Lotte Goldschmidt Magnus

Rubenstein: All right, if you could begin by telling us your name, when and where you were born, and a little bit about your background.
MAGNUS: I was born in 1920 in Frankfurt on the Main in Germany to Lily and Adolf Goldschmidt. In 1913 they had a son by the name of Hans, and that was the extent of our immediate family. In 1926, I started to go to a Jewish school in Frankfurt. There were two Jewish schools, one being Orthodox and the other more liberal and probably better known throughout the whole country. It was called Philanthropie. Anyone in the educational field that is interested in Jewish schools in Germany would know about it. 

I was a student there until 1934 when I had the opportunity to emigrate to the United States through a children’s transport, which was very unadvertised because of antisemitism in this country and political ramifications. It was originally funded by Felix Warburg who was a member of the famous Warburg banking family out of Hamburg. In retrospect now I’ve been finding out quite a bit about that whole set up. It was through different Jewish organizations and as time went on, Quaker and other Christian organizations got involved too. But the children were brought over in small groups, usually with a chaperone and we were placed into foster families. Occasionally, I know that some of the boys ended up in orphanages for a while, or farms, until they could be placed. I was fortunate enough to be placed in a family in a suburb of Philadelphia about two weeks after I arrived in the States. During those two weeks I stayed with friends of an uncle of mine from Germany. 

Rubenstein: This was 1934.
MAGNUS: Yes.

Rubenstein: And what were things like in Germany? Why did your parents think this would be a good idea?
MAGNUS: Well, there were various reasons. My father was an invalid; he lost his hearing in the early 1920s, which precluded any possibility of getting admission to the United States.  We had no relatives in this country. My father had been following the political career of Hitler, and as soon as Hitler started to raise his ugly head, he always said, “That man is no good for the Jews.” My mother had an aunt who worked at the Jewish welfare in Frankfurt and this was all unbeknownst to me. In the spring of 1934 my aunt told my parents that a letter had come across her desk and her boss’s from the United States that they will finance children, Jewish children, to come to America who were 12 years or younger, very good students, and prospects for university, and where the parents were on welfare. We didn’t fit into any of those categories, but my mother said to my aunt, “See what you can do about Lotte.”

My brother was too old, and lo and behold, in September I come home one day from school and our maid who had been with us since I was two years old, opened the door for me with the tears just streaming down her face. I asked her, “What happened? Something happened to Papa?” “No, go see your mother.” So Mother started to tell me, “You have to go to Stuttgart tomorrow.” “What for?” “To get a visa.” “What’s a visa?” No idea. And then she explained this all to me, and I said, “No, I’m not going.” I was involved with the Jewish Pathfinders group in Frankfurt, and we were preparing ourselves to go to Palestine. And she said, “Well, it’s just going to be for a year” because at that time, that early on, everybody thought that Hitler wasn’t going to stay in power. Well, for a year OK, it would be a nice adventure, although I didn’t want to go anyplace where I’d have to speak English, and I still don’t speak it all that well.

But to make a long story short, the end of November, Mother was the chaperone for myself and another girl from Frankfurt. She took us to Hamburg. There we met the rest of the group of 14, we ended up with 14 children. I guess I was probably the oldest or next to the oldest down to about six years old. I think they were brother and sister, a pair, the youngest ones. Then we had to go on to Bremen and there we boarded a ship, and that was the last I saw of my mother at that time, and we were off to the United States.

Now I got seasick so quickly, I don’t remember a thing until I started to get over it, and by that time we were way out in the ocean, of course. But in the meantime I had made contact with some children, some people who were on the transport with me. I’ve been told that we stopped in Bremerhoffen, I think, and in Southhampton, that the ship made two or three stops. It was long before it was full of refugees. Probably we were the only ones. It was a normal Harbach [?] line, ship by the name of New York. It was just the normal crossing, except the weather got very bad and instead of making the trip in seven days, we took eleven days and we got to New York on the seventh of December, 1934. So that has been my day long since before Pearl Harbor. Other than the stormy weather, the crossing was uneventful.

I’d like to insert something here. Those of you who are familiar with the movie, Into the Arms of Strangers, portrays the exodus, shall we say, of children from the oppressed European countries to England after Kristallnacht in Germany. There were two Jewish sociologists in Maryland who saw that movie and they got to thinking, what did the United States do about that? And they are the ones that have started to dig into the archives and have found this Kindertransport movement that started shortly after Hitler came to power, which I just said was originally funded by Felix Warburg. I got a hold of, or we kind of met over the Internet, I guess, earlier this year, and since then, I have located several of the children that were on the same transport with me. 

