Oral History Interview with John Rosenberg Part I

John Rosenberg Interview Part I

INTERVIEWED BY

ARWEN DONAHUE

ARWEN DONAHUE: Okay this is a and Kentucky Oral History Commission interview with John M. Rosenberg. We’re at his office in . It’s August twenty-first, nineteen ninety-nine. I’m Arwen Donahue and this is tape number one, side A. We always begin just about the same way, which is with your date of birth and your place of birth.

JOHN ROSENBERG: Okay. This is John Rosenberg. I was born in on October seventh, . Don’t remember much about that day. [LAUGHTER]

DONAHUE: Why not? [LAUGHING] What was your name at birth?

: Hans Meinhart Rosenberg, which was changed. And I retained the Meinhart, at least in this country we call it Mainhart. I don’t refer to the middle name very often. I think when I got off, when my family came to this country, the immigration authorities told my mother that most people who were named, most men who were named Hans, became John. And so I became John. Somehow my father was not there at the time, because he said, why didn’t you name him Henry? But I did not keep the Hans. Some people do keep Hans. There are some Hans’ around, right?

DONAHUE: Yeah.

: So, that’s where the John comes from. And I have kept the Meinhart. My father actually kept the , that Hitler gave him. His name was Rudolph Rosenberg. And you know Hitler gave the men, and the women, Sarah. And the one thing he retained when he came to this country, was he called himself Rudolph Israel Rosenberg. Rudolph I., which I don’t think he had a middle initial from birth.

DONAHUE: Meinhart, was that a family name?

: I don’t think it pre-dates me. I don’t think anyone else in the family has it. And my mom asks me, do I have any questions when I talk to her, and that’s one question I don’t think I’ve ever asked, is where the Meinhart came from. I don’t know if it’s in the literature. I don’t know, but it will be a good question to ask her.

DONAHUE: What was her full name, maiden name included?

: Her name is Gerta Schubach Rosenberg. Her maiden name is Schubach. She was, which her father was a butcher in a town called Eider-Oberstein, which is near Bad Kroesnach, and which we have visited since. And she has still some correspondence with an acquaintance. Well, the last, we went to visit a woman a few years ago, when Jean and I - Jean’s my wife - took mom back to that community. And there was a woman in the next town, which is Ober Reidenbach, and she was sort of a maid helper in the house. Because my father, her father had a butcher shop and her mother had, worked, also worked in the store. And I think when they had, traditionally when they had their meals, it was the three daughters and the parents and all the people who worked in the shop. And they did slaughtering on the premises, so they needed help in the household. And so she, this woman was still alive. She was in her nineties when we were there about five years ago. And I visited that town when I was in the service. I don’t know if you want to do this chronologically, sort of, or how, but…

DONAHUE: I think we’ll try to do it chronologically, but allowing for digressions, that sort of thing.

: Yeah, well when I was in the Air Force, I was in at one point from nineteen….I was in from with an area supply group. Our mission was sort of an intelligence mission, but we dropped Special Forces in training missions during those days where the Cold War with . And one of our training missions was actually in, we went to Germany and the, they attempted to re-create….What they tried to do was set up a situation where they would drop you out of an airplane, if you were dropped out of an airplane behind enemy lines, how do you find your way back and stay out of the way of the bad guys. And the way they did that, was to take you out in a truck and drop you off one at a time in fairly isolated places. And as they were doing it, I happened to look out in the little slit in the back of the truck and I found myself recognizing the street that my grandfather’s butcher store was on. It was called the Vasen Strasse. And so we went through this exercise. Took about a week. They identified certain farmers, who were friendly farmers and if you can make your way into that circuit, they pick you up and give you good meals and you stay out of the way of the bad guys. If the bad guys get you, you’re in trouble. But when that exercise was over, I went back to Eider-Oberstein and there were still people there, who remembered changing my diapers, for example. And some of those folks who knew my grandfather and my mother. Some of my mother’s contemporaries were still there. And then when I came, that was in like around nineteen fifty-six, more recently when we took, Jean and I took Mom back, it’s probably, oh when we went together it’s probably five or six years, maybe even eight or nine years ago. We happened to, well we did a sight-seeing tour that actually started in – my, Jean’s family’s from, her mother is from , or her mother’s family. We started up there and then we drove and eventually made our way to Eider-Oberstein and spent a few days there. And while we were there, it turned out that a number of her contemporaries had this monthly group that got together and even though they were in their seventies and eighties. And they took a, and they get together once a month and they put a little money in a coffee pot and once a year they take all that money they gathered and take a trip on the train to some other place. And it happened that while we were there, that was the week they were getting ready to take the big train trip. And so we were able to go to the station when all her own school buddies were there that morning, which was very nice. And we met some other friends of hers, who remembered her. And one fella gave us, he had a picture of the school they went to. But the house, the butcher shop had deteriorated and was no longer there, but some of the neighbors were there. Anyway that’s the tie in to her community. And we can talk a little bit more about it later.

DONAHUE: Were there any Jews left in the town?

: I think not. We did not….We really did not – our trip wasn’t very long. We stayed in a hotel and we did some sight-seeing and walking around in the area. Most of the people who were her age were obviously not Jewish. Her – although he was not a kosher butcher store that he had….As far as I know, we really didn’t run into the Jewish community, any Jews there. When we were in , I mean this is a pretty small town, although now it’s been reconstructed and it has some similarities to….The runs through the town of . They did an interesting architectural thing. They covered, they have the highway over, they built a highway over the river, which made you, made the streets much more accessible. Because the separated the town of from Oberstein and so it’s called Eider-Oberstein. Anyway, in Pikeville, they did this huge cut through, too, because the town used to flood. And they cut the big, made a cut through in the bend of the river and filled that in, much like this particular area, but in a different way. Anyway, Eider-Oberstein is a little, has been rebuilt. I don’t think it was terribly damaged during the war, but it’s sort of touristy. Looks like a little Swiss village downtown. I think if we had stayed there a little longer, we might have made more, a few more connections. The women who, this women’s group, for example, told mother that one of her boyfriends from school days was now in a nursing home. In fact, it was the person – his name was Hans. One of the funny stories is my mother decided to name me after him. But he apparently was really failing, was in his nineties. We didn’t take the time and she didn’t feel like she wanted to go to the nursing home. And I think, I think there are some, you know, all the feelings about that place aren’t great, because her family left. I mean her father and her two sisters came to this country before, in . They recognized a little earlier that they wanted to get out of the country. And I think one of the men who worked for my grandfather took the butcher shop over and he was, himself very….I’ve learned, very sympathetic to Hitler and was very much involved locally or never….I don’t know whether he just took over the business, didn’t buy it. But I know the family felt pretty badly about that. And some members of my family never want to go back to . Her two sisters have never gone back. We did a little bit of exploring. My mother, there’s a small Jewish cemetery, my mother had a sister, who died, a fourth sister, who died early, either when her mother gave birth to her. Her mother had been married….Her father had married twice. But there is the grave of the young child, who either died, was like a month old. And so that cemetery was still kept in quite good condition. I don’t think there was a synagogue there. It’s coming back a little bit. But we really did not meet any members of the Jewish community and I doubt if there are any Jews in Oberstein. Because when we did go, we then went to , my home. We had not been to at all, because it was in the East zone. was in the West zone and is the next large city down the from . So when we went back to , they were having, it had been badly bombed in several major raids. It was a town of about three hundred thousand people, an industrial center. We lived….In the synagogue, we’ll get to this a little bit later, but we had….The Russians had renamed all the streets. So they were just starting to rename them back. And so we had a little trouble finding, trying to orient the map to show mother where we used to live and the synagogue we used to live in. Where it was. Now there’s just a memorial tablet in the location. There was a big office building. But that is gone. But then we, it happened that during the week that we were there, they had a memorial exhibit to the Jewish community from in one of the….There’s a cloister there. There’s a very large cathedral in , which is fairly famous. And there was actually, the week we were there, they were having a, one of these annual conferences of the Protestant gathering in that moves around. All the churches were there and they had booths set up and they had services in the main square. And one of the groups there was a group that was trying to promote better relationships between and . And they, they were not Jewish, but that was the mission of this group. And they pointed us in the direction of some people who knew some of the Jewish folks. Again, we went to see this exhibit and I can get into that with you a little bit, because one of the exhibits involved, it was a diary written by the person who was the Rabbi in the congregation with my father, who had written a diary when they were picked up to go to the Holocaust museum. I mean to go to the concentration camp. So, this is a long winded way of telling you that there, we know there was a Jewish congregation. When we were walking around the city buildings, we bumped into this woman who was Jewish or who knew the Jewish – had some connection. She worked in the city hall, worked with the mayor, just happened. And so, it happened when we were walking by that the mayor came out and we spoke to him a little bit. And he said they were just trying, starting, he was interested….glad to meet mother and said the city was starting to put together an event like a lot of other cities had done, to bring the Jewish members of the congregation or for the Jews from Magdeburg, back to Magdeburg for a kind of gathering and reconciliation sort of thing. But I don’t think that’s happened or she continues to get mailings now from the congregation which is….There was not an active synagogue that we knew of or could find. I think they said there were several hundred families, but we really didn’t go out of our way. I’ve got a book, little brochure at home or here, from that exhibit, which was very touching and very nice. Had a huge wall-sized photograph of the inside of the synagogue where my father was the, where my dad was involved. Anyway there were very few Jews, I think. And it was not an organized congregation yet, but we either didn’t bump into them correctly. I mean, we were, it was more of a sight-seeing trip than an effort to dig into records about the congregation sort of thing. Because we also had a limited amount of time. And so we got in the car. I had a car and we did drive over to the section where Mother, my dad and my mom first lived, when we came there. I mean, when they first, when my father first married Mother in Eider-Oberstein and then they moved to . It was a small garden apartment kind of place, a little young couple’s new….I’m sure at the time looked very pretty. That area had not been bombed and was still there. It was just much more rundown. I mean it was like going to a building that was fifty years old. But the flower boxes were there and we did manage to….you know, we drove by where they probably lived or near where they, in that community. Remarkable for me to see, because my dad didn’t have a car and he bicycled to work every day. People either walked or took bikes right into, in the twenties and thirties. I guess he moved to, well I was born in thirty-one, so he and Mother had been married two years. It was kind of like being in suburbia and taking a bike, biking into work every day.

DONAHUE: Had your father been, you said he met your mother in Eider-Oberstein? Had he been from there or from ?

: My dad was a, he was born in Lehr, Freesland, which is in the northwestern part of , near Freesland. And I have a family – I was just looking and we have a pretty good family tree on his mother’s side of the family, going back to the seventeen hundreds. His father was a junk dealer and he had nine brothers and sisters. He had a large family. And then his father, unfortunately, when he was very young, committed suicide.

DONAHUE: Your father’s father?

: My father’s father. Leaving my mother with this huge, rather large family when they were – I think at that point he was probably like fifteen or sixteen. And so, he went, spent some years in an orphanage in and then went on to our equivalent of college to be a Jewish school teacher, which when you think back about it, was quite an achievement. He had an older brother, Zemi and several sisters. He also had a younger brother, who also committed suicide.

DONAHUE: Your father’s younger brother?

