Edmund Lang

Harper: Good evening.
LANG: Good evening.

Harper: Can we begin by you please telling us your name, your date and place of birth, and if you can spell those places, too.
LANG: My full name is Edmond Lang [spells out]. I go by the name of Ed. I was born December 25, 1920, in Perleberg [Per-leh-berg] — which I would probably pronounce Perleberg [Pearl-berg] in the English version — in the province of Brandenburg, Germany, which is approximately a hundred kilometers from Berlin and about 160 kilometers from Hamburg. So it’s almost between Hamburg and Berlin. The autobahn goes right by Perleberg, which incidentally, I helped to construct. I did work on the autobahn, construction, for a while, in 1937.

Harper: What kind of town was this? Was it a small town?
LANG: Yes, it was approximately 10,000 population. It was a very rural town surrounded by farming communities. I recall that the main product that was raised in our area was asparagus, white asparagus that is. By the time I was old enough to go to school, the depression started, and I remember that my father, rather than selling his merchandise to the farmers, he traded with them because he didn’t have any cash. So we had plenty to eat during the recession. There was no money, but live chicken, etc., eggs, butter, you name it. That’s what he got in lieu of cash. 

My father was a merchant man. He had a store for men’s, ladies, and children’s ready wear. He actually did visit the farms on a bicycle. Since they could not spare the time to go into town — they worked seven days a week, most of them — my mother held the fort down. She was, in other words, taking care of the store. I, from the age of two to the age of six, was sent to a kindergarten, which was run by, I believe, Lutheran sisters. They could have been Protestant, I’m not sure now. But I was taught the First Testament; I went to church with them. 

I was considered one of the chosen people by the Sisters, especially since I was born on Christmas day, and they were superstitious. I did not get preferential treatment, mind you, but they treated me very well. I also happened to be the only Jewish child in town. I never realized that I was Jewish, of course. I was very fond of the sisters, and even after I was old enough to go to regular school, public school that is, I still visited them for years, and did go to church on many occasions, with them or without them. That was part of my young age, growing up not as a Jew. What else would you like to know?

Harper: Who made up your household growing up?
LANG: That’s it — my father, mother, myself. I had a nanny before I was two years, but even afterwards we had her at home.

Harper: Did you know your grandparents or anything about them?
LANG: No, they died before I was old enough to get to know them.

Harper: Do you know where they were from, or where they lived?
LANG: Oh, yes. My father came from Furhrenia [sp?], a little town called Bridlewood [sp?]. Furhenia is southerly located in Germany. It’s in the mountains. I was never there, where he was born, but I’ve been in the mountain area there, visiting some relatives I had who were not very far from where my father was born. My grandfather there was a weaver. He was rather more German than … assimilated, I would call it. My mother came from Emden, which is right near the Dutch border. That town I visited when I was about six years old with my mother and met one of her brothers, my uncle and aunt there, etc., and cousins who, I believe, all perished as well in the Holocaust. 

They also had ready-to-wear merchandise they were selling, and they catered quite a bit to the Dutch people who came across the border. Many of those were sailors. Emden was a kind of a port town. So that’s where my mother and father came from. My father had three brothers and one sister, and my mother had two brothers and one sister. As far as I know, only one family escaped to South America. The father died there. The mother and the family and my cousins all moved to Israel, where the aunt died, but the cousins are all living in Israel now. That was one branch, the brother of my mother. The rest of them, I think, all perished in the Holocaust. Never heard from them again. I looked for them, I searched, put feelers out when I got out of camp — no sign, no nothing, no word of anyone surviving.

Harper: Do you know how long your family had lived in Germany?
LANG: Approximately. I have to jump ahead a little bit there because it was in ’42 approximately, I don’t know exactly when, when I stopped getting mail from them.

Harper: No. How long had your family been in Germany?
LANG: The family tree you’re talking about. No, I’m afraid I don’t have any recollection of how long they were there. As far as I know, probably at least a couple of hundred years, something like that. That’s as far as I know. How far before that I don’t know. Where they came from prior to that, I don’t know. When I left home, I was 12 years old, and I never left home again after I was 12. Should I mention that, about how it happened?

Harper: Let me come to it. You mentioned your father owned this shop?
LANG: Store. It was a good-sized store. Yes.

Harper: Like a clothing store?
LANG: A clothing store, yes. But also textiles. Bedding, for instance, slippers, buttons, anything like that. It was a general store. Children’s, ladies, men’s, ready wear, etc., also.

Harper: And your mother worked there, too?
LANG: She did most of the work there. My father was travelling quite a bit to visit these farms.

Harper: Was your family at all observant?
LANG: We had a population of about 12 altogether. In our heyday, 12 Jewish families there. All elderly people. They all died out one by one. By the time I saw my parents for the last time, I think there was just one elderly couple left alive. They just died natural deaths. They did meet twice a year. They had a synagogue there. They did meet, but I never knew about that when I was younger. I can’t recollect when it started, when they started taking me there. Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur. They used to meet twice a year, that it. That’s it. My father didn’t know anything about Judaism; he wasn’t religious at all. He was never brought up that way. And my mother knew very little. But because there were so few of us, they went. That’s it. We lived very assimilated.

Harper: Did you know you were Jewish?
Lang; Did I know? I found out about it later on. I didn’t really know, no. I didn’t know the difference. I didn’t know what Jewish meant. I had no idea. I only found out about it when the kids started calling me names at school, after Hitler got popular. Then, of course, they were told by their parents that Jews are no good, etc. Whatever they heard at home. And then, of course, they started picking on me. That’s when I found out that Jew is no good. I had no idea what it meant. I didn’t.

Harper: So your neighbors were not Jews, obviously.
LANG: All of them.

Harper: How did your family get along with them?
LANG: Perfectly. My father had friends all over the place. He didn’t have any enemies. He was a very easy-going person. Most of them owed money to him because he was giving them credit. Most people didn’t have any money to begin with, and they were the worst ones when times changed, Hitler got into power. They were the first ones to start being offensive, calling us names, etc. They took liberties that they would never have dreamt of before because my father was in no position to defend himself. I could tell you more about it when we get around to it.

Harper: Besides being a businessman in the town, was your father involved in any organizations — political or social groups?
LANG: The National Democratic Party, yes. He was a member of it for many years until it was frowned upon by the Nazis. Then, of course, they disbanded altogether because there was only one Reich, one Fuhrer. That’s it. There was no competition there. Until then, yes, he was a member of the party, but he was not very active; he didn’t have time for that. But I remember he did have membership there in the Democratic Party. He also was a World War I veteran; he fought for Germany. And, of course, like many others, like in that book there, they are poor, they are [inaudible]. To make a long story short, a lot of World War I veterans like my father were under the impression that because of their being decorated war veterans, etc., they would be spared. And that was their downfall. I’ve read about it, and I’ve heard about it, and my father was one of them. I pleaded with him, “Try to get out of Germany.” He said, “I’ll be safe. Don’t worry about me. I’m a decorated World War I veteran.” Everything was ignored later on.

Harper: Tell me more about his military service.
LANG: Phew. I couldn’t tell you very much about that actually.

Harper: Do you know where he served? Did he get an Iron Cross?
LANG: The Iron Cross, yes. That’s all I know. I forgot. I really did. I can’t remember that now, and I wouldn’t want to make it up, either. No, I can’t. But he went right through the war, that’s what I know.

Harper: Can you tell me again the name of the political party that he was a member of?
LANG: National Democratic. That’s what I remember. National Democratic Party. There could be one more word there, but that’s what I remember. National Democratic.

Harper: You said that he was busy, so he didn’t have much time. Do you ever remember him going to meetings, or anything?
LANG: No, I don’t remember. 

Harper: Do you have any idea what this political party stood for, what their platform was?
LANG: No. Just that they were not extremists. There was a depression, part of the time anyway. And even before the depression, people didn’t have much of anything really. There was a strong drive for membership in the Communist Party. So they were right in the middle between the National Socialists (Nazis) and the Communists. They were more or less moderate. That’s all I know. I didn’t have much interest in that time period. My father never talked about it.

Harper: Were you involved in any youth groups growing up?
LANG: No, but at school we all were involved in sports. Once a year we had a sports fest. We marched, etc. It was compulsory. We had to play football (that means soccer). We had all kinds of this. It was part of our education, climbing on a rope or climbing on whatever and doing all kinds of other exercise, etc., which was at least two to three times a week. Then we had to compete. The sports fest was part of it. Everybody was involved in that. But other than that, no, I was never involved. Later on — but I don’t want to get ahead of it. Not while I was living in Perleberg until I was 12 years old.

Harper: Did your parents subscribe to any Jewish publications at all?
LANG: None.

Harper: You started mentioning to me about your school, and if you could just tell me up to the time you were 12, what your schooling in Perleberg consisted of.
LANG: At the age of 10, 11, 12, I went to the gymnasium. Sexta, quinta, quarta. That’s Latin for the numbers of each class that I attended. Gymnasium is like a junior high, I suppose. The girls went to a lyceum, which is the equivalent of it. By the time I was in quarta — I had no problems with the other students in the past — that was in 1938; no, it was ’35. By that time it got so bad that I had to fight my way home many, many days. Kids were waiting outside school and starting a fight with me.

Harper: Excuse me, can I interrupt you? This is still in Perleberg?
LANG: Oh, yes. This was at school.

Harper: OK. So how old would you have been then?
LANG: By that time I was somewhere between 11 and 12.

Harper: I thought you said you were born in 1920.
LANG: No. This was still in Perleberg, at school. It got so bad that my parents finally decided to take me out of school. In other areas and larger cities, like Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover, or any one of those, they forced the kids out of school already. They couldn’t go to [inaudible]. But I was the only one in this town, so they didn’t do anything about it. They didn’t stop the kids from molesting me, but they didn’t force me out of school. My parents realized it couldn’t go on; it would just get worse. So they called, or wrote, I don’t think they had a phone in those days. They wrote to my mother’s brother in Hamburg and talked to him, and they decided to put me in an orphanage in Hamburg. The orphanage took in children from parents who could afford to pay for room and board and a little bit of youth education as well — that’s besides going to school there, of course. But they always had their own programs, youth education, so I wound up in an orphanage — at the age of, I had just turned 12 — in Hamburg.

Harper: I’m sorry. Can I interrupt you again? Before you start, I want to get the years before ’35 as well. Do you remember first hearing of Hitler?
LANG: Oh, yes. Not only did I hear of him, I saw him. I saw Goebbels, I saw Goering. They came and visited at one time, Perleberg. This parade, I learned how to say Heil Hitler. I raised my arm, etc. I learned all the Nazi songs, etc. I was singing them with the rest of the kids. I didn’t know the difference. Oh, yes. I was very well aware of it, but I never felt any antisemitism, until the year when I was turning 12 years old and I was in the third year of the gymnasium. Until then I never had any problems, and I never felt I was a Jewish pig, or whatever they called me.

Harper: Before you were taken out of school by your parents, do you remember ever talking to your parents about the Nazis, these songs, etc.?
LANG: I don’t remember talking about it per se. I don’t remember. I’m sure that I mentioned about being sworn at by kids, etc. I’m sure my parents pacified me somehow for a while and sympathized with me, but I don’t remember anything in detail. Too many events happened after that; this was kind of in the background. It was not important to me anymore. I don’t recall that, no. Funny thing is, I remember when I was in kindergarten. I remember a lot of events when I was between the ages of two and six. I remember lots of events. After that, a lot of it is blurred. It’s strange. I remember so many details when I was two, three years old. I can’t figure out why later on things became blurred in my memory.

Harper: Do you remember Hitler coming to power in ’33?
LANG: Yes, to a point. Of course, I was just a child in a way, but I remember, yes, how things were. You see, there’s a difference between growing up in a small town like I did as the only Jewish child and being in a big city where there were pogroms. Things happened much faster there, much more dramatic. They were much more drastic than they were in the small town where I was. It happened all of a sudden when it finally happened. We were way behind what happened in the big cities, in the small town. So I was not that much aware of it as they would be in a large town. I was reading about that in this book here, The Uprooted, by Whiteman, the author. It proved that I was not isolated, and what happened in the big cities. Some of the people that were interviewed from smaller towns had similar experiences [to those] that I had. So I’m not an isolated case.

Harper: Again, you don’t remember your parents showing any concern after Hitler came to power?
LANG: No. No, they didn’t show it. As a matter of fact, I told you that when I begged them to try and get out of there, my father said, “Ah, we are too old. And besides that, I don’t think they’re going to bother me. I’m a World War I decorated veteran with the Iron Cross.” He wasn’t going to move. I don’t think that he wanted to be exposed to being in a new country, a new environment, a different language — that scared him. I think he was kind of in a rut there. That’s the only way I can explain it, because by that time he knew there was a level of danger, and he was still rather complacent about it.

Harper: Besides your harassment at school in Perleberg, were there any other signs of trouble? Was your father’s shop, his business, hurt in any way?
LANG: Not at that time, no. No other symptoms, no other signs at all at that time. That came later.

Harper: So was it the children who were hurting you?
LANG: Yes.

Harper: Calling you names?
LANG: No. They were fighting me. I had to defend myself. They were looking for a fight.

Harper: If we could go back to Hanover, was it? Or Hamburg?
LANG: Hamburg. Where I moved to then during school years.

Harper: So you can continue further.
LANG: OK. So I wound up in the orphanage, called a waisenhaus where now I was exposed to something completely new, novel, and strange, which was a very Orthodox Jewish education. They had services every day, twice a day. They had their own little synagogue right in the orphanage. Now there were others besides me who had parents in small towns. I wasn’t the only one. I had to learn Hebrew, and I had to learn all the different prayers. I knew them by heart. Everybody had to take their turn in conducting a service. Can you imagine the extreme change from my upbringing to a new Judaism, whatever? At that Orthodox, yet? That was even more extreme. 

But I learned it. I became bar mitzvahed, and I went through it with flying colors. I knew everything by heart. I didn’t know what I was talking about, of course. Didn’t know the meaning. I saw some other kids who came from similar circumstances on a high holiday like Yom Kippur where you had to be in shul all day long. They had the prayer book, whatever the prayer book was, with a detective story inside, and so I did the same thing to pass the time away so I wouldn’t be bored. Some other Tom Mix or whatever stories I read in those days, western stories. We thought it was just great, and we got away with it. Then after I left later on, I just forgot about it. I don’t remember anything about what I learned there.

Harper: Why were you put into an Orthodox [orphanage]?
LANG: My uncle was Orthodox. It was his idea, and my parents didn’t know the difference. They just paid for my upkeep there, that’s all. I had no idea. I suppose he figured that since I was completely ignorant of Jewish history and the Jewish religion, it would be beneficial to me to be exposed to the Orthodox teachings. He meant well. For a while it worked fine, but I didn’t know what it was all about. It’s just like learning Latin in school. In school I learned Latin, too, at the gymnasium. It’s a dead language. So was Hebrew. So you learn it, and you talk like a parrot; you just repeat. Do you think a parrot when he says, “Jackie wants a cracker,” knows what he’s talking about? He’s just repeating it. That’s how I was. And so were many others. I wasn’t the only one. 

