Evelyn Diamont Banko

We left for Riga, Latvia. Now when the Nazi’s started coming into power my parents went to what was called an Umschulung, which was kind of a re-schooling because you know coming to the United States of America, there was no way my dad was going to be an engineer the minute he got here. He couldn’t go back to school to get his engineering degree or anything like that. And so he had to be able to do something. What he did, my dad was very artistic and he learned to design purses and belts. And my mother who had never worked a day in her life, she did go to a sewing school and get a degree, a paper saying that she had learned to be a really good dressmaker. So the purses and the belts. And so that, that was what helped us when we got to Riga, Latvia. Actually some of our other relatives ended up in Riga, Latvia too, and I think like three or four people were making the belts and the purses. My mother was staying at home with me and my cousin Suzy, who also had ended up there. She was just a year younger than I am. My mother took care of the children the other women and some of the men made the purses and belts and sold them to stores in Riga, Latvia. 

We didn’t know anybody in Riga, Latvia, but while we were on the train going to Latvia, my dad started talking to somebody. My dad was really personable and always talked to people. And this man was an attorney and he said that he had a brother that lived in Latvia and we should get ahold of him when got there. And it turned out that they just became like family for us. We went over there for all the Jewish holidays. And they were very good to us when we were there.

We also lived with one family in Riga, Latvia the whole two years we were there and ate with another family. The family that we lived with, their house wasn’t big enough for us to eat with them at night. But we ate with another family. And a group called HIAS, which is the Hebrew Aid Society (I don’t know what it all stands for), they were the people that helped us along the way in Riga, Latvia and eventually on our way to the United States, too. 

We kept trying to get out of Riga, Latvia the whole time we were there. And we finally got an affidavit from a relative of a relative. My dad’s sister married a Yugoslavian man, and his name was Gruen, and his brother Otto Gruen came to the United States and became a jeweler in New York City. And he was the one that send us our affidavits. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to save his own family. Almost all of them died in concentration camp – I’ll talk about them later. 

The first affidavit we got, we were going to go through Sweden. And then the Germans marched into Denmark, so we weren’t able to go that way. At that point my dad’s sister, who was Yugoslavian (and Yugoslavia wasn’t involved in the war yet) had sent us all our furniture and all our china and all that, or a lot of that stuff to Riga, Latvia. And so when we were going to go through Sweden, we actually had a lot of our belongings that we had owned in Europe, in Vienna. And they had all been sent there and they eventually went back to Riga, Latvia. The second time we got an affidavit was the next year in 1939 and we were going to go through Italy. Well Italy was of course in cahoots with the Nazi Germany and the war was declared between England and Italy, and so we couldn’t go that direction either. And so finally, in August of 1940 we heard there were about 1500 people I think going to leave Latvia. What had happened is in the early part of 1940 the Russians marched into Latvia. We knew it was going to be either the Russians or the Nazis that came in and for us; very luckily, it was the Russians. And from one day to the other, it was kind of like the Anschluss in Austria. The Russians marched in, there was no fighting at all. They took over Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and just marched in on one day and all of the sudden it was part of Russia. The only thing I remember about that is that all of the sudden this man’s picture was in every single store window, and of course it was Stalin. And his picture was put in all the windows in all the stores in Latvia. 

I also remember having an air raid where somebody tripped in the middle of the street and my mother said if it had been a real war they probably would have died. And we were looking at them out of the window of our apartment. Those are about my two memories of Latvia.

So we lived there for those two years, and out of the 1500 people that were given permission to leave Latvia, [there] were 23 Jewish refugees. My dad was put in charge of the group. Right before they were going to leave the Russians took my father, an attorney that was going to be in our group of 23, and this doctor, doctor Norbet Phil who became our best friend when we came to the United States, and they kept them all night and interrogated them and promised them all sorts of things if they would stay because they didn’t want educated people leaving the country. So the Russians told them if they would stay there, they would do all these things for them. And finally at the last minute they said, “Well we’re going to let you go to America; we have a lot of people in the United States and if we ever come to you this is going to be our secret password and we expect you to help us.” And of course my dad said, yes, he would, just to get out of the country. And I suppose if he had ever been in anything that might have been important to Russia, they might have tried to get him to be a spy. But since he opened up a service station, it was never a problem. But at any rate, then finally they said to him, “OK, are you all ready to go.” And my dad said, “Yes.” And he said, “Are your papers signed?” And my dad looked and they hadn’t signed any of the papers. And so they were still giving him a hard time but they eventually signed the papers and they finally gave us our visas as we were boarding the train the next morning to get out of Riga.

My mother (she always said stupidly) decided to get permission to take all the jewelry out of Riga, Latvia. We had a lot of jewelry. My dad loved buying jewelry for my mom so we had quite a bit of diamonds ourselves. And also some of our other relatives had given us some of their jewelry as they went into hiding and to escape to various places. And so my mother was trying to (because she had done this for other people) sew them into a belt and take them out of the country that way. But the friends that we had made and the other relatives that were there kept saying, “You know, you’ve got this daughter and what if they take you off the train? They will kill you and they will kill your daughter and everything.” So we left all this jewelry back except what we could wear. But what I started to say is that my mother went to the Russian government and she wanted to get permission to take all this jewelry. She was told she could only take as much jewelry as she could wear. They gave her permission to take out what she could wear on her body. And so one brooch, and one ring, and one watch, and so on. And so as she was leaving the office building that she had gone into, she looked over one way and she saw them stuffing this man into a sack, this body into a sack. And as she was staring that direction, some of the Russians came and they just kind of turned her around and wheeled, walked her out the other way out of the building. Just so she could pretend that she hadn’t seen anything. We left Riga, Latvia in August of 1940. And our first stop after that was Moscow. 

We went on the train from Riga to Moscow. On the train, my dad had already met this Dr. Phil because they were interrogated together the night before – Dr. Phil and his wife had a daughter Alice who was just four years older than me. And so when we got on the train my dad introduced my mother to Jenny Phil. And I started playing with Alice. And so the trip to the United States was wonderful for me because I had this friend, who is still my friend that I still see all the time, who just wrote a memoir. I’m in the memoir, but she changed my name to Trudy. But anyway, she and I became very close friends. We also decided on this trip that wherever we ended up in the United States, the two families would go together because since we had no family anymore, at least we would know one person there. And so when we actually decided together to come to Portland, both families came. So we got on this train, and my mother had taken two diamond brooches so she asked Jenny to wear one. And then when we got to the border between Russia and Latvia there was no border. So we could have taken all our diamonds with us and had a little bit of money when we came to the United States to start a business or do something with, which of course, you know, we couldn’t do. 

So anyway because we were going to go through Japan, we needed to have a visa. And since Japan was an ally of Germany all the Japanese consulates in Europe had been closed except the Japanese consulate in Germany. Our passports were sent to Germany to get the visa and when they came back, inside not only did it have the German eagle on it, my father’s middle name was made to be Israel, my mother’s middle name was made to be Sarah, and my middle name was made to be Sarah, it was Evelyn Sarah. 
This is my parents [indicates a picture]. This was actually a traveling pass, different than a passport, but we had to have it too. Anyway, every country we went to had to be stamped, and its full of stamps and stamps and stamps from all the different places we ended up. 

So we had to stay in Moscow for three days because the Trans-Siberian Railroad only ran on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And so, while we were there, my father and Norbet Phil and a couple other men went to the German Embassy and asked them for money. The Germans, the Nazis, that were there gave them all this Russian money, all these rubles, because they said they knew they weren’t going to be there very long, eventually they would be fighting the Russians. And it was just like worthless money to them. So my dad, who was the head of this group of 23 people, took this money and divided it up between all the Jewish refugees. And they went to go into the stores and there was nothing to be bought in any of the stores. The stores were absolutely empty. And not only that, but every single night, people would line up in front of all the office buildings, and one of the men in the group who spoke Russian asked them what they were doing there. They said, “We wait there because we can sleep in the office buildings at night when they are through with their business.” And so all these people were homeless with no place to stay. There was no food or clothing or anything to buy in the stores. There were just paper streamers in the windows. And somehow or other my mother was walking down the street with me and some Jewish man was selling shoelaces. And he said to my mother, “Don’t stay here; get out of this country. If I were selling this shoelace for one kopek more than what they tell me to, they would kill me.” He said, “This is a terrible place to be.” And you know, because he was Jewish and he spoke Yiddish he told my mother that and she remembered to tell me that as we were walking down. 

