My name is John J. Stoessinger. I was born on October 14, 1927, in Vienna, Austria. I grew up in a fairly typical middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. My father was in the bathtub business, selling bathtubs to the community of Vienna, my mother was a housewife. I went to an Austrian grammar school and then to an Austrian gymnasium, and I was in the first year of the gymnasium, which is the equivalent of the American high school, when the Nazis marched in of course, they marched, 1938, and that is my first vivid memory of when Hitler marched into Vienna. I actually saw Hitler rolling into Vienna, the cars, and the troops marching down the street. I was standing there with my governess, Jewish kids had governesses those days, mine was a very attractive, I was ten years old at the time, blonde, who was Catholic and wore a crucifix. When Hitler’s procession passed by, she clutched the cross and said, ‘the new messiah has arrived.’ I did not know what that meant and so I asked my mother and she said, ‘well Hitler is here, we better think about getting out of here. My father shortly thereafter emigrated to Palestine, and he experienced a terrible crisis there, a personal crisis, and committed suicide, so I lost my father in Palestine. Meaning that I lived alone with my mother in Vienna, and then life gradually became more difficult as the racial laws took hold, this was an incremental process, first I was not allowed on the street after eight o’clock, and you are not allowed to take trolley cars, or sit on park benches, and my mother said finally in late 1938, we should go live with my grandparents, her parents in Prague, where her parents had a shoe store.

            In 1938, while hoping to escape from Hitler, my mother and I moved to Prague. Hitler developed a curious passion to follow us around and appeared in Prague, in a déjà vu experience in 1939. When he appeared, I was kicked out of school again, this time it was a Czech school I was kicked out from, in school it was mandatory to take a religion course, so it was being taught in a Christian country, it was Catholic. Since we were Jewish, we were simply dismissed from class, so the other kids were jealous because we did not have to go to class. There was a source of anti-Semitism right there, that we were excused from this. Before I left the school in Vienna, three Hitler youth came in and announced, ‘all Jews must leave this class within ten minutes,’ we had to leave. My teacher with a sense of humor, pointed to the picture of Christ on the wall and said, ‘does that mean he has to leave too?’ Which the Hitler youth chose to ignore. I think the teacher ended up in a camp shortly after that. Now we had to live under the Nazis, for three years, until 1941. In Prague in Czechoslovakia, it was very different, I never experienced any anti-Semitism from the kids. The cheering of the crowds when Hitler marched into Austria, ‘our Fuehrer, my Fuehrer,’ until they were hoarse Heiling Hitler. In Prague when Hitler marched in, they wept they did not cheer. As the tanks rolled into the square, I remember a Czech policeman wept, trying to hold a cordon to try and stop the crowd from trying to stop the tanks, which would have been a very futile attempt, it was a very different conquest experience. The Austrians cheered Hitler on, the Czechs mourned the event, but could not do anything about it, because they had been sold out by the British and the French after Munich.

            So, now what happened is I went to a German school where I was kicked out, there were so many Nazis there. Then I went to a Czech school where I had to learn Czech, which I learned fairly fluently and which I attended for the next three years, until we found a way to leave. During those years my mother became lonely and frightened. and married a gentleman named Oscar Stoessinger, who later adopted me. He adopted me in Shanghai actually, later not in Prague, and he became my stepfather in affect. He was a very resolute man, and he saw the writing on the wall about Hitler. My mother didn’t, and my grandparents didn’t. I remember terrible fights breaking out in the family over this issue. My mother was caught in the middle between my stepfather that wanted to leave Europe at all costs and my grandparents who said, ‘you are just an adventurer, this is the twentieth century, how much worse can it get?’ And they were too old, late seventies, they couldn’t get a visa anywhere else. Finally, my stepfather prevailed, as did my reluctant mother, who eventually agreed to this, to God knows where. Then we laid siege to many, many consulates with names of places I had never heard of like Haiti, for example, trying to get a visa to anywhere to get out of Europe. Life under the Nazis had become quite difficult, if not intolerable, the racial laws were progressing incrementally, and you couldn’t get an education anymore. Rumor had it that it was going to get even worse, and the ghetto was in the making then, although not yet in full operation. I was ten when they took over Vienna and I was twelve when they took over Prague. I remember in Vienna I was ostracized; I could not go ice skating because Jews were not permitted to go ice skating. My fellow pupils laughed and said, ‘well Jews can’t come here,’ and that was that. I used to like to go ice skating and suddenly that was out of the question. The kids turned, of course, the kids were taught by their parents about Jews and all the terrible things we do. I have to emphasis; in Prague it was very different. Even though there were attempts to teach them to be anti-Semitic, the kids were still nice to me, the Czech kids. So, now mother has married this gentlemen, Oscar Stoessinger, who is laying siege to all these consulates and finally, we landed in front of the Chinese consulate, at that time it was run by Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government. This consul took pity on us and for a small pecuniary enumeration, he gave us three visas to Shanghai, China. It is like me telling you, tomorrow you are going to Somalia. We knew nobody in Shanghai, and my stepfather said, ‘better to go to Mars than to stay here,’ and it turns out he was right, in retrospect. I remember a lot of walking around, the consul of Haiti, Panama, the United States, Britain, Switzerland, and we were always being told there was some problem with visa, Switzerland stamped with a J, which stood for Jew, which I found out later was a Swiss invention, not a Nazi invention, to keep the Jews out of Switzerland and they found out now that the Nazis and the Swiss had an agreement in 1938, the Nazis would give them gold if they would keep the Jews out of there. The whole scandal that came out just recently about the Swiss taking the Nazi gold and the Jewish gold extracted from their teeth, some will never be recovered there are no records about it.

            I’m going back now, it is 1941, and I am sitting in a Czech school, under the Nazis, scared to death that anything I do is against the Nazi racial laws, that I would get abducted and sent to a terrible place, which I had already read about. Well, nothing like that happened but the atmosphere became really tense and my mother began to weep a lot, because she saw the handwriting on the wall, and we would have to leave and leave her parents behind, my grandparents that we loved a lot, and were good people, who owned a shoe store. Now, things progressed from bad to worse of course and when we found help, we felt a sense of relief when we got these three visas from the Chinese consulate. I went with my parents everywhere to every consulate and there were long lines everywhere. The three visas were pretty much useless, because in order to go to China in those days, you had to go across the Soviet Union, and worse than that you had to go across Japan, who were allied with Germany, and were not about to give us a transit visa. In a sense the Chinese visas were fictitious because we could not avail ourselves of it. A rumor that became quite widespread in early 1941 that a new Japanese consul that had been appointed, was handing out visas by the hundreds, helpless Jews were lining up by the consulate, and the rumor was, he asked you if you spoke Japanese, if you answered, Hi Bonsai, he would issue you a visa with no further ado. We went in and we were greeted by a nice-looking young chap, and he picked on me, I was an eleven-year-old kid and he asked me, ‘do you speak Japanese?’ I said, ‘hi bonsai,’ and he issued three visas on the spot. Then we went to the Soviet consulate, and they gave us a free Soviet visa, and we were ready to go. Then there was a very painful day which I remember vividly, March 4, 1941, when we left from Prague to Moscow to connect with the Trans-Siberian train, that was the night we said goodbye to my grandparents. That was a terrible experience, I somehow realized in my heart, that I would never see them again. I loved my grandparents, I loved my mother, I was scared of my stepfather, I don’t know so well. I remember jumping off the train into their arms and I said, ‘I am not going.’ There were a couple of SS officers watching the commotion and my grandfather got scared and put me back on the train and said, ‘you have to go, you have to go. I was crying terribly, my mother was crying, and my stepfather kept control, was very icy and determined and the train pulled out on time, it was eight o’clock at night and my grandparents waved a flashlight, that is the last memory, up and down, up and down, a flashlight. They went to Theresienstadt shortly after that, and perished in Auschwitz in 1944, so we never did see them again.

