Views from the Road I Traveled: Segments of an Autobiography

By Henry M. Kissman

In this autobiography, Henry Kissman describes his journey from a boyhood in prewar Austria to life in America, and how he survived the displacements and losses of wartime and built a life devoted to scientific inquiry and public service.
As a prosperous Jewish family in the city of Graz, the Kissmans became Nazi targets immediately after the German takeover of Austria in 1938. Henrys parents were both jailed on trumped-up charges, and were stripped of everything they owned, including their successful lumber export business. Henry, age 15 at the time, was able to flee to England; his younger sister followed on a Kindertransport a few months later. After 9 months, his parents were expelled from Austria. Eventually, they also reached England, where they lived and worked throughout the war.
In December 1939, Henry was able to emigrate to the U.S. After living with relatives in New York City for a time, he worked at various factory jobs in New Jersey and completed his high school education at night.
Through a scholarship he was able to earn a degree at Sterling College in Kansas in 1944. He was then drafted into the Army, where he first served as a combat medic with the 10th Mountain Division in northern Italy, and later as a counter intelligence agent with the U.S. occupation forces in Germany.
After discharge from the Army, Henry obtained advanced degrees in organic chemistry with the help of the GI Bill. Eventually, he joined a research group at a pharmaceutical company, where he worked on biologically active substances such as antibiotics and steroids. In 1955, he met Lee Cohn his wife-to-be. They married in January 1956.
Beginning in the mid-sixties, Henrys interests changed from laboratory research to developing innovative ways of managing scientific information. He directed such information projects at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and then at the National Library of Medicine until his retirement in 1992.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 10, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465319401

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Copyright © 2008 by Henry M. Kissman.

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Contents

Dedication

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

Family Background

CHAPTER 2

Start of my own History

CHAPTER 3

Early Schooling

CHAPTER 4

Middle School Years

CHAPTER 5

End of our World. The Nazi Takeover

CHAPTER 6

Start of my Life in the United States

CHAPTER 7

Sterling College

CHAPTER 8

Life in the Military

CHAPTER 9

Return to School

CHAPTER 10

Start of my Working Life

CHAPTER 11

Job at Lederle Laboratories

CHAPTER 12

Start of Married Life

CHAPTER 13

Moving into Technical Information

CHAPTER 14

Work at the Food and Drug Administration

CHAPTER 15

Work at the National Library of Medicine

CHAPTER 16

Conclusion

Dedication

I dedicate this story with love and gratitude to my wife Lee, to my children Ellen and Paul, to Paul’s wife Megan and to their son—our cherished grandson—Eli. Without them my life would have been a desert.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my wife, Lee Kissman, for her editorial support and for her tireless hunt for grammar and typing errors in the manuscript. My thanks also go to Joe Fitzgerald for creating a drawing of me as a retirement present, and for giving me permission to use this drawing on the back cover of this book. I would also like to thank the staff at the Xlibris Corporation for their assistance in shepherding this book through the publication process.

INTRODUCTION

Clio

Muse of time . . . . forgive us our noises

And teach us our recollections

W.H. Auden Homage to Clio¹

Until about two years ago, I had never considered writing an autobiography, mainly because it seemed like a lot of work, and because I did not think that my history was important or interesting enough to warrant such an effort. However, family members and some friends persuaded me to consider such a project mainly in order for our kids and our grandson to learn something about my history, and, in particular, about my early years—the growing up in Austria, the Nazi takeover and the war—that they do not know much about.

Reading some published autobiographies also influenced my decision. I was impressed by the autobiographies of Carolyn Heilbrun The Last Gift of Time² and of P.D. James, the well-known British crime novelist, entitled Time To Be in Earnest³. James was in her 70s when she wrote her autobiography, and here I was in my eighties. If I was going to do this at all, it was indeed time to start and be in earnest. Comparing my writing to that of these two, highly accomplished authors was pretty disheartening. I have spent much of my working life doing technical writing such as reports, meeting minutes, or technical proposals. There, the goals were: accuracy, completeness, and often speed, but rarely readability. Even so, what follows here is the best that I could achieve and it will have to do.

I learned a lot while writing this story. For example, I had heard that, as one got older, it was easier to remember events that happened a long time ago than things that are of a more recent vintage. I found this to be true. I can remember scenes and events from my childhood with great clarity, while not being able to recall the names of some colleagues I had worked with just a few years ago. Also, the visual and aural parts of the memory seem better than the nomenclature ones—if there are such parts. I remember clearly how people looked, even if I can not recall their names. Although I have never mastered any musical instrument, I have loved music all my life, and for many operas and other musical works, such as Turandot, Salome, Beethoven’s 7th Symphony or his Waldstein Sonata, I can vividly remember the occasions and circumstances when I heard them for the first time. Occasionally, there are some curious retrieval problems with words. Trying to think of a word, I occasionally retrieve the German version of the term and only find the English version with more effort. This happens even though I have not spoken German for decades.

The structure I picked for this autobiography was pretty straightforward. I started with giving some background information about my parents and their families, and then went on to provide a more detailed overview of my own history, starting with my childhood, schooling and growing up in Austria. I also described the lives of my parents, my younger sister and relatives who influenced my growing-up years. I then tried to relate, as best as I could, the historical events that totally changed our lives—the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, and World War II.

Early on in planning this project it became obvious that I would have to put a time limit on my narrative, and I ended it with my marriage in 1956. It would have taken too much space and time to relate the rest of my life’s history in such detail. Besides, my immediate family, Lee and my children, Ellen and Paul, were around for this part of the story, and, therefore, they didn’t need to have it retold from my perspective. I did add several chapters at the end that describe some of my work-related activities during the rest of my working life, because I thought that these might be unfamiliar to my family and other readers of this story. Also, in describing the lives of some of my relatives and friends, I extended their stories past 1956 with brief descriptions of the remainder of their lives up to the time of this writing.

Each of my chapters starts with a quotation, a sort of aphorism more or less related to the subject of the chapter. I took these from poems that I liked—mostly by T.S. Eliot—and from other sources such as the Bible. For historical and other factual information, I relied mostly on that treasure trove of information, the Internet. The ease with which one can now retrieve information ranging from dates and names to geographical and biographical facts in seconds still astounds me. It brings back memories of the weeks and months of work, preparatory to a laboratory research project, that I used to spend in libraries to gather the background facts needed for the project. Doing research now, must be very different from what it used to be before the advent of the web.

The other hurdle in autobiography writing is deciding what would be of interest to readers. I did not want to write this account as if my readership would be restricted to my immediate family. Therefore, I described events—as best as I could—to make them understandable, and hopefully interesting, for readers who do not know much about our families and their histories.

What I did not expect when I started this project is how deeply painful it would be to write about so many people I had loved, who had profoundly influenced my life, and who have since died. One downside of getting old is that one outlives so many people who were close and important in one’s life. Writing about them, brings them back, and again makes their loss vivid and wrenching.

I would like to end this Introduction with some words about time. The feeling that, as we get older, time is passing us by ever faster, seems to be common among us seniors. As I write these pages, I feel it very strongly, wondering if there will be enough time left for me to finish this project. To strengthen my resolve to keep writing, I would like to close this chapter with a quote from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, one of my favorite operas. It comes from the beautiful and moving aria, in Act 1, where the Marschalin, the heroine of this opera, sits before her mirror and wonders how time and her life could have passed by so quickly, and how she could have become old when she was just a little girl. Later on, she consoles herself with the following words: Allein, man muss sich auch vor ihr nicht fürchten/ Auch sie ist ein Geschöpf des Vaters der uns alle erschaffen hat. [Yet one must not be afraid of it/ Time too is a creature of our Father who made us all.]¹

CHAPTER 1

Family Background

In my beginning is my end.

