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Second Interview Insert Key
Indented text represents the follow-up
interview conducted on April 24, 2003.
Introduction of Interviewers
My
name is Matthew, my name is Julianne, and my name is Leah, and this
is Lucille Eichengreen. This interview is on May 30th, 2002 in Kennsington,
California.
My
name is Ilana, my name is Sam, and my name is Michelle, and we
are interviewing Lucille Eichengreen for the Urban School of San Francisco's
class, Telling Their Stories. Today is April 24th, 2003.
What is your full name?
Mrs.
Lucille C. Eichengreen. It used to be Cecelia Landau. 2-1-1925. I am
of Polish nationality but I was born in Hamburg, Germany.
What was your earliest memory?
When
I was about three or four years old.
And what was it?
Where
we lived. What the rooms looked like. What the parks looked like. My
parents.
Why and when did your family come to Germany ?
It
happened right after the First World War. My father was in the Austro-Hungarian
army. During the war he was wounded. And many Jews decided around
1918 that it would be easier to make a living in Germany than in Poland.
He knew my mother at that time but he was not married. He got to know
her older brother who already lived in Germany and had a very successful business
so my father moved.
And what year was this?
It
was between 1918 and 1920. He came from Vienna where he went to school
and then he came north to the city of Cuttbbus
near
Dresden.
When you were growing up did your parents consider
your family as Polish-Jewish or more German?
No,
there was nothing German in our home. My parents spoke Polish. I never
learned it. And it was very convenient because we couldn't understand.
No we were definitely Polish. We were Jewish first, I would guess,
and Polish second.
When did you learn Polish and German?
I
learned German in school. I spoke it in school, I spoke it at home.
I learned German in 1942. No, I learned Polish in 1942 when I lived
in Poland. Before that I have no idea.
Did you speak any Yiddish at home?
No.
My grandmother spoke Yiddish but she lived in Poland. I could understand
her but I could not reply. I only learned Yiddish in 1941-1942.
Did most of the kids in your neighborhood speak
German? Any Polish or Yiddish or other languages?
No,
there were very few Jews who lived in the same area. It was a middle
class neighborhood and everyone spoke German.
Would you say you enjoyed living in Hamburg, Germany?
I
don't think I ever gave it much thought. Life was very nice, very comfortable,
until 1933. It was pretty much taken for granted.
One really realized the difference between before and after in 1934, '35, '36.
As a child you take many things for granted. A comfortable life, enough food,
enough clothing, vacations. It was a matter of fact and when that changed we
became very aware of it.
Just thinking about the things you took for granted
and the good that happened then, can you recount happy or fond memories
when you were younger?
We
would go on a Sunday to a park and the park had ice cream and coffee
and cake and children could play. And, there were no remarks made,
nobody took any notice whether you were Jewish or not. It was just
a happy carefree life. Specifics? I remember trips to Spain, I remember
trips to Italy. I remember trips to Yugoslavia and to Poland. If you
were 7, 8 and 9 years old you take it pretty much for granted. You
do not think about it, you just accept it. It's taken for granted,
which later on we found out was not as natural as we thought.
Do you remember visiting family in Poland?
My
Grandmother and my aunts lived in Poland, which is now the Ukraine.
The family, by and large, spoke Polish. My cousins went to the university
in Warsaw. But already at this early age, Jews had to stand in the
last row, they couldn't sit down. They became teachers but they remained
in Poland, except for one cousin who went to Palestine.
Did anyone in your family ever consider going to
Palestine besides that cousin?
Yes,
there was family on my father's side that left for Palestine around
the turn of the century. My mother's oldest brother left for San Francisco
around 1900.
Did you have much contact with your family in America?
No,
no contact at all.
Never, no postcards no nothing?
There
might have been a letter once a year. My uncle really didn't care for
family.
Did your parents care much for family? Did you
have contact with them? Were you close with them?
Yes,
with cousins, aunts and uncles. We were very close, especially if they didn't live too
far away. There was a good contact.
You would visit them?
We
would visit. We would go to Poland every three years or so and see
the family. I had one cousin and an aunt and an uncle in Germany and
my mother's oldest brother in Dresden which was several hours away.
My father had two brothers in Berlin. The contact was constant and
very close.
What did your parents do for a living?
My
father imported and exported wine, wholesale. He did not have a store.
I remember the cellars and the huge barrels of wine which had to age
and then were filled off into bottles and sold. It must have been a
very comfortable living because we never worried about money.
Did any of your other friends have money concerns?
Some
did, but the majority did not. I had several friends whose fathers
practiced medicine or law, so there were no money concerns. But I had also
some friends who lived in a very slum-like area and could not pay the
tuition in a private school, and did not bring lunch to school, so
we gave them some of our lunch. There were kids that were not well-off,
but it was not the rule, it was the exception.
Did you ever feel a sense of sadness when seeing
some of your friends living in these slum-like areas?
Well,
I felt pity for them because they were dressed differently, they looked
differently and they spoke more of a slang rather than a clear language.
I noticed the difference in school as a child, but it didn't bother
me, it was just accepted. My father used to say, "There will always
going to be people who are richer than you are and people that are
poorer than you are," and I accepted that.
