L. Jack Davidson: From Hamburg to Santiago de Chile

This interview is filled with specific dates and stories, leading me to dedicate nearly a week to the transcript. I encourage you to stay posted for the daily installments of this family's remarkable journey from Germany to the Americas.

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My family’s connection with Latin American goes way back. I have to start back when, because otherwise it won’t make any sense. My grandfather, Leandro Davidson, was born in Lautenburg, Silesia, Schlesien. His cousin, Benjamin Bloom, brought him and his brothers to El Salvador. I don’t know the exact year, but it must be in the late 1800s, at some point, before 1900. They came, and eventually there were four brothers here. One went to the US and the other three remained here. My grandfather settled in Sonsonate. One brother settled in Santa Ana. And the other one settled in Ahuachapan.

(What were they doing?)

They were coffee growers and exporters.

(What were the names of the—?)

My grandfather was originally Leiser, and changed to Leandro. His brother was Bernardo and Adolfo, originally I think Abraham, and he changed it to Adolfo, which was one hell of a change! (chuckles) But anyway— (chuckles) This was before Hitler, so it wasn’t such a terrible name.

(Right. Exactly.)

And the other one was Isidor, and he left for the US at some point. I’m not sure when.

(And Benjamin Bloom was their cousin?)

Their cousin. Also from Lautenburg. In probably 1904 or 1905, my grandfather went back to Europe to find a bride and married Eva Loewenberg from Berlin. Now, I don’t know how they got together, but I have to assume that the German Jews who had connections with Latin America had contact with each other, because my grandmother’s father had made a business trip to South America in the early 1880s and spent two years on that business trip. Of course, at that time a business trip was with the whole family. And during that time they had two children, who were born in Valparaiso, Chile. My grandmother was one of those two children and was inscribed in the Cathedral of Valparaiso because there was no civil registry. She was Jewish, but she was inscribed in the Cathedral because there was no civil registry.

(Wow. You can still see her name there?)

I suppose. I haven’t looked, but it must be there, because afterwards my father found it and that’s how—I’ll get to that.

So he married Eva Loewenberg in 1905—they got married on September 4th, 1905, and he brought her here to Sonsonate, which must have been quite something, because you can imagine Sonsonate now, and at the time, the only story I heard about it was that the first flush toilet of Sonsonate was installed for my grandmother, and apparently it was the sensation of the town. Everybody would have to come by once to flush it, see how it worked. (laughs) Because that didn’t exist at the time. So Don Leandro brought his chelita over from Germany in 1905. They lived in Sonsonate and had three children there, and in 1913 went back to Germany—not too visionary, because in 1914 World War I started, but I don’t know if the Liebes’s or somebody lost some children. Some children died because of illness. So my grandmother got scared, and she didn’t want to bring up her children in El Salvador, especially not in Sonsonate, so she, being the strong one of the family got them to go back to Germany, and they settled in Hamburg. And of the four siblings, the only one that was born in Hamburg was my father, who was born in 1914. The other three were born in Sonsonate in 1907, ’09, and ’12.

(And their names?)

Percy was born in 1907, Rolf was born in 1909, and Dorita was born in 1912, in Sonsonate. So they went back to Germany, and as I say, there must again have been contact with the German Jews who had contact with Latin America, because in 1932 Dorita married Freddy Koenigsberger, who lived in Guatemala, and she moved to Guatemala. There must have been some contact between the German Jews with Latin America, because otherwise, you know, these things wouldn’t have happened.

When the Nazi era started, early in the ‘30s, in the middle ‘30s, my grandparents, who—at that point my grandfather was already an older man, ( born in 1867,) - and my grandmother emigrated to Guatemala, where their married daughter lived. My father went to England and became an apprentice at a store in Piccadilly Circus called Swan & Edgar. And his two brothers went to the US and then later joined the US army and fought in North Africa with the US army. There was a group of Jewish soldiers at the time. And my father was in England. When the war started, or when things got worse in England, they wanted to put all German citizens in a concentration camp in—I don’t know if it was northern England or southern Scotland, because they were “enemy aliens.” They were German citizens living in England, so they were enemy aliens. Of course, for my father, going to a camp with a bunch of Germans was not exactly where he would have felt comfortable, being that he was their enemy as well, because he was Jewish! So he inquired and found out that Chile had a law that any child of a Chilean-born parent has the right to claim Chilean citizenship. But they gave them a Chilean passport only for one trip to Chile, where they had to legalize their situation. So my father, since his mother had been born in Valparaiso because of this business trip in the 1880s, claimed Chilean nationality, got a Chilean passport, and got on the last ship that wasn’t mined in the British Channel and emigrated out of England to America. Went to Panama, got off the ship and—somewhere I have a story that one of the other co-passengers wrote where they mentioned my father—he went on to Guatemala to visit his parents. This was in 1938 or ’39. Visited them, stayed a few months, I suppose, and then continued his journey to Chile, where he had no reason to go except for the fact that he had a passport. But being a good German, he had an obligation to go, because he had taken the passport.

I never thought of asking him until about six months before he died. He had had a heart attack and he was in the hospital.
I said;

“Papi, why didn’t you just stay in Guatemala? I mean, you could have just thrown away the Chilean passport and somebody could have gotten you Guatemalan citizenship. That’s where you had your parents, your sister, and your family.”

He said, “Nobody asked me to. So I just got on my boat and went on.”

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC