Hello, I am Rosemarie Birman, a long-time member of this synagogue, Congregation Tifereth Israel, and also a member of the Daughters of Israel.  As most of you know I am also a practicing Roman Catholic.  I was born as Rosemarie Van D'Elden to American parents in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and still have many friends from my school days there.  My husband Paul and I have visited Frankfurt many times during the 40 years of our marriage.

The father of one of my Catholic girlfriends was almost put into a concentration camp because his father was Jewish.  However, he became a Catholic and escaped imprisonment by claiming that his mother had had an affair, and his "actual" father was, therefore, his mother's Christian boyfriend.  That, of course, was not true, but it saved his life.  I am still in touch with this 'girl.' (Now elderly and living in an assisted-living facility in Frankfurt.)

My father, Edwin Van D'Elden, was in charge of the American Chamber of Commerce of Southern Germany from 1929 until 1942 when we returned to the United States as part of an exchange program brokered by the Swiss Embassy to return us to the United States in exchange for German nationals living there.  Therefore I spent the first part of my childhood in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Frankfurt was a beautiful city and many Jewish people lived there, especially in the West End where we also resided.  Within walking distance from us was the best business district, Goethe Strasse and Schiller Strasse.  The opera house was there, too and Jews owned most of the best stores.  We used to do all our shopping there.

As soon as Hitler was elected he started persecuting Jews. Jewish children, for example, were no longer allowed to go to public schools and instead had to attend Jewish schools.  I remember Jews being herded down our street, carrying suitcases, on their way 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.

I still remember the events leading up to November 9^th 1938, when non-Jews were not allowed to go to the Jewish stores and then the Jewish stores were forced to close, and finally on the 9^th rampaging mobs throughout Germany smashed some of them.  There was broken glass from the store windows all over the shopping streets.  Synagogues were also trashed on this night.  Throughout Germany perhaps 200 synagogues were damaged during what has become remembered as Kristallnacht. 

Shortly after this, my dad decided we should leave Germany and we took a train to the border with Holland.  Most of the people on the train were Jews attempting to flee but they were turned back at the border.  My dad was able to take us across the border because he had official-looking credentials and as often been remarked upon, Germans are inordinately respectful of official documents. My dad's papers were from the Paris Edition of the International Herald Tribune, for which he wrote opera reviews!   We spent a month in Rotterdam before the American Chamber of Commerce ordered my dad to return, telling him that the chamber in Frankfurt should remain open.

Once back, my father tried to convince all the Jewish members of the Chamber of Commerce and other Jewish people we knew, to get visas to go to the United States.  Most of them, however, were not convinced that they were in danger or that Hitler would start the concentration camps.  Nevertheless my father helped hundreds of them escape Germany and some, who were temporarily released from concentration camps, get visas.  Otherwise they would have been sent back to the camps and exterminated.