Karen Irwin

Kettler: Good Morning. Could you please tell us your full name, including your maiden name, your date of birth, your place of birth, and your address, if you know it.
IRWIN: If I know it where I was born? My address where I was born? Oh, OK. First of all, my name. I have a string of names. My father, actually he chose the names and they are Evelyn or Evelyn [transcriber note: she pronounces one with a long and one with a short e.], Karen, Hanne Lore (which is two names. Hanne Lore Lise Lotte [spells out] Aronson. Ach! My father wanted me to have lots of choices [laughs] and my second name, Karen, which is the one I’m using now, was borrowed from my aunt, who wanted to name her child, if she had a daughter… and it… that name. Turns out she never had a child and so finally, it got to be mine. When I made it my legal name on the day I became a citizen, which I have the documentation for here, of the United States. I was born on July 4, 1924 in Halberstadt [spells out], which means a half a city. And it was in … I don’t remember the exact street address but it was in east Germany until the reunification and it is a medieval village, a small town, where all the houses…. I’ve never seen this town but anyway, the houses were built so that the second floors were closer to each other than the first floors, so that they were like this. By the time we got to the third of fourth floor they were really close. It goes back to medieval times. So, I was six months old when we left there. Is there anything else that you asked me that belongs in that particular… I mean, I also have maiden names. My maiden name is Aronson. Anything else?

Kettler: How long does your family date back to that town?
IRWIN: Not at all. My mother was a chemist and she went and worked there while her three sons…. And my father was a businessperson. They both went there from wherever they were, to work. And they met there. I have a long story about that process. My mother was very beautiful and very glamourous. My father was very handsome and my mother was courted a great deal. One of the people who really wanted to marry her very badly was Hans Weil, who is Kurt Weil’s brother. Kurt Weil, you may know, is the writer of The Three Penny Opera, Mac the Knife, One Touch of Venus… that whole… an incredible musician. And Hans Weil was a wonderful person. I’ve met him later and many times, years later, wished that my mother had married him because he was really some kind of a father. But my mother was very enamored, I mean both my mother and father were very “movie star” type people and very… hung up on their appearances. You know, their whole demeanor and their whole… so that is why they got married.

Kettler: Where was each of them from originally?
IRWIN: My father, his name was Rabinowitz, actually Aronson, but his mother’s name was Rabinowitz. My father was brought up a good deal of his youth in Paris and that is one of the reasons I spent a large part of my life in Paris. His family came from Konigsberg, which is Prussia, on the Black Sea. In fact we used to sometimes…. One time I remember going on a vacation. We went to Kanz, which was…I don’t know if it is Lithuania, but it is on the border. I remember there were white beaches… It was [can’t hear] … Prussia was sort of a separate piece of Germany that was stuck up. I think it is Lithuania now. Anyway, my father was from Königsberg and my mother was from Kassel. She was born in Hede Munden, a village of about a thousand people, in which my grandfather was the only Jew. And he had the country store. He played the country barber and the doctor and the … you know… the important people in the village would bring, um, them all kinds of goodies at Christmas and Easter. He would bring them, other people, the goodies, Passover goodies and … so he was, you know, a well-liked man in his village, which was Hede Munden. Then, when his three children… His name was Emanuel – Julius Emanuel– and his wife’s name was Clara Elsbach [spells out]. Their families both… We have records going back to the 1700s, as being Jewish, even though everyone in the family on that side was light blond and blue-eyed, and hazel or gray-eyed. I know my grandmother, Clara Elsbach, was somewhat of a… she was a… I don’t know to what extent she was Orthodox because she had sort of…. My mother was a pantheist but my grandmother had sort of, she was attracted by Catholicism and by, by just mystical things in general. But she was engaged to a man (my grandmother was) who went away for some reason. I don’t know what he went away for. And he didn’t come back for seven years. So, after seven years she entered an arranged marriage, which was with my grandfather, Julius Emanuel, who was very Orthodox. I mean “black” Orthodox. In German “black” Orthodoxy, which is very different from the Eastern European kind. I mean, it is very rigid. After that marriage, she put on a sheytel and became very strictly Orthodox. 

When their children, as my mother reached the age of six she was sent to Hassel to go to school because there was no good school in a village of 1000 people. She was sent alone at six years old to live with some very stodgy aunts up in an apartment in a building in Kassel, which I also know, but my family, the family stayed there until we left. She was locked up in a room two floors above where these aunts lived. No bathroom and, uh, she was pretty terrified. She went to school there, six-year-old. She had to. I have stories of her using her shoes to go to the bathroom in and dump them out the window [laughs]. Then she was essentially locked up because there was, for safety, you know. Then the following year her second sister came and that wasn’t so bad because there were two of them there. Then the following year the third sister came and then finally the whole family moved to Kassel. So those formative years were rough and probably had an enormous influence on how she grew up, and subsequently on me.

Kettler: How many siblings did she have?
IRWIN: There were three girls –all a year apart. And then a brother came 12 years later. So the brother and I weren’t that far apart in age. It was interesting. He was a neat guy. He is the only one that moved to Israel and eventually he died very, very, very early. So … where are we?

Kettler: Do you want to talk about your father’s family?
IRWIN: My father’s family supposedly there was some kind of a rabbi or a well-known… not so well known, but some kind of a rabbi somewhere in the background. But as far as I know, for generations my father’s family was a broken family. Divorces, you know, my grandfather [sighs] those bastards [laughs] no. I man, not literally, but he had already, when my father was 17 he went into the Germany army. He was conscripted into the army. He was in the army in World War I and, uh, 17 years old. His mother was a very gentle, loving person. She lived in Königsberg. His father lived with a lover in Berlin. And when my father, the story goes, (he told my mother and my mother told me) when my father would come home on a pass from the war… He was in the trenches and my father was extremely meticulous. I mean, he was so meticulous the family used to say, “Hair number 365 is out of place.” I mean, he was very vain and very handsome and very meticulous and very clean. And he spent four years in the trenches, which wasn’t too cool for a person of his inclination. When he would come home on pass, I understand that my grandfather told his lover or whoever he was living with to put away the cream and the butter and sugar. “My son is coming home.” I mean, this stuff was rationed and when his son would come home it was put away so he wouldn’t get any. That was the level of [laughs] uh, nurturing he got. There’s no small wonder that these two people, who really passionately fell in love with each other, neither one had had much nurturing. And when it came to building a solid relationship, each needed… one needed a father and the other needed a mother and they couldn’t be father and mother to each other so it eventually broke, very quickly. So my grandfather, whose name was Willi Aronson, was a German citizen of Jewish, what is it Deutche… oh, [mumbles] yiddishem–Jewish faith. Very, very assimilated. And uh, no religious, you know, he really separated himself from the whole thing. 

And I remember when it came to leave Germany, which will come later, my mother asked me, “Do you want to go to Palestine?” which it was then, “or Paris, France?” I said, “I want to go to Palestine. I want to live in a kibbutz. I want to have lots of kids around me, (I was an only child.) and others around me.” Of course, we went to Paris and we went to live at first with this grandfather, who’s not terribly generous. So I have first-hand experience with his, you know, some arrogance and distance. But he did allow my father, when we did get to France, which I will go into later, to work for him. Paid him an absolute pittance but it was the only way that we were able to survive in France because, if you didn’t have a working card, you couldn’t work and that was essentially the reasons that… that’s what made it possible.

Kettler: Did your father have siblings?
IRWIN: Yes, he had an older sister who I have a picture of, who eventually went to Argentina. Then she came to visit just before she died. Yes, he had one. He had one sister. But that’s sort of the immediate grandparents.

Kettler: That’s when your parents met each other and when was that?
IRWIN: Oh, the married in ’22, so, so, ’21. I don’t know how long, you know.

Kettler: And is there a story to their meeting?
IRWIN: Well, either they worked in the same place. My mother had a lot of admirers and, you know, they were always a very romantic portrait, apparently, and very…. My father’s mother warned my mother. She said, “Do not marry my son. We have a family history of infidelity.” But she didn’t listen [laughs] and I wouldn’t be who I am if she had, you know.

Kettler: Did your mother continue her Orthodoxy?
IRWIN: My mother never bought into the Orthodoxy. She was a free thinker, a pantheist. She used to tell me because there was all that loneliness, and then, the other sisters came and she was afraid to go to sleep until all the birds would start singing in the morning. She used to tell her sisters… I said they were one year apart. They would all sleep in one bed and she would tell them stories about the falling leaves, from the viewpoint of the leaf and from the point of view of the tree, and what that felt like and that, the, you know, the floating and the separation and the, the falling and the floating. The same thing with snowflakes, the same thing with… She was very much a pantheist, very much, she was the cart, she was very delicate; she was like an anemone, you know, touch her and she will pull away… very, very vulnerable, sensitive, artistic. She sensitized me to dance, to music, to the arts. She was very creative but very, very [sighs]. She was sick a lot. I was leaned on from a very early age, you know, I would be almost taking care of her. My father told me, “Take care of your mother for me.” At the age of nine I would fix things for her and cook for her and do things for her. She was very…. She had migraines and was sick a lot. Oh, that kind of thing.

Kettler: Physical illnesses?
IRWIN: Yes, yes, but just very, very sensitive and vulnerable. But luckily for me, her sister, my aunt, who just died last year here, was a very life-affirming person and with her I got to be a child during the early years when my father very, very early started having girlfriends. Finally he very soon met a woman who later because my pediatrician. I have many, many pictures of her. She took all the pictures of me in my childhood. She was called Hede Grossmann. When my mother used to sadly say, “Hede Munden.” Hede Munden was where she was born. It means culminating with Hede, or ending with Hede. Hede [spells out] was the wife of my father’s best friend, who was Walter Grossman. He was a urologist and his wife, Hede Grossmann, was a pediatrician. Actually, they later married for… we’re in Germany in the ‘20s now… which was very much ‘60s here, only a little different, but comparable. They married primarily to have, to be able to practice out of one place, out of one office in Berlin. They decided at the time they were married, they would be married that some time along, somewhere along the line, they were going to go to Italy and have a child. But she had a relationship, which was my father, and he had a relationship, which was somebody else, and that was that. They were the best of friends and my father and his buddy and she were all very close. And my mother. So there are a lot of pictures where everybody is together, you know. How did I get into that? I trans…. There is a side-step here. Can you get me back on track?

Kettler: You were speaking about the town when you were six months old, where you were born.
IRWIN: Yes, and they went to Berlin. And in Berlin we moved, at that time things were already getting shaky, workwise

Kettler: OK, tell me about that.
IRWIN: Well, in the side, only in the sense that I don’t know very much about it, but I do know that this was now…. I was born in ’24, so we are talking about ’25….and jobs were…. You know, my father ran the business and that failed. So we moved. And also, most people lived in apartments. They spent every penny on getting the most modern (and I’m talking modern) furniture and apartment in Halberstadt. You can imagine, I mean, everything was extremely, if you know anything about the Bauhaus period, you know that this was modern [laughs] and remains modern. It all went down the drain during the time when I couldn’t find it in an envelope, you know, with one envelope of stamps, with hundreds and hundreds of stamps on them. It was like a million dollars [to send a letter.] That was the inflation. And I couldn’t find it. I have it somewhere. Well, so, if I find it I will…. So they lost. Nothing was worth anything anymore. We lived in rented apartments, furnished apartments. And we moved practically every year. So we moved once a year at least.

Kettler: Within Berlin?
IRWIN: Within Berlin. But all the time that things were…. Either my mother had an operation or my father and mother went to Copenhagen. I have pictures where I was…. Or things were going rough at home or wherever. I was always sent to either my aunts or my grandparents. So I was constantly moved around from school to school to school to school, within Berlin as well as Kassel and Gottingen, which was where my aunt lived.

Kettler: And how far is Gottingen from Berlin?
IRWIN: Gottingen? I think both Kassel and Gottingen are southwest of Berlin and I’m not sure. In the province of Hesse. I don’t have maps so I don’t know. But not terribly far train rides. So for me, these periods, and the more I look back, the more powerful they become, were the healthy periods of my life. I was treated like a kid. You know, my aunt would… I didn’t want to get out of the tub and my aunt would spank my bottom and now I think, “God, this is great!” You know, she let me out on the street to play with other kids, or even by myself on the scooter or jumping rope. Whereas in Berlin I was always a little adult. My father considered me a little doll that you sang to. Or he taught me. I was already singing Russian when I was two, and French songs, and kiss me here and you know, take me on his knee and sing me a song and my mother would… I remember just being taken by the hand and overprotected, walked here and walked there and …either overprotected or leaned on, one or the other. So these were just incredibly wonderful periods in my early life, and then one time when I was in Gottingen, which was where I started my first school. I have pictures of my first school and my first teacher, who is a man. Herr Hoffmann. And I have my first ABC book with me. At one time while I was in Gottingen in this place, which had a courtyard and they had some cattle and would look out the window when I was supposed to be taking a nap and see somebody force feed a goose, which was awful (for pate de foie gras). But anyway, I was given an opportunity to have some contact with real life. And this was also the time when I was actually even getting close to getting out, when my grandmother Clara Emanuel, who was a tiny little, very fair woman, was very ill. She was staying with my aunts and I was out and was playing on the street. She was going to go to a spa, to get better. This was the summer of ’32, June. I was to be called in to say goodbye and I just waved, you know, “Good bye” and continued playing. A couple of nights later I woke up in the middle of the night crying and said, “Grandma is dead. Grandma is dead.” And the next morning we went swimming, my mother, my aunt, and myself (it was a very hot day in June) and as we came out of the swimming, walking back on this hot, dry, dusty path, my aunt’s husband, whom she, I think hated, came toward us and told us that my grandmother, which was my mother’s and my aunt’s mother, had died that night. So it was one of the dreams that [laughs] was powerful. So that’s Kassel and Gottingen and back and forth between the two places.

Kettler: Did you go to parochial school or public school?
IRWIN: Well, that’s a whole story. We went only to public schools because at that time (this was prior to Hitler, see)… Then, shortly after my grandmother’s death we moved to Kassel to be with my grandfather, to be supportive. Now, by the way, in Germany, and this is why I wish I could show you these things, while I’m doing this because I went to public school in Germany, in Berlin, in between one of all of these many movings. Always changing schools each time in Berlin as well as Gottingen and Kassel, I got to learn Hebrew in German public school and this is where I learned Hebrew. I mean, you’ll have to really photograph this but this was the title page and then the first page and what happened was that, well, do you want to put it away at this point?

Kettler: Yes.
IRWIN: OK. Actually the Geshers did a copy of this. In the schools at that time there was religious education. The Catholics went and had catechism, the Protestants went and had theirs, and the Jews learned Hebrew. This was for one hour. I think it was one hour a day.

[tape 1 – side 2]
IRWIN: …was a little girl with very dark hair. She was even shorter than I was at the time. She would say, “What are you doing here? Get out of here. You don’t belong here.” [laughs] I was very light. I was extremely light haired, and I don’t know. She didn’t think I was Jewish. So, yes, I learned Hebrew and to this day, I mean, that’s where I did most of my Hebrew learning. Then in Kassel, which was again, we were in Kassel when my… Now I have to go back to [whispers to self ‘1931’]. Yes, this is where most of my Nazi memories are. There was first of all, I don’t know the exact sequence of these things but I know the dates approximately. First of all there were parades in the streets, with the, um, torches held up high. And of the parades and the yelling and the screaming and singing and the Horst Wessel song and all of that. There was, I remember distinctly hearing on the radio when the Reichstag was burning, and you know who set it on fire, and so forth and so quote unquote. I remember, actually in a very odd way, sitting on a pot trying to get rid of a [laughs] tapeworm, while Hitler’s ranting and raving on the radio. I think this has somehow merged with the burning of the Reichstag. And shortly thereafter, I was moved to another school and I don’t remember being told to leave school. But I think that this time around, when we got to Kassel I immediately went to a Jewish school.

Kettler: You don’t know if it was mandated at that point?
IRWIN: I think at that point it was. It was, yes, because I don’t recall having gone to public school in Kassel. So I think it was a Jewish school and it was the same dirty old man who taught my mother, who also taught me [laughs]. Which was another encounter of another kind. But I remember learning Hebrew, studying Hebrew there. I remember having a friend; at one time I had a friend. We were walking through the streets at dusk looking at the Hanukkah menorah, at the menorahs in the windows, feeling both scared and proud. Sort of a strange, magical feeling.

Kettler: What year was this?
IRWIN: Well, we’re talking about Hanukkah ’32.

Kettler: Did your family celebrate the holidays, the Jewish holidays?
IRWIN: Whenever I was with my aunts, or with my grandmother, we celebrated. And, you know, I got my grandfather’s… I got to do the whole Shabbat thing on Friday night and read not only, I mean….I got to go to the retseh, which is a very difficult paragraph that I could read in the whole, you know, in the… after the shir ha ma’alos. That whole prayer, long, long pages after Friday night dinner, and singing shir ha ma’alos, which is the song, the grace song after the meal. And then going through the pages, I got to read the small print, you know, the parts that….I have the original, my original prayer book with me.

Kettler: Can you still read that?
IRWIN: Yes, I mean, I’ve got… I’m struggling a little bit, but yes. Especially since I get the two pronunciations mixed up because I learned the Ashkenazi pronunciation first. I remember one night during that period I was at my grandfather’s, as I said, my grandmother died in June of ’32 and in January ’33, the Reichstag burned. So it was essentially the second half of ’32 that I remember very strongly, especially here. And there I remember one night there was a loud banging on the door of my grandfather’s house in Kassel. And I woke up, like 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning by these people who lived down the street. I didn’t know them but they were wailing and moaning, this older woman and her husband coming in. Apparently they had been dragged out of bed. Pulled into the street, beaten up with clubs and smashed and wounded and salt and pepper poured into their wounds. So it was getting scarier and scarier and that was, of course, again because it was not in Berlin, not in the metropolitan area, but out in the, you know, the redneck country, more or less. It was a lot more pronounced early, you know, like in the second half of ’32.

Kettler: You remember what you heard the adults discussing?
IRWIN: Well, what I just told you, yes,

Kettler: Any talk about leaving at that point?
IRWIN: No, no. See, I firmly believe that the reason that I’m alive today is that I come from a broken marriage, and no jobs, no furniture, no stability and nothing to lose. All the people whom I know, the other people who stayed and didn’t make it, were people who were established in some way. What saved me was all that instability, which is pretty miraculous. Then, I guess, my mother and I did not stay with my relatives. In January ’33 we were still in Kassel. My father was living somewhere else. He was in Berlin, living with Hede Grossmann and her husband Walter. I think we continued to stay in Kassel through the spring. [sighs] In Jewish school with ever increasing marches and stuff, it stayed more or less at the same level there for a while. I don’t remember what month this attack that I’m talking about [happened]. That is vague. But sometime early in ’33 [sighs] we went back to Berlin and stayed with Walter and Hede and their baby. My mother started being employed as a baby nanny for their child and a lot of pictures were taken. Yes, we actually stayed there for quite a while. It wasn’t really a ménage a trois because I don’t know to what extent my mother, my mother and father had any relations at that point, but it was my mother and I, and then Hede and Walter. Then my father. My father was sort of, I don’t know….

