Eve Steinberg Leveque

Kaplan: Good afternoon.
LEVEQUE: Good afternoon.

Kaplan: Would you please start by telling us your full name, including your maiden name, your date of birth, and your place of birth — city, state, country, and address, if you remember.
LEVEQUE: My name is Eve Emmy Steinberg Leveque. I was born on the 14th of January, 1924, in Frankfurt Oder, Germany. I don’t remember the actual number of the house, but it was on Berliner Strasse.

Kaplan: Berliner?
LEVEQUE: Berliner Strasse. Yes, if you pronounce it correctly. 

Kaplan: Can you tell us who lived in your household?
LEVEQUE: My father, my mother, my brother, and myself. My father — he’s dead now, of course — was Jewish, and my mother was gentile, so we came from a mixed religious family. My brother was younger than myself by two and a half years. We were allowed to learn as much as we showed interest in as we grew up in any religion. Neither my mother nor my father actively practiced their own religions, although my father’s family were fairly Orthodox, so I got a smattering of the Jewish religion and a smattering of the Protestant. That’s how we were raised until all sorts of things started happening with the Nazis.

Kaplan: Did you know your grandparents?
LEVEQUE: I knew my grandfather on my father’s side; my grandmother on that side died long before I was born, I believe. I knew my father’s sisters, who lived in the same household. At least one of them did. The other one had a store she owned. They lived in Bischberg, Germany; it was quite a distance from Frankfurt Oder to Bischberg, but I spent some holidays there. That was awfully early in life, around the age of five and six. Things got a little bit too [rough?]. My mother was afraid that something would happen to us if we left, spent time away from the family because of the political unrest.

Kaplan: What year [inaudible]?
LEVEQUE: This must have been ’29 and ’30 because I hadn’t started school yet. I started school in 1930 when I was six years old and successfully went through grade school and then went to a high school at the age of 10, at least that’s what it’s equivalent to in this country. I even remember the name: Heinrich von Kleist School [spells out name]. The first thing that really penetrated into my life that things were not going to be the same as before was — my father was a physician. He had his practice as part of our flat in our house.

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: No. There was a flat downstairs. We had the first floor one. It was L-shaped, and there were a couple of more flats on the other side. I understand the house isn’t anymore. The first thing that happened was I came home from school, and two brown shirts were standing in front of the main door and said, “You can’t go in there.” 

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: I don’t remember. It was before I went to high school, so it must have been between ’30 and ’36. I said, “Why can’t I?” I was told, “Nobody can get in here. You can’t see the doctor.” I said, “Why not? He happens to be my father.” So they let us in. That was the first thing that happened.

Kaplan: [inaudible] before 1936. When were you aware, as you said, that things were not going to be the same?
LEVEQUE: That was one of them, the one that really brought something home to me. Before that, my parents would discuss the news, and I didn’t pay much attention. I was too busy in my own world at that age. 

Kaplan: What do you remember about Hitler’s rise to power?
LEVEQUE: I can remember that I was visiting my grandfather in [Duisburg?] when the Munich Putsch happened, but that’s about all. I heard his rantings and ravings on the radio at other people’s houses. My parents would listen to it until they couldn’t stand it anymore and turn it off [laughs]. That was ongoing, so I don’t have any real specific things. When I was 11 then, my parents decided that life was going to be very intolerable in Germany, and I don’t even remember — maybe I should have done some homework, but I didn’t feel like it — when Hindenburg was overthrown and Hitler actually took power. Anyhow, my parents decided we would try and emigrate. The Russians were soliciting for professional men to come to Russia and help them teach their people, and also they were short of people who were better educated than themselves, so we moved to Russia.

Kaplan: In what year?
LEVEQUE: That was ’37, in June or July. First we moved to Berlin in late ’36. My father left for Russia prior to us, and then my mother and my brother and myself, we followed. 

Kaplan: Why were you moving?
LEVEQUE: I was aware by osmosis we were going because the Jews were not going to be welcome in Germany, to put it mildly. So we moved to Russia and ended up in the Ukraine [Zaporizhia?]. I had a fairly good facility with languages, so I became quite fluent in Russian, at least Ukrainian Russian. My mother was stuck in the house. We were promised a house of decent proportions, which never materialized. We lived in two small rooms with a toilet down the hall, and my mother was quite miserable. It was part of a hospital compound, and my father worked at the hospital there. We were there for about a year and a half. Every so often my parents had to travel down to the main part of the city to get their visas redone. 

My mother, during that period of time, had a complete mastectomy because she had cancer of the breast. She took x-ray treatment. We would travel with her to keep her company because it was a long, couple of miles walk and then a tram ride of about a half hour to 45 minutes. It used to be full of people. She didn’t seem to be able to learn any Russian to speak of, and I very early on started translating for her. 

The climate when we got to Russia, and I don’t mean temperature-wise, people-wise, was very good. We had lots of friends; we had a real good time, my brother and I. Just shortly before this one trip to go to get the visa rehashed, just overnight, one day we were all friends, and the next day, they were shooting at us from behind buildings with slingshots.

Kaplan: Who is they?
LEVEQUE: Some of the bigger kids. All of a sudden there weren’t any friends. It was really strange. On one of the trips down with my mother to have her treatment, I saw people being walked down the street, handcuffed, with somebody in uniform — it wasn’t army; it probably was police — with a drawn gun. Taking them down, five, six, seven people. Things went crazy there, too. They started. 

That’s why they called my father to come down to the police station. I went with him, and I had to wait outside in the waiting room. They took my father into the office. He came out about a half an hour later, and he looked extremely disturbed. He couldn’t even talk to me. He said, “It’s all right. Tell your mother everything will be straightened out.” And that’s the last I saw of him. I got driven home in a police car with three policemen and the driver. On the way home, I remembered that my dad had been reading a book that my mother had said, “I wouldn’t have that around here.” She felt that it was politically not quite Russian philosophy.

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: I never read it. What I did do is, when I got in there — like I say, I had to translate. I knew where my father had hidden the book in the other room and told my mother to stay in this room with the guys and try and make believe she understood some of what they said. I went and got the book, stuck it under my dress into my underpants [laughs] because I didn’t want them to find it. I had a feeling they were going to search the place, which they did. Under duress, I was allowed to go to the bathroom. It wasn’t a bathroom; it was a small toilet in the side of the wall. At the bottom, there was a big hole that went down into the floor, evidently a rat hole. I thought of pushing the book down there, but couldn’t get it in. The police car was in the front with the driver in it, and I thought, “How in the hell am I going to get this book out of here and hidden someplace?” There was a window at the end of the hallway that we used to use instead of a door when we were playing. Couldn’t budge it, couldn’t get it open, so I had to grit my teeth and walk out the front door and just made believe I knew what I was doing. The driver didn’t say a word, just looked at me. I went in the field where we used to play and buried the book in a little dugout thing. 

Then I went back in and started explaining to my mother what was going on. Before we left Germany, some friend wanted us to have German history. Do you remember the cigarette cards that used to be collected by people? There would be different cards in a packet of cigarettes, like baseball cards only they had German history cards from way back to the present day. These people had the two albums. The one was the old history prior to Hitler; the other one was the ascension of Hitler. They gave that to us. They felt that us kids should have some kind of German history that we could maybe refer to someday. The police guys found those, and they took them and accused my father of doing German propaganda [laughs]. He didn’t come home. 

We spent the next couple of months going down to the police station trying to find out where he was. He wasn’t even allowed to have a toothbrush and a change of clothes. We even had to travel down to Dnipropetrovsk, which is quite a distance away, and try and get news. I had to go with her and do the translating. The Russians used to resent a 12-year-old talking to them and telling them what should be done, or why can’t we find out where my father is. They used to get quite belligerent, but my mother couldn’t do anything. Wait a minute. I’m a little ahead of myself. Prior to that my mother used to go on occasions by herself down to the police station, and I had sort of a nervous breakdown. If she didn’t come home by the time she said she’d be home, I’d get crying jags. They went away finally, but anyhow . . .

