Ricardo "Dicky" Schoening: A Beginning

Dicky was the first person I interviewed on a recent research trip to Miami. We sat at his big breakfast table surrounded by albums and loose photographs. Here he gives us a brief background summary on the Schoening-Falkenstein family.

Growing up in El Salvador, my father was a businessman, and their circle of friends was really the—initially I would say the German Jews who were also living there, among them the Lewinsky family, the Reich family, the Joseph family, later on the Weill family who came from France, the Freund family who came from Germany, of course my uncle and aunt, the Falkensteins, the Steiner family, who had come from Austria, the Frenkel family from France, the Henriquez family from Spain via Curaçao, probably via Panama, and then later on younger couples moved into the life of my parents, like the Scherer family. He is an American citizen, had come to Central America, married a lady who was born maybe in Salvador, maybe in Guatemala, I’m not really sure. Her father was American, her mother was Guatemalan. The Wieners, who now live in California. That’s about it.

(When did you start school, and where did you go to school?)

I started school at age five. At the time when I went to school, my—the only good schools in El Salvador were the Catholic schools, so my father and a group of his friends got together and they founded the Escuela Americana, the American school, with the help of the US government. I was among the first class. They brought in an educator from the US, a Mrs. Inez Terzian, who became the first director of the school. The school was founded in the house that used to belong to my grandmother and the house where my parents had gotten married seven years earlier.

(And tell me, how did your grandmother arrive? How did your family get to Salvador, of all places?)

On my mother’s side, her father—my mother was born in Berlin in 1914. Her father was a soldier in the German army. Her mother was a seamstress. My mother’s father was killed in World War I by the time she was four years old, so by 1918. Somewhere around 1926, my grandmother met Mr. Salvador Mugdan, a German Jew living in El Salvador. Part of his family already lived in New York, I believe. They fell in love.

They decided to get married and left her two children in school in Switzerland. My uncle went to a yeshiva. My mother went to a girls’ boarding school. And they went to El Salvador. Once a year, they would take the boat and come and visit the children and then go back. In 1937, Salvador Mugdan died of a heart attack. My mother by that time had already moved to England, where she was attending nursing school. When she got news of her stepfather’s death, she decided to go visit her mother. There, on the day after she arrived, at Shabbat dinner at her mother’s house, she met my father. They fell in love and got married five months later.

My father was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1906. He went to the—whatever the school, you recall it? the Hochschule in German, the high school, and when he came out of high school, his father, who was a very wealthy man, sent him to Brazil to learn the paper business. There was a big paper mill in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My father spent four years in São Paolo, came back to Germany, was probably going to work in one of his father’s companies, but his girlfriend—that must have been 1928 when he came back to Germany, and he had a girlfriend, and the girlfriend’s brother was very much part of the Nazi movement. One day the brother said to the sister, “You tell your boyfriend that if he does not stop seeing you, what is going to be left of him will not be a pretty sight.” So with that, my father decided that he would move on.

My grandfather, whose mother’s maiden name was Kauders, had a cousin already living in El Salvador. It happened to be he was in the paper and office supply business. My father went to work in El Salvador. He met another Austrian Jew there, Victor Steiner, and they worked side by side and then ended up buying the business from Uncle Kauders it, must have been probably early ‘40s.

My grandparents, my Schoening grandparents, they stayed in Germany until the last moment, simply because my grandfather did not believe that the Nazi movement was a reality, although he was being chased all over the place. But I guess he didn’t want to give up his lifestyle in Germany, also. When they finally left, they took a boat with whatever they gave them, the one suitcase, a fork, a knife, a spoon for each, and $4 in their pocket. They traveled by boat to Panama and stayed in Panama for three weeks while my father was able to arrange their visa. He was able to arrange their visa simply because his now-partner, Victor Steiner, had married a local lady and her father was the Vice President of the Republic of El Salvador. So he was able to arrange for a visa for my grandparents, and they came to live in El Salvador.

(How old were they when they got to El Salvador?)

My grandfather was sixty-seven, and my grandmother was ten years younger, so she must have been whatever.

(And they lived for how many years?)

Well, my grandfather lived twenty years in El Salvador, never learned Spanish because he was one hundred percent deaf in one ear and ninety-whatever percent deaf in the other ear. So basically he was never able to pick up Spanish, and so his conversations were always in German. He knew some English from his youth. That is where I learned my German. My grandmother died at age eighty-nine, so she lived in El Salvador thirty-some odd years, I guess. Yeah, exactly thirty two years. And she was fluent already when she came, in German, French, Italian, English, and then she learned Spanish, so she was fluent in five languages.

(Amazing. Did your grandfather work when he came?)

My grandfather worked for his son. He did all the accounting for my father’s business, and he worked till the day he died.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC