>> This is James Newberry.
I'm here with Herbert Cohen on November 12th,
2013 at the Museum of History and
Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University.
And Mr. Cohen, do you agree to this interview?
>> Yes.
>> When and where were you born?
>> I was born in Frankfurt on Main,
Germany, September 27th, 1926.
>> And what was life like for your family
and friends in the years before World War II?
>> My family and
my friends were upper middle class family.
My father had a good job.
We had a very nice home.
It wasn't a house that we lived in,
but an apartment, but we had
the whole floor of an apartment.
Had many rooms, well-furnished,
nice library with many,
many books, a whole abundance of art.
My mother had very nice clothing, beautiful jewelry.
We all were well dressed in most times.
And we lived a good life.
I have a family tree that goes back to 1490.
So we lived in Germany 500 years of my family.
Over 500 years,
we were steeped in German culture, European culture,
music, art, literature, Goethe,
Schiller, both of my grandparents
and my father fought for Germany in World War I.
My grandfather was a doctor and
he became a first field great officer in the German Army.
Jewish in World War I.
My father was a front soldier in the front lines.
We were raised and brought up not as German Jews,
but as Jewish Germans.
A big difference. And all of that,
of course, changed.
>> So what role did your Jewish faith,
your Jewish identity play in your life up to 1933?
>> Well, we were observing Jews.
We were not Orthodox Jews.
We didn't observe all the rules and
regulations and the Kashrut laws.
But we went to services once a week on the sabbath.
We observed all the holidays.
We had our celebrations in our home with family?
And my brother was bar mitzvah and I remember being
there and there was no denial that we were Jews.
We were proud to be Jews.
And we were active in the Jewish community.
>> Was your neighborhood mixed non-Jew and Jew?
>> Yes. Completely mixed neighborhood.
>> So what level of anti-Semitism would you
say was there in Germany prior to
1933? How visible was it?
>> Well, there probably was anti-Semitism.
My grandfather was telling me more about it because I
spent a lot of time that's on my mother's side.
My maternal grandfather, I
knew him well because he lived with us
and we used to
walk to town and everywhere together.
So he was telling me he belonged to
the Democratic Party of Germany at that time,
which was in power before Hitler became chancellor.
And after World War I on,
Germany had a democratic government
and he told me some
of the incidents where
there was confrontations on the streets and things,
but I never observed any myself.
It all changed though.
>> So how did your life stay the
same or change when
the Nazis initially came to power in Germany?
>> Well, I
want to tell you about that is because it really
changed in one incident where it
really became a very dramatic change.
In 1933, in March,
I went to public school.
I was in the first grade of public school.
The Cloud Brooks School.
That's the name of school.
And the parents made
arrangements of everybody in the block that we would
walk together because we had crossed
two major thoroughfares and didn't have
any school buses then,
and any crossing guards, anything like that.
So we walked together.
And that particular day,
we walked to school together two miles.
And when we got to school,
we got in our seats.
And I remember I was six years old.
The teacher said, are there any Jews in
this class? Raise your hands.
And I raised my hand proudly.
And looked around, it was one other person in the class.
It was a girl raised her hand.
The teacher said, you two,
get your things and go home.
Jews are not allowed in
public schools in Germany anymore.
I didn't know what she was talking about.
You remember I was only six years old.
I really didn't quite understand it
because immediately I started thinking
about how I'm going to get home.
I never walked home by myself.
I managed to get home.
And when I go home, my mother immediately said,
I knew something was wrong because just today,
our neighbors told me she couldn't talk to me anymore,
and I couldn't talk to her
anymore or she would lose her job.
The next morning, I was standing by my gate.
Waited for the group to came by.
And sure enough, the group came by and
the leader of the group was my best friend that I
played ball with in an empty lot every day.
And he saw me standing at the gate,
and he says, what are you looking at, you dirty Jew?
Twenty-four hours after I got kicked out of school,
everything had changed.
He was converted.
From that moment on,
my life changed completely and not only for me but for
life of all Jews in Germany and later on in Europe.
