“I remember we had a Jewish bakery down the street, and on
Kristallnacht they broke all the glass in the front, and they just threw all
the cakes out in the street. It was just total chaos. And the police . . .
they just stood around, they just laughed. They had a grand old time.”
Ben Waserman
growing up jewish in 1930s berlin, Ben Waserman always
felt like an outsider. “I knew even as a child that I was not wanted there,” he
says. On the night of November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed Kristallnacht,
the violent attack against the Jews of Germany and Austria. Although Ben
was no stranger to antisemitic hostility, he remembers that he “didn’t really
know fright until that time.” The Gestapo seized the family’s tailoring
business and Ben and his parents, Abraham and Alice, were forced to leave
their handsome home next to the small factory. They moved to a series of
cramped apartments, always just one step ahead of arrest. Ben’s brother
John (b. Jonah) was born in 1939. In 1941 the Gestapo arrested Abraham
and sent him to Buchenwald, where he perished.
After a year in hiding, Alice and the boys were caught and sent to
Theresienstadt, a ghetto and transit camp in Czechoslovakia. The vast
majority of Jews in Theresienstadt succumbed to disease or malnutrition
or were sent on to extermination camps. Alice, the child of a mixed
marriage, had a non-Jewish father. Perhaps because of this, she and her
children were spared. At one point she managed to rescue Ben, who had
been placed on a train bound for Auschwitz. Imploring the guard to
release him, she explained that she was only half Jewish. “He came over
and he grabbed me by the shirt and he pulled me off the train and I
stayed,” recalls Ben, who credits his mother’s courage with saving his life.
Starving and ill, Alice, Ben, and John were liberated from Theresienstadt
by Russian troops in May 1945.
After they recovered they went to Deggendorf, a camp for displaced
persons in Bavaria. Ben has fond memories of the year they spent there.
On June 19, 1946 he came to the United States with John and their mother,
settling in Philadelphia. After completing his interrupted high school
education, Ben joined the Air Force. He served six years and two overseas
tours in the Pacific and in Korea, where he flew 75 combat missions and
earned a Distinguished Flying Cross, three Air Medals, and a United
Nations Medal. Honorably discharged in 1954, Ben moved to Houston
to study architecture and electronics technology. He married Carmen
Mercado, a Texan, in 1955. They have two children, Karen and David. Ben
worked as a sound system engineer and a video design engineer before
opening his own audio visual production company in 1970.
Although Ben rarely talked to his children about his experiences
in Theresienstadt, he has dedicated himself to the work of Holocaust
Museum Houston, co-chairing the Changing Exhibit Committee. He is
active with the Houston Child Survivors group and helped plan the 2001
Child Survivors of the Holocaust International Conference in Houston.
199
Ben and his parents, Berlin, 1935.
Born: Benjamin Wassermann
Berlin, Germany
June 21, 1929
Parents:
Abraham Jakob Wassermann,
d. Buchenwald, 1941
Alice Winterheld Wassermann, survived
Sibling:
John (b. Jonah), survived