Gunter Hiller

Turner: I’d really like to begin at the beginning. In an interview of this kind, we like to begin with where you were born, what your early life was like, and take it era by era in your life. Every now and then I’ll ask questions. If you could start off with where you were born and raised, who’s in the family, and so on.
Hiller: I’m Gunter Hiller. I was born Gunter Hiller. I don’t recollect a lot of things from my early childhood; it’s rather dense [tense?] in terms of the whole extent of both sides of the family. But I was born and we lived someplace in what was, up until recently, East Berlin. Then we moved at an early age, and that’s the only street where I remember having lived in Berlin, in Zollingerstrasse einz, which is now in Berlin. It was [Morbiez?] close to the Tiergarten, which is the zoo, the zoological garden where a lot of Berlinists walk around. My parents and I also spent many pleasurable hours walking around

Turner:  What year was this?
Hiller: This was in 1928 I was born. I’m not sure exactly how old I was when we made the move to [Morbiez?]. Just last year, to just jump ahead a little bit, last year when I was the invited guest of the Berlin Senate, I went back to the Zollingerstrasse where my last memories were, and from the street address where we departed, and I couldn’t recognize it anymore. And no wonder, the whole street had been bombed out and reconstructed, and shabbily reconstructed. It had been just a working class type of neighborhood. That area had always been a working class type of neighborhood.

Turner:  Now when you say “working class,” what sort of people lived there? Was it a mixed neighborhood, or …?
HILLER: My memory’s kind of short, as I said. I didn’t even remember the street when I stood there, but I remember certain incidents. We had a neighbor who was a Nazi, and with a dog, and he set his dog up against me. He made me run away from the dog. I was very young, and I fell and hit my head against the lamppost. They had to take me to the hospital with a cracked skull. It was kind of a lower middle class neighborhood, I would say, working class. My father had been raised on a farm near Surrene [sp?]. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Germany or not. But in any case, he came to Berlin with a savings of 1,000 marks, which he had saved by raising rabbits and the rabbit skins. He sold them, and then he came to Berlin and found work in a leather tanning room, Hoyt und Fellow Gesellshaft. Do you understand German, David?

Turner: Just a little bit.
HILLER: Just a little. A leather tanning firm. A big firm. He started as a worker, and I remember he was taking me to the docks. There was a lot of atmospherics. Those docks were wondrous to me. The wagons. They had to unload the heavy load of skins and everything. These were just impressions that were very sensuous in my childhood and workplace. My father apparently was highly regarded by the company. He worked his way up, and just before Hitler and the Nuremberg laws forbade Jews to be part of management, he joined the management of the company. He had gone through various stages, from being a worker, loading and unloading, to being a traveling salesman for the company, and then finally becoming part of the management. Then he was dismissed. 

My mother was a Berliner, and she worked as a saleslady at one of the big department stores. My father met her there, and they were married. I was their only child.

Turner: How long were they married before you came along?
HILLER: I think my father was 25; my mother was 23. They were married a couple of years before I – and I was their only child. I remember vaguely, my grandfather was still on the farm, sort of a Grocheevian character with a bald head …

Turner: What kind of character?
HILLER: Grocheevian character; I don’t know if you know Grocheef.

Turner: Grocheef, yes.
HILLER: Grocheef, the Caucasian Greek who had some influence. He was a formidable man with big moustaches and a big personality. People were afraid of him because he walked with a stick and was given to outbursts of temper if things didn’t agree with him. On my mother’s side, I was very close to my grandmother, who spent a lot of time in our [German word], which was our apartment. I was sick a lot. I was a very frail child and apparently the darling of the ear, throat, and nose specialist. They had to take out my tonsils twice. My grandmother in my memory was always there, and she tucked me in. She sang to me and taught me little children’s songs, and so on.

Turner: Do you remember any of those?
HILLER: [Quotes lyrics. German phrase: something “fogel flogan”?] Then she had me on a nap, too. There’s a song where she hobbled around, and all of a sudden she made me fall through. There’s probably something similar here. When I was ten, the atmospherics in Berlin … I remember we were there in ’36 …

Turner: A lot must have happened before you were ten.
HILLER: Before I was ten …

Turner: For instance, was your household a religious household?
HILLER: Our whole family was Jewish, and we had many Jewish friends, and as the Nazi era in Berlin … this took more time; it didn’t penetrate as quickly and as thoroughly in Berlin as in elsewhere, like in Bavaria. We had good times in Berlin. We walked, and my parents liked to go dancing. My father usually worked through Saturday noon, and then Saturday afternoon he picked up us and we’d take walks and maybe go to a café, hang out in the café, listen to music. Maybe we’d go to a film.

Turner: Was there, in your early memory, any hint of restriction or concern about who you associated with?
HILLER: Well, in ’32 when Hitler came in, I was only four years old. And I went to regular school, grammar school, out of Zollingerstrasse.

Turner: Neighborhood school?
HILLER: Yes. We had the whole German thing where [when] the German children go to school the first day, they have these die tuten [cones filled with treats], filled with candy. Then they make it through the first day, the mothers come, and they all get this cornucopia. They’re all wild and so on. I remember I cried going to school. I was always shy, but that was not because of antisemitism. That came later. That came into our house really when … I can’t really pinpoint the years, but when we really began seriously to feel threatened, like when the Nazis in the neighborhood even began to agitate against the Jews. There were years that were worse. Then in 1936 things got a little better because the Olympics took place in ’36 in Berlin. And I remember …

Turner: That must have been a great excitement.
HILLER: It was great excitement, and the Germans toned down their antisemitism quite a bit. I remember even we were walking on the Kurfürstendamm, which is the — have you been to Berlin?

Turner: Yes, many, many years ago.
HILLER: Do you remember the Kurfürstendamm where they had [the big kisches?], those beautiful statues? It’s the hub of where all the expensive shops … all the boulevards and so on lead into it. We spent a lot of time there during the Olympics, I remember. I saw these gigantic American black men walking up and down the Kurfürstendamm, and I’d never seen people so tall before. I was very impressed and gawked at them. That distracted us, and chronologically … I mean, I’ve gone through this material a lot, so I don’t remember exactly how it was immediately afterwards in ’37.

Turner: He was sort of using the Olympics as a marker. What sorts of things did the family talk about or notice prior to then?
HILLER: As I said, it’s a blur.

Turner: The incident with the dog, was that before?
HILLER: That was before the Olympics. And a year after the Olympics …

Turner: Let’s see, in ’36 you were eight.
HILLER: Yes. The dog was around when I was about six or seven. I even forget, I must say. Because I had a lot of bronchial problems and so on, my parents sent me to a Montessori-type school in St. Moritz, Switzerland for a year, which was a wonderful experience for me. I think it was after the Olympics because that’s when things got very heavy …

Turner: That’s when you went to St. Moritz …
HILLER: During that time there was a great deal of anxiety because the families, their Jewish friends, were searching frantically for the opportunities to emigrate. They wrote to South America, Chile; the United States was very difficult. They didn’t quite know where to go and how to make it.

Turner: So there was no question about getting out, if they could.
HILLER: It built up. It was not a decision that was made overnight. Ostensibly, the means and livelihood were cut out from under us.

Turner: When did your father lose his job?
HILLER: I believe that was around ’36, too. ’36, ’37. The first Nuremberg laws were promulgated in ’35, I think it was, but they did not affect immediately private industries. They had to do with state employment and so on. It was just gradually that they were employed. I’m not sure about my historical dates here, but I remember impressionistically that the anxiety level … and it had also a lot to do with money — how much would it take, what would we do, would there be enough, and what about the parents? 

The parents were a chronic source of excitement because would they be able, they didn’t want to go, they wouldn’t know what to do, it was probably beyond our resources to all get out. My mother had a brother whom I met again after the war, in Cincinnati. He had made it out after we left, but he came to America in ’39. He had given us all of his jewelry. He had a lot of wealth, actually. He was well to do. He was one of the last Jews to leave Berlin and come to America. But he had the means to do it. We didn’t. So at age 10, shortly after the Switzerland trip for me, we were let into Holland. We were allowed to come into Holland, so we left. Again, I only have an impressionistic sense here of this train station — the baggage, the Germans surrounded with the swastikas, the whole sense of both a mingling of excitement and fear.

