First Person with Margit Meissner
 |
mp3 – 61.55 MB » |
Download Full Program »
View Transcript »
Listen to Podcast »
Learn more about Margit Messner »
Learn more about Paris »
Learn more about France »
Encyclopédie de la Shoah (en Français) »
BILL BENSON:
Good afternoon and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Bill Benson. 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. Margit Meissner whom we shall meet shortly.
This 2009 season of First Person is made possible through the Louis and Doris Smith Foundation, to whom we are grateful for again sponsoring our First Person program. And I’d like to acknowledge Mr. Louis Smith who is in the audience with us today.
[Applause]
First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust who share with us their firsthand accounts of their experience during the Holocaust. Each First Person guest serves as a volunteer here at this Museum.
We will have a First Person program each Wednesday until August 26. The Museum’s website at www.ushmm.org, that’s www.ushmm.org, provides a list of the upcoming First Person guests. And since we’re coming to the close of our 2009 season, if you check the web site later this fall, you’ll have information about 2010.
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. A number for this year are already posted on the website, and Margit’s will be available within the next several weeks. The First Person podcasts join two other Museum podcast series; Voices on Antisemitism and Voices on Genocide Prevention. The podcasts are also available through iTunes.
Our first person today, Margit Meissner, will share her first person account of her experience as a survivor and during the Holocaust for about 40 minutes. Depending on time, we hope we will have an opportunity for you to ask Margit a few questions. Before you are introduced to her, I have a couple of requests of you and a couple of announcements. First, we ask that if it is all, at all possible, please stay seated with us through our one-hour program; particularly today.
We have a full house, as you can see, and that way we minimize any disruptions for Margit as she speaks. If we do have time for question 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 Margit, 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 do that now. If you have passes for the Permanent Exhibition today, please know they are good for the entire afternoon, so you can stay with us ‘til we end our program 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 Germany.
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 Margit Meissner is one individual’s account of the Holocaust. We have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with Margit’s introduction. And we begin with this photograph of Margit at age three. Margit was born Margit Morawetz on February 26, 1922. Margit was the youngest of four children born to Gottlieb Morawetz, a banker from a religious, Jewish family and his wife Lily, who was from Vienna, and here we see Margit’s father, Gottlieb. Margit was born in Innsbruck, Austria.
When Margit was a baby, her family moved from Austria to Prague, Czechoslovakia. Our first arrow on this map of Europe points to Austria and the second to Czechoslovakia. On this map of Czechoslovakia, the circle shows the location of Prague. As a young girl, in addition to the Czech and German spoken at home, Margit learned French and English. Here we see Margit’s family at the Lido, a beach resort in Venice, taken in 1926. From the left is her brother, Felix, her cousin Ernie Morawetz, her brother Bruno, her mother and father, Margit with the circle around her, Margit’s governess Yeya, and her brother Paul.
Margit’s father Gottlieb passed away in 1932 when Margit was ten years old. In 1938, when Margit was 16, attacks on Jews in Central Europe escalated and her mother decided she should leave school and Prague. Margit was sent to Paris to live with a French family where she studied dressmaking. In March 1939, Margit’s mother joined her in France. In this photo we see Margit with her dog, Flippy, just before leaving Prague in 1938. As the Germans advanced on Paris, Margit’s mother was deported. When Paris fell to the Germans in June of 1940, Margit bought a bike and fled with other refugees to the South of France. At this time, Margit was unaware of her mother’s whereabouts. Her mother had been sent to the Gurs detention camp on the French Spanish border. Here we see a photo of the Gurs Detention Camp. Margit would reunite with her mother and the two fled via Spain and Portugal to the United States, where they settled in 1941. We close our slide show with this photo of Margit, taken in 1941, soon after she arrived in the United States.
Upon her arrival in the U.S., Margit would find employment as a dress finisher on Madison Avenue in New York City. From there she would attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina and marry three days after Pearl Harbor. Margit would later work for the office of War Information, spend time with MGM studios, and because of her language abilities, work for the United States Army of Occupation in Germany reeducating Hitler Youth.
We can’t do justice today to describing the remarkable journey Margit’s life would take from there, but it included many stops in the U.S. and abroad. Margit would eventually spend 20 years in the Montgomery County, Maryland public school system, specializing in disability issues. She remains on the board of an organization which she helped found that helps youth with disabilities obtain employment after graduation from high school. Margit resides in Bethesda, Maryland. She has two children and two grandchildren. Her daughter Ann lives in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland, and her son Paul is a hospital planner at Monte Fiore Hospital in the Bronx.
Margit’s partner, Irvin passed away early this year at age 97. Margit leads tours of the Museum, mostly for groups of police officers and FBI agents. She recently spoke to a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ among others in Puerto Rico. She also works in the Museum’s archives; translating documents form Czech and German to English. The first document she translated was a memoir of a Czech boy who was 15 when the war ended and wrote his memoir at aged 17. He was so pleased with the translation of Margit’s that he donated the original manuscript to the Museum. In 2003, Margit’s autobiography, Margit’s Story, was published. Her book, which I have here in my hand, is available in the Museum’s bookstore. And with that, I’d like to ask you to join me in welcoming our first person, Mrs. Margit Meissner.
