Suzanne Loebl's Blog

As many of you know, I have spent the most of the last decade writing a book about the art uprooted by the Nazis during the Holocaust. About two years ago, Bloomsbury Press bought the unfinished manuscript. I finished the book with the assistance of Abigail Wilentz, and it will be published on October 16, 2025. You can preorder it here.

To accompany the book, next week I am launching a Substack called Plunder and Survival: Stories of Nazi-Uprooted Art. This biweekly newsletter will showcase tales that, for a variety of reasons, didn’t fit into the book, but were too good to abandon. If you enjoy the short essays I publish on this blog, you might also enjoy the newsletter. You can subscribe here.

Next week, I am returning to Echo Lake—unfortunately without Viva, my miniature poodle. She was fifteen and died last spring. Viva was born in Brazil and was a glamorous show dog during her first 3½ years. Luck would have it that she retired to our modest “pet home” thereafter. We changed her name from the Portuguese Genevia to Viva, but she never listened to her new name, even though we engaged an expensive trainer to teach her. 

I will miss Viva sitting uncomplainingly in the car’s backseat during the 463 miles separating my two abodes. When she finally got to Echo Lake, she always looked around and seemed a bit disoriented, but only for a moment. Then she would race back and forth down the long approach to the camp—a favorite exertion she would continue all summer long.

I also miss Viva following me around the house as if she were my shadow, settling down with me at every destination, whether it was my desk, the kitchen table, the dining room, the TV, or my bed. She always knew when she was coming out with me and when she had to stay home. As she grew older and slept more deeply, I would touch her slightly when I was about to relocate, telling her that “we” were going, and she would rouse herself. 

Only very young children and dogs proclaim so openly and forcefully that you are the center of their world! Edith, a former Maine neighbor, used to say: It is unfair that people and their best friends have such unequal lifespans.

I apologize for neglecting this blog for so long! The reason, and the good news, is that I had to finish Plunder and Survival: Stories of Theft, Loss, Recovery and Migration of Nazi-Uprooted Art, my fifteenth book. Bloomsbury will publish it on October 16th, 2025. It is already available for preorder!

In honor of yesterday’s important anniversary, here is a little story that will take you back by over eight decades.

I cautiously stretch my arthritic limbs in my bed in Brooklyn. It is 5 AM: time to take my diabetes pill. Suddenly, I am wide awake. I have been transported back to 85 years ago, and my mom is standing at the door of the Brussels bedroom I share with my sister Gabrielle. 

“Kinder, get up,” she says. “We may have to go to the basement.” A rumbling sound fills the room. Since when is Mutti afraid of a thunderstorm? I wonder. Then my father joins her. His face is ashen.

“The radio announced that the Germans invaded Belgium and Holland. We are at war,” he says.

I was about to turn 15, but to this day, I think of May 10th, 1940, as the day my life began.

My family of four had arrived in Belgium two years earlier, escaping Nazi rule in Germany, where my Jewish ancestors had lived for centuries. It had been hard for my parents to leave their comfortable bourgeois existence, but I blossomed in my new school’s tolerant atmosphere. My classmates looked out for me, explaining to those who were unfamiliar with my background that I needed special consideration because French was not my native tongue. 

Routines often persist in spite of catastrophes. On the morning of May 10th, the local bakery had delivered our freshly baked croissants while Nazi troops invaded. Doubting the Belgian army’s ability to stave them off, our parents decided we would try to outrun the Germans.

While we did our best to savor the croissants, our doorbell rang. Two members of the Belgian Civil Service had arrived to arrest us because we were German nationals. They loaded us aboard a hastily requisitioned hearse that drove us to my beloved school, which had been turned into a makeshift detention center. Pandemonium reigned. Most adults were stunned and sat quietly on makeshift accommodations while the teens organized a ball game. Soup materialized at midday.

During the afternoon, Madame Tordeur, the school director, spotted me. For some unfathomable reason, this ordinary-looking middle-aged woman terrified me. Whenever she entered my classroom, I expected her to single me out and declare, “Suzanne Bamberger, you don’t belong here. Leave.” Now, she shook my hand, her eyes moist. Suddenly, the enormity of what had happened hit me. My sense of adventure evaporated, and I sat quietly beside my mom. Shortly thereafter, the authorities released women and children but kept my father. Two days later, he and other wrongfully arrested men were shipped to a terrible concentration camp in the south of France. We would not see my father for six years.

Famine, war, redrawn borders, and persecution or fear thereof have often forced specific groups to flee their homes. Since World War I, the number of refugees that roam the world has increased exponentially. In 1915, Armenians fled their genocidal Turkish compatriots. Soon after, “White Russians” escaped from the nascent Soviet Union. Vanquished Republican Spaniards fled Francisco Franco’s Fascist Spain, and Jews fleeing Hitler swelled their ranks. And it’s not just Europe—this kind of displacement has occurred all over the world. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there were 20 million refugees in 1940 and more than 120 million by mid-2024.

As I stated at a rally at Kennedy Airport when Donald Trump instituted what was known as the “Muslim ban” during his first presidency, being a refugee is not a permanent condition. Even though I spent decades as a refugee, my life has been good and successful. Still, I know being a refugee leaves a permanent imprint on the self.

