To listen to the interview, go to http://www.theauthorsshow.com/

Passport photos: Gerda Katz and Edith Westerfeld

In our quest to find my mother’s old friend, “Gertie Katz,” we discovered that my mother had the wrong spelling of her friend’s name.

That’s not surprising, given that the two knew each other when they were 12 years old — seventy-three years ago.

The two girls immigrated together on the Deutschland. The ship left Bremen, Germany on a cold, gray day, March 8, 1938 and arrived in New York City on a sun-splashed March 19, 1938. Gertie and Edith became inseparable on the ship. (See blog below: WANTED (by Edith) Gertie Kahn of Seattle)

We contacted the One Thousand Children Foundation (OTC), asking for any information about “Gertie.” Here is the response from the OTC that identified our error:

dear edith,

yes, there is a gerda katz in the otc database who arrived in the us on 3 19 38 but we have never found her. perhaps you can find a lead from the archivists at YIVO (http://www.yivo.org) where indivudual otc childrens’ files exist.

good luck

Ahhhhh, GERDA KATZ.

Here is the passenger record the OTC included in the email:

Lost childhood

From reader Karin Gordon:

“The one scene in the book, Is It Night or Day?, that stays with me is the young boy who lay curled up on the deck crying he wanted to go to the zoo. I was without my parents for several years during the war.

“The Germans walked into Denmark in 1940 when I was two years old. When I was four, the Germans took our house, the Resistance movement bombed the milk factory where my father worked. (The Resistance bombed anything that could be of help to the Germans, in this case, milk and butter.) No one could take in a family of four so we were scattered like unwanted puppies.

“For three years, I stayed with different aunts and uncles and once with a friend of my mother’s. Some treated me well, one undressed and beat me for no reason – I was so sick at that place I couldn’t eat but threw up constantly (while they taunted me). My father came one evening on his bicycle, saw my condition, put me on the crossbar of his bike, but had nowhere to take me, so he dropped me at a cousin’s house on the way to the town where he had a room. I had no idea where the rest of the family were. I saw one of my parents on occasion. No one wanted to talk about it afterwards.

“We were united in a flea-infested flophouse near the end of the war in 1945. The other lodgers were pimps, whores, black market racketeers. the owner was a witch. My mother broke down and continued breaking down resulting in long stays at a sanatorium. This led to me being farmed out again, to a lovely aunt, but I was desperate for my mother.

“I remember how terrifying it was not to know when I’d see my parents again. My aunt once told me I’d get to see my mother in ‘two weeks,’ but I didn’t know how long that was.

“We were not united with our family in our own apartment until I was 11, but my mother remained threadbare, unavailable.”

The Deutschland

Gertie Katz (from an unknown German town) and Edith Schumer (my mother) of Stockstadt am Rhein immigrated together on the Deutschland. The ship left Bremen, Germany on a cold, gray day, March 8, 1938 and arrived in New York City on a sun-splashed March 19, 1938. Gertie and Edith, who were both 12 years old, became inseparable on the ship.

“We had so much in common,” Edith says. “We both left our parents and we turned to each other for support during the passage. She immediately became my best friend since I didn’t have many friends left in Germany.”

Passport photos: Gertie Katz and Edith Westerfeld

When the two girls parted in New York, Gertie gave Edith this photo. On the back, she wrote 21 März 1938. Zur Erinnerung Deine Freudin, Gertie Katz. “March 21, 1938. For remembrance. Your friend, Gertie Katz.”

“Gertie didn’t know where she would be living,” Edith remembers. “All she knew was that she would be placed in a home with strangers in Seattle. I gave her my address, but I never heard from her again. I always wondered what happened to her.”

That was 72 years ago.

“Gertie?” Edith says, “I’ve thought about you all these years. I’d love to hear from you or your children.”

Edith’s email is edielar@aol.com.

Both books, Is It Night or Day? and Motherland, tell part of this story.

The Sick Child by Edvard Munch

Excerpted and paraphrased from an article in the New York Times by Susan Gilbert

Adolescent and pre-adolescent girls who were overly anxious grew up to be roughly one to two inches shorter, on average, than other girls, according to a study published in Pediatrics.

The reason: children and adults of both sexes with anxiety or depression have lower-than-normal amounts of growth hormone which stimulates the growth of muscle and bone in children and teenagers.

The study followed 716 boys and girls from adolescence or pre-adolescence until adulthood, assessing their symptoms of depression, separation anxiety, characterized by excessive uneasiness about leaving home, and overanxious disorder, characterized by worrying about appearance or academic performance, among other things.

The researchers found that 226 of the girls and 149 of the boys initially showing some symptoms of overanxious disorder, and 168 of the girls and 124 of the boys initially having signs of separation anxiety.

But nine years later, anxiety was associated with shorter adult stature only for the girls. The researchers explained that depression and anxiety disorders are relatively rare in boys after puberty, the period when the connection with height appears to be most significant.

The older the children were when a diagnosis was made, the stronger its influence was on stature, the researchers found. The strongest association was seen in girls who were 11 to 20 when separation anxiety was diagnosed; they were 1.7 inches shorter than the girls in whom no emotional problems had been found.

From Dr. Judith Lewis Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, a definitive work on this subject:

Dr. Judith Herman, author of "Trauma and Recovery"

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

“Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work…Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and the healing of individual victims.

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma…When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.”

My cousin sent me these pictures which tell the story of a relative’s successful German business and its demise. For more than 100 years, the Kahn family owned a shop selling sundries at the corner of Darmstädter Straße/Ecke Sandböhlin in Groß-Gerau. The first picture was taken in 1851. See blog below (Part II) for more recent pictures.

c. 1930s - The Kahn family lived above store. SA and SS boycott the store.

Memoirist Berthe Meijer

A new memoir by Berthe Meijer, a Holocaust survivor who, at the age of six, was an inmate at Bergen Belsen along with Anne Frank, “continues the tale of Holocaust victims where the famous diary leaves off.”

The book, Life After Anne Frank, tells of Meijer’s acquaintance with Anne Frank. Meijer claims she remembers Frank’s attempts to comfort the small children in the camps by telling stories.

The major focus of the memoir, however, is the long reach of trauma. Despite the fact that Meijer fulfilled many of Anne Frank’s dreams by becoming a journalist and author, she says she has suffered with lifelong symptoms of post-traumatic stress as memories continue to haunt her to this day. For example, she says, sliding a finger along a pan to collect sauce triggers the memory of licking a cooking vat when she was starving in the camps. In addition, she has a deep fear of crowds and public transportation.

“The dividing line is where the diary of Anne Frank ends,” Meijer told The Associated Press at her Amsterdam home. “Because then you fall into a big black hole.”

In history books, she adds,”the war ends when we were liberated. No. Not for a lot of people. Not for the lives of the people who survived those camps or went into hiding or had traumatic experiences because of that war.

“Those things, they don’t go away.”