So Tuesday came and we got on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. We went across Siberia, and it was, it was no water, virtually no water on the train. Everybody was thirsty. There was no way that you could wash yourself. My mother had taken a little metal wash basin to wash me in, and she had to wash clothes and stuff, so at least she could kind of give me spit baths. And people were really envious of her, because not only did we have a wash basin but my folks had taken their down comforters. So we had down pillows and down comforters, which came in very handy, especially in Japan when we were sleeping on the floor. We put them down on top of the mats, and so we had a little bit more of a floor, to sleep on – some more comfort. And then the other people, because of course we weren’t used to sleeping on mats on hard floors, the way the Japanese were. So, anyway, we got on the Trans-Siberian railroad, and by the last few days there was hardly any food and it was all just terrible. By the last few days all that was left was this canned food, mostly red caviar, which is very, very salty. And so we had very little water and all this salty red caviar as food for the last few days. 

While we were going through any of the military installations they put these metal bars down on the windows of the train so you couldn’t look through. And I remember wanting to peak out, and my mother telling me that if I looked out I would be killed. So you know obviously I didn’t look out the window. 

So, but Alice and I had a good time. We ran up and down through the train, and we chased each other around, and we played all kinds of games and everything. 
When we got to Manchuria we got off the Trans-Siberian Railroad. In the entrance to Manchuria there was like a no-man’s land in between. So you had to get off the train on the one side and then carry all your luggage over this no-man’s land to the other side and then get on the Manchurian train.

My parents had all these down comforters and pillows and blankets and suitcases and everything. The other stuff had been sent ahead to Japan The trunks had been sent ahead to Japan to go on the ship. And so we didn’t have these. I remember coming to the United States with this big trunk, one of those old fashioned steamer trunks that we had in our basement for years and years. But it had been sent ahead so it wasn’t something that we had to carry with us. But suitcases and all the things that we needed everyday were with us – the wash basin, and everything. So then we were in Manchuria. We went to Harbon, and we stayed there for a few days, which was the capital of Manchuria I guess. And then from there we went into China.

When we got to Dairen in China, they were having a typhoid and a cholera epidemic. And everybody was wearing these masks on the street and my parents were very, very afraid that I would end up getting cholera or typhoid from being in this country with this huge epidemic. Although we had had shots. I found a form that we had that showed that at least my parents had had typhoid shots. So they did have a shot at that time, for that. So I don’t know how well they worked in those years but at any rate they had those. 

So we went through China, and everywhere we went, every little town that we were in, there was somebody from HIAS waiting for us. And they would give us money for food, and tell us a place to stay. Whether it was a nice hotel or a gymnasium floor, or whatever but we had somewhere to stay. So we had to spend some time in Dairen waiting for a boat to get to Japan. And my mother tells this story about when we were in China, we were staying in this house somewhere. And she looked out and there was a European family in a house just across the way, with a chandelier and tablecloth on the table and my mother wondered if ever we would be to the point where we would have chandeliers and tablecloths again. 

When we were in Japan this family invited us to their house for dinner and a bath. And so we were able, my mother and I (my dad didn’t go, but my mom and I were able) to go have baths and actually be treated to dinner. I’m sure it was a Jewish family, not a Japanese family, that was living there. One of the speakers on the speakers’ bureau lived in Japan during the year, and he thinks that his family might have even been the people that invited us over to their house, who knows. So, I wouldn’t know who they were. But anyway, the Jewish community in Kobe, Japan did help the refugees as they went through. 

We had to spend time in Japan waiting for the boat that was taking us to the United States, which was a Japanese ship. And we left Japan and got on this Japanese ship where we were in the bottom of the ship. We were the like steerage. And we slept on the floors, and we were terribly, terribly seasick. Our first few days out there was a typhoon and everybody was horrendously sea sick except my father and about two other men. They were the only people that through the whole voyage went up to the restaurant to eat and got to eat the food in the restaurant. The rest of us were all in bed being seasick and trying to just eat. My dad would go up and try to get rice; he would say, “Rice for my wife.” And the Japanese would make fun of him, “Rice for my wife, rice for my wife.” The Japanese at that time already did not like the Americans. And we were coming to America, so they already did not treat us that well on the ship. 

And of course the food was very, very strange to us, having never ever eaten anything that was Japanese. So this raw fish, and all this strange food was not at all like Austrian or Jewish food. And so rice was probably one of the few things that was recognizable that we could eat on our journey. 

