Peter Greg

Frankel: Good day. I’d like to begin by asking you to state your full name, date and place of birth.
GREG: I was born on March 26, 1925 in Berlin, Germany, and my name at that time was Peter Guggenheimer. 

Frankel: Tell us something about your family.
GREG: I lived in what you may consider a middle-class German family. My father was employed by one of the large banks in Berlin that was a nationwide bank. My mother, who had been a teacher prior to her marriage, had quit working when she expected me. We lived in a small, somewhat semi-rural suburb of Berlin. I remember that across the apartment house from where we lived there was still an open field where people were growing potatoes at the time. It’s fair to say that my folks were well situated. We had a live-in maid, which was not as unusual as it would be in this country. It was quite acceptable. Although my mother was not working, the maid would do the household chores. My mother did the cooking. 

We lived a very comfortable, ordinary life, and my early childhood memories are very pleasant. I was an only child. We were a close-knit family. I remember going on vacation with my parents. During springtime we would go down to Bavaria to visit my father’s parents who lived in the city of Augsburg, which is close to Munich, and we would spend a week or two down there. In the summertime my father would take a month’s vacation, and we’d go to the Baltic seashore of Germany. We took our maid along and set up housekeeping, somewhat like people today would rent a condominium, only in those days it was a small home that was owned by some of the locals in that particular seashore resort. You could rent small apartments with bedrooms, could take up cooking, and things like that. It was a very enjoyable and pleasant life that I remember. 

Berlin was an exciting city to grow up in. We had a beautiful zoo. I remember going to children’s plays. In the first four, five years of my life, there was no inkling in my mind that something was coming over the political horizon that could spell out some trouble and eventually, of course, some terribly horrible times. My first memory of something that was disturbing was I noticed that there was graffiti that was placed on the walls in our suburb and expressed more or less for Jews to leave Germany. There was a swastika along with the black painting that was scribbled onto these walls. I remember one distinctly because it was placed on a fairly nice home that was surrounded by a wall that was inhabited by a Jewish family. 

In addition to that, I remember coming from our suburban railroad station in the evenings. Sometimes my mother took me into town, and we would come home together from a shopping trip. There used to be sort of a grotesque, uniformed little man in black jack boots, brown riding pants, brown shirt, swastika around his sleeve, and he was selling what became then the official newspaper of the National Socialistic Labor Party, which was called the Völkischer Beobachter, the Popular Observer. He was selling it to people who were coming off the train, commuters, and it was unusual because newspapers were either delivered or they were sold from a kiosk. But at that point, that’s how the Nazis began to distribute their reading material. 

I started school in 1931; I was six years old. School starts in Europe in March, and aside from the normal traumas of starting school and getting used to being around a group of children, I don’t think there was too much of an indication that there was any hostility among my fellow students. But thinking back, probably in ’32, I remember incidents where I was singled out. Kids would call me names. It was unfortunate that the community was small enough so children knew from their parents that I had a Jewish parent, my father, but I also had quite interesting red hair, which was apparently unusual. I don’t remember another redhead in my school at that time, and so I was singled out not only for being redheaded, but also for being identified as Jewish. Once in a while there were incidents where, on the way home, kids would try to hit me and chase me, that type of thing.

Let’s skip over to the start of 1935, when I transferred, as is very common, from the elementary school to the German form of high school, the gymnasium [pronounces German style, with hard “g” — gim-nah-see-um], which was exclusively for boys. Not anymore now, but it was then. The girls used to go to a lycee, or lyceum. The secondary education in Germany is such that not everybody is admitted to it. You have to have a certain academic record and certain grades. Also, there was a small fee, a tuition charged. I remember that at that time the question was raised whether I should be admitted because my father was Jewish. The decision was because he had been a volunteer and served in the Germany army from 1914 through 1918, World War I, that children of veterans, although they were not Aryan were permitted to go to the public high school, gymnasium, and so I started my school there.

I remember the time really quite fondly because I was able to make quite a few friends. Some of the students there had been with me through the first four years of elementary school, and I recall very few incidents where I was either singled out or people would call me names. There were a couple of times when upperclassmen did that, but the kids in my class, we were good friends. We did things together. But the distinction of singling me out became — for instance, during the second year when, as a routine, all the students in the class instead of having phys ed at the school, they go to a public pool and learn how to swim. I was not allowed to participate in that because Jews were not allowed in public pools. At that time [began] the drive to enlist these youngsters into one of the Hitler organizations. They were separated by age. That became very noticeable. The greeting in the morning when the teacher entered the class was Heil Hitler, which was done in unison by all the class with the raising of the hand. We’re talking now of Hitler being in power, actually having taken over the entire government of Germany. The parliament has been disbanded because of the fire in the parliament building. 

It was in the third year in this public high school that my teacher called me and wanted to see me. I went to the faculty room. He met me outside, and he had tears in his eyes. He put his arm around my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry. You can’t go to school here anymore.” I guess I was very upset. He sent home a very nice letter, and I went home. From then on I continued school, of course, but I had to attend private schools. They were primarily schools that were attended by other Jewish students. I did that all the way through 1942. Of course, that’s sort of jumping in time.

Frankel: Can we go back a little bit? You mentioned your paternal grandparents who lived in Bavaria. Can you tell us a little bit about them? What was their vocation? How long had they lived there?
GREG: My grandparents, parents of my father, both of them came from a radius of approximately 100 miles. It’s very interesting. I’ve been back there and have looked at their respective hometowns. My grandmother came from a very small village. It’s interesting to note that the family had been there since the 16th or 17th century. Jews migrated in. At that time, it was still part of the Austrian Empire. Jews had been permitted to migrate into that area, and they were farmers and horse traders. My great-grandfather was dealing in implements. He was going around selling tools to the farmers. The hometown of my paternal grandfather is, as I said, not very far from there. It’s a beautiful small town, which still has a castle sitting on a hillside. The town nestles below it. As far as I know, the Guggenheimer family has lived there for several hundred years. I’m not quite sure how long.

Apparently these two people met, got married in, I think it was 1888, and settled down in Augsburg, which is a very beautiful medieval city, has a lot of history. Dates back, actually, to a settlement of the Roman soldiers. My grandfather was in the tobacco wholesale business. He was selling cigars to retail people. My grandmother was a homemaker. They lived there all their married life. Fortunately, my grandfather passed away before any of the political problems started. My grandmother, however, lived almost until — I want to say 1939 or 1940. So they spent all their life there.

