We're in America Now - Fred Amram

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      PRAISE FOR WE’RE IN AMERICA NOW: A SURVIVOR’S STORIES

      “This beautiful memoir touches my heart. Fred Amram writes eloquently of his childhood in Nazi Germany: being born in a Catholic infants’ home because Jews were banned from the public hospital; the narrowing of his world as Jews were banned from radios, park benches, trolleys, and schools; opening the door to the Gestapo; and, ultimately, the extermination of nearly all his relatives and his new life in America. But he didn’t leave the war behind him in Europe. He writes about how it continues to touch his life and the lives of his children and his grandchildren, not only through the generations’ commitment to social justice, but in their very DNA that was shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust.”

      —Ellen J. Kennedy, Ph.D., Executive Director, World Without Genocide at Mitchell Hamline School of Law

      “Fred Amram has given us something very precious. A lively, eclectic and moving memoir of his life as a Jewish child in Nazi Germany, and as a émigré in the US. Sensibly written and full of illustrative anecdotes these stories provide a unique vantage point into the early stages of the Holocaust, when a community of mutual acceptance has been destroyed. But the primary function of this book is to keep the Holocaust–not only the event in history, but also the potential for its repetition–before everyone’s eyes. Fred Amram writes with the hope that his readers become also witnesses—to the lost world of European Jewry, to the fate of other children in his family who did not survive the Nazis, and thus to the past’s unrealized possibilities. Amram invites us to remember and to assume responsibility for the world we live in.”

      —Alejandro Baer, Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota

      Copyright © 2016 by Fred Amram

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      Author photographs by David Sherman.

      Book and cover design by Anton Khodakovsky.

      Printed and bound in the United States of America.

      First printing, 2016

      ISBN 978-0-9864480-4-1

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      This project is supported in part by grant awards from the Ben and Jeanne Overman Charitable Trust, the Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation, the Cy and Paula DeCosse Fund of The Minneapolis Foundation, the Lenfestey Family Foundation, and by gifts from individual donors.

      Holy Cow! Press books are distributed to the trade

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      CONTENTS

      XV. Unjust Desserts

      XVI. Bombs Bursting in Air—Again

      XVII. Today I Am a Citizen

      XVIII. Pakn Treger

      XIX. The Outsider

      XX. Two Outsiders

      XXI. Good-bye to P.S. 70

      XXII. Lessons from Papa

      XXIII. Today I Am A Man

      XXIV. …And God Created Beginnings

      XXV. More Rites of Passage

      XXVI. Smoking, Skin and Sin

      XXVII. Today I Am a Man—Really

      XXVIII. A Bronx Cheer for Nerd High

      XXIX. College Daze

      XXX. Home Again

      XXXI. Political Upheaval

      XXXII. Tante Beda Died Last Night

      Epilogue: My Children and My Children’s Children

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      DEDICATION

      I’M AN ONLY CHILD.

      It was customary for young Jewish German adults during the Holocaust to have only one child—often none at all. “Why bring more Jewish children into a world like this?” my mother often asked. Why, indeed.

      Papa had an older sister, Tante Beda, who married Ernst Lustig. No children. Papa’s younger brother, roly-poly Onkel Max, my favorite relative, married Jenny late in life. No children. They all died of natural causes in the United States.

      Mutti (German for mommy) was the oldest of three girls. The second, Karola, married Jakob Stern. No children. She died in the Riga (Latvia) ghetto on January 6, 1945. Perhaps Onkel Jakob did, too.

      The youngest sister, Käthe—Mutti called her the baby—moved to Amsterdam and married a Dutch man, Isaak Wurms. Their only child, my only first cousin, Aaltje, was born in Holland on August 21, 1939, when Holland still seemed like a safe country for Jews.

      At the end of October 1939, shortly after Aaltje’s birth, Mutti, Papa and I, a six-year old “adventurer,” escaped from Germany. We stayed with Tante Käthe and Onkel Isaak where I met Aaltje for the first and only time. I held the baby with great love. Everyone reminded me often that this was my only cousin. I couldn’t really play with this babe of two months. How does one “play” with a newborn? At best, one shakes a rattle in hopes of eliciting a gurgle. Did I sit on the carpet with her nestled in my arms? Did I sing to her? Surely, it was the clichéd love at first sight.

      The Nazis invaded Holland on May 10, 1940. We don’t know the details of the family’s suffering. Years later, however, while studying records at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, I learned that on April 30, 1943, Onkel Isaak died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He outlived cousin Aaltje by a few months. On February 19, 1943, Aaltje, with her 29-year old mother, was killed in an Auschwitz gas chamber. The Nazi executioners scrupulously documented their evil in a clear script. Aaltje’s age at the time of her murder: 3½.

       Cousin Aaltje Wurms

      What can I tell about Aaltje Wurms? All I remember is that she was small, an infant, when I saw her last. I can only imagine her life story; what might

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