            So, now we travel across Poland, to Moscow. Poland was divided at this time between the Germans and the Soviets. I remember distinctly a compartment where my stepfather and my mother and I sat, she was weeping uncontrollably, she had taken an expensive broach and had it hidden inside an old-fashioned coffee grinder and she had hidden it in one of her suitcases which were up on a shelf. Suddenly in the middle of the night, a high-ranking Nazi, an Obersturmbannfuhrer, enters the compartment, with swastikas galore all over his tunic, sits down, and doesn’t know who we are, doesn’t know we are Jewish, and says, ‘Heil Hitler, where are you going?’ With great presence of mind, my stepfather said, ‘we are going to Moscow and then onto our diplomatic mission,’ If we would have said we are refugees we would have been dead on the spot. So, what happens now is this guy, engages my mother and stepfather in a conversation, and suddenly he says, ‘I am hungry. Where the Hell is the dinner? Aren’t they serving anything on this train?’ My grandmother had packed for us a last supper for on the train, for the trip, a little chicken, a little schnitzel, a little bread. So, my mother unpacks this meal and offers it to this colonel or whatever, just to shut him up. If he is chewing, he can’t ask questions, God forbid he should ask questions, we’ll answer them. So, now this guy eats up our dinner and he is flirting with my mother and thank you frau. Nice polite conversation and then he says, ‘those Bolshevik dogs, the Fuhrer knows what he is doing, we will take care of them when we reach the Soviet border.’ He gave the inkling that the Nazis may invade the Soviet Union, which is in the middle of Poland, because Poland was divided then. Then I remember the train slows down and the Nazi Custom Control barges in complete with their swastikas, my mother is shaking because she knows the coffee grinder was in there, and suddenly this Nazi colonel shouts at his own people, ‘Raus, these are my friends, get the Hell out of here,’ so, there is no inspection. My mother was weeping uncontrollably, it turns out about an hour ago, she threw the coffee grinder out the window including the broach. We did not know that we would not get inspected, we could have gotten out with it. The Nazi tries to comfort her and then leaves and there we sit at the Soviet border. They checked luggage just briefly and then the train was in motion slowly, I noticed on one side of the border there was a big picture of Hitler and a swastika, and on the other, a picture of a benign looking man with a nice mustache. I asked my father, ‘who is this?’ My stepfather said, ‘that is Joseph Stalin, now shut up and don’t ask any more questions, it is not a free country.’ Then we traveled across the Soviet Union, that took in those days two months, it was March/Apryl 1941, it was eight weeks before the Nazi invasion and there was a lot going on with the military and troop movements. We would be pulled off on a siding and Soviet troop would come in and piss in the wash basin, thinking it was a urinal. Having no idea about anything. This train began slowly eastward through town after town crossing the waste of Siberia. We shared a compartment with a nice Japanese diplomat, he was the attaché to Berlin, and this fellow taught me chess, my mother wasn’t scared of him, because the person in the consulate had been so nice. We spent some pleasant time together, this went on for two months and we finally reached the Soviet Pacific coast, he got off to go north to Japan. And we went down to Shanghai. We took a small fishing boat to Japan, which I got very sick on and another fishing boat to Shanghai.

            We did not know what to expect, but frankly we did not care, we were out of Nazi Germany, anything was better than that. As far as Shanghai at the time, it was a large metropolis that did not really belong to the Chinese. The Shanghai area was split up by several governments during the middle of the Nineteenth century. We found a little place in the French concession of Shanghai, my stepfather got a job as a teller in a little bank, my mother became a hat maker for the ladies. She had two sets of prices, with or without stories. I was enrolled in a nice British public school, where I learned English, French, Chinese, and Japanese, in the international settlement of Shanghai. For four- or five-months life was rather pleasant, my stepfather had a job, my mother was working, and I went to school, and during those years if you were white in Shanghai, you were ipso facto considered somehow superior to these Chinese coolies that were all over. If I had to go somewhere, all I had to do was flip a coin in the air and there were all these people wanting to take me to school.