: Yeah, named Meier, who had an affair, I think with a non-Jewish girl, and decided….which was a no-no in a big way back then. But he had several sisters, Yetta and Martha, both of whom married of all things, butchers in the next communities. And they came to this country. One of them is named Dan De Frees. His wife’s name is Martha. They’ve both died in the last ten years and their son lives in . And his wife is actually the woman who published the coffee book for the Holocaust museum. His name is Allan De Frees. He’d been married before, but Judy and he’d been married for many years. And then he had this other sister, Yetta Van Der Wyck, married Nathan Van Der Wyck. They came to this country and had three daughters and she is still living. She’s ninety. She’s kind of failing, but she’s now ninety, I guess. Then he had a sister Ola, who was married and went to and then divorced her husband and came back to and lived there until she was about fifty and died. And another sister, , who with her husband went to , early, one of the early settlers in . They moved to a moshav in . And they have a son, Moshe, who is my age and whom we have visited. I think that’s all the sisters and brothers. Two of those families came to this country and lived in , in the area. And both of them were – well, Nathan was a butcher and he died relatively young in this country, while the girls were still growing up. The Dan De Frees lived, well he actually outlived Alan’s mother, but he lived to be about in his eighties. And I think Martha was right around eighty when she died. My father, you know this large family, his mother’s name was Wexler before she was married to a . And her father and her father’s father were fairly prominent Rabbis in this northern part of . The Wexler family, that was there. So, there was a very heavy religious influence in my father’s family. And my dad was very knowledgeable in Jewish law. He knew the five books of Moses by heart. You could start him in the Torah. If you go into the synagogue, the five books of Moses are in the scroll and you could start my father anywhere and he could give you the rest of the passage. So, he was a Jewish school teacher. When he got his degree, he went to Eider-Oberstein I think originally, probably as a practice teaching. But he came there as a young bachelor. And he met, to be a school teacher or whether a Sunday school teacher in the Jewish school. And he met my mother, who was a student. She was like sixteen when he met her. I think he had another, I think he had a year of school to go. And he came and he went. He was, she said a very jealous man, when she was still going with some other, this Hans or whatever. She was eighteen, I guess, quite young, when they were married. Then he took her back to Magdeburg, where he got a position with the Jewish, with the synagogue and the Jewish – it wasn’t the welfare agency, but it was like the united, not United Jewish Appeals. Sort of like the Central Kentucky Jewish Organization. He was assisting the, assisted the Rabbi as a, not as the cantor, but as the lay leader, with services and with classes. And then he also taught classes to people, to Jews who wanted to go to , in Hebrew, and preparing them to go. And I think he wanted to go to , but my mother did not. She wanted to come to this country, if they were going to leave, because her family was here. And I think my dad really wanted to go to , but they were, like many others, not really, did not think this thing was going to get as bad as it did. So that’s where he met her and then brought her to in this little garden apartment, this very pretty, young woman. And then a year later. Mother always likes to kid that I’m a….I don’t know if you realize that people who are born in very early October are often New Year’s Eve babies. They had a big party. Here I am.

DONAHUE: Did you, you mentioned about your father’s family being religious. Were you instilled at an early age with a sense of religion?

: We were kosher at home. We had, I suppose in a pretty, what would be called, it wasn’t reformed, probably like the conservative, American congregation or family. We had a kosher household, that meant Mother had two sets of dishes. We had all, we had Sabbath. My father being with the synagogue, went there regularly. And I would go with him. But I was only eight. I was really young. I went to the….Hitler, you know, in , I believe, started, was when Jewish children could no longer go to school with others. There was a separate Jewish school system. And my father was actually a teacher, then became a teacher in the Jewish school system, in the Jewish school.

DONAHUE: After ?

: Yeah, well when I went to school first in nineteen, let’s see I would have been six years old, that’s when I started. I don’t know if my father had been….I think he’d actually, he must have been a teacher in that school along with being at the synagogue. I think he must, that must have been his other occupation, that he was actually teaching school already, besides working in the synagogue. Because when I went to the first grade, it was in the school where he was teaching.

DONAHUE: And what did he do in the synagogue?

: In the synagogue he assisted the Rabbi and was a, he taught these classes and he taught Sunday school classes, taught Hebrew school.

DONAHUE: He wasn’t a cantor though?

: He was not a cantor. There is, even in this country, a formal training for cantors. He could be the cantor and I think sometimes he spelled the cantor. And a lot of times, Saturday nights, there are at the end of the Sabbath, there are services, which lay leaders lead or when the Rabbi or the cantor sit down, somebody else gets up and takes their place for a while. I think my father could do all those things, but his primary occupation was being a teacher in the school system. You know, you don’t always think about these things until you really try to, until you work them through. Because his reparation, some of his, I think that part of my mother’s social security from is based on his years as a teacher, not only the congregational status. Though he had probably several years, at Oberstein and then being a teacher. Except that there was no other place, by that time the schools were segregated. Mother was not working in during, she basically was a housekeep at home. And did not have anymore formal training after she finished high school. Did we get off to some subject on that? You started to ask me something.

DONAHUE: Started to ask about religion. I was wondering, did you have much of a religious education?

: Well, as much as you can get from six to eight. Because we, Krystal Nacht was November thirty-eight, so I was just seven years old. I mean I probably had as much as any child would have in those early years. So you learn a lot of the basic biblical stories. You learn Hebrew to read. But when we came to this country and my father then went south, which we can get to, I think we became pretty much reformed Jews. Because it was so difficult to be kosher unless – back then, unless you went to great extremes. Possible to do that in . I don’t know if you want to talk about how we got there.

DONAHUE: How you got to the South?

: Or what happened in the Holocaust time, itself, that’s about where…

DONAHUE: I wanted to ask a little bit more about your early childhood. Did you have any siblings?

: I have two siblings, one of them was born in , my brother, Harry, who is now in .

DONAHUE: .

: , right. And he’s the head of the Mortality Statistics Section for the for Vital Statistics. He’s a demographer. Harry was….He’s four years younger than I am. And my sister, Joan, is in . And she’s been an architect for twenty years and then went back to law school. Right now she’s holding her breath to see if she passed the bar. But she was an architect for the state for many years and decided she would go back to law school, could be a lawyer. So, hopefully she will know this week whether she passed the bar or not. But my brother, you know when you’re that age in the early….The only real recollection that I have any problem about those years together…..I mean I have some recollection of having been at Eider-Oberstein or with some relatives. We went back with my father.

DONAHUE: We might want to…

: You about to switch the tape over?

DONAHUE: Yeah, save this for the other side of the tape.

: Okay.

END OF TAPE 20.U.5a, JOHN ROSENBURG, SIDE A

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5a, JOHN ROSENBURG, SIDE B

DONAHUE: Okay, this is tape number one, side B.

: When we, my brother….you don’t have many recollections….I don’t know how much. Do you have brothers and sisters?

DONAHUE: Uh huh, I have two brothers.

: Well, do you remember when you were five and four?

DONAHUE: Not a whole lot.

: Yeah, I remember only the Krystal Nacht and he was out, that he was with my parents. We were there together. The earlier years, I can remember visiting relatives, as you probably do or you have images of having been in Lehr and playing in my grandfather’s junkyard piles with a cousin, for example. Or being in the house, just little things like that. But I really have very little recollection of my brother and I when we were that age. Or not all, or actually even not too many….four years apart is sort of when you’re always one….Often you’re not in the same school. But Harry was, he was only four years old. Oh yeah, when I mentioned there was another sister. My father had another sister, named Mary. And Mary was married and living in . And that’s where, when, that’s kind of, this is the Holocaust story. I don’t know if you want to ask some more about. I don’t have much else in terms of growing up that I recall, other than where we lived in . We lived in the house that was adjacent to the synagogue, a big courtyard out front. Had just enough of an incline so that my father could put me on a bicycle and let me roll down the incline, which he hoped he had taught me to put on the brake on, so I wouldn’t smash into the other side when I was learning to ride a bicycle. The address was Number 2 Schule Strasse. Zwei C, I think,

DONAHUE: Did you spend a lot of time in the synagogue as a child?

: I don’t think so. Not, I mean, a fair amount, not any, I mean not like an orthodox child would. Although I think my father pretty much took me to most services. But it was not a daily. I didn’t go every day, and orthodox Jews do go everyday. I started school in nineteen, when I was six. And that’s always a very happy occasion. In you begin school by, the big event is you get a large cone, about, almost as big as you are and there’s some pictures. Looks as big as I did. And it’s filled with nice, with goodies, so you celebrate the first day of school. Called a [INAUDIBLE] I think it actually….I think the school year may have begun or you begin school at Easter time. So, it coincides with Easter, if I remember right. But anyway, I do recall that. And I recall sometime being in my father’s classes and he was a very…Did a lot of drills. Believed in teaching math with oral drill, how much is three times three, four times four, five times five, asking kids around the school.

DONAHUE: So you were one of his students. Did he start teaching in or was he teaching before that?

: He was already, he was teaching. I think that he had secured a job with the Jewish school system when he brought mother – along with this job at the synagogue. That the two were basically together. Because he was a teacher. Lehrer. They called him Lehrer Rosenberg, teacher Rosenberg. So he taught both my mother and me, when you think about it. He was my mother’s Sunday school and religious school teacher, and I suppose her sisters. I don’t know. We’ve got some pictures and I guess her sisters might have been in his classes also. He was a very fine looking man in his youth. He was a nice looking man later on. But he did have this real store of knowledge. But my sister, and as I said, her family went over. And then my, the people, the family members who were alive, like the two uncles, all those people sort of left around nineteen thirty-six and were gone by Krystal Nacht, as was my mother’s father, who was in New York. I think my father then, in, my father, we were still living….We were in the night the Krystal Nacht happened. That’s what, when I said I remembered my brother, we were upstairs in our apartment and my mother and his mother and his brother happened to be visiting with us. Actually my mother said, his mother had come for a visit and been there for several months. She was still fairly new, well she had me, but his mother was a very strong, assertive woman, both religiously and with her family. The children really worshiped her as far as I….She was the epitome of a matriarch, that had kept this family going after her husband committed suicide. She was a very strong woman. And she lived, getting ahead a little bit, into the end, close to the end of the war in a concentration camp. Because my uncle….Which is where my uncle went. They were visiting with us. And when the storm troopers came to the house and rousted us out that night….They brought us into the courtyard. And mother I think thought, she asked somebody, are they going to kill us? And they said, they didn’t know.

DONAHUE: Is that something that you remember or that your mother told you?

: I don’t remember. She told me that. She didn’t know whether we were going to live or not, live or die. We were all asleep and they just broke into the apartment and brought everybody in the courtyard. Then my recollection….Then they bombed, dynamited the and they brought all the religious scrolls and all the books out into the courtyard and burned them. That’s what I can remember very vividly, just seeing all that stuff burn up. And then eventually….They didn’t blow the building up. They went in, the next morning we went in. The upstairs was sort of caved in, the upstairs back where the women would sit upstairs. That had been detached from the walls. They hadn’t totally destroyed the synagogue, but it was quite a mess. But all the books had been burned. And then somewhere, she said, two or three in the morning they said go back into your house. And the house, things were pretty well upside down, but it was, they just smashed a lot of stuff. And we went back to bed. And then the next morning, early on, about, when it was early, they came back and the military, the Nazis came and arrested my father and his brother. Now, I had always….I was just reading some stuff. I always had this backwards, because I thought that my father had….It was interesting, because they arrested Dad and they took off. And I don’t have a good recollection of them arresting his brother. Whether his brother and his mother left. Because I know what happened was when they came upstairs, they arrested, they asked for my father and they arrested him. And then my mother asked me if she could, asked the soldier – he had already gone out the door, whether she….When he was standing there, she asked whether she could give him something, make a sandwich for him. And the guy said, yes, go ahead and do that. So, she made a sandwich and she asked me to run after them and give my father….And he was, they were already down the street on the sidewalk with my dad in the middle. And I went running after him and gave him the sandwich. And I don’t remember at all that his brother was anywhere around. My mother may know, whether he took his mother back to somewhere else, because he was also arrested and they joined up in the concentration camp. Just a little, something I’m not sure of right now. But my mother….We were in our kitchen, I think I was on the mattress on the floor, because the beds had been torn up when they came back for Daddy. What had happened, which I thought happened afterwards. My father, though, was in the concentration camp about eleven days. They took him to , he and his brother. The town we grew up in, , this very large town….Apparently the political establishment was not sympathetic to Hitler. Or a lot of, there were at least a fair number of people in power. So, with their help, they were able to get my father out. And he was ordered to get out of the country within thirty days. He was able to come home. And I have a copy, although I didn’t have it with me, it’s at home. I recently had it out for some other reason, of the official papers, sending him out, getting him out of the concentration camp. My mother took me to , she said, to my father’s sister. The one whose name is Mary, that I mentioned a while ago, and my brother. Well, no, she said she took me to and that she stayed with friends, not by herself. Different people every night for several days during that interim. When my father and his brother were released from the concentration camp – it must have been at the same time, because I can remember them getting, coming to this apartment. There was a young, my father’s sister had a little boy, had a boy named Bube, who was my age. And we played together. And he was the one I played with when we went to see my grandfather at the junk shop. We knew each other. We were just little seven and eight year old kids running around together. But I remember being in when my father and his brother came and they were totally bald. They had had their heads shaved, which my father, at that time, had a lot of hair. So it was dramatic to see them, even as a very young child. We then, I think Zemi took his mother probably back to Lehr and we went to…

DONAHUE: Zemi is your father’s brother?

: Right. He was taller than….Was a very outspoken fellow, very active in the Jewish youth movement. Was in his thirties. And he was running the junk, sort of took over the business. He was the oldest son, the oldest one of the children.

DONAHUE: I have a couple questions.

