Finding Refuge in the United States

My name is Joanna Wasserman I am an education initiatives manager in the William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

I'm joined by Susan Warsinger, a Holocaust Survivor and long-time Museum volunteer, to learn about her harrowing escape from Nazi Germany and eventual immigration to the United States

Hearing from Holocaust Survivors gives us an opportunity to understand that the Holocaust

affected individuals and families in diverse ways as you will hear from my friend Susan Warsinger

today even those who eventually found refuge in the United States also experienced insecurity

trauma and immense disruption to their lives Adolf Hitler the head of the Nazi party was

appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30th 1933. he immediately began laying the foundations

of a nazi-controlled state based on racism and anti-Semitism the hatred of Jews in less than six

months Germany was transformed from a democratic State into a one-party Nazi dictatorship during

the first six years of Hitler's dictatorship national and local governments adopted hundreds

of laws and regulations that increasingly restricted the rights of the Jews in Germany

Susan you were born in bad kuznak Germany in May 1929 just a few years before Hitler was

appointed Chancellor in 1933. can you tell us about your family your community there and how

the Nazis anti-jewish laws affected you well but of course not was a beautiful little town and my

family lived in a nice house and my father had a thriving linen store and he was we were doing

really well until Hitler came into power and as soon as he came into Power my father lost

lost his store because the townspeople and the Nazis boycotted his store and then eventually

he had to give up his business so he didn't have that much more money to take care of his family

so we had to move from our nice house and we moved to a smaller house and then to a smaller house and

then a smaller house but we were kids and life was still good and I didn't know anything about what

was really going on I didn't know that there was anti-Semitism because my parents kept it away from

us in 1933 I had one brother and my mother and father and we were very happy together tell us

about your experiences going to school in Germany and how that changed as the Nazis established

their power and expanded their power well I was so excited to go to school and because I wanted

to learn I wanted to know everything there was to know about the world and things at first were

pretty good but then the teachers started to read books they were anti-semitic books and the kids

all knew that I was Jewish and some of the book said that Jews were pigs and shoes were stupid

and Jews were ugly I mean she read it on a on a first grade level to the kids and the kids knew

that I was Jewish so they started to bully me and they started to make fun of me and I ran home to

my mother and I told her I did not want to go to public school anymore and I was really unhappy and

she kept on encouraging me she said well things will get better but they didn't get better however

one day I was extremely happy because there was a law in butkotsnach and probably all

over Germany the Jewish children weren't allowed to go to public school anymore

and uh so I was happy however you know the parents of the Jewish parents in our community wanted

their children to go to school so they hired a Jewish teacher one Jewish teacher and one one

room it was a smaller room but all of the Jewish children from first grade to ninth grade were

in the particular room and the first grade sat in the first row second grade in them second row all

the way to the ninth grade and that teacher had to teach all of us everything all in the subjects and

all the grade levels but he was fine and the kids were fine and they were happy because nobody was

making fun of us and there was no anti-Semitism in the classroom things became much worse of

course on November 9th and 10th 1938 when the Nazis staged violent pogroms state-sanctioned

anti-jewish riots against the Jewish communities in Germany and all of the territory it controlled

these events came to be known as Crystal knocked or the Night of broken glass a reference to the

broken windows of synagogues Jewish owned stores community centers and homes that were plundered

and destroyed that night hundreds of synagogues were burned businesses were destroyed and thirty

thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps tell us what you remember about kristanache my brother Joe and I we were sleeping in our bedroom it was the night of the

November the 9th and we were very excited because the next day November the 10th was going to be on

mother's birthday so we weren't quite sleeping and it must have been around 11 o'clock or so

um bricks and rocks be being thrown through our bedroom window and my brother who's always braver

than I am he looked he pulled himself up the window silled and he looked out the window and

he said to me Cersei that was my name in German he said it is our neighbors that are throwing

these bricks and rocks through the window in our civil policeman was standing at the edge of the

crowd and he was standing like this and he was not doing anything to stop the people from throwing

these bricks and rocks through the window I was very scared and I pulled my blanket over my head

but eventually we were they kept on coming so we ran across the hall to our parents bedroom

