Life Gave Me a Chance

Introduction

The collection of personal stories set out in the following pages was originally gathered for the creation of a Holocaust Education web site in Israel. The authorities charged with the creation of the web site chose four families whose histories dramatically illustrate the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust. One of these four families is our family.

Two documents led to the discovery and choice of our family: my father’s diary of my parents’ life in Holland after the start of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Holland, and their subsequent deportation into a series of concentration camps, and my own story of my six day trip to the concentration camp of Terezin, where I found my parents in May 1945.

My two brothers, too, led significant and dramatic lives that were worth recording: my older brother left Germany for Palestine in 1935, at the ripe age of 15 and attended the Mikve Israel Agricultural Training school together with some of the young men who later became the military and political leaders of Israel. He was a member of Palmach and took one boatload of European Jewish survivors illegally from Italy to British Palestine. My younger brother later became the Agricultural Attache of Israel in London and was injured there by a letter bomb.

As I was composing the collection of stories, my aim was modified from recording for the web site, to leaving an understandable record for my grandsons; it is doubtful that I will ever have a chance to visit these stories again.

Reliving and recording the battle experiences proved to be frightening, and gave me nightmares. In spite of our superior physical and intellectual training in Three Troop Inter Allied Commando, both we and the Commando units to which we were attached needed considerable battle experience before we felt confident that we could assess risks to keep casualties to a minimum. We were fighting the German Army, whose key elements were ideologically motivated and, above all, they had five years of battle experience.

There are many parallels between my army career and my professional career.

On the night of 5th to 6th of June, 1944, we landed in Normandy for the D-Day invasion; on the night of 5th to 6th of June, 1957, two French engineers and I and a highly skilled crew of operators started up an elevated pressure, high temperature chlorination chemical plant containing a lot of glass, quartz and impregnated carbon equipment, which had never before been tried in this type of application. I was in charge of the control room of that plant and I sweated more blood in 1957 than in 1944: minor operating failures could have led to substantial losses in equipment and life.

I suppose the highlight of my army career was my trip to the Terezin concentration camp, where I found my parents. The highlight of my professional career was a three-hour lecture in 1986 to a totally hostile audience in the University of Hanoi in Vietnam, to persuade the leaders of the Vietnamese Chemical Industry, on behalf of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization that they should give up doing basic research and concentrate on applied research to run their plants more efficiently.

If I ever write a book, I will want to blend these two aspects of my life. The material gathered here may be a beginning, but the task is daunting; while most people can see the drama of war, battle and military exploits, very few can understand the drama of research, development, industrialization and the dangers of operating a novel chemical process.

The Weimar Republic, Jewish Structure.

I grew up in a picturesque, thousand-year-old, German town – Borken in Westfalia – near the Dutch frontier, a town complete with walls and moats. According to the town’s records, my grandmother’s ancestors had moved within the walled city in 1610, an unusual privilege for Jews. We regarded ourselves as Germans first and foremost – our father had lost a leg in World War I fighting in the German Army and was very active in the politics of the Weimar Republic.

We lived in a large, luxurious house just outside the town (Bocholterstrasse); we had two maids and a chauffeur and employed people to look after the flower and vegetable gardens.

My father’s office was at the other end of town (Wilbecke). He sold textile fabrics to custom tailors and manufacturers of stylish clothing. He would be on the road, driven in our car by his chauffeur, every weekday, while my mother, who was a full partner in the business, would spend her afternoons in the office.

Though Borken was a rural town, the trade and industrial center of fertile, well-tended farms, and though it had an extensive, highly mechanized textile industry, there was plenty of poverty and misery around us. The trauma of World War I, with its tremendous casualties, beloved family members killed or seriously injured, and the trauma of defeat in that war set the pervasive mood of the public at large in our youth. Runaway inflation in the early 1920s, which impoverished the middle class, and the world economic crisis of 1928/1929, with its mass unemployment fostered crime, smuggling of goods from rich Holland and a search for radical political solutions.

