Doris Colmbs

Interviewer: What I’d like to do is start way back when, obviously, when you were a child. And it would be helpful if you could tell me about your family, the size of your family, your parents’ names, your brothers’ and sisters’ names and ages, that sort of thing. So starting with your parents. 
COLMBS: My father’s name was Max Lang Goldschmidt. He dropped the Max and used his mother’s maiden name and became Lang Goldschmidt. He married my mom who was a New Yorker and she came from a Russian socialist family and her name was Isabel [Sicklik], which was the Russian name. And he married her. I think he was over here during that time doing the draft dodging for World War One. I don’t really know, but he didn’t want to serve in the army. So they went back and lived in the mansion that they built to live in, which was humungous. I mean, you can’t imagine. The closest I can come to – there was a movie a while back called the Garden of the Finzi-Continis and it was that kind of a household, with the maids and the butlers and the blah blah blah. And there were three kids. My oldest sister Marianne (she was about eight years older than I was), my middle sister Eleanor (who was five years older than me), and then me.

Interviewer: Could I ask you – your father’s family, how long had they been in Germany?
COLMBS: Since the time of the Magna Carta. They were an old, old, old Jewish family. I mean, seriously. What was so tricky about the whole thing is my mom didn’t have a sense of religion because Russian socialists didn’t do that. And my dad thought he was a German. He did not think that what ethnicity he was born into was of any concern whatsoever so they weren’t really … I didn’t know what a Jew was until I damn near got killed for it [laughing]. 

Interviewer: So I take it that your family was not particularly religious?
COLMBS: Oh no, not at all. I can remember Christmases when all the servants would come in. There was a Christmas tree and the whole works. And we put our shoes in front of our bedroom doors for St. Nicholas. And the servants would come in and be given their gift. I remember that very vividly. My mom was so determined that we all speak English that when we lived in this mansion, if you will, she sent us to the convent on the hill in back of the house because the nuns there spoke English. And when we moved to Berlin (and I will get to how we moved to Berlin later) I went to American school in Berlin to learn English and she insisted that we go to Presbyterian Sunday school because they spoke English.

Interviewer: That’s fascinating. You went to the American school in Berlin? So did Eva Ritter [Rickles?]. 
COLMBS:     Oh. I wonder? We must have been there at the same time. 

Interviewer: Could have been.
COLMBS: Wow. I would like to get in touch with her and ask her about that. 

Interviewer: When I get the dates straightened out in my mind as we go through your story I will see if they match up. 
COLMBS: Yes, well they would. Because after a certain point no Jewish kids were allowed in that school, after 1938. So she must have gone about the same time. If not with me, then at least with my older sisters. 

Interviewer: That’s absolutely fascinating. I wanted to ask you, your mother, being a socialist Russian, had lived in New York for a long time. She was born in Russia?
COLMBS: She was born in New York. 

Interviewer: Born in New York? So very American then?
COLMBS: Oh yes, very American. Matter of fact, she had constant problems trying to adjust to being an “elite,” ordering servants around, because she was used to doing her own dishes [laughing]. So she never quite got the hang of it. And the servants (which is hilarious) disrespected her for that. They wanted it to be just so. Anyway, up until I was five years old we lived in that place. And I had two people upon whom I relied on (well not counting my dog who was my big brother). One was my neighbor from also up the hill. He was a kid my age, a little boy my age, his name was Eckerhardt and he dressed in leather shorts, Tyrolean style with the suspenders and the whole works, and he and I were best buddies. And I was used to being with Eckerhardt all the time. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if this is appropriate for this particular kind of taping. When we were playing horsey his older sister Brunhilda would harness us and we would pretend we were the horses and she was the driver, right. And as he trotted along he would do exactly what a horse would do. He would zip down his little leather pants, or unbutton them, and out would come a stream, like a horse, you know? And I thought, “Oh my god, how does he do that? This is amazing [laughing]!” But all of the sudden Eckerhardt wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore. 

