Margret Hoffman Survived the Holocaust

Margret Hoffman was born in Berlin in 1925. She lived through the Holocaust (although her mom wasn’t so lucky) and later secured passage to New York. At 78 years-old, Margret is a writer, activist, Quaker, and all around conscientious person. Margret is an incredible archivist. A few weeks ago I was afforded the opportunity to see her files. I didn’t know what to expect. Would I be looking at her computer? She took me into the garage to see droors full of manila folders with newspaper clippings on local and national politics, hot-button issues, and anything else that interested her. It even seems like all the people in her life have done unusual and incredible things. Her husband (he died a few years ago) made pipe organs. He made the pipe organs that are in that big cathedral in Jackson Square, New Orleans. Her son is doing innovative AIDS work in Africa and occasionally flies her in to D.C. to visit and meet with congressional leaders. Sarah and I had her over for dinner recently and learned more about her fascinating life. Here are some excerpts of our conversation:

OK, we’re rolling…

There’s nothing to roll.

I guess you’re right. There is no tape in the digital recorder.

OK, well… I was born in ‘25. Which is… a long time ago. But I’m of this important age group, who has memories before the war, the Nazi years. Because they came about in ‘33 and I was not quite 8. All through the Nazi years I was in my teens. They lasted 12 years and they were over and the war was over by the time I was 19. So what you experience later–20s and 30s is very hard to remember for some reason. But I was at the age where I was old enough to know not to blame myself for not having tried to do more from stopping things from happening. I was just too young.

And you consider yourself a “Half-Jew” right?

My mother was Jewish and my father was not. That’s what they call a “Mischtlin” (sp?) — a mixed person… So what do you want to know. There is so much. That is why I didn’t want to do this over email. So much to tell.

It’s just neat for me to hear you talk about this… I guess I have a lot of questions, really. But you can go in whatever direction you like… Are there any stories, like the one you talked about in the Christian Science Monitor piece, you can share? You know, just what you experienced living in Germany at that time?

I remember seeing a huge group of American soldiers marching down the street and I didn’t hear anything. I was used to groups of soldiers marching down the street and there is the sound of the soles–they were harder and louder. But when the Americans come down the street there is no sound. And they weren’t in step. And the Americans had not learned the power of music. No music. One of my kids found a web site with German march songs. A lot are WWII songs which are Nazi songs. I don’t know if it’s hidden Nazis putting this stuff up or not.
So why couldn’t you hear the American soldiers again?

Rubber soles. Not marching in step. Not singing. All these things illustrate why people aren’t always excited or perceive why people view it as liberation (Billy: we had been talking earlier about a former history teacher of Sarah’s who had fought in WWII and told a story about being confused and frustrated when his troop was not received as liberators). I mean what if they had just gone through terrible bombings from the Americans? And to what degree had they been exposed to war propaganda.

Along the same lines, big question for me, you’ve been through all of this, your mom was killed because she was Jewish, yet you consider yourself a Pacifist. I think a lot of people would be curious how someone like you who has seen this atrocities and might say, “How in the world could someone like Hitler been stopped without force?” Maybe pacifism allows certain…

It’s very difficult to… once the bombs have been released from the plane you cannot bring them back anymore.

OK, well let’s back up then. Hitler is…

Well if you backup, as a Pacifist, create an atmosphere. That is really the job of a Pacifist is to create an atomosphere to make violence less likely.

But… stopping you again. You’ve got Hitler sweeping through Europe. How does the Pacifist worldview… how do you confront this.

Not with a simple patent answer. There are certain levels which… One could certainly have done without bombing the cities. That affected attitudes and makes the mind coarser.

That doesn’t make sense to me.

You cannot start at the end of the whole thing. Gotta start at the buildup. And especially at the buildup in the person’s soul. The first bombing raids on Rotterdam from the Germans… several hundred people were killed and that was terrible. As far as I am concerned bombing is always terrible. As the war progresses, one gets more callous. Big raids, hardly a note in the paper. Over here there were cities that weren’t known and suffering 10…20…30,000 people killed in raids. Hamburg, 60 or 70,000 people.

