Fred Marcus' Video Library

Fred Marcus: Our lifestyle was very similar to that of American Jews today. My father spoke with pride about the fact that our family had lived in Germany, no, even in Prussia for 200 years. And so we were very assimilated, very integrated into society. And I don’t think that when I was small, other than going to my grandparents’, there was a very pronounced Jewishness or feeling of being Jewish or being different from anybody else. That was all taught to us by the Nazis. […]

[…] being persecuted for being a Jew motivated me to find out more about Judaism. It seemed so preposterous what the Nazis were doing, that all of a sudden, you were an outcast, didn’t belong, had to be thrown out, et cetera, that I really wanted to know more about what it was that I was being persecuted for.”

“I was enrolled by my parents into a private school. And in what turned out to be not so fortuitous results, I made the first four school years, I completed in three. So that from then on, for the rest of my school life, I was always the class baby, which did not always have salutary results. And after these three years, then, I moved over to the Friedrichswerderscher Gymnasium, a school that to which college-bound and university-bound kids still go in Germany after their four years in basic public school. And this was a public school, too.

It was an all-boys’ school with large classes and I would say between 35 and 40 kids. And I entered that school in the fifth grade, having skipped the fourth, because of that private school. This was the school year of 1933-1934. And some significant events took place that made me aware of how Germany was changing. One was when one of our teachers entered. In Europe, to this day, it is customary for kids to stand up by their seats when the teacher enters. And the teacher will say, good morning, please be seated. And we do it in this country only when a judge enters in the chambers. But you do it every period; when the teacher comes in, you stand up. And as of one day, the greeting, from “Good morning,” changed to “Heil Hitler.” And I remember this strange feeling. By that time, I was nine years old. I knew already, of course, what was going on, that I had to stand there and lift my hand and mumble “Heil Hitler.”

The other experience I want to share is very important in my life, concerns music lessons. We had music twice a week. We went to a music room, which was just like any other room, except that it had a piano in it. And a very nice teacher with a great, big mustache was our music teacher.

And his pedagogy and classroom management consisted of ‘rewarding’ us—if we were a school group here now, the kids would all titter—by letting us choose the closing song at the end of every lesson: “Well, boys, you have been very good today. You may choose the closing song.”

And invariably, my classmates chose to sing the Nazi marching song known as the “Horst-Wessel-Lied“, which they sang all verses. Horst Wessel was a young fellow who was stabbed to death in one of the street fights between Communists and Nazis during the 1920s. And with his death, the Nazi movement had its martyr. If you want to arouse people’s emotions, it’s very important to have a martyr.

They had a martyr, you know, and—and they glorified him, and they wrote this marching song about him. And it has many stanzas—marching songs, by their nature, have to have many stanzas, so you can keep marching—and one of them is indelibly inscribed on my soul and in my memory, are the words, “Wenn’s Judenblut vom Messer spritzt, dann geht’s noch mal so gut.” “When the blood of the Jews runs off our knives, things will go twice as well.”

And twice every week, my beloved classmates—the leaders in the class, the Nazis in the class—and they weren’t all Nazis—yelled out that song, and twice a week, they sang that at me, while I and my five, six other Jewish classmates sat down with our heads bowed, and in great pain and embarrassment.

I had totally blocked this experience until I we came to San Jose, California, in 1964—I remember the year—as director of education of a large synagogue there, Temple Emanuel. And the rabbi, in the spur of the moment—who has been my mentor all my life, still is—asked me to come and speak to the confirmation class, one sunny Sunday morning.

And it was a small class, about 20 some kids. And I remember sitting at the table with them and talking just like I am talking to you now. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, came that experience. And it was so powerful that at the—at the end of relating it for the first time after 30 years, I blushed. The pain, the anger, and the embarrassment were still so strong.

And I kept blushing for maybe five or six times. It’s the proof of modern psychiatry working and psychology working. Once you talk it out, now I can talk it—talk about it with equanimity. But I couldn’t do that at that time.

And you might ask, why did that teacher not suggest once, “Well, fellows, we sang—sang the same song. Why don’t you pick something else?” He knew what was going on. And the simple answer is, already, in 1933, he was afraid.

That was the climate in which we lived. That even a teacher was afraid to say something that might be construed against the Nazi government, which some kid would repeat to his father who is a Nazi functionary, and the man might have been reprimanded, or he might have been taken into ‘protective custody’ for some time, just because he wouldn’t let this Nazi anthem be sung in his classroom.