Turner: Did you have to wear a yellow star?
HILLER: Not in Germany. No. That hadn’t been introduced yet.

Turner: So you left before Kristallnacht?
HILLER: A couple of months before, yes. One or two months before. We went to Holland and settled in Amsterdam. Holland seemed like a safe place at the time, and we were safe for a couple of years.

Turner: Where did you live? What did you do?
HILLER: My parents with the money they brought, they bought into a little cigar store in the south part of the city, Amsterdam, where a lot of Jewish immigrants lived. Then we moved someplace else because the cigar store didn’t make it; it was really a very tight economy. The Dutch were living on pennies. I remember that they used to come to the ice cream cart — and I love Dutch ice cream — I begged my mother for money, and she said, “You think I have a penny every day?” this kind of thing — to bring me to realities. The reason I say that is because at the cigarette and cigar store, we would sell cigarettes not only by packs, but one or two at a time. If the people bought a cigarette, or two cigarettes, and they wanted some matches, there would go the profit, and yet we could not refuse them.  My parents, none of us spoke Dutch, and we received some prejudice. We were subject to prejudice because we were called moffins. Germans.  Moffin in Dutch is a pejorative word for German. The moffa is like …

Turner: So it was because you were German, not because you were Jewish.
HILLER: Yes, at first. Later on, before when the war started, which is really afterwards, in ’39, the Dutch started having animated discussion about … that in spite of their neutrality, they took sides. The NSB, the Nationalist Socialist Movement in Holland, reared its ugly head. They started wearing uniforms. They tried to, you know, show their preference for the Germans. At that time, the antisemitism in Holland, from that quarter, started rising, too.

Turner: How did you and your family notice this?
HILLER: Well, in school — I don’t know the incidents particularly anymore — but alternatively I was despised, or jeered at because I was a German, and then some took exception to my presence because I was a Jew.

Turner: Were you able to make friends?
HILLER: We had some neighbors that were very nice to us. At that age — ten, eleven — we were in gangs, not so much individual friends, but we had gangs. We played soccer in the streets, a lot of street life in Amsterdam. In the part where we lived there were a lot of Jews, so it was kind of comfortable. Instead, after we had sold the cigar store, we moved a couple of blocks away, and my father started dealing with textile scraps, which was again, one of the venues open to Jews to make a living. Actually, he did pretty well with it. After awhile, he bought a little car even. Tiny car. We had nice furniture, and we always had enough to eat. I never during that time suffered from deprivation. There was always enough money, although the money was not to be thrown around. There was always enough for clothes, for food. It was a pleasant life in Amsterdam. We lived, actually, only a block away from Anne Frank, and when after the Germans invaded in May, 1940, subsequently it was first very quiet, and then it started building up in 1941.

Turner: [inaudible]
HILLER: The Germans invaded. After the Four-Day War, the queen fled and Holland was occupied. There was that whole period of trying to get out, and we couldn’t. People were trying to make it on boats, trying to rent fishing boats. Anyway, my father tried some things. He made efforts, but they were not successful. So we were captured, we were captives in Holland.

Turner: This was when?
HILLER: The Germans came in in 1940. The war started May 10, and then they bombed Rotterdam, and they made [the] Four-Day War.

Turner: The story in my family is that they remembered my birth, which is May 8, 1940, …
HILLER: Two days before? 
Turner: Because my mother was in the hospital with me after my birth when the Germans invaded.
HILLER: Oh, my goodness.
Turner: That’s always been a part of my background.
HILLER: Milestone. That was in Chicago?
Tuner: Yes. 
HILLER: My goodness.
Turner: But that takes us away from …
HILLER: Although I like to find out to what extent your family …
Turner: Well, I’ll talk afterwards. After we finish.
HILLER: All right.
Turner: You see the “unwisdom” of making comments.
HILLER: No, it’s good.

Turner: I was curious. When you were back in Berlin, you had all kinds of friends, German and Jewish?
HILLER: Yes, my father and mother were modern people. They did go to the shul of their choice, but they were looking for assimilation. They were not Orthodox. We didn’t keep kosher, but we celebrated Yom Kippur. They fasted. We did the Seder, and we did most of the highlights of the Jewish rituals, ritualistic life, along with the congregation. It was really part of the social-religious life, but they also had non-Jewish friends. My father, the word always got around … When we were later on, to jump the story a second, when we were arrested, we were taken into a car to jail. Our two captors were Dutch policemen, National Socialists, and they discussed among themselves whether we looked Jewish. The one guy, “Yes, he would have recognized us on the street.” The other guy said, “No, these people don’t look Jewish.” And also, this in Germany, this was kind of the case where Jews did not want to look Jewish all that much unless they didn’t care, because we were Orthodox and so on. The life in Berlin was assimilationist from the time of Mendelssohn. The whole Jewish presence in Germany either was Zionist-oriented or it was assimilationist. 

And the Germans and the Jews considered themselves, the better they made out — like in the United States also — the more comfortable they felt; the more successful they were in Germany, the more they thought of themselves as German Jews. Like American Jews, not Jews who happen to live in America. They actively sought to expand their relationships; they did not hide. They were kind of proud of the couple of friendships they had with non-Jewish people. It made them comfortable to have those possibilities in Berlin and to be able to talk about everything. They were not intellectuals. They were ordinary people insofar as they worked, they ate well, they lived a good life, they were affectionate in the family. They were content with what life offered them, with the exception, of course, the Nazis, when that came about. 

Then Holland, again, too, because Amsterdam, like Berlin, was a city where the Jews felt comfortable. A lot of German Jews were there. After the Germans came, there were these forebodings, though I remember that when actually the war started, all the kids were so excited because now school was let go. This was a great adventure. At that time, it’s difficult to describe, but since ’39 the war was the object of almost all conversation. The phony war first, and then the German success in Poland, and so on. But at that point, we were removed from the antisemitism and the fears that associated with it that started in Germany, so we had enough margin of comfort still to be really interested in life and in what went on in the world. 

It was uncanny that it was totally unknown at that point whether the Germans would win the war, or whether the French and British would win the war. Of course, after they swept to Holland, Belgium was over and France pretty fast, and then came the period of the Germans bombing England, and so on. The outcome, although the Germans scored heavy victories, especially the defeat of France, it kind of looked like it was all over. But still there was a lot of uncertainty about where the war would go. In the first year, until 1941 or so — a year, year and a half — the Germans, unlike in the east of Europe, kept a low profile as far as their antisemitic program was concerned. Although Holland was unfortunate because it was occupied by Seizinkurt [?]. I mean, Seizinkurt from Austria was brought in by Hitler, and he was closely allied to the SS; it was really an SS occupation of Holland. They were calling the shots. In Belgium and France, the Wehrmacht, the German army. These are all pretty well-known facts. But none of this became acute, the Jew-hunting that then progressively took place in the first year or so, not at all bothersome. Then we had to register. The registration was the big thing.

Turner: Before the registration, you did not notice too much or [inaudible] …
HILLER: The Germans were there, but we didn’t feel personally menaced. The community was not frightened, was not at all in the same shape as July ’42, the next year, when by then the Germans started calling the shots. The Jewish Council was established. The registration had already taken place, and then just about weekly, through the Jewish press, the new German orders were published regarding the restrictions that the Jews had to undergo.

Turner: What do you remember of those, both in terms of what they were and the experiences they brought you and your family?
HILLER: Well, I remember that it was one thing after another. I don’t know where it started, but it became more and more restrictive.

Turner: Maybe it would help at this point, if in this period rather than try to give a chronological … if there are sort of snapshots of memories that would give some of the flavor of what it was like.
HILLER: I happen to have in my library a book about what happened in Holland day by day, the whole war period, so actually it would be futile of me to try to fill in. But on a personal level, and as it has affected my consciousness and is present in my mind now, it was a continuous … we thought only certain measures would be taken and then we would be left alone, but then it started to snowball. We weren’t able to take public transportation, except certain times. We weren’t able to buy food, except certain times. There were time restrictions. We had to be in, curfews. Then, of course, the biggest jump was when we had to begin to wear the Star of David. Everyone had to wear the star. Then we were targets. Then we were open targets. We couldn’t have telephone service. We couldn’t visit or be visited by Aryans. We could no longer take the streetcars at all. We had to give up our bicycles, our radios. It was just one thing after another.

