Eva Simons Rickles

Ketler: If you would begin by telling us your full name and maiden name, including the spelling and the date and place of your birth.
RICKLES: I am Eva Simons Rickles. My maiden name was Simons. I was originally named Evamarie so my original name was Evamarie Simons and I changed that name when I came to the US in 1937. I can talk about that later. I was born on November 13, 1927 in Berlin, Germany.

Ketler: Can you describe the people who lived in your household?
RICKLES: At the time that I was born our household consisted of my mother, Marie Elizabeth Simons, who was born Marcus in Cologne, Germany. You want her birthdate?

Ketler: Yes.
RICKLES: All right. She was born in Cologne in 1896 and she died in Seattle, Washington in 1966. The other member of my household in Berlin was my dad, whose name in this county was Dolf Simons. I guess it wouldn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that he dropped the “A” at the beginning of his name. He was originally Adolph Simons. He was born in Olfen, a small town in Westphalia. He was born in 1894 and he died in Seattle the same year as my mother, 1966. Those were the only members of my household in Berlin. I had a grandmother who lived in Cologne, Germany. Her maiden name was Gertrude Lowenhaupt, meaning the head of a lion. She was born in North Neubrandenberg, which was at that time in Germany. She was born in 1872 and she died in Seattle, Washington in 1958. I do have pictures of them. Do you want them now or later?

Ketler: We will take them later.
RICKLES: Fine. I guess I should get my grandfather in here then, too. My grandmother Gertrude, whom I called Omie, which is a short affectionate German term for grandmother. It really stands for Omama, or Grossmutter. Omie was married to Herman Marcus, who was born in Apenrade, which was in Holstein and at the time he was born in 1859 it belonged to Denmark. So he is my Danish grandfather. He died in Cologne in 1915.

Ketler: Were these grandparents on your mother’s side?
RICKLES: Yes. They were my mother’s parents. I never knew my grandmother on my father’s side. I have no documentary information on her. But his father was named Levy Simons. I also do not know when or where he was born. But he lived in Aulfen all of his life. They were only two Jewish families in Aulfen. They had a dry goods store.

Ketler: When did he die?
RICKLES: I don’t know. I don’t have any documentary information on him. Isn’t that queer?

Ketler: So both of them died in…
RICKLES: Wait! I do know. Both of my paternal grandparents died during the influenza epidemic after the First World War. So they must have died around 1917 or 1918 in Aulfen.

Ketler: Were there any extended family–aunts or uncles?
RICKLES: Yes. My father had a brother named Paul Simons. Let’s see if I know when he was born. Paul was a younger brother. I don’t have his birthdate but he was about six years younger than my father. Paul Simons remained unmarried, lived as a bachelor with his and my father’s sister Enny Simons, who was in between the two in age. Enny married a man named Michel in Cologne. They continued to live in Cologne (my uncle Paul lived with them) until the Nazis disrupted that whole household. I can get into that later or now, if you like.

Ketler: Later.
RICKLES: OK, fine. Then my mother had a sibling. My mother’s sister was named Margot Braumann. Well, Margot Marcus she was born. She married a man named Fred Braumann. She is three and half years younger than my mother so she would have been born about 1892. She is still alive. They emigrated to Australia and they live in Melbourne.

Ketler: Any cousins?
RICKLES: Mmhmm. Margot Braumann and Fred Braumann have a daughter named Ellen, who is my first cousin. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. She married a man named Ronald Tatt, who comes from an immigrant family from Russia. They were already very prominent in Melbourne. They’re a very large extended Jewish family in Melbourne, Australia. They have three children and many grandchildren. Meanwhile, let’s see, the siblings on my father’s side, the only offspring there were from his sister Enny, who had two children, one older son named Walter Michael, who is married to a woman named Peggy. I don’t know her maiden name. They live in New Jersey and have no children. The other offspring of Enny is a daughter named Lore who married an Englishman. She lives in London and her husband’s name is Bernard Robinson. So she’s now Lore Robinson. She has two children, a son named David, who is a physician in London, and a daughter named Joanne. Both of those children are married. But right now I can’t think of the … well, David is a Robinson so I know his last name. I can’t think of Joanne’s married name.

Ketler: And are there children in that generation?
RICKLES: There are. David has two children whose names I can’t remember right now. Joanne does not have any children.

Ketler: OK, thank you for that.
RICKLES: I have children. I think we should get that in. I have two daughters. My oldest daughter is named Tamara Lee Rickles. That was her maiden name. She is married. Her married name is Tamara Luria. She lives in Seattle. She has one child whose name is Benjamin Peter Luria. Her husband’s name, to make things even more confusing, is David Lewis. Although she did not keep her maiden name, she does not have the same name as her husband because the Lewises changed their name when they came to this country from Russia and they were very sorry to have given up their name of Luria. So Tamara decided to go back to the name of Luria so they could start the Luria line over again.

Ketler: Do they have children?
RICKLES: They have Benjamin. He is three and half. That’s my older daughter. My younger daughter’s name is Annette Rickles but that is not her name anymore. She changed her name to Nessa Elila. She is not married and has not offspring that any of us know of.

Ketler: Where does she live?
RICKLES: She lives in Portland and she is a mental health therapist.

Ketler: OK. What was the means of support… your father’s or mother’s occupation in Berlin?
RICKLES: My mother was trained as an economist and went to work for the German federal government after the First World War in their Department of Economics. That is not what it was called but it had something to do with their restructuring their economic system after the collapse of the First World War. And my father was a physician. He became a dermatologist in Berlin. [We have] kind of cute stories about that.

Ketler: OK. When did they marry?
RICKLES: They married in 1924. My dad graduated from medical school in 1923.There is a story to that, too, like there is a story to everything. I’m very impressed by the fact that my mother, who is basically a rather shy person (she was a very strong woman but she was rather shy) had known my father for three or four years in Cologne prior to his going to medical school in Berlin. She had decided that he was too good a catch to let him escape. She was living with her mother and her sister and their maid in an all-female household, a real typical repressed 19th century female household. She decided to brazen it out by moving to Berlin as a single woman – I think an amazingly brave move for her to make. So, when she was dating my father in Berlin, when they went to the theater she became aware that my father knew an incredible number of prostitutes (because the prostitutes used to hang out in the theater district). Realizing that Berlin during these years was that wild and wooly city that Christopher Isherwood writes about and that bothered her until she got up the courage to talk to my dad about it. He explained to her that the specialty of dermatology and the specialty of syphilology went together. Dermatologists were also treating syphilis, which was… there was an attempt made in Germany to control that. All prostitutes had to have regular examinations. They were constantly being checked. So my dad knew this whole community pretty well. That reassured my mother.

Ketler: When did she get her training in economics?
RICKLES: When it was appropriate for her to go to university and then she graduated from gymnasium, you know. She did the typical German education: grade school, gymnasium, university, which is where she got her economics training.

Ketler: This was before she moved to Berlin?
RICKLES: Yes.

Ketler: And did she work in Berlin?
RICKLES: Yes. That is when she worked for the Ministry of Finance. That is what it was called.

Ketler: And when they married was he finished with his medical training?
RICKLES: Yes. He had graduated the year before.

Ketler: And did he have a practice?
RICKLES: Yes. He had a private practice with a partner on Kuhlstossendam, which is one of the main streets in Berlin, where businesses and practices occurred. It sort of surprises me because many physicians in Germany at that time practiced in their homes. And I don’t know whether this was because he was a specialist that he didn’t practice in his home. There wouldn’t be as many neighborhood people who would necessarily need a dermatologist as a general practitioner. But he was in an office building.

Ketler: What was the Jewish life like for each parent as they were growing up?
RICKLES: My father came from almost what I would call a mixed marriage. His mother came from an Orthodox background. She insisted that they keep kosher. Now my grandmother was an invalid. As closely as I can get it she had extremely severe asthma. For some reason she was wheelchair bound. She didn’t get around a lot. I don’t know whether there were aunts in that household or who was really running the household. I don’t get a picture of a very active mother figure. I get a picture of a rather helpless mother figure who was dealing with a certainly wondering, naughty boy. My father relished telling stores about his mischief; he was pretty naughty. So she wanted to keep a Jewish home, which must have been extremely difficult. This is a farm community with two Jewish families in it. I don’t know the extent to which they could even have been successful with that. 

My dad’s father, on the other hand, Levi Simons, was basically an atheist. He called himself a pantheist. He loved nature. They were out in the country and the only truly religious experiences I think that he had were in communing with nature. That was an experience that he passed on to my father, who professed to be an atheist. He was an atheist but he also was a Biblical scholar. I think at times I wondered whether he was protesting too much. I mean he knew the Bible inside and out in order to fight with it. I heard a lot of that as a child. He was very intelligent and so intellectual discussion was very much a part of his life.

Ketler: Did he go on with what his wife wanted to do as far as the house?
RICKLES: Levy Simons? You see, that is my paternal grandfather. I don’t think so. He tried to sabotage her along the way. Since she was in a wheelchair, I mean. I hear these stories of the kids and the father gleefully mixing up kosher things. And things like that, which could have been pretty upsetting. I don’t think he went along with it.

Ketler: Do you think they celebrated holidays?
RICKLES: I do. The stories I heard my father tell were much more of his persecution as a Jew in a Catholic town. My father was probably not nailed to the cross. I can’t believe that. The children in the village tied him and his cousin (who I guess I forgot to mention; that was the other Jewish family) to a cross every Easter. Those were the stories that I heard about. I didn’t hear about Passover and I didn’t hear… yet I wonder because the recipe I have for the matzaballs I make comes from his sister and she must have gotten that recipe somewhere. I think they probably attempted to keep some holidays. But that is a guess.

Ketler: I am assuming there was no synagogue there.
RICKLES: Absolutely not. No, not a rabbi. I don’t even know how they could have had kosher meat. I think what he meant by keeping kosher was probably not mixing milk and meat.

Ketler: Did he tell you anything else about this being tied to a cross?
RICKLES: I think the whole experience of being a Jewish child in a small Catholic village was very difficult, particularly during Christian holidays. I think that he grew up with tremendous internalized rage about being a Jew. There had been nothing positive in his childhood about being Jewish. Everything that he had experienced involved pain, discrimination, feeling as an outsider, or fear, which then became reinforced by the Nazi experience. And strangely enough, there is an article that was printed in a German newspaper after his death. It is a newspaper that was published in his village, or in the next largest community, and they claimed that in his correspondence (he did correspond with people in Germany right after the war) he never expressed any bitterness. I would almost be willing to believe that because what I remember is that the instant that the Second World War was over he started a regular postal service to Germany, packaging up food, clothes, shoes and every single month sending huge parcels of aid to families he knew who were obviously not Jewish, in Germany. So I think he had some tremendously ambivalent feelings.

Ketler: What about the Jewish life in your mother’s childhood?
RICKLES: Her father died when she was very young. She was 15 when her father died. From that time on it was an all female household. Her mother, I don’t think came from a particularly religious home. I doubt that there was much notice taken for the reason that I don’t recall anything except lighting Hanukkah candles in Berlin during my early childhood. I was ten when I left Berlin. Up to that point I had a Christmas tree as well as a Hanukkiah. I never had been to a Passover that I can remember in Germany. Since I assume with an agnostic or atheistic father, it would have been up to her to introduce those customs into the family. I assume very little notice was taken in her home.

Ketler: Do you remember going to synagogue?
RICKLES: Well, I do because I went to a synagogue school. I don’t know whether you want to get into that.

Ketler: [inaudible]
RICKLES: Well, in 1933 I was six when it was time to start school. There had been some very bad episodes of children being injured in the German school system in the non-Jewish German school system and many parents and Jewish teachers had expressed some real concern about the physical safety of children in the schools. I think they weren’t too keen on their own job security at that point already. SO in a large city like Berlin several synagogues began running their own private schools for children. I know that I had been registered in a regular German school and at the very last minute I was pulled out and transferred, before it started. I was transferred to my synagogue, which was … Oh, I don’t know the name of the synagogue but I can’t tell you the street. A lot of Berlin synagogues are identified by the streets that they are located on anyway. This was on the Prinzregenten Strasse. The name of the school was the Lessler Schule, which was located in the synagogue building. The education in that school was totally geared toward emigration. Our classes were taught in three languages, Germany, of course, was our native tongue but we were also instructed in English and in Hebrew because at that point people were moving either to Palestine or to England or English-speaking countries. So what they were trying to do was teach us to be trilingual at that point.

Ketler: How much were you aware of what was going on?
RICKLES: Totally. I was totally aware and I was a very anxious little girl, even though my parents did their very best to keep me extremely protected. In Berlin in 1933 there was no way that any child that was not feeble-minded, any Jewish child, could not know that there were grave dangers. I have several outstanding memories. One is that I was never anywhere near a parade or any kind of public gathering because they could turn into a mass panic scene at any time. To this day I will not go to a Rose Festival parade or anything like that. I am very uncomfortable when a lot of people are gathered in one area. Also by 1933 the Nazis passed a regulation that domestic servants could not serve in the homes of Jews because all Jewish males were lecherous (that is what they said) unless they were over the age of 45. So we had a maid because at that time it was common in Germany, until that time of all the electrical devices that we have as labor-saving devices like the washing machine, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, earlier on those things weren’t available and labor was very cheap, so instead of having a vacuum cleaner and a refrigerator you had the old fashioned icebox and you had maids. That wasn’t a sign of status or prestige. That was just the way that housekeeping was done. 

