I was born on June 22nd, 1921, in Eisenstadt, and, uh, um, I was born in, uh,
um, my name when I was born was Politzer, which was later changed in the United States to Pol.
Not because I wanted it, but I am the youngest.
I was the youngest of four boys and one sister.
And by the time I came to the States, they all had changed their names already.
My parents were all born in Burgenland.
My mother comes from Ziegles near Mattersburg and my father comes from Burgen.
And they both grew up without very little former education.
The teacher came to the house to teach them how to write and how to read.
And, uh, together with, uh, with a Jewish, uh, education.
First I went to the Jewish Folk Schule, the first four years, age six to ten.
Age ten, I went to, started to go to the Gymnasium where I stayed to be.
Just before the end of the seventh grade that this in March they came.
So in April I had to leave.
So in, and in, and in June the year would have been over.
So before the end of the seventh class I had to leave one year before the matured.
My father, even though he was a, he was a respected, uh, modest, uh, citizen of, of the town.
Uh, everybody liked him.
The Gestapo came within one week and arrested him.
And he was in, in, uh, incarcerated for five weeks.
And he got out only because my own, one of my older brothers, uh, schoolmate,
was an, uh, an illegal Nazi already before the, before the Hitler came to, to Eisenstadt.
And he, he put in a good word for him.
So he released him.
Uh, he, he got to release him, uh, after, after five weeks.
We had to leave our apartment.
You see, we didn't live in, uh, in the Judengasse.
We lived down around the, around the, the catch-loss in the, in the Heidengasse and Weigelgasse.
From there moved temporarily up into the Judengasse where my paternal grandfather,
uh, grandmother still lived by herself and she had room.
She had an extra room.
So we all moved in with her.
No lens, no lens.
We had to move in with her.
There was no other choice.
Um, but by September,
at, at, when the first Jewish holidays came about,
we had to clear out all the Jews had to be out of Eisenstadt.
Juden ran by September.
So we moved from there.
We moved, uh, we moved to Vienna.
We were fortunate, uh, with the, uh, American emig, immigration situation,
because, uh, we had no relatives here.
We were on no, we had no number, waiting list number.
And yet through a friend of my brother's marriage,
brothers, my brother's wife's friend who was here already established long before the Nazis came about the Viennese.
And he was well to do here.
He came to Vienna.
He still had his mother there and he befriended a, uh, an American vice consul.
And, uh, he had, uh, within two weeks, he had, uh, four American visas.
Without waiting list, without, I was not included.
But my two older brothers and my sister and, uh, my parents and myself, we, we just had to stay behind.
But that, that was very fortunate because we were desperate.
I mean, if, if that hadn't happened, they, they would have had to either leave the country illegally,
like so many climbing over the mountains and, uh, or wind up in Auschwitz.
At that time, nobody knew about Auschwitz yet.
In the meantime, I have to tell you that after the Kristallnacht, which I still was in Vienna,
uh, it got, uh, very urgent for me to, to leave.
But I, I, I couldn't, I was waiting for the visa.
The Vienna Kultus Command had an action with the British, uh, the British opened a kitchener camp.
The kitchener camp was, it was in southeast of England, near Kent, or Kent, the Burry.
And that was a dilapidated first world war army camp.
And they said, uh, we let the, uh, Austrian and German Jews come in here and, uh,
they gave him a room and board where the room and board came from the Jewish organizations anyway,
uh, to, uh, to read, to help us rebuild that camp.
Of course, everybody was happy and anything, you know.
I didn't fit into this program age-wise.
I didn't fit into a kinder transport, and I didn't fit into that program.
But there was a very, very kind woman at the Kultus Command who handled this.
And she said, I'll try to slip you through.
Nobody will pay it.
I'll slip you through.
So she slipped me through and I was actually the youngest one.
I was in the mail room.
I was in charge of the postage stamps.
And I had to make sure that the, the mail is properly stamped and goes out of the camp.
We were five, we were six, six thousand people there in Kitchener camp.
And when the war started, they had us go to the, to the shore and fill the bags with sand,
which went to London to protect, to protect the buildings with the sand, sand bags.
And that's where I was.
My parents, as I said, got their visa in August, got booking on the SS Bremen.
That was one of the larger German boats, if you ever heard of it.
And took off from Bremen often.
I still went out to visit them in Southampton.
It was a big excitement for me from the Kitchener camp.
I got permission to go to Southampton and visit them.
They were on high seas.
If you remember September 1st, what happened September 1st?
The war broke out in Europe.
And Hitler gave orders for the Bremen to turn around and to go back to Germany and with my parents on it.
And that captain of the boat, if something happened which is probably unique in the Nazi history,
he disobeyed the order to turn around, luckily.
And he says, I can do better to take the boat to New York and paint it gray, wartime gray.
And then take it back to Germany, which he did.
Because the Nazis were afraid of the U-boats at that time, that they would sink the boat.