That’s why I found out about these stops that the ship made. One of them is a woman, just a few weeks younger than myself who lives in Arlington, Virginia. Another one is a man who lives in Arizona, and one who lives in South Carolina and another one who lives in Florida. Now two of them have email, and I’ve gotten knowledgeable enough to use it; it’s been very interesting to do emails and telephone calls, too. We have exchanged photographs. They had, through one of them I got one photograph, no two photographs that I had nothing of. I have six snapshots. Some of them I took, and some, evidently somebody used with my camera.

I sent the film to my mother and father and they developed, had it developed in Germany and sent it to me over here because my parents’ handwritings are on the back. I’ve made copies of all those pictures and exchanged them with the others and we’re telling each other who is who on the picture. There was another boy on the transport. He came from Berlin. He and I kept in touch until the war started, well, even afterwards, because when things started in Germany – Kurt, that was his name – he joined the Canadian army. He was living with a family in Newburgh on the Hudson, and we met several times in New York, and I went to be with his family. If I get too wordy, let me know.

Rubenstein: You said there’s a website for the Kindertransport?
MAGNUS: Yes, it’s www.onethousandchildren.org. There’s quite a bit of information on there and I’m searching for others that came over like I did. Those transports went on until way into the war. It stopped when the war was over in 1945. And I just wanted to say something about this Kurt Henschel. When the United States got into the service, he joined up with the American forces, and unfortunately, he was killed in Africa, which has always been a great sorrow to me because he and I were good friends. And then by coincidence, after my mother came to this country, she was playing bridge with this foursome in Denver at a house and she looked around and said that there was this picture on the wall, kind of a family picture. One of the boys looked so familiar, so she asked the hostess, “Who is that?” and was told, “Well, that’s my brother who was killed in the war.” And that was Kurt. She remembered his appearance from just, well, she was with us, we were together about three days, I guess. I suppose I told them about Kurt, too, whenever we got together.

Rubenstein: So, after you came to the United States, what happened?
MAGNUS: I was placed with this family. They had taken another foster child a few weeks before me. The family that had agreed to take me changed their minds while we were on high seas, so these people, their name was Klopfer [spells it], were asked if they would take me temporarily. They had two small children of their own, two and four. So, yes, we’ll take another one. And then when they did find a family, they said, “No, she fits in very well.” Because I was a girl, I could do housework and stuff. And so I stayed with them. That was in late December of 1934. I stayed with them until June of 1938. 

In the meantime the father had died very young of one of the cancers. Leukemia, I think it was. The mother decided to move to California with the children. The other foster child had already been placed somewhere else when the father got sick. But I stayed and helped nurse him and helped with the children and all that. In 1938 I had graduated from high school too. I think that was the reason why Mrs. Klopfer remained in Pennsylvania until that time. Also, the father had died that March, so that was a good time. In the meantime I had been offered this opportunity to go to college in Colorado. We traveled together as far as Denver and then she went on with the children to California. Just within the last few years, I have made contact with the only remaining child. One of his daughters lives in Tacoma, and she has taken a fancy to me. I am her pseudo aunt because I can tell her a lot about her grandparents.

Rubenstein: Were the Klopfers a Jewish family?
MAGNUS:   She was Jewish. He was Jewish several generations ago, but after the first war, he was not going to stay in Germany. He came to the States early on in the early ‘20s. What little religion they practiced was Quakerism, and that was fine with me. I tell you frankly, when all these things happen to us Jews in Germany, I couldn’t understand how if there was a loving God, that that could be allowed to happen, and I decided that I’m the one that’s responsible for myself, not some deity. That’s still my belief. I’m sticking with it through all the tragedies I’ve had in my life. My belief is you live a decent life; you do unto others as you would want them to do unto you. It doesn’t have to have a name or rituals or anything, but I have become more active in Jewish activities because of contact with these children, and also I’ve found a group that does not believe in a deity as such, the humanistic Jews here in Portland. We call ourselves now the Kol Shalom, and I feel comfortable there. But I don’t do too much. I have too many other things to do yet.