Apparently my parents were very suspicious of our maid, whose name was Fraulein Strobe, because the maids that served in Jewish households were probably spies. I know that when conversations took place about the possibility of immigration and things like that, my parents used to stuff pillows around the radios because they didn’t know if there were speakers there. I saw that and I may not have understood the full implications. I was also taught from whenever I was old enough to really start remembering, not only never to speak to strangers but nerve to speak about anything that was discussed in the family. Anything. And so I became very suspicious, and I still am very suspicious. 

The first real memory that I have that I was different was that we lived in an apartment building in Berlin and when you walk down the stairs… one morning I saw posted a very large poster with a huge picture of a very ugly person with a hooked nose. He was holding a gun that was smoking and on the ground below him what was a heroic sort of Siegfried-type of young person in the uniform with a swastika on his arm. The big caption above it read, “I killed him because I am a Jew.” And I remember asking my parents what that meant.

Ketler: Prior to these memories how would you describe your childhood?
RICKLES: It was terrific. I was a spoiled child in a very upwardly mobile middle-class family. I have a picture. I can’t believe how… we really had a luxurious lifestyle, I have to say it. As I look back over the old family pictures, I’m struck by how incredibly elegant my parents were. And I have memories of them going to the opera, my mother in beautiful long black dresses with the gorgeous diamond brooch. And I was dressed incredibly well, which I can see now, from my pictures. I wasn’t aware of it then. I’ve got pictures here; these were my parents in their heyday in Germany. The funny thing is, my father grew up as a country bumpkin but he sure learns fast because he became so cosmopolitan in Berlin. This is my dad. This is via really fine photographer in Berlin. Are you able to get this okay? And this is my mother. I’ll show you what I was like at that point. Immodestly, I bought a newspaper picture. This is a magazine cover or actually sort of a journal cover; it’s me holding my doll. And the original is this picture. And it is Berliner Hausfrau, which was a very common sort of magazine like Woman’s Day. It’s the Berlin housewife. This says, “Neue Roman” meaning that there’s a new novel being published in this book and this is a picture of me feeding my dog. I was apparently taken to this incredible photographer in Berlin, who did a great deal of advertising work. And I had my face on postcards. I was in albums, photography albums. There’s quite a collection of the pictures. All of them done by this man. Did you get this? Okay. Of trips they took all over Europe. I find it hard to believe that they had a young child. When I look at the lives of American mothers with young children and realize how carefree my mother’s life must have been.

We had a maid. I either stayed home with the maid… I occasionally went to visit my grandmother in Cologne with the maid and then when I got older I was sent to a children’s home. There are some islands in northern Germany there between Denmark and Germany. I can’t remember the name of the Islands right now. And there was a children’s home there. I was sent there for two summers. I hated it. It was awful.

Ketler: Was it like a camp?
RICKLES: Well, yes, but it already had strong Nazi overtones the last time I wasn’t there. I was talking about this with a friend of mine who lives in Australia now, a childhood buddy of mine, who had been at the same camp with me. We can’t quite reconstruct it but what my memory tells me is that when I started at the camp that summer we were still marching to the beach. I mean that Germans are very organized and children don’t just walk holding hands – they March. And they sing songs. I remember that I was singing songs that didn’t leave an impression on me until one day (and this may have either been 1933 or 1934 during the summer) when we were told to sing a new song on the way home from the beach. It was actually the Nazi national anthem. When I came to the part about, “Let Jewish blood drip from every sword,” I heard what I was supposed to say and even though I had not talked to anybody about the meaning of these words (I was six or seven) I knew I didn’t want to sing that song anymore. I didn’t want to sing it at all; I had never summit. But anyway have to sing it and I remember as my first act of conscious protest I mouth the words, but I didn’t sing it.

Ketler: Does your friend remember that?
RICKLES:  Yes he remembers it. They were three Jewish children in that camp, my friend, his younger sister, and I. And none of us sang it. And of course, once my parents found out, they never sent me back.

Ketler: Were your parents active in any political organizations or anything like that prior to 1933?
RICKLES: I wouldn’t think that there were any political organizations that would have been safe for Jews.

Ketler: What about any Zionist organizations?
RICKLES: They were not Zionists.

Ketler: But they were culturally oriented.
RICKLES: Yes.

Ketler: In your apartment building do you know if it was composed mostly of Jews?
RICKLES: no. My parents were the epitome of what we call assimilated German Jews. Judaism was not an important aspect of their daily life. They were Jews and would never be anything but Jews. I think that their very intellectual turn of mind was very Jewish. The whole emphasis on reading and education, discussion and lectures, at out of those things I find very Jewish about them. Certainly not exclusively Jewish, but very Jewish. They and their friends were, in large part, Jewish. The whole ambience of being with Jews became more difficult later on for their non-Jewish friends. I don’t think of their choice they would have limited their circle of friends to only Jews; it just became necessary later on. There was another Jewish family and our apartment building. They were orthodox Jews. And I think there was a rather snobbish way my parents had a viewing that. I got the feeling that they were “lesser than”, that they were superstitious. There was something Medieval about them. That they somehow had not kept up with modernity. So we weren’t friends. We knew each other but we weren’t friends.

Ketler: Prior to your entering the synagogue school did you have any Jewish friends?
RICKLES: Yes because some of my parents’ good friends were Jewish and I was friends with their children.

Ketler: How about Gentile friends?
RICKLES: [sigh] I just really can’t remember very well. Part of my family is Gentile, as a matter of fact. I should mention that. My grandmother’s brother. Gertrude Lowenhaupt – her brother went to England early on to find employment. By early on I’m talking about probably in the latter part of the 19th-century or the very early part of the 20th Century. He went to work in the textile industry in Manchester. He married an English woman who was not Jewish. I don’t know whether he actually converted but his children were baptized as Church of England. That whole side of the family is not Jewish.

Ketler: Prior to entering school were you aware that attitudes toward Jews were changing? Did you hear discussions at home?
RICKLES: I think the attitude toward Jews had always been there since I was born. My mother tells me one reason I am an only child is that even by 1927 they were rumblings. They simply didn’t know whether they would be able to maintain a family of more than one child and that climate. So my parents, although they didn’t leave until 10 years later, we’re very aware that things were not good.

Ketler: How early do you think they began thinking about leaving?
RICKLES: I think there was a difference between my mother and my father. I think my mother began thinking about it earlier than my father. I think he was very afraid about what his prospects of starting over would be. He had a very good private practice in Berlin. He was reluctant to go. And I think she was much more panicked and wanted to leave much earlier. But I would assume that by the very early 1930s they were talking about it and just didn’t quite do it. It has to get worse before they were able to leave. I didn’t get worse. Another problem was that my father, having served in the First World War for the Kaiser, was one of the German Jews who honestly could not believe that the Germans whatever do this to a totally assimilated a German Jew.

Ketler: When you first remember hearing about Adolf Hitler?
RICKLES: I don’t even remember. I think he’s just being part of the gene pool. I don’t think that there is a beginning, Exactly sort of an ambience.

Ketler: Would it be correct to assume that life felt fairly safe and secure until the incident at the camp then?
RICKLES: Yes. I would think so. I would say that.

Ketler: And he began school in 1933?
RICKLES: Yes. Now I had gone to an English-speaking kindergarten earlier. I was three when my parents sent me to an English-speaking kindergarten. Again, whether that was done with the intention of getting me to be bilingual very early, knowing that we would have to go, or what…. The other thing is I had a lot of English relatives and we went to England every summer and they also wanted me to be able to talk to my relatives. So in that kindergarten, which I think was organized by my parents and their friends, we spoke only English.

Ketler: Your parents also spoke English?
RICKLES: My mother did. My mother had been to school in England my father did not. I actually spoke English before my father. And I remember my father learning English and practicing English with my mother. But also they were into foreign languages because they also had a French tutor who came to the house every week. My dad had gotten part of his training in Paris. I love this picture. He went to Paris for his training and plastic surgery; this is a marvelous picture of his classmates in Paris and my father… this is my dad. These people are from all over the world. They signed this picture. They come from Buenos Aires. They come from North America. There from just all over so he spoke fluent French, as did my mother. And I think the idea of the tutor was to maintain their French.

Ketler: What year was this?
RICKLES: 1929. Yes. So I guess I was two years old when this picture was taken.

Ketler: Your mother was in France with him?
RICKLES: I don’t know what she did. I was too. I don’t remember. As a matter of fact I was not taken care of by my mother for the first few years when I was born. My mother hired a baby nurse, which was common. Her name was Schwester. Elizabeth. Elizabeth took complete charge of me. I don’t think my mother ever changed a diaper. And I think it was at the point where I was so attached to Schwester Elizabeth, who I probably thought was my mother that my mother got jealous and fired her.

Ketler: What was your age?
RICKLES: I was probably about a year and a half, something like that. And then my mom began to take a little more care of me but there was still in the house. So I have a feeling that she didn’t go along. For that was a long session.

Ketler: Maybe now in your own words you can tell us what happened.
RICKLES: Okay

Ketler: The start of the synagogue school and becoming aware that things were dangerous for Jews… what happened?
RICKLES:  Um, well I think I was perfectly content in my school and had of course all Jewish classmates. And we didn’t live all that far from each other. Now living in Berlin, children didn’t just go bopping over to each other’s houses anyway, I mean we had to be taken because of traffic and all those kinds of things. And I had a very close friend who lived just a few blocks…the boy who now lives in Australia. And we saw a great deal of each other and did a lot together, like we had swimming lessons together. I remember my mother taking us on a streetcar great distances to get me out to a beautiful lake called Grunwald which is sort of in the outskirts of Berlin. We would pack a picnic lunch and she would take me out there and I would play in the water and dig in the sand and do all kinds of fun things. My dad, the country boy, wanted to get a dog, which was really quite a hassle. We were living in an upstairs apartment in a major section of Berlin,. I have a picture of a view from my balcony. This is, I don’t know if you can see this, it’s a tiny picture, but this is what I looked out at from my window. There’s a corner of the balcony right here, which is outside of my bedroom window, and then there’s this little circle of grass, and the name of that was “Prager Platz” which is now or was in the Russian zone. I don’t’ know if you know, now of course that Berlin has been reunified, so it’s just in the eastern part of Berlin. 

When my dad decided that he wanted a dog, he prevailed over my mother’s protestations, I’m sure. I remember coming home from school one day and seeing a woman in the distance. She always came and met me at the school or at least where the streetcar left me off and walked me home. She was dragging this white ball of wool, I thought, until she got closer, and it turned out to be my mother who had absolutely no affinity for animals at all, dragging this little puppy that didn’t know about walking on a leash. And that was my new dog. I loved that dog dearly. Here’s a picture. This is Vippy and me. Vippy lived with us for a good number of years, until we immigrated to the US and he was my buddy and one of the problems was, when we left the US, I had to give Vippy up and that was going to be a very traumatic episode. I guess I can talk about how that came about, and that will take us back to Vippy.

It appears that my mother’s attempt to prepare us for immigration to the US was that she had been bringing small amounts of money out of Germany to a bank account in England, which her English relatives were holding for her. They were not huge sums of money but it was something to get started with. She had been doing that every time she went to England, which was sometimes frequent. I think that at that point too (we’re talking about 1934, 35, 36) friends were trying to help each other since we were all going to be in the same boat. And whether she was taking money out for other people it would have had to be very close friends to run risk like that; I don’t know. A long story short, by late 1936 or early 1937 it was very apparent, even to my father, that we would have to leave and people were already being taken to camps. They weren’t yet being gassed. I mean those were different; they weren’t death camps. They were concentration camps. The closest I can understand it, the main point at that time was either to just get people who were causing political problems off the streets and away from any influence they could have, or to extract money. Some of my father’s friends had been in concentration camps and we were being watched. We knew that because, you know the apartment buildings in German had “portiaux?” They’re sort of custodians that are given the apartment, it’s the main apartment downstairs by the front door, and they kind of can keep control of who goes where. We know that he was watching who was coming to our apartment and that kind of thing. The problem was that the preparations were very late by 1937 and my father had an American patient who had a very positive position with Chase Manhattan Bank, which had a branch in Berlin. This man had been talking to my father about leaving and my father had been saying, “Yes, I really need to do that.” So at one point he had said “If you need help getting a quota getting into the US let me know and I’ll see what I can do for you.” So he, at some point then, exerted his influence and probably bumped three people down a notch and gave us preference in the quotas. 

Ketler:  What was his name? Do you know?
RICKLES:  I believe his name was White, which isn’t going to help a lot because I don’t know his first name. My parents had every intention of leaving, and as a matter of fact, leaving in 1937. At the same time that they were making plans to leave their very close friends, the parents of the little boy I played with all the time, were also planning to leave. Their name was Lucas, Otto and Emily Lucas. He was also a physician, he had a different specialty but he was a physician. My parents and the Lucases made an arrangement that, if for any reason, either one family or the other had to leave quickly, that the other family would pack up the household belongings and mail them ahead. The arrangements had already been made. Both families had rented what we call lifts. They are what I think are containerized cargo now. They’re these enormous containers, they’re huge boxes into which the entire household could go—furniture, all kinds of accouterments, and then be shipped across to the United States, in our case, in their case to Australia. The families were fully aware of each other’s arrangements for emigration. 

