Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is
Frank Kohn. Mister Cohn was born in Germany and was forced to escape to
the United States as the Nazis persecuted Jews throughout the nation. Once he turned
eighteen, mister Cohn was drafted into the US Army. He was assigned to
the eighty seventh Infantry Division, but later served as an interrogator of German prisoners
of war. And mister Cohn, it's wonderful to see you again, sir.
Thank you for your time today. Thank you. Where were you born
in Germany? I was born in the city called Breslau, which doesn't exist
anymore. After World War II, it ended up being Polish and it's now
called Ratslow. Now, at the time you were born, your family was
doing quite well, but it would not be long before the anti Semitism became
a big problem, even before the rise of Hitler. Correct, that's right.
We had an incident in the city of Kemnitz where my uncle was accosted
by some Nazi stormtroopers. When they understood that he was Jewish, they killed
him, and that was talked about among the adults, not to me,
but as a kid, you overhear what's going on and you form your own
opinions. And I knew right away at that point, and I was about
six years old, that Nazis were our enemy. Hitler officially rose to power
in nineteen thirty three. How quickly did things get much worse? Well,
it was bad right from the beginning because our store, we had a sporting
good store, and the Nazi stormtroopers were demonstrating in front of the store with
signs saying that the Jews our disaster and don't buy from Jews. And my
father understood right away that this was going to be a losing proposition, and
he sold the store immediately, and from then on, our economic means took
a slow dive downwards. And even as a young boy, you saw this.
In fact, one of your favorite teachers really kind of broke your heart,
right absolutely. I started the first grade in nineteen thirty two or so,
and I don't remember my first grade teacher. He was old, he
was about fifty years old. Anyway, my second grade teacher was a young
energetic fellow by mister Schubert. Harris Schubert was his name, And when I
understood that he was coming back in the third grade to us. I was
all excited because I really loved that teacher. But when he entered, he
came in full Nazi uniform, and my heart just sank to the floor because
I thought my friend, and all of a sudden he was no longer my
friend. And then the other kids, they came into school with Hitler Youth
paraphernalia, wearing belts or shirts or whatever that identified him as a member of
the Hitler Youth, and they all stood up and sang the Hitler songs,
and I was instructed to stay seated. And of course, the kid who
stay seated while everybody else stands is never going to be a popular fella in
that class, and I was sort of outcast. You have also shared a
story that you never even told your parents about how your babysitter took you to
see Hitler. Well, she was actually our sleeping maid. As a family
of medium Goods and such, we used to have our maids sleep in the
apartment that we were living in and be in a sense was my second mother.
She had me in tow most of the time while my parents did other
things. They were working delivering various bales of cloths to tailors and other people
who needed cloth. Anyway, Beta had me in tow and when she heard
Thatitler was coming to Breslau, she said she absolutely had to see him,
and she of course took me along with her and instructed me that when Hitler
came, I was to give the Hitler salute. And I said, I'm
not allowed to. Hi, I'm Jewish, I'm not allowed to give a
Hitler salute. She said, you just do exactly what I tell you to
do. And I was scared that some of the kids who had been in
the German public school by now I had been transferred to a Jewish private school.
But I was scared that one of the kids in the public school might
see me and turn me in. But it was lucky that nobody did,
because when Hitler came and is convertible, we were right there in the front,
and I did exactly what I was told. I made the Hitler salute.
Made Berta. She went wild, yelling Zee Kyle zek Kyles, Ze
Kyle Victory Hale. And I couldn't understand why she was so ensused at somebody
who was actually my enemy. And this in a sense made it easier when
a few months later, in nineteen thirty five, the Nurnberg laws required us
to discharge the maid because Arians were not allowed to work for Jews anymore,
so she had to leave. And because of that incident, my heart wasn't
completely broken, although I still had yearned for Berta to stay, but that
was an impossibility, and that was the last we saw Berta. What do
you remember seeing about Hitler as he drove by? Oh, I really didn't
pay that much attention to Hitler. I was too scared that somebody might see
me as I was rendering the Hitler salute. But the people around me were
going wild. All of them, just like Bartler, were yelling zeke heile,
zeke heile. And you could see the enthusiasm among that population. They
just loved him and whatever he was doing. I was fine, and me,
I was just scared, and I did what I had been told,
and I withdrew my hand as soon as I could and waited for us to
leave the scene. And I was still shaking when we started go home.