Most people would not accept the defeat of World War I. They believed that Germany had been defeated by incompetent, aristocratic leadership and stabbed in the back by traitors. The argument that Germany had no ally except the shaky Austro/ Hungarian empire and that war was now fought with machines and that Germany could not match the industrial capacity of France, England and the United States was lost on them.

Militaristic discipline and heroic deeds in war were greatly admired, reinforcing the view that the German soldiers had been superior and should not have been defeated.

My parents were quietly but decidedly opposed to the prevailing political mood; they were dedicated democrats and socialists. They strongly believed that a nation should be ruled by its elected representatives, and not by aristocrats or dictators, and that government should provide education and social services for its people. They now felt that the ultimata issued by the Kaiser just before W.W. I were an excuse for an unjustified aggression based on an illusion of invincibility.

Father became the President of the local branch of the League for War Injured, War Orphans and War Widows. He ran that organization from his office, and his staff drew up, at no cost to the League members, all the necessary applications and letters to the governmental organizations. These papers were supposed to furnish rents, financial support and medical treatment. As a result, he was very popular and became the Chairman of the local branch of the Social Democratic Party, and he was eventually elected to the Town Council as a Social Democrat. Though Jews had lived in the town for almost 700 years, he was the only Jew who was ever elected to the local Town Council.

When I was growing up, the town had 8000 inhabitants, including about 25 Jewish families. There were Jewish families in all the nearby villages, some of which even had their own synagogues, but Jewish children from those villages came to the school in Borken.

We were brought up and lived in accordance with the orthodox Jewish tradition. We ate only kosher food, strictly observed Shabbath, and attended services Friday night and Saturday morning, afternoon and evening.

We started to attend the eight-grades, oneclassroom Jewish Elementary School at the age of six. Apart from a good secular education, we learned to read and write biblical Hebrew, learned the prayers and worked on the translation of the Tenach (Old Testament)

The eight grades, one classroom Jewish Elementary School, undoubtedly had a profound effect on my whole life, The one and only teacher, (Mr Guensberg) who had to teach eight grades simultaneously was a brilliant, warm, good humored, superbly well educated man with an in-depth devotion to orthodox Judaism. He also was the cantor, the reader of the Torah (five books of Moses) and the preacher in our synagogue and he had to teach us to read the Torah for our Bar Mitzwa, where the congregation standards called for us to read the complete weekly portion not just one seventh of it as is the standard now in many synagogues. (The Torah scrolls from which we read have no punctuation, no vowels and no cantilation). Guensberg left Borken when I was in third grade. He emigrated to Israel before World War II and there became an important member of the Ulpan organization, which was charged to revive the Hebrew language by teaching Hebrew to all immigrants.

In Borken, Guenberg’s job was taken over by Mr. Locker who was younger, but equally well educated and devoted to Jewish learning. He made us work still harder. He and his family survived the war in hiding in Holland, then immigrated into Israel, where he became the Headmaster of an orthodox High School in Tel Aviv.

Friday evening meals – after services – were invariably a festive occasion, as was the brunch after the Saturday morning service, and there were similar routines for all the festivals.

Those of us whose parents could afford it changed at the age of ten from the Jewish Elementary School to the Public High School, which, like the whole region, was predominantly Catholic. We now had to attend classes on Saturday morning, but we did not write in school on Saturday, after Bar Mitzvah we did not carry our books to school on Saturday, and attended Hebrew School in the Elementary School on Sunday morning and at least one weekday afternoon.

Great-grandfather Abraham Gans. He gambled the family’s fortune on one transport of cows from Holland to England, but the ship was wrecked in a storm. His five sons who were in business with him banned him to an island near Rotterdam (Overbeuren?) to which he retreated with two spinster nieces and a nephew. One of his sons then immigrated to the USA and became very rich. My grandfather Karl Gans decided to come to Germany to marry Amalie Windmuller, my grandmother.’

Grandfather, Karl Gans He died in 1917, apparently from a messed up hernia operation

Grandmother, Amalie Gans-Windmuller She was accepted as a solid citizen in Borken, because of the long association of her ancestors with the town and its surroundings.

