Ester Starobin
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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 today. We are in our tenth year of First Person. Our First Person today is Mrs. Esther Starobin. We shall meet Mrs. Starobin 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 serves as a volunteer with the Museum.
With few exceptions we will have a First Person program each Wednesday through August 26. We also have First Person programs on Tuesdays through 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 the First Person program. Excerpts from our conversations with survivors are available as podcasts on the Museum’s website, and several from this year have already been posted, and Esther’s will be posted sometime over the next several weeks. The First Person podcasts join two other Museum podcast series that are also available on the website: Voices on Antisemitism and Voices on Genocide Prevention. The podcasts are also available through iTunes.
Esther Starobin will share with us her first person account of her experience as a survivor for about forty minutes. We hope we’ll have an opportunity to follow that with a few questions from you, if you wish to ask Esther a question. Before you are introduced to her, I have several requests of you and a couple of announcements.
First we ask that if it is at all possible, please stay seated throughout our one-hour program; that way we minimize any disruptions for Esther as she speaks. Second, if we do have time for questions and answers and you have a question, I ask that you make your question as brief as you can. I will repeat the question so everyone in the room hears it, including Esther, and then she’ll answer your question.
If you have a cell phone or a pager that has not yet been turned off, we ask that you take a moment to do that now. If you have passes to the Permanent Exhibition today, please know that they are good for the entire day so that you can stay with us to two o’clock comfortably and then go to the Permanent Exhibition.
The Holocaust was the 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, to stop injustice, prejudice, and hatred wherever and whenever they occur.
What you are about to hear from Esther Starobin is one individual’s account of the Holocaust. We have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with Esther’s introduction. And we begin with this portrait of Esther Starobin, born Esther Rosenfeld.
Esther was born in Germany, and the arrow on our map of Europe points to Germany. She was born in Adelsheim, a town located north of Stuttgart, Germany. And here we see an arrow that points to the location of Adelsheim.
Esther was the youngest of five children. In this photograph are her brother, Herman, her mother, Katie Rosenfeld, Esther, who is sitting on her mother’s lap, her older sisters, Bertl and Edith, and her father, Adolf Rosenfeld, as well as her sister Ruth.
On November 9th and 10th, 1938, a violent anti-Jewish pogrom, known as Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass," was instigated primarily by Nazi party officials and Nazi Storm Troopers and took place throughout Germany and Austria. The pogrom also took place in parts of Czechoslovakia. In this photograph, Germans pass by the broken window of a Jewish-owned business that was destroyed during Kristallnacht.
Concerned about the safety of their family, the Rosenfelds registered their children for a kindertransport, the informal name of a rescue effort that brought thousands of Jewish refugee children to Great Britain from Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1940, and our arrow shows the route of the kindertransport from Germany to England.
The kindertransport began on December 2, 1938, less than a month after Kristallnacht. The last transport from Nazi Germany left in September of 1939, and the last transport from the Netherlands left of May 14, 1940.
Esther wore this tag attached to her clothing as she traveled from her home town of Adelsheim, Germany to Thorpe, Norwich, England to join her foster family, the Harrisons. And we close our slide presentation with this photo of Esther with her English foster family: Alan, Dorothy, and Harry Harrison.
In 1947, after the war, Esther came to the United States, settling in Washington, DC. She attended the University of Illinois and had a teaching career, specializing in world studies, in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is adjacent to the Washington DC area. Today Esther and her husband Fred continue to live in the Washington DC area.
They have two daughters: Judy is an attorney in Indianapolis and Deborah founded – and I want to spend just a moment on this because I know you’ll find it very interesting – in 2004, Deborah founded the Hand-Made Afghans Project to “bring comfort and warmth to our wounded service members.” They have so far made over 2,000; in fact Esther gave me, right before the program, the latest count. I believe they now have made 2,356 hand-made quilts with the work contributed by over 1500 volunteers across this nation.
So far these quilts have gone to a variety of hospitals including Walter Reed Hospital here in the Washington area, the Craig Joint Theater Hospital in Afghanistan, and the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where our wounded soldiers are treated, in those locations.
Esther and Fred also have two grandchildren, and I’m pleased to say that Esther is joined today by her husband Fred—Fred if you wouldn’t mind letting the folks know you’re here.
Esther’s volunteer work here at the Museum has involved helping to expand the Museums collection of documents, photographs, and other items. She is also a contributor to the Museum’s writing project, which produces editions of "Echoes of Memory" a collection of writings by survivors. These compilations are produced every several years and the most recent was produced last year and we’ll have another “Echo” produced this coming year.
The Museum’s bookstore carries “Echoes of Memory” but I also want to let you know that right after today’s program there will be copies of “Echoes of Memory” outside the Museum, up the stairs, and Esther will be available to sign a copy of that if you wish to get one.
And with that I’d like to ask you to join me in welcoming our First Person, Mrs. Esther Starobin.
