Remembering my childhood, specifically my second grade class in Germany, each student was allocated a small lot and instructed to plant vegetables—lettuce, radishes, beans, and tomatoes. I thought, now, why can’t I do that on my otherwise useless lot?
We were now together in New York and had escaped from Germany, but our problems were not over.
On a Friday afternoon in September, I started coughing. I thought it was no big deal.
It all had started in Germany. With hate, the Nazis got tough. We Jews were placed in jeopardy. That should have been enough!
In the spring of 1945, the US Army was closing in on Cologne. I was an intelligence agent, a member of Interrogator Prisoner of War Team no.66, a part of an intelligence unit called T-Force, 12th Army Group, with a mission to follow the infantry into large cities as they were liberated.
Going back to my childhood in Germany, my mother always had a bowl of fresh fruit sitting on our dinner table. Fruit was just one thing that was always available, so no big deal. But things changed drastically when I fled with my parents to the United States at age 13.
My best remembered early days were unfortunately my years in Nazi Germany.
A few years ago, I donated a German passport to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, along with a description explaining the meaning of each entry.
Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.