Rubenstein: Now, where did you go to college?
MAGNUS: In Greeley, Colorado. That was a state teacher’s college and through a couple whom I met in ‘37, ’38 in New York City, I was made aware of that college. The man of the couple was a professor of educational psychology at Greeley. He knew that I was college material. By that time I had gotten a little smarter because schools are so much easier here than in Germany. I put my efforts into it, too, and wanted to become a dietitian, and he said, “Strange that you would choose that field because just a couple years ago on my campus we arranged for a girl who also wanted to become a dietitian to modify the curriculum so that she would not only get her teaching degrees in home economics, but also her credentials to go into internship for the American Dietetics Association.” That was two years prior to my coming there and he said, “I think we can activate that program again, if you’re interested.” And I told him, “A lot of it depends on what the Jewish committee in Philadelphia will say.” 

He got in contact with them and they told me then that if I wanted to do that, they would be willing to make him, more or less, my unofficial guardian until age 21 and leave it up to him to be more or less responsible for me, and they would help me financially the first two years. But I was expected to work also, besides taking courses. That’s how that came about that I went to college in Colorado. These people, my children have middle names that refer to at least the oldest one, and he even used one of their names for his son as a middle name. They were like grandparents in the family and were very fond of my husband. He always told me, “You’re not going to marry one of these college kids; you’re going to marry a man.”

[Laughter] And I did. My husband was 12 years older than I. So that’s how that came about. That started in 1938; the war started in ’41 over here and pretty soon it became obvious that dietitians were needed in the army. They were offering a program where under civil service we could take the second half of our training on a military post with the understanding that we would then accept a commission in the medical corps to become hospital dietitians. Many people think it’s the same thing as the army nurse corps. It is not. We dietitians always felt kind of superior to the nurses. For one thing, we had to have more formal education and that’s where I went then in the summer of [’41?]. 

In the meantime I was out of school for a year-and-a-half because I accepted a position in Monticello Junior College in Alton, Illinois to be assistant dietitian. It was a boarding school, and also instructor of chemistry, the lab work. I started there before we went into the war, and shortly after, we were in the service, the president and I had one of our altercations. One of his comments was, “Of course you realize, I only hired you out of pity because you’re a German Jew.” And I said, “Well, you may stop pitying me now; I am just resigning.” I didn’t know what I was going to do. 

But in the meantime my brother and his wife had come to the States and they were living in Denver and I was going back to Greeley to finish my college education quicker than I had originally anticipated. So I ran into antisemitism everyplace, in many places, I should say. That’s what I did. I graduated from college in the summer of ’43. In the winter of ’44 I started my first half of my dietetics internship at the University Hospital Medical School in Denver. Then in the summer of that year I transferred to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri to do the civil service part. It was a financial advantage too, because under civil service I got paid. Whereas the civilian internship at that time paid nothing. You got two uniforms washed at the hospital a week. White uniforms for doing kitchen work. And whenever we were on duty, we could eat for free. Help had gotten very short because of the war. I scrubbed many kitchen floors in a white uniform on my hands and knees. It was a means to an end, and what I wanted it. I stuck it out. 

Then I went to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. We were not in any type of army uniforms at that time. We wore white uniforms and off duty we were wearing our own clothing, but we had all the privileges of the post and lived in the barracks. We each had our own room unless we had somebody we wanted to share the room with. I was there until March of ’45. The signing of my papers was delayed because I was – no, I was a citizen by that time. But because of my foreign background, they did a lot of background checking. Also they discovered, and I had told them by that time, my mother was in a concentration camp. I had asked for European duty, because of course I spoke German fluently and at that time I was fluent in French. I thought if nothing else, I could be a switchboard operator, which was one of the jobs I had in college, working my way through. But they said, “No. In case you become a POW, it would be very rough on you. And also you might go AWOL looking for your mother.” OK. So, you take orders in the service.

Rubenstein: How did you find out about your mother, that she was in a camp?
MAGNUS: Mother was supposed to . . . first of all, let’s go back. My brother was put in a concentration camp after Kristallnacht and I had made contact in the States with this couple by the name of Waite that helped me go to college. They knew my background and everything. They said well, when the time is right we’ll give affidavits to your brother and his wife (my brother had gotten married earlier in 1938) and whatever is left of the family. 

Well, came Kristallnacht, I had a letter from home on Thanksgiving Day which they brought to the switchboard to me at school and then that evening I had dinner with the Waites. I told them that my mother had written that my brother and his father-in-law were no longer at home. Which I knew what it meant. Because this was 20 days or so after Kristallnacht. At dinner I told them what had happened and he said, “Well, I’ve looked into it a little bit. We don’t have enough money to sponsor everybody, but my wife and I can sponsor your brother and his wife. We want to bring the younger people out. There is a Jewish merchant in town, I’ll give him a call and see if we can talk with him.” Which we did that same day. 

The outcome of that is that by that time, my brother was released from concentration camp after a month or so. That is his story, but he was able to get out, and by the time he came back to Frankfurt, the affidavits were over there. With that in hand, he and his wife were able to leave Germany. They left to go to England because their quota was such, the visa number that they couldn’t get in right away. 

After they got here finally in 1940, we kept writing to Mother to please make arrangements. She was reluctant to take financial aid from the welfare organizations. We finally convinced her, and she was on her way over here, and was in Holland. On May 9 of 1940, and that was the night that Hitler overran Holland. She never got out. She had become very good friends with someone in Frankfurt whom we all knew who was a widower who was Dutch by birth. He had moved back to Holland and they were together at the time, when she was trying to go to the United States, he was meeting her. He then kind of took over and seen to it that she was hidden for a while. They did get married. Then when they were discovered, he, because he had received the Iron Cross in the First World War, had the dubious privilege of keeping his wife with him – whichever concentration camps they went to.

So first they went to the concentration camp in Holland. There was just one I believe. Westerbork. Then they were transferred to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, but by that time I had a grandmother living in South America and my mother could write to South America. Of course, we weren’t in the war yet either and occasionally we would get mail from her. The reason why my grandmother was in South America was because that daughter that made it possible for me to come here had gone to Buenos Aires, where she had an uncle living. It’s a mish-mash, like you used that expression on the phone. 

Let’s see, and that’s the way we knew what was going on with Mother. At first she didn’t want to get married again because she didn’t want us to have a stepfather. I told her, “You go marry whom you want to, because that’s what I’m going to do, too, and my brother was married already. There was also an uncle, a brother of my father’s, in Switzerland and it was very often true. Those connections that we kept hearing about my mother: my father had killed himself in 1936. My mother had also tried that at that time, but she survived. But my father, being an invalid, he knew that there was nothing for him to live for if mother wouldn’t survive, and there wasn’t anything to live for anyhow because the business had stopped and everything. So he killed himself. I feel it was an act of courage on his part. It did make things a lot simpler for my brother and me, and for my mother, too, in the long run. So you wanted to know how I knew about my mother and how she got out. 

Towards the end of the war, we knew that she was in Theresienstadt. She was liberated when the American troops came in. By that time I was on my way to Hawaii, and I was stationed in Honolulu. One day the switchboard called me and said there was a telegram here for you.

So I went upstairs to get my telegram, and it said something to the effect of Lily Salomon and an address, which didn’t register with me. I kept looking at it. Suddenly it dawned on me. Lily was, of course, my mother’s first name and Salomon was the name of the man she married. Then I realized the address was Venlo, the town where they had been hidden and all that. But that’s all that was on that telegram because we were still at war. My brother had gotten the information. That’s all he could send out to me. 

Once I realized what that was, I fainted dead away. My mother was alive. So they revived me, being in a hospital situation. There was plenty of help around. All these faces were staring down on me. They wanted to know what that telegram said because the switchboard operators couldn’t understand. I explained it to them, and this was about 11:00 in the morning, and by 12:30 when I went to the officers’ mess for my lunch, everybody stood up. They all knew about it. They were so pleased that – most of them didn’t even know that I had a mother in a concentration camp, but word gets around quickly. They honored my mother for having been able to survive, and then that evening we were always looking for a cause for a party. We had a party. [laughter] Then the correspondence and everything went more through my brother, but he told mother where I was and all that. I am running on aren’t I? [chuckles]

Rubenstein: Lotte, when you were talking about your work at Fort Leonard Wood and the German POWs who were there…
MAGNUS: Well, there was a ward of injured POWs that were on the ward, all kind of separated. They did a lot of their own cooking. Towards Christmas, a food order came down that had words on them that the person that was taking care of that ward didn’t know what they were. The head dietitian decided it was German and she asked me, and I told her those look like ingredients for making Christmas cookies – stollen and stuff like that. She said, “What do you think about it?” And I said, “Is that in the Geneva convention?” She said, “No.” I said, “OK, we don’t send it.” She talked to the commanding officer and they decided, unbeknownst to me, that I was going to be in charge of checking the food orders, and checking the ward to see that they got what they needed and all that. But not to speak German to them. And they weren’t good enough in English to detect my German accent. So I did this and for about three or four months, until I left that post. 