[On the morning of Nov. 10, 1938,] I was at that Jewish high school, and as usual I had to go take the elevated train to get to school. And I met one of my close friends, Herbert, on the same car and the same train every morning, but he got on down the line. And as I got onto the car and with my practiced swings threw my briefcase—when you were a certain age, you graduated from the satchel on the back in Germany to a handheld briefcase—I threw it across the car to where he was standing, and he’d go across the aisle to the tittering of several German people—you did things like that then you were that age.

And Herbert looked white as a sheet. And I said to him, “Herbert, what’s the matter with you, are you sick?” “Mm.” “You had trouble with your parents this morning?” “Mm-mm.” “Well, what’s wrong with you?” “Nah.” He was very uncommunicative.

When we completed our journey four stops later, and got off and got out into the open, he stopped me in the street and he said, “You know where the train goes by at the Synagogue Fasanenstrasse?” One of the major synagogues. The train goes right by, elevated. “You can look into there,” he said. “When I went by, the synagogue was burning, and the fire department was there, but it looked like they weren’t doing very much.”

And as we got to school, every child who had passed—every kid in school who had passed a synagogue reported that that synagogue had been set afire, including the Levetzowstrasse, where the pictures of which I showed you earlier. On that night, 80% or 90% of all synagogues in Germany were set afire for some subterfuge reason, which we don’t need to get into here right now.

But that was the beginning of the end. And I don’t know whether it was on that occasion or another one where it was deemed too dangerous to keep several hundred Jewish children in the school building at one time. And I remember very distinctly a little door being opened to the main gate—a wooden—great, wooden double doors and a little opening—with our school director, Dr. Bobby Stern, standing by the door.

We were divided into those who had to go out to the left and those who go out to the right. And he would let out two kids left, two kids right, and he’d look down the street until they had turned the corners. Then the next two kids. Because they were afraid to let us all go en masse, you know, several hundred kids coming out into the street.

When at first Hitler came to power, people who were involved in German life said about him, “Oh, that paper hanger. Give him three months and enough rope, and he’ll hang himself.”

But what happened to the unfortunate people in Poland, for instance, when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, in that they got this whole package of anti-Jewish legislation overnight. In Germany, it happened over a period of five or six years, and it was gradually, gradually, gradually, gradually tightening the screws, until, I mentioned earlier, that economic law came out.

So that people became less and less optimistic, and the smart ones started to leave in ’33 and ’34, but others didn’t. And in our family, my family, there was no serious talk about leaving Germany, because we just knew Mom wouldn’t make it. She could not be transplanted.

So when she died, and my dad got over the shock—and it just devastated him. I have some pictures I looked at here in preparation for our meeting. The man looks just devastated. Gray and old all of a sudden. But, when he got over the shock, he [Semmy Marcus, Fred’s father] decided it was time for us to leave, in conjunction with my uncle and his two sons, who, by the way, still live in San Francisco. And the choices that were available, this fed into the Nazi mill, too. Where could a Jew go in 1938?

It sounds ridiculous, but we talked about Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Madagascar, Chile, and yes, Shanghai. Being an international city, open to the whole world, a haven for gangsters and any people on the lam who wanted to disappear, because you could go there without any papers.

And so I remember going down to Unter den Linden to one of the nice cruise companies. In those days, the cruise companies sold directly to the public, and asking for two one-way—one-way tickets to Shanghai, and being told in late ’38, yes, we could go the end of March 1939, as the clouds of war were already gathering. And there were three berths available. So my dad and I went, and we took one of my uncle’s sons, and he had to come on a later boat because we couldn’t get four berths together.

The household was liquidated. We moved into a furnished room with another nice Jewish family. The Jewish family did that to raise their income a little bit. They rented a room, that extra bedroom was rented to somebody. And we spent the last few—a month in that room, until the time came to leave.

I want to speak about the arrival in Shanghai. For some unexpected or inexplicable reason, I never thought of what would happen when we reached Shanghai. And Dad didn’t talk to me about it, maybe because he was so worried, he didn’t want to worry me. So we arrive at the Bund in Shanghai. I come from 25 days, 29 days of sitting at the white tablecloth with three forks here and three knives there and three spoons there and a water glass and two wine glasses, and all excited now in Shanghai.

And the first thing, we’re led—we have a picture of this in one of these books, by the way—we are led on a plank onto a flatbed truck with a few sides. And we are carted, standing, into a bombed-out neighborhood of Shanghai that is called Hongkew, and which was the scene of fighting between Chinese and Japanese outside the International Settlement in 1937.

And that stood like a bombed-out war zone, and a few buildings remained. And we were taken to one of these red brick school buildings and put into a room with 29 double-decker bunks, upstairs and downstairs. “You take the upper one,” my dad said, of course.