We thought for sure they would put him on the wall and shoot him.
But that wasn't the case.
He was only relieved of his command, of the Bremen command.
He was an honorable person.
He says, 5,000 people, mostly Jewish immigrants.
I cannot turn around.
And that's how my parents got to New York.
I, in the meantime, was still in the kitchen at the camp.
My visa came through in early 1940.
So in February 22nd, I landed in New York.
When I came to this country, then in February 1940, I did some opticianry work.
But my liberty lasted only two years.
Because after being here two years, Uncle Sam said, I want you.
And put me in uniform and back to Europe again.
I was an American soldier by December 42, one year after Pearl Harbor.
And I was three years over there as an American soldier.
I was even a D-Day soldier.
I was not in the infantry, but because of my knowledge of languages,
I was in what they call the intelligence service.
As part of my job, I was always hoping that I needed a German soldier
from the Eisenstadt area and possibly one that I knew was a Nazi already before.
That was I was hoping for.
Well, that wasn't the case.
The closest I came was our unit was ordered over to Brest in France.
And we were there in the middle of the night.
We were walking our team and it says, get up.
We have a bunch of Germans coming in and interrogate them.
And that was a tough outfit.
It was a Fallschirm group.
And they were tough, tough people.
They did not cooperate at all.
By coincidence, you take this, I take this.
By coincidence, I got a failed label.
And he was cooperating with me from the moment he sat down.
You must realize this is the middle of the night, candlelight.
And he sits there, I sit here, and he was cooperating.
And he kept on saying right away, he says, I know you.
He says to me, I know, ich kenne Sie.
And I didn't pay any attention to that.
But from his accent, I could tell that that is possible.
So after we got through, he told me various things, positions,
and names of generals and other officers.
And I said, after he repeated that I kenne Sie, I said, how can you?
He said, you are the Freddie Polizier aus Eisenstadt.
And I went to school with his older brother Ernst.
We were together in the Fühlerorchester and I often ate with him in the house.
Yes, he failed.
So that was about the next one I met from my neighborhood.
And then he said, I have answered all your questions.
I am an enthusiastic violinist, a violin player.
And in the bunker where your colleagues caught me,
I had an Italian violin.
And I got into an Italian field or bought or something like that.
I know exactly where you are.
If you could go there with me and get the violin, I would thank you very much.
I was happy, I was a few kilometers behind the front line,
and I would go with the middle line in the back line.
Say, my dear friend, even if we get the violin there now,
how long in prison do you think you can still play the violin?
I said, I can do a few sandwiches, I would like to,
but the violin where it is shot, I don't necessarily have to go there.
Silvashi had the idea.
Silvashi.
There was strong anti-Semitism in Eisenstadt.
I felt that, well, primarily in the school,
our neighbors were very friendly with us.
They were strict Roman Catholics,
and they had one son, one year older than I,
and the next grade between me and Marta Monti was,
but people said they were illegal Nazis.
I couldn't detect any such thing.
We had the most cordial relationships.
In fact, I went with him to midnight mass on Christmas,
and things like that, to his church.
And on our holidays, he came over and he ate with us,
and said the nice and things like that.
So the neighbors, I didn't feel it with the neighbors at all.
Where I did feel it was the school.
Well, there was certainly the Twin Farang,
where there was no way for us to join the Twin Farang.
But then there was one pool, one swimming pool was there.
The military, our building was shared with the military,
and in all of Eisenstadt was one swimming pool,
and they harassed us.
I mean, they didn't really hurt us or kill us or whatever,
but you can make things pretty unpleasant for somebody without killing him.
So that's what happened.
And then later on, also on the way to school,
you see, I went to school this way,
and some of the students came this way.
And there were incidences through stones, sometimes it does, things like that.
But they let us feel that we were not the same as they are.
They didn't only take illegal Nazis in Austria to be anti-Semitic, you know.
You had what one normally saw were the best citizens
and the best Catholics or believing people.
All of a sudden, they turned out to be overnight.
Generally, I have the feeling that a good percentage of the Austrians
would go along again with a program like the Nazis.
Anti-Semitic, for sure.
The killing, I don't know, but anti-Semitism in one form or another is there.
It cannot be any other way as long as the pharaoh in the church tells them almost every Sunday.
That the Jews have killed Jesus Christ.
How can, when I was in school, how can my classmates, after having had this talk,
play soccer with me, for instance?
I mean, I'm one of the Jews that killed their God.
And that has existed for 2,000 years, and we cannot change it now.
The change can come, I mean, some of the popes have tried to, you know,
make speeches in certain, but I don't think it did much good.
It is so deep, ingrained in the people that the Jews, many people don't even know why.
Why they are anti-Semitic?
They heard that even though there are hardly any Jews around anymore.
But the Jews, like I said before, they have the money, supposedly, and I don't know.
Thank you.