Then just shortly before I left the post I was commissioned in March, and was to leave for Camp Carson to do my basic. The colonel came and said, “Let’s go down to the POW ward.” I think it was number 27. “Let them know that you’re leaving and also let them know that you knew what they were up to at Christmas time, before Christmas time.” He appreciated that very much that I caught that. We did that and I could hear one of the POWs behind me saying in German of course, “Now I know why we couldn’t make the Christmas baking.” Because I wouldn’t allow it, that they could get the ingredients. They had a stove on the ward and the POWs lived a good life in the United States. Many of them came back afterwards because it is a good place to live. I really enjoyed that, shall we say? [laughter]

Rubenstein: Why didn’t you let them make the Christmas cookies?
MAGNUS: They were POWs; they were our enemies! They were from the group that caused me so much grief personally. Why should I make things pleasant for them? And especially at that time, I was still quite Jewish, and Christmas in Germany was always the other people did that. That was never our thing. We had cookies at home, but they were not specific Christmas cookies, things like that. I got introduced to more of that after I got married, but that was in ’48. Then also once before this episode, or during that time I guess, I was out on a date one evening on the post with a group of other girls, dietitians, student dietitians and officers. 

My date got rather high, and he started to talk about “those damn Jews.” And I said, “Well, I think it’s time for me to go back to the barracks.” The other officers caught on right away, and they said, “No, you’re not going. He is going.” And they booted him out of the officers club. There were other instances, too, but you don’t go after everything. Life is too short. I felt that I can handle it. In college I was the only Jewish student on the campus. At that time all the colleges were much smaller and there was never anything. There was curiosity about my accent and my background. Also then, being more or less a “ward” of this professor of educational psychology, I had a privileged status there.

OK, then I went to basic training in Colorado. Because of my European background, it took a while before all my orders came through. Because they kept checking before I got the commission and then also afterwards where to ship me. Then I was shipped to, I got orders to go to Maryville, California, and start staging to go to Hawaii. From there I came up to Washington, Fort Lawton, and we shipped over to Honolulu on a ship, the Mariposa, I think it was. We got into Hawaii June 4, 1945, and I was assigned to the Tripler General Hospital, which was still the old Tripler at that time, across the street from FortShafter, if that means anything to anybody. Became one of the staff dietitians and after a few weeks I was transferred to a satellite, which was a lovely location. 

It was again the private school, which was called Kamehameha Heights School. It’s just for Hawaiian children. We had lovely rooms and it was up on the hill. You had a beautiful view of the harbor and the city. That’s where I found out about my mother. It was an interesting experience and I made a number of good acquaintances and then about a year after that, early in 1946, I was transferred. In the meantime I had been promoted to First Lieutenant. Then I was transferred to, at first it said “Saipan,” but I ended up on Guam. After I found out that my mother was still alive, I immediately made arrangements so that if and when she would be able travel and come to the States that I would be able to get emergency leave in order to meet her in New York. 

By that time my sister-in-law was pregnant with her second child and there was no chance that my brother would leave her alone. It was not all that difficult to get open orders for emergency leave. That came about then in November of 1946, that she was finally, the number was due, and she flew to the United States. It was the first time she ever was on a plane. I came in from Guam, and I had planned on stopping in Denver to pick up my winter uniforms. Guam, being 12 degrees above the equator, I certainly didn’t need my lined topcoat over there. 

It was November, and I knew I was going to New York, but my brother said on the phone that when I called him from whatever base I landed on, San Francisco, there isn’t time, “You’d better get your stuff back east, because Mother is booked on a flight which will be in at such and such a time.” So I hitched a flight with some navy officers that were on emergency leave and got to New York on time. I had contacted an aunt and uncle that had made a reservation for me at a hotel in New York. Of course there was great consternation when I checked in as “Lieutenant Goldschmidt.” “Where is Lieutenant Goldschmidt?” Well, that was me. Being a female was kind of surprising. This happened several times.

