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EUGENE LIPMAN February 8, 1990

Q: Would you tell me your name please?

A: Eugene Lipman.

Q: And where and when were you born?

A: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 13, 1919.

Q: Okay. Uh...Gene, tell me something about your family and growing up in Pittsburgh.

A: Uh...My father was a small jeweler in the mill district of Pittsburgh, my mother a Pittsburgher by the way. My father was born in Europe...uh...had and raised children and was the compliant homemaker. Uh...We never had any money. My grandparents,...uh...all four, lived in Pittsburgh until my grandfather, my paternal went off to Palestine. In 1925 or 6 came back for my Bar Mitzvah celebration, and then came back permanently during World War II because the idea of the Germans taking over Palestine was an unpleasant idea to him and so he came back and he died in Pittsburgh. We are a long lived family.

My paternal grandfather was 93 at the time of his death. Uh...I grew up in this mill district of Pittsburgh to the age of 7, then moved to the ghetto of Squirrel Hill because I had to go to Hebrew and all the synagogues and Hebrew schools were in Squirrel Hill, and I completed my high school education at High School, 40 percent Jewish and...uh...finished in 1936, by which time I had already decided to be a Rabbi. And started the Pitt because I could live at home and go to Pitt. This was depression time. And then in 38...Solomon Freuhauf who was my mentor in this Rabbi business decided that I was wasting my time in Pittsburgh and sent me off to Cincinnati. I went to Hebrew College in Cincinnati and the University of Cincinnati at the same time. They were across the street from the other...from each other. They still are. And...uh...got my degree from University of Cincinnati, finished it HUC in 1943, having accelerated a year because they needed chaplains so badly. And...uh...so we went to school for 22 straight months in order to accomplish this. No professor would allow us to give up a course. How can you be a chaplain without my course in mid rush five, one of them was known to say. Uh...It was required by the military that you have a year of experience before you can go into chaplaincy, and so I replaced a Rabbi in Fort Worth, Texas, who went into the Navy and spent a very uncomfortable year there. I was 23 years old and everybody I met in the street 23 years old was in uniform. Uh...The entire American army was in Texas.

And...uh...I was not in uniform so as soon as I could get into uniform, I got into uniform.

Uh...We had married...in...1943, the day after ordination. It was a long weekend, and...uh...by the time I went into the military, Esther was pregnant with our first child.

Q: When and under...when did you go overseas. What were the circumstances?

A: Well, I had decided very early on that my war in World War II was the European theater, not the Pacific theatre, even though I wavered on that because of something I'll mention in a minute. But I had really decided that I wanted to go to Germany and I had asked the Chief Chaplain's office to ship me to Germany. Going overseas was unavoidable. I knew that. And so...uh...in February of 1945, I got orders to go overseas and didn't get there until April because that's the war the army worked. The...uh...thing I didn't mention to you was that while I was in Fort Worth, a member of my congregation who had rabbinical connections...uh..asked me, right after Yom Kippur services, as a matter of fact, if | had ever thought about becoming a pilot. Uh...He taught fairy pilots, the women pilots.

Q: Excuse me. I want to hold it. And can you stop the tape please? Alright, just hold the tape for a minute and then we'll pick it up. We've had construction problems on the third floor.

The sound is coming through the roof. Okay. These people are just marvelous. What we will do, we'll back it from the beginning of that story. I'll ask you to describe... Dean, tell me about...uh...the gentleman in Texas.

A: His name was Stanley Herst, and he had rabbinical connections. He came up to me after services on Yom Kippur and introduced himself. We had never met. I had been there all of about 4 weeks after all, and said that all his adult wanted to teach a Rabbi to fly and all Rabbis were chicken. And being 23, I wasn't having any of that and I said, "When do we start." And he said, "Tomorrow morning at 7 o'clock." And (laughter) I said, "No. I can't do it tomorrow. Give me a couple days." Because, among other things, I didn't have a flight jacket. And in those days, you had to wear a yellow jacket. You couldn't go up in an airplane. They were open. There were no closed airplanes. That's a long time ago. So he taught me to fly in his little piper cub which went 70 miles an hour maximum, and I notified the...uh...Jewish Welfare Board and the Chief Chaplain's office that I was doing this in case it was of interest. And the Chief Chaplain's office was very interested, they said. So I got my license and...uh...after Chaplain's school, which was 5 weeks we got our assignments and I was signed to the armored force. And I thought, you know, "Typical Army screw up!" But...uh...It was done deliberately. I found out that they just didn't want Chaplains flying airplanes. They wanted Chaplains praying for troops. And so I did go to Europe instead of doing Island hopping in the Pacific was what they had been talking about. So | arrived in Europe in...uh...April 1945. The...uh...voyage was of interest historically. I became the radio announcer on the plane...I...on the ship. I probably was the only one who could read English, something of the sort. And several times a day I did news broadcasts, which I had written from whatever material they could garner.

Uh...Historically, I guess the most important thing I did was announce the death of Franklin Roosevelt...uh...who died while we were on our way overseas. That was a very discouraging and depressing...uh...idea. Who...who was Truman became a very important question to those of us who were on our way overseas. We also had a...uh... marathon bridge game going. It should be noted for historical record that nobody in my Army career ever suggested that we play bridge for money. Never did. There were eight of us in this bridge game and we cut in and cut out for all kinds of necessary purposes, like sleep.

And...uh...I didn't get a good hand (laughing) in 14 days. Several million points were involved in my losses. Uh...I also agreed to...uh...box for the only time in my life,

because they were having a series of boxing matches and they couldn't find a heavy weight to fight against this lieutenant who was crazy enough to volunteer, but he had fought a couple of times before. We sort of sparred around for three rounds.

I...uh...developed a strep ear toward the end of the voyage and was taken by ambulance from dockside to an Evac hospital just outside Lahov in France. And the rumor went around that this guy I had fought against had beaten me up so badly that I had been hospitalized. And...uh...rumor also went around that I was being sent back home again because I was so sick. I heard that long after I got into Germany. Couple...couple of people were surprised to see me. I was in this hospital for 3 days. The hospital chaplain, who was bored out of his mind,...uh... stole a couple of bicycles and he and I peddled each night into this little village where he had met a French couple, and we played bridge in French, which was fun. Uh...Eventually, though, that had to stop and I had to get to work. So I...uh...was put onto a troop train headed for Germany. Typical 40 and 8 box car and I staked out my little piece of turf big enough for my pack and me, and then I was standing at the entrance to this box car waiting for the train to start and some sergeant was walking up and down yelling, "Who can talk French? Who knows some French?" So, one never volunteers, but he wasn't getting anybody and I said,...uh... "Will some French do?" And he says, "Three words will do. And Colonel needs a French translator." So I went back to the Colonel, an old regular Army man, obviously unsuccessful because he was in the transportation corps running these troop trains which didn't require much military skill. And he was delighted to see me, and I was moved into his car which was not a box car. It was a heated Pullman car and...uh...I lived very well for 5 days going into France. Uh...My job was every time the...uh... train stopped to tear up to the other end to the engineer and ask him what was wrong. And he told me, "Signal." (laughing) Every time, it was "Red Signal. I can't go." And I went back and told the Colonel who was quite content to go on doing whatever he was doing. I had lots of bad books to read. I had a fine, fine trip into Germany. Uh...wasn't wanted in Germany at that time. No one knew what to do with me. I was moved back to a town in Belgium called Verea, and...uh...as a casual. I did not have an assignment. And then V.E. day came, and we celebrated V.E. day by going from our camp which was outside Verea into Verea to watch the celebration and to celebrate. I was depressed. I didn't feel like celebrating. I don't know why. I...Probably because I was alone, and...uh...couldn't think of much to celebrate as a matter of fact. The world was over, but in the square in Verea, I saw some men and women in concentration camp uniforms. Clearly! Uh...I knew what they were, and they were standing over there, and I walked over toward them. They recognized my insignia and crowded around because I was the first American Jew that they had run into.

They were Buchenwald graduates, and they were the first survivors of the Holocaust whom I met. Uh... They didn't want anything. I didn't have anything. Uh... But we talked, and...uh...they did a lot, my first concentration stories, my first Holocaust stories. They were followed by thousands more Holocaust stories over the course of the next 3 years. I did get an assignment to 22nd Corps Headquarters in the Rhineland. Our town was Hildan, not to far from Cologne, and I moved in. Large territory, all of the Rhineland, including Cologne. A lot of troops. Theoretically, we were conducting services for all those troops. I got a jeep and went to work. Early discovered that a lot of German Jews and a lot of East European Jews had come into the area not in displaced persons camps, but living on their own where they could find a place to live, which many of them could

not do. So I began to do three things. First of all to push military government to find housing for them; second, to see that they got food because they had no source of income and they did not get UNRRA food because they were not in a UNRRA installation.

And...uh...some clothing because they were still wearing concentration camp uniforms, and that was not a very good idea. Uh...So my services with American soldiers consisted of a gang coming together. There were about 10 of these a week, and my saying to them,...uh... "Anybody need to say cottage, ...uh...there was frequently somebody who needed to say cottage, so we had a short service cottage, and then I said, "Let's go. We need food. Let's go get it." And after the first time in each of these installations, anybody who could beg, borrow or steal a truck...uh...came with truck, and we went to army depots and we got food. Uh...Sometimes was able to sign for it. I have often had a nightmare about the army catching up with my memorandum receipts...uh...and they will some day. My great, great, great grandchildren may have a problem with the army...uh...1 know that they catch up, because about 1947 or 48, my uncle who fought in France in World War I got a bill from the United States Army for $45 for a pistol that he had signed a memorandum receipt for in France, and had never turned in. ...Uh...Actually, he had turned it in, but the Army didn't think so. So he had a correspondence with the army for many, many moons about that money for the...I think this was all those years later...so someday... Most of the time, though, we didn't bother to sign for it. We just stole it. And there were millions of tons of supplies stashed in depots around the area and...uh...they should be used. And they were. We also managed to get hold of some kinds of clothing.

Couldn't use uniforms, of course, but there was underwear. There were socks. There were shoes. There were jackets and things like that. So, we were starting a pretty good system going when orders came out moving us. Uh... The British were taking over our area.

There had been negotiations and most of the Rhineland became British zone. And in typical army fashion we were moved as far as you could get, which was Plezn, Czechoslovakia. We packed up and we started across Germany. Before that happened...after we got the notice that the British were coming in and before we left, I decided that I better do something in this part of Germany that needed doing for me. I went to Dachau. Took a 3 day pass and took my jeep and went down to Dachau where Abe Klausner, my classmate, ...uh...was working fulltime, and Klausner's a story unto himself, and we'll probably get around to it in the course of this thing. Uh...My reaction to Dachau was what exactly what you would expect somebody's reaction to Dachau to be.

There was still 30 odd thousand Jews there. Some were dying each day cause there was no way for them to make it. Most of them were going to live. They didn't look like they were going to live, but the Army medical people, who are very good by the way, said they were going to live. Abe was in the same business that I was in, only more so as he had this fine clothing for them. I remember the day that he got 38 thousand pairs of shoes out of a German Army warehouse just by going in, opening the doors, and taking them.

And...uh...Every day he had people to bury. I...uh...often have said to people who are skeptical about the size of the Holocaust that if they would like me to step off approximately how many...uh...feet of space it takes in full directions to make a rectangle that would hold 70,000 dead Jews, I know how to do that because I have seen them.

Uh...I stayed those 3 days with Abe and then went back. On the way to Czechoslovakia, we went through Buchenwald. And once and for all...uh...the myths got exploded that the Germans didn't know about concentration camps cause when we went into the marvelous

old town of Yana, and into the wonderful former capitol of the German Republic of Weimar, I saw smoke. And I asked what it was, and those were the fires, not the...uh...crematorium fires, but the fires at the Buchenwald concentration camp where there were still people. You could see them. They were only 3, 4 miles away from each of those two towns. I have a funny feeling that when the wind blew the right...blew the right way during those years...uh...you could smell Buchenwald without any trouble. We got to Plzen, and I settled into my room, and to my office. Uh... Two things happened in fairly short order, one of which is...uh...just of historic interest. The other of which transformed my life. I'll do the easy one first. I got a phone call. It was the Bishop of Plzen, a Catholic Bishop who told me his name, which I don't remember. And I said to him, "Sir, I.. (You see he had some English)...that you want my Catholic colleague, Chaplain Straun," and he said, "No. You're the Rabbi, aren't you?" And I said, "Yes Sir." And he said, "You're the man I want to come to see, he said, "You don't have to come out here." It was a couple of miles from us to the center of town where the cathedral was. "I am coming down this evening. I'll stop in." And I went to see him. And I met for the first time a bishop who looked like a bishop. You know, the long robes, the pointed toes, shoes, the whole business, and he greeted me very warmly and said that he wanted to take me somewhere. Didn't want to explain too much, but that...uh...it will be a great relief to one of his parishioners if I would go with him. I said, "Alright," and we made a date for the next afternoon. We went into the old part of Plzen, which is centuries old. These wonderful 4 and 5 story apartment buildings, which looked like a slum on the outside and are often very nice on the inside, and I was introduced to a man named Snyder, an engineer, who told me the following story. In the building in which he lived, a neighbor had been...Rabbi Katz, the Rabbi of the congregation in Plzen. The synagogue, by the way, was still standing. We cleaned it out. It had been made a warehouse, of course, by the Germans, and it was rededicated and used by the Jews who happened to be in Plzen during that time. It may still be used. I have no idea. (Sigh) Rabbi Katz and Mr. Snyder, became very close friends because they both had an interest in French impressionist paintings, and they both collected what they could afford to collect. In 1938, when the Nazis came in, the Rabbi said to Snyder, "They are going to take our pictures because they want paintings. They steal paintings. Let's hide them. Snyder, being an engineer, was ingenious, and he took his living room which was 40 feet long, by the way. One of these European saloon-type rooms, and he built a fake wall 3 feet in from the regular wall, and that wall was covered with book shelves and other nice things, with one a typical spring door. He took me inside, and there were all the paintings which they had stashed away, both Rabbi Katz's and his. His agreement with Rabbi Katz was that, obviously, if Katz came back...uh...the paintings would be his...his paintings. If he did not come back, all the paintings would be Snyder's. Uh...He also left some books, and that's why the Bishop had taken me. His most precious books. Rabbi Katz was killed in Auschwitz, his whole family, so there was nobody to inherit either the paintings or the books. And I took the books at Snyder's request. An interesting group of 4, 5 books. Not his library, just the books he cared most about. One 2 volume set turns out to be precious.

It's now in the rare book room of our seminary in Cincinnati. It's one of two copies of this 1520 Hebrew edition of one of the great classics... uh...in the whole world. The other one is at Oxford. Uh... There were some German poems, beautiful edition, which I gave to Sylvia. We'll come across Sylvia shortly, and...uh...a Hebrew New Testament, 17th

Century, which I gave to the Bishop. And...uh...for myself, I kept and sent home an album of Visidor Kaufman, a prince. Visidor Kaufman was a fine classical Jewish painter of the beginning of the 20th century who was himself Austrian and got interested in East European types. And his paintings of East European Jews and East European scenes are classics. And...uh...I have been distributing those to friends, and I have one or two of them. That was my visit with the Bishop, and these books. The same day there was a knock on my door and a little woman walked in, in an American Red Cross uniform.

Uh...Sylvia was maybe 5 feet tall, a skinny little thing, very good looking, about 10 years older than I, and she told me the following story. She was a social worker who had been part of the social work department at Steven Wise Free Synagogue, which was then just called Free Synagogue because Steven Wise was still living. And she had worked for Wises, and told wonderful stories about Steven Wise. When America got into the war, he said to her, "You have to go into the Red Cross." And she said, "Why? To feed donuts to G.L."s?" And he said, "Yes, because in Europe you are going to be in front line areas, and you are going to be able to help Jews. There will be survivors, and they are going to need all kinds of help and you're just the type to do it." He was right. She was just the type.

She got into the Red Cross. She went to Europe, ...uh...opened one of the first concentration camps in France...uh...organized all of the little kids, and middle sized kids who survived, and that was the transport that went to Palestine legally...uh...after liberation. She landed in Czechoslovakia. I don't know how. And was the director of the Red Cross club in downtown Plzen. She had four other women working with her. And from early in the morning till 10 o'clock at night, she handed out donuts and coffee and talked and chatted with American soldiers. Then they closed up for the night, and they opened the back door and the Jews started to come in for all sorts of things. Uh...Sylvia asked me if I wanted to help Jews. Since that's why I went to Europe, I agreed "Yal," and...uh...asked her what was going on. She had been contacted by the Jewish Brigade group which was in Italy. They had been attached to the British army in Italy, had fought through the war, and at the end of the war were in town called Trevisio, way up in the Italian Alps. Immediately, they organized themselves to work with Jews and they sent ambulances and they sent trucks over the hills into Austria and they began to move Jews into Italy to get on ships, illegal of course, to go to Palestine, and would I help with this enterprise? We could send Jews from Czechoslovakia into Austria and the Brigade would pick them up and take them to Italy. That sounded like a very intriguing idea to a 25 year old kid. Cops and robbers! And so Sylvia and I organized a movement out of the American zone of Czechoslovakia. Actually, it was out of all of Czechoslovakia, because at that point the border between the American zone and the Russian zone was an open border. We were still friendly. We mutually declared the Cold War only in August of 1945. So I was given the 3rd language...uh...pass to go anywhere in Czechoslovakia I wanted to go for my purposes. And...uh...two things happened. First, Sylvia and I went over to Prague. There were 6,000 Jews in the Rothchild Hospital there without a place to go, and new people were coming in all the time. Some from Theresienstadt. First time I had heard of Theresienstadt. Others from further East coming West because they had no intentions of living in the East. Uh...Poland was not a place for Jews. Uh...They didn't want to live in Hungary. They didn't want to Czech. They didn't want to live in Europe.

They wanted out. And they would come to a Jewish center hoping that somebody would have some ideas about how to get out. They were also looking for relatives...uh...a very

important function. We'll talk about that some more when we come back to Abe Klausner. We organized...uh...a way for these Jews in the Rothchild Hospital to...uh...receive railroad passes to come into the city of Plzen. From Prague to Plzen is only about 40 or 50 miles. The only way to get there is by train. We then proceeded to type one at a time...uh...passes, authorizing this person a United Nation's Stateless Person to travel from Prague to Plzen for the purpose of looking for relatives. We looked around Plzen for the biggest stamp we could find. I haven't any idea what it was about, but we found one and got a little bunch of red stamp pads and we put big red stamps on this thing and signed the name of a non-existent American Colonel to this document.

And...uh...We would collect them when the people came into Plzen and then take them back to Prague because I could travel. And...uh...leave them at our Headquarters, hospital and a new group would come. Uh...We wanted them to come a few at a time. We didn't want large groups taking over trains, so they came in every day. And they reported to us at the Red Cross Club after 10 o'clock at night, and we drove them out to the Karlov displaced persons camp which was just on the edge of Plzen. It was an UNRRA camp.

We were able to do this because of a rather remarkable coincidence. I went out to the camp to meet the Director and see if we could make a deal for our people to spend some time in the camp. His name was Andrew C. Dunn, and when we met I said, "Tell me.

Does the C stand for Carnegie?," and he said, "How do you know?" I said, "Because anybody with named Dunn with the first name Andrew, the chances are fifty fifty that your middle name would be Carnegie, and you have to be from Pittsburgh." And he said, "Amazing." I said, "Yal, So am I." And we talked and he said, "Lipman. Lipman. Is your old man a jeweler?" And I said, "Yal." And he said, "I bought my wedding ring from him." His assistant, a woman named Fay Green, who many years later became his wife...uh...was intrigued by this whole business so he offered a five hundred in his camp..

We used for transportation to Austria and the answer was U.S. Army trucks. And who drove them? U.S. Army personnel. Why did they do it? Scotch. And some money. We did not want people doing us favors. We were commercial. Uh...We made a trip down to the Austrian border and made the discovery that the only bridge across the Danu...Australian Rivers that we knew about was a military bridge and we weren't about to use that. So we went down the road looking for a way to get across that blasted river, and we found one. It was an old dam no longer in use, but serviceable and was just wide enough at the top for an Army 6-pods to get across with about 6 inches of play on each side. And that's the one we used. We went across the dam into Austria and found our way either to Lintz or to Gratz or to Saltsport, depending on whether the Brigade told us to bring this bunch of Jews. Others, it worked. But I have to tell you where we got the liquor because that involves one of my more favorite memories. I was entitled to a few bottles of Scotch a week as a...I was a Captain by then. That wasn't enough because we needed at least a dozen to 20 trucks or it wasn't worth taking the chance on the trip. Uh...One of the breaks we got by the way...lots of breaks in this... Massel is not to be considered a minor thing. The...uh...sergeant in charge of our motor pool at Corps Headquarters. Now Corps Headquarters has a lot of trucks. It just does. Uh...Corps a big thing. Was a sergeant named Katz, and he was from Brooklyn, and Sergeant Katz and I made a deal that he would get truck drivers for me and trucks and we would pay with money and Scotch. As I recall, it was 2 bottles per round trip or something like that. But where the Hell do you get Scotch in that kind of quantity? And I decided to take a real risk. I went to my senior

chaplain, a Presbyterian from Kansas, Bird Colonel, full Colonel, but not regular army.

He was a reservist. A very, quiet, pleasant man. He said to me, "You know, I haven't asked you any questions, but you travel a lot more than is comfortable for the Chief of Staff." Cause I was going to all the Jewish camps and communities and people I could find all over Czechoslovakia. I was also going to Theresienstadt by then. We haven't come to Theresienstadt yet. And he said...uh...Chief of Staff has asked...has asked me about this and I said I would investigate it." He said, "I can cover for you if I know where you are going. And you haven't any reason to tell me where you are going, but you will have to or I can't cover for you with the Chief of Staff," who is after all a 2-star General. I said, "Okay. I'll make a deal with you. When I leave each day, I will put under your blotter a statement of where I am going, from town to town to town each day, and then I'll give you my trip ticket. And you validate it if you chose to do so." He said, "Of course, I chose to do so. I know what you're doing and you got to do it." He did not know that we were taking Jews to Austria, but he knew I was working with Jewish displaced persons and he thought that was absolutely essential. Bless him, said I. He says, "Anything else I can do for you?" And I said, "Yal. You're a Bird Colonel. You get all the liquor you want, don't you?" He said, "I wouldn't know. I don't drink." I said, "I knew that, but you're about to." And he listened and he said a couple of people in supply are going to be awfully (laughing) surprised. I said, "You don't have to explain what you're doing with it. It's for charitable purposes that you getting into Protestant charities in Czechoslovakia which is your bound duty as a Christian." And he smiled and he thought that made sense, and I got all the liquor I wanted from then on, on his tab. Bless his heart.

I was...I heard of his death in the early 50s, and I was very sorry. He was a good, good man. He saved my life, and saved Jews. That operation worked very well until August when...uh...we got caught in one of the Austria towns. Red handed! The whole bunch of us! We had not yet transferred these people to the Jewish Brigade...uh...and we got picked up. And I got terrible reaming from a General who announced me that he was going to radio my General immediately, and I would be court-martialed.

And...uh...General Hubner did not court martial me. General Hubner, who was known as the little Patton, was a tough...uh...guy, but he wanted to get rid of Jews. He didn't want Jews in his territory. I have to tell you the Jewish displaced persons were the only displaced persons who were difficult. All other displaced persons, and there were 20 some nationalities of displaced persons...Outer Mongolians, for example, that the Germans imported for labor purposes. They were grateful for being alive, for being fed by UNRRA where they ate better than they had eaten most of their lives, and they were no hurry to go home. The Jews were not grateful. The Jews were in terrible conflict over being alive, over having survived. They didn't like anybody very much and...uh...they wanted out, and nobody would let them out. And so they caused more trouble than everybody else put together. Some of us understood it. We tried to organize it so that it wasn't too difficult. In addition, of course, we had all the internal Jewish problems that we always have. For example, within a month of liberation every Zionist party there was was in business, and they all wanted paper for publications and they all wanted everything. It was not easy. And these were not pleasant people at that point, and I think that should be understandable that they were not. So General Hubnere said, "Get them out of here. I don't care." He didn't tell me that, but that's how he behaved. One incident will illustrate this. He called Sylvia and me in one day. Now I had never met General Hubner.

Uh...Captains don't monkey around much with 3-star generals. There are layers of bureaucracy in between, and certainly Red Cross women don't have a lot to do with Generals, though Sylvia had had more to do with Hubner than most because she was always making demands. Sylvia was a tough, tough lady. And Sylvia told the General...uh...got what she wanted most of the time, because the General didn't want to monkey with the Red Cross. He needed the Red Cross. Those donuts were very precious.

Donuts and coffee kept American troops going. Uh...He called us in and said, "I hear there is going to be a Jewish meeting in London to talk about the future of all these Jews." And we said, "Yep." And he said, "You're going. You go my plane. When does the meeting start?" And we told and he said, "Okay. Two days before that, get out there and tell them for me to get all these Jews out of here. They should do everything they can do to get them out fast. It's not good for them and it is not good for us either." And he said it not unkindly, but he wasn't smiling. And Sylvia and I flew to London to the special Zionist Congress that was called in July in London, the chief purpose of which was to set the course that would lead to...uh...Israel's independence 3 years later, which meant that Ben-Gurion had a fight with Wietzman and Ben-Gurion wiped up the floor with Wietzman in a 4 hour Yiddish speech which, for me, is pretty unforgettable. Uh...What did he say? He did what Ben-Gurion always did. Ben-Gurion's idea of a speech was first to tell the history of the Jewish people, starting back with Abraham and working his way up. Sometimes I felt like he was going it minute by minute. Four hours was not his longest speech. Uh...He has made longer. And then rehearsing the Zionist movement from Belu all the way up...uh...and then minute by minute the events of World War II, subjectively stated so that Wietzman looked like an idiot who played the British and he was the savior who was going to see to it that we had a Jewish State. And they believed him. And Wietzman was really not in condition to do a proper answer. Wietzman aged 10 years in 5 days, and he became the old man, the inevitable person to the first President of the State. Powerless and ceremonial. That's what Wietzman became as of that day. Ben- Gurion became the leader of the Zionist movement. Uh...Sylvia and I did not spend much time in sessions. We spent our time meeting people that Steven Wise told us to meet to tell them about Czechoslovakia, to tell them about displaced persons, to tell them about the Haganah, and to urge certain kinds of support, none of which we had yet gotten. I met some fascinating people. Uh...I discovered this Lord Reading. Rufus Isaacs had gout, and that Lady Reading was really a lady and as passionate about...uh...Jewish things as any convert could be and...uh...all the leaders of the Zionist movement wanted to hear from us. We were the only people there from the occupied territories. That is, from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria. Nobody else there. Because nobody could get there. It never occurred to them for some reason or other to send some displaced persons over to tell the thing first person. There wasn't a single one there. So we were busy. And the General made that possible because that's how he wanted to get rid of the Jews. (Laughter) Benevolently! So he did not court martial me. He called me in. Actually, it was the Chief Staff who called me in and said, "We got this TWX from Austria." "Yes, Sir." "What the Hell have you been up to?" "TWX tells you what I have been up to." "We can't allow this." I said, "No, I suppose not. What'll you do." He said, "We're moving you so you can't do it." Alright, that was fine. Sylvia could keep the thing going and then other people took over. So far as I know some transports continued to go until the communists took over Czechoslovakia.

Q: I would like to halt a minute.

A: Yal.

A: Go back to London.

A: Yal.

Q: Uh...Something else happened, I believe, when you were in London. You met Leo Beck.

A: Huh? That has to do with Theresienstadt so we have to start.

Q: Let's go back. Go back and do Theresienstadt because that leads to Leo Beck*.b-HD

A: Yal.

A: When I got to Prague the first time, I discovered there had been a concentration camp at Theresienstadt, or as the Czechs call it Terezin, north and a little bit west of Prague. So I went there. There was still 16,000 Jews there with a Russian unit...uh...running the camp because it was in a Russian zone. And...uh...Theresienstadt was exactly what...uh...all the pictures have ever shown it to be. It was an army barracks...uh...and wasn't bad, because Theresienstadt, I remind you, was the show-off concentration camp. That was the place that the Red Cross came to. The International Red Cross was not exactly heroic during World War II, but they would go to Theresienstadt and make inspection...inspections and then send out a report saying the concentration camp was fine. They had a band and gave concerts and they had classes and they did all sorts of things. What they didn't say is that everyday transports left for the east and that none of those people survived. Leo Beck had survived by accident, by the way. There was somebody else named Beck in the camp, and they got mixed up and they sent that Beck off to East instead of Leo Beck. Leo Beck had left by the time I got there. The Russians had flown him into the British zone, and the British had flown him to London where his only child, a daughter, lived. And...uh...We proceeded, the Russian and I, to make a very simple deal. He wanted to close the camp.

We wanted to close the camp. UNRRA had agreed that they would take this people to a town called Begendorf in the American zone. It was just a case of getting them there, and I had trucks. So we made a deal to move all the Jews out of Theresienstadt to Begendorf and here I have to tell you another one of those absolutely uncanny coincidences. All of our conferences, the camp commander and I, took place in the presence of a third person wearing a plain uniform who was the Commissar, the political leader, and he ran things.

He sat there. Fortunately, he knew virtually no German. The only language the Commander and I had in common was German. Mine was fairly bad, and his was even worse. So we were talking German to each other, making ourselves understood and then I heard a word in a sentence that this man was saying, which was not German. It was a Yiddish word with a Hebrew origin. Aw, said I, He has just sent me a signal. So in my next paragraph, I carefully used a Yiddish word that had a Hebrew origin. Neither of us blinked an eye lash, but we both knew why he was going to work his head off to get those

Jews out of there and he wanted me to know why. I had a Jewish camp commander.

Never again in the whole time I was there...those...almost 3 months did he allude to it.

We were never alone. The Commissar never let us alone. If I went there for lunch, the Commissar had lunch with us. He was with us every minute that I was in Theresienstadt.

Came the last day. The last transport leaving Theresienstadt for Dagendorf, trucks all lined up, my jeep ready, my driver excited, Vic, and...uh...suddenly was a scream toward the back of the transport, somebody yelling "Halt." And a woman, I remember her, a kind of heavy set lady climbed out of the truck and started to run toward one of the buildings.

So we followed her, the Camp President and I. She went into the building. She went down some steps, around corners, down some more steps, way down into the bowels of the earth, and came to a...what looked like a piece of metal covering the wall, only it wasn't. It was a door. And when we went through that door, we were in the Theresienstadt synagogue. And...uh...it had not been completely cleaned out. There were some things there, and we took them. One of the things was a Megillah, of Esther. And they wanted to give it to me, and I said, "No, that I thought it belonged to Leo Beck." Whether or not it was his, it should be his. They all agreed that was so. He was a hero in the camp, by the way, because he had organized all those classes. He had insisted after pulling his garbage truck all day that you could not let your mind go to waste, and he had organized what amounted to a university. Anybody who could teach anything taught it.

And he taught it. And that was...uh...accepted by these people as terribly important. And so he was...there have...there has been some statements about Beck's status in the camp as being something less than heroic, but not in my conversations with people in that camp.

They really respected this old man. So I said I would take it to him, that one way or another eventually I would be going to London or I'd send it or whatever. So when I went to the Zionist Congress in July, I took the Megillah with me, wrapped in a piece of plastic, and I called, spoke to his daughter and made an appointment to see him on a particular day I don't remember. When I arrived, I was taken through the house to the back garden. It was a little back British gardens which are so nice. And...uh...Leo Beck was a bit of a ham, and my later experiences with him confirmed the fact that he was a bit of a ham. He was sitting...uh... reading something in profile. He had a marvelous profile, and the sun was shining directly on to him. (Laughter) And we talked for awhile. I had to give him condolences. His niece...uh...had been killed in a truck accident on the way out of Theresienstadt, the only on toward thing that we had in our Theresienstadt transports.

A truck slid into the ditch and she was killed. His great niece was okay though. Her daughter! And we talked about that for awhile, and this young lady's future and I gave him the Megillahe. And he looked at it, and he looked at it, and he said, "I don't want this." I said, "Why not? The people wanted you to have it." He said, "No. If I have it, it's a museum piece. The Megillah should not be a museum piece. It should be a living document. It should be read. It should be read by Jews. This one being the Theresienstadt Magila should be read under circumstances which connect the story of the Megillah with Theresienstadt. You take it. Only you promise me that that's how it will be used." And I took it. I had a box made for it by a Holocaust survivor when I came back. Actually, I didn't have it made until I got to Washington. And a woman named Friedal Blumenthal, a superb silversmith, made this box. The box is teac and she has ornamented it with appropriate symbols and the fact that it's a Megillah of Theresien. It is now going into its second generation. When I retired, I gave it to my son who happens to be a Rabbi, and he

uses it in his congregation and he has made a...an arrangement with the Holocaust Museum that it will be on display here for part of each year. That's my first meeting with Leo Beck. Later, he taught me. He came to Cincinnati in 1948, and from 1948 until his death in 55, I think it was, he taught one semester each year at the college institute in Cincinnati and the rest of the year was in London where he lead the World Union For Progressive Judaism. First rate lecturer and a bit of a ham. Uh...Now where do we go from here?

Q: What I want to do from here is to go back? Uh...I want to...I do not yet want to leave Czechoslovakia. Uh...And I would like to know... You worked so closely with the Haganah, and you worked with Berichah. I would like for you to talk a little bit about that. Uh...Tell us who you worked with and what those relationships were like.

A: Okay, then I'll have to talk about the girls too.

Q: Yes. I want to do all of them.

A: The people I worked with were primarily my American truck drivers. Andy Dunn and Faye Green at Camp Karlof...uh...I don't remember the names of anybody from the Rothchild Hospital, but there was an office there in which these documents...uh...which we did about 4 or 5 hundred eventually, these one-page things with the red stamp, that ..uh...got these people. They never had trouble getting from Prague to Plzen traveling.

Even after the...uh...cold war was declared, and I had to go back roads my last couple of trips to Theresienstadt, by the way. I could not just go across. I had to go through a back road that I found to get to Theresin and then I could get to Prague and then I had to go back to my road to get back into the American zone because the Russians would no longer let us travel. My 3"language pass was no longer acceptable. Even after that, United Nations displaced persons traveling from Prague to Plzen for the purpose of looking for relatives had no trouble getting through the border crossing at Brockisoni. So I don't remember names very well. I remember nobody from the Jewish Brigade group. Sylvia had made contact with a man named, who had been a Captain in the Jewish Brigade, and , an attorney and I heard of him subsequent over the years. I never met him. So I had no dealings directly with him. I dealt with whoever happened to come across with the ambulances or the trucks or the combination that was taking our people from the town in Austria across to Italy. It was pretty much a...uh...two-person operation, Sylvia and me.

Sylvia worked day and night. She was absolutely incredible in that Red Cross thing of hers. Her four people, the other women knew exactly what was going on, and they helped as much as they could. They wanted to. They were nice, healthy American kids who...uh...got a little bit bored listening to G.I. stories from 9 o'clock to 9 o'clock and handing out donuts and coffee, which is all Red Cross...un...canteens served. They got tired making those donuts too. So...uh...I didn't have a great many...uh....Berichah contacts then. Later it...uh...it changed drastically. But, the Czechoslovakia thing was pretty much as I have described it. Uh...One ...uh...group of people I really have to mention because they become so important to me. Shortly after we got to Czechoslovakia, I kept hearing about places where there were Jews and that's why the Chaplain had such trouble with my trip tickets because I went to all these places. And

incidentally managed to show up at all the American Headquarters I was supposed to go to. There was a town in, a town in the southern part of ... And I heard that there some Jewish girls there. Women! And I went down there, and sure enough, there were. Nearly 400 of them in a hospital. They had been in a labor camp in Germany and the Germans who were really suicidal about Jews had put these women...more than 400, nearly a thousand.... on to a train and sent the train east. Toward the end of the war, they did that with a lot of Jews. Their minds, I think, going like...we don't want the Americans to find them. It will be better for us if the Americans don't find them. These women got as far as Suchita when they couldn't get any more fuel for the train. So the engineer abandoned the train, and there they were. Somebody opened it up because they heard screams presumably, and they buried the dead and put the rest of them into this hospital. I went there and met these women. They wanted a service, so we had services, after which one young woman came up to me, introduced herself in quite good English, told me that she and her three sisters and three of their friends, all from Krakow, had been together through the war. Turns out that she mama'd this group and saved them through the war.

And...uh...they wanted to get out of the hospital. Was there any place they could live?

Because she had been offered a job with UNRRA, and one of the others was going to this, one of the others was going to do that. They all had plans for living in Suchison, so we got them a house. And...uh...they became my kids. Uh... The word kid is funny because Erna is really only about 5 years younger than I am, and the man she married was older than I. But...uh...They're my kinds. A little later...uh...the job situation was such that they would do better in the Bavarian town of Tishinroit, so they were moved to a house in Tishinroit, where they lived until they came to...well, 1946, Bronya, now Betty, married Henry and they moved to Australia where his only living relative was, and they are still there and we still correspond. I have not seen them since 1946. Uh...Dora, who was the housekeeper....she was the domesticated one of this crowd...married Borrof, and they disappeared in the wilds of Brooklyn, where he is a Hasid and does not permit his wife to have much to do with the rest of us. But Dora manages to call Erna periodically to make sure everybody is alright and to send her love. The other five have been together constantly ever since. They all came to the United States. They all married. Two of them...three of them married in Europe. I officiated at all three marriages.

And...uh...some of the kids were born in Tirsenroit, including a pair of twins, who are now both M.D., Ph.Ds doing extraordinary work. Uh...They've remained my family to this day. Uh...Interestingly enough, the one who was not their sister..-uh...married their uncle. They had a very uncle, and Maguska married him. So we've been through a lot of things. Births, Bar Mitzvah and a couple of deaths. Remarkably few deaths, I am glad to say. And we are still in routine communication. Uh...Erna's marriage was rather miraculous because in the concentration camp, she had met a woman who had said to her that she was absolutely perfect as a mate for her son. And after the war she married that son, a physician who had a successful practice in Syracuse. The coincidences are such.

Anyhow, that's my ...

Q: We need to break tape. Let's change tapes at this point.

Q: Okay. Uh...We are still in Czechoslovakia, and you said there was a story that you wanted to tell me.

A: Not everything that happened in Czechoslovakia (clearing throat) or anywhere else was upbeat. There were problems. There were tragedies and there were horrors. Uh...I'll tell you a horror story just because it happened. The Karlov camp was our salvation, but there were problems there too. One middle of the night, I got a frantic call from Andy Dunn to come out immediately, so I went over to the camp. It seems...uh...a Kapo had turned up in the camp. A Kapo was a Jew who worked for the Germans or Poles in the concentration camp, and if the Jews hated anybody more than they hated Germans and Poles and other people, they hated Kapos. Somebody recognized this Kapo in Karlov that night, and they had killed him and they just tossed his body over the fence outside the camp, and the body had been found. And poor Andy didn't know what to do with a dead Kapo, and that was understandable. And...uh...It seemed to me that to inform the Czech authorities was a bad idea. So we just buried the guy. And...uh...he, like many other Jews, lies in an unmarked grave. My own feelings that night made that one of the low points of the entire 3 year experience in Germany. Uh...It's not my only Kapo experience. We had another one, but...that Jews could kill somebody, another Jew. No matter how terrible the other Jew was, with no due process of any kind, outraged me and upset me and scared me.

But...uh..it was another lesson to be learned. Let's go from that to a birth. A woman came to Sylvia, Hungarian Jewish girl who was very pregnant and who didn't want the baby.

The father of the baby was a concentration camp guard. Following liberation she had met a man, a Hungarian, who wanted to marry her, only he wouldn't marry her with the baby.

It didn't bother him that she was pregnant. After all, she had nothing to do with that really, but...uh... he wasn't going to raise that child and neither was she. What should we do with this baby about to be born? Sylvia said, "Give it to me. I will somehow get it to the United States. I have a sister who does not have children. That will be her child." And on June 1...July 1...July 1, 1945, this baby was born. A little girl. And the doctor who delivered her, I remember his name. Interestingly enough his son, who was very young at the time, became my friend because of this incident and the son died in California just about 2 weeks ago to my sorrow. Uh...Here was this baby. The mother agreed that she would keep the child until she was ready to leave for Hungary. Five days later she came into the club after 10 o'clock one night and said, "I can't do this. I have no interest in this baby. Why should I waste time looking after this kid? Here." And handed a baby to Sylvia. Sylvia and four Red Cross girls found themselves the mother of a 5 day old baby, and I became it's sort of surrogate father. The child lived in the Red Cross Club. The five women took care of her. The...uh...story of how we found... Well, bottles were easy.

Coke bottles worked fine. You sterilize a coke bottle, and we had lots of coke bottles around. Nipples were harder to find. It took almost a whole day of tearing around Czechoslovakia until we found one nipple for this kid that would fit a coke bottle. That's part of the problem. (Laughter) It was big enough for a calf as a matter of fact, but the baby thrived on it which is what mattered. We had no trouble with the other necessities for a young baby. And then in very dramatic fashion...uh...Sylvia had to come home on emergency in the summer of 1945. Her father was desperately sick and did, in fact, die.

So she got emergency leave to go home and she packed up the baby in a bed roll and took her along with her. When she got to Scotland to get on the Transatlantic plane they wanted...uh...baby's not on the manifest. And Sylvia said, "Who puts 2 month old babies on a manifest?" "Where did you get the child." "It's my child. I had a baby." And she

bluffed her way through immigration into the United States. And her sister got the child and the child is, I understand, very healthy and alive. We changed her birthdate. On the birth certificate, which...uh...happened under extreme circumstances also, it must have been...oh...a year later, I guess. No....a year and a half later, I got a frantic letter from the child's mother saying, "We're trying to complete the adoption and the court will not put through the adoption without a birth certificate. Get me a birth certificate." The communist had taken over in Czechoslovakia and I wasn't about to go to Plzen trying to get a birth certification. So I went to my Commanding Officer and I said to him, "Colonel, is it true that all camp commanders and post commanders are notaries." "Yes." "Would you notarize a document for me?" "Yes." So in my name, I wrote a statement about the circumstances of this child's birth, never alluding to the child's name or mother because I wasn't going to lie...uh...not in a sworn affidavit. I'm a funny American...uh...in view of the stories I am telling you, it sounds strange that I would lie in an affidavit, but I didn't want to. So I wrote it very carefully. Told the circumstances of the child's birth and the movement to the United States, and...uh...civil affairs were not exactly in order Plzen in July of 1945 and there was no birth certificate, and would the court please accept this sworn affidavit in lieu of a birth certificate, and they did. And so the adoption was completed. Uh...That's one of my nice stories. I hope you can get to Sylvia to get the rest of it because she tells it beautifully and I don't want to tell more because the young lady is around. The young lady and I have no contact whatsoever. I have not tried to keep these kinds of contacts. Okay. Let's now go to the USO. We'll finish up Czechoslovakia.

USO tours were very important, especially during the occupation period. American soldiers were bored, and these entertainers came and...uh...you know, you've seen television pictures of Bob Hope and the crowd he gets. Well, every group that came over, no matter how mediocre got this kind of reception. I was called in by our special services officer in Plzen and asked if I could do them a favor. I said, "What do you want?" He said, "Well, we have a strange USO group coming over. They have let it be known that they will not under any circumstances do the job they're being sent here to do, namely to entertain American troops, unless they can also go to Jewish displaced persons groups.

And they're important people. So I want to indulge them. Can you help me." I said, "Yal.

I can help you. I can make arrangement for concerts and appearances in Jewish DP camps." "Alright, they are arriving day after tomorrow. WIII you meet them at the hotel?" "Yes." And I walked into a room which contained, and now I am name dropping, the only time I shall do this I hope, Ingrid Bergman, Jack Benny, Larry Addler, the world's greatest harmonica player and Martha Tilton of whom I had never heard till then, but who turns out to be a very good pop singer. And...uh...they said to me that they wanted to do this. I said, "What do you want to do for these Jews?" "Leave that up to us." And I took them in a command car for one solid week during the day. After all American troops could not be entertained...until 11:00 in the morning or 2:00 in the afternoon, they were supposed to be working. But Jews were sitting around. They spent their days entertaining Jews, and their evenings entertaining American troops. And they were magnificent. They were absolutely superb. Jack Benny's Yiddish was quite good. Larry Addler's Yiddish was quite good. Uh...Ingrid Bergman talked to them in a broken kind of German which she broke deliberately so they wouldn't think it was Yiddish, and (laughter) they knew it wasn't and...uh...I had a wonderful time for a week. | really did. I was...uh...the only spectator at about | o'clock one morning to a recital in which Jack Benny played the

piano and Larry Addler played the violin. I wish I had a tape of that one. I wish the world had a tape of it. It was a really spectacular experience, and I developed enormous regard for those four people because they really knocked themselves out for these Jews.

Q: Okay. Uh... You were done with your Czech tour in Czechoslovakia and you were sent to Germany?

A: I was exiled to Germany.

Q: You were exiled to Germany.

A: Yes. I was...uh...assigned to the 4th Armored Division, one of its combat commands. In those days a armored division consisted of three combat commands. I was assigned to one of them in a little town not far from Regensburg. And...uh...it didn't take long to find Jews. There were 2,000 of them in Regensburg, not under UNRRA auspices, which means they needed everything in the world and we had to work there. One of the things we got them was a building, a Jewish Center. It had an auditorium. It had offices cause they organized. Two thousand Jews are either organized or you have chaos. One or the other! By this time, incidentally, it's the very end of August 1945. And I was very worried. We had inadequate food for these people and no money to get food. I had written to the JVC in Paris, trying to get money and we could buy food, and...uh...was told no, this was not the way they wanted to do business, that they would be coming in with their people and they would take care of everything. Meanwhile, we had hungry Jews. Uh...I guess the first thing to tell you is the meeting of Chaplains, which happened shortly after I got to Regensburg or... 1 am going to call it Regensburg. It was really a little town called Zoul, but it doesn't matter. Uh...Got instructions to be Munich at a certain time to meet with the Chair of the Commission of Army and Navy Chaplaincy of the Jewish Welfare Board of the late Rabbi Joseph Lipstein, an orthodox rabbi, and with Rabbi who was a director of that commission, who was a reform rabbi. And we all gathered in this hotel room in Munich. My guess is there were probably 30 or 40 of us.

Uh... There were about 90 Jewish Chaplains in the American Zones, but they weren't...he didn't meet them all at once. He had met some in Frankfurt and he met them...I don't know where else. But he met us in Munich, and that was the first time I had seen Klausner...uh...since Dachau because I had just gotten back to Germany, and had not had a chance to go down in Munich to see him. And...uh...I'll never forget Lipstein. He greeted us and he said, "Now Gentlemen, my report to the Jewish Welfare Board on Chaplain activities, I wrote on the plane coming over. It was easy. Now I want to know, and if you trust me, don't hold back. Tell me what's going on." And we looked at one another, and we decided we'd tell him. So we told him. We had lots of problems, and nothing to deal with them with. Uh...Abe was the most outspoken and said the most because he had the most experience by then. I should tell you that by then, you see, he had organized the Central Committee of Displaced Persons in the U.S. zone of which he was the president. And he had departments set up. They were doing health work. They were getting food and clothing where they could scrounge it, and I guess most of important of all, they were doing a relative search. Uh...Abe published five volumes of names of survivors which sat in Munich in the old Dorchus museum which was his office

then and on the walls of this building...I wish we had pictures of it...I think he does...are the names of thousands of Jews and where to find them so they could find relatives. And relatives were found this way. It was a very inefficient way, but it was the only way we had so we used it. And...uh.. during that meeting with Lipstein not participating, the chaplains decided that our people had a right to clothing, and they weren't getting it and there was no indication that when JDC or anybody else would come in to give people clothing who weren't in DP camps. And even in some DP camps they didn't have clothing. They particularly didn't have clothing for children. Our people were beginning to have kids if you can count. And...uh...we decided we would use a technique which was legal which the Army permitted. You in the United States could send to any soldier anywhere in the world a 11-pound package of food and or clothing...uh...to his A.P.O.

number, and you could send as many as you wanted. So each of us wrote letters, and we sent them to everybody we knew. I sent them to every Rabbi I knew. I sent them to my family. I have a large family, and all my friends and everybody else I could think of.

Send packages. And God helps us, they began to come in. Tons. By the end of October 1945, I had 80 people working full time in a warehouse in Regensburg on just the stuff addressed to me, sorting this clothing, throwing away some of it I am sorry to say or using it for smotas and fixing that which was repairable and getting it cleaned and once a week I visited all of the 31 camps and communities in my part of north Bavaria delivering sacks of this stuff. I began to worry about my post office. So I went to my postal officer and I said, "People in the United States are sending me a lot of stuff as you know." He said, "Yes, Chaplain, I am aware of it." I said, "How about it if I make it easy on you and I send a truck down here everyday to pick up the stuff so you don't have to deliver it." "Oh, that will be wonderful. Thank you." He didn't ask a question. I didn't give him any information. (laughing) I just sent the truck, and we got our stuff.

Absolutely incredible quantities. Tons and tons of clothing. Now people began to ask questions. We give contributions to the Joint Distribution Committee which is supposed to be doing relief work all over the world. How come we get asked by the Rabbis for these packages? And that must have been....must have been embarrassing to JDC but by that time, I am afraid we weren't very sympathetic. Uh...When they came in, they came into my territory...uh...no...they came into Munch in August...three social workers. Not carrying a stitch of anything with them, and no budget for anything. Klausner got them him a house. As he had a house in Munich and he brought them into his house, and that became their headquarters cause they had no place to work. They were credited to UNRRA, but UNRRA didn't supply them with anything. It wasn't UNRRA's job. It was their job to be supplying. These people were absolutely unprepared for what they were going to do. They didn't know anything about relative search. They didn't know anything about getting people out, if you could get people out. They had not been trained. Of course, neither had we. One of the astounding facts of my life is that those of us who went to Europe got absolutely no orientation from anybody about what we were going to find when we got there. None. Not from the JWB, which...whose job it wasn't, but not from the other agencies either who really might have gotten a hold of us before we left and said, "Hey, you're going to run into A, B, C. and D, and contact so and so and so and so, and at least know the address of the JDC office in Paris which none of us had.

So...uh...those relationships...uh... were either strained or good, depending on the personnel. Two of the three people who came to Munich were magnificent as people.

Ceil Wineburg, I shall always...married a man...uh...died in Detroit, was superb. And she wouldn't leave Europe. She got so attached to those people and their needs that she must have stayed 5 years. Uh... The other one, a girl named Debbie, I am sorry to say died in Europe...uh...a defective heating stove...uh...in her room. This happened in 1946. So.

A: Another thing we had to do...

Q: Tell me more about JDC and this.

A: (Sigh) Well, I was lucky. In late October, early November, there came to Regensburg, a full time JDC person named Joe Levine, who now lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, deeply devoted, cared about these people and did everything in the world that could be done. He even learned how to scrounge, and he learned how to steal, and he learned how to send for this and that not through JDC channels, and eventually JDC managed to get stuff in. I mean it didn't stay this way forever. But those...that first year was pretty horrendous and Joe was as frustrated as I was. Fortunately, we became very close friends and we were on the same wave length from beginning to end. We are still good friends, by the way. High Holidays, 1945, I must tell you. Had to do something. Not only for soldiers, but for displaced persons as well. And I decided that they were decided...that they were entitled to have a break fast at the end of Yom Kippur which would be traditional. What do you need for a break fast? Herring. You gotta have herring. Without herring you can't do it.

How do you get herring? There's no herring in Regensburg. Legal, illegal, no herring. So I cabled military to a Chaplain friend in England and said, I need a big barrel of salt herring, enough for 2,000 people for break fast. One day in August...late August, 1945, beginning September, I don't remember the dates at this point, I got a phone call. Munich airstrip. "Are you Chaplain Lipman?" "At the end of our runway is the biggest God Dam barrel (you'll have to censor that) I have seen and it stinks." "I'll be right down." (Laughter) I put my trailer on my jeep, and I went to the air strip and we unloaded what was an enormous barrel. You think of a barrel as this big. It was three times that big. Was almost as tall as I. We couldn't lift it. It had to be rolled. And I took it up to Ragensberg, and said, "Now what do I do with it? How do I make this into pickled herring, because it was old salt herring, in brine, untouched. It had its heads. It had had its scales. It had everything. Then I got an idea. My commanding officer was a Colonel Koen. We were not friends, I am sorry to say. He should rest in peace. Harold Kone was not very Jewish.

He was part of the famous teams of Abrahams in Kone. The 4th Armored Division had been hell on wheels for the Germans. They had hated the 4th Armored, and they particularly Abrahams and Koen. They thought they were both Jews. Abrahams was the late General Kritein, Abrahams of Viet Nam fame who was then a Colonel, and was Harold Koen's commander. He commanded the combat command. Harold...No, he commanded the regiment. Harold had the combat command. Harold Koen taught Kreitein Abrahams some Yiddish and to the extent they could on their walky talkies, they talked Yiddish. And the Germans called them terrible names, these two Jews. But that was as Jewish as Harold Koen got. He was not interested in me. He was not interested in what I was doing, and so we kept away from each other. I went in to him and I said, "Harold, I need something, and maybe this will appeal to you. I need some PWs, a bunch of them for a whole day." "What for?" I said, "To clean herring." And he said, "What?" I said,

"Yal, I got a barrel of herring here, a big barrel for both our troops and for the Jews in Regensburg for Yom Kippur." And he said, "Oh, how beautiful." We had a PW cage for high ranking officers. He gave me 10 Colonels, 10 Nazi Colonels, who arrived in step in uniform, and I said to them, "Gentlemen, I suggest to you that you take off as much of your uniforms as you can because the task you have is not going to be exactly..." "We are forbidden to do menial labor. We are officers." I said, "I am aware of that, and we will keep the Geneva Convention. We will not smash it. We may bend it a bit before the day is over." I sat them down on relatively low stools with big buckets in front of them, put the barrel of herring in front of them, and said, "Gentlemen, you are to cut off the heads.

You are scale it. You are to gut it. And then put it into these buckets of water." They refused. And I said, "Here's the written order from Colonel Koen. I am not sure what you can do about it. You are, after all, prisoners of war." They sat down and they spent 10 hours...it was a pretty hot day...cleaning herring. I loved every minute of it. I was a sadistic so and so. Koen must have come out 10 times to watch it. He had a marvelous time that day. And then when they went back...uh...the herring having been cleaned, they demanded baths. And the camp commander said, "But it's not your bath day. You'll get your bath day on your bath day." And so these guys walked around reeking of herring for I don't know how many days until their bath day came, and I must tell you I had no compassion. I confess that I am not that human, or humane. So we made enormous quantities of pickled herring. I found some other things that the commissary or the... our supply group was willing to let me steal and then I got 4,000 donuts from our Red Cross people. Had lots and lots and lots of coffee and all the rest of it. And then I got a break.

The 4th Armored Division was a New York Division and organized at Camp Pine. And of its 10,000 people when it was full strength, almost 15 hundred were Jews. It had the highest casualty rates in Jews of any unit in the United States Army I suspect because 4th Armored had been through very heavy combat. Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the high point men got their orders to go home. I had over a thousand men at Rosh Hashanah services. I had 80 at Yom Kippur services. They had left me. (Laughter) They had gone home. I was delighted for them. I was delighted for another reason too. I had that much more food for my DPs. We finished early. I deliberately started services early and finished early, so we could all get into Regensburg. And all these guys that wanted to go...some of them drove trucks for me...had this food all loaded and we went into Regensburg and we parked our trucks in front of the Jewish Center where the Jews were dining. And...uh...somebody looked in one of the trucks. They didn't know I was coming. I had not told them we were bringing a meal. And I am not sure they ever finished the meal that day. They unloaded those trucks faster than I have ever seen trucks unloaded, and that food disappeared. I stood in there. I had such a wonderful time watching these people break fast as you're supposed to break fast. It was a quite memorable experience. Lots of other adventures in Regensburg,...uh...including my second kapo. I came into the center one day, and they were screaming and yelling at this poor, bedraggled looking Jew who was a kapo, and I said, "You are not going to do anything in this center." And we asked questions. The guy admitted that he had been a kapo, so we had no trouble with that. And I said to the Jews, "Was being a kapo a war crime?" "Yes." "What do we do with war criminals? We try them. I am taking this Jew to military government, and I am having him arrested as a war criminal and the Allied Armies will try this war criminal as we are trying war criminals and you won't touch

him." And they screamed and they yelled I was a traitor. They were going to kill this guy.

The least they could do was get there vengeance, etc., etc., etc. And I said to my assistant, a wonderful Jew named Si Pova, who lives in Hartford, Connecticut. He's a social worker. He raised an orthodox family. He was 19 years old. They called him , Simon, the righteous one. And he was. Si must have worked 20 hours a day, 6 days a week for these people. He was absolutely magnificent. I said to Si, "Si, you have to do something. Don't say anything. Just go, unhook your carbine out of the rack in the jeep and bring it up here." And he did. And I said to the Jews, "Si, here has a gun. Wouldn't it be terrible if he had to use it. But we want to use it rather than let you kill this Jew." And we marched the Jew out and turned him over the military government, and I can't tell you what became of him. That was my war criminal. It took awhile for the people in Regensburg to forgive me. They were very angry, and I understand their anger. But that's what...our Hasidic style. We changed hats and we danced and we went absolutely bananas and 5 o'clock in the afternoon when I went back to my hotel....[ managed to stagger in...uh...they had finished yet because they had danced so long. And...uh...I had an incident with my anti*Hasidic grandfather as a result of that day. I made a mistake.

Before I sobered up, I wrote him a letter, telling him of the wonderful time I had had with those people and that I wanted to see more of them. He wrote me back. We corresponded always in Hebrew. From the time that I was 7 years old, I got only Hebrew letters from my grandfather, who figured I was smart enough to get somebody to translate them for me for the parts I couldn't translate myself. And he had beautiful handwriting. So I got this letter by return mail which sort of crinkled the edges of the paper in which he said, "I have your letter. I want to remind you of something. When you wrote me to Jerusalem that you had decided to become a reform Rabbi | didn't argue with you. I thought about it.

After all, your father was a businessman and an atheist. At least, you weren't going in either of those directions. To become a Rabbi, even a reform Rabbi you would have to study. You would know something, which is more than most Jews did, so remember I didn't fight with you. But, if you become a Hasid, don't come home. And he signed the thing. (Laughter) One of my favorite all-time letters from the old man. Okay. We now move into...uh...November. We got theater orders that any Chaplain who could was to report to Paris in time for a theater wide memorial service on November 11, the speaker at which would be David Ben-Gurion, and it would be held in the Synagogue in Paris.

And I didn't want to go. Joe and I had a lot of things going, 31 camps and communities...uh...the package system is working. I'll have to tell you about the mail system which was also working. I didn't really want to go. And my Senior Chaplain said, "Gene, go." I said, "Why?" He said, "You're too tired. You don't look good. Just don't like the way you look." And Si Pava said, "You're pain a neck these days. You're irritable. You're terrible. Go to Paris." said, "Pava, you just want to go to Paris." He says, "I want to be at that service. I ought to be there." And I said, "Pava, you've earned the right. Let's go." So we went. Snowed the whole bloody way across Europe. We had to go by jeep. There was no other way to go and...uh...it was not exactly a happy, happy ride, but we made it. And one of the most frigid experiences of my entire life was that service at the Synagogue. Not the atmosphere, but it was cold. There was no heat in this synagogue. We were all sitting there in our gray coats, and Ben Gurion hung a on us. He made a long, long speech. I had been instructed by my Berichah people to see Ruth Kluger in Paris, at the Haganah office. Haganah had an office in Paris. European

headquarters. So I wondered in there, and we were talking, Ruth and I, about what was going on in Germany and Czechoslovakia and what we needed and how we could do a better job of moving Jews when her phone rang. And from the conversation at my...at our end, it was clear that she was talking to Judge Simon Riskin who had arrived...I don't remember how many weeks earlier...as the advisor to General Eisenhower on Jewish Affairs, with a rank of Lieutenant General. And they were talking about a deal which Ben Guron had made with Eisenhower just before Ben Guron came to Paris for the service.

The deal in which teachers would be sent from Palestine to the DP camps to teach Hebrew, to teach agronomy. All of those teachers would be Haganah people, and the Army would try to turn its back to the maximum possible extent to let them operate.

Eisenhower asked one thing. You will not bribe any American soldier. You will not corrupt my men. I'll help you get around them, but you're not going through them. And Ben-Gurion thought that made good sense. So they wanted to get going. The Army had an airplane ready to go to...uh...what is now Ben Guron airport, then called Lud to pick up the first group to bring them. And it suddenly occurred to Judge Riskin that an American crew flying into Lud wouldn't know what to do with itself when it got there.

That some liaison person was necessary, and Ruth agreed that a liaison person was necessary. And she looked at me and suddenly she said to Judge Riskin, "I think I have the person sitting right here. Shall I put him on the phone." And I introduced myself and Judge Riskine said, "If Ruth thinks you're the person to do this, then it's alright with me.

Can you be here tomorrow morning?" I said, "If I drive all night, I can." He said, "So drive all night." Lieutenant Generals are like this, and Simon Riskin is like this too. He's a very blunt...uh...guy who had given up a place on a Federal District bench, a life appointment, to take on this temporary thing, to work for Eisenhower and do Jewish things. He was wonderful. So I found Si with no trouble. We had a terrible time finding our other driver who was carousing Paris, but we caught up with him and we loaded him in the back of the jeep because he couldn't drive and the two of us drove all night. We reported to Judge Riskin in Frankfort the next morning. Uh...the morning following that, I was on a B-17, with a crew of five Americans heading for... Uh...Bewildered. Excited. I had my orders from General Walter Bedel Smith, and they were for 7 days. Okay? So I got into Delist. Got to Jerusalem, and discovered nothing was ready. Uh...Our Israel friends will all forgive me, but the Middle East is not exactly the most efficient place in the world to do business. Not then and not now. Uh...I went to meetings and tried to get things going. There was no way to get those people out in 7 days. But I got a lot of questions that had to be answered in Germany. So we flew back to Germany, went into conference with the various people at headquarters that were going to deal with this thing and...uh...got answers and flew back again. I made two trips in about 2 weeks I guess it was. My second trip was not long before Hanukkah. And...uh...while we were getting my 14 people organized, a couple of incidents are worth mentioning. First, my 7 day orders, the 7th day was a Shabbat. It was alright with me. I was under military orders and you do things under military orders. But 4 of my 14 teachers so-called were orthodox Jews. They refused to fly on Shabbat. And I said, "What will give you permission to fly on Shabbat?" And they said, "Written authorization from the Chief Rabbi." I said, "Okay." So I called the Chief Rabbi's office and I talked with a gentleman who is now the President of Israel, the Chief Rabbi's son, who was then his secretary. I told him what I wanted and he laughed and he said, "All of us are gonna have fun with that one." And...uh...he invited

me for Shebot dinner and I didn't accept because I was having Shabbat dinner with the men who was really the political head of the Haganah, the first foreign minister of Israel, who I am delighted to say became Esther's and my very good friend. Uh...We loved him dearly. And I remember President Hertzog saying, isn't going to like that. You don't turn down an invitation to the Rabbi's dish." And I said, "One is also not rude. One has to have . And I had accepted another invitation. Now would the Chief Rabbi call Sharet and give him reasons for me not to go to Sharet's for Shabbat dinner?" He said, "No, the Chief Rabbi will not do that." I said, "Fine. You'll give my apologies to the Rabbi. I have no choice whatsoever." But I went there late Friday afternoon, and the Rabbi's little synagogue and had an interview with him before . His first question to me...he spoke Hebrew and English and Yiddish with an Irish accent. He had been Chief Rabbi in Dublin before he went to Palestine. Charming, wonderful little man. His first question to me was, "Is it true that you are Morris Neman's nephew?" And I said, "How did you ever hear of Morris Neman?" And he said, "We know things out here." I said, "Yes. I am his nephew." And he said, "You can't be all bad, even if you're a reform Rabbi." I said, "Thank you for nothing." (Laughter) He gave me the piece of paper authorizing these guys to go on the grounds it was . Human life was involved, and they had to fly out on Shabbat or not fly out. I would have to go without because I wasn't going to get court martialed for this bunch or anybody else. So we left on Shabbat. Chief Rabbi was wonderful. I was carrying with me not only 14 somewhat scared Jews, but the most peculiar package I have ever carried in my life. I had been called and asked to come and see aman named Caplan, who was the treasurer of the Jewish Agency, First Minister of Finance, with the Government of Israel in 1948. I walked into his office. This was before my meeting with the Chief Rabbi. And he said, "Are you really Morris Neman's nephew?" I said, "Yes," and he offered me condolences because as it happens Morris had died in September of 45. One of the first things I did in Jerusalem was go to the walls and say kottish for him. He was a great Zionist in Pittsburgh. A magnificent, magnificent man. My favorite uncle. So he said, "Okay, then I'll trust you." He said, "I want you to do something for me. I want you to take a package to Paris. I said, "But I am not going to Paris." He said, "If you take this package you are." I said, "What will be in the package?" And he said, "A quarter of a million dollars." I said, "That's too big a package." (laughter) for my purposes. He says, "No, it will fit in your shaving kit." I said, "How?" He said, "Because it's going to be in gold sovereigns. It's the budget for the Paris office for the next period of time." And I said, "Alright. So I'll get court martialed. What can I do?" And he took me through a door and through another door into a room that consisted of shelves, each one of which was marked with a country. All currency. This was the Jewish Agency's private treasury of foreign currency. I don't know how much money was there.

No idea. All I know is that he was correct. I got a quarter of million dollars in gold sovereigns into my docket. Then I wondered, "How'll I pull this off? I am going to have to trust one of my pilots. And I got hold of the Major and I said to him, "Look. I am going to do something very dangerous. I am going to tell you something you don't want to know and I don't want to tell you, but I need you. I need you in two ways. I need you to protect me. I am going to be walking around for the rest of the time we are Palestine with my dock kit in my hands, and I don't anybody to ask why. And I don't want anybody to take it because it is money in it. A lot of money." "Okay, Chappy. It's alright with me." I said, "Second of all, you are to arrange an emergency that makes us land in Paris for 1

hour." "That's not as easy," he said. I said, "You'll do it though." I let them know approximately when we would be coming in, and we were met at the airport by a man who became one of my most beloved friends, Efriam Decal who is second in command of the was the boss and Decal was his second. Decal has written extensively about the Berichah and about all sorts of things. He...uh...has died. His wife is still living I am glad to say. I just handed him this, and he, in effect, said thank you. (Laughter) That was our first meeting. We became friends later. And we flew back to Germany. And we got away with it, which was alright. We had something else on board, about which I was very sentimental and still am. I was invited to a meeting of the Vodlume, which is the National assembly of the Ishuf, headed by..-uh...Ben , who became the second President of Israel.

And I met all the people who are legendary. You name them and they were all sitting there, and I was introduced to all of them. And Ben said, "I need a favor." "What." The school children of Israel had been making Hanukiyot for the children of the DP camps in Germany. We have 36,000 of them. And we have candles. We don't know how to get them to Germany. Nobody ever thought of that. I understand, he said, that you are flying in a bomber. I said, "Yes, and my bomber has bomb bays, and I think it would be very nice if we filled the bomb bays of a B-17 with Hanukiyot and candles." And we did. And I sent a military TWX to Si Pava to alert everybody he could alert to come to the airport at Piece boden and pick up their Hanukiyot and they did. All 36,000 of them got distributed in about 24 hours to Jews all over Germany, all over the American zone of Germany. And...uh...that was some Hanukkah. By the way, I don't have one of them. We distributed them all. (Laughing) I never got one. I would give much to have one of those Hanukiyot but I don't have one, and I guess that's proper and just that I should not have. I never went back to Regensburg to work. I spent the next period of time until April 46 running around, doing I don't know what, but there were emergencies constantly. The American headquarters in Frankfort would call...the G.5 sections civil affairs, or Hiam...then called Hans Hoffman, later became Hiam Hoffman, later became , one of the fine people of Israel, and I had to do things. So I was on detached service at Frankfort Headquarters for some months, but that had to end. You just can't keep doing that. So the theater Chaplain, a man named Hunan, Catholic, Truman's Chaplain, he called himself, from the first World War, called me in and said, "You gotta stop this monkeying around.

This isn't why you're in the Army. I am sending you to Berlin. That should be far enough away from all those displaced persons." And I said, "Yes, Sir." Excited, because the Jews from Poland and Russia had just started to come in and we were routing them all through Berlin. We had one of the Haganah people stationed in Berlin, and that's where the action was going to be. Break my heart. Send me to Berlin. Twenty four hours later, he called me in and he said, "You're not going to Berlin. I just found out the stuff that's going on there. You're going to Augsburg to the Ist Division." "Yes, Sir." "And," he said, "when you get there, find Chaplain Freedman, whom | assigned there, but who is now going to Berlin in your place." And I went to Augsburg and found Herb Freedman, whom I had never met before. A young, first lieutenant, fresh into the Army, who was angry at me because Augsburg is near Munich, and in Munich is where the action was because he wanted to do Haganah work. He was busting to do this stuff. And I explained to him that Berlin was better and he should be made on me. (laughter) And he went to Berlin. Of course, Herb Freedman's career since then has been legendary. He and Phil Burstein did things that people really shouldn't have been able to do. And...uh...it was superb. I was

delighted to be in Augsburg. But my time was running out, because Hoffman was negotiating with the Army to make me into a civilian because it was clear during this period from December when these 14 arrived that this , this Jewish agency for Palestine group, as it was called,...uh... was going to have constant dealings with the Army. And some American had to be there to see to it that nothing got fouled up. And they decided I should be that person, and I was not unwilling. My condition was that my wife and child be allowed to come to Germany with me. I had two reasons for that. First of all, I been away 18 months and that's a lot longer than 2 years...those 2 years that I thought wouldn't be so long, and second of all, I felt that Esther had to experience this or we weren't going to have much of a life because I was no longer the person who had gone overseas. An awful lot had happened. Deeply, deeply transforming stuff. And they agreed. Somebody fouled up, and in April 1946, just before Passover...uh...I got orders to go home to be demobilized and I asked Heim about it and he sort of shrugged and we talked to Ruth Kluger in Paris who was theoretically making these arrangements and she sort of shrugged. So I came home. And I became a civilian. Uh... There was an Haganah office in New York. It had been organized for a very simple purpose. Money. They had to buy ships. Ships are expensive. The only place they really could buy ships was the United States because they wanted larger ships. Ships for 2 or 3 hundred people were not going to be able to do this thing anymore. They needed big ships. So they were going to buy them in the United States, and they sent 4 Palestinians over, led by who later became , the first chief of staff of the Israel army, later the President of the in Haifa. A marvelous, marvelous man. When I got to New York, I went into the office, naturally, and asked me if I would go to work for them. As long as I had to be in the United States for a little while making speeches for the Haganah. So from the end of April 1946 until February 1947, I was on the staff of the Haganah in the United States making speeches. Esther and I lived in New York. First in a hotel, but then we couldn't stand it. And Michael was getting sick in this hotel. The food just wasn't for a 2 year old. And...uh...so we found an apartment on Staten Island, and we lived over there. It was not a good time. I was away more than I was there....uh... making the same speech over and over and over again to secret meetings of Jews to get money. Was not my style, but it was what had to be done.