Kaplan: Was your brother older or younger?
LEVEQUE: Younger. I don’t recall if it affected him that much or not. He was almost three years younger. Anyhow, then when we came back from Dnipropetrovsk. Shortly after that we were told that we had ten days to get out of the country. By that time there came a day and my mother said, “After you eat this, there ain’t no more, and I have no more money.” But we managed to get most of our possessions shipped out. That was another tour de force because we had to arrange for it to be shipped. My mother wasn’t about to leave all our possessions there. We spent the last night at an acquaintance’s house. I shall never forget it. I slept on the kitchen table because they didn’t have enough beds, but they fed us and evidently gave my mother some money. We had to take the train. It took a couple of days, three days actually, and we had to be able to eat on the way out of the country.

Kaplan: Where were you going?
LEVEQUE: Back to Germany. It was Christmas Eve, and the people in the next compartment were singing Christmas songs when we crossed the Russian-Polish border. We went back to Germany to my mother’s mother’s and sister’s house in Brandenburg.

Kaplan: Your father?
LEVEQUE: We didn’t know, and they wouldn’t tell us. From December on, we stayed with my grandmother and my two — that would have been ’38. I shall never forget. I was playing with my cousin outside, and it was early March. I don’t remember the exact date. We were just coming back and going up the front stoop, and here was this man walking along. I looked twice, and it was my father. They had packed him in a cattle car and sent him out. We were so goddamn lucky he didn’t get sent to Siberia! There were so many of them that they sent there. We heard horror stories one after the other. Like I say, we were lucky in a lot of instances. Then as soon as we got reunited, we moved back to Berlin.

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVQUE: We got very little out of him, very little. He may have told my mother, but I know that he had a big scar right through his thumb, all the way. He said he got an infection in it. And that’s as close as he got to telling us of anything that happened. To this day, I think they put a thumbscrew on him. But he got back. We were back together.

Kaplan: Did he tell you how he got out?
LEVEQUE: He just got shoved in a cattle car and sent. That’s all I ever heard.

Kaplan: What is your understanding of why he was picked up?
LEVEQUE: They were rounding up most of the foreign people that they had solicited to come to the country because they had expertise — engineers, doctors. For some reason, God knows what Stalin and Lenin and all those guys, what was going on in their brains, why they did that, and then all of a sudden started collecting them and sending them to Siberia and taking the kids away and sending some to camps, the mother down this way and the father that way. They just separated them and gave them different names. They did all sorts of weird things. Like I say, we were lucky.

Kaplan: Do you know if his being Jewish had anything to do with it?
LEVEQUE: I haven’t a clue in the world. Anyhow, my mother managed to get my brother into a school that would accept him with his last name.

Kaplan: Was it a Jewish school?
LEVEQUE: I don’t think so; there weren’t any at that time. They’d already gone possibly underground. The principal evidently was sympathetic. There were a lot of people sympathetic; they did things but they weren’t publicized. My brother did get into the school, but I couldn’t. Not knowing what would happen, my parents decided that it would maybe be a good idea to get myself and my brother baptized in the Lutheran church, so we went through that.

Kaplan: What did your father think about that?
LEVEQUE: He figured it was politically prudent because he thought we’d maybe have a chance. We went through the motions, shall we say. The pastor that did that for us was in touch with the Quakers in England. He asked my parents would they like to send us kids to England in the refugee transports, and my parents decided yes, ten days before Christmas. I’m again ahead of myself, but let me finish up real quick. He arranged it, and ten days before Christmas we left Germany for England in a 300-kid refugee train, at some ungodly hour like 4:00 AM in the morning. My brother and I, one suitcase, what each kid could carry. That’s all we could take. But before that . . .

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: No, the war started in ’39. This was ten days before Christmas ’38. But before that, my brother’s birthday was on the tenth of November, and we had a little party. Right in the middle of it, they came to pick up my dad and took him away, and we didn’t know what was happening. That was Kristallnacht. I shall never forget. Here’s my brother’s birthday party; he’s been looking forward to a party. We couldn’t hardly concentrate. He had a little friend there, and we were trying to get him out so we could see if anybody else, any of our friends, knew what was happening, why they had come and taken my father. 

We did finally go. One particular lady lived on the fourth floor of a brownstone building in Berlin. My mother had rung the bell downstairs because the outside doors were locked. The woman stuck her head out of the window and said, “Don’t come in! Go away. They took our men, too. Go home.” That was repeated again, so we went home, and as we walked into the main public part of the building — anybody can go up, in and out, upstairs. There’s a transom over our front door, and the light was on. My mother said, “Didn’t we turn the light off?” “I think so. We didn’t leave it on.” She turned the key in the lock to go in, and my father called, “Is that you, Frieda?” 

The story he tells is that he and another guy were being held at the police station where they’d taken him. My father faked a heart attack, and the other guy had a wooden leg. They had traded police from outlying areas to come to Berlin areas, and the Berlin guys were sent to the outlying areas so nobody could use their friends [inaudible]. Anyhow, he faked this heart attack, and they finally told him, “If you and him can afford a cab, get the hell out of here and don’t let’s see you again.” My father after that never went out except at nighttime to get some fresh air. 

He lived through the whole war like that. He couldn’t go to air raid shelters or anything because, apart from anything else, they wouldn’t let Jews in. He didn’t want anybody to know that he was around. By the next morning we found out that all the shops had been mutilated, and everybody had to wear the yellow star and all that shit, shall we say. That’s when my parents decided that if we could get on to the transport, at least us kids, that we should be shipped out, and that’s what we did.

Kaplan: Was the Kristallnacht before you were baptized?
LEVEQUE: I can’t remember.

Kaplan: I was wondering if [inaudible] . . .
LEVEQUE: No, he didn’t go out. He stayed underground. My mother, being a gentile, was able to work and earn her keep.

Kaplan: What did she do?
LEVEQUE: She worked in a hospital. She wasn’t a nurse; actually she was a tailoress prior to getting married to my father, but she definitely had some aptitude. She used to help my father in the surgery. 

Kaplan: What about her health?
LEVEQUE: Evidently it held out long enough so that she died — Tyger was born in ’49, Pete was born in ’50, I think about 15 years after she had the radical. She survived, and she stuck with my father. When we got to England and got situated, my mother came over to see how we were situated, but she went back. She didn’t stay.

Kaplan: She was free to come and go.
LEVEQUE: Yes, she was able to do that.

Kaplan: Nobody questioned her [inaudible]?
LEVEQUE: I don’t know. She probably told me he was dead. 

Kaplan: What name did she use?
LEVEQUE: As far as I know she used Steinberg. The passport was in that name.

Kaplan: What is her full name [inaudible]?
LEVEQUE: My father’s name was Walter, God help, Steinberg. My mother’s name was Freida Korneffel [spells out last name]. 

Kaplan: Before you move ahead to talk about [inaudible], may I ask you a few more questions?
LEVEQUE: Sure, go ahead.

Kaplan: Back to when you were a little kid, you were learning something about Judaism and something about Protestantism. What did you think of yourself? Did you think of yourself as Jewish, nothing, or both?
LEVEQUE: One of my girlfriends was the daughter of a rabbi, and I spent a lot of time at her house and with her. We used to go to the temple, and even my mother would go because we wanted to know. To a certain extent, I was an observer. I did not care for the necessity that women had to sit in a separate area in the temple. As young as I was, I didn’t like that. But apart from that, it was nothing; I probably thought of myself as Jewish at that time.

Kaplan: And that was at what age?
LEVEQUE: Somewhere between six and ten, maybe even 11. My other girlfriend was in the same situation I was, half and half family. I spent a lot of time with her — they had more of a Jewish household, but not kosher or anything — but it hardly ever really came up between her and me. Different story. There were other people, acquaintances, that invited me to go to Christmas mass, and I was interested in finding out what Catholicism was about, so I went to a mass one time. 