When we left Germany for Belgium in 1938, my mother told me to identify myself as a “political refugee”—whatever that meant to a 12-year-old. The term became more meaningful after my father’s abrupt departure, at which point my mother had to manage, with two children, entirely on her own. Perhaps it was fortunate that she did not know she would have to do so for six long years.

She decided we would join the one million Belgian citizens—1/8th of the total population—who left their homes to avoid the Nazi occupation. Our plan was to take the train to Ostend on the Belgian coast and cross the border into France near Dunkirk. The scene at the station in Brussels was chaos. British soldiers who were arriving to assist the Belgian, Dutch and French armies disembarked as Belgian refugees fought their way aboard the few departing trains. It took us hours to squeeze aboard one, and then it took another 24 hours to cover the 67 miles to Ostend. 

Miraculously, we found a room in a hotel. The next day, we took a street car that ran along the Belgian beach and finally walked to the border. We spent the next ten days trying to cross into France. We did not have the proper documents to satisfy the French border guards. We slept in the dunes. I can’t remember how we went to the bathroom or what we ate. We made lifelong friends with another German Jewish family who we had first met when we were both incarcerated at my school on the day the war started. Eventually, we realized that there was no point in reaching France. The German army had bypassed the coast and reached the interior of France by another route. Three weeks after we left, we returned to Brussels.

I will never be able to fathom how fortunate the three of us were to survive four years of Hitler’s Holocaust in Belgium. In addition to luck, it required the kindness of dozens of strangers. In May 1946, my father greeted us on a Hudson River pier in New York City. Though only 59, he seemed old and would die three years later. For him, as well as for me, the forced separation would never be healed. 

I often wonder how being a refugee affected me. In many ways, it was an excellent way of growing up. I am incredibly appreciative of what I have. I am very resourceful. I am fluent in German, French, and English. I have acquired a “native” understanding of three different cultures—different from visiting as a tourist. I also feel a certain distance from my three “home” countries’ crimes: Nazism in Germany; Belgian King Leopold II’s plunder of the Congo; the genocide of the Native American population and the prolonged road to racial equality in the United States.

And at the same time: I never quite felt at home anywhere. I always spoke with an accent, and I needlessly grew up without a father. My sister, who was younger than me when all this happened, never lost her extreme sense of anxiety. I too worry. I am fearful of most authoritarian bodies like the police or the army. I panic during exams and only passed my driving test after the kind examiner reminded me that “they must have taught you how to parallel park in driving school.” 

It is good that we can’t choose our life’s roadmap. But I am afraid that refugee problems, like climate change, poverty, epidemics, and dictatorships, are likely to stay with us.

Hi guys. Sorry for my long silence. Eight weeks ago, Dr. Morteza Meftah, an orthopedic surgeon at New York University’s Orthopedic Hospital, implanted my new hip. My body is still getting used to the repair. The new hip replaced an earlier “new” hip that was inserted by Dr. Chitran Ranawat 38 years ago. My first replacement took place when this marvelous operation was in its infancy. Then, as science editor of the Arthritis Foundation, I had eagerly followed its development by Britain’s John Charnley, MD. I may actually have been the first journalist to write about it for the general public. 

John Charnley started out as a general physician. He volunteered for the Royal Medical Corps on May 1, 1940, just in time to assist in the rescue of British troops from continental Europe at Dunkirk in 1940. After serving in Egypt during the war, he moved to an orthopedic hospital in Britain and eventually specialized in orthopedics. In the 1950s, he obtained funding to establish a biomechanical hip center at Wrightington Hospital in Lancashire. Osteoarthritic patients with deteriorating hip joints became his main concern.

To begin with, Charnley studied the lubrication of the hip joint. Gradually the slip properties of bone, metal, and the newly discovered manmade plastic compounds captured his attention. Charnley established a close relationship with Charles F. Thackray, who headed a small engineering company. Together the two designed the components of a two-part implantable hip. The first component was a long, curved stem that fit into the hollow canal of the femur. The stem ended in a ball shaped like the head of the femur. The other component resembled a cup, the acetabulum, in which the head of the femur rotates. The cup was made of or lined with plastic. At first Charnley used Teflon, which wore out too quickly, then he switched to ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE).

Charnley’s genius and determination was one of medicine’s major victories over disease. In addition to medical pioneers like him, I am grateful to the intrepid patients who agreed to try out this untested surgery. Indeed, many early patients had to put up with hips that failed after a year because the plastic wore out. Today, total hip replacement may very well be the world’s most frequent surgery. According to various data, almost half a million hip replacements are performed in the United States annually. 

A hip destroyed by arthritis, broken during a fall, or otherwise damaged is excruciatingly painful and debilitating. My hip started giving out when I was fifty and, unless repaired, I would have been tethered to a wheelchair long ago. In 1984, Dr. Ranawat replaced it and predicted that my new hip would last ten years; it well surpassed that estimate, lasting me almost four decades. Noting its durability, I had hoped that “we” would depart this world together. Last summer, however, the hip simply disintegrated. By then my height had shrunk from 5’4” to 5’1”. I limped and hurt. Unfortunately, as is the case with so much outdated equipment in our modern world, no replacement parts for my old hip were available! Luckily I found Dr. Meftah, who happened to have trained with Dr. Ranawat.

