A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (22 page)

We had many visitors to our home in Göttingen once travel became easier in Germany. Some of them were people we knew from
Kielce who had heard through the grapevine that we now lived in Göttingen. Others were foreign students or professors who
came to Göttingen to study. Some stayed in the Fridtjof-Nansen-Haus, which had been founded after the war by Olav Brennhovd,
a Norwegian Protestant minister who ended up in a Nazi concentration camp for helping to smuggle Jews from Norway to Sweden.
He was a friend of Odd Nansen, who introduced us to him. Brennhovd and his wife became close friends and frequently brought
greetings from Nansen and other Norwegians who knew me in Sachsenhausen. Another one of our early visitors was a young British
soldier who came to Göttingen as a war crimes investigator. Greville Janner was told about Mutti and me when he asked to be
introduced to Jewish families in Göttingen. He soon realized that we were basically it. Greville was only a few years older
than I. We became good friends and have remained in touch to this day. He served for many years in the British House of Commons
before being elevated to the House of Lords. Lord Janner of Braunstone’s lifelong efforts on behalf of victims of the Holocaust
probably date back to those early days in Göttingen and other German cities where he met many survivors.

The years I spent in Göttingen after the war were very important in helping me cope with my attitudes toward Germany and Germans.
Those were not easy years for Mutti or me, and we often envied some of our fellow Kielce survivors who had ended up in Sweden
right after the war. They did not have to face the economic hardships we faced in postwar Germany, nor did they have to struggle
with the emotions we felt when contemplating the possibility that we were living amid murderers. At the same time, by living
in Germany not long after our concentration camp experience, we were forced to confront those emotions in a way that helped
Mutti and me gradually overcome our hatred and desire for revenge. Later, in America, I realized that many of my Jewish friends
and acquaintances who had come to the United States before the war and thus escaped the Holocaust were much less forgiving
than Mutti and I. I doubt that we would have been able to preserve our sanity had we remained consumed by hatred for the rest
of our lives. Many of our relatives and friends in America never understood what we meant when we tried to explain that, while
it was important not to forget what happened to us in the Holocaust, it was equally important not to hold the descendants
of the perpetrators responsible for what was done to us, lest the cycle of hate and violence never end.

I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK
on December 4, 1951. The ship that brought me to the United States was an American military transport, the USNS
General A. W. Greely,
one of the many so-called Liberty ships that had been mass-produced in the United States during the war. That was a fateful
day for me. A new life was about to begin, and an old one had been left behind. But I did not know that at the time, for I
traveled to America without a clear sense that I would settle there permanently. All I knew was that I wanted to see America
— skyscrapers, big cars, Hollywood movies, chewing gum, cowboys and Indians. That was the America we kids in Göttingen imagined
as we tried to find barbers who knew how to give American crew cuts, which had become the rage in my school. Of course, I
looked forward to meeting my uncle and aunt, Eric and Senta Silbergleit — in America the name had become Silberg — and their
daughter, Gay. I was to live with them in Paterson, New Jersey, less than an hour away from New York City. The very thought
of being so close to Manhattan, Broadway, and the hundreds of movie houses I had heard about was all very exciting.

But those were by no means my only reasons for deciding to go to the United States. By 1951, at the age of seventeen, I was
beginning to have doubts about remaining in Germany for the rest of my life. Although I was quite happy in Göttingen, I came
to realize that I never really considered myself to be German the way my classmates, for example, thought of themselves as
Germans. The term
Vaterland
(fatherland), which for the vast majority of Germans evokes patriotic emotions, triggered in me memories of Hitler and the
Nazis; so too did the sound and words of the German national anthem. I was unable to shed these emotional associations, despite
the fact that I was living in a very different Germany, a Germany that was being transformed into a solidly democratic state.
These associations served as constant reminders of the crimes that had been committed in the name of the German
Vaterland
. The fact that I could not divorce the various nationalistic slogans and symbols from my past set me apart, in my own mind,
from ordinary Germans and convinced me that in Germany I would always feel that I was different — different from that mythical
“ordinary German.” That feeling of not belonging or of being different was, of course, directly related to my past. At the
time, moreover, I could still not rid myself entirely of the fear that the world had not seen the last of Nazi Germany. In
retrospect, these fears seem to have been totally irrational. But in 1951, when I was seriously beginning to think about my
future, only six years had elapsed since the collapse of the Nazi regime, and most of us who had survived the camps still
could not quite believe that our nightmare was really over. These reflections and doubts about the future convinced me that
I would never be able to put my past entirely behind me in Germany and that it would therefore make sense for me to emigrate
at some point.

I was also forced to think about my future because my uncle and aunt in America kept urging Mutti and me to leave Germany
and to settle in the United States. For a variety of reasons, Mutti was very reluctant to move to America. Her main worry
was that she had no profession and that she would not be able to live in America on her German pension. That meant, she claimed,
that despite her recurring health problems, she would have to work in a factory there. I do not know what prompted that idea,
although the fact that my uncle and aunt had worked in various factories after they arrived in the United States in 1938 may
explain Mutti’s fear that a similar fate awaited her there. Whatever the reason, she became obsessed with that fear. It may
well be that her decision to marry Jacob (Jack) Rosenholz, another survivor of the Ghetto of Kielce, was influenced in part
by her worries about the life she thought she would have to live in America. At that time, she already knew that Jack planned
to move to Italy, where he had relatives who wanted him to join them in a business venture.

For me the situation was very different. Although I was eager to accept my uncle and aunt’s invitation to come to America,
I did so without committing myself mentally to making it a permanent move. In the back of my mind was the idea that after
a year or two in America, I might settle in Israel. There was something romantic about the notion of living in a kibbutz in
Israel and helping to build a Jewish state. More important, while I knew little about the realities of life in Israel, I was
sure that in Israel I would not feel “different,” and that sense of belonging was becoming an important consideration in my
thinking about the future. In short, I really did not know what I would or should do in the long term; given my age, the long
term seemed very far away. In the meantime, the thought of going to America, whether forever or only for a year or two, had
immense appeal for me.

Thomas’s aunt and uncle Senta and Eric Silberg, previously Silbergleit, 1978

My decision to leave Germany for the United States was made much easier by Mutti’s marriage to Jack Rosenholz and her willingness
to move to Italy with him. Had that not been the case, I would have found it very difficult to leave her alone in Germany.
Despite her remarriage, however, it was not easy for Mutti to face another separation from me. Although she agreed that I
would have a better future in America and did not try to dissuade me from leaving Germany, she hoped nevertheless that I would
be back in Europe within a year or two. At the time, I probably thought the same. During that entire period, Mutti and I had
many a sleepless night wondering what we should do. Some of the problems we worried about, particularly lengthy separations,
never really materialized. In the years that followed my move to the United States, I managed to visit her almost every second
year by getting free rides across the Atlantic on freighters. On these occasions, I also managed to visit my friends in Göttingen.

Mutti had a wonderful life in Italy and was very happy there. And once I completed my studies and then married, Mutti and
Jack visited us regularly. These visits became even more frequent after the birth of our sons. At that point, Mutti’s interest
in me shifted dramatically to her grandchildren. Now, as a grandfather myself, I understand that natural process, even though
I viewed it with a certain amount of jealousy mixed with a great deal of amusement at the time. I am also very grateful that
my sons still had the opportunity to get to know their “
Oma,
” that very special woman.

Thomas and his mother in Bremerhaven in 1951, shortly before his departure for the United States

After various inquiries about the bureaucratic steps I needed to take to enter the United States, I learned that it would
make sense for me to seek admission to the country as an immigrant, rather than as a visitor or a student. It also appeared
that I met the requirements to come to America as an immigrant under a special quota for refugee children. In those days,
the United States still had a very strict quota entry system that depended on one’s place of birth, rather than on one’s nationality.
Since I was born in Czechoslovakia, I would have fallen under the Czech quota, which had a long waiting list. By contrast,
the refugee children’s quota was wide open. I applied for a visa under that quota and received it after a brief wait.

A month or two later, I was asked to come to a transit camp in Bremerhaven, in the north of Germany. I stayed there for about
two weeks, undergoing medical tests and various interviews by U.S. immigration officials. Mutti was with me throughout this
time. She was happy for me, since I was excited about going to America, but very sad at the thought of not seeing me for a
long time. In those days, America was very far away, and I can only imagine how difficult the idea of my leaving must have
been for her. She kept giving me all kinds of motherly advice, from wearing warm clothes in the winter to eating well, and
so on. The one piece of advice she gave me that still brings a smile to my face was “Remember, Tommy,” she told me more than
once, “it is better to have many girlfriends than just one. That will ensure that you won’t get married too young.” I was
never quite able to comply fully with that advice. Mutti had also obtained a fifty-dollar bill on the black market, which was
a great deal of money in those days. She told me to hide it in my shoe so that it would not be confiscated on entry into the
United States. She must have assumed that they had currency controls in America as they did in Europe at the time. I did as
she said and can now only imagine what that bill must have smelled like on arrival in the United States, considering that
the sanitary conditions on board our ship left much to be desired. Years later, when I read Emperor Vespasian’s famous dictum
that money does not smell, I remembered the fifty-dollar bill in my shoe. He was certainly wrong about
that
money.