Actually, I never considered myself an adherent to any particular religion, other than I feel there is a God, and he’s been on my side so many times I can’t refute him. But I don’t think — you might not like this, but it isn’t the religion that makes you more acceptable to God; it’s just a hat you wear. It’s how you behave in your life, how you treat other people, and how you deal with things yourself, as fairly as possible and all that sort of stuff. It’s much more a way of showing that you are a good person. I’m sorry, but that’s how it came out.

Kaplan: What was the reaction of your father’s family when he married your mother?
LEVEQUE: They semi-disowned him. They didn’t like it, but they tolerated it. That’s the best I can say.

Kaplan: How about her family?
LEVEQUE: The same sort of thing, but they were there for her when we came back from Russia. I don’t know if my grandfather on the other side would have been there for us. I would imagine yes, but he had died.

Kaplan: What about his mother?
LEVEQUE: His mother had been dead for years and years. One of his sisters disappeared in one of the concentration camps. His brother, for some reason I don’t know, but he survived how or what I don’t know, because my father and his brother did not communicate that much. I think it was just if he was well or not. The thing is he surfaced in East Germany after the war. As a matter of fact, I have a letter from his son at home. I have not written to him. My nephew, my brother’s son, is very interested in getting lineage, and he unearthed him. That’s just happened in the last year or two.

Kaplan: Is there anyone else on his side? You mentioned a sister and a brother…?
LEVEQUE: Yes. There were two sisters. I don’t know what happened to the other sister, and just the one brother. 

Kaplan: How about on your mother’s side?
LEVEQUE: There were quite a few, several that I never even met. She was one of 13 children. My grandfather on my mother’s side was part White Russian and part Polish. I never met him; he died before I was born. He went through three wives, and the third wife was my mother’s mother, and she was the oldest of the third wife. There were two sisters and I think two brothers, or one brother, from the third wife. I only met the two sisters, my aunts, and her brother, Uncle Fritz. He was a cripple. He was born with a hunchback and a clubfoot, and my grandmother took care of him all his life until she died. Actually, I think he died just a little bit before her. I think he died just before the Russians came into Germany. I know that the family walked to Bremen in front of the Russians to get away from them; they were terrified. My grandmother — she must have been 86, 88 — walked with them. She managed to survive another year after they got to Bremen. Anyhow, very tough start growing up.

Kaplan: [inaudible] Were there other Jewish families that you went to school with?
LEVEQUE: No. The rabbi, his daughter. There was another physician who lived on the other side of the river. They were Jewish, but they weren’t friends. They were acquaintances, mostly because both my father and he were physicians. The social life my parents had was a little bit different than what social life is nowadays. I know they used to have a party every so often in the evening, usually to play cards or something like that, and occasionally a coffee klatch in the afternoon. But we kids were never involved in any of that; we never even met the people that came. It was children over here and adults belong over here. They were good parents. 

Kaplan: Did they have a housekeeper?
LEVEQUE: In the early years, yes; there was a regular maid and one that came in and did the heavier work once or twice a week. Then we had a nurse to take care of us kids when we were little until — the last one was —anyhow, after that we had a teenage girl who would come and read and take us for walks and play with us, until my dad couldn’t work anymore.

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: Not at that time. No. They owned the house we lived in. That was a big place. There was money coming in. My dad was not poor. He had quite a bit of backlog, savings. My father was always very — he saved it [laughs]. He didn’t stint it, but he always made sure there was money.

Kaplan: [inaudible] back to 1935 [inaudible] do you remember that at all?
LEVEQUE: I think maybe that’s when those two guys came and stood in front of our door and said, “You can’t come in.” That must have been it.

Kaplan: That’s when his practice . . .?
LEVEQUE: Yes. It went down, definitely, because people were afraid to come. The very faithful ones continued, but my father — in those days it was different than what physicians do now. He had a two-hour surgery time in the morning from ten to noon and from two to four in the afternoon. The rest of the time, he was out on the road doing house calls.

Kaplan: What kind of a doctor was he?
LEVEQUE: General practitioner. He did everything. We’d ride with him in the car when he had to go to some outlying farms. He’d go in and see the patient. We’d stay outside and play. I can remember one time, it was strawberry time, and the lady of the house said, “There’s a strawberry field. Go ahead.” We had a nice childhood. If we hadn’t had the kind of early childhood that both my brother and I had, I think we would have turned out much more injured. It got us through a hell of a lot of stuff after we left and went to England.

Kaplan: You said that during that time your parents talked about emigrating and they ended up in Russia. Did they consider going anywhere else?
LEVEQUE: Yes. They considered coming to the States, but they figured that Russia was the country of the future because it had all the resources. It would be a second United States. And the offer was there, with golden promises.

Kaplan: Did you have any contacts in the United States? Would anybody have been able to sponsor you?
LEVEQUE: My mother had a sister living in Baltimore. She got married and moved to the States with her husband after the First World War. I even met her when I came over; she was still alive. But whether she would have done it, I don’t know. It’s a case of which way to jump, what to do. You do the best you know how. Even before we went to Russia, I can remember some friend of my parents had said to her, “Don’t leave the country. Stick with it. In the long run, you’ll be better off.” But under the circumstances, I don’t know. I think that’s why they stayed put and didn’t try to go across the border somehow or other after. We had to come back to Germany, at least my parents.

Kaplan: Is there anything else about those early years that you would like to [share?].
LEVEQUE: Yes, briefly I was involved with a Zionist group who were quite militant. They were older than I was. I was one of the youngest ones in the group. I didn’t really feel like I wanted to be that much of a soldier as they wanted me to be. I only went to a few meetings. They were all talking about going to Israel, but I knew we weren’t going to go. We had been once. Oh, no. That was before we went to Russia. That’s when I was still in Frankfurt.

Kaplan: Was Israel out of the question?
LEVEQUE: I don’t know. I had never heard it discussed by my parents. Like I say, children on one side, parents on the other, and they meet, but parents decide the heavy questions and don’t necessarily load them on the kids. At least that’s the way I was raised. We go with where the rest of the family is. 

Kaplan: So when you did leave for Russia, was that frightening for you?
LEVEQUE: No, it was exciting. My mother was apprehensive, but out of all reason. It’s carried through whenever we’ve moved and lived in different countries. I’ve done quite a bit since then. My husband wants to study everything and look up what’s this and what the temperatures are and — forget it! Go there with an open mind and accept what you get. It’s much more exciting, much more interesting to me [laughs]. That was right from the start. It wasn’t frightening, not to me. Everything was new and exciting. Even when things were lousy, it was still just pull your way through. Any more questions?

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: OK.

Interviewer 2: [inaudible] Did you go to school [inaudible]?
LEVEQUE: We went for about three months, if that long. We had to hike about two and a half miles to school through open steppes, and the snow and the cold were such that my mother decided she didn’t want to have to pick us up frozen, she would teach us at home. Well, that went the way all other things went, so we didn’t. And we didn’t really benefit from the little time we were in the Russian school because at that time we weren’t quite fluent enough, and they plunged us into things like geometry. Well, geometry in a foreign language, things like that. But I was always, and my brother too, we were avid readers. I missed a good two years of schooling altogether, but when I went to England I had no problems. My basic schooling was far above average, I think. It must have been because I started right in with the high school group and graduated with my class two years later.

Kaplan: Do you want to take a break, or do you want to keep going?
LEVEQUE: What time is it? Can I go out and have a quick cigarette?