: Yeah.

DONAHUE: When was, I wondered about your father’s and your uncles being arrested. Were most Jewish men in arrested?

: I think they rounded up most of….They actually, before they….My father they came for the next day. And I think they took off….They arrested hundreds, maybe thousands of Jewish men. And it was not yet, I don’t think they were the only ones to get out. I mean, they had help getting out of the concentration camp, but I think they had not set on this course yet of genocide. I mean, I remember there was this Madagascar Plan about sending the Jews to Madagascar and getting rid of them and basically eliminating them, before they figured out this final solution that they were going to kill everybody. It may have been in somebody’s mind. How did I get on to that? You asked me…?

DONAHUE: I asked you about whether Jewish men in in general were arrested.

: I think there were a lot of, now it was a large congregation. Now the other, that was uh….That diary that I was telling you about when we went back to and they had the exhibit of all the Jewish artifacts? There was an open diary by, the Rabbi’s name was Wilde, W I L D E, Professor Wilde. He was a PhD. It was a large congregation. He had a very prominent role in the community, I think. He started this diary, saying there we were. We had all been arrested by the police, a banker and a baker and a Rabbi and Rosenberg. And here we were sitting in the police station, all expecting to go home that night. And all I could read – it was in a glass case, so it just went that far. He ended up going to . He also got out safely, but even though, he was older than my father. I don’t know what, I think he just lived out his life in , in somewhere. So, there were a lot of people arrested after Krystal Nacht. And how many of them….There was a family. There was actually a family living upstairs above us in the synagogue, in this building. It was just an apartment building. There may have been some offices downstairs, but it was perpendicular to the itself, and then there was this courtyard. There was another family upstairs that was Jewish and they were from . And they came and arrested them about, several weeks earlier. And I think that Hitler – they were arresting Jews from and shipping them out. I think that was sort of the event probably, although I’ll never know, you know, that got my father to thinking it was time to get out. And he had thirty days to get out of the country and I always, what I’m going to tell you now is I always thought he did that after he got out of the concentration camp. But I was reading some notes my wife had made, which I suspect happened right after they arrested the Poles, that he said, well how am I going to get out of this country? Or how can we do it at this late date? And he was told to go to the American Consulate and to get a Visa and to go to . Why don’t I just get those notes? I was just looking at them. I’ll read them. It made a little bit of sense, in that it also had….These were actually from some notes that Jean made when we were on a plane with my mother a few years ago. And let’s see….Yeah, Daddy….And Opa was safe….Teacher in synagogue housing. They, if I have this right, one of the reasons Zemi and his mother were there is that they realized that it was getting to be a dangerous time and they might have to try to still get out of the country. So mother said she thought that was why their stay was being extended, that they had started realizing they were going to try to get to the . And she said, he was on a….They were taking a walk with the family when they ran into an acquaintance, who said to them that if they were going to get out it was necessary to go to the U.S. Consulate in Berlin. And my father asked him how to do that and he said, you should go to in the morning and get in line and book four passages to this country. Then when you get those passages, you need to go to to the Consulate to let them know you’ve got your tickets. So my father, she said, cashed in his life insurance policy and bought the tickets and got the papers together to get a Visa to come to the . He sent the Visa application, he said, by registered mail to . Then he went to and stayed there with his sister Ola and her husband, who was….Remember her husband was not Jewish, which was another very….They’re the ones who went to . So, he went there. He went on to the office, but they did not find his papers. He showed them the registered mail stub, which was copied and he was told that he would then get the confirmation of the fact that he would be approved to go to this country. He got a letter, eventually he got a letter with the number on a piece of paper, which he kept on his person. And it said, he gave that piece of paper to Zemi, his brother, when the Gestapo picked him up after Krystal Nacht and took him to concentration camp. Zemi in turn gave it to his mother, who took me and went to Mary in . So his mother then….What isn’t clear to me, is what happened to Zemi. I suppose they must have arrested him after my father, but I just didn’t pay any attention to him because I just wasn’t focused. Because they took him off. Because she said, it was actually his mother, who took me off to….Mom said, you know, that she took Harry, who was only four at the time and waited around and went from house, lived with different friends in the community while they were waiting for my father. But he had this little registration number, which as you know, probably from other stories, people were selling their souls and lives for, because they were, it was the quota system that determined whether you were going to make it to this country or not. And we were, we then went, during this thirty day period they got all their belongings together and filled it in one of these things they call….We put everything in a big box that’s going to go to the other country. And they packed up all their furniture and it was sent to . And they made their way to , , where we were in this sort of an internment camp. It was actually….We went on the train and it was a large, overnight hostelry for people who would otherwise have taken, say the Holland America Line ship. The boat to this country on a normal, as a tourist trip.

DONAHUE: Before we leave I want to, I had another question. First about Krystal Nacht. You described being taken out of your house in the middle of the night by the storm troopers and then watching them burn all the Torah scrolls. What do you remember, personally, about that? Was that the first time that you had realized the danger of the situation?

: I want to believe that I remember the signs on the, some of the signs that said no Jews allowed, which you know popped up on stores. And the family – but I don’t remember, as a six or seven year old having any, you know you just learn what the rules are. Don’t go into this store or you stay with your parents or you go to school. I don’t remember children other than my cousin. So I don’t know that I ever was afraid. And I don’t think my parents ever gave me any reason to be afraid. I mean we lived a very normal life. And I didn’t know, I do remember that we, I played with the kids of that Polish family. They had two children. I think their name might have been Finkelstein. They had two children and I remember them. But I don’t….And so they were gone. I don’t remember, you know, that we were living in fear. Until these storm troopers showed up at the house that I had any conscious feeling about even knowing that things were bad. As I say, in our town there was not a lot of sympathy for him.

DONAHUE: So, do you remember that moment of watching the Torah scrolls be burned and being pulled out of your house in the middle of the night?

: I do remember the fire. I mean I do remember going, I do remember, probably because it was so vivid. And when I told this story before or talked about it, that it stays a little bit in front of your mind, so it’s probably hard to separate. But I have this very strong recollection about this fire in the courtyard. And my father being arrested and running after him. So, those are the, I guess, the vignettes that I remember. I remember them coming to the apartment and my mother giving me the sandwich. And I remember that one of them, this fellow, who was in uniform, who said that she could go ahead and make a sandwich, seem to be very friendly. Or was a very, he said okay and he wasn’t….They didn’t beat any of us, I mean, we….I’m sure the adults were very fearful, because they were forced out there. I was just a little kid and everybody said, go outside in the yard. As I said, my mother certainly was very afraid and they didn’t know what they were going to do. And they did it all over . She told me that, Mom said at one point that they had heard that was going to happen that night, something like that. I think this was, if I, you might know this. I think that they had an excuse for doing it, some official, some German official had been killed and this was an act of retribution. It was the way they got at it. I don’t know that word had spread that this was the night that they said we’re going to synagogues and arrest….Blow them up and arrest everybody. But they just, they knew something was going to happen. But they went to bed. They didn’t know what. I don’t know whether anybody was awake, because we were rousted out.

DONAHUE: Do you remember being particularly afraid?

: No. I really don’t have any, any recollection. And all I remember, I do remember a little bit, going to Frankfurt, only because, somehow at one point, I remember we were eight years old. And my cousin and I were under the table, playing under the table and seeing the knees of all these adults sitting around. I mean, it’s just sort of a goofy thing, but they were also killed. Almost everybody, this family and this cousin were gassed. Zemi and his mother….We stayed….Well you wanted to go ahead about . When we get into , I’ll tell you what I remember about Zemi and his mother. But that’s really about all I remember of those days in . I remember going, sometimes vaguely, going back to Eider-Oberstein as a kid, but not much. I was just too young.

DONAHUE: Okay, one more question about , then….You had mentioned, did you mention that your father was involved in some way with helping Jews, who wanted to emigrate to ?

: Yeah.

DONAHUE: Can you say something about that? And also did he have any interest, did your parents have any interest in trying to emigrate to at that time?

: Well I said my dad, I think, wanted to go and my mother did not. She wanted to go to . If they were going to leave, she wanted to go to this country, where her family lived. But his sister had gone to Israel and I think he….Lena and her husband, his name was Evan Van Der Work, another Van Der Work….De Frees. I’m sorry De Frees. I just actually had sent a little note to my cousin. I visited them when I was in the Air Force first, in , when I was still single and was stationed in and went to . I stayed with them and toured the country. And then when Jean was pregnant with Michael, we went over. So, we’ve had some connection over the years. And they have a son, Moshe, and his wife, Nora, have a son, who came to this country and was married a few years ago. And my dad and mom did go to afterwards. In fact Zemi’s widow….Zemi got married in the concentration camp, which we can get to or just say his wife.

DONAHUE: Yeah, you can go ahead and say what camp he was in.

: Well, he went, I think he and his mother….I mean, we got out. We went to and they did not. Whether he went back to Lehr, I’ll have to ask my mom where they went. Whether they went to or back to Lehr. Because they went to….I think they did eventually get to and he was supposed to leave on the next boat. I don’t think he was in the camp with us. I’ll have to….where Zemi went. …father had a sister in , was named Ellie. The sister in was named Mary. She was married to a stock broker named Herman Metzger, who spoke a number of languages. They had something like five children. And we would be able to visit with them….

END OF TAPE 20.U.5a, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5b, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE A

ARWEN DONAHUE: …quickly say, this is tape number two, side A of an interview with John Rosenberg.

JOHN ROSENBERG: I think that it was simply a train trip from to . And they had arranged, it was a legal, they had the papers. They had to be out by thirty days and they had packed everything up, except a few little….Except their day-to-day living clothes and put everything in this big lift is what they called them, I think. And they expected eventually to send that to this country. As it was, it went to and sat there while they were in the internment camp.

DONAHUE: Did you all enter illegally?

: No, I think it was just, my recollection is it was just a train trip and that he had his passport or the proper papers to go to . And had been directed to be out of the country in thirty days from the time he was out of the concentration camp. That’s why I had originally thought he went….I always remembered that he went to or that he stood in line in and in . This little thing I had read from my wife’s notes that mother had recalled the other part of it. I think he ended up standing in line for at least a day in Berlin at the Consulate to get this number, which was so precious, which ended up being the key to allowing us to get out of Holland and come into this country. But the train, I don’t think there was anything particularly noteworthy about the trip to . They went to . Mother, I think, did a lot of the arranging of that while my father was in the concentration camp. Or friends of hers helped her do that. And when he got out – I mean, they knew they were going to have to leave. And they were able to keep this number.

DONAHUE: Did they know that they would be staying in this transit camp?

: Yeah, I think so. I mean they must have….I think that the immigration authorities, the Jewish Welfare Agencies….I mean they had their….For one thing, he had his tickets. He had purchased the tickets to come to this country, so it was the logical place to go. It was also a place full of immigrants. I don’t know if they put people there, who did not have their papers in order or had booked their passage. People had their passages, but they couldn’t leave until they had an approval from the authorities in the . You know they had a quota. So, that was the other part of the….The problem was getting a sponsor in this country.

DONAHUE: So everyone in the camp was waiting to come to the ?

: Yeah, as far as I know. Whether they were waiting – they were also taking boats to other parts of the world, I’m not sure. But that’s what they were waiting to do, was to leave on the boat. And I’m not, not conscious, have no real recollection of people going ahead of us. We ended up being there for a year. Large building like a hotel, and on each floor the furnishings and the layout sort of was equivalent to the class of the boat that you would be going on. So if you were a first class passenger you’d have a little….Each of these floors, as I remember them, had a series of compartments where people would stay, normally for a day or two before leaving on the boat. So, the first class cabins would have a little fancier compartment. I mean these compartments weren’t very big. They were like twelve by twelve, at least, small. And then we had, the one that my family had. It was a very austere, it was, I don’t know if it was equivalent to Daddy’s class, but it was sort of, it was just a very small enclosure with two double beds, with bunk beds. And my brother and I were on an upper and lower and my mom and dad were across from us on an upper and lower and there wasn’t anything else, that I can remember, other than maybe a little thing, cabinet to put your clothes in. And then people congregated in other parts of that facility. They had a library, reading room. They had a large cafeteria or a large dining room. Huge dining room, where everyone ate at the same, together. I always tell people I remember the sign on the wall said, in five languages, don’t spit on the floor. That was the sign. They had this huge sign. Don’t spit on the floor. My father, so it was pretty, you know, it wasn’t a great living conditions. But my father’s sister and her husband and their children lived in . They were Dutch residents. I don’t know where she met him. His name was Herman. I think I mentioned that. He was a stock broker and they were fairly well-to-do and we could go to see them or they could come to see us. We weren’t, it wasn’t any concentration camp. It was just, it was an internment camp and you could go away, go out on weekends. But no one had any vehicles, and unless you had a lot of money, which they had hardly any money, you basically stayed where you were.

