First Person with Alfred Münzer
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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. This is our 11th year of the First Person program. Our first person today is Dr. Alfred Münzer and we shall meet Dr. Münzer shortly.
This 2010 season of First Person is made possible through the generosity of the Louis and Dora Smith Foundation, to whom we are grateful for again sponsoring First Person. First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust who share with us their first-hand accounts of their experience during the Holocaust. Each First Person guest serves as a volunteer here at the Museum.
With few exceptions we will have a First Person program each Wednesday through August 25. We will also have First Person programs on Tuesdays through July. The Museum’s website at www.ushmm.org provides information about the upcoming First Person guests. Excerpts from First Person programs are available as podcasts on the Museum’s website. They are also available through iTunes. Al Münzer’s podcast from today’s program will be available on the website in the very near future.
Al will share his first person account of his experience during the Holocaust and as a survivor for about 45 minutes. If time allows we will follow that with an opportunity for you to ask Al a few questions. We ask that you stay in your seats throughout our one hour program. That way we minimize any disruptions for Al as he is speaking. I’d like to let those of you who may have passes to the Permanent Exhibition today know that they are good for the time on your pass and anytime after that.
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-6 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.
The life stories of Holocaust survivors transcend the decades. What you are about to hear from Al is one individual’s account of the Holocaust. We have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with his introduction.
We begin with a portrait of Alfred Münzer dressed in a Jewish National Fund costume for the Purim holiday. This was taken after the war, most likely 1948. Al was born in November, 1941 in The Hague, Netherlands.
Al's parents Simcha and Gisele were married in 1932 in The Hague. Here we see their wedding portrait. Al had two older sisters, Eva and Leana. Eva is on the left and Leana is on the right with Al between them.
The German Army invaded the Netherlands in May 1940-before Al was born. Immediately, life became very difficult for Dutch Jews. After the invasion, the Münzers remained in their home and endured the repressive measures taken against Jews. On this map we see the German invasion routes of Western Europe in 1940, with a circle around the Netherlands.
In 1942 Al's sisters went into hiding with the friend of a neighbor. His parents hid in a hospital and Alfred hid with a neighbor named Annie Madna, who placed him in the home of her younger sister. After only a month Al was removed from this house because a Dutch Nazi lived next door. Annie then called upon her ex-husband, an Indonesian Immigrant named Tolé Madna, who agreed to take Al in. Here we see a photo of Tolé Madna.
Al spent the rest of the war in Tolé Madna's home, where he was cared for by Tolé's Indonesian nanny Mima Saïna. This photo was taken while Al was in hiding in Tolé's home. Mima is pictured on the left and Tolé Madna is in the middle holding Al.
Al's two sisters Eva and Leana were denounced in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz where they perished. Al’s mother and father were also discovered and sent to concentration camps. His father Simcha survived the war, but would pass away 2 months after war's end. Al and his mother were reunited after the war and they emigrated to the U.S. in 1958.
Al Münzer came to the United States with his mother in 1958. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, New York and his medical degree from the State University of New York-Down State Medical Center in Brooklyn. He completed post graduate medical studies at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.
He specializes in diseases of the lung and is Director of the Pulmonary Medicine department at Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland. He has been a frequent spokesperson for the American Lung Association since 1974 and he served as their President in the 1990s. His Air Force service brought him to Washington D.C. where his interest in public policy was formed. Al often divides his day between caring for critically ill patients suffering from a variety of lung diseases and testifying on behalf of the American Lung Association before Congressional Committees. He is deeply involved in anti-smoking efforts internationally through the World Health Organization and is currently very active in negotiating with individual countries, the implementation of an international treaty on the control of tobacco.
In 2000 Al was awarded the Will Ross Medal, the highest honor given by the American Lung Association for volunteer service at the national level. He is also active as a volunteer here at this Museum, where he translates Holocaust related diaries from Dutch into English. These translations will be releases as part of a 5 volume set by the Museum, with the first volume having recently been released. Occasionally Al finds time to engage in his hobby of writing plays. With that I’d like to ask you to join me in welcoming our first person, Al Münzer.
[Applause]
BILL BENSON:
Al, thank you so much for joining us and for your willingness to be our first person today.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
I am delighted to be here.
BILL BENSON:
Thank you and thanks to all of you for being here. We have so much to cover so I’ll get started. Since we first met Al, about 6 years ago, you have learned even more about your family’s roots. Why don’t we begin today with you telling us a little bit about your parents, your family, and your community in the years before the war began?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well my parents were born in a part of the world that at various times has been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and then Poland or Galicia as it is often called. My mother was born in a little town called Rymanow and my father in a small town about 40 miles away called Kanczuga. They both came from very observant Jewish families as was certainly the tradition at that time. In fact, in Rymanow there is a very strong Hasidic tradition of Jewish mysticism if you will, with two very prominent scholars dating back to the 18th and early 19th Century.