Then I went to the airport the next day or whenever and stood around there in my army uniform and one of the Red Cross workers asked me, “What are you doing here?” And I told them. She said, “Well, you go on out there on the tamarack to meet your mother.” I said, “No, we aren’t allowed to.” She said, “I say, you go.” So as Mother was coming down the stairs, we spotted each other, even though we hadn’t seen each other in 12 years. We hadn’t even seen pictures of each other in the last three or four years. We embraced, of course, and sobbed and all that. In the process, I knocked her glasses off. “Oh, no, this is my reserve pair. I broke the others when I got on the plane.” [laughter] So one of the first trips was to get her new glasses in New York City. We stayed in New York City for a while. I don’t remember now when my leave was over, but there was enough time so I could take her to Denver where my brother was. 

Then I flew back to Fort Dix, where my next assignment was, and from there I was reassigned to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC. My tour was supposed to be over that summer. They tried [to get] me to sign up again, but I didn’t like it in Washington, DC because there was so much brass and it was nothing but “yes sir, no sir.” After you’ve been overseas, life becomes much more casual. They wanted me to sign up again, which I would have done if I could have gotten the assurance that I could go overseas again. But, no, we can’t promise that. There wasn’t even any indication that they might, so I said, “No, I think I’ll get out.” Before I left Washington, I went to the Pentagon and she said sure enough, “I would have kept you right here at Walter Reed because the person in charge is retiring, and we were going to put you in that position.” So that took care of that.

I had one very interesting experience at Walter Reed. I came back from a weekend leave and I had a note in my box. It so happened that I was taking care of the officer wards. General Eisenhower was in, would I please stop in first thing Monday morning to get his wishes for lunch? So, I combed my hair, even put on some lipstick and knocked on his door. He asked me in and asked what I wanted, and I told him. We were standing in the doorway. He said, “Well, if I would still be here about lunch time (this was about 10:00), I would want the same food as you’re serving in the enlisted men’s mess, but I’ll be leaving before then. I was in just for a checkup this weekend.” I said, “OK.” 

Then he asked me about my German accent and I told him. He said, “Do you have a few minutes?” Well, whether I had or not, I said of course. “Come on in.” There was just one chair in the room and he insisted that I sit in it. He sat on the bed and he asked me where I was from in Germany and I told him Frankfurt. He said, “I just came from there. Where did you live?” I told him and he said, “Both of those houses are destroyed.” He knew exactly what I was talking about and he asked me how come I’m in the service. I told him that I felt such gratitude for being able to come here that it was the least I could do to sign up. And we had quite a long conversation. It lasted at least for one cigarette. He offered me a cigarette. I took it, and he had one too [laughs]. It was just a real highlight. He was actually a soldier’s soldier, which was not the feeling I had toward MacArthur.  

I had an experience about him on Guam. I had written to quartermasters in Washington if I couldn’t get some fresh fruits and vegetables for my patients. “No, you’re too far away.” But we were mingling with the navy people, and one day I was at the harbor with my date. There this hold of the [Terrabra?], I think was the name of the airplane carrier, was wide open, full of  fruits and vegetables, fresh things. I said, “Where is all that going?” “To MacArthur’s headquarters in Japan.” So I told my date what my experience was, and he said, “You get a jeep tomorrow. I’ll pick you up and we’ll bring the jeep down here and see what we can do.” Well, we ended up taking the tarpaulin off the jeep, too, because they were piling it up so high with fresh fruit and vegetables for my boys. And we lived high off the hog for a while! It was so much that I used it for the general mess too, and the officers’ mess, because it would have spoiled otherwise. That’s one of the differences between the two men. I’m sure Eisenhower would have stayed on canned rations.

Rubenstein: Now, you were in the medical corps for two years.
MAGNUS: Yes, and then I got an honorable discharge.

Rubenstein: Let’s see, if you could tell us on the tape the years you served and your rank.
MAGNUS: I always consider my six months in the training under civil service as part of my military career and that started in the summer of ’44. And then I was discharged, with a terminal leave – no, these dates are for when I was overseas. I took my discharge in the summer of ’47 and got mastered out and did enlist in the reserves. Then I first went back to Colorado but decided that I would be better off coming back east. I had the offer for a dietetics job in charge at the Jewish hospital in Philadelphia. I went into the service as a second lieutenant and I was just a few months short of being promoted to captain by the time I left, but it wasn’t enough of an inducement for me to take a chance that I wouldn’t get overseas assignment. 

