00:00:00,720	S1:
Now. History is often something we read about in textbooks, watch on TV, or learn about a class. Today, we're very fortunate to have history standing here right beside us. We're joined today by Holocaust survivor Werner Salomon. Also with us today on stage is Debbie Colton allowed a foundation? You may remember that Debbie presented to us earlier this year. December. Mr.. Sailing was. Life has spanned the most defining moments of the 20th century, from witnessing Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass in 1938 Germany, to serving his adopted home in the US Air Force at the height of the Cold War. This story is one of survival, the immigrant experience and an extraordinary commitment to service. Mr. Sallinger is here today to share his recollections of a childhood in Berlin, his journey to the United States and his eventual return to Germany in uniform with American military is a profound honor to introduce Mr. Werner Salvatore.

00:01:18,010	S2:
Please join me in another round of applause. Thank you for your service to our country.

00:01:30,049	S2:
Good morning everyone. It's wonderful to be back at the school, and I want to thank Mr. Mengoni for inviting me to join Mr. Sallinger to speak with you today. It's quite an honor and a privilege to be the Holocaust survivor, because here we all stand at the threshold of time. We're very soon there will be survivors alive to be a witness to the Holocaust. And that's where each and every one of you come in. Because what you hear here today, what you learn here, what you learn in your classes about the Holocaust, will only continue forward if you carry it with you into the future. So we ask that whatever the story you hear today, this wonderful opportunity to meet this very special individual. Please take it forward and share it with other people. You can't point to one date on the calendar and say that's the date the Holocaust started. We have a difference of opinion. For me, I define it as. I identify it as when Hitler rose to power in 1933. And Werner would tell you for himself where he pinpoints the star of the Holocaust. But regardless of the date that it started, it had absolute tragic consequences for humanity, and in particular for the Jewish people of Europe who were selected for murder.

00:03:09,830	S2:
To create the perfect race.

00:03:14,469	S2:
More than 6 million Jewish people, including 1.5 million Jewish children, were murdered because they were Jewish. Millions of other people were also persecuted, oppressed and murdered. Anybody know why? The groups? Yeah.

00:03:30,909	S1:
Just probably.

00:03:32,750	S2:
Yeah. Any other groups? The white gay men? Other groups?

00:03:40,870	S2:
Yes.

00:03:41,270	S3:
Slavs to sit with?

00:03:44,110	S2:
Yes. Individuals with disabilities, including children. But political opponents. And the list goes on and on. The Holocaust.

00:04:01,110	S2:
Happened because people allowed it to happen was people who did this to people. And it was fueled by hate.

00:04:13,310	S2:
And that's why it's so important to understand and hear for yourselves. What happened was real. It took place because Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion are on the rise. And the only way to counter it is to set the record straight. So we're going to dive right in. Give you the opportunity to meet Mr. Salinger, and when he's done speaking, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions. And we hope you'll take advantage of this very valuable moment in your in your lives. Actually, because not many people your age get to meet a Holocaust survivor. So, Werner, why don't we begin with. Tell us about your family and yourself. When were you born and where did you grow up?

00:05:06,639	S4:
Well, thanks, Debbie, and thank you to the principal for the introduction. And thank you all for inviting me to be here today. I was born in Berlin, Germany, and Berlin was the capital of Germany at the time, and the time was 1932, April 1932. Uh, if you are any good at math, you can figure out. I just turned 94 about a week ago. Right. So. Berlin, Germany. It was the capital. Uh, I was the only kid. Uh, my mother and father were both professional, professional people. Unfortunately, my mother died soon after we came to this country. We actually arrived in this country in 1939, on February 12th.