You know opportunities were very limited in those small towns so both my parents left their homes when they were in their early 20s. My father went directly to Holland, to start a tailoring business, men’s clothing business. My mother left her town, her hometown, to go to Berlin which was at that time considered the city for the future. She joined two older siblings who had already established roots there, a sister and a brother. She worked in their business, also men’s clothing and women’s clothing.
BILL BENSON:
In fact your family had generations of experience in the tailoring business, is that true?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Absolutely, the town of Rymanow, both towns, were very, very heavily involved in tailoring and that kind of business.
BILL BENSON:
Berlin, the Nazis were already beginning to come to at least rise in power. What was that like for your mother during that time?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well for my mother initially when she got to Berlin in 1929 it was really just an experience of, you know, finally being in “the big city” of the area. She also really enjoyed meeting her two nephews, Norbert and Jossie, two very handsome kids. You know, playing around with them, taking them out. I don’t think she paid too much attention to the beginnings of what was happening in terms of the rise of the Nazis. But that certainly became much more of a factor by the time my mother left Germany in 1932 when she came to Holland and married my father.
BILL BENSON:
You said that your grandparents kept few of their possessions in cash, furniture, or homes. Why was that?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well I think even though they were very comfortable, living in these little towns in Poland they also knew that pogroms could happen at any time. Antisemitism was certainly alive at that time and so many Jews kept all their possessions in cash or jewels, rather than furniture, things that could easily accompany them if they had to make a quick getaway. In fact, most people really sought opportunities elsewhere. One of the very prominent people from my mother’s little hometown Rymanow was Isidor Rabi, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics in the United States in 1936 so some very, very famous people came from those very, very limited circumstances.
BILL BENSON:
Al, did you have a large extended family? Did your parents have many relatives?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well both my parents really had many brothers and sisters. Frankly, I’ve never really gotten a precise number but I think my mother, it was a family of about 8 siblings. My father, somewhat similar. Unfortunately, of all of those siblings, the only survivor that we ever knew about was one brother of my mother’s, one who was in Berlin and who managed to escape to Bolivia, one of the few countries where Jews could obtain a visa when they tried to get out of Germany.
BILL BENSON:
In fact you’ve stayed in contact with those family members in Bolivia. Is that right?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Absolutely. I am still in almost daily contact with the grandchildren of my mother’s brother. He passed away quite a few years ago and his son, this nephew that my mother and I talked about earlier, my mother so much enjoyed in Berlin, unfortunately passed away about a year ago. But it was really good for me to make contact with them.
BILL BENSON:
Absolutely. When were your sisters Eva and Leana born?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
My sisters were born in 1936 and 1938, Eva was born in 1936. This is certainly when Nazism was on the rise. It was just about the same time frame as the famous Berlin Olympics and then my sister Lea was born two years later in 1938, certainly when Hitler was already very much on the march.
BILL BENSON:
In fact she was born, wasn’t she, just a couple of days after Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass?”
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly, yes, three days later is when my sister Lea was born.
BILL BENSON:
What was the environment like for Jews in Holland at that time?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well, Jews have lived in Holland for so many centuries that they really were very comfortable and they really occupied very high positions in government, in the arts, in business, and I think that may have led to a certain level of complacency. I really, I am not sure that they ever felt how serious the threat was of the invasion. But, the measures, the Anti-Jewish measures really began almost immediately. In a typical fashion for the German occupiers, for the Nazis, it began with fairly simple things-the banning ritual slaughter or shechita for kosher meat. That was one of the first things that was done. Then the next thing was the Jewish businesses had to register. Then they moved from businesses to individuals having to register. Then finally Jews had to hand in all their property so it’s sort of a stepwise turning of the screws that happened.
BILL BENSON:
And that happened once the Germans occupied the Netherlands?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly.
BILL BENSON:
War began, really, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia in September of 1939, then of course Germany would attack Holland in May of 1940. Right about, right before their invasion your parents ended up sheltering a Dutch official. Will you tell us about that?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Sure. What happened was, and I am not exactly sure the circumstances, but my parents were asked to shelter a Dutch official who carried a suitcase that contained plans to preemptively destroy the rail road center in Utrecht, which is a major railroad crossing in Holland.
BILL BENSON:
With the idea…so the Germans couldn’t get to it.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly.
BILL BENSON:
Okay.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Then while he was there was exactly when Holland was invaded when the city of Rotterdam was bombed, basically as sort of the initial invasion, part of the invasion of the Netherlands. They woke up that morning and were sitting and having breakfast with this man and he said, “Thank God it’s over.” Which sort of…my parents were puzzled about. Here was a man supposedly in the resistance, but from his standpoint he felt okay you know this is it, it has happened, we have been invaded, we’ll make the best of it.
BILL BENSON:
Like he’d been hanging over as a cloud up until that point.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly. But for them of course it was just the beginning of the occupation.