Interviewer: And you were what age at this time?
COLMBS: I was just five; I was born in ’28. And the other thing that happened is my father’s factory got taken away from him. [phone rings…]

Interviewer: Oh one thing, I don’t think we got to that point, what town was this now? This was in the middle of Germany?
COLMBS: In a town called Meiningen, in the middle of what the American’s call Thuringia and what the Germans call Thüringen. 

Interviewer: How is the name of that town spelled?
COLMBS: Meiningen [she spells it].

Interviewer: So your family owned a factory of some sort?
COLMBS: My dad did, yes, a shirt factory. And as a matter of fact during the war it was converted to a uniform factory we found out. But his partner (he had a partner), Herr Dipser, Mr. Dipser. His factory was simply taken away from him and given to Mr. Dipser. And Mr. Dipser gratefully accepted, which just goes to show you what fun friends are. And so was the house taken away. Everything was taken away. The only thing that they didn’t take away was our chauffeur. And our chauffeur was my surrogate dad. My parents didn’t parent me. I had the chauffeur and he was my daddy. And he was allowed to come to Berlin with us. So we moved to Berlin into a ready-made mansion. It wasn’t as fancy. 

Interviewer: Let me ask you if I could, before we get to Berlin. At that point, that would have been a terrible turmoil in the family. Do you have memories of that happening, when the factory was taken and the house was taken?
COLMBS: No, just that there was more tension than usual in the house and we kids were not allowed in on anything. As a matter of fact even my oldest sister, who was eight years older than me, so she certainly was old enough to be accepted… We ate in what was called the nursery and only on Sundays were we allowed to participate in the family meal. And that was very strict. I mean you crunched a radish wrong and out you went. So we had to do it by intuition and by eavesdropping on the servants, which I was very good at doing. And something was wrong. That’s all I knew. Something was very, very wrong. And I was really upset that my friends suddenly disappeared, so I knew that something was up. 

Interviewer: But you had no sense that it had anything to do with your being Jewish? 
COLMBS: Didn’t know what Jewish was; nobody ever mentioned it. Nobody. Ever. Mentioned. It. The first time that it was mentioned to me at any time, was after we had moved to – well I will get to it. Because chronologically we moved to this little ready-made mansion and that was right across the street from a forest in Berlin called the Grunewald. Which is a very, very posh street, Crown Prince Avenue. And living about eight blocks up the street from us was a fellow named Herman Goebbels, and he was a big shot in the Nazi government, as you know. And every Sunday a marching band – this is for real – a marching band would come ‘oom papa, oom papa’ up the street to salute Herr Goebbels and my parents and the servants would haul us in man, I mean… [laughing]

Interviewer: How old were you when you made the move to Berlin?
COLMBS: Between five and six because I was kindergarten age then. 

Interviewer: This would have been ’33?
COLMBS: [counting] between ’33 and ’34 I would say. 

Interviewer: Pretty early, it seems?
COLMBS: Yes. 

Interviewer: That’s interesting because I thought the Nazis really started appropriating Jewish property in ’37 and ’38?
COLMBS: Well I think that what happened – no, they did it, I believe, earlier than that. 

Interviewer: Well, clearly yes. 
COLMBS: But also what I think happened in this particular case, and this is just conjecture on my part ok? Mr. Dipser probably had an in with the local Nazis, and he wanted that factory real bad. And I think that may have had a good deal to do with it. 

Interviewer:  Wow. That must have been a shock to the family and to your father and your mother?
COLMBS: I suppose so but Mother just screamed more [laughing]. She was not what you might call a good mom in any sense of the word. 

Interviewer: So here you are in Berlin?
COLMBS: Yes, so here we are in Berlin. And I’m kindergarten age and my two older sisters are grade school age and, baddam!, we go to American school. And wow, it was my first school experience and I liked it. 

Interviewer: Oh it was?
COLMBS: Yes because kindergarten, you know… It was a good school and I learned a lot and I learned English, very quickly. I think part of one’s brain, when one is a child, is more attuned to language and music. That’s why kids learn languages so much more easily than adults. Yes, it was an enjoyable time. And Carl, our chauffeur, was able to stay with us. And of course there was my dog, Audi, who was presented to me when I was still in a crib, I think at age two. He had the same birthday as I did so he was my bosom buddy so we were cool. Everything was working. 