            All this splendor abruptly ended with Pearl Harbor, which was December ’41. And all of a sudden the Japanese declared Marshall Law, and cracked down on the Jews, encouraged by their German allies, and shortly thereafter, an edict was issued by the Japanese occupation force in Shanghai, that all Jews that come from Europe, about fifteen thousand of us, would have to go to a ghetto, and that began the Shanghai ghetto in which the Jews lived in kind of a phony Israel, until liberation in 1945. I never lived in the ghetto for reasons I will explain to you now. Before it was a ghetto it was a kind of run-down section, but I knew people there, so I visited there frequently, I played soccer there with a friend of mine, Mike Blumenthal, Secretary of the Treasury under Jimmy Carter, he lived there. It was a rather self-sufficient community with a few synagogues and a few schools, which weren’t very good, terribly, terribly overcrowded, but the community developed in a rather self-contained fashion. The place was run by a guy they called the king of the Jews. He ruled accordingly, he was very arbitrary, he would slap people around, he decided if people should be killed or thrown in jail, or to treat someone with typhus or they died. I never went through any of that, my mother was a gutsy lady, the Japanese man we had met was transferred to Shanghai as a vice-counsel, she said, ‘I am going to go see him, what have I got to lose?’ We had two weeks that we had to do something. My mother went to see him alone, my stepfather had developed a heart ailment, she came home, and she was beaming and said, ‘he was nice as always and gave all three of us an exemption from the ghetto for a year.’ So, for a year we did not have to go to the ghetto, I continued school, we actually learned Shakespeare, the British teachers revenged themselves against the Japanese by teaching us good English, punctuation, syntax, grammar, and Shakespeare, I once knew Hamlet by heart. Here we are in the middle of this military occupation and my mother continues her millinery work, and my stepfather is in bed. She pulls this off twice more in ’44 and again in ’45, with our Japanese friend, so we never went into the ghetto. I attended school in Shanghai where there was terrible racial hatred against the Jews, largely attended by White Russians who had escaped from the Soviet Union, and hated the Jews, deeply anti-Semitic kids. I defended one of them that was not anti-Semitic, that was my friend, and who is my friend to this day, he went to Australia, and I went to the United States. I got beaten up frequently, especially since I was a very good student, which they hated. This was a very strange concoction of nationalities, profound animosities, but the majority of them were White Russian boys, it was a boy’s school. They used to beat the Hell out of me because I was Jewish, and that hurt. I remember one day in the bathroom they passed a bamboo cane around and my friend refused to be part of this, and so we became inseparable, I had one dear friend. We tended silkworms and learned about sex by watching silkworms, and they became moths and we eked out a living selling silkworm cocoons for a few dollars here and there. In school I did very well, I became first in class, so I got another beating. I got beaten up a lot there, I tried to fight back but there were just too damn many of them. This took place in the bathroom, so the teachers didn’t know. If I would have snitched, they would have beaten the Hell out of me some more. You learned very quickly, like in the army, you keep your mouth shut when that stuff happened, you said you fell off a chair or something like that. There was a teacher from India, another one from the Philippines, but they were not as good as the British teachers. The teachers looked the other way, they did not want to antagonize the students there, so they didn’t see it. The headmaster was a nice fellow from the Philippines, who I had a good rapport with. Oh, I also had to learn Japanese, the Japanese teacher would walk around with a whip and if someone didn’t do his homework he got slammed, he got whipped you know smacked by this Japanese guy, they were very strict about it. So, I learned Japanese, Chinese, French, and English in that school, some of which I still speak to this day. Then in 1945, I graduated first in the class in that school. After we saw the atom bombs drop, the yellow light in the sky, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not that far from Shanghai, and at the liberation and the Japanese surrendered, the forces of Chiang Kai-shek walked right in, clothes in taters, no shoes, they had been fighting since 1931, they brought lice into the city where almost half the population died from the typhus they brought, I contracted typhus and almost died from a raging fever, and then the Americans came in shortly after and liberated us. I was eighteen and that to us was as if God Almighty or the Messiah had come. The Americans then were like demi-gods, down from Mount Olympus, among the mortals. I remember that all of us teenagers wanted to meet an American, and how to meet an American, become a shoeshine boy.