BILL BENSON:
Right, of course. You began to tell us about the increasingly repressive measures that the Nazis took. Tell us some more about that. One of the things I read in something you wrote, that all Jewish property was “Aryanized.” What does that mean?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
It basically meant that all Jews had to give up property, their own property. It was no longer, the Jews were no longer allowed to own anything basically, any kind of property. The other thing that happened, something that my mother told me about, that Jews were banned from going into the public parks. One time, we lived in a fairly nice neighborhood, not too far from where many of the embassies were located. She went out with a stroller with one of my sisters and this woman from a German Embassy, from nearby where the German government of occupation, stopped by and had one look at my sister, she looked at my mother and my mother’s heart skipped a beat because she was in a place that she wasn’t supposed to be in. The woman looked at my sister’s blue eyes and blonde hair and she said, “You know you can tell that this is good Aryan stock.” That was the last time my mother went to the park.
BILL BENSON:
Al, several months before you were born your parents enrolled your sister Eva in a Catholic school. Why did they do that?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well at that point Jews, Jewish children, were forbidden from attending public schools and so my parents enrolled them in a private Catholic school. It was also an attempt really at hiding their Jewish identity, first attempt at hiding their identity before they were actually formally hidden with another family.
BILL BENSON:
Several months later, November 23, 1941, almost 19 months after the Nazis occupied Holland, you were born. Your parent’s joy in your birth, in the midst of such circumstances must have been accompanied by fears on their part. Is that something you can say something about?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Sure. My mother talked about that quite a bit, you know. First of all you know, when she found out that she was pregnant she was advised very strongly by her obstetrician to have an abortion. Her obstetrician told her that it would be immoral to bring another Jewish life into the world. My mother at that point turned to the Bible and the story of Hannah, a woman who was desperate to have a child and went to the temple every year praying that she might conceive and it was in reading that story that my mother decided that she could not possibly have an abortion so she went through with the pregnancy.
But then, you know, when I was born it was another dilemma. One of the things that’s part of the Jewish tradition is circumcision. The Bris or Brit Milah and again, you know, my father especially, you know was really not certain. Many friends advised him against having the circumcision ceremony because that would really label me as being Jewish and circumcision was fairly rare at that time throughout Europe in other groups. But then the doctor turned to him shortly after birth and said, “Everything is fine with your son but he’ll need a small operation.” That small operation turned out to be a circumcision. So, according, just very much in keeping with Jewish tradition, we had a circumcision ceremony 8 days later in The Hague.
One of the amazing things if you don’t mind my digressing a little bit, there were some photographs take of that ceremony and two tiny photographs of that ceremony survived and my mother finally, when she ended up in the concentration camps, managed to keep those two little photographs with her throughout her stay in the camps. She told me she kept them hidden in her hair. I am not quite sure, that may have been another part of her body, but she managed to keep those pictures with her.
She had this idea, this superstition that if she ever lost those photographs it would mean that I had died. So those photographs did surv…I survived, and those photographs survived and they are now part of the collection of the Museum.
BILL BENSON:
That’s amazing that she was able to keep those throughout all that she endured and we’ll come back to that in a little bit. Al, over the next 10 months or so following your birth, by September 1942 conditions had grown so bad for Jews in Holland and throughout Europe of course, that your parents decided that in order to survive you really needed to go into hiding. So tell us about their decisions that led up…what convinced them that they needed to do that and what steps they took to put each of you into hiding.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well, Jewish men were already being called up then to go to report for work in labor camps. At first my father, to avoid that call had an operation, a hernia operation, which he had delayed for a long time. So, that sort of postponed what was then becoming inevitable. There had already been Jews in Amsterdam who were rebelled and had been sent to Mauthausen where they actually committed suicide by jumping off a cliff and the Germans referred to them as the “parachutists.”
And so that had already happened and it was certainly known to the Jewish population so people were getting more and more afraid and people were making decisions to go into hiding basically. One of the important decisions that my family had to make is whether to go into hiding as a group, as a family, or to take a chance, to basically as a form of insurance to divide the family and have some, have members of the family hidden with different groups. So, my father first went to hide in a psychiatric hospital, pretending, feigning a suicide attempt. He went to a clinic called Remaerkliniek near The Hague,
BILL BENSON:
So he became a patient there?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly. So came there as a patient basically and he was not alone. There were other Jews doing the exact same thing and I have since found out that this was really very common throughout Holland. My mother was then left alone in the house.
BILL BENSON:
With 3 kids.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
With 3 kids and then she first, she emptied the house of all furniture of all the belongings. She sold things so that they would be ration cards available, money available for the kids as they were placed with different families. She first found a place for my two sisters, a very devout Catholic woman, through the intervention of our neighbors actually who were very, very prominent Catholic family. Their priest, Father Schulling actually was involved in placing my sisters.
Then for me it was a little but more difficult to find a place for Jewish boys because they were, again because of circumcision they were more obvious targets and could more easily be found out so what I was placed then with my mother’s neighbor, Annie Madna, who then as you heard passed me on to her sister, and then finally I was placed with her ex-husband Tolé Madna. At that time I was about 11 months old.
BILL BENSON:
So here you are, an infant, going actually two or three places before you ended up with the Madna family. We’re going to, in a little bit…oh please yes…
ALFRED MÜNZER:
This is actually a little object that I have from that period. This is my teething ring that was left with me when I was in hiding with the Madna family…and a few other little objects.