It was courageous for Dr. Meftah to take on an overaged patient like me, especially since the bones that usually form the hip joint had deteriorated. The surgeon did not know exactly what he would find once he cut me open, so he and his bioengineers designed two implants for different possibilities. The first assumed that the part that Dr. Ranawat had cemented into the femur would be loose, and could be lifted out. Fortunately, that plan worked and I got a brand-new prosthesis. Dr. Meftah used 17 screws to fasten the new acetabulum to the pelvic bone.  

It was a big surgery. During the operation Dr. Meftah was assisted by a trauma surgeon and other experts, and they managed to complete the surgery in three hours. It was done under spinal anesthesia, which spared my aging brain. Following current practice, I stood on my new hip the day after surgery. I spent five days in the hospital and another ten at Rusk Rehabilitation. To begin with, walking was excruciating painful, but surprisingly the overall pain that had increasingly impinged on my joie de vivre had disappeared.

Eight weeks after surgery I am still ambulating with a rollator, but making progress. Able hands allow me to take care of myself and live alone. I sit here at my computer talking to you, my good friends, and next week I may be able to go out, catching the end of spring. Viva, my little poodle, came home, and the two of us are looking forward to Maine.

Summer homes, especially when located in spectacular places, usually attract guests laden with gifts and improvements. This year, now that I am old, handicapped, car-less, and recently widowed, both were plentiful.

Walter was the first guest. His contributions were novel because he had never been to Mount Desert Island, much less my cottage. My simple nest dates from the 1940s. It stands on a hillock overlooking a spectacular lake that serves as its water supply. My husband and I upgraded it over the past half-century, doubling its size and adding a deck. Basically, however, it remains a rustic cabin in the woods, which enchants most visitors including Walter. 

As for the gifts and improvements: Walter was troubled by my scanty locks and upgraded them. In spite of my decades-long housewifely experience, Walter felt that I was in dire need of a refrigerator thermometer. When the little gadget arrived, it confirmed that my fridge was at an even 40 degrees. For the past fifty years, I eyeballed our guests’ cocktails. Now, however, the liquor for these is measured in a jigger, which doles out either 1½ ounces or half the amount. My granddaughter—who sometimes moonlights as a bartender-endorsed Walter’s contribution as an essential acquisition. Time will tell whether our liquor bill increases or drops. Unbidden, Walter replaced most of my ancient lightbulbs with new LEDs, and the house is brighter and environmentally updated.

Walter’s most welcome contributions were electronic. He animated our TV in a fraction of an hour, a task that for years had defeated professionals and laypeople alike. For years, we suspected that some mountain, probably Beech, interfered with reception. After that problem was solved, the proposed fees for service became exorbitant. Now, as set up by Walter, service seems free. The phone, too, yielded to Walter’s efforts. I have good intermittent cell phone service and four creaky landline outlets that I can access from any one of my 1400 square feet.

Naomi, one of my twin granddaughters, visited next. She equipped the house with traditional and electronic bug zappers. The intense blue light that emanates from the contraptions reminds me of her visit. I, however, wonder what to do with the elaborate sticky old-fashioned gadgets, now covered with dead insects, that hang from lamps and occasionally get entangled in my hair. Naomi also tried to slip-proof my rugs. 

Joseph, an annual visitor, arrived with foie gras mousse, delicious wine, smoked duck breast, and one hundred Lindt dark chocolate truffles. I am still working at reducing the latter to a reasonable number.

My daughter Judy and her partner John arrived with elbow grease. Less than 24 hours after their arrival, my kitchen was unrecognizably neat, though I can no longer can find anything. Along with Naomi, my daughter embarked on a vigorous throwing-out campaign of pleasantly aged groceries, oodles of storage containers, chipped china, torn linens, old clothes, and gifts from previous visitors. The campaign encounters strong resistance. 

All these gifts were eclipsed by the last. Casey, my three-month-old great-grandson, came to visit. He arrived with Ana, his mother, who celebrated her first birthday here some 34 years ago, and his father Tyler, a recent Maine enthusiast. Casey is unaware of the historic significance of his visit. He smiles and cries as three-month-olds are wont to do. I am too old to teach Casey to hike, swim, borrow books from the local library or pick blueberries, but he’ll have many other willing teachers. Chances are that he too will become a devotee of the modest family seat.

The half-century since we bought this little piece of Maine have passed awfully quickly. I feel at home here, even though I spent my youth being a refugee. Let us hope that the millions of refugees who now roam the earth will find a little corner where they feel at home, too.

Around 1968, soon after it was founded, Population Connection—then called Zero Population Growth—called the members of its small New York group and asked them to counter a major march by the right-to-life forces, who were assembling in Central Park. My recollections of this long-ago event are vague, but I remember being shocked by the lack of warning, and our inadequate response. Rapidly I fabricated a home-made sign that read

AN UNWANTED CHILD IS A CARDINAL SIN  

and went to Central Park, where I joined a dozen or two of my pals. My sign did not last long. A cleric detached himself from the mass of anti-abortion marchers and ripped it up. The message clearly stung.

Everyone concerned knows the outcome of that particular fight. On January 22, 1973, almost exactly half a century ago, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the right of women to have an abortion. Then as now, those who do not want to avail themselves of this right can carry their child to term.

I came of age at a time when both abortion and contraception were forbidden topics for well-brought up girls. My mom provided a few facts, and my friend Elisabeth and I read the appropriate sections of my parents’ four-volume medical encyclopedia. Nevertheless, for a long time, I was incredibly naïve and ill-informed. I hid my lack of sophistication as well as I could. 

Doctors were not allowed to provided birth control to the unmarried. They were also forbidden to perform abortions, though some physicians bent the rules. When the time came for me to need reliable birth control, I stumbled, gauche and embarrassed, into the office of a willing doctor. My explanations of why I had made the appointment were ridiculous. I remember both the doctor’s and my relief when he finally discovered why I had come: “She wants a diaphragm [contraceptive pessary],” he informed his assistant in a loud voice. Then he fitted me.

My boyfriend, who was actually pacing outside the doctor’s office, and I continued to have sex, which now was safe, got married and, as planned, had kids four years later when he had a PhD and a respectable job. I have always envied those who did not have to go through such a charade. 

When I became a medical writer, I researched and wrote a book for young adults about humankind’s long and marvelous history of both conception and contraception. The search for a solution for those who had trouble conceiving, as well as the process of developing birth control, was long and arduous. Most women bore their children, wanted or otherwise, and I presume fell in love with what Germans call ein Maleurchen—a little misfortune. Mathilda, my own great-grandmother—the much beloved matriarch of my family—always recounted that she cried when told that she was expecting her third and fourth closely-spaced children. Her doctor consoled her, pointing out that she had “a loving husband who did not drink and stayed home at night,” and that they had “enough money to feed everyone.” For the poor and the unwed, accidentally conceiving a child was a catastrophe that often ended up in a deadly attempt at abortion. Abortions always were and are poor alternatives to successful birth control.

As I was researching Conception / Contraception: A New Look, fortuitously published the year Roe v. Wade was decided, I discovered Margaret Sanger, a nurse who during the 1910s cared for the women of New York’s Lower East Side. Many of them were suffering and dying from the consequences of illegal abortions. After watching a Mrs. Sachs die of septicemia, Sanger quit her palliative, often ineffective nursing and embraced birth control. (Sanger coined the term.)  She illegally imported pessaries from Holland. She taught poor women how to try to avoid unwanted pregnancies. She lobbied the legislature and fought Comstock, the postmaster general who confiscated mail that discussed contraception. She went to prison because she would not cease operating a clinic that distributed whatever birth control was available to poor women. This clinic was the beginning of Planned Parenthood. Sanger gave a $500 symbolic grant to three genius scientists, and they developed the birth control pill. It fulfilled a centuries-long dream. 

Today, girls and women can avoid pregnancy in a variety of ways, but abortion is still with us. Done in a clinic by experienced and expert staff, it is a necessary, safe part of our medical arsenal. Birth control, including abortions, is part of our modern lifestyle. Let us not go back to illegal abortion mills. As always, those with adequate means will have relatively safe abortions. It will again be the poor who will bear the brunt of killing Roe v. Wade.

A short century ago, Susan B. Anthony and her friends were jailed for demanding that American women be able to vote. No one would dare to take this self-evident right from us. Fifty years later, women demanded and won the right to decide when to become mothers. Nobody should tamper with that indelible right. Birthing healthy, happy children is humankind’s greatest gift, joy, and obligation. Having our babies when we can care for them to the best of our ability is our sacred right and duty. 

SUPPORT WOMEN’S FREEDOM TO CONTROL THEIR BODIES.

Jacques-Louis Leblanc by Jean August Dominique Ingres (1823)

Two days before the official beginning of spring 2021, I decided to leave my lockdown quarters in Brooklyn Heights and visit my home away from home: the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I took a taxi and was shocked along the way by Manhattan’s many vacant stores. Finally I disembarked at my museum. I found the Met much the same as it’s always been—except now it was so empty. I was relieved and delighted to be back.

Actually, Covid-19 has not deprived me of art. Long before it started, I had embarked on writing Plunder and Survival, my book that deals with the after-effects of the war against art unleashed by Hitler. Artworks that originated in Europe and are now exhibited in U.S. museums are a special focus of the book. These include modern, especially German Expressionist, pictures as well as traditional art confiscated from eclectic collections.

Closed museums and libraries hampered progress. Nevertheless, thanks to a combination of my notes and technology, I became familiar with the victims, perpetrators, art dealers, politicians, profiteers, and rescuers who participated in this dark phase of art history. Returning to the Met, whose library had been one of my main sources, seemed like the conclusion of the nightmare of the past year—though I knew that this feeling was, as Churchill put it, at best “the beginning of the end.”

Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc by Jean August Dominique Ingres (1823)

My expedition to the Met was solitary; I had come to commune with art. Except for two Klimts (see below) it was unstructured. I took the elevator to the second floor, planning to look at the Impressionists and early modern European art, but before I got there my attention was captured by the 19th century European painters—Eugene Delacroix, Jean François Millet, Théodore Géricault, Jean August Dominique Ingres, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, and JMW Turner. As a group they were never my favorites; though I love some of their works dearly, I find their complexity and surfeit of emotions often overwhelming. During this visit, however, my antennae were tuned differently. The grandeur of Monsieur et Madame Jacques Louis Leblanc by Jean August Dominique Ingres from 1823 impressed me. The portraits managed to be majestic, calm and friendly. The couple wore black, but a carefully folded patterned shawl relieved the solemnity of the paintings. They are long-gone, but their likenesses survive with grace on the walls of a great museum. I learned that Edgar Degas, the painter of tutu-clad ballerinas, purchased the portraits at the Hôtel Druot auction house in Paris—an institute that plays an important role in my current project. The Met bought them from the Degas estate in 1918.