BILL BENSON:
Esther, thank you so much for joining us and for your willingness to be our First Person today. Let’s get started, because we have a great deal to cover and we also hope to have an opportunity for some questions from our audience.
You were very young when your parents sent you to England, too young to really have first hand memories of the experience. But from what know of that time, what you know from your older sisters, tell us what you can about your family, your community, what that early life was like for you and for your family.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Okay, I was two years and two months old when I was sent from Germany to England, so all the information that I’m going to share with you basically I’ve collected over the years from my sister and from a person in Germany who is studying the Jews of the area that I came from.
My family—as the picture showed you, there were five children. My father and mother had originally lived in another little town. When you say I came from a town, it’s not really a town. Even today there’s only one stop light; it’s a really small place. There were about ten Jewish families in the area.
My father had served in the First World War and had lost a leg in the war, so he had a wooden leg. He sold grain to the farmers in the area and occasionally helped in the trade of a horse or something like that. Originally, before the First World War, he had trained to be a baker, but of course, he couldn’t really do that with one leg; it was too hard.
My sisters tell me they had a very pleasant childhood. They never needed anything; they were very happy. They went to the local school until the Nazis prevented them and they could no longer go to school in Adelsheim.
At that point, my three older sisters were sent to live with my mother’s aunts in Heilbronn and they lived there for a while. And then that didn’t work out and they were sent to Aachen, where they lived with another family, [and] also two of my mother’s sisters. They lived in Aachen until they were sent to England. My sisters recall that my aunt—there used to be strangers in the house at night and they were gone in the morning, so my sisters assumed that my aunts were helping them escape from Germany.
The other thing that I’ve heard from my sisters is that sometimes they walked across the border to Belgium, and they would come back with items hidden in their clothing that they needed or were being smuggled back into Germany.
My brother and I stayed in Adelsheim with my parents. I have no idea, and even though I’ve found out a lot about what life was like, I do not know how my parents got me out of Adelsheim. We also don’t really know why they sent me, who was two, and my brother, who was six, why they didn’t send my brother and they kept me.
In 2000, there was an event commemorating the—commemorating isn’t really the right word. There was an event in which it was recalled when the Jews of Baden, which is where Adelsheim was, were sent to France, where all the Jews were collected and transported to France to work camps, to Gurs, Rivesaltes. And at that time the Nazis made a list of everything that was in our house, this gigantic list.
My sisters and I went to Germany for this event, and at the beginning—my sister who’s 12 years older than me understood what they were saying. In the beginning she translated. Then she stopped translating and I had no idea what anybody was saying, actually.
But what I wanted to say about this list and the events at this; I came home with a big program totally in German—and I must make a comment, the person who translated it for me is sitting in the audience, and it was really very nice Mrs. Lotti Eichhorn who did a great job of translating!
BILL BENSON:
Give us a wave, Lodi. Thank you very much.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
But—
BILL BENSON:
Esther, before we go on to the events that would lead to your family sending you and your siblings away to England, tell us a little bit about your extended family, as well as—you’ve mentioned, that Bertl, I believe, is thirteen years older than you—tell us the age range of all of your siblings, if you wouldn’t mind.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Okay. Actually Bertl is twelve years older; my other sister was eleven years older; my next sister, the middle of the middle was seven years, still seven years older; and my brother who was four years older. We had one other uncle that lived in Adelsheim with us but he came to the United States in 1935, maybe he came in 1937, because he came before I was born.
Each of my parents had ten siblings. Several of my [father’s] siblings had come to the United States earlier. My mother had one sister who had gone to England in 1933. The rest of the relatives were all killed in the Holocaust.
BILL BENSON:
So clearly many, many cousins and uncles and aunts—a very large family.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Oh absolutely. And not that I actually knew this family, but in Germany there are people in many of these little towns who study—they’re not Jewish people but they’re people who are interested in the Jewish community—and they trace the history. So there’s a man there called Ryan Hart Lochman, who has done a lot of studying about the Jewish community there.
And he has in fact collected information on most of these relatives of my extended family, so I actually have a family tree that goes back two or three generations. And the thing about it is the generation that were my parents were of, of course, it has all these people and then it says, for the most part, what camp they were killed in. So it’s kind of a mixed blessing, this.
But often, I have done this a couple of times before, and sometimes Bob will send me a note and say, “What about this or that?” and I never know the answer, so I send an email to Ryan Hart and he will look it up for me and find out. So quite a bit of the information that I know I’ve learned from Ryan Hart.
As far as—my sisters talked about, my second sister Edith talked about taking the bread to the community oven and not paying attention and dropping it in the creek. She talks about going to the front room of the house were the cookies were hidden and eating them all up, but knowing what the consequence was she still ate them.
My sister Bertl had talked about going to school, and when we were in Germany in 2000, she met other people that she had gone to school with. And it was really, it was such a good experience for her because she could talk to these people. Someone had died in the first grade and here they were talking about, what did he die of, what was the history?
