, and ladled out to them by a woman who was called Garden Marie.
        Mother idolized her father for his brilliance, his many talents: mastering languages, for example, presenting the valedictory speech at his Gymnasium in Latin, his powerful singing voice bursting forth in Italian operatic arias, and for the dominance of his presence born of the indomitable combination of erudition and wealth.
        Mother learned from grandfather and her brothers to take great pride in being Jewish although her knowledge of Jewish matters was limited. Religion and Jewish traditions were not stressed. There was no attendance at religious services although Grandfather would say a prayer kneeling by the side of his bed before retiring. Grandfather was given the honorary title of Professor, but was not appointed under the Kaiser to teach at Berlin University unless he became Christian. He refused to do that even though he did not practice Judaism.
        My uncle Hans was not invited to participate in the birthday party of his best friend at the Gymnasium, a young nobleman who lived in the neighborhood, because as he was told after the fact, it would have been unseemly to have a Jew in the house.
        Both my uncles became ardent Zionists convinced that to live with pride as Jews was possible only in their own Jewish country. Uncle Julius established an orange orchard in Palestine in 1925. 1 once called him a 'chalutz', pioneer, but he wouldn't admit to anything as grand as that. Uncle Hans followed him in 1932 and practiced medicine in Palestine. Zionism and Socialism were both anathema to Grandfather and the source of conflicts between him and his sons. I remember an occasion when Uncle Hans and his family, having suffered an intolerable insult, arrayed in order of height, Hans first, followed by Medi, his wife, and their three boys, marched out of Grandfather's house looking like a walking human stair.
        Uncle Hans was a daredevil. I think he mainly wanted to outdo his young friends of the nobility in the practice of the manly virtues. The express train did not stop in the suburb. To demonstrate his courage he would jump with his baggage from the express train and thus avoid the trip from the main station. I was told he once drove a nail though his hand in imitation of the deed of the Roman hero who burnt his hand in the brazier to demonstrate to the enemy general the honor and bravery of the indomitable youth of Rome.
        Mother married Father, a mild mannered lawyer, whose father was a partner in a prosperous textile mill in a small town of Thuringia, and moved with him to Duesseldorf, a city on the Rhine that was, and remains, the commercial and industrial center of the Ruhr region. Early in 1933 the National Socialist Workers Party under the leadership of Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Shortly after assuming power, the Nazis enacted anti-Jewish laws. One of them excluded Jewish lawyers from the free practice of their profession. Father was allowed to plead cases before the court only on Wednesday afternoons. This may have been a special dispensation because he had been an infantry soldier in the First World War, had been wounded in action and received the Iron Cross decoration.
        Soon after Hitler's accession to power, Mother undertook economy measures in our house. The third floor, where previously in one room Father, an ardent amateur paleontologist, had kept his collection of fossils, and in another room the maids stayed, and in a third one suitcases and other items were stored, was made over into an apartment that was rented out. Somewhat later, the second floor, where in the past the family bedrooms were located, was also converted into an apartment and rented out. The family then slept and lived in the downstairs rooms that had previously been used as my father's library, the salon, and the dining room, the winter garden, and the kitchen. Mother had special beds made that folded out at night and served as settees in the daytime. We children later used these beds in the US.
        Grandfather died of cancer in April of 1933 and it was considered a blessing that he did not have to deal with the awful people who had taken over his beloved country. It would have killed him, it was said.
After Grandfather's death, mother spent a great deal of time in Berlin to settle family affairs and we children were left in the care of our domestics. I remember a wonderful Christmas vacation in the Westphalian village where our cook, Luise's, people were farmers and blacksmiths. I think we spent time there because Father and Mother had gone to Palestine to visit with her brothers. Later I found out that business deals were arranged to transfer money from Germany to Palestine through, among other things, the importation of Frisian cows.
        In Westphalia, I helped chum the butter. I skated on the packed snow in the streets that had turned solid ice. I slept in a big bed under an enormous feather comforter in a big house the major part of which was set aside for the pigs and cows. After returning from Palestine, Mother spent time selling off family property in Berlin in the Wannsee area where later the infamous Wannsee conference on the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Problem' was held with over half of the distinguished group consisting of learned men with doctoral degrees eager to outdo each other to prove to their Nazi masters that their basic bestiality had been untainted by higher education.
