Lory Gruenberger Cahn: Almost Saved by the Kindertransport

For the past two months, I’ve posted individual stories about children who fled the Nazis and survived the Holocaust by taking the Kindertransport to England. An earlier post explains how the Kindertransport program was created. If you missed that post and would like to read it, here’s the link:  The Kindertransports: Nearly 10,000  Children Rescued from Nazi Territory. 

Lory Gruenberger lived a happy childhood with her brother and parents in Breslau, Germany, close to the Polish border. To her doting father, Lory could do no wrong. Mr. Gruenberger, a partially paralyzed WWI veteran, had a flourishing law practice and refused his government disability pension. After the Nazis took power in 1933, they didn’t harass Mr. Gruenberger due to his veteran status.

By 1937, Lory’s parents recognized the rising danger for Jews and searched for a way to leave Germany. They applied for quota numbers to the U.S., but the wait was long. In the meantime, Lory’s aunts in South America sent papers for the family to emigrate there. The Gruenbergers sold their house, bought passage for South America, and shipped all their belongings ahead. Two days before their scheduled departure, the Argentine consulate informed them that Hitler would no longer allow siblings to sponsor each other to emigrate from Germany. They were unable to find a way to leave.

The Gruenbergers had money, but very few stores would sell to Jews. They lived in a hotel in Breslau and started over, purchasing what they could. Lory’s brother completed secondary school three years early, and the family sent him to a small university in Czechoslovakia to get him out of Germany. During the summer break, they sent her brother to stay with Lory’s uncle who taught at Cambridge and Oxford in England. He never returned to Germany.

One morning in November, 1938, Lory road the trolley car to school as usual. During the trip, she passed store after store with smashed windows. In the center of town merchandise littered the sidewalks. She realized all the damaged businesses belonged to Jews. After leaving the trolley car, she could only see the top of their synagogue, but she spotted flames shooting from the edifice. She was so frightened, she crossed the street and took the next trolley back home, refusing to look out the windows on the return trip.

Lory arrived home, and the family maid, with tears running down her face, grabbed onto Lory. German officials had just arrested Lory’s father and taken him away ten minutes earlier. Lory’s mother was also distraught. But three or four hours later Mr. Gruenberger returned home in a police car. The Iron Cross belonging to a WWI veteran still provided protection for some Jews.

Lory applied and was accepted for the Kindertransport. Her father wanted her to go to England, but at the same time he didn’t want her to leave. On the prearranged day, the Gruenbergers boarded the Kindertransport train with Lory and put her suitcase up. Her father lowered her window all the way down so she could lean out of the train – the German passenger trains had very large windows. They hugged and kissed, and Lory’s parents disembarked. While waiting on the platform, her father’s face turned whiter and whiter, and her mother couldn’t hide her suffering. 

As the train started to move, Lory’s father asked to hold her hands through the window. Before the train gained speed, Mr. Gruenberger pulled Lory out the window. She fell on the train platform, causing injury and bleeding. Her father was extremely happy to have his little girl back, but Lory was devastated. After arriving home, her father admitted he probably shouldn’t have pulled her off the train, but after losing his son, he didn’t want to live without her.

Mr. Gruenberger chose to believe that nothing would happen to their family and stated as much to Lory and her mother. Lory was no longer allowed to attend school or the movies, but Lory and another Jewish friend decided to defy part of this order. Neither girl looked Jewish, so they removed their yellow stars and went to see Shirley Temple movies. When Lory’s father discovered from the other girl’s parents where she was, he went to the theater with a light and pulled her out. He slapped her, which he had never done before. 

Most stores posted signs informing Jews they weren’t allowed to shop in their establishments. When Lory and her mother entered stores where they were welcome, they were greeted with “Heil Hitler.” They responded with “Drei Liter,” which means three liters, and because it sounded so close, no one challenged them.

In 1940, the authorities called women up for forced labor. Lory was fifteen years old and was assigned to clean the streets in another part of Breslau. She wasn’t allowed to ride on the trolley car because she was Jewish, so she had to get up at 4:00 AM and walk by herself in the dark almost 45 minutes to the assembly place. Lory was next assigned to work in a uniform factory where she mended and cleaned dirty uniforms. She did this until close to the end of 1941. 

Various judges and lawyers visited Lory’s father and warned him that he and his family would eventually be arrested. The SS came at 4:30 one morning and nearly broke the door down. The Gruenbergers were only allowed to take what they could put on and nothing else. Lory’s father had a very high fever, and he was taken out on a stretcher and loaded on a truck.

Lory and her mother were taken on another truck to the huge yard of a synagogue and, along with hundreds of others, waited outside in the March cold for about two days and nights. They were then taken by truck to the railroad station and loaded into cattle cars. Thirty-five to forty frightened people traveled in the cattle car, in complete darkness, with no food, for two days. 

After two days of traveling in the dark cattle car with 35 to 40 people and no food, the guards opened the door and ordered the prisoners to quickly disembark. The daylight blinded their eyes. Lory’s father waited outside the train for Lory and her mother, and he appeared perfectly fine. The prisoners traveled by truck to their final destination—Theresienstadt, a Jewish ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Because of his WWI service, Mr. Gruenberger had been given the opportunity to pay the German government to send him and his family to Theresienstadt, rather than to another camp or ghetto. 

Lory and her mother lived in a barrack with 300 other people. They slept on straw mattresses in bunk beds with three people per mattress. Lory’s father lived in a house with older, sickly prisoners. 