So, after I graduated, I became a shoeshine boy and shined the shoes of the Americans, and hoped I would meet one of them, maybe one of them would help me, maybe a GI, or an officer. Then in 1946 I shined the shoes of a young American Army lieutenant, a very nice guy from the mid-western states, he said, ‘you speak pretty good English, would you mind getting an education in America?’ He said the magic words, the Garden of Eden itself, America. I said, ‘how can I get to America from this place?’ He answered, ‘I live in a state called Iowa,’ which I never heard of, ‘I went to a college called Grinnell College,’ which I never heard of, he said, ‘do you know who went to Grinnell College, Gary Cooper went there.’ I heard of Gary Cooper, a new movie had just been released with Gary Cooper, he was my hero. I was a kid so, I said,’ how can I get to this college where Gary Cooper went?’ ‘I’ll write you a letter of recommendation,’ said the lieutenant ‘it is my Alma Mater, I will give you the address, write your own letter asking for an application form for admission.’ So, I sat down in Shanghai, with my somewhat broken English, and I wrote a letter, to an unknown place, across the ocean, and sent it across the sea, and I sent the letter and I waited. Just about that time, I got a job as an office boy, a flunky, for the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, later it became the International Refugee Organization, as an office boy and also delivering relief supplies like blankets and food, to refugees across the city that are now being supported especially by the American Army, and since I spoke pretty good English I was given a job to distribute this largess and as an interpreter, because my English was good.

One day when I was sitting around the office interpreting, a gentlemen walks in and introduced himself as Charles Jordan from the JDC, the American Joint Distribution Committee, I did not know what that was, a nice man, and he asked me all kinds of questions about my education, about my background, he was impressed that I knew Hamlet virtually by heart. He said, ‘you know I think you might get an education in America, just like the lieutenant said.’ And just like that he got me an admission to Grinnell college, to my astonishment I was admitted, but I have no money. I told Charlie Jordan, ‘I would do it, but I don’t have the money.’ To make a long story short, he got me a full scholarship to Grinnell College through the JDC, the Jewish Distribution Committee. I told the people last night that I owe them a great debt of gratitude, without them, I wouldn’t be here.

So, now I had been admitted to a college, I had a scholarship, so I was able to go. I got myself a job as a deck hand, on an American troop transporter, for General Gordon. To scrub the deck on this ship, that was taking the American soldiers’ home from the war, and I was going to college on a scholarship. So, I kissed my mother goodbye, and told her I was going to America. She was very nice about it, and followed me there two years later, like most Jewish parents would and they showed up in 1949, in New York.  I went to Grinnell College. I spent three very good years there, it is not very far from Toledo, I got a BA there, and then I went to Harvard where I got a PhD., again supported by the Hillel organization. From there I got a PhD. in International Affairs, and the rest is recent history, I built a good life here for myself. It took eighteen days to get to the United States, we passed Honolulu, which was still a territory, it wasn’t even a state yet. When I saw Hawaii, I said to myself that I must be in Heaven, it was not built up yet in 1947, it was pristine in its beauty. A few days later the ship docked under the golden arch, the golden gates of San Francisco. I don’t mind telling you. When I got off that boat, my knees gave way, and I went down and kissed the American soil. It took me a long time, but you see, the reality was not much different than the fantasy. I took a Greyhound bus all the way to Iowa. I remember when I went to my first college classes, I put a nice suit on, the only one I had, and walked into the class there, and twenty or twenty five kids were there, they were very nice and friendly, and that was a new experience for me, friendly fellow students that kind of took me in, and didn’t want to beat me up, because I was a Jew. In the back of the room there was this huge guy, a football player, with this helmet and I did not know who he was. He scared the Hell out of me because my relationship with helmets had not been that great you see. The professor walks in and the football player waves at him and says, ‘hello prof, how are you doing today?’ They were very friendly in Iowa, very American. I said oh my God, where have I landed. What kind of a planet is this? No student talked to a professor in Shanghai. I was back again and again the football player, again the hello prof. The second time around I had this kind of insight, I am free now, I can say what I want, and no Gestapo or KGB is going to show up at my door at 3 o’clock in the morning and take me away to a concentration camp or a Gulag.