Frankel: How many children did they have?
GREG: They had two children: my father, and he had a sister.

Frankel: Were they Orthodox? Did they live a Jewish life?
GREG: Yes, my grandparents kept a rather Orthodox home. They served kosher meals, had separate dishes for Passover. They were very religious people. My father grew up with that background and somewhat got away from it when he had to go to war as a soldier and there was no way for him to continue to observe the dietary laws or anything like that. But it was interesting to note that, since he married a non-Jewish person, there was a very caring relationship between my grandparents and my mother, the grandparents on my father’s side and the grandparents on my mother’s side. There was apparently no objection ever made that he married outside of his faith.

Frankel: Can you talk about your maternal grandparents?
GREG: My maternal grandparents lived in Berlin; my grandfather’s family had lived in Berlin for several generations, as far as I know. My grandfather was very talented. He studied art and became an artist, a painter. I have documents from when he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. Apparently he was a very outstanding student. Later on, in addition to doing commissioned paintings, he became an instructor at the Academy. I still have some of his paintings, some of the portraits that he did of our family. 

My grandmother had come to Berlin from a part of Germany known as Silesia, which is now Polish. They also had two children. They had my mother and an older girl, my aunt, who was a teacher, as was my mother. In those days, girls did not have very many choices. They either became nurses or teachers. The girls grew up during a very interesting and good time in Berlin. The Kaiser was, of course, still there. It was a very peaceful time — the late 1890s, the early 1900s, the turn of the century. Horse carriages. My mother always lived in what is now considered the center of Berlin because due to my grandfather’s profession, he needed to be somewhere close to the Academy and things like that, the university. They had a very happy and relaxed childhood. 

Of course, the only sad part was that when World War I started, things fell apart. The aftermath of World War I was quite harsh on German people because first there was the lack of food, the shortages, and then the inflation started, and people were paid on a daily basis. My mother was a young teacher. She would receive her salary every day. The German mark became so devalued, they never knew how much value was on that mark the next day, so they would pay them actually on a daily basis. My grandfather died during the ’30s, and my grandmother, who I remember quite well, lived to be about 82 or 83 years old. She died in the 1940s, during the war. I have very fond memories of those two grandparents because they were obviously closer to us. We lived in Berlin, and my grandfather did things with me. I spent a lot of summers at my grandparents’ home. They lived in another suburb of Berlin, and I spent weeks at a time there with my aunt, bicycling in the woods that are around Berlin, going swimming in the rivers that are abundant in that part of the country, having really a wonderful time.

Frankel: What was their name?
GREG: Their name was Holtz [spells out].

Frankel: What about your religious upbringing at home?
GREG: It was somewhat interesting, somewhat very liberal, I guess you could call it. We would celebrate or at least observe the most important Jewish holidays. My father was still attending temple and I would accompany him sometimes. We also celebrated, of course, Easter and Christmas. In some ways, I feel that I had a very envious background because I became familiar with the aspects of both religions, Judaism as well as Christianity. It was interesting that the last time I was in Europe, I went to Berlin for the first time after 41 years and I found the synagogue that my father attended and where I accompanied him. It had been burned by the Nazis, then it had been bombed during the war, and they had a memorial plaque on it. From what I understand, they were going to do some repairs, but they were going to leave it pretty much as it was as a memento to future generations. You were talking about my religious upbringing. It’s interesting to say that my family was living proof that two religions could exist side by side, very harmoniously. I’m sure my mother respected my father’s beliefs; my father respected my mother’s beliefs. Being exposed to that type of an attitude was very good for me, very beneficial.

Frankel: You said you accompanied your father to synagogue. Did your mother go to church, and would you?
GREG: Yes, she would go to church. She was not a frequent churchgoer, but she would go to church, and I would go with her. 

If I may inject this, since we’re talking about my being present at the synagogue with my father, that was the last few years that was possible because after the destruction of the synagogues, late ’30s, there was no attendance anymore. I remember that my father very quietly pointed out to me that there was a Gestapo man sitting in the congregation as the services took place. The reason why these people were placed there was so that they could monitor the sermons that the rabbis would give. There were some very fiery, dynamic rabbis in Berlin in those days, and some of them were courageous enough to at least imply the deplorable situation. So they were monitored, and there were actually Gestapo people, and you could tell who they were, you recognized them. That took place. 

I could say at this point, which may be of interest, that as the Hitler regime progressed and things became more and more serious and the Nuremberg racial laws had been established, and restrictions upon Jews became more and more severe, the park benches had on them, “Juden Verboten.” In other words, Jews were not allowed to sit on the benches. You were not allowed to go into a movie theater, or any theater or concert hall. Eventually, you were not allowed to use the public transit systems, and of course, the beaches were restricted. As this all happened, it was interesting that we all built up certain defense mechanisms. We became like animals that live in the forest, in the wild, that have to protect themselves, and are becoming very alert to either recognize the enemy or see something that could be threatening. 

I remember my mother saying to me, “Be careful what you’re saying. Everybody listens to you. You’re being singled out. Don’t do anything that makes you stand out from the crowd.” You became very cautious of who you talked to. That sort of slipped in. Maybe at first almost unconsciously, but then it came to be a very important self-defense mechanism that everybody had to exercise because there was a tremendous reporting system. There are cases that have been documented where young teenagers would report their parents to the Nazi party because they felt their parents were not good enough Germans. There were cases where these parents were arrested and put into prison. They even made a movie out of that to serve the purpose of putting a lot of fear into people’s minds that that could happen. 

The young people were indoctrinated, terribly, and of course it fell on fertile minds because the young were very impressionable. They gave them a uniform, which the saying goes, “You give a German a uniform, they’re happy and they’ll do just about anything.” The interesting thing, as I said before, was the fact that these kids were in these Hitler youth organizations but they got along fine with me. I really don’t know why it was, but I had learned to be cautious enough so I could get along with them. We wouldn’t talk politics obviously. But I was good at sports; I played soccer, and it was sort of a little bit of a macho world. Germans prided themselves to be the sports people and all that. I still felt very German at that point. I never identified myself as anything else but a German.

