Lisa Baer, 98, never gave up her German passport, issued when she was a child living in Frankfurt. “The passport had a big J in it. Every Jewish female had to accept Sarah as her middle name,” she said.
It was issued by the Nazi German government, which aimed to isolate Jews from public life as a step towards their extermination. “I’m the last one remaining of this generation. I was the youngest.”
Baer was brought to speak at the Young Israel of West Hempstead’s Yom HaShoah program last Sunday by her daughter Sandy Baer Morad, who lives in West Hempstead.
“The flame of G-d is through the image of man. This year we find ourselves in a very difficult precarious position,” said Rabbi Joshua Goller, the Rav of YIWH. “In the world of chasidus, the Eish Tamid symbolizes the eternal bond. It gives us strength and resilience and we face significant challenges right now.”
The retelling of the Holocaust experience was delivered by Aliza Toplin, a student at Lander College for Women. “A little over a year ago I experienced the most life-changing moment of my life, in Poland. I looked back and I think it was hashgachah pratis. The weather was gloomy. It set the mood.” She participated in a tour focusing on the country’s Jewish history, which included the largest number of Holocaust victims among the nations. “We visited camps, forests, museums, and shuls. One place that stood out the most was the children’s forest, where children were murdered in horrific ways. They never had a chance to grow up. This got to me the most.”
The trip concluded on a positive note with a return to Israel, where she davened at the Kosel. “So many grandchildren of survivors. Standing next to the holiest place in the world. I thank my parents for this.”
Baer’s birthplace is the financial capital of Germany, where Jews have resided for centuries. Their timeline alternated between moments of persecution and prosperity. “Everything was very good until 1933 and things started to get scary very quickly. My late father was a stockbroker. He was fired and he took it very badly until he finally had a stroke in 1934 and died a year later.”
Within their first year in power, the Nazis banned Jews from government jobs, law, medicine, and finance. “Jewish doctors could only treat Jewish people. You started seeing signs in stores that Jews are not welcome here. They took away our telephones. We could only communicate by snail mail. We could not have any more radios. There was some sort of a curfew. We were really stuck at home.”
With a long history in Germany, Baer’s family maintained hope that their situation would improve. The Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938 changed their minds. “It happened in an organized way,” she said. Nazi youths broke into their apartment. “They took my father’s Iron Cross. My mother went over to one of the guys with a handgun, ‘I have parents upstairs.’ Take whatever you want, don’t go upstairs.”
The armed intruder obliged and most of the tenants upstairs, including Baer’s grandparents, were spared from the traumatic ordeal. “We did not know what’s going on; one of my cousins came. Her father was taken to Dachau. Now everybody wanted to leave. We looked to Central America, South America. Anybody who would take them.”
When they went to the American consulate, her parents were told that the quotas for German immigrants were filled and those holding them would be eligible for entry years ahead of 1938.
“My mother needed money and all of our relatives were poor. This is our only chance to get the visa and they got the money together; $7,500 was needed.” With support from relatives in America and many friends whose names they did not know, the money was raised for the Baer family to get the visa.
“The consul saw that we had money to get started. We got the visa to go to America. Then in 1939 the war started. Everyone in Germany was given ration stamps to obtain food. “Our rations were stamped with a J, with one store open only two hours a week for us. It had non-kosher meat. We were Orthodox and couldn’t use it. My mother found a bakery in the city that took our meat and gave us eggs, butter, and sugar.”
“I was the shaliach to take that package of meat. Then I went home. I didn’t look particularly Jewish. Many years later I realized that if I had gotten caught, that would have been the end of me.”
In 1940, as the war intensified, the family purchased tickets for a flight to Barcelona in Spain, which was ruled by a neutral fascist government. Then they continued to Portugal. “We were allowed to pack household items. Ten dishes, four soup bowls. We were limited in what we were allowed to take.”
In Spain and Portugal, networks of volunteers supported by Jewish organizations in America assisted the Baers on their path. “None of us knew any Portuguese or Spanish. We managed to get four tickets to get to America, thanks to family here who managed to borrow from strangers.”
They departed Lisbon in November 1940. “The water around Bermuda was very heavily mined; our ship went around Cuba. Then we came to the United States. There was plenty of food on the boat and American staff.” They landed in Hoboken, where her uncle picked up the family. “We drove through the Holland tunnel, I was petrified. I thought that we would drown.”
Baer settled in Washington Heights, whose sizable German Jewish community earned it the nickname Frankfurt on the Hudson. At age 57, she enrolled at Lehman College to become an art teacher, proving to her children that even at a late age she could earn her degree before they did. A few years ago, she retired to nearby Riverdale.
“Unfortunately, I’m the last of the family to be alive,” she said.
Baer described Frankfurt as a very liberal city, and most of her neighbors did not show any anti-Semitism, but they also did not help Jews when persecution increased. There was one lawyer who helped the Baers with documents and the bakery that exchanged their meat for baking items, and they were the exceptions.
Baer’s first visit back to Frankfurt was in 1985, when the West German government invited back former citizens “to show how good they are.”
“We were guests of the Germans, they paid for everything, they wined us and dined us. My husband enjoyed every minute. We wanted to go see where we lived, the graves of my father and my grandparents who died in 1941 and 1942.” Their graves appeared neat among thousands of others who were unable to escape the Nazis. “There must have been a Jewish organization that took care of these things.”
Concerning the uptick in anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses, Baer encourages Jews to be outspoken. “Take any kind of action to fight against it. You can’t ignore it. We cannot ignore it. It is a progression. It’s very upsetting.”
Sponsors of the event honored their parents and grandparents who either perished or survived the Holocaust, including the Bleich, Silber, Weiss, Rumelt, and Miodownik families.
The Silber family shared their Holocaust experience of surviving two brutal regimes. Richard Silber’s parents Joseph and Suri married before the war in Hungary and were separated when the Nazis rounded up Jews for deportation. Miraculously, they found each other after the war but were then trapped under a communist regime. During an uprising in 1956, they fled to the West, where Joseph, trained as a watchmaker, opened a jewelry shop on Madison Avenue. This story was shared with me by Joseph’s grandson Joshua, and his family knows it in detail, passing it to the younger generation through his mother Randi, sister Tali, and wife Shira – all educators in yeshivos where Jewish values live on.
By Sergey Kadinsky