[Applause]
Margit, thank you so much for your willingness to be our first person today and for joining us. We have so much to cover; we should start right away I think.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Okay.
BILL BENSON:
Margit, although you were born in Austria, your family moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia when you were very young. You would live there until 1938 when your mother sent you to Paris at aged 16. Let’s begin today with you telling us a little bit about those early years, your first 16 years, your life, your community, living in Prague.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, I was a very fortunate little girl. I was the only little girl with three older brothers. And I was, I think they thought that I was a doll. So, I didn’t like that, and I always thought from the very beginning on that it was a great shame to be a girl. I would’ve much preferred to be a boy. But, I was a good little girl, and I was expected to be a good little girl, and if you so that picture of me at age three with the white stockings, I, the main issue was that I shouldn’t make anything dirty, because that was not ladylike.
So I was brought up to be a very compliant, nice, young lady. We, as you heard, we had a French and an English governess, because my mother believed that her children had to speak four languages, but by the age 16. So, we spoke German at home, we spoke Czech in the street. We tried to speak English and French at home, and of course, that was very helpful because nobody didn’t know that we would have to leave Czechoslovakia one day, but as it turned out, it was really very helpful to us.
BILL BENSON:
I might just interject here the fact that I mentioned earlier that Margit spoke recently in Puerto Rico, and she gave her talk in Spanish and was interviewed on TV in Spanish, so she’s added languages. She met the challenge of learning four by 16 and went beyond that. Margit tell us a little bit about your father whom you lost very young.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
My father came from a very poor Jewish farm family in Bohemia. He was, I didn’t know him very well, because he died when I was 10, and as was the custom in the kind of family that I lived in, fathers didn’t spend very much time with their children. Their children were really the mother’s department. But, my father apparently was a very intelligent young man, so when his mother could no longer support him in, in Czech, in what then was the Bohemian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she sent him to Vienna to study. And he studied very successfully.
Most of his studies were in the German language and he became, he studied law and then became a banker and when Czechoslovakia that was created in 1918 at the end of World War I, became a new country that needed to create the new financial system. He was asked to go to Prague and to take over a large bank and help create that financial system which basically had not existed.
BILL BENSON:
Margit in 1938 after Hitler annexed Austria, your mother and you made a profound, a truly profound decision to send you by yourself at that time from Prague to live in Paris. Tell us what convinced your mother and you that you needed to make that decision why Paris was chosen and what it was like for you to go there alone at age 16.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, Austria had been annexed by the Germans in 1938 and we were Austrian citizens, although we lived in Czechoslovakia. And, it, we already knew what was happening to the Jews, because we had watched what was happening to Jews in, in Germany. Most Czechs felt that Czechoslovakia was a democratic country and nothing like what happened in Germany could ever happen in Czechoslovakia, but my mother, a very smart lady, really didn’t trust that, and she thought it was not safe to stay in Czechoslovakia if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. And my two older brothers had already left, because, not only because of Hitler, but Hitler was one of the reasons why they had left. And my younger brother was still one of those who believed that nothing could ever happen to him in Czechoslovakia, but Mother thought if I could leave it would be so much, I would be so much safer. And I was a very good student, because I knew how to take tests, but I was not an invested learner. I just went to school because it was, because I had to, and I was mainly interested in boys.
[Laughter]
But, unfortunately, many of the boys that I was interested didn’t look at me. So, it was, so in a way for me to go to, to go to Paris was an adventure. And I also believed together with my mother, that the future was so uncertain that if I could become a dress designer, then I could maybe make a living wherever fate would take us. And if you wanted to become a dress designer, where would you go? To Paris. So that was one of the reasons why Mother and I together decided to take me out of school. I was in tenth grade, and that’s basically all the education that I had for many, many years. But, it, it was difficult to leave home. On the other hand, it was an adventure, and I welcomed the adventure.
BILL BENSON:
If, if her sense was that it wasn’t safe to remain in Czechoslovakia, was the belief that Paris would be a safe place?
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Certainly, because people did not believe there would be a war, and Paris was far enough away. In retrospect, it seems like a very poor, very poor judgment, but of course, at the time one didn’t know what was going to happen. Although, there was a great deal of talk about war, and it was clear that the situation of the Jews in all over Europe, but especially in central Europe was very precarious.
BILL BENSON:
Did the family that you went to live with in Paris, was that, were they known to your mother?
MARGIT MEISSNER:
No, they were not known, but they were recommended to her by a friend. And so, I went to live in a French family where in sort of an impoverished aristocratic family where the lady of the house was a French teacher. She was very ambitious for me. And although I had, as I told I had had some French before I left, so I was not lost when I came to France. But she thought that I should learn French perfectly, and she gave me three hours of French instruction every day. Just she and I, and then she gave me enough homework for another hour in the afternoon, and as a result of that, after three months, I really spoke pretty good French, which has really stood me in very good stead.
BILL BENSON:
And were you able to in the midst of all of that study of French, also learn the dress making design you set out to do?
