First Person with Gerald Schwab
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PETER BLACK:
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Peter Black and I am the Senior Historian here at the Museum. I want to thank you very much for joining us this afternoon. We are in the tenth year of our program, First Person, and our guest today, I’m very happy to announce, is Mr. Gerald Schwab whom we will meet very shortly.
I’d like to make a few announcements first, and give you some background on the program. This 2009 season of First Person is made possible through the generosity of the Louis and Doris Smith Foundation, to whom we are very grateful for again sponsoring First Person. And I understand that Mr. Louis Smith is here today and would love him to stand up so that you folks can see who is responsible.
[Applause]
Thank you. First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust who share with us their first hand experiences associated with the Holocaust. Each first person serves as a volunteer here at the Museum, and I’m happy to say that Gerry has served as a volunteer with the division of the Senior Historian for as long as I’ve been here and for about 10 years before that. With few exceptions, we will have a First Person guest here each Wednesday through the month of August, ending on August 26th. For more information on upcoming First Person guests, please visit the Museum’s web site at www.ushmm.org.
This year we are offering a new feature associated with First Person. Excerpts from our conversations with survivors will be available as podcasts on the Museum’s web site. Several, excuse me, are already posted on the web site, and Mr. Schwab’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, for the younger generation and those who are technologically cognizant in the older generation, through iTunes.
Gerry will share his first person’s account of his experience during the Holocaust and as a survivor for about 40 minutes. We will follow that with an opportunity for you folks to ask Gerry questions. Before you are introduced to him, though, I have a few announcements and a couple of requests of you. First, if possible, please stay in your seats during the program so that we can minimize any disruption while Gerry speaks. Second, if we have time for questions towards the end of our program and we’d like to arrange for that, please make your question as brief as you can so that as many people as possible can ask their questions. I will repeat the question as best I can so that all, including Gerry, can hear it. Finally, please turn off any cell phones or pagers that you have that may be on. I would also like to let those of you with passes for the Permanent Exhibition and are wondering whether they have to be upstairs in 15 minutes, know that they are good for the balance of the afternoon. You can go up at any time after the program is over.
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and it’s collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims. Six million were murdered. Roma, or Gypsies, people with disabilities, Poles, and Soviet Prisoners of War were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression under Nazi tyranny.
More than 60 years after the Holocaust, hatred, antisemitism and genocide still threaten our world. The life stories of Holocaust survivors transcend the decades and remind us of the constant need to be vigilant citizens and to stop injustice, prejudice and hatred wherever and whenever they occur.
What you’re about to hear from Gerry Schwab is one individual’s account of the Holocaust, and we have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with the introduction of Mr. Gerry Schwab. Gerald grew up in Freiburg, Germany—You’ll excuse the, if I call you Gerry since that’s what I’m used to calling you—which is in the southwestern part of Germany. He was born in 1925. Here’s a photograph dating from 1932 of Gerry’s very small, small town school. This is his entire class, and Gerry is the young man standing in the center row right next to the teacher in 1932 at the age of seven. He was the only Jewish boy in this entire class. Here’s a photograph taken at some point during the late 1930s of Gerry’s parents, his elder sister who came to the United States in the mid-30s, in the late 30s, and Gerry himself on your left. This document was a document issued to Gerry’s father who despite the fact that he was Jewish was also a decorated and wounded war veteran from World War I. You’ll note the date here, in the European style, 3rd of May, 1935, which was still early in the Nazi regime. And at this point, Jews of several categories, including that of wounded service veteran, were exempted from general antisemitic regulations and laws. This changed, of course, later in the 30s. Gerry’s going to address this particular certificate which awards his father a honorary cross, Cross of Honor for front line veterans, for combat veterans.
In 1938 Nazi Germany began to expand as you can see here with the darker brown shadings. Germany incorporated Austria in March of 1938 and the borderlands of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland in October 1938 as a result of the Munich Pact. And it was at this point that the Schwab family had to make some serious decisions. In November 1938, as a result of a carefully orchestrated Nazi pogrom, thousands of Jews were arrested. Thousands of apartments and businesses owned by Jews were vandalized and destroyed. And thousands, hundreds of synagogues were burned to the ground. Twenty six thousand Jews were arrested by the Gestapo in the course of two or three days and they were sent to what at that time were three concentration camps in Germany. Here is one of the earliest photos we have of the Dachau concentration camp, which was where Gerry’s father was sent. He was one of those arrested. Here is a photograph showing prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp.