Life became more difficult.
It actually
involved four different periods
to Holocaust that lasted from 1933-1945.
The first period was discrimination and then it
turned into segregation and that
came on when there were laws passed.
The Jews couldn't do this,
and Jews couldn't do that,
and they couldn't be there and couldn't be here,
and then it went into persecution every day.
Something happened and Jews were
abused because they were Jews for no other reason.
And then came the final stage,
which began with Kristallnacht it was
a test actually to
see if the world was ready to accept the final stage,
and that was extermination stage.
The killing of people who were Jews.
>> So you had
referred previously to your middle name at that time.
And what was your middle name?
You said it became your middle name in these early years,
the rise of Nazism.
>> My middle name was Israel.
I didn't know anything about that.
That came to me after I escaped from Germany after
Kristallnacht and I saw
where my name was officially added.
Israel was added to my name.
All Jews were given a middle name,
Israel to identify him
better to be ready for the final stage.
>> So how were
these anti-Jewish policies instituted
in Frankfurt at this time,
starting with the Nuremberg Laws in 1934?
>> Every park bench in Frankfurt
had a mark on it Jews cannot sit here,
a sign on it.
And there are lots of park benches in Frankfurt.
Every store had signs on,
you didn't sin to your own advent,
that means Jews are not wanted or allowed here.
Every public place, theatre,
restaurant, had the same signs on.
Jews were segregated completely.
Because after I was kicked out of school,
a year later, about six months later,
I went to a segregated school.
They established two of them in Frankfurt.
One more for the orthodox group of Jews and the
other one for anybody who wasn't told very orthodox.
My brother and I and my father went to that school.
My father had lost his job because he was a Jew.
He had a very good position and
he became active in the sports department of the school.
And this school, especially this particular school,
the philanthropy in Frankfurt way
the building and is still there.
The school is still there,
but it's now being used for other things.
I just want to go forward a little bit that says,
I was invited by the city of Frankfurt in
2003 to have a program
that heals the guilt of their grandparents.
And I was invited to come there,
and my wife and I for two weeks,
all expenses paid stayed in the finest hotel that had
actually been destroyed but was rebuilt
again during the war.
And then we had a docent that was with
us and took us everywhere and I could
show my wife where I was born and where I lived,
and where my ancestors were buried
in cemeteries and it was a powerful trip for us, really.
And for everybody and we saw where it happened.
But the reason I'm mentioning it
is the initial meeting
was held in that school of that group.
Was a group of people.
They had a program,
but on that particular room we had about 35 people came.
It was held in the school,
and it was a very emotional moment
for me because it was right in
the school right where I had been
before where I went to and where I was kicked out of.
[OVERLAPPING] Not where I was kicked out of,
where I went to after I got kicked out of the school.
>> To the Jewish school?
>> Yeah.
>> And you said your father lost his job,
and worked in the sports department at the school?
>> Yes.
>> And so did your family have to
live with less means
at that point because your father had lost his good job?
>> We had some savings
and we lived on him, and we managed.
In German mindset is very
different that you manage on what you got.
And there's a whole lot of other principles that
are different that I learned in
my life is mindset of
Germany that absolute obedience to government,
to parents, and to teachers.
The word is bad word in it,
it is the word absolute.
Because for instance, in Germany, it doesn't say,
please do not litter,
and place your trash in appropriate containers.
It says, it's verboten to litter.
It's forbidden to litter.
I don't know if any an opportunity to ever be in Germany,
but to this day and when we went back in 2003,
one thing you couldn't find
any trash or anything like that.
Everything is clean.
And it's a mindset.
That part of the absolute mindset is good.
The other one that you
absolute obedience to parents and teachers,
which I was brought up under,
I thank God, in America,
we believe that the students
in an appropriate way can speak to
the teachers and can speak to
their parents in an appropriate way.
>> So continuing in that same vein,
why do you think the Nazis were
able to come to power in Germany?
>> Just recently, I saw a film that at the Breman,
that they showed the propaganda that Germany
used to sell their principal
of the thing that I found
out the day I was kicked out of school,
that from that day on,
the Jew was a nothing.
