Gerry Glaser, a thoughtful soft-spoken physician in his mid-seventies, will never forget the phone call his family received on November 9, 1938. The hushed voice on the other end of the line delivered a shocking message: The Nazis were planning a major action against the Jews that night, and Gerry’s father, Arthur—a prominent Berlin physician who had been confident he could “out-last”Hitler—was on the list of those to be arrested.

“My parents decided that Father would be safest if he spent the day in a movie theater,” recalls Gerry, who was 13 at the time. “And since I was tall for my age, they were afraid I would become a target also; so my parents thought that I should accompany Father.” Thea Glaser, Gerry’s mother, would stay at home: “My parents didn’t think the Nazis would bother Mother."

Later that day, while Nazi mobs beat Jews and plundered their neighborhoods, uniformed men came searching for the doctor. Gerry and his father nervously sat out the fray in a darkened cinema. “I remember little of the movies— we must have seen several,” says Gerry. “At one point, some men came in and shone some flashlights around, but we were not disturbed.”

Gerry’s uncle, Paul Benjamin, a manager at an international bank, was not so lucky; he was arrested and taken to a concentration camp. Later that evening, after calling home to see if it was safe to travel on the streets, Gerry and his father joined other relatives at his uncle’s apartment, where they anxiously passed the rest of the night, pondering their options.

This was the night that became known as Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass.” Daylight revealed the destruction: Broken glass filled the streets. The windows of Jewish shops had been smashed and covered with anti-Jewish signs. The large synagogue on Fasanenstrasse where Gerry had been bar mitzvahed only a few months before was in shambles.

“Father, by nature a stubborn man, finally decided that it was time to emigrate,” Gerry says. “He decided that he wasn’t going to outlast Hitler.”

"An Ordinary Family"

Born in Berlin in 1925, Gerry, whose given name was Gerhard, lived with his parents, Arthur and Thea, and an older sister, Gisela, in a spacious apartment on the Kurfurstendamm, a street in the fashionable center of West Berlin. Arthur Glaser had a large medical practice with two offices—one on the east side of the city, where he treated working-class people, and the other in his home, where he treated more well-to-do Berliners. Gerry’s mother, Thea, was a “sweet, quiet lady” who had suffered from rheumatic heart disease for many years.

The family lived a comfortable, cultured life. They often visited their country’s scenic areas, traveling freely around Germany, and they tended to spend their summer vacations in Italy, Czechoslovakia, or Yugoslavia. They had Jewish and non-Jewish friends; they felt very much a part of mainstream German society.

“Father was an energetic, successful, respected physician,” Gerry recalls. “He considered himself very German, having served with distinction as a physician in World War I. He had been decorated for bravery and had been a prisoner of war in England. Because of this, the Nazis allowed him to practice medicine until quite late—1937 or 1938—after many others had been deprived of their livelihood.

“My sister and I were largely raised by our maids, usually nice young girls from the country,” Gerry says. “I have few memories of my elementary school years. Levels of instruction were high, education formal and rigid; we were expected to study Latin and French.

Father was a well-trained violinist, and I was often taken to performances of the physicians’ orchestra. There were also occasional chamber music evenings in our apartment.”

Gerry undertook religious training and Hebrew lessons at the insistence of his maternal grandfather, Gustav Wolfsohn, a wealthy, devout man who had worked his way up from office boy to an executive position in a German manufacturing firm. “He was not a very nice person—he was demanding and domineering. We were all a bit afraid of him,” Gerry acknowledges with a smile. When Gerry celebrated his bar mitzvah in Berlin’s large liberal synagogue on Fasanenstrasse, his grandfather—his only living grandparent—refused the seat of honor because the service was not Orthodox enough.

"Set Apart"

Gerry’s political awakening came when he was quite young—on his eighth birthday, January 30, 1933, the day Hitler came to power. “I was driving in the car with my father and I asked him about Hitler,” recalls Gerry. “He said, ‘It is a very bad thing.’” By 1935, the ‘bad thing’ had borne visible fruit; there were open displays of antisemitism by ordinary Germans. Gerry particularly remembers the Nazi posters on street corners that featured caricatures of Jews with long, hooked noses.

At his father’s urging, Gerry joined a German Jewish youth group, "Bund der Deutsch-Judischen Jugend", when he was about 11. The group gathered for sports, hikes, and singalongs. Once, during a hike into the countryside, some young men wearing the brown shirts of the Nazi SA (“storm troopers”) stopped the group in the woods. The men questioned the group’s leader, a youth about 16, and started to slap him around. The teen, who kept his hand over a pocket to hide a knife, didn’t resist. “We were all in a panic—we just stood there,” Gerry says. “After a while the men became bored and moved on, but the memory of total helplessness and fear remains strongly with me.”