My father, his friend Leo Lamm (who eventually became my father-in-law) and two girlfriends ca 1910 In this picture the balloon is a fake, used by the photographer to attract clients.

The five Gans brothers. From left to right: Sally, Ernst, Abraham, Iken and Moritz (my father) ca 1912. They were all in business together, selling textiles. They split up after WW 1. Originally their father had given them 100000 Marks to set up this business but after few years he demanded that they return that money. Apart from the 5 sons there also were 5 daughters.

My father, Moritz Gans, in a recuperation home, ca 1917, after loosing one leg and a lung fighting in the German Army against the Italians in Tyrol. By that time he was engaged to be married to my mother, Else Fraenkel.

75th birth day of grandmother Amalie Gans (1932), surrounded by all her sons, daughters, their spouses and their children. The only one missing from this picture was her oldest grandchild, Phillip de Leeuw. I believe his wife had just given birth.

Clue to picture No. 7

Grandfather Moritz Fraenkel, died in 1933. I had a very good relationship with him.

My parents ca 1930

My mother ca 1930

1928 First Day of School, under the chestnut tree which stood in the yard of the synagogue/Jewish elementary school/mikveh (ritual bath) complex. None of that survived the war, not even the tree. Allied bombs, not Nazi action.

1931 Coming home from school. Theo on the far right was then in first grade. Gershon in the middle was in the second year of high-school and I (on the far left) was in the fourth grade of the Jewish Elementary school.

1931 Ready for sports Until 1933 we belonged to a Catholic Sports Club

Our house before World War II The house had four balconies and a sunken bath

Lunch on one of the balconies of our house.

Great-grandfather Avraham Gans. Here is one more story about him. At one time he got permission from the state of Prussia to import thirty cows from Holland into Germany. He used this permit to transfer thirty cows across several frontier control points, hoping that the communication between these control points was sufficiently bad to hide the multitude of transfers. But he was unexpectedly caught and the famous Prussian prime minister Fuerst Bismarck banned him from Germany. This must have meant that he could not have even come to the wedding of his son Karl when he married my grandmother. Consequently, my grandmother always preached that Bismarck was an anti-Semite.

The Storm

Even before 1933, as eight-year-old children, we were very much aware of the Nazi Movement. My mother’s parents, Moritz and Bertha Fraenkel, lived in a small village, Voelksen near Hanover. They were the only Jews in that village. They did not try to hide this fact, though they did not believe in any organized religion; literature, operas and music were their inspiration. We frequently spent our vacation in Voelksen and played with the local children. Everyone in that village, which was overwhelmingly Protestant, while our hometown Borken was overwhelmingly Catholic, seemed to have become a convinced Nazi already in 1930, and children started to withdraw from us.

On January 31st, 1933 my mother and we three boys were having lunch in the upstairs room, which had become our living room since father’s office had been moved into our house. We were listening to the news from the West Deutscher Rundfunk when the announcer casually said, A little news item has just been dropped on my desk: President Hindenburg has appointed Adolph Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist Party, as The Chancellor (Prime Minister) of the German government. Mother was stunned. Initially, we thought she was unduly pessimistic, but the enthusiasm with which this news was greeted by most of our fellow students in the public High School soon convinced us that our lives would be changed fundamentally.

In February and March 1933, in preparation for a new national election, every town was ordered to organize torch light parades and demonstrations to show the new spirit prevailing in Germany. But in our, overwhelmingly Catholic, town there was no Hitler Youth to carry out these torchlight parades and demonstrations: the High School had to substitute for the Hitler Youth. We Jewish students just had to go along, it took two of such events before my father got us out of this extra curricular, evening duty. Just in time before the patriotic World War I songs were replaced by the more aggressive, frequently anti-Jewish, Nazi songs.

Saturday, April 1st, 1933 was the watershed event confirming that our lives had changed drastically. Hitler proclaimed that International Jewry was organizing a boycott against Germany and in retaliation he ordered the boycotting of all Jewish businesses in Germany. Storm Troopers were placed in front of all Jewish stores to prevent shoppers from entering. But our Jewish community was orthodox and almost all Jewish stores and businesses were normally closed on Saturday. However, we who attended the public High School had to attend classes on Saturday morning, where we did not write, clean the blackboard or do any form of work.