00:06:02,689	S4:
And the goal of all that is always used for how many Jews were killed. And I hate to say it, but fortunately it's only 6 million. That was not really the goal of classes and skewed. The goal of the Nazi government was not 6 million. It was the level of it. They had taken a pretty careful census of the number of Jews in Europe, both in the countries they had already conquered and the countries in Eastern Europe they were still aiming to conquer. And that number was not six, but 11 million. And they met one day and had in 1942. On the 20th of January, in a villa outside in the suburbs south of Berlin, and in one day and one day at a table around which were about a dozen high ranking Nazi officers, they they decided that what was then called the Final Solution, they were going to kill 11 million people. And they only had two major concerns to come out of that meeting. The first was, what psychological effect would it have on the German soldiers ordered to do the killing? That was their first major concern on any concern about the 11 million budget. What psychological effect would it have of German soldiers ordered to do the killing? And the second major concern was that the logistics meaning mostly used at the time that it would take to get a lot of people. That's about twice the number of people who live in this state. Massachusetts has roughly 7 million or so. They wanted to kill 11 million and they decided in one day, called Final Solution. Sitting around a table in a villa outside of Grove in Paris. So one window at the beginning of the Holocaust. Well, I was born in April. Ten months later, in Germany, Adolf Hitler came to power. He was not elected at that time. He was appointed by the person who was then the president. Von Hindenburg was the president of Germany, and Hitler had been very active in politics, Especially Nazi politics. He had been in jail in southern Germany in the 1920s. Many of you might know. I would vote. Anybody know which book he wrote while he was in jail?

00:08:59,799	S5:
When he warmed up.

00:09:01,000	S4:
When it comes, time comes, translated from German means my skull. And he made no secret in that book that he wrote in the 1920s that if and when he came to power, he would kill every last person with a drop of Jewish blood in them in all of Europe. And that number was 11 million people, not six. They only got to six.

00:09:30,000	S2:
So, Werner, before Hitler came to power. Tell us about your family. What did your parents do and what was life like for them and for you as a Jewish family?

00:09:41,759	S4:
Well, I was an only kid. I was obviously a Jewish kid. And Jews in Germany at that time, prior to Hitler's coming to power. We didn't live. We were. The Jewish population was very well integrated into the German population. There were no ghettos and no neighborhoods where only Jews lived. Um, until the very, very laws were passed on the 15th of September, 1935. My parents were both professional people. My dad was a lawyer, specialized in labor law in the German government, and my mother was one of the world's first orthodontists. They were called pediatric dentists for Moses, and she was one of the world's first orthodontists and unfortunately contracted tuberculosis on the ship coming over to this country and died within ten months of arriving in the United States. I consider her Oracle's victim, which she actually was. Because she wouldn't have gotten TB if she hadn't been on that ship or so.

00:10:54,529	S2:
It wasn't easy. Excuse me for people to leave. So how was it that your family was able to leave Germany?

00:11:03,090	S4:
Well, let me answer that in a broader sense. Um, anywhere in the world, if people wanted to escape from their own country. I'm thinking now, for instance, the Vietnamese people who work with the Americans during the Vietnamese war. You have to have three things, whether you're leaving Vietnam or Germany or any other place. You have to have number one money. You can't go anywhere without money. Everything costs money and you have to pay people along the way. So you have to have money. You have to have a visa. from the country to which you're hoping to emigrate. And you also have to have an affidavit of support written by a citizen of that country. In our case, we needed an American citizen, this lawyer in writing, that they would be responsible for the financial health of the three soldiers, Odenkirk and Moyer. I was six at the time, and you have to have an affidavit or someone who will swear that they will support him. Should you need the support, that you will never become a burden to the American taxpayer. That's pretty common in other countries as well. He didn't ask me to support. So I guess we had the money because we bought the tickets and we got the visa. And that was hard because the United States of America only allowed Something like 35 or 40,000 German Jewish refugees a year to come. And of course, there are a lot more people than that wanting to escape Nazi Germany. Uh, and you had I have an affidavit support, and we had a very hard time getting that. I introduce it to a man named Carl Lemley. LAEML he came to this country as a 17 year old from Lodi in Germany. And he was Jewish and had nothing to do when he came. And just other young men who wanted to come to America. And he came in 1903, and he struggled for about ten years before he found his way into the American movie industry. And he became a very wealthy, made a lot of money, and he founded Universal Studios and in Hollywood became quite rich in the Holocaust. Ratchet it up. Which I did, by the way. To the 15th of September of 1935 or the Nuremberg Laws were published. Um, he decided that the best thing he could do was try to help any family that had a connection to alpine, Germany. My mother happened to be one of five sisters, and the oldest sister was married, a man from Germany. And so he gave them an affidavit of support in writing. When my parents, I didn't know anybody else they could approach. So they approached him again and he said, I'm sorry, I can't do this again. The American State Department has warned me against doing it again, so I'm sorry. The answer is no. Fortunately, I had another uncle in New York already who said, I'm going to go see this guy the best families in New York. And he did that. He was able to convince him to, uh, write us a, uh, an affidavit of support. And so we got it from him. Absent that, I wouldn't be sitting here this morning. I would have gone up and saw quite the other night. And so I did. The beginning of the Holocaust, my mind to the publishing of the Nuremberg Laws. One of the first things that Hitler did when he came to power in 1933 just said mindset to my birth. I was obviously just a baby, so I didn't know anything about politics at the time. But he did, and he sent a team of about a thousand high ranking Nazi officials to other countries around the world that already had racial laws. And you studied any, uh, you've studied this history? Maybe. So, any idea where the first country, which was the first country they went to? Anybody?