Hagar in the Wilderness by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1835)

Next I lingered in front of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot’s Hagar in the Wilderness, an enormous realistic landscape filled with rocks and leafy French trees, despite the fact that the painting is set in Iran. Looking at the peaceful site, I could not help thinking of that war-torn country. Two small figures—Hagar, Abraham’s concubine, and her son Ishmael—hover in the foreground while a helpful angel flies to their rescue. Turner’s Whalers, whose outlines are barely visible in a foggy impressionistic view, is a harbinger of things to come. It hangs next to a more traditional painting of his, Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute. Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, an enormous canvas filled with rambunctious horses, was next. The rare woman painter created the work from 1852-55 while visiting the equine market, dressed as a man to deflect attention.

Within easy striking distance of the Rosa Bonheur, I came across the two Gustav Klimt paintings that were my day’s only professional obligation: the portraits of Serena Lederer and Mäda Primavesi. Looted art’s most iconic painting, Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, hangs at the Neue Galerie across the street from the Met. The Nazis looted all three paintings in Vienna. Adele’s restitution to her niece, retold in the box-office success The Lady in Gold, made headlines. By comparison, the restitution of the Met’s masterpieces was quiet.

Serena Pulitzer Lederer by Gustav Klimt (1912-1913)

Serena Lederer’s portrait predates Adele’s by a few years. It is a traditional image à la Sargent. Her cloud-like white gown is barely visible; her well-defined face, crowned by a mane of curly hair, dominates the canvas. Mäda’s image is more classically Klimt-like. Her dress is also white and diaphanous, but it is decorated with blossoms, some of which also appear throughout the painting. In spite of these romantic surroundings, the young girl’s stance is resolute, foretelling that as a grownup she will be able to fend for herself. Both pictures were restituted to Serena’s son, who survived in Switzerland. Eventually the two paintings ended up at the Met, a pair of turn-of-the-century witnesses to Plunder and Survival.

Mäda Primavesi by Gustav Klimt (1912-1913)

For me, beloved paintings are like old friends. After all this time I wanted to call on Hans Memling’s portraits of Tommaso and Maria Maddalena Portinari, so different from those Ingres painted of the Leblancs 350 years later.

In spite of a major rehanging, the Met’s early Dutch art can still be found near the top of the museum’s grand stairs. I encountered Maria with her hands demurely folded in front of her, her hair covered by tight cone-shaped headwear, and her remarkable necklace enclosing her flawless throat. She was still as lovely and innocent as when I saw her last. The painting is of a girl on the brink of womanhood and childbearing; a portrait of youth before innumerable children and caring for others wore her down. Years after I fell in love with her at the Met, I met her and her daughters at the Uffizi in Florence, where Hugo van der Goes painted her as part of the Portinari Altarpiece. She looked the same and wore the same clothes; the painter had obviously copied the earlier image.

Tommaso di Folco Portinari and Maria Portinari by Hans Memling (1470)

Before leaving, I lingered before one of the museum’s great views of Central Park. The image was framed as if it was a painting, and I admired still-bare trees, faded grass, and bright sunlight. A few walkers, encumbered by dogs and baby carriages, were savoring the awakening of the earth. It had been a great day. My soul was filled with beauty. Why, I wonder, is life often so hard? May all our futures be filled with more good days than bad. Amen.

I had my father for a relatively short time: 24 minus 6 years. When he died suddenly, more than half a century ago, I was distracted by both the immense joy and relief of having recently met my life partner and the distressed atmosphere of my immigrant nuclear home. So I never mourned Vati properly. This year, perhaps because I am recently widowed, Dr. Hugo Bamberger has moved to the front of my consciousness. I owe him my sense of humor, my ability to work hard, my optimism, and my gratitude for what is rather than excessive regrets about losses and unfortunate developments. I don’t think I ever heard my father complain. I took it to heart the one time he chided me for not appreciating that I never was poor or hungry.

Hugo was a busy man. He got up hours before my mother, tending to his small chemical factory. We lived in a big Victorian house located in a suburb of Hanover, Germany. Anna, our cook, prepared the meals. After my fastidious father had washed, shaved and donned his meticulous clothes, he woke me and carried me downstairs to our imposing dining room. I kept him company while he drank his coffee and ate a soft-boiled egg and hard roll slathered with butter and jam.

His return at six was heralded by his loud whistle. Often my mom was still attending to her own interests, and it was me who responded to his shout of, “Sue, I am home.” We spent another tête-à-tête, weather permitting, on our terrace facing Hanover’s surviving native woods. My father and I bonded. Far from preparing me to be a typical stay-at-home wife, the time we spent together inspired me to hope for professional exploration and adventure. I wanted to be like my dad, leading a fun-filled life out in the world.

Both he and my mother had badly wanted a son and heir and were disappointed when I showed up. Vati, however, soon declared that I was the “most beautiful infant in the world.” Nevertheless, I was aware of my parents’ regrets and felt that I had to take the place of my unfortunately nonexistent brother. I became a tomboy, very good at getting things done. By the time I was a young teen my mother said, “When something is difficult we send Sue.” When I was five or so, I decided to study chemistry so that I could take over Vati’s business.

