Lola

Two Histories, One Shared Life

An Interview with Jack & Terri

A Home in the Forest

Leslie: Today I’m in Florida’s capital, Tallahassee, where I’m meeting a couple of Holocaust survivors who chose to make their home deep in the forest. Terri was born in 1925 in Germany and her husband Jack in 1938 in Greece.

Leslie: Hi Jack.

Jack: Hello Leslie.

Leslie: How are you?

Speaker unconfirmed: Nice to meet you. How are you? Nice to meet you. How are you? I’m fine. You’re fine. You can see we love nature.

Leslie: I love it. It’s gorgeous. And this house Yeah, it’s amazing.

Leslie: Jack and Terri built this house in the 1970s. Long before people talked about protecting the environment, they were already living in harmony with nature.

Leslie: Hi, Terri. How are you? My name is Leslie.

Terri: Yeah.

Leslie: Nice to meet you.

Terri: Nice to meet you.

Leslie: Terri, I was admiring the house. Yeah. And your husband was telling me that it was your idea initially.

Terri: Probably.

Leslie: It’s so like avanguard. Like he said that you cared a lot for the environment, for the plants, and everything.

Terri: There’s a lake down there.

Leslie: There’s a lake right here.

Jack: That’s Lake Lafayette. She walked into Reagan’s White House. She managed to get the Justice Department to come here and defend the lake.

Terri’s Childhood in Germany

Leslie: Terri grew up in Halberstadt, a small town at the foot of the Harz Mountains. In 1933, Hitler’s rise to power turned her life upside down. Her brother and sister left for Berlin while she remained alone with her divorced mother.

Leslie: When did you realize that really Jews were Hitler’s target?

Terri: Very clear from the beginning.

Leslie: So what what was he saying for example?

Terri: Okay, I’ll sing you a song.

[Song lyrics are not included in the supplied captions.]

Leslie: These lyrics were part of anti-semitic chance used in Nazi propaganda and sung by the Hitler youth in the 30s.

Leslie: Do you remember being scared when you saw things changing?

Terri: We were always scared. [Brief interjection; speaker unclear.] My mother took me to the piano teacher and she said she didn’t teach any Jewish children. Just like that, she wouldn’t even let us inside her door.

Terri: Jews could no longer go to regular schools. They had to have their own schools. My mother had a store, a clothing store for women. It was very successful. She was a very successful woman. And the SS used to come in, you know, in their black uniforms. They would actually come in and try and shoo people out and say, “Aren’t you ashamed to buy from Jews?”

Terri: Not far from our store. There was a bakery. But every store had a sign, Jews forbidden.

The Arrest of Her Mother

Terri: And um one night we were sitting down to dinner. My mother was preparing dinner. There was a knock on the door. There were two SS men in the black uniforms came to pick up my mother. The next morning, my mother had not come back. And uh so I went to the police station to look for her and I said I came to see my mother. He said they’re all gone. And closed the door.

Terri: They never saw her again.

Leslie: Terri was only 13 when her mother was deported to Ravensbrück. For a few months, she stayed behind helping her stepfather run the family shop.

Terri: When they came for me to arrest me and my cousin was in the room and he said, “Look, I don’t know what you want from my cousin. She’s just a child. It’s just I was supposed to have defamed the third

Terri: rice.”

Leslie: defame the Third Reich by doing what?

Terri: By saying something derogatory about they don’t know what they’re doing. Well, they weren’t taking children at that point. That was the one good thing and uh they let me go. I found out much later that there was a couple that had their eye on the store. They wanted the store.

Finding Safety in Scotland

Leslie: Eventually, Terri reached relatives in Berlin who sent her to safety in Scotland.

Leslie: What happened then in Scotland? Were you taken into a foster family?

Terri: No, we we went into Lord Balfour’s castle [name to verify].

Leslie: And you spent two years?

Terri: Two years there.

Terri: Yeah.

Leslie: Wow. How many children like you were there?

Terri: About 250, maybe.

Leslie: And what were you doing there? Were you studying or you had to work?

Terri: We studied half a day and worked half a day. And one day I found a letter. I was I was cleaning the quarters of the headmaster. And the letter was a diatribe against Jews.

Leslie: What What did it say?

Terri: It talk about how how bad they are and how how undesirable and so forth and and I knew this was the letter of the mother of the headmaster. The headmaster was a very nice guy. I was very upset and I took it to the head mistress.

Leslie: And so what did she say?

Terri: She reprimanded me for reading other people’s letters.

Leslie: You must have been even more upset.

Terri: Yes.

Photography, Israel, and Meeting Jack

Leslie: She later moved to London where she remained until the end of the war and learned photography.

Leslie: After the war, your your mom was not alive, your brother, your sister, no more family member.

