Living in Interesting Times: Living the American Dream

By Morris Herman

This book describes the personal journey of Morris Herman. His parents were Holocaust survivors who were incarcerated in a Ukraine concentration camp from 1941 to 1944. Morris Herman was born in Romania in 1946 when it was ruled by a Communist dictator. His mother shared with Morris stories about life in concentration camp where she barely survi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morris Herman
• Release date: Dec 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780692045701

Book preview

Prologue

May you live in interesting times sounds Chinese but is probably not Chinese per some sources. Depending on how it is stated, it could be a negative – bad, challenging, dangerous times or it could be positive – good times. But it could be both because that’s what life is anyway. We have no control of the character of some events in our lives and living life means adapting to the circumstances that are thrust upon us.

I don’t remember exactly when I decided to finally write my autobiography but I remember many instances, when I related events in my life to family, friends and colleagues, that I thought to myself: I should write this down. This is an autobiography but it also documents the development of my life philosophy over the years, including my thoughts about religion and politics.

I am living the American Dream. As the son of Holocaust survivors who came to the United States with no money, I managed, with the help of my family and my work ethic, to get a good education that led to a successful career which allowed me to rise substantially above my parents’ living standards. The American Dream was first defined by James Truslow Adams in a 1931 book titled The Epic of America. He described the American Dream as a better, richer and happier life for all citizens.

The book will not be a telling of my life’s minute details. The title of my book is Living in Interesting Times and I hope it does not mean interesting only to me. I am going Epic. OK maybe not that big. Something that will be interesting to the casual reader.

I am not writing this book to make money. I am not a celebrity and very few people know me. I never had friends coming over every day like you see in sitcoms. My immediate family, changing through three marriages, was always the center of my home life, while my forty-seven plus year career with only one company was the center of my work life.

I never went to the bar with the boys. I don’t drink, except for a toast on special occasions, I have never smoked nor have I ever taken illicit drugs. Could I have an interesting life? Yes, and I hope you will agree. With this book, I hope to leave behind something tangible, other than the memories of me in the minds of my family, former colleagues and friends.

My life journey, starting in Romania and lasting for almost thirteen years, took me then to Israel for a couple of years and then finally to the last stop, the United States. Three continents, three countries with three different eco-political systems and time that spans the end of World War II in the 20th century to the present second decade of the 21st century.

I will present the events in chronological order as much as possible. I will use sidebars (unnumbered chapters) to deal with events and issues that span years or decades. I will use italicized paragraphs to indicate direct quotations of other sources. I found Wikipedia to be a very useful source in retrieving much of the history of Bukovina and Romania.

I hope you will enjoy reading my autobiography.

I

Bukovina (1910 - 1945)

1

Location, Location, Location

I wish I could say that I can go back in my ancestry and write about my great grandparents or even further back but that history is not available to me. I never even met any of my grandparents because they were deceased by the time I was born. Unfortunately, this is quite common with families coming out of Europe, which was ravaged by two world wars.

My family, going back many years, lived in the Austro-Hungarian empire (see Figure 1), a part of the world where cities and regions changed names and were annexed by different countries, multiple times even during a single lifetime. The region in which my family lived was named Bukovina (see the light purple eastern region in Figure 1 and the more detailed map in Figure 2). You will see the alternative spelling Bucovina because that is the name for the region in Romanian. Outside the home, my family spoke German which was the official language of the empire. Inside the home, the language they used was Yiddish which is a derivative of multiple Eastern European languages, especially German.

The largest city in Bukovina, under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian empire where my parents and earlier generations lived, was named Czernowitz. It was renamed Cernăuți (see Figure 2) after the Kingdom of Romania acquired Bukovina at the end of World War I. The northern yellow part of Figure 2 is now in Ukraine while the green southern part is in Romania.

Czernovitz was not your Jewish shtetl (Yiddish diminutive for an Eastern European village). The city was very cosmopolitan and was dubbed Little Vienna, because its architecture is reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian capital Vienna, according to Wikipedia. I found a picture of the Central Square pictured on a postcard (see Figure 3) with Greetings from Czernowitz in German.

Finally, its name changed to Chernivtsi when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) demanded the northern part of Bukovina from Romania, following the implementation of the Germany and USSR Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1940. By the way, if you are a fan of Mila Kunis, you might want to know that she is Jewish and was born in Chernivtsi. A view of the city in modern times is shown in Figure 4.

North Bukovina was annexed into the Ukrainian Republic of the USSR while South Bukovina, where I was born, became part of Communist Romania. After the USSR broke up in December 1991, the northern Bukovina region became part of the independent country of Ukraine.

My family’s hometown city, under three different names (Czernowitz, Cernăuți, Chernivtsi), governed by four different countries (Austria-Hungarian Empire, Romania, Soviet Union, independent Ukraine), all major changes that occurred within one human lifetime. Even now, Ukraine is threatened by Vladimir Putin who considers it part of Greater Russia and is not above using all means to make Ukraine part of a greater Russian Federation.

Figure 1 Regions of Austrian and Hungarian Empires (source: FamilySearch)

Figure 2 Bukovina (source: Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 3 Central Square in Czernowitz in the 1900s (source: Sasha-korol)

Figure 4 Theater Square of Chernivtsi in Modern Times (source: Sasha-korol)

2

My Family

I know least about my paternal grandparents. My father, Wolf, was born in 1910 in Vijnitza which is a small town west of Czernowitz in Northern Bukovina (see Figure 2). His mother Mindel Margulies died, after succumbing to a disease, leaving eight small children in the care of my grandfather Isaac Leib Margulies who committed suicide just a few weeks later.