That was a policy of the German government,
and that led on to the final stage of discrimination,
segregation, persecution, and extermination.
That's what happened.
However, that film showed
propaganda was another one of their specialties.
By the way, I don't know where you know the statistics,
Germany had 60 million people.
And had actually only 450,000 Jews.
And how they can make the small minority such as
center point was the Gerblz who was in charge of this.
He was a minister in charge of that.
He developed a propaganda system
that convinced the people overnight.
When Hitler spoke and he said,
the Jew is a nothing,
any of the other spoke,
the Jews are nothing.
The German people almost 99% were with him.
Heil Hitler, we are with you.
Because they followed that principle,
the government is always right.
We got to obey. And they were with him.
And he's going to take care of us.
>> So where did you see this propaganda on a daily basis?
>> Daily basis was
from the day I was kicked out of school,
and my best friend called me a dirty Jew.
According to him calling me a dirty Jew was a worst name,
but I don't use that in public speaking.
From that day on,
I couldn't go on the street anymore.
You're talking about segregation,
we segregated ourselves.
And that's the reason when we went to
the school and my father was
involved in the sports program, whatnot.
We had
a whole social life
and sports life and outside activities
were all centered just among Jews.
Because when I went on my street right outside the door,
which I always used to go and play with my friends,
my friends beat me up because I was a dirty Jew.
So I stayed away from them.
And we and my brother and I we
just segregate ourselves and my parents,
they completely broke away from neighbors.
You asked if we were
segregated or integrated in that neighborhood.
My mother was very active.
She knew everybody in grocery stores.
Like you know your neighborhood people.
That all stopped.
And it stopped and it was difficult.
And we had activities only in our family members
and our synagogue activities in our Jewish community.
>> And what did you think?
What did you feel when you saw
propaganda posters put up on
city streets, different things like that.
How did that make you feel?
And how often would you see these images?
>> Well, can I tell you a little story?
This is a good story.
Right down the street from us, about two blocks,
three blocks was a big public high school.
And it was called the [inaudible] School,
was named after some famous German person.
And it was changed to Adolf Hitler School.
And since we walked a lot with my grandfather,
my brother and I walked a lot and down.
We had to go down that street to go to a town.
My grandfather in defiance
of what was going on,
he couldn't be publicly in defiance.
But when he walked onto that block,
when he stepped up on
the sidewalk after crossing the street,
all along that school,
he would whistle a Jewish song that
we sing on a festival of Hanukkah.
He would whistle it and stop when he stepped off.
He did that regularly,
all the time every time, as in defiance.
And we whistled with him.
We knew the song well.
And that was the only thing that we could do to do it.
But we were opposed
to what was going
on and well we couldn't do much about it anymore.
>> So in those years between 1934 and 1938,
what were the conversations
between Jewish families who had segregated themselves?
What did they expect in the future?
>> Well, when the Nuremberg Laws were
passed that really made Jews second class citizen,
my father made a family tree.
That was most people what they did.
How can we maybe get out of here?
This is our country,
but how are we going to get out of here?
We lived here 500 years and fought for it in World War I.
That's the reason I told you this in the beginning.
So my father made a family tree and wrote letters
all over the world for people that he could find out.
How he got addresses I don't really know,
but I got that family tree still, by the way.
Big family. Finally a third cousin
from Birmingham,
Alabama sent us a letter
that they want to sponsor us for a visa to America.
We finally got that visa in 1937,
but it didn't come valid until
1940 because there's a quota system
that's still in effect,
how many people can come from
each country to America each year,
and were able to get out.
And we had to get out in 1939,
because I haven't told you that part of the story yet,
we'll come to it a little later.
But when my father was arrested and after that,
if we tried to escape to England.
But in the meantime,
our visa did become valid and we were able to leave
from England to America in April 1940.
>> What was your experience during Khristall Nacht?
>> November 9th, 1938.
75th anniversary was last Saturday.
That was a night that I will never forget.