Frankel: Was your father involved in the Jewish community?
GREG: Not actively. We subscribed to the newspaper that was a monthly. My folks had both Jewish as well as non-Jewish friends. The interesting thing that I remember from my childhood was that my father seemed to be almost naïve about his perception of what would eventually happen to him, to his family, to other Jewish families in Germany. I remember listening, or hearing at least, heated arguments with his friends. My father very strongly felt that he was German. He had fought for Germany; he was decorated. He was a non-commissioned officer when he came out of the service after four and a half years. He could not fathom that anybody would do any harm to him or his family just because of his religious beliefs. That is one of the reasons why my parents did not pursue getting out of Germany sooner like some of their friends did. It wasn’t that easy, unfortunately, and then of course once the war started, it became more and more difficult. There also was a very rigid quota system that was set up by the United States for allowing people to come from Germany into the country. There were no special permissions granted for people being persecuted because of their faith. 

By the time my folks finally thought maybe they’d better do something about it, it was a long, long waiting line, for years, before your number would come up to be able to leave the country. You also had to have a sponsor, which of course is still true, but that was no problem. We had former colleagues of my father who were in this country. We missed the boat, so to speak, really because I think my father was just too naïve to not expect to have fate turn the way it did eventually. Yet almost every year, there was an additional warning. 1936 is the year when the Olympic Games were in Germany, both the winter and summer games. I finally got to see the Olympic stadium when I returned to Berlin because I was not permitted to see it. 

The interesting part was that at that time Germany started to ration certain food items. I remember, for instance, butter and eggs were rationed. You were allowed still a fairly generous amount, but they were rationed. Keep in mind, the war did not start until 1939, but at that time already the government was preparing towards a war. I remember visiting my grandparents and seeing factories that had been quiet and closed down because of the large depression that also hit Germany there in the ’30s. All of a sudden it started to bustle again, open up. We know now after the thing was all over, that they were already building arms and military vehicles, anything that had to do with enhancing and strengthening the army, which had been limited by the Versailles treaty. But Hitler ignored that like he ignored everything else. Any territorial restrictions he ignored, and he took over parts of Europe. These things sort of happened gradually, and yet they constantly happened. It became more and more frightening to see this happen and not be able to do anything about it.

As I mentioned before, when we used to go vacationing at the Baltic seashore, all those resorts declared that they would not allow any Jewish families to come and spend the summer there. So my father decided that instead of going to that side of the Baltic, we went to the other side of the Baltic. In 1934 we spent summer vacations in Denmark. It was very lovely and enjoyable. 1936 was the last time we were able to do that.

I talked about the day that I was dismissed out of the public school. That same year, 1938, was when my father was dismissed from his job in the bank because of his Jewishness. He had over 25 years with this organization, but he was being let go and he had to find other types of work, which he was able to do. For a while, life continued on somewhat normal. Of course, when the war started in ’39, things changed very drastically.

Frankel: When he was dismissed in 1938, he still didn’t feel that it was necessary to try and leave?
GREG: I think he did, but it was almost impossible to do anything anymore. I know that my folks went to the American Consulate to apply for a visa, but at that time the quota had been used up and they would say, “Well, it’s probably going to be two or three years from now.”

Frankel: Was the United States the only place they would consider?
GREG: It was one of the easier ones. Of course, the terrible, terrible fate that happened to the German Jews that got out of Germany earlier and went to Holland, France, Belgium, and Spain, was almost even more tragic because they thought they had escaped the government, the Nazis. Of course, when the war started, the Nazis occupied those countries. They almost immediately started to collect those people and ship them off. The one exception was Denmark. Denmark took a very courageous stand. The king, actually, put on a star and rode on his horse through the city of Copenhagen. The Danes hid most of the Jews, and they were able to escape to Sweden. I should say at this point, and I think it’s very important, that there were decent people all over the world. My family and many others would not have survived if it hadn’t been for the help of some of these decent people. 

We were given extra food stamps. We were helped with clothing, which we were not able to buy anymore. I grew up. I was not even a teenager when this started, and I was 20 when the war was over. There were a lot of people — neighbors, friends — that provided us with help of some sort or another. Once the rationing started, which was in ’39, the ration cards for Jews were identified with J’s, little tiny J’s stamped all over the coupons. Shortly thereafter, they were shortened. The rations that were given to Jews were less than the rations given to non-Jews. It created quite a hardship, and as the war progressed and supplies which always to a great extent had to come from outside of Germany — because Germany had never been self-supporting as far as agricultural products were concerned — the rationing was tightened up and tightened up, so then it went down to the bare essentials. We were always cut short in spite of the fact that we did heavy physical work and things like that.

Frankel: You mentioned that at school the teacher would come in and salute. Would you do that too?
GREG: Yes, I had to. I was expected to.

Frankel: Were you the only Jewish student in that school?
GREG: In that class, yes.

Frankel: What about the rest of the school?
GREG: There were maybe two or three that I remember. Yes.

Frankel: You mentioned one day the teacher told you that you couldn’t come back. You mentioned a private school. Was it a Jewish private school?
GREG: It was a Jewish private school. Correct. It was one that had been in existence for quite some time. They were small. They had used sort of an apartment building that they had converted into classrooms. It was somewhat makeshift, but it was a good school. Academically, it was very fine. The lady who owned it feared that things would get worse. She had a chance to go to England, and so she closed the school, and I went to another private school. It was of the same type, a little larger maybe. Part of the education there was taught by people from England, by English teachers in English, which was of course of great advantage. Then that school saw the same fate as the first one. 

I eventually wound up going to the only existing high school in Berlin that was actually run by the Jewish congregation. It had consolidated all these kids from all these various schools all over Berlin. We moved around. From one building we got kicked out, and then we moved to another building. I think we moved three times. This is getting towards 1940. By that time, actions took place where kids did not show up in school anymore because they’d been picked up the night before at their homes with their parents. All those people, with very few exceptions that I remember, ended up in concentration camps.

It may be interesting to note at this point, and I certainly have no reason to change that, but we were not quite aware of what was going on in these camps. We knew there were camps. We assumed that people were put into the war effort, like in many situations they were, that they were put to work to do something. But we had no idea of the horrible, horrible destruction machine that had been set up — the gassing — programmed destruction and deletion of these people. That we did not know. We knew, for instance, that from my father’s family, cousins and distant relatives who lived in small communities in Bavaria — and we must keep in mind that’s where the Nazis started, down there in Bavaria and Munich — they were hauled away into the camps that existed in Germany — Dachau, Sachsenhausen — and many of them just would not come back. Their families also were eliminated. 