Women loved my father and he unfortunately responded. I believe that at one point my parents, like some of their friends, opted for an open marriage. The arrangement misfired. My mom, whose explanations about sex were always gauche and mystifying, once explained to me that: “Vati was not much of a family man but a ‘lover’ (amant) who preferred to gift a woman sexy undergarments rather than sensible pajamas!!!” It was a peculiar way to state that your husband liked to play around.

One of the biggest treats of my childhood was to visit Vati at work. Somebody walked me to our local railway station and entrusted me to the care of the conductor. I bordered the train to Lehrte, the site of the factory. I lunched with my father. Then, knowing when to disappear, I spent the afternoon visiting “my friends”: secretaries who let me use their typewriters, the lab technician who “turned water into blood,” and the factory worker who monitored the growth of pure chemical crystals in large vats. Everyone treated me like visiting royalty. Thereafter I repaired to a large garden attached to the factory where Vati grew mounds of fruit and vegetables. I had my own patch of radishes. I climbed a safe tree and read Winnie the Pooh and other favorites over and over again. Hanover seemed to lack public libraries. I received five or six books on gift-giving holidays and they had to last me the year. Fortunately the Greek hero tales and Arabian Nights were very long. I am convinced that these solitary afternoons taught me to enjoy my own company—a very useful skill for a future hidden child, not to mention Covid-19 lockdowns. Our Jewishness and the fact that we were discriminated against was a much-neglected topic. As with the wishy-washy conversations about sex, information was lacking; frank discussions and righteous indignation would have been useful.

The first job I did for my father was to brew his afternoon coffee. I ground the carefully chosen beans, slowly dripped the boiling water through a Melitta filter and served the concoction. My father was as choosy about his food and tableware as he was about his clothes. I still treasure his blue and gold Fürstenberg cup and coffee pot. And Father was a real gourmand. Around Christmas time he ordered smoked goose breast and Westphalian ham. Fat white asparagus marked spring; new potatoes, simply served with butter, signified fall.

These idyllic times did not last. Vati and I had our clashes about table matters, Latin grammar, pronunciation, and how to address people correctly with all their titles. Hitler came to power and my poor parents had to find us a safe haven. Much later I learned that each had kept a small suitcase packed in case of unexpected arrest by the Gestapo. The 50-plus-year-old Dr. Bamberger lost his factory and wondered how he would make a living. We moved to Belgium. Two years after we got there, the Nazis followed us. Before they overran Brussels, the Belgian police arrested Vati because we were German enemy aliens. They shipped him to a French detention camp where dysentery, cold, and famine reigned. He managed to reach the United States in 1941; we remained hidden in Brussels and arrived in America in 1946.

I was anxious meeting Vati after an absence of six years. He had worried himself to death while his little family was threatened with extinction in Europe. Instead of the vigorous, attractive man I remembered, an elder suffering from severe arteriosclerosis met our boat. I was afraid that he would be bald. His hair was okay, but the dentures that replaced his familiar, crooked teeth shocked me beyond belief.

For six years my glamorous, spoiled, much younger mother had managed life on her own, shepherding my sister and me through the Holocaust. She was no longer used to receiving a weekly household allowance and accepting restrictions from a spouse. She also had discovered that back in Germany my father had had a long-term affair with his secretary. Moreover, the two had corresponded ever since and now he supplied Miss B. with food and nylons. I never understood why, since my parents must have had a sort of arrangement regarding marital fidelity, my mom considered this transgression so serious. Meanwhile, my disoriented maternal grandmother had joined us in New York, and life in our small house in Forest Hills was stressful. My sister and I felt very responsible for our parents’ relationship. We were all miserable, though Mom and Dad told us not to worry. They assured us that when they were alone with each other they “did quite well.”

As planned, I studied chemistry, and for a while I worked as a laboratory technician at Chemo Puro, the small factory Vati had founded in Long Island City. Like the bigger enterprise in Germany, it manufactured extra pure chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry. We had not, or not yet, recaptured our closeness, though he was overjoyed that his future son-in-law was a chemist.

Three-and-a-half years after we were reunited as a family, just as things were getting better at home, my father died. He was 62 years old. We all were devastated. His funeral was one of my life’s worst experiences.

I think that Vati was content with his life. His little family survived and grew new roots. He provided for us under difficult circumstances and he loved America. I deeply regret that he did not meet his four grandchildren, evenly divided between boys and girls or read the dedication of my 1115-page-long Nurses’ Drug Handbook published by Wiley in 1976. It is dedicated to: “The memory of Dr. Hugo Bamberger, and to Margaret Bamberger.”

[image error] Amy Coney Barrett in 2018 (Photo by Rachel Malehorn / CC BY 3.0)

Congress is in the process of evaluating the suitability of Amy Coney Barrett to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. In reality her potential appointment is a very realistic threat to the hard-won legal right of women to terminate unwanted or unsafe pregnancies.

I am no lawyer, but it seems to me that people with strong personal beliefs rooted in their religion should not decide an issue that affect the entire population of the United States. Though it is the role of females to bear the young, the well-being of our children is the responsibility of both sexes.

I know that having an abortion is a serious, emotional undertaking, but children that are not wanted, or cannot be cared for, or women who perish from or are harmed by unsafe abortion, are a much greater peril. Let me once more state the obvious: the decision to have an abortion in the United States is voluntary.