And the other thing—because you asked me what life was like—one of the people mentioned that her father had put food on my parents’ step after dark because it was hard for my parents to find food, and another person mentioned that her mother had exchanged items, taken goods from us in exchange for food. And I said to Bertl, “Who knows if that’s true?” And she remembered, she said she’d gotten letters from our mother that said that these people had done that.
And the interesting thing about the person who left food on our step, the man said to us, his mother was very upset about it because she was afraid her husband would get caught, and then of course they would have all been punished for doing this.
But life was pretty hard for my parents after we left.
BILL BENSON:
Before you left, once the Nazis began to consolidate their power in the 1930s, the events leading up to Kristallnacht, do you know—especially in light of what you just mentioned about food being left for the family—do you know anything about what happened to your father’s business, his ability to earn a living during that time?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Well, he was taken to court by someone who said he had given them a bad cow—or horse, I don’t remember which it was—but it was the beginning of trying to take businesses away, so it became quite difficult for him to run his business.
And the other thing, talking about food, they had of course been kosher, because it was an Orthodox area and everybody was kosher. But once they no longer had a butcher there that could kill things kosher, and they started to send for food from someplace else, it came and it was spoiled, and that was the end of being kosher for them.
And I would imagine—I don’t really know this, but I would imagine—at that point they were just interested in finding food; it didn’t really matter so much what kind of food it was.
BILL BENSON:
Kristallnacht, of course, convinced many German Jews, including your parents, that life under the Nazis had become intolerable and would only get worse. Do you know much about what happened with Kristallnacht and its impact on your own family?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
In Adelsheim, apparently people came from a nearby, bigger place, and in each little village they collected one or two people who joined in the groups. And when they got to Adelsheim they destroyed the synagogue, they took the books out and took them to the sports arena—I don’t understand that—and burned them.
Jews were dragged out of their houses and were either jailed or hurt. My parents’ house was off the main road so they were spared by that, nothing happened to them. My sisters were in Aachen at the time, and they walked to school. I mean it wasn’t like now where you knew immediately what was happening in the world. And they saw that the synagogue was burning so they went back home. And it was right after that that the kindertransport was started.
BILL BENSON:
Within weeks, within weeks. In early 1939, that’s when your parents made the decision to send you and your sisters on a kindertransport to England. You’ve already mentioned that, for reasons you don’t know, your brother didn’t go at that time; they sent you instead.
What do you know about the kindertransport? Tell us a little bit about the kindertransport in general, but what you know about the arrangements, if anything, your family was able to make to get you out.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
I don’t know anything about the arrangements, actually. My sisters were in Aachen and I would assume my aunts made that arrangement. I mean Bertl, my older sister, talks about having her ears pierced before she left because it was supposed to improve her eyesight, and my sister Edie—neither my older sister or my middle sister remember anything about the trip. My sister Edie, who liked food a lot, remembers they got food when they got across the border into Belgium. But that was all any of them remembered.
As far as the kindertransport itself, after Kristallnacht a group of people in England went to the Parliament and tried to make some kind of arrangement to rescue children. And the arrangement was that children could come without their parents and with some kind of financial support and that they would be helped to re-immigrate later.
As far as the actual arrangements, my aunt, who was in England at the time—she had gone, as I said earlier, in 1933—worked as a domestic, because that was the only thing she was allowed to do. So she made arrangements for my three sisters and found them all homes with different people.
My sister Bertl lived with a family that had a place in Scotland, so she was in London and then went to Scotland. When she was sixteen she came back to live with my aunt and go to work. My sister Edie lived with a Jewish family in London, and then when the kids in London were sent out of London, she went to some other relative of theirs. She was not allowed to finish school; she always said that she was treated like a maid.
And my sister Ruth originally lived with a Jewish doctor in London and then was sent to a hostel. Again, we don’t really know why. My sister Ruth said it was because she refused to do her lessons—her Jewish lessons, Hebrew lessons—but I don’t think so.
But as far as when I went, I lived with the Harrisons—you saw them in the slide. Uncle Harry worked for a shoe factory which was owned by a Jewish man. And this man put a sign up on the bulletin board, and asked was there anybody willing to take a child.
Well they had a son, Alan, and they wanted another boy, but they didn’t, they got me instead. I was originally supposed to go to Wales and I don’t know what that was about. But my placement was arranged by the [Society of] Friends.
BILL BENSON:
The Friends as in the Quakers?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
The Quakers, yes.
BILL BENSON:
So they helped to arrange this.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Yeah. So as far as the actual arrangement, I have a letter that a Mrs. Edmunston, who was a Quaker, sent to the Harrisons telling them when I would be coming down from London on the train, could they come down to the train station to pick me up or did they want me delivered to their house, like a package. I don’t know which they did, I don’t really know.