Turner: And how were these enforced?
HILLER: They were enforced merely through threats. The Germans used the Jewish Council; the names are all well known. They were people from the diamond industry, and so on. A rabbi or two were prominent in the story. The Jewish Council, in order to provide a cushion between the Germans and the Jews, was set up. They were first to sit by the Germans in an honorable way. They sat together at a table. I think they were even offered a glass of wine. Then the Germans told them, “We will go through you with all our requirements, and we will work this way until we find that you are no longer enforcing our wishes.” So we went to the Jewish Council, and we saw in the Jewish paper — or also on the kiosks type of thing, the paper was printed, on the street corners — the latest [German word, ordnenung?] of the high SS, politzifuhrer and SS grupenfuhrer who happen to be enrouter [?]. Other SS fuhrer and SS people became prominent and became well-known names. We started to know the names of the people we had to fear because they…. then they started, I forget the names now, but the highlights of this were that the Germans all of a sudden one night, this was probably the first gruesome action, as they called them, actions themselves. When they came at night with lists of all the young Jewish men around 18-21, they picked them up and they were never seen again. This was the first transport that went to Mauthausen, the notorious concentration camp where they were all killed. This was to my memory, the first deportation.

Turner: What did you see? What did you hear of this?
HILLER: The next day, I mean. We heard … they would have the police sirens. They would come through like they did here last few Sundays ago with a busload of police. They would go door to door with lists and pull the people out and put them on busses and trucks and take them away.

Turner: So you were living in an apartment?
HILLER: Yes, we were living in a whole street blocks of residences.

Turner: So you must have heard or seen them do this?
HILLER This action, I think, was a couple of hundred people were picked up, but all through the whole Jewish quarter in the southern part of Amsterdam. I can’t remember any one exactly of our neighbors being picked up, but the next day, many Jews met in the street, the anxiety started spreading, and the names, we were wondering who was picked up. This became a very immediate threat to us because now they’ve shown their hands. They immediately then usually, though I don’t remember specifically, but usually they would then come up with some kind of sop to tell us to be quiet, and nothing else would happen. 

This was a special action, and this would not be the beginning of anything; we should not worry. Just keep doing what we were told. So at this time we were wearing the Star of David, and these things began. The noose started to tighten around us. Then we received visits. We were already expecting this because we received a letter that we would be visited by police, German police, to take inventory of our possessions. This would be preparatory to being sent to somewhere, to Germany — nobody knew — Germany or the East to work. Sure enough, I remember these guys, a couple of them, coming up with their leather coats to take inventory of every chair, table, everything. They wrote it all down. They made searching questions about jewelry, what else we had, what the bank accounts were. We had it all ready for them because we knew they were coming. But also because we knew they were coming, we had some good furniture that we exchanged the night before with our Dutch neighbors who gave us their less expensive furniture. So as much as possible, we tried to hide and get rid of what we had. My uncle’s jewelry, the uncle that went to America, had already been given to a Dutch doctor for safekeeping until the chance was for him to get it back. After we had the inventory taken …

Turner: Now, you remember that whole scene? 
HILLER: Yes.

Turner: Was it frightening?
HILLER: Oh, yes. I mean, these guys would come in with their leather coats, and they were not pleasant; they were demanding. They came in, treating us as Jews. We were there to be quickly responsive and to give them all they wanted by way of information. And then, a short time later, we were ordered deported. We were told that with so many pounds of luggage, etc., etc., we were to go …

Turner: I’m always curious what the etc., etc. is.
HILLER: I can’t remember what we were allowed to take, but they made it seem as though they wanted to make sure that we were well prepared for a voyage, that it was well organized. We were not herded as we later learned that others were, herded into cattle cars. They had passenger trains. We were treated decently. Provisions, we were to make decent provisions. And so the trip was to take us someplace where we would certainly not be killed or anything. We could expect an orderly kind of removal from Holland. All the Jews would be resettled. It was the resettlement question.

Turner: How did you understand this going on? You were, what, an adolescent at  that time?
HILLER: This was shortly after my … in ’42, I was 14. It was after my bar mitzvah. I still had a bar mitzvah in Amsterdam.

Turner: You had a bar mitzvah.
HILLER: I had a bar mitzvah in Amsterdam in a shul. We had friends who had bar mitzvahs, too. There was a continuous atmosphere of fear. The talk was always around our fate. Rumors. First of all, there was the unknown. Nobody really knew what the Germans were up to with the Jews. Rumors started because … we hadn’t seen them; no one was physically attacked at this point or anything. Rumors, however, had it that things, that an awful fate — just the unknown. We weren’t told where they would take us, what we would be expected to do, etc. It was frightening enough for my parents to deliberate as to whether or not they were going to obey these orders or not. They made frantic efforts and found, in fact … they made a connection, and they found, just like the Franks did, a way to go into hiding. 

So the night before we were supposed to go to the train station, for which, incidentally, since the Jews were no longer allowed to take the public transportation, we were given special passes because we had luggage and so on. We were to show these passes that entitled us to take public transportation, the trams, to go to the train station. But instead what we did the night before, arrangements were made. Some people had already pulled a couple of suitcases away during the day, and then we … somebody came, I think it was only one person, and we were standing there with our coats. We were ready to go. It was dark. We took off our Stars of David. All the clothing was stripped from the Star of David. We were told that we should act naturally and talk normally and act, not as though we were taking a trip, but just going from one side of the town to another. We boarded the streetcar that night, and we were taken somewhere to a house. Then we were taken again with a car to a little town outside of Amsterdam.

Turner: Do you remember the name?
HILLER: Well, it was a time when we were not — it was just the beginning. These were the first transports from Holland. The resistance, the Dutch resistance, had only begun, and it was sporadic. A lot of fear, both on the part of the people who helped us, and of course, the Jewish people because they didn’t know — sometimes large sums of money were involved, or substantial sums of money — and they didn’t know whether we were actually going to be taken somewhere or betrayed, or what. It was totally a matter of blind trust. That made the whole trip … then we went into a house, and everything had to be mouse-still because these people lived next to other people. The idea, of course, was that other people maybe were there. In fact, we met my father’s sister there, too. 

We were five or six of us huddled together in this room trying not to make a sound because the people next door were to be kept innocent of our presence. But because of the fears and the crowdedness of conditions, people were moved around quite a bit. At one point I was separated from my parents and taken with a couple who said I was from somewhere and visiting them for a couple of weeks. None of these things were like we were visiting, but in some cases it was arranged that we could go outside, so young people could go out and play with their host family. But that usually didn’t last very long. For the most part, we were obligated to stay inside, to be very quiet, to walk in our stocking feet, not to make any noise, and God forbid somebody should drop something. 

Then we were lucky. We found a house near Hillversen, which is one of the towns that I do remember, where a woman lived alone. It was out in the country somewhat. We found refuge there, and I was brought together there for the first time with my parents. It was probably the best place we had had up until then because there we were together. We didn’t have to share with others. We had a room to ourselves. It was a large enough house. There was a little garden, which was fenced in, high enough so we could see daylight. We could keep the doors open, but we didn’t talk. We felt relatively safe there.

Turner: These were Dutch?
HILLER: It was a Dutch woman.

Turner: And these were members of the resistance? What motivated them?
HILLER: When we say resistance, resistance normally refers to people who were activists. There were a lot of people who were approached by the resistance to see if they would help out to hide Jews. They were resisting, of course, and they were taking a break. 

Turner: Do you remember the woman’s name?
HILLER: No, I don’t. I don’t remember her name. I don’t remember a lot; I must tell you the truth. Is it possible we could we take a little break? Because I’m getting a little dry.

Turner: Sure.

[BREAK]

Turner: You were in the country with the Dutch woman. You felt safe. 
HILLER: I felt safe. This, remember, time-wise … it’s important to establish what our horizons were and what, if any, kind of hope was available to us. The Germans were still on the march and succeeding in Russia; however, Montgomery had scored the first victory in El Alamein. This was shortly before the Germans got stuck in Stalingrad. Also there had been a moment of great hope in July-August that year, shortly after we went underground, when the Allies, primarily the Canadians, launched a raid on Dieppe, in France, with tanks and everything. We were all ready to embrace this as the second front and the possibility of liberation, but that was snuffed out. During that year, too …

Turner: This was ’43?
HILLER: No. No, this was ’42. 

