A train ride to survival - The Villager Newspaper | The Villager Newspaper Home HOME About Us Advertise FRONT PAGE FREE ARTICLES Media Kit Information OPINION SCHOOLS & SPORTS SPECIAL SECTIONS Letters to Editor Contact us BUSINESS Digital Editions 10/1/14 11:45 AM Login NEWS Legals Search in site... Register LOCAL ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Obituaries POLITICS Weddings / Engagement A"train"ride"to"survival Added by Tom on 10/01/2014. Saved under Front Page Littleton resident Peter Ney still has the silver pencil his father gave him as a memento before he boarded a Kindertransport train from Germany in 1939. The Holocaust survivor is one of four Kindertransport passengers to be honored in November at the Denver Jewish Community Center. Photo by Peter Jones Littleton man fled Nazis on Kindertransport By Peter Jones In January 1939, 7-year-old Peter Ney was put alone on a train from Germany for reasons few first-graders could have understood. http://www.villagerpublishing.com/train-ride-survival/ Page 1 of 6 A train ride to survival - The Villager Newspaper | The Villager Newspaper 10/1/14 11:45 AM “My father had given me a silver pencil as a memory,” Ney recalled some 75 years later. “I kept thinking, why is he giving me this for a memory? He’s supposed to meet me in England, whatever that was.” It did not help that the Nazi-guard porters were less than friendly to the confused children who were ordered to turn over any valuables they might be carrying. To make sure the message was clear, the guards snatched a few of the child-size suitcases and brazenly dumped their contents on the floor. Ney slipped back into his seat as Nazi bullies walked the aisles. “This silver pencil that my father had given me was in my coat pocket,” Ney recounted with a wry smile. “I guess it was the first political statement I made in my life. I reached in my pocket and got this silver pencil and slipped it in my underwear. I went to England with this pencil in my underwear.” The fancy metallic tool would become even more of a keepsake than Ney’s father could have ever intended. To this day, the 82-year-old Littleton resident and retired judge keeps that pencil in the top drawer of his bedroom bureau. Decades later, he related his story as a Kindertransport passenger in his book, Getting Here: From a Seat on a Train to a Seat on the Bench. Ney is one of four local Kindertransport passengers to be honored this fall at Denver’s Mizel Arts and Culture Center in remembrance of the 75th anniversary of the British rescue program that saved nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Germany and Eastern Europe in the months before World War II. The celebration is to be part of the Denver Jewish Community Center’s seventh annual Neustadt JAAMM Fest, which will include performances, Oct. 30 through Dec. 7, of Diane Samuels’s Kindertransport, a fictionalized play based on the real experiences of children saved by the sonamed program. Among the other local survivors to be honored will be Henry Lowenstein, a longtime leader in the Denver theater community. Peter Ney, 6, standing next to his teacher, far right, at an all-Jewish school established in Nuremberg, Germany, after new laws prohibited Jewish children from attending other schools. The teacher, a former college professor, had taken the elementary school job when Nazis prevented Jews from holding teaching positions in universities. Kristallnacht http://www.villagerpublishing.com/train-ride-survival/ Page 2 of 6 A train ride to survival - The Villager Newspaper | The Villager Newspaper 10/1/14 11:45 AM Peter was born Nov. 11, 1931, as an only child to Alfred and Gretl Ney, in Nuremberg, Germany, a city that would become a significant hotbed of Nazi activism and the birthplace of anti-Jewish laws while the boy was still a toddler. Alfred, a nonreligious Jew, owned a successful metals factory that supplied parts for Nuremberg’s large toy-manufacturing industry. The burgeoning Nazi influence was in stark contrast to not just Nuremberg’s toys, but the city’s beauty and rich history in the arts and as a onetime center of the German Renaissance. A landmark castle in the center of Nuremberg dates to the late Middle Ages, surviving the Holy Roman Empire, the Protestant Reformation and the French occupation under Napoleon Bonaparte. By 1937, the majestic site had become a rallying locale for the likes Hitler Youth, as 6-year-old Ney unwittingly discovered while walking through town one day with his parents. “All of a sudden, I heard music and I ran to the curb and there were these teenagers in uniform and a lot of flags,” he said. “I was running to see the parade. My father grabbed me and pulled me back and said, ‘This is not for us.’ I’m screaming bloody murder. When we got home, that was probably the first time my parents explained to me that we were Jewish. They tried to explain all the political implications – and for a 6-year-old that didn’t mean anything.” The first-grader got a rude awakening – literally – to those “politics” two nights before his seventh birthday on the evening of Nov. 9, 1938, when he awoke to the sound of a commotion in the apartment building’s hallway. “I thought it was a celebration of my birthday starting early,” Ney said. “All of a sudden, a light came on and my mother rushed into the room and picked me up. As she carried me to the hallway, I saw all the bookcases were leaning across each other at these crazy angles.” While Ney’s mother franticly carried her son out of the disheveled flat, the boy spotted his father talking to two men in uniform as he showed them the German Iron Cross he had been awarded for heroism during World War I. Meanwhile, mother and son sat motionless in the attic with some of their Jewish neighbors, wondering what would happen to the men who had not yet made their way up the stairs. “We heard the crashing and breaking glass in the apartment house. I don’t know how long that lasted,” Ney said. After minutes or hours, footsteps were heard. As it turned out, it was some of the men, including Ney’s father, whose wartime valor had evidently spared him – at least, temporarily – from the disappearance suffered by a couple of the apartment’s male adults. During what became famously known as Kristallnacht or the “night