After Kristallnacht, on November 9, 1938, my wife and I fled Vienna and entered Belgium illegally by walking across “no man’s land”, a large forest between Germany and Belgium. We went with a group of refugees led by a guide who got paid for this.  Our destination was Antwerp, Belgium. On May 10th, 1940, the Nazis invaded Belgium, and immediately searched for Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany.  My brother and I were taken while walking home from work, and were incarcerated.  A few days later, we were taken to the railroad station together with hundreds of men, and we were shoved into a cattle train.  We travelled for a week in horrible conditions and arrived at a French detention camp set up on the western shores of the Mediterranean in the Unoccupied Zone, Camp St. Cyprien.  There were about 27,000 men waiting to be deported again, probably somewhere to be killed.  Four months after we arrived, in September, my brother and I escaped with some help from the lieutenant of the camp. He needed a tailor to make him a suit for some occasion and I was lucky that he chose me. A week later, I finished it and he was very pleased. He was a nice French man and offered me some money.  I refused because money wouldn’t help me. But I trusted him and told him that my brother Ernie and I were planning to escape.  I asked that instead of money if he could provide us with travel documents that didn’t show that we were Jews.  He agreed.  I still have the document.  He advised that we escape as soon as possible because we were scheduled on the next deportation list and the trucks would be coming any day.  That night we ran out of the camp. We went through an opening in the barbed wire where two armed guards were laying on the ground and looked like they were sleeping. They had rifles. I don’t know how come they didn’t shoot us. Maybe they were really sleeping.  We ran for about nine miles and arrived in Perpignan where we knew how to find people from an Underground Organization who could help us.  We got food and fresh clothing, and after a few days we got on a train, and with our identification papers, we safely arrived in Nice, also in the Unoccupied Zone.  There we met up with my mother and sister and family.  They had settled in Nice legally prior to the Nazi invasion in Vienna.

In 1942, Germany took over the whole country; there was no free zone anymore.  Jews were taken from their homes and placed in “forced domicile” locations.  My wife, our two-year-old daughter Jeannette, and I were sent to Vence, a small village nearby.  The Italians were allied with Germany and were in charge of refugees there.  Jews had to report to the Italian authorities twice a day but were free to roam about in between.  I found a job in a tailoring shop.  A few months later, Italy capitulated and was ordered by Germany to leave Vence and take the Jews with them.  I had a feeling that going with the Italians would mean certain death, so I decided to risk the danger and flee with my family in the middle of the night back to Nice. That decision probably saved our lives. 

 

In Nice, we had to hide.  We were escaped prisoners.  Christian friends came to our rescue and hid us for a few months, rotating us from home to home so neighbors wouldn’t be suspicious.  Eventually our daughter was taken by a childless couple who promised to adopt her should we not survive.  After some months of hiding in Nice, we were secretly transported from Nice back to Vence, and we were hidden in the attic of my former employer’s mother and father-in-law until the liberation in 1944.  We came out of hiding and were reunited with our daughter. We had applied for entry into the U.S. in 1938 and had to wait until 1951 to receive permission. Thirteen years we waited for our number to come up.  We arrived in New York on November 27th and left for Detroit ten days later. 

There will always be evil people and good people in the world.  Be aware of the evil ones and be among the righteous