With the exception of my aunt, my father’s sister who managed to escape to England before the war started, none of my father’s family that I know of survived the Hitler years except he, himself. My only cousin, who is my father’s sister’s son, he lives in Israel. He was a dentist. He’s retired now. Two other cousins that I have —— our grandmothers are sisters, so we are second cousins, I guess — one is here in this country, one is in England. In other words, there are just four of us that have survived. The families were of good size; my grandmother came from a family of 16 children, and my grandfather had three or four siblings. None of them survived. 

We went back to Augsburg. We went to the cemetery. There again, the paradox in history. The Jewish cemetery in Augsburg remained totally untouched. It’s in as good shape now as it was prior to Hitler’s times. The graves are maintained. There is a congregation again. I was able to see my grandparents’ gravesite, my uncle who is buried there because he committed suicide, and my cousin’s in-laws who also ended their lives because they knew that they didn’t want to see what would happen to them. It seems strange that so many live people, young people, had to die, and the resting place of the dead was left untouched. Sort of tragic.

Frankel: You mentioned when your father was dismissed from his job in 1938, he found some other …?
GREG: He found some other work. He had been in the banking business, so he was capable of doing accounting, CPA work, this type of thing. He had been in the international department of that particular bank, which still exists now. He wound up eventually working in the offices of the Jewish congregation, in the administrative offices in Berlin, and had a job there until that one was dissolved.

Frankel: Do you recall the year?
GREG: I’d say it had to be ’41 because then my father had to report to the employment office and he was given a job to work for Mercedes. There was a large factory where they were building tanks, and he was given the job to unload coal from freight cars, trains. At that time he was a man in his early 50s, had never done any physical work since World War I. Which brings us to 1943, I believe, when the “Final Solution” was being hurried along, “Final Solution” in quotation marks, meaning that was the way that the Nazis chose to call the elimination of all Jews in Germany. Everybody was rounded up. 

It’s safe to say that all these folks who either were Jewish or had been in marriages with Jews were working in some kind of a war effort. They had been conscripted to do so. They were all rounded up. It was very easy to get them all. They were all at work. They were taken into gathering points, office buildings, any place where you could put several hundred people into large rooms. They at that time did not tell the spouse or whoever was at home, if there was anybody at home, that the family member would not come home. That night I remember my mother telling me she was waiting for us to come home from work and nobody came. A fellow that worked with my father stopped by and said, “Don’t wait for your husband. He’s been picked up by the Gestapo.” Of course, she could figure out then that had probably happened to me. 

By then I had graduated from the high school, and I had done some work on the large Jewish cemetery in Berlin. It’s one of the largest there is. They did not have any gardeners anymore, so the high school kids came out and we helped with garden work and cleanups, stuff like that. But then I had to report to the employment office, and I had been given a job to work in a factory where they were making equipment for the army. I was picked up there. I was not in the same place where my father was. Eventually, after almost ten or 12 days, I was let go because I had a non-Jewish mother. 

I had to go back and report again, and so did my father, and we both wound up with different jobs. He was working for a construction company that was merely assigned to clean up the bombed houses, the sites where bomb damage had occurred, and to possibly reconstruct some of the buildings with minor damage. My father chipped cement off bricks and hauled cement like a hod carrier and was sort of an unskilled helper for some brick masons. I wound up working for the sanitation department of the city of Berlin, which meant that I was emptying the garbage cans in the apartment houses and things like that. Ironically speaking, it was a good job because I was out in the fresh air. It was physically very hard. I was only 17 years old, but I got some extra rations, believe it or not, for doing this job. I also got paid, strangely enough, for doing this. I didn’t get the pay that the other people got, but I did get paid. 

All in all, it was all right. We were together as a family. We still lived in our home, in our apartment in the suburb. By then the damage to dwellings and apartments had become so great that people were asked to take other people in, so another family moved into our apartment and we shared it. It was not a Jewish family, either, but at that point those things were overlooked, so we had two families living in a fairly good-sized apartment. Fairly large rooms. The women shared the kitchen, and of course, there was not much luxury left anymore. You had cold water, and if you wanted warm water, you had to heat it. There were outages of electricity, natural gas, and things like that, that became more and more of a regular occurrence.

Frankel: In 1935 you were still young, but do you recall any of the changes after the Nuremberg laws were implemented?
GREG: Some of them I vaguely remember, the effects of them. I remember that my folks were very concerned when this happened because all of a sudden, it said in other words that there was a difference between certain human beings and other human beings, regardless of their decency, character, or whatever. One of the items that I was aware of was the fact that we could not keep a maid in our house anymore because a non-Jewish German person was not allowed to be living in a Jewish home. That was certainly one effect. 

Some of the other things that I have mentioned, prohibiting Jews from using public facilities, public transit, pools, all that, were more or less side issues that came about. It curtailed the existence of those that were affected by the laws quite heavily. There was also then certainly the encouragement by the Nazis, for mixed marriages, where the non-Jewish part should divorce the Jewish part. I know that there were cases when that happened, which totally left the Jewish spouse unprotected, and it was really signing the death warrant to that person.

Frankel: Was it also at that time when you had to wear the Jewish star?
GREG: Yes, I will never forget that first day. I guess I was a teenager. I don’t remember the year anymore. It must have been ’39. I don’t remember, quite frankly. But they were handed out, and you were given five or six of them, and then they had to be sewed onto your outer garments as well as the inner garments because if you took your coat off, you still had to have one showing. I remember leaving the house for the first time with what I considered a horrible stain that I was carrying around, becoming very vulnerable to whatever people would want to do to me. I was walking to the railroad station probably to go to school, I don’t know what, and people looked and stared. It was very hard for a teenager to do that. Really. 

After a while, you don’t really get used to it, but again, you learn defense mechanisms. I remember that on August 23, 1943, our suburb was very, very heavily bombed during the night. Probably 60% of the place was destroyed. During these raids, we would always spend the time with the neighbors and all down in the basements. We fought fires all that night and then into the next morning. It was a real frightening experience to see your house burn, the neighbor’s house burn. Our community was totally cut off then from the rest of Berlin. No commuter trains, no food supplies. The Red Cross came and gave out food. For some reason, that day my father and I decided we weren’t going to wear that star anymore, any longer, and we didn’t. We carried briefcases, and we carried them under our arms so people that knew us could assume that we had a star under there, but we got away with it, and a lot of other people did. We just did not wear them anymore.