After 1938, as a result of a request from the Swiss authorities, Germany authorities stamped a “J” in the identity papers of each German, Austrian and Sudeten Jew, and you can see the red “J” up in the upper left-hand corner of this passport that’s written out to Gerd Israel Schwab. The middle name is not Gerry’s real middle name. This name was required to be carried by Jews as Sarah was required to be carried by women if they were Jewish.
Now Gerry left Germany for the first time in 1939 and then again in 1940 for good, but he didn’t leave forever. He came back as a member of the U.S. Army which he joined just about as soon as he was old enough to do so, and here he is with a prosecutor’s assistant, Robert Kempner. Gerry is on your right, and they are interrogating one of the key German generals, Gerd von Runstedt. who was the general who orchestrated the Arden Offensive in the autumn in 1944 which we know as the Battle of the Bulge. With that I’d love to stop talking now and introduce Gerry. If you would come up to the stage?
[Applause]
Good afternoon Gerry. How are you doing today?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, so far so good.
PETER BLACK:
Well, now’s the time to perform, right? Tell me Gerry about your family history. Where did your family come from and how did they come to settle in southwestern Germany?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Actually my family, their background is or was in southwestern Germany going back a number of generation, as far as I can tell, certainly into the 18th or 17th century.
PETER BLACK:
And what was the name of your town?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Town is called Freiburg. It’s on the edge of the Black Forest and well…
PETER BLACK:
What did your father do for a living?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, my father had a business which covered parts of Germany, France and Switzerland with a main depot in Switzerland, in Basil, Switzerland. He sold the plumbing supplies, basically.
PETER BLACK:
And he was a veteran of the First World War.
GERALD SCHWAB:
He was a veteran of the First World War, and was wounded three times; once on the Russian front, once in Verdun.
PETER BLACK:
What rank did he hold at the end?
GERALD SCHWAB:
You know, I never asked him. But I do know, I do know he did get the Iron Cross.
PETER BLACK:
Which is one of the most significant awards that the German Army gives out. What’d your mom do? Was she a mom at home or did she help with the business?
GERALD SCHWAB:
She helped with the business. She was a part time book keeper for the business.
PETER BLACK:
And you had how many sibs?
GERALD SCHWAB:
One, a sister, five years older than I was.
PETER BLACK:
How did your parents respond, or how did you remember—you were only about eight at the time—but how did your parents respond to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany in 1933?
GERALD SCHWAB:
That’s a good question. I really, I’ve been trying to recollect, but I can’t add much. All I know for me in a way it was exciting, because we left Germany in 19, in April of 1933. There was a boycott of Jewish businesses, and we moved to a hotel in Switzerland and the main thing I remember from that is riding up and down in the hotel elevator.
[Laughter]
PETER BLACK:
So, it would be fair to say that at least in the early days your dad and your mom saw the writing on the wall and thought it would be a good idea to get out of the country.
GERALD SCHWAB:
Yes, especially since the main portion of the business was in Switzerland.
PETER BLACK:
Now they, but they returned to Germany at a certain point. When was that and why?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out in the last 80 years, 70 years. We actually, they could not remain in Switzerland, and so we moved into France, a two mile move from Switzerland into France, a town called St. Louis. I remember that some of our mail used to go the U.S. And then the French announced that refugees who were, who had fled from Germany could remain in France provided they moved at least a hundred kilometers, about 60 miles, from the border, which to me seems like a pretty appropriate measure. The trouble was since my father was the chief salesman of his business, who travelled through Switzerland almost every week, that hundred kilometer travel from our supposedly our new home to Switzerland and back proved to be a bit too difficult. And strange as it seems, in 1935, late ’35 I believe, we moved back to Germany. I’ve been trying to explain this to people for a long time, and I’m not gonna try it here.