It took us about six weeks, starting from Riga, Latvia, before we arrived in America. 
Our first stop was Vancouver, BC and my parents were so excited to get off the ship in Vancouver, BC and get on dry land. And we actually had relatives, or distant relatives, that had immigrated way earlier to Vancouver, British Columbia, and were in lumber. They had been in lumber in Vienna and they were in lumber there. Eventually they were bought out by Warehauser. Actually, one of the relatives had his name put on some building at the University of British Columbia because he gave them so much money. But we couldn’t get off the ship because we had German passports. And anybody with a German passport couldn’t get off a ship in Canada because Canada was at war with Germany. So we had to stay on the ship during the time that we were in port there. And so the very first thing we did the day we got our citizenship papers. We drove all night, and went to Vancouver, British Columbia, and ended up there the next morning. The day after our citizenship papers we couldn’t cross the border until 1946 when we were citizens of the United States. So that was our very first trip over there to visit the relatives that had gone there, which were distant relatives, not close relatives of ours. 

Anyway, so we ended up in Seattle. The ship went to Seattle and we ended up in Seattle and we were put up in Seattle. And then we were given a choice because there was a Jewish quota on Jewish refugees and the quota by September (we came to America on September 23rd, 1940). My dad turned 40 on September 26th, 1940 and so three days before my dad’s 40th birthday we came to the United States. My mother was 36 at the time. So here we were starting a new life with a four year old daughter and not knowing where we were going and what we were going to do. We were given a choice of going to Portland, Oregon or San Francisco. And so my parents and the Phil’s decided that Portland was a smaller city, might be better opportunity for us and it had mountains like Vienna. So the two families then decided that Portland would be where we would end up. 

And so we were supposed to be picked up the next morning with the Phil’s. The people picked up the Phils and took them to Portland, and settled them in some house somewhere and they forgot all about us. And so my parents contacted whatever group it was, whatever Jewish organization it was, and the next day they came and picked us up and took us to what was the Jewish neighborhood, or the Jewish ghetto in Portland, Oregon and put us up in this apartment house on Second Avenue.  

The lady that owned it was a Russian, a Russian woman. And my mother was very, very well dressed and always looked really, really sharp. And the woman, the first thing she said to my mother in Yiddish was, “And you could read and write too.” Kind of like a put-down, you know, ‘Here you are the refugees in our house and I can’t read or write but you can and I’m taking care of you.” sort of thing. That was kind of our introduction to United States. 

I had the whooping cough, I got whooping cough when we got to Seattle. And so, when we came to Portland, I couldn’t go out to play. And so I would look out the window of our apartment building every single day and see these children playing across the street and I could hardly wait to go down there and start playing with them. Finally, I was declared to be well and I ran downstairs and I ran across the street to play with these children and I couldn’t understand a word they were saying and they couldn’t understand me because I spoke German and they spoke English. I yelled up to my mom, “Mommy, [speaking German]…’ which means “I don’t understand anything” and my mother yelled back, “[speaking German]” which is, “I don’t either Evie.” [laughing]. So, you know, eventually I started at what was then called the Fruit and Flower mission. It’s on 10th or 12th downtown – a nursery school – when I was four. My mother got the first job because she could sew. She was offered a job at Hirsch-Weis, which later became White Stag, but at that time it was called Hirsch-Weis and it was over where the White Stag building eventually was off of Burnside. And my mother did piece sewing and she was paid by the piece. Now she was paid only $9 a week, whereas the other people were paid $12 a week because she was a Jewish refugee even though it was owned, the person that owned the Hirsch-Weis was Jewish. But he paid the refugees less than he did the Americans. But my mother, you know, the faster she got to work, the more they would give her to do. You know, it was piece work, and they paid you. So if you got really good with one needle, they gave you a machine with two needles, and then if you got really good with two needles, they gave you a machine with three needles. And you know they would have to do bigger and more piece work to get more money. 

But anyway she was the one that got a job and that paid for our food and our housing was paid for by whatever Jewish agency was giving us housing. And my mother kept going around every single day trying to find affidavits for her brother and her dad. And she would meet with these Jewish organizations and they would not help her. And finally the first person that helped her was from First Christian Church. It was this marvelous woman. And I realize that everything always has to do with individuals, not organizations or groups or anything like this. But whatever this woman’s name was, I wish I remembered her name, she just took care of us wonderfully. She got people to try to write affidavits for us; she gave me my first clothing, used clothing – American clothes. And she was just a wonderful woman, that was you know, her thing to help the refugees. 

