…to a gathering in the Carmel highlands, three friends in their 90s, two of whom lived through the tumultuous years my book covers: Lotte Marcus and George Hahn, both Viennese Holocaust survivors who’ve written movingly about their own experiences.
At age 10 Lotte left Vienna for China with the only exit visa she and her family could get. They spent the next 9 years starving slowly in a Shanghai Jewish ghetto, during which time her father died. With her mother depressed and grieving, it was left to Lotte to support them. Her jobs included working in a clinic and playing the accordion for change. In 1945, they got visas to the US; first stop, the American south, where on a train, dark-skinned Lotte was told to move to the “colored” section . It’s a story with a Hollywood ending: she found work and married a screen-writer there.
November 11, 1938, the day after Kristalnacht, twelve-year-old George Hahn and his aunt hid from Nazi thugs by riding streetcars until nightfall, when he was able to sneak back to his apartment. His mother, desperate to get him out of Austria, signed him up for one of the last “kinder-transport” trains to Holland. George spent the next 18 months at Dutch camp for Jewish refugee children, while back in Vienna, his mother worked to get her husband released from Buchenwald. Reunited in Belgium in 1939, the Hahn family procured visas, first to the Dominican Republic, then to the US. After a rough start in New York City, they settled in Sacramento, California. George later served in the US army, and was hired by the Army Counter Intelligence Corps, the outfit, he says with chagrin, that helped Klaus Barbie escape to Bolivia! Years later, George learned that the children remaining at his Dutch camp after he left were sent to extermination camps.
Lucky for the world these two survived: Lotte created a school for migrant farm-workers and became a clinical psychologist, George, a cancer researcher and Stanford professor. A great privilege to get their take on things.