On the other hand, let me, the certificate that was rejected had something to do with it. Many people asked, “Why did Jews not automatically leave Germany?” First of all, that was pretty, would be pretty difficult if you had a business or had a solid background, institution. Secondly, you needed the place to go to, and in addition to that, that certificate put out in 1935, in the name of the Führer and Reich’s Chancellor, Adolph Hitler, seemed to cause many people to believe, “Well, things can’t get too bad.” In my mind, through my mind, that certificate probably caused a lot of people’s death. Why? Because a number of people and I happen to know in the family itself, decided that they would not leave. They were Germans. They felt like Germans, and here was evidence that nothing would happen to them.
In many cases of course, by the time people woke up to the fact that this was totally meaningless, it was too late. In 1938, for example, there was a conference of potential places where people could move in Evian, France, and the discussion, everybody felt sorry for German Jews—and when I say German, obviously I include the Sudeten area and Austria—but, nobody came through with any authorizations. I think the only ones that did was the Dominican Republic. By the way that never turned out to be, but they volunteered at that point. I think more interesting is the reaction, it was a reaction of the Australians who said we don’t have a minority problem at this point, and we don’t want to import any. Anybody knows anything about the Australians and their native people knows that they had a very big minority problem, but they didn’t recognize it at that point.
PETER BLACK:
When did your parents start thinking about permanent emigration after returning?
GERALD SCHWAB:
I would say they probably started thinking about it in 1936, ’37, and then, of course, when we—you mentioned the “Crystal Night” of the November 8th, 9th. At that point, I think just about everybody realized that things were not turning out the way they had hoped. Obviously even many of the German industrialists hoped they could manage Hitler, and they couldn’t. And so, when you look at statistics of Jews leaving Germany, interestingly enough, the highest number left Germany in 1933. These were the young people who had no attachments, and felt free to move. And then the statistics show that the numbers that left decreased year by year until November, 1938 when they shot up, and so at that point, I think everybody got the message.
PETER BLACK:
Before that message was delivered, so to speak, when you went back to school in 1935, when you moved back to your home, what changes did you notice and how did you feel about them?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well I was the only Jewish kid in this small town school, medium town. Depends the size, depends on how you look at it. It was a town of about, at that point, it was about 30 or 40,000 people. Excuse me. And when I talk to some of my colleagues here in the Museum, most of them were actually kicked out of their schools, and put into their separate schools by 1935 and early 1936. I stayed in this particular school until 1938, late 1938. It wasn’t too bad. Southwestern Germany was perhaps not quite as virulently antisemitic as some of the other areas in the north and east. It was no great joy, let’s put it this way. I didn’t particularly care for the school, and you got picked on, but you survived.
PETER BLACK:
And were you able to maintain most of your friendships with the other kids?
GERALD SCHWAB:
No, I just, I actually had one friend. There were no other Jewish kids in town, actually one or two were, but they went to a different school and I had one friend who joined the Hitler Youth, and he and I continued to get a long quite well.
PETER BLACK:
Going back to the “Night of Crystal,” what was your personal experience during that horrible time? Were you frightened? Did you watch, see anything?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, my parents obviously got some word that it might be best for them to leave town, and so they went from this town we then lived in back to Freiburg where I was born, where they had lived previously, and I stayed home. Our synagogue was destroyed. I didn’t really grasp the full effect or the full, the problems that were occurring.
PETER BLACK:
What, did your father have any severe consequences from Kristallnacht?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Very much so. He was sent to the Dachau concentration camp as a former front line soldier, he was released among the first ones after, about two months. He came home in very bad shape. I might say this, he, my parents as I say, moved to Freiburg in order to avoid this and obviously, somebody recognized him on the street, turned him in. He was arrested and my mother, who actually drove at that point, had a car—we had a car—had to come back on her own. Needless to say, she was a wreck mentally. So, he was about two months in Dachau and came back with severe frost bites and both physical and mentally severely damaged.
PETER BLACK:
What had happened to your sister? Had she left?
GERALD SCHWAB:
My sister actually, was sent to the States in 1937, and she lived here.
PETER BLACK:
So, she was out of harm’s way.