00:15:39,779	S5:
Yeah. For all they know.

Yes. 00:15:45,059	S4:
Thanks for calling.

But. 00:15:48,220	S5:
Yes, yes, yes. That's right.

00:15:51,580	S4:
Yeah. The United States of America. We already had our own racial laws. We had something called the Asian Exclusionary Act, which was written by the US Congress in 1882, intended to keep people of Indian ethnicity out of this country. In other words, people of color, yellow color slate. And it was Asian. And of course, we had Jim Crow. We already had Jim Crow, which discriminated very heavily against people of color, especially how.

00:16:30,259	S2:
And speaking of Jim Crow. Just an FYI, on Wednesday night in your community, there's going to be a public screening from Swastika to Jim Crow at 630 at the community center. It's very compelling. And if you want to learn more, I encourage you to participate in the conversation. So, Werner, what did six year old you think about where you were going and how did you feel about it?

00:16:58,500	S4:
Well, six year old me felt excited about it. I had no idea what the politics involved were. What I did immediately understand when the labor laws were written, there were two. One was called the right citizenship on which to find who and who could not any longer be a citizen of Germany. So Jewish people who had been total citizens of Germany yesterday woke up this morning to the fact that they no longer were citizens of Germany. How did that affect me? I could no longer go to the school that I had been going to just yesterday, and the friends that I had. Yes, we were German kids my age are not Jewish. No longer only a friend. They called me an enemy overnight. I would protect my parents. The second law was called the German Law of German Blood and Honor. It was Hitler's intent to create a pure German race without any other blood streams in it. And also that they wanted to get rid of all Jews. I already told you the goal was the system was 11 million and that law was published in Germany. When those guys came back from their visits overseas, very high ranking Nazi officials. They published what became known as the Nuremberg Laws. and that date was September 15th, 1935. And the law said that my parents, both professional people who could treat anybody, in the case of my mother, the orthodontist yesterday, but today could only treat people who are Jewish, no non-Jewish people. In the case of my father, who was a lawyer, and he took from that day on overnight, overnight yesterday was okay to have clients who were not Jewish. And this morning it wasn't. That's how it affected them. That's how it affected me.

00:19:07,799	S2:
I wonder what was the voyage like? Do you remember any details?

00:19:13,559	S4:
Well, yeah, I remember it was in February. So in the North Atlantic, from Holland to New York. Um, pretty rough weather, but players across the assets and across their ship. Actually engaging troops, one going the other direction back to Germany. Oh, and so it was stormy. But for a six year old kid it was Boston society.

00:19:41,410	S2:
And so. Right. So you get here to the States. Where did you go and what did your life become like for you?

00:19:51,049	S4:
Well, when I came here, I couldn't speak a word of English, which was pretty embarrassing. When I was in school, I thought now and I needed to go to the bathroom. Um, but I couldn't, and neither could my parents. So the first goal was to learn how to speak English. And, uh, because my mother's because of my mother's tuberculosis, I was quickly separated from her and never, never saw her again. Died one day after my seventh birthday. she never made it. 36 very, very sad because she was a world renowned author at the time, and she was also a pretty lady. I learned she used a hyphenated last name after Hilda Marx Dutch Salinger in the 1920s and 1930s. That was pretty unusual for that time. So pretty lady guitar playing lady never made it to 36.

