Eveliese Shuermann Jacobson, a slim, gracious, fair-haired woman, was born in Hildesheim, Germany, in 1929. She still remembers the event that changed her life. She was only 9 years old when a classmate come up to her and yelled, “Your father's a dirty Jew! Your father’s a dirty Jew!” “He is not!” challenged Evie, a beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed child who had been raised as a Christian and baptized in the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
When Evie ran home to tell her mother, Else, what had happened, her mother realized that she couldn’t easily keep the truth from her daughter any longer. Else told Evie that she (Else) had been born a Catholic; but Evie’s father—Otto—was Jewish. The news meant only one thing to the young child: She was one of Germany’s unwanted. “It’s not true, it can’t be true,” Evie cried. “I hate you, I hate my father!”
It was 1938 and antisemitism was at a peak. Evie was a student in a typical German school where her classmates saluted “Heil Hitler” every day and sang the German national anthem. Her teachers, required by Nazi law to teach “race science,” taught Evie and her classmates that Jews were an inferior race and that they were enemies of the Third Reich.
In an attempt to protect their daughter from the inevitable slurs and self-doubts that would arise from hearing these vile lies about the Jewish people, the Shuermanns had decided to withhold her father’s Jewish identity from Evie. They wanted to bring her up in the most normal environment possible. They visited frequently with Else’s brother, Fritz, and his wife, who were Christian. Finally, as antisemitism became more and more virulent, they decided to make Evie’s Christianity official: In 1938 they baptized Evie in the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Evie was 9 years old.
There was also a practical reason for their deception: “Mischlinge”—children of one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent—were not treated as severely by the Third Reich as children of two Jewish parents, particularly if they were brought up as Christians. Evie might not ever be subject to the same terrible restrictions that were being levied upon children with two Jewish parents.
Evie’s parents explained all this in a patient, caring way. Eventually, her anger dissipated. But she could not foresee that—as a result of this revelation—her life was about to change dramatically. Even though she would not suffer the brutalities of the concentration camps, she would throughout her life go through painful conflicts about who she was and who her true parents were.
"Flight to England"
As the Nazis imposed more and more restrictive measures on Jews, Evie’s parents made plans to emigrate to England; Else got a job as a housekeeper, Otto as a butler. Then, tragically, in March of 1939, Else died of tuberculosis. Shortly afterward, Evie’s Uncle Fritz, a Nazi party member, cut off relationships with Evie, no longer wanting any association at all with relatives who were partly Jewish. Otto, realizing that he had to get Evie out of Germany as soon as possible, arranged for her to leave on a "Kindertransport" (a children’s transport) to England. He planned to join her as soon as he found a job there.
The following August, 1939—the very month Evie turned 10 years old—Evie left Germany on a train headed for France. From there she took a ferry to Harwich, England, where she was met by two Quaker women. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland; two days later, England declared war on Germany. England’s borders were now closed to German immigrants.
Otto could no longer join Evie. Evie settled in with her foster family, the Whyatts, who lived in Ipswich, a small village about an hour from London.
Gilbert Whyatt, a manager in a manufacturing company, and his wife, Irene, had two children, Philip and Lois, both of whom were about Evie’s age. They played with Evie right away and made her feel welcome. Mr. Whyatt gave Evie an hour’s lesson in English every day, a gesture which Evie appreciated even then. “I wanted to be assimilated,” she recalls. “I wanted to be the same. I wanted to fit in and be accepted.”
Through the Red Cross, Evie and her father managed to exchange one bland letter a month, consisting of only 25 words or less, since all mail going to England was read and censored by German officials. But at least Evie knew that her father was alive.
Then one day the letters stopped. No explanation, no news. Her foster parents tried to be comforting and told her to be hopeful. Evie tried not to grieve, even though her mother had died only a short time ago and now her father had disappeared. “I just had to stuff everything,” she says. “I totally lost touch with my German roots and was raised as a stoic English girl.”
When families were evacuated from Ipswich to protect them from German bombing, Irene Whyatt and the children moved to Morecambe, a small town in Lancashire, where Irene’s mother had a house. Irene and the children lived there for two years; Mr. Whyatt visited on weekends. As the RAF sent bombing missions to Germany in retaliation for the air raids on England, the people around Evie all cheered. But Evie didn’t know how to respond: Did she belong to Germany or England? Germany was persecuting the Jews, and this had forced her to leave. But should she cheer for England while her father and other relatives were trapped in Germany and, therefore, in danger of being killed by English bombs?