GERALD SCHWAB:
She was out of…
PETER BLACK:
So given Kristallnacht, after your father returned home…
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well…
PETER BLACK:
Go ahead.
GERALD SCHWAB:
To me the biggest effect of Kristallnacht was the fact that I was kicked out of school, and I didn’t particularly, that didn’t particularly bother me.
[Laughter]
I was about to flunk Latin.
[Laughter]
And it had nothing to do with antisemitism. I mean to me, Latin was a dead language. So, however, my mother sort of got sick and tired of me, I suspect, and—well, I might as well go on—and at that point the U.K., England, volunteered to take 10,000 Jewish kids in one of the most incredible moves or government moves. As a former bureaucrat—and I’m speaking about myself—I still admire the way they did it, because somehow there was no legislation passed. They just decided to do it, and they did. Within three weeks, they started taking kids, what they called “children’s transport.” Now, these children’s transport went to, in this case, to England. My mother heard about it, being pretty, presumably, pretty sick and tired of me under foot, wrote to them and said, “Why can’t you take my kid?” And they said, “Well, you live so close to the Swiss border, the Swiss are doing it as well.” So she contacted an organization in Switzerland. The Swiss eventually took somewhat under 300 kids.
Now, many people may have heard about these children transports. The effects were, how should I put it? Some were good, some were bad, and some were in between. Let me give you three examples. My wife of 60 years left Berlin in April, 1939 for England where she was taken into the home of a family and had a very good, except for being of course away from home, had a pretty good year. They did eventually transport them out of London when the bombing of London became serious to another town. In her case, as in so many other cases, the kids waved goodbye to their parents and never saw them again.
There was another case of somebody—and I consider this a, a good case, I mean she had a good living, went to school, etc. And another case of one of the people that this sent to Switzerland, wrote a book in which he said, “Now when I come to Switzerland, I’m feeded, I’m given flowers and gifts and I can have a wonderful time.” I wish the local authorities had been as friendly and as helpful as they are now. The person’s name was Karola Siegel. Name doesn’t mean anything to you. Her real subsequent married name was Ruth Westheimer, and for those of you, if you don’t know Ruth Westheimer, Ruth, Dr. Ruth was the individual. So that one didn’t work out too well. By the way, I should say that my wife, after the war, went back to Germany to find relatives. She had 17 relatives that disappeared. She found two, not including her parents.
The third case, if I may give it as an example, was me. I was sent to a Swiss town, Swiss village. In fact, it’s so much of a small village that I would guess that the large majority of the Swiss, which is a pretty small country, have never heard of this town. I mean it was small, and having lived a rather good life before that in my early life, I ended up with a Swiss farm family. Now when I say “farm,” they had a couple plots of land, eight cows, one horse which kicked my across the, well kicked me across, on the first day I saw it. That sort of established the relationship.
[Laughter]
And this is where I made a great discovery. I was not cut out to be a farmer. I must say, I feel sorry for the farmer. It’s not their fault. They really did their best, but I was a round pin in a square hole. It just didn’t work. Anyhow, I stayed there for a year, desperately trying to get visas or helping to get a visa from, for my parents, from relatives in the United States. I guess I went a little further than I planned.
PETER BLACK:
I would like you to just keep on going. My next question had to do with, while you were in Switzerland, you were helping your parents to obtain visas. Tell us about some of the problems, the difficulties with getting a visa to enter the United States.
GERALD SCHWAB:
I really—
PETER BLACK:
That you folks experienced—
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, I, well we did experience it in that I, how should I put it? Somebody had to, you know had to, state that you would take care of the immigrant, take physical responsibility and it went through a number of, of individual or number of officers, etc. We eventually did get the visa, and we were called to the American, my parents were called to the American Consulate General in Stuttgart, and we did get a visa on May 10th, 1940. That date is fairly significant in world history. It’s the day that the Germans invaded Holland and Belgium. May I go back a little bit, what brought on the fact that my parents did desperately want to leave by then.