00:20:52,380	S2:
What was most challenging for you as a six year old in school?

00:20:55,819	S4:
Going to the language, of course, are learning how to become an American kid. So I got sent to Princeton, Princeton, new Jersey, um, I had a brothers up there. My father's first cousin was married to a man, world renowned, world renowned New Testament theologian, Presbyterian minister, and they had three kids of their own boy girl group on point. The oldest of their biological sons was drafted into the army of World War Two and killed in mitosis and killed in the battle of the bulge in 1942. Was 40 time in Germany. Very decisive battle in the Second World War. I never made it back. And um. And three kids from their own boy, girl boy and it took him five kids, like eight. All refugee kids, all from the wife's, um, extended family. And she, of course, was Jewish, and she had married over to Peter and sometime in the 20s. And so we had eight kids, maybe biological kids, kids of their own. And I have kids like me. I think it was two boys and or 3 hours.

00:22:20,680	S2:
What's amazing is I'm just Werner. I'd say just a two years ago, but I think it was Warren Salinger. And I recently asked him, what's with the name switch and tell them what six year old Warner did.

00:22:36,759	S4:
Well, six year old Warner decided he couldn't go to school in the first grade. But at the same time that the United States was going to go to war with Nazi Germany and with a name like Werner, I didn't think that was very cool. Yeah. So I just sort of called myself Warren, and I was Warren my whole life and never changed any papers, never changed passports or my naturalization papers. They were always honored and that was always just fine. Until one day, the shoe bomber on the way on an airplane on the way to Detroit, tried to blow up the airplane, after which security became Much later, and you couldn't show up at the airport with a passport. That's an order and a ticket that said Lauren. So it just became more permanent.

00:23:26,440	S2:
And one of the first examples you told me about coming to this country was your introduction to racism in America.

00:23:34,319	S4:
Yeah, I've only been in this country three weeks when my mother, who at that time was still in the practice industry again, was told that if she went to Richmond, to the University of Richmond, that's where she could take the necessary courses, um, most quickly and also most cheaply, which was very important at that time. So we went to Richmond. Three weeks in this country, went to Richmond. So somewhere in the hotel, got up the next morning onto a bus and sat in the back of the bus. Richmond, Virginia, 1939. When the bus driver saw three white people sitting at the back of the bus, he broke the bus to a screeching halt. I'd been in this country three weeks. Looked in the rearview mirror and saw three white people sitting back. The bus brought the bus to a screeching halt and screamed at us in a language we could barely understand using the N-word. Didn't we know the back of the bus was for the Lord?

00:24:48,809	S4:
Well, it's the land of the free and the home of the brave.

00:24:52,890	S2:
And even though we were friendly, was fortunate to escape Nazi Germany, it certainly had its long lasting and devastating impact on you personally. Lost your mother because she got sick on the voyage. Um, lost her at a young age. Who was separated from your father? Went to live with another family. Um. And yet you you made the best of. It would be wonderful to tell the students who has won here. Neighbors in Princeton.

00:25:24,259	S4:
Well, Albert Einstein was our neighbor, was looking about five doors away. And a maternal grandmother who had rushed to this country to try to help raise me because my mother died. Knew the woman who worked for, uh, Doctor Einstein. Miller from Perth, literally when she came out of the womb. They were both from Freiburg, Germany. So my maternal grandmother would visit me. Uh, we would walk down to the Einstein house and Uncle Albert were there and start calling him. Um, he would take me by the hand. He loved kids. I was just a kid. Seven years, eight years, nine years old. But he would take me by the hand and walk me through his garden and then back his studio. Take his violin off the wall and play it for me. So I know him for four, maybe four and a half years. When I was seven, eight, nine, ten.

00:26:24,910	S2:
Isn't that amazing? It's quite a new album. It's incredible. So where do you went on to high school? Your middle school, junior high school, middle school.

00:26:36,230	S4:
And your first class? Personal life?

00:26:38,509	S5:
Oh.