I was 12 years old now.
There are three things happened on that night.
And the Nacht, by the way,
said it was the discontent or
the opposing of the Jews
of the German people against
the Jews of all the terrible things
that the Jews did to them.
That was a spontaneous reaction.
I would just tell you something when
it absolutely has been proven since then.
It wasn't a spontaneous reaction.
It was an organized systematic process,
because in a four hour period,
these three things happened.
Every synagogue in Germany and in Austria got destroyed.
Every one of them.
Desecrated, burned.
Every store owned by a Jew.
The glass was broken
in all of these week places all over.
Every store, that was owned by a Jew,
the glass was broken,
and it was looted, ransacked and destroyed.
And number three,
every Jewish male person
between the ages of 16 and 60 was arrested,
who hadn't been arrested before was
arrested and put in a concentration camp.
I was there. I was 12 years old.
And all this happened in a three or four hour period.
I saw how synagogue
the one I went to and
all the others because the next morning,
my grandfather walked me by him.
All the way in the town.
It's a big city. Four miles
to go to just to go to town or five miles.
I saw the synagogues burning.
I saw the fire truck standing by and the police.
Not to put the fire out,
but to keep the fire from spreading.
I saw the glass on the street of all the stores.
There was street with many stores and all of them.
They call it Kristallnacht.
Interesting enough. It was in Germany,
the Jewish community of Germany just changed the name to
Program Nacht Just changed
it recently because Krystall sounds too pretty.
It was supposed to denote that glass was everywhere.
Broken glass.
And I was there when
the storm troopers came to our house,
knocked on the door,
standing next to my mother.
When she opened the door,
I can see him with
his Nacht uniform on swastika on his arm,
leather boots, leather belt, leather shoulder straps.
And he came in and pushed her to the floor of
the foyer and stepped
in the middle of the foyer and says,
are there any dirty Jews here,
and I'm using again, the word dirty used in other words.
Dirty Jews here between the ages of 16 and 60 male.
I was 12.
My brother was 15.
My grandfather lived with us was 64 and my father was 38.
My father came out of the back and says, here I am.
Grabbed him and took him away.
No explanation, no nothing in the media.
The media was all controlled by the Nacht.
And nobody knew exactly what
was going on. We didn't know.
But my mother said,
if he ever should come back,
we got to get him out of this place
immediately out of this country.
And we had the visa to come to America, but we didn't.
We remember we had a distant cousin in London,
England, which we didn't know,
but we've heard of him.
And she called him.
She how she got the number,
I can't tell you that,
but she called him and was able to talk to him and he
sent a telegram back and said that he would
sponsor my father for a transit visa.
Under Transit view you can't work,
but he would put the money up so we had a place to
live for that year for one year.
My mother took that telegram
to the English consul in Frankfurt.
And the English consul in Frankfurt
told my mother to put in front of him,
my father's passport, her passport,
my brother's passport and my passport.
And he took his visa stamp,
transit visa stamp and
stamped each one of them with a visa.
And now I dwell on that sometimes.
It's because he was a righteous gentile.
And he also was not a bystander.
Because during this whole period of the Holocaust,
where later on, millions of
people were murdered, men, women,
and children killed, exterminated, without any question.
He was not a bystander.
He's tried to save lives.
And he saved our lives.
>> And your father was held at Buchenwald?
>> My father actually came back three weeks later.
I happened to open the door
and I didn't recognize him at first.
His hair had turned white.
He had lost 30 pounds in three weeks.
He had been subject to unspeakable abuse.
Yes. He was taken first to
an assembly place in Frankfurt,
and from there to Buchenwald concentration camp,
which is at Weimar Germany in
the foothills of the Bavarian Alps.
Two and a half hour train ride from Frankfurt.
He was
there and
he said when he first came in,
he was glad to see us, hugged us,
and was glad to hear that he could go
the next morning to England, get out.
But he said,
"I have to talk".
And I thought he would talk in half an hour.
He talked all night.
A terrible story of abuse, physical,
mental, personal abuse in this concentration camp.