Of course, in my work outdoors, I wore a uniform as a garbage man. These people are all city employees. You can put on a uniform in Germany, you [laughs], and so I didn’t wear a star then. I think what happened maybe in a way was that people, ordinary people, became more and more concerned about their own well being. Food shortages became greater, the bombings started to become rather serious, and so maybe somehow the interest and the attention was directed into more self-concerned reasons because they seemed to not do anything to us in any malicious way. I’m speaking strictly for my family living in that community. Everybody became very concerned about their own lives. By that time, 1943, keep in mind, the war took a very different turn all of a sudden because in Stalingrad in Russia several German armies were totally surrounded and defeated. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were taken captive by the Russian army. A horrible winter started and the German army really became similar to Napoleon’s retreat out of Russia, a disaster. 

That is not to say that the government, the people that were in charge of the Jewish “Final Solution,” relented in any way. They continued to send trainloads and trainloads of people away to the camps. There was no change there, and it is my firm belief, and I think my folks always felt that if the war had continued for any length of time eventually we all would have been transported away somewhere, or whatever. Finally, with the total disarray that the German military forces found themselves in, they just did not have time to do anything anymore about it. You could say that from the day the invasion took place, there was noticeably quite a concern among the military. Although the Nazis certainly kept saying to the last days that this is not the end of the war, they were still hoping for a miracle. They were hoping that the allies would let them, the Germans, join and fight Russia and all kinds of hopes. But …

Frankel: Let’s go back again a little bit. November, 1938. Any recollections?
GREG: Yes, you’re thinking of the Kristallnacht? Crystal Night. Personally, I remember the small department store that was in our little suburb outside of Berlin, owned by a very nice Jewish family, husband and wife both working in it. It was a small, local-type store that would carry clothing, notions, and things like that. It was totally wiped out by the hoodlums during that night. The window displays, the windows were smashed. People had gone in and dragged things out into the street. 

I also remember the synagogues that were put to fire. One of them that I saw that I mentioned before and another one that I saw were totally burned out. They have put another building in, but they saved the entrance of that synagogue. You could say that all the houses of worship in Berlin and all over Germany were destroyed by arson, and of course, the large department stores that were owned by Jewish corporations in Berlin were all damaged and rocks were thrown through the windows. Gangs of uniformed Nazis marched through the streets. The interesting thing was that it was then described to the press as a “spontaneous reaction” of people being irate over Jewish greed and capitalism. It was described as an action that was not ordered by anybody, but was spontaneous. It was the indignation of true Germans being victimized by the Jews.

Frankel: Was anyone in your family arrested that day?
GREG: I don’t know exactly whether it was that same time or not. Nobody in Berlin. Of course, we were a small family; we didn’t have any relatives there that were Jewish in Berlin per se. I know some of our distant relatives down in Bavaria, that’s about the time they started arresting them. Yes. 

Frankel: What school were you in at the time?
GREG: I must have already been kicked out of the public school.

Frankel: Do you remember actually going to school on that day?
GREG: Yes, it was business as usual.

Frankel: And no riots at the school?
GREG: No. Everything was quiet.

Frankel: And your father was still at the bank?
GREG: I don’t remember. He could have been, although I don’t think so because this was November, and he lost his job sometime during the summer.

Frankel: When you mentioned that in ’43 you chose to take off the star, does that mean that when you were working for the sanitary department in your uniform, did you have to wear a star on top of the uniform?
GREG: No, we never did. All of us — and there were 20 or 25 people that were either Jewish men married to non-Jewish wives, or children out of mixed marriages, that type of thing — none of us wore a star. We weren’t asked to do it, and we just did not. We just got by with it.

Frankel: Also, in private Jewish schools, did you end up getting a Jewish education?
GREG: No. I didn’t because — you’re talking about a religious education?

Frankel: Or Jewish history, of any type?
GREG: Yes, as a matter of fact, I did take classes that were dealing with Jewish history and things like that.

Frankel: Prior to that, had your father tried to teach you Hebrew or any kind of Jewish …?
GREG: I knew a little bit of Hebrew. He had shown me how at work, and so I still have some recollection of what it’s like.

Frankel: Did you have a bar mitzvah?
GREG: No.

Frankel: Then towards the end, in other words, after the school, what happened then?
GREG: As I mentioned, through the efforts of the Jewish community, the Jewish congregation in Berlin, a lot of us went to the Jewish cemetery and we worked there. That was the summer of ’42. I stayed on. I got a job working in the office there. Odd jobs: emptying paper baskets, going into town to take care of certain banking transactions, depositing money, and this type of thing. I did it for them. I was sort of a “go-for” as you might call it. That ended then because they were not allowed to keep me any longer, and I had to report to the employment people. Then they gave me this job in the factory, which did not last very long. I was there three days and everybody was picked up and collected, so to speak.

Frankel: In ’43 when you said all the Jewish men were arrested and you were taken for 12 days, what happened during those 12 days?
GREG: We just sat around. It’s one thing when people are forced to spend time together without anything to do and they know that they are in a serious situation, a life-threatening situation possibly. It becomes very interesting mass psychology that works out. Different people react differently. Some of them fall completely apart; some of them become very courageous and help other people to bolster their morale. And then, of course, the typical part of this, that the rumors start to go around: “What are they going to do to us?” “Well, I heard so-and-so that they’re going to all let us go again.” And others say, “No, they’ll never let us go. They’ll just put us on the train and ship us off somewhere.” 

The interesting thing was — as I mentioned before, there were many men and women because they picked up everybody in these various sites that had non-Jewish spouses at home — it was probably the one and only time that history recorded where the wives and mothers of the people that were incarcerated actually went to the building where we were. They made a mass demonstration and they said, “We want our husbands.” They just stood there, wouldn’t move or go away. It was, in some ways, an embarrassment to these Nazis. I don’t know how much of an influence it had, but obviously some of us got out again, and we were the ones that belonged to those ladies that were upset. But it was the only time that I remember that there was a mass demonstration in spite of taking great chances of being either arrested, or worse, physically man-handled, that these people demanded to find out what was going to happen to their relatives.

Frankel: What building was it and …?
GREG: It was an office building that belonged to some Jewish organization. It was in the older part of Berlin. I noticed that on the piece of discharge that I showed you, it has the address on there.

Frankel: Were you fed during your …?
GREG: Yes. Eventually they came with some food. Of course, we were in the war and there wasn’t much left. It was some kind of gruel, soup, a slice of dry bread. They had these large sacks that were made out of artificial material. It wasn’t burlap, but it was stuffed with newspaper shreds and things like that. That’s what we had to sleep on. There were literally 50 or 60 in a room of this size, if not a little smaller. It wasn’t very sanitary and it wasn’t very comfortable. Then air raids happened also. Of course, they did not have a shelter for us, so we had to tough it out in these rooms. But luckily nothing happened.

