The Paucker Family

(Father of Congregant, Alice Perlman, Grandfather of Congregants, Ellie and Will Perlman and of their cousins Ben, Sam and Sarah Greene)

As children, my sister, Anita, and I were fortunate to live around the corner from our grandparents, Minna and Wilhelm, Paucker. We went to their house every Sunday for dinner, and, once I was old enough to walk or bike there on my own, I would stop by for additional short visits during the week. Known to us as “Minnie and Willie,” they were kind and adorable grandparents – and they absolutely doted on Anita and me. They both had thick German accents and spoke only limited English, which made it hard to communicate in words but did not in any way diminish their ability to transmit their feelings of love and gratitude. My grandmother’s English was a bit better than my grandfather’s, and, from time to time she would tell a story about, for example, her life in Shanghai after she left Berlin. But the stories were not all that frequent and not at all sequential, so we never had a complete picture of her life or my grandfather’s. Our father, Kurt, was no more forthcoming – at least not to Anita and me. He only told me his story once – we were sitting in the car after dark waiting for my sister to finish her AP exams. I was 10 years old when he related his jaw dropping narrative. We never spoke of it again. He died when I was 20, and I lost both my grandparents the following year. My grandmother’s vivid snapshots of her post-Berlin life, and my father’s harrowing tale were not enough to support a written account, so what follows also relies heavily on the written recollections and background knowledge of my Aunt, Pauline Paucker, the widow of my father’s brother Arno.

My father, Kurt Paucker, was born on November 12, 1925 in Berlin, Germany. He and his brother Arno, who was four years older, grew up in the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin. They lived at Mommsenstrasse 1 in an apartment building that is still standing. The family occupied the spacious ground-floor apartment, and the children went to school nearby.

Kurt and Arno’s father, Wilhelm came from a very large Romanian Jewish family -- Willhelm’s father was one of 6 or 7 siblings. Something must have gone wrong, though, perhaps with the family business, a leather factory, or due to problems arising from increasingly anti-Jewish laws, because Salamon and all of his siblings left Romania for France, for Germany, for the US, for Switzerland. They kept in touch intermittently, which was of great importance later on in Nazi times with possible emigration in view.

Salamon moved from Romania to Germany as a young man. He opened a leather factory in Offenbach-am-Main, near Frankfurt, and sold high-class leather goods: suitcases, briefcases, folders and so on in a small chain of shops he opened in Berlin. He himself was very skilled in working leather, and it amused him to mend his own shoes. He was much loved and admired by his grandsons. He married Luisa Brill. Wilhelm was their only child.

Kurt and Arno’s mother, Minna, was born Minna Wolff. Her father, Marcus Wolff was originally from Czernowitz in Galicia (present day Ukraine), which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Marcus and a partner set up a tobacco factory – tobacco being one of the trades open to Jews – and this became quite a well-known firm, Loeser Wolff, manufacturers of cigarettes and cigars.

Marcus married Jeanette Strassberg, originally from Jassy, in Northern Romania, also then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Minna and her sister, Cilly, were the only two children of Marcus and Jeannette, both of whom died before World War II, and are buried in Weissensee Jewish cemetery in Berlin.

Minna had known Wilhelm as a friend of the family. He was a little younger than she was, so she waited for a ‘somebody else’ before finally deciding for Wilhelm.

Minna and Wilhelm, Arno and Kurt lived a life typical of the assimilated Jews of the German middle class, feeling themselves a part of German life, unlike the German Jews of Eastern, Russian and Polish origin, who remained more devout and apart. However, under Nazism, even the more assimilated Jews returned more to Jewish religious customs. Both Arno and Kurt had Bar Mitzvahs, and Kurt sang in the synagogue choir.

Kurt and Arno were very close. They described playing practical jokes like a phone call ordering a coffin for a neighbor, they watching from a window; of setting up gangs, roaring round Berlin like the gang in ‘Emil and the Detectives’, paper chases with the trail laid across department stores and museums, across the great Pergamon Altar one time. One prank was not set up by them: They were quite small and their parents were holidaying in Venice. As was then the custom, they had left the boys in the care of the two maids, nanny and housemaid. One of the two women had an idea – the boys were dressed in their oldest clothes, smeared faces, dirty hands, and were taken round the apartment blocks to sing in the courtyards: ‘Our mother is dead, we have no father -’ etc. Coins wrapped in paper were thrown down and they were then treated to ices from the most popular ice cream shop in Berlin. They loved it, till one day they sang in the courtyard of Tante Toni’s apartment block and it came to a sudden end. The escapade was fondly remembered in later life.