00:26:39,509	S4:
I'm so glad I experienced this time now because it's called in German in Berlin. We lived right in the middle of Berlin, in pretty much the Berlin commercial and residential. I guess you could call it upscale. It is certainly today. Um, and we had a very large apartment because my mother's dental practice was in the same apartment, and it was on the second floor overlooking across the street. there will be a strong of stores, um, mostly or maybe all owned by Jewish owners. And even before cross-ownership, which was November 8th to 1938, even before that, those store fronts all over the country at the word Judith Judd in very large print need to know that. And then that person and of course, the storefronts were smashed and didn't just happen by accident on that day. The day before, in Paris, France, a young German Jewish man who happened to be living in Paris got so incensed by what the German Nazi government joined to Jews that he bought himself a stone in Paris, France, walked into the German embassy in Paris, France, And killed the first person he saw. So now I show you the German Nazi government with incest and then stay. And the Goebbels, the propaganda minister, ordered a. Ordered for Somov to happen on the night of November 8th. And on November 9th ordered the storefronts of Jewish owned stores all over the country. Not just for one slice. I could look on and see chat advice for open street bodies all over the street, but the thing I remember most. He also ordered goggles and has also ordered the burning of synagogues all over the country, and ordered German fire departments not to douse the flames just over those synagogues burned to the ground. There was one exception to that. A very courageous fire accounting in the eastern part of Berlin, said, I will try to quell this fire and did. That synagogue was further destroyed than by Allied bombing raids. They were in the war, but it was rebuilt after the war. And it's a very beautiful house of worship. But today.

00:29:24,819	S2:
That's a lot for a child to observe, to live through together.

00:29:31,180	S4:
So I suppose today.

00:29:34,539	S5:
It's a lot.

00:29:36,259	S2:
More than. What did you do after high school in this country?

00:29:39,259	S4:
Well, I went to the University of Maryland for a while. I wanted to become an engineer. And then. Then I was told by various family members that that wasn't a good idea for a Jewish boy from Baltimore, that the profession of engineering was not very kind to the Jewish men. But I went to University of Maryland, and then the Korean War broke up, and I had been too young for the end of the Second World War. I was 13 when the Korean War came along and I said, this is money. And I immediately joined the U.S. Air Force. Nine years at.

00:30:21,059	S4:
War reserve. Went back to Germany, became an intelligence officer, did a lot of interrogating at that time. This is very foreign just with us today. This was the height of the Cold War, 1951, 52, 53 and 5455, that period. And we were absolutely sure that we would be going to war with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Which country was that? That is, Russia today was still in those years 50s. Winston Churchill didn't just give me the speech in Fulton, Missouri, calling the border between East and West an Iron curtain, he said an iron curtain, and it became known as the Iron Curtain. And we were all sure that we would be going to war with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened yet.

00:31:27,670	S2:
And so you're in Germany and a big, life changing event happened to you.

00:31:34,910	S4:
Oh, yeah, I met my wife. I think that was life changing. All right. Think about 74 years now.

00:31:45,309	S4:
About. She was the daughter of the Nazi soldier. Actually, I married the daughter of a Nazi soldier. He was not by any means Nazi, but he had been drafted into the army. Army in 1937 and 3839 was the Nazi army and he had fought on the Russian front, actually been wounded and returned round him. And I got to know both him and my mother in law. Loved them both. I'm often asked, how did you relate to your father? Well, pretty simple. He loved me and I loved him.

00:32:22,960	S2:
What about your family? How do they accept it?

00:32:26,200	S4:
Well, it was a little bit like Robert Frost. Road less traveled by. It was not the common thing to do, but it works out well. And my family accepted my wife and it all worked out. Paul was.

00:32:41,759	S5:
Wonderful.

00:32:42,640	S2:
Tell us about your family today.

00:32:45,240	S4:
My family today. And although I don't live with my wife at the moment. Um, my family, we have four children, three, three daughters and a son. My son is a judge here in this state of Massachusetts. Uh, superior court judge. Um, so four kids, six grandkids and seven great grandkids.

00:33:12,250	S5:
Bob.

00:33:13,250	S2:
How long have you been speaking about the Holocaust? Oh, I can't do it.