Mom would regularly be hauled off to a sanitarium because she would get… I don’t know what she got, hysterical or something. They didn’t tell us. But pretty soon after that, and I cannot tell you the exact date – “Uh uh, no more mansions for you Jew folks [laughing], out of there!” So, “OK [laughing]”… whatever that meant. And again I didn’t know what Jewish was, they didn’t tell me. And I remember saying so to Carl, “Carl, what’s a Jew?” I remember that. For the first time in our life together, the chauffeur and I, he went, “Ahem” – and stopped making eye contact and said, “Ahem, I really have to go into the garage and take care of the car right now.” And he disappeared and I thought, “Uh oh; something is wrong here.” 

Interviewer: That was your first experience?
COLMBS: My first experience. The second experience was when my oldest sister, Marianne, who if I was five or six and she was eight years older, well that would have made her what 12, something like that? I was home with a cold and she came prancing into my bedroom – this was after we had moved out of the mansion and moved to the second. This was a duplex or something, some kind of building, apartment style, two stories. We moved in there and I was at home in bed with a cold and in pranced my sister Marianne waving a piece of card board in her hand saying “[sing song] ha ha ha ha ha, I can eat cardboard.” And she went crunch. And I thought, “Oh my god!” And I started to scream, “Give me some! Give me some!” And she wouldn’t. And I started making such a fuss that my mother came in and said, “What’s going on here?” So she made her give me some and I crunched it and it was really good and it was matza. I didn’t know what matza was [laughing]. It must have been Passover somewhere. I don’t know where she got it. But that was my second introduction to being Jewish. 

Anyway, make a long story short… Where was I? Oh yes, so we moved out of the mansion (the mini-mansion if you will) into this sort of apartment building. It was just two families in there, us and the downstairs neighbors. And it was on a street called [street name in German] which was a very middle class neighborhood. And Carl said he wasn’t allowed to come work for us anymore but he would sneak in. I realize now that he must have taken his life in his hands to do that. But he would sneak in and be with us and do whatever needed to be done, if the car needed fixing or whatever. That’s when the Jewish thing started. In that neighborhood. 

First of all across the street lived the Bloom family. Their son’s name was Hans Joachim, called Chaiyo. Chaiyo and I were best friends. He took the place of Eckerhardt, if you will? And they were affiliated with the Nazi party. They were definitely pro-Hitler. And Chaiyo and I used to sit on the curb, we had little racing cars, and we would play race the racing cars and who’s the winner. And what was hilarious about it even at that age I knew enough to “let the guy win.” [laughing] I look back on it now and I think, “Oh my god! Where did I get that from?”

Interviewer: Were you aware that he had any feelings about Jews or were you becoming aware of the whole Nazi thing?
COLMBS: Yes, I was becoming aware. But it didn’t have any…until a little bit later. I thought it was pretty scary but it didn’t have anything to do with me personally, you know what I mean? Anyway, Chaiyo’s family liked me and I liked them. And they had a cottage on a lake near Berlin called the Vonzet and that was their weekend retreat. I was invited there on weekends, I don’t know why my father let me go, I don’t know the politics of this at all and I don’t know why they…I don’t know, I cannot tell you what their motives were. But here is what paid for my weekends with them. They would be on their veranda overlooking this lake and Mrs. Bloom would be in an easy chair and she would stretch out her long legs; she did have exceptionally good long legs. They would have other company and she would say, “OK Doris, get up and tell us what you are.” And that was how I paid my dues for the weekend. I would get up, and of course I was brought up to curtsey; all of us were in that age. I would get up and curtsey and say, “I am a Jew.” And the whole house would fall down laughing. I don’t know why it was so funny. Either they thought I was some sort of an Aryan kid pretending I was Jewish, because our family had very Teutonic looks, or what exactly. I found it slightly embarrassing and I never could figure out what was so funny about it. 

