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BILL BENSON:
Good afternoon and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Bill Benson and I am the host of the museum’s public program, First Person. Thank you for joining us. We are in our tenth year of the First Person program. Our First Person today is Mrs. Inge Katzenstein, whom we shall meet shortly.
This 2009 season of First Person is made possible though the generosity of the Louis and Doris Smith Foundation, to whom we are grateful for again sponsoring First Person.
First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust who share with us their first hand accounts of their experience during the Holocaust. Each First Person guest serves as a volunteer here at the museum.
With few exceptions we will have a First Person program each Wednesday through August 26. We also will have First Person programs each Tuesday until the end of July. The museum’s website at www.ushmm.org provides a list of the upcoming First Person guests.
This year we are offering a new feature associated with First Person. Excerpts from our conversations with survivors will be available as podcasts on the museum’s website. Several are already posted for this year. Inge’s should be available within the next several weeks. The First Person podcast joins two other museum podcast series also available on the website: Voices on Anti-Semitism and Voices on Genocide Prevention. The podcasts are also available though iTunes.
Inge Katzenstein will share with us her First Person account of her experience during the Holocaust, and as a survivor, for about forty minutes. We hope to follow that, if time allows, for an opportunity for you to ask Inge a few questions. Before you are introduced to her I have a couple of requests of you and a couple of announcements.
First, if it’s possible, please stay seated with us throughout the one-hour program; that way we minimize any disruptions for Inge as she speaks. If we do have time for questions and answers at the end of the program and you have a question, we ask that you make your questions as brief as you can. I will repeat the question so everyone in the room hears it and then Inge will respond to it.
If you have a cell phone or a pager that has not yet been turned off, we ask that you do that now. If you have passes to the permanent exhibition today, please know they are good for the entire afternoon, so that you can stay comfortably with us through our one-hour program.
The Holocaust was a state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims; six million were murdered. Roma and Sinti, or Gypsies, people with mental and physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.
More than 60 years after the Holocaust, hatred, antisemitism, and genocide still threaten our world. The life stories of Holocaust survivors transcend the decades and remind us of the constant need to be vigilant citizens and to stop injustice, prejudice, and hatred wherever and whenever they occur.
What you are about to hear from Inge Katzenstein is one individual’s account of the Holocaust. We have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with Inge’s introduction. And we begin with this portrait, taken in 1939, of Inge Katzenstein, born Inga Berg, with her cousin, Igan Berg, and her sister, Gisella, who is now Jill Pauly. Inga is on the left.
Inga was born in March 1929 in Cologne Germany. The arrow on this map of Germany points to the city of Cologne. The family lived in Lechenich, a small town outside of Cologne. The Nazis came to power in 1933 and life changed for Inge. In 1935 she was no longer allowed to attend German schools. On November 9, 1938, the Nazis carried out a nationwide pogrom against Germany’s Jews known as Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass.” Alerted to the danger, Inge and her family fled to Cologne during the pogrom. Pictured in this photo are Inge on the left and her sister Gisella.
Inge’s family decided to leave Germany and in May of 1939 they left for Kenya. In this photo we see Inge in the center with her sister Gisella and her mother aboard the Usambara, sailing to Kenya. Inge and her family lived in Kenya for the next seven years. Here we see Inge standing outside her family’s farmhouse in Limuru, Kenya.
Here we have a group photo of members of the extended Berg family on their farm in Kenya; Inge is the second from the left in the back row. Also pictured here are her sister Jill, in the front of course, her paternal grandparents, sitting, and then her uncle George on the left hand side and her parents on the right hand side. Inge pointed out to me that the building behind is the outhouse.
In 1947 the Bergs came to the United States, first to New York City; then they settled in New Jersey. We close with this contemporary photo of Inge.
After the Berg family’s arrival in the United States from Kenya in 1947, they lived in New York City. After a few weeks, Inge’s father found her a furnished room, gave her one hundred dollars, and she was living independently. Inge found work in Manhattan and went to night school in Queens. She later met her future husband Werner and they became engaged in 1950, married in 1951, then settled in Vineland, New Jersey, where Werner worked in sales and Inge would have a long and successful career in real estate.