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, after I finished, after I…at the end of the summer my mother came to join me in Paris not be—basically only because of, she came for vacation. She still didn’t have any idea that one would have to leave. So, then I enrolled in a dressmaking course, and it was very difficult, because I had not had any dress making in school, because I went to an academic high school. And I came to a French dressmaking school for, for girls who had all done a lot of dressmaking, sewing at home, and who knew a lot about sewing. And I was absolutely the worst student there. I mean the teacher was very unhappy with me, because she thought I was never careful enough and my stitches were not even, and they were not, they were not small enough, and she kept chastising me and I was really quite unhappy there.
BILL BENSON:
And your mother came to spend some time with you, but did she go back to Prague?
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, at the time Mother came, a important political occurrence took place, and that was the Munich Conference, rather, I should rephrase that. Hitler decided to annex the German speaking part of Czechoslovakia without the consent of the Czech government. And that meant that Czechoslovakia was being dismembered.
The Czech government had to resign, and Hitler cemented this takeover of Czechoslovakia with a conference in Munich to which he invited the British and the French to accede to his demands to take over that part of Czechoslovakia. That became the well-known Munich Conference, which is sort of used again today by people who are talking about delivering a country to an aggressor without interfering with the aggression.
So that happened while Mother was in Paris with me. And then of course, it became clear that now the situation was very, very dangerous. At Munich Hitler had convince the French and Germans for letting him have this part of Czechoslovakia because he said he had no further territorial ambitions, and the British and the French believed him, and the United States was basically looking away at that time. We had just gone through a very serious depression, as you will all know. And, and America was very inward looking and was not interested, really, in what was happening in Europe, which was 3,000 miles away.
So, as a result of this, this Munich Conference then, the world was just watching what Hitler was going to do next, and although he had promised he had no further territorial ambitions, six months later he took over all of Czechoslovakia and that was basically the end of his…the end of his territorial annexations until a year later. He went, he declared war on Poland, and that’s when finally the West woke up and Britain and France also declared war on Germany. So, Mother was stuck in Paris for a while and then decided to go back to Prague to close her apartment because she had just left on vacation. And when, while she was there, Czechoslovakia was annexed.
BILL BENSON:
And what happened to her once she was there?
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, once she was there, she tried all kinds of—by that time it was clear that one had to emigrate, and she tried to take some of her furniture along and to organize sort of—emigration, but she came to late and she wasn’t able to do anything, and just after, after Czechoslovakia was annexed there was a window of maybe three days when you could get out without permission by the, by the Gestapo. And my brother Bruno who was still there, because he was the one who had faith in the, in the, in the Czech democracy—he and she were able to leave on the last train out of Czechoslovakia before the Germans closed the border. And I was, of course, in Paris and I had no idea where Mother was, and you have to think of a world where communications were not what they are today. I mean there was no telephone. There probably were telegrams, but that was just about the only means of communication except for, for what is now snail mail.
[Laughter]
So, I had no idea where mother was. I did not know where Bruno was, and I was very desperately waiting in Paris, going to every express train from Prague to the station to see whether my mother would arrive, and finally she did arrive and basically, with one suitcase. So that meant we lost everything that we ever possessed.
BILL BENSON:
Margit, your brother Bruno, he, he was significant help in helping to get out of—he and his, your mother and he to get out of Prague.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Yes.
BILL BENSON:
How did he do that?
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, he was very clever, because one couldn’t get permission, permission from the Gestapo. So, in order to, to use the subterfuge, he—some man came to him and said, “I can get you a permit, but I need your passports for three days.” Bruno’s friend said, “Your crazy. Don’t give him the passport. He’s just going to denounce you and that’s dangerous.” And Bruno took a chance and gave him the money and gave him the passports and he actually produced the papers that he needed. So, that was a risk well taken, but it could have ended very badly.
BILL BENSON:
Absolutely. So now your mother and Bruno are in Paris—
MARGIT MEISSNER:
No, my mother, my Bruno then went to England where my mother’s brother was, and that was very fortunate. He came—you know as soon as Czechoslovakia was annexed, all the European countries closed the borders against refugees. They, nobody wanted to accept any refugees, and what was happening to the Jews was basically of no great importance to anybody but the Jews.
But England still had—and Bruno was the only one in our family who had a Czech passport. We had Austrian passports, because I told you we were Austrian citizens because I was born in Austria. But Bruno who was a great Czech patriot, he had decided to become a Czech citizen. So with his Czech citizen—with is Czech passport, he could go to England until the 30th of March 1939. Am I correct? Yes, ’39. Czechs could enter England without, without a visa. However, they had to become farmers or they had to go into agriculture, and Bruno had already started agriculture in Czechoslovakia, so he became a farm hand in England.
BILL BENSON:
But that was an option not available to you and your mother.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
No certainly not, because we were Austrian citizens and nobody gave us any options anywhere.
BILL BENSON:
So once your mother was there with you then what did you do? Did you remain living with a family?
MARGIT MEISSNER:
No then Mother and I—I have to tell you that as long before Czechoslovakia was occupied, Mother had gotten permission to send money to me every month to, for me to pay for my expenses, because where did the money come from? And there were currency restrictions all over Europe, so you couldn’t just send—if you had money, you couldn’t send it out. So, I had received this monthly allowance on which I lived, but then mother came, and I and mother and I got an, got, lived in rented rooms. And Mother brought some money along, but very little. I mean most of the money was lost, but she had some money along and I really never quite figured out where she had the money from.