        In 1935, Hitler marched his troops into the Rhineland where we lived. This was the first time that I had seen soldiers. My parents were hoping that the Allies would enforce the treaties guaranteeing the non-militarized status of the Rhine land. The Allies did not. Hitler had triumphed once again.
        In 1936, the Nazis passed the infamous Nuremberg laws. Our younger housemaid had to be discharged since, to prevent 'miscegenation' between Jewish men and Aryan employees no Aryan female under the age of forty was permitted in a Jewish household.
        I believe that the idea of leaving Germany had grown in my parents minds shortly after the Nazi takeover in 1933 and everything they did after that date was done with the notion of facilitating emigration under the best conditions possible. Mother went through a rigorous indoctrination of herself and the rest of us. She would rail against weak women relatives who were too much concerned with their 'antimacassars', their crystal and silverware, and other customary niceties, to think about their principal duties to their families. She preached a hard and radical sermon to us children, perhaps as much for our sake as to steel herself. It was 'all for the family'. Don't be easy on yourself. Don't give yourself airs. Get rid of the frippery. Think only of things that are worthwhile. All around, there was great emphasis on strength. I was a Zionist boy scout. And all of us little boys would greet each other with hands arranged in the boy scout salute and the Hebrew word 'chasak', 'be strong'.
        We children were taught to be independent and self-reliant. It seemed the most normal thing in the world to me that my mother allowed me, when I was ten, to take a bicycle trip from Duesseldorf to Frankfurt in the company of a pal who was fourteen. The first night we stayed with an old cousin, Siegmund Rosenstein, in Cologne, thirty kilometers south of Duesseldorf. The next night we stayed at a very rich cousin, Mayer-Alberti's house, with backyard bordering the Rhine in Coblenz, where we were served breakfast by a very tall and correct butler. On the way to Mainz, it started raining badly. So we took our bikes on the train for the rest of the way to Frankfurt.
        There was a time, I believe early in 1936, that my father had a great deal of business in Holland and was away from home a lot. Once when I was walking with my mother she conspiratorially confided in me that Father's going to Holland was no one's business but our own and not to talk about it to others. Conspiracy was part of our lives. We knew that one mustn't speak one's mind to anyone except the members of the family.
        I was told that I had caused my parents some problems. I was alleged to have asserted in the Montessori school that I still attended in 1933 that Hitler was a murderer. I don't recall having said that. But, as a consequence of the allegation, my parents were called to the Gestapo office. I don't know what happened there but my father had nightmares for years after.
        We thought that somehow the Nazis would know everything we said in a room with a telephone in it and therefore were very guarded. We all knew that we mustn't talk where non-family members could hear. In those days there were stories of children who had betrayed their own parents to the Gestapo.
        After school let out in the spring of 1936, we children were shipped off to a children's home in Recco, Italy. Mother took us there. It was a heady experience to live along the Ligurian sea. Everything seemed new, and sharp, and clear. The sun was the strongest we had ever experienced and the sky the bluest. When the summer ended most of the other children left to go back to their schools. However, no one came to get us. So, for lack of any other routine, we started to participate in the school that was held there. We were exposed to an Italian grammar, and received obligatory Fascist lectures from the one-armed former army officer, the baron, on the greatness of a country that was ruled by an 'elite' of people that were qualified for that job by family, position, and accomplishments. That doctrine went against the grain then as it does now. Finally, Father came to get us.
        Before we left Italy, Father took us children on a wonderful hike through the mountains. It was a very hot day and we passed by a farmhouse where Father stopped to ring the doorbell to ask for water for us. Father spoke no Italian, but was fluent in French and had the usual eight years of Latin in the Gymnasium. He always kept a copy of the Corpus Juris Civilis on his book shelf. With a mixture of Latin and French he was able to communicate with the farmer. The farmer gave us water and loaded us down with grapes and figs. He refused Father's offer to pay, saying that when he came to our country then we would give him hospitality.
