I also responded with delight to again being in the company of my only girl cousin, Anna. She was a year older than I, studied at a private school, and had accumulated a wide network of girlfriends. Although Anna and I did not spend much time together then, I liked and admired her immensely, for her good looks and keen intellect as well as her friendly nature. She inherited her mother’s generous disposition, showing love and acceptance to others and especially to her family. That trait continues to this day. Now, Anna and I see more of each other and enjoy a close relationship.
Modifications to my former life came almost daily. Uncle Paul suggested that we change our surnames, as his family had done, from Bächer with the umlaut over the “a,” to just Backer. That sounded more American, he said. Naturally, we followed his counsel and became, as we are now, the Backers. I was happy not to have to explain umlauts and the correct spelling of my name.
The blending in this way of the two branches of our family was not without tension. My mother had worked earlier in London for the Czechoslovak government in exile. She intended to continue to work in America and had obtained a recommendation for a position at the Czechoslovak consulate in New York. She saw working at the consulate as a positive development since she liked financial independence and enjoyed interaction with others at a job. This precipitated the first family disagreement that I can recall. Uncle Paul was strongly opposed to her working, stating that her place was at home caring for the health needs of her husband. Nevertheless, Mother persisted and joined the staff at the consulate.
Uncle Paul took the responsibility of enrolling me in school. On the first Monday after our arrival he accompanied me to George Washington High School in Washington Heights. This was the school from which my cousins Charlie and Paul graduated, and he declared it was “the best.” Once again I was to attend a school that was not close to where I lived—it required a forty-minute subway ride each way. When we arrived at the school and the principal reviewed my transcript from Fulneck Boys’ School, he gave me an amazed and puzzled look, then declared, “You have enough subjects to be finished with high school right now, but you are not sixteen years old yet, so there is no way we can we let you graduate.” This situation arose because in England I took nine subjects simultaneously, and in the US only five are taken at one time in high schools. No wonder I had completed all the requirements! I vividly remembered Mother emphasizing the value of a “proper” English education and I understand now what motivated her to send me to Fulneck. Compromise needed to be reached with the principal, so it was decided I would attend high school there for a year plus a month and then be graduated. However, by the time the mid-year high school graduation exercises took place in January 1946, I was already in college, but apparently the principal didn’t know this when he called out at graduating exercises, “Backer, Backer—where is he?” I never did receive my high school diploma to document that I graduated, but it didn’t seem to matter.
George Washington High School was huge. My first day there was completely bewildering, especially since I was used to a school of about a hundred pupils and George Washington High had a staggering five thousand! Not only was the size of the school dramatically different, but there were girls there too, mixed into the student population with boys, and very different shades of brown skin were represented. I had seen a few black people as part of the American troops on the lawn at Battle House, and one in London’s Regent’s Park, and that was it. Now I was in class with many of them. Between courses I found the hallways to be a streaming mass of bustling bodies chattering noisily, and as I stood there confused, not knowing where to go next, a big African American boy put his arm on my shoulder and asked me, “Are you lost? Where do you want to go?” He showed me the way to my next class, and although I never recall seeing him again, from that moment on I lost any fear I may have had of black people. He never realized what a favor he had done me.
Once I went to Harlem. The 72nd Street Backers had occasional household help in the person of Evelyn, who cleaned and did some cooking. One time Evelyn was needed to carry something heavy home and I either volunteered or was volunteered to carry it for her. When we got off the subway at Lenox Avenue and 145th Street, I saw only black faces. I was fascinated with the naturalness of everyone going about his and her business. I was aware through discussions in England of the unjust and uneven treatment of black people in America, so the normalcy I saw surprised me. What struck me as odd was that when we arrived at the door of Evelyn’s apartment, she had to unlock four locks to enter her small spotless home.
I began working Saturdays even before my sixteenth birthday, and my first employment was at an A.S. Beck shoe store on Delancey Street as a stock boy. I was fascinated with the street scene I sometimes saw outside the store. The unusual way Orthodox Jews dressed was novel to me, as was the price haggling prevalent among customers and peddlers behind their open stalls. Seeing the pushcarts and hearing the hawkers and chatter made me imagine I had landed on another planet. After I had been working at the shoe store for several weeks, I came to work one day as usual only to be told that I was no longer needed. I was surprised and then furious when I recalled it cost me a nickel on the subway to get there and I would need to spend another nickel to get back home yet the manager made no mention of this when he dismissed me. He also didn’t say he was sorry or give me any encouragement whatsoever despite my hard work and perfect attendance. I calculated that a nickel was 10 percent of my hourly fifty-cent wage! Well, that was capitalism I growled to myself, and I definitely did not like being cast as the exploited worker.
But my next job I loved. Chain stores had a lock on their doors that recorded what time each day the manager opened and closed the shop. Once a week the paper that recorded the information, which was wound around a cylinder, had to be changed and a new paper put in its place. I had an established route of places to go where I had to change these recording strips. My route began at Rockefeller Center and wound through midtown, finishing on Tenth Avenue at the company office, where I turned in the paper strips I had removed earlier. One of my stops to which I looked forward eagerly was a candy factory where the receptionist supplied me with enough free candy to last all week.