Well, seen through my eyes, here’s what happened: In November of 1937 I went to school as usual, and when I came home from school I was greeted at the door by a very tall, starched, imposing nurse whose name was Schwester Anastasia. She spoke with a Russian accent and she told me that my mother was very ill and that she had come to take care of my mother and she sent me about my business, whatever that was. As I said before, I was a very anxious child and being aware of all these plans about leaving for America I had somehow gotten the notion that in their haste they might forget me. So I had continual nightmares that they would forget to take me. I probably pushed a panic button. Anyway, I don’t remember exactly what happened that day. I remember she allowed me to stand in the doorway and my mother was in bed. My father did not come home that evening and they next day they sent me to school again. Schwester Anastasia got me ready and sent me off to school. I was called home from school before the day was over and when I came home from school my grandmother, who lived in Cologne, was there. That was very unusual; that had never happened before. And Schwester Anastasia was there. Oh, and I had noticed the day before that there were two men sitting in the living room, but I didn’t go in and I didn’t talk to them and I didn’t pay much attention to them. They were in the living room either still or again when I came home from school the second day. Then my grandmother (I mean, these are the big events in a child’s life) had knitted me this wonderful blanket, which had its own little purse with a zipper and she had put my name on it. It had a handle so it was like a little soft suitcase with my own little blanket, and she gave that to me. Then my mother and my grandmother and Schwester Anastasia and I and my little blanket got into a taxicab, made one stop, and went to the train station. 

My grandmother and Schwester Anastasia waved goodbye and we went on a train ride, and when we got off the train we were out of Germany. We were in Holland and we were going to Rotterdam, which was a port. It was when we were on the boat going to England that my mother told me. But you see all that wasn’t alarmingly unusual because whenever we went to visit our relatives we took that route. So I figured we were just going to see our relatives. But it was on the boat going to England that I had a surprise coming because my father would be there to meet us in England. Furthermore, that this was a different trip because we were going to be gone for a very, very long time and that we were actually going to go to England first but we were really going to go to America. My first thought was, “But what happened to Vippy?” I didn’t get to say goodbye and I raised a tremendous ruckus. I mean, I started crying and I was terribly upset, and it is for that reason undoubtedly, that they never told me when I was leaving because I think they were very fearful that I would raise the same ruckus. That’s what I remembered about leaving Germany was that I was never able to say goodbye to Vippy. 

What had happened was that my father had been visited by members of the Gestapo in his office the day before who had accused him probably of smuggling money out of the country. I don’t know exactly what they accused him of. They told him that unless he could come up with however many marks that he would be interned in a concentration camp. So what he had done was he had left from the office, never gone home, hopped on that train, and taken off. Fortunately he had very well placed patients, I might say. One of the advantages of having a very good practice in Berlin is that you had a strong possibility of international connections. Probably the most important connection besides Mr. White was an English Jew who had left Holland many, many years before, and gone to England. He was probably a more honest Ivan Boesky. He was spectacular on the British stock market and his name was David Bingham; it was Birnbaum originally. He probably had come from Germany, or his family gone to Holland, and then Mr. Bingham had immigrated to England. Mr. Bingham had met my father many years before. I don’t know whether it was in Germany or England. Mr. Bingham had a very severe skin condition and my dad… had a wonderful sense of humor. Mr. Bingham, I remember him as Abraham Lincoln. I never knew whether what I remember is Abraham Lincoln or Mr. Bingham, because he struck me as incredibly tall. I was very little, but you know I thought he was ten feet tall. Very thin, very somber, and rather scary, you know, dark and brooding. Part of that must have been true because apparently he intimidated almost everybody. He didn’t intimidate my father. So my father, with a very irreverent sense of humor, was able to plug into David Bingham’s sense of humor and they got along fabulously well. Mr. Bingham decided that he needed this dermatologist from Berlin to take care of him and so he would fly my dad out. He was usually very wealthy though occasionally terribly poor because he was such a speculator. He lived on a magnificent country estate outside of London, and when my father was talking about leaving…am I rambling?

Ketler:  [indistinct]
RICKLES:  When my father was talking about leaving, Mr. Bingham said, “Perfect, come to 

London and I will set you up in an office.” My father said, “No, because if I’m going to leave Germany, I’m going to get as far away from Germany as I can possibly get. England is certainly not far from Germany.” At that point, they must have been in London. They were sitting around talking with Mr. Bingham’s brother-in-law, who was conducting business with the Bethlehem Steel Company in Seattle. He had just come back from Seattle and they were talking about “well, where would you go, Dolf?” My father was saying, “Well, I don’t know where I’ll go but I know it’s not New York and I know it’s not Chicago.” Mr. David Bingham’s brother said, “Well, you like Switzerland don’t you?” And he said, “Yes, I love the mountains. I’m an asthmatic.” My father had been bombed, he had been in a gas attack during the First World War and he had very severe asthma. That was his present from the First World War, and so he did want to be near mountains because he needed to have that atmosphere. Mr. Bingham’s brother said, “You know something, I’ve just come from a place that is almost as perfect as Switzerland. Maybe even more perfect. And it’s called Seattle.” My father had never heard of Seattle and he said, “Where is it?” and Mr. Bingham’s brother said, “It’s as far away from Germany as you can get without dropping into the Pacific Ocean.” My father said, “That sounds good.” 

He went back to Germany, to Berlin, and they started combing the bookstores and they couldn’t find anything about Seattle because Boeing wasn’t big yet. This was before the Second World War. There was just zip in the books about Seattle that he could find but he did find it on the map. And then he found a geography book and it talked about a mountain called Mount Ahoma, which is the Indian name for Mount Rainier, so you know how old the book was. And that there was a city, named for an Indian chief, near Mount Ahoma, named Seattle. Based on that slim read my father decided, “That’s it, that’s where we’ll go if I can get an internship and a residency there.” Because all physicians coming from Europe had to take their basic science exams over again. Those are the exams you take when you graduate from college and then have their internship and their residency. 

When my mother and I disembarked from the ship in Southampton we went to Mr. Bingham’s estate, which is where my dad was. We could not come to the US for another month because we had to wait for our quota number. So we spent that month on this estate in London, which is one of the most wonderful memories I have. It was like stepping into an old English nursery rhyme. I mean, where we were on this huge estate with stables full of horses, and grooms, a nursemaid who took you to high tea in the nursery with the other children. It had everything but Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh right there. I absolutely loved it, and oh I remember lying in a bed in the bedroom and there was a panel of buttons behind be and in boredom I pushed the buttons. I think every servant on that estate appeared in my bedroom door [laughs]. It was a bell that called down to the servant’s quarters. Actually it was a little like Upstairs, Downstairs except that those people lived in the city and the Bingham estate was in the country. But the complete staff with the butler, and the maid, and everything, and it was just very wonderful for me I thought. Then, after the month was up, we boarded our shop to go to the US and there’s another wonderful story. 

…quest, and was based in Seattle so he knew this man’s name. Then he had the name of a woman physician who had immigrated many years earlier. Her name was Hannah Kosterlitz and there are Kosterlitzes in Portland. She was not married; she had no children. She was an eye specialist and was told to look him up, that she might be of help to him. But he didn’t know them personally, and he didn’t know anyone personally in Seattle. Nor did he know whether we actually could settle in Seattle because he needed to find a hospital that would be willing to give him a residency and an internship. But first we’ve got that ocean to cross and when we got to New York it happened to be Thanksgiving Day, 1937.

Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday so we did not know about thanksgiving. The first thing that happened was that when we disembarked and we arrived on the dock and still needed to go through customs and do all those things – immigration – my father heard a familiar whistle. He had belonged to a fencing fraternity when he was at the University in Germany. It was a Jewish fraternity but the Jews were doing the same thing the non-Jews were doing. They were fencing and scraping up their faces. My father had many, many scars from fencing, dueling victories, and all that. Well, they had a whistle and my dad was sure he heard this whistle over all that clamor and all that noise of hundreds of people disembarking from a boat. So he whistled. And it wasn’t an echo. He heard the whistle. He whistled; he heard the whistle. So the two whistlings came closer and closer and closer until there appeared a fraternity brother of my father’s whom he had not seen since he graduated from university because they all went to different cities. Well, it turns out that some of these [the name of the fraternity was, well I know the initials as KC, it turned out the] Kotsay brothers who lived in New York were aware that there were people fleeing Germany, were going through the list of the Holland America Lines to see if any of the fraternity brothers were on any of those lists. If they were, one of them was at the dock to meet them. Isn’t that incredible? This man…see these lists are available before the boat pulls in, so he had known for a week or two at least that we were coming, had rented us an efficiency apartment, and as the final coup de gras, his wife had prepared their Thanksgiving meal in our apartment so that we hosted them at our very first meal in this country in our own temporary home, which psychologically was just really incredible. 

So, when we got here, we were settled within a few hours and serving turkey dinner, which we had never known anything about, to their family. On the way to the apartment, we were stopped by the Macy’s parade and we really thought we had come to the land of milk and honey. You know here it is a weekday, a Thursday, practically the middle of the week, nobody’s at work. Everybody’s out in the street with balloons, looking at Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse floats. We thought, “This is wild.” And every time my father said “Thank you,” they said, “You’re welcome.” And he said, “How do they know that I just go there?” Because the English don’t say, “you’re welcome.” They have, I forget what the English say when you say, “Thank you,” I think they say, “It’s quite all right.” Or, “My pleasure.” or something but they don’t say, “You’re welcome.” So he assumed they were all welcoming him to his new home. So that was quite an arrival.

Ketler:  What do you remember about the crossing and how long did it take?
RICKLES:  I think the crossing at that time took about a week–a little bit more. I believe we crossed First Class. This was also bought for with German marks so we went very comfortably and luxuriously. I remember just a lovely ocean trip. There were a lot of games and at that time also they had very organized activities for children. They had children’s maids on those ships so the parents could do their adult things and the child…it’s like kindergarten on board ship, where there were many activities with babysitters, nannies, what have you.

Ketler:  Were there other Jewish families on the boat?
RICKLES:  There probably were but I wouldn’t have known, you know, I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I have my passport here, you know in looking at this passport it strikes me how tiny the swastika is and how in our own thinking a swastika assumes just mammoth proportions. I mean, when you think about a swastika, it’s a symbol for everything that has killed six million people, disrupted your life, and so I always think of a swastika as a huge thing. I was just stunned when I looked at my passport and here’s this tiny little swastika and it almost looks cute. I mean, it’s just so diminutive and yet it is a symbol for something so huge and so monstrous that it just struck me as out of sync. It’s a teeny weeny swastika at the bottom of the stamp. You may not even be able to pick it up. But am I here with Vippy again? No, I’m just sitting in the window. So that’s my passport and my German signature. I was taught German gothic writing, so hee hee, the way I used to write. And it shows my German name, Evamarie. It was at this point – the next document, which is my citizenship, my application for citizenship, that it no longer shows Evamarie. I didn’t like the name. I was so impressed by the story of Ruth in the Bible. So my mother was teaching me Bible stories. She also taught me to pray. I took the name Ruth and I stuck it in between the Eva and the Marie, so name on my citizenship papers is Eva Ruth Marie Simons. Then when I got married, we decided that was a little cumbersome. Eva Ruth Marie Simons Rickles was just too long so I dropped everything except Eva S. Rickles. 

Ketler:  Looks like the place to pause for a moment. Are there any questions at the time? Prior to life in America?
RICKLES: Eh, yeh.

Ketler:  Who were the men that were in the living room….and where did this nurse Anastasia come from?
RICKLES: Good question. The men in the living room were officials of the German government. Whether they were Gestapo or not, I don’t know. Their purpose there was ostensibly to hold my mother hostage until my father would come back from England. However, the family that had worked the escape plan with my family, the Lucases, were on to all that. So as soon as my mother was aware…my father called my mother from the office and simply said, “I’m going to see David,” and they know that was David Binghm in London and that was that.

She immediately called Otto Lucas, the doctor, who knew Schwester Anastasia because she was a medical nurse. Schwester Anastasia was a white Russian who had gone through the Russian revolution and was very savvy with ways of dealing with governments and all of that sort of thing, and had done this kind of thing many times before. She was there as a decoy to persuade these, I don’t think they were very actively involved in pursuing us because my father was very small. I mean he was not some multimillionaire that the Nazis were really putting a great deal of their resources into capturing, but it was worth a try. So her purpose was to keep them at bay until my grandmother could make a few necessary business arrangements for my mother, and then under the guise of my mother being ill, they just kept my mother in bed an out of the way, and that way also it kept the Gestapo in one place in the living room because my mother was in the bedroom.

Ketler: So then how did you and your mother get away?
RICKLES:  In the taxi, remember? The next day we took a taxi. The one stop we made was at the bank, I was told. Then we went to the train station and took the train.

Ketler:  But were the men still…
RICKLES: No, they were still in the living room. We went out the back way.