Lory contracted spinal meningitis and stayed in the camp hospital for four months. The doctors were also prisoners, but they were able to get medicine for her through the Swiss Red Cross. 

The Germans “beautified” the ghetto, dressed up the prisoners, and put on a good show for the representatives of the International Red Cross, visiting from Switzerland. Lory performed for them in a children’s choir. After the visit, more prisoners were crowded into Theresienstadt, and it became necessary to sleep in shifts, one group sleeping during the day and the other at night. 

One day Lory was ordered to report to the railroad station and meet with an SS officer. He informed her she wasn’t going on the transport and sent her back home. This happened four times, and each time she said goodbye to her parents. The fifth time she was called she told the SS officer that she wanted to go. He gave her the chance to back out, but she had made up her mind. He crossed her name off the list and loaded her on a cattle car. Her trip ended at Auschwitz.

The guards opened the door, and Dr. Josef Mengele stood outside the car with his stick, hollering and cursing at the prisoners. The officers chased the prisoners out of the train, and Lory’s glasses fell off and broke. Since having spinal meningitis, Lory wore glasses to take the pressure off her nerves. Her inner voice told her not to pick up the glasses, and she obeyed. Mengele divided the prisoners, sending those with defects to the left, including those wearing glasses. This group went directly to the gas chambers, but Mengele sent Lory to the right, and she lived.

After a six to eight-week stay at Auschwitz, the Nazis transferred Lori to several different camps—Buchenwald, Dachau, Kurzbach and Gross-Rosen. At the beginning of 1945, she arrived at Bergen-Belsen where people died by the hundreds.

One month before Lory’s twentieth birthday, the prisoners hollered and many ran outside. The English Army had arrived to liberate Bergen-Belsen. Lori only weighed fifty-eight pounds and was so weak she could only crawl halfway out on her hands and knees. She lay on the ground and prayed to God. A soldier approached and asked if he could assist her. The liberators wanted to help the inmates and gave them chocolate and chicken soup, but more people died from consuming the rich food.

Attachments of soldiers from the French, Russian, and American Armies accompanied the British Army when they liberated Bergen-Belsen. They put together lists of the names and nationalities of the internees. Lory was fascinated when an American soldier from Germany spoke to her in German. The soldiers took her to a hospital for treatment, and she was surprised to see many people she knew, even folks from her hometown of Breslau.

One month after liberation, the British soldiers burned the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to the ground to prevent the spread of Typhus. The survivors were relocated to a former German Army camp nearby. 

Lory traveled by bus to Hanover, a city nearby, to register as a survivor. There she found a man who had lived in the same building with her father at Theresienstadt. He recognized her but said she didn’t look too good. He shared that her father was still at Theresienstadt, but her mother had been transported to Auschwitz three months earlier and had gone to the gas chamber. He pointed out a bus driver whose route went to Theresienstadt once a week. Lory spoke with the driver, and he promised to ask about her father on his return trip. Lory wrote her name on a slip of paper so Mr. Gruenberger would see her handwriting and believe the bus driver. 

Lory took the bus back to Hanover the day before the Theresienstadt bus was scheduled to return. She didn’t have a watch, so she waited on the street all night long to meet her father’s early morning bus. The bus arrived, but Lory’s father didn’t. The driver had checked on him and learned that he had left on a bus for Berlin two or three days earlier. Lori had no way to travel to Berlin and didn’t know how she would ever find her father.

Lory met two young men who’d been traveling around Germany on foot, looking for family. They had come across a little town in Bavaria that wasn’t damaged, and the officers at the American military installation in charge of the area told the young men they’d be happy to have Jewish people locate there. The fellows asked Lory and her girlfriend to join them, and they traveled for a couple of days, begging for food along the road and sleeping with animals, including pigs, to stay warm.

Lori and her group rode into the Bavarian town on an army truck and were sent to a very nice furnished house. Jewish American soldiers, originally from Germany, brought them food the next morning. One of the soldiers was Walter Cahn, and Lory recognized him as the soldier who had taken her information right after the Bergen-Belsen liberation. She was astounded to see him again.

Walter helped Lory locate her father through the Red Cross and Military Intelligence, but it took eight months. After four more months, her father traveled to see her. They had been apart for four years. Lory was thrilled to receive his hugs and kisses.One year later, in 1947, Lori immigrated to the United States and married Walter Cahn. Over the years she corresponded with her father, but they didn’t see each other again until Lory returned to Germany with her son in 1962. She and her family visited her father two or three more times before he died in 1972.

Lory often pondered what would have happened if her father hadn’t pulled her off the Kindertransport and if she hadn’t been able to help her parents through the tragedy they had faced. She didn’t want to hurt her father, so she never brought the topic up with him. But Lory realized she wouldn’t have a normal, happy life if she hated the Germans. She spent many years speaking at universities, schools, and organizations, encouraging others not to forget what the Germans had done, but not to hate them. Lori had a wonderful, happy marriage to Walter Cahn for sixty-one years. She passed away in 2008.

Lory often pondered what would have happened if her father hadn’t pulled her off the Kindertransport and if she hadn’t been able to help her parents through the tragedy they had faced. She didn’t want to hurt her father, so she never brought the topic up with him. But Lory realized she wouldn’t have a normal, happy life if she hated the Germans. She spent many years speaking at universities, schools, and organizations, encouraging others not to forget what the Germans had done, but not to hate them. Lori had a wonderful, happy marriage to Walter Cahn for sixty-one years. She passed away in 2008.

Source: 

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer. Warner Bros., 2000.