And I had to be in the [INAUDIBLE] metal bedsteads, black metal things. And Dad got very incensed the first night. As soon as the lights went out, some of the younger people were telling dirty jokes, the likes of which I had never heard. And I could feel the whole bed shaking as he jumped out into the—yelled into the darkness, “There are younger people in this room! Why don’t you just shut up!” And I was terribly embarrassed that my father should do that. […]

So when we arrived and got off the truck and were shown to our bunks, they announced that it was too late for dinner. And the vision of that table in the ship’s dining room is very vivid. It had upturned corners, so if there was a storm, things would not roll off the table, and beautiful linen. We were taken into the dining shed, and we were given a piece of bread with a single sardine on it. And I believe it was margarine, which I refuse to eat to this day, and a mug of tepid tea, pre-sweetened.

And I can remember that the enamel on the mug was chipped, and the black metal was showing through. And I took a bite, and I took a sip, and all of a sudden, I could feel the tears running down my cheeks. I wasn’t really aware I was crying. I wanted to cry, but I could feel the tears running down my cheeks, and I—they mingled on my lips—the taste of the salt of my tears mingled with this. It was just such a shock to go from one world into that of being a refugee.

And fiendishly enough, they—our Nazi passports—we had German passports to leave the country— had in their front page where the name is, a big red J stamped into it. And the bend of the J, a date was written that was 30 days after you left Germany. So 30 days after leaving Germany, a few days after arriving in Shanghai, I became a stateless refugee and remained such until 1951.

Let me just say that this was a strange ghetto, inasmuch as it had no walls or gates or barbed wire. In this totally Chinese neighborhood, all one needed to do–and what they did is–put up signs, “Stateless refugees not permitted beyond this point without special permission.” And so you could see, if a Caucasian person went beyond, that was very easy to see. Not only that—the Japanese adopted the old Chinese [NON-ENGLISH], which every citizen serves for several hours a week as a police person. That’s in Confucian times how Chinese society controlled itself without a professional police force.

And so we became [NON-ENGLISH] persons. We Jews had to control our fellow Jews not going beyond that certain point. And you’ve got a rope around your neck and the wooden batons. They give you a sort of a thing as an authority. And every week you had to put in two or three hours standing there, controlling your fellow Jews going in and out. So they didn’t have any gates.

But the living conditions for many, not everybody, were abominable. Some people had built houses, bought houses, reconstituted houses. But others, great numbers lived in camps with still 30, 40 people in a room in double-decker bunks. And we lived sort of in a half situation, where we had a private room. As soon as my dad died, they put another man in with me, because I couldn’t be just one person in a room–with very unsanitary conditions, but better than being in the camp.

So living conditions were abominable. Many people were unable to earn a living. And so the camps all had soup kitchens, and every Jewish inhabitant of Hongkew had the choice of getting a subsidy in cash—that means you took responsibility for buying your own food and cooking it—or to traipse once a day to the nearby camp with food stamps and get where much—how many stamps, you had so many scoops of whatever in huge cauldrons what, what was cooked for you. That’s what I did then after my dad died.

Well, it—as I mentioned before in my litany of horrors, and I forgot to mention that I was penniless as well after my dad died. Jobs were very hard to come by. And so the Japanese had established a ghetto police—that’s also a German, or I should say Nazi, example.

And we were unarmed, but we had to mostly spend time in protecting food supplies, stores of food and coal, et cetera, that we had for the camps. Keep order in the camps. And at these soup kitchens that I mentioned earlier, I was the guy who used to pull out the little date stamp and yell at the cook, “Twice!” “Three times!” “Four times!” And then that’s how many people would get.

I would get, at the end, if there was lots left—it was hard to gauge when you feed several hundred people or 1,000 people, maybe, in each kitchen—there was special, we got a special portion for the police. And I made extra money by selling half of my portion to my roommate, who did take the cash allowance instead of going to the camp, and then he would pay me for it, and—little bit of money, so I made a bit of extra money. It was a pretty poor existence.

And the fire department was a very honorary thing. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the Shanghai Fire Department had a reserve of 100 men who were all officers rank. And 95 or 98 of those were Britishers. And a friend of mine, who got me into it, and I, were the only refugee members who ever became lieutenants in the Shanghai Fire Department. It’s still a great hobby of mine. I learned quite a bit about firefighting.

And then later, during the Japanese occupation, I still had my fire officer’s pass. And when there were acts of terrorism, resulting in streets being blockaded and so on, I could always flash my red fire department pass and be let through the blockade. It didn’t apply with the ghetto, but outside the ghetto, it was possible.

