We had many visitors to our home in Göttingen once travel became easier in Germany. Some of them were people we knew from Kielce who had heard through the grapevine that we now lived in Göttingen. Others were foreign students or professors who came to Göttingen to study. Some stayed in the Fridtjof-Nansen-Haus, which had been founded after the war by Olav Brennhovd, a Norwegian Protestant minister who ended up in a Nazi concentration camp for helping to smuggle Jews from Norway to Sweden. He was a friend of Odd Nansen, who introduced us to him. Brennhovd and his wife became close friends and frequently brought greetings from Nansen and other Norwegians who knew me in Sachsenhausen. Another one of our early visitors was a young British soldier who came to Göttingen as a war crimes investigator. Greville Janner was told about Mutti and me when he asked to be introduced to Jewish families in Göttingen. He soon realized that we were basically it. Greville was only a few years older than I. We became good friends and have remained in touch to this day. He served for many years in the British House of Commons before being elevated to the House of Lords. Lord Janner of Braunstone’s lifelong efforts on behalf of victims of the Holocaust probably date back to those early days in Göttingen and other German cities where he met many survivors.
The years I spent in Göttingen after the war were very important in helping me cope with my attitudes toward Germany and Germans. Those were not easy years for Mutti or me, and we often envied some of our fellow Kielce survivors who had ended up in Sweden right after the war. They did not have to face the economic hardships we faced in postwar Germany, nor did they have to struggle with the emotions we felt when contemplating the possibility that we were living amid murderers. At the same time, by living in Germany not long after our concentration camp experience, we were forced to confront those emotions in a way that helped Mutti and me gradually overcome our hatred and desire for revenge. Later, in America, I realized that many of my Jewish friends and acquaintances who had come to the United States before the war and thus escaped the Holocaust were much less forgiving than Mutti and I. I doubt that we would have been able to preserve our sanity had we remained consumed by hatred for the rest of our lives. Many of our relatives and friends in America never understood what we meant when we tried to explain that, while it was important not to forget what happened to us in the Holocaust, it was equally important not to hold the descendants of the perpetrators responsible for what was done to us, lest the cycle of hate and violence never end.
CHAPTER 11
To America
I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK on December 4, 1951. The ship that brought me to the United States was an American military transport, the USNS General A. W. Greely, one of the many so-called Liberty ships that had been mass-produced in the United States during the war. That was a fateful day for me. A new life was about to begin, and an old one had been left behind. But I did not know that at the time, for I traveled to America without a clear sense that I would settle there permanently. All I knew was that I wanted to see America — skyscrapers, big cars, Hollywood movies, chewing gum, cowboys and Indians. That was the America we kids in Göttingen imagined as we tried to find barbers who knew how to give American crew cuts, which had become the rage in my school. Of course, I looked forward to meeting my uncle and aunt, Eric and Senta Silbergleit — in America the name had become Silberg — and their daughter, Gay. I was to live with them in Paterson, New Jersey, less than an hour away from New York City. The very thought of being so close to Manhattan, Broadway, and the hundreds of movie houses I had heard about was all very exciting.
But those were by no means my only reasons for deciding to go to the United States. By 1951, at the age of seventeen, I was beginning to have doubts about remaining in Germany for the rest of my life. Although I was quite happy in Göttingen, I came to realize that I never really considered myself to be German the way my classmates, for example, thought of themselves as Germans. The term Vaterland (fatherland), which for the vast majority of Germans evokes patriotic emotions, triggered in me memories of Hitler and the Nazis; so too did the sound and words of the German national anthem. I was unable to shed these emotional associations, despite the fact that I was living in a very different Germany, a Germany that was being transformed into a solidly democratic state. These associations served as constant reminders of the crimes that had been committed in the name of the German Vaterland. The fact that I could not divorce the various nationalistic slogans and symbols from my past set me apart, in my own mind, from ordinary Germans and convinced me that in Germany I would always feel that I was different — different from that mythical “ordinary German.” That feeling of not belonging or of being different was, of course, directly related to my past. At the time, moreover, I could still not rid myself entirely of the fear that the world had not seen the last of Nazi Germany. In retrospect, these fears seem to have been totally irrational. But in 1951, when I was seriously beginning to think about my future, only six years had elapsed since the collapse of the Nazi regime, and most of us who had survived the camps still could not quite believe that our nightmare was really over. These reflections and doubts about the future convinced me that I would never be able to put my past entirely behind me in Germany and that it would therefore make sense for me to emigrate at some point.
I was also forced to think about my future because my uncle and aunt in America kept urging Mutti and me to leave Germany and to settle in the United States. For a variety of reasons, Mutti was very reluctant to move to America. Her main worry was that she had no profession and that she would not be able to live in America on her German pension. That meant, she claimed, that despite her recurring health problems, she would have to work in a factory there. I do not know what prompted that idea, although the fact that my uncle and aunt had worked in various factories after they arrived in the United States in 1938 may explain Mutti’s fear that a similar fate awaited her there. Whatever the reason, she became obsessed with that fear. It may well be that her decision to marry Jacob (Jack) Rosenholz, another survivor of the Ghetto of Kielce, was influenced in part by her worries about the life she thought she would have to live in America. At that time, she already knew that Jack planned to move to Italy, where he had relatives who wanted him to join them in a business venture.
For me the situation was very different. Although I was eager to accept my uncle and aunt’s invitation to come to America, I did so without committing myself mentally to making it a permanent move. In the back of my mind was the idea that after a year or two in America, I might settle in Israel. There was something romantic about the notion of living in a kibbutz in Israel and helping to build a Jewish state. More important, while I knew little about the realities of life in Israel, I was sure that in Israel I would not feel “different,” and that sense of belonging was becoming an important consideration in my thinking about the future. In short, I really did not know what I would or should do in the long term; given my age, the long term seemed very far away. In the meantime, the thought of going to America, whether forever or only for a year or two, had immense appeal for me.
Thomas’s aunt and uncle Senta and Eric Silberg, previously Silbergleit, 1978
My decision to leave Germany for the United States was made much easier by Mutti’s marriage to Jack Rosenholz and her willingness to move to Italy with him. Had that not been the case, I would have found it very difficult to leave her alone in Germany. Despite her remarriage, however, it was not easy for Mutti to face another separation from me. Although she agreed that I would have a better future in America and did not try to dissuade me from leaving Germany, she hoped nevertheless that I would be back in Europe within a year or two. At the time, I probably thought the same. During that entire period, Mutti and I had many a sleepless night wondering what we should do. Some of the problems we worried about, particularly lengthy separations, never really materialized. In the years that followed my move to the United States, I managed to visit her almost every second year by getting free rides across the Atlantic o
n freighters. On these occasions, I also managed to visit my friends in Göttingen.
Mutti had a wonderful life in Italy and was very happy there. And once I completed my studies and then married, Mutti and Jack visited us regularly. These visits became even more frequent after the birth of our sons. At that point, Mutti’s interest in me shifted dramatically to her grandchildren. Now, as a grandfather myself, I understand that natural process, even though I viewed it with a certain amount of jealousy mixed with a great deal of amusement at the time. I am also very grateful that my sons still had the opportunity to get to know their “Oma,” that very special woman.
Thomas and his mother in Bremerhaven in 1951, shortly before his departure for the United States
After various inquiries about the bureaucratic steps I needed to take to enter the United States, I learned that it would make sense for me to seek admission to the country as an immigrant, rather than as a visitor or a student. It also appeared that I met the requirements to come to America as an immigrant under a special quota for refugee children. In those days, the United States still had a very strict quota entry system that depended on one’s place of birth, rather than on one’s nationality. Since I was born in Czechoslovakia, I would have fallen under the Czech quota, which had a long waiting list. By contrast, the refugee children’s quota was wide open. I applied for a visa under that quota and received it after a brief wait.
A month or two later, I was asked to come to a transit camp in Bremerhaven, in the north of Germany. I stayed there for about two weeks, undergoing medical tests and various interviews by U.S. immigration officials. Mutti was with me throughout this time. She was happy for me, since I was excited about going to America, but very sad at the thought of not seeing me for a long time. In those days, America was very far away, and I can only imagine how difficult the idea of my leaving must have been for her. She kept giving me all kinds of motherly advice, from wearing warm clothes in the winter to eating well, and so on. The one piece of advice she gave me that still brings a smile to my face was “Remember, Tommy,” she told me more than once, “it is better to have many girlfriends than just one. That will ensure that you won’t get married too young.” I was never quite able to comply fully with that advice. Mutti had also obtained a fifty-dollar bill on the black market, which was a great deal of money in those days. She told me to hide it in my shoe so that it would not be confiscated on entry into the United States. She must have assumed that they had currency controls in America as they did in Europe at the time. I did as she said and can now only imagine what that bill must have smelled like on arrival in the United States, considering that the sanitary conditions on board our ship left much to be desired. Years later, when I read Emperor Vespasian’s famous dictum that money does not smell, I remembered the fifty-dollar bill in my shoe. He was certainly wrong about that money.
Gerda in Trieste, 1957
My stay at the transit camp in Bremerhaven was largely uneventful. The camp was filled with refugees from all over Europe. Among them were large numbers of peasants and laborers from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Many of these people had been brought to Germany as slave labor or as prisoners of war. I later learned that this group most probably also included Nazi collaborators who had served as policemen and camp guards during the war and who now claimed to have been slave laborers in Germany. Another group consisted of individuals who had fled after the war from various eastern European countries that had been taken over by Communist regimes. Many of these people were professionals, including lawyers, professors, teachers, and medical doctors.
Since I spoke German and Polish and schoolboy English, I was called from time to time to act as interpreter for the interviews U.S. immigration examiners conducted with prospective immigrants. It did not take me long to realize that it was quite easy for those who claimed to be peasants and laborers to pass whatever test the examiners were applying for admission to the United States. Those refugees who had left their countries for political reasons and who were, on the whole, more educated were asked detailed questions about their backgrounds and political views. Judging by the questions the examiners kept asking, I soon realized that they were not really interested in finding out whether or not some of these prospective immigrants had been Nazi collaborators. They focused instead on ascertaining whether they were communists or had leftist leanings. It was only later that I learned that in the early 1950s, when the cold war was heating up and McCarthyism was at its zenith, the United States had admitted thousands of immigrants from eastern Europe, among them many who had collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces. Years later, when the U.S. government began to deport immigrants who had been found to have committed war crimes during the Nazi period, it was discovered that some of these people had managed to enter the United States because of sloppy screening by immigration authorities. I was not surprised.
The voyage to the United States took about ten days. I recently found among my papers a copy of the “Souvenir Edition of the Greely News,” our ship’s mimeographed newsletter. From it I learned that there were 1,271 refugees on board the General Greely. They were born in twenty countries and professed ten different religions. Roman Catholics were the largest religious group with 743 individuals, Baptists the smallest with two. There were fifty Jews on board, sixteen Buddhists, and eight Muslims; the remaining passengers represented various other Christian denominations. In many ways the passengers on my ship mirrored the immigration trends in the United States at that time. I had never seen people from so many different countries in one place and took lots of photographs of individuals whose faces suggested national or ethnic origins I had not encountered before. I was particularly fascinated by a Kalmyk family who looked Chinese to me but spoke Russian. They came from the Asian part of the Soviet Union and were also planning to live with relatives in New Jersey. I never did manage to find out how they ended up in Germany.
Most of our sleeping quarters were on the lower decks of the ship. We slept in single four-tiered bunks. The distance between each of the tiers was quite small, making it very difficult to sit up in bed. As soon as we arrived on board the ship, we were informed that we were all required to work, washing the decks, cleaning toilets, painting walls, and so on. I decided right then and there that there had to be more interesting jobs to perform and that I should try to find myself a more exciting assignment. As soon as I heard that frequent informational announcements were being made in different languages over the ship’s public address system, I volunteered for that job and was hired for the German and Polish announcements. It turned out that I could also serve as one of the German-language editors of the ship’s newsletter. With my two assignments came the right to work on the top deck in a very pleasant set of cabins. Since the ship’s public address system was located on the bridge, I was also allowed to enter that part of the vessel, which was off-limits to the other passengers. Once they got to know me, the captain and the duty officers would allow me to linger on the bridge after I had made my announcements and would answer my questions about the navigational instruments on board. On one of those visits, Captain Niels H. Olsen, the ship’s master, told me proudly that he had come to America from Denmark as a young man without speaking a word of English and that life had been good to him in his adoptive country. He assured me that I would be equally happy and successful in America.
I owe my introduction to American food to the chefs of the General Greely. Our meals were served in the mess hall on long, elevated metal tables. We ate our food standing up and had to hold on to our trays whenever the ship tilted to one side or the other. In rough seas, the trays of inattentive passengers would end up crashing to the other side of the hall. Our typical American breakfast consisted of ham and eggs, milk, coffee, and a small box of cereal. The cereal presented a problem for me and many others, for we had no idea what it was or how it was to be eaten. I finally decided that it was some sort of American dessert and carried the cereal box with me to the top deck, where I
ate it like candy. I was by no means the only one who labored under this misconception, for the decks were usually full of passengers eating the dry cereal with their hands once breakfast was over. On one or two occasions we were given turkey for lunch or dinner. It was usually served with what I thought were carrots. Never having eaten sweet potatoes before, I could barely swallow my first mouthful. Not only did it not taste of carrot, my favorite vegetable, but it also reminded me of the turnips I had promised myself never to eat again if I survived the war. In time I came to enjoy sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving and Christmastime. On those occasions, however, they are prepared much more tastefully than the sweet potatoes the ship’s chefs served us.
Our ship docked in New York harbor during the evening of December 3, 1951. We had to remain on board until the next morning. The New York skyline was ablaze with multicolored lights. On our way in, we passed the fully illuminated Statue of Liberty, which to this day symbolizes for me the warm welcome with which America received me as an immigrant. Seeing New York City at night is always a special experience, no matter how often one has had that opportunity. But seeing it for the first time after leaving a gloomy Europe still recovering from the devastation of a world war was truly a breathtaking experience. I will never forget that moment. As I looked out on that vast city glittering with what appeared to be millions of lights, many thoughts and images raced through my mind. I thought of that recurrent dream I had had in Sachsenhausen that one of the Allied bombers that flew over the camp on its way to Berlin would lower a big hook, lift up my barrack, and take me to America. That dream had finally come true, albeit not in such a fairy-tale way. I also wondered, not without some trepidation, what life would be like in America, when I would see Mutti again, and whether I did the right thing by leaving Göttingen. But the longer I stood at the ship’s railing, fascinated by a sky drenched in the reflected colors of the multitude of lights that illuminated the city, I was transported back to Auschwitz and the reddish brown smoke bellowing out of the crematorium chimneys. Suddenly, the life I had lived — Kielce, Auschwitz, the Death March, Sachsenhausen — flashed before my eyes. Right then and there, I knew that I would never quite liberate myself from that past and that it would forever shape my life. But I also knew that I would not let it have a debilitating or destructive effect on the new life I was just about to begin. My past would inspire my future and give it meaning.
A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy Page 16