One of my cherished dreams as a teenager was to be a farmer, the bug having bit me especially hard back in England during the two consecutive summers I worked on farms. Having specific responsibilities there made me feel grown up, and I especially enjoyed those work camps in England. When I came to America I continued my interest in farming. During the summers of 1945 and 1946 I worked near Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada on a farm operated by the Běhals, Czech refugees, who also employed three Czech hired hands. The Běhals were friends of my parents and, like me, escaped in 1939. To get to the farm job, I hitchhiked my way to Canada via Albany and Buffalo before the New York State Thruway was built and crossed on foot at Niagara Falls. One year I caught a ride all the way from Albany to Buffalo with a man in an old car who drove to the top of each hill on Route 20 and then cut off the motor and coasted down. I asked him why he did this and he said in order to save gas.
I had a great experience on the Běhals’ farm. When I arrived in mid-June it was haying season. I liked riding on a big load of hay drawn by a pair of horses. On the way back from the barn to the field with an empty wagon, I found the horses were frequently frisky, and the challenge was to control them lest they run off with me. After the hay was in the barn, the wheat harvest came in August. Since all the farms were relatively small, 200 to 300 acres, no farmer owned his own threshing machine. When a rented thresher came to a particular farm, all the men from the neighboring farms would arrive to help so that all the grain grown on that farm would be threshed in one day. Everyone looked forward to the noon break because lunchtime was a veritable feast where each farmer’s wife would try to set out a spread that outshone the previous wives’ prepared lunches. These contests gave us something to talk about while working.
During the school year I continue
d farming in the New York borough of Queens where Queens College had an agricultural program. A couple of times a week I rode the subway from high school in Washington Heights in Manhattan to the end of the line in Flushing, about an hour’s ride, and then walked to the farm. Although the ride was long, it gave me time to dream about the farm I planned to own one day and contemplate how I would run it. The Queens’ farm included a variety of animals, so I picked up information on animal husbandry and also received instruction on pruning fruit trees. I felt I was storing away valuable information for my future. Eventually, however, my dream of farm ownership receded, but I have sometimes thought about what kind of farmer I would have been.
After the war, my cousins Charlie and Paul were discharged from military service. One cold day in December 1945, I was riding the 79th Street cross-town bus through Central Park. Paul had just come home, but I wasn’t in contact with him yet; I thought how it had been six years since I last saw him. People were bundled in overcoats, hats, and scarves when a young man sat down next to me, leaning sideways toward a standing friend who was conversing with him. I stared—was this my cousin Paul sitting next to me? I wasn’t sure and I thought it too bold to address him directly. I would be embarrassed if I spoke out and it wasn’t Paul. So, instead, I took out a piece of paper and wrote in Czech, “Are you Paul? I am Ivan.” I practically shoved it under his face then turned to look out the window. He finally read it and turned to me with great surprise and delight, “You are Ivan?” I turned red and acknowledged my identity. We were very glad to see each other again.
My love for New York City blossomed during that first year I lived there. I liked the independence it offered me, losing myself within its vastness, its tall buildings that towered overhead and the palpable, pulsating energy of the crowds. Anonymity in the city appealed to me, and I enjoyed the fact that no one knew me as I scurried here and there. I have never lost that sense of exhilaration, and it reawakens whenever I visit. The city continued to be my home for the next eight years. When my father’s health improved, my parents and I moved into a two-bedroom furnished apartment on 69th Street (before Lincoln Center was built) and stayed there until 1947, when we moved to Washington Heights and lived at 105 Pinehurst Avenue. On vacations from college that remained my home base. The spacious five-room apartment was my mother’s home until she died in 1984. In the meantime, Frank returned from Europe, where he had been escorting convoys bringing relief supplies to Czechoslovakia. Finally, all four members of our immediate family were together again.
Chapter Eight: Why Was I Spared? 1946–1952
ON A COLD January day I carried my two well-worn suitcases to New York’s Pennsylvania Station to catch a Lehigh Valley train to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I was off to Moravian College, the next rung on my educational ladder. Choosing Moravian came naturally, almost automatically, because of my positive experiences at the Moravian school at Fulneck, England. A generous scholarship from the college was further incentive to seal the deal.
I looked down at the half frozen brook meandering alongside the train tracks and thought about what lay ahead. Of course, it was not the first time in my young life I had traveled a train alone to an unknown destination, but in the earlier journeys arrangements were made for me and always included a person who would meet me at the end of the trip. Now I optimistically, but unrealistically, hoped someone would be sent by the college to direct me to my new place of residence. However, when the train pulled in and we disembarked, I stood on the platform and watched the other passengers walk away and disappear. Glancing around I quickly became aware there was no one to welcome me.
“How do I get to Moravian College?” I finally asked the clerk at the ticket office.