BILL BENSON:
Before your mother found places to hide your sisters and then you, among those many repressive measures was being forced to wear yellow stars and I know I read in something you wrote about Eva having to wear a yellow star at age 6.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
I think that was really the decree that children, beginning at age 6, had to wear the yellow star so my sister Eva wore one and my sister Lea certainly was still exempt at that point because she was two years younger.
BILL BENSON:
So you were placed, you end up in Tolé Madna’s household and a little bit later we’re going to talk about what that experience was like for you. So now your mother has found places for your sisters a separate place for you, your father is in a psychiatric facility, and your mother is out there. What did she do?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well what she decided at that point is that she would join my father in the psychiatric clinic but she could not bring herself to be a patient and so she went there basically as a nurse’s assistant and spent probably about 6 months there, approximately, maybe a little bit less actually, working in the psychiatric hospital. She told me about what it was like. This was her first exposure to mental illness and the treatment of mental illness at that time was certainly very different from what we have now, fortunately. This was something very, very difficult for her. But, nonetheless, when she saw what was happening in the hospital compared to what was happening on the outside she really wondered where sanity was located, but it was really the…
BILL BENSON:
Where it begins and where it ends?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly.
BILL BENSON:
Do you know, Al, if, your mother as a nurse’s aide in the facility and your father is a patient, do you know if they acknowledged each other to others or did they lead very different lives in there?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
I think they had some contact and certainly she said my father definitely had contact with other Jews who were in hiding. She told me that, you know, they tried to make the best of it and would have card games and things like that together. So, it really, you know it’s trying to make the best of some very, very bad, very dangerous, very threatening circumstances.
BILL BENSON:
You mentioned a moment ago about getting the ration cards. Will you say a little bit more about that? I know your mother actually purchased ration cards on the black market. Why was that so significant in terms of hiding you?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well this was really the only way to get food for children who were in hiding, for anybody in Holland at the time, you know, milk, everything was rationed very, very strictly, bread, milk, all the necessities of life. In placing the children, one very important commodity, in addition to their bedding and their clothes and all that was really providing ration cards so that the family that was taking them in would be able to obtain food, which even under the best of circumstances was very, very difficult.
Mima, the nanny who took care of me would walk miles every day, trying to get milk for me. Also, one of the things I heard just a few years ago, I was in Holland and I met a woman and she looked at me very sternly and she said, you know, “You drank my milk!” And I was kind of angry, kind of upset by her and then she told me, she said she was a little girl going to school and they had little bottles of milk in school and her mother told her to save half the bottle everyday for the baby next door. I was that baby next door.
BILL BENSON:
With the ration cards for a Jew whose hidden with a family, they might have ration…if there was 3 in the family they would have ration cards for 3, so it would be an extra mouth to feed.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly.
BILL BENSON:
So it was so important for your mother to do that. So your parents are in the psychiatric facility, Al. The day after Christmas 1942, the SS come in and take them.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
That’s right. They emptied the entire hospital, the entire clinic, of all, not just the Jews who were hiding there, but of all patients who were considered “mental defectives” and also all the nurses and attendants, anybody working there. They were all deported. I don’t know how many of them survived and how many ended up being killed but in some of the work that I have done recently for the Museum for example, a similar situation in another psychiatric hospital in Apeldoorn, all 1,500 patients and employees were deported in one day and were killed in Auschwitz 3 days later.
BILL BENSON:
The entire facility?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
The entire facility and you know the same thing. In this particular case my parents initially were taken to a prison in The Hague. Appropriately enough if you will, the home of the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, that was turned into a prison.
BILL BENSON:
His home?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
His home was turned into a prison and the Dutch Jewish philosopher, very famous. And from there they were taken to Westerbork. Westerbork had originally been built as a receiving center for Jews who were trying to escape from Germany into Holland.
BILL BENSON:
So a positive place.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
A positive place, and with the invasion was converted the first concentration camp on Dutch soil.
BILL BENSON:
And that’s where they went initially?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
That’s where they went initially.
BILL BENSON:
And then what happened?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well then they both were taken from Westerbork, to another facility, another camp called Vught near the city of Eindhoven. And they became part of a forced labor contingent working for Phillips electronics.
BILL BENSON:
Phillips that still exists today?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Phillips that still exists today and still located in Eindhoven actually. They were there for close to a year. Now, my mother told…never told me how horrible the conditions were there but recently I did some reading about it and Vught was really a pretty awful place and really was very similar to the concentration camps that were in Poland or in Germany.
BILL BENSON:
You told me about your mother’s work and how she got the job that she got. Would you share that with us?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well she heard through the grapevine, I am sure many other people, that one of the things that really was necessary for the Germans was anybody working in electronics was an essential occupation and so she figured out, she learned how to assemble radio tubes, basically by looking, others and how they were doing it and then very quickly she picked it up and that’s how she basically survived.
