Henry Lowenstein's Video Library

Henry Lowenstein: My mother was not Jewish, but my father – my father was moderately involved in religion, he, you know it was one of, the days of emancipation and all this. My grandmother was very Jewish, in terms of … his mother. And so what we would do was, we observed all the holidays. And we would, I have wonderful memories as a child where, that we would celebrate Hanukkah in one room, and the whole family was there, my mother and my sister, who obviously she was – since her father was not Jewish, she wasn’t Jewish.

But my mother, my sister, would join in everything to do with the Hanukkah festivities, or Friday evening, you know the blessings on Friday night, and whatever took place, and then we would go into the other room, and there we had Christmas. And my grandmother, who was a really good sport – who was a really good sport about all of this, would participate in the Christmas things.

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In those days it was – the pre-Nazi days, we really didn’t give a whole lot of thought to this. I mean, the way I grew up, we assumed that everybody lived like this: that we celebrated the Jewish holiday, that we celebrated Christmas, Easter, and we had a great time.

Henry Lowenstein: My mother – this was the second marriage for my mother. My mother had been born in Estonia. And had married a White Russian officer, who – who obviously was a target when the Bolsheviks took over in 1917. And so he and my mother fled from Estonia and Finland where they were living, and Leningrad, what in those days was St. Petersburg. They fled to Germany with my older sister, Karin, who was born in Finland. And they lived on an estate in what was really East Prussia.

And then when her first husband died, my mother moved to Berlin, worked in a variety of jobs and she told about working during the inflation, when people would be paid in the daily pay because they were paid daily because the value of the money changed from morning to afternoon, so when they went home at night, they had to be paid because tomorrow – today’s money wouldn’t be worth anything tomorrow. And she told about how they were paid – you know, it took a whole washtub of money to pay for one day. And she was the person handling the pay.

And eventually she met my father, and they were married in 1925, and we lived a nice life, you know, in those days. Definitely not wealthy, but pleasant. My father was very much involved in the arts. He was – again – he was a doctor, he had served in the First World War in the German Army, as a doctor, and was highly decorated, for bravery and so on.

And he was again very much into the arts, and he played the piano, and one of the – my earliest memories is of Kurt Weill playing in our house. You know Kurt Weill who wrote many wonderful, musical hits. And one of my very earliest memories is singing stuff from the Beggar’s Opera from – you know, making up my own words to his music. Everybody thought it was pretty cute. And my father always claimed he was a better pianist, but obviously Kurt Weill was the one who wrote the music.

And that was, our house was always full of artists, theater people, dancers, and we lived there for several years, and then, I guess I was about 4-5 years old, we moved to another apartment across the street – directly across the street. And that’s where I then lived, and where they lived until, even after the war.

Henry Lowenstein: I was 5 years old when I started school; I was 8 years old when he came to power. And I vividly remember the Stormtroopers marching up and down the street, carrying torch – torchlight parades, and carrying the flags, and the attacks on Jews…

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One of my earliest memories after the Nazis came to power, was that, I would be playing with my buddies on the street, and with all of this negative propaganda about Jews, one really had to ask one’s self, “Am I really as bad as they say? Am I really a second-rate person compared with these others?” And it was very hard to keep one’s—to keep a belief in one’s own being. Because, I mean, it was drummed into us morning and night how the Jews were at the root of all the problems and how the Jews were bad, and everything that went wrong could be blamed on the Jews, and Jews were creatures—second rate creatures, and so on… and it really got one to question whether it was, whether we really were as bad as they said they were, because, after all, here this was coming at you from all sides. And the other thing was you see that the more they beat on us with these—this propaganda, the more this was … the more this became part of everyday life, the more Jewish I became…

