Saint Mary's Magazine Spring 2004 - Saint Mary's University of ...

Katie, whose family lived in Winona
at the time.
Their five children grew up not
knowing details of their father’s
history as well. Occasionally phrases
like, “You don’t know what hunger is”
would slip out in conversation with
their father.
Yet watching his children grow,
George couldn’t help but compare his
life to theirs. “I do that with my
grandkids too. Every time somebody
is 8, or whatever age, I would think, ‘I
was here’ or ‘I was there.’ I think, and
Georg and Ursula
on the steps of
St. Jacobus, a
Catholic convent
in Earsel, Holland,
where they lived
prior to being
taken to the
concentration
camps.
I wonder how they would do.”
It wasn’t until after a 50th
anniversary trip to Trobitz,
commemorating the anniversary of
the Lost Transport survivors, that
George was able to open up.
“My family insisted that I go on
this trip,” he said. “I didn’t want to go,
but they told me I should because it
would be good. (After the trip) I felt
real good about everything. These
very people were at the same
place that I was at the same
time … I felt at home, and they
were people I could talk to. And it
was like kind of like a rock off my
chest.”
By reading “Lucie’s Hope,”
readers feel as though George is an
old friend, one they’ve known for
years. It’s a response he gets from
many people, he said, “because I
laid it all open and wrote it just
the way I talk.”
George said the book
was originally meant only
for his family. “It just
got out of hand,”
he said, his
humor coming through. “They kept
bugging me, and bugging me and
bugging me, especially my son ... So I
finally did it.”
The goal of “Lucie’s Hope” is
simple: “So that basically they get
some understanding of what
happened to people,” George said.
“The futility of it. There’s no reason
for this to have happened. It’s
absolutely 100 percent wrong for
someone to come in and break up
your family and everyone else’s
family and kill everybody off and take
all your property … There’s no
reason for it.”
George now shares memories of
the Holocaust with schools and other
organizations. “But I’m no
philosopher. I don’t philosophize
nothing. I just tell what happened. I
think it’s enough.” (p. 86)
But George is more that a
“Holocaust
survivor;”
… for the first time
since I was 8 years old,
I felt like a normal person …
he’s a
veteran,
husband,
father of
five,
grandfather
of 15, pilot,
musician
and
pharmacist, living in Glen Ellyn, Ill.
His children, in their
own chapters of “Lucie’s
Hope,” also call him a hero.
His son, Joe, writes, “I
think the best part of his
story is that he has kept
moving forward, moving
on in a positive direction.
“My dad came to this
country with nothing. Now
he has a profession, a
beautiful house, a
45-year marriage to a good
woman, five children – all
professionals, all
successfully married, no
divorces – each child with
three children of their own.
Not bad for an orphan. My
dad is an American success
story.” (qtd. In Levy Mueller
and Weedman p. 106 and
109) ≠
This is a recent photograph of
Ursula and George, two
survivors of the Holocaust.
George and Ursula posed before
flying to the United States. This
trip on a DC3 was the first leg of
their trip from Eindhoven to
Amsterdam.
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