Kettler: Was he in the same household?
IRWIN: Yes.

Kettler: Were you all living…?
IRWIN: Yes. We had a large apartment. I remember I was also farmed out during that Berlin period to somebody else, to some people where I felt I was being used as a … I don’t know. I was sent out berry picking along with….There were some other kids in the family, too and we all were sent out berry picking and I know we weren’t given much choice and it wasn’t fun. It was hot and it was sticky and it was… But I also remember good times, you know, going swimming at Wannsee, which later had this infamous name of the Wansee Conference. But to me it was the place where you went to swim and play in the sand. I also went to school during that time. And then I got….We were already talking about leaving.

Kettler: Who is “we”?
IRWIN: My mom and I. That is when she asked me, “Where do you want to go?” My uncle had already gone to be in a kibbutz.

Kettler: Your mother’s brother?
IRWIN: Yes, in Israel. And I said, “I want to go to Palestine.” I was a real “people person.” My parents made friends through me. I was reading in the little book about how I would be very musical and at, at spas, clap, and there was silence to the piano and scream and shout, “Bravo!” And dance in public and everybody would just look and all these people would start meeting my parents because of how outgoing I was. It was not uncommon with kids, to bring adults together. So anyway, we’re talking about…. And I aslo remember this very, very strange scene. I don’t know whether it was, in what town… whether it was in Berlin or whether it was in Kassel. But I remember Nazis working and looking across at a builing. It was a high, multi-story building. And things were being thrown out of the windows. In my… There’s a blockage in my head, whether it is books or people. It’s like just a lot of violent images of things or people being thrown out of windows. Probably more likely books, but who knows? I was getting more and more freaked out, motivated my mother more and more to say, “We’ve got to get out of here.” When I think that we had made some kind of plans by that time. The decision was made irrespective of what I said. We were going to go to France. When I developed an illness, which turned out to be scarlet fever, I was, at the time that was before Sulfa and before Penicillin, so we were quarantined. I went into a scarlet fever hospital in Berlin for children. I had a ball there.

Kettler: Do you remember the date?
IRWIN: I loved it. Yes, it was [whispering]. My birthday was there. July, it was, from the end of June, 1933, when I celebrated my ninth birthday, July 4th. I was going into, well it was six weeks, so June, July, 1933. First of all, it was a place where I had kids to play with and talk to. I wasn’t alone; I wasn’t a little adult. Not only that but there was one, two , three, four, five, six, seven, eight in a ward. And that’s when I started to talk to the nurses and start my political life. At that point I said, and you know, I didn’t know who Shylock and Shakespeare were, but I said, “We too believe when we are” you know. And did the whole trip about “What is it? Why are you against the Jews? What do you have?” You know, and started really talking and propagandizing with the nurses. Then there was this other incident which, as I said, really politicized me for life. The other incident was that once we were better, that this children’s hospital had an outdoors, like a lawn and gardens and stuff. I was playing with the other kids. And what were we playing? We were playing “Nazi.” And we were marching up and down and it was… I didn’t think anything of it. I was called in by one of the nurses to have a shot of medicine or something, I don’t remember. And when I came back out the leader of this little Nazi group, a fairly tall guy, a young kid with blond hair, said, “You’re Jewish. You can’t play. You can’t play if you’re Jewish.” And I was heartbroken. I cried and I moved over to the side of the garden and cried. Pretty soon I felt an arm around me and he said, “Oh, never mind. You can play, com on back.” So we went back and then, of course, we got little cards saying our name and member of this little troop. We had our own little name. I mean these were eight and nine-year-old kids. I’ll never forget, talking about embarrassing moments, when I think it was shortly after that. I don’t remember the date but it was early in July. My parents came and the only way my parents could see me either through the door window or (this was on the first floor) to the windows from the outside, and they brought some friends and I held them with great pride. [laughs] I remember showing them the Nazi party. But be that as it may, it really left a strong mark. Then we packed a suitcase. After I finally recovered and was gotten out, we took some more time… but anyway, on September 4, 1933, we’d been on the train from Berlin to Paris and I remember going through the Ruhr Valley, which is an industrial area between Germany and France. It’s got steel mills and coal – lots of coal and steel. It’s very, very black and dusty and noisy and really industrialized. The train stopped and, if you know European trains, they have that long corridor inside the train, like you see in Orient Express. You see it and then you’ve got the little compartments off the corridor. While stretching my legs and looking out the window, there was this man standing next to me. Here I am now, barely nine years old and he is saying, “Isn’t this great? Isn’t this wonderful? Finally, this is our country, this is the great Germany.” And I’m saying, “Yeah, yeah” and agreeing with him and all. And then the train goes on. This was pretty close to the border and I am sitting and I’m embroidering this apron. Now this apron I didn’t do all this I think it was one of these things that even then they had pre-, pre-, pre-edged there, but the rest of it I did. I was working on this and holding my breath while I’m concentrating on this stuff. I still have part of the unused thread to home. 

At one point, as you cross the border, the conductors change. The Germans leave and then they ask for your passports and so forth. And then the French come in. So this is the very important piece of my life because, as I say, I’m almost wanting to do something with it and frame it in some way and call it, “Border Crossing,” or something like that because this has in every stitch that says, “I’m going to get out. We’re going to make it.”

Kettler: Who was on the train with you.
IRWIN: My mother.

Kettler: Just the two of you?
IRWIN: Yes, we packed a suitcase.

Kettler: And where was your father?
IRWIN: He was still in Berlin with his…

Kettler: He was unable to come?
IRWIN: Yes. He came subsequently, a few weeks later.

Kettler: Do you remember if there was any difficulty in getting a visa?
IRWIN: I don’t think he even needed a visa, you know. He spoke French like a… He learned during the war and when in Russia, he learned fluent Russian without an accent in two weeks. He spoke fluent French. He’d been brought up in France and I don’t think there was a problem with a passport.

Kettler: You and your mother did not have any difficulty going?
IRWIN: No, that was still, you know…

Kettler: What was the plan? Once you got to France you would be safe?
IRWIN: Well, yeah, that was…Which I began to realize very quickly was an illusion. But in France, and I have my boat, my Exodus from France. So in France, essentially, my mother and I didn’t have any money. We lived in a small hotel room and we ended up living for about two weeks. I remember the telephone calls to my father. My grandfather didn’t want us. He had a villa outside of Paris in St. Beau. I remember drinking café au lait and eating croissants, which I love. But you know, you can’t very well live on café au lait and croissants. Then, after a few weeks, she and I went to stay at his county place, where I had my first experience with having a dog. That was kind of neat. Also, [there was] a kid across the way so I started playing and learning French, which I didn’t know a word of French. You know, with sign language and stuff, nine year olds start learning French. Then my father came and we got an apartment in Paris in November. And that’s when I think he, in that apartment, he told me, “Take care of your mother for me.” But anyway, from that point on, we moved several times, even in Paris but also rented apartments with, you know, furnished.

Kettler: Did he work?
IRWIN: Well, he worked for his father then His father finally agreed to let him work in his business, which, as I said, he made a pittance. And he really used my father. But we were able to live.

Kettler: As far as you could tell, were your parents reunited?
IRWIN: No, I didn’t really know until I was 12 that there was something wrong. It wasn’t until I started reading. I started peeking in drawers and reading letters. My father lived in the so-called living room. And when we had a larger apartment, or once we moved, he spent all his time writing letters. When he wasn’t home, when he wasn’t working, he was writing letters. My mother had a room and I had a room and she was taking care of both of us. But we had no bath. We had relatives in France where we would go and take a bath once a week. That was common in France. I mean, we had a cold water…essentially we had a sink and cold water and a toilet. But a nice apartment otherwise.

Kettler: Did you go to school there?
IRWIN: Yes, I love it, absolutely adored it, just loved my whole time in France. Later on I joined the Jewish Scouts and it was a rich, wonderful experience. But even in France I remember especially during the Lèon Blum…Now we’re talking, if you know anything about French history, we’re talking …. Let’s see. We got to France September 4th, 1933. And, just to give you an image, I left in February 1939. Somewhere in ’37 or so, Lèon Blum, who was a Jewish Socialist, I mean you’ve go to, you know, was in the, the president and they changed presidents every time you turned around. But that was the period, as is now to some extent, when I thought Clinton’s gone, Blum is gone, when the reactionary and the right wing in France really [expostulates] really, really, became very vocal and very visible. You know, with lots of pamphlets being handed out the Action Française was out on the street in full force. I remember very much in class, schoolmates and teachers and talking to them about Germany. Talking to them about what I knew was going on in Germany, not so much persecution, in terms when we didn’t really know the extent of what was going on until years later. But in terms of their buildup. They kept saying , “Oh, you know; it can’t happen here.” And I kept saying, “It can happen here and it is going to happen here.” and kept talking and talking and talking and talking. Then in September, August and September of ’38, which was Munich, I had terror dreams of war, all the way through this period in Paris. I mean, really, really terrified. I remember during that whole period of Deladier and Chamberlain being in absolute terror of what would happen. I finally asked my father, “Please tell me there’s not going to be any war. There’s not going to be any war. There’s not going to be any war. Please tell me.” And this was ’38, so I was 14 and he kept saying, “It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right.” Then I actually broke down in tears of gratitude at the time over… September, when the Chamberlain and Deladier, you know, “Peace in our time” agreement was made. Now you must remember that we had already started, and I’m just remembering, making plans to go to America during that whole time. My aunt Margaret, who just died, had come through Paris and everybody was sort of coming and visiting us in Paris on their way out from Germany. My aunt Ruth had gone in 1937 and then somebody else, my aunt Margaret in 1938 and my grandfather came in ’38 with my aunt Margaret and they stayed at our house one their way to America. First the youngest sister came and established and they managed to get visas and affidavits for my aunt and her father, my grandfather.