Ketler: You slipped out the back door?
RICKLES: Yes, we slipped out the back and, and…

Ketler: …what kind of apartment?
RICKLES: That’s a nice detail. Yeah, we did have a back door. And had they been really gung ho on catching my father they would have had guards at both doors, so obviously he was sort of lackadaisical. I asked my friend from Australia, you know this is nuts, “Why were they just sitting there? Why didn’t they have guards at the door?” And well, he doesn’t think…that it was sort of a desultory effort at that point. If they could get my father back and extract whatever amounts of money they could, they would have done so. But they made the attempt and it didn’t work and it wasn’t the end of the world.

Ketler: And so they never limited your father’s practice in any way?
RICKLES: That I don’t know.

Ketler: Is it, was his practice affected?
RICKLES: I think it was. Yeah, I think it was. And my father’s partner, who I am not sure was Jewish, now that I think about it, went to Egypt. He emigrated to Egypt; he must have been Jewish. He wouldn’t have left. I can’t remember his name. I think it did affect their practice, but I think it was still a good practice.

Ketler:  And then is it safe to assume that the Lucases packed up the apartment? Do you know?
RICKLES: That’s what they did. Yes I do know because I just talked to my friend Frank about it. He said he remembers his mother with the list, going to the apartment and supervising that. He has a very clear image of going with her and seeing all that stuff being packed up. Then that was shipped to Seattle, which was a little risky because we didn’t know whether we were going to say in Seattle. The assumption was that we would go to Seattle, and then you see, by that time we were in Seattle because it took a lot longer to get the furniture out and it was shipped through the Panama Canal. Either through the Panama Canal or it came all the way around the Cape, I don’t remember. But it was a long ocean voyage. Once we were in the US we had very little money so my father had bought a ticket on a Dutch ship, to get us from New York to the West Coast because he didn’t have enough money for a train ticket to be bought in New York.

He, in Berlin, had still bought a ticket on a Dutch liner to go through the Panama Canal to get from New York to Los Angeles. That’s where the boat stopped, docked. So my mother and I stayed in Los Angeles and my father took the train to Seattle and looked up Hanna Kosterlitz, who had the medical contacts he needed. I don’t think at that point he looked up P. Ellen Rickles. I don’t know, but he was able to locate an internship and a residency at the Swedish Hospital. He sent for us, and at that point David Bingham was extending very generous loans to my father. That’s how we had the money to take the train from Los Angeles. I mean, I don’t know, David carried us for several years in this county. Then, of course, my parents paid it all back.

Ketler:  You mentioned that in your apartment there were some Orthodox Jews who lived upstairs and your parents had suspicions. Was that the usual relation between assimilated German Jews and Orthodox Jews? Were there tensions like this, and mistrust? Did they get along?
RICKLES: I don’t feel qualified to speak for all German Jews because I was just turning ten when I left. But if I am an example of that, and I suspect that I am. Assimilated German Jews considered themselves highly educated, which actually they were, and considered themselves part of the modern world. I think the attitude that was transmitted to me as a child was that Yiddish was an ugly language, that it was a prostitution of high German, and my parents prided themselves on speaking what we call “Hoch Deutsch.” So I was never allowed to use any form of Berlin dialect. They tended to be snobs, intellectual snobs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the attitude that religious people are superstitious people, especially Orthodox religious people, who seemed, at least to my parents, to do things not because it was carefully thought out, but because of a fear of retribution for what would happen to them if they didn’t do that. 

Even in this country, I noticed that attitude of my father’s. When we went to the market in Seattle, many of the fruit and vegetable stands at the public market in Seattle were in the early days held by Sephardic Jews, some of whom were Orthodox, and certainly were practicing Jews. He would have a lot of arguments with them. Fortunately, they were friends. I mean, fortunately he was also nice. He was a very charming man and so it was more in a joshing style. But what they personally thought of all that, I don’t know.

Ketler:  Do you know how long it took for the Lucases to get out?
RICKLES: Another almost year. No, as a matter of fact, they went through Kristaalnacht, so it took more than a year. See because Kristallnacht was in November of ’38. We left in November of ’37, so it was over a year until they go out.

Ketler:  Do you think that was due to quotas as well?
RICKLES:  I honestly don’t know. I don’t know what the situation with Australia was.

Ketler: Do you know why they went to Australia?
RICKLES: Well, there was no possibility to get into the US. I mean, the quotas were really very small relative to the need. Then, seen through the eyes of the Americans, they may have been generous, but seen through the eyes of refugees fleeing Europe, they were very small. At that point, Australia was still welcoming white immigrants. They were closed to Asians. But it was a big country and they were welcoming certainly educated white people, Caucasians.

Ketler: Do you have any memory of the Nuremberg laws in 1935?
RICKLES: No, I really don’t.

Ketler: It sounds like that didn’t directly affect your father’s practice at that time.
RICKLES: Well, review me, which Nuremberg law could have affected him, if you could refresh my memory.

Ketler: I believe that there were restrictions placed on employment and education and use of public facilities and that kind of thing.
RICKLES: Well, see that’s the period, that’s probably the Nurnberg law is when we lost the maid we had and had to hire another one who was much older and who we were very suspicious of. So that I’m sure is part of the Nurnberg laws. I think that patients who came to my father didn’t do so at their risk, but I think that they were aware that they were going to a Jewish doctor, and I do think that he lost quite a few patients. That is the time from which on I think the portiere in our apartment became very nosy about who was coming to our apartment and why, and people who weren’t comfortable about that stopped coming. I think their life became much more circumscribed.

Ketler: Want to take a break?
RICKLES: Fine.

Ketler: Can you tell us a little bit about the rest of the family? Were they able to leave Germany?
RICKLES: All right. Let’s back up into Paul Simons, my father’s brother. Paul Simons went to Belgium at some point, because of the Nazis. He was linguistically very gifted. What he was doing in Belgium was he was serving as a translator and I don’t know for whom. I think this was…he left…back up. He had been living with his sister Enny and her husband. When that family broke up, the children had been the children of Enny’s, my cousin, Lore and my cousin. Walter had been sent to England by the children’s transport service that was taking out Jewish children from Germany. Both children…no…I have to back up on that one too. Walter, who was at the point 15 or 16, took a bicycle trip from Germany to England, somewhere around 1939, ’38, before the war. It was before the war. And didn’t come back. And he went to see David Bingham, I mean that’s where we all went.

Mr. Bingham said that he would support Walter and found a place for Walter to live and I think Walter was just entering university. Mr. Bingham started Walter on his university career and then as soon as he could, my father took that financial obligation over. So here was Walter, about 16 years old in England, starting university, and his sister was still in Germany and so he arranged with Mr. Bingham to be in touch with the children’s transport service to bring my cousin Lore over. 

My cousin Lore was farmed out to a Jewish family through, what was the name of the service that was bringing children out, it slipped my mind right now, but it will come back. They found Jewish homes for the Jewish refugee children. Her first placement was a miserable placement, and although these people had agreed to provide education that was appropriate for the children from Germany that were coming into their homes, this particular family did not carry out that agreement and was using Lore as a servant. Lore was only about 14 and very bright and needed to have her education completed. So Walter went back to Mr. Bingham and through Mr. Bingham they found a wonderful home for her in the home of a don at Cambridge University. This don was not Jewish but in his family there had been Jews and so as a…he was a very socially responsible man and he and his wife brought or kept in their home throughout the war, about six or seven refugee children, which is where she completed her high school education. Then as quickly as possible she got started on her nursing career, because there she would be paid while she was being educated. They paid their student nurses so she became a nurse and moved out.

Now, back in Germany that left Mom and Dad, my father’s sister Enny, and her husband, and then they were going to get transported to… They were going to be taken prisoner, and so they escaped and fled to Holland and were in Holland for, whether it’s months or a year I don’t know, and then would have taken the ship out of Rotterdam to come to the US.

My father had found a sponsor for them in Seattle. And they were due to leave, and the day they were due to leave, the harbor was bombed. The ship blew up. The Germans invaded, took them prisoner, and they were taken to Theresienstadt I believe…let me make sure of that…No, Bergen Belsen. They lived in Bergen Belsen throughout the remainder of the war. I mean, really Enny’s life was filled with so much irony. They were liberated and on the train out of the camp she died of typhus. But then, of course, the camp was full of typhus. Somehow she managed to hold it at bay, but on the train, she died and her husband survived her. Ultimately, for what reason I don’t understand, he came to the US, rather than stay in England where his daughter was. He had met a woman in camp and he married this woman. They lived together in New York for a couple of years and then he died.

Ketler: When did he come?
RICKLES: He came after the war, after the liberation, so it was sometime after ’45.

Ketler: Do you know when they were supposed to leave Holland? Do you know the year?
RICKLES: Whenever it was that Rotterdam was bombed and Germany invaded. That’s when they were supposed to leave. I mean, they were literally on the way to leaving when the boat blew up, and so it was just that last minute thing, that last connection that they couldn’t make. 

Then Enny’s brother Paul, my father’s younger brother Paul, left Germany at the same time as they did. When they went to Holland he went to Belgium, and he must have been in Belgium before. He knew a Quaker family in Belgium and he had worked with them for…There was a connection there and he was living with them when the Germans invaded Belgium. He was on his way to Auschwitz in the train and somehow he jumped the train on the way to Auschwitz and escaped to Belgium. He made his way back to this Quaker family and they kept him in hiding throughout all the years of the war. Which means they shared their very puny rations with him. And you know the whole story about all the risks they ran. He was like their son to them and so they kept him. After the war was over and after the liberation he stayed in Belgium until they died. They were elderly and he stayed with them until they died. After they died he returned to Germany, which is where his restitution money went the furthest. By then I think his spirit was thoroughly broken anyway. I mean, he had by then developed a lot of personality quirks and he never came to America to visit his brother, even though my father invited him many, many times. He wouldn’t even go to London to see his niece whom he dearly loved and in whose home he had lived for so many years. She always had to go to visit him. He was very fearful of many, many things, and I guess he just felt more comfortable going back to Germany and so he died in Germany.

Ketler: In what city?
RICKLES: He went back to Cologne. He lived in a home for the aged, a Jewish home for the aged. He also wasn’t well physically. He had developed a lot of physical problems. He lived in a home for the elderly. He never really integrated into that home. He had gotten the same snobbish attitude about Eastern European Jewry and the sound of the Yiddish language and all that. And of course many Jews in that home were Jews who came from Russia and Poland to Germany. He lived isolated from the population in the home.

Ketler: Did you ever meet him?
RICKLES: Yes.

Ketler: See him again?
RICKLES: Yes, I did. In 1976 my husband went on his second sabbatical in London for nine months and we would have gone to Germany to see him, but he screwed his courage to the sticking point and my cousin Lore went to Germany and brought him to England to visit us. My children came from America and he came from Germany and we had a wonderful weekend together in London.

Ketler: What happened to Walter?
RICKLES: Walter was interned by the British because living in that divine ignorance that the British have, they decided that once a German always a German. So he was taken out of university and was classified as an Enemy Alien and was shipped to Canada because they were afraid of fifth columnists. I have my own story about that in America too. The British were not alone in that. The part that shocked me more than anything else though was that the British shipped their Nazi internees in the same hold, same ship, with their Jewish refugees. The Nazis and the Jews were all together in the same boat being transported to Canada and were brought to the same camp. Because to the English they were all German. Then, once arrived in Canada, my father…see the Canadians had no interest in keeping them in camps there…and so my father was able to get him released and pay for his university education. So cousin Walter went to McGill University, continued his studies in physics, and became a theoretical physical person and went to work for Bell Telephone Laboratories, which is where he worked for the rest of his life. He lives in New Jersey with his Canadian wife. No children.

Ketler: What about your mother’s parents? And her sister?
RICKLES: Right. My mother’s father had died when she was very young. My mother’s mother, who had been living with her own sister, Johanna, in Cologne, left Cologne after Kristallnacht. She must have left Cologne either in December of 1938 or early 1930, and went to England, where her brother lived, the brother who had gone to Manchester to work in the textile industry. Both she and her sister stayed with her brother in Manchester until we were able to bring my mothers’ mother, my grandmother, to Seattle to live with us.

Ketler: What year did she come?
RICKLES: Well, I would say around 1940. Now how this works out with the war, I don’t know. How we got her here, I mean, as far as going across the Atlantic and all, I’m a little confused on. She did live with us during the war. Maybe she got here before the war broke out. Somewhere around in there. Her sister remained in England and then died in England with…you know, I don’t know when the brother and the sister and all that, when they died. But my grandmother came and lived with us. By then we had bought a house in Seattle.

Ketler: Were there any children on that side, cousins of yours?
RICKLES:  Yes, that is my aunt who went to Australia. Her daughter is Ellen Braumann. And we see each other from time to time. Ellen was just here. I’ve just seen both Lore and Ellen within the last six months. I never see Walter. For some reason that’s a more difficult connection and I don’t know whether it’s that the females make a greater attempt to get together, but whatever it is…I’m really very close to my two women cousins and we see my English cousin every few years. Either we’ve been able to go to England on a variety of sabbaticals, or she comes here.