So you’re sort of saying that before things got to this point, people, society, the world could have approached all of this differently.

Well, yes with the experience of WWI. Generations were raised without fathers, uncles, and cousins.

OK, earlier you were asking how I got here. I did not come to Texas right away. Very soon after the war, to my amazement, President Truman, who was president at the time, opened America up to refugees, and I thought with all the soldiers returning, he’s gonna have a tough time finding jobs for all the GIs returning. I admired that a great deal. There were no newspapers yet in those days. The war had been over almost a year–

There were no newspapers?

You have to realize everything was bombed to pieces or shut down. And Germany was in the process of being divided, you know, East Germany, West Germany and all this hampered the development of newspapers, postal service, and all this. Now there may have been newspapers in some places but the only thing I got to see was notices, newsletters sent out, or you just heard about. There wasn’t TV in those days. Even radio was a rarity. But I happened to see in one news sheet just various rules that the occupation had placed on the people. And I learned that I might actually quality for emigration. I was fairly adventurous and independent early on. And the idea that I could go to America. It was an especially attractive thought at a time when you had no idea what would become of Germany again. Will there ever be jobs and training? Universities?

Were you not angry at all with the Americans?

No. No, I wasn’t… And another thing was that everybody had an uncle in America. (laughs) You just had an uncle in America. I mean when the Americans came over, they could get in a jeep, get out a map and visit relatives in some German town! Put some cigarettes in their pocket and just go on over! It just difficult to think that these groups were enemies…. But anyway, would there ever even be stores? I mean, you couldn’t even buy pencils. I remember a dream I had about being able to buy lots of pens in a store. So anyway the requirements were that I had to be able to prove persecution from the Nazis. You lost your home or something. I found that I could just barely qualify. I was thinking that when I got here I would find a real job and buy food and send money home. My brother and his wife had just had a baby. He’s now over 50. Young girls didn’t have anything except what the soldiers would give them–that’s just how it was.

German soldiers or American soldiers?

Well, the German soldiers were no more. The Americans were the ones who gave. The British were a little stuffy about that.

So where did you first arrive?

New York. But the trick was to get qualified. The examinations were an interesting story. Everyone who had the slightest chance of emigration were gathered up in a camp near Munich. I was there for a while. Every day they published a list of those who were eligible to ride in the street car into Munich to the office of the council. They say “yes” or “no” to you basically. Everybody was Polish it seemed like. They were Polish refugees and prisoners of war. Many were criminal or just really pathetic. You put something that you didn’t lock away or hide and it would disappear. There were four of us in a barracks style room. We got to be good friends. Each of them got called up and each of them got turned down. And they had family over here. One girl was pregnant from an American soldier. All turned down. Meanwhile, I had learned, I was called last, I learned that some deputies were really vindictive. But one was very highly regarded. If you were interviewed by him, you might have a chance. All my roommates wer more suited to emigrate but they met with the vindictive guy. I was determined to see they other one and did… My English was good enough that I did not need an interpreter–that really saved me. I’ll never forget, after we talked a little while, and he said, “Well how do I know that everything you’re telling me is true?” And I told him, “It’s my word and I don’t lie.” It was so refreshing to him after all the crap he had heard. He promised me a Visa. I felt so guilty going back to my room. All the others had been turned down.

So how old were you when you came over?

Just turned 20.

So you arrived in New York…

I had my father’s second wife–a perfectly worthless person–get me.

So I guess you arrived by ship?

Yes, and that is a whole ‘nother story.

