Pictures are of Christ Lutheran Church, Bexley, Ohio, our gracious sponsors.
Mom, Dad, my older brother, and I arrived at Union Station in Columbus, Ohio at 5 :00am, after an all-night train ride from Grand Central Station, New York.
Why Columbus? In those days immigrants needed sponsors that promised jobs for the adults and a place for the family to live. Our sponsor was Christ Lutheran Church, of Bexley, Ohio (a city within Columbus’s city limits).
Ma and Pa Peters, a retired couple, opened their home to us. After arriving, we ate a huge American breakfast of pancakes, bacon, eggs, and toast.
That morning we attended Easter Sunday services at Christ Lutheran. We stood at the front of the church, were introduced, and were welcomed by the church members who had arranged for employment and housing.
Without a sponsor, we could have not come to America.
Thinking back for the three previous months, our “baths” consisted of washing with a rag and a bowl of cold water. Fortunately, before attending church, we took turns bathing in warm water. We had lived in our clothes, without laundering, for the entire 12 days aboard ship.
Thankfully, in our two suitcases, was a second set of clothes for each of us. If we stank, the kind Christians welcomed us anyway. I’m sure Mom and Dad were concerned about the cleanliness issues. I didn’t care. I had eaten a good breakfast!
Thank you Christ Lutheran. Happy Easter to all. He Is Risen.
After 12 days crossing the angry north Atlantic, we arrived at Ellis Island on April 12, 1952.
Excerpt from my memoir:
“I remember all one thousand darkly dressed, orderly refugees waiting in lines at customs. We had our two suitcases and Dad’s violin, which he had kept with him on the ship.
The customs agent questioned Dad at length about his violin. Maybe he wanted to confirm that it was really Dad’s. Finally the agent asked Dad to play the violin. Rather than being nervous, Dad relished this opportunity to play in front of such a large audience of scraggly-looking refugees. He enjoyed playing and soaked up the moment. All activity, including talking, stopped in the big hall while he played. When he finished, everyone applauded.”
Cooks aboard the USS General Ballou during the time they were feeding US Soldiers traveling home after the war.
Seventy years ago, today, Mom, Dad, my brother, and I were sailing across the angry North Atlantic to the promised land. It was the fourth day since embarkation. I was within several months of my 9th birthday. An excerpt from my memoir follows:
“Once the seasickness subsided, we regained our appetites. For the first time in my memory, we had all we wanted to eat. The mess hall was super clean and was brightly lit. Food was served cafeteria-style.
After taking an aluminum tray from one of the tray stacks, we would slide them along three stainless pipes as the American merchant marine sailors plopped food onto the tray. We had never seen so much food! It was delicious!
We ate standing up and, when finished, dropped off our trays. We were not permitted to take food with us to the living quarters. Of course, I would get hungry between meals. In my case I was still feeding the intestinal parasites (worms) I had lived with for years. The worms took their share of nutrition and calories from my food. I was hungry all the time.
On the ship, I wore a dark pair of pants similar to sweatpants, which had elastic at the bottom of the pant legs. I took extra rolls, opened my elastic waistband, and dropped them into my pants. Gravity worked so that the rolls ended up at the bottom of my pant legs, safely held in place by the elastic. I put so many rolls down my pant legs that the bottom of my pants bulged out and I had to walk with my feet apart. Talk about bell-bottom trousers!
The sailors working in the mess hall noticed, smiled, and let me go my way. God bless Americans!”
After WWII, seventy-five years ago, Mr. Massler saved my father’s life. Massler was a good and brave man. I often wondered what his fate was. Last year my question was answered. With this new information I was compelled to add a postscript to my memoir. The postscript follows:
Illuliu and Magda Massler
Postscript
The last story
Mom told me one last story on a Saturday afternoon. I had stopped by her assisted living apartment for one of my frequent visits. She was 82 and in failing health. She was sitting in her favorite easy chair beside the window. I pulled up a kitchen chair and we were talking. Mom appeared to remember something and unprompted, told me a story from her past. She told me about Mr. Massler. His story is found in chapters 2 and 7. Massler was Dad’s Jewish friend. They had been classmates at a Romanian prep school. Massler’s family owned one of the finest stores in Bistritz.
Many of Mom’s stories were corroborated by the documents my parents had saved and by research. This last story was not corroborated until 2020.
Good men. Courageous men.
The Romanian-Hungarian border was changed in 1940; we now lived in Hungary. The fascist Hungarian government treated Jews the same way the Nazis did. It was decreed that it was illegal to do business with Jews. Despite being an officer in the Hungarian army reserves, Dad continued to do business secretly with Massler at considerable risk to himself.
In May 1944, Dad left home to fight the Russians. Mom told me that Massler had been sent to a Nazi concentration camp. She said that Mr. Massler survived, returned to Bistritz, and was appointed the communist police commissioner.
Dad was released from a Russian POW camp on August 28, 1945. He returned home to the family farm, but his family was gone. He did not know where we were or if we had survived the war. The communist authorities had been conducting nighttime arrest raids since January 1945. They were arresting Transylvanian Saxons of working age and political opponents. All arrested Saxons were sent off to slave labor camps in Russia. Massler protected Dad by warning him of impending raids. Massler’s courage cannot be overstated.
Considering my father’s poor health, had he been arrested, he would not have survived the arduous train trip to a slave labor camp. His body would have been thrown out of the rail car without a burial. My brother and I would have grown up without our father. My brother would have missed him terribly. I would have had no memories of him.
Oppression and killing were back in full bloom, only now the communists were in charge.
I often wondered what Mr. Massler’s fate was. He was a good and courageous man. A true friend. A man of character.
Question answered
In January 2020, I posted a short version of the “Massler story” on my book’s Facebook page. About one month later I received a response, stating, “I am Mr. Massler’s daughter.” I was in shock. I was in an emotional state. Could this be true? Is it a scam?