T.S. Elliot East Cocker¹

I don’t know how and when my parents met, but it must have been in Vienna shortly after the end of Word War I. They married on January 23, 1921. My parents had been born and raised in parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which were split off from the Austria that remained after the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. As outlined below, my father had grown up in the Bukovina, which became Romania after that war. My mother was born in Krakow (also spelled Cracow), which was part of the new Poland. As so many other Jews from pre-war Austro-Hungary, my parents, and in my mother’s case her family as well, moved to Vienna, the capital of the greatly diminished Austria, rather than living in the new usually very nationalistic and often anti-Semitic nations.

Father’s Background

My father, Jacob Kissmann, was born on May 30, 1888 in Paltinosa, a village in the Bukovina, a province situated on the upper Prut River in the Carpathian foothills, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jacob was the son of Leiser and Brane (Bertha) Kissmann. Leiser owned lumber mills close to a small town called Gurahumora. Father had a sister, Anna, and three brothers, Milan, Sacha (Alexander), and Joseph. I will have more to say about my aunt and these uncles later.

I only met my grandfather Leiser once when I was about six years old. I remember him vaguely as a tall man with a long white beard wearing a yarmulke. He was an orthodox Jew, to whom our non-kosher household in Graz, Austria apparently was not an acceptable stopping off place. In any case, he traveled infrequently. I did not know Bertha, my father’s mother, at all. She died in 1923 while still relatively young; I never learned much about her. Grandfather married again; his children referred to his second wife as aunt. By the standards of his time and surroundings, grandfather was a wealthy man. Despite being a rich, orthodox Jew, he was respected by the local non-Jewish farmers, who were the suppliers of the lumber for his saw mills. They tried to protect him from the Nazis after the start of World War II. But this was to no avail. He and his wife were arrested and transported to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp in Bohemia. Over 200,000 Jews were sent to Theresienstadt, and about 97,000 of them, including over 15,000 children, died there, or after being further transported to the Auschwitz death camp. At Theresienstadt, they died mostly because of hunger, diseases, including a typhus epidemic. Apparently Leiser and his wife died of typhus in 1943(?); he was in his 80s¹.

Because Paltinosa did not have a good school system, father and his sister and brothers went to high school in Seret, a nearby town. He must have finished his schooling there just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914. I believe, his brothers Joseph and Sacha were drafted into the Austrian Army, but they did not become involved in combat. My father had some sort of heart defect, and this kept him out of the draft. Toward the end of the war, my father moved to Vienna, where he worked as a lumber specialist for the Creditanstalt, Vienna’s largest bank. His brothers, Joseph and Sacha, also came to Vienna to attend the university there. Joseph became a lawyer, and Sacha a physician. After the war, the two went back to Czernowitz to work and establish their families. Czernowitz was a town with a fairly sizeable Jewish population. It had become part of the new Romania after World War I. Anna also emigrated from Romania to Vienna with her husband, Max Bindermann. Max, a fiery young socialist, had been her tutor when she was in her high school years. They fell in love and married. I don’t know when Milan left Romania. Originally, he was interested in becoming an actor, but he ended up in Paris, where, later, he worked as the representative of my father’s lumber company in France.

None of Leiser’s children practiced his orthodox faith. They became either non-political atheist, as my father did, or they turned into socialists, as did Joseph and Anna.

Mother’s Background

I don’t know as much about mother’s family. She was born Regina Drimmer in Krakow on December 21, 1898. Krakow was a city in Austro-Hungary, which had a fairly large Jewish population. As mentioned, after World War I, it became part of Poland. When talking to us kids about her history, mother told us that in the Golden Room of the Jewish synagogue in Krakow there were records of her ancestors, who had fled to Krakow after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the 15th century. Apparently two of these ancestors were brothers who served on the court of a Polish King in the 16th century (?). One or both, were placed into an official debate about religion with a Jesuit priest also serving the King. The brothers seemed to have won the debate, and were both burned at the stake for heresy.