Frankel: You said that some of you were able to go home? What happened to the others?
GREG: People that did not have any relation to any non-Jewish spouse or whatsoever, or were children of a mixed marriage, they were all transported away, right from there.

Frankel: You were a child also of a mixed marriage.
GREG: That’s why I was let go.

Frankel: What happened next?
GREG: I had to go to the employment office, and that’s when I got the job with the sanitation department. I lasted that out until the war was over. From ’43 to ’45.

Frankel: What about your father?
GREG: He left the Mercedes Benz, the shoveling of coal, and went to the construction people where he was a helper for either cleaning up bomb sites or trying to reconstruct smaller damages.

Frankel: Do you recall the day the war ended for you in Germany?
GREG: Yes. I recall that very much because at that time the war was over, the last days of April. You could say that from about March on, Berlin, a four and a half million city, fell apart totally. You could hear the noise of the sounds of the artillery of the approaching Russian army. There were air raids continually. You practically lived down in the basement of your house. Supplies of natural gas or cooking electricity became more and more nonexistent, and it sort of became a part of the war zone. Then as the armies came closer and closer, we could see the falling-back German army, which by that time consisted a lot of either very young — children almost — or very, very old men. Again, the comparison to Napoleon’s retreat from Russia is very apropos because these people were a beaten army; they were wounded, they were dragging. They had nothing but the clothing on their backs. They had thrown their weapons away. They had no transportation. They were footing it. They had bloody rags on their feet. It was a beaten army, and of course, the Russians were pushing right after it. 

So we became the war zone. The only resistance given was by the SS troops that were stationed in Germany because they had nothing to lose. We were fortunately living outside of the inner city, but we heard what was going on right behind us where Russian batteries were throwing rockets into the city. There are usually 24 in a stack that are fired. So we were right there. The Russians came through the houses, took whatever was loose, primarily watches, bicycles, whatever else, did their share of molesting women, unfortunately. After what the Germans had done to the Russians, you could hardly blame them. Germany had left Russia with a scorched-earth policy that left nothing and had butchered people, raped women. These people that came into Berlin remembered that. 

I was lucky I had worked with Russians while I was working for the sanitation people. I picked up a few Russian words. I was not the least bit afraid of them; I figured that these were my liberators. I guess my attitude showed or something. I was trying to tell them that I was not a soldier, so they didn’t do much. They took a few belongings, but we were not in any way molested. It was interesting to watch the reaction of the people around us that were all of a sudden seeing their world crumble and come to an end, and who had hoped until almost the last moment that maybe it wasn’t over yet, maybe there would be a turn of events. They were all very scared and tragic things happened.

Some of them were resisting the incoming Russian soldiers and were killed. There were corpses all over Berlin. We walked through the streets. People had died and were lying there for days because there was no one to take care of them. Eventually they buried them in front yards, just temporarily. You could say that there was a stench of decay that settled over the city, and it was all dusty and destroyed. You could see outlines of flies in the outlines of human beings where tanks had run over either wounded or dead people. 

You could not recognize anything of the inner city. It was just gone. The landmarks that you remember when you find your way around in your own hometown were not there anymore. Street signs were gone. You walked through endless streets that had buildings that were down, almost leveled out. It was a battlefield, literally a battlefield that had been taking a very heavy beating. I think it’s true to say that 70% of Berlin was destroyed when the war was over, from the bombings and then from the fighting. You go into what used to be East Berlin now and you still see part of the destruction because it was not rebuilt; it was left. You see the shrapnel marks on the buildings, and you see half-standing buildings that obviously were hit by bombs.

Frankel: Had you made plans for after the war?
GREG: During the war?

Frankel: [inaudible]
GREG: No, I don’t think you could call it that because when you were in a situation as we were, it was almost impossible to make plans. You did not know what the outcome would be. You did not know what your opportunities, your chances would be. You could, however, say that we daydreamed. We were hoping that we would get out. The option of going to the United States was at that time not really much of a definite plan because we couldn’t think that far, and we didn’t know how the war would end. Of course, we were hoping very much that this would be the defeat of this terrible regime, but we were not able to make any more concise plans as to what to do. 

Once the war was over, my father was offered a job with a bank, but the bank was practically nonexistent at that point. I enrolled at the University of Berlin to take up my studies as pre-med. Then finally our friends and my father’s sister were able to establish again contact with us. They all thought we were dead. Plans evolved a little bit more, and my folks decided that Germany, being as destroyed as it was, and the experiences that certainly had left a bitter taste in their minds, that maybe it would be better also for my future that we would try to emigrate and come to this country, and that’s what eventually happened.

Frankel: What year was that?
GREG: 1946. We were one of the first groups that left Germany to go to the United States. They were using two transport ships that had been used during the war, and we took a wonderful 12-day voyage across the Atlantic in May of 1946. The name of the ship was Marine Perch. I’ll never forget it. It was just like going on a vacation. I ran into some friends that I had gone to school with that had gone into hiding. They were friends; their parents were friends with my parents. They found each other there on the ship. It must have been a feeling that can’t ever really be described unless you go through it yourself. I think the people that came out of the Mideast after five, six, seven, eight years of imprisonment, their freedom must have felt like that.

Frankel: Where did you first settle when you came to the United States?
GREG: I lived in New York for about a year and then went to school in the Midwest in a small liberal arts college. Got married. Got a job with United Airlines, moved back to New York City, got out of there again and lived on the west coast ever since.

Frankel: Your parents?
GREG: My parents stayed in New York City and then eventually, when they retired (they both worked there) they moved from New York City to San Diego, where we lived at the time, so they would be close to their grandchildren. My father has passed away, but my mother is still alive. She’s going to be 99 years old this year.

Frankel: Did you speak any English when you arrived?
GREG: Yes, I did. My wife claims I spoke “very well English.” I had taken it in high school, of course. I had taken intensive English in these private schools that I had attended because everybody in those schools, more or less, was at least prepared to have a chance to get out of Germany. I also had an opportunity to go to a sort of kindergarten when I was very young that was run by a young woman who had been to England, gone to school there. She came back and started to work with young children, teaching them English by learning words, reading nursery rhymes, things like that. So I had a beginning at a very early age, which is of course the best time to learn a language. It’s a lot easier then than when you get to be older. I had private tutoring.

Frankel: You also mentioned that at the time, during the war in Germany, you weren’t aware of what was going on when people were shipped out. When did you find out?
GREG: Afterwards. When the troops, both the Allies and the Russians, were coming through the Polish camps, when the first pictures came out, and when the gas ovens, the whole machinery, when that was revealed.

Frankel: In Germany, through the press, you found out?
GREG: Yes.

Frankel: What was your reaction?
GREG: What kind of a reaction could you have to something like that? It’s so horrible you can’t put it into words, especially when you know that some of your best friends were there and they’re not coming back. And it never goes away. It’s a very horrible, horrible experience. I think that anyone that has lived through this experience — and I guess in some ways my experience was by far not as bad as some of those people who have survived the camps and came back — whether you were there or whether you just had family and friends die there, it’s something you’ll never forget. It stays with you. The only thing that you have to tell yourself is that you must try to tell the story so the rest of the world will know about it. I’m always shocked when some people tell me, “Oh, that’s really not true. It’s all made up. We know that’s impossible.” I’ve had some pretty heated arguments with people.

Frankel: Also, when you went to school, you spent about a year at the university in Berlin after the war. Who were the instructors? Who were the professors?
GREG: They were probably people who were there before. Existing faculty.

Frankel: Had they served in the Nazi army? And went back to teach after the war?
GREG: I’m sure they did. Those who were young enough to have served. Yes. I remember some professors that were past that age. You see, the losses of lives in Germany, they were not as great as the ones, for instance, in Russia. But still, a lot of my generation, the people that were in their mid-twenties when the war was over, they had been decimated. Older people that would have been in their 30s and 40s, people at the height of their careers and productivity, they were either in the service or they had been pressed into some other things that were furthering the war effort. A lot of them continued to do their jobs. 

The interesting thing is that after the war you could not have found a single person that said, “Yes, I supported Hitler. I think Hitler did a good thing for Germany. I agreed with everything that he did, including the Jewish ‘Final Solution,’ including the killing of the gypsies, and the Catholic nuns and priests, and so on and so forth, all the political dissenters that went into concentration camps.” There was not a single person that would have looked you in the face and would have said, “Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.” Nobody. They all said, “We always felt so bad about this. We really couldn’t do anything about it. But we certainly did not agree with it.” 

So what do you do? Are you going to annihilate an entire nation for being guilty? Can’t do that. It’s very hard. They tried the Nuremberg trials [inaudible phrase]. They may have proved a point, but I don’t really think they accomplished much. The worst guys were gone. They either committed suicide or were dead already, or they escaped. I’m sure there are still people that — of course, they’re getting older now — but there are still people who were party members and are now still active in Germany.

Today in the Oregonian I saw a little article that an agency in London found out that antisemitism is again on the increase, particularly in Russia. They singled it out, saying it’s tremendous. Of course, we know historically that the pogroms and everything. There is nothing being done about it, to avoid it. The sentiment is there again by the right-wingers in the western countries and by people in Russia that — I guess they have to have somebody to pick on, so it’s again the Jews.

Frankel: You went back to Germany 41 years later. What was it like?
GREG: Interesting.

Frankel: Were you invited by the government …?
GREG: Yes, by the government of Berlin. They were very nice. They were very apologetic. I thought it was very interesting to go back and see the old hometown that you lived your first 20 years in. People were very friendly and I enjoyed it very much. There were some people who were very bitter. I don’t have that bitterness dealing with individuals. Of course, I’m sad about what happened, and shocked and horrified that it ever could happen, but I don’t bear a grudge against the Germans per se. I think many people agree with me. 

Whatever happened in Germany could happen somewhere else as well. It’s not uniquely German. It happened in Italy, in Spain. It happened in Russia, and it’s happening in Poland. If anything, of any disappointments that I had after the war, is that the effort by the free world then, while Hitler was in power, was not greater to bring these people who were persecuted out of Germany prior to the war. There was no concerted effort made by the U.S. government or the English. It may not be right to talk about it, but I feel concerned about the fact that there was so little empathy and understanding in the world at that time. They said, “Oh, well. What can we do?” They could have done something. They could have raised the quota and said, “Sure. Come over. We’ll find you jobs.” But anyway, I have no grudge against the Germans per se because there are as many decent people there as anywhere else. I know it from my own experience that there are decent, good people there. It really sours you on life if you want to go on and live that negative feeling of hatred against people.

Frankel: Eric, do you have any questions?
Harper: The only question I have is — you said that you didn’t know really what was going on in the camps until the Russians would bring you pictures and stories. Were there any rumors at all floating around?
GREG: Yes, there were rumors. There were rumors that they had to work, that the conditions were deplorable, that people were supposedly escaping and then were shot. That type of thing. About beatings and of people not surviving camps. We were all aware of that, but when I said we weren’t aware of the type of [the Eidenich?], of Auschwitz, where there was mass destruction, ovens going night and day, and the gassing and all that. That we did not know. We had no idea.

Frankel: Did you have a radio?
GREG: The radios were taken away from us,’38, ’39. Nobody was allowed to have a radio. My father had a small collection of fairly valuable coins. He had to turn them in. He had a service revolver from when he was a soldier. He had to turn that in. Jewish people were not allowed to own real estate. All this should be mentioned. But I got from a friend of mine a crystal set radio, the old kind with the earphones and all that. I would rig it up in the evenings sometimes, and I would be able to get the BBC. I would listen to some of the news.

Frankel: But even there …?
GREG: They did not speak about that, at least when I listened to it. No, they did not speak about it.

Frankel: Did your mother ever go back to Germany?
GREG: Yes, my father and mother both went back. At that time the sister was still alive, and some other relatives, and they visited, but they were always glad when they came back to this country.

Frankel: Having experienced what you did, is there any message you have that you would like to convey to …? 
GREG: What I’d like to convey to the younger generation is what I said just a few minutes ago, that we must be terribly alert to the fact that this experience, this happening, could certainly happen again. It is not uniquely German. We know that there’s a lot of hatred, even in this country. What we need to learn from experiences such as mine, and those of many, many other people is that we need to learn to be tolerant and accept people for what they are. If one’s own life is not as good as one expected because of circumstances, it’s very easy to go and look for a scapegoat to blame on one’s own misfortune. That’s what happened in Germany. There was a lost war, there was a fairly tough treaty, there was lots of unemployment, and there was lots of unhappiness. So it became a very natural solution to find a group to blame this on, namely the Jews. 