Kettler: How did they get to America?
IRWIN: Through some relatives who had previously gone. I don’t know whether it was her husband or what. It was always a piggy-back kind of situation.

Kettler: Did you have the idea that you were also going to go?
IRWIN: The idea was, and I remember distinctly spending hours and hours in 1938 at the American embassy. Talk about anger. I remember people being crowded in this… It was this huge area divided by some wooden gates that you have for keeping kids out, you know. And there were all these desks of all these secretaries in that half of this huge area, pecking away and with all their makeup, and doing their nails, and you know, being typically American. Here we were on the other side of this wooden gate being terrified and crowded and anxious and there was about as much communication or human flow as from St. Helen’s to its environment in terms of those two areas of the room. And my anger. I was just livid. I was absolutely livid at these people who just had no connection, no understanding, not even seeing us. You know, we weren’t even being seen, let alone talked to or acknowledged in any way. What anger. So we had already responses and we couldn’t get it. We couldn’t get a visa. We couldn’t get an affidavit. We couldn’t. So the September “Peace in Our Time” was all the more crucial because it was like, “Oh, are we going to make it past this moment?”

[Tape 2 – Side 1]
IRWIN: Because if it had been war at that point, that would have been it. Well we were lucky enough to get an affidavit a few months later. In fact, we got a… in France there was a lottery, a French lottery. The way they work it you can, for one franc or ten francs or whatever, you can buy a… tenth or a hundredth or whatever of a ticket, a lottery ticket. It was the only time in my life, or my mother’s life and to this day….I don’t want to give away my secret bank number here and I won’t but the last three numbers of this bank… we won 2,500 francs, which is about $50. That helped us get across and, of course, the rest of the international rescue, and the Jewish…. We got a lot of help getting passage because we didn’t have the money. We got passage finally and an affidavit and it was very, very traumatic leaving–the whole story. I want to tell you about the Jewish scouts and what happened there. This was hard for me because to me, France was home. You know, when you are 14 or 15 years…. But anyway, the Jewish scouts. We sang in the large synagogue in Paris. We all sang. And this was my uniform which I wear to this day. We got passage on the Ile de France on one of its last trips. This was blue and this was white and one of the last trips of this ship. It left Le Havre on February 15, 1939 and got here on Washington’s Birthday, February 22nd. I went into Philadelphia; that is another whole story. I don’t know if you want to break of something.

Kettler: Who was that? Who went?
IRWIN: My mother and I.

Kettler: Okay then, just the two of you?
IRWIN: Just the two of us.

Kettler: Where was your father?
IRWIN: In Paris.

Kettler: He wasn’t planning to leave, or what?
IRWIN: Again, planning to leave later. And he did leave later.

Kettler: What about the couple–the close friends? Were they still in Germany?
IRWIN: No, actually no. They had gone to Harford, Connecticut. I think already earlier but maybe they were staying… I don’t know at what point they came. He spent the rest of his life living in their house in Harford, Connecticut. I went to visit often, and my kids did, too. This was one of the last, I think it was the last voyage of the Ile de France. It was the sister ship of the Normandie, which was a little larger, which was the other large French liner. I was sick as a dog.

Kettler: You got seasick?
IRWIN: Ach. We were, well you see, we didn’t have any money so we were in the hull of the boat, in the bottom of the ship, where the horses and… We were just above the horses. There were a lot of central European immigrants along with us, who like to, especially when they get seasick, to sleep on the floor and suck on lemons. They were all over the floor with their babushkas and their stuff. We went in February and, if you know anything about the Atlantic in February, we hit this…It was great. The first day we had Coquille St. Jacques and it was wonderful and delicious and I thought, “Wow, I’ve never seen such luxury!” The next day we hit the tip of an iceberg and an absolutely horrendous storm, which lasted for days, all the way across, all the way across. It was like you were pushed up and then up and then up again, suspended, and then crash. And this went on for days [laughs], and we were sick. It wasn’t until the last day, just before we got here, when we got up on deck and saw that there was no deck left. It had just been ripped off. Everything had been ripped off. So, talk about a trip whose…..

Kettler: Can I ask you a few questions about….? Just before I go back to….?
IRWIN: Yes, yes.

Kettler: When you were living in France, what did you hear about what was going on in Germany or elsewhere?
IRWIN: Well, most of the people who we knew were in Berlin. And in Berlin there wasn’t that much violence going on. Or I mean, it got to be more and more uncomfortable for professional people, so you know we have a practice and stuff, so it got…. More and more we heard but there was nothing about….And we knew that there was a rumor that there were concentration camps, but nothing, no details. Just having seen what I had seen, when I was there, you know. It was enough for me to….Uh, certainly not to suppose that there was… That would happen to the extent that it happened.

Kettler: Do you remember hearing about Kristallnacht?
IRWIN: Well, that was in ’38. That was just about when my aunt….You see, my aunt had a store in Göttingen and she….I don’t remember exactly no the dates, but she had a cigar store or cigarette store and she tells about it. She told how these young guys who used to be her customers, then all of a sudden they would come in wearing SS uniforms and some might not say much to her but ask to use her bathroom and throw up. What she gathered from them was that they were asked to do things that made them ill and they would. I remember being in Gottingen in Germany that time and seeing, and being on the side of the street and the SS, which were the brown uniforms and the SR which were in the black uniforms and marching by the tens of thousands down the street and singing the Horst Wessel song and hearing the words of the Horst Wessel song which tells you all, just tells you.

Kettler: It’s good to have it on record.
IRWIN: Yes, right. I remember feeling very conflicted, What do I do? I stand there. Do I raise my hand? Do I make the signal with the Heil Hitler sign or not. I remember what I did but it felt when you were on the street and you couldn’t really retreat and you couldn’t move and you couldn’t . It was an ambivalent feeling. Really ambivalent and scared, terribly scared and that whole time in Kassel and in Gottingen, especially is a University town, and a large medical school there. The memories are skipped from place to place especially since we moved around so much, are scattered.

Kettler: Was there anything specific to Kristallnacht that you remember?
IRWIN: I was gone by Kristallnacht, it was in 1938.

Kettler: Do you remember hearing about it? 
IRWIN: Not really. I’m sure it was in the French papers but it all blends not. It was happening in the small cities all along, it happened that night on a larger scale, all over Germany. But it had been happening in 1932, windows were smashed in and graffiti on the wall and people being dragged out of their place and “Don’t shop here,” and being called names and people being beaten up and it was happening all the time in the smaller places from 1932 on. So that having heard about something, you know I was heavily involved in school in being a scout and a student and so it didn’t penetrate to that extent. Other than the awareness that this was an ongoing process, which I knew was getting worse and worse. This Kristallnacht happened in 1938 and I know my aunt, I can’t remember if my aunt got out before or after. I know she got out in 1938 and my grandfather as well and I think my Hede and Walter had already gotten out then.

Kettler: So was there any family left in Germany by that time?
IRWIN: There were family, older people who had stores and homes and I have a picture of one of the children that I used to play with that lived in the house and she was. Well, I was 7 or 8 and she was maybe 9 or 10. I know she died in the concentration camp. There were a lot of people whom I knew who never made it out. I lived a very isolated life in this strange family configuration. But immediate…now all the people who stayed in France didn’t make it and I know that both family and friends. I went back in 1956 and started trying to find fellow scouts and people and of course it was summer and Paris was deserted but I didn’t find anybody. I wasn’t able to find anybody.

Kettler: What were some of the activities that the Jewish scouts did?
IRWIN: Well I think by the way I understand that the Jewish scouts were actually became part of the Resistance in large numbers. The scouting in France is whole different thing from here. It is a deep spiritual commitment. We met once a week all day from early in the morning on Sunday until late at night on Sunday. We had our own house that all of us, the troops, met jointly together. We went to camp in the Alps in 1936 for six weeks and that was paid for by the Jewish Committee of some sort. In 1937, in the Pyrenees and I remember hearing, being terrified about the war in Spain and even hearing shots. For all I know they were hunters. But I thought they were. I was hearing the war in Spain, but again terrified. To this day, Guernica, the painting. I saw recently a piece of dance that’s being performed actually this weekend which reminded me of that whole feeling of just terror. Absolute terror. Dealing with some stuff that’s going on now. The scouts were, it was really a fascinating thing because. Like in France you don’t say an oath when you become a scout, you say an oath when you two, three, four years down the road when you feel that you’re spiritually ready to make a commitment and they pushed the date ahead for me because they knew that even after two or three years they let me take this oath because they knew I was leaving on this board. 

The oath is very, very profound experience. The French have this love affair with Native Americans, so in the real ceremony you jump over fire and you get given a totem. I was given the totem Yucca, “Static”, and I didn’t know what a Yucca was until I got to the west coast. I really liked that because it was both tall and strong and very gentle and delicate. They read me a passage about love and loving. The French there was also a strong influence in France, probably through Switzerland and Hesse of Eastern philosophers so there were a lot of Eastern thinking as part of this even thought it was a very Zionist Jewish. But in terms of the spirituality there was a lot of a profound kind of Eastern influence which was interesting. I belonged to a choir, we sang. I belonged to a Jewish choir as part of the scouts and we sang in the main synagogue in Paris, La Victoire. Being up there in the choir loft was just incredible. We sang wonderful, wonderful songs, both of the service, songs, Hashivenu and also Israeli songs and Shalom and just. I was hoping to bring the music actually but I have to dig in the basement to find that. Oddly enough there was one girl from my troop was on the ship coming over, but she was in first class. This was one of my first real interpersonal disappointments because after I got on the ship and I went and all this solidarity vanished on the boat. I was down there and she was and I tried and I tried, you know, come on (laughs) and I’m very strange. The French, when they are in families they’re very. Anyway, so much for adolescent wounding. Then coming here to finally getting off the boar at 2 am on February 22 and I’ll be coming to the end here pretty soon. And being picked up by my mother and were picked up by my aunt Margaret and aunt Ruth’s husband who had traveled from Philadelphia to pick us up. I remember my first Life magazine while waiting to. And then traveling out on a train or something to Philadelphia and then in a cab to their house. And it was early, wee hours in the morning and there was all these little houses and they little edges of snow and I thought, “Are we in the right country?” I mean I thought, “Hang on, Am I in Japan?”. (laughs). Cause I, it was like I was expecting glitter and skyscrapers and all that stuff.

Kettler: Do you remember when you first landed? Did you go through Manhattan?
IRWIN: Half asleep in the middle of the night from the train to the. I didn’t see very much. I mean I got to see the Statue of Liberty, finally, sort of “Oh, come on out”. You know and what was left of the deck at that point. Then it was Philadelphia and Philadelphia is row houses and very different from what I expected. Anyway, we got to their apartment and it was on the second floor. There were flags all over the place in the apartment and cherry pies and all the whole hatchets, the whole Washington’s Birthday trip. To welcome us on Washington’s Birthday to America, February 22, 1939. 

Kettler: How long had they been there?
IRWIN: Well my aunt Margaret since 1938 and my aunt Ruth, which sister was the youngest sister, I don’t know. The year before that, I mean not very long, 1937, I don’t know when they got out.

Kettler: And your grandfather was with them too?
IRWIN: My grandfather had come with my aunt in 1938. I don’t know whether it was before or after Kristallnacht, but my guess is that it was before in 1938. Cause they stopped in Paris, So, I think it was probably before because I mean they were able to actually get a visa and get out and not only that but have their stuff shipped. So my grandfather had bought a lot of accordions and all kinds s of stuff that they took out in this big lift on the ship with them. Only they came over on the Queen Mary. You know I could look all that up and find out more accurately when they got off, but…

Kettler: Do you want to take a break? 
IRWIN: Yes.

Kettler: I don’t know Herman personally.
IRWIN: Well, his wife went and got her PhD in her sixties.

Kettler: OK, so where we are after you just landed in America
IRWIN: I’m eating cherry, cherry pie.

Kettler: Chery pie in Philadelphia
IRWIN Philadelphia on Washington’s birthday.

Kettler: Maybe you could summarize what happened. Some focus on what you were hearing about what was going on during the war and what kind of news were you earing back about what was happening to the Jews in Europe and what you heard, from different family members, what happened to your father and his father and different relatives and what your Jewish life was like in the States.
IRWIN: 1938 I went to Grant High School in Philadelphia which is a working class in north Philadelphia area. I couldn’t believe because I came from a school in Paris which was before 1968 the schools weren’t integrated male and female. I came from an all-girls lycee to an American high school where the guys were standing there and with their shirts hanging out and it was just a whole other world. I was very out of place. Somebody asked me if I ever had a date and I thought they were talking about the kind you eat. Generally speaking. I was sort of taken aback and I think I must have been some kind of snob, because I was put in a general class and what we were learning wasn’t very interesting.

Kettler: Did you know any English?
IRWIN: I had studied some English in the lycee in France about a year and a half. I knew some English. Pretty soon I got into an honors class and somewhat things were a little better after that. Then I enrolled in a conservative synagogue which my aunt who had preceded us here and her husband and family were involved in. So I was in that synagogue and I got confirmed and lived. My grandfather was here so there was a lot of Jewish life going on in both my aunt’s family and then with my grandfather who was staying in the same house. But my mother and I were living by ourselves in an apartment and of course she and I didn’t, I mean where we were in Paris e participated in Jewish life with other German Jews in Paris for the holidays and she and I would light candles and do things for ourselves and each other. Not so much on Shabbat, but certainly Hanukkah and lots and lots of internal prayer. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, with my heart always being with, even in Paris, all the way through being with the German Jews, I mean always internal prayer for the German Jews because I knew things were devastating. And the same here, there wasn’t a holiday of any kind including New Year’s when I wasn’t thinking, praying for an end to the horror. Which I was hearing more and more about. I remember, I don’t know exactly what year, but I know that when the first stuff came out on the liberation, I was absolutely torn apart. I was having a great deal of feelings of guilt about having gotten out about my friends especially about the ones in France who I knew at the time. When France went under which was early in the war my terror of what I knew was going to. I mean when I was in France, I kept saying, “It can happen here, it can happen here.” And now it was being realized what my worst fears had been and I was thinking and worrying a whole lot. My mother and I lived a very isolated life so you know we hear from my relatives in France. I mean later on I heard that my relatives on my father’s were apprehended and taken to southern France and didn’t make it. I had lost all contact with my fellow scouts. They had all essentially gone to southern France and my guess is they didn’t make it and because everyone who went down south, which is where people fled to, most of those people didn’t make it. Of , the Scouts had totems, so we knew each other by totem names. How do you find people when I was 15 and 21 by the time the war was over? It was a matter of tracing, tracking people down. I tried in 1056 and it was like married names. Who the heck knew, you know?

Kettler: So what happened to your father?
IRWIN: My father got a job in Hartford, Connecticut and stayed with Walter and Hede Grossman.

Kettler: When did he leave France?
IRWIN: A few months after we did.

Kettler: And with your grandfather?
IRWIN: My grandfather came with my aunt Margaret in 1938.

Kettler: What about your father’s father?
IRWIN: The rumor, we don’t know whether he died of illness or whether he died in an apartment. I don’t know if he collaborated, I have absolutely no idea and we never did find out. We didn’t have enough contacts with people there. I finally wrote to someone of that branch of the family and got a letter back like six months ago and I sent a long letter back including some questions and I think I was so verbal in this letter that I must have intimidated the person because they never wrote back. Here they said they would try to send and they sent some things special delivery and then I answered and got nothing back. This person is my age, you get more if I ever hear back again.

Kettler: Did your mother work in Philadelphia?
IRWIN: Yes, my mother worked very hard, far beyond her physical abilities. She worked for RCA Victor Raymond Rosen which was a record company. She was picking records and you had 78’s at the time and they were very heavy and the albums were even heavier and she would have to fill orders and pick them off the shelves and that was really hard. And later she did some bookkeeping. I worked a little bit at that same place. You know after school. My first vocational paper was written about wanting to become a psychiatric social worker. The reason why I wanted to become psychiatric social worker is that we had a Jewish welfare worker whom I could have strung her up at the nearest pole, because she came in there. My mother was very creative and we lived in a one-room apartment and we had orange crates and things that my mother draped with silk scarves and so it was very beautiful. This woman came in with her high heels and her furs and told us we were living…it was too nice and we had to move. So, we got $7 a week or a month or something from these people and so we moved to an apartment which was more expensive. It was $37 instead of $28. I don’t know a month or a week or whatever. And she was telling us what to do and looking down her nose and so I wrote an extensive paper on what I think social worker should be like. My aunt Margaret worked as a kitchen maid and we stayed at that person’s house for a while. I was lucky enough to compete for a scholarship, a Philadelphia merit scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania. Because of my knowledge of Latin, French and German, I ended up being a scholarship although I probably flunked math. But I got a full year scholarship which was a blessing. I wanted to go to medical school but didn’t quite make it. So I got a bachelor’s in microbiology. That was my first career. I have 5 careers. Then when all the stuff came out about what really happened in Germany I was devastated with guilt and horror and then of course hearing later that, especially one Edith, the one that I played with, that I have a picture was killed during. To this day I have not seen the film about Anne Frank. I think I once read the book. I have not seen and probably will not see Schindler’s List. I’ve seen all the images in Shoah and in the television things. Because I could turn it on and off. I can somehow there’s a way of seeing it and then getting away from it and seeing it and getting away from it. It’s hard for me right now to really put into words that I’m feeling. You know, seeing in that book that my grandmother’s brother, whom I knew and he was a witness, his signature is witnessed on my parent’s wedding license, marriage license. His signature is right in here. A woman who aunt Mathilde who my grand grandfather’s sister who was a really neat woman and I remember going to her store and I found her picture of her store last night and seeing her. She had chickens and she sold chickens among other things and I see this image of this woman sitting there and she was actually crippled and they took her to a concentration camp and she was killed there. And on this picture I found yesterday she’s got a cane and she’s a very heavy woman with a cane. I remember her sitting there pulling the feathers off the chicken, the feathers flying all around. I mean these are childhood memories. You know I tend to talk more about the lighter aspects of my childhood. It is these memories are just and the knowledge of what happened and the imaging it is. I can’t, hard to put into words and to address.