Gerry got a better understanding of what it meant to be Jewish when he entered the Fichte Gymnasium (a German high school). He was among three Jewish youths in his class. “I was fortunate,” he says. “While not a great athlete, I did take part on our school relay running team and played on the handball team (a German game similar to soccer) so I was largely left alone. One of the other boys, a quiet lad who looked like the Nazi caricatures of Jews, was not so fortunate; he underwent much hazing and some beatings.

“Some of the teachers became more strict and distant, while a few went out of their way to be nice to us. I particularly remember the music teacher, who had the courage to say openly in class that it was a pity he could no longer teach the choir the beautiful melodies of Mendelssohn.”

Gerry remembers a particularly hurtful incident involving a close friend, Hanno Ascher, who came from a wealthy Gentile family. The Aschers had a big, luxurious car and a private chauffeur, who would sometimes drive the youngsters around a nearby racetrack. “One day, Hanno came to me quite embarrassed,” he recalls. “His father had forbidden him to play with me—even to speak to me—because I was Jewish. This has stayed with me ever since.”

Despite the growing anti-Jewish sentiment, some people provided acts of unexpected kindness. One afternoon, running to catch a bus home after a handball match in the suburbs, Gerry slammed into a car and was injured. Two SA men emerged from the vehicle and approached him; he was frightened. “But they were very nice to me, and they drove me home,” Gerry says. They rang the Glasers’ doorbell; Arthur Glaser opened the door and turned ashen. “There were the two Brownshirts and me with my face bleeding,” Gerry says, now able to laugh at the memory. The officers left the badly bruised teen with his parents and calmly departed.

"A Glimpse of the Future . . .
From Sachsenhausen"

In 1935, the Glasers had to fire their German servants because it was no longer legal for Jews to employ non-Jews. (It was considered "Rassenschande", “racial shame,” for a Gentile woman under the age of 45 to work for a Jew.) The Nazis eventually shut down Arthur Glaser’s practice. “He had no income, and we moved to a smaller, simpler apartment,” recalls Gerry.

No longer able to stay in the German secondary school, Gerry transferred to a Jewish school, where everyone was studying English. His sister, who was four years older, left Germany to study nursing in England. Gerry’s uncle, Paul Benjamin, who had been transferred by his employer to Austria after Hitler rose to power, returned to Berlin in 1938. He had found the Austrian Nazis to be as antisemitic as the German Nazis. At one point, Paul’s wife, Muschi, had been forced to scrub public streets in Vienna on her hands and knees.

The warning that saved Arthur Glaser from arrest on Kristallnacht was given at great personal risk by a young SA member who was the son of Frau Dust, a close friend of the Glaser family. She played the viola in the doctor’s chamber-music group. But Uncle Paul did not get away: He was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp outside Berlin. There, many detainees were abused and tortured. Paul managed to escape this treatment by appearing to be working all the time.

Since the death camps were not yet set up, these early arrests and confinements were done primarily to pressure Jews to leave Germany. After Paul had been in Sachsenhausen for two weeks, his bank associates negotiated his release, promising authorities that the family would leave Germany. “My uncle came back dirty and smelly, and told us the way to survive was to look busy all the time,” Gerry recalls. Soon afterward, the Benjamins emigrated to Holland. From there they went to England and then the U.S.

The American quota system made immigration difficult, but Arthur Glaser located some distant relatives—prominent New York lawyers—who agreed to sponsor his family. Since the Germans had imposed a heavy export tax on Jews as a way of getting their fortunes before they left the country, Jews had to smuggle money out. This was necessary not only to preserve their money but because English authorities would admit Jewish families only after being assured that they had the means to support themselves and would eventually be leaving to live in the U.S.

Gerry remembers the days before their departure: “The Nazis were very happy to let us leave. I believe they took some valuables and artwork, and there was a heavy penalty tax to be paid for leaving the country. The rest of our belongings were stored in large vans for future transportation. We never saw them again.

“When everything was in readiness, tickets bought, a few small suitcases packed, Mother became ill again and had to take to her bed. My parents jointly decided that she would stay behind under the care of her brother, Berthold Wolfsohn, a physician at the Berlin Jewish Hospital. She was to follow us to England as soon as she became well enough to travel.”

