Werner Salinger, 94, now lives in Bedford but was born and lived the first six years of his life in Berlin, Germany, where he experienced the Holocaust firsthand as a young Jewish boy before fleeing the country and coming to America in 1939.
Salinger spoke on his experience to Gloucester High School students Tuesday. His appearance is part of an ongoing effort by the school’s Genocide Education Committee to teach students about genocides throughout history.
Committee co-Chair and high school history teacher Alyssa D’Antonio said last year the group received a $40,000 state grant to put toward genocide education, building new curriculum and increasing student enrichment. D’Antonio said Salinger was brought in as part of speaker series being funding with the grant.
Much of Salinger’s talk focused on his childhood leading up to Kristallnacht and the quick division between Jewish and non-Jewish people Hitler established as Germany’s leader.
Born April 1932 in Berlin to a lawyer father and orthodontist mother, Salinger was only alive for 10 months before Hitler was appointed in 1933. In 1934, Hitler became the sole leader of Germany and the Nuremberg Laws were quickly passed, which Salinger said marks the beginning of the Holocaust for him.
He said after the laws were passed, overnight his mother could no longer treat non-Jewish people and his friends the day before in elementary school were now “enemies.”
“They called me names if I ever saw them again which mostly I didn’t because pretty quickly I went to an all Jewish school,” Salinger said. “My dad was a lawyer and of course he had clients of all faith backgrounds but overnight, he could no longer have a non-Jewish client.”
Kristallnacht
The family remained in their central Berlin apartment, according to Salinger, and at age 6, he witnessed Kristallnacht in November 1938 when Nazi officials ordered synagogues be burned, Jewish shop windows smashed. Jewish people were imprisoned and killed across the country as a result.
“My memory of Kristallnacht is going to the window in the second floor of this pretty large apartment looking out across the street seeing shattered glass, bodies and smelling the dark black acrid smoke of the synagogue just a block away,” he said.
Just two months later in January 1939, Salinger and his parents departed from a brief stay in London to America in an attempt to escape German anti-Semitism.
“I have no idea how my parents were able to get a visa because the quota for German-Jewish refugees to come to (America) was very small,” he said. “This was not a welcoming country for a lot of people but it was for me.”
But on the trip over the Atlantic Ocean, Salinger’s mother contracted tuberculosis. She died 10 months after they arrived in the U.S.
“I consider her a victim of the Holocaust,” he said.”I never really got to know her.”
New Jersey and Einstein
Once in the U.S., Salinger stayed with relatives in Princeton, New Jersey, one of whom was a world-renowned New Testament theologian and taught at Princeton University’s theology school. Albert Einstein happened to live down the street and Salinger recalled the time he spent with Einstein during his few years in New Jersey.
“He would take me by the hand and walk me through his garden and then we’d go back into the studio and he’d take his violin off the wall and play for me,” he said. “I called him my uncle Albert; he loved kids and I was just a kid to him.”
But Salinger’s time in America didn’t come without hardship. He struggled to learn the language and even called himself “Warren” for a time to avoid being associated with Germany.
As Salinger got older he moved to Baltimore to join his father and his new wife and to finish high school. He eventually enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, which sent him back to Germany.
For two of his four years stationed in Germany, he interviewed German prisoners of war who had recently been released from the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War.
“These guys had been involved in the rebuilding of the Soviet Union … they knew how long the runways were in the new airports, they knew how thick the factory walls were, and they knew what kind of steel was used in the new bridges,” he said. “We extracted all this information and sent it back to the Pentagon.”
‘Make sure you vote’
Also while stationed in Germany, Salinger met his bride-to-be Martha, whose father was forced to join the Nazi army despite not believing in the Nazi ideology himself. The two are still married to this day, 74 years later.
“Bringing the daughter of a Nazi soldier into a German-Jewish refugee family was kind of like Robert Frost’s ‘Road Less Traveled’ but we did it,” he said. “My family accepted Martha very quickly.”
Today the two have four children, six grandchildren and seven great-grandkids.
After Salinger spoke about his life, several students asked questions about everything he has endured and his opinions on a variety of topics pertaining to genocide. Salinger ended his response to several questions by reminding students of the importance of voting and how that is the way to enact change in society.
“Talk to your parents, talk to your teachers, see what you like about life in the country at this time and what you don’t like,” he said. “And when you get old enough to vote, make sure you vote.”
Staff Writer Bobby Grady may be contacted at 978-675-2714 or bgrady@gloucestertimes.com.