What finally convinced your father that there was no future for him and the rest
of the family in Germany? Well, he lost all the customers because all
he was allowed to sell to Jews, and Jews were leaving right and left
or abandoning their business because there wasn't that much business because Arians weren't allowed to
buy from Jews either, so as he was losing his way of income.
I had my bar mitzvah when I was thirteen, and I had all kinds
of presents, and I got a BMW bicycle. And then he went right
after that occasion, he pulled me aside and he said that he's going to
go overseas to see if he can find his distant relatives who were in the
States. As a matter of fact, he first took me to his birthplace
in a very small town called Vrounke, which was in Paul, but it
was the same as Breslau. Before the First World War he lived in Varonke,
which was German, and as the First World War finished, he had
to leave because it became Polish. So we visited the people who were still
in Poland. These were all Jewish friends of the family that had lived there
before and they had stayed in Poland, and I was introduced to them,
and all these people, just about all of them perished in the Holocaust because
when the Germans moved into Poland, they immediately placed all the Jews into Halleck,
into concentration camps, and eventually they were killed. Well, anyway,
my father decided to go overseas on a visitors visa, and that meant he
could only take one suitcase and ten marks, and with that he took off
for the United States. And he was at the mercy of the Jewish relief
organizations because the ten marks aren't going to take him very far. They're worth
less than ten dollars. Well, anyway, he found his relatives. Because
of the problems, the economic problems in the States, they were in a
recession, these relatives were not able to give him an affidavit. Now,
an affidavit is needed for immigration to the United States, and it also signifies
that the person who receives the affidavit will never become a burden to the government,
which means that the person who issues it has to have an enough money
to support the people that he's giving the fi David too, that's Frank Cohne,
a US Army veteran who was born in Germany, fled to the US
as his Jewish family was persecuted by the Nazis, joined the military, and
ended up interrogating German prisoners of war. Still to come. In this first
installment of mister Cohn's story, we'll learn how getting permission to come into the
US was easier said than done. Mister Cohn also tells us about the challenges
of getting out of Germany without telling anyone, trying to adjust to life in
the United States, and then finding his new country at war with his homeland.
That and much more is still ahead. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is
Veterans Chronicles sixty Seconds of Service. This sixty Seconds of Service is presented by
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help anyone at all, it makes them feel better. Also, Jensen said,
it's something Jensen has built his life around since serving in the Marine Corps.
He said he was just seventeen years old when he got to Vietnam,
where he spent most of his three year tour. He said he struggled for
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helped local youth. That's where he learned giving back to others also helped him
and his recovery from PTSD. Today's sixty seconds of Service is brought to you
by Previgen. Prevagen is the number one pharmacist recommended memory support brand. You
can find Prevagen in the vitamin aisle in stores everywhere. This is Veterans Chronicles.
I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Frank Cohne, a
US Army veteran of thirty five years. We now continue his story of how
Cohne and his mother made it to the US and how they got out of
their town just in time. But we pick up now with Cohan still discussing
the criteria for the US government allowing people to enter under the promise that people
already here would vouch for them and make sure the newcomers would not be a
burden on society. Seemed simple enough, but it wasn't well. They were
unable to do that, and although it seemed like a catastrophe to my father,
it was a blessing in disguise because he had to stay longer to see
if he could find somebody else who might give him an effort Avid And in
the meantime, while he was doing that, the Gestapo. Two Gestapo agents
came to our door and my mother told him that my father was overseas on
a business trip, and she was instructed that the minute he returns, he
has to report to Gestapo headquarters. Well, that order really raised concerns both
in the brain of my mother and the brain of me as well, because
I understood what it was to report to Gestapo headquarters. We had a business
acquaintance by the name of Michaelis who had received orders to report to Gestapo headquarters,
and a few hours later they found him dead on his sidewalk. He
had either been pushed or jumped out of a third store window. And my
mother immediately wrote my father to stay where he is because he was facing your
rest if he came back, and that also motivated your mother to leave as
well. Well. There was another incident that came well more than one.