For example, I'll just give you one example.
They had a stand formation
every morning at 5 o'clock and it
was in that part of Germany, especially in December.
It was 20 below zero.
They had to stand formation naked without clothes on.
And the Nazi guards made fun of them and took away
all their personal dignity and
abused them right there
while they were standing in formation.
And then one day while he was standing in formation,
they called him out because they found in his wallet
a document that showed that he had been
awarded The Honor Cross for
front soldiers in World War I,
and he was awarded by the Fuhrer and Chancellor,
which happened to be
Adolf Hitler under a rule passed after the war,
and after he came into power.
In the warped sense of justice,
they took away his prison uniform,
gave him back his raincoat,
nothing else on,
and said, go home.
How he got without
hardly any clothes on
from Weimar Germany back to Frankfurt,
I don't know, but here he was.
He left the next morning for England, and first,
my brother and then my mother and I several three,
four months later joined him in England.
>> But who did you leave behind in your extended family?
>> My maternal grandparents.
My paternal grandparents had already passed away.
My grandfather and my grandmother.
And when we went on this trip to Frankfurt,
Germany in 2002,
I showed my wife where they stood in
a train station when the last
time I saw them, we waved at them.
My grandmother died a natural death in 1940 in Germany.
And my grandfather was
walking on the streets of Frankfurt in 1942
after the Wannsee Conference had been
passed and the final solution stage was in force.
He was picked up and put in a cattle car and shipped to
an extermination camp in Poland where he arrived DOA,
dead on arrival because they put in
a cattle car that's made for eight cattle or 40 people,
they put 140-160 people in to murder him,
to kill him, to exterminate him, in extermination camp.
He was one of the 6 million and I
lost many more relatives and friends.
>> So what was life like in
England when you when you fled to England?
>> In England, my mother and father lived in one room.
My brother was able to get
a job learning a trade and got room and board that way.
And I was in
a refugee boarding school
run by the B'nai B'rith Organization.
And went to public school from that,
and got my religious school there.
But public school, I went from there.
A group we went together.
And that was a very interesting experience
because that gave me a taste of Orthodox Judaism.
That's where I was really.
And I was [inaudible] into that school.
Very interesting event in my life.
But we left there.
We were able to leave there
one year later in April 1940 because our visa became
valid and were able to come to
America and started life from the beginning in America.
>> And where did you immigrate to in the United States?
>> When we first came to America we came across
New York and we were
greeted by a representative of
the family that brought us over here,
to begin with, my cousin from Birmingham,
third cousin from Birmingham.
By the way, it was a family that is still
in Atlanta, Georgia, Heyman family.
The the wife was my cousin.
Actually she married a Mervyn Sterne.
Neither one of them is living anymore.
After we were a few days in
New York in a hotel state somewhere,
they paid for all of our expenses because
we couldn't take any money out of Germany with us.
We left that for my grandparents,
the little we had left.
We couldn't we took some of
our furniture and things that were shipped right
when we first got our visa and stored in
New Orleans in a warehouse by our sponsors.
They took care of that.
When we went to England,
the only thing we could take with
us was equivalent to about $10 each,
one ring and one watch.
We were children. I didn't have no rings,
but I had a watch.
So we came here to this country really with nothing.
And our sponsors helped us get started.
And my father just out of a concentration camp says,
we're going down south because they
suggested come down to Alabama and learn how to farm.
Never been on a farm before, none of us.
But we as a matter,
they built a small house for us and we
lived on this farm and we learned how to farm.
Every morning at 5:30 when I was 13 years old,
I was at the barn milking cows.
But I learned a great lesson and I went to school
from this place outside of Demopolis Alabama.
That's where we actually were coming.
This was outside of Maps on a farm.
Went to school at Demopolis Alabama every morning
and I learned my life lesson right there in America,
my first life lesson.
And somewhere or other,
they instilled me from what I needed to do.
I was only 13 years old,
but by milking in that barn and by going to
a segregated school and
noticing in the little town of Demopolis,
Alabama, which had 5,000 population,
3,000 African Americans and 2000 White.
