Kurt

I said I'd write about my Father - but that's treacherous territory.

I didn't know my Father. For one thing, he wasn't one to share his feelings and thoughts - certainly not in my hearing. I only lived with him 10 years. He left when I was one to go to England. He had found a way out of Germany - which I thank him for. He was a plumber and was able to find a job helping build a refugee camp in England. For this work, he was promised a visa to New Zealand for his family.

From England, he could see what was happening in Germany more clearly. In Germany, from what I read, the Nazis had clamped down on all radio and printed news so that the view from inside the country was one of paranoia. All the rest of Europe was planning to crush Germany and the Jews were instigating communism world wide with Germany as a major target. Or so they told everyone and amazingly the people of Germany swallowed it whole.

My Dad might even have believed it himself if he weren't Jewish. He was a loyal and proud German and I did hear him talk about his pride in his country at the 1936 Olympics. He hated England and France for the sanctions they imposed on Germany after World War I and the economic distress it caused in Germany - something he and his family had suffered from.
His Father (Sigfried) had died from wounds received as a soldier fighting for Germany.

But to get back to the story, from England Dad saw what was happening and after Kristalnacht he wrote my Mother to go - to leave - she had been trying to sell the business and collect what she could of their possessions to ship to England. I think she was also tied to her Mother and sister waiting to see which way they would jump.

But leave she and I did. The war broke out six weeks later.

So there we were in England - My Father was put in a camp for enemy aliens - after all he could have been a spy. My Mother was told that she would have to find work or go back to Germany -
(I'm sure this was in the 6 week period before the war actually started). So there my Father was in a camp full of men (women apparently weren't suspected of spying). He complained of the food, the crowding, the sanitation and he was sure the English put something in the food to
dampen his sexual energy.

Dad got into trouble - I think he might have been drunk, but he was cursing the King - and was arrested. My Mother was never clear as to how he disentangled himself from that mess, but clearly he was intemperate and that posed a danger to himself. He was given a choice to join the army or work on the land, but not until he spent about a couple of years in camps and working in a soap factory but under personal restraint. The soap factory was in Whitchurch - actually quite near the house where I lived with Sims, but I don't ever recall seeing my Father while he was there. My Mother, when she came to visit, would walk me down to the factory and point and tell me my Father was there, but squint I did, I couldn't make out the shapes and forms to be people, let alone my Father.

I was four when we were reunited as a family and moved to the farm. I remember him at that time as a big man who could be funny and fun but was mostly rather dour and depressed. He often carried me on his shoulders and since he had a funny walk, it was rather like riding a camel. The best times I remember then was snuggling in bed with my parents on mornings when we could be more relaxed. I run hot, so they called me their little stove.

There were times when I climbed onto my Father's lap and felt safe and secure there, but I quickly got "too old" to do that.

I never mentioned that while he and my Mother were early in their marriage, he was hit by a car while riding his bike. He was badly hurt and spent almost a year in a hospital in a body cast. One leg was always shorter than the other after that and that is why he walked "funny". I don't think I was born at the time.

In many ways my Father felt cheated. His Uncle short circuited his education and saw to his becoming a plumber which my Father never really liked. He had lost his own Father young and
was pretty much on his own - with his brothers. And now his country took away all his rights as a citizen, took away his citizenship, his livelihood and his roots. He was dependant on the good will of a people he hated and wanted no part of. He didn't even like the language and had trouble learning it.

All this I've intuited - from things I overhead, things I remember him saying and my "reading" of history of the time and thinking of how that history fit with what I remember of the man.

He was a hard worker and industrious and it saved him. They liked him on the farm and when we came to the USA, he made friends, was able to get into the plumber's union and get certified.
If he had lived he wanted to have his own business - and I'm sure he would have. But he died of stomach cancer when I was 14. He was 46.

By then we were in Los Angeles. I still didn't know him very well. I would catch him looking at me when we were still in England and he looked bewildered and disenchanted (or so I thought).
He didn't really know me either, he had missed most of my early years and when we were reunited I was this little English girl who knew no German, wasn't German in any way he understood and I was a GIRL. My Mother had told me he was disappointed I wasn't a boy so I knew I had to "make up for being a girl". I don't think I succeeded.

My Father made a lot of things - he was handy - and he tried most anything. He made pots and pans for my Mother to cook with. He made me toys of wood and showed me how to make little boats to float in the rain barrel. He and my Mom would make sauerkraut (yuck) but they liked it. In Los Angeles, he fixed up an old house and built a patio. He and I liked eating breakfast together on the patio in the hot weather. He was not a talker though and he and my Mom spoke German between themselves - naturally. I don't think they realized that I understood a good deal of what they were saying but even though I understood it, a lot of it went over my head.

In England, Daddy had no friends that I ever saw or heard of. He and my foster Father, Tom Sims, would get into political arguments that got pretty heated but I don't think they were friends.

I always had the feeling that my Dad's situation in England made life difficult - if not impossible. He wanted to leave England as soon as the war was over - and we did.

In the USA,
he was much more relaxed - and, of course, the war was over. Living in tensions and fear in England had a great effect on him. Here in the USA, we played cards together; we bought a house and a car and socialized - often with the Raaymakers but most often with my Aunt Helen and Uncle Sid and their friends - a small group of German Jews - expatriats all. We went for drives in the country and to the beach.

Ah, the beach. My Father was the only one in that group who played - he swam. He was a diver
who was good at it even though he was pretty fat. When I learned how to swim he became more interested in me and we swam together at the city pool - sometimes at the beach. The others all sat on the grass up on the palisades of Santa Monica. We, my Father and I, trudged to the water and got wet!

My Father seemed happiest when he was with his friends - especially Uncle Ray (Raaymaker).
They often worked together and Uncle Ray - who was Dutch but had lived in the USA for a long time - showed him the ropes. The house we bought in Los Angeles, was near Uncle Ray - that's how we ended up in this community with few Jews and far from the Jewish areas of the city.
My Father never really was Jewish in the same way as my Mother. He didn't live and breathe it.
He was German first and foremost and he had lost that.

He started having stomach pains in October or November of 1951 and was diagnosed has having an ulcer. He was put on a special diet for ulcers, but nothing helped. He got worse and worse and was hospitalized at Cedars of Lebanon. They must have done surgery on him because that was when we found out it was stomach cancer and had spread to the liver.

After that he was in and out of the hospital. Unable to work. They tried radiation therapy on him but that seemed to make it worse, not better. He spent his last weeks at home in terrible pain. Mom learned how to give him morphine shots but it was a pretty bad time for us all.
He died May 7, 1952. He was buried - with my Uncle paying for part of the funeral - at this Jewish cemetary in Hollywood. I didn't realize at the time how much I would miss him and how he stabilized our family and my Mother. He was way too young to die.