Interviewer: Were they being cruel?
COLMBS: No, not at all. They were just hilarious. Applause, do it again, do it again [laughing]. But what happened next, and this must have been ’36 or ’37 I would say, there was a concierge across the street, a janitor lady who was concierge for the apartments across the street and every time she saw me she would take her broom and chase me and say “juden tier!” Jew animal. And I thought, “Oh my god!” and I would run. And I realized that being a Jew was becoming a bit on the dangerous side. This wasn’t funny anymore, you know? And they still wouldn’t tell me what it was, you know [laughing]. 

Interviewer: You still weren’t having any conversation with your mother or your father?
COLMBS: No, nothing. But here’s what they did do. And this is what broke me up so. They decided that it was getting dangerous to be Jewish so they bought a giant American flag which they hung off the balcony of their upstairs apartment and they got these giant rhinestone pins for us kids with the American flag that we were to wear on our lapel. And the concierge across the street, the janitor lady, took one look and she said, “Oh my goodness. I didn’t know you were American. I only chase Jews.” 

So then 1938 came about and Carl had gotten married to the girl from the butcher shop whom we had introduced him to. But we couldn’t go to the wedding and that was sad. That made me sad and I wondered, “I wonder whether this Jew thing has anything to do with it.” Because I loved him and he loved us. And between him and us there was no Jew-Gentile, there was nothing like that. But the family that he married into, you know. We don’t know. 

But the next thing that happened is summer of ‘38 we received a letter from the American school saying we cannot take Jewish students anymore. We also found out that we couldn’t go to any school in Berlin. No school was allowed to accept Jewish kids, period. And then somewhere along the line, and I don’t know, end of ’38? I do not remember the date, came Kristallnacht. I remember with my oldest sister Marianne walking ankle deep in glass in front of a department store in Berlin, also named Blooms, very coincidentally, and saying, “Shhh, don’t say a word.” And that I figured, “OK, here we come again, must have something to do with Jews.” And then the other thing that happened we started to realize it was really dangerous because in the park near where we lived they had what they called “Jew benches.” These were painted bright yellow and you could sit on them if you were a Jew. So, I was a kid and I sat on it. And the German police said, “Get out of there! What’s the matter with you sitting on a Jew bench?” And again, I didn’t look Jewish. 

So then the next thing that happened, the 1936 Olympics had been held in Berlin and they had kept the pool and I imagine other facilities as well. All the stores said, “No Jews or dogs allowed.” And at the Olympic pool also, “No Jews or dogs allowed.” But we were fresh little buggers, we were. I don’t want to do this on TV but we would literally give the finger to people [laughing], again because we looked so Aryan. So we would sneak into the Olympic pool and go swimming. The only problem was my middle sister, Eleanor looked very much like my father’s side of the family with the dark complexion and the dark eyes and the dark hair and could easily be tagged as a Jew. So we had to be very careful if people started to stare at her for any reason we would get out of there. 

Interviewer: Do you remember at that time, did you see any of the propaganda that was being put up? 
COLMBS: Oh yes, we were forced to. Let me tell you how and why. At every bus station there were not only those horrid cartoons of Jews. They had one guy, the Jew guy cartoon, with a potbelly and weird Mr. Spock-type ears, you know pointy ears…

Interviewer: I’ve seen those. There is a website that specializes in those. I just came across it. 
COLMBS: Oh I didn’t know that. When we are done give me the address. And then there were loud speakers and one was forced – Jew, Gentile, you name it – if you didn’t stop and listen to what was being blared out of the loud speakers you were subject to arrest. 

Interviewer: If you didn’t stop and listen?
COLMBS: Yes, you had to stop and listen. Whether you were waiting for a bus or just passing by. You had to stop and listen. 

Interviewer: German or?
COLMBS: In German!

Interviewer: Any German, any citizen being Jewish or not?
COLMBS: Yes, had to listen. So we heard the whole drill over the loud speakers and it was becoming… you know, I was hip. Let me tell you the important things I witnessed, and I will get to…

Interviewer: No rush, no rush. 
COLMBS: OK. Oh yes, the movies. I have two things. My parents would go to movies. They didn’t allow Jews to go to movies. “No Jews or dogs” allowed in the movies. But they would go and one time they went and a man came up in front of the screen stage and said, “If any Jews have come here by mistake we invite you right now please leave so that we follow the law.” And my parents said, “Uh uh. We paid for our tickets; we are staying.” And a couple of people looked at my father a bit askance because he was the one with the dark hair and the dark eyes, but they stayed. And you know what? Outside – a lot of people left – outside the door of that movie theater was a van and into that van they were forced and never to be seen again. 