Henry Lowenstein: When I switched to the Gymnasium, which is the title for a school that follows the grade school—I think it would have been in 1936. That was a whole different story. […] I can remember that we – being kids on the way to school—the Jewish kids would be set upon by Hitler Youth and frequently I had to fight my way to school. In the school, the whole Nazi thing became very much a part of everyday activity. We would have to stand in the courtyard and sing the Horst Wessel song, the Nazi songs. And, you know, all the kids would. One of my teachers—the gym teacher—was a real evil son of a bitch. He would come to class in an SS uniform, and say, ‘Well I don’t have time to change, I’m going to an SS meeting after this.’ And he would clearly pick on the Jewish kids. To demonstrate how ‘incompetent’ we were, [that we] couldn’t do what they wanted us to do and find ways of humiliating us. There was one kid who was kind of fat and not very athletically inclined, and they really picked on that poor kid all the time. I was relatively lucky, because while I was no great athlete, I could handle what came along and I was able to stand up for myself.

I’m not particularly proud of the fact that I did not—there were times when, on the way home from school, in retrospect it would have been nice if I had been braver and stuck up for my fellow Jewish kids. But quite frankly, it became more of a matter of survival and I’d run like hell or fight my own way, but I didn’t go to the aid of the others. None of us did, I think. We all each went our way and it was not—in retrospect I wish we had put up more of a united front but, you know, at the time, it didn’t seem like the thing to do. Because they were really rough on us. And I lasted for two years in that school. And it was a horrible time, I mean it we were really picked on. And it’s very hard to do any kind of learning when you are the butt of everybody, and you sit in a class and the teachers will talk like the Nazi propaganda. And of course everything is the fault of the Jews.

Henry Lowenstein: The great concern for everybody was what was happening in Germany, of course, and how we could somehow cope with what was going on. And the thing was of course by that time, Jews were not permitted to gather in groups other than for religious purposes. And so we would – and increasingly this became more of a problem as time went on. So if we wanted to meet, the group that I was with was like, probably about 7 or 10 kids really, it wasn’t big, it was just one Scout leader. But just for the 7 or 10 of us to get together meant that we sometimes had – it would take us hours to assemble, because we couldn’t just walk into the building to meet, because that would instantly trigger a response from the Nazis. So we would sometimes file into the building over a period of 3 or 4 hours so that we would go and stay and somebody else would stay later, and this was all organized and agreed upon.

And then when we did have meetings, we would sit there with the Jewish prayer book in front of us, discussing issues that had nothing to do with religion whatsoever. But, this happened twice, that the Gestapo man would show up, and he would come in there and said, I want to see what’s going on, and of course we’d all sit there and do prayers. And while he was there and we were so drilled that the moment something happened we’d switch the discussion would stop and we would begin the prayer portion of the meeting. And this went on like this, we had numerous meetings like this.

Henry Lowenstein: A member of the German delegation in the Embassy in Paris had been killed by a Jew. This was clearly a—it was a bad thing. The Jewish kid who did it should not have done it, but that’s beside the point. The Nazis picked upon that as a golden opportunity really to go after the Jews full tilt now. It was November of 1938 and I remember sitting with my father listening to our radio. And late in the night, and hearing that, Grynszpan was the Jew who did it, and I can’t remember the name of the German’s name who was killed, but anyway, I remember hearing that he had died, and saying “Oh my God, we’re in for it now.” Because it was perfectly obvious what they were gearing up to do.

In the morning we woke up to the sound of glass breaking and screaming and noise on the street and discovered that trucks with Nazi Stormtroopers were driving up and down the street. And wherever they saw what they surmised was a Jewish business, they would smash the store window, loot the store, drag the store owners out and beat them. And paint in big red paint on the floor—on the street “Jew.” Which meant that of course no one would dare go in there and buy anything, which essentially put them out of business.