Ketler: Ok, well on to life in Seattle. When you tell about it, if you could include what you were hearing about what was going on overseas, when you became aware of the concentration camps where they were killing people, and what kind of news that you were hearing about friends that were still over there, if anything…
RICKLES: Ok. I think one of my problems at that point was that I became so involved in my own life and in the business of acclimating to a new culture, a new language. Although I did speak English, I spoke very British English. I very quickly became sort of a curiosity in my classroom because of my strange language. I had long braids. I wore European clothes. I was so odd and so different—the only one in my classroom like that. I don’t remember a whole lot about what was going on in Germany because I think I became so egocentric with all my own problems. My clearest recollection is somewhere along the way I became aware that my father’s family had been wiped out. I mean, all of his cousins died in concentration camps with the exception of one. He’s a fascinating man and I should talk about him a little. 

I mentioned that there were two Jewish families in Ulfen, the town my father was born in. The one cousin that was closest in age to my father was named Albert. Albert Simons. So Levi had a brother and Albert Simons and my father were very close in age. Apparently the two mothers, Dolf’s mother and Albert’s mother, were very competitive with each other about the accomplishments of their two boys. It’s a real tribute to Dolf and Albert that they were able to maintain a very close friendship despite this intense competition that was going on between the mothers about their clever boys. They were probably both pretty clever little kids. Albert went to medical school and became a radiologist. Those were the early days of radium and Albert emigrated to Palestine in about 1934 or ’35, early on, and went into private practice in Tel Aviv. He developed cancer, which must have traveled very slowly, and they hacked him up, piece after piece after piece. I mean, they’d get rid of a finger here, and they’d get rid of a piece of leg there, because he wasn’t dying of cancer, he just kept getting it. It was from the radium that he was handling. 

I do remember fascinating letters from Albert from Palestine, talking about the harmonious relationship between Arabs and Jews in his waiting room because all these people were dying of cancer. They were all facing the same destiny. He was a very philosophic man, and he was also stone deaf. He had learned Hebrew – lip reading. He spoke three languages – lip reading. He was an incredible man and we have newspaper clippings that were written after his death. He became a member of the Knesset, which we didn’t even know. Apparently he was very philanthropic and he was very involved early on in working on better relationships between Jews and Arabs. I remember his philosophic letters in which he was saying, “Do people have to be ill and dying in order to realize that all these artificial barriers we create between ourselves fall away and are so totally meaningless?” In view of the really important issues in life and death. I remember, I really loved him…he had no children but he used to come and visit us and he was the person I remember so clearly never talking down to me. You know the German culture was very paternalistic and children were meant to be seen and not heard. There were ways children acted and ways children didn’t act. My father was very paternalistic and he had some very high standards of proper behavior and improper behavior. I remember Albert, whose nickname was “Pistone” for some reason, but he was never that way. He always regarded me as a human being with my own civil rights. He went to Israel. He never married but he had a common-law wife, for many, many, many years. He had no children that we know of. So that was that part of the family.

Ketler: When did he die?
RICKLES: In 1956.

Ketler: He lived a long time with the cancer.
RICKLES: With a variety of cancers, yes, he did. I’ve lost my train of thought, here, that’s Paul. Albert…

Ketler: You were talking about….and that you knew that your father’s family had been lost with all…
RICKLES: Oh yes, I realized that they, with the exception of Albert who had left, had been wiped out, but I don’t remember any proper emotional response to that. I remember it was a fact but I don’t remember tears or mourning. I don’t know whether that was done privately. I feel it’s more a message I got than I remember than talking about it. I think my parents felt very strongly that in view of all the insanity of the external world, it was very important for them to present a very together appearance to me. Talking about this to my friend Frank from Australia, he feels very strongly that he never saw his parents in moments of panic or fright or any of the emotional responses that would have been really appropriate and human to what they were really feeling. They just didn’t let on, and I think it was a very conscious attitude on their part that they didn’t want to scare their kids, and my parents didn’t want to scare me more than I was already scared. I knew these people had died, but I didn’t know what it felt like. 

Meanwhile, back at the farm, the war broke out. My parents had been in Seattle. Let’s see, they came to Seattle probably early in 1938. The war broke in Europe and we didn’t feel much of that. My father was very busy, and very traumatized, trying to get his professional life together and get his practice going. When we had been in this country for five years, which would be…five years from 1937 would make it 1942, the war was on. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, America went into a tailspin and a panic, and living on the West Coast, suddenly there was the possibility of an attack by the Japanese, or betrayal by the Japanese. That very quickly extended to possible betrayal by Germans and Italians as well since we were all part of the Axis:Germany, Italy, and Japan. It was decided to evacuate all German, Italians, and Japanese from the West Coast. Now most people don’t know that. Most people remember what we did to the Japanese but what they don’t remember is that, very early on, there was talk of doing the same thing with the Germans and Italians.

My father had just completed his training. He was just setting up a private practice, and now he was faced with the possibility of being evacuated and being placed in an internment camp, or at least being evacuated from the West Coast. Simultaneous, or somewhere around this time, but it must have been 1943, my mother received notice that she was up for her citizenship, and that she should begin Americanization classes because in order to get her citizenship she had to pass an examination on the Constitution and a little bit of American history and some proficiency in English to become a citizen. No notice came for my father and they entered on the same ship, the same day, everything was the same. They waited a little while, allowing for bureaucratic bungling, but no notice came for my father. In investigating why my father wasn’t being notified by the Immigration Service, and a lot hinged on it because…I don’t know how not to get ahead of myself…this story has so many ramifications. It was important for my father’s practice of medicine for him to become a citizen, and I’ll go into that in a minute. Well, long story short, the Immigration Service, it appears, had had a letter, an anonymous letter, implicating my father in moral turpitude. So they were not even investigating this letter, they weren’t doing anything but they also weren’t calling my father up for his citizenship. Well the attempt, of course, immediately was made on the part of my parents to find out what the anonymous letter was and how come the Immigration Service accepts anonymous letters. Anybody can writer an anonymous letter. And what was the moral turpitude? What was he being accused of?

Well, here’s the story: It turns out that the American Medical Association, which at that time had a lot more clout than it does now; everybody belonged to the American Medical Association at that time. They were not welcoming refugee doctors. They were scared to death of some of the competition that was coming into this country by these guys who were trained at Heidelberg and some of the famous universities in Europe. So the AMA, through the King County Medical Association, which is the local chapter, had placed an anonymous letter with the Immigration Service, because it turns out you couldn’t become a member of the AMA if you weren’t a citizen. And if you couldn’t become a citizen, then you couldn’t become a member of the AMA. It was already beginning to have an implication because my dad had practiced medicine in one of the two major medical buildings in Seattle, the Kopp Building, which was controlled by members of the AMA. 

After two years they wouldn’t renew his lease and he had to move. Well, every time you move, you have to print your stationary, and you have to print new cards, and for a dermatologist, who doesn’t have patients who are ongoing because hopefully you cure them, and then they’re done. If they need you again 10 years from now and they have to go finding you, you’re going to lose them, he couldn’t stand the expense of the move. And furthermore he had to go now into a second class building, because the first class buildings were the Kopp Building and the Stimson Building, and they were controlled by the AMA. They wouldn’t take him because he wasn’t a member of the AMA, and so it went. It was a long struggle, in the course of which my father became very ill. At this point I think he was suffering from what I like to call nerve fatigue. You can just take so much harassment and then it all starts coming apart. So my mother carried on the fight, from doctor to doctor, pleading with them. She went to a lot of Jewish doctors in the community asking them to help and unfortunately they were unwilling to do so. I think they felt too insecure in their own position.

It finally ended up that the only person who helped him was a fellow dermatologist, who had the most to lose and who is not Jewish, who did not have the history of what it was like to be an outsider. He went to the state senator and they asked the state senator to investigate and they found that the letter was totally without foundation. It was just an attempt to keep my dad out of the medical association. So from then on, the procedure to make him a citizen was very rapid, and there were no further problems after that. But that shattered my any belief I had in the Am Yisrael.

Ketler: Why?
RICKLES: Because the, I read statements about how we take care of our own, and they sound really pretty. But I really haven’t found that necessarily to be the case. I have found it to be the case that it’s who you know, how strong your nerves are, how hard you fight, whether you survive or not. I have not found that any of the institutions that were there were helpful to use as a family. 

So then my father became a citizen. He joined the AMA. He became a member of a group of men whom he held in the lowest of low esteem, members of the King County Medical Association. He was able to practice medicine in Seattle. And then another irony–the whole business about evacuation, so terrific. He was still at that point…You see he hadn’t become a citizen yet. So it’s before 1942. He became a citizen much later than the five years because this whole process took so long, to discover who’s behind the anonymous letter, how do you get it reversed, and all that. It was after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. We became classified as enemy aliens. My elderly grandmother and I, along with my mother and father, had to carry a pass, which stamped us as “enemy alien.” We were under curfew from sundown to sunrise. We could not have radios with short wave receivers. We could not have cameras in the house. It didn’t sound terrific to us, having come from Germany, but there it was.

Then Congress decided to have hearings on this and they sent a committee called the Toland Committee to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, at which would appear representatives of the German and Italian communities. Japanese had no word. I mean, they were out of there, like bats. They did have hearings for the German refugees, and the Italians. My father was the spokesperson for the German refugee community in Seattle because by then his English was very good, and he looked very good, and he was still a very sophisticated European. His picture was taken and it appeared on the front page of the Seattle Times, and one of the things that was in that letter that the AMA put out about why he wouldn’t be an asset to the professional community was they accused him of seeking to get publicity by having his picture on the front of the Seattle Times. And there was a copy of the picture, which he had nothing to do with. He happened to appear before a congressional committee. 

The Toland Committee held hearings in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, and came to the conclusion that they did not need to evacuate the Italians and the Germans but they would classify them as enemy aliens. They would place them under house curfew from sundown to sunrise. We could not leave the radius of Seattle, or people who lived in Portland could not leave the radius of Portland, we were confined to the city radius of where we lived, and there were other restrictions. As a refugee, trying to integrate into the American system, the business of carrying a pass and all cards that stamped me as an enemy alien probably did its share of injury too. I have no way of knowing how much harm it did; but it did harm. 

What I remember very clearly was, I was going to Temple DeHirsch Sunday school at that time. I had already been discriminated against in the Sunday school because I was different. The children there were much crueler to me than the non-Jewish children in the public schools. There I was different because I looked different and I spoke differently, but I was able to correct that very quickly. The fact that I came from Germany and had not entered the social cliques at Temple DeHirsch I could do nothing about. None of us, none of the German refugee children every felt accepted at Temple DeHirsch. 

So the miraculous happened. When I was confirmed from Temple DeHirsch, as part of the confirmation process, I was asked to go to the confirmation dance by a gorgeous boy. He was an older man, he was like three years older than I was. And he was very pretty. I just, you know, this was going to be the turnaround in my life because finally someone was noticing me. We were all supposed to go to a confirmation dance, except I was under curfew from sundown to sunrise! So I wrote a letter. I was going to write to President Roosevelt but was told he was too busy. So I wrote a letter to General Biddle, who was some muckamuck in the civil defense movement and I have that letter somewhere in my records. I told him that I would be with a native-born American. Irv was going to be with me all the time and that I would be with a group. I was never going to be alone. I could not bounce off to Boeing and take secret photographs. Furthermore we had no cameras in our house anymore. But I would be with Americans in an American setting at all times. Could I be excused from my curfew for one night to go to my confirmation dance? And I got an answer. I couldn’t.

So, I was back to feeling, you know, I was different. I was not acceptable is what I was made to feel. And of course that is how I had been made to feel in Germany. There I wasn’t acceptable because I was a Jew. Here I wasn’t acceptable because I was a German refugee. I just never could get with the program, no matter where I was and how hard I tired. And I’m still not with the program. I’m still different. I will always be different. In other words, I feel different, and that, you know I’ve come to make peace with, but there it is. And so then I quit Sunday school as soon I as I could because it was…

Ketler: I was going to ask, related to that, does that mean that your parents were more observant?
RICKLES: No.

Ketler: Why?
RICKLES: Quite frankly, my parents needed to have me go to Sunday school because the Jewish community needed to know there was a Jewish dermatologist in Seattle, and I was part of the network. I’ve always known that I was a part of my family’s team of trying to get going. That, I think, has been a very strong ethos that we pull together as a family because there’s nobody else pulling for us. My job was to go to Sunday school so that families would know that we were there, that my father was practicing medicine in the city. They knew that I hated Sunday school but that was just part of the job, they were doing a lot of things they hated to do too. 

Meanwhile, I was very well accepted in public school. I had an absolutely splendid teacher to whom I owe a great deal. When I came to this country I was placed in the fifth grade and I had a British accent, and long braids, and hand smocked dresses, which nobody past babyhood wore in this country. My parents didn’t have enough money to change that. I could get a haircut, but I couldn’t change my clothes.