Turner: ’42.
HILLERL: The Dieppe raid was in ’42. The other encouragement was the assassination of Heydrich, the second in command of the SS and the Gestapo, Hitler’s [adjutant?]. He was assassinated in Prague, around Prague. So there were all these things. We listened. Our life, besides keeping mouse-still … we were cooped up in this uncertainty and in this space, in this uncertain space without (like an ordinary prisoner) the knowledge of how long the sentence was going to be. But it was all cut short in December when, early in the morning — it was a nice morning —  we had the windows open, we were having something to eat. My mother was still in her robe. There was a knock on the door, and the woman of the house said, “Mr. Hiller, the police is here for you.” Immediately after that, the doors opened. Two policemen in civilian clothes came in, and they uttered the famous words to quiet us down immediately, “Don’t worry. We are not barbarians.” They looked at us. They tried to be civil. They didn’t hit us or anything. They knew we were there. They came to pick us up.  

I’ll never forget these particular images. My mother was totally panicked, but she had it in her to ask them if she could not get dressed, if they would not leave the room for a moment for her to get dressed. Indeed, they obliged. During that minute, whatever time they gave us — it seems like an eternity now — my father said, “Let’s run.” And we could have run to the garden and scaled the fence. My mother panicked and beseeched us not to leave her alone, not to leave her behind. There was a little bit of hesitation, and they were back in the room. They escorted us out to a car. We were put in the back seat. It was an ordinary passenger car, and they drove off to the Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam. That’s when the discussion took place, between the two guys. They were Dutch National Socialists.

Turner: How did they come to know?
HILLER: I never found out. I never found out.

Turner: Do you think you were betrayed?
HILLER: There’s no doubt about it. No doubt about it.

Turner: Was it the woman?
HILLER: I don’t know. Some mistakes were made. People were captured. It was known that Jews were caught. No, not that woman. 

Turner: Not the woman.
HILLER: No, not the woman. She was as surprised as we were. And we were worried about her because we didn’t know if she was going to be taken also. They did not take her. I visited her once more much later. During that raid in Dieppe some people got to be very loose. They went out, and they threw cautions to the wind, and some people … in the meantime, the Germans had developed a network of people who were trying to help them to catch Jews. They were caught, some, and probably they threatened them, maybe even attacked them physically. Names were dropped. It could have been … it’s bizarre; I really don’t know. What I do know is that when they drove up, they had this conversation for us to overhear about whether or not they would have been able to recognize us in the street and pick us up as Jews. By that time, we were frightened. We didn’t know what they would do to us because we had not obeyed the orders, but they took us, some bureaucratic procedure. We were strangely enough put … we waited, and other people were led before them who had also been arrested. They just took names and information, and so on. Then, at some time later, we were taken away again, and we were put in a Dutch jail.

Turner: So the family [was still] together?
HILLER: Still the family together in Amsterdam. In that jail cell we stayed for three days. Then they came for my mother, and they took her out of the cell because they said that women and men could not stay in the same cellblock together. I never saw her again. She wept. It was a heavy scene because every time they separated us, we didn’t know …

Turner: How was that for you?
HILLER: It was terrible. I mean, it’s indescribable what that’s like. Now I’m a different person. It’s 50 years ago. It’s a lifetime, many lifetimes. It has lost its immediacy. I could probably with some hypnotic means, or whatnot, get back closer to that memory. But I do remember that it happened and that it was [an] emotionally very, very heavy situation. The next day, I believe it was, they came for me, and they separated me from my father. We were trying in jail … while we were together we tried to cheer each other up. My father tried to cheer me up more than anything and to try to distract us from the fear. 

When they took me away, it was the same thing as when my mother was separated from us. I was taken out of the jail, and I was taken to a theater in Amsterdam that had become a collection point for Jews. At that time the [Rotziests?] even though we were in the underground, we kept track. Two things we all did: we listened to the BBC through all the jamming, tried to catch what the news really was because the German propaganda machine was atrocious, and we tried to find out what was happening to the Jews. We knew that [Rotziests?], what they called Rotziests, had started what the Germans called aktionen, that they would round up people, one group after another. Then they started playing their games. You get a stamp on your identification card which entitles you to stay. The Jewish Council would take from lists certain other kinds of people, and they would send them now to two or three — and the main one transit camp in Holland was called Westerbork. It was in another northern part of Holland where the Jews were accumulated, and from there, the trains came and deported them to Sobibor and Treblinka, for the most part.

Turner: What was the other one?
HILLER: Treblinka, where Demjanjuk was supposed to have been the guard. Ironically here, I told [Wasi?] that to me it makes very little difference whether he was Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka or whether he did his work — just a cigar, as they said — at Sobibor because my father was killed in Treblinka, I found out after the war. And my mother at Sobibor. So I was put in with the children’s transport that was contrived to make it … all the children they’d sent. My parents by that time, already having decided that the Germans could not be trusted, that what we had seen, and the hatred of the Nazi who set his dog on me in Berlin, all these things made us more willing to take risks to escape than to hope and to count on German mercy. When I was in the theater, people were brought in by the truckload, and more in registration, and so on, and I stood back. There was tables for … the Jewish Council were there, and they would give you things like blankets and food packages for the transport to Westerbork. I just hung back. I went to the main part of the theater, and I didn’t even know I hadn’t registered. 

Then I wandered around, and as I wandered around, I also looked at the entrance to the theater. It was fairly loose because the Jews kept things together. There was one German guard going back and forth in front of the theater. So then it became dusk. I wandered over to the theater, just looking around, and I saw the guard was walking toward the other corner so slowly, and I split. I went out of the theater, made the first corner and took off. Then there was a long period, we’re talking now from December ’42 to the time of my liberation finally in October ’44 in [the] southern part of Holland. I was very lucky because at that time the southern part of Holland which was close to Belgium and the German border was liberated by the 2nd Armored Division, the American armored division, and they didn’t make it up over across the Rhine. The rest of Holland, the northern part of Holland, went through one of its worst winters of the war. People suffered, and they were caught. 

The Germans, the worse the war went for them at that point, the rougher they got, and the more hectic and unbelievable the situations became. I have some tapes about people shot, films that they shot about what the Germans did, even when the British were already in town. The SS started shooting out of balconies and so on. The point I was trying to make here is that from the point where I split, found friends, found some distant relatives, lived with these people, lived with that people, took some stuff to the jail, then found out my parents were gone — it was a very dense period with many, many events, many, many people — that by that time I was determined to stay free. I got to know some people in the resistance. I needed money to buy false papers. I was caught. I was arrested again. I went to Westerbork. I was miraculously … and I saw things in Westerbork that were unbelievable. 

That situation I should briefly sort of bracket here. There were a lot of Austrian Jews that had fled Austria at the Anschluss and had come to all kinds of places, but a lot of entertainers, very well-known entertainers, had come to Amsterdam, and they were caught there. The commandant in Westerbork was also an Austrian, and he liked his music, he liked his culture, and these people understood each other very well. So when these entertainers were brought in, he kept them there. He did not allow them to be shipped to Poland, and he had a stage built for them, with a piano. He gave them everything they needed to stage a cabaret. The front row of the cabaret was leather seats for tourists that the Germans used, the SS and their guests, to a drink for an evening at the Jewish cabaret. The rest were the rows of wooden benches for the Jews. These were VIP Jews he gave tickets. It was a whole merchandising trip, who got to go to the cabaret, because it was a world apart; it was a [dynamo? or diamond?], probably one of the best reviews I’ve ever seen. I had a chance to see one, and a mood it’s like Berlin. They brought back a piece of Berlin without the fact that the Nazis were there or anything; it seemed to matter very little. The entertainment was so excellent, and the Germans appreciated it as much as the Jews. They clapped together. 