BILL BENSON:
She convinced them that she could do this?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly, yeah. She convinced them that she could do this and that’s how she worked in the Phillips factory and subsequently in another factory.
BILL BENSON:
What do you know about their daily life there? What there routine was like?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
The one thing that my mother mentioned was that they would have to get up very early in the morning at 5:00 or 6:00AM and it was a lineup basically where they would stand sometimes for hours. On one occasion they were even visited by Himmler himself and he exhorted them to work for the German Reich and as long as they kept working no hard would ever come to them.
One little thing my mother told me about was that way off in the distance she could see the spire of a small Dutch church. Even though she wasn’t Christian, she wondered how wonderful it would be if peace were to break out at that moment and she could rush to that church just to say a prayer, to thank god, for deliverance.
BILL BENSON:
Was your father there with her in Vught?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
They were still together in Vught. I don’t know how much contact they had with each other but they were both there and from there they both went on to Auschwitz.
BILL BENSON:
And a little bit later I hope that you’ll tell us a little bit more about this. So while that’s happened to your parents, of course you are an infant and you are now living with the Madna family. Tell us about that experience, what you know. Of course you’ve stayed connected with the family so you know a lot about what happened.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Yeah and there were certain memories that I have that are very, very clear in my mind. They are sort of spotty memories but one of them…they are happy memories. I was just a child and a nice big family. So I remember my foster father playing the piano. I remember Mima singing lullabies, Indonesian lullabies and I have vague memories of those lullabies.
I also remember, you know, trying to compete with my three sudden siblings, older siblings, the three children that he had custody of, Robbie, Willy, and Dewie. They were in school and I saw that they were writing, doing their homework, so I grabbed a pen and tried to scribble, you know, and show off my writing and they were laughing obviously at me, and I got very upset about that. I could barely reach the table.
One of the other things I remember is, you know, just how the bias that childhood memories have. I remembered that they had a liquor cabinet, which was quite big and it was in the shape of a barrel. Well, many, many years later, living here in the United States I was visited by the grandchildren of my foster father and they carried this very heavy bag with them, this duffel bag. I couldn’t believe what was in the duffel bag and they opened it up and there was the barrel.
BILL BENSON:
Which was gigantic to you as a child…
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly, and as a child huge to me and then suddenly realize that this was the barrel and that was probably just about my height at the time.
BILL BENSON:
But they brought this to you.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
They brought this to me, right.
BILL BENSON:
Al, here you are hidden with an Indonesian family in Holland. You would stick out like somewhat of a sore thumb. How did you manage that.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
You are absolutely right and, you know, my foster father Tolé Madna concocted some pretty wild stories to explain my presence in the family. One story that he told it was apparently quite effective, in which he volunteered actually to the Germans, was that…
BILL BENSON:
Because they were inquiring?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
That’s right. That I was the illegitimate child of his ex-wife and that she had…was Dutch, Caucasian, and that she now had a new boyfriend who did not want me around. And that’s how I ended up with him. Somehow he managed to convince them of that story and that’s how I survived.
BILL BENSON:
What was the…for anybody who hid a Jewish child or adult, what was the penalty for that?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
They could really face death, actually. This was, they took incredible risks doing this. It’s something which to this day I can’t explain, you know, and I always wonder about myself, you know, what would I do under those circumstances? I think it’s the case not just for them but for the many thousands who took those same risks to hide Jews.
BILL BENSON:
You said to me earlier that not many of the neighbors though…because you were…to stay indoors they didn’t know you were there, the Dutch neighbors, but in the larger Indonesian community, which there was a fairly decent sized Indonesian community in Holland, that they knew you were there. So how did they know and why didn’t it get out, leak out in some way?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well the Indonesian community was very insular and they had very little contact really with the outside and for some reason they were really shielded to a large extent from the Germans. That’s how they managed to keep a secret. Many years later when I went to visit my foster father we went to an Indonesian grocery store and the man had one, the grocer had one look at me and he saw me with my foster father and he called out, “Bobby!” Bobby was my name when I was in hiding. I had been told for a long time that it was actually the dog’s name. More recently I was told that the dog’s name was really Teddy, so but I was given the…most kids in hiding were given names, new names.
I subsequently found out for example that my sisters were given the last name Johnson. But in my case it was Bobby and to this day I am known as Bobby and that Indonesian grocer, by just seeing the combination of an Indonesian man and a Caucasian younger man, immediately knew who I was.
BILL BENSON:
Knew you were Bobby. Tell us about Mima. Mima was the family’s nanny and her significance to you.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
You know, I have really no direct memory of Mima at all. It’s very strange because I have other memories of that period. She was really an amazing woman. She could not read or write, was completely illiterate, did not speak any Dutch, only Indonesian and yet, you know, I was her child. I was told, in fact, I slept in her bed and that she kept a knife under her pillow to fend of any Nazi who might come and try to get me. She even said that if they came to get me she would kill me first before letting them have me. And she would, you know, do everything she could to get milk and necessities for me…just a tremendous, tremendous risk. Unfortunately, Mima passed away two months after the war. And that’s probably why the only memory that I have of her is of visiting her grave.