Mrs. Fickheisen, who was my fifth grade homeroom teacher, decided that she was doing to do something about that accent very fast because she realized that it stood between me and my social integration. So this woman, who was a single mom in 1938, with a paraplegic son, teaching full time, spent hours after school with me. And she always made it seem like I was helping her do things around. I mean, it was never, “I want you to stay after school so we can talk.” It was always, “Eva, I need help. Do you have a little extra time? Will you help me with this? Will you organize the books? Will you do this? Will you do that?” When I think back on the hours this woman gave, and I think about what was her paraplegic son doing at home in the meantime, you know, I mean, she cared so much. Then, because I was so scared, I mean at that point, I was panicked to let my mother out of my sight. Because I loved my teacher, she also came and babysat at night, when it was absolutely essential that my mother go out with my father because they needed to get known in the community. She did not have the luxury of staying home, a lot of times she had to be there, out front. So Mrs. Fickheisen would go home from school, take care…she had this paraplegic son, plus another son, get them fed, get them taken care of, and then she’d come all the way back to our apartment and babysit me. She’s one of the real unsung heroines of the kind of decent, mainstream Americans that I have come to look for more than Am Yisrael. I think I resent this attitude of, I don’t know if it’s elitism, but [sighs] as I say, the people who have been the most helpful to us have been people who are just wonderful human beings, but who have not been through centuries of persecution as minority group members, who have not been through the refugee experience necessarily, but who have just been incredibly kind and outreaching because they’re wonderful human beings. So, let’s see, then high school was uneventful.

Ketler: Which high school?
RICKLES: Franklin High School in Seattle. However, since I was different, I mean, because by then I was different on the inside. Then it didn’t matter anymore what the outside world could do to me; I’d learned my lesson. I was always more interested in, and I was safer with books and studying, than I was with kids. I did have friends and I still have some of those friends. I had a few good friends but I had another really unfortunate occurrence. I attempted to get into a Jewish high school sorority. It’s probably my last attempt to be a part of the group. Would you believe it? I was blackballed for the same reason that I was discriminated against at Temple Dehirsch. It was the same kids. They’d grown older. They were in high school. They’d formed Eta Phi Sorority and they blackballed me. They didn’t know me; they didn’t know my background. I don’t know what the reason was. Then the next year, when all my friends got in they got me in, but by then the damage was done. So then I went in and I went in with a vengeance. I became president and I determined that I would do everything within my power to break down whatever I could of the snobbish system. I couldn’t do a lot but I did what I could. And that was the last I’ve ever touched a sorority. I felt that was just a score that needed to be settled and I settled that score. then I chose Reed College, which has no sororities and fraternities. And I’ve never gotten near another organization like that again. 

Ketler: Did you mother work?
RICKLES: No. Well, she did and she didn’t. She didn’t have a place of business, but because she was an economist. And my dad was earning money; my mother was investing it. So my mothers’ place of business was a lovely Victorian, antique couch in our living room where I remember her lying for hours reading Forbes investment advice. Because she had to learn about how the American stock market worked and how the American system worked and I remember going to Merrill Lynch with her. 

I also remember that my mother and I, and we were the best of friends, I mean all through my adolescence my mother was my best friend. I never got involved in after school activities. I always went home and my mother and I always went for a long walk. That was just routine. After school, as long as I lived at home, I went for an afternoon walk with my mother. She attempted valiantly to teach me how the economic system worked and I have such an absolute blind spot about that. It’s really, odd, I mean, I am really economically illiterate, and I can’t get it into my head. I’ve taken classes in college about it in the meantime, I’ve read books about it, and it’s just ‘pop’ it just goes nowhere. So what that’s about, I don’t know. But she tried, really hard. So I would say she did work, but she worked at home.

Ketler: What kind of life did you have at home in terms of celebration of holidays, if any?
RICKLES: We had some. I suspect partly because I went to a Jewish Sunday school, I suddenly became aware [laughs] of things, celebrations. My parents celebrated Hanukkah, which we had done in a manner of speaking in Germany already. Then they became friends with other Jewish families in Seattle. Among them was a family that was a good deal more religiously observant than they, and so we were invited to their home for Passover. It was fairly long. It was a long Passover and it was taken very seriously. Passover isn’t really a happy memory for me until I was married and was able to do our own Passover with friends and I realized that some people actually laugh and joke and do all kinds of fun things during Passover. That was quite a revelation because it was pretty serious business when I did it in Seattle with this other family. So being Jewish didn’t really, again, play an important role in my life, except in a sense somewhat negatively. Although, my very closest friends, among my closest friends were Jewish, and it probably wasn’t because they were Jewish, we just clicked. Most of my activities in my adolescent years had very little to do with the synagogue. I did go to dance there when, once I wasn’t an enemy alien anymore. But you see most of those high school years I was an enemy alien and I couldn’t go out at night. So my adolescence was partly skewed because my social life had to be during the daytime.

Ketler: Did that go on until the end of the war, the enemy alien?
RICKLES: That’s what I’m trying to remember. I don’t remember it’s ever being revoked so I think it did go on until the surrender of Japan. It was during the Japanese phase of the Second World War that I was an enemy alien.

Ketler: Did you grandmother continue to live with the family?
RICKLES: She did.

Ketler: Until she died?
RICKLES: Well, until she moved up after I left home and was married. Then my parents sold their house and she was already ill. She then moved to Kliengalen Home and died within a year of her move. So she essentially lived…she must have been, well, we know when she died, so she lived at the Kleingalen Home for one or two years, I think, is all.

Ketler: When you graduated from high school what choices did you have about college? Could you have gone anywhere?
RICKLES: I suppose I could have but some of my insecurity was still left over from Germany and I really didn’t want to leave home. It was very traumatic for me at college age to think about leaving home. If I had my druthers I would have gone to the University of Washington and continued to live at home. But I didn’t have my druthers because I think my parents thought I would live at home forever. The only ultimatum was, “We don’t care where you go but it can’t be in Seattle.” So I went to Reed College, which isn’t very far away from Seattle and which does make occasional trips to Seattle possible. Also, it didn’t have sororities; it didn’t have any Greek letter organizations. I had graduated as a valedictorian because I had spent a lot of time during my high school years studying and so Reed was an acceptable school for a valedictorian. I had a small scholarship there, which helped some. 

So, I went to Reed College. I went there for two years, at which time I asserted my newfound independence. You see, that’s why I went away, wasn’t it? My parents wanted me to become independent. So I became very independent in my second year at Reed and I wrote to the University of Washington. I got them to accept me and then I presented my parents with a fait accompli that as an independent person I had made my own choices and I was going to be attending the University of Washington and living at home [laughs]. There wasn’t very much they could say and I think they were delighted. They were perfectly content to have me come home after two years. There were also some other academic reasons why I wanted to leave Reed.

Ketler: What were you studying?
RICKLES: Psychology. I went to the University of Washington and I graduated with my bachelor’s degree from the university with a split major in psychology and literature. Then I needed to get some graduate training so I went to the New York School of Social Work for a year. That was a disaster [laughs] academically because I came from such an incredibly protected background up until then. I mean my whole life had been academics. I was a marvelous student but I knew like…zip. I went to New York and my first placement was in Hell’s Kitchen [laughs] in New York. It was like a different planet. Also, there was all kinds of bureaucratic bungling that had gone on because they admitted more students than they really had field placements for. I was really emotionally not ready to take that kind of a commitment on, and so, as I say, academically it was a disastrous year. But it was a wonderful year because I lived at International House, and this was International House during some its most prime years in New York. All of my friends were from all over the world. I learned more living in International House and having friends from absolutely everywhere than I could have learned at any school. 

Ketler: What year was this?
RICKLES: That was 1949. It was such a yeasty year. There was so much going on. Leontine Price lived there, Dimitri Mitropolous would give impromptu little concerts there. It was just a wonderful year in New York. And New York was a different New York. You could go everywhere and do everything, you know, go to plays and do all kinds of wonderful things, and I did all that. Then I came back to Seattle. I took a leave of absence from New York School of Social Work… I agreed with my student advisor that I needed to get some work experience and just get out into the world. She said, “It doesn’t matter if you sell hair ribbons at Frederick and Nelsons. Just get out and work.” So I got a job at really unique place. I got a job at a place called Pennell, which was a very small private psychiatry hospital that was based on the same plan that they had at Meninger in Topeka, Kansas, where they were doing milieu therapy and I was one of the milieu therapists.

It was a wonderful work experience and I learned more about mental illness and the kinds of treatment that were being used—from shock treatment to lobotomies. I mean all kinds of things were still doing then that they don’t do anymore now, but I learned a lot…it was a good setting. Then, unfortunately, because the hospital was very expensive, the ratio of staff to patient was very high in that kind of treatment modality and the hospital closed. So I had to get another job and I was just about to start working for the welfare system in Seattle, where I could have learned a lot, when didadidadida…Norman came riding to the rescue [laughs].

I met Norman, who was a Seattleite, who was teaching at the University of California Dental School and who was coming back to Seattle every summer to visit his parents. I met him through a mutual friend. We got married after…well, we got engaged after three dates, and we got married within three months. So that took care of the career and I moved to San Francisco, which was pretty neat.

Ketler: Was it a Jewish wedding?
RICKLES:  Can you believe it? Not with the chuppah. I don’t think the rabbi… At that time it was Ralph Levene. And at that point I had never encountered the concept of the chuppah or of the ketubah. I had never heard those words. So you know he was the rabbi of Temple de Hirsch. I wasn’t married in the synagogue. I was married at the Olympic Hotel. I was married in a small room at the Olympic Hotel in as untraditional a wedding as I could possibly get away with. I mean, see by now I really had had it with all tradition.

Ketler: What year are we talking about now?
RICKLES: 1950. I was trying to tread a very delicate balance between not offending Norm’s family, which was much more traditional, and meeting my father’s needs who was marrying off his only daughter, and my needs for being as untraditional as I could possibly be. And so, we managed in between all that. Then I moved to San Francisco, which lasted a year. Norm was teaching at the University of California as an instructor in oral pathology, but he hadn’t finished getting his specialty training… No, he was in oral medicine.

Then the Korean War broke out. Norman had gotten part of his dental training through the compliments of the United States Army at the conclusion of the Second World War. So he had a choice of being drafted or volunteering and he chose to volunteer because he had more choices.

So he went into the Army, for the first time as an officer (whatever that is you enter as), a second lieutenant, I guess. We were sent to Battle Creek, Michigan [laughs] where there was a very large hospital, Percy Jones Army Hospital, which had formerly been a Kellogg’s rehabilitation Center. It was connected with the Kellogg’s cereal people because Battle Creek, Michigan was a center of cereal production. Kellogg’s was a very important name in Battle Creek, Michigan. And actually it turned out to be a blast because there were volunteers from all over the United States. There was a huge hospital that treated amputees from Korea. I mean it was enormous. It was a skyscraper, practically, in this very small town. Practically all of the patients had had limbs amputated as a result of their participation in the Korean War. Norm was part of the dental service there. It was a very carefree time. It was at that point that I went to business college because I had never learned to type or to do shorthand and I was totally unemployable. You know I mean I had all these years of school behind me but I was non-functional in the world of employment. My parents felt they needed to tie up the loose ends and they sent me to business college in Battle Creek, Michigan, and I learned to type and to take shorthand. Sounds so funny and anachronistic to do shorthand. Then I got a job in a child guidance clinic transmitting the tapes…they were still using talking into machines that recorded on tapes and then the tapes had to be typed into records which were on file, and I was doing that while Norm was doing what he was doing at Percy Jones Army Hospital. He was transferred at the very end…while he was still in the service he got a Public Health Fellowship because he wanted to complete his oral pathology. By then he had definitely decided he was going to become a real oral pathologist. He applied to and was accepted at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC, which is the largest pathology training center in this country. So we moved to Washington, DC and by then I was eight months pregnant. Tamara was born right after we got to Washington, DC. Norm finished his military service in Washington, DC and then started his training at the Armed Forces Institute. We lived there for two years, did not affiliate with anything Jewish at al. We accidentally had a Jewish neighbor. Well, in Washington that’s easy to do, I mean there’s a much higher density of Jewish population. They weren’t affiliated with anything either. We did not observe Jewish holidays, nothing. 

Then, when he completed his training he had a choice of three job possibilities. He knew he wanted to go back into teaching and at that point oral pathologists were so rare that they were all affiliated with universities and some did private practice. I don’t think at that point there were freestanding oral pathologists practicing that yet. He had a choice of University of Washington, back to Cal, or the University of Oregon. For a variety of reasons, he chose the University of Oregon and we moved to Portland. He became head of the department because there was no department [laughs] and there was no other head. And again, when I think about that, here he was, a brand new oral pathologist having to organize a whole department at the university…that was a lot for him to take on…he did it.

Ketler: When was your second daughter born?
RICKLES: Three and a half years later, in 1957. Then we bought a house, which we are still in. At that point the, when we bought our house, my parents decided to sell their house. They had been the preservers of the family antiques. We have furniture in our family that has come down from the 1600s, and came out of Germany. It had been in my grandmother’s house actually. My mother seemed to feel that it was important that somewhere, someone have a house to put the furniture into. So they had kept their house until we bought our house, and then all this furniture came to us in Portland and my parents were able to move into a small apartment. 

Ketler: They stayed in Seattle?
RICKLES:  Yes.