Young people should realize that this is not anything that has never happened before in history, but it has never, at least as far as we know, been as tragic as it has in this particular instance where we know that over 6,000,000 people became slaughtered and butchered because of one regime, or people that were inspired by one person. History teaches us lessons. It’s very true that we can learn from history, and if we extract the important parts of it, we can certainly, hopefully prevent things like that from happening again.

Frankel: Do you have any questions?
Harper: Any time you like.
GREG: OK. What I’m holding here is a German identification card. It’s called a Kennkarte. Every German had to have one. There’s only one exception that you note here. This card had a large “J” imprinted on it, which of course stood for Jude, or Jew in German. If you noticed also now that it is marked up with crosses that were scribbled through, that happened after the war; it did not happen beforehand. We were all required to carry this with us at all times. Anytime that we were in any contact with any official agency, or we were applying for travel papers or anything like that, we had to show this identification. It was issued to me in 1944, and the other thing of note is the fact that all Jews were required to add a middle name. Women were required to all have the name Sarah added to their name, between their given name and their family name. Men were given the name Israel, so you will see here that my name appears, but it appears as Peter Israel Guggenheimer. Then we were fingerprinted, but that happened to all the other Germans as well. So this was our identification. This identification was even extended after the war, and you can tell there’s a note from the police department where they said it was valid indefinitely. The only indication that this is past the Nazi regime time is that the official stamp does not bear the German eagle and the swastika any longer.

This is a permission for me to travel from a certain point of origin to a destination. In this particular case, it was my permit to travel the suburban train from my home, a suburb of Berlin, to my place of work, which was with the Berlin city sanitation department. It indicated my name, it said that I was a laborer, and it gave the address and all that. It cross-referenced it with my identification card, and it also gave an expiration date, which was March of ’44. Then it was renewed on the back twice. You can see that each time it was entered in and it was stamped. The way it worked was that when I bought my monthly pass on the railroad, I had to produce this and show it to the railroad person so they knew it was OK to issue to me a monthly pass. Then as you went through a barrier to get out on the platform at the railroad station, you had to show this card again. I observed that after a while nobody really looked at it anymore, and I think it was partly because they didn’t care, partly because maybe they were embarrassed. But it was a necessary document that I needed in order to be able to go to work. We all had to have it.

This piece of paper represents the dismissal of my stay at the collection point where we were all apprehended and brought to stay for a certain length of time. Of course, as I have related before, I was dismissed because I had a non-Jewish mother. It’s interesting to note the description up here where it says “the Jew.” They inserted the word gilt als, which in German means considered as, or being validated as. In other words, although I was not of the Jewish faith, I had a Jewish father, and so under the Nuremberg racial laws I was considered a Jew. Then, of course, it states again that I was dismissed, that I was not given any ration cards, and it is signed by an SS person who was probably the rank of a major in the SS, in the branch that had to do with security, or was actually a part of the Gestapo.

This is a map of Germany, not as it necessarily existed under Hitler’s time, but it indicates at least the position of Berlin, which is in the northern part of Germany, and where I lived was a suburb that was in the southwest corner of Berlin. Berlin, at that time, was a large city. It had about four and a half million inhabitants. As you travel south, you get to what is known as Bavaria. It shows the city of Augsburg down here. This was the home of my paternal grandparents, and as I have told before, we took annual trips down there to visit these grandparents of mine. A very beautiful part of the country.

Frankel: How were you treated by Americans when you first came to the country?
GREG: We were certainly a novelty in some ways because we were some of the first people that had survived the Holocaust in Europe. Interestingly enough, several of my parents’ old friends lived in New York City, had come prior to the war, and of course were delighted to see us. There was a whirlwind of visits and get-togethers and parties and story telling. It was all very exciting. In general terms, everybody was very nice. They seemed to be interested to know what our experiences were. I started college about a year and a half after I got to the U.S. It was in the Midwest, which because of its location is not as much exposed to the arrival of refugees and displaced peoples as the folks in New York City or on the east coast. They asked me if I’d be interested to go around to meetings of Rotarians, Lions, Kiwanis, and talk a little bit about Europe and the war. So I did that. Everybody was very receptive, very interested. There seemed to be no negative reactions.

Miller: Earlier you said that you felt very German [inaudible] …
GREG: When did it change? It changed when I became aware of the distinction that was being made with my family vis-a-vis other German families, and the way that our lives were forced into certain channels of being underprivileged. You certainly lost that pride and patriotism that one would have otherwise. That was pretty much gone by the time the war started. I certainly was not rooting for the German army, in spite of the fact that it was life-threatening to be bombed by the Allied Air Force. We were quietly overjoyed every time there was an air raid because we knew this had to be certainly forcing a quicker ending of the war. We were sort of between a rock and a hard spot, being affected by it, but yet we were glad that it took place. 

Here’s a little episode that I can tell you about that. I was still in school. It was Monday after Pearl Harbor. One of the kids in class with me had seen it in the paper. He came in, and there was a group of 15 or 20 of us, and we all just let out a big hooray because we knew now that the United States was in on the war effort and this would speed things up hopefully, but also it would be overwhelming odds for the Germans to come up against that type of alliance. I’ll never forget that. Of course it was December. It was a cold, rainy day in Berlin, still dark. 7:30, 8:00 a.m. in the morning. A guy came in and says, “Guess what? Pearl Harbor. United States is going to get into the war.” We didn’t feel very German anymore, obviously.

Frankel: In this country when you went to the university and later on, did you affiliate with the Jewish community?
GREG: No, not at all. I have and have had some Jewish friends. Actually, I’m a practicing Roman Catholic, but I feel from a traditional and an emotional aspect very strongly aligned with Judaism. I’m not subscribing to the religion of it, but I feel that part of me is part of them, and I’m very interested in what’s going on, on the national and international political scene, as far as the events in Israel and things like that. You don’t come out of an experience like mine and not have learned your lesson, not only specifically as far as Jewishness is concerned, but also as far as any kind of prejudice or any kind of discrimination is concerned. That I cherish as something I’m very privileged to have and to hopefully be a better person for that. I can say I’ve walked in their shoes, and I think that’s very important. We’ve always tried to teach our children in our family that there was a part of Jewish heritage and ancestry in the family, and we have told them about Jewish holidays. We have observed with them in some ways Passover and talked about the other holidays that are in the Jewish religion and have made our children aware that they are part of this.

Frankel: How many children do you have?
GREG: I have seven children. A 19-year spread. The oldest is almost 45 and the youngest is 26, and I have 11 grandchildren and still more to come [laughter].