Eve Kugler
“In New York in five years
I lived in three different foster homes. I did not believe that I would ever
see my parents again. Our family was reunited in New York in 1946. We started
again with nothing except the Jewish beliefs and values that the Nazis could never
take from us.
My memories of Halle are… very small, and very fleeting. I remember going with my grandfather to a farm in order to get milk, because he was very, very observant of kashrut and the milk that you would buy locally was not suitable. I remember going with him when I was about four. I remember when my mother’s younger sister got married in Leipzig because I must have been about three. I was a flower girl... I think, looking back on what happened, what must have stayed in the back of my mind was the Nazis everywhere…which I think greatly, hugely, hugely frightened me. Because, oh, and I do remember also going on a picnic by the river and lying in the grass looking at the trees with the sky. All beautiful, as you can see, happy, sylvan memories. And then I remember leaving Germany, in 1939. We flew out. And I remember looking down from the plane at the rows of the houses below. And that, on one hand, are basically my memories of Germany.
I lived through the
nightmare that was Kristallnacht when I was seven years old. That our family
was still in Nazi Germany almost six years after Hitler came to power was not
through choice. Although he had served in the German army in World War 1, my
father was not one of those German-born Jews who thought nothing would happen
to us. He was the owner of a small department store in the city of Halle an der
Saale, famous as the birthplace of the composer Georg Friedrich Handel and the
birthplace of the infamous Reinhard Heydrich, the despised architect of the
programme to exterminate the Jews. My father felt the danger of the Nazis, as
posters shouting ‘Juden Verboten’ appeared in store windows, cinemas and public
parks all over our city, books by Jewish writers were publicly burned and his
customers abandoned him.
He was wrong in believing
that I and my sister Ruth, a year older, were unaware of the tension in our
home as Nazi antisemitism steadily increased and friends who were opponents of
Hitler were arrested. He thought of us as little dolls, oblivious to the fear
uniformed Nazis created as they paraded down our streets requiring all to
salute and shout ‘Heil Hitler’ when they passed. He shrugged off as Nazi
stupidity the time an SS man scooped me up – a fair, blue eyed girl – and
congratulated my terrified mother on having such a beautiful Aryan child.”
Father was right though in recognising the dangers for Jews in Germany. In 1934 he applied for a visa to Palestine. But as a businessman he had low priority and four years later we were still waiting. Though our name reached the top of the list of people entitled to the visa, we were continually bypassed in favour of Jews in imminent danger of arrest. On 29 October 1938, the Nazis arrested all Polish Jews living in Germany and sent them back to Poland. It was the first mass deportation of Jews and included my beloved grandfather, who had lived with us, as well as more than a dozen others of our family.
In the afternoon mother
walked to our local police station and was told that my father was in
Buchenwald. If she could produce a visa, they said, he would be freed. Germany
was to become Judenrein, free of Jews. It took her six weeks. The week my
father left for France with his forged visa, we were evicted from our flat. The
Nazis had created an arbitrary list of homes in which Jews were permitted to
reside, forcing Jews to share living quarters. Ours was not on the list. Mother
sent Ruth, my 2-year-old sister Lea and me to Leipzig to live with her father,
although he was already sharing his flat with five other Jewish families. It
took her another six months to procure a second illegal visa. We flew to Paris
at the end of June 1939 with one suitcase each and a total of 40 Deutschmarks,
all the Nazis permitted us to take out of the country.”
“The reunion of our family
was short-lived. When war broke out in September of 1939, the French interned
my father as a German national. Now destitute, mother sent my sisters and me to
a home for displaced Jewish children run by the Jewish welfare organisation,
OSE. My most abiding memory of the year in the home was the continuous bombing
in the weeks before the Nazis took Paris. Just before the city fell, the
children were hastily evacuated to other OSE homes in central France. Now
living under the collaborationist Vichy government, our future was uncertain.
The present consisted of severe shortages of food and fuel.
The children were always
hungry; in the winter we shivered in unheated quarters. In 1941 the United
States issued a rare visa for several hundred Jewish children trapped in French
concentration camps. When the French Resistance could not spirit the children
out of the camps, the visa was given to the OSE. At the last minute Ruth and I
took the place of two children who had suddenly become ill and were forbidden
to travel. I remember nothing of the long, hazardous train journey through
France and Spain, nor of sailing across the U-boat infested Atlantic Ocean. In
New York in five years I lived in three different foster homes. I did not
believe that I would ever see my parents again. I don’t know when I realised
that I could remember nothing of the years in Nazi Germany, except flying out
of the country. Nor could I recall much of my two years in France. But the
guilt I felt for securing a place of safety at the expense of a sick child
never left me.
My parents and Lea did survive. With
the help of the French Resistance Lea was hidden first in a Catholic convent
and then on an isolated farm. My mother and father survived three French
concentration camps, twice miraculously spared from deportation to Auschwitz.
My father struggled as a forced labourer on the Nazi project to strengthen the
seawall in Calais where they expected the Allied invasion to take place, until
he managed an almost unheard of escape from this camp. Our family was reunited
in New York in 1946. We started again with nothing except the Jewish beliefs
and values that the Nazis could never take from us. But it was a very difficult
adjustment [when her parents arrived in NYC after five years of separation] for
me because initially I’d forgotten all my - my German. Most of us did. We made
a wilful effort. We didn’t want to have anything to do with German, we didn’t
want to admit we were German, so we remembered nothing. And so I had to
re-learn my German. My mother’s English was sparse. But she was a linguist;
they learnt French very quickly, they learnt English. So there was a language
barrier, but the greater barrier was the fact that my mother felt that she
wanted to pick up where we left off.
I worked, earned a university degree and became a journalist. I went around for years and years plagued by the fact that I really had very little memory of anything that happened to me before I stepped off the ship, when I was not quite eleven, and landed in New York and walked down this wooden pier. And that used to be my memory of when my life really started. And this plagued me. It really drove me crazy. And I was I think in my forties, when I finally, and I will say ‘got the nerve’, because I thought about this for a long time. And I asked my mother to tell me what happened. What happened to me, to my sisters? What was my life like? Tell me everything.
And my mother, who was in 1997 she
was 93 years old. That was when the book was published. And she used to say,
“How’s it going? How is the book doing?” Now, she wasn’t looking for being
famous. She wanted everybody to know. She said, “Everybody has to know what
happened during the war. What happened to us. People have to learn.” And so I-
it sounds grandiose, but I feel now along with other survivors I have a duty to
my parents, and to the survivor community, to share this story. I think
it’s…it’s a way of people having to learn. And I find that no matter what
programs there are, the reaction to someone who tells a story and says, “I was
there and this is what happened to me” always has the most – most immediacy,
the most influence.
[I stress the importance
of] learning what happened to - to the Jewish people, how, how terrible it was,
and you know, how six million people, including over a million children,
perished. That this is something which should not be repeated. And if you
understand it and take in what happened, hopefully, that you will do what you
can in whatever small way even if it’s just speaking to other people, and
telling them about what you’ve seen, and telling them, sharing even just this
experience to try and make people see that they should... stop killing each
other. But for years I was plagued by my inability to remember what had
happened to me during the first 11 years of my life. In my forties, I finally
asked my mother to tell me all that had taken place. The story of our family’s
survival is recounted in my book, Shattered Crystals. I now speak in schools,
synagogues and to civic groups about this history and accompany young people to
Poland on the annual March of the Living.”
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