Inge and Werner moved to the United States area from New Jersey in 1998; they have three children: Michael, a behavioral health consultant, David, an attorney, and Deborah, who is in financial services. Inge and Werner have nine grandchildren, and a two-year old great-grandchild, and a second great-grandchild due in June.
Inge volunteers for the museum by spending about forty hours a month doing translations of documents from German to English. She is able to do this from home on a computer. She has been translating a voluminous series of letters from a Jewish mother in Vienna to her son in England, who left Vienna as a young child on a kindertransport in 1939 to flee the Nazis. The letters span seven years. Werner helps with the translations when Inge encounters technical and legal terms.
Werner and his family came to the United States in 1939. He joined the US Army and was a GI fighting in Germany and France during World War II. He would later serve as a translator for the American occupational forces in Europe.
Inge has been a First Person guest in the past, but on those occasions she was here with her younger sister Jill. This is Inge’s first time by herself on the First Person program. And with that, I ask you to join me in welcoming our First Person, Mrs. Inge Katzenstein.
BILL BENSON:
Inge, thank you so much for joining us and for your willingness to be our First Person today. We’ve got a lot to cover so we should just start. You described to me that Kristallnacht was the catalyst for the decisions and directions that your family’s life took during the balance of the Holocaust and the war. You were very young at the time; you were nine years old. Let’s begin with you telling us a bit about your early life, the years before Kristallnacht and before the war: what life was like for you, your family, your community.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
I remember very, very little about my life prior to age 5, 6. But I do remember that I started school in 1935 and after six months Hitler had made a rule that Jewish children could not attend German schools anymore. There was no Jewish school in the little area where we lived, so I had to go and live with my grandmother, who lived about an hour, an hour and a half away, to be able to go to school. I lived with them for about a year, a year and a half, when my grandmother and my uncle moved to Holland. And I had to go back home, but I also had to go to school. So I daily had to go either by train or bus to Cologne, to the Jewish school. And I did that for about a year and a half. And I also did this in November of 1938. That was the day of Kristallnacht.
BILL BENSON:
Before we go to Kristallnacht, let me ask you just a couple more questions if I might. Tell us a little bit about your parents.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
My parents lived in a large, large brick house that had three stories and seventeen rooms. My father was a cattle dealer, and the barns were attached to the house, and we had a huge backyard that was fenced in. And my grandparents lived on the third floor, in an apartment on the third floor. And we were a family of seven, all the time. I never knew it to be any different.
When I went to school, that day in November, it was a Thursday, I remember very well: I had gone by train that day, and then I had to walk from the train station to the school. And there were brown shirts—and I don’t know if there were Nazis or SS or whatever they were—they wore the brown shirt uniform, standing in front of the school, and on either side of them were German Shepherds that were wearing muzzles, and I was horrendously afraid of German Shepherds.
In front of the school, I could see through the gates that the synagogue that was next to the school had burned out, and I could see where the roof had burned and the guards in front of the school said, “There’s no school today, you better go home.”
Living in a small town with no television and very little information coming in out of the big cities, my parents did not know what had happened in the bigger cities, except that during the day—and I came home on the train, and the train passed our house, and my mother saw me on the train and I waved to her, and she was really wondering, ‘what is that child doing home now?’ And when I told her, things had gotten very busy in the house too because a school friend of my uncle had come out and said to him, “Whatever you see and hear today, do not leave your house.” In other words, they were warned. Because even at that time, not all the Germans were bad.
At about three, four o’clock in the afternoon we heard the fire engines, and we looked and we could see that the synagogue was burning. And the thing is when a synagogue burns, everybody would run to it to try and rescue what’s possible. And this man had told my parents not to go. So my father and uncle did not go, and my grandmother said, “We have to leave here right away.”
So my father hired a car for us, with a driver, and put us, my grandparents—my grandmother’s leg was in cast, she had a broken ankle—and my sister and I, into one car, to go to Cologne. And our grandparents did not want us to see what was going on, so they put us on the bottom of the car. And I remember my grandmother kept her cast leg on me so I wouldn’t perk up to look.