Two days after the Gestapo came to our door, a British came to our
door with an official document that we had to provide her with a bedroom and
kitchen privileges in our apartment. Well, my mother pulled me aside and said,
this is a informant for the Gestapo, So whatever we speak of importance,
we have to do that outside of our apartment, because she would report
anything that she finds out to the Gestapo. And secondly, the passports of
Jews were confiscated to be stamped with a big J on the front cover,
and well we didn't know that as to what the reason was, but the
reason was it was at the behest of the Swiss government because they wanted to
know if the people who were coming across were actual visitors or if they were
Jews who were looking to escape from Germany, so they could turn them back
right at the border. And my mother thought that the next step would be
the confiscation of the passports. So she went to the American consulate and she
got herself a visitor's visa, just like my father, and completely out of
character, she went the next day to put to bribe somebody in the consulate
to put my name on that visa as well, and that is how she
was now in a posture to leave Germany. What's it like to pack up
your whole life into one suitcase after that and leave everything you've known? Well,
my biggest problem was I couldn't put that BMW bicycle into my suitcase.
And I even had a stamp collection and I couldn't take that long as well.
So the suitcase was was just the normal clothes and toilet articles and whatnot.
So it wasn't in any enthusiasm for me. That suitcase was just the
necessities. And oh, I had one more soccer game to play when my
mother told me we were leaving the next day, and I was distracted,
and I helped them lose the game. And besides that it had to be
all Jewish team, of course, and we could only play Jewish other teams.
But anyway, I helped them lose the game, and at the end,
I said, well, see you next time, but I knew,
of course, there wasn't going to be next time. And I never found
out whatever happened to all my soccer friends, and I never heard or saw
found out anything about them anymore, and most of them probably perished in the
Holocaust, because if they hadn't taken some steps at that point, it was
pretty late in the game nineteen thirty eight. If they didn't take any steps
to get out of Germany, they probably perished in the Holocaust. For example,
I found out that the last Jews in Breslau were taken to a camp
rather to a field in Poland on one week before Pearl Harbor, and they
were shot dead in that field. So that was the end of all the
Jews in Breslau. Had we passed up the ability to get out, that
is what would have happened to us. That's Frank Cohne, born in Germany
but forced to flee to the US as a boy because of Nazi persecution.
Still to come in this edition, we'll hear about Cohne's arrival in the US
and how the US would soon be at war with Germany. But up next
we continue our discussion about Cohne and his mother escaping from Germany. That's next.
I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans' Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles.
I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest this week is Frank Cohne. A US Army
veteran born into a Jewish family in Germany that was persecuted by the Nazis.
His family fled after christall Knacht in nineteen thirty eight, and as you just
heard, there was a massive slaughter of Jewish residents in his town very shortly
after they left. Still to come, we'll hear all about Cohne's arrival in
the US, his efforts to assimilate, and the outbreak of war between the
US and Germany. But first we wrap up his escape from Germany, as
Cone explains, how they left everything behind and could not tell a soul.
I didn't tell anybody. My mother had instructed me keep my mouth shut,
and for the change in things, I really did keep my mouth shut.
What were the most stressful moments on your way out of Germany and onto the
US. Well, I really didn't know any stressful moments because my mother didn't
tell me. She had made arrangements ahead of time, and we could make
all kinds of arrangements ahead of time because we can only carry one suitcase in
ten marks, and she had booked us on a first class passage on the
Holland American Line, the steamer Stattendom, and we had two weeks of first
class hotel reservations in New York. All that was done in advance, and
I well, when we took off, we snuck out of the apartment at
five in the morning, so that missus Griffiths British spy, if you might
call her, that I wouldn't hear us. By the way, she gave
me two English lessons, and I didn't realize they were going to be as
valuable as they turned out to be. But any event, we got on
a train to Berlin, where she said goodbye to her father, who ended
up in a concentration camp, which of course she didn't know, but he
was killed in the camp, and her older sister greater with her family they
escaped. They had made arrangements already because their sons were already in Australia,
and then she came along with the younger two children and escaped to Australia.