So that lasted — for a couple of years I was there, approximately. I went to the Talmud Torah shul, the Jewish school, and then things got pretty bad already by that time. Hitler was getting stronger and more powerful, and the general consensus was, “Don’t try to continue higher education. Rather than that, prepare yourself with a useful profession to emigrate to Palestine” — later on Israel. So I suppose I talked about that with my parents — I’m sure I did — and my uncle, and we decided that I should go to a horticultural school in Blackenaise, which is about 24 kilometers outside of Hamburg, a suburb. It was a school where they teach you hothouse gardening, also vegetable gardening, similar to victory gardens but on a smaller scale. So we learned all about growing vegetables in the hothouse and outside, etc., from scratch. Some horticulture too. Later on I took up also landscaping architecture. I did that, too. So that I did for two years. I did travel these 24 kilometers — it’s about 17 miles, something like that — each way by bicycle from Hamburg. I was still at the waisenhaus for a while, and then later on I did take a room in some Jewish home and was more or less on my own. My parents paid for the education there. I joined the youth Jugend-Aliyah — to go to Israel, of course.

Harper: I’m sorry, can I interrupt you? Why did you do these things?
LANG: To go to Israel. I meant to prepare myself for the youthful profession that I could utilize in Israel, that something would be more in demand than some academic profession, etc.

Harper: Why did you want to go to Israel?
LANG: To get out of Germany. Very much so. By that time, the signs were there that we were not wanted, that we are going to be persecuted. It was already bad enough then. The signs were right there when I was leaving school because of harassment by the kids. Of course, once you’re in a Jewish school in a big city you don’t feel it anymore, but the signs were there. Anybody realized — unless you played the ostrich and lowered your head in the sand — anybody would realize that things were getting from bad to worse. So we were preparing to go to Israel.

Harper: Did you have any Zionist feelings, or did you just want to …?
LANG: No. I didn’t have any. No. But of course all I heard was “the Holy Land,” “l’shana haba’ah b’yeruashalaim” – “Next year in Jerusalem” and all that. These were Zionists that I joined. That’s all I heard, naturally. So you were influenced by that kind of enthusiasm, by the other kids. I felt, yes, very strongly at the time, that I would like to be a part of it. That’s why I went to the school for gardening and raising vegetables, etc. 

After that I did work on a farm for a while, for a German farmer. One event I would mention to you was rather strange, I would say, or unusual. I was working with a team of horses, three horses at a time. Whether it was plowing or any of the other implements that we used, it was always a team of three horses. It was in the winter, and it was rainy, cold, wet, windy. I was wearing warm gloves or mittens to protect my hands, but they were soggy wet, and after days of work (who knows how long it took) my hands were frozen. They were frozen so badly that the bones of my hands, the knuckles, projected through the skin, right through. Everything was frozen away. This came right through. The reason I remember that is because finally the farmer gave me time to go home to recuperate because I just couldn’t work anymore with my hands being exposed, my burns exposed, and I couldn’t touch anything anymore. 

So I got on the train, and I was wearing gloves over it. When the conductor came to collect the ticket, I was afraid to put my hand in my pocket. I remember I took my gloves off, and when he looked at it, he shuddered when he saw it. He said, “Never mind.” He didn’t even want me to show him the ticket. He realized how bad it was. I remember that incident. Anyway, I went home, and when I got better I went back to the farm and worked again there. Then I worked at another farm later on for a very wealthy Jewish property owner in Brandenburg who had a huge estate right on a lake, and I took care of the horses, etc. It was an easy job there. Then later on, I’m coming back to the autobahn. My father had, we had real estate with three stores and three apartments he rented out. Two stores he rented out and two apartments he rented out. One of the tenants got me this job on the autobahn. This was constructing the Berlin-Hamburg autobahn. I worked there for a while. 

Later on he got another job in Berlin, demolition of a portion of the Marineministerium, which is the Ministry of the Navy. The reason I got these jobs as a Jew was because I had what they called an arbeitsbuch [work book]. It’s a document that shows the kind of — the way it worked, it’s like a passport. But it didn’t have “J” or the Star of David in there. I was not branded as a Jew. And he got me this job in the Ministry of the Navy, the official building for the navy, in Berlin.

Harper: Can I ask you why your passport wasn’t branded “J”?
LANG: I have no idea.

Harper: Just a fluke?
LANG: Yes, I believe so. I think it was just coincidence, that’s all. I never realized it until later on I found out about it. I didn’t even know that it was supposed to have that in there. Possibly because I came from a little town, they didn’t know. In the big cities, everybody had it in there. You could never get a job with it. Most jobs were not open to you, period. 

Harper: What year are we talking here?
LANG: ’38. It was in ’38. So I had a pass to go into this building that the navy occupied. I’m sure there’s another term in English for where the ministers of the navy are planning and scheming. They were scheming for the war at the time, you see? And I had a pass there to go through any time. One day, the famous Kristallnacht — crystal night — when the Germans destroyed Jewish stores, some of the biggest department stores especially. First of all they broke the show windows, the plate glass or whatever it was. That’s why they called it Kristallnacht, because of the glass that was all over the streets, etc. Then they pilfered. They took everything they could get out for free. They just looted, all over the place. Looting was universal, all over the country. 

This friend of mine, a tenant of my father’s, was drinking with his buddies, having a day off that day. It was a day of celebration, and I could see Jewish people being chased down the streets, etc. When I came to work the following day, the foreman, or whatever he was, the inspector, called me over and he said, “Edmond, so and so, or somebody who knows you, told us you were Jewish and I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want any harm to come to you. I will protect you for 48 hours. After that, I have to report you. If you can get out of the country within 48 hours, I give you that much time.” So that saved my life. I immediately got on the next train to go back to Perleberg. When I arrived there, I went around the perimeter of the town rather than through town, so nobody would recognize me — because everybody knew me there — and sneaked into my parents’ home. 

I found that the storm troopers had been there already; they had taken my father. Not only them, but also regular neighbors, whoever there were, chased my father through the town, tore over half his ear off. They brutalized him. Then they walked him to the river and they almost drowned him there, but somebody pulled him out before it happened. Then they finally put him in a prison for a while. I think it was a concentration camp, but I’m not sure. Then they released him at the end. But he wasn’t home. My mother was a nervous wreck because they had vandalized the store, looted the store, and also got into our home with axes and other blunt instruments. They broke the furniture, whatever was in their way; they just ransacked it. They destroyed whatever they could, and of course, pilfered whatever was loose. You can imagine my mother’s condition at the time, with my father not being home. But I told her what my situation was, and she didn’t hesitate to go with me back to Berlin where my father’s brother was living. I don’t know who else she called. 

She must have called the other brother because, unbelievably, what I didn’t realize was — a few years ago, about 50 years had passed, one of my cousins was still alive, lives in Sioux City — when I talked to her about my escape in the Kindertransport, she said, “You remember, I gave you my place?” I said, “What?” That’s how I got out. Apparently she was on the list to leave two days later, in other words within 48 hours, by coincidence for England via Holland, for the Kindertransport. She gave up her place for me so I could get out of the country. That’s how I got out. 

And I never knew that until a few years ago. She got out on the next one, I believe, but if it wasn’t for her I was a dead pigeon. They would have crucified me as a spy, even though I was completely ignorant of looking for any secrets or anything like that. I had access to offices if I wanted to. It’s a rather strange phenomenon that I didn’t realize that somebody helped me to get out of there, and it was my cousin. She stood aside. But she did get out, and she’s alive today. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten out if she wouldn’t have given up her place. I witnessed what they did to the Jewish people in Berlin, as a bystander. I didn’t ever feel threatened, period, until this ultimatum was given to me, to get out within 48 hours. Until then I never felt threatened.

Harper: If I could just backtrack a little, from the years between 1936 and 1939, you said the signs were on the wall, what did you see?
LANG: I heard about what was happening to the Jewish people, about them being forbidden any kind of liberties that they normally would take for granted. I realized they couldn’t hold any positions in public offices, they had to quit schools. They were forced, I told you. I wasn’t forced to leave, but they were forced to leave schools already way before me. I knew that, but I never worried about anything. My makeup was, I was a bit of an adventurer. A lot of things that frightened other people excited me. I got a kind of a high out of it. That’s how I was. I was going to join the French Foreign Legion. That’s how I felt. Things like that. I was an adventurer. I never worried about myself, that much.

Harper: Did any of these prohibitions against Jews affect you? Were you not allowed to do certain things?
LANG: Not directly. Indirectly, yes, of course. I had to curtail my education. I had to stop going to school when I was 14 years old. Yes. I had to live away from home since I was 12 years old. Yes. Indirectly, yes. But I took it in stride. I didn’t worry about it. That’s what I mean. I was wearing those black boots and britches like the Germans were wearing, leather jacket and all that. I never felt different, really. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I don’t feel that way anymore now for a long time, but at that time I didn’t think much about it.

Harper: You felt like you were German. Is that right?
LANG: Yes. Right. More than that. More or less, I would say yes.

Harper: Do you remember the Olympics in 1936?
LANG: No, I didn’t have any time to think of it then. I remember it, but I didn’t see it. It was before TV, and I didn’t have a radio, so no. But I remember it, sure that they were there, but they were not where I was.

Harper: This guy who warned you at the seaman’s office …
LANG: Yes.

Harper: You knew this guy?
LANG: Very, very briefly. He was in charge of the whole thing. I don’t remember the title that he was going under. I have no idea. All I know is that I was called over to him, and he told me that he liked me as a person, that he didn’t want any harm to fall on me, that he cannot protect me any longer than 48 hours without him taking a chance of getting himself in trouble.

Harper: Did you hear anything being in this military office? Did you hear anything?
LANG: I was working hard. I didn’t have any time to hear anything. Period. No. This was a different wing. We had to go through the entrance there, but we were on a different — they were making room for a new construction. That’s all. It was demolition. They were building a new one. Yes. For expansion.

Harper: So how did you – usually, to get on a Kindertransport, there had to be arrangements made.
LANG: That was all very quickly done. There was no time. All they did was they changed me. When I did get on the transport they told me that I’m taking a chance, that at the border they may take me off and send me right back because I’m too old for it. I was above the age. That’s all I remember. But they never told me. I was almost 18 years old. The kids that were there were shrimps. Some of them were less than six years old. Others anywhere from four to ten years old, most of them. There were very few older ones. They picked the youngest ones to get them out of the country. So they said that I’m taking a chance. I said, “What am I going to lose?” I was very grateful that they got me on there, that there happened to be one going at that time. I never would have made it otherwise. Germany wasn’t big enough for me to hide. They would find me. How could I survive? I had to eat, sleep somewhere. They did get me, and I realized it at the time. It was just a lucky break that there was one leaving within 48 hours and that somebody like my cousin was supposed to be on it, which I didn’t ever know. That’s the strangest part.

Harper: Was that the last time you saw your parents?
LANG: Yes. It was the last time. My father, no, he wasn’t there. It was the last time.

Harper: Do you know what happened to your mother in Poland?
LANG: We are going to go way ahead then. We are jumping several years then if I tell you about that. I don’t know exactly what happened. All I know is that when I found out, when I didn’t get any more correspondence, was probably the time that they were deported to Poland, and then wound up in one of those extermination camps because of their age. 

Harper: Did you …?
LANG: I tried everything. I tried Univac, was it? No, not Univac. Besides the Red Cross, there were several organizations I tried to get information. Nobody. There was no trace of them. They were just exterminated. That’s all there is to it. I tried. No word of any kind. But it was in ’42 approximately when I stopped getting mail from them. 

So now we are at the time that I left Germany. I do feel it’s important for me to stress one point — since I was strong, very strong, I could carry 200-pound [or two 100-pound?] bags of grain up a ladder on my back or shoulder, up a ladder, into a loft, and do it for hours. 200 pounds! I was very wiry, very strong, and I’ve done all kinds of hard work. So it was very natural for me that on the train when the SSA, the storm troopers — those are the brown shirts — asked the kids to get their luggage off the rack for inspection, it was very natural for me to ask if I could help because the kids couldn’t possibly lift any of their suitcases. All they could take was one suitcase each. That’s it. One suitcase. And the parents gave them the biggest suitcase possible. Can you imagine a four, five, or six year old? No, I did it. I handed all the suitcases down and up again. Excuse me one second.

[Phone rings. Pause.]

Harper: I think when we left off you were describing the transport out of Germany.
LANG: Yes, right. We were right in the middle of me helping the SA, as we called them, the storm troopers, and what stands out in my memory is that they took many things of value. It was quite natural that parents would try and get their children, in that one suitcase they were permitted, something that would be of value that they could possibly sell to generate some cash. Like a stamp collection, or an accordion, or violin, or musical instruments. Many of these items were confiscated per se, literally stolen by these so-called inspectors. When we finally did get to the Dutch border, there were only two suitcases left. They happened to be mine. He asked me, “Whose are those?” And I said, “They are mine.” He says, “Two?” “Yes,” I say, “but they are not big.” Anyway, he didn’t even open them, he said that’s OK. And that’s how I got through there. They never even looked at my suitcases or the contents of them. They never checked the list, anything, because I feel that I helped quite extensively. There were quite a few kids there, and I did all the work for him, and he just let me go. That was it. So when we arrived in Holland, it was just a big, big hilarious celebration.

The younger ones didn’t even realize why we should be so happy; they were more thinking about leaving their parents and their loved ones back home. The older ones, they were all cheering and jubilant about being out of prison so to speak, to be finally in a country where there was liberty and where they were being welcomed by Dutch Red Cross ladies and volunteers — all women — with all kinds of goodies, chocolates, tuna, cookies, and things like that. Everybody was just great, feeling wonderful. At least on the surface of course. It was mixed emotions, I would say. This was just a time in transit, of course. We were on our way to Hague of Holland, which is a port town, where we boarded a small type of a ferry that brought us across to — which was the town? England. What was the name of the town? 

Anyway, we did cross the channel to England, and the channel can be pretty rough, which it happened to be at the time when we crossed it. Most of us had eaten all these goodies that we had got on an empty stomach, and I would say the majority of the kids got seasick, violently seasick. When we arrived — Bertchtoft [sp?] was the name of it, Bertchtoft in England — we looked like real refugees because we were all sick, pale, and really miserable. You know how seasickness can affect you. 