I got out of the camp because a cousin of mine who had been a courier … actually was a distant cousin. He was not an immediate cousin. He was married to a woman who was half Jewish. He had been a courier between Westerbork and Amsterdam for the Germans doing business with the Jews and did all kinds of business for them. He needed to be sent once more to Amsterdam. He took his wife, who was half Jewish, with him, and he somehow got me to be on the list to be left out of the camp, too, his last trip. So I got out of Westerbork on a fluke. I’m reading this story of the fate of the Jews who came here and their fate in America, and where they went and what they did was so largely a matter of flukes, total coincidence … it’s something that somebody said. Somebody that was casually met that would send them over there and get them to do something or other; it was a totally off-the-wall type of life. You never knew what would befall you, so I came then …

Turner: Now I want to take you back to your leaving the theater, turning around the first corner, and have you go a little bit more slowly as to what happened. Where did you go?
HILLER: I had, by then, developed a very good friend who played the guitar, my age. These were the people with whom we exchanged the furniture. I knocked on their door, I told them what was happening, and he hid me for a couple nights. They had a regular apartment, and they also had a garret on the roof, a little room up there. Everyone got one. So I stayed up there and made some other contacts.

Turner: How would you make the other contacts?
HILLER: My friends made the contacts for me. He called people up.

Turner: The person whose house you were staying at?
HILLER: Yes. He would go there, ask. His parents were uptight; they didn’t want me there forever. They were trying to help, but they had a boy, and they had a daughter. The man was kind of ill. His was a precarious position. He was a Dutch official, a minor official, and …

Turner: Do you remember was his name was? 
HILLER: Jope Maas [spells out]. After the war, he lost it. He had a nervous breakdown, and I don’t think he ever recovered. I can’t really … I didn’t keep a journal, and because so many things happened …

Turner: But just again, so … 
HILLER: I had other friends.

Turner: Yes.
HILLER: Like when I went to school in Holland. I didn’t tell you that we were ordered to go to a Jewish school. All the Jews had to withdraw from whatever schools they went to. The Germans allowed us one Jewish school, where also Anne Frank went. We all were packed into that school.

Turner: Your family did not know the Franks?
HILLER: Didn’t happen. They were packed … the streets were full of people. They really weren’t very well known. Everyone had a circle of people that they knew, and until the book — that’s really what made them famous. A book that keeps haunting me — it was also discovered by a woman in Portland. Not the book so much, but the Anne Frank exhibit. It was staged here, as an exhibit, too. I met her and asked some questions, and she didn’t like where I was coming from. To this day I keep running into … I keep having bad experiences, I must tell you. That’s not unusual or astounding for anyone who has read deeply into Jewish history. The Jews have the very false reputation of having had strong bonds. In fact, there’s been an enormous amount of conflicts between the Jews, from beginning to end. Within the family, outside the family, and so on. There were also …

Turner: I want to take you back to the garret.
HILLER: Back to the garret. I remember going to another friend and staying with that person. Then I visited the doctor who had my uncle’s jewelry, and also my mother had added jewelry. What she had was nearly as much as my uncle. I had to take a chance there because the agreement had been that while we kept the jewels there, that we would not approach him until it was safe, until the Germans said the war was won, or whatever. But I had no choice. I had no money. I had to go and ask him for a piece of jewelry. He understood, and he gave me something. I didn’t know anything. It happened to be a ring of my uncle’s, who reproached me later about having taken one of his rings, and he wanted me to pay him back for it. At this point, I was the only surviving child of his sister. So I took the ring, and I sold it. I got a bad piece of identification for it and some money. Then I went to the southern part of Holland, but not before another…

There were three or four major types of things that happened during that period of time. First the escape from the theater. Then roaming around from family to family. Then I also stayed with Jews again, and put the Star of David back on because they were exempted, and they seemed to have a very good exemption. Then the star came off when I wanted to get rid of it, and I put it on when I needed to be with Jewish people. Sometimes it was safer to be with Jews than alone roaming around in the street.

Turner: What was their exemption? 
HILLER: It totally depended on what the Germans decided. The German plan changed. For example, the diamond cutters stayed to the very, very end. There were some that survived the war in Amsterdam. In fact, some of the Germans tried to find protection with those diamond cutters whom they had helped stay out of the thing. But the Germans were looking for loot. It was really an organized loot. Where they found they could profit by the Jews staying in there, or organizing materials for them, or manufacturing things that they could use, they kept them there. Tailors, there were all kinds of people whom … also, their capacity for transports and for liquidation was an ongoing organization. It wasn’t like they came in and one day decided, “We’re going to take all the Jews.” It had to be organized. One of the people who became notorious was a Hauptsturmführer [equiv. of captain], Ouster Fernton [sp?], who at one point, reminiscent of this thing here, we were picked up one time, a whole [inaudible] aktion and we were all assembled together at a square. Some Dutch people, non-Jewish Dutch people, drove by on bicycles, and one came with a car and stopped and asked questions. This infuriated the Germans, in particular this Hauptsturmführer. I remember he was there, and he started screaming and yelling and picking up some stones from the street and hurling them at these Dutch people, who then quickly disappeared. 

That was not one of the big events. The big event was that I was picked up and sent to Westerbork. Actually, that came from that assembly. We were sent on the train to Westerbork from there.

Turner:  From that assembly?
HILLER: Yes, where we were picked up. Then when we came back to Holland with my cousin to Amsterdam, by that time the Germans had …

Turner: How long were you in Westerbork?
HILLER: Six weeks. The Germans had by then decided that the Jews should be removed from where they had lived in the southern part of the city and put them in Amsterdam east, which was a shabbier district. It created a ghetto of the remaining Jews. So we were living there, my cousin and I, and he was making trips to Westerbork and back again for the Germans. The peculiar smell … he came back from the camp always smelling the camp smell. It’s really hard to convey. You’d have to make almost a movie of each episode to get the atmospherics, the smells that were associated with these events, the feelings …

Turner: What sort of smell of the camp?
HILLER: I cannot describe it. The camp had a smell that he brought back with him with his clothes. When we unpacked his clothes and washed them for him and so on: Westerbork. It was right there.

Turner: What was ghetto life like?
HILLER: We were all Jews. All the others had been removed. It was open, but all the restrictions that had already been put in place before we were ordered deported … This was like nine, ten months later …

Turner: Food, how was that?
HILLER: They had rations. They were small rations. The event that happened after this went on for weeks. One Sunday morning I was awakened by the loudspeakers of trucks coming through the streets saying, “Alle Juden [inaudible] machen.” All Jews have to get ready for transport. They had brought in police, Green Police as they called them, from Germany to surround all of that ghetto and to liquidate the Jews from Amsterdam. Not all of the Jews, because as I said, the diamond cutters, the Jewish Council, a couple hundred were left untouched by this action. But everybody else who had been able to find a deferment was rounded up. We saw. We got up. Everybody was sort of always packed — we had a rucksack, a blanket, we were ready to go. I looked out the window, and there were a lot of trucks rumbling up and down the streets. 

Then they came to the street where I was living. They were the police, the SS — actually, the Green Police as they were called — banged on the doors. People opened them, and the Jews came out with their luggage, and they were directed to the trucks and loaded up. The trucks kept coming and going, and coming and going, and we were just waiting for them to knock on our door. Miracle of miracles, out of the whole ghetto, the one side of the street that we were on, a short block, they overlooked, forgot it, or they no longer had the time to do any more. We were left behind. We stood there. We were now in a part of town like hit by a nitrogen bomb and miraculously saved. Everybody was gone. It was like a ghost town, but the people came out of three or four houses and said, “What now?” So we were, so to speak, free to decide what to do next. People do different kinds of things. My cousin decided to stay. In fact, he and his wife survived in Westerbork. I decided not to take any chances because I had been let go. I wasn’t real legitimate anymore anyway. So I went back to people I knew. I knew some people in the underground, and they helped me get out of town, gave me a train ticket. I was handed from one person to the next. I went to Limburg, which is a province, and I landed with some Dutch coal miners.

Turner: You traveled on public transport?
HILLER: Yes, I traveled on a train.

Turner: With the Dutch and the Germans? 
HILLER: Yes, and with the money I was given and the identity cards.

Turner: And the false identity card?
HILLER: And then I survived 15. It was ’43, and I stayed with this miner’s family who were Lutherans. It’s a small village, Rumpen it was called. Rumpen [spells out].