BILL BENSON:
When we talk in a few minutes about your reunification with your mother I know we’ll return to that topic. How did the Madna family, how did they make ends meet and survive during that time?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well I think, you know, it’s really again using the ration cards, whatever they had, some money that had been left by my mother. They were never very wealthy certainly. But somehow, you know, they managed to survive and provide a happy home for their kids and for me. So that my memories of that period are really very, very happy ones.
Even, you know, the few times when I do remember having to go into hiding in a little cellar underneath the stairs I played with all the Christmas decorations and I have memories of that. So I made the best of it also and I wasn’t really aware personally I think of any danger. Obviously life was very limited. I was indoors and the only view that I had of the outside world was what I could see through a mail slot.
BILL BENSON:
Because you were not allowed outside during that time?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
I was not allowed outside at all during that period.
BILL BENSON:
Indoors…
ALFRED MÜNZER:
And in fact people, friends of my mother’s who came to visit, were also told to look through that mail slot at me and that’s the only contact they were allowed to have with me because the Madnas were so protective of me.
BILL BENSON:
The War, it’s late 1944, early 1945, the War is beginning to come towards its end. It’s an exceptionally bitter winter and you have some memory of that winter. Will you share that with us?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Sure. You know I remember at that point really that in all of Holland, but certainly in our family, also the Madna family, food was extremely scarce. Basically we resorted to the one thing that there was plenty of in Holland and that’s tulip bulbs and they were ground up, you know, as food, sort of a pudding, porridge if you will.
I remember one time, you know, seeing, waking up during the night, seeing the table set and getting up and going over to the table, sitting at my seat and falling asleep with my head gradually falling into the plate, because I expected to be fed. I saw the table set up and this was in the middle of the night.
BILL BENSON:
Tulip porridge.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Tulip…yeah. This was all that was left in those last days of World War II. Famine really in Holland.
BILL BENSON:
Al, while you are there of course the Madna family your two sisters had been put by your mother by this devout Catholic woman and her family. Tell us about your sisters, what happened to them?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well unfortunately their story was quite different because it was a fight between the husband and wife in the family and the husband denounced his wife as hiding two Jewish children. They took his wife and the two children, Germans took them both, all three. His wife survived, was ultimately released, but my two sisters were taken first to Westerbork again, the Dutch concentration camp. Then several days later went on to Auschwitz where they were killed at just early in February, 1944. They were six and eight years old at the time.
BILL BENSON:
Beautiful little girls.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Yeah.
BILL BENSON:
When did your mother learn what happened to her daughters?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
My mother, I am not sure whether she…my mother was liberated a little bit before the end of the War and we can talk about that if you want, so she was repatriated after being in the concentration camps from Denmark to Sweden, actually. She spent a few months there. I am not sure whether that’s when she found out my sisters had perished. More likely she found out about it when she came back to Holland in August, 1945. She found out that my two sisters had died and that I was the one child who had survived.
BILL BENSON:
Your mother and father had gone, as you said, first to Westerbork then on to Vught, and then to Auschwitz. It was at that point that they became separated.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
That’s correct.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us about each of them.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well my mother went on from Auschwitz to a concentration camp in Germany called Reichenbach which was the headquarters of the German electronics factory Telefunken and she continued to do the same kind of work, assembling radio tubes. There one of the positive things that she talked about was the fact that there were a lot of ex-German soldiers, soldiers who had been injured in the invasion of Russia and who were half blind or who were missing limbs, who were put to work in that same factory.
BILL BENSON:
So side by side
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Side by side…
BILL BENSON:
With the slave laborers?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly. Side by side with the slave laborers. They, like everybody else, really began to sabotage the entire operation of the factory. In my mother’s case what she would do it she would very carefully…
BILL BENSON:
I love what you are about to say.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
She would very carefully assemble a radio tube over a day and then at the end of the day, just as the alarm was sounded, the end of the day, she would take the radio tube apart and put it back in the drawer and then the following day begin the whole process all over again. So she never really contributed to the war effort. She just managed to stay alive by working on that one radio tube.
BILL BENSON:
That was a good tube though.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
It was.
BILL BENSON:
Al, so from there what happened to your mother.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well, while she was there the Telefunken factory was bombed by the Allies and that may have seemed like a bad moment for my mother, but in actual fact it was something very positive in her mind. She recited the Jewish prayer that is said for, as an expression of gratitude when that happened. When she saw the factory going up in flames she said the Shechiyanu prayer, the prayer that’s an expression of gratitude. She knew that at that point that the end of Hitler was in sight.
Unfortunately, that was not the end because she was taken on the death march to several more camps until she finally ended up in Hanover. There her work which she described to me as not being terribly unhappy, was clearing rubble of Allied bombs.