What I found out later on, especially through the book that I’m reading right now, The Uprooted, which specifically touches experiences of children who came in the Kindertransport from Germany, like myself, and their stories — when I read this I realized that because I was one of the older ones, I was put into a hostel, whereas the younger ones were spread out all over England into homes of so-called foster parents who volunteered to take in one of the kids. That’s what the book was all about. The Uprooted. So I wound up in a hostel because they preferred the younger ones; I was already almost 18 years old. The hostel was supported by wealthy Jews, some of them very wealthy as a matter of fact. Burton, one of the biggest manufacturers of clothing, men’s suits, etc., men’s ready wear, whatever. Darling Mills was another one. His name was Mark Lubovitch. And several others who were very, very wealthy — some were titled actually because of their wealth. They supported it with their funding, and also in many cases they personally appeared on occasion to visit with us and find out how we are. Because of my training as a gardener, I was also given the opportunity to work on one of the estates, this one belonging to Mark Lubovitch who owned Darling Mills in Leeds, Yorkshire. I tended to his gardens, trimming hedges, and planting for a while. 

Of course, I was a little bit of a mischievous person at my age, to be honest. I think I was most of my life that way. I remember he had several cars: a Rolls Royce, a Daimler, and I don’t know what. He had some big cars there. He would use one car and the others were standing around. I remember one incident where I was playing around with the instruments in the car, etc., to see how I can start it, and how I to get in the gears, etc. But I really didn’t know how to drive the car. One of his sons, younger than myself, was with me. I got the car started — it was a Daimler, it was like a tank — and I drove the car, and I missed a little bit by a couple of inches and I took one of the gates with me. Of course, I never felt it. I never realized. It was one of those wrought iron gates. I took one with me. Fortunately for me, the gardener and other employees working there, they fixed it, but apparently he found out about it, and that was the last time I tended to his gardens there.

Later on they figured I’m old enough to take care of myself. By that time I had learned English well enough to make myself understood, and they sent me to London where I worked temporarily as a barber, an apprentice, learned how to shave with a straight razor, and the hot towel and all that, like they used to do in the old days. I didn’t cut anybody’s throat, but they were very lucky because I was just learning. Later on, I also had a job as a commis waiter, they called it, at the Aurora Automobile Club, which is the most elegant, the most elite type of private club in London or in England. Period. The Aurora Automobile Club, it means actually, royalty would be members there. Blue bloods. Counts. You name it. Titled people. 

And a commis waiter was below a busboy, actually. But even a crummy waiter, a busboy, had to wear a full tuxedo, black tie. So I bought one. I don’t know who I bought it from, but I had one on loan. My job was to push around a dessert cart — it was on wheels — and the other one was a salad cart with different salads, etc. You cannot imagine the variety of foods that they served at the Aurora Automobile Club. It was on Pall Mall in London. Pall Mall was a street. They had food from all over the world. That was before the war. All fresh, brought in from all over the world. They only had foreign employees there, no English. The chefs were either from Switzerland or Germany or from France, etc. Everybody was from some other country, and so was the food. We, of course, got different food, naturally. We could eat scraps or leftovers if nobody looked. It was elegant, most elegant. No money ever passed hands there. All was by membership. They signed, whatever it was, way before they invented plastic; credit cards were unknown in those days. This was in ’39, just before the war broke out. That was the last job I had. I was living in sort of a rooming house, had a room, northwest London, and one day a policeman came to my room and told me that I am invited to come with him just for overnight. Leave everything, just bring a toothbrush and leave everything there. That’s it. I found out then later on that I was called in because I was a German national. I was 18 years old by then. It was just around Christmas time. That’s when they took me in. Anyone who turned 18, or was 18 already. But the moment you turned 18, they pulled you in. But what they didn’t tell me is that never would I come back to my room. And never would see whatever I had, little possessions that I had, that I would never see them again. 

After one night in jail, the next day they took me to a temporary make-shift camp. They were completely unprepared — no toilet, no facilities at all. They had barrels, big, big drums where you could do your duty, which lasted maybe a few days. Then they put us into an arena where they showed horses or cattle or something, and there they had made ditches that you could do it in there. In the arena there, they dug a ditch. They had no other means of us going to do our duty. That’s how it was there, and of course, food, they had no preparations for feeding us at all. I forgot what it was, but it was just garbage they gave us. Then it was another camp, temporary, they put us in, and then finally they had made arrangements in some really nice accommodations for tourists on the Isle of Man. 

They acquisitioned all these rooming housings on the Isle of Man for prisoners, and of course, the government compensated the owners for that. There we were like a bird in a golden cage, imprisoned, with hardly any food. The food we got was so terrible that it was almost inedible. The porridge was burned; it was fit to feed a pig. You had to be starving to eat it. With my gardening experience I started raising tomatoes, but they never got ripe. We ate them green. You wouldn’t pickle them, that’s how green they were. I was eating grass, anything — flowers, the blooms, anything that was possibly edible for an animal, we would eat it. That’s how bad it was. 

The accommodations were great, but we were starving. One day we were asked for volunteers to go to another camp. I said, “What have I got to lose?” I volunteered. Within a couple of days later, we wound up on a small boat. And we never saw land again. That small boat took us in a big ship where we met our first German prisoners being deported to some destination unknown.

Harper: What do you mean German prisoners?
LANG: These were U-boat personnel, military, or they were prisoners taken. Maybe they were shot down, air force. They were actually military prisoners, actually prisoners of war. So the first thing that happened was fights between us and the German prisoners because they were being antisemitic right away when they found out there were Jews and most were civilians. So what they did was, they separated us. They put barbed wire between us and them. One part of the ship was occupied by the prisoners of war and the other by the civilians, to prevent further fights. We were in a convoy temporarily, and then I would say within about two days, the convoy left us, and we were on our own, exposed to German U-boats. 

What I found out later on was that some of the volunteers to go to a different camp, also unknowingly wound up on a ship going to Australia, and they had it much worse than we did. One of them was sunk, actually, one ship, by U-boat. Others wound up in Australia, out in, I don’t know, the desert someplace, plagued by insects, which caused malaria, diphtheria, different diseases, etc. They had it really bad. We didn’t have it like that. This was something we found out later on by a mayor from the prisoners in Canada, where I wound up, who had either brothers or relations in camp in Australia. That’s how we happened to find out about what happened there. So we considered ourselves very fortunate.

Then we arrived in Canada for the first time. We didn’t know. They never told us where we’re going to go. The first camp was in Three Rivers, Trois Rivieres, in Quebec. The first thing, as we came, they already knew before we came through the grapevine that there are Jews in our group. When we arrived at the camp, which was pre-existing, in Three Rivers, the three of us, the first thing we heard was the worst anti-Jewish song that the Germans ever invented. And that goes like “Wenn das [German phrase] — “When the Jewish blood squirts off the knife it goes twice as well.” It doesn’t sound right when you translate it, but that’s basically what it means. In this book there, the author talked about that, but not in the same context as me arriving at a camp where I was going to be interned together with other prisoners of war, actual military prisoners of war. 

There again we were exposed to being with these people that hated us, in a country where there was no antisemitism, which is Canada. I recall how we were very concerned about the fact that we had to eat the food that they prepared. They were in control of the kitchen. They could do anything. They could poison us, they could spit in the food, and believe me, I’m sure they did. But we had no choice but to eat the food that they prepared for us. We lived with them for a while before they made different arrangements. Then we were sent later on to another camp, and the same thing happened there also. We were treated as prisoners of war. We as civilians had to wear prisoner of war uniforms — blue denim — which means everything: including pajamas, shirts, outerwear, and outer-outerwear for the winter. Blue denim, or blue flannel for the outerwear  — there were two kinds of outerwear, depending on how cold it got. With a big red circle, about this size, red denim. Pants with bright red stripes on the side. We were behind barbed wire, like a regular prison, with watchtowers, machine guns, just like a regular penitentiary. Same thing. Treated just like regular prisoners of war. There was one benefit. We did get prisoner of war mail from Germany via Switzerland, which normally was not possible for anybody else to receive any mail from Germany during the war. We did. That’s what I told you that when they mailed stopped in ’42 approximately, that’s when I realized that my parents were not at liberty to write anymore and probably were in a concentration camp of some sort. That was the last time I heard from them.