Kettler: How has it affected the way you live your life?
IRWIN: It’s like when I see films and when I see movies or when I read, it’s like I have to, if I see an injustice, so I have to turn it off. It’s like I can’t cope with injustice and I have been from the first I started coming here to and even my daughter, my children, especially my daughter. For example, when we lived in New Jersey, we moved to a school, a town and a school that had an integrated school out of something that was all white to really have a cross section of cultures there and to have some in the mixed neighborhood, black kids. At that time there were no other racial minorities in the area. I was out there on the street with pamphlets and petitioning and not only during the racial things, but peace, . My daughter is a staunch pacifist, non-violent resistance. She is really super, super active. The reason that I called you to do this interview, besides recording the fact that I was there and I left Germany, because of what happened and I would not have survived if I had not left. I left France because of what happened and what I knew would happen and I would not have survived if we hadn’t left. I was very lucky that I had the stormy unstable childhood that I did have, because had I not had this kind of background, there were people in the cities who said, “Oh, it’s going to get better, it’s going to get better, it’s not going to get any worse. Things will change “. And they had jobs and apartments and furniture and whatever and they stayed and waited for things to get better, whereas I knew and we knew that it wasn’t going to get better and we had nothing to lose. Because we had nothing to lose it was easy to leave. The reason I called and wanted to do this was because I want to go out there and sit with the kids, sit on the floor, sit on the tables, be at their level, not walking down. I’m a person who will walk into a room and if you ask me “are there men, are there women, are they young, are they old”. I wouldn’t know because to me I don’t sense the difference and I want to be able to tell them about the time when I was eight, when I started arguing with the nurses and asking them what, why, what was threatening about being Jewish, what was different about them and me. I want to be able to go in and be seen as just another person and share this stuff so that the kids today can realize that life, their life, their personal life and quote politics is not separate. That everything that happens out there in the so called political world, conditions every moment and every aspect of their lives . That it is essential that people stand up for rights and freedom and equality. And justice and get out there and become involved and active and whoever it is that’s being treated unjustly, whether it’s the gay and lesbian population, native Americans, black, Hispanic, whatever group. That if we want and they want to be treated with justice and equality they got to get involved and be part of making that happen. That’s how it affected, coming from that background has affected my life and everything that I feel, sense, believe in, and my family as well. 

Kettler: When did you get married.
IRWIN: Christmas Day, 1946. 

Kettler: What’s your husband’s name?
IRWIN: Samuel Irwin. I sort of put him through school. He was in the Navy and so he had the GI Bill, luckily for me. He went to school and I worked as a researcher. First he went to Rutgers University and then in New Jersey and later on to, I was instrumental in getting him graduate work. I was working in Pharmaceuticals doing bacteriological research on the early antibiotics and got him interested in pharmacology and he got a PhD in pharmacology at Ann Arbor, University of Michigan. Then my first child was born in Ann Arbor, Victoria, 1952, and then I had two sons in two following years. They were born in New Jersey because he went to work at Schering Pharmaceutical, did research in morphine related central nervous system drugs. Later on he became world famous for developing the two most used medications for anti-psychotic medications, polyxing and trilafon. I have a daughter and two sons also a year apart. 

Kettler: Did you raise your family in Jewish Tradition?
IRWIN: My husband’s family came out of Russia or Poland, 1905 Revolution. So they were essentially socialists and non-believers . They weren’t interested in things Jewish, other than cultural stuff. When my husband married me, I brought into his entire family Jewish history, culture holidays, all the ceremonies. They had big seders with nothing but the food. It was very different. Eastern European cooking is very different from German Jewish cooking. My husband was very scientifically oriented and was not interested. He was looking for a spiritual life all his life and judging from his letters. My daughter very early, like at age two began asking about afterlife and death and stuff and was wanting to know about God . We had all the holidays and stories and everything in the house . All her play was involved. There was Esther and Haman and she was under the table. She would be somebody who was in prison when she was two or three years old. The play was involving drama and theater around Jewish themes, even before there was any religious affiliation of any kind. Finally I got him to accept being involved in a reform synagogue that was forming in New Jersey. Even then he would pull the kids out and say “No ore Sunday School” and he would teach them Darwin and stuff like that. My daughter always resented it. She felt from a very early age that he was putting down her belief in God. He sang, on all the trips it was Jewish songs and Yiddish songs.  When my father was in Russia during World War I, he learned Russian in two weeks. That was his first contact with Yiddish, because in Germany there was no Yiddish. Yiddish was middle high German that was carried over from Germany to the eastern countries way back in the middle ages. Germans don’t speak Yiddish and look down on eastern Jews who speak Yiddish. At one time my mother was in love with an eastern young man. Her father forbad her to see him and that was very, very sad. I have books that he inscribed for her, beautifully sensitive stuff. It was like black and white almost. These are people you don’t associate with. Within your own Jewish culture, any culture, any ethnic culture to have that kind of thing is very sad. And of course we see it today in Bosnia and everywhere else. Thant’s another reason to be fighting for justice and freedom and equality. So my father sang Yiddish songs to me and once on a bus or subway in Philadelphia and my father was visiting from Connecticut and I made some remark about there is some loud heavy fat Jewish women who were talking loud Yiddish and he really laced into me. He really planted into me that I was being prejudiced. I never forgot that. It’s been a really powerful part of my life to recognize the importance of talents and understanding and equality. But my husband knew a lot of Yiddish songs. I taught him some Israeli songs and we sang a lot. But there was no religion . My daughter was very religious. We came here to Oregon. My husband wanted to get away from industry. He was working in research in New Jersey and had been kicked upstairs enough so he could no longer do active research. He was more administrative. So he wanted to get back to actual hands-on research. He was interviewed and brought here by George Saslow who was he head of the Psychiatry Department. He was brought her to teach the entire state and the people in psychiatry how to use psychoactive drugs. We came in August 1964. 

Kettler: You mentioned that you’d had a few different careers. Were you working during those years prior?
IRWIN: I was working for 7 years as a researcher before my children were born, but then I didn’t work after that until later when my marriage broke up. There was generational marriage break ups.

Kettler: Did your parents ever get divorced?
IRWIN: No never got divorced. But their marriage was over after two or three years. I mean at most. Bring me back to what I was talking about.

Kettler: Oregon.
IRWIN: I joined Temple Beth Israel and I had this dream of seeing my daughter walk down this red carpet and be married there and so forth. We arrived at some stable living and community. Well it wasn’t to be that way. We came here in August 1964 and moved into the house I’m living in today. Having bounced around my whole life it was really nice to be having a hearth and home. Based on the fact that I had a very open. That I believed in openness. I told my husband I was brought up and you don’t love your own people, you let people be who they are and who they are going to be. So he had a lot of freedom. He fell passionately in love with an absolutely gorgeous woman, whom I also thought was gorgeous and talented and wonderful in October 1967. I realized that the marriage was going to not last and in 1968 it was over. We had 22 years of living together and got divorced in 1971. Part of this process was when things would get really falling apart in 1967, all three kids were going off to camp in different places. My daughter was sent to. This was time when things were really rocky. We had never had a fight. They didn’t know anything was going on in the marriage. My daughter went on a partially scholarship from Beth Israel to Israel. She was there for two months. She worked in a kibbutz. My daughter has a condition which was diagnosed later which made it impossible for her to grow. So she was four foot something, five. She had a hard time connecting with people and did connect with a boy in Lincoln High School in their senior year. He was studying to become a priest and was a follower of Dorothy Day. Dorothy Day was a communist who converted to Catholicism and founded the Catholic Worker Movement in New York. She was honored as a great woman by Life Magazine. 

This is an anarchist movement in Catholicism that goes back to early Christianity to communal living, voluntary poverty, non-violent resistance, you live for the Gospel, you don’t listen to what happened afterwards with the Church and all the superstructure of it. My daughter was coming back from Israel. She was very close to this young man and she was into arrest actions where she went to jail during the Vietnam War, chained herself to the recruiting center. There’s part of my whole background this part of being Jewish. Also in our family historically because I didn’t believe in polarities. My husband’s family had always celebrated Christmas forever and we had celebrated Hanukkah, so we celebrated both. When she came back from Israel she was totally turned off, she loved the life on the kibbutz but was totally turned off by the militant, militarism that she found. Here she was a vegetarian, she was a believer in ono-violent resistance, in Gandhi’s type of living. She was very conscious of persecution and what had happened to me and knew every iota of what I had gone through and what Jews had gone through. But she also believed in non-violent resistance which of course wasn’t possible at the late stage but may have been possible at some stage. She was bar mitzvahed on November 3rd, my aunt’s birthday, 1968. She was baptized in 1970. My aunt never knew. We never told her. But my mother was there. My mother as a pantheist, a person who was open. She has been profoundly religious since then. She leads seders. I have a Haggadah that she leads our seder. She just recently went to the Nevada testing grounds and crossed the lines. They did weaving with the entire Indian population there. 

Kettler: Where is she now? Where does she live? Is she married?
IRWIN: She lives here in town. She is married but cannot have children.

Kettler: Does she consider herself Jewish?
IRWIN: She considers herself Catholic, but she considers it a continuum. She considers it that there is nothing other than a certain mystical aspect. You know she doesn’t see any and I frankly I agree with her.

Kettler: What about your son?
IRWIN: They went to Sunday School. She is the only one who stayed in Sunday school and wanted to be bat mitzvahed. She was 15 when she was bat mitzvahed. They didn’t want any part of it, no part of religion. They were grown up, they were growing up. The marriage falling apart, Sam Irwin was one of the people who founded the Carex recorder 166 which is the OutsideIn now. He was out and was on television and radio talking about the whole. Don’t forget this was the drug period, this was long hair, He as talking about the insanity of calling marijuana a narcotic, which it isn’t. This was the late sixties, early seventies. Drop out, do your own thing, drug thing and that’s where Victoria was into a deep spiritual religious life.