There was some compensation. There was a rainy night. I don't remember what month when I was allowed to go to Baltimore. And down on the docks was a ship, then called the SS Warfield. The Warfield being the same person as the Duchess of Windsor because her daddy was the President of the steamboat company that ran steamboats up around the Chesapeake Bay. This was a Chesapeake Bay steamer. Decrepit, messed up which the Haganah had bought, and we were sending off to Europe to transport Jews. We estimated that maybe 25,000 Jews uncomfortable could get on it. When it sailed in June of 47 to Palestine from France as the exodus 1947, it had 52 hundred people on board, and we'll pick that up later because I have more to do with the exodus. That night in Baltimore we commissioned the exodus in a non-existent Jewish navy. Gave it flag, and all the rest of the . A word ought to be said about Americans for Haganah. It was an astonishing organization. It's head was a multi-millionaire oil man named Rudolph Sonaborn, whose last claim to fame was that he married Dorothy Shift, the publisher of the New York Post then. But he gave at least half his time to Americans for Haganah. We met every Tuesday for lunch in a hotel in New York, and...uh... books have been written about this operation, which was clandestine. The bank account was the bank account of the Palestine pavilion

of the New York Worlds Fair. There had been a New York World's Fair in 1930...what...8, 9, something like that, and they never closed the bank account of the...of the Jewish pavilion or the Palestine Pavilion it was called. And that money was funneled through the Palestine Pavilion bank account, and we never got caught. Later, there was trouble with armed shipments to the Haganah, but that was much later, after the Foundation was dated as a matter of fact. This group that met on Tuesdays was a remarkable bunch, and the fact that we raised several million dollars for the purchase of ships is amazing because we were a small group and you couldn't talk about it. You couldn't do the usual kinds of fund raising hoopla. We met in people's rumpus rooms, they were called in those days. They are called family rooms today, I think.

And...uh...everybody had to know everybody, and they couldn't talk about it, and they had to get lots of money. It was a wild operation. I did not enjoy it. One of my tasks, for example, was to go once a week for lunch to the 21 Club in New York because one of the Krinlers was interested in us, and he introduced me to all these degenerate people. He used to hang out at the 21 Club and I'd get money from them. Uh...Some of the ladies were very frank about where they money came from and how it came. And I had a conscious problem about this, but it didn't last because buying the ships was more important than my Jewish conscious. But it was a tough time for my family and me. We were relieved when finally, finally, finally the paperwork was done, and we could get back to Europe, we thought. I flew to Paris and went in back in to Germany immediately.

Got us a house in Heidelberg, and then went to Paris to pick Esy up when she and Michael arrived. They got stuck in Paris for 4 week because the paperwork wasn't in order. She lived in a very fancy hotel in Paris for 4 weeks, and then we moved into Heidelberg and the next phase of this operation begins. b Hb

Q: The tape is...

A: Good place to break.

Q: Yes. It's a good place to break.

Q: Tell me about Manford.

A: Uh...We went out to dinner at one day last week, and he was alert and he was alive and he was fine.

Q: Okay. We may begin. We're back on tape. Uh... Let us go back to Germany for a minute.

Uh... There were two people you wanted to tell us more about.

A: One day in early Fall (clearing throat) 1945 I walked into our building in Regensburg and I went upstairs and I heard very loud sounds, kids stomping and shouting, and so I went to see what it was. There about 20 teenagers with this short, very short, heavy set, young, young man leading them in a dance...in a song. Uh. was the theme and _ stuff and he had those kids going absolutely mad. And I watched this guy and said to myself, "He's a leader. That man is a leader." So I met him. His name was Leon Retter from , a genius who had been sent by the Russians to the language school in Moscow when he was 16.

He spoke then and still speaks somewhere between 10 and 15 languages quite fluently.

He was a captain in the Red Army during the war, and at the end of the war decided that he wanted to get out. This was what he wanted that he wanted to live in Palestine. So he ran away, and came into American zone in Germany. Landed in Regensburg. some months later his girlfriend joined him and they married. They are still married and they lived in Munich for reasons which will become clear. Uh...We had organized not only the central committee, but regional committees. More people involved the better. He became a member of our regional committee, and then I...uh...let Klausner know, as a matter of fact, that I thought this guy was...uh...good material and Klausner met him, moved him down to Munich and Irea which is the name he took instead of Leon,,...uh...for reasons that have to do with language. Leon means lion and Irea means lion. Their translation.

And Redder became just because he wanted it to. He...uh...became the foreign secretary of the displaced persons. It was he who dealt with the big people who came in. It was he who went to Frankfort headquarters to, as he said, make demands on behalf...on behalf of the Jewish displaced persons. Tough minded,...uh...brilliant orator who in the spring of 1946 was sent to the United States for his first UJA missions. And he has done UJA off and on ever since until his retirement about 2 years ago. He's 68 now. He...uh.. should have become a major political figure, but...uh...Mr. Ben-Gurion was rather capricious about his boys, as he called them, and when there was a revolt against Ben-Gurion within the Labor Party, in the 50's, Irea joined the revolt. And the old man punished him and then made him do projects for him afterwards. Irea decided that the way to get along in Israel was to be independent, and so he become Israel's first management consultant on human relations. As new immigrant groups came in, there were all kinds of tensions and problems and he would work with those. He's a remarkable fellows, still one of my very closest friends. He had the right kind of hutspah in huge amounts. Uh...It was fun to watch him telling General Clay what General Clay had to do. (Laughter) It was really great. He's also...was great with the Jews. I went with him one night to one of the DP camps where we had just gotten a telephone call that there was a riot going on. The G...the American Army did some not very bright things. As we became friendly with the Germans, which we did by 1946, 47...Secretary Burns had led the way on that...they began to put German police in Jewish DP camps, and the Jews didn't like it much. And we had that kind of situation, and the Jews went berserk. So Irea and I went. He got up on the back of the truck and he hushed those Jews, and then he spoke to them with his kind of beery voice, and they went back to their room...home to behave themselves. I have never seen one person stop a riot before, but he did. He had that kind of power.

Extremely, extremely charismatic, powerful guy, who became my brother. And...uh...has remained very much a brother. (Sigh) I am trying to think of.... Well, we had a Congress of Displaced Persons...uh...in the first year, and unquestionably, the most influential individual there, besides Klausner, was Nesher. Okay, that's Nesher. That's who he is.

That's who he was. Uh...He went to Palestine in time for the War of Independence cause he insisted on doing so. He and Lilly took a bunch of kids on a legal trip because there were some... And both of them went into the Army, and I tease them to this day about the fact that she outranked him. He was a sergeant and she was a lieutenant. Lilly, his wife, is one of the experts on Soviet Jewry. She was taking Jews out of the Soviet Union when nobody was taking Jews out of the Soviet Union. And...uh...still there was a great deal about Soviet Jewry. Okay, so much for Nesher Klausner. When I saw Klausner at the

Chaplains" meeting, first time I had seen him since Dachau, and we made all the plans and started the package system. Uh...It was clear that any Chaplain who wanted to do the job right should do so in consultation with Abe. The leaders of the DPs were his. He was the President. The processes of the central committee he was in the middle of. He tried not to deal with the U.S. Army because he was absent without leave. He spent total of 8 months absent without leave. He had no assignment. He didn't get paid. He also did not do anything for the Army. He was unconnected to the American Army. He met every once in awhile with some general, but he was unconnected with the American Army and nobody realized it. Uh...I knew it, but what the heck? It wasn't my business. One day I had to go to 3rd Army Headquarters in . That was the day I saw all of General Patton's cars and jeeps and his private...uh...fleet. 1 went up to the Chaplain's office to get whatever I went to get. I don't remember what. And I heard a voice call, "Chaplain." So everybody in the room turned around because there must have been 15 chaplains in the room, and this guy from inside the private office was pointing his finger at me. And I said, "Yes, Sir." And I went in. A bird Colonel...uh...O'Reilley, he's Senior Chaplain of the 3rd Army, regular Army Catholic, and he said, "What's your name, Chaplain?" I told him my name. And he said, "Tell me Lipman, do you happen to know a Chaplain named Klausner?" I thought, "Oh, boy!" I said, "Which one, Sir?" And he crossed himself and said, "Holy Mary, Mother of God. Don't tell me there are two of them." And I said, "Yes, Sir. There's Chaplain Berkland Klausner. There's Chaplain Abraham Klausner." What I knew that he didn't know was that Berk Klausner was in England, but that didn't matter. I was telling the truth. He said, "You know, I have been hearing rumors about a Chaplain Klausner in my area, but I don't get monthly reports from him. Do you ever see him." And I said, "I suppose I could find him if I tried hard." He said, "Would you do me a favor?" "Of course, Sir." "Would you please tell him that I am looking for him because I must have his monthly reports?" I said, "I will certainly tell him." Next day, I had lunch with Abe in Munich and I said to him, "Here's your message from Chaplain O'Reilly." And he listened, and he said, "Okay, message has been received." I said, "No. Let's do it.

Let's regularize you. It will be good for you, and it would enhance your status. It wouldn't destroy your status with the Army." We sat down in his house on with the help of the JDC women sitting at the typewriters and we wrote 8 monthly reports. (Laughter) Numbers, statistics, services conducted, counseling sessions held, the works! And he signed them, and we sent them in through channels with no note of any kind. We arranged for one of the officers to see that they got into the mail system and they landed in the Chaplain's office. Next thing Abe heard was he got orders brought to him by a finance officer who was bringing him 8 months pay. He hadn't been paid for 8 months.

He got this stack of occupation currency, and the finance officer said, "While I was coming here, the Adjutant General asked if I would bring you these. They are orders." And Abe looked and in the orders he was assigned to a hospital in Munich. And that's where he remained. He just kept right on going. Never moved into the hospital. Reported to the hospital. Spoke to the hospital Chaplain and said, "If you have any Jews problems, call me." (Laughter) And disappeared and never heard from again. That's how he operated. Abe opened DP camps. He started two hospitals. When they emptied out Dachau, he took care of those people. There was a famous transport of twelve hundred Hungarians who were supposed to go back to Hungary. The U.S. Army had a policy. It had two parts. First, one was everybody goes home. No matter what. It's our job to

repatriate. It isn't our job to move people around and second of all, there are no Jews.

They are Poles. They are Hungarians. They are Rumanians. They are Germans. They are Austrians. There aren't any Jews. And at first, there were mixed DP camps. And the Army couldn't understand why there were riots every night. People getting hurt every night. Some of us wrote letters through channels to the Commanding General, a fellow named Eisenhower, saying, "Can't do this. The Jews are in unique position, and you really must somehow, Sir, ... uh...organize special camps for them." It wasn't until July that orders came out (a) declaring Jews a nationality and (b) permitting separate facilities.

So we started...we... UNRRA blew it. They started Jewish DP camps. UNRRA was unable to do so. Well, Abe did it. He had this crazy capacity to do all sorts of things with very few resources. Another funny story that happened to Abe, but it's not about him.

Obviously, the Jews wanted to leave. One day, he was in his office, still at the Dorchus Museum, before he moved into... There was a knock on the door, and this little Jew came bursting in and, "Herr Chaplain. Herr Chaplain." "Yes." This was...conversation was carried on in Yiddish although an instantaneous translation. Uh..."I have a visa." "Wonderful," said Abe. And they danced together and they pranced together, "You have a visa. Where are you going?" "Costa Rica." "Marvelous, it's a beautiful country," and they kibitzed around for a good...and the guy was about to leave and he turned to Abe and said, "Herr Chaplain, May I ask a question?" "Of course." "Where's Costa Rica?" He had no idea what part of the world Costa Rica was in, and I suspect he didn't go there either.

He may have started for there, but he didn't land there. What else should I tell you about Klausner? Uh...The Army arranged for him to come home in 1946 too. He will give you all kinds of stories about how...how and why it happened, but it happened. As soon as he got to the United States, he began to maneuver to get back because that's all he wanted to do. He was a bachelor, and this was his life. And General Hilldring was Assistant Secretary of State for International Affairs. Good guy! And Abe went to him, and Hilldring arranged for him to go back to Germany and he did go back. Did some interesting things that had to do with the exodus people as a matter of fact and when I get to exodus we'll talk about that. And then, eventually, I came home and...uh...took up a Rabbinical career. He's been in Yonkers, New York, for many, many years. He's just retiring.

Q: Okay. We'll pick up with him later. Before we leave Regensburg, was it in Regensburg that you had occasion to call upon a Nazi doctor.

A: No. It was not in Regensburg, and it was later.

Q: Okay.

A: It's from Heidelberg to another town.

Q: Then let's pick up as it were chronologically again. We jump back. You have been civilianized and returned to Heidelberg.

A: Went to Heidelburg to live. And I did (sigh) three jobs. I was responsible for all routine liaison with the American Army. there was a Brigadier General in Frankfort

Headquarters, a good man, solid man, with whom I had the right to talk anytime I wanted to, or he would call me whenever he had something, and we talked a great deal. Second, any publicity or public relations that had to do with the underground, I was responsible for and...uh...I'll come back to that in a minute. My third one was to lead transports with a guy who was then called Wolf, whose name was not and is not Wolf. Uh...His name is Efrian Franke. Uh...He lives in . He's an attorney, Israel's most distinguished restitution attorney. Married to a woman named Hanna, who was one of the members of this group in Germany, and they have an infinite number of grandchildren by now. It was the second marriage for both of them. So, Efrian who was never called Efrian and I did transports together, as the leaders of them. I was called to Paris one day because a major American newspaper person wanted an interview with the famous Colonel Wolf, and I arranged it.

Efrian was in Paris, and we made this interview by agreeing to meet at a certain place.

We met at that place, got into a cab and went to another place. Got into a cab, and went to a third place. I guess it was about the 4th place where Efrian finally walked in, and the reporter joined us. Because everybody assumed all the time that the British were looking for us. That was one of my P.R. jobs. The most important P.R. job I guess I ever did had to do with the late M . We had a contact in the United States where reporters were concerned. Let me tell you about one of the incidents and then I will come to . Uh...The door bell rang one day in Heidelberg, and a young, fresh faced guy said, "My name is Dick Dudman, and I want a story about the Haganah." And I said, "Never heard of it," and I closed the door. And I sent a wire to the late LF. Stone in New York. Isy Stone was our New York contact. He was working for P.M. newspaper then, and nobody could get into Haganah for a story unless Stone sent him. And I in this cable said, "What's this Dudman guy? Do I let him in or not? He claims to be from the Denver Post." And I got a wire back saying, "Yal, He's okay." So I managed to get word...uh...I don't remember how I did it or whether Isy did it, but Dudman came to my door again. And we made him into a displaced person. Gave him everything he needed to be a displaced person, and sent him on one of the trips. And he wrote a memorable series of articles for the Denver Post on being a displaced person, and what it was like to go on one of these illegal trips...uh...for which he got a name and fellowship by the way. Later, we became friends again here in Washington, because he was the head of the Washington Bureau, the St.

Louis Post Dispatch, and...uh...now lives in Ellsworth, Maine. He and his wife decided that it was a small town for them. They bought a radio station in Ellsworth. Dick also became famous because...uh...rcemember when we were not in Cambodia, he was captured...uh...with the American troops in Cambodia...with his press credentials, and he was missing for several weeks and we all went out of our minds till he came back quite unharmed. Remarkable reporter, and those stories I think...uh...were very exciting and very important in having Americans understand what this crazy underground was all about. But...uh...I guess the longest lasting piece of P.R. has to do with a movie, which was made by Myrlon in..starring his wife,, who is now his widow. She was a writer.