00:33:17,569	S4:
Oh, I speak about the Holocaust because I think it's absolutely, totally important to, uh, try to convey to the young people still in high school or even younger how important it is to speak up. It happened so quickly in Germany, and it made no secret about it. And you wrote about it in this book and, uh, made no secret how he hated this life. And he did people with just the thought of a Jewish argument and that he was going to get rid of them and establish a goal of killing 11 million people because they had taken a very careful census. So the message is always the same. You know, I've been to Germany so many times, lived there for four years in the Air Force and then came back and then five more years in the States here in the reserves. And every German village, every German city that you drive through has at least at least two churches in it, a Catholic church and a Protestant church. And those churches existed in the 1920s of the 1930s as well. But the religious community did very little, if anything, to fight anti-Semitism. So the message is always not just not just hatred against Jews, but any hatred against any group of people. You've got to speak out about it. Get involved in local politics. I ran for school committee and the city. Just like the road down the road. It's the only way you can change things. It's year old and you can't vote like you can't win. If you don't run. You can't vote if you don't like it.

00:35:14,190	S4:
Get involved and don't let it happen again. No, the church will just survive for 1020 years. Very few people within those churches and anything about what was about to happen. So the upstairs, not bystanders. Talk to your parents, talk to your teachers, get involved and don't let it happen again.

00:35:43,230	S2:
Wonder why you imagine some students are wondering, did you know you were going to be stationed in Germany? And did you have any say in that? And what was that like for you.

00:35:53,110	S5:
To go back home.

00:35:54,800	S4:
No, it was at the very end of the Korean War. I totally expected it to go to Korea. But when the Air Force discovered that I speak fluent German, which I still do. Um, that said, no place for you was Europe. Only the international Red cross had discovered at that time that the Russians, the Soviets, as they were called at that time, were still holding some 10 or 15,000 German prisoners of war. They had been there many, many years. Some of, you know, 15 to 18 years. Many did not want to come home. They had Russian women. We thought they were married in Tamil marriages. They had kids, many of them. But the Red cross said, you got to go home. And so they came home. And of course, they had been involved in the rebuilding of Soviet Union. I'm talking 5152 through that period of time. And they knew a lot about the new Soviet Union, which we knew very little about. And we wanted to know about that because we were absolutely positive that we would be going to war with the Soviet Union, not tomorrow or the next day and any minute this afternoon. Fortunately, that hasn't happened yet. Um, and they knew how long the runways were in the new airfields, and they knew how thick the factory walls were in the new factories, and they knew what kind of steel was used in the new bridges. And we got all that information through interrogation, send it back to the Pentagon so they could prepare the bomb folders for the next war, which we were certain would start out tomorrow, the next day. But this afternoon.

00:37:41,280	S2:
And how was that? Can you repeat that control?

00:37:43,639	S4:
Well, the first year was a, uh. I had some hard times of stepping off. We came over on stepping off, uh, and, uh, bringing up one of the German ports in the north to the tune, uh, the first band was playing on the dock, which was, I wonder or not, not a great morale booster. But anyway, uh.

00:38:16,769	S4:
So then we got reassigned, and I did a lot of interrogation.

00:38:21,010	S5:
Yeah.

00:38:21,610	S2:
So I think we're going to turn it over to the students now.

00:38:24,730	S5:
Okay.

00:38:25,530	S2:
You probably give you a chance to ask questions.

00:38:28,449	S5:
Okay.

00:38:32,530	S5:
Let's get a start.

00:38:36,809	S4:
Anybody?

00:38:46,409	S4:
Any My own personal history.

00:38:50,019	S5:
But why did you start finding more about something that wasn't.

00:39:03,739	S5:
Even in Sweden? I mean, what is it?

00:39:08,500	S4:
Uh, with my family. Uh, nine and ten of mine.

00:39:14,059	S5:
How?

00:39:14,980	S4:
And the only survivors were.

00:39:17,340	S6:
My great great grandfather. And his father. Who? My great great grandfather. First flight to Mexico and then she followed. And, um, she was we got out very early, but she was amazed just by what she got to our house there. She asked if all of that room that she was in was theirs, and then to explain to her that the whole house was theirs. And I wanted to know what kind of adjustment. Moving to America.