Her parents, my grandparents, were listed on her birth certificate as Schloime Drimmer and Feigla Lea Drimmer. We knew them as Salomon and Francesca Drimmer. He was a wine merchant. He did not have a store, but traveled extensively through Austro-Hungary buying and selling wine. I don’t know much about the history of Francesca, my grandmother. I did know that she had a goiter and that she suffered all her adult life from Basedow Disease (Graves Disease), a thyroid dysfunction. This disease affected her personality; she never seemed very happy or satisfied. The story has it, that she consulted Professor Wagner-Jauregg, a famous psychiatrist at the University of Vienna, who had won a Nobel Prize in 1927, and told him that she was unhappy. He asked her does your husband beat you? She said no. He asked then what are you unhappy about? We do have a large charcoal portrait of Francesca as a younger woman in 1907(?) which we inherited from my mother. It shows that she must have been a fairly handsome woman. My mother, as I remember her when we were kids, looked much like grandmother in that picture.

My mother had a sister, called Cunda, who was about three years her junior. When I knew her, Aunt Cunda was a blond-haired, vivacious lady, always full of fun. She was married to Otto Last, an engineer. They lived in Vienna in an apartment house that Cunda got as a wedding present from her father. My mother also received an apartment house in Vienna when she got married. Cunda and Otto had a daughter, Erika, one of my favorite cousins, who, as I will describe later, shared much of my early life.

My grandparents moved to Vienna some time before or during World War I. They must have lived in Lemberg (now Lwow), another city in what is now Poland, because my mother and her sister had some secondary schooling there before that move. When I knew my grandparents, they lived in a fairly gloomy apartment—at least, so it seemed to me as a child—in a building called the Römerbad (Roman Bath) in Vienna’s second district. That district had the highest concentration of Jews in Vienna. I don’t know whether they lived there when my mother and her sister were growing up.

My mother finished high school and then started on a doctoral program in art history at the University of Vienna. She had a talent for painting and drawing. I don’t know what she planned to do after finishing her university education. In any case, she married my father before completing her degree work. Mother also had a real talent for languages. She was fluent in German, which she must have spoken at the same time as Polish while growing up. When we were children, she could also speak French and Italian, and was taking lessons in Russian. Later in her life, when she fled to England and lived and worked there for many years, she became fluent in English. As she was heavily involved with Zionism, and traveled to Israel fairly often, she also learned Hebrew. I wish that I had inherited her talent for languages, but when it comes to other tongues, I am much more like my father, who had trouble learning other languages.

After World War I, my grandfather continued with his wine business in Vienna. He traveled to Hungary and other Eastern European countries frequently to buy wine for import into Austria. My grandmother remained in Vienna during his trips. Later, in the mid-1930s, he must have retired, because when I got into my teens, I don’t remember him traveling around on business. In retirement, he spent a chunk of his time every day playing cards with his buddies in a café near his apartment. Grandfather probably did well in his business. I think he owned the apartment they lived in, and he also owned several apartment buildings in Vienna and a very nice vacation home in Bad Ischl, a well-known spa in the Northern part of Austria. In a later chapter, I will have more to say about Bad Ischl and our vacations there.

CHAPTER 2

Start of my own History

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

T.S. Elliot: Burnt Norton¹

As mentioned above, after World War I, my father moved from the Bukovina to the new Austria, where he met my mother. They got married in Vienna in 1921. At first, father worked for the Creditanstalt, Austria’s biggest bank, where he was in charge of the lumber department. He was, at that time, stationed in Graz. At some time in the mid-1920s, he resigned from the Creditanstalt, and was given a sizable sum of money as his golden parachute. He used this money to open his own lumber export business, the Holzexport-Komanditgesellschaft Kissmann & Co. in Graz. As it turned out, this was a wise move, because, in 1929, the Creditanstalt collapsed during the start of the great depression, and many people were thrown out of work. His business survived the depression, and flourished in the 1930s.

Birth and Early Childhood

I was born in Graz on September 9, 1922 and lived there until the Nazi takeover in 1938. I was named Heinrich Marcel Kissmann. The Heinrich was to commemorate a cousin of my mother—with that name—who was killed in World War I in the Austrian army during the siege of Premysl on the Eastern front. The Heinrich was usually shortened to Heinz. The Marcel part of my name came from Marcel Proust, whose works mother was reading while she was pregnant with me.

