By Jennifer Krebs, JNS
When I was growing up, Dad only spoke of his childhood around his older sisters or unless someone asked him a specific question. I had many.
When I think of my father’s early life, I picture a 5-year-old boy walking nervously to school in Berleburg, Germany. It was 1934, and the world around him was shifting in dangerous ways.
His teacher, Herr Brockmeier, wore a swastika pin on his lapel—the mark of the Nazi Party—and from the moment my father stepped into that classroom, he knew he wasn’t welcome.
“You will grow into strong Aryan children,” the teacher proclaimed to the class, “and we must rid ourselves of this lesser race, the Jews.” My father, Paul, sat in the back, his face burning with shame.
That was the beginning of his exclusion. On Nov. 8, 1938, the local Nazi Sturmabteilung branch threw rocks through the living room of my father’s home. The following day, after my grandma cleaned up the mess, she sent her three children off to school. There, Herr Brockmeier, still my dad’s teacher, sent 9-year-old Paul off to the principal’s office. The principal told Paul and his 11-year-old sister Hilda that they had been expelled for being Jewish.
About a month after Kristallnacht, when their windows were smashed—like so many others across Germany and Austria—Grandma and Grandpa learned of the Kindertransport program. It took Jewish children from cities in Nazi-controlled Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to safer areas of Europe, mainly England. Grandma had a sister in Mechelen, Belgium. Grandma and Grandpa arranged for their children to be on a Kindertransport to Brussels.
Dad’s time in Belgium was fraught; Grandma’s sister made sure that Dad and his sisters never forgot that they were poor refugees dependent on her good graces. Then, in May 1940, the Nazis invaded Belgium. A huge number of Belgians took to their feet to get out of harm’s way.
My Dad, then 11, walked for days, sleeping in barns, churches and ditches. He saw planes shot down, skirmishes between warring army units and POWs being marched to who-knew-where. He drank water from a contaminated stream and got food poisoning. Worst of all was that he was cut off from communications. He didn’t know if his parents had been killed. He didn’t know if he’d survive.
Grandma and Grandpa had not been killed; they had arranged for their children to return to Germany. And so, Dad and Aunt Hilda returned to Berleburg in the fall of 1940, but their older sister Lucie couldn’t get a visa until early 1941. And only with lots of luck, according to Grandma, was the family able to obtain visas to the United States.
When I was growing up, Dad only spoke of his childhood around his older sisters or unless someone asked him a specific question. I had many.
When he was about 90, Dad mentioned something about his teacher in Germany. I realized that I never had asked the man’s name, as if he actually was called “My Nazi SOB teacher.” I asked Dad how often he thought about the man.
“Every day,” he told me.
He couldn’t stop replaying the tapes of Nazi brutality: being called a dirty Jew, a bloodsucker on “normal society,” watching the SA men and Hitler Youth parade around town, being expelled for who he was and what he believed. There wasn’t a day of Dad’s life that he didn’t remember the effects of antisemitism. The fear of being somewhere you weren’t wanted, of arbitrary violence, of separation from your loved ones, of a loss of childhood innocence.
Though Dad struggled to accept that the term “Holocaust survivor” might apply to him, his trauma was there. He worked with his father, uncle and cousin to build up a dairy cattle business in Upstate New York to replace a similar business in Germany. He didn’t fly off the handle when he had a bad day. He was constant and kind, silly and tender. He was much more than the traumatized boy from Germany.
It’s been a little more than a year since I lost Dad at the age of 95. I remember him as a sweet and loving man who knew the value of family. He also knew that love, in parting, is pain. As Dad openly cried for Grandpa when he died, I am crying now for Dad.
This Father’s Day, his memory is a blessing.