My father was only four years old when this chaos entered his life. He obviously did not have much information to hand down to me about his parents. After he was orphaned, my father was adopted by his mother’s sister Gitel, who gave him her last name of Herman. His two oldest brothers, Charles and Sol, retained the Margulies family name but my father and his younger brother Sydney took new last names of their adopters. I never heard anything about the other four orphan children.

Compared to my paternal grandparents, I know a little bit more information about my maternal grandparents. My mother spoke little if anything about her mother Rifka whose maiden name was Weiner. However, my mother had lots to say about her father, Moishe Herman (see Figure 5). Good thing too because I am his namesake and loved to hear about him.

It is traditional for Jews to name their newborn after dead relatives to keep the names alive. It turns out my grandfather Moishe was a very smart man and very industrious. He was a tailor and my mother told me that he also served some time as vice-mayor of the city of Czernowitz.

My mother, Berta, was born in Czernowitz in 1917. However, her official documents show that she was born in 1915. The discrepancy is due to her modifying the birth year so that she could go to work when her family was desperate for more income. She had an older sister, Dora and a younger sister, Sali. There were three more siblings, Mina, Ana and Gusta, but they all perished in the concentration camp during WWII and my mother did not share any information about them with me.

My mother completed only six years of education before she had to go to work in the Hercules textile mill to help her family. In the mill, she worked alongside Lithuanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians and Poles. She became fluent in all those languages and she passed her very good language learning genes to me. At one time, I was fluent in German, Yiddish, Romanian and Hebrew. Today, after much disuse of some of those languages, I am no longer fluent in them.

However, I am happy to relate that when I visited Romania in 1995, thirty-six years after I left Romania and no longer spoke Romanian, I had long conversations in Romanian with City Archive Office representatives and people that live in the house I grew up. I am sure my grammar was not up to par but I think I held up my end of the conversations very well.

Figure 5 My Namesake Grandfather Moishe Herman

My father moved from Vijnitza to Czernowitz when he was an adult. He married another woman for a short time, divorced and started courting my mother. My mother was not easily convinced and she declined to marry him for a long time. Did I mention that my father and mother were first cousins? Although Americans cringe at the thought of marrying first cousins, this was an accepted practice and not considered unusual in Europe.

I recently came across two very old pictures. One picture is of my Aunt Sali and Uncle Abe’s wedding in 1940 (see Figure 6). In that picture, starting from the bottom left, is my mother, my Aunt Dora’s daughter who died in the concentration camp, the bride Aunt Sali, the groom Uncle Abe, Aunt Dora and my father who is above Uncle Abe.

I cannot identify the other six women in the picture but expect four of them to be Ana, Gusta and Mina who were sisters of the bride and my mother as well as my father’s first wife. I am angry that I did not ask my parents to identify everybody in this picture. Now, nobody is left that can help me identify them.

Figure 6 Aunt Sali and Uncle Abe Wedding (1940)

In the second photo (see Figure 7). from the left, are my Aunt Dora and Uncle Sol with their two children who would perish shortly in the Transnistria concentration camp, an unidentified woman who could be my father’s first wife, my father’s youngest brother Uncle Sidney and finally my father. They are all dressed in their best clothes strolling on an avenue in Czernovitz, unaware that their lives were about to be drastically upended by the 1941 Nazi invasion of Ukraine.

Figure 7 Members of My Family Before the Nazi Invasion

3

Transnistria 1941 - 1944

World War II came to Bukovina in the fall of 1941. My father, his older brother Sol, my mother and her two sisters were forced by German and Romanian troops to walk from Czernowitz to the Bershad ghetto. The Bershad ghetto was in the Transnistria region, east of the current independent country of Moldova, about 250 miles from Czernowitz. The Transnistria name is derived from Trans-Dniester which means Beyond the Dniester river (see Figure 8). Note that Czernowitz is shown on the map as Chernovtsy, another variation of the city’s name.

Much earlier, my father’s oldest brother, Charles, made the best decision of his life, to leave Bukovina. He moved westward until he could travel to the United States as a stowaway on a trans-Atlantic ship.

My family was incarcerated for four years, 1941 to 1944, in the Transnistria concentration camp. The following narrative from Wikipedia matches what my mother told me in broad outlines about her experience in the Transnistria concentration camp (notes in parentheses are my edits).

Many Jews were deported to Transnistria from Bessarabia and Bukovina. During the period 1941–1944, 200,000 Romani people (Gypsies) and Jews became victims of the Romanian occupation of Transnistria. Not being Romanian territory, Transnistria was used as a killing field for the extermination of Jews.

Survivors say that in comparison with the Holocaust of Nazi Germany, where deportations were carefully planned, the Romanian government did not prepare to house thousands of people in Transnistria, where the deportees stayed. The people were instead placed in crude barracks without running water, electricity or latrines. Those who could not walk were simply left to die.

Many Jews died of exposure, starvation, or disease during the deportations to Transnistria or after arrival. Others were murdered by Romanian or German units, either in Transnistria or after being driven across the Bug River into the German-occupied Ukraine. Most of the Jews who were sent to the camps in Transnistria never returned. Those who survived, around 70,000, returned to Romania in 1945 to find that they had lost their houses.

Figure 8 Transnistria Routes of Deportations (source:US Holocaust Memorial Museum)

One of the more fascinating stories my mother told me was of a German soldier coming into her building, sitting down on her bed and complaining about his job and having to be far away from his wife and children back in Germany. What I find remarkable and unusual is that this German soldier, far from home and family, revealed his humanity and vulnerabilities to his captives.

She also told me harrowing stories about their many unsuccessful escape attempts from the camp into the nearby forest. After hearing those stories, I began to have recurring nightmares which featured me, armed with a machine gun, shooting dozens of German soldiers. In those nightmares, I came up with some very innovative modes of transportation: a magic flying carpet and a self-propelled wooden log that could move over land and water.

I also began to think about