Interviewer: Really?
COLMBS: Yes. Yes sir. That’s the way it was. Also we were not allowed to ride on the bus but my older sister and I, man, [laughing] we went all over Berlin. We just did it. 

Interviewer: So talking [amongst the] kids, you had three of you. Talking amongst yourselves, was there ever any time that you worried together? Or were your attitudes more like, “Well to heck with it we will deal with it?”
COLMBS: Was a combination. We didn’t need to talk. We had an understanding that we were involved in a dangerous situation and my oldest sister and I, the ones that had the Teutonic looks, were of the “give them the finger” set of mind and we would dare them, whatever. My other sister wasn’t. For one thing she was Daddy’s favorite and he parented her, so she kind of stuck with him. But we didn’t really need to speak about it. We knew. You take a kid and involve any kid in a dangerous situation and they get very precocious, you know? They do, they get very, very wise and very hip at a very young age. I am sure you will find that out with the other people with whom you speak. 

The other thing that I remember vividly, and I mean with a capital Viv, Jews were not allowed to buy fresh bread. We had to buy day old bread. I have no idea what that was about. So I would stand in line at the bakery for bread. And one day I stood in line at the bakery and I looked up and there behind the counter was this humongous big poster and this big poster showed a kind of chubby house-wife, haus-frau, typical German house-wife, being carted off by two members of the SS, screaming and hollering in the photograph. And around it was one of those big red circles like you see in traffic where there’s a big red circle with a line, and you know what it said underneath? “She voted no.” And I stood there, I had been in American school and I said, “Wait a minute, what do you mean she voted no?” I had been taught in American school that voting was one of those things that you get to do and how you voted was your business and not anybody else’s and I thought there is something very wrong with this picture, no pun intended [laughing]. Something very, very wrong. And that was also a watershed event for me. And then, oh, I’ve got to tell you this refugee story, this is too funny. I am not trying to make light of any of this but my family was a bit on the whacky side, you’ve got to admit [laughing].

Came time to leave. And they put in front of our house something called a lift, which is kind of like one of those giant… it was the biggest box I had ever seen in my life, it was called a lift and it was made for transport across the ocean. And all our belongings went in there and it was sent off to America ahead of us. Whether it arrived ahead of us or not ahead of us I don’t know but we wound up eventually with the furniture in our apartment. But that’s not the issue. We weren’t told why, and the family downstairs, they were Jewish and the kid’s name was Stefan. I don’t remember his last name. But as friendly as Chaiyo and I were together, that’s how badly Stefan and I fought. We were constantly fighting [laughing]. And now I wonder, oh I wonder what became of Stefan. That follows me. That follows me – what became of Stefan? That haunts me. I also sometimes wonder what became of Chaiyo because he probably wound up fighting in the armed services because they took kids after a while. 

Interviewer: Perhaps even, depending on his age, perhaps even your chauffeur depending on how old he was.
COLMBS: Yes, exactly. 

Interviewer: Because they eventually used just about everybody. 
COLMBS: Everybody, yes. I imagine that Carl would have had to go because he was in his 30s. 

Interviewer: But let me ask you, in 1938 you’d be about ten years old?
COLMBS: Yes, ten.

Interviewer: So you knew who Hitler was?
COLMBS: Oh yes!

Interviewer: You knew the Nazi party? 
COLMBS: Oh yes!

Interviewer: You had a growing political sense?
COLMBS: Oh yes, yes indeed. As a matter of fact I used to sneer at Chaiyo. He used to fantasize, he would tell me while we were sitting on the curb playing with our racecars, “I went to a parade and the Fuhrer was on a white stallion and he picked me up and put me in front of him on the saddle and we rode together.” I did have some four-letter words in both languages at the time, which I used. 

Interviewer: I have seen a poster in which they put Hitler on the horse with the, you know, the whole thing.
COLMBS: Yes, I know. But I became very hip to…I just knew.