And, so we lived in rented rooms, and the, I was going to school, and then the war broke out in September of 1939. Mother didn’t quite know what to do with her self. I was going to school. So, she went to live first in the South of France with her brother. That brother was an important person in our lives, because he had a British passport, and that was a wonderful thing to have when you had such a second rate passport like either an Austrian or a Czech passport because Britain was an important country in the world. And he was the one who helped my brother get into England, and eventually my brother Bruno was able to go to Canada, because Canada also permitted farmer’s entrance. You couldn’t go to Canada if you were not a farmer. You had a special visa. But as a farmer, you could go to Canada and the Canadian government gave you some money with which you could build, you could buy a small farm, and Bruno, for a while, became a fruit farmer in the Niagara Peninsula. Now when you think of his being a fruit farmer or my becoming a dress maker, out of this very intellectual upper middle class family, it was kind of a unusual change shall we say.
BILL BENSON:
Absolutely. You so, your mother and you were living in rented rooms and you would remain there until June of 1940 when Hitler attacked France. Your mother and you would become separated and you would be forced to flee from Paris. Tell us how you got separated and then about your fleeing from Paris, you’re leaving by yourself.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
So, I’ll try to make it simple. Mother was not permitted, I lived in, we lived in Paris in these rented rooms, but one day Mother had to leave Paris because we were enemy aliens. As Austrians, we now belonged to Germany, and France was at war with Germany, so we were enemy aliens. And enemy aliens were no longer permitted to live in Paris, so she had to go live in Versailles, which was about an hour out of Paris. And one day she came to the, to the apartment where she lived, and she got a notice saying that she had to present herself at the police in three days with enough food for three days with two blankets and whatever else she could carry on her back, and she would be evacuated to the South of France. So, she did that. I mean there was no question about not going. She simply, she simply presented herself to the police.
I was in Paris, and she gave me 10,000 francs, which was quite a bit of money at the time, but I’ve no idea where she had the money from and I still cannot figure out how much money it really was. But she gave me 10,000 francs and she said to me, “Now it’s your turn to get us out of here.” Now whatever she meant, I‘m really not quite sure, and I have to tell you with embarrassment that I never really asked her this question during the many, many years that we lived together, because somehow it didn’t occur to me that I should ask her what she had meant at the time. So, I was in Paris by myself, and Mother was gone and I did not know where she was.
BILL BENSON:
And you’re just 18 years old.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
And I’m 18 years old. And now the war really started seriously, and I was all alone in Paris, because I didn’t have any close friends. Most of my friends were from Prague and they were Czechs and they were all trying to leave Paris. So, I was one of the very few who had this dual problem that I was somehow Czech and I had an Austrian passport, and I really had no good friends. And my French friends were all very nice, but they were not close friends, and nobody was in the same situation as I was. So, I was really not sure what I should do, but finally one day, the war came so, so France at first seemed impregnable, because there was the Maginot Line which the Germans could never cross, and that protected us, protected France from Germany, and then it turned out that the Germans went around the Maginot Line and attacked France through Holland and Belgium, and pretty soon they were in France and they were, they were menacing Paris.
And it was my job to get us out of there which meant at first I had to get out of there. And when, when the when the noise from the approaching armies or the, the, the smoke from the French documents that were being that were being burned across France sort of wafted in the air, I felt I had to simply get out of there. Now there were no trains. There were no buses. It was bedlam. I mean France had just started going to pieces, although they had not capitulated yet, but I think they were just about to capitulate. And so out of desperation, one, in one of those desperate movements, moments, I decided I could either walk, because there were thousands and thousands of Frenchman were walking on the, going south someplace. Now I—
BILL BENSON:
Streaming out of Paris…
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Streaming out of Paris, south, because the Germans were coming from the north. Now, I was, of course, continuously harassed by the French police. I was an enemy alien. I had to go to the police station every week to show my face to show that I had not escaped or I had not committed some kind of crime. And every time I went to the police they threatened me with arrest if I did something wrong or if I tried to leave without a permit. I mean, so I was constantly frightened. I was frightened of the police on one hand. I was frightened of the Germans. I was frightened about being alone and not knowing what to do. So, and yet I felt responsible. So it was not, not exactly an easy position.
But, finally when it looked like the Germans were about to take Paris, I went to the police station to get that final, finally get the permission to leave. And when I came to the police station, the police station was open and the policemen had gone. They had, they had joined the crowd that was escaping. So, at that point, I thought, “Well if the policemen can go, then maybe I can go.” And so, that’s when I had this idea of a bicycle. And I went and must have gotten—I went to, with my 10,000 francs. I went to buy a bicycle and after a long search, the only bicycle I could find was a men’s racing bike, you know, with these kind of handles. Well, I didn’t mind.
BILL BENSON:
—Cause probably every bike has been taken.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Every, every bike was taken. So, I, I had with me…I had a little case with me which I thought would go on top of the bicycle, and in it was a change of underwear, two pounds chocolat—which is chocolate rolls, and my dress making notes, because I had almost finished my dressmaking course and I was very aware that I would have to make a living, because we certainly didn’t have any money. And for some reason, I also talk, took my oil paints along, because I had gone to painting class in Paris believing that if I needed to—if I was going to become a dress designer, I also need, needed to draw. So, it seemed very important to me that I took my, my wooden case with my oil paints.
