Re: [Cz-L] RE: Hitler the barber

Hi,

It's amazing how seventy-two years old memories can be suddenly stimulated,
but that is what your e-mail did today.
I remember distinctly that during a visit with the parents of my stepmother
in Cz. in 1938, I noticed the Hitler-barber cartoon in DER HAINT, a leading
yiddish newspaper published in Warsaw. There was one detail you did not
mention: a third customer, Edvard Benes of Czechoslovakia, was in the
barber's chair with half a haircut. The Romanian government promptly banned
the HAINT from Romania. WWII would start a few months later. I was eleven
years old.

Regards,
Fred Schneider

----- Original Message -----
From: "veni vici" <venivici_at_inbox.com>
To: "Czernowitz Genealogy and History" <czernowitz-l_at_list.cornell.edu>
Sent: Monday, August 16, 2010 11:00 AM
Subject: [Cz-L] RE: czernowitz-l digest: August 15, 2010

Hardy's very brief summary about facing reality brings back to my mind the
incredible and inexplicable capacity of mankind to delude itself, to avoid
the unpleasant, the disturbing thoughts that come when facing reality.

My dad had gone on a business trip to Berlin in '33 several weeks after
Hitler became chancellor. He saw enough to come home to say, "Europe is
doomed. There will be war. The only sensible thing is to emigrate."

He obtained a visa from Australia but all his Czernowitzer friends told him
he was alarmist. They persuaded him to postpone leaving. He postponed it
for so long, the visa expired. Fortunately, later, he met a man with
Canada's CPR Immigration service who persuaded dad to move to Canada. We
left in mid-April of 1939.

I wouldn't turn twelve until September of that year but even as a youngster
of eleven I had political awareness and I recall seeing a cartoon in a local
paper in which Hitler was a barber in a barbershop. Schuschnig of Austria
was leaving the barbershop with a terrible hair cut, half shaved, a mess.
King Carol sat on a chair waiting for his hair cut and Hitler said, "Next."

 The coming disaster was even obvious to me, a youngster of eleven, but our
friends were still telling us we were crazy to leave.

We all have mental blocks about accepting monstrous realities. Even though
I was aware, I was not convinced. On the train through Germany there was no
sign, no evidence of what was to come. No one knew of concentration camps
that were already in existence and murderously active.

We spent a week or two in Antwerp, Belgium, to get our papers in order, and
then took an overnight ferry across the English Channel to Harwich.

As we approached the English shore, I saw PBY Boats anchored in the sea
every few hundred yards offshore. These were called flying boats,
amphibious airplanes that landed in water on their bellies and had small
pontoons on the tips of their wings. They were later used in submarine
warfare. They also had plastic bubbles on their sides with machine gun
barrels protruding. Those flying war machines brought full reality to me. I
said to myself, "Dad is right. There WILL be a war."

Of course, none of us, no matter how realistic we might have been, had
fathomed how much of a war there would be or the monstrosity of the
Holocaust.

Much of the world today is again wearing blinders regarding the future.

Andy Halmay,

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Received on 2010-08-16 14:38:39