But the Harrisons lived outside of Norwich. Norwich is a cathedral city, and they lived in what’s now suburban Norwich, but then it was kind of far out. And I lived with them for eight years.
BILL BENSON:
Before we talk about that time—so your three sisters went before you and you don’t know why they went before you, or was there a reason for that? And then you would follow several months later.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Perhaps because they were leaving from a different place? I don’t really know. They went in March and then I went in June.
BILL BENSON:
You went in June, and do you know—because you all went to different homes?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Mm hmm.
BILL BENSON:
So the four of you are split up; your three sisters go together and they end up being split up immediately. Were each of the homes that they went to homes in which the folks there had said, yes we’d be willing to take somebody from the kindertransport? Is that how that worked?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
I think so, yeah.
BILL BENSON:
And do you know, given their age, your sisters particularly, did they talk at all to you about what that was like to one, be taken from their family, going to a different country, and then they go to separate homes upon arrival.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Actually, my sisters never talked about it.
BILL BENSON:
They didn’t, okay.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
At least, not when I was a kid, and not for a long time. And that particular aspect they haven’t talked about. My aunt of course knew where we all were—
BILL BENSON:
And this was your aunt in England?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
My aunt in England.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us about her. Aunt Hannah, right?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Aunt Hannah. She was a fiery lady; you didn’t get on her bad side. She had quite a temper. But she was a very good lady, and she worked, as I said, as a domestic. The interesting thing about my aunt, at some point she had saved enough money to buy a home, a house, in London, but she wasn’t allowed to buy it. So she had a gentleman friend, and she bought the house but it was in his name. And I think that’s kind of the way it was.
My sister Bertl lived with her once Bertl was sixteen, but Aunt Hannah really kept an eye on all of us. I haven’t talked about Norwich at all, but she did come to visit where I was living, but there was a definite antagonism between my aunt and my foster mother. I don’t know if it was a religious thing, a cultural [thing]—they definitely were antagonistic toward each other.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us about your experience, then. You go to this pretty rural place, move in with this family, the Harrisons. Tell us about your life with them.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Okay. I assume I didn’t really know what was happening to me because I was that age. When I first got to Norwich I got scarlet fever, and in those days you were quarantined when you had scarlet fever, so I was in a room. Auntie Dot could come in because somebody had to come in, and Alan used to play with me through the window.
They lived, as I said, out—it was a rural area, a new area. And Alan, I accepted Alan right away. I think he reminded me of my brother. So I was very comfortable with Alan. I absolutely was terrified of Uncle Harry, and he was the mildest, kindest man you ever met. I was absolutely petrified, and I can only think that I heard men yelling, screaming, whatever they did, and that I made this connection.
The Harrisons belonged to a very fundamental Christian chapel, and a Mr. Ramsey owned this chapel, and I believe that when I first went, that he helped my foster parents get the equipment. In those days when you were two you were still a baby, so they needed stuff. And he helped them.
I went to church with them. It was a very close community; they had a lot of activities, all of which I enjoyed. As far as knowing I was Jewish and they were Christian, I don’t think that was something I was aware of. I certainly didn’t know about being Jewish when I was two, and I didn’t know other Jewish people in Norwich. What I’ve learned since the war is that there were over two hundred kindertransport people in that town, in that county, in Norfolk. But we didn’t—if the Harrisons knew them, I didn’t know they knew them.
At some point I was supposed to be taught some Hebrew, because Mr. Ramsey knew Hebrew, but I didn’t learn much; I’m not very good on languages. I went to school there; I loved school there. And when I left I was just about to take the eleven-plus exam, which was the exam you take to see which kind of school you go to.
Now Alan was a really good brother. I mean most kids, I don’t think they would have taken to someone else usurping some of their parents’ attention, but he took me everywhere, took care of me, followed me, never tried to strangle me or do any of those things big brothers sometimes try to do. And I was very happy there.
Now the union that Uncle Harry belonged to had trips, so we went on the train to the seaside, we did those kind of things. Once my sisters could travel they came to visit in Norwich and were really part of the Harrisons’ family. They felt very comfortable there. And I can’t imagine; I mean the Harrisons lived in a small house—and Alan and I, my foster brother, talked about this—we don’t know where everybody was, but they were there.
One of the times Bertl came, she took back a live chicken, because everything was rationed in England and my aunt was very kosher. So the Harrisons found a chicken for Bertl but they couldn’t get it slaughtered in Norwich because they didn’t know where, so she took this live chicken back on the train.
A couple of times we went to London, the Harrisons. I once went to a Seder, it was somebody that my aunt worked for, but I had no idea what was going on. I just knew it was very long, but I didn’t really know.
I knew my sisters, you know, I had met them. I didn’t really know what was happening to my parents. It wasn’t anything that was discussed, my sisters didn’t talk about it, even though I’m sure they talked themselves, and Bertl of course had gotten letters from my parents in the camps, which I didn’t know about until the 1980s. So I had one letter—two letters, actually—that my mother wrote to Mrs. Harrison, but I didn’t really know about those either. It was like I was kept in the dark a lot, and I didn’t ask questions a lot.