[Break]

Kaplan: It looks like we’re up the point in your story where you and your brother went to England on the transport . . .
LEVEQUE: Yes, and they warned us before we got on the train that the Nazis would come through and collect all the jewelry on the kids, and to not wear any, and don’t let them know that you have any. I had small earrings, but in those days, my hair was still like this, so I couldn’t put it forward and hide them. That’s all I took with me in the first place. Yes, they came [inaudible]. They said, “Got a ring?” They collected all the jewelry from the kids. It was some ungodly hour in the morning; it was still dark. It was very difficult for my parents. My dad did come to the station with us. I think it was harder for my parents than for us at that particular moment. Later on when we got to England, then homesickness set in. That was a different story for us then, but at the time it was exciting, something new. 

I don’t remember too much about the train trip except that these guys came through and collected the jewelry, and then we were loaded on a cross-channel ship. It was evening; we slept on the ferryboat. It was next morning that we landed in England, I believe it was Dover, and the thing is, all they fed us was hot, sweet, milky tea and cookies. If you have only sweet tea and cookies for two meals, supper and breakfast, you’re heartily sick of anything sweet, I’ll tell you that [laughs]! I did have a couple of bananas. They handed out some bananas, that’s right, before they unloaded us. We had to wait a while on the ferry. I can remember we were feeding the seagulls, throwing the pieces of bananas in the air, which was quite exciting to us kids, but we ate most of the bananas ourselves.

They put us in a holiday camp in England. They had uninsulated small buildings, separated from each other, something like a motel, and it was on the beach. This was December. We took our meals in the main hall. We were the second bunch of kids. They ranged from age four to 18, boys and girls. There were already 300 there and then another 300 that I was part of. It was cold at night. We used to get dressed at nighttime to go to bed. I had ski pants. We put on every bit of clothing we could possibly put on. I used to sleep with my blanket over my face, and in the morning we would have frost on the tops of our blankets from our breath. It was cold. The water in the sinks froze up. We couldn’t wash, couldn’t wash stockings, couldn’t do anything like that. The worst of it was, though, that after a meal — I can’t stand sticky hands, and there was no place to wash [laughs]. 

They fed us well. I can’t even remember what they did to keep us reasonably entertained, but we were allowed to go and walk on the beach. It was a pebble beach. I had a hat that I was very proud of, somewhat like a baseball cap. It was the big rage when I was still in Germany. I had one of those, and a gust of wind lifted it up and blew it out to sea. It made me feel very sad because I loved that hat. First thing actually lost. I was only there for maybe two weeks. 

When you have 18-year-old boys and girls and younger, there started to be shenanigans, so they decided to ship the girls to a different camp. One of the main things that my parents had insisted on was, “Stay together you two. You’re the ones to make sure you stay together.” I was very unhappy when they insisted that the girls get moved, but they assured me it was not a permanent separation, so I went. 

We were sent down to the south of England, a much nicer camp. It was quite a bit warmer there. Except a couple of strange things. There were three of us that shared a room. One of my roommates got an earache, and nobody would do anything. The poor girl nearly went crazy because they wouldn’t let her see a doctor until — it started during the night. I went and woke up people in charge, counselor, shall we say, and she says, “Give her a hot water bottle and go back to sleep.” It was strange; they were good to us, but that particular person was reprehensible because I think the poor girl’s eardrum finally ruptured. Then somebody came down with diphtheria, and we all got diphtheria shots so we wouldn’t get it. 

In the meantime, though, I did get word of how my brother was doing from one of the other people. It was one specific woman that was working with me. At least, I was one of her charges, so to speak. She came and she said, “I’ve got a place for you and your brother.” “Where?” “In Ireland. Some rich family would like to have a brother and sister of your age.” Now my mother had promised us that she would come over and see how we were situated when we were situated, and Ireland seemed to me like it was the United States at that time. I didn’t know how far it was. I said, “No, I don’t want to go to Ireland.” I’ve been so glad that we didn’t go there. Lo and behold, it was accepted. She said, “I’ll try something else.” It ended up we went to York City. My brother was adopted, so to speak, by a Quaker boarding school, the Bootham School in York. He stayed there for close to four years.

Kaplan: He was about eleven at this time? What was his name?
LEVEQUE: Karl. They had a nice, full-size indoor swimming pool, and he learned to swim properly there and became an excellent swimmer amongst other things. Myself, I was adopted, so to speak, by a church school attached to the York Minster. It was a small private girls’ school, and the kids there — although it was a big secret, it did leak out — they all decided that for their war effort they’d bring a little envelope every month with their contribution towards my upkeep. Now this was not a boarding school; this was a day school. I was taken by a family whose daughter went there, and she was a year younger than myself but in the same grade — we were in the same class — and a younger brother just about the same distance apart as my brother and myself. 

That’s when homesickness reared its ugly head. Customs were different, and I couldn’t speak the language yet too well. It took a while to really get fluent. You went to bed at night with a tight band around your head because of the concentration all day trying to learn the language, but that’s the best way. Nobody could speak German, so that’s the only way that you can really get into it and learn the language. You have to, in self-defense. 

The thing is, I had lived such a different life than the daughter, and that particular family had very little insight. They wanted to treat me like a twelve-year-old or even younger, and I’d been used to being treated almost like an adult. It was extremely difficult for me to try and live with that. Then I guess the daughter became jealous. She had thought that having an older sort of sister would be nice, but she didn’t like it, at least that’s how it came across to me. It was decided to find somebody else for me to live with. 

But first it was Easter time, and my mother came over and visited. They found a place for her to stay at this maiden lady’s house. She kept house for her brother. Very, very English and a very timid person, but a very kind person. I can remember Miss [Yule?]. My mother stayed with them. She came to the house where I was staying. Actually, those people were very kind to us, too. As a family, they decided to go away for a weekend so that my mother could have time with us, and my brother was allowed to come. She even cooked the dinner for us. I shall never forget. She made a trifle, the only dessert the English know how to make that’s really good, a bowl about yea big. In those days I had hollow legs, and we finished that trifle between us. The dear lady, when they came back, she was quite upset that we would eat that whole trifle. She expected us to take a little spoonful each [laughs]. Even my mother was a little bit upset when she found out that Mrs. Andrews was unhappy because we ate the whole trifle. It was a silly little thing that sticks in your mind.

Anyhow, my mother was ready to leave. She was there about ten days or something like that, and during that time there were quite a few people whom I didn’t know but somehow were involved. They were trying to help my mother. They wanted her to stay in England. She even had an interview with the Archbishop of York. He said if she didn’t go back he would see to it that she would not be an illegal alien and all that, but my mother said no, she was going to go back to her husband. I remember we took her to the railroad station and waved goodbye, and as she was disappearing down in the train I had this [tears and long pause] premonition that I’d never see her again. And I didn’t [more tears and sobs]. Oh, shit. Cut it out. That’s a horrible feeling, and it came true. I never got to see her again. Got to get my voice back.

Kaplan: Did you share that with [inaudible]?
LEVEQUE: No, I didn’t share it with anybody until much later, not even to my brother. He saw her again. Yes, he did. So anyhow, then it was decided that I would move over to Miss Yule’s house and stay with her, and I’ve always been an animal person. I like animals. I wanted something, and much against the old lady’s desires — and her brother was a real strange person, very rude to his sister and treated her like a dishrag. He wasn’t a very nice person. She was just very afraid. She didn’t ever want her brother to get angry. She wanted to do everything. It was a strange household. Anyhow, I moved to her house and continued. School lets out the end of June, and you only have a month’s summer vacation in England, a month to six weeks, not like here. 

I spent the summer at her house, and my brother and I got together quite frequently at her house, or I’d go to the school and we would visit so we wouldn’t lose complete touch. I tried to find out if my brother was reasonably happy at the school. There were, I believe, two other Jewish refugee boys there. One of them was, I believe, five years older than my brother, and the other one was about two or three years older. I remember his name was Stein. Neither one of them wanted anything to do with an eleven-year-old or twelve-year-old. The boy named Stein was the closest in age, and my brother tried to be friends with him and got rebuffed quite frequently, so he was an extremely lonesome child. But the headmaster at the school, his family, they had us out to their country house for summer vacation for about three or four days and were very kind to us. Time went rather fast in a way. 