One story Arno liked to tell was of his belonging to a young Socialist youth group and having their symbol, three arrows, sewn on his and Kurt’s swimming trunks. They were both beaten up by Nazi louts at the local pool. Kurt was not so interested in politics, but Arno was politically, precociously alert. In fact, he had organized an anti-Nazi demonstration of a small kind during a school assembly, which had upset the school staff and got himself thrown of out of school. He was sent instead to a hastily set up Jewish school, where he stayed until he left Germany a few years later. Arno was a keen member of assorted German youth groups and, when he was fifteen, he was recruited by an underground group to deliver anti-Nazi pamphlets in the working class districts of Berlin in 1936, the year of the Olympics. Dangerous if caught, it could have involved his parents, who, as a result, speeded up his leaving Germany for Palestine, as a member of the elite Jewish youth group: Werkleute.

By then, 1936, only the Jewish youth groups were allowed to exist in Germany in a sort of apartheid system. All other youth groups had been subsumed by the Hitler Youth. Arno had joined in the ceremonial burning of their flags with his non-Jewish companions, mourning the loss of freedom. His farewell party was a mix of his new Jewish friends and old non-Jewish friends, now forced into Hitler Youth uniform. Two of these friends stayed loyal to Minna and Wilhelm, visiting them till they left - a risky thing to do.

Arno’s group was sent to a well-known agricultural high school in Palestine: Ben Shemen, which stood for Arab-Jewish understanding in troubling times. The aim of the school was to turn out cultured farm workers: ploughing during the day, earnest discussions and playing chamber music in the evenings. Arno did not sing or play an instrument, so his participation was limited to the discussions, which became heated and political. As a result, he and his friends were regarded as a disturbing influence. The school was very happy to see him leave. By the time Arno left Germany in 1936, the Nazis had been in power three years, and it was taking some time to organize the country as they had planned. Political opponents, Communists and Socialists had been almost immediately killed or imprisoned in the camps outside the cities: Sachsenhausen, outside Berlin, Dachau in a suburb of Munich, Buchenwald, in a suburb of Weimar, etc. But Berlin was a more liberal, sophisticated city, used to some diversity in its population. Jews were not attacked in the street unless by a Nazi in uniform who knew them as such and were not yet distinguished by a yellow star.

As a result, they could walk about unnoticed, looking, as they did, like everyone else. Arno spoke of a certain freedom still possible, but Kurt said that 1936, the year of the Olympics, when anti-Jewish action was scaled back, was the last year that was bearable. After that -- no future for the young, no higher education, entry to the professions forbidden, etc. Minna and Wilhelm felt it was time to let Kurt go, a bitter decision. There were not many choices of where to send him.

Minna had skills that made life a little easier, and she was able to earn some money. She had always wanted to be a dress designer but was not allowed to study. She was to wait for ‘Mr Right’ at home. However, she had been allowed, after much pleading, to spend a few weeks at the workshop of the family dressmaker, and so saw pattern-making, cutting and so on. When times were lean, she was able to rely on her dressmaking skills. Together with her non-Jewish best friend, Mrs. Eberhard, the mother of one of Arno’s schoolfellows, she made clothing to be sold in the shops. Eventually, this source of income dried up when the family had to move to a “Judenhaus.” Before they left their apartment, they were forced to make a list of all their belongings, almost all of which, of course, they had to leave behind. Wilhelm particularly regretted the loss of his prized collection of etchings.

In early 1939, one of the French Rothsschilds had opened a school outside of Paris, at St. Denis, in a chateau belonging to the family, Chateau La Guette. This was to be dedicated to refugee Jewish children from Austria and Germany. Kurt was part of the German contingent. Here, he learned to speak excellent French and was receiving an education until the Germans occupied Paris. Although the details are somewhat murky, it seems he was then transferred to an agricultural school in Hyères, in the south, and from there to a Jewish school at La Bourboule, in central France. There, one day, Kurt learned that there was to be a round-up of the German Jewish children at the school (the French Jews were still protected). The headmaster called in Kurt and another boy, saying that nothing would happen to the children, but that he and the other boy were tall for their age and might be treated differently. They should try to slip away as the Gestapo officials and the French gendarmes were already in the school. Kurt and the other boy waited for the gendarmes to slip away from their posts to have a smoke, and slipped out while the Gestapo were making the rounds of the classrooms and dormitories. The other boy had an aunt in Lyon, so they planned to make their way there. They decided to wait until dusk, hiding in the undergrowth surrounding the school, but then heard dogs baying. The Gestapo had found them missing when checking the lists, and they were now seeking them with tracker hounds. They plunged into a nearby stream to put the dogs off the scent, and waited there, the dogs howling. It was terrible. Eventually, the Gestapo police gave up, and the busload of children went off without them.

