Inge Bernhard Part II: The Real Deal

(happy thanksgiving!)

Those who have been reading the blog for some time may remember that I first wrote about Inge Bernhard after meeting her in Israel in September. Those initial reactions came from my memory bank-- now I have her transcript. Here are some excerpts directly from her interview. We'll start back in Germany, Braunschweig to be exact.

All questions in (....) are mine.

(Now, you were born in 1924. When the war started, were you still in Germany, living in Braunschweig?)

Yes. I was fifteen.

(You were fifteen.)

Yes.

(And how did your parents react when the war officially began? Do you remember?)

Well, then I should tell you the story before. Because my father, who was not Jewish, married my mother knowing very well that anything can happen to Jewish people. He was a peace-loving person. He went through the First World War and never wanted to tell us about anything, anything about it. He thought it was such a terrible experience that he wanted to blot it out from his memory and from us somehow.

So he knew about Hitler. He read Mein Kampf as soon as—when Hitler wrote it. He wrote it in ’23. My parents married in ’23. And so he only hoped that nothing would happen. But in—his aim was to emigrate to the United States. He finally had a possibility to go to America as an emissary, as a scientist from the Siemens Company, where he worked, to go for one year to see what other companies are doing. They gave him permission to stay there for one year, and he wanted to find a place where we could live and where he could get settled.

So in ’35, he left us alone, my mother and me, my brother, and he told me, “Take good care of your mother.” I was eleven years old. I felt very grown-up. I thought this is a real job that I have to do, to take care of my mother and my brother. He sent us pictures and he wrote us. He was very, very happy in America.

When he came back, it was in ’36, he knew already that war was coming. He wanted my mother to go with him, take his family, and my mother declined. She didn’t want to. She wanted to stay with her family, the family that lived in Braunschweig, while we—my father had work in Berlin. We lived in Berlin. She had all kinds of excuses: she doesn’t know enough English, and the children are still small, he may not have a job. So we just got stuck. My father gave in, and we didn’t go.

So when the war started, we knew what was coming—the worst. We knew, and we were very, very depressed. I remember the day when we thought we will be in a lot of problem. So that was the story behind it.

(So then what happened? After the war started, did your father think that you should move from Germany?)

We had American friends, friends from America who came right before. They came on the Kristallnacht, the year before, and wanted to take me out of Germany. And then the Americans didn’t let me in any more. They didn’t give me a visa, because they knew the war was coming. They didn’t want to have Germans in America. So I didn’t go. I was very excited about it at first. I so much wanted to go. But then it was a big disappointment. On the other hand, later on, I was very happy, because I wouldn’t have seen my parents for five years, maybe longer. I wouldn’t have heard from them. So I was happy I stayed.

We had at the beginning quite a normal time, until food was rationed and until my mother, being Jewish, didn’t get much food—didn’t get a good ration card any more and we had to share with her. We had to—my father got food from the neighbors for repairing radios and for helping people in their gardens and so we had a little more food. We had a maid, which helped my mother. We had a house which was—that my father built, because when my mother declined, didn’t want to go to America, he said, “Then we need a house with a shelter, because nobody will let us go into the shelter.” He knew this in ’36. And in ’39, the war started. That means, three years before that, he knew what was going to happen.

So we had the house with the shelter, which we used a lot, especially from ’42. We got used to this life somehow. We lived in a place where we didn’t get too many bombs. Some bombs fell on roofs, on rooftops, and the houses were not burned. People rushed to the roof and threw water on it. So we were in a fairly good place. It was right behind the Olympic Stadium. Maybe we were just lucky, because downtown was terrible. Many, many people lost their houses and all their belongings. We were very lucky with our house. It had a garden.

So I went to school. I was very happy in school, and I always said and felt I have two lives. One is at home, that is a sad life, and one is at school, that’s a happy life. To make my life happier, I played the piano and I lived with music and I played a lot. I was pretty much alone, because I was not accepted in the youth movements.

So I had to find out what I like. I read a lot. I played games by myself. I played tennis a little bit, as long as I was allowed on the tennis courts, but after the first year of war, I wasn’t allowed any more to play tennis. They just didn’t allow any half-Jewish person to play on the ground.

(Did you ever worry that your mother would be taken to a camp? Did you worry that your mother would be picked up?)

No. I didn’t worry, because my father did everything to protect us. He went to the Gestapo and told them as a scientist in research he was doing a lot for the state, which was a white lie, but he tried not to do anything that would—he wouldn’t construct weapons or something like this or help to develop the atom bomb. He would never do that. He told the Gestapo also, “I want to do something for defense and not for attacking.” And they accepted that. And then he said, “But I need your help to protect my family.” So he came home from this very, very gruesome experience that he went into the Gestapo house where they told him, “If you had had one bit of Jewish blood, you would not have gotten out of this place again.” He told us. And he came with a little piece of paper and it said that to his family nothing should happen. He was happy about this, and he told us, and we felt somehow protected.

We also had a friend who came to our house. He was not supposed to enter our house. Nobody really was allowed to enter our house. It’s something that’s very difficult to understand. My friends came, my young friends sometimes came, but most of the time I went to them. I had one friend—my mother had one friend who came to our house to talk to her, but she felt so proud of that, that I was ashamed. She was actually for some time my piano teacher. And when she said, “Can you imagine, I cannot even be in one of the Nazi organizations because I am befriending you?”, when I heard that, I was so angry about it, I never wanted to see her any more. And then she hardly came.

There was one other friend who came, and she was the neighbor’s relative. She was a singer in the opera house, and she had the emblem, the Parteiabzeichen, I don’t know what you call it. She had to join the Party because otherwise she couldn’t have been a singer in the National Opera. But otherwise she was absolutely not interested in the Nazi Party, and she wasn’t afraid to come to our house. So she was the only one that my mother saw. She came and played chess with my mother once a week.

And then we had—one day, we had the Gestapo coming to the house. My father had a bicycle, which he took to his work every day. The work was maybe twenty minutes by bicycle away. He took his bicycle in any kind of weather, whether it was hot, whether it was snowing, anything. He needed his bicycle to come home as soon as my mother would call him. Then came the day when she called him. She said, “The Gestapo is here, and they’re going to smash the door if you don’t come soon.”

So he took his bicycle, came home, and they were at the door already. He showed them the little paper. Then they were so surprised about this that they didn’t know what to do, and they went away to discuss it with their superiors. Meanwhile, my father was really afraid that something happened. We called our friend from the Opera. She said, “Yes, your mother can come to me, there is no problem.” So my mother took the train, the underground, went to her, but it was a big house, and she couldn’t go to the shelter when the bombs came. This was in ’42.

She stayed there for two weeks. My mother was fearless. She didn’t, uh, she wasn’t afraid that something would happen to her. But first of all, she had to share the food with her friend, and that means that the friend didn’t have much to eat, because two people had to eat from one ration card. And then, she was also afraid that our friend would be denounced by some neighbors, which would have been very, very dangerous for the friend. So she called my father and said, “I’m coming home.”

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC