Remembering Neighbours and Here We Are

There is a photo of my father in my kitchen, it shows him in the early fifties of the last century (or sometime round then), sitting amidst a set of rubbish bins (garbage cans if you're American) reading a script.  The bins say "Unity". A friend admired the picture and asked where I had bought it.  She said she wanted a picture like that for her house, so I told her that it wasn't bought, it was a picture of my father, Heinz Bernard, who was then the manager of a communist party affiliated theatre in London, called Unity Theatre.
Needless to say she hadn't heard of Unity but when I told her that he had appeared in two legendary Israeli Educational TV series, Neighbours and Here We Are, she immediately knew who he was.
In the late 'Seventies and 'Eighties there was only one TV channel in Israel and each of the two series was shown twice a week. They were so popular that they were shown for seventeen years.  Long after Israeli TV broadcast in colour, the two black and white series were still being shown.  That was a age before "celebrities" - many of them people who are famous for being famous - but Heinz, (my father), could not walk down the street without being recognized, and sometimes being mobbed by children.  Very few knew his name, but the entire country knew who he was.  In Neighbours (which was written by my mother), he was "Mr Cohen" and in Here We Are, he was "Dr Sharoni".

Heinz wasn't the only former leftist or top-flight  actor in the two series. Peter Frye, who played "Mr Kashdan" in Here We Are, had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Sarah Amman, who played the doll "Susie Surprise", had been a dancer on Broadway, and the director, Maxine Ellis, came from Beverly Hills, and was the widow of a Hollywood director who had been blacklisted by McCarthy. Thelma Ruby, who played Bella and was coincidentally married to Peter Frye, went on to have a successful career in the West End. The music, which remains popular, was a key component of the success and was written by a former employee of "Sesame Street".

To see the opening of Neighbours: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH58fJxiKqE
of Here We Are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13E9ihrXt6I&feature=related

Educational TV's site allows some episodes to be viewed:
Here We Are: http://www.23tv.co.il/358-he/Tachi.aspx
Neighbours: http://www.23tv.co.il/318-he/Tachi.aspx

The Journey of a Lifetime: my grandmother's escape on the Trans-Siberian railway

My grandmother, Betty Löwenstein (maiden name Ehrlich), escaped Germany by fleeing east and caught one of the last Trans-Siberian trains before the Nazi invasion of Russia. Her aim was to join her brothers in Reading, Pennsylvania. Family legend has it that as she caught the train to leave Germany, a woman handed her a baby to take with her.

The distance from Berlin to Reading is about 6,000 kilometers. The path Betty took to reach her destination was in excess of 24,000 kilometers.

I should add that her husband committed suicide in 1932. Though there may be some question marks over exactly how that happened to him. I have his death certificate here.

Max Lowenstein death certificate

My father left Germany on the 28th of August 1939. three days before the invasion of Poland and 4 days after the signing of the Molotov Pact between Germany and the USSR. He was fifteen and flew to Britain - my grandmother told my mother she sent him by plane to ensure that he arrived safely (he was using a Polish passport).
They were due to meet up and travel together from Britain to the USA, but she was delayed and his departure was urgent. On the day of the invasion she tried to leave Germany for Britain but was turned back as war had been declared. She remained trapped in Germany for another year which she spent trying to obtain visas for a journey out of Europe to the East. 

 

I don't know when she decided to leave Germany from the East, but in April she got a visa for the USSR, 9 months after the start of the war. In May Germany conquered Holland and Belgium and invaded France (which fell by June 1940). 

On the 10th of May 1940 she got a visa for the USA. Getting a visa for the USA was extremely hard in those days, especially for Jews, but her brothers had migrated a couple of years earlier. 

  

US Visa, issued May 10 1940

 She got her Japanese visa in Hamburg on July 3rd 1940 and the next day (4th of July) she got a visa for "Manchuko": Japanese-occupied China.

Japanese visa, issued 3 July 1940

My grandmother wrote an account of her journey as part of her citizenship training for the USA and I have attached it as a jpg at the end of this blog. 

In her account, she says she travelled to Koenigsburg, now called Kaliningrad. The left visa page in the image above has her exit stamp and shows she flew from Koenigsburg airport on the 3rd of August 1940 (Wikipedia says it is one of the oldest passenger airports in the world). She flew from there to Moscow because she hadn't managed to obtain a Latvian visa: The USSR had invaded Latvia 5 weeks earlier in late June 1940. 

I checked this journey on the Eurorail site: They recommend a train to Prague where you take a train to Warsaw, from Warsaw you take a train to Vilnius in Latvia and from there you can get a train to Kaliningrad. It takes two days.

 

1,000km train ride followed by a 1,000km,  7 hour flight in a thunderstorm

 

 

 

Soviet visa, issued 11 April 1940

From Moscow she took the Trans-Siberian railway - a 9,000 kilometer journey. She wasn't allowed to take any money out of Germany (there was a ban on Jews taking money or goods) so she paid for the whole thing in advance and was given vouchers to use on the train. Jews who had a visa to leave Germany could count on help from Jewish charities who would pay their travel and provide for them on the way.

The mathematician Kurt Godel followed a similar route at roughly the same time. He wasn't Jewish so he went through Latvia. Who knows maybe they met on the train. My grandmother took the Trans-Manchurian line (see a map) and left the train at Harbin in Manchuko (Japanese occupied China) while Godel seems to have taken another branch which arrived at Vladivostok. The Trans-Siberian took her 9 days. She says conditions on the train were harsh and alleviated only by the incredible scenery (see the modern site).

There were a lot of Jews living in Harbin. One of them was called Olmert and his grandson became prime-minister of Israel. There is a lovely internet exhibition on the Jews of Harbin and there is a museum in Harbin telling the Jewish story.

 

Manchuko visa, issued 4 July 1940

Betty Lowenstein (my grandmother) says there was cholera in Harbin in 1940, and that it was killing 150 people every day. We now know that the Japanese biological warfare program ("Unit 731") was based in Harbin and they were artificially inducing cholera. See http://www.ww2pacific.com/unit731.html.

She travelled from Harbin overland for two and a half weeks to "Fusan", which I think is Fusan in South Korea (now called Busan), then Japanese occupied. That's over 1,200 kilometers through Japanese-occupied China. I found accounts of two or three other people who took the route, so I assume it was a standard route. Apparently there was a single train from Harbin in Northern China which went down to Busan at the the Southern tip of Korea. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyeongbu_Line.

From Busan she sailed to Kobe in Japan. Apparently there was a Jewish community in Kobe and these helped Jews arriving from Germany. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was providing funds for Jewish refugees (though she says nothing about this), so once she got to Kobe she was safe. 

1,250km train ride from Harbin to southern tip of Korea, followed by 500km journey to Kobe

 

In 2021, a signboard was erected in Kobe commemorating the Jews who escaped through Japan: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14039425. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Kobe.

Betty left Kobe on the 15th of August 1940, arriving in Seattle two weeks later. I found the manifest of the ship she arrived on. It was called the Heian Maru (it has a Wikipedia page) and arrived 29 August 1940, about half the passengers were Jewish refugees. She gave her occupation as 'Housewife' and her nationality as 'German'. Jewish passengers often gave their nationality as "Jew" or "Hebrew". She evidently had a strong German identity, if after all those years of persecution she still called herself a German.

Manifest of the ship she arrived on., look for Betty Lowenstein on the list

 

The date of her arrival in the USA was exactly one year and one day after her son Heinz arrived in England.

8,000km journey from Kobe to Seattle

From Seattle, Betty got a bus to Reading, Pennsylvania. I looked this bus journey up on the Greyhound website. Today (2010) it's a three-day journey costing 234 dollars. Greyhound puts the distance as 5,000 kilometers. Seattle is on the Pacific coast while Reading is close to New York on the Atlantic coast.

I assume her brothers were in Reading.

Altogether, the journey of a lifetime. Perhaps one day I can recreate it.