BILL BENSON:
So your oil paints, chocolate rolls…
MARGIT MEISSNER:
And my dress making notes…
BILL BENSON:
And a pair of…
MARGIT MEISSNER:
And a pair of underwear. That’s what I left. And, and I bought a watch and a map of France. So, and that I don’t know how many of, how many thousand francs that cost out of my 10,000 francs.
And then, of course, I didn’t know where to go, but I had Austrian friends. There was one couple who happened to be the granddaughter of the famous psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. She was my very good friend, and the Freuds were also Austrian citizens, she and her mother. And the rest of the Freud family was in England, so we thought we would go together to Brest which was on the, on the western most coast of France, because from there, maybe, we could get a ship to England. So, when I left Paris on my own, I had made arrangements with the Freuds to meet them in Brest where we would meet or how we would meet, we never discussed.
So, I was go—on my way, on my way south with a whole thousands and thousands of French who were escaping. Now, I was sure every time I saw a policeman, I’m sure that he was looking for me, because I was, I was always afraid that I was going to be caught by the French police. I was also very uncomfortable because I told you, I was a very proper young lady, and a young lady doesn’t go walk, doesn’t go on the highway by herself, right? I mean that really was not proper. What would I do if a man would talk to me? So, I was—
BILL BENSON:
You felt very conspicuous, didn’t you?
MARGIT MEISSNER:
I felt, I was sure that everybody was looking at me and that they were most interested to see whether I had the right kind of papers. Well, it’s turned out that really nobody cared, and I just went along with the crowd, there feeling very sorry for myself. I was really desperate, because I was alone and I was afraid and I didn’t know where I was going. I was just going and going. And there were, since there were thousands of others with me, so I felt lonely in a crowd and as you know, one can be maybe lonelier in a crowd than when one is by oneself. And there was no food anywhere, and I was not particularly a good bicyclist, but I just bicycled, bicycled.
Then at night, after the first day, I arrived in a small town called Étampes where there was a policeman directing the traffic, because there were thousands of refugees. And he motioned to me and said, “Take your bicycle and go to this school over there. You can sleep on the, on the floor there.” Well, at first when he motioned me, of course, I stopped, because I thought; “Now he’s going to ask me for my papers.” Well, he wasn’t interested in my papers. So I went to the school, left my bicycle on the floor and lay down on the floor. And as I lay down, I remembered that just before I had left Paris, somebody handed me a letter that I stuck in my pocket. And, because I didn’t know what, I didn’t know to send it, know what it was, and when I lay down on the floor of the school, I remembered the letter. And it was a letter from somebody who had been with my mother and she told me that my mother was in Gurs. That that was a detention camp in the Pyrenees.
Now, I had no idea where Gurs was, but at least I knew that the Pyrenees were on the southwestern border of France. And I slept the night on the floor of the school, and when day broke early in the morning, probably 5:30, 6:00, I just couldn’t sleep anyway. I decided I’d continue. And so I took my bicycle and started bicycling again, and little did I know, as I found out the next day, that at 7:00 this, that morning, the school was bombed to bits by the Germans. So it was one those really tremendously lucky breaks that I got. And I have to tell you that if I am here today it’s mainly due to the many lucky occasions that came my way.
So, I continued bicycling, and the crowds were still great, and I was bicycling down a incline and somehow I collided with another lady, and we both fell. And, however, I got myself up. I was bleeding, but the bicycle could be, could still be used, so I continued bicycling, and after a while a young man approached me. So, I froze. What does he want from me? And he said, “You can’t continue bicycling like this. You have to get this wound looked into, because you’re going to bleed to death.” Well, I tell you, I didn’t realize that I was bleeding to death. It didn’t hurt. Maybe I was bleeding very hard, but I was so intent of going that I didn’t pay attention to any pain. But, indeed, I, there was a town nearby, and I went to a, I went to a pharmacist who said, “You should go to the hospital to have that wound sewn up.” I said, “I cannot go to any hospital. They’ll ask me who I am.” So, I said, “Just stitch it up.” Well, so he stitched it up, and I felt no pain. I still hadn’t eaten anything. I was not hungry. I was not tired. I didn’t feel my muscles. I don’t know. I must have had a lot of adrenaline in me.
And so, I continued bicycling until somebody said to me, “There is, there are trains here. Why are you bicycling?” I said, “There are no trains.” “Yes, there are trains.” Well, to make a long story short, I was, I found a train, which I thought was going to Brittany into Brest where I was going with the Freuds, and as I got on the train, it turned out that the train went south to Bordeaux. Now, that was just another happenstance, because as I told you, my mother was close to the Spanish border, which is close to Bordeaux. So, I was able, through again complicated circumstances, to find my mother, and that was, of course, a fantastically lucky, because if I had gone to Brest, which was on the other end of France, I might have never found her. And she might have never known where I was, because I had no way of getting in touch with her.