But Australia was so far so my mother never saw her again either. But
in any event, I had a wonderful trip, first class passage on the
boat. We eventually had gotten to Rotterdam to get on a boat, and
I enjoyed my trip immensely. I I almost was a ping pong champion,
but some man beat me before the end of the trip. Anyway, my
mother had a horrible time on that trip because she worried about what would happen
when we get to Ellis Island, because if they find out in Alice Island
that my father was already in country, that would mean we were refugees and
we could be placed on the next boat back to Germany, never even meet
my father. Well. I also was very excited to see the port of
New York because my gym teacher had told me about watching for the skyscrapers and
the Statue of Liberty. He explained what the meaning of the statue was,
and I was excited, and I was up in front there watching us get
into New York Harbor. I saw the skyscrapers, I saw the Statue of
Libery, and I was thrilled. And right then and there, an announcement
came over the speaker system that said all first class passengers are invited to go
through customs and immediately onto the dock, which meant we didn't have to go
to Alis Island. Everybody else had to go to Alice island, but money
talks and first class passengers were invited to avoid it, and my mother was
greatly relieved, and of course we had a happy reunion with my father.
But there was still one problem because he was at the mercy of the relief
organizations and they told him that the minute he had an affidavit, their support
would stop and we would have to return to Germany to wait immigration. Well,
that was a real problem because we didn't know what would happen to that
apartment when we came back with Missus Griffith in there, we had our hotel
reservations, we moved into the hotel and we had entered the United States on
the thirtieth of October nineteen thirty eight. On the ninth of November, just
ten days later, it was Crystal Night. And now Crystal Knight was a
progrome against the Jews that had been a planned ahead of time, and they
were just waiting for an incident to implement this plan. And the incident was
some Polish Jewish kid had shot a member of the German embassy in Paris,
and with that they implement the plan. They smashed all the windows of any
stores that were still in Jewish hands. They burned all the synagogues, and
they arrested every mail that Jewish mail that they could get their hands on,
and then they levied a big fine on the Jewish congregation to pay for all
the damage that they had caused from the Nazi side. Well, anyway,
we were in the States. We were happily saved in that respect. It
was even more of a savior as you might think, because while all this
was a terrible thing and hit the newspapers all over the world, including in
New York, of course, and we were very concerned about our relatives,
and we had no news from them at all. But President Roosevelt issued an
executive order that indicated that anyone in country would not ever be forced to return
to Germany. And this, of course saved us because our visas are now
extended indefinitely. How quickly did you assimilate to the United States. Well,
it was a little bit difficult, with just two lessons of English that didn't
go very far. And I had been in the seventh grade in Germany,
and I ended up in the seventh grade in the States, and I was
placed in a rapid class because my mother told him that I was a good
student, and I was way ahead in mathematics and geography and things like that,
but of course I was way behind in English. And that was a
dramatically demonstrated to me the first day that I was in class. The teacher
didn't recogn eyes my liability in English, and she turned to me and said,
Frank, take that waste paper basket and collect the trash. I had
no idea what she was talking about, but she had looked at the window
and she's and I thought, Aha, she wants me to open the window.
So I went to the window and opened it. Of course, everybody
in class started to laugh, and I certainly didn't like to be laughed at,
and that gave me an incentive to get English into my head as quickly
as possible. The teachers were helpful. They gave me magazines with pictures and
annotated what each item in the picture had the English title for. And then
I listened to the radio. But the radio was difficult because I couldn't understand
what the story was all about. But I got the intonation and that helped
me get away from the German accent, which I really didn't want to acquire.