Leslie: After the war, Terri moved to Israel where she documented the 1948 War of Independence as a photographer. She married, later divorced, and eventually met Jack in New York.

Terri: But I’m glad I’ve got this one

Speaker unconfirmed: that you met before in the movies.

Leslie: Ah, okay. Tell me.

Speaker unconfirmed: In the movies, we we saw a Shakespeare movie. Midsummer’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Terri: After the movie, he asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee and so I said yes and that was it. That was it. He got me with a cup of coffee.

Two Survivors, Two Histories

Leslie: Jack, you’re also a Holocaust survivor.

Jack: That’s right.

Leslie: Do you think this is something that maybe also connected you in a way?

Jack: Definitely. I mean and and the fact that she had gone to Israel to join the army uh that struck a note. Um and uh the loss I mean you know the the fact that uh she had lost everybody you know certainly and she was very beautiful also

Jack: uh and um yeah I mean you know growing up I mean you know you shouldn’t marry Ashkenazi it was one of the things that my parents were

Terri: But um growing up we were told not to marry Sephardim either. I I figured you know that was probably

Jack’s Childhood in Salonica

Leslie: Jack grew up in Salonica, one of the historic centers of Jewish life in Europe. He remembers the arrivals of the Nazis in 1943.

Jack: We had to wear the yellow stars uh and and we had to move into the ghetto. So I know that we moved into one of my aunts homes which happened to be inside the ghetto.

Leslie: Inside the ghetto.

Jack: If they caught you out of the ghetto, they shot you. It was very simple. So that’s why people were afraid to leave.

Escaping the Ghetto

Leslie: When the family learned that mass deportation to the death camps were about to begin, they fled the ghetto in an attempt to escape.

Jack: We managed to get on

Jack: the train and and I remember we were very well-dressed which was a mistake. Uh the guide wisely uh told us that we shouldn’t go first class. Uh and so we ended up with um uh with the farmers and the chickens and in open class overly dressed.

Jack: Yeah. Right. They were all dressed in black. You know the women wear the black chiefs around their heads. You know, my father was wearing a hat uh in which the lining had been taken apart and a lot of dollar bills had been sewn into it. Uh and also there was a lot of money. My father was worried, you know, that the wind would take off the hat, you know, where all the money was. I remember crying because I wanted to be in a covered wagon, you know. I mean, I wasn’t happy sitting on on bales of hay and and uh uh being with all the chickens and so forth. Uh and uh what uh we know is that uh all the Jews in first class were caught by the Germans.

Leslie: They eventually survived in Athens thanks to Jack’s resourceful mother.

Jack: My mother bought a whole bunch of cigarettes, two suitcases full, and she used that for money.

Leslie: She was very smart.

Jack: Yeah. I mean, I’m sorry, but this makes me a little emotional because it reminds me of my mother. They used to call her [nickname unclear in captions]. Okay. I mean, you know, she she was a tomboy.

Returning to a Changed City

Leslie: After the war, of the 50,000 Jews who had lived in Salonica, barely 2,000 had survived.

Jack: I cannot imagine what it was like for my parents to come back to Salonica. I mean, everybody was gone.

Education and a New Life

Leslie: Jack and his family eventually immigrated to the United States.

Jack: We went to America because my parents wanted us to have a good education. Uh my mother would say they can take all of your physical possessions but not what is in your head.

Jack: So become an engineer. And by that she meant become a scientist.

Jack: This year on my birthday, I was talking to my sister and I told her this story and she said, “Oh,” she said, “If you if if mother hadn’t gone to Rabbi Shaktail [name to verify] to talk to him about you, you would never have gotten into Rice [institution name to verify].”

Leslie: So, so they had a quota for Jews.

Jack: Yeah. And u Rabbi Shaktell [name to verify] apparently knew a dean and he talked to him about this.

Leslie: He pursued advanced studies and earned a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology. Today, Jack is an accomplished chemist and a professor at Florida State University.

Leslie: Jack, I want you to answer

A Shared Life and a Sense of Humor

Leslie: this. Do you think the fact that you obviously you both have your own different stories, but you’re both Holocaust survivors. Do you think this is also what created this bond between the two of you and why yes you ended up together?

Jack: Although for many years we didn’t think of ourselves as Holocaust survivors because we thought that you had to be in a camp in order to be a Holocaust survivor. Uh but

Leslie: what are the things do you do you see that you have in common?

Terri: What we have in common? I don’t have anything in common with them.

Leslie: I know what you like in her. She has great sense of humor. Please keep this sense of humor, this incredible sense of humor that you have cuz I think that humor can save us from many things. Right. Thank you for everything.

Speaker unconfirmed: Thank you. Thank you for coming. My pleasure. Bye.