But there is one part of the story I have not told you yet. My mother and I always wondered who these two Japanese consuls were, that helped us from Prague and the train, without which I would not be here either. Then it disappeared completely, decades passed, my mother died in 1992, still not knowing what happened or who they were. I finally found out last year, I had a speech in Kobe, Japan, the earthquake city, to the International Chamber of Commerce, and in the front row were several Japanese reporters, and it suddenly dawned on me that I could ask them to try and find these two consuls or their descendants, so I could say thank you for my life to them. I did that, and the Japanese were quite interested and collaborated, and one night a reporter from a leading newspaper in Japan called and said, ‘we know who gave you the transit visa to cross Japan.’ He said his name is Chiune Sugihara, he is famous, they planted a tree for him in Israel. Chiune Sugihara, had passed out hundreds of visas in Lithuania, he was posted to Prague for a few weeks, where he handed out a few hundred more, until he was called back to Japan, because he issued these visas against the expressed orders of the Tojo, the military government of Japan. I said, ‘who is this guy?’ I was told that he was a Buddhist that converted to Christianity and saved Jewish lives, how ecumenical can you get. He was known as a righteous gentile and they planted a tree for him, I did not know until last year that we were a recipient of one of his visas. I was sad because he died in 1986 in obscurity, and I could not thank anyone. So, I said, ‘what about the other one, Dr. Manaby from the Trans-Siberian train?’ He said, ‘we could not find him, but we will continue to look and let you know as soon as we do.’ So, I went back to Texas to teach my class. Two weeks later the phone rings, it is the same guy screaming into the phone, ‘we found him.’ ‘You found who,’ I questioned? I was half in my sleep asking. He responded, Dr. Manaby, and he is alive.’ He is eighty-nine years old; he lives in an attic in a suburb of Tokyo. The person said, ‘he does have a phone, here is his number, you can call him.’ Can you imagine this? I was shaking of course. Tokyo is fifteen hours ahead of Texas, so I waited, until a decent time and I called him, and there he was speaking fluent German, he remembered everything that happened more than fifty-four years ago, and we talked for quite a while. I told my wife, I am going to Tokyo now, I am not going to take a chance that he might not be around since he was eighty-nine years old. So, I took the non-stop flight from Dallas to Tokyo, wandered my way through their subway system, and I found him. I spent what was probably the most memorable week of my life with this man. A deeply spiritual man, that taught German Literature at Tokyo University, and after a week of learning to love this man, I asked him, ‘Dr. Manaby, why did you help us, they could have killed you, you could have lost your job?’ He said, ‘I never gave that any thought, it was just the right thing to do.’ He was one of those moral heroes like King Christian of Denmark, Bonhoeffer, Wallenberg, he was in that group of moral heroes that matter of factly said no to evil, risking his life, and aware of it, it was just the decent thing to do. He risked his life. I came back to Japan to honor him about this, we had a press conference, he got to see the emperor, and before he died, he was widely recognized as a rescuer, of Jewish people. We were not the only ones, he had smuggled, people into the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, and it became the largest orchestra in the world, because he was a music lover, he did what he could, he always wanted to do more, like Schindler he said, ‘if only I could have saved more.’ I told him, according to the Talmud, if you save one life, you save the world, it made him feel better.