BILL BENSON:
Margit, there’s so much to cover, and I know you’re trying to, to move along, but let me just ask you about one thing. When you got on the train, before you got on the train, you went to the train station, but there was a huge line, but there was an air raid warning, so everybody went down to the shelters. You decided to stay on the platform, so when the air raid warning was over, you’re first in line.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
That’s exactly correct…
[Laughter]
That’s exactly correct.
[Laughter]
I think I became a risk taker.
[Laughter]
BILL BENSON:
Yes.
[Laughter]
MARGIT MEISSNER:
And I think I’ve remained a risk taker. But, really when I came to that train station in Orleans there was a huge line, and it was, it was noon and it was very hot, and people were standing there for hours in line. And, and there were people who were fainting there, and children were crying, and it was really a bedlam situation, and in typical chaotic French manner, at the time they had one window open that was selling tickets.
And so, it took five minutes for each person to buy a ticket, so by the time my, my turn came, I was still an hour away from the, from the, from the counter, and sadly an air raid came, and everybody had to go to the air raid shelter. And I looked at the situation. I was with my bicycle and I said, “I can’t stand it. I mean, if I come back and I have another line to face, I’m just going to take a chance.” And I was really standing under a glass overpass, underpass, I guess. There was glass over me, and there were three other people who stayed with me, and we watched the bombs fall on either side of us. But, somehow, I don’t know how one makes one’s decisions and how one looks at one’s options, right? I had the option of getting killed by a bomb as opposed to waiting in line some more.
[Laughter]
Seemed, at the time, seemed reasonable.
[Laughter]
BILL BENSON:
So that allowed you to take the train?
MARGIT MEISSNER:
So, that allowed me to take the train. And when I got in that train and there were no trains in France, remember, I was all by myself in the compartment. Now I couldn’t believe it, that I could be all by myself in the compartment, and there was, there was curfew and there was everything was blacked out. There was complete black out, and I was all by myself in this big train compartment, and the train started rolling. And, of course, I thought we were going to Brest to Brittany, and so, I sat there again sort of wondering what was I really doing, and was I doing—I don’t know whether I even thought about doing the right thing. I was just sitting there, and the train stopped every once in a while and once the train stopped and next to a troop train that was going the opposite direction.
And so I was standing at the window and there was a French soldier who standing on the other train at the window. And we started talking, and because I spoke French really pretty well I could not be recognized immediately as a foreigner. So, I started talking to this French soldier and he explained to me that he was coming from the war zone. He sort of made conversation with me and he found out who I was, and he wanted to know how, whether I had any food. I really hadn’t thought about food, and I said I didn’t have much food. So, just as the train was starting to leave, he gave me a boule, you know, a round, a round loaf of French bread. And so I had this bread and the train started going, and I went back into my completely darkened compartment. And at the next stop, a man came into my compartment.
So, again, terror. Who can this man be? What could he want? So after a while, we started talking a little bit, and it turned out that he was a soldier who had left his regiment and was trying to go back home. And he said, did I have something to eat? And I said yes. I had a loaf of bread, and he could have some, and I gave him my loaf, and before I knew it, finished my loaf. He just ate the whole loaf. So, but I wasn’t sorry, because I still wasn’t hungry. But at least he was not an unfriendly man.
Now, I don’t know what happened to him, but as we continued it became daylight and I realized then that the train was not at all going to Brittany, that the train was going south, because I understood the, I knew where we were going. And the train started filling up with French men from the south who were still not touched by the war. And, so they started talking, all kinds of things about what terrible mess France was in, and there was one very loud gentleman with a very southern French accent who kept saying that the real problem that France was that it had accepted all these refugees, and it was the refugees that got France into this predicament. And then when he found out I was, that I was coming from Paris, he said to me, “But you are one of those brave, young Parisians who takes life into your own hands and you save yourself.” So, this, to this day, is a difficult moment for me, because I felt that if I had been brave, I would have spoken up to tell him that I was one of those refugees that he thought was the cause for French for the French collapse. And I didn’t have the guts to say it. And it still makes me feel badly today, 60 some odd years later…
BILL BENSON:
But you might not be here with us.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Because I might not be here. So, you know, it’s not easy to be an ethical human being.
BILL BENSON:
So, at some point you would, you would get off the train and, and, and then eventually be reunited with your mother.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, so I got off the train, and when I realized where I was, I also realized that we had friends who lived close by. And that was again, I mean pure luck that that happened. There was no planning involved at all. And these French friends were very welcoming and took very good care of me, and when they found out that my mother was in Gurs it turned out that Gurs was 10 kilometers from there. So this lady of the house, she took her car, although it was not permitted for private cars to circulate, and went to Gurs to see whether she could find my mother to tell her that I was in southern France, because at that point, Paris has fallen and France was about to capitulate. And she couldn’t find Mother, but she left a message, and in the chaos that was in this camp, nobody knew whether—I certainly didn’t think she had ever gotten this message. So, I didn’t know anything about the detention camp of Gurs. I couldn’t imagine it. You saw a picture here, which I did not see, I think, until I came to this museum a few years ago. So I really didn’t know anything about Gurs.
