by Ann Huber
One of the original homes in the Displaced Persons Camp.
The development scheme consisted of small, identical and neatly designed homes, arranged on a U-shape grid of streets, surrounding a communal park area. Each small house was one and one-half stories high with a sloped roof, making up a main room, kitchen, and bathroom on the first floor and two rooms on the second floor. It was situated on a small plot of land, surrounded by a white picket fence. A small vegetable garden sprung up on each plot. Two families were assigned to share each home including the bathroom and kitchen. For those who had endured horrifying living conditions in the forests of Poland and cramped concrete Russian bunkers, these were luxury accommodations.
Years later after they had left the DP camp, we learned that Pesche and Moishe shared their home for a time with the parents of one of our closest friends, Manya. Manya’s parents, Michael and Deborah, who settled in New York, asked Moishe and Pesche to look after their daughter when she started to study at Temple University in Philadelphia years later. Herm met her at the end of the summer of 1965, when Manya came to visit him in Atlantic City. Moishe and Pesche, apparently wishing to get me off Herm’s mind, thought it would be a good idea to take Manya with them on their bi-weekly trip “down the shore.” I met her a few months later. We have been dear friends ever since.
We learned more about conditions in the DP camp from Deborah, then in her nineties, another feisty and strong-willed woman who survived indescribable conditions by her remarkable wits. Still too wary to share many details 65 years after the end of the war, she reluctantly revealed to us that she and Pesche did not get along in the camp.
According to Deborah, there was constant friction with Pesche because she insisted on keeping a kosher kitchen, which Deborah did not want to do. Still smarting after all this time, she told us, “I had to wait every day until Pesche was done with the kitchen before she would let me use it.” Besides, Deborah told us, they also competed in “business,” each trying to eke out a living selling “shmatas” (rags and clothes).
I learned from another DP camp survivor, Sammy, whom I met only recently, that he was placed in one of the many camps in Berlin. He was a teenager at the time. While in the camp, there was much bitter fighting between families such as his and those recognized in the camp as having aided the Nazis in the concentration camps. Their excuses or explanations did not help them. Camp administrators had to re-locate these targets of wrath to other camps.
Residents of the DP camps understood these were temporary quarters. They had no way to know how long their stay would be or where they would be going next. Despite being emotionally and physically scarred and battered by a war with plans specifically aimed at their annihilation and which left them dispersed without families and resources, they had children who desperately needed their care and attention. Thus, they went about the business of restoring a semblance of normalcy to their lives, using their skills at coping with uncertainty.
At the Displaced Persons Camp in 1946. Lenny
was eight years old.
Incident after incident, atrocity after atrocity, I never cease to marvel at how resilient the human spirit is. Like water finding its stable level, people look for a way to restore a normal life.
An economy sprung up with mundane, everyday endeavors. The refugees started small businesses, bartering and trading with each other. Quickly, community institutions sprung up on the streets bordering on the park, including a kosher butcher shop, a small school, an orchestra, and of course, a synagogue.
Men and boys of all ages, including Lenny who was now seven or eight years old, entertained themselves playing soccer on the grassy, large lawn of the central park area. In one of the few historical films of the time, there is one of General Eisenhower touring the Neu Freimann DP camp in 1949, shortly before the last of its residents were re-settled and the American Army allowed the original occupants to return. The grainy film shows some of the community buildings but highlights the soccer game in which Manya swears she can see a vibrant young man, her father.
Life went on. They worked. They married. They bore children. Pesche lost a baby girl to a miscarriage but Herm was born in 1947, in the bathroom of the house on Spitzer Strasse in Neu Freimann or so family legend has it. Whatever else they were, the Germans were superb record keepers, and Herm was finally able to get a birth certificate from the City of Munich in 2011.
A tender moment in the Camp, Lenny
holding infant Herm.