The Germans did everything possible to stop the conduct of our business on the part of the Germans, on the part of the family. Well first they did not allow my father to travel. With a “J” the Swiss would not, in the passport, the Swiss would in any event, not let him in. The Germans were interested in one thing and one thing only. They wanted him to finally sell his business or liquidate his business and bring all the foreign currency, which Germany needed badly for the preparation of war, back into Germany for, to be exchanged for German marks. And if anybody needs a few hundred thousand marks around here, I’m still willing to, I willing to provide some. They were worthless.
PETER BLACK:
How did you and your parents feel about leaving Germany for what seemed to be for good in 1940?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Oh I was delighted, and I’m sure they were too. We left as I say, we got our visa on the 10th of May, and a week later we were on the high seas travelling from Genoa, Italy to New York with the S.S. Washington. Later on we realized just how lucky we had been, because on the 21st of October of the same year, all the Jews in that entire state were arrested, shipped out to southern France and subsequently many of them ended up in Auschwitz. In other words, dead.
PETER BLACK:
Yes that was a very good timing in terms of immigration.
GERALD SCHWAB:
Oh yes, five months.
PETER BLACK:
And even getting through to Genoa, because Italy hadn’t entered the war yet, but would in another week.
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, that the war of course, shortly thereafter the Italians joined the Germans in declaring war on France, that would not have been possible any more.
PETER BLACK:
Now you came to the United States. Where did you settle? Where did you go to school?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, we first, my parents and here I, one of the books I wrote, I expressed my admiration to the people do what immigrants can do. My mother who had, we had, had a maid. We had a good middle class living, became a worker in the New York garment district. And subsequently they both became what was called a couple. I mean they were a couple before that obviously, but they called them a couple in Long Branch, New Jersey where my father became a chauffeur and a gardener and my mother became the house maid in a family of a New York lawyer. They subsequently acquired a chicken farm, and when my parents later on would’ve loved me to become a chicken farmer, my experience in Switzerland inoculated me.
[Laughter]
PETER BLACK:
Remembering your comment about leaving school earlier, what did you do as soon as you could once you were in the United States?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, I did go about six months worth of school in Switzerland. Then when I got to the States I went in Long Branch, New Jersey. And subsequently—any Jerseyites here? And subsequently in Hightstown High School, Hightstown, Central New Jersey.
Fortunately I was able to pick up language fairly quickly, and, well, let me tell you what happened. How somebody asked me recently how well, how much English did I speak at the time? On the second day in New York, we lived with some relatives, actually the step sister of my mother, and we went out in the street and I learned all about stick ball in the Bronx. And I’d say about the third or fourth day, I came home with my face rather disfigured with a huge bump here. And my mother, of course, thought this was terrible, and wondered how it had happened. Well, I tried one of my new language ability. I didn’t know what “S.O.B.” meant.
[Laughter]
But I found out.
[Laughter]
So the answer is no language ability, but I did pick it up.
PETER BLACK:
When you turned 18, Gerry, what did you do?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, I was on the farm with my parents and going to local high school, and my father got an exception from the draft board without my knowledge, because I became a important farmer, farm helper. When I found out about it, I called the local draft board and I said, “Don’t you ever do that again.” And they didn’t. So, I joined the army in 1940…44.
PETER BLACK:
Where did you serve?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, at first—any Floridians here? I’ve gotta watch what I say. I ended up in Camp Blanding, Florida. Don’t ever go there. In basic training, and then went overseas and joined the 10th Mountain Division which at that time had just arrived in Italy. And was with the 10th Mountain Division in one of those real safe assignments; I was a machine gunner. So much for my German language skills. I stayed with the 10th until five days after the war was over.
PETER BLACK:
What happened after that?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, I became an interpreter at General Clark’s headquarters then joined an intelligence outfit in Austria. And in April 1946, got an Army discharge in Vienna and went off to Nuremberg as a civilian. It sure felt good being a civilian. I was a lousy soldier. But anyhow, I ended up in Nuremberg as a translator interpreter at the first Nuremberg Trial, the trial of your, the major war criminals. And if you want to know how I felt about it, I felt great. I thought it was wonderful.
PETER BLACK:
You came back in Germany in a very different position from that which you left.
GERALD SCHWAB:
Yes.