Harper: Can I interrupt you? 
LANG Yes.

Harper: So this policeman just knocks on your door. Did he tell you anything?
LANG: Not a thing. I don’t think he even knew. I don’t think he realized. When he said, “Don’t take anything. Leave everything. Just take something for one night” — I’m pretty sure he had no idea. At least he didn’t seem like it.

Harper: So at first you weren’t at a prisoner of war camp, it was a regular alien camp?
LANG: No, at first I was in jail. The first night.

Harper: After you went to the Isle of Man? Was that just like an enemy alien camp? Those weren’t military people there.
LANG: No. There was just enemy alien there, that’s all. Just like the Japanese were put into here.

Harper: So there were Gentiles and Jews, and everyone. 
LANG: Yes, from Italy and Germany. [There were military people] only when we reached the ship, which was a converted Polish passenger liner. The Polish government loaned it to the British. They painted it gray, war colors. As a matter of fact, I found out about the gray paint. I was kind of a bit of a show-off, adventurous, like I told you. The sea was kind of rough. The higher you go, the more it sways. I climbed the mast right to the top. It was going like this, just to show you what I can do. I used to be a very good climber at one time. When I came down, I didn’t realize; I thought it was spray from the salt water, from the wind. It was the paint. It was still wet. I came down, and all the paint was all over me. I didn’t realize that it was paint and not water. That’s why I remember the paint well. But, no, that was the first time, on the ship, when we were exposed to being thrown in together with military prisoners. From then on we were treated, the same as military prisoners. I told you. We were behind barbed wire with a machine gun, the whole bit.

Harper: Were you scared when you were on the ship?
LANG: No. It was exciting. No, I wasn’t. I thought it was great.

Harper: Do you know why they treated you as military?
LANG: They didn’t distinguish between civilians and military. They didn’t make any difference. It didn’t make any difference to them. They were so completely confused and unprepared for this event that they just threw everybody together. There was no reason why. It’s just that they had no way of separating us. They weren’t even prepared for anybody. Period. Like I said, everything was very primitive. They couldn’t possibly have separate camps, so they put them all together. That’s all.

Harper: What did the letters your parents wrote say?
LANG: You have to realize that they were censored letters. They said very little. They couldn’t possibly tell me the actual facts, etc. More or less [they would] say everything is fine, things like that, how are you? And I couldn’t say very much either because everything went through censorship. But I was fine. We had all kinds of problems there. I could mention to you some of them. First of all, we wound up in another arena there. It was awfully dusty. All the sand around. Every time somebody passed by. You were sleeping on a bleacher, that’s how it was. It was an arena for the show cattle, the same thing as the first time when we were in England. This was in Three Rivers. I was very fortunate. I found an old horse cart, and I was above the dust. I slept on top of a horse cart for a while, which was a lot more, not comfortable, but a lot cleaner than being on the bleacher there, than on the dust down there. Again, they had no facilities for sanitary installations whatsoever. The food was better even though the Germans prepared it. I don’t know what they put into it. We had to eat something.

Then we were moved to Sherbrook from there, to another camp, temporarily. Then finally we wound up in New Brunswick. That was the last camp. That camp was not built yet. Just the walls were up. They were like army barracks, made a frame, but they didn’t have any sanitation facilities. They had only one building with a mess hall, tables for us to sit down and eat. They had one tap for 700 men for drinking. This was in the hot summer. They had no roofs, nothing yet on the barracks. We had to finish it all ourselves. We had a chance to wash ourselves when it rained, but then our feet were in the mud up to our ankles at least. It was clay soil. Drinking? 700 guys stood in line to one tap and drank whatever we could. One day they fed us something that caused ptomaine poisoning. It was bad fish or something. I forgot what it was. They had these latrines, no doors, nothing. Just boards you sit on with a bucket underneath it. We stood in line to go to the latrine. Everybody stood in line and watched you do your duty there. When you look at it now as a memory, it doesn’t seem as bad as it was at the time because at the time you didn’t want to get off the seat because you were afraid to leave because of your stomach cramps. But they made you get up and get back in line again, so you could get back to do more of it. That’s how bad it was. It was terrible. When you have ptomaine poisoning, you have terrible cramps. For 700 men, there were maybe 20, 25 of these latrines. Speaking of latrines, if you caused any problems, or if you were punished for anything, latrine detail was your duty. It means to empty these buckets. That was a punishment. You get used to it after awhile, I suppose.

Harper: Did you do it?
LANG: Oh, yes. I wound up in jail. In jail in the camp. I wound up in jail for two weeks for inciting, not a revolt, but a sort of — I was a foreman for a digging party. We were getting 20 cents a day for all this hard work, for eight hours a day. 20 cents a day. I found out that the Geneva Convention prescribed more or less that we should get 30 cents a day. So I incited a strike [laughs]. Because of that, they put me in jail, for inciting a strike.

Harper: Who?
LANG: The military.

Harper: Who was administering it? Was it the British?
LANG: No, it was the Canadian army. The comical part about that was, that after two weeks in jail, I liked it so much I asked for an extension. But they wouldn’t give it to me because, you see, when you’re sharing a — I forgot how many a barrack there were, 70 or 100 in a barrack — it’s not really that peaceful when you’re sharing one barrack with so many men. So in jail I had a place all to myself. It was great! I asked for an extension, literally asked if I could stay longer. They denied it. They said, “Get out of here. Get back to work!” But I prevailed. We did get our raise for 30 cents. We did get it. Because we felt we were in our right to ask for it. They were supposed to pay it anyway. For that 30 cents, I saved enough to buy a typewriter at Sears catalog store. Would you believe it? And I bought pastry. There was a pastry chef who was really great.

Harper: In the camp?
LANG: In the camp, yes. We had all kinds of people there that were really good. I didn’t smoke, I don’t think. No. But I did buy other things besides that. 30 cents. I saved enough money to buy a “Hermes Baby,” a little Swiss typewriter. They call it Hermes [spells out]. Ever heard of that? They called it baby; it was very small one, very portable. We did get Sears catalogs in camp. We could find them.

Harper: Was there a black market in the camp that you were aware of?
LANG: No. We didn’t have that.

Harper: At this time was the tension between the military personnel and the civilian …?
LANG: We were separated. By this time they had a separate camp. This was the third camp we went to in Canada. By this time they had separated us.

Harper: Were you with just Jews?
LANG: No. Oh God, no. We had everything there. We had priests there; we had rabbis there. We had Scotch people there, Irish people there, Italian people there, Polish people there with German background, etc. There were Catholics. You name it, everything. We had gays there and communists. You name it. Everything.

Harper: Was there any tension between [you]?
LANG: Yes, you know where the tension was? I never knew Austrians before. But the Austrians and the Germans — whether they were Jews or not, didn’t make any difference — they didn’t get along with each other. There was tension there, yes. There may have been some tension between the gays and the others. They might have been riling them or something. I don’t remember that though. There may have been. I never met a gay before, so I didn’t know anything.

Harper: Were these just German?
LANG: No, they were from all over Europe.