Ketler: And as your children were young were you affiliated with the Jewish community?
RICKLES: Well, not when they were young, we weren’t. Then what happened was that there was a War of Independence in Israel, and for the first time Norm turned back into a Jew. I mean, meanwhile Norm’s own growth and development throughout adolescence had been that he too had been a rebel, kind of. Among his friends, who all were Jewish, he had gone to Hebrew school and had his knuckles rapped by the teachers, and his experiences had been less than…They hadn’t ben as traumatic as mine but he had been taught by men he didn’t like and didn’t respect. He learned to do Hebrew by rote but he never knew what it meant, and so it was more pro forma. He knew about the rules of the Kashruth but they didn’t make any sense–and all that sort of thing. So he was kind of rebellious. When we got married, you know, neither of us had need to observe Jewish holidays or anything else until Israel arose. And suddenly Norm turned into a Jew [laughs], which sort of shocked me because I, coming from a non-Zionistic family, didn’t have that. By now I had developed such anti-nationalistic attitude about all nations. I mean I just don’t trust nations. I don’t trust organized human beings. Give me more than three people and I don’t trust them, is basically sort of where it’s at. So I don’t thrall to national anthems of any kind. I don’t like national flags. I don’t like nationalism, and I don’t like their trappings. So I didn’t get into that. It was sort of a peculiar attitude for somebody who had been the victim of antisemitism in Germany, but there it was. So then we went on a sabbatical to Israel, and we lived in Israel for a whole year.

Ketler: What year was that?
RICKLES: That was 1966 and 1967, and as you recall there was a war in Israel in 1967 and so we were in it. So, I’m …there is an irony here. I keep thinking, “Who is trying to teach me what?” And I haven’t learned it yet but probably someday somebody’ll figure it out. That I should be in Israel during a war seemed just very ironic. And Norm, you know, when we got to Israel, he was a Fullbright scholar at Hadassah. He led a charmed life that year in Israel because he was honored, he was wanted, and he was cared about, and he is a lovely person anyway. He’s easy to love, but I mean, he came with, you know, everything going for him because he had slides, he was teaching classes, and the people at Hadassah are wonderful. We made wonderful friends there. 

And while he was the treasured, honored American professor, I was slugging it out trying to keep house with kids who were miserable there. The language that I needed really to be an effective housewife in would have been either French, because many of the Jews who came from the African countries who sold the vegetables and the fish came from French speaking African countries and either spoke French, Arabic, or Hebrew – none of which I had. I had English, German, and I understood Yiddish. I did great in Mea Shearim when I went looking for souvenirs because I could understand their Yiddish. I did beautifully in all the lovely giftshops which are run by the German Jews in Israel. I was in big trouble when I went to Super Sol and tried to shop for groceries, you know. Then, there was the problem of getting the kids integrated into the school system, my adjusting. Also, I had a very erroneous notion of what Israel was going to be like, and I somehow hadn’t realized that I was in the Levant. I was really located on the North African continent, and in 1966, Jerusalem, to me, looked a lot more Arab. Now it doesn’t; it really looks a lot more western European. 

Teddy Kolek has been around for a long time, but Teddy Kolek hadn’t been mayor of Jerusalem that long yet. There were beggars on the streets; the streets were dirty. Yemenite women who are the height of fashion now because they wear all these bright colors that are just, just dissonant, you know, with their hennaed red hair. But at that time everything looked so alien, and it felt so alien, and then the war.

That Six-Day war was a lot longer in the making than the six days it took to fight it. And actually the war started threatening as of January 1967. So I would say that for five months we lived under an ever more oppressive cloud that was gathering, and I am very allergic to repressive regimes, to the threats of war. My sense of security is very quickly shaken by governments. I was scared to death. So the closer we got to June, the more frightened I became.

On May 23rd the Gulf of Tehran was closed. Utham had a toothache and wasn’t at the United Nations. Nobody was standing up for the agreement that had been, the assurances that had been given, that under no circumstances would the Gulf be allowed to be closed. The only one who spoke up was Wayne Morse from the State of Oregon. As a result of which for the first time our neighbors knew where we were coming from. Because up until then when you told them we came from Oregon, they didn’t know what it was. Suddenly, they were all saying, “Oregon, is that where Wayne Morse is from? He’s the one that’s been saying what the Arabs have done is illegal.”

Ketler: Was there any thought of you coming back to the States?
RICKLES: Yes, in my head there was a whole gob of thoughts about my coming back to the United States and Norm wouldn’t hear of it because he had medical skills and he was so much a part of his Hadassah system that he said he can’t possibly leave because if there’s a war, they’re going to need everybody with medical skills they have. We were being called by the American embassy, “Get out of there. There’s a boat in the harbor. What are you doing?” The warnings were everywhere and the Arabs…we kept …I kept…the only English-speaking station at that time, that’s changed, but at that time, was from the Hashomite kingdom of Jordan. They kept saying, “The fish in the Mediterranean are sharpening their teeth for when we throw you into the sea.” and things like that. I was going, “Yaaaa, I don’t want to be fodder for the fish in the sea. Norman, let’s go home.” And he kept saying, “You go home, I can’t go home. You take the girls and go home.”

Ketler: Did you consider that?
RICKLES: No, I did not. Because frankly I did not want Norm to be captured by the Arabs and I might never see him again. I just didn’t want to be around for that. I figured, “Ok, we’ll all go down the tube.” It was fine with me. I made that decision for my children. They didn’t have a choice. But really, you know, it’s back to the story of Ruth. I mean, if we’re all going to hang in there, we’re going to hang in there together or not at all. So I refused to leave and we went through the Six Day War together and came out of it as you can see, all of us.

Ketler: I keep thinking what happened in 1966 to your parents?
RICKLES: My mother was dying of cancer in 1966. At a point there I think she already knew about Norm’s Fullbright. I’m not real sure…no she didn’t. She died January 5th, 1966 of a galloping cancer. She was diagnosed and died within six weeks. So it was very, very fast. She died in the Swedish Hospital and I was with her most of the time. Then they discovered that my father had had a cancer, but he had a slow cancer, which then began to increase in rapidity and so they operated on my father and found it had already metastasized so they didn’t do anything, they just closed him up. My father was adamant about our going on this sabbatical. I mean it was absolutely essential for him. I talked to my dad’s doctor at the point where he was just coming out of surgery and he developed pneumonia and there was a lot of problems and I said, “You know I don’t realistically see how I can plan on leaving here by June of this year.” This was around February, March, and April that he was really sick. And the doctor said, “It’ll kill him if you don’t go. He’ll die. He will die so that you will go. You know, you’ve got an option here. You can either let him know you’re going and he’ll get over at last the operation. He doesn’t stand a chance to live for any length of time, but he is absolutely adamant.” 

Well, what my dad was really adamant about, I realized, was that we were planning on a trip through Europe on the way, and we were going to spend about six weeks to two months travelling in Europe. We had ordered a car and we were going to drive through Holland, Belgium, France, and Italy, down to Naples and catch a boat in Naples and take the boat to Haifa. As it turned out, my father kept himself alive throughout the whole trip through Europe and kept writing us wonderful, enthusiastic, strong letters, and within a month or two after we got to Israel, the letters were all downhill, and he died within a few months after we got to Israel. I realized in retrospect, the priority was that he wanted us and our children to make that trip through Europe. He was going to keep himself alive come hell or high water until we got to Israel. So that’s what happened. I did not come back at that time. 

Ketler: Have you been back to Germany?
RICKLES: No. We had an option to go back to Germany in 1976 on that second sabbatical to Europe. The plan was to spend nine months in London and then the Berlin government had invited me, as it did most people who were born in various cities in Germany, to come back to Germany as their guest. I had decided to avail myself of that opportunity and all arrangements had been made for Norm and me to go back to Germany, and then in November of 1967, I believe it was, Menachem Begin and Sadat had their famous get together and opened the gates between Egypt and Israel and made possible, for the first time, that I could go to Egypt, or that we could go to Egypt as Jewish. We couldn’t have done that before and I have always wanted to go to Egypt because, as a very little girl, my mother, who was a museum buff, had taken me to the Pergamon Museum which is in Berlin. and which contains many of the most famous antiquities from Babylon and Egypt. I grew up with the status of Nephertari and I grew up with that magnificent tiled gate to the city of Ur, which is in B., at the Pergamon Museum. As a little girl, I probably spent more hours with Nephertari than I did with any child, because she used to take me to that gallery and I would pretend I was Nephertari, and I would spend hours fantasizing about my court in Egypt and all the things…and so I have always wanted to go to Egypt, and that was so frustrating on that first sabbatical to Israel…I was right next door and I couldn’t go. So Norm and I decided, “That’s it. We will not go to Germany. Germany has had it. We are going to Egypt.” And so we were among the earliest people to go to Egypt after that agreement was made. And it was wonderful. 

Ketler:  You mentioned that you had an opportunity in 1976, was it ‘76?
RICKLES:   I think it was.
 
Ketler:  To go back to Germany, that instead you went to Egypt…why haven’t you been back to Germany?
RICKLES: I think the major reason that I would have gone back to Germany was to see my uncle, Uncle Paul. Uncle Paul came to London during the nine months that Norm and I were there on our sabbatical so there just didn’t’ seem to be a huge incentive to go back to Germany. I’m not an avid traveler, so just to go on a trip, and Germany is there was not an incentive. 
 
Ketler:  Do you have other psychological reasons for not going back to Germany?
RICKLES:  No, No I don’t. I just….I guess of all the places I’ve travelled, I’ve taken enough trips to other parts of the world to satisfy my intellectual curiosity, and there is nothing in Germany that I have any physical attachment to. The apartment building that I was in as a little girl was blown up. I know that. I don’t even think I would recognize Berlin anymore, and there is no person in Germany that I would be able to look up. There’s no reason go to back.
 
Ketler:  And how has the living though, especially the Six Day War affected your sense of Judaism, being Jewish and your feelings about it?
RICKLES:  I don’t know whether living through the Six Day War itself made any greater and impact on me that just having lived in Jerusalem. Twice, actually. We lived there for a year the first time, and the second sabbatical, after London, involved going back to Jerusalem for three months again. So I lived there again, this time for three months. I have been back for a month since then. What I think has left the most profound effect on me is that we have made close personal friends who live in Israel. The concept of a Jewish state, less than being an academic construct, is a very personal thing, and whenever anything happens in Israel or to Israel, my first concern is how does that affect Lydia and Mario? How does that affect Marion? How does that affect the people I know who live there? I think because of my total distrust of all nation states, I don’t thrall to the concept of Israel being a nation state. That simply is not an entity that I can really respond to. I am relieved that there is a place for Jews to go where they’re safe, whether that is a national entity or whether that has been a protectorate or colony. It is important for Jew to have a place to go, but I don’t have a great sense of pride in nationality.
 
Ketler:   Earlier you said your husband sort of really identified his Judaism through Israel.
RICKLES:  Yes.
 
Ketler:  Has Israel made you re-interested in Judaism or has through your experience with Israel that made you more religious at all or more committed to Judaism?
RICKLES:  I would say that my having lived in Israel and feeling very close to Israel has possibly made me a more outspoken Jew. I’m not a religious Jew. Prayer does absolutely nothing for me. I don’t pray. Therefore, I don’t attend religious services because I think that in a way demeans the people who do go for religious reason. That is a conclusion I really came to in my adolescence when I went with my mother. I felt I went under false pretenses and in doing that I somehow took away from the people who went there to pray. I am an atheist. Because of some personal things that have happened, maybe I’m not even an atheist, but if I’m not, I’m really angry at God. So to put the best light on it, let’s say I’m an atheist. I don’t use synagogues for the purpose of prayer. I do use them as houses of learning. We belong to Neveh Shalom synagogue. I have great respect for the Stampfers and I enjoy the friendships that we have made with people, but in all honesty, I would have to say we made the friendships when we joined the synagogue. I mean we did not make those friendships through the synagogue and the programs we participate in, through the synagogue, are more service oriented. I have been a member of the Taharah, and have helped with preparing dead women for burial and we enjoy the adult education programs. So I would say that I, like my father, enjoy the academic and the intellectual aspects of it, but not the spiritual or religious aspects of it. 

Ketler: If I could ask you a question about your time in Seattle—you said your father was a head of pediatrics? Were there refugees? What did you call him like the refugee representation?
RICKLES: Only before the congressional committee. He was not the head of any organized refugee community; he was a spokesperson for the refugees.

Ketler: The German refugees?
RICKLES: German Jewish refugees.

Ketler: That’s what my question was going to be…was there any sort of conflict between the regular Germans and the German Jewish?
RICKLES: We didn’t really have any contact with non-Jewish Germans. 

Ketler: But I found it interesting that they had a specific representation for German Jewish refugees.
RICKLES: Well, the German Jewish refugees in this country were all faced with the same problems, and I would call them a support group. They weren’t an organization that had any official function, but they met for picnics, they met for suppers, and they would nowadays be called support groups.

Ketler: It appears from your story here that the Seattle Jewish community really wasn’t sensitive to your situation, or they didn’t really understand what was going on. Did you find that the case?
RICKLES: I don’t want to tar and feather the Seattle Jewish community because there were individuals within that community that were incredibly wonderful to us. I would like to mention Bernice Greengard, who came from an old time Jewish family in Seattle and was enormously sensitive to our needs. She went out of her way to be helpful to my parents and her daughter is one of my closest friends. She did it as a person, not as a member of the Jewish community. That’s the kind of person she is…or was; she’s dead now. There weren’t institutions that were helpful or organizations that were helpful.