So, all this was going on, and this was like in the early morning. We didn’t know—we had no way of knowing what was going on anywhere else, and there was a—we really debated whether I should go to school or not. And Herman, who lived just around the corner from us, Herman and I decided we would go to school. And we went on our bikes because I didn’t want to go on a bus because I was afraid if we go on a bus, we might be there, we have no control about what’s going on. So, we rode our bikes and, by the way, by this time in 1938, we were used to having to—we would get waylaid on the way to school there’d be Nazi gangs that would try to get us. And so, we’d have to—we changed our route daily so we wouldn’t go the same way because we were afraid that, you know. But anyway, we made it to school the two of us. We got there and discovered that there were very few students there, and very few teachers. And then we learned that this teacher had been arrested, that teacher had been arrested, and so on. This synagogue had been burnt down, this had happened, and so on. All this information came to us. We got to school I would say probably about 9:00 or so in the morning. By 10:30 it became perfectly obvious what had gone on around—the terror that was going on. And the few teachers who were there said look, go home, get out of here, hide, do whatever you can, don’t come back, don’t even think about coming to school until we know more about what’s happening.

One of the things that I learned there was that the synagogue in which I had just been bar mitzvahed that summer—the summer of 1938—the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue had been burnt down or blown up or whatever, and another synagogue that I used to attend, on Hauptstrasse, which was a much smaller place, we were told, and I truly don’t know if this is true or not, but we were told that the rabbi had, when they set fire to it he ran in to try to save the Torah. And um, they apparently forced him back inside and he died.

Henry Lowenstein: After about 2-3 days of this—and, by the way, my sister went to work, because she was not Jewish, and she went to work again to keep a semblance of normalcy and because we didn’t want to tip anybody off that anything was out of the ordinary. Because if she had not shown up they would have wondered what’s going on. So we stayed there, and then we thought, “Well, we better see what’s going on at our apartment.” And my mother obviously was not Jewish. I didn’t look particularly Jewish, so the decision was that the two of us would go and see what was happening there. We didn’t dare—my father—we didn’t want him on the street. And so we went back to our apartment and the Blanks—the same people I mentioned—said, “Oh yes, they’ve been there, looking for him.” But they had not sealed the apartment. They were just going to come back. They were told that we weren’t there and that—they had so many people to pick up and, you know, if they got one more or less it wasn’t that big a deal, so they were to come back.

So, we decided we’d go in and the first thing—of course, we had taken no money with us. First thing. Secondly, we wouldn’t—no one would dare go to a bank, because that obviously was a tip off where you were. So, we thought, well the best thing we can do was to at least pack up all of our silver and the valuables, and see if we could put that somewhere, because that’s really all we had to trade on. So, we—my mother and I—hurriedly packed, we had a flat box, probably about–it wasn’t really much higher than this [c. 2.5 in], but it was [gestures]. We packed it full of silver and valuables and I don’t know the exact weight, but it was heavy, I would venture to say at least 50 pounds of stuff. And carried it down—because we lived on the third floor, so we carried it down to the street. And I put it across the handlebars of my bike, and we were going to try to take this to friends. And that was really one of the worst experiences of my life, because we went to people who had been our dear friends. They would open the door, took one look at us and slammed the door in our face because they were scared to death. If they took [sighs] if they took us in, they were in danger. So we went from friend to friend to friend, only to have the door slammed in our face every time.

Finally, it was mid-afternoon, and at that point we said, “Well, the best thing is, we’re going to take it back.” Because we didn’t know what to do. And so we went back and were met by the Blanks. They said, “Look, we’ll take care of it.” They took it in the basement, underneath the apartment building, and hid it there. And frankly were the only friends that we found. We went back to our apartment, my uncle George’s apartment and we stayed in for another I would say another 10 days or 2 weeks.

And then, things sort of returned to normal, and then of course the—now it became absolutely critical to be able to leave the country or find out what could be done. And that really was another whole chapter now, because school started again, although our teachers weren’t there, and they were in concentration camps.