        Father told us that we would not go back to Germany but would go instead to Holland. And on the way to Holland we would avoid touching German soil. We stopped in Bern, Switzerland and saw the Bear Fountain after which Bern'. I believe, is named. We went through France, Luxembourg, and Belgium and arrived in Holland. And there we saw Mother.
By agreement between them, Father left Germany first. After having arranged for the smuggling of jewelry, mother left on the train. The jewelry was entrusted to a Rhine barge captain who hid it somewhere in his cargo. This was a risky undertaking. Had the police found out, mother might have been arrested, and lost her life. She took this danger upon herself because she thought that Father was more essential to make a living for us children. Since the Nazi government permitted each person to take no more than ten marks, $2.50 at the time, out of the country, it was essential to use illegal means to take money out. It took great courage and enterprise to carry out this maneuver.
        Prior to leaving, our parents sold our house, for less than half its real value to an engineer named Bernardy. It was a common practice at the time, especially for Nazis, to grab up Jewish property for a song. After the war, Mother visited the Bernardys and insisted on talking to Herr Bernardy even though Frau Bernardy pleaded that her husband was ailing and shouldn't be upset. Mother succeeded in obtaining a sum of money as a partial settlement for the difference between the value of the house and the purchase price. She didn't succeed with some of the other family property that was acquired cheaply by Nazis under a law promulgated by the Nazis prohibiting Jews from owning real estate.
        In Scheveningen, Holland, we spent a wonderful month full of walks by the stormy North Sea. We had lovely date-nut loaf with butter and chocolate sprinkles for breakfast. I relished the most interesting painting of a barebreasted barmaid in a sailors' cafe on the wall of the artist Kaufmann's house where we were staying. For a day or two I believe the Budapest string quartet were staying there too. My parents were trying to get a visa to Canada.
Then we moved to Antwerp where Father attempted to get a visa for the United States. He was successful in spite of the fact that I barely passed the mental test given by the consul. It took me too long to answer a simple addition problem and the consul put me down for being slow witted but passable.
        Father left for the United States first. He had booked passage on the SS Berengaria, a Cunard Liner, from Cherbourg to New York. Two weeks later Mother followed with the three of us children. Our trip to Cherbourg took us by way of Paris where we spent the night. We saw a movie which I think was highly unsuitable because it showed a lady in her underwear. Also at dinner, I was allowed wine, which came with the dinner, and I got tipsy. It was an amazing experience for a boy of eleven. Next day we arrived in Cherbourg and when we boarded the ship I had the feeling that I was leaving all civilization behind me.
        The boat trip was great fun. My brother and I had the run of the ship since Mother and our sister were seasick. Every morning we were asked in all seriousness whether 'master was ready to have his bath drawn'. Then we would go to the mess where we were virtually the only guests and were overwhelmed with a choice of what to eat. After breakfast we might play shuffleboard or go swimming in the pool, which during the rough November passage would, to our great delight, stop from side to side. Boredom was allayed moreover by morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner, and after dinner, of course, a movie. I remember seeing 'San Francisco' with Spencer Tracy. Mother recovered a day before we arrived in New York. She made friends with a wonderful lady from New Orleans who strongly advanced the proposition that black people love their Biblically ordained subordinate role in life. Mother and the rest of us strongly disagreed. But to show that there were no hard feelings the lady generously gave each of us children a whole dollar, more money that any of us had ever before handled.
        Coming into New York harbor was the most amazing sight I had ever seen. A setting red winter sun outlined the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan to make them appear to us like the most enormous fairy castle in the world. Father greeted us at the foot of the gang plank and immediately led us into a strange new world of shouting taxi cap drivers vying for our patronage, of multi-colored advertisements blatantly attracting our attention, of bright neon signs, a noisy, anarchic, blaring new world. We went to live in an apartment hotel on the West side. A few days after arriving, we were enrolled in school. It was strange and interesting. Little girls no older than I were allowed to wear red nail polish on dirty finger nails and spent much time in class peeling off the hardened polish. I was asked what Germany was like. Do people there have bathtubs, and telephones, and automobiles like we do? I think my answer that they do was met with some disbelief.