PETER BLACK:
You interrogated some pretty interesting and high placed military personnel, did you not?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Yes, I worked in the commission and not in the main court room, but the commission had heard evidence from organizations which were on trial. A fact which has been pretty well forgotten by now and as such served as an interpreter, English-German, German-English in that commission, it was only one interpreter who did both languages. Now if anybody wants to know how come a kid of 21 can serve as an interpreter in position such as that, let me just reach back to an old saying, that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is King.” They needed people badly who spoke both languages. Among the people I translated for were pretty well the top, with the exception of the two top generals in the German Army, pretty well everything von Runstedt which you saw in the picture and a number of others.
Also, we saw, while we did not have the main defendants testifying, we usually had the number two such as, Dieter Wisliceny, a name that’s not current or not well known. He was Eichmann’s deputy. And when he testified, he knew he was a dead man. He was later transferred to Poland and executed. The head of the S.A. some of you may remember the name of Klaus Barbie in France, his boss, Dr. Knochen, a philologist, etc. This is the sort of the level of people that we had.
PETER BLACK:
How long were you with the International Military Tribunal?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, the International Tribunal was, of course, the first one that ended in October of 1946. I then moved on to Berlin to be a junior research analyst in German government files which were at Tempelhof Airport. And there worked on preparation for some of the future trials. I remember the first person we worked on was the Minister of Justice, and we worked on it pretty hard. Trouble is they forgot to tell us that he already had committed suicide two months earlier. So, it was a complete waste.
But in, about May 1947, I decided having only two years of high school, I better get back home, go to school. And I went to, being from New Jersey, I went to Rutgers to talk to these people and they said, “Well you’re gonna have to finish high school.” Well after having been an interpreter at Nuremberg and a junior research analyst for a trial, in another trial, major trial, I figured that pushing a desk, third year high school was not exactly what I was fit for. And so I went to the only school that would accept me with only two years of high school.
PETER BLACK:
And that was?
GERALD SCHWAB:
University of Chicago.
PETER BLACK:
And then you joined the State Department after that.
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, no after that, from Chicago, I went to Stanford, and from Stanford went directly to the State Department, and joined the Foreign Service, became what some of you may call a “cookie pusher.” And we started out in Vienna as an assignment which was great, and then from there, we went to Lome, Togo in New Eastern Nigeria, Freetown, Sierra Leone all garden spots. Actually, we enjoyed it, but I dragged my family all over the place. We then went to Tunisia back to States in between several times and then I spent a year at Cornell as a visiting scholar and subsequently left the Foreign Service and spent 10 years with the International Labor Organization in Geneva. That made up for Togo, Eastern Nigeria, Sierra Leone—
PETER BLACK:
And how did you meet your wife Joan who you must’ve married in 1949 if my math is correct.
GERALD SCHWAB:
Your math is correct. Christmas Day, so we wouldn’t forget it.
[Laughter]
We, well, gee, should I tell ya? I tell—I had a girlfriend in Berlin. She wasn’t it, and when I moved back to the States, she moved to New York. It was a colleague in Berlin at the, at the same research job, type of job I had. On my way back from Chicago to New Jersey, I went through there one time to visit her and met her girlfriend. Now I can only say one thing, don’t ever marry the friend, the best friend of your girlfriend.
[Laughter]
PETER BLACK:
Now I’m gonna ask you a question…
GERALD SCHWAB:
Uh-oh.
PETER BLACK:
Two more questions and then I wanna throw it open for general questions. Do you go back to Germany? Did you ever go back to Germany later and how did you feel?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, we went back as I say, first in 1955 on an assignment to Austria, to Vienna, which was pretty nice. But as I say in my book, I’ve nothing against Austrians, but Austria was able in the immediate period, immediate after the takeover to accomplish their antisemitic activities in eight weeks what took the Germans eight years. But we got along. It worked out fine. I was there and I drove through Nuremberg a couple of times while working in Geneva. And the last time I visited Nuremberg was last week while on vacation. I wanted to introduce my daughters to the town.