Ketler: Why are you telling your story?
RICKLES: Well, for one thing, I was asked to tell my story. Beyond that I feel that it is very important. This is part of history. I think why I’m telling it is it’s my attempt to do my small part to fight discrimination against other human beings, and I would like to broaden that beyond antisemitism. One thing I have been very involved in the last 15 years is to attempt to educate people to the plight of the American Indians. I regard that as a very Jewish experience of mine, because I put the American Indians in the same position as Jews who have been, maybe not indigenous, but who have lived in countries for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and who have been forced into exile. That has happened to the American Indian here, instead of being forced into exile, there has been a genocidal program, which has been going on ever since the whites settled in this country. Rather than be a spokesperson for Jews, although I do that when appropriate, such as now and when the Anne Frank program is there, I will be participating in that. In the interim, I guess what I have been sensitized to is that there are many, many people who as minority people are terribly victimized by policies of government. I’m telling my story because although I feel very hopeless that minorities can reverse the policies of government, I do not see evidence of that at all. I feel like the Elie Wiesel story… The story has to be told. That’s why I’m doing it.

Ketler: Well, we thank you very much for telling your story. It’s very important for us to hear it and for generations to come. So thank you.
RICKLES: You’re welcome.

[Video contintues as Eva talks about the photographs she has brought with her]

RICKLES: These two represent passes that my parents apparently had to hold at the conclusion of World War I because that part of the Rhineland that they lived in was occupied by the military forces. So these are identification cards or identity cards. The one on the left is my mother, and the one on the right with the stamps on the face is of my father. I just think they’re interesting historical documents.

This is a view from the balcony outside my bedroom window in Berlin and it overlooks that little green, round Pageplatz and the large apartment buildings, many of which had stories on the ground level around Pageplatz.

The picture on the left is a picture of my father’s father, and the father of this man. This is Levy Simons and his son, Paul Simons, who is my father’s younger brother. This is a picture of my mother’s father. His name is Herman Marcus. He was an engineers and an inventor. He invented the propeller-driven conveyor belt. 

Ketler: Do you know what year this picture was taken?
RICKLES: No, I don’t. This is a picture of my maternal grandmother, Gertrude Lowenhaupt Marcus, who lived in Cologne and then later came to Seattle and lived with us in Seattle.

These are a variety of shots of the town of Olfen, where my father was born. This picture shows the high school building that my father went to high school in, although right now with laundry hanging in front, I’m assuming that …[ends]

Addendum

Ketler: I am Janice Ketler and the date is January 6, 1993.
RICKLES: The first thing I’d like to talk about is my father’s bar mitzvah. When I was putting my papers away I discovered some letters of congratulations that were written to my father upon the occasion of his bar mitzvah, which came as a surprise to me because my dad had never mentioned a bar mitzvah. It leads me to believe that in his home he must have had more religious training than I’m aware of.

Then the next thing that I would like to talk about is an interesting correspondence that I found between my father and his sister. As it turns out, because of intervention of history in the form of Pearl Harbor, this is the last correspondence that took place between my father and his sister. He wrote a letter to his sister, who was living in Holland. Her name was Ennie. Ennie at that time was living in Holland with her husband waiting to leave, to get out of Holland because the Nazis were already occupying Holland. The letter was written by my dad on December 9, 1941, two days after Pearl Harbor and so the letter was never delivered to his sister because that officially made us enemies of Germany. Since the Germans had occupied Holland the letter could not get delivered. On the envelope there is an attachment that says, “This communication is returned to sender because it is addressed to an enemy or an enemy-occupied country. Personal messages of not more than 25 words may be sent through the American Red Cross. Information may be obtained from the nearest Red Cross office.” The problem was that my Aunt Ennie was not able to get any direct information about her own children, Walter and Lore, because England and the Nazis had been at war a lot longer than we had. Since her children lived in England the only way she ever got information about her children was through her brother, my father. 

The last letter to her, the reason I have it is because it was not delivered, due to Pearl Harbor and the change of the political situation between the United States and Holland. In this last letter my father writes at great lengths about the arrangements that are being made for Ennie’s child, her oldest son.

Ketler: What is his name?
RICKLES: His name is Walter. Walter had been interned in England with other Germans, both Jews and non-Jews at the time that the war broke out.

Ketler: What was his age at the time?
RICKLES: Well, at this time, Walter is in his late teens—he’s university age. What is happening is that my father is telling his sister that he, my father, is making arrangements for Walter to be released from the prisoner camp in Canada in order for Walter to return to the university and continue his education. What I find very interesting in the letter is that in the first paragraph of the letter my father explains to his sister that he has just moved his office. He does not tell her why he has moved his office, but I have other corroborating letters that remind me of the fact that he is now in his first forced move from the office that he has been practicing in. So, he is feeling very insecure financially because he’s just been moved, forcefully, from the first office into the second office. And this comes at a time now when he is financially having to assume the responsibility for supporting his nephew in Canada. He writes to his sister that he is going to be responsible for paying for Walter’s clothes, for his pocket money, for his living expenses, for his tuition, for his food. There’s an interesting sentence in here where he says that he’s writing her this because he wants her to know that this money which he is using for Walter, and he says parenthetically that it’s borrowed money. At this point my father isn’t earning that much yet, and so he was still borrowing money from Mr. Bingham. He says to her, “I’m writing you this…I’m writing to tell you that I’m spending more money, more borrowed money, than I would on my own daughter.” I think my father was a very generous man, and he wouldn’t have written a sentence like that if he hadn’t really felt desperate. He’s telling her that he’s doing this because Walter is his only nephew and because she is his only and his beloved sister. But he’s also feeling very…I think what he’s also feeling is very frightened and he doesn’t admit to the fright, but he admits to the terrible stress. It gives me a lot of insight into how many people my father was responsible for when he came to this country. 

On the back page of this same letter he also says that my grandmother is slowly beginning to adjust to live in America, but it’s a difficult adjustment. He says, “People of her age are all having a hard time adjusting to the new country.” So when I really stop to think about it, I realize that here is a man just starting out in private practice, he is in his late 40s now, in a new country, and he is financially totally responsible for a wife, a child, a mother-in-law, a nephew, and himself; he’s supporting five people. I tend to forget what a terrible burden my dad was actually carrying at that point. He was actually much braver then I give him credit for. By the same token, I found a letter that crossed with the letter that my father would have gotten across the ocean by his sister. She’s writing him from Holland, and she doesn’t know about Pearl Harbor because…

Ketler: What is the date of her letter?
RICKLES: Her letter is December 3rd. She wrote her letter six days before he wrote his letter, and Pearl Harbor falls right in between the two. She doesn’t yet know that she isn’t going to be able to get any mail into America anymore. She is telling him, “It’s been three weeks since we’ve heard from you and you have no idea how anxious we are to receive news; it’s the only thing that keeps us going. We don’t have any word from our children. We are very concerned about them. We vacillate between hope and despair and your letters are our only sign of life.” Then they go into quite a bit of detail about their hoped for plans to emigrate, to be able to leave Holland which is under Nazi occupation at this point, and go to Portugal. Apparently from Portugal to Spain. We do know that Franco was very helpful to Jews who were escaping Nazism despite his own alliance with the Germans. They’re apparently attempting to get into Spain and then through Spain out to America. In this letter, my aunt says to my father, “If we find that once we’re in Portugal that we need some money we will send you a telegram.” And I’m thinking, “Oh God, that’s is just what my father needs, another one to send money to.” You know everywhere they’re turning in desperation and there’s no choice. He’s the only one that’s at least in a free place. I thought that was a very interesting letter and it lends further ammunition to the really frightening position that my dad was in. Also, feeling so tormented because he was so insecure because he wasn’t a citizen yet and because he was being evicted from…had already been evicted from his first office building.

Ketler: Do you personally remember any of this?
RICKLES: No, I do not. All I remember is that he had severe asthma attacks. I don’t know whether that was the only way that he expressed his stress. That always came out in this psychosomatic fashion. I don’t remember terrible temper outbursts. Certainly I remember no discussion between my father and my mother in front of me, expressing any financial insecurity. I always knew that I couldn’t get the things I wanted, but I learned very quickly not to ask for them. I knew we were new in this country, but I never had any insight into how frightened my father must have been. So that’s a real revelation to me. At the same time that he was going through all this business of moving his office and trying to establish his practice, he was successful in finding a sponsor for this family, his sister and her husband, and Walter and Lore. So the original plan appears to have been that they had gotten out of Holland, and they had made their way to the United States. They would have come to Seattle. Their sponsor was a most generous man and I feel that it’s really important to get some of these people into the record, because I later on, or somewhere in the tape, alluded to the lack of support we felt from the Jewish community. I think I can say again, that in so far as any support from the Jewish community as an organized community is concerned, we did indeed feel that lack of support. In terms of being helped by individuals that we knew personally, there were some really incredibly generous people. 

This Xerox of an affidavit of support, which my British cousin sent me, comes from Dr. Norman Klein, who is only 38 years old at the time that he was supporting a wife and four children. He was a pediatrician in Seattle and at the age of 38 he was willing to also take on another family with four individual in it, not knowing how long it would take them before they could get on their own feet. I think that was an incredibly generous and heroic thing, and I think he needs to be thanked for that. I also had mentioned when we were talking about the lack of support of Jews, when my dad was having all the problems with his citizenship and my mother had gone from one Jewish doctor to another asking for help during these problems. I found some interesting letters which were letters testifying to my father’s moral character. They were in answer to this anonymous letter that the immigration service withheld. These letters are written to the State of Washington, King County, and I presume are going to the immigration service. There’s quite a batch of letters testifying to his moral character and quite a few of them are written by Jews. They’re not Jewish doctors but they’re written by Jews. I’m going to read just one of them to give you an idea of the kind of thing they were saying that they thought would be helpful at that time. This is written by a man named Thorleaf Torland, an obstetrician in Seattle, who wrote to the State of Washington, King County. He says, “Thorleaf Torland, being first duly sworn on oath depose and say that he is a citizen of the United States of American, that he has known Dr. Dolf Simons for nearly five years, that he is familiar with the political views of Dr. Simons and that he knows that Dr. Simons is loyal and faithful to the United States and to the principles of the American government, that Dr. Simons has always conducted himself and has lived on a high ethical standard.” All of these letter say that he….they all talk about his having lived according to a high ethical standard, so these are the letters that are attempting to undo the damage that the anonymous letter had done. 

I also mentioned in the previous tape about the fact that the American Medical Association accused my father of illegal advertising because he testified before the Toland congressional committee at the time when the plan was…this is just post Pearl Harbor…the plan originally was to evacuate all Japanese, German, and Italians from the west coast because there was great fear of a fifth column. I had told how my dad was a representative of the German Jewish community and how he had testified before the Toland committee, had had his picture taken in the paper. I said it was the Seattle Times, it happens to be the Post Intelligence. Then that this was thrown in his face as a form of illegal advertising. Here are the pictures…

This is a state senator, and this is my father, and it’s dated March 3, 1942. That, the medical society said, was immoral behavior. Together with the newspaper picture of him I also found a letter from the chairman of the congressional investigating committee. It’s headed, “Congress of the United States, House Committee investigating national defense migration,” and it’s dated March 6, 1942. It’s signed by John H. Toland, chairman of the committee, and it’s written to my dada and it says, “My Dear Dr. Simons, I want to express the appreciation of this committee for your excellent cooperation with us at our Seattle hearings. We found your testimony very interesting and it will be valuable to us in preparing our report on this pressing and serious problem. With all good wishes, I am sincerely.” That was in March so sometime shortly after that it was decided not to evacuate the German Jews, none of the Germans, and none of the Italians, but to label them as enemy aliens and place a lot of restrictions on their freedom of movement. 

I also found some interesting papers that have do to with the continual problem of the eviction that my father had from his office buildings until he finally became an American citizen and a member of the King County Medical Association. There’s a series of correspondences that took place between my father and the mangers of the office buildings where he was and invariably the managers refer back to the committees that ran the buildings which were official committees of the King County Medical Society. Invariably the word comes back that the leases have to be terminated because my father is not a member of the King County Chapter of the American Medical Society. I think one of the most interesting parts of all that is an article that my father had clipped and put together with this correspondence. This is an article that comes from the magazine called Medical Economics, and it’s dated November 1943. The title of the article is “Medical Societies Warned not to Exclude Membership Applicants Unjustly” and the subtitle is, “Hospital staff also cautioned against taking arbitrary or prejudicial action.” In this two-page article, it gives a lot of evidence to the fact that a lot of physicians were being excluded from the medical society for arbitrary reasons. Apparently this problem, which you know we were so close to, that we thought was a unique problem to ourselves, was widespread enough in the United States in 1943 that the medical society itself published an article about it. So we were part of the historic process. 

These are the things I found going back over the records as I was putting away my material from the first interview. I appreciate the opportunity to sort of add this addendum because I wanted to clarify a couple of things and I think that concludes our interview.