and they had some windows in their bedroom also in the bricks and rocks were being thrown through

their window um and my butt and the baby was just born he was still in his bassinet and a rock fell

on his hand but he was okay so for all five of us were huddling in the corner of the bedroom trying

to decide what to do because we couldn't we didn't know what was happening so while we were hiding um

in in the bedroom and huddling the people who had been throwing those rocks and Bricks through our

window uh picked up a Lamppost out of the uprooted it and they carried it on their shoulder and they

smashed through our front door and the front door was made out of glass and the glass was red and

blue and purple and all the glass was scattered on the ground and so they start they marched through

our apartment and but they looted some of our things but and broke some things but their main

objective was to get to the second floor where the rabbi of our town lived and then these people

included all of his artifacts and broke some of his furniture in the meantime what all this

going was going on my father we were still in our apartment we need we needed to hide because

we didn't know what was going to happen next so my father suggested that we hide up in the

attic so we lived on the first floor the rabbi on the second floor and the non-jewish family

on the third floor and on the fourth floor there was an attic and so when we got up to the Attic

and the rabbi's family was already there the wife and his four their four kids but the rabbi was end

up in the attic and I was wondering where he was and then with his tiny little window that

I looked out and I saw him then he was standing on his veranda and two SS men were holding him by

the arms and then another one came alone and cut off his beard after Krista knocked fearing that

life would get even worse in Germany your family decided to try to immigrate to the United States

however it was nearly impossible to do so because of laws in place in the U.S before World War One

millions of Europeans had immigrated to the United States each year and the U.S government didn't

place an overall limit on immigration but in 1924 Congress had passed a law to set immigration

limits or quotas allowing only a specific number of immigrants from each country every year the

law limited or even banned immigration from areas where so-called undesirable immigrants including

Jews Asians and Africans lived since these laws made immigration so difficult your parents made

a wrenching decision to send you and your brother alone to France in hopes of keeping you safe you

were nine and your brother was only seven and a half at the time tell us about the arrangements

your parents made and what you remember about departing and saying goodbye to them

yeah my parents had always wanted all of us to go to the United States but they didn't have enough

affidavits in all the papers for us to go so my father decided that it would be best if he could

saved some of us and he had heard about a French lady who was smuggling children across the border

from France from Germany to France and since but kosnach is not too far from Frankfurt and not too

far from the border of France this lady came to our house and she said that she would transport

us and she would use her children's passports and put our names in it and she would smuggle

us over the Border and my father gave her all of the money that he had saved so that my brother Joe

and I would be safe and when I think about it now they must have been very brave to do such a thing

um I feel terrible for my mother to make to see her children leave and not in her not knowing that

she might never see us again but I was a little child and so I thought maybe we would see them

in a week or in another week and so the separation for them must have been horrible but for me as a

kid um I think I was a little bit worried that we were going to go away but I didn't really

understand that this might have been for good and so tell us about what the arrangements were

that your parents had made for you once you arrived in France and what life was like yes

um they had made arrangements with the cousin who lived in Paris I think it was a plus to

level Dome the way he lived and he had a small apartment there and he was a bachelor and he

here he was he got these two children and he was gonna have to take care of the two children and

um the it must have been difficult for him too and so he made arrangements to stay in a foster home

for my brother and me in a small village in the environs of of Paris well anyway we were in Paris

um so when the when the bush that's what they called the German Army when they came and took

over Paris a lot of people were frightened and wasn't only Jewish people a lot of people wanted

to get out a lot of people went South but a lot of people went West and so two nuns I don't know

I got a hold of us and they took us with them and they were people getting out of Paris they were

walking they were going by car they were going on the bicycle I think I remember some horses

but what all of these people were escaping and the people that we were with all wanted to go to

their side so we got to Versailles and of course as big as building in Versailles is is the palace

there and so the mayor came and he just didn't know what to do with all these people because

he knew it was his responsibility to give us a place to sleep and to make sure that we ate

so in the palace in beautiful gardens and at the edge of the garden uh there was this big Haze

stuck and they gave us a burlap back and all these people have these burlik bags and what we did is

we went to the haystack and we filled our burlap bags with the hay and they gave us a string and

we tied it up and we had a mattress and so we took it on our shoulders and the biggest room

in uh Palace is the Hall of Mirrors and that's where we went so for the time being you were

safe you were at Versailles and while you were at the palace you had a close encounter with

a Nazi officer so tell us about that the Nazi army didn't just stay in Paris they also came

to their Scion we I heard them marching and I heard this big Caravan with trucks and soldiers

and and tanks and they came to to the front of the palace and in the front of that Caravan was a car

and a very high officer I don't know what Frankie was but a high officer came out of the car and he

wanted to talk to the mayor of the town and they called the mayor and he came and of course the

mayor didn't know how to speak any German and the German officer didn't know how to speak any French

so somebody in the crowd called oh there's this little girl in The Palace she knows how

to speak German and of course it was me so I was really frightened when they told me what I

had to do and I was I was so worried that this Nazi officer would find out that I was Jewish

and that he would take me to Germany and put me in jail and do all kinds of horrible things to me

so but I came out and they started to talk to each other and I must have done all right because at

the end of the conversation the German officers told me thank you he said thank you little girl

and he said to me how come you know how to speak German so well so I said to him

well you know the French schools are very good and that's where I learned how to speak German

so he clicked his heels he bent down to me and he said thank you little girl and then he left and I

tell you I was so happy after a short stay at the Palace of Versailles you made your way south to

Vichy France which was in an area that was not occupied by Germany and you and your brother

Joseph were sheltered at the Chateau de morale a home for Jewish children in the village of Brew

Varane what was life like in the Chateau de morale well we were really very happy because everybody

was Jewish there not only that I had come from an orthodox home in the Chateau de Morel was Orthodox

and we learned a lot we had a lot of Hebrew lessons and we were all really very happy together

um the the only bad part of being there is because we hadn't heard from our parents

um we wrote to them twice a week we were supposed to write once but I think we wrote twice a week

and we kept one wondering what had happened to our parents so after some time there you were called

into the director's office this had been about two years since you separated from your parents and

you got some incredible news yeah the the that's what made me so happy the incredible news was and

at first when I went to her office I was really frightened because you only went there if you misbehaved and I never misbehaved because I was always a good girl my brother was the one that was

misbehaving and I thought that maybe they made a mistake that he should be going up there but they

called me and I walked in and the directories seemed to be happy to see me and she said to me

Susie and that was my French name she said to me to Z you're going to go to the United States and

I couldn't believe it and so then she explained to me that my parents had come to the United States

and uh that they were looking for me and that they had that these organizations called the

highest and the Quakers and the Hosea all and the state department had all helped my father find us

in the Chateau de morel and so they said you have tickets to go on a boat to go to the United States

so all this time you've been in France and your father had continued his efforts to

immigrate can you tell us about how they were able to come your father first and then your

mother and your baby brother Ernest well what had happened is my father had a first cousin

who lived in the United States in the Bronx and she had a Pickle Factory and with along

with her husband and her children and they said that they would give affidavits to our

whole family so that we could come to the United States they had time he had to have a certain of amount of money to sponsor someone and evidently their money wasn't enough to take

care of the whole family so it was only enough the affidavits were only enough for one person

so my mother and father while they were in Germany must have had to decide make a big decision

as to who's going to come and so they thought that perhaps it would be best for my father to

come and that he would work and he would quit to the state department and get the highest and the

Quakers to do the same thing for my mother and the baby so that's what happened he came here in 1940

and then my mother came a few months later and then this miracle happened that it happened and

you were able to make the journey to the United States so tell us about that and what it was like

when you were able to see America in the distance there were 50 kids and what had happened Eleanor

Roosevelt had made arrangements for these 50 kids to come to the United States together

and somehow I haven't really found this out yet somehow maybe two children couldn't come or four

children couldn't come and so we got to take their place dip their place with that group of children

and so we were told we couldn't we couldn't mix with the people that were on this cruise ship we

were in the Hall of the ship the front of the ship and we had to and we were all in this one 50 kids

all in one room and they had like bunk beds and triple deck or beds and we all slept together and

the trip took 16 days and we had went across the Atlantic Ocean and sometimes the waves were pretty

high well my brother wanted to um explore the ship and he exploded very well and he found a stash

of pineapple in some kind of a closet they were transporting pineapple to the United States and he

gorged himself with the pineapple because we had never eaten any pineapple he developed a rash and

he had also had a fever but he was he was getting better because they told us the next day that if

we got to the deck on the top at six o'clock we were going to pass by the Statue of Liberty

and that we should all be at the top and we would be able to see her so anyway all of us were there

much earlier and I think my brother probably was there at five o'clock so when we got to the top

uh there was a fog the fog was so bad you could not see your hands in front of your face

and um so we were so disappointed but at exactly six o'clock

the fog lifted like this like a curtain in the theater it just went up and up and up and at

first we saw the the base of the statue and very slowly we got to see the whole Statue of Liberty

I tell you it was really very exciting and what did what did the Statue of Liberty represent to

you uh yes first of all in represented that we were going to be reunited with our parents

it was presented that we were going to come to a country where there was democracy

and we were going to come to a country where there was no hatred of Jews that there was no

anti-Semitism and that we didn't have to hide anymore and that we were safe

in order to get off the ship all the passengers got off the ship but the kids had to be checked

to make sure that they had didn't have some kind of infectious or communicable disease

and all the kids passed with flying collars and when they got to my brother he had this he had this rash and he had a temperature and they thought he had something that he would some kind

of a disease which prevented would prevent him from coming to the United States they didn't know

about the pineapple no no no they didn't they said you can't come to the United States so of course

they didn't send us back and we couldn't stay on the ship but they did send us to Ellis Island

and they're in Ellis Island we learned everything that we were supposed to know about the United

States they gave my brother all kinds of selves and aspirin and he got better very soon but while

he was getting better we learned that the children here in the United States we could have candy that

they could keep in their mouth and then it wouldn't melt and you could keep it in your

mouth the whole day and then we learned that it was chewing gum in those days the United States everybody was chewing gum so we knew this very important thing and then when we were eating at

the table with all of the other immigrants that had to be on a on Ellis Island my brother was

sitting next to a sailor and he was drinking a brown drink and it had bubbles in it the Sailor

said to my brother do you want to taste this and my brother looked at me and he asked me should

I do it and I I said okay and so he tasted it and the Sailor told him it was Coca-Cola and of course

Coca-Cola at that time is what everybody drank all these new drinks we have now they weren't

they weren't here yet and so then another thing that we learned was they had white bread here

in the United States we had never heard of such a thing and then every day at the table when we had

had meals there was this pile of white slices of bread in the middle of the table and we could take

as much bread as we wanted to and then we took it and we thought it was soft and you couldn't

we'll make a ball out of it and somebody told us it was Wonder Bread so between those three

things my brother and I knew we were ready to come to the United States so they um after they

just they said okay you can they took us back to the pier and my father uh was waiting for us and

he took us to Washington DC where my mother was and the baby was and the reason that they had

come to Washington DC because the rabbi that I was telling you about before he had been saved

and he had gone to the United States and my father figured well if Washington DC was good enough for

the rabbi of our town would have been good enough for him so that's how we ended up in Washington DC

and so what was The Reunion like with your family and what was it life like trying to adjust going

to school here making friends becoming part of the community learning English what was that

like for you well the 12 year old yeah it was well first of all it was so exciting to see our

baby brother because he was not a baby anymore he was like I don't know he was two years old and uh

and I really dreamed about getting seeing him again and it was exciting to be with our family

I went to school they put me in the seventh grade and they had to track system in Washington D.C

and they put me in the track system in the track system was 7b1 to 7b7 and all of the

kids that had problems learning and all the kids that were problem children were in 7b1

and all the real intelligent ones were in 7v7 uh so they put me in 7b1 because

I didn't know how to speak any English we had gone to Americanization School

for two months but then they thought it would be best for us to go to public school

and it was very difficult for me to see this classroom because the kids some of them fell

asleep some of them were chewing gum even though it was against the rules and some

of them didn't do their homework and I was really shocked because I thought the teacher

in a child's life was the most important person next to your parents and these kids didn't respect

the teacher so anyway I said I need to learn how to speak English in a big hurry and get

out of that class so I did I got to 7v2 and 7v3 and almost seven before but I never got to 7v7

uh it was difficult but I wanted to be an American girl I wanted to be just like everybody else

you were trying to fit in yes exactly yeah so you came to the United States with such idealism and

hope for this new country where you had been dreaming about um settling in what ways did

your actual experience match those expectations and were there any ways in which it fell short

of those ideals it did feel it was everything was fine I found no anti-Semitism against me the kids

all accepted me but they just thought I was this immigrant kid but there was no anti-Semitism and