It was not a scam. It was real. I had been contacted by Mr. Massler’s daughter. She responded to my post. We have been in email contact since then. For the first time, she heard the story of our fathers’ friendship and their noble actions. I then learned what had happened to the man who saved Dad’s life 75 years ago.
Mr. Massler’s daughter disclosed that he had been sent to a slave labor camp where he was terribly mistreated and severely beaten. He was liberated by the Soviets. While he was in the camp, his wife, Magda Mandel, his five-year-old daughter, Juli, his parents, his sister and niece were taken to Auschwitz and gassed. After his return to Romania, he remarried. His daughter from the second marriage is the one who contacted me. She was named after the daughter he had lost to the Nazis.
Mr. Massler became a communist. Eventually he was appointed the communist police commissioner. His daughter recalled that he had not been a dedicated communist.
In 1958 Illuliu Massler (I had not previously known his first name) immigrated to Israel and began a new life in a new country. Some of his extended family had moved to Germany and had a good life there, but he wanted nothing to do with Germans. Making a break from the past, he changed his children’s names to Hebrew names. He is survived by two daughters and four grandchildren. He lived to the age of 78 and was an exceptionally good father.
The daughter who contacted me was thrilled to hear of the goodness and kindness of her father and his part in my family’s story. I was humbled to give her my memoir. As we continued to exchange emails, she sent me a picture of her father. When I first saw the picture of the man who had saved my father’s life 75 years ago, I had tears in my eyes.
As his daughter told me, “The world can learn much from our fathers.”
I remember that a fifty-four-year-old lady died during the trip across the ocean. Her bunk was maybe twenty feet from my bunk. She was buried at sea.
Her body was on a board and covered with an American flag. The ceremony was dignified. The captain read a few scriptures from an English Bible. I did not understand the words. The board was lifted at one end, and the body, which was wrapped tightly in white sheets, slid into the water. After the body slipped into the water, the ship sailed in a large circle around that location in honor of the deceased passenger.
When I think about this event as an adult, I tear up. She did not make it to the United States, the “Promised Land,” but she was given the honor of being covered by our flag.
Nine people who shared that voyage to the USA have contacted me. All remember the sad event. One was only four years old, two were five, and the rest of us were older. The picture shows the Captain and the ships officers walking to the burial ceremony.
For reviews of my memoir or to purchase a copy visit Amazon.com, or get your own signed copy of my book here.
Even after the war was over, danger would come in sudden and unexpected ways. The excerpt from my memoir is from the time Mom, my brother, and I were living communist East Germany after WWII.
“One of the places we lived was a multistory apartment building. Fellow tenants included a Russian army officer and his wife. Like almost all Russians, they had never seen running water and flush toilets. To them, a porcelain sink and a porcelain toilet looked the same except for the difference in height.
“Food was scarce for everyone, including the Russians. One day the officer purchased a small fish at a local market in Weimar. There was a little time till lunch, so his wife decided to keep it in one of the flush toilets the residents shared. Mom came to the communal bathroom with us and saw a dead fish floating in the toilet bowl. It never dawned on her that she was looking at someone’s lunch, so she flushed it. Shortly thereafter the officer came in to retrieve his fish and realized Mom had flushed it. He pulled out his pistol and put it to her head and demanded an explanation. My brother remembers those tense moments as Mom tried, in her broken Russian, to explain why she had flushed the fish.”
The book is available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/31H6cSk A story of war, deprivation, courage, perseverance, and triumph.
Give your friends and family a really cool Christmas gift – a copy of my book! Below is an excerpt describing our Christmas in 1945. Christmas for your friends and family will be much better than ours was, especially if you give them my book!
Christmas 1945
My brother remembers that Christmas:
“The Christmas gift that year was part of an apple. Grandfather Josef Maurer peeled the apple with a knife. The peel was an unbroken spiral. My brother and I got to eat the peel. We also ate a little bit of the apple and ate the core. We ate the entire core, including seeds, but we did not eat the stem.”
You can make someone happy and purchase a gift copy here.
For those who have not read the book and wonder about the unusual title, the story behind the title is explained here.
Many stories we never made it into the book. Some didn’t make it because I took them out, others because somewhere along the way one has to stop changing the book. Yet occasionally something triggers my memory and a story that I hadn’t thought about for decades suddenly pops into my head.
For example, several minutes ago a 64-year-old story came to mind:
I was very sick and near death from a severe allergic drug reaction. I had been in bed for maybe four weeks. My parents were not sure I would survive. In hopes of sparking a will to live in me, my parents brought me a newborn lamb. I remember the joy I felt at the beautiful fluffy little lamb beside me in bed. Their plan worked.
We arrived in Columbus, Ohio, from West Germany, via the Port of New York, on Easter Sunday, 1952. Prior to that the only time within my memory that I had had enough to eat was on the ship sailing to America. There were many new and amazing things to experience in our new country. The abundance of food was a pleasant culture shock.
Excerpt from the book:
Our first visit to an American grocery store
I remember our first trip to an American grocery store, the A&P on Main Street, near the Capital University campus. It was a family affair with my Mom, Dad, my brother, and me. A nice American lady helped us with the shopping, a big help since everything was strange to us. We had just moved into our home on Mound Street, and we had no food in the house; the cupboards were bare.
The amount of food in the A&P was astounding. I had never seen such a so much food or such a wide selection. We filled a cart (smaller than today’s carts) full of groceries, which cost about $10. (That is about $88 in 2014 dollars.) I did not know someone could actually have enough food to fill such a huge basket. While amazed and pleased at the amount of food, it almost seemed wrong to buy that much. We had a refrigerator in the house for perishable food. Now that was amazing!