BILL BENSON:
So for, in a sense, all practical purposes, you knew the Harrisons as your family, and at some point as you got a little older you knew you had sisters—they would come see you and you were aware of that—but it sounds like everybody tried to protect you from telling you too much.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
I was; I had never heard the radio. I mean I guess the Harrisons had a radio. I never heard it. And there must have been newspapers, but I don’t remember seeing them.
BILL BENSON:
Of course, England got into the war in 1939, very shortly after you arrived. Did the war affect where they lived? Did you experience any of that?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Oh yeah. We had a bomb shelter that we went into. We carried gas masks. I mean I do remember going into a trailer to get the gas masks checked. And in fact, many, many years later, when I had a daughter in a co-op nursery, somebody brought a gas mask for the dress up corner, and I had a heart attack. That gas mask was out of there fast! I don’t think kids needed that.
We were near—the Eighth Air Force was stationed near there, so there were a lot of planes and things flying over, bombs. Parts of Norwich were destroyed.
BILL BENSON:
You just mentioned your parents—you got letters, your sisters knew they were in camps. Tell us what you have been able to learn about your parents once you left Germany in June of 1939. What happened after that?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Well my parents and my brother, in October of 1940, were rounded up, as were all the Jews in Baden, and they were sent to France to Gurs, then Rivesaltes. My father had a wooden leg which somehow didn’t get sent with him, and there’s some correspondence about another wooden leg being found for him.
And they were in those camps until 1942—
BILL BENSON:
And these were in France?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
In France. My brother was with them until 1941, and he was then rescued—there’s another group called A Thousand Children, that were brought to the United States. He came here in 1941. He knew we had uncles but he didn’t know where they were, but there was a list. There’s a German Jewish newspaper, Aufbau, and there was a list of the children who were arriving, and my uncle saw that list.
So my uncles picked him up, and then he was brought up by my aunt and uncle. When he first came here, my aunt talked about, he would hide food all over the house. He was always hungry. I mean as long as he lived he was always hungry, there was always a lot of food around him.
He would never talk about it. In the late 1990s Fred and I went to Adelsheim because I needed to know where I came from. I felt like I’d been born in a black hole. I knew nothing about it. And I sent a postcard from Adelsheim, and his wife told me he wouldn’t look at the postcard, he just would not talk about it or anything to do with it.
My parents were there until 1942, then in August of 1942 they were sent to Auschwitz and they were murdered once they got to Auschwitz.
BILL BENSON:
In fact, the date itself, you know the actual date, don’t you?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
August fourteenth.
BILL BENSON:
August fourteenth. How did you learn that?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
There’s a French book that lists all the transports from the French camps, which somehow Bertl knew about, and she got it. And it lists—they were on transport 19—it lists their name, their age, where they were from, and what day they got to Auschwitz, so that’s how I know.
And I think Bertl actually knew. I think in England she had known that; there was some way that she found it out. But we never talked about it.
BILL BENSON:
And you brother, they were able to get him out, really not terribly long before that.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Right.
BILL BENSON:
Less than a year before that.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
There’s one thing about my brother. My sisters were not allowed to go to school in Germany, in Adelsheim, so obviously my brother didn’t go, and yet there’s a listing, on some list of the boat that he came on here, that says he could read and write French and German.
So it’s a big puzzlement. How, where did he learn to read and write French and German? Was it in the camps? Who taught him? Who knows, don’t know.
BILL BENSON:
Will you tell us a little bit more about the few letters that were sent while you were in England by your parents, before they were sent to Auschwitz?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
In the 1980s, when there started to be a lot of information on television and articles and stories about the Holocaust, my sister Bertl casually mentioned, “Oh, I have some letters from our mother.”
BILL BENSON:
So you had never known that.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Oh she knew it. I didn’t know.
BILL BENSON:
No, no, you didn’t know.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Yeah. So my husband Fred had them translated; somebody in his office knew German. And that really is the only way I know anything about my mother. My mother wrote the letters; my father at the end would say hello, goodbye, whatever. He didn’t say much.
But my mother wrote as a mother would to any child, as I would say to my children, you know, she would tell this to Bertl who was a teenager—
BILL BENSON:
And the oldest child.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
And the oldest child, “Make sure your sisters are good, they say thank you to the people who are taking care of them, they do well in school, they clean behind their ears”—you know, all the things that mothers say.
And then as the letters went on, the writing got smaller, less punctuation. I think as my parents realized they were really not going to be able to come and meet us, there was a definite change. Now Bertl said she had more letters but they had gotten lost over the years, but the one thing she said to Bertl was that, “You must keep the family together.” Which is why, in 1947, with help from Bloomsbury House, we all came here.