Interviewer: Any understanding at all…you just…I guess, what could you have known I guess? You just were aware that the Nazis were against the Jews?
COLMBS: Yes, and that not only were they against the Jews but they were going to kill us, and they weren’t kidding. 

Interviewer: Did you feel that threat?
COLMBS: Oh yes!

Interviewer: You did feel the threat of death?
COLMBS: Oh yes, I mean I knew after the dealing with my parents in the movie house and the fact that everybody that left the movie house was carted away, I began to be understanding of they aren’t kidding. 

Interviewer: Did you ever talk to your family about leaving? Did you ever ask your parents, “Why aren’t we leaving?” or, “Should we leave?” Was that ever a topic of conversation?
COLMBS: We were not allowed into those conversations. But I think my mother finally said, “Hey if you don’t go I am leaving.” And she had an American passport. She fortunately insisted on holding on to her American citizenship the whole time she was married, which was a long time. She didn’t give that passport up and it saved us, quite literally, on the trip. And the trip, oh [sighs]. Here’s how it went. We got on a train and at that time we were able to sleep on the train; we had nightgowns and stuff. 

Interviewer: Did you, if I could ask you, in leaving this house, the apartment you lived in, you moved from there? 
COLMBS: Yes.

Interviewer: The big box came, all your stuff was put in. 
COLMBS: Yes, and from there we got on a train.

Interviewer: Did you know you were going to America?
COLMBS: Oh yes. I had been to America once before by the way. In 1936 I believe we took a vacation in America and I remember my first sight of the beach, oh man! We went to visit her folks. And I still remember my aunt Sonja making fun of us the whole time because like all good, well brought up rich children we left our shoes outside the door for the person to come an polish them [laughing]. Oh well, live and learn. Yes, we knew we were going to America and I was happy with that because I had had a good time in America the last time I had gone. 

Interviewer: Did you have the sense you were escaping? Did you have a sense that you were going to get away from what must have been…?
COLMBS: I not only had a sense that we were escaping but I knew that the trip was going to be dangerous.

Interviewer: Did you?
COLMBS: Oh yes.

Interviewer: Did they tell you or you just kind of knew that?
COLMBS: I knew that.

Interviewer: So you had some street smarts?
COLMBS: Oh yes, and they stood me in good stead my whole life, I still have them [laughing]. 

Interviewer: Because you were running around the streets of Berlin, I mean you weren’t running crazy but you knew?
COLMBS: We knew. I knew. Anyway. We got on the train in the night and my parents, they were idiots I swear to God, they put us in nightgowns and pinned their jewelry into the hems of our nightgowns in case of…I am thinking to myself, “Are they nuts?” I mean it just takes one border guard, you know? And we stopped at the Belgian border and the reason that we were able to make this trip so smoothly was for two reasons. My father had rather deep pockets and my mother had an American passport and between those two things we were able to make it, but it was not easy. I remember at the Belgian border, German border guards in full uniform came on the train and hauled my daddy off. I could look out the train window and see him in deep negotiations with these people looking at his passport and I thought, “Uh oh.” The train started to move. It started that first little half a wheel turn of a train about to start to move; when my father got on, “whew.” Well what happened for the rest of that trip during the day time my father decided since we were stopping in all these places of renown, that he would show us the cultural things that we needed to see as children. So in Belgium it was Brussels and we went to the famous statue of Manneken Pis, which everybody knows is the little boy, you know, Eckerhardt in action [laughing]. And then at night we would take our trips at night, “woosh” on the train, holy cats, border guards and then they would go into those little negotiations with the border guards. And then in Amsterdam we stayed for a couple of days, I think we almost stayed for a week, because he had to show us Amsterdam. 

Interviewer: In 1938?
COLMBS: Yes.