DONAHUE: Did they have to, did your family have to pay to stay there and have their meals? Or how did that work?

: I think it was all, I mean they had a little, they didn’t….Now my father – I don’t recall that anybody had to work. I can ask Mom. I don’t think so. I think it was run by the Jewish Welfare Agency.

DONAHUE: The whole camp?

: Yeah, I think there was a relationship there. Maybe it was a relationship to the Holland-America Line. It might have been that it was, someone or the immigration authorities, people. I don’t recall, but I can ask. I don’t think that Mother worked, in the kitchen, for example. It would be nice to know. We’ve never talked very much about that. But my father decided to organize a school for the children in the camp and he did that.

DONAHUE: Completely on his own?

: On his own, yeah. He said, I want to do that for the kids. And so he started a school and gave instruction for a year, while we were there. We had to, he or the people, his sisters who were here and some others set about trying to find a sponsor in this country. And they ultimately found someone who was a fairly well-to-do person, because none of his family had any money to speak of and they couldn’t vouch for him. They weren’t citizens, so they couldn’t vouch for him. During that year they found a sponsor for him, a fellow, who was either an architect or a builder in , who my father went to see after we got here and said, thank you. And that was the last contact, except that in later years, my brother has met the son of that person, who lives in , also.

DONAHUE: Oh, do you know his name? The name of the father and the son?

: I think his name is Meier, Andrew Meier. Does that ring a bell?

DONAHUE: No, I started to chuckle, because I said the name of the father and the son, and just almost said the Holy Ghost. [LAUGHTER]

: Oh, oh. No, but it turns out….His name is Meier and it turns out that, that…that his father, that this Meier, who was our sponsor, that his family and our family come together in the seventeen hundreds with a family connection named Budenweiser, which lead me to think they actually identified someone who was very distantly related. There are some Meiers in our family. And my brother ultimately figured out and I think that David, this fellow, Meier, the son, that there was a family connection, a couple of hundred years back. So there is a relationship. Probably somebody said, why don’t you go see so-and-so, we don’t have very much to do with him, but maybe he’ll sponsor your father. That someone contacted him, Hans Meier. They knew that he was there. He was well off, but very distant family. And he agreed to sponsor my family.

DONAHUE: Was this part of the hold-up, that you didn’t have a sponsor in the ?

: I don’t know why we were there a year. I think part of it, no we were not….I think part of it was that we were not very high up on the list. That there were others in front of us by a long way. In fact my father was, we went in that camp probably in….Krystal Nacht was November and Dad was there until the end of November, and then December. We probably went to in December-January. And we came over on the boat in February nineteen forty. That was just before the war broke out with . In fact, we were either on the last boat or the next to last boat. And my dad had already been told that he was going to be the school teacher either in Theresienstadt or in the camp that Anne Frank was sent to, the first, the concentration camp.

DONAHUE: Westerborg?

: Westerborg, right. He was going to be the teacher. They wanted him to start that school. And he said, I’m going to go to . And he then, there was a fellow – that’s in these notes as well, because I keep forgetting the name. He said, that as time was growing short, he went to the Jewish Immigration Agency to find out whether, the hold-up. Because he was not near the top. And when he got there, he met a fellow named Doctor Moses, who was one of the interview, committee interviewing people. And he and Doctor Moses, in , he had helped Doctor Moses solicit money for . And Moses recognized my father and my dad, and then he arranged for us to be on one of the next boats. So, it was a little “good old boy”. I mean we had been there a year. I think there were a lot of those stories that also….That it was a numbering system from the top to the bottom, but that if you paid someone….You always heard….There were probably people moving up that had some influence with whoever. So, my father said, managed to get this connection or lucked into this connection. Whether he was moved up or he would have been on that boat, I don’t know. But because they were apparently what they were doing was interviewing family….They had a committee on which this Doctor Moses sat. And they determined who was going to go. Because there were probably all sorts of priorities. Are they elderly? Do they have….We have a whole building of people, who need to go to the and the boats only hold so many and somebody can go and somebody can’t. This is my number. And we have a lot of little children. So I think he was able to, that’s what happened. Whether he pulled some strings or whether he just was in the normal course of things and said, you can go. But whatever it was, that’s how we got here. So his number, he still had that little piece of paper and they’d found a sponsor. And so we were on that last boat, I suspect.

DONAHUE: So it was very, very fortunate. If you hadn’t gotten onto that boat, you wouldn’t have gotten out.

: Well, that’s for sure. Yeah, that’s for sure, we would not have gotten….No there wouldn’t have been any other way. And I don’t think there was any chance of going anywhere else. My uncle and his mother, again, I’m not sure why I don’t remember that they are there. But apparently they were on another boat. They came, they were in fact on a boat that was then turned….I think that you go through . I have some recollection as a young boy, you know, you’re playing on the boat. People, everybody’s always looking for mines. There were all sorts of mines floating out in the , because the war was about to start. And there was a route that you could make and we went. And I remember looking for the mines or looking and people say, oh, there’s nothing there. I believe they were in fact on a boat and that the boat was turned around and they got off. Now, whether they were in this same camp or somewhere else, I’m not sure. I don’t know why I would not have remembered them being there, but I’ll have to ask. I’m just not sure.

DONAHUE: And they both did not survive the war?

: No, what happened was they went from there to Theresienstadt. You have the right word for , it was Westerborg. I always forget that. Theresienstadt. And they were there. My uncle Zemi apparently was in charge of the leather working shop. They made boots and repaired leather stuff. And they were there into, they were there in . And apparently my uncle became a little outspoken. The war was turning and they knew that. And he made some untoward remarks about the Nazis, about these shoes are too good for them or something. And someone told on him and he was sent to . And he was in the line to go, to be exterminated and he ran to the electrified fence and they shot him. We heard that from, I think, his wife. During those four years, three years that he and his mother were in Theresienstadt, he met his wife and they were married. When I was with mom last weekend, we have pictures of their wedding, of them getting married on the day they got married. I mean of their wedding or they’re being married. She wasn’t wearing….She was an adult. They were in their thirties. He was probably born in nineteen hundred, so he was forty years old. They were both forty. She was a lovely person. And they were married. He had a coat and a tie on. And some of their friends are around them in a picture. This was the end of forty-four. And his, Daddy’s mother died, I think, must have died right after he was moved to . I looked it up, it’s like a couple of few months apart. She was, hadn’t been doing well, but she was born in the eighteen….She was probably in her seventies, I think. I’ve got that in the other room. We looked up the book, the Gedank Book where she’s listed. But she had survived into the late forties and he, with, being with her son. And so, she was there when he got married, which was nice. When they moved him to , she died. And then we….His widow lived and went to . And Jean and I visited her in . And that’s where this sort of, I mean that’s what she was told happened to Zemi. She knew that he had been taken.

DONAHUE: I had a couple of questions about your time in the camp, at least one question. When you were staying in the camp in , you were presumably one of your father’s students. Do you remember what the school…?

: Well, it was just he brought these kids together of varying ages around a big table. It was just a little sectioned away room, for I don’t know how many hours. And you do your math tables. He’d tell you some stories. He was just teaching. My father had a habit….In I always remember that when he was teaching Bible stories, he would always tell you three fourths of the story and leave the ending for the next week, so that you were anxious to find out what was coming. I don’t really remember very much about school, except where it was. I remember I was, one of the people who was there had a violin that he played and gave violin lessons. And I think my parents thought that would be a good idea. So he loaned me the violin for a lesson, but I remember I was not very good. And he got his violin back. I think he thought it was going to….Might be untuned or leaving it with an eight year old was not the right thing to do. And I don’t really remember very much about the camp. I remember a little bit about the library and where the books were. And the older people would sit down. They had a radio.

DONAHUE: How many students were in school?

: There were probably forty or fifty with us. And whether he did it in shifts or not, I’m not sure.

DONAHUE: Did you all have to share bathrooms with…?

: Well there were no, yeah, I mean you had communal bathrooms for each floor, because there were no….I don’t know if the first class facilities had private baths. Where we were they had a little sink, I think, with running water, but they didn’t….The bathroom as such was down the hall. It was pretty Spartan. I mean it wasn’t terrible because it wasn’t….You weren’t under a guard. But it was, it was very plain. And then when they found, when they got ready to leave, they learned that they could not….There was a limit on what they could take out. It was like twenty-five or fifty dollars. And so all the stuff that they were going to take….My mother really doesn’t remember what happened to it. It stayed. She was able to bring over some linens, some crystal, which she still has and some mementos, several boxes of stuff, things that they could pack up. But no furniture, which they had brought from and things like that. They just either sold them for a very, for a song.

DONAHUE: Did your dad teach all the lessons in German?

: I think he did, yeah. German and perhaps some Hebrew. Of course, I don’t know why anybody would have just spoken…But it would have been….I don’t know that he knew any Dutch. When he came to this country really the only other language that he knew was German. He knew some broken English that he had learned. Mother didn’t know any English. I remember when we were on the boat, I remember I saw the Wizard of Oz was playing. Was the first American color movie, you know, Technicolor movie, sound, Judy Garland. I couldn’t understand the English, but I saw the….And they showed the Wizard of Oz on the boat. I’m sure it was a nice boat trip. I mean for us, that was kind of fun, just a little kid running all over the place.

DONAHUE: What happened to your uncle and family in ?

: They couldn’t get out. They were also killed. I don’t know if they went to Westerborg. I tried to, Mother and I looked for his name in that book. We were in, when we were in ….After we went to on that trip I was telling you about, we went to for sightseeing and to look around. And we found a Jewish library there in connection with the synagogue or with the agency and they had one of these Gedank Books where all the Holocaust victims were listed alphabetically. So, that’s where I saw my uncle and my mother. I looked for some of…

DONAHUE: Your uncle and your grandmother?

: My grandmother. And I don’t remember….I think we looked for some of the others and couldn’t find them. They were, all of that family was killed, the one in . The family in was killed. The sister that was living actually in , went to and then up here. As I say, mother, I mean my father’s mother, because my mother’s family had already come to this country. When we came to the , they were there to greet us. Her two sisters, one of whom I think, well neither of them were married at that point. But they were all living on, with my grand, with mother’s parents. Mother’s parents had come over and my grandfather who owned a butcher shop was working as a butcher in a large restaurant in . He had gotten a job and was maintaining the family.

DONAHUE: Was he a kosher butcher?

: No, he, no. And it was not a….It was called, I think the restaurant was called Zimmerman’s Hungaria. I think it was a Hungarian restaurant. I think he could be, I mean he knew what there was to know, but he wasn’t a kosher butcher in . They went to the synagogue, this was , right across from the . Big neighborhood of German immigrants in those days. It’s changed a lot. A lot of Spanish speaking people living there now, along with a few of the….Some have actually….Well, I was with Mother….One of her friends, who lived downstairs, is still in that same building, called her to wish her a happy birthday. At . Her sisters came to the boat and we moved in with them initially. Just squeezing into an apartment. It was a fairly good sized apartment. But we lived with them. And at that time, there was not a very good, for some reason, there was no one that really told my dad what he ought to do is get his teaching degree for this country and learn to speak English and to go on with what he was doing. Or if they told him, he didn’t think he could quickly take care of his family. There was very little work in . Most of the jobs were cleaning for women or people were doing stuff at home. There was an enormous, they called it craft kind of stuff. They give you….My mother and her sisters would sit around sewing slippers together, the bottoms and tops of bedroom slippers, piece work, to make money. Mom was actually a maid. She’d go out and it was cleaning apartments, cleaning houses, doing a little bit of nannies. My father after a very short time, heard that there were jobs in the South and he went to and started sweeping floors in a textile mill, so he could take care of his family. So he went to and got a job. He got a job. He knew where he was going. Somebody had said, contact this man when you get there. So, it was a very menial job initially and then he….He swept floors and he did manual stuff and pretty quickly learned how to….He became a shift manager at one point and he brought us, he had saved his money and got a small apartment, and about six months later we moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

DONAHUE: Before we go on, do you remember anything else about your journey to ?

: I don’t, I mean the boat, just that it was a boat trip and we were on a big ship. And a little kid could run all over the boat. And I remember the Wizard of Oz.