At about eleven o’clock that morning our classroom teacher, whose humane, antinationalistic views were impeccable, came to our classroom and unobtrusively told us four Jewish students to meet him in the corridor. There he said, almost in a whisper, You know yourselves what is happening to you. You have to go home now. Here we can not guarantee your safety.

Our parents were shocked when we got home, but by Monday morning, my father had extracted from the High School principal a guarantee for the safety of all Jewish students and we went back to school, fully aware that we now were still more different.

May 1st, 1933 confirmed the rapid advance of the Nazi ideology in our school; in solidarity with the workers, the High School participated in the May Day Demonstration. As we were being organized to march to the center of the town, we noticed that our Biology teacher was wearing on his lapel the emblem that showed that he was a fully accepted member of the Nazi Party. So much for their vaunted principle no politics in this school.

Sometime in 1933 we Jewish students decided to keep to ourselves and not associate anymore with our classmates for play during the intermissions. We didn’t want to wait until they would tell us to stay away from them. But when our schoolmates laboriously avoided contact with us, we had no identity crisis, though I was only eleven years old: they, who now enthusiastically rushed into the Hitler Youth, who swallowed Hitler’s ideology lock, stock and barrel, were wrong; we were right. We represented a large, proud family of Jews in a small, closely knit Jewish community, all brought up for generations in the Orthodox Jewish intellectual tradition. Sudden alienation from one’s immediate surroundings, social persecution – all that was familiar: Grandfather Karl Gans had moved from nearby Holland to marry Grandmother. He had grown up with the descendents of the Jews who had been driven from magnificent Spain 400 years earlier, and Grandfather still spat every time the word Spain was uttered in his presence. The town contained other Jewish families whose ancestors had gone through pogroms and flight from Russia and Poland.

Five Years of Pervasive Reeducation

Soon after the May 1st revelation that our Biology teacher was a full member of the Nazi Party, this PhD in Biology was charged with teaching the Science of Races, a science which was supposed to prove the racial superiority of the Germanic race and the inferiority of Blacks and Jews. Successively, as we reached the ripe old age of 15 or 16, we Jewish students were exposed to this wisdom. My cousin Charley caught it just before he matriculated. He didn’t argue, he just stamped his feet and coughed incessantly while the subject of the Jewish Question was being taught. The Biology teacher then complained to Charley’s parents about the bad behavior of their son!

Next in line for exposure to these teachings was my brother Gershon. By that time (1935?) he went to school without any books, just carrying the two volumes of Arthur Ruppin’s Sociology of the Jews. Whatever assertions were made by the biology teacher, Gershon had the statistics to disprove them. Though by that time most of the students belonged to the Hitler Youth, they enjoyed seeing the teacher being contradicted. This situation was so embarrassing to the teacher, that in the following year, when it was the turn of my cousin Hansfried to be taught the Science of Races, the teacher offered Hansfried that he could stay away from class while the Jewish Question was being taught. Hansfried accepted that truce.

No such offer was made to me the following year. The teacher probably knew that I never shied away from an argument. By now all but one of my fellow students were enthusiastic members of the Hitler Youth. They growled at my defying attitudes, but they also loved to see the teacher being contradicted.

More problems: as High School students we wore fancy caps, different colors for different grades. We had to doff these caps when we met a teacher on the street, but now an order came to replace the doffing of the cap with the Hitler Salute. We refused to go along, even when some of the teachers who, secretly did not approve of the Nazi ideology, argued that the outstretched arm was now the German Salute and not necessarily the Hitler Salute.

The old establishment of teachers who ran the High School never became enthusiastic Nazis. The Nazi authorities must have been well aware of that fact, because eventually they brought in a teacher who had been a longtime member of the Nazi party whom they trusted to report on all the other teachers. This trustee was an unsavory character, an alcoholic with no depth of knowledge to teach any subject. He taught Geography to my class for one year. During that time he tried his best to ignore me: he never called on me to give an answer or a presentation and he never marked my tests.