Escape from Hell

Forced to leave their country In their own voices, twentieth-century Germans tell why and how they escaped to America. The 1920s immigrants left because of the hard times after the First World War and the poverty from living on farms of ten acres or less. An apprentice tells of getting 10,000 Mark tip for delivering a cabinet. He decides to ride the train once instead of walking home. "They laughed at me at the train station. The bill wouldn't even buy a roll at the bakery." Such was the inflation. A woman escapes the hard physical field work expected by German farmers. She becomes a maid, first in Germany and then in New York City. In the United States, the F.B.I. rounds up Germans who have not yet become citizens. Even German Jews who had fled the Nazis are grilled by the FBI. A boy, born in the U.S., tells of being sent with his family to an internment camp in Texas and then to Germany as part of a prisoner exchange. After Hitler takes power in 1933, Jews are forced gradually to relinquish their identification as Germans, not Jews. A woman tells of her illegal five-year sexual relationship with a Gentile, only escaping in 1938. The Nazis fear sexual contacts between Jews and Gentiles. Jews could only hire Gentile maids if they were older than 45. An eighteen-year-old is arrested on Crystal Night with all other Jewish men and shipped to the Dachau concentration camp. The SS do everything to humiliate him and get him to leave Germany. His mother fortunately finds an American relative who can supply an affidavit of financial support. This gains him release. The 1938 Crystal Night destruction of synagogues and businesses and the arrest of all males creates panic, but America's quota for German immigrants is for the first time filled. Those who didn't get a low number and submit affidavits at American consulates are doomed, deported to the East and death after December 1941. The few to survive the ensuing Holocaust testify of heartbreaking experiences. One woman tells of the horror of returning to her hometown where all the Jews are gone. "You know every house and every stone, but the people you grew up with are all gone. It's a terrible feeling." Germans on the home front endure the Allied carpet bombing of the cities. The incendiary bombs wreck havoc. A fifteen-year-old tells of joining the thousands to fight the raging fires in Munich. He is subsequently drafted in the army, but he joins his friends and sneaks home to avoid being shot as a deserter. War's end is known as "Time Zero." Housing was destroyed and there was little food and fuel. Tobacco is so valuable that cigarette butts discarded by American soldiers are scooped up by boys to manufacture "new" cigarettes for sale on the black market. Germans raid U.S. garbage cans. A woman falls in live with an American soldier and comes to live in America as a "war bride." Unfortunately, she is imbued with the German idea that work is important. As a soldier, his views on work couldn't be discerned by her, and like so many such marriages, the culture conflict ends in divorce. Millions of Germans flee by wagon train from their centuries-old settlements in Eastern Europe to crowd into postwar Germany. The Red Army forces some to return to Romania, to homes taken over by others and to live in privation under communism. One young man admits, "When you have no food to eat, you are not ashamed to beg." Almost all of the escapees come to America penniless. Even the children of the immigrants have a hard time, because Americans often see them as German enemies. The stories of overcoming adversity are inspiring. German Jews find hatreds by Yiddish-speaking Jews who feel that those who can't speak Yiddish are really Germans. The children of both Jews and Gentiles often learn German as their first language as Americans. A boy stands up to the FBI who come to confiscate family cameras and books, telling them he is a citizen and they can't take away his to