Turner: And the name of the family?
HILLER: Close to Mastrecht. I have it somewhere. We were trained to forget names. I have dissociated so much. In part also, because when I was liberated and I tried to patch my life together, waiting to hear whether my parents had survived also, living this, that … the whole struggle which people even undertake in normal times in this country, the whole struggle to put together a life out of whatever resources you had. Out of a little job, a girlfriend, some family, whatever you could patch together. With all the family gone, all of that was such a shifting scene for me that what the …

Turner: So you’re at this village, Ru–?
HILLER: Yes, Rumpen.

Turner: Rumpen.
HILLER: What the Germans called — I was a luffmensch, an airhead, an air person. It was hand-to-mouth social existence with a lot of trouble.  I remember at one point I had a tremendous infection. My face was like this, with no food. I lived in the fields sometimes, dug a hole, ate a raw potato. This was later when I moved to these people’s very cramped quarters. 

Turner: This was the…?
HILLER: The Dutch coalminers, yes. To some Catholics who had a farm. This was toward the end, toward 1944, when the misery … now it became a fight at a certain point after the Allied invasion, after the defeats of the Germans. But even with the defeat of the Germans in Russia, they were still a long way away. The real rescue everyone was waiting for was from the second front it was called. Everyone was waiting for the Allied invasion. When that happened in June, D-Day, 1944, and I heard it, I think in French first, on the radio, then it became a race to elude the Germans until the possibility of liberation. It was not just a question of … because they were hunting Jews until the last. That’s the one obsession they had, the SS, it’s become known, that even when they knew they had lost the war, they were still liquidating the Hungarian Jews. This was when they knew. It was a religious mission on their part. Some people were no longer as enthusiastic, but in Holland, because of all the SS, the occupation, the pursuit was heavy. Unlike in France, where there was much [inaudible] hidden in the mountains, there was really no place in Holland to hide. It’s flat; there’s no place to go. There’s no vast stretches of forests where you could forage. You had to depend on your social connections. Live in little towns, whatever.

Turner: And that’s what you did?
HILLER: That’s what I did. When I lived with the Lutheran family, I was alerted that the Dutch, even without the SS, the Dutch took it upon themselves to pursue the Jews. They loved it. Their power trip. Rumors went that the Dutch, NSBers, National Socialist Organization that the Dutch national socialists were going to stage, they were looking for Jews in this little town. So I had to leave. In the last minute kind of thing, somebody came and suggested, told me where to go. But I went by myself. It was toward the evening. There was a little road that passed over a bridge, and I had to continue for kilometers. Then I knew approximately how to get there. But on the bridge were these two guys with the fascist uniform, the black uniform, and a shotgun. One of them held a shotgun and [was] checking papers. There was hardly any traffic, but in front of me, there was a young Dutch man and his girlfriend, and they were walking their bicycles. I had to make a decision. I was too close for them not to have noticed me, but I could have given them a run for their money. I could have run into the fields. It was a very small village. There were just fields over there, and there was some corn, and I could have made an attempt to run. 

As I was walking slowly, deciding what to do, then all of a sudden it was already too late to decide. I was already too close to them now, and they checked. They stopped the couple in front of me, so I made my move. When I saw what was happening, really, I walked a little faster to be close to the couple, so that when they were stopped and both of those guys were looking at their papers, I just walked right in back of the couple, and I just kept walking as casually as I could. And they didn’t stop me. So that could have … a fraction of a second. Then I stayed with a farmer; I helped him in the fields. They had a couple young children. The Germans came and took their foodstuffs. By this time also, the war was going badly. The Allies had landed. There was a lot of German troop movements, and they were hauling away everything they could. Actually, they came in and made the farm the headquarters, for the time being. 

I remember very vividly the jubilation one night when the Warsaw Uprising, not the Jewish Warsaw uprising, but the general Warsaw Uprising had been crushed. The Germans came out with their bottles and said, “That serves them right.” The Russians who were across the river refused to help them, the Polish, as most of the Polish refused to help the Jews. The Germans felt jubilant; they sucked life out of little triumphs. But I stood at the farm, and I saw the next scene, so to speak. The curtain went up on the scene of we didn’t know what the hell was happening because we knew that the Allied troops were coming closer. This was before the Battle of the Bulge because we were already liberated then. That was the most frightful time after the liberation because it was very close to us. 

The Germans at first seemed to have considerable success in that drive. Do you remember the Battle of the Bulge? The Battle of the Bulge was when Hitler made his last concentrated attack to drive a wedge to Antwerp — this was in the middle of the winter — to try to split the Allied armies. He threw everything he had into that thing. It went well because the skies were covered. The Allies could not use their planes. But this was after the liberation. What happened before then, when the Germans made their headquarters at the farm, I made myself scarce, but I did steal a louver from them out of a car. So for the first time in the war, I had something to defend myself with if worse came to worse. I actually sat next to an SS courier who had come on a motorcycle and took his motorcycle by the side of the road and took a rest. I don’t know what got into me, but I started looking at the guy, and I started talking to him. I said, “Well, what’s happening?” He said, “Oh, we’re going to get them. You see these hand grenades. If they come down here out of the sky, I’m going to kick their ass.” So I covered myself. I said, “I’m here with these people. My father was Dutch; my mother was German. That’s how I came to be in Holland. They sent me to this farm to have something to eat, to be able to survive the war.” 

Then the fear was that there was going to be battle. We didn’t know whether there was going to be battle because the Germans had an enormous amount of troops and materiel going through the area. In fact, I was sitting in an apple tree, and I saw the British come down in their Spitfires and start strafing the columns. I saw them go up, like in ammunition trucks and everything. That was the first time. I saw it out of the tree like it was a movie. I saw the planes come down right in front of my eyes and saw the columns attacked. But we didn’t know what the final situation was; it was fluid, and so on. 

Then the whole column of SS came back the wrong way, back to form a defense. We thought, “Oh, my God, this is going to be a bloody scene here.” So we waited and waited, and then the Germans — and I never saw this SS troop again, this column — but all of a sudden the Germans retreated, and then two Germans came on bicycle with their rifles slung over their shoulder. One of them had walked his bicycle because it had a flat tire. Those two Germans were the last two Germans I saw. The next soldiers I saw in a tank were Americans. They had this little reconnaissance plane. It started circling overhead, slowly, slowly. I saw the pilot and everything. And then, nothing for hours and hours. The Germans were no longer there, but finally we heard the rumbling of the tanks, and we still didn’t know whose tanks they were. 

Then all of a sudden a tank came through. I saw the first tank with an American star on it. That was my moment of liberation, which was like … I don’t know. It’s an indescribable moment when you’re tense with fear and all of a sudden it dropped away. It’s like a migraine headache maybe which all of a sudden lifts, if you’ve been battling it maybe for weeks. I found some Jewish soldiers, and I tried to make myself understood. I waved, and the farmer — here’s a little bit of irony that stuck in my memory — the farmer and three or four whole columns of tanks came through. And the Dutch farmer, who had been decent to me certainly, he stood there. It was a mixed story for them, really, because the Dutch farmers before the war had suffered. Economically, they were deprived. Many of them had been heavily mortgaged. It was difficult for them to make a living off the land. During the war, this was the first time really, even though they had to give a lot of produce over to the Germans, they were able to black markets, a pound of butter, a couple eggs. A piece of bacon or ham was literally worth its weight in gold. People came from the towns, they gave him their jewelry, and many of them accumulated small fortunes during that period because they were the only ones who had food. So the farmer and I stood together when we saw these tanks all of a sudden, all come through, all Americans, and he said to me, “Why did they have to come through the potatoes?” [laughter]

Turner: What day was this?
HILLER: The tanks?  

Turner: What date?
HILLER: It was around — I’m not sure of the month — September or October 14th to18th.

Turner: ’44?
HILLER: ’44. Yes, it was September or October. I think it was probably October. Then that was the end of the war, the end of my story [laughter].