00:39:51,230	S2:
Then what kind of adjustment?

00:39:53,469	S5:
For moving to America?

00:39:54,909	S6:
Yes. Sorry for you. Berlin said Hungary. It was.

00:40:01,949	S5:
So you ended up adjusting? Yes. What was.

00:40:04,949	S2:
The adjustment?

00:40:06,630	S5:
Speer and Charlize agreed.

00:40:11,590	S4:
Well, no. The country. So moving to Princeton was a big help. Because the person with whom I lived. And what is this, Mr. Terry? With this New Testament theologian, he actually had, uh, he had evidence that actually had received honorary degrees from the Sorbonne in Paris, France, on the same day. So he was a pretty important guy, and he took a lot pains for me my first summer here. Some Jewish charity actually sent me up to a beautiful camp in Maine. Camp called. But the challenge is becoming an American kid from having been in a German camp. And that takes some. No matter what country you come from, that that gives that takes a good bit of, uh, working out and it takes about a year to kind of feel comfortable not just the language, but the customs and ethnic culture.

00:41:12,800	S5:
Yeah.

00:41:16,239	S5:
What do you hear?

00:41:20,679	S5:
Yeah.

00:41:21,440	S2:
Um, how long did.

00:41:22,360	S7:
It take you to, like, fully learn English and be confident in your.

00:41:26,039	S5:
Speaking artist? I wanted to take that question.

00:41:33,760	S4:
Well, I think it took about six months. Which is first graded, you know, Princeton, Princeton elementary School. It was wartime by then? We in the United States and Pearl Harbor had occurred. 51 became 52, and about six months, maybe a year to get more perfect. But young kids learn a foreign language with me. And I was just a little kid.

00:42:08,170	S5:
You know.

00:42:10,170	S7:
Like, how.

00:42:10,929	S5:
Long till, like, well, let's go over.

00:42:14,969	S7:
It.

00:42:15,050	S5:
Civil rights things. I was due to go to the forest.

00:42:19,210	S6:
But.

00:42:19,650	S4:
I do. Exactly. It is eight days. But we went to London first. We wanted to get out of Germany as quickly as possible, for obvious reasons. And we were able to, because my partners, my father's law partner and his wife already had an apartment in London and his wife was the daughter of the Chief rabbi of Berlin. They was the effects today in the religions of the US. He survived the concentration camps and he survived the war. So we went to London first stayed there about 6 or 7 weeks, then went back to Holland to catch the ship to come to America. And 88 days later we were here.

Uh. 00:43:10,690	S4:
I love ships. I want to tell your wife. Love ships. One of the things that happened before we left Germany one day, and my father's law office after the Nuremberg laws, uh, were posted, and he could only have, uh, Jewish clients. Uh, he had had a Jewish partner in a small office in a larger, um, business house in the centre of Berlin? Fortunately, that house had a front stairway and a back stairway. Unfortunately, also it had a very courageous woman who was the building superintendent. And one day it was after for some months, actually, the three Gestapo men arrived downstairs. I wanted to arrest my father and sister for being Jewish. And, um, the woman was very courageous, ran up to the front stairs and warned him. And my father was not a guy to really make decisions. Hears me very quickly anymore. And he ran down the back story and then hit out at his mother's house for ten days. Why? They didn't find him in his mother's house, I don't know. I think in those days the Gestapo guys have lists of people, and that one guy wasn't here. One that just went on and the next one. But he told me when he came over for the ten days that he had been on a business trip to Bremen, which was a big seaport in the north of Germany. And to validate that story, he brought me a bunch of beautiful little bomb ships that I still love today. And it really awakened my interest in ships. And I love being on the ships. I've worked on ships for 14 years on Mars.

00:45:07,510	S5:
Yeah, I said.

00:45:10,190	S4:
Yeah, that was his story. And he lived to be 93.

00:45:15,949	S5:
When.

00:45:16,190	S7:
He came to America. Did other kids support you with your.

00:45:26,110	S4:
Other kids? There were schools in America. Yeah, especially once I got to speak pretty good English after, you know, eight, nine months.