DONAHUE: What about arriving? Did you arrive at harbor?

: We came through . We did not, for some reason, got to . I’m not sure, because our family came to meet us and we went on. Recently I asked my mom if we went to , because I didn’t remember that, us doing that. And I think my father….We all went off and the name change must have actually taken place while he wasn’t around. Because he might have….Even when the paper stuff was done, he had already gone to . It said Hans is no longer Hans. Your son’s name is John. But the flags were out when we came. We landed on February twenty-second when we passed the Statue of Liberty. And we thought this is really nice, they’ve got all the flags out for us, but it was Washington’s birthday. And I remember my aunt giving me a quarter and telling me that was a lot of money and I should hang on to it, very, very carefully.

DONAHUE: Do you remember how you felt at the time?

: I think you’re kind of, you’re in wonderment. I mean all of sudden you take a boat trip and there’s the Statue of Liberty and then you come up with your family. You’re glad to see your family, because you’ve known them. It’s been a few years since….They had been over since thirty-six, I think, thirty-seven. So let’s see, Mother was born in nineteen eight and she’s the oldest. So Emma and Ruth were just eighty, so they were, I think they were born, that would make it about . So they were in their early twenties when we met them. Ruth went through dental hygiene school and I don’t know that Emma was just working in various places. They both met their husbands in the next few years. One of them, Emma’s husband was Jewish and then they both went into the service. John and Walter. Walter was a baker and John was a salesman. I went….They enrolled me in a school called P.S. 132 and they put me in a class with kids from other countries. All the early…

END OF TAPE 20.U.5b, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE A

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5b, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B

JOHN ROSENBERG: …with children from other countries and I don’t know how one teacher handled them. I think they taught you some basic English. I spoke no English. You pick it up pretty quickly on the street playing with other kids. I stayed in that room. It’s funny, because now, you know, they have the dress code that’s going on. At least one day, on Thursdays you had to wear red, white and blue. It was red, white and blue day. That was all new to me. They had some codes. I think I did pretty well and adjusted with these other kids. I walked to the school, it was probably three quarters of a mile, every day, from where we lived to the school. And after, I remember after a couple of months, I was sort of mainstreamed into another, into the regular, would that have probably have been the third grade, second or third grade and I was there. Then we moved to . My father had rented a small walk-up, in a poor….It was not a very well-to-do neighborhood. But a little apartment that he could afford. Actually he had saved enough money, he said, to have bought a car, but they decided to buy furniture or something. But he worked in the shirt factory doing fairly menial work initially, as I said. Then unfortunately after a few months, he had an….He fell off a ladder, which was interesting, because in this apartment where we lived. We had just a couple of rooms, two or three rooms. My mother did the laundry on a pot bellied stove. So, she had relied on him to always pick up this big vat of clothes and laundry and put it on….We had this little wood burning stove and burned corn cobs and I suppose coal. And she’d boil the clothes and wash them the old fashioned way. When he broke his foot, he couldn’t do that. As a result of that, he went downtown and we had the first, Bendix automatic washer. This little immigrant family in had one of the very first automatic washing machines in . Neighbors would come in to look at it and see the clothes spinning round and round and round. Daddy bought it on time, you know, you could buy if you were making a lot of money. But we used that washing machine for many years. Even when we went to , it just kept on working. It was called, I remember it was a Bendix. But my father also then, it was very interesting in our little apartment. There was no Rabbi in Spartanburg and so he….I don’t know if they ever had one before the war, whether they just got….The Jewish community learned right away about his vast knowledge of Jewish culture and religion and that he could actually officiate at a service. And so he began officiating in and started writing sermons in English. And did the whole thing, I mean he was quite remarkable. As a result of that, the Jewish soldiers. There was a military base in – . And so the soldiers, the Jewish soldiers who would come to the synagogue and see Daddy, would come to our little, poor apartment on weekends. And on the porch….And we have little pictures with a Brownie, black and white that were taken of all these soldiers sitting out on the porch or out front on a Saturday afternoon, because it was a place to go. They didn’t know anybody. They were away from home. It was just kind of ironic, right? And I’m sure the rest of the Jewish community was also very fond of them, but they came to Mom and Dad because they were new in the community and very warm. I don’t know if they realized that this immigrant family had come to and were totally in a new environment. I’ve always thought it’s been very remarkable when you think about it. I mean, they didn’t stay in , where people spoke German. My mother and her sisters still speak German. She has an accent. But they came South and here’s my dad, writing sermons, officiating when he’s not in his fairly menial job at the factory. Then somehow the congregation in , which was about seventy-five miles away, I think, also had no Rabbi. And he got to , because there was a family named Heilbraun, who were in , that they knew in . And that family, the Heilbrauns, had owned a textile mill. They were very well off. And they had brought their whole, their manufacturing facility over and they were living near . So, I think they contacted Dad to see if he couldn’t start helping them with services. And so my dad started commuting between and and officiating at services in . So, after a couple of years, Daddy in the shirt factory, let’s see, in the place he worked was called, yeah….Dixie Shirt Factory is the mill where he went to work. He started moving up a little bit and became a shift manager and a foreman. Learned essentially how the textile knitting business, totally something he’d never done in his life. Never knew anything about it. And became very good at it. Several years later, the family in Gastonia asked Dad or Mr. Heilbraun asked him if he wouldn’t come to work for him as a, I think as a shift manager. And then he also, when he got to , he invented, made some innovations on the machinery in their dye house. But after ….So we lived in about three years. People were, of course, very nice to us. And I started really a public school in , both my brother….And my brother, let’s see, I was then, I would have been, let’s see in I would have been nine. I was like in the fourth, fifth and sixth grade. And I was kind of a novelty, obviously, immigrant son. People would ask questions about how it was on the boat. So, the classrooms would start scheduling me around as a speaker to other schools, because they had this little ten year old, who could talk about life in and coming over on a boat and being Jewish.

DONAHUE: So, did you talk about the plight of the Jews in ?

: I’m sure I did. I mean, I essentially told, I think, told much of this story from the perspective from a ten year old. If somebody had taped it, I’m sure there were more details that I don’t even remember, but it was, you know, it was sort of novel having somebody….There was nobody else there. And I was still probably speaking, well in certainly, spoke broken English. I always remember when the first report card came out with all these numbers. What are these numbers? When my parents wanted to find out what is this report card? Very good grades. They were like nineties and things like that. And they didn’t know the first thing about socialization. They didn’t know when kids had parties or going to somebody else’s house. Everything was different. The conventional things that you grow up with, the books, the stories, Alice in Wonderland. The children’s books in this country are totally different. So some of that was lost, but I thought they did remarkable well and we had a lot of very nice friends. And I thought the teachers were very welcoming. I still remember some of those teachers. And the community was very accepting. The Jewish community was pretty wealthy by and large, as most of them were store owners. They tended to be, by that time, all lot of them all, like so many others in these smaller Southern towns….Their fathers and mothers had come to the South, to these communities, selling rags or generally as sales people. And then a lot of them decided to stay and open stores. And the war years were fairly recent, so most of them were retail merchants. And some of them were like Heilbraun – there were several factory owners, who were very well-to-do. So, really….People, most of the kids were from much more well-to-do homes and I think to some extent, that’s why so many of our own associations were always very comfortable with working people, who were not necessarily Jewish. When you’re living really in a Protestant environment in the South. So, I don’t know that we were very conscious, for example, to the same degree of anti-Semitism to the extent that it existed even then. It was never a problem. My parents were not in the country club set, so they didn’t have to worry about whether they could get in the country club.

DONAHUE: Was your lack of socialization a problem at all or did you, were you, did you really feel confident…?

: Oh, I think it went very well. I mean, my folks were very permissive about….And I think I tended to….The friends that you made in those years, tended to be either in your neighborhood directly. And there were a few kids that were in the neighborhood that you played with. And then children, your friends were also, friends who did well, if you were making good grades. Kids you hang out with or that you learn and then their parents know about you. I spent some time in those years. Probably it was more middle classy than my parents were. Kids whose homes were a little better. But I think it went pretty well. I didn’t play any ball really until I was [INAUDIBLE] …capture the flag. I got into scouting. When we went to . We moved to then and I went into the seventh grade and my brother was in the third grade. I think in the seventh, in the junior high school I developed a lot more confidence. By the time I was in the eighth grade I was president of the class. In high school I was president of the class my Sophomore and my Senior years. I became pretty Americanized. I was very involved in Scouting and in some other civic stuff. And I worked after school. I think what gets you off the ground….When I was twelve, I think, started twelve, I had my first newspaper route. Started delivering papers. Actually I think I may have delivered papers in . I think I delivered the paper just the last few months before we left, on a bicycle. My parents bought me a bike and that was a big deal to get a bicycle. It’s interesting it was a big deal to buy….I got a fountain, the first fountain pen. That was in fourth or fifth grade. That was a big deal. They really never….They spent all their money on me, to the extent that they had any money left it was always for the kids, either little gifts like that. And you didn’t have television in those days. We didn’t have a radio. Dad didn’t get a car. We actually, the family, there was another family living in our building, that had a son, who was our age. I remember we drove to and saw Sergeant York, the movie. The movie with Gary Cooper. It’s a wonderful picture. He was a war hero. He was from or . Gary Cooper played him. It’s a marvelous picture. He was a pacifist, who enlisted and became the Congressional Medal of Honor winner and he came back home. He was a marksman, shooting wild turkeys. But then when we came home and returned it was Pearl Harbor Day, December seventh, . [INAUDIBLE] I think that’s part of our heritage. As some people would say, we were poor and didn’t know it. There was always plenty of food and my dad was very involved in the Jewish community there and subsequently in . But those early years, when you think about it, we had such an enormous adjustment to make.

DONAHUE: I was going to ask you about that. It seems that, well I’ve heard other people talk about arriving in and there being a lot of encouragement for Jews who were immigrating to go to various other parts of the country. And so many people just didn’t want to do that and felt so strongly about that, that they stayed in and didn’t explore any other economic opportunity at all. I guess this is more of an observation than a question, but your dad seems to have been somebody who was very open minded and aware of opportunities, that probably shaped your life a lot, too. In being a child in situations where you experienced this extreme disadvantage of having your childhood interrupted so much. [INAUDIBLE] Your family would be broken apart. For you to be able to arrive in this new place and be honored for who you are and what you had experienced. It’s kind of different than what Jewish kids in , who immigrated were experiencing. [INAUDIBLE] There were so many immigrants, so many survivors and people, who weren’t really, overall encouraged to talk about…

