Kestenberg Archive

ST (M) was born on January 1932 in Vienna. His father was a surgeon and he has one brother six years older. They had a large apartments on one of the main streets of Vienna. Father's clinic was in the same building. At home they had a maid and a cook. At the time of the Anschluss, his brother was in sixth grade and ST was in kindergarten. After Anschluss, he was taken out of kindergarten, and stopped going to the street or playing in the park. ST was told that there was an epidemic. ST has a very good memory and remembers a lot of details of his early years in Vienna and of the Anschluss. He had an unusual talent for arithmetic from a very young age. He never suffered from hunger. ST's brother was put with other Jewish kids into Chajes Gymnasium, a Jewish institute. The maharaja of Bikaner had built a state hospital and he commissioned his chief medical officer, Dr. Weingarten who had left Germany in 1933, to staff the hospital. He wrote to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Vienna for recommendation of physicians and he hired ST's father and three more Jewish physicians in 1938. The family got visas to British India on September 7th, and on September 8th they left by train to Milan, Italy. ; They spent two weeks in Milan, shipped out from Genoa and stopped in Naples. They went through the Suez Canal, stopped at Aden and landed in Bombay on October 3rd 1938. The family lived in a bungalow in a British internment camp in Bikaner until they got the visas for the United States in late April of 1941. There were no armed guards, there was no barbed wire, and they just knew that there was a boundary beyond which they are not allowed to go. His brother had his Bar Mitzvah at the age of 14 1/2 as there was no minyan. No English school existed in Bikaner. His mother started teaching him English during the summer of 1938. When he was seven years old, already fluent in English, he and his brother went to school in Simla, many hours away from home by train. This was an English boarding school, ran by the Anglican Church. The boys stayed at school for nine months without visiting home and went home only when the school year was over. Their mother visited them just once. ST saw his brother just on Sundays. ST was in that school two successive years. He was extremely unhappy. He was always very much a loner, in India and later in the USA. His only friend was a local Hindu boy. He had to write letters home twice a week and the letters were censored by the teachers. Occasionally he got hit on the wrists or on the behind with a cane or a ruler for infraction of rules. He became sick after the second year at school and did not return to school. ; The family got affidavits from an uncle and from a friend. They sailed from Bombay through Cape Town and Port of Spain to New York and arrived to the US in June 1941. ST started school immediately. At school he never got along with the other kids, not in India and not in the States. Several family members, cousins who live now in the US and their spouses, were part of the Kindertransport.