Chapter Sixteen
PHILADELPHIA
IT HAD LONG been Pesche’s wish to go to Palestine. She’d been an active member of a Zionist organization in her youth in Poland, and she and Moishe were planning to immigrate when the Holocaust intervened. After the War, they still wanted to go to Palestine and as “displaced persons” requested re-settlement there. But, few countries opened their arms to Jewish refugees, and British-occupied Palestine was not one of them.
Great Britain had long had an ambivalent relationship with the Jews. When the Ottoman Empire was divided at the end of World War I, Palestine fell under British control. In 1917, a letter written by Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour to prominent Zionist Baron de Rothschild, known as the Balfour Declaration, recognized the rights of the Jewish people to a land of their own. It was followed by Churchill’s White Paper of 1922, which continued to support the immigration of Jews to Palestine.
However, in 1939, the fate of millions of Jews was sealed by then British Colonial Secretary MacDonald’s White Paper. It limited annual immigration to Palestine to 75,000, and prohibited further land purchases by Jews. MacDonald was motivated by a desire to maintain a stable proportion of Arabs and Jews in Palestine. But as a consequence, Jewish immigration was greatly curtailed at a time when millions desperately needed a safe haven. The State of Israel, as a land where Jews could go freely, would not be recognized by the United Nations until 1948.
Thus, the doors to Palestine were closed to millions of Jewish refugees except for the seventy thousand who were smuggled in by underground militant groups, the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi. Their struggle was publicized by humanitarian Ruth Gruber, a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune. She would eventually write Destination Palestine, the Struggle of 1947. At the age of 101, she recalled the details of that difficult struggle, vividly and articulately as I listened spellbound, at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. Gruber died in 2016 during the writing of her book, at the age of 105.
In 1958, Exodus, the best selling novel by Leon Uris, widened public awareness of the struggle. In Montreal, we saw the 1960 epic movie based on the book, shortly after we arrived. The actors wore the same clothes I’d worn and sang the same songs in a landscape I remembered so well. Hearing the national anthem, Hatikvah, at the end of the movie still brings tears to my eyes.
The Hubers on the trip to America in 1949.
Those displaced persons not permitted to go to Palestine, or who did not wish to go there, had to find relatives in other countries like Canada, Australia, England, or the United States, to sponsor their immigration. Those with no family or sponsorship went to countries with more liberal immigration policies, including Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.
Finally, four long years after their arrival at the DP camp, Moishe and Pesche’s turn came. Pesche, Moishe, Lenny, and two-year-old Herm were permitted to travel to the United States. While America was not their first choice, its rumored streets paved with gold had an appeal.
Herm and Len just before sailing to America.
The family’s immigration was sponsored by Moishe’s paternal cousin, Dora, about 20 years his senior. She had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1920 to join her husband, Jacob, who’d preceded her. Moishe and Dora had not maintained contact after Dora’s departure from Poland, but the United States Refugee Relocation Assistance Committee located the family in the United States. Co-operating with the American Joint Distribution Committee and the National Council of Jewish Women, the agency s
pent a year working with Dora and Jacob on the Huber family’s immigration.
After a long anticipated departure, the family traveled to the United States by boat from Bremen, making their way on the USAT Mercy to the port of New York. They arrived on June 19, 1949, with five pieces of luggage, having lost an unmarked wooden crate of clothing because they did not have the twelve cents to properly arrange for the baggage. The wandering souls made their way by train from New York to Philadelphia. Lenny, then 11 years old remembers that, “Someone picked us up in a 1948 black Buick sedan at the 30th Street Station.” It was the biggest automobile any of them had ever seen.
Dora, Moishe’s cousin, and her husband, Jacob in 1947. The baby at the bottom is their
grandson, David.
Dora and Jacob generously put their cousins up for two weeks in their home at 53rd and Locust Street before Moishe and Pesche found their own apartment nearby, at Ruby and Market Streets, and then a job. Quickly and resourcefully, they started to fend for themselves with only a few words of English between them.2
The Hubers at their first apartment in
Philadelphia, 1955.