BILL BENSON:
Before we turn to that, you had, by all accounts, as you remember, a very happy experience with the Harrisons. Say a little bit more about each of your sisters. You mentioned that one of your sisters felt that in many ways she was no more than a servant in the house she was in. If you don’t mind, giving us a little more of a sense of their circumstances.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Yeah, okay. Edie, that was the one you were talking about, lived with this family, and worked in their house. And then when she was old enough she joined the Women’s Army and was in the Army in England. She was in the Army because she came a year later than we did because she needed to be demobbed. And she actually went back to Adelsheim after the war in her uniform—
BILL BENSON:
So right after the war?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Right after the war. And she said she was walking down the street and somebody came up to her and said, “Oh, you’re Adolf’s daughter.” They knew exactly who she was. But she went back; she went to get us birth certificates.
And Bertl lived with a Scottish family and they went to—
BILL BENSON:
I wanted to hear this.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
That’s what you wanted to hear. They went to Scotland and then they came back and at some point, later on, after Bertl wasn’t living with them anymore, some police came to the door, and they said, “Do you know” and they gave some name. And she said, “I have no idea who that is.” And they said, “But it’s Mr. Poole, the man you lived with.”
Apparently he was a spy for the Germans, and when he had been looking at planes he had been spying for the Germans. And what a good cover-up, to have a little German Jewish kid.
BILL BENSON:
A little German Jewish foster child—amazing.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Yeah. And Ruth, as I said, lived in the hostel.
BILL BENSON:
And what’s a hostel? I mean, we think of the youth hostels where people go and travel and stay.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Well this is where people go when they don’t have a home to live in, and it’s a group home kind of thing. And she lived there. Just before we came here she had finished school and was starting to work. And when we came here she went to high school and then she went to college here.
BILL BENSON:
As you were saying, you mother very clearly was saying to Bertl, “Keep the family in tact, make sure they’re okay.” The war comes to a close, it’s 1945. What happened then, because your one sister’s in the army, they’re all adults, Bertl is a young adult, and there you are, still a child, living with the Harrisons. What did Bertl do then?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Well, Bertl made arrangements for us to come to this country. As I said she got help from Bloomsbury House.
BILL BENSON:
And what was Bloomsbury House?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
It was an organization that was supposed to look out to make sure we were being treated right and that sort of thing. I guess I knew I wasn’t ever going to be able to stay with the Harrisons but it wasn’t uppermost on my mind. And Bertl got these—Ruth came one week and the next week she got passage for us.
The Harrisons had no phone. Bertl needed to get hold of them because I was leaving the very next day. So she called the police and had the police go ‘round to the Harrisons and tell them that they had to take me to London so I could leave.
BILL BENSON:
Did they know that was coming? Yeah, so they knew that was coming.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Yeah, they knew. So Uncle Harry couldn’t take off work, he didn’t come with me, but Alan and Auntie Dot took me up to London and handed me over—there’s been a lot of handing over in my life—you know, handed me over and I went with them. Alan tells me his mother’s hair turned white overnight that night, that she was pretty upset, as I can imagine.
Alan, who’s a very good student, was supposed to get the Lord Mayor’s Prize that day at school; of course he wasn’t there to get that either. But Bertl and I were to sail on the Queen Mary, but the Queen Mary had a strike. So Bertl had a boyfriend who was a butcher; he gave her a sausage, and my aunt had given her bread, so we had food to eat.
I was miserable on the ship. I mean I was seasick and the whole thing. And I don’t know that Bertl was much better. What I didn’t know until recently, she wasn’t so happy to come here either, but she felt that she should do that.
So when we came here, two of our uncles met us, and Bertl remembered one uncle; the other was an American. And when we first came here we lived in my aunt and uncle’s house, and it was a terrible, terrible experience.
BILL BENSON:
Was that in the Washington area?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
In Washington D.C., right on North Capitol Street. It was a big house; there was another immigrant family, my aunt, my uncle, my cousins, my aunt’s mother. And my aunt was mentally ill. Nowadays she would have been able to have pills, she would have acted normal but she didn’t. My uncle had a violent temper; he occasionally threw furniture. I had come from this house where nobody ever raised their voice—
BILL BENSON:
In a quiet little village.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
In a quiet village, and we were living on North Capitol Street. There were streetcars, so I had a new school, where I was very unhappy, a new religion, a new family—everything was new. And it was really quite a bad experience.
BILL BENSON:
And you’re, at this point, it’s 1947—
ESTHER STAROBIN:
I was ten.
BILL BENSON:
You’re ten years of age.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
But once Edie came and my sisters got jobs, they got an apartment and they brought me up, which to me, when I think about it, they were young women trying to make a life for themselves, and they were stuck with me. I mean sometimes when they went for conferences they were dating the people I was having for teachers. It was a hard time.