Abortions or attempts at abortions were probably common among prehistoric people. They are discussed in a Chinese medical text written 4,600 years ago, and in the Ebers Papyrus written in 1550 BCE. Home remedies, often consisting of physical intervention, like the use of shoe-hooks, coat hangers or knitting needles, or the use of poisons like turpentine, were more common in recent times.

Margaret Sanger, a nurse who could no longer stand to take care of poor women who died of self-inflicted abortions, initiated the fight for birth control in the United States about a century ago. At the time, Anthony Comstock, a US postal inspector bent on upholding Victorian morality, managed to prevent Sanger from mailing pamphlet discussing birth control.

Sanger was convinced that unwanted pregnancies exacerbated the challenges already faced by economically struggling families, and she advocated for planned parenthood. She organized clinics and ended up in prison. She was a persuasive writer and once, tongue-in-cheek, imagined that the unborn could evaluate their future parents, as employers interview potential chambermaids, chauffeurs or gardeners. In her article she fantasized a scene of children asking their future fathers about their health and income; their mothers about their nerves, their knowledge about childcare, and their cooking skills; and both of them about their plans of bringing them up. Most insistently the child wanted to know how many children they had already.

“Eight.”
“How much are you earning?
“Ten dollars a week.”
“And living in two rooms, you say? No thank you. Next please.”

The children would certainly have expressed disapproval at being schlepped MASK-LESS to a party at the White House in support of their mother’s application to be elected to the Supreme Court, all that at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Getting back to Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court: The subject of a woman’s right to abortion has been thrashed out repeatedly. The landmark decision of Roe v. Wade should not be tampered with. The selection of a judge determined to overturn it should not be rushed through Congress. Modern times have changed the birth process. Doctors fertilize eggs in Petri dishes and sometimes implant these embryos in surrogate mothers, perform in-utero fetal surgery and carry out all kinds of unprecedented procedures that often resulted in miraculous babies and overjoyed parents. Given this monkeying with nature, terminating a pregnancy for whatever reason—and it rarely is an impulsive decision—is a minor issue.

On the flip-side, we can no longer leave the birth of children to the whims of nature. In large part the many problems of the earth—hunger, poverty, climate change—are caused by humanity’s joyful population growth and its ability to exploit the fruits of the earth. Having children today takes careful planning. As Margaret Sanger imagined in her child-interviewer scene, it takes love, emotional strength, a safe home, and confidence in the future. Nobody should be forced to be a parent, and women who regret being pregnant, for whatever reason, should be able to undo it.

Judge Barrett may truly believe that life starts at conception and she is entitled to her beliefs. Until 1867 the Catholic Church itself equated the beginning of life with quickening, the time at which a mother feels the child moving. But I am also wondering whether I can trust Amy Coney Barrett’s judgment and backbone—both crucial qualities for any person serving on the Supreme Court. At her nomination party she not only exposed herself and her children to infection by COVID-19, but kowtowed to the President of United States, whose actions she is to evaluate on the Court, and openly defied the recommendations of this country’s health authorities in fighting this scourge.

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I met my husband in the library of Columbia University’s Chemistry Department soon after he arrived from Israel in 1947. I asked Siegi Lichtblau, a fellow graduate student, to help me with a seminar that I was to present. He introduced me to Ernest, a newly arrived genius from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, saying that he would be better able to assist me. Ernest’s excited explanations of the finer points of my problem were way above my head. But strangely, I kept thinking: “This man needs a wife like me.” Wisely I kept these intrusive thoughts to myself, and for almost two years we were both busy with other romantic entanglements. Then we simultaneously broke up with our beloveds. I was in the awkward position of needing a partner to paddle my canoe on a 1949 Fourth of July outing, organized by my cousin Claude.

I asked Ernest and he accepted. It was his introduction to America’s beautiful outdoors. He loved the spectacular Adirondacks and their deserted waterways. He loved the untamed forests, the cool water of the lakes and streams we traversed, the challenge of canoe portages and the art of cooking over a wood fire. We talked a lot. We were remarkably compatible, so much so that six weeks later we embarked on a longer, more intimate camping trip, also led by cousin Claude. It took us to the wilds of Canada, including Montreal and the province of Quebec, and we ended up hiking solo in the Adirondacks.

During that adventure I learned a lot about Ernest’s Viennese childhood, his father’s medical practice, his love of the opera, his wrenching experience during the Nazi annexation of Austria 1938, his family’s escape to Israel, and his deep devotion to that struggling British Mandate. There, as a freshman at the Hebrew University, he became a member of the budding underground Haganah, which was to defend the new Jewish homeland if and when it was born. That dream ran in his family. A historical photograph records a meeting of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and a group of young men that included Ernest’s father, in Vienna around 1900.

Ernest’s Haganah training did come in handy. He won my heart when, on that long-ago camping trip, he hit a bullseye in a shooting competition with an obnoxious fellow camper. I was also impressed by his vast, eclectic knowledge. Who else knew that SPQR, engraved on many classical-inspired buildings, stood for “the Senate and the People of Rome”? And I loved his unfailing “BS” detector, combined with his deep concern for humanity. When we returned from that summer vacation we knew that we were meant to spend our lives together.