I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington and inscribed him into the archives. The thing I can say is, I do not know any other survivor that has been able to say thank you to his rescuer in the flesh, most of these people have died. So, what do you do if you have this emotional debt to repay? They build museums, they endow scholarships, they do what they can. I had this incredible experience, and fifty years later I am hugging this man, like hugging my own father again, my grandparents again, and to be able to say thank you for my life, he appreciated this. It enriched him spiritually and it enriched me a great deal more. Today when I look back on my life, I would say this had to be the most important event in my life, to say thank you, to be able to say thank you, to this man. A wound open for fifty years healed a little bit, my grandparent’s death was a terrible wound, my father’s suicide was a terrible wound. I did something to make this man’s life a little nicer. I brought him to the attention of others, I expressed my gratitude, I hugged him, I made his life more comfortable, and I was able to repay an infinitesimal percentage of what he did for me. At last, I felt like I did something right, you know. Those of us that survived the Holocaust have this existential sense of guilt, why did I survive, why me? And being good to a man that helped me, after he discovered me, I discovered him. That guilt was assuaged to some extent. I found him, I went there for him, I didn’t have a speech, I went there for him, I did something right, for once, you know. That made me feel good about myself. Even though he died in April, I said. ‘Well, at least I had a year with him. Had I waited, I would have played the if only game, which you always lose.’ If there is an older person in your life that you owe some type of a debt, a parent, a teacher, a Rabbi, someone that meant something to you, don’t wait, get on the phone tomorrow. Better yet, go see that person, give them a hug, especially because they are probably lonely, old and frail. Do it now and it will enrich you as it enriched me. Maybe this is why I was given this opportunity, to spread this message, because old people in this country are lonely, in an old age home waiting to die, and he did that too. I found him in that attic, and for six months I made his life a little brighter, and that was important to me, more important than writing another book or giving another lecture. It was a spiritual experience I do not have words to describe it, it was nurturing in a way, a healing of the spirit. I am not an overly religious person; I am a spiritual person.

Life after Harvard was not a bed of roses. I think all Holocaust survivors are marked in some way. My professional life took off like a meteor, those of us that survived tried to make good, I got a PhD, a professorship at Hunter college, and at Columbia University, got a job in the United Nations, director of political affairs, it looked great on paper, great resume. My personal life was always a shipwreck. I was never able to really commit in a marriage, even though I was married twice, I could not really make it stick. The minute I loved somebody I was scared to death that I would lose them, I had to get an insurance policy, somebody else in case this one would die or leave, and women don’t like that kind of thing you know. So, my personal life has been from one shipwreck to another and what is seeing me through is my work. It is valuable and fulfilling, which probably is the price I had to pay, for having people wrenched out of my life at a very early age, which left a wound, that I was never able to fill really. Since the Dr. Manaby experience I feel more whole, I might be able to form a lasting relationship. My health is ok, and maybe there is still time to build one that will not be a shipwreck. I do not know anyone that has gone through this, that has not been scarred in some fashion. I teach through my experiences, which gives them conceptual setting, I tell them stories from my life. It brings it home to the students as a real-life experience and not an abstraction. I was in the second highest post in the United Nations under Waldheim, I worked with him for several years, we always spoke German, he was nice to me, I hated the fact that I was Jewish, because at eleven and twelve years old I was a pariah and left out of things. I shudder to think, It takes a lot of intestinal fortitude to stand up against this sort of mass hysteria, I remember it like it was yesterday. I am now involved in the Bosnian thing in a new book I am writing, I added a chapter about Bosnia, I went to Sarajevo, to see if there was a chance to bring indicted war criminals to trial, and I doubt it very much. Since I left the UN in 1974, I went back to teaching, writing books, and giving lectures. I am one of those lucky guys that loves what he does, it saved me. It is probably a wonder that I am not insane. I am writing my memoirs now, another year I will probably get it done.