Somehow, with ingenuity and courage that still amazes me, Pesche and Moishe managed to lease a hot dog stand from an enterprising 22-year-old named Bob Rasmussen, who had the rights to the concession stand in Strawberry Mansion, a north Philadelphia neighborhood that took its name from a 19th century restaurant that had served strawberries and cream to some of Philadelphia’s wealthiest inhabitants.
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2. Dora and Moishe’s families lost contact several years after they moved out. It was not until 60 years later, and only by happenstance, that Lenny met Dora’s grandson, David. David was quite excited to finally hear from the two boys he was never able to identify in an old family photograph: Lenny and Herm as young children.
Pesche selling hot dogs in Memorial Hall
in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.
The whole Huber family became involved in the vending enterprise. As his parents manned the hot dog stand, Lenny trolled with an ice cream wagon. However, in the fall, he was enrolled in the sixth grade in a public school, the Huey School, where he soon mastered English without an accent.
Later, with preschooler Herm by her side, Pesche operated Rasmussen’s hot dog stand in Fairmount Park, on the banks of the Schuylkill River, one of the largest urban parks in the world. One Saturday morning during our courtship, Pesche told me an endearing story of how gullible Herm was at such a tender age, although I think he still is (at not so tender an age). “This man approached me and was about to rob me. So, I whispered to Chaim (Herm) in Yiddish to go get a policeman, but when the robber asked, ‘What did she say?’ What do you think Chaim did?” she asked.
“Chaim obligingly translated for the robber, ‘She told me to call the police.’” Even as little more than a toddler, he always tried to please. Pesche blew a small red whistle hanging from a string around her neck, to alert police and the robber ran away.
Meanwhile, like Sandu, Moishe got a job in a factory, a millinery plant, and he complained about the job just as regularly and bitterly. He laughed at himself when he’d told me how much he disliked the factory work and its rigid rules and schedule. At one point, he’d hoped the factory would burn down. Mostly, I think these proud young men who had survived such hardships found it hard to take orders from a boss.
Eventually, Moishe’s factory job led to a venture with their former housemates at the DP camp. Moishe and Michael began operating a hot dog vending business in New York’s Yankee Stadium, selling all-beef Nathan’s hot dogs. Both were short men with heavy accents and aquiline noses. There must have been some funny stories from this immigrant alliance in a quintessentially American setting, but alas, they have been lost.
The hot dog business, in turn, led to a series of more secure and respectable businesses for Moishe. There was a dry goods store where he sold shmatas, followed by a grocery store on the corner of 16th Street and Allegheny with other former housemates from the DP camp. Unfortunately, they had a falling out, lending support for the truism that, “One should never go into business with friends.”
Around 1957, two remarkable events shaped the rest of Moishe’s and Pesche’s lives: First, the family moved to the apartment on Euclid Avenue near City Line and 54th Street. Pesche gave up the hot dog stand and upgraded to her own storefront near Euclid Avenue, selling eggs the family bought at the farms in Vineland, New Jersey. On the sidewalk outside the storefront, Herm sat in the hot sun frying ants with a magnifying glass, apparently in preparation for frog dissection in high school.
Second, Moishe met Meyer, also a refugee, and the two men began a long-term partnership operating Harry’s Market. Their wives also worked in the store. The partners must have purchased it from Harry because neither was named Harry.
Florence with Moishe, Pesche, and Lenny.
She and her family lived on the second floor.
When they moved to Euclid venue, their upstairs neighbors were a newlywed couple, Florence and Charlie, also Holocaust survivors. Charlie had been Lenny’s friend. It was Lenny who suggested the apartment when the couple was married. Pesche referred to Florence as her daughter and Lenny thought of her as his sister. By the time we met, my future in-laws and Charlie and Florence had grown quite close, almost like parents and children.