PETER BLACK:
Finally, based on your life’s experience, including your life during the era of the Holocaust, is there something that you would want the folks who’ve come to hear you today to think about for the future?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Yea, I guess. Well, how should I put it? It’s, I well, let me put it this way, in a book which I wrote, I have a, whenever somebody asks me to sign it, I put something into it. I write something in. The thing I usually say is, “May you never fully understand what transpired here.” It goes beyond your normal human understanding, and I think your visit here to the Museum—and I’m not just talking about antisemitism—I think is a good step in that direction.
PETER BLACK:
Thank you, Gerry. Thank you for coming.
[Applause]
We have a little bit of time for questions so if…Gerry would be happy to take your questions and I think he’d also be willing to stay a few minutes after—
GERALD SCHWAB:
Oh sure.
PETER BLACK:
—for those of you who don’t get your questions answered.
VISITOR:
Whatever happened to your sister?
GERALD SCHWAB:
She lived in New York, got married, had two children and lived a reasonably happy life.
PETER BLACK:
In the back?
VISITOR:
Since you moved to New Jersey at age 15, wasn’t it too hard to learn English by then?
PETER BLACK:
Since you moved to New Jersey at age 15, wasn’t it too hard to learn English by then?
GERALD SCHWAB:
Well, I was lucky. I had some relatives that came in 1933, and they were hikers. They loved hiking. It was a young couple, and they moved in German-American, with a German-American hiking groups. And so they invited me just for about two, three weeks after we got here. They invited me to come along. So we went hiking and camping in the Adirondacks. And what I didn’t know is they told everybody in that group not to speak a single word of German.
[Laughter]
Well, you learn a language pretty quickly…So that was the start. I don’t know whether you know the, there’s an anecdote that Henry Kissinger, everybody or many of you know his accent, very strong accent. His brother was a professor, I think, at Columbia. And one day they asked, they said, “Professor Kissinger, how come you speak such fluent English, or very good English, fluent English while your brother has this great, incredible accent?” He said, “I listened.”
[Laughter]
I didn’t have much of a choice there, but I was lucky. I pick up languages and accents fairly quickly. If there’s any Swiss here, I even picked up schweizerdeuts which is a, it’s not a language, it’s sort of a throat disease.
[Laughter]
PETER BLACK:
Yes ma’am.
VISITOR:
My family name is Freund and my grandfather said that during the ‘30s and ‘40s here experienced some anti-German sentiment living here in the U.S. and I’m wondering if you felt welcome here when you came not only being Jewish but also being German?
GERALD SCHWAB:
I , well, you had of course, in 1939, when you, when the British took in 10,000 kids, I think it was Senator Wagner of New York that introduced legislation which would authorize the same sort of thing, and it was tabled, which means it was killed. I’ve been told and I think it’s probably true, in the Department of State certainly, until the mid-40s, there were some antisemitic sentiments. I have never experienced it personally. Or let me put it this way, if I did experience it, I could usually rationalize that part of it was my fault.
PETER BLACK:
Yes?
VISITOR:
I was wondering, were you satisfied with the world’s efforts in post-war, in terms of Nazi prosecutions and efforts towards prosecutions and what went on there.
GERALD SCHWAB:
No, but the situation, of course, was most of those who were not executed were usually released within five to ten years for crimes that really we would not stand for at this point. But that had something to do with the Cold War. The fear of Germany being a weak Germany, etc. So, to, in the abstract my answer is no, but I can understand why.
PETER BLACK:
We have time for one more question, but then I would encourage those of you, who still have questions, Gerry can stay with us for a few minutes. Sir?
VISITOR:
You spoke about your immediate family; your sister, your father, your mother. What about your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, and others in your family? Do you know what happened to them?
PETER BLACK:
Question is about other relatives.
GERALD SCHWAB:
I’m very, quite fortunate. Our immediate family survived. There were some distance relatives who did not, but my uncles and aunts, for the most part, did leave in ’36, ’37. So, I was, we, were lucky. As I say, my wife’s family, she looked for 16 or 17 people and found two alive. It was a crap game. You really, because by the time people realized that they had to get out, it was getting more and more difficult to get out.
PETER BLACK:
Gerry, thank you very much. And Mr. Smith, thank you for supporting this program, and thank you for our attention.
[Applause]