The get-togethers got more infrequent with my brother because we both got involved in our own schools. I can remember that I did not want to go back to school. I was afraid of starting in again. I don’t know why I was afraid. I know I decided I was sick, and it took me a week and Miss Yule saying, “I think you’re better now. You can start school. Are you sure you’re sick?” I finally decided no, I’m not going to be scared anymore. I’m going to have to do it. Really I don’t know why. But that second year then, I got a good support group of three other girls. We worked together and we had a rivalry between each other, grade-wise, and it was a lot better than the first three months in school. You get awful tired of everybody saying, “How do you like it here? How do you like being in England?” Every kid in school wondered. I was one of the seven wonders of the world. 

I remember one time this girl came running down the steps behind me; we were going outside on recess or something. She was running down the stairs, and she was yakking at me again saying, “How do you like it here?” I was, I don’t know if frustrated is the right word, but I went like this and hit her in the face. I felt terrible, but I did it. She cried. I had hurt her. When you backhand somebody, it hurts. And I felt horrible. I felt mean. But there was something, I think it was the pressures and what have you. I had to have some kind of release and that was it, but it backfired [laughs]. Those sort of things and trying to learn the language and learning the customs and fitting in. The one word that was drilled into me: be tolerant. Be tolerant. Remember you’re on their turf. Be tolerant. Learn what you can and fit in.

Kaplan: Were you identified as Jewish?
LEVEQUE: Yes. Jewish-German. The German was much more important to people than the Jewish part because by September ’39 the war started. After that it was German, never mind Jewish, that worked against you. Anyhow, then I met this other lady who raised dogs. She had a foster girl staying with her for a while, and when she went back home, I asked if I could come live with her and she took me in. Mrs. Jackson. I stayed there until I was 17 and ended up running her dog kennel for her. I was happy as a clown with her, most of the time. 

There were little difficulties, not with her and me but with her. Her husband was a sweetheart. He worked in the post office and every once in a while there’d be a package that wasn’t delivered or something, with chocolates in them or oranges. They would have a chance to bring something like that home, right from the post office. I can remember he had a big box of Kit Kats that got lost. His wife gave me a couple of bars of Kit Kats. Like I say, I was still in my teenage and always hungry. As a matter of fact, I was always hungry in England, period, until I left. Her husband would sneak me one into my lunchbox when she wasn’t looking, “Don’t tell.” He was very kind.

Kaplan: Did they have children?
LEVEQUE: No, never had any children, but they were very kind. To make a long story short, some female dentist — who was also very kind to me, did all my dental work for free and got me over my horror of dentists which the Russians started — she couldn’t find a place to live, and she wanted to rent a bedroom from the Jacksons. Then it became — I can’t remember the dentist’s name — that she was more important than I was. When she was there, I ate in the kitchen, this sort of thing. I had to give up my bedroom because she moved in. Little difficulties like that which were hurtful to me. Maybe they shouldn’t have been, but I needed to feel wanted. Anyhow, essentially I was happy there.

Kaplan: What kind of contact did you have with your family?
LEVEQUE: Once the war started, none for quite a while until the Red Cross got going, and then I think you could write 25 words a month to send, and that was for the duration. We were essentially on our own. I went to school. I got my school certificate, which is a state examination. I passed it. Then I was told that I could not stay at the school and go on for my higher school certificate because they decided that they had done enough for the war effort, even though I had only just started. What would I want to do? Well, at that time I had wanted to go on for a higher school certificate and then go to university and maybe become a pediatrician. But that was out, so they said, “Would you like to do something else in the medical field? Would you like to be a nurse?” I thought, well, I’ll think about it. So they took me to a mental hospital.

Kaplan: Who’s “they”?
LEVEQUE: A teacher from the school. The principal and a couple of the other men teachers at my school must have worked with the Quaker organization, and between them they would decide what to do with us “difficulties,” so to speak. They took me to the mental hospital and said, “Would you like to work here?” Beautiful place. It was like a country club. Some of the patients I met were delightfully delusional. One was Queen Mary of Timbuktu, and somebody else was Julius Caesar. They had tennis courts. It was a beautiful place! 

However, I was 17, and I thought no way do I want to work with people [like that]. But — and this is a paradox — I couldn’t enter nursing school until I was at least 18, and yet I could go into mental nursing. It doesn’t make sense at 17. Anyhow, I said, “No, thank you.” “What other choice would you?” “Well, I like to work with animals, maybe go agricultural.” I even went to one of the ag schools and interviewed, but because I didn’t have any money, they said, “This is war time. We don’t have any scholarships.” Too bad. So that was out. 

Then the Quaker group had a place down in the south of England — the town’s name was Haslemere, I think Sussex [it’s in Surrey] — where they had a private home that they made into a school for all the kids that came over, refugees that did not find homes. They had a small 20-acre farm part attached to it, and they supplied their own food pretty well. So I was told that I could go there and learn agriculture, like in the college. Well, I got down there. Yes, they had one guy that gave us some classes, teaching us about crop rotation and what have you, but it wasn’t a college. It wasn’t accredited. It was just a school. We had kids from the age of five and six up to the teens. We all took turns. One day a week we did the bathrooms. One day a week we would take turns in the kitchen. The rest of the time, if you were teaching the younger kids, then you taught the others, and we worked on the farm.

The first night there I had to babysit a sow who’d just had 13 piglets that day. You have to babysit them because they tend to lie on their own babies. I don’t know what I would have done if she had. I could not have moved even an inch of her. She was huge and ferocious, very mean [laughs]. I was put in charge of the chickens, had about a hundred, different breeds, and I would feed them and collect the eggs and all that stuff. I used to be so conscientious; even if an egg was a little bit cracked, I’d take it to the kitchen. The guy that was running that end of it, he told me I was not being careful enough with the eggs. There were cracked eggs in there, and I had to be more careful. 

Well, the chickens do crack them sometimes when they lay them, especially if there’s more than one egg in the nest. So I thought, darn you, and I learned how to drink raw eggs. If there was a cracked one, I ate it before I took the basket up to the kitchen [laughs]. Never hurt me one little bit. I got extra protein. And the same thing when we had a goat, and I took care of the goat too. She had a couple of kids, and oh, I had a delightful time with those kids. Cute. I had to milk her when the kids got taken to the butcher, which was just — and nobody liked goat’s milk. “Feed it to the pig.” I used to milk the goat, then drink my fill of goat’s milk and give the rest to the pig [laughs]. The strange thing is, warm goat’s milk that has must been freshly milked does not have that peculiar taste that goat’s milk has once it gets cold. It’s strange.

Kaplan: How long did you stay there?
LEVEQUE: Well, I raised heaven and earth. I was told I would only have to stay three months if I didn’t like it. When I got down there, the principal that ran the school said, “We never take anybody for less than nine months. You’ve got to stay nine months.” As soon as I found that out, I started in, “No way.” It ended up that I was there almost nine months, but the thing is, I wrote to my brother. He was still at Bootham School, and I wrote to Mrs. Jackson. Anyhow, Karl, my brother, told Mr. Green, his principal. He evidently asked about me, and he told him that I wanted out from there. 

So the next thing I heard, he wrote me a letter and said would I be interested in working in a dairy with the cows up in Northumberland, and I said yes, anything to get out of that situation where I was. However small the farm is, you work from 7:00 AM until dark. The house was up on a hill. You come up, you’re dead beat, you’ve eaten, you want to fall into bed, and here is a big puddle of water right on your bed because the roof leaked. So we turned on the gas fire to try and dry the blankets a bit, and we got hauled over the coals because we turned on the fire to dry the blankets. “Oh, you could use them wet.” I had to get out of there. Half a day off once in a while. No money. What do you do with yourself? I used to go hiking and eat blackberries from blackberry bushes in the fields behind the place.