: Well yeah, I mean, I suppose that….I don’t know why my Dad did not explore a little more about teaching. I don’t know that, whether, how he felt ….We were living in a very crowded place and I think he wanted to get us out. Because that apartment, because it was my mother’s parents, her two sisters. They would just let us live there. But I don’t think he wanted to stay there. So he set about pretty early trying to figure out what he could do and how to earn a living basically and bring money home, enough. And that , whether he felt too hemmed in there, or there just really wasn’t very much for him to do, because he couldn’t be a teacher, he couldn’t be a Rabbi. He couldn’t get a job. There were so many people looking for work, as you say, it was [INAUDIBLE] situation. But it did, I’m sure it shaped my life, from the time we went South. But I think, I don’t know that he always….They had a very strong work ethic. My parents had a strong work ethic. So they encouraged me or were not opposed to seeing me have a paper route at a very young age. That’s a very liberating experience. I always tell people, I remember getting up at five in the morning, going out to get the paper and then going by the coffee store and putting a nickel down on the lunch counter and saying, I’d like a cup of coffee. [LAUGHING] I was probably not much higher than the stool. But you know when you have a newspaper route and you start putting a little money in your own pocket… I always had a job of one sort or another. I mean my parents just didn’t have any extra money to….And we knew that. Knew how they lived. Whether there might have been small, I guess there might have been a small allowance. After that newspaper route, I delivered papers at home for a while and then I started – I was tell [INAUDIBLE] over here the other day, my fiscal director, I hadn’t thought about it, somebody downstairs was, some of these people sell Home Interior [INAUDIBLE] do a lot of sell things. I was always selling things. When I was thirteen, I started selling stationary and greeting cards, knocking on doors. Had a little bag. Within a year I had a little business. Had a whole room full of stationary and greeting cards for all occasions. Of course then I was going to the factory owners and selling Christmas cards to businesses. Then I started working in town after school for Jewish merchants. I was always working, doing some kind of work. And it didn’t really get in the way. I mean, the kids…People….All of those experiences help you appreciate the way other people live, especially working people. …family, money’s tight and how you make it. [INAUDIBLE] I have an appreciation for my mom and dad. My mother was always basically working at home. She never worked. She was a very traditional mother, in that she was a housekeeper and cooked, did the cooking. Later on, I think, when my brother and my sister is ten years….My sister was born in . She’s fifteen years younger than I am, eleven years younger than my brother and was not initially expected, I think. After my sister was born, a few years later, she finally became, decided she wanted to work and became a sales lady in one of the large department stores, where she worked for a long time. I think it did a lot for her, she had never worked in any store. But she’s a very warm, very outgoing woman and was everybody’s buddy. So, she was a very good sales person, but it was a new experience for her. It was an enormous adjustment for her. [INAUDIBLE] Anyway, scouting, during the….We were a little, I suppose people, where else but in the South, if you think about it. Having people recognize you, elect you to be president of the class or something was quite a nice thing. But I think scouting did a lot of that. I became an Eagle Scout. Was a counselor in a scout camp for summers, for several years, getting close to the scout executive. He….This is really kind of off the subject, but it’s interesting when we say how things affect your lives. The scout executive in , married a woman, who was a Cherokee Indian. He was a, his name was [INAUDIBLE]. He was a park ranger for much of his life, and then he got into scouting. He also, during his ranger days, learned the stuff to make, he was a taxidermist. He amassed a large collection of animals that he had mounted. His wife collected. And together they also collected a lot of Native American things, since she was a Cherokee Indian. That was in the summer and the camp put on a large Indian pageant every Thursday night. The pageant of Hiawatha. I was Hiawatha for several years and my brother was Minihaha. Put a wig on him and I would paddle a canoe in the lights at night. But [INAUDIBLE] when he retired, he gave this collection to the town of and said, I’d like to start a little museum here. So, he gave that collection and began a Natural History museum, which today is about a square block. He’s no longer there, but they’ve developed this wonderful museum. Natural history with outdoor walking trails and some really beautiful….It’s quite remarkable in the sense that it’s also twenty miles from , which has a very large science museum. The point I’m getting to, is that after, when I was at, later went to , I was a Chemistry major before I was a lawyer. I’ve always had an interest in Science and in this region here. We are behind in the education – we’re still behind. Caught up. But I’ve always had an interest in….As much a result of that experience as seeing Bud Shield’s museum grow and starting a science museum here. So, outside of my work, one of my major activities involved this organization that we began in this last legislature, we finally got two and a half million dollars and we’re going to put a planetarium with a very sophisticated projection system out here at the community college. The guy, in fact in our little offices are next door, picture of the on the wall. Because seeing that effort work and flourish in the small town of gave me some real thought, idea that we can do it here. I think a lot of, I mean I think scouting gave me a lot in terms of values apart from the Judaism that was in my family.

DONAHUE: Did you have a Bar Mitzvah?

: Uh huh. Bar Mitzvah in .

DONAHUE: Did you prepare for that with your father?

: No. Now, my father, after he did this commuting thing. We eventually, we then moved to Gastonia, where I was in the seventh grade and he….When he began working full time, actually he worked in the little community called Lowell, North Carolina, which is about seven miles away. And he assisted the Rabbi. Sometimes between rabbis he would do – he often acted as the cantor during services, and he often was on the pulpit. Sometimes he was not. During the high holiday services, especially, like Yom Kippur, where people pray and they stay in the synagogue all day, the rabbi needed somebody who he could take turns with. But he was very close to most of the rabbis that were there. The Rabbi I was Bar Mitzvahed with was named Bill Silverman. It was a very large group. I suspect there were as many people who were not Jewish in the synagogue as there were, a lot of friends, and my father had all of his friends from the mill that he worked with everyday. He was, he became an office manager there, in addition to his working daily around….A shift manager, but he became sort of a supervisor in Mr. Heilbraun’s. And then by the time I was thirteen, in the seventh or eighth grade, there were school friends, mother had friends. So, it was a very nice congregation in . There were probably fifty Jewish families. I was Bar Mitzvahed, my brother was Bar Mitzvahed. Can’t remember who the rabbi was when he was there. And my sister, nowadays they also have what they call Bas Mitzvahs for girls, where girls go through the same thing. Or they have what they call confirmation classes. I think she did that. We stayed pretty active, but like a lot of other kids, who are in the South, in high school, fourteen, fifteen years old, you sort of….Friday nights, teenagers, unless they have a real tie to, unless you’re in a Conservative or Orthodox family, that is very traditional – get away from the Sunday school. And your next connections with other Jews….Charlotte has a large Jewish community and there were a lot of children our age, boys and girls. And then we went to college. But we had the Bar Mitzvah. And my father, people weren’t very aware of the Jewish community, I think, in . In retrospect, after I worked in the Civil Rights Division and after I was in the service, I always felt a little sad that the Jewish community was not a little more assertive about desegregation. But I think the store owners were all afraid to lose their businesses.

DONAHUE: You think that if they weren’t afraid to lose their businesses, that they would have been inclined to push for desegregation?

: Oh, I think that….I mean, Judaism is founded on the theory of Justice. It was as bad for them to look the other way as it was for, I mean churches were segregated. It was a segregated life. Although you grew up with it, you don’t pay attention to it. I mean you just aren’t aware of it. You have, well and . Well, , as I was growing up, I think…..

END OF TAPE 20.U.5b, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5c, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE A

ARWEN DONAHUE: …this is tape number three, side A of an interview with John Rosenberg.

JOHN ROSENBERG: Yeah, we were talking about the Jewish communities in these towns and what they might have done. I think it’s always hard to look back and say but. I think the answer would have been if they had felt they could have done more, they might have done more. I think that they were in the business establishment just the way….I mean they were living in the South and they were not going to be trail blazers, because they would have been ostracized. I mean, if you look at what was going on in the South in those earlier years and even later years when I was in the service. Well, I was saying in high school, I think there were sometimes that there were some occasions at high school with kids who were from the , from the black school – there were a few social, not social engagements, but some things were you tended to see each other. Or if you were working together, where they were stock boys. I worked in department stores for many years. You would run into them. But it just was an accepted way of life. And I have just….It did not really, even in college, I mean you heard more about Jews not getting into the country club, that kind of stuff. And that there were incidents from time to time, but it was never, I don’t think I was ever conscious of anti-Semitism. But it was really not until I was in the service, working with other officers who were African-American, I mean the Service was the first major arena where there was desegregation in this country, the Military. I have told the story that when I came back from….We brought an airplane back from England one year, by way of Iceland and Greenland. Came back to New York and then two of us….The radar operator on my plane, I was the navigator, was a fellow named Abe Jenkins, who was from South Carolina, who was black. And he and I got on the train in together to come home. And when we got to , he got up all of a sudden and said I’ll see you when we get back. And I said, where are you going? And he said, I’m going to the back of the train, where the blacks are. And I said, why? And he said, Yeah you better, that’s where, I need to go there, otherwise we’re going to have some trouble. And he did. And I think it was an incident that changed my life, really. Because I never….I was really outraged and aggravated and thought we’ve got to do something about that or eventually maybe I can help to do something about that or whatever the thought was. It was not easy for….It wasn’t going to come without court action and others, but I think that the Jews are no less, those Jewish communities are and the people who are there, are no less, maybe no more to blame than their other counterparts. But it was their economic circumstances and they were not willing to speak out or if they did, I don’t know where they did. I mean, the few people who did speak out, until there was more of a movement, couldn’t stay in their communities. I worked with a man, a lawyer in the Civil Rights Division, who came from and he started trying to be, I mean he was speaking out and the next thing he knew, he had no law practice left and he was in . So, it’s more easily said than done. But when you think about the history of the persecution with the Jews have had….Holocaust and all of the things that are behind us here, that they’ve gone through, you would have hoped that Jews would have been more sympathetic to the situation that blacks faced every day. And not quite as much of a willing participant. Easier said than done. It’s just something that bothers me, you know, philosophically it’s hard to defend it.

DONAHUE: So, then was the time that you were in the Air Force the first time that you had, had close personal contact with black people and formed friendships?

: Yeah, right, I think so. I went to….When I went to Duke, I went to Duke on a scholarship which terminated. Because I got, the scholarship I was given through a trustee of Duke, who was from . I can’t remember what his prominence was, but he was on the Board. And he died about six months after I went to Duke. And I had started working in the dining halls and they told me I made too much money and didn’t need a scholarship, which might have been all right. I didn’t have any trouble, I just worked my way through Duke. But he uh, Duke had a quota on Jewish students even in those years. And it was before the years that there were any black athletes to speak of, before Duke had any. So, I was just sort of thinking back, were there any blacks in my life in those earlier years? There weren’t. And when I came out of the Service, out of Duke, I went into the ROTC. And when I was in the military, that was the first time were I had any….And growing up in this country and thinking back on it.

DONAHUE: I wanted to ask you, you were talking about your experiences in Boy Scouts in your earlier years in . I’m wondering if there was ever a conflict between your Jewish identity and your Jewish practice and your social life? Did people expect you to be Christian and to be participating in things as a Christian? Was that a real problem for you?

: No, it was very interesting, I think. Because the Scout troop, all the Scout troops were sponsored by churches. And the Scout troop I was a member of was sponsored by the Associate Reformed, ARP. They were called the Associate Reformed Presbyterians. And I think they had two or three other Eagle Scouts from the Jewish community. And so, the answer is no. I mean I think they were cognizant of the fact that we were Jewish. And I don’t know that anybody ever tried to sort of convert anyone. But the troop, when I got to scout camp as a counselor one summer, I was sort of….I wasn’t….One of my jobs was to arrange the services and many of the scout troops had ministers along with them or they were their scout masters. And so, I found myself in the position of being, sort of the associate minister to these folks and I learned all the, many of the hymns. And as we grew up, I went to church a few times. I certainly went to that Presbyterian church. But I think it was just a healthy respect. I think people in the church appreciated, I mean were respectful of the Jewish community and that religion. And often times people came to those services. So, I don’t know that, I think, you know, we often, the Shields encouraged me to do that actually, the scout master. To be, I often times did the Vesper services for the campers who were there over the weekend. And there would probably be not much Jesus, but I would read from the old and the new testament and we would sing the hymns that they knew and it didn’t bother me. Now it might very well have bothered many other, not….Other Jewish men might have said, well you’re just stupid. What are you doing this for? [LAUGHING] Or you know, why are you being a minister in this largely Protestant camp and sort of embracing their way of having a service? But I didn’t have any problem with that. My parents didn’t have any problem with it.

DONAHUE: I was going to ask you, did your, do you think your parents taught you Judaism in a way that allowed you to think of that as not being a contradiction?

: I think my parents were very tolerant of other religions. I think my father….I mean my mother basically grew up in a small, country town and was Jewish, but had many more associations with non-Jewish people. Now my father had this very strong Jewish background. And there was actually a period of my life after I came out of the service that I had given some consideration to going to Rabbinical school. And in the Reform movement, the Reform Rabbinate is not so different from the minister’s life. It isn’t all prayer. It’s social work, visiting with people, around with the Jewish doctrine. So, I think my parents, when my father came South and started working in the factory and realized that it was not going to make sense to be kosher and that maybe bacon and eggs were good together. I think he essentially embraced the idea of reformed Judaism and was pretty – and since he worked almost all the time with folks who were not Jewish. I think only the factory owner was Jewish, Heilbraun. You just adapt culturally, much more, which the Reformed congregations have done. If you go to , Saturday all the stores are closed, right? The Sabbath is Saturday. And Friday night to Saturday night in this country, it’s all on Sunday. I mean there was never such a thing as Sunday school, but Jewish Reformed congregations have Sunday school. They basically adapted to living in a Protestant society. And I think we did that, of course I think my father, it was a big change in our family to have me marry someone, who wasn’t Jewish. Although it was probably less pronounced because we were both a little older. As time has gone on it has become much more common than it was. But then my sister married a young man from , who wasn’t Jewish. They subsequently divorced, but she’s had a significant other for many years, who’s not Jewish also. So, I don’t know how, my father, I assume he came to grips with that. I think they both felt comfortable about their sons and then their daughter, who were, you know, were sort of achievers in the community and were happy with their lives. And everybody likes to hear good things about their kids. I don’t think they were going to throw up barriers. I don’t know that it was ever verbalized. I think that my father had a very….He was very strong with his own convictions and had some very strong ideas, but again if your kids go in a certain direction….Raising children is as difficult for anybody in school. And if they pal around with, in a society where very few people are Jewish, to say well, you can’t go out with them or you shouldn’t go to that camp or you shouldn’t do this or you shouldn’t do that; it’s much harder. And I think they were always sort of adapting to where we were. I think. I think it shows terrific flexibility on their part. My mother was always much more of a social person, much more than he, which more than my father. My dad was a pretty private person. And he was very….He read and he worked and he read. When he was home, did the dishes, sat down and read. And he had this enormous knowledge of Jewish history and Jewish religion. And there were very few people, other than the Rabbi, that he really enjoyed having long conversations with. I mean they were just in a different world. He would do his work and liked his work in a very exacting way. But this fellow, when I asked you about Mrs. Hershfeld earlier, the person who volunteered….Her husband was a scientist, who came over here and became, and went into the textile work.

