Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Anne Hirschle - July 21, 2006

My husband uh, was in the army and then he was in military government. He was at the Nuremberg trials and so forth, he had been a lawyer. He just-my husband's quite a bit older than I was.

Yeah.

He had been a lawyer and so he was back for the Nuremberg trials and we were already thinking about possibly getting married and I remember him saying to me, you know, "I might have an option of uh, working in Germany for awhile," because of his law background and everything, "How do you feel about that?" And I said, "Absolutely not. I, I, I'm not going to go back to live in Germany under any circumstances," and that settled that question for him. And um, he-I don't think uh, I always thought that he and my children thought, that he was more fair about what happened and less bitter because I really didn't suffer. I mean, I've got to be absolutely honest, that's why I was reluctant to even contact you because I, I don't consider myself a, a, a Holocaust victim at all. I wasn't. But my husband really was and yet he seemed to be able to keep a, a much uh, less violent reaction to things German. I just said, you know, "They're rotten..."

???

"...I don't want to have anything to do with them. They were rotten, rotten, rotten."

Yeah.

And uh, he had been much older when he left and he felt there had been some decent things going on and I always wanted him to talk to you or Yale University. I think my-both my kids went there so they had contacts and they wanted him to do an interview and he always said he had nothing to say. And I always said, "You must, after you, nobody will know. You must." And I set up a tape recorder for him and I-they said they would phone you, they would talk to you, you could do it with a tape recorder. And he always said he wouldn't, he had nothing to say. And very shortly in the last few years when he was really quite frail um, I suddenly realized that he absolutely couldn't do it. He just couldn't do it. He was so guilt ridden that he had, he had drawn a curtain between those years and what came after that he simply couldn't go back there.