Holocaust survivor among Aero protestors

She wants to build bridges instead of walls

By Lee Raynor
Editor

Posted: 11:00 PM EST Friday January 06, 2006

Hedy Epstein is a tiny Jewish woman, an 81-year-young bundle of energy, enthusiasm and dedication. Her face glows. Her smile is radiant. Her childhood was a nightmare of the highest caliber. She’s a holocaust survivor.

Her name was Hedy Wachenheimer in January 1933 when Adolph Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers Party took over Germany. She lived with her parents Ella and Hugo in Kippenheim, a village in Germany’s Black Forest. Her father and uncle owned a dry goods business founded in 1858 by Hedy’s grandfather.

“I remember my parents talking about Hitler,” Hedy said. “They hoped he wouldn’t come to power and if he did, he wouldn’t remain in power very long.”

Hedy’s childhood and early teen years under Nazi rule provided the foundation for her anti-torture

activism today. She began protesting torture and wars when she was only 17.

“You don’t build walls, you build bridges,” she said. “When you build walls, you stop communicating. We need to communicate with each other. We need to get to know each other. And when we do, maybe then we won’t hurt each other. But as long as we don’t know each other, then we have stereotypes and images.”

After it became apparent that Hitler was not about to loosen his iron grip on Germany, Hedy’s parents desperately tried to leave the country. They would go anywhere except Palestine. The Wachenheimers were ardent anti-Zionists, a term whose definition has altered slightly over the decades.

Hedy, an only child, was 8 on the day she learned what it meant to be a Jew in Germany.

“On Nov. 10, 1938, which was Kristollnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass, was the first major act of persecution by the Nazis of Jews in Germany and Austria, which was already annexed to Germany,” she said. “The first thing that happened, the principal came into the classroom, pointed his finger at me – and I was the only Jewish child in the class – and said, ‘Get out, you dirty Jew!’”

What Hedy did not know at that moment was that all Jewish children, whether in public or private schools, no longer were allowed to attend school.

On Kristollnacht, Hitler’s stormtroopers swept through Germany. They torched 1,000 Jewish synagogues, ransacked 7,500 homes and businesses owned by Jews, assaulted Jewish men. They herded 30,000 other male Jews into concentration camps, to stay until their families could ransom them.

Kristollnacht, a lovely word with a horrific definition, took its name from the shards of glass that remained in the streets after the Nazi SA and SS shattered the windows of Jewish homes and businesses.

When Hedy arrived home from school, her house had been vandalized. Her father had been arrested.

“He was still in his pajamas when he was arrested,” she said. “It was a very cold day. Sunny, but it was a cold day. They wouldn’t give him a chance to get dressed, or even put a coat on. Just imagine standing outside where we were this morning in your pajamas and slippers.”

Hedy had not been home long when she saw all the Jewish men in the village, even boys of 16, being marched down the street. Among them were Hedy’s father, uncle and many others she knew well.

“Where were they going? When would they be coming back home?” she wondered. “There was no answer.”

Hedy and her mother had no idea for two weeks where Hugo Wachenheimer was, or even if he was still alive. Then they received a postcard from Dachau, the infamous concentration camp. The postcard contained the rules Hedy and her mother would have to follow: They could not visit. They could not send money. They could not send letters that contained more than 15 lines of writing and the words must be legible to prison officials.

Ella Wachenheimer decided to visit the Gestapo office.

“I begged her, ‘Please don’t go. If you go, and they keep you, I won’t have a mother and I won’t have a father,’” Hedy said. “My mother explained that it was important to go. Maybe we could bring about the release of my father and the others.”

Hugo Wachenheimer finally came home, after four weeks and one day, a broken man.

The family’s efforts to leave Germany resumed, intensified a thousand fold.

The imprisonment of Jewish men had delivered the Nazi message: If you don’t leave, we’re going to do this again and if we do, you won’t get out next time.

Despite their efforts, immigration restrictions in countries throughout the world kept the family in Germany. The Wachenheimers, desperate by this time, decided they would leave one at a time. Each would follow the other as soon as they could.

Hedy was able to get out of Germany, with 500 other Jewish children, on May 18, 1939 aboard Kindertransport, a children’s railroad transport to England. The youngest children on the train with Hedy were six-week old twins. The oldest was 17.HeHHe Kindertransport eventually removed 10,000 Jewish children from Germany before World War II began. Some were placed in institutions. Others went into English foster homes.

Hedy attended school until she was 16. Then she had to go to work. Her first job was as a companion to a 14-year-old girl.

“By sending me away, my parents literally gave me life a second time,” she said. “Had they not done so, my fate would have been the same as theirs.”

Hedy’s family was deported to concentration camps in German-controlled France on Oct. 22, 1940. She never saw them again. Her mother and father were sent to separate camps. They were allowed to write to her – one page a week. She never knew the hellish conditions of the camps until much later. The last card she received from her mother was dated Sept. 4, 1942. It read, “Traveling to the east ... Sending you a final goodbye."

In late 1942, her father was sent to Auschwitz where he died.

“And so were all my other family members,” she said. “Those that went to France died there and were maybe spared the remainder of agony and pain and torture.”

Hedy returned to Germany at the end of the war and to work for the U.S. government. She began in the U.S. Civil Censorship Division. Later, she worked at the Nuremberg Medical Trial, which tried the doctors accused of performing medical experiments on concentration camp inmates. Part of her reason for returning to Germany was to find her family. Her research led to records that showed her father went to Auschwitz on Aug. 19, 1942. In 1982, she found a book that contained a list compiled by the Nazis with the names of the people sent to death camps. Her mother’s name, and those of other family members, was on the list.

Hedy came to the United States in May 1948. Her mother’s brother and his wife – her only living relatives – had arrived in the U.S. in 1938. They became her sponsors. She eventually married an American physicist and moved to St. Louis, Mo., where she lives today.