Turner: Oh, no. Not the end of the story. You’ve got the winter, and the rest of your life.
HILLER: Well, after I was liberated, just to digest the sense, to go to sleep that night, to wake up the next morning remembering that it was over, took a little bit of adjusting. I remember a few things then that happened. Things happened to me. I wanted to affirm my own existence. I went to a little town, and I looked around and I saw one of the stores, one of the bars, still had a sign on it: “Jews not allowed.” So I went in there, and I said, “What about this, is it still…”  “I don’t care,” the guy said. So I went over there, took it out, and ripped it up. Then another piece of irony came. The Dutch who had survived, including … I went back actually to the people in the mines, the mining family. They were nice people …

Turner: Which family?
HILLER: The miners, the coal miners.

Turner: Oh, yes.
HILLER: In the little village. I went back to visit with them and to talk, you know. These are people also who had very hard lives. Their faces were always black with coal soot. These were people with a minimal existence who had the smallest … they didn’t have enough fuel. They didn’t have enough to eat. They had hard work. They spent half their life underground, digging out coal. These guys, one of them … the other one wanted to stay with the mother, and he had sort of achieved some kind of position in the mine, a little foreman or something. The other guy was too young, and he was anxious to get out of the mine. So he and I went to form up for Dutch Volunteer Brigade to draw weapons and to fight the Germans. We stood there at attention already; we were new volunteers. This guy came around and asked, “Who are you?” They took note. The Dutch army officer who knows who you were, where you were born, he came to me and said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Gunter.” I used my real name again. This was my name. He said, “Gunter Hiller?” I said, “Yes, I’m a Jew. I just survived. My parents have been deported. He said, “We can’t accept you. You’re German.” It came right back to me. For them, I was a German again. He didn’t try to arrest me or anything, but I was not to be included in the force. If you look at this, the Jewish story as it happened to the Jewish partisans who were killed by other partisans in Poland, the story of Vilna. Have you ever read the story of the partisans of Vilna?

Turner: Well, I know about it.
HILLER: Yes, I have the tape. It’s an enormous documentary tape. The weirdest things that sort of happen when there’s a social disorientation, when things are in flux. The next thing that happened to me was that some other people who were distant relatives — lists were starting to be made about survivors, and I got onto a list — they got hold of it and saw my name, and they invited me to come to live with them in Mastrecht, where the European treaty was signed, the Mastrecht treaty. That’s where they lived, and that’s where I joined them. They had connections with the military. For the Jews, it became then a question of getting their life back. They were milliners, they were in hats, and very successful Jewish people.

Turner: You were 16.
HILLER: In ’44, yes. I was 16. They wanted me to go back to school. They were very bourgeois in that they had … for them to go back is to make money and very quickly reestablish themselves in as comfortable a way as possible.

Turner: Their names were?
HILLER: Cohen. Fritz and Vera Cohen. They were nice to me. They were very demanding in their own way, in the same way that drives generations of people apart, you know. While I was with them I received Red Cross notices that my parents had been killed in Treblinka and Sobibor, and I was not interested in putting a life together. I felt really I had no life. I was at loose ends, and I was depressed. I survived the first wave of joy and relief. Liberation had passed, and now I went into a weird kind of space where even the opportunities … and no longer having to worry about food, I mean, materially I was well off. 

But psychologically I was devastated. Then the next year after the northern part of Holland was liberated and the war was over, and the atom bombs had been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima … they had a business going, and they were totally immersed in building up their business, except for that part of their lives which was then the main kind of focus of all the surviving Jews who congregated together, who sought each other out, to find out who had survived, whom they were still waiting for, who had had news, who came back, including the father of Anne Frank. Up to this time we still didn’t know exactly what had happened. 

The news of the camps and the revelation of the camps started to come in, and the enormity of what had happened began to dawn on us. So it was a split existence between people trying to resume their pre-war life on the one hand, and still living through the war and mourning for relatives who had been deported, mourning, trying to digest the news that came from the camps about the treatments that people had received there. This was a totally disjointed kind of abnormality that I had to deal with. It’s not a very flattering picture, and maybe it seems ungrateful, but one of the problems I had living with these people was that they were too well off, readjusted. They had had an excellent deal. They were in hiding, too, and they were well-provisioned, and they had had their trip very together. They paid a lot of money to get what they wanted. They had had it arranged much better than most of us, and they stayed in one place through that period. Not that it was pleasant, but there were all kinds of different comfort zones.

Turner: I can imagine some of the [inaudible] if they had it so much better.
HILLER: Some of them had it better. Even in the camps, you know, some had it much better than others. The majority had nothing. The majority was abject slavery. The majority were pushed right into the ovens. The others, many of them, died a slow death, a brutal death, being beaten to death, or starved to death, or typhus, or whatever, you know. These Jews came together, and this was their social life to share the news. The war was over, but it wasn’t over. There was no way to reconnect, except for these people the war was really over. I remember one time when we went someplace to hear some stories about what had happened, people had come back with these stories. He’s dead now, may he live in peace, may he rest in peace. Fritz. But he was so successful that he had one of the first Jaguars that he was able to buy that was shipped over to Holland from England. When we were sitting together talking, he looked at his watch and said, “I got to get the car back in. Tonight is the night they wash the car.” 

To this day, and I tell you the truth, my reason for wanting to make this oral tape is to deal really with the aftermath and the unassimilated part of our lives, which I also find even normal people endure, and I’m sure you as an analyst know a great deal also about. That this raw aspect of society, that doesn’t really deal with what’s not relevant to the functioning, the money making, the paying of the bills, the taking care of business aspect of our lives. These raw encounters and these unresolved pains that may not at all be noticeable. I mean, I’m a normal human being, a whole. I may be plugged into something that’s very pleasant. Rosalind and I, who was not involved in the war, we can live, and we live like everybody else. We have dinner together somewhere, perhaps with some friends. We have a picnic, maybe. And then something happens, socially, or in the news. I’m still a news junkie. I must know what’s going on in the world. Is the world still not right? And this is part of my sickness. It is a real sickness because I hold on to it. I don’t stop reading about it, the literature, the analysis, the suffering. I can’t let go of the suffering. I never said goodbye to my parents [cries]. Coming to America was my only solution in my own youthful mind.

Turner: Were you working with, for this family at this kind of in between, depressed period?
HILLER: Yes. I was living there and trying to go to school. They wanted me … I  went to high school.

Turner: When did you get this idea of going to America? After [inaudible]?
HILLER: No, it was a Dutch.

Turner: Dutch. They didn’t have high school. They had gymnasiums.
HILLER: They had various kinds. They had medium. They had high schools for people who were gymnasium material. The high schools in Holland are tough, tougher than a lot of colleges are here. People really prepare for these endlessly to get into university from there. The university is relatively easier; it’s almost like in Japan. So my uncle, my mother’s brother, contacted me. I wrote to him, and he offered if I wanted to come over.

Turner: He was in America?
HILLER: He was in Cincinnati. He came over in ’39. His son had fought in the American army. He was diabetic. He had troubles. He had a small apartment in Cincinnati. The son had come back and with the GI bill went to college, then to medical school. I came there, and it was a disaster because he got most of his jewelry back, but he insisted immediately that I give him the money for the rings. I didn’t have any money. I got a miserable job as a stock boy for a mail order house. My social contacts were with the guys who worked there, and America in the ’40s, I think perhaps you know something about. We had won the war, the war was over, except for those who had had losses. 

America was prosperous. Cars were built again. The younger people had their eyes on cars and women, and on sports, entertainment. Cars. I can’t tell you how much people were into cars when I first came to America. Who got the first cars that were now coming out of Detroit, and so on. And the money, and college, and so on. My English was very poor. I started going to night school, and then the apartment of my uncle was too small, so I rented a little room. I found myself stacking the bins for this mail order house and going home. I didn’t even have a room. It was an area with a curtain roped off. Then I had $5. I bought a radio and listened to the news. Finally, somehow, something, I didn’t know, I was frightened because I didn’t have any money. But I scraped together whatever money I had, about 100 bucks, and I took a bus and I went to San Francisco, on a Greyhound bus to try my…

Turner: The year is 19–?
HILLER: The year is 1948.

Turner: So you were in Holland until?
HILLER: 1946.