BILL BENSON:
Kept you pinned down.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yeah. And my mother had my parents and uncles, they all followed later. When the driver of the car that my father had hired came back, the Nazis beat him up severely because he had taken us away.
And my parents and uncles and various aunts from other small towns all piled into this apartment in Cologne, where my mother’s old uncle and aunts lived. It was a two-bedroom apartment; in the end it must have been fifteen people. And of course, my sister could not go out at all, because they were afraid that she would talk—she was four or five years old, and they were afraid to even let her see daylight.
And I, having gone to Cologne on the bus every day, was allowed to go to school, and I went to school, and most of the time I stayed out of the apartment. I roamed the city of Cologne alone. At the time, coffee was rationed, and my grandmother liked to drink coffee. At that time it was being sold with an eighth of a pound. And there were lines in front of the stores for people to buy coffee, but in all the windows of the stores it said “Juden Unerwünscht”—“Jews Not Wanted.” And those are the lines I stood on. And I brought home a pound of coffee.
BILL BENSON:
Your sister told us, one time, that you were very defiant, and that you would go and do exactly what you said, get in lines that said “no Jews wanted,” and you would get and line and get coffee.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us some more about your behavior.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
About what?
BILL BENSON:
About your behavior, your defiant behavior.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
I was a brat! Well, I was forced to be independent, at age eight. I went to Cologne alone, I came back home, and it was part of my life.
BILL BENSON:
Right. What, during that time and after Kristallnacht—and just for the audience, this pogrom, this assault on Jews, assaults on their businesses, the violence against them, occurred all over Germany. Many, many synagogues were burned, all on the same night, and of course as you said, not having television, you probably didn’t know the scope of what was happening everywhere in the country.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
No. We did have a telephone and that started to ring, but still, the communications were not what they are now, of course. And one thing that really stands out in my mind is: Kristallnacht was Wednesday to Thursday. Thursday night it was kind of quiet; we went to Cologne, and there were so many of us that someone invited us to come over to dinner for Friday night, and there must have been ten, twelve people, and it was an upstairs apartment, and the doorbell rings.
And everybody got as white as a sheet, because the Gestapo was going from house to house picking up the Jewish men. And from that table, the men disappeared. Didn’t see them, we don’t know where they went, and the lady of the house went to answer the door, and thank God, it was just some—it was not the Gestapo. And after that night, I did not see my father again until we got to Kenya.
BILL BENSON:
So where did your father go?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
My father and uncle and a cousin got in the car and drove around Cologne—all night. The only thing they stopped for was to get gas. And they did this for two or three days just driving, and then went across the border to Holland. And when they got to the Dutch border, they were picked up by Dutch Nazis, and they wanted to send them back. And my uncle had to go up very high in the Dutch government to find out that they were not allowed to send men back unless they had written orders, and they didn’t have those, so my father was then interned in Holland until June ‘39.
BILL BENSON:
At some point even the Royal House of the Netherlands intervened to protect your father from being sent back, isn’t that right?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
Why did they go to Holland? Why Holland?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
It was close. It was close, and we were fortunate that in 1933 my family had smuggled out money to Holland—
BILL BENSON:
In anticipation of what they thought what would lie ahead.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yeah, of Hitler coming to power. And there they had money.
BILL BENSON:
You father, was he able to send any money back? No.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
No. No, no. There was plenty of money; we were not a poor family. There was plenty of money and my mother had all the access to it, but we had to leave it all behind. And when we left, each one was allowed to take out ten mark, and that’s all. So all the rest stayed in Germany.
BILL BENSON:
So with your father and other male members of the family, some of them in Holland, it’s your mother, your grandparents, and you and your sister, at home still. What was the decision making then that led to the decision that the family decided they really did need to leave Germany?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Well, my parents wanted to leave Germany even prior to this, and had applied for American quota numbers, which from Germany were extremely high, and they had no hope of getting there, so they were thinking of South America, they even thought of Cuba. But it was just—all these countries were not taking people anymore.
BILL BENSON:
In fact, Inge quipped to me that, she said, “I think our quota number might be coming up about now.” You know, just to kind of put it in perspective, in a sense. So those doors were closed.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
All doors were closed. There was very little that was left open. And that’s how, why we ended up in Kenya.