Anyhow, the next thing I was invited to tea in town, in Haslemere, for an interview for the job in Northumberland. They were Quaker people, relatives of the guy that was going to maybe hire me. On the way there, I slipped and fell and put a hole in the only stockings I had left, and the only dress I had that was decent was a summer dress and it was wintertime. I took my stockings off and went bare-legged, and oh, it was cold in a summer cotton dress, but evidently it worked. 

Then I moved the beginning of May. In England they have May and October, I believe, changeover times for farm workers. So I started in May, or was it March? One or the other. I worked there for over a year. In the wintertime, we had to go out and cut kale that’s got frost and rime on it. It’s cold and wet, and you can’t have long sleeves because it’s all wet. That was the only thing. I finally thought, no, I didn’t want another winter. I liked it otherwise, but it would just cut down to the bone. So then I got to know somebody who opened a door for me. I said, “I might as well go into nursing. I’m old enough now.”

I had thought of being a Red Cross nurse, volunteer type. They had really nifty uniforms [laughs]. But this dear lady did me a big favor, and I took my nurse’s training at Newcastle General Hospital. I was there three-and-a-half years. That’s when being a German really raised its ugly head. Everything that went wrong, yours truly was blamed for it. There came a day when I had been there about six months [second rotation?]. We used to go during visiting hours in what was called the sluice, the bathroom in those days. We washed bandages and rolled them and all that. We used to sit on the side of the bathtub and roll bandages unless we were called or something was needed. 

The two of us were sitting there rolling bandages, and in comes the charge nurse and she, “You can’t sit down.” Oh, that was a rule in British training. You never sat on somebody’s bed. You never sat down except in the kitchen when you went for lunch. You never sat down anyplace. She said, “You’re not to sit down. What are you doing here rolling bandages? The cubicles in the back need scrubbing down because we’re expecting possible new patients.” That had been an unused area. There were about four cubicles. “Steinberg, you get in there and do it.” She didn’t like me at all. I was so angry, and I cried to myself. I was so mad, and I thought, “Damnit, all you’re wanting is to run me out of here. I’m not!” I scrubbed cubicles. I scrubbed floors. I did everything. 

Then came a turnaround day when we had an emergency, and that same charge nurse and I were the only two dealing with it. When we were through she told me, “You always made me feel a little bit frantic because you always moved so deliberate, but now I see that in an emergency you act deliberate but good.” And after that, we never became buddies, but both of us developed respect for each other. And she didn’t treat me like a — this could happen anyplace in the world. This is not specific. But some of the things were brought on because my name was Steinberg and also there was always a little accent. I worked real hard to try and lose it.

Kaplan: What year was it when you finished your nurse’s training?
LEVEQUE: ’43.

Kaplan: Were you still [inaudible]?
LEVEQUE: Before I was through, I had met my husband-to-be, and he was in the infantry. He was on leave in England. I only knew him for a couple days, but he told me that when he was going back to Germany he was going to be stationed in Berlin. So I wrote a long letter to my parents and asked him to deliver it, and he did. He visited with my parents quite a few times, took them coffee and stuff they needed. We corresponded. After that, things became easier. Shortly after that we could write regular letters, but by that time I had been on my own so long that the letters weren’t as frequent as they should have been probably. My mother was sick and couldn’t travel. I didn’t have the money or the passport or anything like that to go and see them, and quite truthfully, I didn’t want to go back.

My brother, in the meantime, after he got out of school, he joined the British army and became naturalized British. He stayed in England. He married and had two sons. But he took his wife on a honeymoon to Germany, and he was able to go over when my mother was dying. I was over here by that time. I had one child and the second one was due in another month or so, and my husband was going to college on the GI. There wasn’t money, and they wouldn’t let me fly anyhow that late along. She died about a month before my second son was born.

Kaplan: What country was your husband from?
LEVEQUE: He was born in Fresno and lived all his life in Oregon [laughs]. Well, we corresponded for a couple of years, and then he was going to come back over to Europe. He was going to work his way over with the Merchant Marines. He was driving with a bunch of other guys across the States, and they had a car accident. He ended up in the hospital with, for all intents and purposes, a broken neck. Anyhow, he wrote and asked if I’d [inaudible]. 

By that time I was living in London doing private nursing with one of my girlfriends. We shared a small apartment. She worked the day shift with most of the patients, and I worked the night shift, or the other way around. We only had one bed, so it was easier that way [laughs]. She worked the night shift, and I worked the day shift most of the time. My life wouldn’t have been that way if we had stayed as a family. It would have been very different. I probably would have been able to go to college and university because my father would have seen to it. But you go with the flow. You want to ask me questions?

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: I was working when the war ended. Everybody was having a hell of a time; by the time we got off, everybody was drunk as a skunk [laughs]. We were sort of feeling left out of the celebration. That’s when I met my husband-to-be. That was ’46, no ’45. That’s right. I was still in training. I started in early ’43 and left the hospital, passed my boards, all except one subject. I missed the orals. I had to take that particular subject again. But I’d had enough of the hospital routine. The nurse’s training was very different in England than here. You get intensive schooling for about three months, anatomy, physiology, that good stuff. Then you start working on the floors, and you learn the actual, practical part and go to classes too. We worked 12-hour shifts. It’s pretty rough, and you’re always hungry, and if you are at all wanting a good time, it’s frowned upon because you’re not doing your studies. Even if you pass all your stuff, you still don’t deserve any fun. It was a hard rule, the method they had. 

But by golly, I got my boards in ’45, the final one in ’46. I got better than the average bear. I got high grades in everything, so they figured it was a fluke and I just had to take that one. And it was a fluke. The guy that did the oral, I couldn’t get anyplace with him. I sat my boards in this country again in 1977, the whole shebang. No problem. So it was a damn good training if it sticks with you that long.

Kaplan: So when the war was over, did you have any thoughts of going back to Germany to see your parents?
LEVEQUE: No. I would have liked to have gone back and see them, yes. It was there. But at the same time, the world was not — number one, I was stateless. It was enough problematic just to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Food was rationed to a much greater degree than in this country. Two eggs a week, half a pound of sugar a month, a couple of potatoes a week, a half a pound of meat a week, and what you could scrounge, clothes. You’ve got so many coupons. On one coat you could use up a whole year’s coupons, or one sheet. There was too much other kind of pressure. 

My brother got out of the army and didn’t know what to do, which way to go. I tried to help him to find his way. I did get him apprenticed in the hotel business, so at least he had something to work for. It wasn’t necessarily his first choice, but I didn’t know that at the time. He since then told me many, many years later that he wished he had gone into police work because that’s what he had thought of doing when I came up with this apprenticeship. He turned into a fantastic chef and had his own restaurant. You have one kind of a dream, but things push you in a different direction. You take what you can get and make the most of it.

Kaplan: Were you ever in danger from the bombing?
LEVEQUE: Yes. As a matter of fact, right at the beginning of the war, a lone plane came over York and we were all in the house downstairs, all blacked out, and I mean blacked out. There were some friends visiting. One of the guys went outside and came back in and said, “I think it’s a Jerry up there.” We all got up to rush outside to see this German plane. No, we were going to go upstairs and look out the bedroom windows because the bedroom windows were not blacked out. We just didn’t turn on the lights. We were halfway up the stairs when we heard this whistle [makes whistling sound], and we dived down underneath the stairwell. The bomb hit in the field behind where we lived, and it made a huge crater. It rattled and broke half the windows on that side of the house. That one was close enough.

Then my brother, he went through when they bombed York City, after I was gone, when they dropped all the incendiaries, and he was on the roof, picking them up and putting them in the buckets from the school and saw the city burning. When I was in Northumberland on the farm, we had them come over. They’d come over Newcastle, and our house was high enough on the hillside that we could see the skyline of Newcastle. It must have been close to ten miles out of the city. We could see the anti-aircraft barrage putting up what looked like a dot-to-dot net in the sky lit up. 