I already knew about these accents, and I also understood that that to
me sounded terrible. So the radio helped in that respect, but what really
helped was the movies. And the movies and now they were ten cents,
which was a lot of money for us at that point because we were at
a very limited budget from the Jewish relief organizations. Anyway, there was a
distant uncle who took me along to the movies and had paid for it.
And then a lucky thing happened. Somebody had connections and married me up with
Time magazine, and Time magazine wanted to have a will. They had a
newsreel which was given in front of every movie, and in that newsreel they
wanted to have one about Germany and the discrimination in Germany against the Jews.
And I was hired to participate in that. And they had a blackboard which
had writing on it and crayon saying Jews or disaster and don't associate with Jews.
And there were two kids next to that black board with their heads hung
down, and I was one of those kids, and I got one hundred
dollars for about ten minutes of work. Obviously, they wanted to help the
refugee kid and that one hundred dollars that paid for a lot of ten cents
movies, and so I was able to pay for all my movie visits later
on, and that certainly helped me learn English. Now in junior high school,
I had a lot of trouble in the beginning, but towards the end,
in the ninth grade, I started to be able to associate with the
kids. Because I was an outcast, I couldn't communicate well with me,
so I wasn't particularly a desired kid to be friends with. But what changed
was in the ninth grade a little Irish girl with the red hair and freckles
by the name of Mary Cavanough. I still remember she came up to me
and said, Frank, can you help me with this mass problem? And
I was thrilled to death that somebody asked me to help them, And of
course I did, but I was much too shy to explore that any further.
The I never asco for a date or anything like that, but I
was just in heaven that she even asked me anyway. That showed that I
started to get over the roadblock with the English. When I hit high school,
I even passed a test for Stuyvesant High School, and I went into
Stuyvesant and I was well accepted by the rest of the kids. I was
no longer a complete outcast. Now, when you were sixteen years old,
Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and within a few days we're also at war with Germany,
even though you were only sixteen at the time, did you think you'd
be going to war within a few years. I was outside my apartment when
somebody came running by and says, the Jebs just bombed Pearl Harbor, and
nobody knew what Pearl Harbor was. And then we finally found out and the
war started. And in a sense, I was pretty happy about being in
the war because I knew England had a lot of trouble, but now that
the United States was in there, Germany was going to get beaten. I
knew that right from the start. But I also knew this wasn't going to
affect me because I was only sixteen years old. Well, it didn't take
too long when it started to get into my brain that oh ho ho,
this thing is not going to be a quick one, and this might as
well get me into it if it lasts two years. And of course the
time went on and I was able to volunteer as an air raid warden messenger.
I was too young to be an air raid warden, but I was
thrilled to volunteer because I wanted to help the war effort any which way I
could. And I did very well because I stopped off at a street blockwarden,
and then I went to the sector and then I went up to the
zone in the police headquarters. So I got promoted as a messenger. I
did a good job anyway, as soon as I became eighteen. I was
eighteen in August, and I had taken one course, a summer course in
college, and in September I was drafted. It didn't take long, but
I did finish my course, which in a sense was a disaster because I
was distracted. I thought I could coast along, just like I did in
high school. I was very good in high school, and I took three
courses. First of all, I didn't know what to do with myself.
After I grew up and all my friends were engineers, I said, I'll
be an engineer. I took ROTC and I took myth and I took physics.
I got a D in meth and an f in physics. And when
I returned from the war, I was on probation, but I was no
longer an engineer. I switched my degrees to psychology and education, so that
didn't I was on probation, but I got out of that immediately anyway,
I was drafted. That's Frank Cone, a US Army veteran who served for
thirty five years in uniform during World War Two. He interrogated German prisoners of
war. In the second half of our interview with mister Cohn, we'll hear
all about his time in the Army, why his deployment got delayed, how
he ended up interrogating German POWs, and his work to this day telling the
truth about the Holocaust. Please join us for that. I'm Greg Corumbus and
this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks for
listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more
information, please visit American Veteranscenter dot org. You can also follow the American
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