Uh...He came with full credentials, of course, and moved into our house in Heidelberg.

He was going to make a movie of one of our transports because the story of this movie was this displaced person and how this displaced person got to Palestine. And obviously this displaced person had to be out of Germany. And we decided to use one of our regular transports. So one night, we applied all transports out of our part of German...the ones I was responsible for left on Saturday night. Why, I hear you ask, Saturday night? Because

as few American troops as possible were on duty Saturday night. Saturday night is getting drunk night or having a beer night or reading a good book night, but you're not on duty Saturday night if you can avoid it, so it was easiest to get through the border on Saturday nights. We always had some kind of papers. We never tried just to sneak through a border. That was too risky. Uh...There were times when for small groups we would go through borders, but we had a list of the constabulary units and their schedules, where they would be when General Mickelson always saw that we had those. That was the guy at Frankfort Headquarters who was my contact, a Brigadier named Abraham Mickelson. And he provided those. Uh...But the big transports, we had to go through roads and border points because we were in 6 by 6 trucks, and some German trucks, though we never used wood burning ones. We bought trucks. We bought gasoline. If did not have Army supplies unless we could steal them, and you couldn't steal large quantities of gasoline. That's hard to do. But by this time we had a budget and we were getting money from the United States. This was a transport of about twelve hundred people, leaving Saturday night from the town of Noowhom. We owned a barracks in Noowhom. We bought it. It was ours. And we could use it to get people ready to go. And we would appear there on either Friday or sometime early Saturday, and the people would arrive. How they were selected and how they got there is a story unto itself, but that's what we eventually had 130 Palestinians doing out around the countryside. They had political problems; they had age problems; they had all kinds of problems in making up these transports. How did we know how many to send? Uh...Let me ask myself the question when I finish the Myrlon Lynn story because it's a separate story which has its own kind of interest. We got instructions on my telephone. Saturday night we would have our people all ready. This was a well organized thing. We knew who was going to be in which trucks. If they were pregnant women, they were in the same truck, and there was a nurse with them. Sometimes the nurse was a woman named Esther Lipman, who was not a nurse. But she was pregnant at the time, so she knew all about it. (Laughing) We were going to have our second child, so Esther a few pieces of equipment and she went on some of these transports as transport nurse. We never delivered a baby on one of these transports, I'm glad to say. It's just as well. The tough part of the trip was the night part into the Black Forest. And so we left. Every 2 hours we would stop for relief. We left at midnight so that we had two or three 2-hour periods before dawn. At dawn or shortly thereafter, we would arrive at what was known as the picnic area. We had been looking for this for weeks, and when we found it, it was as though we had found Heaven. There was a place in the middle of the Black Forest where a small road went off to the right.

And they went about a half a mile and then there was a circle, at the end of which there was a wine house. End of road. That's perfect. No traffic. On the side of the road was a little cabin. And there we got one of the great breaks of the entire era. When a DP named Gittshuck, who worked for us, and I were looking for this place...and...for a place, and we came to this, we decided we better check out that cabin. We knocked on the cabin door, and a lady answered wearing Bavarian costumes as everybody in the Black Forest did.

They wore old fashioned Bavarian costumes. And we talked to her and asked her if she would have any objections if every once in awhile, every week, 10 days, some people would come and rest on the side of the hill and use the stream at the bottom of the hill just to wash. And she said, "I have no objection, but who are they?" And I said, "They're concentration camp survivors who are going to their new homes, and we are moving

them." And she said, "Oh, can I help?" And I said, "If you want to feed them, it would be a great help. We often have children. It would be marvelous if we could leave cereal with you and we could have hot gruel for these kids when they get here and hot tea for the adults. That would be absolutely marvelous." Nothing to that. Asked some more questions, as I was interested. This woman was a Jew, who had married when she was at the University a non*Jewish German. When the Nazi...when the war started, he was pulled into the Army. She decided and he decided and his father decided that she should hide out in this cabin with the father because he lived there in the middle of the woods.

How many people would come into the Black Forest looking for somebody? Uh...She was announced as his daughter-in-law, and her husband was off in the Army being a hero. Her husband was killed on the eastern front, so she stayed. Took care of the old man. She took care of the old man till he died about 1946, and because some of the neighbors knew that she was Jewish and nobody had turned her in, she decided to live out her life there. She had a job. She worked. She had her husband's pension from the Army, whatever it was, and she was living there. So then we were able to tell her that these were Jews. And this became our picnic area. Every transport going to Milhouse in France...uh ...went through there, and this woman loved it. She was magnificent. I remember her with great affection. Any how, after resting at the picnic ground and having a meal, we got back into the trucks and headed for a place called Pompdecess, where the only bridge across the Rhine was. It was a military bridge. And...uh..we got to Pompdecess, and we had to be there at 4 o'clock. Not 5, not 3 because the French officer whom we owned, the , immigration officer, was sure to be on duty then. Any day but Sunday. And he would take our papers and pass them right through. So we got through the Duon easily. And then from there to Milhouse in France was nothing to it, and there there was a big railroad yard and the French Haganah picked up the people at Mulhous and took them by train to somewhere in the Marseilles area depending on where the ship was going to be sit, Port Boog or Marseilles itself, whatever. This particular transport had Tereska on board as a DP. She had DP papers. She had DP clothing. She was a DP. In front of this particular transport just before my car was the camera car with Myra. And we had a terrible time with Myer. It wasn't his fault. He had to make noise. He had to call something out to the camera crew. You can't do it. He had to call this... There's simply no way to do it. You're going to shut up or you ain't going. You see you had to go through the American zone of occupation to the French zone of occupation. Pompdecess was in the French zone. The French zone was a small zone in the southwestern Germany. The French insisted on having a zone. It was a four-power power thing after all. So going from the American zone to the French zone was the dangerous one. And having the camera crew along was great, because we say the United Nations wanted to have records of all these transports of survivors as they go to their new homes and...uh..we have a crew with us, and want to take your picture at the border as you do your duty, and we got through very fast. Uh...It was very difficult for Myer. I am sure he suffered a lot. It's got the illegals. It is still available in 16 millimeter. It still gets rented I understand by school groups and others who want to see it. One minor tragedy in it which we laugh about in our family, but it isn't totally funny. Esther was along on that transport as transport nurse. The only time that I appear in the film was at Pompdecess where I am standing with the Duan going over the papers and getting people ready to go through. And Esther was filmed there too.

There were other pictures of me in the...in my car and so forth. We had a car with a

moveable roof so that we could stand on the seat and watch what was going on.

Dangerous, but...uh...very effective because we had to see what was going on. We didn't want to lose any trucks. They had to stay in line. Uh...We had to go through one or two towns, went through Fribrook for example and in the streets of Fribrook, we did not want to lose trucks. But the only one that got printed and is in the film is me at the...there's nothing of Esy. All the shots of Esther got cut in the editing, and she never stopped teasing Myer about it. And whenever we met, he would come up and want to hug her hello and she would say, "You don't want to hug me. You wouldn't even put me in your movie." (Laughter) So...uh...that's our...Myer saga of The Illegal. Incidentally, they...uh...filmed the...the boat. That part of the trip being caught by the British, going to Cyprus. They got a complete record on the illegal. I forget how much of it is in the film.

But that was part of the P.R. job as well as taking transports. Uh...With one exception we had no difficulty, with the transports to France. Uh...One night they got nasty at the border and kept us there 5 hours, and it was only when we finally, finally found Paul Edwards... It being a Saturday night, he wasn't at home either. When he finally got home...uh...just before dawn, that he was able to say to these guys, "Are their papers in order? Is my signature on them? What do you want? Get them out of there? You've had those peoples in there a long time. They're tired. They have to get where they're going." So the soldiers backed down. And...uh..that had been the result of a tip from a CID Criminal Investigation Division of the Army, I am sorry to say, a young man I knew. The son of somebody I had grown up with in Pittsburgh who was stuck on his duty and he got a...in his investigations or whatever, he heard that a bunch of Jews were going out on Saturday night and he notified the border station. But it happened. Not everybody was...uh...all for what we were doing. There were people aside from the British who didn't think we were...uh...behaving properly. Okay, that's transports. Oh, no, there's one more thing about it that I must mention. How did we get the quotas and the number of people who were going to take a transport? I had a telephone. Because I was a Lieutenant Colonel, I had a telephone that could call outside the country. Whenever we were scheduled for a transport, at precisely 7 o'clock in the evening, my phone would ring. It would be a female voice talking English with a heavy French accent who never identified herself and who gave me a list of agricultural implements and tools and God knows what all, that I was to copy down with numbers. And the code Hiamhead I didn't know what it said. I immediately called Munich and transmitted it to Munich, and that's how we knew about our transports. Some years later, 48 or 9, I don't remember, I was asked by the UJA to go to the opening of the campaign in Nashville, Tennessee, at a posh country club and I went. Sitting next to me at dinner was a woman named Paulette OppertO PPERT,a French Jew, whose husband had been killed in the resistance who had herself been in the resistance and who after the war worked for the French Haganah and for people in Paris.

She later married an American businessman named Fink, and lived in Minneapolis for many, many years. I saw her once in awhile. I listened, and I said to her, "Paulette. I know your voice." And she said, "I have been sitting here going crazy cause I know your voice." It was she. She had been calling from Paris all those months, giving me all those instructions out of order which she understood, not a word of which I understood, that made it possible for the transports to go. We felt like blood brother and sister. Okay, that's the...uh...that's the transport business. What's next?

Q: Okay. Alright. Uh...How did you start preparing for the Exodus?

A: Well, first of all we got a call from Paulette, telling us that we had to 52 hundred people in Marseilles on a certain date. The largest transport that had ever been contemplated.

And the people in the camps did their job. And it was decided that two of the transports would go by train, by way of Strasbourg, and three of them would go by truck and they would be back to back and then we would go down, turn around and come back, load up, and do this three times. Two of them being Saturday nights, and one of them being mid- week which we had never done before. But what're we going to do. Because we had to get these people on board. The British were watching this ship in sit where it was, and they didn't have a heck of a lot of time, so we rushed it. All of these people had to get new identities because we using a series of French transit visas that the Minister of the Interior people had kindly prepared for us, but they were...we would call in blank. They weren't really blank at all. They had names on them. They just weren't names of any living people, and they all had ages and they all had birth places. So we prepared in advance DP cards. Uh...All DPs had identity cards issued by UNRRA with military authorization and we had tens of thousands of them that we had printed and...uh...we issued new ones to all of these people with the proper stamps on them and then we handed them out at Nooam in the barracks in the stables there, and told them, "You got a new name. You got to know how old you are. You got to know where you were born. It has nothing to do with you. It has to do with whatever that name is on that piece of piece." So they all had to learn them. And some of the old people had difficulties with this. Kids had no trouble at all. There was one cute little kid with obviously orthodox origins was standing there holding these things and chuckling back and forth as he memorized his name and his birthplace and his birth date. It was nice. And then we took them. Normally, when we got Milhouse there was a little hotel there. A wonderful lady owned it who fed us a hot meal. This is the staff who had gone on the trip. The people were on the train bound for Marseilles already...and...uh...we'd spend the night and part of the next day. Relax a little bit, have some fun, drink some good wine. I learned to eat pate for the first time and...Milhouse is in...uh...SS Lorraine...that part of France and they made wonderful pate. So this time we got there early evening. We turned in. Didn't have all that wonderful hospitality. And in the middle of the night, we got back in our trucks and we went back to , and that night we loaded up and we did that three times in 8 days.

Esy was not with me on the Exodus ones. I don't remember why not, but she wasn't.

And...uh...when I left I said to her as I always did, "I'll be back when I get here," and all she would say to people who called was, "I am sorry. He's out of town. Have you tried the Munich office?" Uh...This was the longest I had been away. And she allowed as how she was a little bit apprehensive, but nothing we could do about it. That's how the people got on the exodus. The French Haganah did a superlative job in getting all those trains.

Uh... That's a lot of bribery for the railway officials to... These were private trains. These weren't just seats on train. Twelve hundred people is a lot of...lot of people. So these were three transports of between a thousand and twelve hundred each, and the other approximately two thousand went by train from Germany. Then the exodus story doesn't end there. It goes on because as people should know, the British sent that ship back. Not the ship. The ship stayed in Haifa Harbor. It's still there. By the way, it's falling apart. It is disintegrating and will not last forever. They've tried to preserve it. It's not working very

well. It's been in a museum for quite awhile. They sent the people back in three ships to a place called Port Luke, where they went on a hunger strike. They wouldn't get off. The British took them off by force, and then put them back on again and shipped them around to Hamburger in the British zone where they were taken, by I think, truck or train to two concentration camps. One is called Amistow and one is called Popendorf where they incarcerated them. One of the things Abe Klausner did was organize their escape with a bunch of the Haganah people, and they escaped. And one of my great stories was greeting some of them again at Nooam when they went a second time. I don't know how many of them went the second time by Haganah, but I had all transport of them one night, twelve hundred of them who went. They landed on Cyprus. Cyprus requires specific mention. We made jokes about Cyprus. We are going to have a Jewish State, but it's not going to be an ordinary state. It's already an empire. It has a colony. Cyprus.

Because we had tens of thousands of Jews interned on Cyprus by the British in concentration camps. The first immigrants who came into Israel after independence were the people from Cyprus. They had priorities. God knows they had earned them, and they came through. That was Cyprus. I have never been to Cyprus. I should go there some day. What's next Linda?

Q: Okay. Where did you...What did you do after the exodus transport or do you want to go back?

A: Uh...I think we ought to do the baby before we forget it.

Q: Yes.

A: A good friend of mine, displaced person, had a child. Called me from where they were, told me that they were in terrible trouble. The child was born with infantile jaundice, and she was getting dehydrated and they weren't sure she could live. It was particularly painful because they were displaced persons and looked forward to this child, even more particularly painful for this father was a physician and didn't know how to save his child.

So Esther and I got into our truck...our car...it was truck, and we went to that town to be with them. When I got there the father told me in the most agonized tones I have ever heard that he had a decision to make and didn't know how to make it. That 30 or 40 miles down the road, not in the country, was a very famous German...uh...obstetrician, pediatrician, who was barred from practicing medicine because he had not only been a Nazi, but he had done experiments on Jewish children. But, said the father, this man can save my daughter if anybody can. He has unique information and methods that nobody in this hospital knows about. I said, "I don't think I am asking you. I think I am going to tell you. Your daughter's life is more important than the fact that this man was a Nazi. If he can save your daughter's life, that's saving the world for you. You gotta do it." So he decided we better do that. So I went down in my jeep and met this doctor who was living in a little cabin in the woods. A very dignified, middle-aged man who spoke relatively good English. I told him the circumstances and said we would pay him well to come and take care of this child. And he said, "Alright." And he got into the jeep with his bag and he came. And he spent about 48 hours without sleep taking care of this baby. And he saved her. After it was all over, I drove him back to his cabin and gave him German

money, a large sum and I said, "I trust that's enough for your services." He said, "I don't care about the money." He said, "I want a letter from you addressed to military government saying that you recommend that I be permitted to practice again because I saved this Jewish child." Now I said, in effect, "Doctor, you should live so long." And I left the money, and I left with him not being very happy with me. The end of this story is not a pleasant one. The child developed acute leukemia at the age of 4 and died. The family had other children, but that was a bad blow. That was in the United States. Okay.