DONAHUE: Was his name William?

: It’s , wait. Her name was Frances Hershfeld, his name was….I think it might have been William.

DONAHUE: Yeah, now I’m remembering who they are. Yeah. I think they’re still volunteering there.

: Well, she just died. But he was – he died a few years back in . He was, lived in , before they moved to . And he came to to be, like the chief chemist for the factory, dye work and things like that. My dad could, would enjoy having him to talk to. And even in his retirement, when they moved to , he, one of his good friends was the Rabbi for that congregation. So he was not a, he was in some ways a pretty, very private person. And I think he didn’t either understand, understand may be the wrong word. He didn’t always appreciate what we were doing in our spare time. He didn’t grow up in scouting, but I think he really appreciated what we learned in scouting. And the people that he met, the other scout masters and the activities that we did.

DONAHUE: Was your brother a scout, too?

: My brother was a scout. And he became an Eagle scout in that same Presbyterian church. He endured a summer with me that he says he’ll never forget, because I was the scout master in charge of the cabin when he was a few years younger and was a camper. And I induced him to be Minihaha or twisted his arm or the Shields twisted his arm. When my dad in that way was pretty, I think, tolerant of what we did and just let us do it.

DONAHUE: Was being Jewish important to you at the time, from a young age?

: Oh sure. I think it’s always been important to me and is important to me, today. I think it’s had a rather profound effect on my life. I talked about it during….Judaism has been part of me all the way through and I guess I’m pretty conscious of being Jewish. Not that I think about it every day. It’s a very attractive religion, I think. It’s very simple. It’s principles make a lot of sense to me, if one is going to believe in a higher being. And people are aware that I am Jewish. And I have spent some time talking about Judaism, sometimes in schools, sometimes to Civic groups or Passover, that sort of thing. It’s nothing to necessarily flout; it’s just the way it is. And then of course, I said my wife is not Jewish. And we have a small Quaker contingent in the mountains that I participate with. So, we put those two things together, something I probably wouldn’t have predicted years ago either. I’m sure that all of this Holocaust history is very much a part of or contributed a great deal to what I’ve been doing in my later life, in this work that I do and the work I did in the Civil Rights Division.

DONAHUE: And I’d really like to discuss that more and maybe it would make more sense to do that after we [INAUDIBLE] your work here in the Civil Rights Division. We can put it more in context. Do you think? Or do you….

: Well, what were you thinking? What else did you want to talk about?

DONAHUE: Well, your later years, [LAUGHING] the rest of your life that we haven’t talked about yet.

: I see.

DONAHUE: I definitely am interested in hearing how your Holocaust, what you say about your Holocaust experiences that had a profound effect on your subsequent years.

: Well, I think the family, I think coming to this country….I think we’ve always been grateful for the opportunity that we’re here, from the time we came. And I think my parents were always very cognizant, emphasized that. I always remember right after we, when we moved to in those earlier days, like many other immigrant families, you’d have a picture on the wall of Franklin Roosevelt and the Statue of Liberty or something else. And I remember, I think I remember this incident. When the immigration people or the FBI showed up one day on our door in . Was it or ? And they came and took out – you were not allowed to have a short wave radio and you were not allowed to have binoculars, because you might spy on something. And we had an old monocular, one of those things that sea faring captains use. And they took that. And they saw the picture on the wall and they were very embarrassed in what they were doing. I mean they, my parents were very nice…

DONAHUE: I’m sorry, is what just immigrants that weren’t allowed to have these things?

: Right, yeah, if you weren’t American citizens. We were aliens, foreigns, aliens. And eventually, years later they brought them back. They returned them. I don’t know it was right after we got our citizenship papers. My parents applied to become citizens in after five years. Took their test and got their citizenship. We went to . Federal judges often talk about, the most poignant experiences, how often or how many of them remark about the thrill they make, they have in presiding over the citizenship swearings in. And we went to….My parents were sworn in, in . We went across the street. And I think it was….the restaurant….We went to a restaurant. I think it was the first time I ever ate out in my life, that they ever went out. It was a little diner across the street, after the swearing in ceremony. But, and I think that my work, going into the military, in part and then working in the Division and maybe the work I do here is all, in some ways I never viewed it as a sacrifice, but I think having a life in public service, in a way, is helping to try to make this country a better place to live in and give back a little bit. There are lots of ways of giving back, if that’s the right word. At least helping to contribute to making this a better society and not necessarily being governed by the dollar sign, which, you know, we all have an opportunity to do. But in that way, I think, all of this, at least I think that whether it was my parents or my Judaism, it all kind of comes together in some way that you….It’s a real privilege to do what I do and get paid for it. It was that way in the Civil Rights Division, to have a position where you can help to provide better opportunities for African-Americans of this country, by working, by using the legal system to make, to break these barriers down. And to do the same thing in my present job or what I’ve been doing for almost thirty years for poor people, to give them a chance to be on the same playing field or to level the playing field for them, at least when they’re trying to make their way through the legal system, or when they’re in trouble. And to make the legal system work for them, which they wouldn’t be able to afford unless it was for the lawyers and staff in this program that I’ve been in charge of for a number of years.

DONAHUE: During the early years that you were in the and and , as the war was developing, were you aware of what was happening in to the Jews? Were you able to follow that?

: I don’t think so. I don’t when we found out that they were all killed, that the family was killed. In or even that these ships that were not allowed in this country, all these that were going around and around, went back to , . I don’t know whether there was any contact. I don’t think there was. I don’t think….That’s a good question. Whether my father knew where his brother was, if they were alive. I don’t think they did have any contact. Because when we looked at those records, I think from being with Mother, that, that was the first time that she knew for sure. We had heard, I think, from….But I don’t think there was any contact. I don’t know. I was still too much in school. I mean, you know, it seems like it jumps from high school. It seems like you’ve always known the story of the Holocaust. But whether we knew that was happening when, let’s see I was, forty-four, I would have been thirteen, in the seventh grade. What are your, what do you know about that?

DONAHUE: Well, the stuff that filtered through the press was sketchy and sometimes you’d get news about what was happening to the Jews, but it wasn’t really until after the war when the liberators were encountering the camps and [INAUDIBLE] that they really knew the extent of what was happening and that, that started to really, that started to really reach the press. It wouldn’t have been until forty-five, probably. And definitely as far as keeping in contact, that would have been really hard.

: I mean that’s what I remember, that’s my thinking. You read these stories about the Germans letting the American Red Cross into some of their camps and cleaning them up and all of that stuff. And that they did visit some of the camps, right? At least right after the war. But I don’t know…

DONAHUE: The camps that the Red Cross…

: I mean after the war began. Huh?

DONAHUE: The camps that the Red Cross visited were cleaned up and altered for the media to come in stages.

: But I, I mean that’s all I know. I don’t think my father and mother had any idea if they were alive or where they were until after the war. We don’t really know what happened to the family in , I don’t think. And , the family in . I think we know they’re, did not live. I’m not sure we….I don’t think I could find the record. Trying to remember what his first name was, whether that was another De Frees. I have a cousin, who did this family tree and he drew a family tree like a tree with limbs and how many immediate relatives on my father’s side and cousins and cousins. We’ve got eight children and there are cousins that we’ve never met and what happened to them all. I just don’t think there was any real communication in those years.

DONAHUE: Do you remember, do you remember learning about it later? Do you remember what was going on in your family in when you started to learn about what had happened?

: Well, I mean I was in, let’s see in forty-five I was fourteen. You know, I don’t have a good recollection. We just had a reunion in and one of my teachers was there. She’s living out west. She was, it happened that she was the newest teacher to come to the high school, so she’s only four years older, five years older than some of us. At the time she was an algebra teacher. And she had her grade book with my name in it. She still had her grade book from those years. I had very little recollection about having been in her class. And so I don’t know whether other people have had better memories about when you start to lose your line. How good is your memory? Your memory is probably not too bad for high school days.

DONAHUE: It seems like memories change so much over time.

: So, I don’t know what I remember about . I mean if you go to….we went to services Friday night as we all did and you listened to what happened. I’m sure we were conscious of what, I mean, just like everybody else when they did go in forty-five and liberate the camps…

END OF TAPE 20.U.5c, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE A

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5c, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B

: Side B?

DONAHUE: Yeah, tape number three, side B….Tape number three, side B of an interview with John Rosenberg.

: Well, I was just saying I think that Betty, Zemi’s wife, came out of the concentration camp alive. And so there, she was visited a couple of times. We really did not dwell on anything with her, I think, other than the fact Zemi was her husband and that she had made it through. That’s when we went to see her. And of course, that was in nineteen sixty, it was nineteen seventy, which would have been twenty-five years after she went to , after the war was over.

DONAHUE: She went to in forty-five?

: She went in, or forty-six, right after she got out. And my father and mother, I think he was in touch with her and had seen her. They went over before we did….it was somewhere in there….well maybe they didn’t. I don’t think they went to until after he retired, which would have been in nineteen sixty-six. When he was sixty-five he retired from this factory in . And he went, they moved to . And then in their retirement they took some, they started traveling. I think they had corresponded pretty regularly, Betty and my father. So it was almost twenty years. I think she had relatives in also. I don’t think they knew very much about what was going on in the war. I’m not a fount of knowledge about that. You probably have more from other interviews about that. Did you talk to any people, who knew very much about, who were in this country, who knew very much about what was happening in the camps in the forties?

DONAHUE: No. And I haven’t talked to [INAUDIBLE]

: No? You haven’t talked to many second generation people? My sister was born in this country. She was born in . I still speak fourth grade German. Can understand it. My brother can speak a little. My sister doesn’t know German. Do you want to see any of this stuff? You’re welcome to….I don’t know what there is to see, but I think you’re doing it primarily on tape. We have birth certificates. I don’t know where my father’s is, couldn’t find it this morning. I have that Gedank book in the other room. I’ll show you that.

DONAHUE: [INAUDIBLE] picture.

: Well the pictures, unfortunately are with my mother. She has the old book. I almost brought them back because nobody ever looks at them. I happened to look at them on this trip because I had a little time. One thing, I didn’t know what had happened to it. I was afraid we might have misplaced them. They went back and forth a couple of times. When my mother moved from up to ….My dad passed away in nineteen eighty-nine and she stayed another year or two in , where, her sister lived in the same place called . Then she moved to . She’s about fifteen minutes from my brother in a high rise for the elderly. So a lot of stuff got moved around, but she does have a lot of the photographs. And it’s nice and interesting to go back and look at.

DONAHUE: So, changing the subject a little bit, when you were in college at Duke, you were really interested at that point in Science? Is that what you thought you were going to [INAUDIBLE]

: I enjoyed, I like Chemistry and Physics and had a very good Chemistry teacher. I also like doing sales work. Sold a lot, all the way through high school. I sold clothes, women’s shoes, everything. I decided I might enjoy being a chemical salesman or technical representative of that sort. So, when I came out of Duke, I first went into the Service. When I came out of the Service I went to work for a chemical company in called Os-Cal.

DONAHUE: You graduated in what year?

: Fifty-three.

DONAHUE: Fifty-three and then you enlisted?

: I was in the Air Force ROTC partly because at the time they gave you a break on tuition, it was sort of an avocation. I think becoming, I had originally thought, I thought about, I mean I joined it. Air Force ROTC. The Navy ROTC’s were giving full scholarship. The Air Force ROTC was just being established. And I think there was a commitment to two years afterwards, it seemed like. Footloose and fancy free in peace time it might not be such a bad thing to do. It was a trade-off for some tuition and again the idea of giving some service for your country. So at Duke, so that’s what I did. And then the commitment, the two year commitment, I first thought I would like to fly. And I went to flight school for a short period of time and that didn’t really work out, so I ended up going to navigational training, which I liked. And I became a navigator and that had a three year commitment attached to it, which I served in .