And there were three or four of us who, again, not being very bright but being 13 years old, decided we would get on our bikes and we would ride out to the concentration camp to see if we could see anything. We rode out to the Oranienburg concentration camp [sic: Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg], of course you couldn’t see a damn thing because it looked all very neat with flowers in the flowerbeds and barbed wire and so on, but you couldn’t see anything. And we knew that our teachers were in there. Well, a week—a few weeks later they started releasing people. They didn’t keep them, they released several of them. My uncle was released. He’d had frostbite; he lost fingers and toes. And as they were being released, they were told, “Look, if you get out, we can always get you back in again. And if you go to another country, we’re still going to get you there. So don’t you dare ever say anything about what went on. If you talk about this, you’re dead.” They said, “If you go to the United States, it doesn’t make any difference. United States, any other country in the world, we’re going to get you. So don’t you ever say another word.”

Henry Lowenstein: Now the scramble was really on to get out of there. And clearly we—our scout troop as I mentioned earlier, we met and there was one guy there who had been to Palestine. He was older, he was probably 18 or 19. And he had come back in an effort to try and arrange for people to get out, which I thought was incredibly courageous, because he was gone and he came back to see what he could do. And we would have these meetings, and try to find out ways in which, where could one apply, how could one get out. And we all applied to Palestine, to France, to Shanghai, to you name it.

And the thing was of course that we all knew that adults couldn’t go. It was not a question of—the only way that other countries would take grown up people was if somebody would guarantee that they would not be a burden to the country where they were going. And they would not be allowed to work, and they could take no money with them. The Germans would allow them to take five marks—five marks or whatever. This was—remember this was the end of the Depression era, all over the world. And people were out of work, in all these countries. And you couldn’t blame them for not taking people in when they couldn’t even find work and support their own population. And the Germans said fine, you’re welcome to go, we want to get rid of you, go! But we’ll only allow you to take this out, and you can’t take anything with you. So clearly, the adults were not permitted to go anywhere. And there were efforts made all over the world really, with Jewish organizations trying to save the kids. To save the children.

Henry Lowenstein: We had—in the meantime, I had been accepted for a transport to France. And I must confess that I wasn’t wild about going to France, but I would have—anything was better than staying in Germany. And that was a child’s reaction because I didn’t like French as a language. Didn’t speak French very well and never seemed to get it through my head what that was all about. But anyway, the—just as the plans were being made to go to France I became ill and was not able to go. And—which was probably, ultimately, one of the best things that ever happened to me because all the people that were sent to France were all killed, eventually when the Germans conquered France, all these people were taken away and never to be heard of again. So we got word from London that I was accepted, that this committee had agreed to sponsor me to go to England. And then we had to go and get paperwork done.

Henry Lowenstein: But I mean the only thing—at that point, the only thing anybody thought about was, “How can we get out?” And I mean, of course it was a terrible thing to leave one’s parents and to leave one’s relatives, but it also became a question of survival. And the parents realized that the only way they could save their children was to get them out. So there was not a question of saying, “We have to stick together,” because you knew if you stuck together the chances were you were all doomed.

[Interviewer] Did you have plans that maybe if they got out how you would meet or anything like that?

[Henry Lowenstein] No. We didn’t talk about that at all, because we absolutely, simply didn’t know. I mean the hope was to simply stay in touch and to find a way, you know. I mean after all, my mother had experienced—she had fled from the Bolsheviks to Germany. My father had been all through four years of the [First World] War, as a doctor, but still in all on the front lines. It was—you know we had grown up knowing that life could be very difficult. So all we could really look forward to was hope—finding a way for each of us to survive, and then finding a way of getting back together. But um, at the time, it was strictly a day-to-day survival thing.

Henry Lowenstein: We arrived in Rotterdam, it must have been in the evening, it was getting dark. We had to go through customs with our 10 pound- kilos of stuff. And then they put us on a boat. On a ship. The ship was the New—the Niew Amsterdam. And we got into our cabin and were absolutely exhausted. It must have been about 11 or so at night when we finally got in there. And I don’t remember anything, we slept in the cabin and we woke up the next morning and were already in the harbor in England, in Harwich.