A Catholic organization officially sponsored me. I was Catholic for a brief period. I had to visit their office the next day. The office was in the Empire State Building. They were having a little observance there. The observance was for the first anniversary of the plane crashing into the Empire State Building in 1945. Anyway, I went to the Catholic offices there. They had already been reimbursed for my trip by my stepmother’s brother who lived in Detroit. So I went to Detroit and went to school for about a year. Worked for room and board. Tuition was only $75.

What school?

Wayne. Now it is known as Wayne State University.

After about a year I gave up. I had to work to send food back to three families. I didn’t know what a degree was or how long it would take. And the pressure was always there as it is now. How can I tell these people, who know so little about war, what it is really like? What are we talking about when we are talking about developing nuclear weapons. Only those who have lost sons or husbands in war know what bombing is really all about? And like… how come some of the young men come back and they are just so different than before. I know why. Y’know? There is just such a vast difference that is hard to swallow. You learn the day you leave… You know, you go to church and learn the basics– love your neighbor and all that and then you leave and everything is totally turned around. You see all these people dying and unless you’re totally callous, you wonder, “What is going on? Why are civilians being killed?” And what is the difference between civilians and soldiers anyway? They are somebody’s sons.

Why do we make such a difference?

Do you feel like twenty, thirty years ago… people like students, young people, adults… Well I guess what I mean is, how have people’s attitudes changed about war, sending our soldiers over to fight in conflicts?

Not much. Not as much as it should. Communications and technology. Yeah, that’s changed. But as you said earlier, we are making more of an effort not to kill a bunch of civilians. You cannot get any kind of a counting but there is some place on the internet of how many Iraqi civilians.

And you’ve got a question everything though right? Like I was just reading on anti-Bush site that thousands and thousands of civilians had been killed and I wondered, “How do they know this?”

There is some real efforts being made… based on lists from hospitals. But you never hear about it… How come you never see pictures of Baghdad? You never see any skyline or what buildings look like.

You can see all that on the web. Very easy.

Sarah: Something I don’t understand about the Iraq war… I keep reading these soldier’s journals and they talk about how bored they are. How they spend all this time hanging around the camp. Playing basketball, reading books–bored. But at the same time, I hear that we’re understaffed. And we don’t have enough soldiers. And that we need to send more soldiers.

Margret: You don’t look for logic when it comes to the military. Because they want the billions of dollars but yet the Pentagon has lost millions–can’t even account for it. And there will be projects approved that don’t make any sense whatsoever…
a land-locked senator’s district is builing a massive ship they can’t even get out of there. So much wasted money. But you know if it provides jobs in congressional districts so it happens. So many people make money on wars. On other people’s misery.

Do you have any regrets or anything you would have done differently?

Yeah, college degree. An advanced degree. I wish I knew then what I know now–I would have done it. It would have been in nursing. I did work in hospitals until I got married.

Switching gears again. I was thinking about your Vietnam book published in the late Sixties. And everything that happening then. Counter-cultural revolution, anti-war rallies… Were you a part of that at all?

No. I wanted to bring the war to an end in a more constructive way instead of standing on a street corner and screaming. I spent my time listening to the hearings on the Council of Foreign Relations Committee on radio. I was appalled at how little well-compiled material was available to the members of the Foreign Relations Committee wheras the representatives from the Pentagon had stacks. I thought if I could put together basic information…

So in the 60’s when all this was happening, you were here in Austin, and you would write letters, and…

Yeah it was a difficult time. I had five kids. I had to publish the book myself. The printer’s contribution to the cause was printing my book. I wanted to have only reputable sources in there so he wouldn’t just brush it off… No, I don’t believe in standing on street corners and screaming. But I did participate in a silent march before the marches became big. That was in ‘63 just before Vietnam. Several of marched silently from the Capitol to Bergstrom. A long walk.
I got so sunburned.

This was before Vietnam, what was the march about?

Well, there was the continuing build-up. It was the Cold War, y’know? Soviets were building up, we were building up. There were hydrogen bomb tests in open air. We wanted to put a stop to this. Kennedy finally started the underground testing…