Interviewer: Wow.
COLMBS: And we looked at the Rembrandt exhibit and we looked at the canals and we looked at everything that you could possibly show a child. I remember going to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I remember this for the rest of my life; you know how some memories are? They took us to see the Nightwatch, Rembrandt’s famous painting of the Nightwatch? It was a big, humongous painting; it took up a lot of space. And I stood there and Rembrandt had somehow – one of the four figures had his hand stretched out, that was part of the painting – but Rembrandt managed to do it in such a way that it looked like 3D. It looked like three-dimensional and they couldn’t get me away from there. I whimpered like a dog whimpers in his sleep. I wanted to stay there forever. I remember that. And then of course it was Paris, again in the night, over the next border. And then to Paris and, of course, the Louvre, the Champs Elysees, the Marseille Palace. That must have taken a week. I think he had a lot of… in Jewish they call it chutzpah, in English they call it something else, which I am not going to go into. But he had it. He was going to make sure that his kids got acculturated. So our port of exit was La Havre. We did not go to England. Or did we go to England and then come back across the channel? I don’t remember. I remember, I think on my honeymoon I was in London for a time but I think that was another time. And we got on the Normandy.

Interviewer: The Normandy? Wow.
COLMBS: And the dog had to be locked in the kennel upstairs and we got to visit him. And movie star James Stewart was on board and we got to watch him grandly descending the staircase. And that was my first experience with celery. Somebody at dinner we got handed a stock of celery and I thought, “What are you doing [laughing]?” and I discovered she picked it up and ate it. And then of course we drifted ashore and when we drifted ashore we drifted ashore in Harlem and that was my first taste of freedom. And again, I told you what happened there. 

Interviewer: Your freedom in the sense that no more persecution?
COLMBS: No, oh no! It wasn’t that! It was no more having to be driven to school; no more having to write in that damn room of his. Man, I mean I had a best friend downstairs, Iris [Zelmich], who was Jewish, and I learned a little bit about Judaism from her. So you know I had my best buddy, which I never had except for Chaiyo and Eckerhardt; I never had a best girlfriend before. And Riverside Park and the roller-skates and the “wooo, free at last free at last,” man it was good [laughing]. And I enjoyed every moment of it until that day at Riverside Park when I saw that. I could never be the same with my best girlfriends anymore because I realized that they were having done to them what I had just escaped from. And that hurt me so bad. 

I have a life long defense mechanism, if you will. I know how to shut off my emotions and when I do that I have always called the Antarctic – frozen, you know. I did that through my marriage, I did that through… And I still do it. That’s what makes me such a good hospice worker. I don’t feel anything, you know? And that’s the way it was with me and my friends in Harlem. I just couldn’t bear the pain of seeing them. Then I started to open my eyes and I saw what they were going through. The mothers that had to work as housemaids. The key around the neck, the latchkey around the neck. I even for a while thought it was hip so I put an old closet key nobody was using around my neck [laughing]. And the signs, you know, “White Only.” And I [thought], “Oh my God, no Jews or dogs allowed?”  

Interviewer: Right in Harlem, huh? Right in the middle of Harlem?
COLMBS: Oh yes! Because it was at Washington Heights and the stores were owned by white folks. Even the corner magazine shop. 

Interviewer: It was not the Harlem of today?
COLMBS: No! No, no. Washington Heights at the time had the wonderfullest mixture of refugee Jews and Black people [laughing]. We were together! There wasn’t any trace of anything except, “We’re in this together.” That kind of thing.

Interviewer: ’39, ’40?
COLMBS: Yes, ’38, ’39. And then my sister died. My older sister Marianne, the one to whom I was close. What had happened was she had apparently eaten pork. And had gotten a case of trichinosis, which was not diagnosed until she became ill enough to go to the hospital and then it was too late. The trichinosis ate away at her diaphragm and punctured it and then she died. 

Interviewer: Oh my god. She was very young.
COLMBS: She was 17 at the time I believe. And she was an artist of great renown. She was at the time being taught by a man who had his own pictures in the American Museum of Modern Art and she was a prodigy. But you know that’s not part of what we are talking about here.

Interviewer: Your parents settled in and what did your father do? Go into business?
COLMBS: Yes, he went into business. My mother went nuts, but nobody ever hauled her off. So we moved. When my father got into business (he was a good businessman) we moved out of New York into Boston and we settled in a suburb of Boston called Brookline, which is a very posh little suburb of Boston. And there we were. At that time I became an adolescent. I went to the elementary school in Brookline and then to Brookline High. And my mom was crazy. She went after me with a butcher knife one time. 