And in a barn where milk
cows where all the employees were Black,
they were actually one year out of slavery in 1940.
Slavery was abolished in
1865 in America, the 14th Amendment.
I made up my mind then
it's important to help the underserved.
Somewhere in other, was in my head.
And my entire career in America was built
through worked in that direction.
We were on that farm, we stayed on it,
later on my father
got a job as a manager of another place in
Uniontown Alabama
and then later on,
they moved to Demopolis, Alabama.
>> How did the people receive you and your family?
How did the people in Alabama
receive you and your family at that time?
>> Well, we were accepted by certain people,
we knew they had a little congregation in Demopolis,
and we met some people there,
we went there to pray.
But it was not easy.
We were outsiders.
We had to learn how to farm because we
were we moved to another place and had our own farm,
rented a farm and did our own farming.
And that was really we came out of it.
My mother had chickens,
she took care of the chickens.
My brother and I and my father the cows,
and I was in charge of the calves.
And from there, we went to school every day.
I had a walk a mile and a half to
get to the place where the school bus picked you up.
And went to school and in
the Demopolis and I
went all the way through high school there. I graduated.
And thank God, I went to
my 50th anniversary of my graduation and it was
now totally integrated to school in
a new building and everything had changed. Thank God.
>> So when did you join the military?
>> I volunteered for early induction.
You couldn't be drafted until you were 18 years old.
That was a rule then.
And I joined for early induction,
so on the day I was 18,
I was inducted into the military and I actually became
a citizen afterwards in
the military and in
a place outside of Jacksonville, Florida.
I was sworn as an American citizen.
I stayed in the military to
basic training and I didn't choose it,
but they sent me to Germany to
join five and I was
back in Germany five years after I had left.
I arrived in Le Havre,
France to join my assignment,
which was a 78th infantry division and go to
the front lines to be taken to the front lines,
of course, another group of
people and it was in a camp outside of Le Havre.
And two days after I arrived there,
the war was over.
Everybody cheered and I cried.
Mistake. Everybody was cheering and I cried,
because I couldn't fight the Nazis,
and I did so much damage
to my family and my friends and my people.
But I want to tell you something,
when I went back in 2003 as a guest to
city and I've been back several times before
that on business and several other trips.
But 2003, I wrote an article in
a local paper after I came back and in it,
I said, Germany has changed because I
spoke like I'm speaking to you here right now,
I spoke to a group of people,
to schools in Germany,
where I speak now to schools here.
Schools in Germany and I saw that young people was
totally changed from the ones I
left who beat me up on the streets.
And I wrote an article that says, Germany has changed.
That's what the thing we have noticed mostly, I noticed.
And I'm taking the word of hate,
revenge and retaliation,
three words out of my vocabulary.
There was a lot of my
fellow Holocaust survivors who speak at
the Bremen and some of them speak here and
one of them was just interviewed here recently,
who didn't like that,
who still don't like it.
That's one of them, don't speak to
me anymore after that article came out.
I see him often, but I shake his hand,
but he doesn't look at me but he shakes
my hand but doesn't speak to me anymore.
Personally, I have
a very strong belief that hate is the cause of
these problems and still causes
the problems and discriminate
and the other two items that I mentioned.
All need to be removed.
We need to find ways to make this a better world.
Because that's how I end up all my presentations
to young people and tell them over and over again,
we have a common obligation, all of us.
It's not only written in the Jewish Torah Bible,
but it's also in the Christian Bible,
as well even in the Muslim Quran.
We have a common obligation to make this a better
world for the privilege of living on
this Earth and living in this world.
We got to work at it to do that.
We got to make things happen to make this a better world.
We got to serve the underserved.
We got to bring them up,
we got to educate.
This is the lessons of the Holocaust.
I believe in that.
That is the lessons of
the holocaust and that's the reason
after 40 years speaking about 40 times a year,
I still do most of that routine.
And I'm sitting here right now for
this interview because I
believe we have an obligation
to make this a better world,
and we got to work at it.