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5-Photographs

This section is a series of rough video cuts capturing Karl's description of various photographs

This is a picture of my father and my mother. I don’t know when it was taken…certainly before 1928, because that is the year when my mother died.

Two years later my father married again and this is a picture of him and his second wife.

This is a picture of my father and mother and my little brother and myself.

I am on the left I was about nine to ten years old.

This was when I was fifteen years old shortly before I left Germany sitting on the banks of the little river behind our store you can see this sign which was the sign at the back entrance of our store.

This was the entrance to my father's store, and at the door you can see my father with a young lady who was his employee.

Our synagogue, which was vandalized in 1935 and burned to the ground in 1938.

This is a picture of Gloria and me taken about a year or so after we were married. We were married in 1949. This was in our second apartment.

This is myself on the right over here when I was in the army together with a fellow soldier. I think this picture was taken after the war was over.

The brown patch was a shoulder patch of my division, which is the 103rd Infantry Division, which is called the cactus division. The little pin in my right hand is the insignia of my artillery battalion, which is the 928th Field Artillery Battalion. It had a motto—“we shall return.” It is at the bottom of the pin.

This is what I brought back from Germany, which I acquired, shall we say. This is the cross of honor of the German mother, which the Nazis bestowed on German women who had a lot of children. I found this in one place and found the document in another place. This document attests to the fact that this particular woman received this cross of honor of the German mother second class – apparently they had different classes – and it bears the signature of Hitler and a secretary of state at the bottom.

This was my father's passport, which he had when he left Germany. You will see a big "J" on the side, which means Jew. All the Jewish people had to have their passports stamped with the big "J" at that time.

Also you see his signature. His name was Alfred, but there is a middle name there, "Israel." This was not his middle name, but all the Jews in Germany had to add Israel. All the Jewish women had to adopt the middle name "Sarah," and my mother's passport shows that.

This also lists my brother's name, Martin, who you also see has the middle name Israel.

Of interest, this is the American immigration visa. As you notice, the American Consulate didn't bother with the name Israel.

This is a sample from the correspondence between my relatives in Kansas City, Missouri and Senator Harry Truman, to ask him to help facilitate my family’s immigration to the United States. He wasn't able to accomplish this, but he advised my family to get to a neutral country and wait there until the immigration visa number came up. This is a letter from one of my relatives to Senator Truman. This correspondence, the original of this correspondence, is in the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri.

This is a copy of the letter that Senator Truman sent to the American Consul in Germany. It’s not the original because it is just his file copy. Asking him to help this family.

Pay was not taxable, so the income was zero. But the year before, in ‘42 before I got into the army, I paid a little - I probably overpaid my taxes by thirty some dollars. I had an overpayment, and in order to get that overpayment back I had to file a tax return, even though I had no income in 1943.

From our local draft board in Kansas City: Notice of Alien’s Acceptability. Where they notified me that I was eligible for the draft…to be drafted into the army, even though I was an alien at the time.

This is my report card. It shows my name, the son of Alfred Lyon and so on.

This shows my grades in the first and second year of elementary school.