BILL BENSON:
And this is, of course, this is almost eight months before the war has actually broken out in September of 1939.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Right.
BILL BENSON:
So, tell us about how they got to the place of going to Kenya.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
One of my cousins’ wife had a cousin, who went to London and had a British education, and got a job in Kenya as an attorney, and he worked for a law firm and they—he and the firm—vouched for us to come to Kenya, and they were able to send out twenty one visas for the family to come out. And seventeen of us were able to leave and the other four could not leave right then and there, and they perished.
BILL BENSON:
Obtaining those visas however, those permits, was not an easy matter
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
No.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us a little about that. That was quite an ordeal.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
It was a big ordeal, because a lot of information had to be passed on by telephone. The telephones in the house we were afraid were tapped, so this cousin went daily to the railroad station to use a public phone to give all the information that was needed. And it took from November-December ’39 to about I would say April, ‘til everything was in order.
And don’t forget, during Kristallnacht, the Nazis destroyed the entire house. My mother found everything in the yard on the compost heap: books, carpets—well, glass was broken—and afterwards they, the Nazis, made the Jewish families clean up. And my mother had to go there alone to do this, and they kept asking her where my father was, and she kept saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” And they cleaned it up, and my father was gone and my mother had to take care of everything. And she bought all things new, and anything you bought because you were emigrating, there was a double tax. Whatever it cost the store, the German tax doubled.
BILL BENSON:
If you were going to emigrate and leave the country.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
If you were going to emigrate and take it with you. And she did all that. She bought clothes for us until we were adult, for my sister and myself. But none of it arrived. The war broke out; it was either bombed in the harbor or it was stolen. None of it came.
BILL BENSON:
And on top of that, obtaining these permits, she had to pay for those.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes!
BILL BENSON:
And they were very expensive, weren’t they?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
And the charge was from the British.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Charges from the British were fifty pounds per person, and after they realized that a lot of Jews wanted to come to Kenya, they upped that to 250 dollars per person.
BILL BENSON:
Fifty pounds—
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Pounds, yes.
BILL BENSON:
Which was a huge amount of money in those days. So your mother—didn’t your grandparents play an important role in the decision making?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
No, no. But they said—my grandmother was a very determined lady and she said, “We can’t stay here. We have to leave.” But, they said, “Wherever you go, we will go.” My mother’s mother was very ill, and she said, “If I have to die on the train, I’m coming with you.” And she was carried onto the train, and she came with us to Kenya and lived another nine, ten months.
BILL BENSON:
In Kenya.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
In Kenya.
BILL BENSON:
I want to come back to the description that your sister gave of you of being defiant. And she told us that at one point you actually got into an altercation with a kid.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Oh yeah.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us that.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
That was when I was going to school on the bus, and every morning there was this little boy that would come to the bus, in the afternoon, and would call me a “dirty Jew.” And that went on for two or three days, and I got fed up, so I gave him a bloody nose. But after I saw what I did, I got scared and I ran.
BILL BENSON:
He probably didn’t call you that again.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
No, I never saw him again.
BILL BENSON:
So the decision now is to go to Kenya, everything’s been put into motion, the permits have been obtained, your mother has bought supplies and clothing to last a long time, it’s been packed, you think it’s going to go with you to Kenya. Tell us now about beginning the journey to Kenya.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
We left Cologne by train, and went via Switzerland to Genoa, Italy. It was a wonderful trip, except that we were not allowed to talk, one word, on the train. Not a single [word]. They separated my sister and me.
BILL BENSON:
So you wouldn’t chatter with each other?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
So we wouldn’t chatter, or fight. And as long as we were in Germany, we were not allowed to open our mouth.
BILL BENSON:
And that was out of fear of drawing attention to yourself?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes, fear of drawing attention, or their wanting to see what we had or didn’t have. We had to be quiet. And once we crossed the border into Switzerland, my mother said, “Now you can talk.” And we traveled from the afternoon through the night to Italy, and we stayed there a day or two and then boarded a German ship to go to Kenya. And the trip took two weeks.
