Holocaust Remembrance Day

I know this is a bit late, but I meant to post this earlier.





Jewish refugee shares survival story

First, she noticed the Jewish bookstore across the street burning.

Then, she took a street car to her family’s synagogue in Berlin, Germany. Stunned and shaken, Inge Brann Booker watched the flames swallow her family’s place of worship.


“I stood there in disbelief; it was once so gorgeous,” she recalled.


She was just 15 years old, but the Holocaust survivor vividly recalls the horrors of Kristallnacht. The term describes Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, when more than 250 German synagogues were burned and thousands of Jewish businesses were trashed and looted and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools and homes were destroyed while the police and fire brigades stood by. It was called Kristallnacht — “Night of Broken Glass” — for the shattered glass that littered the streets from broken windows.


Booker experienced degradation as a young Jewish girl living in Germany in the 1930s.


First, she was told she couldn’t go to public school anymore. And then, many non-Jewish friends and neighbors cut off contact with Booker and her family.


“They said, ‘Sorry I can’t be with you,’ ” the Warminster resident recalls. “I had a woman who took care of me and knew me since I was born. Once day, she told me, I couldn’t come there anymore.”


In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. Then came the burning of books written by Jewish people. Jewish teachers, actors and conductors lost their jobs, she said, and soon after that, some Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.


“That was the beginning of the end for the Jews in Germany,” she said. “My family was lucky; a Gestapo man was looking for my father and said he would come back at 7 p.m., but he never did.”


Realizing the family was in danger, her father sought refuge in China. Shanghai was an open harbor in the 1930s and received 25,000 Jewish refugees during World War II.


“My parents and I were forced to leave Germany in 1939, otherwise I wouldn’t be alive today,” said Booker, who spent eight years living in squalid conditions in China.


“Shanghai, China, was the only city where we could go because a sponsor was needed to immigrate to the United States … Both my parents left their mothers behind. We left five weeks before the war (World War II) broke out,” she said.


At 16, she gazed back at her homeland as the ship departed, crying as she listened to a German folk song. She had no clue what awaited her.


Shanghai was bombed by the Japanese in 1932 and had been occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army since 1937. “The heaviest fighting was in Hongkou, one of the poorest sections of the city where we eventually relocated,” Booker said. “Entire streets were totally destroyed.”


Booker’s aunt welcomed the family to Shanghai. They traveled in a rickshaw to an apartment, where relatives had rented two small, bedbug-infested rooms. Booker and her family shared a single room.


“They were like two jail cells; You could imagine the culture shock,” she said. “The streets were dirty with the dead waiting to be collected in the morning.”


When war broke out in Europe shortly after her family arrived in Shanghai, Booker’s parents obtained visa permits for her grandmothers to relocate to China. Her grandfathers had died.


“My mother’s mother wanted to get out, but my father’s mother did not,” she said. “She chose to commit suicide using gas rather than going to Shanghai or Auschwitz.”


Her maternal grandmother made it to Shanghai a year after Booker arrived. “Thank God my grandmother came; it was not easy for her, then again, it was difficult for all of us,” she said.


To support the family, her parents sold the fine china and crystal they had brought with them from Germany. And Booker began sewing lace vests and scarves that her father sold on the war-torn streets.


After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese authorities in Shanghai designated all Jewish refugees as “stateless,” stripping them of their national citizenship and forcing them to live in the most impoverished areas of the international settlement. That meant even smaller quarters off alleyways, lacking modern toilets and clean water.


“You couldn’t drink water anywhere; we had to go to a Chinese business, standing in line for some time for water that they boiled, because we didn’t have electricity to boil our own,” she said. “They didn’t treat us as Germans. They treated us like Jews. We were stateless.”


After they were moved into a Jewish “ghetto,” she met German refugee Fred Booker, the man who would become her husband. In 1944, when Booker was 21, her daughter Evelyn Ruth was born. The harsh living conditions took a toll on the infant’s health.


“Can you imagine going to the hospital in a rickshaw? Most of the time, our baby daughter was in and out of the hospital with skin and ear problems,” she said.


Food was hard to come by. Without electricity, the family cooked on a small charcoal oven, where it was difficult to start a fire. Often, they got meals at a local soup kitchen.


“I nursed (Evelyn) as long as possible and my weight went down to 80 pounds,” she said. “If we got anything to eat, it was only half an ounce. We ate a slice of bread with pork fat, which was a delicacy. In fact, that was the only intake of fat. It was not easy for us to eat pork (which the Jewish religion forbids), but to survive, one does anything.”


In 1942, Adolf Hitler put pressure on the Japanese to turn over the Shanghai Jews.


“What we learned later ... is that they (the Germans) intended to build gas chambers for us, too ... ” she said.


Despite the living conditions, Booker considered herself lucky because she, her husband and her daughter survived. Many did not, after they contracted virulent dysentery and spinal meningitis in winter 1943.


“Their remains were placed on a pushcart and pulled through the streets to the cemetery,” she said. “My husband was in an isolation hospital with typhoid. Later, he developed hepatitis and was hospitalized for six weeks.”


Shanghai was a target because it was still occupied by the Japanese. Booker said she’s haunted, to this day, by the memory of the U.S. bombing of Shanghai, which killed more than 30 Jews and more than 500 Chinese. Booker recalled rushing to the roof of her apartment building to investigate the loud humming noise — and catching a glimpse of the approaching B-29s bombers.


“(I) was almost hit by a piece of shrapnel,” she recalled. “The noise was deafening as the bombs exploded all around us.”


World War II ended in August 1945, after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.


“We were dancing in the streets and we could make plans again for the future,” she said. “The question now facing many immigrants in Shanghai was how to leave and begin a new life.”


A Jewish-American rescue group helped Booker, her husband and her daughter make travel arrangements to get to the United States.


Their first stop was Honolulu, “which looked like paradise,” she said.


But the vision that made the voyage so memorable was the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. “Nobody can describe the feeling to sail under that bridge; it’s the Statue of Liberty in the West,” she said.


In San Francisco, a Jewish family services organization offered to relocate them to Philadelphia, where some members of Booker’s family had immigrated. While they temporarily lived in a Philly shelter, they found jobs two weeks later and never had to apply for unemployment, Booker said proudly.


Booker landed a job sewing in a factory for 11 years, and her husband worked as shipper for a men’s clothing manufacturer. Eventually, Booker went to school to learn about computer technology. That training led to a career at Penn Mutual Life Insurance, a job she kept until she retired at 60. Her husband died in February 1999.


“We worked hard; and this is how we became Americans,” said Booker.


Today, she shares her story to remind people about the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust, an event that some people contend never happened.


“My generation will soon die out, so let us share history,” said Booker, who’s now 91. “Unfortunately, it’s happening in other countries, too. We always say this should never happen again. That’s what we hope for. That’s what we speak for.”


Booker moved to Ann’s Choice in 2008. Her daughter, who’s now 70, lives in Upper Southampton.


Booker said, she’s appreciative of “everybody, every organization and every country” that played a role in her family’s rescue.


“There are thousands of us survivors, and we are grateful for all the help we got,” she said. “We are proud Americans … God Bless America.”