The boys must have dried themselves off and eventually gotten themselves onto a train to Lyon and been received by the Aunt, but memoires here are vague. The Maquis were newly forming in the area, and Kurt was quickly in contact with them. He was hidden in the home of a professor or doctor. He had two anecdotes of this time. In one, he said that the family was warned that there was to be a house-to-house search for hidden Jews. Nazi police or army frequently demanded men to drop trousers and pants to check for the circumcised. The professor hid Kurt under his children’s bed. “You can see, they’re sleeping,” he said, Kurt holding his breath in fear. “Would I do that as a parent?” he asked himself years later when he was a parent himself. “At that moment” he went on, “I knew what real courage was, and respected the French.”

The Maquis eventually provided him with false papers and he did what he later realized was a wickedly stupid thing. Delighted with the idea that he could now go out, he borrowed the family’s only bike and went out in the dark with the lights off, wanting to test the new papers. He was stopped, as he knew he would be. “Identity?” the gendarme asked. The papers were handed back, no questions, and he was admonished and cycled back “Just think,” Kurt said, “I could have been caught and taken away, the professor and his family would have lost the vital bicycle, which they needed to scour for food each week in the countryside – what a fool you can be when you’re young,” he said later. Now, with his new false identity papers, he made an attempt to join the Maquis. They, however, wanted seasoned war veterans, or farm boys with a rifle, who could shoot, not a young town boy. But they had a mission for him, which would lead him to freedom.

He was to act as a guide to a party of Jewish women and children who, all with false papers, were to meet a well-paid guide who would take them over the mountains into Switzerland. Kurt would be pointed out to them, walking along the train corridor from time to time to reassure them, and meet the paid guide, who would be wearing and saying certain agreed upon things. So, he set out, they met the guide, who took them up into the mountains – this was a very hazardous and grueling trip, feet and clothes torn and bleeding, and then stumbling exhausted into the Swiss border post. The Swiss behavior towards refugees from Nazism is still under discussion. How could they take such a flood of refugees into a small country? Much depended on the individual officials at border posts and in consulates. Kurt was hysterical with joy. He gave over his papers and then cried to the border guard, “But these are false! My real name is . . . “and tore the shoulder pad in his jacket, where he had hidden his real papers to show, and said he had relatives in Zurich. “False papers! said the border policeman, “Back you go!” Which would have meant death, surely. Kurt wept, he groveled, he pleaded, he thought he’d kissed the guard’s shoes. It was terrible for him to think about this humiliation later on, but eventually the man relented, and Kurt was let in.

He and his party were put in an internment camp, fed on rotting potatoes, living miserably, until Great Uncle Moritz, came to release him, and took him home, where Kurt returned to bourgeois life and to school. He became a student at Zurich’s Minerva Gymansium. Kurt was not unhappy in Zurich, but there were tensions. He had to share a room with a grumpy old man, somehow linked with the family, who resented his presence. He received an excellent education and was not expected to work and earn, but he was a dependent, no easy role. He attracted friends easily, and one girlfriend went on to become an international film star: Maria Schell, an actress of great charm. Her photograph is in Kurt’s album.

Postwar, Kurt learned of the fate of his Jewish schoolfellows from La Bourboule. The small children had been sent straight to their deaths. The older ones to a terrible camp in a stone quarry, where, on starvation rations, they were made to carry blocks of cut stone, climbing up and down steep stairways. Many chose death rather than waiting to die, holding hands and jumping off the cliff edge to be smashed below.

During the war, the Swiss house in Zurich became a kind of post office for the German Pauckers. They could write via the neutral country from anywhere. Minna and Wilhelm, now in Shanghai could exchange letters with Arno in the British Army, with Kurt in Switzerland, and with Cousin Steffi in London. Arno and Kurt could write to each other.

Kurt had been in France still when his parents left for Shanghai via Trieste, in August 1939, a week or so before Britain declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland. The boat, the Italian Conte Bianca Mano, would stop at Suez before going through the canal, a last chance for Arno to see his parents. He was fifteen when he left Berlin, now he was eighteen. It was very hard for a Jew from Palestine to get a visa for Egypt, but he was helped to do so by a Baptist Christian he knew, who ran a mission in Jerusalem – she had good connections and she was some sort of distant relative. Then, how to dress? Shirt and trousers was all he had, he had left the school and was living in a sort of commune with school friends, picking oranges for a few days a week to earn money, attending lectures at the Hebrew University the other days, but not as a registered student. The group had one jacket between them, which was loaned to Arno, and one sees him wearing it in the photograph of him and his parents on the boat deck. They hardly recognized him. He told them, brashly, that there would be no war. Just three days later, war broke out.