When I was born, my parents lived in an apartment somewhere in the city center of Graz. I don’t remember the place at all. Shortly thereafter, my father bought a villa surrounded by a nice garden with plenty of room for playing, with the address of Siemensgasse 5. This was in a suburb of Graz at the end of one of the streetcar lines. The house had two stories. We lived on the lower floor, and my father’s offices and some seven employees of his company, occupied the four rooms on the second floor. My parents also employed two live-in servants—a cook and a children’s nurse—and several others, who came into the house for tasks such as washing and ironing.

One of my first memories involves some chickens. I was sitting in a little cart by the garden gate of our villa, which I could not open, surrounded by clucking chickens and being very scared. When they first set up housekeeping at Siemensgasse 5, my parents kept chickens, probably for their eggs. This was only a few years after World War I, and food was still scarce.

Father was a great believer in new technologies and gadgets. Our house had a coke burning furnace which provided central heating through hot water radiators—rare in Graz houses at that time. One basement room was set aside for storing the coke to feed that furnace. We also had an elaborate central electrical hot water heater that would turn on and off at specific times. Every time we went on summer vacation, with father remaining behind because of having to run the office, there were some house innovation surprises when we came back.

Graz

First, some words about Graz, my birthplace. It was—after Vienna—the second biggest city in the post-World War I Austria, with a population of around 180,000. Graz was then—and still is—the capital of the Steiermark (Styria), a province in southeastern Austria. The city was situated on the banks of the river Mur. It was about a three-hour train ride from Vienna. The railroad went across the Semmering pass, a beautiful spot in the Southern Alps. This stretch of railroad, which I traveled several times as a boy when visiting relatives in Vienna, was built in 1884 and was one of the world’s first, steep, pure adhesion railroads.

Graz was an old city. It had its start in the 9th century as a fortress built by Slavs on the Schlossberg, a rocky hill that still dominates the city. The name Graz comes from gradec, a Slavic word meaning small fortress. This name was first used in 1128. Graz received town rights in about 1240, and became the capital of the Steiermark during the Middle Ages. Its fortifications, built in the 15th and 16th centuries, withstood many sieges by the Magyars and, later, the Turks. Protestantism was established in Graz around 1530, and flourished there until the Counter Reformation, under Karl II in the 16th century, restored Catholicism. During the Napoleonic Wars, the French held Graz several times, and, except for the clock tower still emblematic for the town, the fortifications on the Schlossberg were destroyed by them. Through the intervention of the Archduke John, Graz was reconstituted as a city in 1850.

Graz was a rather pretty place. It had some well-known schools of higher learning including the Karl Franzens University, founded in the 16th century, and a University of Technology. The town also had an ornate, 19th century opera house, in which the city took much pride. Aside from Vienna, Graz was the only town in Austria at that time that had such an opera house. I mention this here because this opera house became an important entertainment site for my friends and me as we were growing up; it was there that I received my education in music. The town’s streetcar system was reliable and cheap, and, since Graz was surrounded by wooded, low mountains and farms, it was easy to go on nature excursions by just taking a streetcar to its final stop and starting to hike. Most people lived in apartment houses; some of the wealthier ones had villas—single-family homes with gardens.

At the time I was born and grew up there, Graz had only a few thousand Jews. Most of Austria’s Jews lived in Vienna. Graz—and really the whole country outside of Vienna—was intrinsically anti-Semitic. Many Jews were considered foreigners even though they had been citizens of Austro-Hungary for generations. As mentioned, many of these people—like my parents—came from parts of the former Habsburg Empire that, after 1918, became separate countries. But the mostly Catholic population disliked even these Jews. For us, the net result was that while the Jews in Graz mingled with the rest of the population as required by life’s daily activities, they represented a special group that, socially, did not mix much with those other people. For example, while my parents were socially active, and entertained guests frequently in our house, I cannot remember one non-Jewish Grazer being part of their circle of friends.