Kettler: Where are your sons now?
IRWIN: Daniel is still living at home because he’s got a few problems but he is fine otherwise. Daniel is probably also spiritual, more Daoist than anything else. He participates in the seder with moans and groans. My youngest son who really wanted to have nothing to do with religion now has two kids. He’s married to an Episcopalian woman of German origin. When you have children, you know, the religion becomes important.  They were married by a rabbi who used to be at Havurah, before the rabbi who is there now. At that time there was an agreement that the children wouldn’t learn about both religions. Now that his kids are growing up, he is pushing Judaism on the children. He’s preventing his wife to practice her religion or even do much talking about it.

Kettler: How old are your grandchildren?
IRWIN: Two and eight. So I just got the book: If You’re Jewish and He’s Christian, What are the Kids? It examines two sets of families, one with children learning about one religion and the other learning about both religions. Neither one of the boys got the same background as my daughter. She went for the religion and they didn’t. They got it from their very, very earliest days.

Kettler: When you moved to Oregon, where was your mother?
IRWIN: My other had been living with us. She had a lot to do , not consciously, with my relationship to her was of incredible closeness. I was sort of absorbed by her and just now sort of developing my own boundaries which is really neat. She had a lot to do with the breakup of the marriage. She lived with us for a long time and actually my husband invited, first he insisted that she leave and then after a number of years, he invited her back it. It was not good. When we moved to Oregon he had hoped that she would finally not stay with us but she was unable to take care of herself. Not only take care of herself but even know people she was so shy, she never had a friend. She didn’t talk to anybody and so it was that we brought her over. She lived with us for a while and then lived in an apartment. But it was a devastating conflict. She died in 1976 and our marriage had already been over, but it had a lot to do with it. It was like the children and she came first and my husband came last. 

Kettler: What did she die of?
IRWIN: She had peripheral vascular disease. She had a leg amputated, had diabetes. She didn’t move around very much and she wasn’t very strong ever. She was 76 when she died.

Kettler: How about your father?
IRWIN: My father died when I was beginning to finally develop some kind of relationship with him. I was studying and working on a Master’s degree in French at the U of O and of course he had a French library and French knowledge that was immense. I was so looking forward to spending more time with him and developing more of a relationship with him. He died in 1968 just about the time my marriage fell apart. It was a rough time. Among many other things.

Kettler: Have you remarried?
IRWIN: No, no.

Kettler: So what are you doing now?
IRWIN: Well, I read and there’s lots of time in between when I do my recorder 267. I had several. It took me ten years to finally become financially to where I could support myself . After thinking about what I was going to do, reviewing my assets, I decided I wanted to go back to research. I found out during the Nixon years, mush as it is now, research funds were cut off. I really didn’t want to do medical lab work. I wanted to do research and so I would have to go back to school. After twenty years it’s a bit late. I got a degree in French and by that time the language requirements had been dropped and so I went back to school to the U of O and took a look at my other assets. Dance had been my avocation throughout life. Since late in my twenties, but I danced when I was born, so I got an interdisciplinary degree in psychology and gerontology because I wanted to work with the senior population and movement, which I still haven’t done. The reason I haven’t done it is that there is something in me that says I’ve taken care of people my whole life and it’s like something doesn’t want to right now. It’s something about wanting to do for myself right now, because I’ve like giving, giving, giving, giving. Anyway, so in practice, for a while in Oregon State Hospital and Providence Psychiatric Unit and privately and stuff. I also got work as a counselor at CODA which was and worked there for about, at the methadone program, for a few years and other types of counseling and finally worked also in nutritional counseling and then went and got a job at Vocational Rehab and worked for the state as a social security disability examiner, making decisions as to who’s disabled and who’s not disabled according to the law and medically. Did that for 10,11 years traveling to Salem every day and then retired in 1999, got called back to work in the summer of 1991, 1992, 1993. This is the first summer I haven’t worked and I’m enjoying it. I need the money but I’m enjoying it.

Kettler: Are you involved…
IRWIN to celeb rate my 70th birthday this month or rather in July and I’m enjoying my life a lot. Am I involved in what?

Kettler: …in any Jewish organization?
IRWIN: Well, um.

Kettler: What about your sons?
IRWIN: I’m so much into the …funny every once in, you know, I go back to, I’ve gone to the service here and couldn’t find a hard connection. At the Beth Israel I found myself really, I went back and asked to use the chapel for my husband’s memorial and they said, “Well,”, Rabbi Rose said “If I can’t do the service, you can’t use the chapel.” Which I didn’t, was unhappy about and Rabbi Geller said “By my guest, use the chapel,” he said. And here I really enjoyed Rabbi, help me with the name…

Kettler: Stampfer.
IRWIN: Yes, again his bringing the Arab population and the Jewish population and his whole ecumenical stand, I really, really liked. But I just couldn’t connect with a very universal spiritual content, you know, it wasn’t until I think I felt that when I went to P’nai Or. There was the first bushes, you know, only went to one of their services, but there I felt this Jewish group where I can flourish, because this transcends to the whole spiritual thing, rather than social and exclusive and I have a problem with organizations that exist to maintain our identity and by maintaining identity you are including but you’re also excluding. It’s I know that’s not the intent, but that’s how it feels, psychologically. I take full responsibility for being, for having a totally. This is not what it’s all about. It’s just my reaction.

Kettler: You mentioned that you’ve been back to France and did you ever go back to Germany?
IRWIN: For a few hours, my husband had gone to Germany to lecture and I met him from France and we had an encounter and met at the Frankfort railroad station and then went on to Switzerland and we had a very unpleasant encounter with some people there. These guys were talking abusively to some women and my husband in his broken German-Yiddish told this guy to lay off and the other guy spat in his face or something, or whatever happened there was, it was a very negative experience and I thought Let me get out of here!

Kettler: Have you been to Israel?
IRWIN: No I probably would go. I have a very intense fear of flying. I don’t know what it’s related to. Fear of flying and fear of war. I’m fearful.

Kettler: That’s understandable.
IRWIN: I’m fearful. I’m just really.

Kettler: I’m going to turn it over to Eric now for a few minutes.
IRWIN: Yeah, cause?

Kettler: Because he’s been listening to the whole interview and taking notes and they’re probably thinking that you knew that he would like to ask you about.
IRWIN: Yeah, right.

Eric: When you were living in France, do you remember any anti-Semitism or political, anything about the political climate?
IRWIN: Ya, ya, as I was mentioning earlier, there was a great deal of anti-Semitism. Not that I experienced personally, but that was on the street in the area, in the neighborhood. There were people out on the street, Lecion Francais, which is the right-wing French newspaper and French political…which was far right, which were handing out anti-Jewish literature and were being very aggressive in their verbal and you know haranguing stuff.

Eric: But based on, you said you felt at home there even though this was going on?
IRWIN: Well, I mean this was out on the street, you know like people were, it was one political, don’t forget this was, I mean it’s understandable.

Ok, Leon Blum was the Jewish President and then the reaction to that was then came that idea actually who was not really, he was sort of in between but then after that came Petain, so you had a very strong right wing anti-Semitism movement in France. I mean it goes back to the Dreyfus. I mean it goes back to World War I and he Dreyfus case. You know it goes way, way back. And these people were out there and they were vocal but there was a very liberal government and when I was there, you know, and so I felt I knew that there were political parties and political differences and there were many, many, parties and you know there was no television so you didn’t have an overriding stuff going into people’s head, minds, you know, in terms of turning whole, a whole country’s head around you know, we didn’t have a radio.

Eric: Did you at all meet any other Jews who were concerned for their future in Europe? And in France?
IRWIN: the only people I knew were the people, the French. There was very little contact, we didn’t, the only time, the only services we ever went to were the German Jewish services that were held at holiday times.

Eric: But even like in your scout troop, for example, there was no talk of …
IRWIN: Well the scouts again in France, everyone who was in the scouts stays in the scouts. There were no grownups. Which it was a great thing, in other words, if you were like, have started like when you were 7 or 8 and then you would go into the junior scouts and then you would become a leader. And so my leader was a young woman who was the top leader of the whole troop, was 21, and she was in law school. There were no mommies and daddies around. I didn’t meet mommies and daddies and we were living again, my family being so odd, didn’t, we didn’t know any French people and they also the French are very, I remember even from my Jewish friends, I don’t think I was ever invited to anybody’s house, ever. And I lived there almost six years. And I never went to anybody else’s house except one non-Jewish family lived in the same house as I was and they were divorced, there was a divorced mommy and daughter. The French are very insular when it comes to their family life, you know, so and of course we spent time in school from 9 to 5 every day, six days a week except for Thursday which was a day off. So I didn’t know anybody.

Eric: Were you a resident alien or anything like that when you lived in the United States during the war.
IRWIN: Ya, as a matter of fact we were investigated by the FBI and I have a police report here with me about…. Actually that was only in 1944 where they checked on my mother’s criminal record but there was nothing there. Ya, we had to register as aliens, Germans.

Eric: Well what was it like being in the country, or being in high school, being a German Jew during the war?
IRWIN: I had a very peculiar position because I was considered French. And I was like, “Oooh, you’re rom Paris?” and I spoke French and I got to talk in front of the French classes and stuff, so I felt, well, for one thing I felt kind of being a total greenhorn. I didn’t know how to cope with the kids around me and the whole American Society. But I didn’t feel any negative anti-Jewish or and is it because of the fact that I was from France and I spoke more French than I spoke German. I wasn’t really affected by that. In fact, anything I felt kind of special, you know, I was very lucky, very, very, lucky.