Yeah. 00:45:39,639	S4:
They did support me.

00:45:41,800	S6:
I look like I give the spirit of the affection.

00:45:47,039	S5:
And a good question.

00:45:52,159	S5:
But.

00:45:53,440	S4:
Well, I'm not a very religious guy. Um, as a matter of fact, I'm not religious, but I'm very proud of being Jewish. And so were my parents. They always taught me. And I taught my kids the good things about being Jewish.

00:46:12,679	S4:
Foremost of which, coming to my mind, is the Jewish commitment to education. We are always more than represented by our actual physical numbers, only to be educated and educate our families.

00:46:32,530	S5:
Other places in their side that deals are.

00:46:48,090	S5:
In your first interviews, are there any people that you might? That's the worst part. This is what you think you said when you first came to America. Are there any people who like similar experiences like that but they still want silver coins? It has a mission and it's more.

00:47:07,369	S4:
Well, my best friend growing up or my father got remarried, so I had a stepfather, and one of her brother says, I had a son who was pretty much my age, maybe a year older, who had come out of Germany on the Kindertransport. There was a period of time when several trainloads of kids who had been invited to come to England by English families. We will leave again to be called Kindertransport. So Johnny Neumeier and I were very close friends by growing up, and I had 1 or 2 other friends, and of course I had the five kids who were the five kids who were living with me in person. We were all primitive and the family.

00:47:57,139	S6:
Kind.

00:47:57,420	S4:
Of environment.

00:48:01,260	S2:
Where I'd love you to tell the story you've just told me. Today. I learned something new about you with every school presentation. The long lost friend you found.

00:48:12,380	S5:
A childhood friend in my ward.

00:48:16,139	S4:
That about a year ago, I learned that I had a childhood friend who now lived in Jerusalem, Israel.

00:48:25,099	S4:
And he had also been evacuated from Nazi Germany on one of the Kindertransport, and they had gone to England.

00:48:35,230	S4:
And had been raised by a family whose last name was Conor SONER and some of our other. We must have gone to school together in Berlin, because now, 75 years later, he still has a collection of postcards, one of which was sent by me to him in England when he was in England in the early 1940s, 40 4142. And the Japanese journalist, who is now stationed in Berlin, Germany, was writing about a book about him and discovered this postcard that I had sent him in 1940 promptly. And the postcard is a picture of the ship I came to America on, and he had saved it, along with other postcards. All these years. And now I'm in touch with him again through this Japanese journalist who kept seeing references to my name and kept wondering who this guy with my name was. And he tracked me down to Arizona, where I lived for about 30 years, and I was on the board of the Phoenix Holocaust Association. And through that connection, we've all become a Mexican.

00:49:59,550	S5:
Over here. So I was just wondering, I was like, you didn't really know what was going on. I was wondering what your perception of that was, though, because, like you, sure. That is kind of shocking, I guess. But also like, when did you realize, working down that censorship where you converted somebody and the hand up in 86, you didn't believe in the state of what he was he got when Jesus went video. I just got done.

00:50:31,239	S4:
Oh, certainly. My father had to register for the draft. In the period 194243.

00:50:40,159	S4:
We began to get news out of Germany about some of the things that were the concentration camps, for instance. It was about the gas chambers began to trickle out. So, uh, I think by the time I was 9 or 10 and I began to understand and realized how lucky I had.

Did. 00:51:13,239	S5:
You think?

00:51:16,679	S1:
Well, I think, uh, of course there's nobody here at the audience for the sitting today. Uh, Mr. Sahlins represented in a really powerful story. On juniors, you guys will study this, but I would also offer to everybody home. Uh, the message that echoes of fighting that is eight, uh, or all the supporters will have to push back against that with the littlest things that they're allowed to become big things. Just remember, if you prevent it and promote it. So all of us just stand up, do great. They call us up. It's all about us. A round of applause.

00:52:05,250	S4:
The number of senators, not bystanders.

00:52:11,010	S2:
I like to thank all the students for being so attentive and for your great questions as well, though I know he really appreciates it. So thank you so very much and thank you again for the invitation.