"Trying to Conform"
In England Evie felt other stresses as well. Her natural father had warned her to behave and follow the rules in England: Always say “please” and “thank you.” She was fearful that one wrong move would cause her foster parents to abandon her. So, despite the fact that the Whyatts were extremely welcoming, Evie felt a constant pressure to live up to expectations that she hadn’t been raised with: Simple things—like using the proper British manners while dining—took on added weight. Evie now felt totally dependent upon the kindness of her foster family.
Even the informal geography quizzes that Mr. Whyatt would hold over meals took on great significance: With each wrong answer, Evie felt that she would be in jeopardy. Evie had been raised in a family where she had been doted upon; both of her parents had been openly affectionate with her. The Whyatts were kind and fair, but they were typically British, reserved with their emotions. Sometimes Evie mistook their coolness as a sign of disapproval, not realizing that they were naturally reticent.
When Evie turned 16, the British government tried to put her in a detention camp for “enemy aliens”: Evie was still a German citizen, and now old enough to be treated as an adult. But Mr. Whyatt refused to allow the government to take this action, arguing that by this time she was now part of the family. He won the fight—but Evie didn’t find out that he had advocated for her until years later.
"A Letter Arrives"
On May 7, 1945, the war in Europe ended. Soon after, Evie received a letter from her father. Miraculously, he was alive; he had hidden in the countryside with a German Jewish woman named Hanny Geese and her "mischling" child, Heinz. (Hanny’s husband, a Christian musician with a German orchestra, had divorced Hanny when his employer threatened to fire him if he remained married to a Jewish woman.) Otto had managed to obtain false documents and he had been working incognito on a farm owned by Nazis.
Excited to receive her father’s letter, Evie made plans to meet him in Bonn, Germany, where Otto and Hanny had resettled. Evie knew that she was incredibly lucky; most children who left Germany on Kindertransports never saw their parents again. But it was not until November 1947 that she was able to get the proper travel documents. When she arrived, their reunion was unexpectedly painful: Evie had been living with the Whyatts for almost nine years and she was an integral part of their family. Now 18, she was a young woman, but her father couldn’t grasp that she had grown up; he wanted to hold her on his lap, as if she were still a child.
“He still thought of me as a little girl,” recalls Evie. “I felt almost as though he were a stranger. I still loved him, but I felt guilty that I didn’t feel the same way he did. I was torn.”
They spent six weeks together, talking and traveling to the countryside and revisiting Evie’s home town. Otto wanted Evie to remain with him in post-war Germany, even though the country was in shambles: There was little electricity and a severe shortage of food and housing. People could get water only from pumps. Jobs were scarce. Despite these hardships, Evie’s father still had a strong sense of loyalty to Germany and wanted to stay there. Evie wanted to live with her father, but she could not live in Germany.
They finally compromised: Evie’s father
offered to emigrate to Chicago to join his brother, Willy, and his family, who had settled there before the war.
Once again Evie had to say good-bye to her family, only this time it was her foster family, the family she had lived with during her formative teenage years. She was once again torn and distrustful: “I am never going to love anybody again,” she remembers saying. She swore that she would never allow herself to form a deep tie again.
"Voyage to America"
In 1948 Evie boarded a ship bound for America. (Her father would follow soon after.) On the ship, her life once again changed: She met a young man named Ray Jacobson, a young American Lutheran of Swedish descent. Ray had been studying in a university in Stockholm on a GI Bill. He was traveling back to his home in Minneapolis. On the ship Evie and Ray spent several hours together and Ray asked if he could write to her, to find out how she was adapting to her new life in America.
When Evie arrived in Chicago, more troubles confronted her: She ran up to hug and kiss her cousin. His wife exclaimed, “We don’t do that in this country!”
Evie felt the same nervousness she had experienced when she had arrived in England: Behave or you could be out on the street. Become whom you think people want you to be in order to survive.
A year later her father, then 60 years old, arrived from Germany with Hanny. When he did, the pressure on Evie intensified. “I wasn’t comfortable with him,” she says. “He wanted me to spend time with him—maybe more than I wanted to. I had this feeling of guilt if I didn’t measure up to what he wanted.”
She got a job working in a garment sweatshop to help pay the bills. She also continued writing to Ray Jacobson, and through their letters they fell in love. He proposed on December 31, 1949. Evie, almost 21, accepted. They married the following August. Since Ray was working as an engineer with a large company in Minneapolis, he asked Evie to join him there. Evie agreed, even though she felt guilty about leaving her father in Chicago, particularly since he was having such a hard time there adjusting to American life.