But when France capitulated, the, the director of this detention camp said to people who had a way to leave, that they should just leave, because he had no more interest in keeping the foreigners in prison. So, he said to my mother, my mother came to him and said, “I’ve just found out that my daughter is 10 kilometers away. May I leave?” And he said, “Go. You can just leave.” And because she knew that I was close by, she was able to get a farmer with a hay wagon to take her and her bundle, which she still had from when she was interned, and she, he drove her to close to where I was. And, I was sitting in the garden of the house where I was living and a lady came from over there waving at me. And I didn’t wave back, because I didn’t know who this lady was and I wasn’t sure she was waving at me. And as she came closer, she was still waving at me, and I was still not waving at her, and when she came very close, it turned out that it was indeed my mother. But she had gotten so sunburned and she had lost so much weight that I didn’t recognize her in the first moment. And she was very upset about that. For long time, she said, finally, she had found her child, and I was not even welcoming. How could that be? Well, it was one of these moments, and then I found out what life was like in Gurs, because as you saw this camp, she had spent much of her time sleeping outdoors. The latrines were almost unusable, and there was very little food. So she really had gone through a very difficult period, which made a huge impression on her for the rest of her life.
BILL BENSON:
Margit, at this point, now, reunited with your mother, you’re now in the occupied zone of France, and you and your mother would escape from there. Tell us about your escape. You went to Marseille, and then from there, crossed the Pyrenees. I know we’re running short on time, but, but…
MARGIT MEISSNER:
So, should I do it quickly?
BILL BENSON:
If you can, but...
[Laughter]
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, again, so we crossed, we knew we were going to be in the occupied zone, which was going to be German and there was going to be an unoccupied, which was going to be French. So, we had to cross into the unoccupied zone, again, without any permission from the police, and with, again, trepidation that we were going to be caught. And we found an uninhabited house that had a roof but no windows where we could stay, maybe, for a few days. And as luck, again, will have it, a group of men came to this house who turned out to be Czech Protestant pastors. Now can you imagine, in this whole world you all of a sudden you find Czech protestant pastors. And they said to us, “You can’t spend the winter here, you have to go to Marseille, where we are going, because from there you might be able to leave France.
So we went to Marseille, because they told us that that’s where we had to go. And there, indeed, we, we were able through all kinds of subterfuges to get a Spanish and Portuguese transit visas to leave France, but France would not give us a, an exit permit. So, we, the French didn’t want us, but they didn’t want us to leave, because they thought that we, they could always turn us over to the Germans and that would be a plus for their relationship with, with Hitler. So, our visas were about to expire and somebody on the street said that at the border women without exit permits had been permitted to leave yesterday. So, on the, on the basis of that bit of information from somebody on the street, we took off for the, to the border of Spain, and when we arrived at the border, I said to the border guard, “Here. We don’t have any visa, but you let people like us go.” And he said, “That was yesterday. Not today.” So, again, make a long story short, we walked across the Spanish…the French-Spanish border into Spain. And they, we were told very carefully to avoid a, to take a certain route which was the only authorized route that one could take and we somehow lost the route and came into Spain on an unauthorized way and although we had a valid Spanish visa, but because we crossed the border at an unauthorized place, the Spanish police took us prisoners.
And that was a really sort of life changing experience for me to go to prison in Spain, because I really, as I told you, I was very law abiding young lady, and I thought I would never do anything that would land me in jail. Little did I know at the time that there were lots of, lots of ethical people who went to jail during World War II and afterwards. So, my experience in jail in Spain was life changing in the, to the extent that I realized that the world in which I had brought, been brought up, certainly wasn’t the real world and there were all kinds of other ways of living than I was living, and I sort of became, I don’t know, more aware of what the world was all about.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us about the fellow inmates that were just so kind to you.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, the fellow inmates were on one hand French, Spanish schoolteachers, because this was after the Spanish Civil War where the Franco regime, which was an autocratic fascist regime, had vanquished the democratic Spaniards. And so schoolteachers were and social workers were suspect by the fascists. But, most of the people were prostitutes, and of course, I thought I would never, ever meet a prostitute in my life. And when it turned out that we had no—in jail you presented a bowl every morning into which they, the warden gave you some food and we didn’t have a bowl. So, how could we eat anything? And there were a couple of prostitutes who came to us and said, “Here. We give you one of our bowls.” Well, that was a life saving gesture, which certainly was not unappreciated, and it really showed me that you shouldn’t have any prejudices against people who just because they belong to a certain group you just dismiss them. So, that was a very helpful thing that I learned.
BILL BENSON:
How did you get out of jail and then you made your way to Portugal?
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, we had, we had had in France good German friends who had lived in Spain before, before all this happened and who escaped to France when the civil war in Spain started. And when the civil war was over, they returned to they returned to Spain, and they said to me when Mother was taken, when Mother had to go to, to the police that they would always help us, although, they went back to Spain. So, when we were in jail in Spain, we were able to contact them. And again, this one of the stories if I told you coincidences or luck. When we arrived in, in jail, it was a Thursday, and we, I said, “We have to write to our friends.” Of course, we had no pencil, no paper, no money, nothing. And there was a guard there who spoke some French. And I started speaking to him and said, “We need to notify our friends.” And he said, “Well it’s too bad, because letter writing day was yesterday.” So, however, he was very kind and he wrote a letter on his own and paid for the stamp and sent it to our friends so that we didn’t have to wait until the next week, and a few days later, indeed, our friends came and, and told the warden that they would come to pick us, to pick us up, because what the Spanish jail had said. “Aha, so you are part German? You, if you are here in jail we’ll just call the German consulate and they’ll come and pick you up.” So, here we were doing all this to escape the Germans only to end up in Spain to be told by the Spanish authorities that they will call the Germans. So, our friend, our Spanish friends that came to the police in jail and said, “Don’t turn them over to the, to the Germans because we will come and pick them up.”