Interviewer: What contributed to that? What were the causes of that?
COLMBS: I don’t know. When my dad married my mother she was a concert pianist and she had given numerous recitals. And I think he may have married her because he could show that off. When my sister died she never touched the piano again even though we always had a grand piano in our house. She never played another note. And I think that brought her over the edge because during my sister’s funeral my father leaned over the coffin and screamed at her, “This was your fault. You did this, you did this. You fed her. You poisoned her.” And I don’t know what that did to her but I think that’s what took her over the edge. 

[recording pauses– transcriber note: It seems like this next part, or at least some of it, should come before this point in the interview.]

Interviewer: You were going to tell me how you came to write that book?
COLMBS: I had been in communication with Eli Wiesel and he and I had been corresponding back and forth and what we had been corresponding about was the fact it’s really possible that the Holocaust actually changed the course of this world. Because we don’t know who got killed. Maybe the guy who was going to invent antigravity, or perhaps the woman who would find a cure for cancer; we will never know. But it may have given this civilization an inadvertent little shift and we may have lost more than we think we have lost. And perhaps the person that we lost, he and I posited together, was the one human being that may have had the sense and the ability to create peace on earth. We don’t know that. So he said, “You need to sit down and write about this.” So I said, “OK.” I mean the master speaks you know [laughing]. So I sat down to write this very stern and serious intellectual tome about all the things that he and I had discussed and instead out came this wacky memoir. Which is not to say that I didn’t address those issues, because I did. I mean that was the whole point. But it did not turn out to be one of those dead-serious diatribes. It turned out to be my whole life because somehow or other, either inadvertently by mistake or on purpose, I seem to have gotten involved with every single cultural phenomenon of the 20th century. 

Interviewer: Tell me what the book encompasses. From when to when?
COLMBS: It starts out when I was born, actually, to a very rich Jewish factory owner in Meiningen in a small town in central Germany. With an entire mansion and a staff and the whole blah blah blah, you know. And his American wife who was an import [laughing]. And it tells all about that particular childhood. And then goes on from there and I will tell you what – one of the most important events in my life in the book happened when we drifted ashore in New York City and moved to Harlem. And I really hung out; we had roller skates, we went zooming down Amsterdam Avenue stealing fruit from the fruit vendor. The Black kids and me. We liked each other. They liked the way I spoke and I liked… Their color was beautiful. Well one day I was down at Riverside Park with my dog waiting for some friends and I went to take a drink of water from the fountain there and I was ten going on 11, maybe I was 11 already, I don’t know. And I looked at the fountain and someone had scratched into the actual stone of this fountain, “Niggers go home.” And I thought, “Oh my god. They do it here, too.” It changed my entire life. From then on nothing was the same.

Interviewer: So your book encompasses the time as a child in Germany up through…?
COLMBS: Up through when I retired from work and Eli Wiesel said, “Sit down and write a book.” 

Interviewer: When did you write the book?
COLMBS: In 1999.

Interviewer: How long did it take you to write it?
COLMBS: Well I was working still off and on. And then when I finally retired it got published in 2002.

Interviewer: Were you a writer then? 
COLMBS: No, as a matter of fact – I will go into this later when I talk about our family situation – but I was raised by an extraordinarily abusive set of parents and my father had decided when I was in kindergarten or something that I was to be the family writer. He had a dancer, he had a painter, and I was the last one. So he used to lock me in his den or living room or whatever it was he had, his studio– lock me in there and wouldn’t let me out until I had written something. And I vowed then and there that I would never write again, I mean never write again. Which I didn’t until this [laughing]. And when this happened, my friend, the fellow that I was telling you about, the Vietnam vet, insisted that I start writing articles. So I did and, “kaboom!” [laughing]. 

Interviewer: Well that’s quite an accomplishment to write and publish a book and probably is a story of its own I would assume?
COLMBS: The publishing of it? Oh yes [laughing]. 

Interviewer: I don’t ever hear anybody saying it’s an easy thing to do.
COLMBS: No.