BILL BENSON:
Not unhappy because it was the rubble…
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Not unhappy…exactly because it was rubble. Then finally, shortly thereafter, she was liberated through the intercession of Count Folke Bernadotte, who was the head of the Swedish Red Cross. He had negotiated the freedom of about 3,000 women. I am not entirely sure of the number but I think it was about 3,000 women. Himmler had sort of kept apart just to curry favor with the Allies, just in case he needed it. It was sort of for his own safety if you will. So she was liberated in April, 1945 at the Danish border.
She described that event very vividly to me. She said they got off the train and they were greeted by Count Folke Bernadotte and the Crown Prince of Sweden also, who insisted on embracing, hugging each one of the prisoners…
BILL BENSON:
3,000?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
…as they came off the trains. She felt so ashamed because they were dirty, their clothing was…the women actually she told me, tried to convert their prison uniforms, those striped uniforms into nicer dresses by fashioning belts, shortening them. This sort of became a competition to try to regain a little bit of humanity, a little bit of dignity, which really was one of the things that she was most sad about losing.
BILL BENSON:
Then she would end up going to Sweden. In the meantime, the War is over for you and you are living with the Madna family and it would be several months after the War before your mother would return. Tell us about your reunification with your mother.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well that’s another very, very vivid memory. Probably the clearest memory that I have of that period, was the day my mother came back. I remember being asleep and being awakened by one of the Madna family members and really not being too happy about it and crying. I was taken into the living room where the entire family was sitting in a circle and I was passed from lap to lap trying, people tried to quiet me down, and there was one lap I would not sit on and that was my mother’s lap. She was a stranger. That was…that’s one memory that I, the earliest memory I have really of my mother.
BILL BENSON:
Of course Mima had been your…
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Exactly.
BILL BENSON:
…as far as you were concerned.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Mima was really my mother up until then and had cared for me.
BILL BENSON:
You started, you told us a little bit that Mima had died shortly after the War.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
The plan had been, that my mother had made was for…she knew that I was very attached to Mima. She also knew that she would have to get work and so her plan was for Mima to continue to care for me. But unfortunately, that plan never materialized because two months after the War Mima suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and suddenly passed away.
You know there is an interesting, a little side bar to this, my mother told me that she was really trying to have an opportunity to be alone with me. So she gave Mima some money to go and see a movie and she got her the tickets and Mima went to the movie and then about 5 or 10 minutes later Mima came back and she waged her finger at my mother, she said, “Don’t hit him!”
BILL BENSON:
Al, let’s return to your father. Your mother and he were separated at Auschwitz and you mentioned earlier that he did pass away shortly after the War’s end. Tell us what your father’s journey was until that point.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well he went from Auschwitz to Mauthausen, from Mauthausen to several sub-camps. Mauthausen is located in Austria, near the city of Linz, and from there he went to several sub-camps, and finally ended up in the absolutely beautiful little town called Ebensee. It’s the only place in the world where Edelweiss actually grows. This is this magical flower. There he worked to his death really in a concentration camp.
BILL BENSON:
The concentration camp that was in this beautiful setting?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
It was in this beautiful setting and it’s…they were working on assembling V2 rockets in abandoned salt mines, these tunnels in the mountain. Obviously there was very, very deadly labor. Very recently, just actually about a week ago, I had an opportunity to meet one, a person who was involved in the liberation of that camp. I should say my father survived the liberation and then passed away two months later.
But anyway, I met this…there was an article in the Washington Post on the occasion of the Days of Remembrance, an annual event here at the Museum, and they mentioned a nurse, Dorothy Pecoraa, who lives in McLean and who had been an Army Nurse, and was involved in the liberation of the camp in Ebensee so a week ago Sunday I spent the afternoon with her, looking through hundreds of photographs that she has of the camp. She described what it was like when she came to the camp.
BILL BENSON:
As an Army Nurse?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
As an Army Nurse. There were six Army Nurses, U.S Army Nurses who came there. The conditions were absolutely horrible. She said there were bodies everywhere. She said they were on a big Army truck and the truck could not go forward because there were bodies in the path, literally. Then they found some prisoners who were still alive and they tried best they could to care for them. It was a really very important event for me because it gave me an opportunity to thank her, for at least providing some comfort, perhaps some dignity to my father and to his comrades in there, in their final days. I think this was really very important closure if you will for me.
BILL BENSON:
And I would imagine it was very important for her too.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Was very, very important for her.
BILL BENSON:
This was just a week ago this past Sunday?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
This was just a week ago this past Sunday. She is 90 years old and is about this tall, and wasn’t much taller when she was an Army Nurse.
BILL BENSON:
Wow.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
…showed me pictures driving truck through occupied France, through Germany, finally to Austria, very, very sturdy, little woman, as was her husband who was an Army Doctor actually.
BILL BENSON:
Thanks for telling us about that. Al, I think before we go any further, because we are going to have a closing a few moments. We have a couple of minutes to turn to our audience to ask them if they have any questions they’d like to ask you, just a little bit of time, so we are going to ask you if you have a question, I am going to repeat the question before Al answers it, that way we ensure that everybody hears the question, including Al, before he responds to it. So, would anybody like to ask Al a question? Yes ma’am.