The distance from Berlin to Reading is about 6,000 kilometers. The path Betty took to reach her destination was more than 24,000 kilometers. 

 5,000km bus journey across the USA

 

The text she wrote is undated. She was naturalized in 1946, and the essay appears to have been written as part of her preparations for American citizenship. So it probably dates from between 1941 to 1946 and is reasonably accurate. 

 

USA naturalization certificate

 

My grandmother with her precise documentation has left something for posterity. Her account of her journey is so remarkable that it should probably be typed and uploaded to the internet.

Betty had sent her son to England on the 28th of August 1939, intending to join him three days later. Instead it took her a year to reach the USA, arriving on the 19th of August 1940. 

In June 1941 Germany invaded the USSR and this route closed. Six months later Japan attacked the USA and the Pacific end must have been cut. 

For further information and account of how her son was saved see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Bernard. This is also a remarkable story. 

This page from the US Holocaust Museum tells how 2,200 Polish Jews escaped over the Trans-Siberian: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005588

A personal account by someone else who followed this route: http://www.rijo.homepage.t-online.de/pdf_2/EN_DE_JU_eastern_route.pdf

Betty Lowenstein's hand-typed account of her journey

More passport photos

My other passport is with Mossad

My daughter just got her first passport and now I am faced with the decision of whether I should try and get her a British passport too.  My son has three passports: British, US and Israeli (his mother is American).  It's fine as long as they don't all start requiring compulsory military service or taxes.  At this stage he's too young for the Mossad to send his doubles (or in his case trebles) to Dubai.  I somehow avoided this fate, probably because my surname "Lowenstein" is too obviously Jewish (it isn't Jewish). 

Passports are a big deal here in Israel.  Our passports won't get you into many places.  My British passport enables me to freely trek or work round Europe and, no less importantly, it gives me visaless entry to the USA. An Israeli wanting to travel to the USA has to queue for hours at the US Embassy where each applicant is personally interviewed to check they are neither a terrorist or someone trying to illegally emigrate.

On my occasional jaunts to Egypt and Jordan I prefer to enter with my British passport in the almost-certainly-false belief that being a Brit will somehow afford me extra protection.

Since the EU started to spread across Eastern Europe a lot of Israelis are rediscovering their Bulgarian, Polish etc. roots and trying to obtain local passports.  There may also be the distant memory of the holocaust when passports could be a ticket to life.  Raul Wallenberg famously saved thousands of Jews by handing out Swedish passports.

My father had passport troubles. He was born in Nurenburg in Germany and his parents were Polish immigrants to Germany. In 1938 the Nazis cancelled the German citizenship of all such German-Poles. 

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 He was adopted by a German (-Jewish) family so it took them a bit longer to get round to him, but eventually even adopted children were traced. His (adopted) mother had to get him a fake Polish passport to enable him to leave Germany because he wasn't entitled to any passport. The German system at the time was simply to deport such Jews to Poland. The Poles refused to accept them, saying they were Germans, and about 17,000 Jews starved to death in a small space between the two countries (see Herschel Grynszpan for more information, see this too). 

You can see my grandmother's passport at the side.

When my father reached England (3 days before the outbreak of World War II) he stayed there as a non-citizen.  He used a UN refugee document to travel for the next 30 odd years and only took out British citizenship in 1969 when he decided to emigrate to Israel.  By that time he had a whole British family.  Obviously he was afraid the British wouldn't take him back. He then did the same thing in Israel, living there for ten years without taking out a passport.  It caused me a lot of trouble years later when I decided to live in Israel: they couldn't decide if I was an Israeli citizen or not.  They eventually decided I wasn't.

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A few years ago my cousin applied for a German passport on the basis that her mother (my father's real sister) had been a German citizen before the war and was rejected because her mother "wasn't a German citizen".  Which I find very irritating.  Her mother was born a German citizen in Germany and it was only the Nazis who cancelled her citizenship.  Needless to say if she applied for Polish citizenship they would reject her because her mother was German.

Incidentally while my son does have a British passport his children will only be British if they are born in Britain.  The Israelis will take him wherever he is.

    

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