My dad became a janitor first, he was sweeping out building sand. He would take care of me in the daytime when I wasn’t in nursery school. And then was sweeping buildings, and then eventually he started working in a service station. And so he decided that he would open up a service station of his own. And so, he contacted Texaco Company. And they were building a new service station on 17th, SE 17th and Holgate, and they offered it to my father. Now this was still the end of the Depression. There were already two service stations on the other two corners. And so at first, there wasn’t much business. My father didn’t speak English. He was opening up a service station and he really didn’t know much about cars. There’s kind of a funny story because when my father had his business in Austria they owned a company car. The business owned a company car. And they had a chauffeur. Now my father knew how to drive, but Dieseldorf, his partner, didn’t know how to drive. And one day my dad and my mother went to Schönbrunn to the castle in Schönbrunn for the day just for an outing, and this was before I was born, and the car had a flat tire. So my dad left the car on the street, called the chauffeur, and he and my mother took the streetcar home and the chauffeur came and fixed the flat tire and took the car back to the office. So here’s my dad who’s never fixed a flat tire in his life, and never did anything with a car, all of the sudden fixing flats, changing oil, doing all these things in the service station. 

The service station opened in 1940 or 1941. We opened the service station in early, probably like maybe April of 1941. My mother then went looking around the neighborhood, looking for someplace to rent a house near the service station. And she found this house that was for sale on what was called Reynolds street off of Milwaukie near Holgate in SE Portland. And so she asked the people if they would rent it, and they said yes, and so we started to rent this house. Well we had been living there maybe two or three weeks and all the sudden started people started walking through this house. And my mother called the realtor and they told her that the people had decided to sell the house. And so my dad decided that we would buy it. He borrowed a few thousand dollars from a customer at the service station, and we bought the house, and then the war started December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor started. With the corner of 17th and Holgate was right next to Arn Fireman Foundry, the Portland Traction Company, which was the bus company, and the railroad. All three of them went on double and triple shifts. In the service station across the street the man went into the shipyards and closed his service station. The one next door the man went into the Army and it closed. My dad was the service station on the corner, he worked 10, 12, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, and we did really quite well. Within six months of buying our house, we had paid it off. 

Then I started kindergarten at Brooklyn school, which was a school in the neighborhood. And after school I would walk to my dad’s service station and stay there with him until my mother got off work about 6:00. And then we would either go across the street to the Semifour diner and eat dinner and my dad would be running back and forth every time a car came to get gas. He would sit by the window in the diner if a car came, he’d run across and fill up the tank or do whatever he needed to do, then come back and eat the rest of his dinner. Or my mother would walk me home then and we would go home. 

So that was kind of the story of our coming to the United States. Eventually my dad wanted to buy the service station and Texaco just wanted him to lease it. They wouldn’t let him buy it. One of the salesman that came into my dad’s service station worked for a company called Niehoff and he saw how educated my dad was and he said, “You know this is really not the place that you should be. Why don’t you come work for Niehoff.” And so my dad went down and interviewed for this job. They sold ignition parts for automotive parts. And my dad interviewed with them and was hired and became a salesman. And so for the rest of his life he sold automotive parts. Which is kind of what he started with in Vienna and ended with here. So that’s kind of the story of our trip to the United States. 

I was an only child, but we, my parents had huge families. My grandparents both came from large, large families. My mother’s mother was one of 12 or 13 children because her mother had died and her father remarried. So he had two wives and he had children with both families. So we had this huge, huge family. And part of the family was the wealthy part of the family that my you know her brothers became wealthy and they really were very, very good to my mother. And my dad the same thing. My dad’s family originally were farmers in Czechoslovakia, my dad was born in Gaya, Czechoslovakia on a farm, but they went to Austria and they also were importers and sales people, I don’t know exactly. But they were fairly middle class, fairly you know not rich but not poor either. They were from a very, very large family, lots of cousins and uncles and aunts. My dad had a very, very big family. So you know, what I lost was all these people that would have been my friends. And in fact, my mother’s two best friends were her two cousins. She had three cousins about her age that she was really good friends with. And two of them, one had a daughter a year older than me and one had a daughter a year younger than me. So I would have grown up with three cousins. We would have been within two years of each other in age. And one lives in London now and one lives in Connecticut. But they both survived the war.