        Later we moved to an apartment in Flushing, New York, out in the leafy suburbs. Mother had a hard time in New York. At one point she left home, called from Manhattan, and wanted me to come to meet her for one last time. She had spent the night riding on the subway, using the nickel fare for all it was worth. Next day, Father had us all dress up in our best clothes. He bought flowers. And we all welcomed her at the Flushing subway station like a returning queen. I remember vaguely that she spent a day or two at Bellevue hospital. When she wasn't despondent, she could be extremely charming and gracious. She invited my grade school teacher, Mrs. McDonald in for tea, and was quite the grand lady.
        Father tried to become an insurance agent and took courses in that specialty at NYU. He sold some policies but felt that he would not succeed in making a living at it since almost every 6migr6 lawyer was trying to do the same thing. He felt that there were too many of his kind in the same place and therefore he thought of striking out into the hinterland. Somehow he had heard about a grocery store that was for sale in Stillwater, Oklahoma and worked there without pay for a month to see if he could learn the trade and buy the store. I guess he had some reservations about it. Then he went to Los Angeles and met acquaintances, Lyons, from Germany who had started a rather successful business and whose advice he therefore valued.
Ultimately, he found out about a small variety store for sale in Paso Robles. He and mother liked the town, bought the store and we all settled there.
        Father was in Los Angeles and my brother and I left New York for Los Angeles to join him. Mother stayed in New York. We took a train to Chicago. Mother had made arrangements for us to be met by distant relatives, to be given lunch, and then put on the train to Los Angeles. On the three day ride to Los Angeles, we met some wonderful people. They were named Karl, were Jewish, and owned shoe stores. But they shushed us when we started talking too loudly about Jewish matters. They were apparently embarrassed by that. In 1938, there were torrential rains that had taken out the Southern Pacific rail road tracks. Therefore, in Nevada we transferred to busses in the middle of the night, and were greeted the next day on arrival at Los Angeles Union Station by Father.
        Mother joined us a few weeks later after recovering from a stay in the hospital where she had gone for some mysterious female affair that little boys were not expected to ask about. Shortly after mother's arrival in Los Angeles we moved to Paso Robles where I was amazed to see real live cowboys with ten gallon hats and boots right there on the street.
        Even though my parents were now the owners and operators of a very small store in a small cow town in the middle of nowhere, Mother was ambitious for the entire family. She didn't want us to be ordinary and like other people. She insisted that we speak German with her at home because that was her language. She was good at English but polished in German with all the subtleties and nuances at her command.. She wanted us to be bilingual and succeeded. She wanted me to go through school as fast as possible. One way or another she got me to start University at the age of fifteen. After we had been in the small store in Paso Robles for a couple of years, she insisted that we must build a new building for a much larger store.
        The store opened at eight in the morning and stayed open until seven in the evening. At first Father didn't have a driver's license and we would walk the mile or so to our house from the old store. It was embarrassing to me because nobody in those days walked, ever. And here we were an entire family walking for a mile on the main street in full sight of everyone and disgracefully carrying sacks of grocery. After the new store was built we lived in quarters above the store. Many years later Father and Mother built themselves a house outside of town.
        But Mother was in her glory in the store. She worked terribly hard but it was rewarding to her ego and her sense of accomplishment. However, she took everything very personally. If business was bad some day, or some week, she would undergo the most grueling soul searching to discover what she and Father had done wrong. She never allowed herself the comfort contained in phrases such as 'well, those are the breaks', or 'well, this was just one of those days, or weeks, or months', or 'take the bad with the good'. It was always her opinion that what happens is under our control. She didn't accept the popular notion that 'they' control our lives We should have done better. If we had only foreseen this or that circumstance, planned better, thought harder, worked harder, then things would have come out better. Even when business was very good, she never allowed herself the satisfaction of a little smug self congratulation. No, it was always, we should have done better.
        Mother had a temper of which we were all in awe. After the store was closed she would count the money. During that time everyone had to go about his task of putting away, sweeping, and dusting very quietly. Since the store took in a great deal of coinage, the task of counting was very tedious and Mother was very meticulous in her accounting. Everything had to come out exactly. When she lost count, there was hell to pay. On several occasions, full of anger and overcome by the tedium of it all she would throw the drawers full of coins so that there were coins, pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters everywhere on the counters, on the floor, in the comers. And then it was up to Father and us children to pick up all of the coins and to mollify Mother.