I will have more to say about Austrian politics and how they affected our lives. Here, I wanted to mention one episode that stayed in my memory. In Austria, as in many other European countries, May 1st was Labor Day and was celebrated with marches and demonstrations, mostly by left-leaning organizations such as labor unions. The Nazis and other right wing groups opposed these expressions of labor sentiment and mounted counter demonstrations. On one such May 1, our nanny took my sister Ati and me—I must have been around six or seven years old—to see some of the Labor Day celebrations that were being held on one of our downtown squares. In retrospect, this was a harebrained idea. There were thousands of people, yelling, singing, carrying signs and throwing stuff at each other. Police on horses were riding into the crowd trying to separate the groups. I remember one policeman near us, with his horse on its hind legs and the officer with his drawn saber beating down on the heads of the demonstrators. It was scary. And then, I got separated from my sister and the nanny. They tried to find me but could not. They just left me on the square and took a streetcar back home, presumably to report my loss to the police over the phone. I tried to make my way through the yelling crowds, and finally got to a streetcar stop on another square. I had my streetcar pass that I used for getting to school, and made it home all right. There, I found my mother in hysterics. She slammed me against a wall, screamed at me—as if getting lost had been my fault—all the while crying and carrying on. The story had a happy ending, in that I got back unharmed, but I never think about May 1st without this all coming back to mind.

My Sister Ati and Other Playmates

My sister was born on May 3, 1925. She was named Beate, after Dante’s Beatrice—my mother read and greatly admired Dante—but was called Ati. My sister and I lived in the children’s room behind a door that was heavily upholstered, presumably to keep the rest of the household from being disturbed by our noises. The room also had an enclosed porch where the nurse slept when we were little, and where I moved to after we no longer had a live-in nurse. The bottom floor of the house also contained a master bedroom for my parents, a dining room, and a living room with a piano and a huge—at least, so it seemed to me—painting of a nude women falling down a waterfall. There was a big kitchen with a small, attached bedroom where the cook lived. The bottom floor also had a bathroom and a separate lavatory; this was the custom in Europe in those days.

One of my earliest memories involves my sister. She was three years younger than I, so I must have been about four years old. I was sitting on a toy bear on four wheels—apparently a favored possession of mine—in my parent’s bedroom, watching my mother breast-feeding the new baby.

I think, I was jealous of my sister. Although we played together, I also remember that we argued and fought a lot. Ati was artistically much more gifted than I. She started drawing good pictures early. She probably inherited this talent from our mother.

Originally, Ati and I were supervised by a succession of nannies, who lived with us. Later the people watching over us were called governesses. They were supposed to speak some French, and help us learn that language. The kindergarten, which we attended, was also intended to give us some exposure to French. But this language training did not take hold; neither Ati nor I learned much French during those years. Father went on long business trips four or five times a year and mother was busy with language classes and various social activities. For supervision and companionship, we were, therefore, much more dependent on these nannies and governesses than on our parents.

One of my first friends and playmates was Maria Pacher, who lived in a neighboring apartment house. I remember Maria as a blond, friendly girl, about my age. To get from her place to ours, she would just cross through a bushy fence arrangement between our house and her apartment house. For several years, we played together almost every day. After a few years, Ati was big enough to join us in games. Our backyard seemed big to us kids; in reality there was room for only a few birch trees, a bench and a sandbox. But it was all fenced in and a good place for kids to play without much adult supervision. Our neighbors on one side had some apple trees that reached over our fence, and, as we got older, we learned how to knock the almost ripe apples off the trees with a long stick. We ate them—and got stomach troubles. Altogether, that yard was a wonderful place for us and the kids in our neighborhood to play in while we were in kindergarten and grade school.

I do not remember ever going over to Maria’s apartment. Her parents were probably not overjoyed with Maria having this Jewish buddy, but there was not much choice because there were not too many kids of our age in the neighborhood. I vividly remember