But the family was never reunited.

"Safety in the States"

Gerry and Arthur left for England on August 15, 1939. Since Germany was on the verge of declaring war on Poland, the British were suspicious of anyone who was German. They began rounding up some German Jewish refugees, thinking they might be German spies; Arthur Glaser was among those rounded up. He was interned at a camp on the Isle of Man. “Oddly enough, it wasn’t a bad experience,” notes Gerry. “He seemed to have had quite a good time there. The men were well treated, and he became friendly with many artists and musicians.”

Gerry, just 14, went to live with the Benjamins; then he moved around from house to house, living first with an English family and finally with an aged great-aunt from Austria who had an apartment near Hyde Park. He attended an English secondary school, where he learned to recite, in succession, all the British kings and queens.

On September 1, 1939, England declared war on Germany. The following August, 1940, the Germans sent massive numbers of bombers to pummel England. Gerry remembers the beginning of the London blitz (the bombing of London). Many Britons were killed or wounded during those bombing raids, but Gerry remained unscathed: “We would listen for the sound of planes and bombs, but I can’t recall feeling very frightened,” he recalls. “And nothing did happen to us.”

That same month, Gerry and his father sailed for the United States, with less than $10 between them. They knew they would be met by Gerry’s sister, Gisela, and the Benjamins, who had gone before them. For a while they lived with the Benjamins. Though he was no longer wealthy, Paul Benjamin had secured a position at a New York bank. “My aunt saw to it that I was properly fed and clothed, and mothered me as I was growing up,” Gerry says. Years later, when Arthur and Gerry were living on their own, Aunt Muschi would travel an hour by subway just to bring them home-cooked meals.

Gerry went to high school and worked at odd jobs. His father, who was in his fifties and not very fluent in English, had a more difficult adjustment; he had been a respected physician, but now he had to take mundane jobs as an ambulance attendant or a dishwasher. Eventually, however, Arthur passed the American medical boards and opened a small practice.

After graduating from high school in 1942, Gerry briefly attended Queens College; then he accepted a partial scholarship to Huron College, a small, Presbyterian school in Huron, South Dakota. “I have happy memories of Huron,” he recalls. “One other young man, a Japanese-American, and I were the local curiosities, and we were both asked several times to speak to
local groups of our experiences. My father later commented that I had become less shy and introverted after my year out there.”

"Return to Germany . . .
In the Conquering Army"

In 1943, Gerry was drafted into the U.S. Army as a medic. After the war, because he spoke German, he was stationed in Germany with the Counterintelligence Corps. This gave him a chance to look for his mother. His parents had exchanged letters once or twice a year through the Red Cross, but once the U.S. was at war with Germany, the letters had stopped, and neither Arthur or Gerry had any idea where Thea Glaser was. Gerry's inquiries confirmed what Gerry had suspected, but dreaded to discover. In 1943, Thea had been sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia; from there she had been sent to Auschwitz. Gerry could get no definitive information about her, but he believes she died there, with her sister and brother-in-law. Thea's  brother, Berthold Wolfsohn, continued to practice at the Berlin Jewish Hospital, which continued operating, under terrible conditions, all through the war. Somehow, he survived. He died in Berlin shortly after the war ended, but his wife and daughter made it to the United States. Gerry's grandfather lost everything to the Nazis and he died in Berlin during the war.

After Gerry left the military, he completed his studies at Columbia University. Then he enrolled in the University of Rochester Medical School, financing his studies with help from the G.I. Bill and part of an inheritance from his grandfather, obtained as reparations from the German government.

At a summer camp in Massachusetts in 1949, Gerry met Dorothy, a British-born artist who was to become his wife. They settled in Rochester and raised a family there; their son John is an associate professor of orthopedic medicine at the University of Iowa, and he has 2 children; the Glasers' daughter, Ann, lives in Rochester. Dorothy died in 1991.

Coming to terms with the past is still difficult for Gerry. He has visited Israel and Vad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, but he will not return to Germany , and cannot bring himself to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Despite his pain and loss, he believes that his experience in Hitler's Germany influenced the way he chose to lead his life - inspiring him, in particular, to work for recognition for nurses and other caretakers of the sick and aged.

Even thought he doesn't talk much about his past, thoughts about Auschwitz and the Holocaust increasingly weigh on his mind.  "You never get rid of it," he says sadly.

Excerpt from "Perilous Journeys: Personal Stores of German and Austrian Jews Who Escaped the Nazis" written by Barbara Lovenheim and Barbara Appelbaum