DONAHUE: So was there any, that was during the Korean War.

: Right. It was during the Korean War, but I was very far from .

DONAHUE: So there was no [INAUDIBLE] you knew that you weren’t going to get involved in [INAUDIBLE]

: Well, I don’t know that it would have mattered. There were some of my, we had our choice if you were near the top of the class where you wanted to go. Maybe everybody had a choice. And I could have gone to, I don’t know that you went to , to the Pacific or to teach. I decided that the opportunity to go to seemed like a really good one. So I chose to go to , because of it just seemed like a nice opportunity to travel. There were, [INAUDIBLE] but it was not a military, you know, as I said, it was cold during the Cold War. And so we were doing a lot of exercises on the border out of . [INAUDIBLE] is where the special forces were. And we did a lot of very low flying. I would not have objected to being in, if we had, had to. The big, I think most poignant thing for me was, while I was England, at one point towards the end of my tour, we were on alert for the Six Day war during the Suez Canal crisis. And we were on alert for a week and nobody knew whose side we were on. We didn’t know whose side they were going to go on. And I said, I think this is not a good way to spend your life, when you don’t know which side you’re on and then they tell you which side you’re on, whether you like it or not. So, I enjoyed my days in the military. We had wonderful associations. We, the group I was with on this small base in still gets together every two or three years. We’re going to meet in in October. Over those years my pacifist, Quaker wife has gotten to meet some of my war-mongering friends and they’ve all gotten to know her. Most of them are retired. A lot of them spent their life in the military and then retired or had second careers. But when you mentioned Duke a while ago, I was thinking in those days….If I had it to do over again, I’d probably would have gone to the . I had this scholarship. It’s not as good an academic reputation as it is now. It’s a much more liberal small town. It’s very church dominated. But I made very good friends. I was in a Jewish fraternity there during those years. It’s probably the first group and strong associations with other Jewish men that I had had since probably ever, because many of them came from other states, , and what have you. While I was there, I was the delegate to the convention that agreed to stop limiting fraternity membership to Jews. Still it was predominant [INAUDIBLE] I had a lot of mixed feelings about that at the time. It was also part of the history. There was a Jewish sorority and a Jewish Fraternity, sort of kept me, those were my strongest associations when I was at Duke, other than the fact that I also worked in the dining halls, doing dish washing. And then I became cashier and head waiter and learned the food business, working my way through school. There were, most of my very good friends at Duke were Jewish. We lived together for the three or four years I was there. In terms of the continuity and where I was going. And then I went into the Air Force and actually in , in we had some distant relatives. I was just looking at the family tree [INAUDIBLE] related. A cousin of my father’s was in . And then his daughter married a rabbi and they went to , and I think they’re back in now. But most of the people on the base were not Jewish. I mean most of my associations in the Air Force were not Jewish. So it’s sort of come and gone. I don’t know what we did on the Jewish holidays. I think someone, there was a chaplain, he wasn’t Jewish. I mean, it wasn’t a full time Jewish Chaplain. I think I went there, several times during the holidays, I went to , to be with family. It’s sort of come along. I was looking at a picture at my mother’s, photograph that was taken at when I went back to at the . There was a group of Jewish students and the rabbi, who was at Hill-el, which was the Jewish Student organization on most campuses. That was taken [INAUDIBLE] it’s always sort of been there. Want to stop some?

DONAHUE: Okay, it is now August twenty-first and we’re back again for more

interviewing and Mr. Rosenberg is going to say some things that he learned last night from talking to his mother.

: We were not sure, I was not sure what had happened with my uncle when he was arrested. My mother does not know either, whether he was arrested and taken away with my father, which I didn’t remember, or whether she thought he was arrested at the same time or almost at the same time. But may have been taken to a different place, because my – I told her my only recollection was running the sandwich up the street to my father. And I didn’t remember seeing my uncle at all. He may have been there and I was just focused on my father. But they did, he and my father did end up going to together. And they were released together, because I remember, as I said, seeing them very bald, in in my Aunt’s house, Ellie’s house. Then my mother confirmed of course, that my grandmother took me then to Ellie’s house. She said that they made their way to also. She said my grandmother then went to and lived in a small apartment by herself, near my Aunt Mary. That she said, she remembered the German, the Dutch government would not allow immigrants to live with their relatives. So she couldn’t live with her daughter, Mary, who had four children. And she took, apparently took her meals with her. My family then went into this large detention camp that I had explained, had talked about. And she said my uncle also got there, eventually ended up in that same place in . She didn’t know how he got there, because her impression was that he did not stay with my mother, my grandmother. Whether he went back to Lehr to close things down very quickly and then made his way to , which is very possible. I don’t know and I’m not sure that anyone recorded that. But she did remember that he was in the detention camp with us part of the time because she said that he, she remembered him coming up and talking with my father. I just don’t remember. I have no recollection of that. And he may not have been there the whole time we were there. She said he was on the boat that, after us and the boat turned around, she remembered because war broke out that very day, with the Dutch. And they told the ship to turn around. Or with the British. The war had started and they wouldn’t let the boat go. And you had asked about our contacts during the war. She knew, as far as she could recall there was no contact with anyone in the concentration camp. She didn’t remember when we learned that Zemi had gotten married in the camp, but there was no correspondence back and forth or any kind of….And no one had really any knowledge about what had gone on. She said, the Dutch government, that both my grandmother and my uncle ended up at Theresienstadt. They probably went to Westerborg first, where most of the refugees went to and then the Germans took them on over. That was pretty much, I just did not remember, couldn’t fill that hole in. When I was in the service, of course we had relatives in . And I went to a number of times with my Air Force, with our crew, we flew planes into several times and had some days off. It’s a very strange feeling to be in , I always remember, having, knowing you’re in a country where the language is yours, it’s not like the language you learned in college, but that people are speaking a language that you sort of know is your native language. And yet we really were, our trips were generally, our stays were generally quite short. And I really never made much of an effort to sort of identify the local synagogue if there was one. I mean I just didn’t come into contact with any Jews. I was trying to think in retrospect, I suppose my first big jaunt was to go, my contact with the Jewish community was really when I went to . When I was in , when I was in , I took a trip to where I visited my father’s sister and her family, and my counterpart, who was my age at that time. They lived out in the country. Living in place called [INAUDIBLE] which was a cooperative farming community.

DONAHUE: What were their names?

: Their names were De Fries. His name was Ivan De Fries and her name was . And that was when I met Zemi’s widow for the first time. She was living in an apartment, I think in Hifa. And I spent some time with her, but we didn’t really talk in detail about the camps or I don’t know enough of her own relations. I think she may have had a sister or someone. I don’t know about the details of her family. And Moshe, my cousin, had already gotten married to a young woman named Nuric. In fact while we were there, one of our other cousins was married to – well, no, that was when I went on my second trip. This time I was in the military. I was by myself. I stayed in a couple of weeks. We had some, I’d say we had some other relatives in Tel Aviv. His name was Berliner, he was sort of an amateur archeologist and he had collected this amazing – had done a lot of digging and rooms full of artifacts that he had collected. But they were still, they still led a fairly plain farm life back then as it were. You didn’t leave any food on your plate. They ate their chickens. They are their ducks. They ate every, they cleaned that duck up. But they were lovely, lovely people and they knew, of course, Betty. Then I just traveled around on my own. Later when I came, after Jean and I were married, we came back when she was pregnant with Michael. She said she was the first non-Jewish wife in the family. But while we were there we also went to a distant cousin’s, relative wedding. And that young man married a Yemenite, Jewish woman, which at that time was as different, as rare Jews marrying non-Jews in this country. That was several years later. It was nice. We are, we still correspond with each other. We still are close to our family in with Moshe. My father’s sister and her husband have died. And Betty has also died. In terms of itself when I went, I think I mentioned I had gone back to the town where my mother was born.

DONAHUE: Did you have any memories [INAUDIBLE]?

: I may have had some vague memories about the butcher store, because I was so small when we were there, five or six. I remember the butcher store sign. It’s hard to tell whether what I remember really has more to do with recollections from pictures than from what was real. The people I met, who remembered me obviously were contemporaries of my mother or the sisters. It was a small country town and I think my grandfather was well known in that area for his being a butcher, an honest butcher and hard working. It’s like in Prestonsburg, people who have lived here all of their lives and it was a very well known family, the Schubach family. So people when I first went there, word traveled pretty quickly, at least in the area where they were and I met a number of people who knew them. I stayed in the local hotel. Later when I came back with mother, the second time, you know, I mentioned her friends were there. But before that, but you always have this feeling generated by the notion that no one there that’s still alive, they’re all very embarrassed, maybe guilty about what happened. I guess most of them would say they didn’t know anything about it, just like the people who lived near and and saw the smoke, were looking the other way or knew. Probably most of them knew what was happening or many people certainly knew what was happening in . Many were very sympathetic to the whole idea of Hitler and were very supportive of him all the way through, certainly when they thought they were going to win the war. So, I’m sure that I think I had some of those mixed feelings and wasn’t, I was younger than, that interested particularly in trying to dig up a lot of Jewish history. Well for one thing was not in….I couldn’t go to the city where I was born. So other than the city.

DONAHUE: Why couldn’t you go to ?

: It was in the east zone. It was in the Russian zone, so we couldn’t go. We couldn’t go until the Berlin Wall came down. Couldn’t go when I was in the service or after that. I did not go to Lehr. I don’t know why I did not really ever try to go to Lehr. My wife, Jean and her mother, when they drove down from on a European tour went through there Lehr once to see. I have a film at home that was made by a Jewish film maker about a reunion about the Jewish community from Lehr, when Lehr hosted the Jewish community for a reconciliation weekend and he happened to be there and made a film of that. He’s in now, I think. But I have that film and Lehr’s a little bigger than it was. Then I have a family history that you can have or a family tree and there’s a letter from a distant cousin in , who sort of got into the genealogy and he went back to a number of these places where my father’s mother, the Rabbis and traced some of that history back. And went to Lehr and all of those small towns where my grandmother came from and her family came from. I guess I did not have anything that was really driving me to do that. I think when you get to be older, you sort of start thinking, somebody, which is one my interests in talking with you, it is important to preserve that history and it’s nice to have it and to know about it. I’m sure it has some impact on all our lives, but I didn’t do very much of that when I was in the service. There was still a lot of hostility, feelings, ever though my mother and….My father and my mother did go back to . They went once or twice. My father did not feel, I don’t think he was….They went several summers in their retirement to . They had been to on their honeymoon. So I don’t think their feelings were so strong. And my mother, as I said, kept up her correspondence with some of her friends. Anyway…

DONAHUE: So what compelled you to go back? [INAUDIBLE]?

: The trips to were generally military. We had an airplane. We were flying into bases in and had business there of one sort or another, training missions. I didn’t really just go there to sightsee. I was there for a reason and then generally we stayed over, as we did in other European places. I had some distant relatives in , which I went to see for family connections, who are related to my mother, two older brothers. And maybe the local explorations were kind of curiosity, but it was more looking at this cathedral or….The towns that I wasn’t familiar with….I went to Oberstein, I really went to Oberstein, to mother’s home town because I happened to be there in survival training in that area and didn’t realize how close it was. I think I was not yet on any….Whether I would have gone there otherwise, I’m not sure. I might have. I think I had some idea. I knew mother was still in touch with her contemporaries. My father had no connections to anybody in . Most of their friends that were alive had come to this country. So, there wasn’t much reason to go, other than maybe trying to determine what the status was of the Jewish community. Going to of course was a voluntary, a vacation thing for me. Going to . I think I didn’t go out of my way to go to .

DONAHUE: About going to , did you have any, did you ever had any Zionist feelings or any desire to go there?

: Oh, it was wonderful to be there. I felt really proud of what had been done. I never….My father was a very strong Zionist. And I felt very strongly and still do about the Jewish homeland there. But I didn’t really, I think with your parents, I never considered, I think, living far from where my parents lived, either there. I mean sort of staying in while they were here. Just like in this country, I went to one summer and went to other places. And unless you have the means to get back and forth every weekend or something, I always thought we’d want to be near them. So, is certainly, Jean went with me. I’d like to go back again. It’s a great accomplishment. It’s part of our history. And it’s especially nice when your relatives who are there or being that close, being my father’s sister.

DONAHUE: Did you have a strong sense of [INAUDIBLE] to the ?

END OF TAPE 20.U.5c, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B