Did your mother practice any profession?
My
mother was educated in a town that was called Lemburg, it's now Lvov.
She spoke Polish, German, Yiddish and French. When she was about 22
or 23 she learned to make hats, but she never worked professionally.
Did you spend a lot of time with her at home?
Yes,
she was at home, she did not work. But the school day was very long.
We would go in the evening and pick up my father at his office. Yes
we spent a lot of time with our mother.
Why did your mother learn to speak French? Was
that common among people there?
Yes,
the educated people in Poland spoke German as a matter of course, and
French because it was the thing to do.
What do you mean they "spoke German as a matter
of course?"
It
was the Austro-Hungarian Empire so you had to be bilingual – Polish
and German, or German and Polish depending on the government. And French,
I would say the middle class spoke French, the upper middle class.
Did you ever learn any French?
When
I went to school my first foreign language was English, the second
one was French, and the third one was Latin.
What was your relationship between you and your sister?
She
was five years younger. She had her friends, I had my friends. But
it was a good relationship.
Would you call yourselves friends?
No,
I don't think so. We were more related than friends because of the
five year difference.
How did you spend your time with her?
She
was five years younger than I was, so she for the most part had her
friends, and I had mine. There was really very little time spent that we
would spend together. I used to read to her occasionally. We shared
the same room. We walked to school together. But our friends were just
five years apart in age and we did not share the same friends.
Growing up did you ever feel like a caretaker for
her, like just help her out when she was growing up?
No
I did not because we had help around the house. We had a maid, we had
a nurse for the children and I did not come
to that point until the war.
What was your first day at school like?
I
wanted to go to school. It was a school with roughly five-hundred students.
It was frightening. It was intimidating. And the thing I noticed on
the first day was that the faculty was rather old—fifty and above.
You mentioned that you were frightened the first
day of school. Can you explain that further?
I
was not frightened the first day, I was frightened right after Hitler
came to power. Because the streets changed, the children changed, everything
changed. I started school in 1930, so till '33 nothing happened. It
was just a normal walk to school, normal people. And after Hitler came
to power, it took less than 90 days. People would call us names and
throw stones. And that was frightening.
Can you describe what school life was like before
Hitler's rise to power?
It
was a very old-fashioned school. The teachers, to me, were ancient,
but they were over 50, all of them. It was an Orthodox school in terms
of religion, and religion was taught. You had to learn modern Hebrew,
you had to be able to translate the Torah, you had to know Hebrew,
in addition to everything else. We took it as a matter of fact, we
didn't question it. I questioned it when my kids went to school.
Questioning religion?
No,
no private school. I don't know what I would do today, but this was 1970
when I said "no private school." Because, in a sense, a private
school, it's different, it has privileges that a public school does
not have. And you are really not exposed to the population at large,
you are exposed to people of more or less your background, and I didn't
want that for my children.
Were you a good student in school?
In
the beginning, yes, I was good, I mean average A's and B's. And then
as the pressure from outside increased – and we were beaten up
and we were harassed, and our parents told us "it's a passing
phase, it will normalize" – we worried. And my grades really
were terrible at that point. And my parents got private tutors for
English, for arithmetic, for German, for just about every subject.
And my grades improved, but I just didn't concentrate, I couldn't.
Were your parents very much involved in your education?
Yes,
they were.
Do you recall any friends that you met during school?
No,
I'm still in touch with 3 or 4 of them that started first grade with
me. They live partly in Israel, there is one in New York. We have very
little in common, we have led very different lives. But we are still
in touch. I remember their birthday parties. I remember getting dressed
up and bringing a present and playing games. But seeing them now and
talking to them now, our lives are very different and have been very
different, for the most part. Not each and every one, but for the most
part.
Can you recall as a child, any activities you enjoyed
doing by yourself or with friends?
We
liked to go swimming. We belonged to an athletic club for young people.
We played various games, board games and other things. We took walks
or went to the park when we got permission to go away from home. Nothing
very specific, if you put a group of two or three girls together, young
girls, they mostly chatter, it's not an organized playtime.
When you were going to places like pools and this
club you talked about – though this was before the rise of Hitler – were
there any sort of clubs you couldn't join because you were Jewish?
Well,
I belonged to Bar Kochbah which was a Jewish club. I could have belonged
to a non-Jewish club, but somehow I never did. When we went swimming,
the pool was accessible to everybody, I don’t think there was
a distinction made between Jews and non Jews. But going to a private
Jewish school, my friends were for the most part Jewish.
Do you remember any special occasions that stuck
in your mind?
Well,
we went to the fair once a year in November, December, had a lot of
junk food and sweets and games and roller coasters, and that was great
fun. During the High Holidays when the prayer for the dead was recited,
children who had parents went outside, so we played in the courtyard
and made an awful lot of noise. Occasionally we would go to a bakery
and pick out a piece of cake. But money was very carefully distributed
once a week, I think it was on Sundays, and it started out with something
like a quarter and it increased in terms of five cents a year, or something
like that. So you didn't have much money, but you didn't have need
for money.
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