And we didn’t know what, you know, we were just there being processed. And one of my—one of the more interesting memories was that—it was early in the morning, it must have been about seven or eight in the morning, the sun was up and they were unloading cargo out of the ship—or maybe they were loading, I don’t know, something was going on. And I went up on deck with Thea, and there was a circle of these kids. And by the way, I should tell you that this children’s transport was all ages. I would say the youngest were about three; the oldest were about 16. And obviously the older ones tried to take care of the younger ones, and so on, but it was a pretty motley crew of kids.

Henry Lowenstein: Well soon thereafter we were then assembled again and we got on a train. And it showed my ignorance of the geography of England, because I somehow thought that Harwich was pretty much around the corner from London. Which it wasn’t. And we got on this train and it was early afternoon when we got to London. Now once we got to London they – everybody got off the train and they were sorted out by groups as to where people went. Some were immediately sent off to refugee camps, others had some people meeting them, and so on.

Henry Lowenstein: It was not a particularly great situation. And there was a lot of illness. There was every kid’s illness you can think of, from whooping cough to measles and mumps and polio going rampant, and no medical help.

Interviewer: No medical help?

Henry Lowenstein: No medical help. There was one young man who was a med student – a Jewish British med student who was a med student, who tried to deal with all of this, but obviously was in way over his head. And the only thing they could do, if you came down with something, they quarantined you. You were stuck in your room, then you had to wait for someone to bring you food, you weren’t allowed to leave until they figured that whatever ailed you was better. Well, what happened to me was that I fainted while I was bringing the food to the table. Next thing I woke up I was in the room quarantined. No idea what was wrong, but because I’d fainted they figured something was wrong. I think the reason I’d fainted was because I hadn’t eaten. And I was there for like two weeks, in solitary. You know, they would just shove the food under the door and that was it. And the whole thing was pretty rough. But again, I want to make it clear, the conditions might have been rough, but no matter what happened, it was still better and we were all grateful to the people who had arranged for us to come.

Interviewer: How many were at that refugee camp?

Henry Lowenstein: Hundreds, but I couldn’t tell you how many. Anyway, suddenly one day – this was, you see I’d gotten there in the middle of June, about the middle of July, towards the end of July, the people from the committee that had brought me, they had only sponsored about eight or ten kids because that’s all they could do. You see, there were different committees that sponsored different groups of kids. My committee came and looked at the conditions at the camp and they said, this is terrible, we can’t have our children there, and so they arranged for us – for the ones who had come through this group to travel to London and live in a boarding house.

Henry Lowenstein: Yeah! Well, I mean, if you’re in a country and you don’t speak the language, you learn fast. So obviously, we learned. And then, within about two weeks, it became obvious that the war was imminent. And the British government decided to evacuate all of London’s children. So we were evacuated, and by evacuated I mean we were told to report–this was done through the school, British kids, it just so happened, were there with us. We reported to the school, we walked from the school to a London tube–you know, the subway station, were taken to another location where we got on a bus and were then taken by bus to where we were to be evacuated to.

In my case, in the case of my school, we were evacuated to a little village called Whipsnade. Which, as it turned out, at that time, had the largest zoo in Europe affiliated with it. Whipsnade was there before, and the zoo was built on to it. We arrived, there were I think about six of us who were refugees. Six–seven or eight, maybe. Anyway, it was an interesting procedure because the zoo superintendent, who had been a captain in the British army–a veterinary captain, sat on one side of the room, the villagers sat behind him and here were all the kids to be distributed. And so we sat in this village hall, and he would say–he would call out the name of the villager, you know, the people who lived there, and he would point to a couple of kids and say, you go with them. And you, with this one. And so we were simply apportioned out, and to live with these folks.

And we–in fact there were three of us–were sent to this one place, which was a farmhouse. Lovely people. And the British government paid the equivalent I think of about a dollar and a half per week per kid for these people to feed us. Which wasn’t much. But it was the first real decent food I’d had in quite a long time, and I loved it. It was a wonderful life, we were on a farm. I’d never been on a farm before in my life. Never seen a chicken up close, and cows or anything. Not only that, but we were right adjacent to the zoo so we had full run of the zoo, with all its animals.