My dad started a business in clothing, men’s clothing materials. We had a lot of refugees going to office buildings. Like your nut man comes around, or the candy man, a lot of refugees went into offices where all the British and the English and the French sat and brought clothing materials with them. They’d sell clothing materials. We were the ones who supplied them with clothing materials. So it was a takeoff from the shirt materials that we had in Berlin, my mother’s business.

I worked with Dad there. And then, after the ghetto was established, we began, very strangely, an import business of mother-of-pearl buttons. We had one customer who was Chinese, American-educated Chinese person. And Dad imported those buttons—I didn’t know how he got into this business—from Japan during the war and sold them to this one customer. And all his shirts—these were very famous, like Arrow brand shirts in Shanghai—had the buttons that we imported.

So when a shipment of buttons came in, we ate rather well for a few weeks. And then we had to—we had, I remember, long walks around the block before we decided to go out to dinner—we had to decide whether could we afford to go and have dinner out today, or could we not. “No, we better not.” “Let’s please go, Dad.” “No, I think, you know, we’ve got…,” and so on.

And then when the ghetto was established, that Chinese man gave me a fake employment and wrote the necessary papers, filled out the necessary forms. And with that piece of paper that I had to renew every month, I got a green badge which permitted me to leave the ghetto anytime during the daytime hours. I had to be back at night, but I could leave.

And the psychological—psychological relief that brought—gave me—is very hard to measure. It was tremendous, just to be able to get out of the ghetto, get among the people, be in town, and so on. It was wonderful.

Interviewer: While you were in Shanghai, what were you hearing, as the war years continued, about what was happening in Eastern Europe and how the Jews were being treated back in Germany and in Poland?

Fred Marcus: Hardly anything about the Jews. We did have a lot of news. Because Russia, as you may recall, did not enter the war [against Japan] until two weeks before the—the Japanese capitulated. So Russia was theoretically neutral, and we received lots of radio broadcasts from Russia.

And when the Germans began to be expelled from Stalingrad after staying out of Germany, we listened to Russian newscasts every day, and you could tell the place names. And then there are enough people in the ghetto who could speak Russian, because they came from Eastern Europe, that we all had maps, and with a crayon, every day, we would fill in that area that was being reconquered by the Russians of their own land.

And we knew how the war progressed. I don’t think that we had any news about the persecution, the Nazi persecution. At least I don’t remember that we did.

I was the only refugee among those eight passengers. The others were American service officers, retired officers, people working for the government, and so on.

And we arrived in San Francisco in a dense fog. And it was a scary, wonderful experience getting into that fog with a pilot. And this American man, a 50-ish man, and I stood on an open bridge, just underneath the captain and the pilot. We could hear every word the pilot and the captain were saying to each other. We stood directly below them.

And imagine this dense fog, the ship creeping through the fog, giving its blast every so many seconds. And ships going the other direction, blasts had a different pattern so that they cannot blast themselves simultaneously and not hear themselves. And we heard another ship coming. And we heard the “Vrrrrt.” And finally, this ship appeared close enough to touch out of the fog and quickly disappeared. And moments later, somebody pointed up. And out of the fog came the orange lights of the Golden Gate Bridge.

And he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, “We’re home.” And that was the big moment, not stepping ashore the next morning, but to get under that Golden Gate Bridge, and I never see it without thinking about that. That was a great moment. And, “Gee, this is really going to be my home.”

I came to the United States very quickly. I found a good job in the hotel business. I worked from 1949 to 1964 at the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco, had an excellent position, was well-liked and very successful. But the hand of fate, usually called ‘Alexander’ in my family, was at work again.

And Ted [Theo Alexander] got me a job as a Sunday school teacher in one of the synagogues of San Francisco. And my good Jewish background from the Jewish high school came in stead and of—took me in good stead, as well as this experience with his family. Within two years, people said, “You have very great administrative talents. Would you come to our synagogue and run the religious school on a part-time basis?”

By the time I—while I was still working in the hotel six days a week, I spent two days in a synagogue running programs. And by that time, in 1967, I had a school of 700 students and took the place of a person who was running the school full-time as a part-time person. My rabbi—Gitten—whom I mentioned earlier, my mentor, said, “Well, we want you to come to us full-time under one condition: that you go and get a master’s degree in Jewish education.”

And it was only at that time—and I was 40 years old—that I worked full-time in the congregation, commuted to Los Angeles, and became—got first a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree from the Hebrew Union College. And from then on, it was Jewish education all the way.