The Jewish Observer

Happy endings are not like those depicted in story books and adventure stories. True, the really well written books or movies make us sweat through the trials and tribulations of the hero. But we know there will be a happy ending, and what is more, we know the story is not real. So the emotional journey, however skillfully portrayed, is fake. In the end no real people were impacted, no lives were changed other than through the enjoyment of a good story. What about when a happy ending is real? What about those stories lived by our friends, our families? Have you ever seen someone and known, just known their life had turned out well? And after realizing it turned out well, did you wonder at what cost they purchased their happy ending?

My first family interviews were yesterday in Dallas, Texas. Bert Romberg is the cousin who actually found the rest of us. Bert also organized the family meeting in Dallas last year. He is an intelligent, thoughtful person who is also a kind, caring soul, very involved in the Dallas community. He mentors students at a magnet high school for the performing arts, helped to found a chavurah in Jackson Hole, WY, where he built a vacation home. He and his wife Terry are long time active members of a Conservative congregation in Dallas, yet he is known around the Jewish community. In fact, one of my rabbinic colleagues from Dallas, upon hearing that I was going to meet Bert for the first time last year exclaimed to me, “you are really going to like him!” And I do. I try to speak to Bert at least once every few months. He is a person whose judgment I really trust in that if I needed to confide in an older wiser head, Bert would be at the top of my list. His Jewish values reflect my own Jewish values. He understands the challenges facing the Jewish people in the same terms I do. No accident, I think, that we have turned out to be related.

He had a successful career, starting as an office clerk for a scrap metal processing business based in NY in 1955. At that time the firm had maybe a couple of hundred employees. When Bert retired in 2000, he was the Chief Operating officer of the company which by that time had about 20 thousand employees and did business all over the world. He and Terry raised three great daughters and have in many ways been the glue that holds family together. His ending, by any standards, is a happy ending; indeed, a great ending.

Bert told me his story in slow, measured tones, using thoughtfully constructed sentences.

Bert was born in Astheim, Germany in 1930. His sister, Magie, is a year older than him. Their father, Alfred Romberg, was one of the few Jewish commissioned officers in the Kaiser’s army in World War I. In addition, he is the recipient of the Iron Cross, highest order. He was wounded in battle and his wounds stayed with him the rest of his life. He married Sida Rothschild in 1927. Alfred moved to Astheim to work in Sida’s family’s rather successful farm supply and feed store. Astheim was a smaller town with only two Jewish families.

Bert has no memories of his father. Alfred died in 1934 from a combination of complications from war wounds and heart problems. Magie, Bert’s sister does remember demonstrations by the Nazis out side of their store. They were called all manner of names and the Nazis urged the locals not to buy from the Rombergs. So when things got very bad by 1936, Sida sold their assets for whatever she could and moved her and the children to a larger town and Jewish community, Eschwege. Realize that from 1934 onward, Bert’s mom was essentially alone in managing her two children.

After Kristalnacht, November 8, 1938, Sida was desperate to at least get the children out of Germany. A series of Kindertransports, specially arranged transports to get Jewish children out of Germany, began in December 1938. The Quakers of England started the program and got the British government to support it. Sida was able to arrange passage on a Kindertransport for Bert and Magie in May 1939. She also had a bit more luck. At the same time, a cousin of hers in London was able to sponsor her passage with the children to England as well, and she acted as an adult chaperone on the trip. On the train ride out of Germany the SS shouted at the Jewish children, demanding they turn over their valuables and calling them Jewish dogs.

But upon arrival in London, the cousin told them he was bankrupt and had sold his house. Sida would be able to work there as a maid, but the children were placed into foster care, each with a separate family. Bloomsbury House, an English Jewish welfare agency, took charge of placing the children and seeing to their education. Magie’s foster placement was very difficult. The father was abusive. They expected her to work as a maid and a cook along with going to school and trying to get along in a new country at 10 years old.

Bert’s had a better experience in foster care, even though he moved around a bit from family to family, part of that was to avoid the Nazi bombings of London and the industrial town of Coventry. Indeed, one foster family Bert kept contact with even into the 1990’s, hearing from the couple’s children when their parents passed. But where Bert really shone was academics. He excelled in school, not only academics but in making friends and participating in English life as well. Both Magie’s and Bert’s educations were supervised by a Jewish orphanage, but it was Bert who was able to lift himself through education. In fact, he was one of only two children connected with the orphanage to earn a scholarship that would have covered all levels of British education he wished to pursue – through college and even institutions like Oxford.

From May 1939 until May 1945, Bert and Magie lived apart from their mother and apart from each other. Each had scrapes with German blitz of London, the bombings that tortured the British for the first 3 years of the war. Finally, in 1945, Sida heard from her sister who had made it to New York, that she could sponsor the family to come to America. But Sida faced a difficult situation with Bert. He could never have the educational opportunity in America that he had in England. Yet, she needed to be in America, where she could once again have the support of family and live a life free of fear. So she gave Bert, then not quite 15 years old, the choice. It was up to him. He could stay in England and follow his mother and sister whenever he finished school, or go with them immediately. Bert chose to go with his mother and sister and forego the scholarship.

At this point I asked Bert a question. I asked him what pushed him to give up the education and leave with Sida and Magie. He could have followed later. At that moment he began to sob. He wiped some tears away and said quietly, “I did not want to be separated from them any more.”

We had only been speaking for about 90 minutes, but it really hit me that for the better part of 6 years, the entire time they lived in England, Bert had lived apart from his mother and sister. From age 9 to 15 his only families were foster families. Whatever scholastic success Bert ever had became insignificant as I realized he had lost a childhood. In Germany it was impossible to have a normal childhood, and in England, even kind caring foster families could not be a substitute for his family. What an emotional price Bert paid for his life.

Sacred moments really cannot be planned. They just well up and suddenly you have experienced something holy. When Bert softly cried I saw the holiness of his life, and the emotional price he paid to earn it. It was an honor to sit with this good soul at that moment. The Shoah is a tragedy in which many deserving people did not survive. But Bert Romberg did, and did so in a way that honors everyone who lived through those years.