The question is “How did your parents meet given that your mother had gone to Berlin and your father had gone to Holland?”
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Sure, they were actually childhood friends. They had become acquainted, they were childhood sweethearts if you will so…
BILL BENSON:
In the old country…
ALFRED MÜNZER:
In the old country, right, in Poland. So this is just, they came back together in Holland. My mother actually came to Holland with the idea of marrying my father. That was the main purpose for coming there.
What’s interesting of course is that people thought of Germany as being a safer place than Poland. That’s why they came, and then people left Germany to go to Holland because it was felt to be a much safer place, but there really was no safe place.
BILL BENSON:
Except for Bolivia in the case of…
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Bolivia, right.
BILL BENSON:
Another question? Young lady right here.
The question is “What was it like living in Europe after the Holocaust?”
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well, it’s for me, my personal memory is really kind of unusual because I grew up in the Holocaust. This was part of my life, so living in the city it was largely rubble was just part of my normal childhood. We would go visit friends of my mother’s, a woman actually who had been in the concentration camps with her, and she got married after the War, we would go visit them and cross this huge field of rubble and visit Max and Hella who lived in a little attic actually, that was the only house standing in the whole area. That was their home, but it was a very festive occasion for me. That was, I consider that normal.
When I played on the beach and we saw bunkers, that was considered again, part of normal life, seeing a lot of orphans, again many of my friends were orphans. That was just normal at the time. That was my perception.
One of the sad parts is that the War was not the end of antisemitism and even my mother we were standing on line one time to go to the movies and this man said, “Well there is one they didn’t get.”
BILL BENSON:
I am going to come to your question in just a moment, but let me ask a follow up question for you Al, that was your experience as a child, but your mother had experienced for her, unimaginable loss, her daughters, her husband, most of her extended family, how did she cope with that? How was she able to create a new life?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
It’s something that I have struggled with and I really don’t know how she managed to survive. I think the one factor that there were so many other people in similar circumstances and what she said in worse circumstances, who had lost everything. The fact that she just at least had one child left I think it what kept her going basically.
But I also remember that my mother told me that she had made a fist to keep herself from crying because one of the things she told me she realized very quickly that people did not like to see tears. She actually got an infection in her hand.
BILL BENSON:
From clenching her fist?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Just from clenching her fist to keep herself from crying. I also remember certainly even though during the day she would try to be perfectly fine and cheerful, but I very distinctly remember as a child hearing her sob during the night, mentioning my father’s name. So, she tried to hide her grief and tried to be strong about that but obviously it had a very, very major impact. That’s one of the reasons why we finally came to America. It was really to forget and move away from all of those bad memories.
BILL BENSON:
In fact she moved you first, in 1952, to Belgium, then to the United States.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Right, we first moved to Belgium, and it took a long time to get a visa to the United States and we finally came to the United States in 1958.
BILL BENSON:
Do you still have your question?
Question is, “How old were you when your mother returned?”
ALFRED MÜNZER:
I was about three and ½, almost four.
BILL BENSON:
Literally almost the first four years of your life were with Mima and the Madna family. So she brings you to the United States in 1958 and from there Al you just had a remarkable career. How did your Mom fair, my last question of you, how did your mom do once you came to the Unites States?
ALFRED MÜNZER:
She did quite well, she got a job and she really tried to learn English, which she managed.
BILL BENSON:
And you did too.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Yeah, and she went back to one of the things that she enjoyed as a young girl, which was doing painting, art, drawings and painting, and somehow really made a life for herself in the United States. She passed away at the age of 94 here in Washington.
BILL BENSON:
Wow. We are going to close the program in just a moment. I want to thank all of you for being with us today. I want to thank Al, certainly for being our first person. I am going to turn back to Al in just a moment. I would like to remind you that we will have a First Person program every Wednesday until the end of August, and every Tuesday until the end of July and our next program is tomorrow, May the 12th when our first person will be Mrs. Charlene Schiff. Mrs. Schiff, who is from Poland, left a ghetto by crossing a river that was adjacent to the ghetto and escaped into the forest as a young teenager, where she would remain in hiding in the forest for two full years before her liberation.
We hope you’ll come back to a First Person program if you are in Washington, or if you live here please come back whenever you can. I’d like to remind you that you can listen to podcasts of the First Person program, including Al’s in a few weeks. They are available on the website of the Museum as well as on iTunes.
It’s our tradition at First Person that our first person has the last word. And with that I’d like to turn back to Al to close this program. Also, if you would like Al, when he steps down off the stage, available to chat with people if you’d like to talk with Al please do so. So, Al.
ALFRED MÜNZER:
Well you know the story of the Holocaust obviously is a horrendous story of tremendous horror. Certainly can see all of that here in the Museum, especially if you go through the permanent collection. But there was also some amazing good, like the Madna family, people who took incredible risks to do what is right and I think, I hope, that that’s the lesson we all take away from this Museum and from the Holocaust in general is that even in the worst of times there is the possibility of choosing to do good and choosing good over evil.
BILL BENSON:
Thank you.
[Applause]
