Herbert Weiss 's autobiog (abbreviated) sent me Oct 30, 2003
Herbert's father (Armin) was the brother of Martin's grandfather George - anamolous characters exist in the narrative as a result of email seams
Dear friends:
Enclosed is a description of my life-experiences as far as I can
remember. I hope, you will find it interesting. all the best,
Herb Weiss.
Autobiography of Herbert Weiss.
It has been my intention to put down in words my experience of life.
Now that I am over 80 year of age, the task becomes more urgent if I want to
finish it. I was born on July 23, 1920 in Vienna, Austria and lived in that city
until May 1939 in the same apartment in Rechte Bahngasse 12. In the same
building were Walter Feistritzer, the janitor’s son and Ilse Cyganek, both of
them my age and my friends. After the German Anschluss, Walter became a Nazi and SA
man, which of course ended our friendship. I had two first cousins on my
father’s side, Peter (the son of George, my father’s brother), about two years
older and Renee (the daughter of Siegfried, the second of my father’s brothers)
almost exactly my age. We were also the best of friends and met frequently.
I went to the nearby elementary school in Strohgasse for 4 years and
then to the Realgymnasium ( the Austrian equivalent of high school) in the
Stubenbastei for the required 8 years. My father, who had owned an
embroidery factory before the first world war, had to sell it in order to enter the
Austrian Army as a lieutenant (since he was a reserve officer). After the war, he found
jobs as a bookkeeper and eventually as a salesman of life insurance, nothing
to give us luxuries. So we led a rather frugal life.
In high school I was a fairly good student in the subjects of Latin and
Mathematics, I was a mediocre one in French and my cousin Franzi
Schapira helped me with that language. An aunt of mine, aunt Kathe Bondy who was a teacher of English gave me lessons in that language (which was not the required
language in the high school). As a fairly young boy I joined the boy scouts, together with my cousin Peter, partly under the leadership of Hans Schapira, Franzi’s brother.We
went to several summer camps, Litschau, and Fernsee. In 1937 I was advanced to
be an assistant group leader of the scout troupe. My mother’s family was mainly in Czechoslovakia, she had several sisters and brothers and I visited them and their families one Summer in Prag and Teplitz and Karlsbad. One Summer when I was about 14 I was invited to visit a Hungarian family to speak German to their children, Renee was invited to a different family and we set out together and were picked up at the railroad station with
bicycles, which I didn’t know how to ride, but I soon learned.
Then came the various political events in Austria, the failed revolution by the worker’s party, the assassination of the Chancellor Dollfuss and eventually the ultimatum to Chancellor Schuschnik and the German Anschluss in March 1938.Times became very dangerous for Jews; fortunately, our janitor, Mr. Feistritzer, when questioned,denied that Jews lived in that apartment building.
My cousin Peter and one of the boy scouts, Paul Brunner escaped by crossing the German-Belgian border into Belgium, where they were assisted by the scouts and housed in a camp in Merxplas. I was in my last year of high school to graduate in May, but in April of that year all Jewish students of our high school were transferred to another Realgymnasium in the 2 nd district of Vienna, which had been preponderantly Jewish. I eventually passed the required test and made Matura (graduated) in 1938.
Now came the difficult time of finding a way to leave Austria, because it had
become impossible for Jews to live there. Most countries required a financial
security which my parents didn’t have. My mother’s brother, Max,
who had lived in New York since the first world war, worked for Mr. Brunswick,
the owner of a phonograph record company and got him to write the required
“affidavitâ€that we wouldn’t be a burden to the US. Another of my mother’s
brothers, Hugo, had a Summer home for people who came to Karlsbad (in
Czechoslovakia) for the water cure. One of his tenants was Mr. Jules Bache, the Wall street broker who wrote an affidavit for me. Now, all we had to do was wait for the
quota to be supplied with a visa.
After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Germans one of my cousins emigrated to England and after realizing that she had left some jewelery behind, came back to Prag and was never heard from again. Only one of my mother’s 6 sisters and brothers and her family survived, the rest didn’t. In 1939, England permitted people of my age group, who had to wait for their visa, to go to England and wait there until the quota permitted them to have the visa. So with tears in my eyes I left my parents at the Westbahnhof
(West railway station)and went to England by railroad through Belgium and eventually by ship to the coast of England and we arrived in the Kitchener Camp in Richborough, near a town of Sandwich, close to the Seacoast towns of Margate and Ramsgate. I was housed together with about 20 other refugees in one of their huts. We were asked to contribute some work, I helped building more huts for future refugees, for which I was paid sixpence per week.This was my first contact with people who had been released from concentration camps and our first knowledge of the terrible life they were forced to lead. Since I was
one of the few people being able to speak English I was also asked to be a guide to
the English visitors who came to see our camp frequently. For that service I usually received tips. The supervisors of the camp were two brothers with the names of
Mays. They also taught us, what they thought were useful things for our future
in America or other foreign countries. One of the things they taught us was a
song (obviously the words changed slightly maybe due to their attitudes as
Englishmen vs Americans): John Brown’s body has a pimple on his nose...
As Europe became engulfed in the war with Germany, the camp of Merxplas was emptied of refugees who were sent to the Kitchener Camp. Among others, my cousin Peter and one of his cousins, Walter Fuerst were sent to our camp and we all volunteered to work with the kitchen and the distribution of food in the dining hall, all for sixpence a week. We were pretty free in the camp, several times a week we walked to nearby Sandwich for “tea and crumpetsâ€. We also took several trips; on one, after borrowing bicycles we went to Canterbury, another time we took the train to London to visit relatives: Who they were, I
cannot recall at the moment but one time we visited my cousin Renee. This was also the time of the Blitzkrieg where London was bombed. Eventually, we saw the rockets from the battle of Dunkirk and the decision was made to evacuate the camp. At that time (March 1940), Peter, myself and several other occupants of the camp received our visa to the United States. The camp was transported to the Isle of Man, except the lucky ones with visa and ship tickets, such as myself, who stayed behind in Liverpool to wait for the ship. For lack of better accommodations we were housed in the police prison where we stayed for a few days.Then dirty and unshaven we entered the ship and soon mixed with the other passengers. This was a convoy with two passenger ships and a cruiser in
between to protect us from the prevailing German submarines. Rumors had it that
the other ship carried the gold of Holland. Many of the passengers became
seasick; I didn’t until one day when I forgot to shave and went back to my cabin
at a lower floor and looking into the mirror while the ship shook from end to end,
I became sick myself. We landed in Halifax where the cargoes were unloaded and
then went on the St. Lawrence river to Montreal. After a night’s stay at a hotel we
went by Greyhound bus to New York.So, contrary to the experience of most
immigrants who saw the statue of liberty on their travel to America, I never saw that statue until many years later, My parents had meanwhile arrived in this country in December 1939 and found a position as a “couple†my father a butler, my mother a cook, in Connecticut. Peter’s parents lived in Washington Heights (NY) and Peter moved in with them while I rented a room owned by their homeowner’s’ relatives two city blocks from them. After a short visit with my parents, Peter and I found jobs in Long Island City at the Murida Hotel, he in the bakery, I as a pot washer. Our salaries were $30 per month and room and board.
My English started improving a bit, although I remember a situation where one of the waitresses was up on a ladder to take some dishes down from the cupbords and said to me: Herbert, will you give me a hand. Obviously, that was an idiom I didn’t understand and proceeded to hold her hand full of dishes. On our off hours we went to the beach where we met a Mrs. Wertheimer from Vienna and her two daughters Eva and Linda for nice social contacts. At the end of the Summer I found employment at a zipper factory and
later on as an elevator operator, for the minimum wage of 30 c /hour. I don’t
recall exactly about Peter, but he found employment in another state. My father’s brother, Renee’s father, in Boston asked him and my mother to move there promising him employment. I suspect now, that what he had in mind was to work for him, selling insurance. We all moved to Boston, Massachusetts, renting an apartment in the same building as Renee’s parents. Renee lived there too. Unfortunately, my father was almost immediately after our move diagnosed with having tuberculosis and had to go to a sanatorium where he lived for two years and died. My mother and I depended on other relatives of the patients for rides to the place, although I frequently took a bus to it, near
Worcester.This country meanwhile was at war with Japan and Germany, but I was released from my duties (partly for a previously broken leg with metal brackets and
partly to take care of my mother, who also had a small job taking care of some
children in a family). Renee and her fiance Egon, joined the American armed forces.
I got a job in a factory for band -aids and mothballs, and eventually, Peter worked there too until he too joined the American army. I found other employment in a factory making oil filters. All the time, I had hoped to be able to study engineering at night, but the Massachusetts colleges and Universities didn’t have any degree programs in their night schools in engineering which I had intended to study. A Jewish committee advised me to study the two- year course at the Lowell Institute School, MIT’s night school.
After graduation I was hired at MIT to help build high-voltage x-ray generators, one of which had been installed at the Massachusetts General hospital, and another one I
helped install at the Oncologic Hospital in Philadelphia (today’s Fox-Chase) I studied graduate courses at the Lowell Institute School and Northeastern University at night. I had a hobby, doing photography and I belonged to a camera club in Boston, where I used their facilities. They planned to spend the 4th of July weekend in Rangley Lakes, Maine and I decided to participate in that. In those days of black and white photography retouching was an important skill and Louise Milonthaler, a professional retoucher decided to join the group to meet photographers for business reasons. She invited her friend Gertrude
Braunstein to come along. Gert and I met, dated and eventually decided to get married on
the following Independence day 1952.. We purchased a house in Natick, MA and bought the minimum of furniture, all we could afford. Our honeymoon was on Nantucket Island. I got a job offer from Raytheon,which hired engineers at that time without degrees to work on their Radar systems, and accepted it, leaving my position at MIT. I started work at the same time as the technician Dennis Piccard, who became a good friend of mine and who eventually became Raytheon’s CEO. About four years after our marriage Gert delivered Ellen,our pride and joy.
General Electric Co in Utica New York promised me that Syracuse University would give me a degree if I studied there at night. I accepted the job and and my family and I moved to Utica, NY.In a little over two years received a Master’s degree in Engineering.We had taken my mother along, but after a while, she needed nursing home care and we had to put her in one of Utica’s homes, where she lived for many years until she died. Utica was not a bad place to live, although the weather at times turned pretty ugly, once a snowfall of 30 inches in a day. We bought camping equipment and spent many of our vacations in the Adirondacks, on Prince Edwards Island, Nova Scotia, and Maine. Ellen
who was three when we came to Utica, became an avid camper.We became friendly
with our neighbors, most of them one family and Ellen became friendly too with their children, especially with ChristineCole.
After 7 years I was transferred to GE in Valley Forge to work on their manned orbital program, MOL,which unfortunately was canceled by the government, forcing me to find work, eventually at Western Union in Mahwah, NJ and RCA, in Moorestown, NJ where I stayed until retirement. At the time of my retirement RCA had been made a subsisidiary company of General Electric so I am really retired from GE and my pension is being paid for by that company., Of course, every time we moved, Ellen had to change school and she eventually graduated in Oakland, NJ just before we moved to Marlton NJ for my RCA job. I had been living in the Southern part of New Jersey for a year, just coming home over
weekends.
I don’t recall Ellen’s high school graduation, I was told that I had to stay home and wait for the movers. Elllen graduated from “Franklin and Marshallâ€University and eventually received a PhD in biology from the University of Tennessee. She is a scientist at the University of NC.Her husband, Shoji, works in the same biology laboratory. After Gert was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease we moved into another one-story house in Mt. Laurel, the “Holiday Villageâ€, a retirement community. Unfortunately, after a few years Gert’s health deteriorated so that she had to move into a nursing home, where she eventually died after several rather unpleasant years for both of us and her family. After several years of living by myself at the Holiday village I moved to a condominium apartment in Cherry Hill where a friend of mine, Ruth Lewis owns another apartment. We plan many entertainments and trips together, we belong to several groups, the local Bnai Brith group (I had belonged to Bnai Brith when I lived in Mt. Laurel and was active in that group as a vice president) and we participate in many of their sponsored events and trips. In the last two years we had participated in several cruises, one to Alaska, another to the Mediterranean, which included a trip to Greece and another to Rome, where we visited the Vatican among others. this Fall we intend to participate in a cruise to the Caribbean.
Still, my main hobby is photography, I have changed cameras several times and also participated in various photography shows. Some of my photos have won prizes and I am trying to improve my photos, using my computer and other means. Several of my photos adorn the walls of my apartment.
Herbert R. Weiss