BILL BENSON:
And it was a German ship?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
It was a German ship that served kosher food, in 1939. And the trip was Italy through the Mediterranean, Gibraltar, through the Red Sea, around the corner of Africa, and down the coast of Africa to Mombasa. Up and down the coast of Africa, from Gibraltar all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. Because when we continued to come here, we boarded the boat in Kenya, in Mombasa, and then came down and around—it was a cargo boat, took seven weeks to get here.
BILL BENSON:
Inge, it was a German ship, so it had German officers on it. Did they know that you were a Jewish family?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Oh yes, oh yes. Not only did it have German officers on it, it also had carrier pigeons on it that Germans were taking to Tanganyika, and it was right before the war. God knows what they were used for, but they were using them.
BILL BENSON:
Do you remember the trip yourself?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Vaguely. Vaguely, ten year old. It was nice, it was a boat trip.
BILL BENSON:
There was one incident that you and Jill had talked to me about where your sister, I believe, was overheard singing. Tell us this.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
My sister had a good voice, and she was overheard singing, and the captain asked her to come and sing to them. And my mother was absolutely petrified that they were Nazis and that my sister would say something. She was four or five years old and she didn’t know the difference between a good or a bad person. So my mother lived in fear every time they called her to sing. But she did it.
BILL BENSON:
And she was worried about what she might even sing, right?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yeah.
BILL BENSON:
But you pulled that off, she pulled that off, you made the journey and you get to Kenya. Before we talk about Kenya, I want to just go back to something you told us a little bit earlier. As it turned out, all those goods that you thought would go with you didn’t go, and I think you mentioned that you had ten marks per person?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
How much, roughly, would ten marks be?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
I would say, at that time, I don’t know, you could buy as much as ten schillings, ten dollars would buy. That was all the money people were allowed to take out of Europe.
BILL BENSON:
So a teeny amount of money.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
It’s nothing.
BILL BENSON:
Nothing, yes, nothing. So you get to Kenya and you’re free from Germany, you’ve gotten out, and now you’re in Kenya. But new challenges begin.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us about life in Kenya.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
My father and uncles had gotten there maybe two or three weeks before us because they left from Holland, and my father rented a very, very large house in the mountains just north of Nairobi. And seventeen of us moved into this house.
BILL BENSON:
The seventeen that had gotten the permits to go, all seventeen of you.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes, together with my father, by the time we all had all congregated it was seventeen. And the house was very large and each family had a bedroom and there was one kitchen that everybody used. And we got there in June of ’39, war broke out on September first. And at that time, we were declared enemy aliens.
BILL BENSON:
By the British.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
By the British. We had left Germany stateless. We arrived in Kenya stateless. And then were declared enemy aliens. By the way, we came to America stateless. The day that war broke out, the British came with a big truck and soldiers to intern all the men as enemy aliens.
BILL BENSON:
And before you go on, the irony of you are Jews that have escaped the Nazis, you get to a British colony, and they declare you, because you’re German, to be illegal aliens.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Enemy aliens.
BILL BENSON:
Enemy aliens.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
And they took all the men and they wanted to take my grandfather. Ad my grandmother who was little, stood in front of this British officer and said, “We’ve been married 48 years and we’ve never been apart. And if you take him, you’re gonna take me.” So they looked at each other. They took my grandfather but they brought him back.
And I mean, he was not a spy. And they kept the men for a short while, I think after a week they came back. By then, the British had decided that the men would be used as managers of the farms that the colonials had, so that the British colonials could join the army and go fight, and all the men had to manage the farms. And since we were going to buy our own farm, we were interned on our own farm. We could not leave it without getting permission from the district officer. Even my sister and I couldn’t leave without first getting permission.
And so we all moved onto the farm. You saw the house; my sister calls it “the Villa.” It was made of cinderblocks and corrugated roof. The corrugated roof was really a savior for us, because it collected rainwater and that’s the only water we had to drink. The other water, we built a big cistern and collected waterfall because it only rained twice a year in Kenya, in March and September.
BILL BENSON:
And that was your source of water.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
That was our source of water. Electricity we didn’t have. We didn’t have a radio, we didn’t have a television. We did have a radio, I have to say that. It was operated by car battery. And we could only use it to listen to the news. Otherwise we would have been cut off from the world. And the house had cement floors, no electricity, no running water. There was a fireplace for heat.