Harper: Were they in prison there because they were gay?
LANG: Oh, no. Because they were German, and Italian, yes. They didn’t know each other before. They just met there. But I know communists they were there from different countries. We were a mishmash of mankind, I would call it. We had professors there from universities. We had people who became very well known here, teaching at Columbia University, McGill University, you name it. They were let out earlier, by the way. They freed them earlier than that when they found out who they are, and they put them on the faculty there in no time at all. They also had German scientists there who were also let out earlier, who actually used to be Nazis at one time. They were taken in. If they found out, if they caught them or not, I don’t know, but they were civilians. I have no idea how they happened to be in England at the time. They were caught by the war, something like that. But we had a variety, all kinds of people there. 

I remember a Scotchman who was Scotch. His parents were Italian. I think he was born in Scotland, or maybe a few months old when he came to Scotland. He didn’t even remember. He didn’t know anything about earlier. He spoke with a brogue that you could not even understand. He was a real Scotchman. He lost his business. Just like the Japanese when they were interned, they lost everything. In Canada. They took them from the West Coast and brought them all the way down to Montreal from Vancouver, B.C. I heard their sad stories about they had a fishing boat, and others had businesses, left everything behind.

Harper: Did you see these camps?
LANG: No, I didn’t see that. By that time they were released already. They were just working, doing manual labor, just to feed themselves. In Canada. This was during the war. But this is exactly what happened to a lot of these people that were caught in England at the time when the war started. They could have been Fascists or Nazis, wherever they came from, Italy or Germany, and they were interned together with us. We were together for two years. Then I was released on parole one day. Being a farmer, I grew up on a farm, etc., I was sent to eastern townships near Sherbrook in Canada to work on a farm belonging to a Scotchman who lived up to his Scotch reputation of being very stingy. He starved me; he worked me like a horse, but he starved me. 

You could buy cookies — they were broken up kind of cookies — for 25 cents a pound, something like that I paid for it. I used to stuff myself with that. Also I used to take eggs from chickens, from under the chick from their nest, and drink them raw to sustain my strength because he wouldn’t feed me enough. It was awful. This was in ’42 during the war. Anytime he could, or it might be for any reason at all, not that I complained or anything like that, but he would remind me and say, “If you don’t do this or do that, I’ll send you back to camp because you’re on parole.” So I had no choice. I worked sometimes 16 hours a day, in the summer from early morning to late at night during harvest time, etc. But I got well paid. He paid me $15 a month, and there were no deductions. $15. Straight. Very generous. So that was part of it anyway. 

Later on, somehow I got connected with some Jewish people in Sherbrook who felt sorry for me, about the way I’d been taken advantage of by this farmer. They arranged for me to get a position with a Jewish family who had an estate in the province of Quebec, about 60 miles north of Montreal. They asked the military for a transfer to this estate — but it was not a farm — not mentioning to them that it was just an estate with one horse which was strictly for the pleasure for riding. That’s all they had there. Right on a lake. It was a beautiful home with their own beach, their own Chris Craft, etc. And they were hardly ever there, so all I was doing really was housesitting and taking care of the horse [laughs]. It was great! I felt like Alice in Wonderland. It was just a complete new experience for me — luxury. 

And it happened that there was a Jewish hotel right across the street from there, but across the street was on top of a mountain. In a snowstorm, I remember one time it took me half an hour to get across, at least, to get up that hill. So there I was a very, very welcome guest. I was a very unique addition to the Canadian population because they had never seen a refugee up there. I was like something from outer space. So everybody was asking me questions, etc., and wanted to get close to me somehow because I was a phenomenon. It was like a breath of fresh air for them. Nothing ever happens out there. It’s a little village, a little town. Especially in the winter — when I got there it was close to winter — and nothing ever happened because there was no transportation hardly. Trains got stuck in the snow halfway before they even got there. People came there for skiing for the weekend. They were on the train all weekend long and then they went back home again without ever getting there. That’s how bad it was. 

The only way you could move around there was either by snowshoes or by horse and sled, or skis. But not always skis because the snow was so deep that skis sank right into it. You went up  — the skis were down there somewhere and the snow was up here [gestures]. The soft snow. So I was a breath of fresh air, like I said, for them to ask questions, etc. After all, in those days they never dreamt of TV, so I was quite popular and I had some interesting experiences with different people who were wanting to adopt me or something like that. But basically I was more or less adopted by the owners of the hotel, where I finally moved over without the military being informed. They quietly transferred me over to the hotel where I was helping out in the dining room for a while. Later on I became a waiter there, etc. I think that some Jewish organization finally achieved a permanent release for me after about two years from the military, when I had a job at the hotel. Then I was off of parole, period.

I was working for the hotel for a couple of years, etc., and it was my home by that time. They were taking me in. There were three owners, all married, and the women kind of took me under their wings, so to speak. For many years, I corresponded with them. Who knows what happened finally? This is about 50 years ago now. What else would you like to know?

Harper: When you were working at the hotel, were you aware of the Holocaust going on and were these people aware?
LANG: Oh, yes. Positively. Not directly, but yes.

Harper: They knew something was happening.
LANG: Oh, I knew. Positively I knew what was happening because of what happened to my father even before I left. There was no doubt. What I saw in Berlin, on Kristallnacht there, I was well aware of it and I told. Sure. But you see, it is obvious and it’s history already, that the American government and the Canadian, I’m sure, played the ostrich. They did not really want to know. They pretended that they didn’t know. They did not want an influx of a lot of Jewish people from overseas. They really didn’t want it. There’s no doubt in my mind. There was, apparently, a resistance. There were isolated cases, like in England [where] they took the children. Holland has been very liberal. Sweden was very liberal. Denmark, to an extent, too. But in general there was very little opening, anywhere, including Israel. Palestine was closed to the Jews, too. They had to be smart. They heard about it. But I didn’t exactly know what was happening. About the extermination camps I didn’t know. No. We found out later. I had no idea. I just knew about concentration camps, but I didn’t know about the ovens and all that. No. That came quite a bit later.

Harper: So were you at this hotel for the end of the war?
LANG: The first thing that I came to Montreal, which was in ’42, visiting Montreal, I went from one recruiting office to another to join the forces. First I went to the army. No. Navy. No. Air force. No. Yes, they would take me and give me a shovel or spade to dig ditches. I said, “How can I defend myself? How can I?”  “Sorry. You are an enemy alien. If you want to volunteer to dig ditches, something like that.”  Why would I want to go there and be cannon fodder? You know what I mean. Expose myself to being shot without being able to defend myself. I want to fight. I said no. Make a long story short, I then moved to Montreal and I got a job at a restaurant as a waiter. I then also branched out, opened my own place for a while—a deli. I also had a trucking company for a while called “Olms [?]Transfer” for moving people, whatever. Of course, it was the Fords trucks, I remember which I sold it on and barely broke even. After I found out my employees were using my trucks at night to deliver, to moonlight with it, etc. In other ways cheating me, so I sold it.

Harper: This is all…? 
LANG: This is all during the war, all during the war.

Harper: You were able to open a restaurant during the war?
LANG: Yes. No, this was after the war. This I did after the war.

Harper: You were able to save up enough money?
LANG: Oh yes, the trucking business and the restaurant after the war.
Then in ’47 I finally decided to immigrate to the United States. My cousin from Sioux City, the one who had given up her place for me at the Kindertransport, her husband furnished an affidavit for me and then I worked in Detroit for a while as a brakeman for the New York Central, going between Detroit and Toledo. Then I worked at several hotels in Detroit. I lived in Windsor and I commuted every day between Windsor and Detroit. Then I decided to visit my cousin in Sioux City. I had bought a car in Detroit, yes, the first time I went to Detroit was to get a car there because it was very difficult to get a car after the war. Very difficult. But Detroit was the home of Ford, and the Big three automakers, I said to myself, “This will be replaced.” It turns out that I was cheated. I bought a used car, which was an ex-taxi. They removed the meter and covered the floorboard, etc. so that they couldn’t tell. It was a real lemon. I drove it to Sioux City and it conked out on me. The differential broke, or something like that. I got as far, after visiting with my cousin, I went to Omaha, Nebraska and there I ran out of money and I decided to sell the car. When I put an ad in the paper, I remember that I gave the keys to the car to the management of the hotel because I couldn’t pay my hotel bill. They fed the meter for me, it was in front of the hotel, and they kept on feeding the meter during the day. 