It would have been nice to stay in the service, because financially it was very advantageous. I got a nice dependency allotment for my mother. But I talked it over with Mother and she was only in her 40s at that time. She said, “I’ll get some employment somehow.” And she did. She became a chief cook in the special diet kitchen at the National Jewish Hospital in Denver. And after that, there were many times when she’d call me, “What am I supposed to cook for this kind of diet?” if her dietitian was out of town. I feel I’ve had a lot of interesting experiences in my life. My army time was very interesting to me and I’m glad I did it. At the time I’ve always said I wouldn’t want to do it again, but with what happened on September 11, if I wouldn’t be as old as I am, I would sign up again.

Rubenstein: How did being Jewish affect your experience? You talked about some experience of antisemitism.
MAGNUS:  Well, it became mainly a social contact for me. Being among doctors, there were a lot of Jewish doctors. Nurses were primarily Catholic, but there was one Jewish nurse with me in Hawaii. But on Guam, as far as I know, there were none. And it was just never an issue. But came holidays, the Jewish people somehow got together. There was always the wine, too, that we could get without any restrictions and things. It was a camaraderie. 

After the war when I was on Guam, especially I was on Hawaii, on Oahu when Japan capitulated, and Germany had capitulated by the time I got to Hawaii. So the antisemitism, I think, got less as time went on because it became known what was happening to us Jews and had happened to us Jews in Europe. It was, we did have some service, but not too much. Sometimes there wasn’t even a rabbi; it was just a gathering of us and somebody had a prayer book. We’d read some prayers and those of us who could read Hebrew would do it in Hebrew. Most of them like myself, read the Hebrew but didn’t know what it meant in English or in German [laughter]. To me, it was never a big thing and it’s kind of the way I feel right now, too.

Rubenstein: How did your military service affect your life?
MAGNUS: It gave me a lot more insight into American life. I think it made me feel much more a part of America rather than just still a refugee or someone who was born someplace else. I wish I could get rid of the rest of my accent. I took elocution lessons in college because I was planning on going into teaching. With the political situation the way it was and the war over there, the German accent didn’t help any. That’s how come this date that I had realized that I was a German at least and somehow, I guess, word got around that I was a refugee, but of course he was drunk. But nevertheless, it hurt. But I think if I hadn’t had the accent, it would have been easier. I know it would be easier now, too, because even if I say on the phone just “Hello,” to a stranger. “Oh, where are you from?” I cannot not stop trying.

Rubenstein: How did you come to Oregon and when?
MAGNUS: Like I said before, or didn’t that go on the tape? Sorry. I was on troop movement from California to state of Washington and I woke up in the morning and the fog was hanging among these beautiful trees, on the pine trees and the porter told me that we were over some place in Oregon. I can still hear myself saying, “Someday I’d like to live there.” 

After Jim and I got married, we decided not to raise a family in New York City, and it was a choice of either going to Colorado, Denver where my family was, or moving to Portland, where his sister, who was just 11 months older than he, had moved to the year before. He was leaving it up to me. My family did not feel too kindly towards my husband because he had converted to the Lutheran church before he left Germany. Of course, my brother, being my brother, I don’t think anybody would have suited him that I married. So I decided let’s move to Oregon, and that’s how come we got here. Been here since the end of February 1949. Though my husband always said, “It’s difficult to make a living here, but it’s a nice way to live.”

Rubenstein: Let’s see. We have a few minutes. Tell us about this photo.
MAGNUS: OK. While I was at Marysville, California, I forgot the name of the camp. It might have been Camp Beal that comes to mind right now. We were socializing and things like you do in the service. There was one soldier who had an accent like mine, so we were drawn together. One evening when we were out together, he said, “You know, you have beautiful hands. I’d like to take a picture of them.” Then he explained to me that he first of all came from Austria someplace and that he was a photographer in private life before he joined the service here. So I consented and this is the result of it. Do you want me to hold it up? I have on the back that it was taken in ’45, which was before I went overseas.

Rubenstein: You were in your basic training then?
MAGNUS: No, the basic training was at Camp Carson in Colorado. This was when I was on the move to go overseas. I went back to Fort Leonard Wood after basic and from basic, from Fort Leonard Wood, then I came to Maryville, California, and from there they put a platoon together of dietitians and physical therapists. There were 15 of us and we shipped up to Fort Lawton, Seattle. OK?

