Out of personal compassion, Mr. Van D'Elden arranged visas, letters of introduction and other official forms to enable Jewish people to escape the horrors of encroaching Naziism. His connections to the American Consulate permitted him to do this. As has often been remarked upon, Germans are very respectful of official-looking documents. My father exploited this to assist many people in leaving Germany. Afterward, my father received many letters of thanks and articles about my Dad appeared in the German-Jewish newspaper 'Der Aufbau'. These are in my possession. He, himself, made numerous speeches and published several articles about the Nazi atrocities after our return to the United States, during the early days of the war, when such things were not widely known and frequently doubted. I have copies of most of them too.

My father, Edwin Van D'Elden, is quoted from a book by by Martin Gilbert in the Nizkor project on the deportation of the Jews from Lotz. Gilbert, Martin. Final Journey: The Fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany. New York: Mayflower Books, 1979.

My first personal recollection of the persecution as a small child came when I was in grammar school. From one day to the next my Jewish classmates were no longer allowed to go to our school. This was within one year of Hitler's ascent to power.

It did not take my father long to realize what was happening and he urged all our Jewish friends and business acquaintances to leave Germany. He got them visas to leave, he hid them in his office, he welcomed them into our home despite the fact that the Nazi family, who lived in the apartment below us denounced my father to the Gestapo.

When he found the Germans (who had offices in the same building as my father, called 'Haus Offenbach') were listening at the keyholes and putting dirt in his mailbox, etc. he decided to move the American Chamber of Commerce's office into our home. He feared for his life.

My brother, a teenager at the beginning of the war with England and France, was proud to be an American. This made him a target. A fellow student informed my parents that his Hitler Youth classmates planned to kill my brother by rigging one of the gym instruments so that he would break his neck. My parents removed him from this school. The American Consulate arranged for him to work at the consulate and study privately. When it became too dangerous for my brother to stay in Germany, my father sent him to the States at the age of 17, where he promptly enlisted in the Navy.

We lived in one of the best sections of Frankfurt, called the Westend, a section where many well-to-do Jews also lived. In the late 30s the transports started. My father had a sort of a sixth sense about them and before each transport, hid many Jews in his office, while it still existed, and later in our apartment. I still remember these people, wearing their yellow stars of David, being pulled out of their apartments and driven down our street by the Gestapo, carrying suitcases and whatever else they could carry. They were marched to the Gueterbahnhof (freight station) and were never seen again. I remember going to my piano lesson and finding the apartment door ajar--my Jewish teacher and her sister were gone. There had been a transport on the day before.

The street we lived on, Mendelssohn Strasse, was renamed by the Nazis: Joseph Haydn Strasse. Mendelssohn had, of course, been Jewish. I remember my father saying if they changed the street name to Goebbels Strasse he would move! Mendelssohn, one of the most famous German composers, had become persona-non-grata, and it was forbidden to play his music.

Around 1940 my father was summoned to the Gestapo headquarters. We did not know whether he would ever come home again. They warned him to keep away from the Jews. When he told them that he was an American citizen and could do what he wanted, they said it was not necessary for him to have 'Kaffeeklatsches' with the Jews in our home. They did let him go with a warning. Our downstairs neighbor had denounced him.

My parents dismissed our full-time maid because they did not want any spies around the house, because many Jews and half-Jews found their only outlet by talking to my Dad in our home. We subsequently had a cleaning lady three times a week. Our downstairs neighbor (the Nazi) told our cleaning lady that 'from now on you work one day a week for us'--the poor woman was too scared to say no. Although home movies were at their infancy then, this Nazi told us that he had a film about Hitler, which he frequently watched with adoration.

The downstairs neighbor also claimed that Germany would never be bombed. Later, during a raid, when we sat in the air raid shelter and a bomb fell one block from our house, my Dad secretly smiled. These same people had the audacity, after the war, to ask us to send them CARE packages!

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, but before the actual declaration of war between the US and Germany, the Gestapo came for my father. He was allowed one suitcase. It took us one week to find out that he was in the city prison in Frankfurt. There were some decent people left in Germany. Because of my father's heart condition, my mother appealed to the warden of the prison, and he consented to let my mother bring salt free food to my Dad once a day. I am sure the Gestapo did not know about this. They kept him there locked up with criminals for four weeks and then he disappeared. We found out later that he was transported on a prison train to the Internment Camp Laufen in Oberbayern. Some people on the train were dropped off at Dachau. Again it took us many weeks to finally locate him. One day, a few months later, he unexpectedly appeared at our home, having been released because of his heart condition--the Nazis were afraid he was going to die on them. My father was singled out and, alone among the Americans in Frankfurt at the time, incarcerated because of his clandestine activities on behalf of Jewish people.

In May of 1942 the Swiss Consulate asked us if we would like to be repatriated to the United States in exchange for Germans who were resident in the United States. Of course we said 'yes'. A big surprise to us was that nearly all of the other American residents elected to stay. We don't know what became of them.

We were allowed two suitcases and one steamer trunk each and very little money, had to leave everything else behind. There were no taxis, we pulled a little wagon to the train station with our limited baggage and met the exchange train in Stuttgart. The internment camp population and other Americans who chose to return to their country were assembled there. Our exchange train was a locked train accompanied by the Gestapo through occupied France to the Spanish border. One of my father's friends accidentally pulled the emergency cord somewhere in France, thinking it was the window shade. The Gestapo ran all around the train, thinking we were trying to sabotage it. For a moment we thought we would not make it to freedom.

At the Spanish border we were exchanged for the Germans, which was not much to our liking. While the Germans were "home", we still had to travel through Spain and Portugal to Lisbon, (where the Swedish ship S/S DROTTNINGHOLM awaited us) and cross the great big Atlantic Ocean without protection. The ship was all lit up all night. We found out later that U-boats had been tracking us.

What a joy when we arrived in New York on Decoration Day 1942 and saw the Statue of Liberty.

My father was glad that he had burned all his Spanish American War Disability Pension checks while in Nazi Germany. The American Government replaced them, so we had some money to live on until my father started work again.

After the war, my parents sent many packages of food and necessities to friends who survived. To this day, their generosity is remembered and remarked upon to me.

Prior to living in Nazi Germany, my Dad served in the US Army, seeing action in the Spanish American War. For a while he lived in Japan, and spent 10 years in China working for the American Tobacco Company. Besides having a house in Canton, he lived on a houseboat on the Yangtze River. Before the age of airplanes, he crossed the Pacific six or seven times. He died in 1951, resident in New York City.