Because we lived in Africa, we lived seven thousand feet above sea level. It was gloriously beautiful country. You looked out the window in the morning on a clear day, you could see Mount Kilimanjaro. The weather was cold at night, never more than 70-75 during the day because it was high up. It rained—rainy season it rained daily, in March and September. But then April it stopped, October it stopped.
And you had all the household help that you would want. The African were called “boys,” the men. Each house had at least three boys: a cook, a cleaner, a gardener, whatever, and they were wonderful people. They were warm, they were intelligent, they just were not educated.
BILL BENSON:
And you learned to speak Swahili.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Oh yeah. We had to.
BILL BENSON:
You had to.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
We had to. They didn’t speak English. Nor did we!
BILL BENSON:
Nor did you, exactly! Which was the official language of Kenya at that time. You’re ten years old, you would end up staying in Kenya ‘til you were almost eighteen, seventeen. One, that must have been a profound cultural shock, to move to Kenya, but you also had to then, in a country where you didn’t speak the English language, you had to then get educated, go to school yourself. Tell us about that.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
We went to school. My parents thought highly of education. After two days there, we had to go to school. And we went to a British school where we were hated. And, being ten years old, I had to start in first grade because I didn’t speak English. But I learned very quickly. Within three to four months I was at grade level, sufficiently. And went through the British school system, which was very good. It was British government schools, run under the auspices of Oxford or Cambridge.
After high school, the colonials would send their children to England for college. They couldn’t do that during the war, so they added a year or two onto high school, which gave you the equivalent of junior year in college. So we had a good education, after we learned English.
But the schools were all boarding schools, and my parents did not want us to go to a boarding school. So when we first moved to the farm, they decided to hire a tutor for us. That tutor lasted three, four weeks. We terrorized her. Both of us. She left.
And my parents didn’t know what to do about this, so eventually my mother—first we went to one of the private girls’ schools, which was also in Limuru, but in order to do that we had to move away from the farm, and we did that for one or two terms, and that didn’t work. So then my mother moved to Nairobi with us—
BILL BENSON:
Leaving your father, still at the farm?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
My father stayed on the farm because he was interned on the farm, and he also had to manage somebody else’s farm.
BILL BENSON:
One of the British soldiers who was off fighting in the war.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yeah. My father commuted by bicycle in Africa. We moved to Nairobi; my father stayed on the farm with his parents, and weekends he either came in or we went out. And then we went to school that way.
BILL BENSON:
So in Nairobi you were living with your mother while you were going to school?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes. Oh, no, first they tried to find homes in Nairobi for us where we could live, but that was not very successful so after two terms my mother said, “This doesn’t work, I have to take care of my own children.” And that’s what they did.
BILL BENSON:
During that time, until the war’s end, Inge, did the family know much about what was going on with the war, and particularly did they know what was happening to Jews in Europe? And did you have any contact that you know of with maybe extended family members still in Germany?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
We did not know what was going on in the camps. Don’t forget, we had no newspaper, the only thing we had was radio. We had no idea what was going on, except that my grandmother had a brother and wife who were still in Germany, and we got a Red Cross letter, a letter from them through the Red Cross, telling us, I’m not quite sure whether they told us they were going to Theresienstadt or whether someone else was, I don’t remember. And they perished.
And we had absolutely no idea until after the war. And I remember someone gave my parents a book of pictures of what had gone on in the concentration camps. And my father took one, opened it up, and I remember when we got on the boat to come here, the first thing he did was throw it overboard. He couldn’t see it. He was devastated. Because we lost—my grandmother was one of eight. My father had approximately a hundred living cousins, and only one or two survived. So, he could not look at those things.
BILL BENSON:
Inge, tell us, when they war ended in 1945, the British colonial men had been off fighting the war returned to their farms. What happened then? Because your father had been managing one of the farms for them; now, war’s over, what’s life like for you in Kenya?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
It didn’t change much. It didn’t change much, we still had the farm, we still lived in Nairobi and we still went to school. I graduated high school from there. And life didn’t change much, but my father didn’t want to stay. We tried again, quota numbers, and the ironic thing is that we came to America in 1947 on the German quota, because no Germans were coming then, but we were stateless. And I became a citizen through Werner, he was a citizen.