“Go up the stairs by the bridge, stay on this side of it, and take the bus up North Main Street.” Sensing my confusion, he added, “Ask the driver to call out your stop.” The voice wasn’t particularly friendly. I followed instructions, lugging my bags up many stairs to the bus stop. Stepping off the bus I found myself in front of a large gray stone building with two smaller colonial style structures across the street nearby. I wondered which was the right building then decided to walk the long path to the larger structure, which proved to be the right choice. Inside I was given information that my room was on the third floor and I would register for classes down on the first. I was proud to have dealt with transportation issues and orientation to a new, completely unfamiliar place entirely on my own for the first time.
The incoming class at Moravian College that year included 130 G.I. soldiers plus three of us who were newly minted high school graduates. I was sixteen and a half years old and had to face the challenge of conquering my fears and adapting to this unfamiliar environment. This new world I had entered seemed complex and confusing; I felt a total stranger in it. But I quit thinking so much about myself after I met my first roommate, and he told me about his army service in Europe. I listened to him and others who had been overseas relate stories about military life and give details of their exploits, especially sexual ones. I was jealous of their worldliness and well aware that I was being viewed for what I was—a schoolboy and a novice in matters concerning the opposite sex.
I attended the summer school session as did almost everyone else that first summer, and at age seventeen I became a sophomore. In my first semester at college I received what I considered one bad grade—a C in a compulsory gym class. The problem was with basketball, a game I had barely heard of and never played. I simply could not hit the basket! Nevertheless, most semesters I made the dean’s list. Years later, at a college reunion, I was surprised that my classmates had labeled me “smart” although I hadn’t thought of myself to be in any way exceptional.
I needed to supplement my college scholarship with jobs. My first work experience was sweeping dusty floors in the science building where renovations were underway. Later I worked in the dining room washing dishes and at the same time was employed as a soda jerk at the local luncheonette where I claimed banana splits as my specialty. Assisting Dr. Raymond Haupert, Moravian’s president, in his garden was another occasional job, and, as in my earlier horticulture days, I liked working in the soil. In all these earning opportunities I made 50 cents per hour, and this money was my only source of funds.
Picking a major was no problem for me. I chose pre-med driven by my desire to be a medical missionary in Africa. That resolve had been nurtured by reading about Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s life and investigating many of his writings. I determined in those early days at Moravian College that my life path was set, driven by my increasing and deepening desire to do something useful and serve others. I asked myself, isn’t that what I was saved from the Holocaust for? I thought nothing was more worthwhile than to heal people in parts of the world where there were few doctors. During my first two years in college I took the requisite science courses and did well, although I was more drawn to the humanities, especially history.
At the same time I became friends with several students who were preparing for the Moravian Church ministry. The Moravian Theological Seminary shared the campus with Moravian College, and in my junior year it appointed a new dean. Soon after his arrival he called me into his office to ask me how I expected to be a medical missionary without any theological training. I told him my plan was to practice medicine first. I see now how the outcome of that meeting with the dean reflected my youthful age, natural shyness, and inexperience in defending myself. I was too immature to recognize and understand his bias when he launched into an argument with adult confidence to influence decisions about my future.
“You must first get a theological grounding! You can’t be a missionary without being ordained and you can’t be ordained without going to seminary,” he insisted as a counter to my plan for starting with medical school. “After all,” he continued, “you will only be twenty years old when you finish college and seminary takes just three years, so you will still be very young when you begin medical school.”
I wa
s facing a crossroad. At eighteen I found it difficult to argue with this man of authority who was such a smooth talker and compelling spokesman for the church. It is true, I thought, that three years is not that long. I never considered, nor did the dean, intervening events that might well arise over time in this broad outline of a young man’s life and would derail the most distant part of the plan—medical school. I had feelings of doubt about what was being said to me, but reluctantly acquiesced and enrolled as a pre-theological student, but I still completed all my pre-med requirements. That trait from boyhood—to always finish what I start—was still with me!
I sought to attend a Moravian Church just as I had in England. There were five churches in the city of Bethlehem to choose from. Someone said that the best young people’s group with the most girls was located at West Side Moravian Church. I wasted no time investigating this bit of news and in short order became a member of the group and sang in the church choir as well. The young people’s group met every Sunday evening, and I found them extremely friendly and accepting of new members. Group discussions were intellectually stimulating to me, and often after the meetings all of us visited someone’s house to enjoy refreshments. Gradually I felt at home here and became more confident socializing with girls.
That fall a new girl came to the young people’s group. The first thing I noticed were her shapely legs, and as my eyes took in the rest of her I liked what I saw. Her name was Carolyn Bartholomew, but I was told to stay away from her because her fiancé died recently and that would mean she was in a fragile state. My heart sank but not for long as her grief lifted and we started dating a short time later. We shared a love of music—one of our favorite activities was attending the Community Concerts at Liberty High School, from which she had graduated. There we heard a very young Leonard Bernstein play and conduct one of Beethoven’s piano concertos. Still bashful it took me ages to hold her hand and eventually to kiss her. I shouldn’t have waited so long!
My Train to Freedom Page 8