When my mother and I met them in 1965, they had two small children, “Little” Lenny and Robin. Herm was their steady babysitter. He actually taught me how to put on a diaper when it was our turn to have a child years later. Truth be told, I still had to hold an instruction manual in one hand, while I changed my first child’s first diaper with the other. (Everyone had left me home with the baby while they went shopping for all our basic needs. No preparation had been made prior to her birth in deference to Jewish superstition.)
Florence, who otherwise was quite shy, was warm, funny and gentle once she got to know you. She was tall and quite large for a woman, with an impish smile, always ready for a joke. When she hugged you, it was truly a bear hug. We laughed hysterically, many times, when we relived times we spent together, including an incident early in our courtship, when we went to visit Crystal Cave, Pennsylvania. The cave walls were made of crystals, the formations known as stalagmites and stalactites, a fascinating experience although a cold one.
Around lunchtime at the site, Florence was hungry but afraid to eat any non-kosher food in front of Herm, who she thought still kept scrupulously kosher. Little did she know how little he cared about keeping kosher, although he respected his parents’ rules until he married and moved away from home. When Herm went to the restroom, Florence sprang into action and whispered to me, “Shhhhh!”
Then, she sprinted over to the hot dog stand, bought one and started to eat it as fast as she could, keeping a look out for Herm. When she saw him coming back sooner than expected, Florence quickly shoved the rest of it into her mouth, like those Coney Island hot-dog eating contestants, laughing all the time.
After my mother and I met them, we became life-long friends. Sadly, Charlie died at a young age and Florence moved to Florida. Years later, my mother and I loved visiting her whenever we traveled south to escape the harsh northern winters.
Florence lived until her mid-seventies. She had been traumatized by her war experiences, having been born in 1940, and only told us how her family escaped the Holocaust the year before she died. It was the last time we saw her. She showed us a book, Fighting Back by Harold Werner, a relative of hers who had written a memoir of his heroic experiences as a resistance fighter during the war in Poland. In it, there is a picture of 6-year-old Florence, shoeless in a shapeless frock, standing next to her parents, with a caption reading:
Zindel and Betty Honigman with their daughter Fella [Florence] in eastern Poland shortly after liberation in late summer 1944. Zindel escaped from a work detail at the Sobibor death camp together with two other camp inmates, by killing two guards and slipping awa
y in the woods. On a moving train bound for Sobibor, Betty pushed her four-year-old daughter through a crack in the cattle car, then followed her and was hidden by friendly farmers in Gorzkow until Liberation. (Columbia University Press, 1992)
Florence’s remarkable spirit was what shone through when we met and was the same spirit we observed in Moishe and Pesche. In retrospect, it was the same spirit my parents had.
Chapter Seventeen
HARRY’S MARKET
HARRY’S MARKET was a small grocery store and deli, the equivalent of today’s bodega. Located in Powelton Village, a once elegant and affluent neighborhood in central Philadelphia, it was by the mid 1950s home to students from Drexel Institute of Technology, (affectionately referred to as Dreck Tech), and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the homeless and the unemployed.
Harry’s Market, with neatly lined shelving filled with an amazing array of grocery items, occupied a small space, a few steps down from street level on the side of a large, previously grand building complex that took up an entire block.
The small store even boasted a butcher section and a fresh fruit and vegetable section. When we got married, Moishe insisted that we stock our first apartment with all our basic needs from the store. Also, on every visit to us, they brought bags of groceries for their undoubtedly malnourished children. For years, I owned and used the classic broom, dustpan and pail from Harry’s Market. I wish I’d held onto them as mementos.
Moishe at the register in Harry’s Market.
Pesche usually manned the cash register near the front door while Moishe stocked the shelves and his partner manned the butcher shop. The neighborhood fell upon hard times and they were robbed several times in the late 1950s and 60s, once even at gunpoint. The way Moishe remembered it, “Five men with shotguns entered the store and made me and Meyer and everyone in the store lie down in the back room. They took all the cash, cigarettes and some food before they left. Everyone thought they were going to be killed.” Having survived the Holocaust, Moishe did not appear to be traumatized by a mere robbery.