BILL BENSON:
Once you became married.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Once I was married, yeah.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us, when you left Kenya, you were also motivated in part because things were not tranquil in Kenya at that time.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
No.
BILL BENSON:
Say a little bit about that.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
I don’t know if anyone here knows the history of Kenya, but in the mid-40s, the Mau Mau were uprising. The uprising of the Mau Maus was the Africans wanted their lands back. And particularly in the highlands where we lived, there were bands of Mau Mau who went around stealing and killing all the Europeans. They didn’t care whether they were; as long as you were white they were going to kill you, because they wanted their property back.
Don’t forget the British had just, taken over their land, without buying it from them or anything. It became theirs. And the Africans by then had begun to be educated and realized that they were being oppressed. And just around where we were living, that was the biggest uprising, and we left about three months before. So not only did we survive Hitler, we survived a second time, from the Mau Maus, because we certainly would have been killed.
BILL BENSON:
When I was a kid I remember my father had on his book collection a book called Uhuru about the Mau Mau Uprising, I remember that.
So, in light of all that, you make it to the United States, you’re stateless, you arrive here, and as we said at the beginning, no sooner that you’re here that you’re living independently. How did you get started with a new life?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
My father found a room for me, and I was what, seventeen, eighteen, and being very green, I said, “The only job I want is on Fifth Avenue. I don’t care what it is, it’s going to be Fifth Avenue.” And I had gone to school in Kenya, taking shorthand. And when I got here, I armed myself with—I first went to continue taking some courses in Queens, New York, and when I moved here I armed myself with a New York Times, and read the want ads, and anything that was on Fifth Avenue I marked with a pencil.
BILL BENSON:
No matter what it was?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Doesn’t matter what it was! I started on 23rd Street to work my way up. I got a job in the twenty-somethings but I only lasted there a week. I was green! So back to the newspaper, back to Fifth Avenue, and I found a job as an assistant to the secretary in an attorney’s office. So they hired me, and I was okay, and after a week or two, the man said to me, he was from Brooklyn—no, no, he wasn’t, the teacher was—the man said to me, “Ms. Berg, do us a favor, go back to school and learn something.” But they kept me.
So I went to night school, and I took shorthand and typing again, and the teacher always said [Brooklyn accent] “Ms. Berg”—he was from Brooklyn. So by then I worked in Manhattan, went to school in Queens, and lived in Brooklyn. I used the entire subway system of New York. And I stayed with that office until I got married.
BILL BENSON:
And, Inge, your father had been a cattle man, a cattle dealer in Germany. In Kenya he’s a farmer. Now he’s in New York City. What did he do when you first arrived?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Oh he wasn’t, he was miserable, he was miserable. And everybody advised new immigrants at that time to go and get a poultry farm, because they didn’t have to talk English to the chickens.
And my father listened and then he said it was the biggest mistake in his life, because chickens, if you know, on poultry farms, they keep dying. They don’t lay eggs, they die. And the feed costs more than human feed. And after a while my father converted his chicken coops into a dairy farm, and then he was okay.
BILL BENSON:
In New Jersey?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
In New Jersey, yes.
BILL BENSON:
In New Jersey, yeah. And was able to get back on his feet after that.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
Inge, why don’t we do this, why don’t we turn to our audience and see if they have some questions of you. If not I’ll ask some more, but we see one hand up already—yes sir.
BILL BENSON:
If I could somewhat paraphrase the question: in light of what the Nazis did, how would you deal with the feelings of hate, or what thoughts would you have for people about who feel hatred in light of what they suffered or others suffered?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
I would feel horror, and I think with my quick temper, I would give him my opinion, but I don’t think that’s right today. I think today people should be educated and that hate is an illness. You don’t have to be—you’re not born hating. You have to be taught to hate. And the only way it can be taught is with love and understanding, not to hate. All people are humans and they all have feelings and they just have to be taught and channeled in the right way.
BILL BENSON:
Young lady in the back? Yes.