        Mother didn't care for the small town conventions. Considered the absolutely worst place in town was the pool hall. Decent people were never seen there. The only people who ever went to the pool hall were poor farm workers and cow hands. But it was the only place in town that had a good glass of draft beer together with the nice aroma of beer emanations mixed with the smoke from cigarettes and stogies. After work, Mother and Father would sometimes stop at the pool hall for a glass of beer. When Father would light up his cigar, Mother would remove it from his mouth for a puff or two of her own. I enjoyed playing pool and my parents, unlike the parents of the decent boys in town, never saw anything wrong with that.
        Unfortunately, Mother suffered from the fact that the decent people of the town would not pay her the consideration to which she felt she was entitled. For the rest of their life in the United States, although they were grateful for the freedom and the humaneness of life here, they were outsiders, sort of peculiar foreigners.
        Mother had her own explanations for American customs which she confided just to us children.. She told me that people in America use preprinted greeting cards, because, "you see, Henry, most people who came to the United States were poorly versed in reading and writing and availed themselves of scribes to communicate with their distant families. Greeting cards are merely the institutionalization of illiteracy". She also had a ready explanation for the strange American custom of cutting food with the knife in the right hand, then placing the knife on the plate, and changing implements to pick up the food with the fork in the right hand, rather than following the sensible European custom of bringing food to the mouth with the fork in the left hand. She had the notion that the majority of early Americans kept a knife in their tall boots, cut off a piece of meat, returned the knife to their boots and transferred the morsel to their mouths with their hands. The custom having been thus established, it was simply a later refinement, to use a fork instead of fingers.
        Everyone in the little town stood in awe of Mother and respected her. They may not have liked her but they didn't want to meet her head on in a fight. She had strong opinions, which were usually right, and a blunt tongue, and she was absolutely unafraid.
        Paso Robles was located only twelve miles from Camp Roberts which at the height of training during the Second World War contained over fifty thousand soldiers. On a Saturday afternoon crowds of soldiers filled the streets and stores of the town. Our store was jam packed. All of a sudden, there was a commotion. Mother had overheard some enormous six and a half footer say to one of his buddies, 'aw, let's get out of this goddamn Jew place'. Mother positioned herself within an inch of this monster, and, her black eyes blazing, told him to get out of her place, and pointed to the door. The man was absolutely nonplused. He didn't know what to do. I am sure if a man had faced him he would just have knocked him down. With mother, he just shrunk a bit and then slunk out of the store.
        Mother had unerring instincts in business and politics. She would show a mocking deference to our, Father's and mine, subtlety and scholarship. When Chamberlain came back from Munich with his umbrella and his 'peace in our time' statement, Father and I thought that he must have arrived at his decision from superior knowledge and wisdom and must know what he was talking about. Mother said he is a fool. He has sold out. And you two are fools for believing him.
        In business she had a penchant for simplifying everything to its essentials. She rounded off, or up, dealt in orders of magnitude, made conservative estimates and came up with the right answer as to what was a sensible deal and what wasn't. Her way was a much sounder and quicker way of coming to the right decision than Father and my timid, slow, thorough way. Mother liked lists. She was always after me to write down all the pros and the cons of a proposition on opposite sides of a page and then make a decision.
        Mother had a strong sense of noblesse oblige, of helping those who were less fortunate. She and Father sponsored a number of relatives to be admitted to the United States. This meant guaranteeing with their money that the relatives would not become public charges. Mother was one of the founders of the NAACP chapter in Paso Robles. Both my parents were fervent New Deal Democrats involved in the County Central Committee of the Democratic Party in a county where all of the proper people were Republicans.
        Unfortunately, in spite of Mother's nobility and willingness to give of herself, of using her strong mind and unerring instincts on behalf of others, she was not able to get along with other people. She hated hypocrisy and would readily tell people home truths that they didn't want to hear especially if they were unpleasant and true. This caused her to have a very lonely life and yet she was starved for affection.
        Moses led the Children of Israel out slavery in Egypt and Mother led us out of perdition in Germany.