Eric: When you found out about all the destruction and what was happening, was that difficult to relate to other people who had no experience of those sorts of things?
IRWIN: At the time I think everyone who heard about it and it was all over the radio and in the newspapers, was equally horrified. I don’t know if there was anybody that didn’t believe it. You saw it in the newsreels, you aw he pictures and you knew that these people were your contemporaries and these people that you saw who were liberating and there were people that everybody knew, that you saw in the newsreels all the time. And everybody, the soldiers were people’s sons and people’s brothers and husbands, so it wasn’t like it was long ago, it was, it’s like now and so there was no one was doubting that there was something. And everybody was equally horrified, and disbelieving, I mean disbelieving in the sense of, you know, “How can this happen” you know, not a sense of it’s not true, but how can any human being be so, I can’t even say animal because no animal does this. I mean it was so, I can’t find words, horrendous, monstrous, to not only allow, but actually bring themselves to carry out this kind of atrocity. These kinds on this scale. I mean it’s like we’re seeing stuff of Rwanda now and we know that it’s for real and that’s how it was.

Unidentified Woman: Is there anything else you want to add before we stop? Before we go to photographic?

Second unidentified Woman:  I just want to ask more about, you talked a little bit about hearing Chamberlain’s speech, “Peace in Our Time” in appeasement and I was just wondering if you….
IRWIN: Only that I was unbelievably grateful and incredibly relieved. I mean for me it was like, you know, I did not have the political persp0ective at the time because my own survival was, we are having a visa pending and we are leaving, another try at getting an affidavit and it’s another reprieve and so it was life-saving for me.

Unidentified Woman: Because the war didn’t begin?
IRWIN: The war, this was in September of 1938, I got out in February of 1939. The war didn’t begin until after that and when we got out was one of the last ships that went out. 

Question: So it left us chronological or window in time where more people could leave, more Germans could leave. 
IRWIN: Right, but I mean personally it was like, being 14 years old, I was thinking of primarily of myself, I was thinking of survival, and it meant and I knew enough about what was going on in Germany and what I realized was going to be going on in France and what I knew that the Germans were, were building up like crazy, 
IRWIN: That is a picture probably taken around 1930 -31, of my grandfather, Julius Emanuel and his wife Clara Elsbach. These are my maternal grandparents.

A picture of my maternal grandmother, Clara Elsbach, in her youth so that was well before her marriage. I don’t know if it was before her marriage. But in any case, I don’t have a date on that but she is a young woman. That is Clara Elsbach, my maternal Grandmother. Emanuel, Clara Elsbach, Emanuel, not too long before she died. She died June 11, 1932 and I remember it like today. This was probably 1931. I used to visit her a lot and she used to bake my birthday cakes and the house smelled delicious with flowers and cake. In Germany, we used to have birthday breakfasts, all the presents would be on the table and there’d be like pound cake and it was for breakfast, you had cocoa and pound cake for breakfast and you didn’t wrap presents, you had them all laid out and that was probably around one of the times I that I might have been there. Anyway, 1931 possibly, probably 1931, And that’s what I would say, 1931. And that’s a picture of my grandfather, paternal, is that in focus? OK, my paternal grandfather, Julius, Emanuel and this is in Kassel and it’s at the entrance of his sister Mathilde’s grocery and poultry store and I remember going there and seeing his sister. It was when I lived in Kassel. It was him after his wife, my grandmother, I used to go in there and I would see his sister, Aunt Mathilde, sitting there on a chair, on a stool, plucking feathers out of chickens and there’d be chicken feathers would be flying all around, so that business was smashed sometime during the Hitler period. Turn me off for a minute. 

Kettler: OK, you want me to turn it off?
IRWIN: Ya. 

My grandmother’s Clara Elsbach Emanuel grave in Germany. She died as I said earlier, in on June 11, 1932. She was spared the whole, at least a lot of the horror of the Nazi period and the grave was made for both her and her husband. My grandfather Julius immigrated from Germany, from Kassel, through Paris in 1938, and died in Philadelphia in January of 1941. So there is a letter about this grave but from a person who took the picture of this grave. They were trying to make sure that it was going to be properly preserved and maintained. That’s my grandfather, Julius Emanuel on this way actually to America. This was taken very close to my house in Paris where I lived from 1933-39. There he is on his way to America, visiting us on his way in Paris. This is my grandfather in the middle, my mother on the right, She and I and my father were living in Paris and on the left is my aunt Margaret who just died recently in April of 1993. Both my grandfather and my aunt Margaret were on their way to Philadelphia, just in 1938 on their way to safety. And that’s me, at the same spot, 1938 on my way to school. I’m probably 14 years old. This photograph is on the right is my mother Franziska, Franzeska, Frances, Fran, whatever, me at age 7 and her sister my aunt Margaret at age 6.  My mother you can see on there was always very shy and sensitive and somewhat insecure. My aunt who had the illusion that she was insecure and not pretty and so forth and so on, actually was the one that was probably a lot stronger, but she leaned a lot on her bigger blonde sister.

Again on the right is my mother, Fran, her sister, Margaret or Grete as she called herself. “My name is Grete”, she says, “Don’t call me Gretchen or anything else.” That’s it.

This is an old photograph, a postcard of Gottingen where my aunt Margaret lived and where I was lucky enough to stay with her a lot and play in the streets and live in her place and be a kid. So Gottingen is a favorite place in my life in which I spent my first year of school for that matter. Of which I will show a picture pretty soon. Sometime between 1929 and 1932 I spent a lot of time there. This is a postcard of Halberstadt, it means half a city, which is the town that I was born in which I never saw because we left when I was 6 months old. My parents then moved to Berlin. My aunt recently recalled before she died that I was born either at number 17 or 27 Richard Wagner Street across from the theater whatever that connotes. I was never there and I don’t know if I ever will go. This is a school picture of my very first year in school in Germany and it was in Gottingen, first grade and the teacher was Herr Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman was a really neat guy and I really loved the school. I think I’m in there somewhere. Ya, that’s me right there, with a little purse hanging around my neck. 

And that’s a picture of my first year in France. We got to France in September of 1933 but I didn’t really get into school until late 1933 or 1934. And the teacher, there I am in the middle and the teacher’s name is Madame Esminand. It was an elementary school and I loved it. It was great and I remember a lot of the kids and their names. I still have some of their first communion cards that they gave me. This is a picture of my school, the Lycee Moliere, which is secondary school which I absolutely adored. This is in France, in Paris and I went there from age 12 to the day I left for America which was February 15, 1939, so from 12 to 14 and a half or so. I have lots of stories to tell about that school and it was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

That’s a picture of my mother, my grandmother, the paternal grandmother and me. It was taken apparently on September 24, 1924. I was born July 4th 1924 so was two months old or however much. 

That’s a picture of my father in the middle, my mother and my aunt Margaret on the left and my aunt Ruth on the right. These three sisters were a year apart, Fran, Margaret and Ruth. Fran was the oldest, then was Margaret, then my aunt Ruth. And I’m down at the bottom on the left.

And that is a picture of  I think the three of us sitting on a log, my father, Felix Aronson, my mother, Franciscka or Fran, Frances Emanuel, Fran Aronson and me, Karen. I think that was taken 1930 or 1931. Look on the back and see if there’s a date on it. Yes, I hit it on the nose, 1931. 

This is a picture of my mother and myself in 1933, shortly before leaving for France, essentially leaving Germany so it was 1933, sometime summer of early 1933. That’s a picture that was taken way after a long photography session of myself and my mom and I was really tired of being photographed and sitting still and being under the lights. So that’s my mother and I’m crying and she’s consoling me and that was also on the same day in 1933 when I was 9 years old and shortly before leaving for France, escaping from Germany. This is a family composite picture of myself, my husband and my three children, on the left is Dan, who was born Daniel Mark in 1954 and my son Robert Peter who was born in 1955 and myself July 4th 1924, and my husband Samuel Irwin who was born December 1, 1920. This picture was taken in 1961, December 25. 1946. That’s the bottom of a coffee pot or teapot that came from the hotel Emanuel in Kassel which was owned by my grandfather’s sister, Cilli Emanuel, and I recall, eating there. It was typical hotel food and all the smells of hotel soup. At the bottom it said Hotel Emanuel, Kassel, and we just got a letter in 1957 which states that the owners of the hotel tried to, apparently sold it to a Mr. Otzel in 1933, the owner was Cilli Emanuel and her husband Izzy DeJong who was of Dutch citizenship and apparently they as they were trying to work on restitution and I don’t know whether restitution in this case means getting payment for it or rebuilding it. I don’t know whether it was destroyed or not. Anyway, it was, there was, they weren’t able to succeed in their attempts to do whatever they were trying to do because only sales after 1934 were being recognized. The address of the owner in 1957 was Izzy De Jong Utrecht Molierdaan in Holland. He was in 1957 in sales in cities in Holland. So that was a place that I remember distinctly as being a part of the family history and property and part of my memory. I wasn’t aware I was being photographed yet. That’s a photograph my Mo’s Francis Emanuel’s first day at school and she was holding in her hand, in her arms what I also had in my first day at school. But I can’t find my picture something called Zuchertutte which is a sugar bag which was given to all children on their first day of school, full of candy and goodies to sweeten the first of school, the first day of being away from Mommy and Daddy. So that’s a tradition, as a matter of fact, on my first ABC book, you also see a picture of these same items.