Every so often one of the planes would fly down the river because we were awfully close to a munitions factory that was located on the river Tyne. They would look for it. They would come down and drop flares and then drop a bomb or two, but luckily they were always far enough away. I was lucky in a lot of ways. Especially when they drop the flares, you feel so exposed. You think that they can see everything exactly where you are standing, and that they are going to drop it on you [laughs]. I was in Newcastle one time when they had a raid, and the friends I was staying with, they had an anti-aircraft gun right behind their house. We couldn’t hear anything except the aircraft guns going off. The whole house shakes and everything else. But like I say, I was lucky in that respect.

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: Yes, I heard about it, but I already knew about them. Before I even left Germany, I knew that they were there. But the pressures of life as I was living it didn’t give me much time to think about it. I just kept hoping that my father’s luck would hold out and he would stay underground, and the infrequent letters that did get through kept saying, “Yes, it’s OK.” Maybe I got a little calloused, who knows? But what the heck can you do? You can’t spend your life worrying about something you — it’s there in the back of your mind, but you can’t make it ruin your life. You’ve got to go on with what you’re learning and what you’re doing and have to keep your head above water.

Kaplan: [inaudible] connected with the underground movement?
LEVEEQUE: I don’t know. I doubt it. My father was a very scholarly person. He couldn’t even drive a nail into the wall without hitting his thumb. He was all thumbs when it came to anything mechanical or dexterous. He could sew up a patient in a beautiful knitting, but anything else, no. What he did . . .

[END TAPE ONE, BEGIN TAPE TWO]

Kaplan: This is Tape two, September 12, 1993, interview with Eve Leveque continuation. We’re going to talk now about your relationship with your husband-to-be and coming over to the States.
LEVEQUE: After the war over, from there back?

Kaplan: From when you got your visa. You said that he was making a decision between two women.
LEVEQUE: I wondered if that had to go in there [laughs]. My husband had a girlfriend in France and myself in England. He decided to come over to Europe, and I had a suspicion that he was then going to make up his mind which one he really wanted to marry. He was driving across the States. He was going to come over on the boat in the Merchant Marine and was involved in an accident, and he ended up in the hospital. So he wrote and asked me to marry him. I said, “Yes.” I was working in London then doing private nursing, and with his help financially and my little reserve monies — because I hadn’t been out of school that long and housing was expensive, food too — anyhow, I got my visa and wasn’t aware that the visa had a limited time to run and that I only had three months during which to get out of England until somebody, one of my patients, pointed it out to me that I only had a couple of weeks left on my visa. I was talking to him trying to figure out how to get out of England in the first place, too. He was instrumental also in getting my brother his training-ship in the hotel business, same guy. Anyhow . . .

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: No. I think he was in the hotel business, but he had cancer of one kind or another. I can’t remember. But he was a patient of mine. I had to really work at it. I had to go black market in order to get a passage on the Queen Mary. It wasn’t a choice. First it was going to be Queen Elizabeth, and then they said, “No, it has to be the Queen Mary because they don’t have room.” There were so many people traveling. I got to the United States around the third of March, somewhere in there.

Kaplan: What year?
LEVEQUE: ’48. I then spent several days with my aunt, my mother’s sister who lived in Baltimore, and her family. On the way to Baltimore I met this gentleman on the train who wanted to show me his city, New York, and asked me if I came back through New York could he show me some of the sights. After I left my aunt’s house, I went back to New York and he showed me. We went up to the village, and I had my first piece of pizza. I didn’t care for it; it was too much solid food. I couldn’t eat that much. Here he had ordered a big pizza, and I could only eat one slice. He thought I would be able to eat the whole thing [laughs]. Your stomach sort of shrinks down when you don’t have that much food. That was rich. It was good. Anyhow, then he took me to some of his friends’ house. We went up the RCA Building, but it was too windy and they wouldn’t let us out on the platform. And he took me to a play. 

Then I flew to Portland and was met at the airport by my husband. We were walking across the tarmac. He was being a gentleman, and he said, “Let me carry your little suitcase.” As he took it, it opened up, and all the unmentionables on the tarmac. Were we ever highly embarrassed, both of us. Anyhow, we survived it, packed up, and I stayed at his parents’ house. I wanted some time to make sure that this was really the person I wanted to marry. 

He had bought a shell of a house with some of his army money, and we were going to finish it inside and either live there or sell it, although we knew that he was going to go back to school in Corvallis to get his degree. We were about two-thirds finished working on the house when the Vanport flood hit and the thing floated two feet over the foundation. The only thing that held it down was the plumbing. We had water in the attic almost waist high. We rode out there to see whether the house was still there [laughs], so then we decided we weren’t going to wait until the water went down. We got married on the seventh of June in ’48. Life proceeded from there.

Kaplan: Your husband knew that you were Jewish?
LEVEQUE: Yes, he knew my background. He had met my parents. He had spent time with them in Berlin. So he was very much aware, but it didn’t make any difference and it never has. As a matter of fact, if there is something in that line that he thinks I might be interested in and I haven’t seen it or heard about it, he will bring it to my attention. It’s nothing that bothers him. 

What else? I was going to say that after the water went down, we finished the house, we rented it, went back down to Corvallis. My husband went to school to get his master’s degree, and I started producing children, one after the other, five of them. Three boys and then two girls. 

The oldest one was born in Corvallis. The others were born in Portland at Emanuel Hospital. Five children, like I said: three boys and three [sic] girls. The oldest one, my son [Tiger?] lives in Illinois, is married, and he would be 44. The next son will be 45 in October. The next one is 18 months younger, so he’ll be 43 next year. Number two son is Peter. Number three son is Paul. My fourth child is Rochelle. My youngest daughter is Dominique, and she lives in Indianapolis, has two children. Rochelle, my oldest daughter, lives in Portland and has two children. My youngest son just got married a year and a half ago. They live in California, and they decided to come and get married where Philip and I got married, at the courthouse in Portland. They had the wedding up here. They don’t have any children. My number two son, Peter, got married in Iowa. He works at the Newport Aquarium, the new one, and he has one son, Sean, who is 15 now. My oldest son I already told about. He’s married. His wife had two boys when they got married, but she couldn’t have any more. So that’s the family.

Kaplan: Are any of the spouses Jewish?
LEVEQUE: No. 

Kaplan: How did you raise your children in terms of religion?
LEVEQUE: I became introduced to Unitarianism when we were living in Georgia. It seemed to us that it was the way we wanted to go, and we joined the Unitarian Church in Virginia. Then when we moved to Ohio we continued, and the children all went to the church and the youth group and learned about all the different religions. As far as I can tell, they all more or less stayed thinking very much Unitarian. 

Except for Paul, who for a while was involved with this cult in California. He’s an extremely intelligent and brainy person, my number three son Paul. He went to Case Western and took political science. At the end of his first year, he ran for student body president and lost by one vote. He spent his third year in Africa; there he was almost teaching the subject. When he came back, he decided that what they were teaching at Case Western, and other places too, political science, he didn’t agree with most of it because it was being taught out of books rather than what was really happening in different countries. Then he wouldn’t go back to college. 

He became a complete vegetarian, moved to San Francisco, and learned how to make holograms, was there a couple years and then came home for a year and did all sorts of offbeat things. Not drugs. There was a craze for a while, pyramids. If you sleep under a pyramid, you would be more healthy and all that good stuff. He sold them. He went for that sort of stuff. I can’t remember whether that was before he went and learned how to do holograms or afterwards [laughs]. Like I say, he got involved with this cult, but he soon figured out it wasn’t even exactly a religion; it was enslavement, and that’s not him.