So, they picked us up and we were fortunate again by people who helped us with the papers which we didn’t have that we eventually were able to wind up in Portugal that the, our visa was expired, you know—I mean, all kinds of little difficulties that somehow were over come, and we wound up in Portugal without any money, of course. And there my dressmaking came in very handy, because many of, there were many refugees who also lost all their belongings and I became sort of the court dressmaker to the refugees. And that was wonderful. We lived in a Portuguese family. We rented the room in a Portuguese family, and the lady had a sewing machine, and so a little thread, a sewing machine and I started sewing then. She had an iron that one had to heal with, heat with coals and you had to just go like this to make sure it was hot enough, because there was no electric iron and so I started making dresses for the refugees and my mother became the finisher. And so, we made a living in Portugal.
BILL BENSON:
And eventually your mother, of course, would be able to reach out to her brother in the United States and he would be able to get visas and you were able to come to the United States and again, your dressmaking got you started in this country.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Absolutely. I got a, very soon after we—of course, we had no money, ever. I got a job very soon after we came, again, as a finisher, and I thought I was pretty good by now, because I had sewn in Portugal for such a long time, and I was very successful, very successfully sewing. So when I got my first job, I thought that was going to be, I was going to be very good at it. And, I was put in front of an electric sewing machine, which I had never seen before, and there I was the only young thing in this shop, only elderly ladies who worked there. One of the ladies helped me thread the machine, and I sewed a little bit and the thread broke, and I had to rethread the machine, and I again didn’t know how to thread it. And after a third time, the supervisor came and said, “I’m sorry, we can’t use you.” And that was a tremendous blow to my pride, because here I had landed this job, first job in the United States, and the same day I got fired. So, I went down the stairs. I remember crying, going to a, to a pay phone trying to call my mother that yes, I got the job, but I already lost it.
[Laughter]
So, that was my beginning of my career in the United States, but I can tell you that a career has taken very many unexpected and very productive turns.
BILL BENSON:
I wish as obviously all of you know there is just so much that we were not able to discuss, you know, for example when Margit talked about crossing the border over the Pyrenees, sounds like walked across the mountains. Well, I went on line and it’s described as peaks of 11,000 feet with few valleys, and they climbed over the Pyrenees and found themselves in all kinds of different circumstances.
So, we could only scratch the surface, but Margit before I turn back to you to close the program in just a few minutes, I want to thank you for being our first person. I want to thank all of you for joining us today. Like to remind you that we will have two more First Person programs the remaining two Wednesdays of August this year, the 19th and 26th, and if you can’t come back and join us either of those two weeks, we hope that you will do so next, next year.
Our next program will be next Wednesday, August 19th when our first person will be Mr. Haim Solomon who is from Romania. Mr. Solomon and his family were ordered by Romanian authorities to move from their hometown to another town to escape fighting and the chaos, they moved to Bucharest, remaining there until the end of the war. In 1947, Mr. Solomon made his way to Palestine on a ship that was then captured by the British and he was imprisoned on Cypress.
Please remember that excerpts are available as podcasts on the museum web site, and at iTunes. And Margit’s podcast will be available within the next few weeks. It is our tradition at First Person that our first person has the last word. And so with that, I’d like to turn back to Margit to close our program. Before I do so, because we didn’t have time for question and answers, obviously we could have spent the next three hours talking to Margit, when Margit steps down off the stage, she’ll be available if you want to come up and say hi or ask her a question, meet her. So, please feel free to do that. And let me just remind you that her book Margit’s Story is available for sale. Is able to provide those details that we were not able to get to. So, with that, Margit, our last word.
MARGIT MEISSNER:
Well, I want to thank you very much.You’ve been such an attentive audience and I’m really happy that I was able to speak to all of you. And the thing that really is most important to me is to reflect on what it means to me to be able to work in this Museum. As, as Bill told you, I lead groups and I translate in the Archives, and I think this institution is really a unique place, because not only does it remember what happened to all of us during World War II, but it still deals with the genocide and the injustices that exist in the world. And I think it’s so important for all of us to be aware of the prejudice and the, and the, the, the injustice that people experience because of who they are. And that I feel it’s really in a way, I feel my work by being here is a reflection of the importance that I assume and I hope all of you assume of our making sure that our world becomes a just, less prejudiced, less violent place in which we can all live and raise our children. And really, every time I come here, I learn something new, and the institution is really invaluable, and it’s the only institution of it’s kind, and I’m really happy that you come to see it and I hope that when you see the exhibit here, that you will remember what you saw and you will remember the implications of what you saw. So, thank you very much.
[Applause]
