GILROY
– Long-time Gilroy resident Otmar (Otto) Silberstein survived
what millions of others did not 60 years ago. After years of
silence he found he was ready to talk about his escape from the
Holocaust.
GILROY – Long-time Gilroy resident Otmar (Otto) Silberstein survived what millions of others did not 60 years ago. After years of silence he found he was ready to talk about his escape from the Holocaust.
At an early November meeting of the South Valley Unitarian Fellowship in Morgan Hill, Silberstein kept 25 friends riveted to the story, first of Kristallnacht, then of his – and his family’s – attempts to leave Austria and to survive the concentration camps during World War II.
He showed the gathering photos of his two “long-bearded” grandfathers – playing chess in somewhat safer times.
“Fortunately they both died long before the Holocaust,” Silberstein said. His remaining immediate family had a difficult, fearful time of it down to the last minute but, ultimately, managed to survive. Silberstein, his parents and brother ended up in the United States.
“We were lucky,” he said.
An aunt had been living in the U.S. for a long time and that – besides a lot of luck – turned out to be the key factor where the Silbersteins succeeded and so many others did not.
Why delay so long to tell his story? Silberstein said it was because many people central to the story have died recently; the others are aging. It was time, he said. The story is long and complicated and deserves an entire book.
Otmar Silberstein was born in 1921, in Graz, the second largest city in Austria – an industrial city in the southeast corner of the country. Austria was a a separate country before World War II, a remnant, he said, of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Beginning of the end
When Germany invaded Austria – in what was called the Anschluss – in March 1938, the handwriting was on the wall. Jews, Silberstein said, were expected to give up their businesses; an uncle – his father’s older brother – refused, was arrested and sent to jail for six months. The Germans confiscated both the store and his apartment.
The family was declared stateless when the Nazis revoked its citizenship.
“We suddenly had no friends,” Silberstein said. “People avoided us, looked right through us or changed sidewalks.”
Graz, he said, became the first Austrian city to be completely “cleansed” of Jews.
“That’s why I don’t consider it my hometown,” said Silberstein, who still displays his Stateless Passport.
The principal of his high school was replaced. “He spoke in only one voice: a loud hysterical scream,” Silberstein said. After this the lives of the Jewish students went from bad to worse when November brought Kristallnacht.
The Encyclopedia Britannica has a chilling entry on Kristallnacht, or “Night of the Broken Glass,” on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, calling it essentially a ‘pogrom’ by Nazis against Jews in Germany and Austria. Jews had, for several years, been blamed for all Germany’s economic ills, and there were many.
Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller had sent a telegram, just before midnight Nov. 9, saying that “in shortest order, actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” Police, instead, were to arrest the victims and fire departments were only to intervene if nearby “Aryan” properties were threatened by the flames from burning Jewish buildings.
The word ‘Aryan’ meant, to many Germans at the time and certainly to Hitler and his cronies, ‘pure German stock:’ people who were tall, fair and blonde. This designation did not include any of Germany’s Jewish citizens who may have been tall, fair and blonde, as many were. They were Jews and, therefore according to Hitler, inferior to Christian Germans.
Over the two days of Kristallnacht, German civilians and others looted, burned or damaged more than 1,000 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish businesses and killed more than 91 German Jewish citizens. Any building owned by a Jew was in peril and countless homes, schools and cemeteries were destroyed or damaged, according to Silberstein.
To the camps
Even scarier to the Jewish population was the 30,000 men and boys deported to concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, infamous names to this day. Silberstein was one of these boys.
Before Kristallnacht, the lives of Jews in Germany and Austria were exceedingly unpleasant, causing many to leave for other parts of the world. Afterwards, when their lives became impossible, it was difficult-to-impossible to leave and many were trapped. This was the situation in which the Silberstein family found itself.
By Nov. 15 all Jewish children and youths were banned from schools and, by December, all Jews were banned from most public places in Germany, also according to Silberstein’s Britannica resource – and his own experience.
But by Nov. 15 Silberstein wasn’t in school any more. On Nov. 9, at 5 a.m., there came what he describes as “an ominous knock on the door.” It was the Gestapo come to arrest the entire family.
“The most upsetting things to me was seeing my father in tears,” he said. “He knew what was coming.” Silberstein was 17 years old and considered the arrest an adventure. He found schoolmates in the cell.
“We learned from older inmates how to form chess pieces from bread and played on a board carved into a table,” he remembers.
The next day Silberstein’s 13-year-old brother was pulled out of line and sent to his mother and sister; they remained in jail for two more weeks and were released. The men were given a small loaf of bread and sent to the concentration camp, Dachau. Silberstein told the friends at the Unitarian meeting of life in the camp.
He remembers undressing, bald haircuts, “running a gauntlet of bat-swinging storm troopers to be hosed down with high pressure cold water.” Then the blue-striped uniforms ‘adorned’ with yellow stars for Jews, red stars for Communists and pink triangles for homosexuals. Unpleasant memories.
Standing for hours in the extreme cold, Silberstein survived by doing what he discovered later were isometric exercises. Constantly moving fingers and toes without appearing to move. Inmates stood so the still-alive could be counted, every day.
Thankfully, Silberstein was released from Dachau after six weeks because, at 17, he was too young. Later this would not matter. But then it saved his life.
Silberstein was reunited with his parents in Munich. From that time on the family tried over and over, every possible way to escape from Austria.
Times were not all bad. On New Year’s Eve, 1939, a former family friend unexpectedly brought a basket of goodies to celebrate one more time – for old time’s sake. He had been a Nazi-sympathizer for years and now was important in the party hierarchy.
“We’ve made a terrible mistake,” he told the family, “but now it is too late.”
The day of the Anschluss, the Silberstein family had begun writing frantic letters – to an uncle in Sao Paolo, Brazil, to family in Poland and to an aunt in America.
“We can always commit suicide,” is the way Silberstein said his mother ended these letters. The problem with U.S. immigration was the requirement of finding ‘guarantors’ for families, affidavits to guarantee they wouldn’t become a burden to taxpayers. Waiting lists were too long.
“Of course we tried other things: A U.S. lawyer showed up promising Cuban visas for the family for $600,” he said. The money was paid and disappeared.
Silberstein was given 30 days by the Gestapo to get out of Austria. He joined a kibbutz in Vienna, preparing to emigrate to Palestine – though the British in control were trying their mightiest to keep them out. His father escaped to Italy, volunteered for the French army and came to the United States on one of the final ships out in 1942. Silberstein, his siblings and mother were still in Austria.
“Uncle Henry invested in a scheme that promised visas to Barbados,” Silberstein said. He was arrested; Henry’s family tried to escape into Switzerland as skiers. They were caught and sent back. Another uncle and his wife made it onto an illegal ship for Palestine but had to send their two-year-old son to unknown foster parents in Sweden.
Silberstein was ready to take his chances at getting into Palestine when, at the very last minute, visas to the United States arrived. He describes the last-minute glitches as “harrowing” but he left Bremerhafen on Aug. 3, 1939. Silberstein’s sister and mother joined him and the family arrived in America on Aug. 11.
After that, for the Jews of Europe, came the deluge. Friends, family and acquaintances left behind mostly perished in the camps.
The Others
While Silberstein’s close family eventually ended up in America, all of his parents’ families perished in the Holocaust except for two cousins, who miraculously survived. One fought in the Warsaw uprising and later jumped off the train bound for Auschwitz, joined the Polish underground and was eventually liberated by the Red Army.
The other cousin, sent to Auschwitz, survived the repeated ‘selections’ by sheer luck (two selection lines: one to live, one to die) and was shipped from camp to camp until she escaped from notorious Bergen Belsen. Eventually, she was exchanged for German expatriates in Denmark. More family luck.
After many years brother and sister found each other; they now live Australia.
After landing in the United States and serving in the U.S. Army, the young Silberstein was working on a farm in upstate New York when he attended the wedding of his best friend. Across the table at the reception was an attractive young woman named Natasha, visiting from the University of Wisconsin.
“I was sunk,” he said. It took a while before she noticed him or would answer his letters but, eventually, 55 years ago, Natasha became Mrs. Silberstein. They raised two sons, Robert and David.
After years of college at Michigan State and graduate school at Cornell University and with a doctorate degree in food research, Silberstein moved his family to Gilroy in 1963 and went to work for Gilroy Foods, where he stayed until retirement. Both sons graduated from Gilroy High School and have made their parents proud.
“Winter in New York was long and hard,” Silberstein said. One of the boys suffered from asthma, and the California climate was said to be helpful.
Gilroy suited the couple and, except for a few years back on the East Coast, they have been part of South County ever since.