An interesting experience, if I may mention it was that, I was sitting in the hotel lobby. It was raining and there was a cab driver who asked me “Where are you from?” I told him. He said, “Well, would you like a girl?” I said, “Why not? What’s wrong with a girl?” He says, “I’ll tell you. I got some nice girls if you want.” I said, “I’m game.” Now, how I was going to pay him, I don’t remember. I don’t think I even thought about paying him, but at the time. To make a long story short, he says, “You come with me.” He took me to another hotel, checked in there and rented a room. He said, “You wait and the girl will come to your room.” So the girl came, he told me that I don’t have to take the first girl that came. If I don’t like her, then ask for another one. So, sure enough, girl came in the room. We talked for a while. I said, “Well, can you send me another one”? OK, another one. And then, “Knock, knock, knock.” But no waiting for “Come in.” Two guys, burst into the room, police, “This is a raid.” Interesting. But the girl had nothing on but a raincoat or something like that. Nothing underneath. So they grabbed her first and then they grabbed me and put me in the police car and took me to the No. 1 Police Station and asked me for identification. I had a police card from Miami where I had been before. The Miami police card goes through Washington, DC and when they saw that, they said, “No questions. You’re OK. No problem.” It was like an alibi, you know. The police card. And then they asked me about different things. I said, “Look, I was just talking to the girl. I don’t know anything about it. Well, nothing happened. I just talked to her.” He says, “How much did you [inaudible]?” I said, “I don’t know.” Anyway, we talked for a while and I said, “Look, I don’t have any transportation. I’m staying at a certain hotel.” They gave me a ride back to the hotel. That was it. Anyway, I don’t know, maybe you erase the whole thing afterwards. You take it off, if it doesn’t fit. 

Make a long story short, I wound up in San Francisco, sitting in a bar, talked to a guy next to me who told me he was serving on a ship with the Norwegian Merchant Navy. They told me how wonderful this is, “Travel the world and get paid at the same time, etc.” That’s very easy, you steer the ship, you port, you paint, you scrape paint, rust, etc., paint, etc. During the various voyages, you take turns. Four hours on, steering, and eight hours off. All around the clock. That was your duty. I said, “How can I get on a ship like that?” He explained to me what I should do and pretend that I’ve been serving on ships before. I went along with it. He said there’s always sailors getting inebriated and not coming back, skipping ship, you know. They always look for some replacement. So I did exactly what he told me. I went with him. Went to the captain. Said, “Yes, I’ve been on ships before, blah, blah, blah.” And he hired me.

I served on three ships altogether, travelling different parts of Europe, etc., and back and forth. The first one of course when they put me on the rudder, this was 10,000 tons, the ship. They’re all merchant ships, of course. I didn’t have the vaguest idea how to steer a ship, and they found out soon enough. By this time, we were already out of the port from Long Beach, California, we shipped out. Then I said, “Well, the last ship I was on was a little smaller than yours, I’m a little inexperienced in this.” Of course they realized I was lying, but by this time they had no choice but to train me. They did, and I learned how. I steered the ship through the Panama Canal, from the Pacific into the Atlantic. Later on I steered another ship through the Kier [?] Canal from the North Sea into the Baltic with a pilot, of course. And I learned all about being a seaman, ordinary seaman, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I can tell you quite a bit about life on board the ship, but that takes quite a bit more time. In one year of seafaring, you learn quite a bit and you see quite a bit. So I roughed it for quite a bit of my life. Like I said before, I was a bit of an adventurer, and I enjoyed every bit of it.

Harper: How did you get to Portland and in what year?
LANG: That’s a lot of water under the bridge [laughs]. In ’71, yes. A lot of things have happened since then, before I came here.

Harper: Were you married ever?
LANG: Oh, yes.

Harper; Where, when did you get married?
LANG: In Boston.

Harper: What year?
LANG: You see I went back after I was in the merchant marine for a while. By this time it was 1949; I left in 1947, Canada for the States. In ’49 I finally came back after gallivanting all over Europe. Scotland, Belgium, England, France, etc., Germany, Eastern Germany. Oh yes, there’s one more event I should talk about. In East Germany we wound up not far from where I was born, but I never had a chance to see it. It was on one of the Norwegian ships, and everybody was smuggling things into East Germany from the United States, or Canada, or from England. All the things we smuggled in were silk stockings for the women, neckties for the men, coffee, tea, chocolates, chewing gum, cigarettes, things like that. Innocent things. Everything that was not available in East Germany under Russian occupation. 

Well, we came into Schwarine [?] and the first time I went out from the ship, I came to the guardhouse. There was a Russian and a German gendarme, soldier. They stopped me and said, the German spoke to me, “Don’t you have anything you want to bring through here?” I said, “No.” He says, “Come on. We know you have something. We are here for another hour. So, if you have anything, will you give us some of it?” Me, like a ignoramus, or innocent, went back and put everything into a sack over the back like Santa Claus and came back to the gendarmes and they looked at it and saw cigarettes and they said, “OK, we’ll take half of it.” I said, “Like hell you will.” I put everything back again and went back to the ship. I came back without anything. That was the first day. They were mad as hell. I didn’t realize I was being watched. In the meantime, I came back later on, and I found out that you can smuggle out through other means by making arrangements with the engineer on the locomotive that goes in and out with freight. They put it under the floorboards. You meet them outside the port at certain points, prearranged, and they throw off to you, etc., etc. 

So that’s what I did. I gave them the stuff. They smuggled it out. I met them and then they threw it out, just like in a storybook. And sure enough, they stole half of it. Then I went out for the rest of it. I traded it with the Germans. They gave me microscopes, jewelry, camera, different things like that. They were bringing it in from the locomotive again. Well, they didn’t catch me but somehow they knew that I had brought it out from the locomotive. So the next day I came back with nothing in my hand. They were waiting for me with machine guns, two guys with machine guns, and they said, “Follow us.” They marched me through town, I’m in front of them, they’re behind me with machine gun. They took me to the commander of the town, which was a Russian woman. She read me the riot act, telling me that I smuggle things in and out. She wanted me to name all the people I had dealt with that traded with me. I kept on telling her that I didn’t know any one of them, and I would never remember anyone of them, because I had never met them before; they were completely unknown to me, and I’m sorry I couldn’t help her. She was furious, screaming at me, blah, blah, blah. 

They put me in jail for smuggling, even though they had no proof. Then they made me bring back some of the stuff and they confiscated it. Then finally, the ship was leaving, and of course, they wanted to keep me there, their intention. They wanted bail, so they called the captain of the ship and the captain had to come up with so much in English pounds I think or dollars. They wouldn’t take anything but English pounds or American dollars. He bailed me out, and I had to pay him back from my wages. I got some stuff out, quite a bit, as a matter of fact: jewelry, Bernsteiners, amber, in German it’s Bernstein, amber jewelry and heavy silver for ladies’ wrists, and different things like that, and a telescope. So I got some of it out. It was an experience, that’s all. I thought it was fun. I enjoyed every bit of it. At least after I got out of it you see. I was a little perturbed about the fact they put me in jail.