Minna and Wilhelm had somehow kept their good clothes and onboard ship, first class, were invited to the captain’s table as well-dressed, well-mannered passengers. It was a surreal experience; they had left Germany with only the permitted few Marks but on board everything was paid for, wine, cognac, even cigars, Arno’s father told him. Minna later talked about looking out over the ocean as they sailed farther and farther away and wondering whether she would ever see her family again. Later,she learned that her sister, Cilly, had been rounded up by the SS together with one of her daughters. They were murdered in the forest outside Riga as were many other Berlin Jews, in mass shootings, stripped and lined up to fall into the trenches, dead or alive.

The journey to Shanghai was to last much longer than expected. On the outbreak of war, the Italians were uncertain – should they join Hitler or wait? The boat took a long detour to avoid British ports, the Italians decided not to join the Germans at that point but the journey, a break from real life, lasted over six weeks at the end of which they were dumped unceremoniously on the quay at Shanghai, put into a barracks and then given a room to share with an Austrian Jewish couple in the newly set-up Jewish ghetto. The single room was divided by a curtain. There was a squalid toilet and a pitiful cooking place. There was not much to eat. Ironically, Minna, who was Eurasian in appearance and had enjoyed dressing up as a Geisha in Berlin for fancy dress balls now had to dress as a Chinese woman to buy bread in the hours of curfew for Jews in the ghetto

A bitterly hard life was to follow under Japanese occupation, but Minna’s skills as a seamstress were once again turned to good use. The “Aryan” wife of a Jewish refugee in the Shanghai ghetto had been allowed “out” to open a shop in the town selling children’s clothes to the wives of the Japanese occupying force. It was called “Kiddies Paradise”! The Japanese mothers liked to dress their children in fancy style and Minna offered to design and make cute little hats and jackets, and frilly dresses. She worked with Chinese employees, but was obliged to queue up every morning to ask permission to leave the ghetto. So many of the young people herded into the ghetto had become bar girls or street sellers in order to eat. There was no other work, and the Japanese soldier who was in charge would beat them up before giving the permit, shouting that their work was a disgrace. This happened every day. But for Minna, he declared he had respect because she worked as a seamstress, and she escaped the daily beating. Minna and Wilhelm said that they had been glad that their sons had not been with them. So many young boys who had come with their families had become pimps or drug dealers, semi-criminals -- they had no other choice.

Arno, meanwhile, volunteered for the British Army, was stationed in Cairo and served in the Africa and Italy campaigns, in the Royal Engineers. They were in the invasion of Italy. The Allied armies slowly came up, the defeated Germans left after long and bitter fighting and Arno found himself near the Swiss border at Domodossola, with his unit. He rang Kurt who excitedly said he was coming down at once. The American soldiers stationed at the border said they could meet in No Man’s Land for half-an-hour and they sat together in a jeep, talking and talking, not having seen each other since 1936, now it was 1944. Kurt, who Arno had last seen as a small boy, was now a striking young man. They begged, and were grudgingly granted, another half hour. Later, Arno’s unit then stationed in Bologna, Kurt was able to come down into Italy and be with him. In the confusion of war’s aftermath (fighting was still going on in Germany) soldiers could do many things. They dressed Kurt in British uniform, made out a pass for him and he and Arno went to Venice, staying in army-requisitioned hotels. They called it their honeymoon, as their parents had spent theirs in Venice long ago.

Kurt was at the university in Zurich. He had considered a musical career as a flautist but decided it was too uncertain and chose to study science. By now he had a serious girlfriend, a medical student. The two wanted to marry but realized that Kurt had no hope of Swiss citizenship or a future in the country and they sadly agreed to part. Through a professor of his, Kurt received a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein that enabled him to enter the United States.

Kurt got a job at First National Citibank in New York as a translator (French and German). There, he met Eleanor, who was also a translator (Spanish). The two soon married and moved to Cleveland, where Kurt attended Western Reserve University. He went on to earn a PhD in virology from the University of Pennsylvania. He worked as a researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and later became Chairman of Microbiology at the Medical College of Pennsylvania. He was one of the first to do research on Interferon.

Arno had nowhere to go. He had wanted to stay in the British army which he liked so much, and was down for officer training with Intelligence work in mind but the bombing of the King David hotel meant that all Palestine Jews were rapidly demobilized. In the end, Arno made his way to Italy, where he met his future wife Pauline, a British citizen. After spending some time in the United States, the two married and moved back to England. There, Arno attended University and received his doctorate. He went on to become a well-known historian of German speaking Jewry, Director of the Leo Baeck Institute, London, and editor of its Yearbook.

Minna and Wilhelm stayed in Shanghai for 11 years, all told. After the Allies won the war, no country wanted to take the Shanghai refugees. They were seen as debased in some way. They were unable to enter the United States, but their ship docked at Ellis Island long enough for Kurt to visit them and introduce them to Eleanor. They then traveled, under guard to San Francisco, where they embarked for Israel. After 3 years in Israel, they were able to join Kurt in the United States.