Turner: ’46. Then you came to Cincinnati.
HILLER: I came over, in fact, on a freighter which went the southern route and came to Tampa, and actually we docked in a little island opposite Tampa called Boca Grande, where the ship started … it was July the 18th. Hot. It was chemical fertilizer that they loaded, so we all went off the ship. This was the first time I set foot in America. I remember the first mate. It was an American freighter. There were 12 passengers, also refugees. The first mate was drinking, and he picked up a stick in one hand, and he had a pint of something. 

He was going to take us to the island, where we could get something to drink. Four, five Jews and the first mate strolled down the road. There were some shacks around, and there was an old black man sitting on the wooden steps of the shacks reading a paper. The guy was throwing the stick up. All of a sudden he spotted this black guy reading the paper. He sauntered over, took the paper out of his hand, put the stick in his hand, and wandered off, already reading the paper. That was my introduction, my first of many, many experiences of racism in America. So that was prior to … but these things were really always just around the corner. I seem to always run into them. There are people who stay out of that margin of traffic, and they never see anything. But later on I went to school in Louisiana … 

Turner: What happened in San Francisco?
HILLER: New Orleans. Let me just make that little story that happened to me. In New Orleans in ’60, ’61, I did graduate study in New Orleans when the sit-ins started. My roommate was heavily involved in that, and it was ugly. Ugly scenes. 

In San Francisco I got off the bus, I sat down in the main street there right by the bus station, got a cup of coffee, bought a paper, and looked through the ads for a room. I found my way to the room. It was $5 a week. I gave them the $5. I had the room. I counted out all my money in the bag to see how much I had left. Then I sat down and read the paper, and I started looking for a job. I had no skills. Unlike the Jews who came over here after the 1890s en masse on these boats, there was no Jewish milieu. Nobody was there either to exploit you, or you were not stuck with a lot of people who had nothing, but nor did you have any kind of social support, both of which were present when Jews came in waves to America. 

I looked for a job. I found a succession of jobs. Somebody was trying to find somebody to carry clothes to department stores, to try to show them to buyers, to get orders for the wholesale clothes, the wholesalers. I remember going with this big bag [laughs] to one after another, trying to find a buyer at the department stores. I could hardly carry the bag anymore from one place to another. She wasn’t in. Finally, I got to see her. She did me a favor. She looked at me, exhausted with this clothes bag. She said, “Show me what you got.” So I hung up the clothes, and she said, “Come see me again.” I packed them up. I saw that I was not going to make a dime. I did this for a week or two. I wasn’t selling anything. I wasn’t making a dime. 

So I kept looking in the paper. I got a job with the Bank of America as a bank teller. This lasted for a couple years, and again, I found a rooming house, the job, and I was pretty much alone. The job, the lack of conversation … I really at that point had no interest at all in talking about who I was. In fact, I added “Frank” to my name. Everyone called me Frank. I didn’t want to tell them about the story, about the war, about the concentration camps. I didn’t even want anyone to know that I was a Jew. People were really not interested all that much, you know. I saw some movies, like The Gentlemen’s Agreement, about antisemitism in America. I saw things that made me wary about how safe it is to be a Jew in America even. I thought the wisest course was not to mention it. 

So I lived alone, and the one thing I did to escape was I joined the National Guard because when I was liberated I also went with the tanks for a couple days and helped them interrogate the German prisoners and so on. To be with the GIs after the war is something I did as much as I could because they were at least in the war. I felt comfortable with them. I was there. And so I joined the National Guard. Through correspondence courses, I actually got a commission, and I spent three months in Fort Benning, learning to be a Second Lieutenant. That for me was as close as I could come to camaraderie, social identity, not being totally alone. After the Fort Benning experience in ’53, it was nip and tuck. I almost was going to go to Korea. There were two divisions in California. One of them went to Korea, and I was in the one that did not. So I went and started college.

Turner: Whereabouts?
HILLER: San Francisco. I went to San Francisco State. I took an exam. I had gone to high school at night while I had these jobs and got a diploma. I went and applied for the college because the jobs were dead-end jobs. I mean, I could be a teller, but I didn’t have the talent to become a loan officer. I tried to take a bank course once, and I was totally bored by it. I couldn’t absorb all the banking regulations and material. I knew I wasn’t going to be a success at that, so I looked for a way in which my poverty, which it always was … I would never have more money than to pay the rent, maybe see a movie, because those days they paid like $180 a month at the bank for a teller. I figured the only way I … it was an attempt. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but at least in college, there was the cafeteria, you could talk to people. There was poetry, there was literature. Not that I was so interested in literature and poetry, but at least people were not just talking about buying things and going and getting a car. They were trying in some way to get into human interests. I picked philosophy as a major, and I did pretty well. I graduated four years later with a cum laude and was just as lost as ever [laughs]. I don’t know how much more time we’ve got on this thing

Turner: Nine minutes.
HILLER: Nine minutes. I don’t know what else I should tell you at this point. 

Turner: You took a graduate degree in what?
HILLER: I stayed at San Francisco State College because it had become my home. I got a master’s degree there in General Humanities, and then it was up for grabs. I applied a few places, and I got accepted with a scholarship at Tulane in New Orleans for a Ph.D. in philosophy, which I never finished. I passed the orals and I did the prelims, but I didn’t write the dissertation. By that time I found another obstacle in life, which was … but I thought about philosophy being a way to be emotionally on track with myself. It was not at all what philosophy was all about in the academic world. At the time I took philosophy, they were dismissing existentialism and existentialist-type questions. The rage in America was logical positivism — Lichtenstein, Carnap, Conceptual Analysis. If you were going to be anybody, this was the way to go. This was a totally materialistic trip. With this people were looking for tenure tracks, suburban homes, station wagons, wives, dogs, and kids.

Turner: So what did you do?
HILLER: I went back to Europe several times. I got married. Married out of the blue. Someone who wanted to marry me, I married. I got divorced the first time six months later. I went to Europe and taught philosophy for three years at NATO bases in Italy and France. There I met a French woman whose mother was a Hungarian Jew, whose father was a Breton. I learned French, and I had a wonderful time in Italy, usually. The woman came out of parentage that did not prepare her very well for marriage, either. She came back with me, got her Ph.D. at Davis in French, and I started teaching for a few years, at San Francisco State first. No, prior to going to Europe actually, my first teaching job out of Tulane was at New Mexico Highlands University, where I stayed for two years. Then I went to Europe for three years, then I taught at San Francisco State for a year, then I taught at the University of Nevada, where I was dismissed because I participated in a demonstration against Governor Laxalt, one of Nixon’s cronies, who came on campus to celebrate the ROTC parade at the time when Nixon had invaded Cambodia. At that time I found a way to connect to action by opposing the … the 60s began, this was in the 60s. I found rock and roll, I found pot, I found political action against the Vietnam War. I found an earnest civil rights battle. That was probably my best period in the United States, even though I didn’t get rehired because the University of Nevada is a very conservative school, and they didn’t appreciate my lying down in front of the limousine that carried the governor with other people. That was the end of my academic career because I wasn’t interested in it anymore. Nobody was. 

I went to live back in the San Francisco area and then struggled to get a little money together from my savings as a teacher and went back to Europe. I went to Turkey, Tehran, Persia, Afghanistan, India, and Nepal. I got very sick. I got to Thailand, and I stayed a year in a Buddhist monastery. I had a lot of experiences there. Buddhism became a very attractive way to stepping back from myself from those realities that I had no way how to maneuver, and they gave me parameters, the kind of philosophy I should have been studying in the first place that dealt with human suffering. I picked up meditation, which is still something I daily do, and I’m still interested in the world, and protesting brutality, oppression, in whatever imaginative ways I can find.

Turner: Why don’t we wind up at this point, since the tape is gone. How did you get to Portland?
HILLER: What happened was that I had some physical problems from place to place. After I came back from Thailand, I lived in Arizona, which gave me terrible allergies. Then I went to Missoula, Montana. Then I came to LA, and I started making cheesecake for a living. I became a cheesecake maker, and I opened a café for political purposes. We worked with the “Greens,” with the sanctuary movement. So political activism of one sort or another became my way of life. I met Rosalind, actually sometime later. We both had a hard time in LA with the air. It was not the city we wanted to live in, so we made a trip and we saw Portland, and we made a stand here. This is my latest, my last, maybe not my last, but my latest stand [laughter].

Turner: Thank you very much.
HILLER: You’re very welcome.