Most long lives have their ups and downs. Ernest’s parents had a hard time settling in Israel. Their income was meager. A teenage Ernest helped by tutoring math and picking oranges. He studied chemistry and was a top student. In 1947 he came “temporarily” to the United States, married, and stayed. After he obtained his PhD he started teaching at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, which was a truly glorious school during the infancy of the plastic age. In addition to Ernest’s satisfying work and salary, the institution supplied us with a brilliant, fun group of lifelong friends, augmented by the artistic ones we met in our longtime home on Riverside Drive. Ernest and I were blessed with our children Judy and David, who provided us with joy. Alone and together we explored the world. Fifty-two years ago we bought a lakeside cottage in Maine, which so amply nourished our love of the outdoors. The Granite State became another place to call home. After the horror of the Holocaust, I still wondered how life could be so normal. Tragedy, however, was around the corner. In 1993 we lost our son to AIDS. Fortunately David lived long enough to get to know Judy’s children: Ana, Naomi, and Sean. Ernest’s relationship with each of them was deeply satisfying.

Until the very end Ernest kept up many of his interests. For decades he read aloud for Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D), now known as Learning Ally. After he retired he went there three times a week, tackling double sessions. He was one of their top readers, skilled at reading obscure languages and translating intricate equations into words. He was deeply interested in music, especially opera, and an avid newshound. He did not derive much pleasure from the latter and acutely suffered with all the world’s terrible happenings.

On March 15th, 2020, we celebrated our 70th wedding anniversary. It was the last evening before the city ordered the closure of its restaurants. Ernest was already ailing. His heart and kidneys were giving out. Over the past couple months, in a world terrified by COVID-19, I took care of him with the help of our daughter, Judy, and Wendy, our housekeeper. He passed away peacefully and reluctantly on June 19th.

We hope to have a celebration of Ernest’s life in the fall.

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For me, the current lockdown is a vivid reminder of the two years I spent as a “hidden child” in Belgium during World War II. Actually, I was neither a child nor confined to my quarters like Anne Frank. I was a teen, hidden “in plain sight.” Still, in those years, the biggest burden turned out to be loneliness.

As readers of this blog know, my German-Jewish family had fled to Belgium in 1938. Two years later, the Nazis invaded the country in which we had taken refuge, bringing with them their intent to exterminate all the Jews. In 1942, the local authorities sent a letter instructing my nuclear family to report to a “work” camp in Malines, where my mother, my 12-year-old sister, and I would help the Third Reich achieve its glorious destiny. My mother fortunately declared, in her native German, “We won’t do that.”

Unlike Anne Frank’s family, we separated. I spent most of the next two years working as a mother’s helper with four different families who were kind enough to shelter me. I owe them my life. Many things about that experience were difficult, but the hardest by far was the social isolation. Within a matter of hours I lost my family, my friends, my school, my plans for the future. Worse, I lost my identity. I could not reveal my real self to those around me. For their benefit I had to invent believable stories about my past and present. Why, for instance, did I rarely leave the house on my day off or go out dancing?

Actually, then as now, no one had locked me inside the house. But Brussels’ streets were patrolled by a legendary German agent named Adler who was excellent at identifying and arresting “hidden” Jews, and my mother was wisely cautious. She was chagrined when I ventured out unnecessarily. When she discovered that I had disregarded her instructions, she yelled and cried, declaring, “War is not a piece of cake.”

I felt my life slipping by. Would I be an old maid?  I had never been kissed, gone on a date, been drunk or stayed up all night. I read voraciously, identifying with the characters in French romans-fleuves—multi-volume novels centering on the lives, loves, and deaths of fascinating characters experiencing world war.  I identified with their victories and defeats. I fell madly in love with a married man named Emile, the brother of my boss and a member of the Belgian resistance. Emile hardly noticed me, but in my fertile fantasy world he asked me to join the resistance. The Gestapo arrested us. We were tortured, condemned to death and made love the night before we were executed. How delicious! The real Emile perished a few weeks before Belgium’s liberation.

Mostly I was very busy taking care of my charges and helping in the house. By the time I went to bed I was exhausted, but a persistent nightmare woke me often: a boatman rowed me to an island peopled by living skeletons that tried to grab me with their spidery fingers. How could I have had such an accurate vision of Nazi death camps?

My most difficult stint was with a Dutch family. My official cover was that I was their upscale niece, looking for a suitable husband. I hated my idle days filled with dusting my hosts’ ninety-six knick-knacks, reading stacks of women’s magazines, knitting with scavenged wool to please my “aunt” and playing solitaire. It was, however, at this house that I began to keep a diary, which decades later formed the backbone of At The Mercy of Strangers: Growing Up on the Edge of the Holocaust. Somewhere in its entries, amidst the passionate declarations of my love for Emile and realistic descriptions of the terrible times, I wrote, “I hope that my children will never have to live through anything like this.” Even then, I must have believed that I would survive the circumstances and go on to have a future. I don’t look back on these years with horror. Somehow I learned to be my own best friend, to enjoy my own company, and to trust myself and others.

The current lockdown occasioned by this new catastrophe is different. I am old now, and I hate having yet to go through another major disaster. Death has already robbed me of many of those I loved. The Internet, iPhones, FaceTime and Zoom lessen social isolation. As during World War II, some virtual strangers turn out to be extremely helpful: offering to shop, bringing me masks and home-baked goods. Reading and writing again provide solace. I write every day and fervently hope to finish Plunder and Survival, a book about the fate of fine art during World War II. For my protection, my three beloved grandchildren keep their distance. They do not have to deal with Nazis and gas chambers, but fate is full of nasty surprises.