You know who to talk to if you want more about that one, and if that person says to you, "Cut it completely," I insist you have to do so. She has a perfect right to her privacy and if this is too much to identification it's got to go. Next, after the exodus we went into a bad time. Uh...First of all, all the stuff was going on at the United Nations. Would there be a Jewish State, whether or not there would be a Jewish State, where they'd be partitioned, wouldn't there be partition and what should we be doing meanwhile. So I sat in my office day after day in Heidelberg doing not very much. Uh...Taught English to a couple of medical students at Heildelberg University. Uh...This, I think, is worthwhile story. Uh...The University gave 15 fellowship to Jewish survivors to study medicine. Full tuition and books. Three of them I still have communication with. One of them was my secretary's husband, and...uh...he practices as an internist in New York, and we are good friends. I taught him English. She was my secretary because she spoke Hebrew, German, Yiddish, Hungarian, Russian, and was a remarkable woman. She still is. Her husband is a good doctor. Two of them are my story really. It...uh...has to be told backwards. About two years ago, here in Washington, my wife attended a seminar at the Washington School of Psychiatry, being conducted by two very imminent psychiatrists from the University of Cincinnati Medical School, named Ornstein. Anna and Paul Ornstein. They had the full day and Esther went up at the end to thank them, and Anna said to her, "Tell me your name again. I want to remember you." She told her her name. Paul, who was standing about 10 feet away, came over and said, "What did you say your name was?" She told him. He said, "Are you by any chance related to...to Chaplain Lipman." Anybody who calls me Chaplan Lipman goes back to Germany. She said, "Yes, I am married to him." At which point, he bursts into tears, threw his arms around her and wouldn't let her go.

He and Anna had been two of those medical students in Heidelberg. Very poor. They had a room in a German house. The Germans would do nothing for them. They lived, aside from going to medical school which they wanted to do, for Friday night for whenever I was in town we had a Shabbat service, and if anybody else could conduct one when I wasn't there, they had a Shabbat service, followed by a Shabbat dinner for all the Jews in the area. Displaced persons, G.I.s, the Palestinians who might be passing through because our house was a way station for any illegal going through. We had 4 bedrooms on the third floor with 12 army cots and we had as many as 14 people on a given night.

Uh...And then of course the arms and the czar. They came and went without us. They had a key to the cellar and they moved out. After the service and dinner, we sit around and talked. And it was the only adult conversation these people had and they thought of the Chaplain as somebody very special. The next night after this revelation, Paul gave a lecture in Washington and I went and then we went out afterwards to drink coffee and begin to catch and he looked at me and he smiled and he said, "You know. It's eerie." I said, "Why?" He said, "You are only 4 years older than I am." I said, "Oh, you're thinking of that Chaplain." He said, "That's right. I have never quite gotten rid of that image." I

said, "Please get rid of it (laughter) real fast." And we have seen a great deal of one another since then, and are good friends. The person who saved their lives in Heildelberg was a Protestant minister. Herman Maus,...uh... whom I call the of Heildeberg. I read an article about him once. He had been a very famous pastor...uh...before World War II was pastor of the Holy Ghost Church of Heidelberg. He had become a Zionist in 1933 because when he grew up in Titisay in the Black Forest, his father, a poor pastor, had not been able to send him to college. A Jew in Titisay came to him and said, "Herman, you want to be a pastor like a father don't you?" And he said, "Yes. You have to go to school, don't you." "Yes. Okay, you go to school and I will take care of the bills. You just be a good pastor." The year he graduated and was ordained the Jewish friend said, "Herman, you've done well. Before you take up your first congregation, you have a vacation coming. He handed him some money and told him to take a vacation. And he went to Switzerland and he turned up in Bail during the 1903 Zionist Convention, the famous one at which the Uganda Resolution was turned down, and he met Hertzl and he met Nordau and he met all of those people, and he joined up. David Yellin became his particular friend. He made his first trip to Palestine with his wife and daughter in 1933 this summer, and he said to David Yellin, "I'm not going back. There is where I belong and this is where I want to stay." And Yellin said to him, "Herman, you haven't earned the right to stay. You have to go back and to earn it." The daughter said, "My father can go back. I am not going." And the daughter remained in Jerusalem, became a weaver, until after World War II. When her father got very old, she went back to care of them because the mother couldn't anymore. But she lived in Palestine the whole time. He came back and because he was a pacifist, he went to every peace meeting there was anywhere in Europe carrying messages about how to get Jewish kids out, how to save this, how to save that, and he did that until 1941 when the Germans picked him up and put him in a concentration camp. And he and his wife both spent the war years in a concentration camp, and they both survived. He came back and became Dean of the Diocese, that's second to the Bishop and did several things which were characteristic of him. First of all, every Yom Kippur, he spent all day in the synagogue and fasted as penance for the Germans. Second of all, he announced to his congregation, that is to the people he dealt with, that for the rest of his life he would never preach a sermon on a New Testament theme. That it was time that Christians went back to their origins and learned what they should have been. He preached only out of the Hebrew bible for the rest of his life, and he never missed. I know that. Third of all, every Jewish displaced person around he would take food to. He visited all of these students at least once a week bringing them food on condition that they tell nobody. My secretary never told me that she ever had a visit from him. Anna and Paul told me last year about their relationship with Maus. Maus had been to my home. I had been to his home. He took me to meet Carl Yasburs, and we had an incomprehensible conversation one day (laughter) and...uh..but he never told me.

No one told me. They kept their promise. He looked after these people. I think it's absolutely fitting that there is a large forest in Israel named for him, and it pleases me.

You know this is all part of the Heidelberg saga.

Q: Yes. Let us break at this point. We're going to break and change tapes.

A: You know what we ought to do?

Q: What?

A: It's a quarter after 2:00. My own suggestion would be that we break until you have a chance to read this stuff and I have a chance to go through the letters. I have mentioned a number of times the role that luck played in getting results and coincidence. Luck every one in awhile reunited a family. I have one particular memory of being in my office in Regensburg, and a young woman came in, kind of agitated and excited. She had heard a rumor. She had no living relatives so far as she knew. Everybody had been killed, but she heard a rumor that maybe her younger brother had survived and was in Germany. And I said, "Do you have any idea where?" And she said, "Yal. I think so." I said, "The way to find out is to go there. There's no point in trying to do it...uh...by any other way." So we got in my jeep and we went. We got to this town and found a Jew and asked around and it was her brother and he was there. And we really should have tape recorders in those days.

Every recording of the looks on their faces as they met each other, each believing...having been forced to believe that the other was dead. Every once in awhile a tragedy occurred however in this connection. I remember a case, sad case, which has since been written up in the annals of Jews Law. I didn't decide it. A guy came in to one of our communities, lived there, and did not know what had become of his wife. Went on the assumption that she was killed. We took a sort of informal position. Jewish law didn't permit it, but we took it informally that as a certain date there would be a presumption that anybody who hadn't been heard from was dead. I don't remember whether it was 2 years or what length of time. And we...we knew this was an informal, not...uh...sanctioned, position in Jewish law, but...uh...people had to get on with their lives. And a lot of people were just plain missing. There was no way to find out. And this man met a woman, wanted to marry her, and...uh...the time came and they married. And 6 months later, his first wife turned up. She had been off in Soviet Union over in Siberia somewhere and it had taken a long time for her to get out and to come to Germany.

Under Jewish law, of course, he had to divorce both of them. And as happens so often, one does not hear the end of the story. I don't know with which one he ended up. I am not sure that it matters at this point. The dilemma...that was a very poignant one, and the fact that I have only one story out of the many hundreds of people...uh...with whom I came into contact during those 3 years is, I think, a marked statement of the propriety of making a decision that just set a date after which you have to gamble. You gamble. For most of the people, they had a little mazal and the gamble was okay. When they married, they could stay married. I don't think it's good luck that one's first spouse is dead, but there it is

Q: Under what circumstances did you leave Europe?

A: We finished our work. We had a huge celebration in November when the partition plan was announced...uh.......decided not to send transports thereafter because what was the point of...of that, and then changed our minds because it was a good idea to keep pressure on the British and have more people go to Cyprus. So we did somewhat. Not a great deal though. Much of it by then was being done from Constansus or from Italy, not from France, and I simply don't know about those operations. One of the generalizations that

you have to know about is that none of us knew anything we didn't have to know. People keep asking me did you know so and so who worked on this. One of my closest friends in the kibitz in Israel is a man who was one of the leaders of the Berichah in Italy. I never met him in Europe. I met him in 1960 when I got to the kibbutz because he was not my business. I knew what I had to know and nothing else. In Washington, it's called "need to know." Uh...the doctrine of secrecy. But by February, March of 1948, it was clear that the State would come in to be, and that our work, Berichah, would end. There would be lots of people at the camps, a lot of to become Israelis would have to stay there. To help and to work and to teach and all the things that they were doing legally, but I was none of those things. My operation would end. I turned down, with thanks, the suggestion, an urgent one, from of my...uh...Israeli friends that I take Esther and our one and half children and go to Israel and fly for the upcoming air force which at that point had one and a half piper cubs, I think. I said, "No, Thanks, that...that isn't how I wanted to die," as a matter (laughter) and decided very reluctantly to go home. Mostly because of the war.

That there was a war coming was clear, and...uh... I had had my war. So, in...uh...April of 48, we tried to get out of Germany. It was almost as hard to get out of Germany as it was to get into Germany because the American Army had forms and you had to fill them out, and a pregnant wife caused problems. We wanted desperately to go to Norway. I have a thing for Scandinavia, and take the Oslo home. They wouldn't let us. The Oslo did not have a full-time physician on board. Although my wife was having the healthiest pregnancy in the history of the world, but there had to be a ship with a doctor. The Army would not take responsibility. So we decided to come home on the SS America from Lauf, and we close up the house and shipped everything home. Michael was very disturbed because nothing he was ever going to see again. He was 3, and....uh...he couldn't bring his dog, and I think that bothered him more than anything else. He...uh...he really a mess. But we got to Paris, settled in for a couple of days and went to the boat .

Two of the people in the world closest to us were Eva Kaufman, now Eva Kaufman Penn, and her late husband, Rabbi Jay Kaufman. They had gone to Jerusalem in 1946 for Jay to get a doctorate at Hebrew University. Uh...They tried to leave the United States in the middle of the Maritime strike, and they got held up, and stayed at our house in Staten Island. When they left they were allowed to go, but they couldn't take the car. They had Palestine and stayed with us until Paul was done. It was this kind of relationship. Then they disappeared in the wilds of Jerusalem. What we heard about them once in awhile was from Jay's parents who would drop us a note saying they got a letter. They were okay, and then we didn't get that any more for awhile because Jerusalem was under siege, and they were in the of Jerusalem. We were in Paris, and we went to to the and Michael was riding a little kiddie car up and down the platform, and we suddenly heard a scream.

It was Eva. She and Jay had tickets for the same ship to come home. Coincidence. And she was 2 weeks more pregnant than Esther, and we had a 5 day trip across the Atlantic which was an extraordinary experience, just trying to catch up with one another with these two very pregnant ladies. Their son, their first child, was born on Israel's independence day, and our second child was born 2 weeks later. I had had an offer from Henry Montaur, the head of the UJA, and the world's greatest fund raiser in all of history.

I would add here that the 1948 UJA campaign raised a hundred and 80 million dollars. As of that date, that was the largest fund raising campaign in private hands in the history of the world. And it was not surpassed for quite awhile. Now, of course, it sounds like small

money thanks to inflation, but it was an absolutely amazing out-pouring of money.

Uh...And I spent 3 months doing speaking full time. One of my first speeches was on the night of Israel's independence. I went to Norfolk, Virginia, to speak. Why was I sent to Norfolk? Because the featured speaker was the Senator from Kentucky, Alban Berkley, shortly to become Vice President of the United States. Now Barkley was one of the world's worst speakers in terms of content, but he was an affable pleasant guy and he loved Jews. And he went around making speeches for Jews and for Israel and for Zionism all the time. So he was to be the featured speaker. He made a very short speech. He walked over, wrapped himself in the Israel flag, and the cameras popped and I made a sort of content speech. Only later I discovered how much money he was paid for all the speeches he made for the Zionist movement and for Israel and for the UJA and the rest.

Fortunately, I make it a practice not to have illusions about public figures, so I didn't get disillusioned about him. Uh...He was not a pleasant experience. Most of them were very pleasant experiences because to watch people give more money than they ought to give...uh...has its beauties. And the statements they made. Uh...I didn't fight in the second World War. I was too old. I was not involved in the decimation of our people in Europe.

Therefore, the least I can do is pay for it. And the money poured in. Unbelievable amounts of money. I learned to respect sacrificial giving for the first time. There has been very little of it, of course, but I respect it when I find it. I was invited to go to Hawaii to open their campaign. That was exciting. Never been to Hawaii. And I understood that the Hawaii Jewish community was all excited. When you're that far away, you get more excitement. Excitement grows in direct proportion to the distance from the action.

And...uh...Montra called, asked me to go. I said, "What dates?" And he said, "Well, the affair is on June 2nd, but you would have to go a day or 2 early because it's a long way." And I said, "Forget it. Not me. We're due to have a baby right on June 2nd." And...uh...he kinda said, "So what?" And I understood that. I said, "Well, I wasn't there when the first one was born, and I have solemn advice from my wife that if I am not there when the second one is born, there won't be a third and I won't have a wife. And I believe her." And he was a little bit upset, but he accepted that. As it happens, the child was born on June the Ist so it was very sensible of me to stay home. Those 3 months were exhilarating and exhausting. And then I settled down for the first time since I had become a Rabbi to be a Rabbi. I accepted a position at our seminary to teach and to get my doctorate and we moved to Cincinnati and became people for the first time. No longer did our son Michael get into a pullman berth and say, "Home," which he had done a number of times when he was 2 years old and traveling constantly. I'm done. Finished.

Q: Okay.

A: Unless you have something.

Q: No. I don't think so.

Conclusion of Interview.