Rubenstein: OK. Thank you. 
Other: Go ahead.
MAGNUS: My name is Lotte Goldschmidt Magnus. My brother always said, “Change it to Goldsmith.” And I said, “No, I’ll wait until I change it altogether.”

Rubenstein: When you moved to Oregon, did you have children?
MAGNUS: Yes, both our sons were born at Emmanuel Hospital. I was pregnant with the first one when we moved out here. They are now in their 50s. The older one lives here in town, and the other one lives in California. My husband became an invalid in 1982 due to a hypo profusion stroke during open heart surgery, and I nursed him for eight and a half years and then the VA stepped in.

Rubenstein: You were saying that your husband became an invalid in 1982.
MAGNUS: Yes, and I must say the VA took very, very good care of him until two years before his death. He died in 1999. It was a long struggle. He was a veteran also. We met in 1948 and after a short courtship we married, and it lasted over 50 years, so I guess we made the right decisions. By now, there are six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Rubenstein: And how did you and your husband meet?
MAGNUS: Well, a woman who went to school with me in Frankfurt, and also our parents were good friends, lived in New York City. When my mother came over from Europe she wanted to see Irmgard because she, my mother, was present when her parents died at Theresienstadt. She wanted to give her all the information she could so that if and when the time comes to claim restitutions, Irmgard would have that information and that’s what we did. And that’s how I even found out that Irmgard was in New York because there I had been in Colorado; I had no contact with Jews in the East anymore. She and her husband decided that it was terrible that I didn’t even have a fellow on a string, let alone get married, and my mother agreed with them. So they were going to produce somebody and they had this fellow, but every time I had a weekend off… 

By this time I was working in Philadelphia, this fellow was out of town. One time they decided they just had to produce somebody, and that turned out to be Jim, who was the brother of a co-worker of Irmgard. That was in January of ’48. In March of ’48 we married after eight weeks. Like I said before, it lasted for over 50 years. And that’s how we met. He came from Königsberg, East Prussia, which is now Russia. He came over in 1936, through an affidavit of a distant relative and brought a lot of the rest of his family out. His parents didn’t want to come until after Kristallnacht and then they couldn’t get in here right away. They were able to get into Cuba where the father died, and the mother finally got over here in ’40 or ’41, I don’t know. She was still alive when we married in ’48. We lived together for a while. 

The following year Jim and I moved out here and Mother came to Portland with us because Jim’s sister lived here, but then she got so demented that she couldn’t live alone anymore, and I had these two small babies pretty soon. There was a brother in Cleveland, Ohio who arranged for her to go to the Montefiore Home in Cleveland. That’s where she died. I think it was in 1957.

Rubenstein: Your mother?
MAGNUS: No. Jim’s mother.

Rubenstein: Your mother moved out here?
MAGNUS: No, my mother lived in Denver with my brother, not with him, but in close proximity (That’s an oxymoron, isn’t it?) Then she did die in Portland because of health problems. Just about two weeks before she died, she was in the hospital. Then when my brother had moved away from Denver by that time. I arranged an ambulance flight for her to come here and she died at the hospital where I was working at the time. That was in 1973, August of ’73.

Rubenstein: So you continued working as a dietitian in Portland?
MAGUN: Yes, until about 1977. Then I retired. My husband had retired the year before, and we used that time to do a lot of things that we had been wanting to do. The boys had been in the service and come back. They were on their own. I’m glad we had the five years before he became ill.

Rubenstein: So your sons had also served, were in the military. And where and when did they serve?
MAGNUS: One of them was in Korea, and the other was in Okinawa. They both graduated from high school in the late ‘60s and enlisted.

Rubenstein: Late ‘60s would have been Vietnam.
MAGNUS: Yes, but they did not see combat. They enlisted. Ron was in the Air Force in cryogenics they trained him in, but then he stayed the next 23 months and became a qualified traffic controller, but he couldn’t get a civilian job because he was of the wrong minority at that time. You either had to be female or a different color. He tried and tried, so he has gone into other things. The other one was in communication in the Signal Corps, also in the army. He is the one that spent most of his overseas time on Okinawa.

Rubenstein: And his name is?
MAGNUS: That one is Tom; the other one is Ron, the older one.

Rubenstein: I think that will take care of us.
MAGNUS: OK.