The other thing that really impresses me about my sisters: if we’d been in Germany, I would never have gone to college, or my sister. But they made sure we did, and I think [that] is the most unusual. I mean they were so good. Personally, other than the basic fact that I had to leave home and my parents, I certainly had a lot of people who were willing to go out of their way and help me.
BILL BENSON:
So at one point, here, you lived with—all four sisters lived together? That’s pretty amazing. And they were all going to school, going to college themselves?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Well Ruth, once she started going to college she lived at Maryland.
BILL BENSON:
Okay.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
And yeah, the three of them.
BILL BENSON:
That’s amazing. And tell us about, you’ve already told us a bit about, your brother. He’s already here, he’s been here since 1941, so probably pretty Americanized. Were you able to be in contact with him pretty much right away?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Yeah, yeah. We spent time at that uncle’s—that was a different uncle—and we saw Herman. Bertl and Edie and Ruth of course remembered Herman; I didn’t really remember him. But he was in high school when I was in high school, I mean a little bit ahead of me. So, yeah, we saw each other. But I will say I have a closer, and have always had a closer relationship with Alan than with Herman.
BILL BENSON:
Well you grew up with Alan, for all practical purposes.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Right.
BILL BENSON:
What was the impact on the Harrisons? You arrived as a two-year old and left their home as a ten year old. They had raised you for a good, well, almost your entire life at that point. What do you know about that?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
I know it was very difficult. I know they were deeply religious, so I think that would have helped them see that it was ordained. We always kept in contact. Bertl and Edith were very good about making sure that I wrote them—not very often, but I did write them.
I went to visit. I visited my Aunt Hannah, I visited them, and then once Fred and I were married we were there. And my kids considered them grandparents. They knew they had other grandparents, but they were also grandparents.
But Alan was never an uncle. Alan was always Alan.
BILL BENSON:
Just Alan. Why did Bertl bring you to the United States? Is it because you had a couple of uncles here, is that what—as opposed to staying together in England? What—
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Cause my mother told her she had to bring us here.
BILL BENSON:
She had to go to the United States—and was that because of some relatives here?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
And what about Aunt Hannah? Did she come?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
She came to visit.
BILL BENSON:
But not to live.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
No. She had become very English. She used to send us packages sometimes; I think she thought we needed things. And I remember when I was in high school and she sent us a package, once, and it was woolen underwear. And I was in high school and I had to go pick up this woolen underwear, which was hanging out of the package. My aunt was a good lady but sometimes she was very fast about how she did things!
But she came, I guess once she came over to stay with us, and see how we were and what we were doing.
BILL BENSON:
Before we turn to our audience and ask them if they have some questions of you, Esther, let me ask one more before we do that. Tell us about the time you and Fred went back to Adelsheim.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Well we went back because I had this big need to see Adelsheim, and we got there around lunchtime. The whole town was quiet.
BILL BENSON:
When was this?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
’95? No, ‘87. There was nobody around. It was the creepiest thing. We got to this town, we couldn’t find the town hall—well it turned out it had moved—but eventually we found some people. Nobody spoke English and I don’t speak German, so we finally found—Bertl had written a letter to them, told them I was coming—we finally found the letter, and they said, “The Assistant Mayor’s Wife speaks English, so if you come back tomorrow, we’ll show you around.”
Then they wanted us to go stay someplace else and I said to Fred, “They kicked me out of Adelsheim once—not again.” So we stayed at a guest house, and I had such nightmares that night. I dreamt that the Nazis were coming up the stairs to get me. I mean I really had nightmares.
But anyhow, I survived the night, and we did go. They showed us where the cemetery was, there was this cemetery between Adelsheim and Senfeld, they took us there. They showed us where my parents had lived, the house, and my sisters had told me a couple of things to look for, so I saw all those. I saw where my father and his brother had played cards, all those kinds of things.
But it was worth it to me, because then—I didn’t feel like I was coming home; it was still I was a tourist there. But I was so happy to have seen this place and to see some of the places that my sisters had talked about. Because once the letters surfaced in 1980s, my sisters had said, “Ask a question, and we’ll tell you.” Well if you don’t know much it’s hard to ask questions, but gradually we got some information out of my sisters.
And then when Bertl and I went back in 2000, and my brother’s daughter went with us, we got to go inside the house where my parents had lived. And it was really very interesting because it had been totally redone, it was beautiful, but on the top floor the son in that house, who was the same age as our grandson, lived, he had all the same toys my grandsons had, except his were neat—my grandson’s were all over the place. But it was exactly the same toys.
BILL BENSON:
Let’s turn to our audience and ask if anyone has a question, and we’ve got a hand up immediately, right here.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I had know two ladies, one was born in Austria and she was from the city and the other lady was born I don’t know where at in Germany, but she was in the country, and one says that woman in the city says, “The Holocaust wasn’t nearly as bad as what people perceive it to be.” The other one in the country said, “Oh yes it was and it was very much what you hear of today.” Why is there such a difference? They fled Austria. They actually fled Austria, she was like 12 or 13. She knew her husband as a child also and he fled Austria with his mother. They ended up in the States in the 1950s. But they just…one says no it didn’t happen, the other…why would they be so far apart on this?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
Were they both Jewish?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
No. They were German. Both ladies were German.