Henry Lowenstein: [My father] was on forced labor. My mother was on forced labor. Karin [Henry’s half-sister] was, because she was living with a Jewish family, was not permitted regular rations, you know, but she was working. But the reason they managed to survive was because my mother was absolutely steadfast in her support of my father. And they were scheduled for transport several times. They would receive a notice … ostensibly from a Jewish organization from the Jewish community. Which was merely a front for the fact that they wanted—they didn’t want any trouble, so they had Jews ordering other Jews to appear for transport, figuring that the people were more likely to respond.

And every time that happened, she [my mother] would go to the authorities and put up such a fuss, because she was not Jewish, and because she was not about to leave my father, and she said, “If you take him you’ve got to take me.” That we actually have documents where they said that, “Alright, this time we let you off, but next time you’re going,” kind of thing. And she did that several times, and of course she told me later that had the war gone on another three weeks they would have gone and that was it. I mean, they were tired of her, and there was not a question but that they would have taken them. But she managed to save my father’s life, time after time. And the people in the basement that I told you—the superintendent of the building—were solid supporters throughout all of this and managed to tip him off every time that the Gestapo would try to come and do something.

Henry Lowenstein: Well, during the war, I mean, I would be glued to the radio, and I would listen nightly—you see there was what was called Radio Calais, which was actually a British station broadcasting from Britain, pretending to be in France, broadcasting propaganda to the Germans. And they would obviously delight in giving the locations of where bombs had hit the night before. If they would bomb a city, they would list street by street where the bombs… Because the idea was to demoralize the German troops who presumably were listening. Or whoever was listening. And would—I had made myself a map of Berlin from memory—what I could remember about the streets, and clearly sat there, night after night, wondering whether they would mention streets that obviously were in our neighborhood to see what had happened. And hoping and praying that my folks were safe. But no way of knowing. We—I think the last communication that I actually received was about 1943, it was a 25-word message through the Red Cross. And conversely, as I found out later, they only heard very infrequently from me, too. And so the—you know one went through the war.

Henry Lowenstein: My mother and sister were working in a factory there, making clothes; my father was working as a chemist in a … testing water in a plant where somehow that was important. And, you know, I didn’t have a job, I had of course no education, my education had basically stopped at the age of 14 or 15, the only thing I had learned was English, but no real education. And my sister managed to arrange for me to go to the local high school. But I was 23 years old at this point. And so the first job I got was digging graves. I dug graves in the morning from 9 until about 2, and then classes would start and I went with the students who were studying under the GI Bill. And I went from 3 until into the evening. And I started at the rock bottom of high school. The folks there were wonderful and allowed me to work at my own speed—the whole program was designed so that students could work at their own speed because, I mean a lot of people had returned from the war and these were veterans from the war, who had come back. And I actually had to do every piece of work that a high school student was expected to do, write every paper, pass every test. And I must tell you that I found it pretty much of a breeze. I went through it and I did the four years of high school in four months. One year per month! And this was in addition to working every day as a gravedigger. Except for algebra! Algebra defeated me, and it took me another three months to get through algebra. And so it took all together seven months before I qualified for high school graduation. But people were wonderful.

And so when I got that, I then went to work in an iron foundry. And I worked there and then I went to an art school in the morning. They had an art school in Williamsport, the Technical Institute, and there was a wonderful woman there in Williamsport who managed to get me admitted. And it was a Jewish lady, and, just at every step in my life, somebody had helped. And it has always been a source of gratitude on my part. Anyway she got me into the school, I would work on art in the morning from 9 till 2, then start… go to the foundry and work from 3 until 11:30 at night. And that was hard work, and very miserable, actually, but I was grateful, it was a job. It was relatively dangerous, because I had to climb above the hot metal and work on the machinery above the red hot iron down below. And that lasted me about a year, ‘til one day I slipped and almost fell off the roof into all of this, and at that time I quit and got another job in a paper factory, making paper plates, paper cups, and napkins. And I worked there for a year. Again, all the while going to art school.