BILL BENSON:
Question is, did you live, I guess, a religious Jewish life earlier and how did that change in the different places, if it’s changed, Kenya and then the United States.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
We always an Orthodox Jewish life. The reason my parents didn’t send us to boarding school is because there was no kosher food available. We’ve always been observant, to this day. We’re still Orthodox.
BILL BENSON:
One of the things we weren’t able to get into, Inge and Jill have told me that they had always kept a kosher home, and of course after the Nazis took power, they outlawed that, they made it impossible, yet you still managed—at great risk—in those years while you were still in Germany after ’33 to maintain a [kosher home]. How did you do that?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Two of my uncles were shochtim, which were ritual slaughterers, and one cousin had a butcher store. And they would secretly do the slaughtering at night and at the same time that they slaughtered the animal, they would shoot off a gun, so that people would believe they had shot the animal. And they did that for years.
And during the Nazi time, after Kristallnacht already, when we lived in Cologne, meat was not available. And I had this very, very ill grandmother, and there was a lady in the town where we lived who would bring a live chicken on the bus to Cologne so that one of my uncles could slaughter it for my grandmother. And if she had been caught—
BILL BENSON:
So hidden, basically.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
No, to keep a chicken quiet you—
BILL BENSON:
I can’t imagine.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yeah, you take its neck and put its head under the wing, and it can’t cackle.
BILL BENSON:
I have just really learned something. We had another question, yes sir.
BILL BENSON:
Question is, in light of all you experienced, did you take up keeping a journal or recording or writing about all that you and your family experienced?
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes and no. Some of the things are written down, but we have spoken so much of it and so continuously, our children grew up with it. And they know it. Now our grandchildren are learning.
As a matter of fact, one of our grandsons, who lives in Pittsburg, asked us to come and speak to his German class, because he was taking German, two years ago, and last year he asked us to come again to speak to his history class, because they were doing the German history of that period. And I said, “Matthew, why do you want us to come again? It’s the same children, you’re in the same class.” He says, “No, it’s different children. I want you to come again.” And we talk as much as we can. I think my sister’s writing—I’m not.
BILL BENSON:
Okay. Folks I think I’m going to have to stop the questions there. When we close up the program in just a couple of moments, Inge is going to be available, step down off the stage here, so please come up and ask her another question, meet her, whatever you’d like to do, so Inge will make herself available in just a couple minutes.
But we’re not quite done yet. I might mention that Inge told me that there is a film, and I remember it being out, I didn’t see it, several years ago, “Somewhere in Africa,” [Nowhere in Africa] that was widely received, plus a book, and Inge said it really does mirror their experience in Kenya. It’s about Jewish refugees from Germany in Kenya during the war. So it’s a movie that you certainly would recommend as being very representative.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
Yes. And it’s a book.
BILL BENSON:
And also a book. So I want to thank all of you for being with us today, I certainly want to thank Inge for giving us what is really only a glimpse into all that she and her family experienced both during the war and post-war.
I want to remind you that we do a First Person program each Wednesday until the end of August and also on Tuesdays through July. Our next First Person program will be next Tuesday, which is March the 12th, when our First Person will be Mrs. Nesse Godin, who is from Lithuania. Mrs. Godin survived a ghetto, slave labor, several concentration camps, and a death march before she was liberated. So please if you can come back to another First Person program.
Also, just to remind you that we do have excerpts as podcasts on the museum’s website or available through iTunes if you want to hear an excerpt from today or any other of our First Person guests.
It’s our tradition at First Person that our First Person gets the last word. So with that I’d like to turn back to Inge to close our program and then she’ll step down off the stage.
INGE KATZENSTEIN:
My last word: we’re volunteers at the museum here, and one of the reasons we volunteer is to tell the world that this should never happen again. People’s inhumanity to people is something that is abhorrent to me. How can one person just be so bad, have so little conscience and live with themselves by hurting other human beings?
And that’s the main reason we are fortunate enough to be able to volunteer here. My husband and I personally don’t spend too much time in the building, because we work from home, but I think it’s very, very important that children are taught not to hate. Hate is an awful word, and it should be eliminated from the language.