of broken glass,” more than 90 Jews were killed in coordinated attacks on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues across Germany and Austria. More than 30,000 people were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht’s message was clear. Jews were to self-deport before it was too late. “Getting out was easy. It was finding a place where you could go that was difficult,” Ney said of the quandary. Two days later, as the family plotted its next move, the Neys celebrated Peter’s bittersweet seventh birthday. http://www.villagerpublishing.com/train-ride-survival/ Page 3 of 6 A train ride to survival - The Villager Newspaper | The Villager Newspaper 10/1/14 11:45 AM Peter Ney’s passport he used on his Kindertransport trip from Germany to England. Note the swastika stamp. Photos courtesy of Peter Ney Mystery train Although Alfred Ney had been convinced that Germany was too sophisticated to tolerate a government of thugs for long, he was not about to throw his only child to the chance of political winds. His answer came in the form of Kindertransport, which was hastily established in the aftermath of Kristallnacht after British Jewish and Quaker leaders appealed in person to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In fast-track legislation, Parliament waived immigration requirements to temporarily admit unaccompanied Jewish children into the country. Their parents would not be allowed – at least not for the time being. “This was the Depression. They sure didn’t need a bunch of adult refugees competing for jobs in England,” Peter Ney said. In January 1939, the Neys packed the car for Frankfurt, where young Peter was to catch the train with other Jewish children and teenagers. Ney was to meet “Uncle Steven” at Liverpool Station in London. His parents said they would be joining him “soon.” As it happened, Steven Weisman was not an uncle, but a relative of one of Alfred’s closest friends. “Most of the kids had no idea where they were going to go,” Ney said. “I don’t think I said a word to anybody else.” Lost in silence, he knew he had reached the border when the intimidating Nazis disembarked and were seen laughing and smoking outside. “The teenagers knew what was going on and went wild screaming,” Ney said. At the next stop, a heavenly parade of women in white uniforms offered the children a paradise of hot chocolate and cookies. Travel got more complicated at the Hook of Holland, where the children took a ferry ride across the channel to England. In the confusion of the moment, the baffled 7-year-old somehow missed his planned connection to London. http://www.villagerpublishing.com/train-ride-survival/ Page 4 of 6 A train ride to survival - The Villager Newspaper | The Villager Newspaper 10/1/14 11:45 AM Two days later, Ney heard his name for the first time in days when Weisman and his chauffeur finally picked him up and took him to a Jewish-run boarding school. As weeks turned to months, Ney learned English and became accustomed to the inexplicable ease of life outside of Germany. His relative comfort was interrupted when a case of whooping cough and scarlet fever sent him to the hospital. It was there that Ney was reunited that summer with his parents, both of whom had narrowly escaped Germany with a month or two to spare before the start of World War II made emigration nearly impossible. “I would not speak a word of German when my parents got there, which made it rather difficult because they didn’t speak any English,” Ney said. “At that point, I wanted to be English and I didn’t want anything to do with being German.” Seven-year-old Peter Ney wrote several reassuring postcards to his parents during his trip from Germany to England. They read in part, “I traveled with the children who we were sitting with in the waiting room. Everything is fine with me. Now we are going out on a ship. Greetings and kisses. Your Peter.” American dreamers Because Alfred could not legally work in England, in 1940 the family took the proverbial boat to Ellis Island. Even then, the family’s fate was less than certain, as a potential survey of Alfred’s war injuries could have sent him back on the boat. “We arrived on a Sunday and thank God civil servants don’t work on Sunday,” Ney said with laugh. On the streets of New York City, the young boy was in awe of what seemed like a freewheeling melting-pot culture – especially when he saw black people for the first time walking through Central Park in pastel blue and pink. “I thought I was in a show or something,” Ney recalled with a smile. The penniless family eventually wound up in Philadelphia, where Alfred re-entered the metals industry – not as a business owner, but a foreman. “They never complained. They lived in the lap of luxury in Germany, and here they were http://www.villagerpublishing.com/train-ride-survival/ Page 5 of 6 A train ride to survival - The Villager Newspaper | The Villager Newspaper 10/1/14 11:45 AM hardworking people,” Ney said. The family lived in a tough neighborhood, where Ney says he was prone to quickly trade his British burr for a rougher-edged East Coast accent. Years later, after a series of careers, including a stint in the space industry, Ney went to law school and wound up on the Court of Appeals in Colorado. Alfred died in the 1970s well into his 80s. His wife, Gretl, moved to Colorado to be closer to her son and passed away a decade or so later. The older Neys never voyaged back to their native Germany, but in recent years their only son somewhat reluctantly returned to the old country, largely because of the urgings of his daughter and his desire to explore his family history. “I thought I’d do something stupid when I got to the border,” Ney said, “but it was almost like nothing.” The father of three and grandfather is not lost on the luck his family experienced in surviving the horrors of the Holocaust intact. “What I keep telling my kids is as long as you’re healthy and lucky, everything else will work out,” he said. “I had more than my share of luck.” You must be logged in to post a comment Login HOME BUSINESS DIRECTORY RSS The Villager Newspaper http://www.villagerpublishing.com/train-ride-survival/ ↑ THE VILLAGER NEWSPAPER Webmaster: DenverWebGuy Page 6 of 6
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