BILL BENSON:
Well, I don’t know if you want to venture at that one.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
The one that says it didn’t she is so adamant about that she actually gets upset with me because I am so interested in it.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
I’m not sure how to answer that.
BILL BENSON:
I think the only thing you can say is this is somebody whose profound sense of denial is just so great and so deep that if they really believe that, they’re just, deeply fooling themselves, that’s…
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
But also her husband at the age of 13 was traveling with his mother out of Austria and he disappeared for 3 weeks and she didn’t know where he was at…
BILL BENSON:
You might work to try to get her to come and visit here sometime—and well that speaks volumes that she won’t come here, to test her beliefs.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
The one lady that’s country says “Oh she is city. That’s why she believes it.”
ESTHER STAROBIN:
She probably was very protected.
BILL BENSON:
And is continuing to protect herself by not learning and opening her eyes a little bit, quite honestly. Do we have another question? Over here, and then I’ll come to you in the middle.
[question]
BILL BENSON:
The question for Esther is, there are those who survived concentration camps and Esther’s story of surviving and going on a kindertransport, what does that mean to you in terms of your feelings as a survivor?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
I think it’s a really good question, and as you probably know there are stratas [sic] of Holocaust survivors. In no way was my experience like being in a camp, or being in the woods, or any of those things. On the other hand, I was taken from my parents, I was taken from my home, and I didn’t have the happiest childhood. But it is in no way comparable to being in a camp.
And I think over the years, for many years, I didn’t know where I belonged. I mean, I have one very close friend who I went all through school with, and when I started writing for the memoir I sent her something I had written and she wrote back, she said, “I never knew that you had been on the kindertransport or what had happened to you.” And I was in my 60s, so she was too, and I had known her since we were ten.
So there’s a definite feeling of “where do you belong”? I can tell you my sister Bertl doesn’t think we’re survivors. On the other hand, what are we? We’re not exactly average normal experience, so I think—I do consider myself a survivor.
BILL BENSON:
One of the things we try to convey from the outset is that each survivor’s story is unique, but what they all have in common is that they survived first-hand, the various forms of terror and horror of the Nazis and their co-conspirators, which was manifested in so many different ways.
And just to remind you, of course, and Esther didn’t just say it, but not only was she torn from her parents and her family and her life, but her parents perished at Auschwitz along with, remember what she said about the size of her extended family, the cousins and uncles and the many others who perished during the war, during the Holocaust.
We have time for one more question and then we’ll wrap up; this lady right here.
[question]
BILL BENSON:
The question is: you were separated from your culture and your faith; at what point were you able to realign yourself with that?
ESTHER STAROBIN:
As an adult. I mean when we had kids and we sent them to religious school, they probably knew more about Judaism than I did. And then I had an adult bat mitzvah—I’ve been very involved in my synagogue and I had an adult bat mitzvah a few years ago. And I was Temple President.
BILL BENSON:
Well, we’ll leave it at that. Let me remind, before I turn back to Esther as I’m about to do, I’d like to remind you that we will have a First Person program each Wednesday through the end of August. We’ll have a First Person program on Tuesdays, as well, until the end of July.
So our next First Person program is tomorrow, and our First Person tomorrow will be Mr. Morris Rosen, who is from Poland. After the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, he was forced into slave labor. He survived several Nazi camps and after a death march, he was taken to the Theresienstadt camp before he was liberated. So I hope you can come back for another First Person program this year, or next year if your travels bring you back to the Washington area.
I want to also remind you that excerpts from this conversation with Esther will be available on our website, at the Museum’s website, as well as through iTunes and you’ll be able to hear, as well, the full transcript of this as well as other First Person programs.
[to audience member] I might just turn back to you and suggest to the person you know that maybe a beginning point for them is to go to the website and listen to some of these first-hand accounts of the people who lived through it. It’s worth trying.
Anyway, it’s our tradition at First Person that our First Person gets the last word. And before I turn back to Esther to close our program, I want to remind you that when Esther leaves here she’s going to go up the stairs where they will have “Echoes of Memory” copies of it for sale, and Esther has been a contributor to that, writing personal vignettes of things from her memory in that publication. So when she steps down she’ll head up there and then I hope you’ll be able to follow her up there.
So with that I’d like to turn it over to Esther to close our program.
ESTHER STAROBIN:
The thing for me that’s so important is that each person has a responsibility, and one person can make a difference in someone’s life. And I think it’s very important for each person to do whatever they can do and not look to say it’s someone else’s, it’s the government’s, but each person should do something to help another.
BILL BENSON:
Okay. Thank you all very much.