When I fled through all these countries, I started feeling sorry for God, he sounded like an old general, always changing uniforms, because every country invoked his help. The Nazis had ‘God with us’, on their belt buckle, a German belt buckle even in the Wehrmacht. Everybody else did the same thing, God is on our side. I had a dream one night that God was an old general, with closets full of different uniforms and all he had time to do was change from one into the other, because everyone beseeched his help. For a while I didn’t go to synagogue anymore, I became an Agnostic, and I was deeply involved in the existentialist school of thought. That happened when my mother got Alzheimer’s and she didn’t remember who she was, who I was, and I remember she was over eighty-five and I found this very hard to accept that, my mother did not know who I was anymore, we had been very close. I went to a support group with six or eight other people in a similar fix. There was this Baptist minister and he was so, so, so mediocre, his approach, talking about the inscrutable will of God and after ten minutes I had enough, I said, ‘listen sir, I’ve got a new theory about God.’ He said, ‘what are you talking about?’ I said, ‘I think God made man and must have gotten tired on the fifth day, so he needed a nap,’ They looked at me like, who is this Jewish guy blaspheming? ‘So, he needed a nap, so he called an assistant God down and said, ‘why don’t you practice making a world while I take a nap. God went and took a nap, and the assistant was making the world. God wakes up from his nap and he looks at the world and says, ‘Oye Vey, what did you do here? Nothing works in this world, I’m leaving, you run this world.’ And we live in the world of the assistant God where nothing works. We have to invent ourselves all over again each day. It was the only way I could integrate my mother’s experience into some type of theological belief, so people go, how can you talk like this it is blasphemy, and what happened when the meeting broke up in discord, about two days later people individually called me up from the support group saying ‘Professor I have been thinking about your theory of an assistant God, would you care to have lunch with me?’ My theories of God are very unconventional. I have thought about it a great deal, I am a spiritual person, not a religious person, a spiritual person, I don’t go to synagogue, I think the Holocaust has made me an agnostic.

I think they should go after Nazi war criminals; they should certainly go after them because it is not a crime that is forgivable. It is so enormous there should not be a statute of limitations on it. They are still finding a few, here and there, it is not going to go on much longer, but I don’t think they should die, like Mengele died, while taking a swim, some place in Brazil, that’s not fair either is it? The collaborators should if not to be punished, should at least be told they did not behave very honorably. Ellie Wiesel wrote in ‘Night’, and I know him very well, it was almost impossible not to compromise yourself, because here you are you are starving, and his father was dying and the kapo said, ‘here eat his ration. What are you going to do waste it, he is going to die tomorrow? Ellie ate his father’s piece of bread and never got over it, to this day he feels the guilt of it, even though his father would have died, he still feels that guilt. I am glad I was spared this kind of thing.

In America I am not so worried about right wing extremists because, when you have kooks like this, the constitution cuts them down to size, when they get out of bounds, I think they will get resistance, like we are witnessing right now. Anyone who tries to become some right-wing maniac that wants to take over the county, they always get cut down by the constitution. I do worry about revisionist historians and Holocaust deniers because when all of us are gone, it could all look like Napoleon, not some lunatic like Hitler. My students get mixed up already between World War I and World War II. When I say the war they say, ‘which war, Korea? Vietnam?’ The revisionists are a danger and I think they should be exposed for who they are, which is charlatans, they are deniers, and they’re still around, and that should not be tolerated, and the only place it is a crime is Germany. You’re not allowed to do that; it is a crime there now.

If you look at Bosnia, they have not learned a thing in five hundred years. Others do, the Germans, the French, there has been no war in fifty years, that is progress. I think, if you learn at all, you learn through immediate tragic experience. Hopefully you have learned enough not to make the same stupid mistakes, hopefully Germany, has learned, they have been destroyed three times, they will probably not do this again. But then you look at the Serbs in Bosnia, why haven’t they learned in five hundred years? They are making the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again, from what I have seen recently. There are some that learn from extreme tragedy and some, like Bosnia, that haven’t learned anything. It is with deep astonishment that, people can learn nothing in half a millennium.

The most important lesson from the Holocaust is do not repeat it, it is said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. As painful as it is to learn about it, to study about it, to go to a museum, they must know. You have to expose them to it, as kind of an inoculation against it, like for cholera, they will not be immune to it. It is a very painful lesson, but I think you are doing the right thing to teach it, no doubt about it. I think it is the worst thing that ever happened, because there was no escape of any form, physically or spiritually. You see in the past during different times, under the Spanish Inquisition you could become a Christian, when there were Bolsheviks, you could become a Bolshevik. Through the Nazis, you could never become an Aryan, by blood you were tainted without recourse. You could not convert even if you wanted to. After 1941, it was almost impossible to get out, there was no escape, and the conjunction of no physical escape and no spiritual escape, resulted in six million dead, and that is why it was the worst thing that ever happened. In history usually one of these escape routes is kept open, this time both were closed simultaneously.