This whole family was taken away from us. My grandparents died in concentration camps; my uncles and aunts died in concentration camps. My father’s mother and father went back to Czechoslovakia and they had relatives on a farm and they went to live in Czechoslovakia. And eventually were picked up. I don’t know exactly where they died or how they died, but I know that they did. When I was in Czechoslovakia, when I was in Prague, we went to the Jewish section of Prague, and I went, I didn’t know what was in there, but went to the Jewish section. I was walking through the various buildings and one of the buildings was a synagogue that had been made into a memorial. And when I walked in there, there were 23 Diamonts on the wall in there. I figure that most of them were my relatives. And the first two names that were on the wall were my grandparents. So those were the people that were picked up in Czechoslovakia. Some of them were from Prague and some were from a town called Brno. And so you know it was, it was very, very emotional to all the sudden see these names on this wall, when I didn’t even know what the building was and didn’t expect to see anything in there. So that was very hard. 

My father’s sister, whose name was Hilda, had married a Yugoslavian man. His name was Gruen and I think I said that his brother Otto was the one that got us our affidavit. They went back to Yugoslavia and eventually were picked up and put in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia. The concentration camp was called Jasenovac. I know I don’t pronounce it right. It was a Croatian concentration camp; they picked up mostly Serbs in that camp and put them into it but they also picked up Jews. And so the first person that was picked up was my dad’s sister’s husband. He was taken into that camp and he died within a year and a half of being in there because the camp was a horrible, horrible camp. They didn’t have much food and they were mistreated and they were taken out a killed too. So I don’t know exactly whether he was killed or whether he died of starvation or what, but anyway he died. 

Eventually my, my dad’s sister and my dad’s niece and my dad’s nephew were picked up and taken to exactly the same camp. By the time they got to the camp my dad’s sister had already died. But they were put in the camp. Now my dad’s sister and her daughter, who was probably in her late teens early 20s, were put to work I think on, what I read, when I read the stuff in German I think was like a farm. My dad’s nephew Walter was studying to become an electrician. When we had all this stuff with (you know what are you going to do if you go to a strange country), everybody wanted to do something that they could do with their hands. So he studied to be an electrician and he was about 17 at that time I think. So when he went into the camp he had it a little bit easier because he had a skill that they needed. And not that it made it easy, but when I say easier I don’t mean easy. But at least he was given perhaps a little more food, working inside instead of outside, all that kind of stuff. So they were in the camps and eventually my dad’s sister and her daughter died in the camp. 

Walter was there toward the end of the war, and in 1945, as the war was going down, they knew that the Croatians were going to kill all the remaining prisoners. And so there was an uprising in the camp. I see different numbers everywhere. Walter said about 1500 people were in the uprising. I’ve read papers that said hundreds. I’ve read papers that said more or less. So I don’t know exactly how many people were in the uprising. What I do know is that less than 80 escaped and one of the ones that escaped was my cousin Walter. And he was picked up by the Communists, the partisan group, and nursed back to health because he was all skin and bones. Eventually he found an aunt of his. And went to live with her. My parents tried to get him into the united states but there were so many rules and regulations and quotas and everything. My dad really wanted to buy this service station and have Walter come over and work in it with him because here was this young man that would have been perfect to have the two of them could have bought this service station or some service station. My dad by then was getting older you know. In 1945 he was 45. He wasn’t that old but not a spring chicken anymore. So Walter could have helped him in the service station. That was really his plan but he never could get Walter out. 

Walter eventually immigrated to Israel and after my dad died in 1981 my mother and I, in 1982, went to Europe. She showed me around Vienna where I was born, and all the places that I’d been. We went to London and met my cousin Raizle (who changed her name to Terresa) who was the one that was a year older than me. And then we went to Israel and met my relatives, my dad’s side of the family, in Israel. I got to meet Walter and his wife there. 

He died last year of cancer, but his wife is still living and he has children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Israel. So he was the only one out of that side of the family that survived.

My mother tried all through the war to try to get her brother Max and her dad out of Vienna. She had a picture of Max on her dresser, a big picture, that was on her dresser her entire life that she looked at every single day. She just couldn’t, she never could get over the fact that she couldn’t save his life.