Kaplan: What does he do now?
LEVEQUE: He’s a broker in California right now. He was in the computer business for many years. He went back to school, got his degree in political science, and he got a real estate license. He’s a real estate broker. He sold bonds and stuff for some years. Now he’s, like I say, a real estate broker. But with the condition of the economy in California right now, it’s not a very lucrative business. Tough row, but his wife works for Marriot Hotels and has a very responsible position, so they’re making it between them.

Kaplan: Early in your marriage [inaudible], you lived in many different places . . .?
LEVEQUE: Yes, I did. After I got over here, we lived in Oregon, Georgia, Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Virginia, then South Dakota, then Ohio, then two years in East Africa. We even lived in Dar es Salaam for six weeks, which was really fun. Then back to Des Moines, Iowa, and eventually back to Oregon.

Kaplan: During this time, what was your husband doing?
LEVEQUE: He was teaching pharmacology until we moved to Des Moines, where he was teaching pharmacology and physiology at the medical school, and during that time he became a student as well as teaching and got his DO degree. He took his internship in Davenport, and then came out here and worked for a physician in Molalla for a year and then opened his own.

Kaplan: What about you? Did you go back to your nursing career?
LEVEQUE: Are you sure that didn’t get on the other tape [laughs]? After my youngest started school, I worked in a medical library. I worked as a research technician in various places. I worked as an EKG tech in Des Moines. Then I decided at my husband’s urgings that I should try and get my license in this country. After a lot of negotiations with the Board of Nursing and one of my supervisors who wrote a letter to England and was instrumental in my getting the papers from England, then I had to take a couple of courses to supplement what I had before. I sat the boards and then became a psych nurse at the hospital. I’m very fond of Iowa Lutheran Hospital. It was good to me in more ways than one. When we came out here to Oregon, I worked as the Director of Nursing in a couple of different nursing homes altogether for seven years, and that was enough. Now I am a painter. I paint portraits. I paint landscapes. I have painted animals.

Kaplan: How did you get in touch with that? Tell us.
LEVEQUE: I always wanted to learn how to oil paint, and when I retired from my director of nursing job in Oregon City, somebody in Molalla had a sign out that said, “Oil painting classes starting. Sign up.” And I said, “Here it is. I’ve always wanted to do that.” So I went, signed up, and started painting. I even worked a couple of odd jobs for six months here, three months there, but I finally decided the heck with it, although the other day I went out and got an application. I don’t really want to go back to work [laughs]! I’d rather paint.

Kaplan: Tell us what happened to your father.
LEVEQUE: My father came over when we lived in Georgia. That was in ’59. My mother was dead by then. He spent a couple of weeks, got to know the kids, and suffered severely from Georgia heat, but we enjoyed ourselves and got reacquainted.

Kaplan: After how many years?
LEVEQUE: 20 years almost. And then in ’65 I took the two girls to Germany, to Berlin, after my father had retired. We visited with him for two weeks, and then went to England and visited with my brother, who hadn’t seen me in 17 years. He was overjoyed. Everybody that came into his restaurant, “This is my sister! I haven’t seen her for 17 years!” Long time.

Kaplan: Did your father resume his medical practice?
LEVEQUE: He did, right after the war. He didn’t open a private practice. He worked for the [traction?] company as their company physician.

Kaplan: Did his family members survive the war?
LEVEQUE: I think I mentioned that his brother showed up in East Germany after the war. He’s the only one. The others didn’t. We talked about that earlier.

Kaplan: Did you find out what happened to them?
LEVEQUE: No. I think one of his sisters was taken to a concentration camp. I don’t know about the other one. My grandfather had already died before we went to Russia. He died of natural causes.

Kaplan: When you [were talking to?] your children about it, did they know your story? Did they know anything about what happened to you?
LEVEQUE: No.

Kaplan: You never talked about it?
LEVEQUE: No. They knew. It came home to them very strongly when my father visited the first time and I was jumping from German into English, back and forth. I’d do it so automatic that half the time I didn’t know which language I was in. I would talk to the kids, and they would look at me like, “What are you talking about?” Then I’d realize I was talking to them in German. They always knew. They grew up with the knowledge that I came from Germany, that it was because of the political situation in Europe, and that I spent ten years in England, but they don’t know any details.

Kaplan: They will know now if they watch this tape.
LEVEQUE: Yes. That will be all right. It’s a lot easier, I think, to talk to somebody you don’t know. I was afraid I would — sometimes I do — not exactly break down, but tears do come still, especially when I think of my brother. He died in ’85. We did have him over here, and I took him up to Mt. Hood. He sat. He gazed. When we got there the mountain was behind clouds, and I thought, “Oh, dear.” We went and had something to eat, and then we went up to that bar where you can look out the window, and by golly if the clouds didn’t all of a sudden go away! He sat and he looked at it. I went for a walk, came back, and he was still gazing. He really loved to look out at the mountain. It wasn’t because he hadn’t seen mountains before, but they put on a show for him. That was the last time I saw him.

Kaplan: Did he die [inaudible]?
LEVEQUE: He had a heart attack. The British medical system being what it is, they killed him. They did not give him the care he should have had.

Kaplan: What about his children [inaudible]?
LEVEQUE: Yes. His oldest son does not correspond with me, but the younger one, he even came out and visited with us for a week. He’s so interested. He said that his father never spoke about his war years and prior to, and he wanted to know if I knew anything? Could I help him?

Kaplan: Did you?
LEVEQUE: Yes. I got a couple of belts, and I was able to talk to him.

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: Actually, he wrote a book, sort of, with pictures about his father and relatives, and he sent me a copy. I opened it and I shut it, and I haven’t been able to look at it. I’ve had it sitting by my bed for a year now. I have not been able to open it and really to read it. Maybe now I can.

Kaplan: [inaudible]
LEVEQUE: I’ve got pictures of my kids. From Germany? I have some someplace, yes. My house is so full that I haven’t been able to locate them recently, but I’ve had them. They were taken, most of them, when I was real small, and even before I was born. I don’t know where they’ve gone. I have to really hunt for them. Actually, two albums have disappeared. I don’t know why or where they are. I remember bringing them out when one of the kids was visiting, and they wanted to look at them. My daughter from Indianapolis. Maybe she took them. I don’t think so. She would have told me.

Kaplan: [inaudible] over the years and what happened to your family because of the rise of Nazism. What are your thoughts about how you’re telling your story, and about how people now and in the future [inaudible]?
LEVEQUE: Help them to know what happened in those days. 

Kaplan: You think it’s important?
LEVEQUE: The thing is that there is a certain section of people who deny it ever happened, and I think that something like this would probably help them understand that it did happen. I saw the windows broken, I saw the Jews being made to sweep up the glass, I saw that they had to wear the star, and I know that they were picked up and shipped out, the Jews. But how to convince the ones that deny that it happened, I don’t think you can because it probably scares the hell out of them, and they don’t want to be scared so they deny it. I don’t know; that could be one of the reasons that they deny it. 

But I’m scared that we’re getting similar kinds of actions in this country. I think that the youth of today haven’t been taught any values. They haven’t been taught any self-discipline. They haven’t been told to think and to respect. This is my pet peeve. That book that somebody wrote, I can’t remember the author, I’m OK —  You’re OK. If you don’t like what I’m doing, that’s your problem. That’s a bunch of bullshit. Those kids that were raised by parents who believe that and let their kids say, “If you don’t like it if I’m walking around with no shirt on, that’s your problem.” They’re adults now, and they don’t know how to respect anything and how to teach their children. I think the pendulum has gone so far, and it’s high time it started swinging back, but it’s going to be a much slower swing back than it did to go over there. Listen, I’m not here to talk about this sort of stuff.

Kaplan: Yes, you are. This is part of what happened to you. We want to know your thoughts [inaudible]. Is there anything else that you wanted to say in conclusion before we stop?
LEVEQUE: Whoever, if ever, anybody looks at this and listens to it, I still think I was the luckiest person.