I did see anti-Semitism we wanted to go to the beach and some of the beaches around Washington

that you see that were on the Chesapeake Bay they said Jews and dogs are not allowed here so that

was really very shocking to me but the other thing that was most shocking is that the kids

um the African-American Candace weren't in my classroom they had to go to a school by themselves

and I couldn't understand that and also I we used to go to the the to the movies downtown it was

called the Capitol and I was very excited to go to that theater and and the kids who were the people

who were African-Americans were sitting in the last row I was really surprised at that but things

have changed so much in all the years I mean it takes very slowly to change something that is not

right with your democracy but things have changed a lot and I think what we're trying to do now is

to try to make that everybody would make everybody equal and then we should all love each other and

we're still working on that but we're getting there I hope we're going to get there eventually

so back to your family and your experience making your way to the United States your family had made

it to the United States but back in Europe War was raging and territorial expansion eventually

brought Millions more Jewish people under German control and in 1942 news of the Nazis murderous

plans began to trickle out into the public do you remember hearing anything about that about

what was happening about the final solution if so did your family try to take actions to help

in some way and did you ever receive updates about your extended family those that were

stuck in Europe and weren't successful in making their way to the United States well

in 1942 I guess we did we we knew everything that that everybody knew about we didn't know

more about what was happening we didn't know about the concentration camps until everybody

in the United States found out about it and we didn't hear anything from my father's

relatives but but we did know that a lot of people were in ghettos and so in my house

where we lived we had a ping pong table in the basement now we didn't use the ping pong table all

the time for playing ping pong but what we did is on the Jewish Community used to come once a week

and bring clothing and canned goods and boxes and so we used to make boxes and we filled the boxes

and packed the boxes and they were supposed to go to Germany to the people in the ghettos or the

people who needed them so I remember we were doing that I didn't find out about what had happened to

all of the relatives of my father who lived in a town called kolomea which was in Poland at

the time and the town is now in the Ukraine and I didn't learn this about it until 1992

and even later when I started to work here at the Museum that what had happened is when the German

Army marched into his town they took most of the Jewish people took them in the woods and made them

dig their own Graves and then they shot them so we never heard from my father's family that was there

um my father did have a sister but that sister immigrated to Israel way before the Holocaust

in the my mother's family some of them were living in Germany and I did find out about them uh

my Tanta my mother's aunt Tanta Anna and my great grandmother and my Tanta and his husband

they were sent to Riga and they were murdered in Riga there was a big loss when I found this out

it was not until much later in many ways Susan and her family were fortunate they found refuge

in the United States their entire immediate family survived and yet their Journey was not

without significant struggle this history raises enduring questions that continue to resonate

how do seemingly abstract policies impact individuals and the course of their lives

how have debates about who belongs in the U.S and who does not reverberate throughout the nation's

history and why is there this continuing gap between American ideals and the political

realities we hope that hearing Susan's story will ensure that these tensions and complexities are

seen in human terms and in recognition of the consequences of our failures to sometimes live

up to our highest ideals though estimates vary somewhere between 180 000 and 220 000 European

refugees like Susan and her family immigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1945. the

United States accepted more refugees fleeing Nazi persecution than any other country in the

world most of these refugees were Jewish and from Central and Western Europe during the Holocaust

Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered six million European Jews the United States

Holocaust Memorial Museum is fortunate that Susan and other Holocaust Survivors are willing to share

their stories to help personalize this largely incomprehensible moment in human history

if you would like to learn more about the Holocaust and hear more personal stories like Susan's please

visit the Museum's website at ushmm.org and follow the museum on Facebook Twitter and Instagram