In Chicago, Otto and Hanny married, but Otto could not find a job; so he walked from door to door selling can openers to earn money, longing to be back in Germany. Despite Hitler’s terrible policies toward the Jews, he still considered Germany his homeland; there he could speak the language and work in his given profession. At least, that is what he thought.
Evie also found adjusting to life in Minneapolis more difficult than she had anticipated. On top of the normal stresses of living in a new city, Evie was racked with guilt and ambivalence, torn between her love for her new husband and her sense of obligation to be with her father, who had settled in America to be with her. Was her loyalty to her husband, Ray, or her father, Otto?
The following year she gave birth to her first daughter, Pam, and these stresses escalated. Evie fell into a serious depression and sought help and guidance from a therapist. To heal the wounds with her father, she made frequent trips to Chicago to visit him and Hanny. But it wasn’t until 1957 that she and her father developed a real closeness. Then Otto died unexpectedly the following year from a lingering heart ailment.
In 1966 Ray was transferred to Rochester. Evie, now the mother of two teenage daughters, took a part-time job as a teller in a bank. Some customers would assume she was Jewish because of her last name—Jacobson—which was a common German/ Jewish name. She would always point out that her husband was of Swedish descent.
“I felt that I was denying my heritage,” she explains, “but I was afraid of what people would think if they knew that I was partly Jewish. Some of my co-workers would make snide remarks about Jewish customers.” For many years, Evie would say nothing when she heard these remarks; after all, antisemitism had ruined her life once. She did not want to suffer from it again. Finally, after working in the bank for ten years, she decided to confront her co-workers, telling them their remarks were racist and that she, in fact, was of Jewish heritage.
“I was scared,” she says. “I was really shaking inside. But I decided I couldn’t be quiet anymore.”
Once she confronted them, she found new strength from simply telling the truth. “It made me feel more empowered,” she says. “I was not hiding something about myself anymore.” Evie began making connections with other Holocaust survivors in her area; soon she felt strong enough to share her story with schoolchildren in Rochester.
"Chameleon No More"
Evie Jacobson’s story is one more example of the way in which the Nazis partly succeeded in stripping human beings of their humanity and their identity.
“It’s taken me a whole lifetime to figure out who I am,” says Evie today. “I spent so much time trying to fit in or be what I thought other people wanted me to be, I was like a chameleon all this time. And I’m still trying to resolve my identity.”
Evie told her two daughters, Pam and Debbie, about her mixed heritage when they were small children: She wanted them to know that they had a Jewish grandfather. But she was not willing or able to talk about her past with others. Eventually, with the help of therapists, friends, and family, she gathered the strength and understanding to do so, overcoming learned habits of silence and suppression.
“It was just always something she talked about, at whatever level we could understand,” says her older daughter, Pam Barnes, 49, a mother and special-education teacher, who lives in Vermont with her husband and three children. “It’s in her nature not to stuff things, to always look for answers and share things with people in her life.”
Evie’s younger daughter, Debbie, 46, is also close to her mother and sees her parents often. Debbie lives in Rochester, where she is the director of public relations for the Rochester Museum and Science Center.
In deference to her husband, Ray, Evie joined a Lutheran church in Minneapolis, but she was never a devout Christian and raised both of her children to be open-minded about religion. Spirituality, however, is increasingly important to Evie; although she does not embrace any organized religion, the philosophies of Unitarianism and Buddhism appeal to her. She has also begun painting mystical watercolors to express her inner beliefs.
Evie has told her grandchildren about her Jewish father, and they are proud of the association. Just a few years ago, Evie’s grandson, Michael, and her granddaughter Lisa, completed high school projects based on the journal that Otto kept while he was in hiding in Germany; her granddaughter Kathryn used Evie’s story to illustrate an immigration project in fourth grade.
Evie has also been deeply touched by her foster family. Many years after the war ended, the German government offered large sums of money to the families who took in Kindertransport children as recompense for taking care of its citizens. The Whyatts refused the money, saying that they had raised Evie as a member of their family: They did not expect to be paid for it. The gesture hit home.
“They had me for nine years—I was part of the family,” says Evie. “It’s unbelievable that anyone would do that.”
Excerpt from "Perilous Journeys: Personal Stores of German and Austrian Jews Who Escaped the Nazis" written by Barbara Lovenheim and Barbara Appelbaum