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In 1929, when Hannah Deutch was seven-years-old, her father was walking home from work one evening in Dresden, Germany when a brick toppled off a building and headed straight for him.
“It just grazed the tip of his nose,” Deutch recalled in amazement, dragging her hand slowly down her face.
Her soft smile quickly faded when she said that a flu epidemic took her father’s life two weeks later.
“I’m a fatalist. I believe when you were born, everything was written in the book,” explained Deutch, now 85.
The anti-Semitism and brutality Deutch faced is no exception to her rule. At the age of 14 her family was evicted from their house and a friend said to Deutch, “Life is going to be very difficult for you but I can’t see you anymore.” Even Kristallnacht, on the night of November 9, 1938, was destined to occur, according to Deutch’s logic, despite the fear it brought and the terror it foreshadowed.
“I woke up because the whole bed was shaking,” Deutch recalled of that night.
“And the room was so light it was like sunlight.”
The synagogue, right outside her window, was aglow in flame and businesses and homes were “smashed to smithereens.” Windows, previously streaked in anti-Semitic sentiment, were shattered all over town. But nobody bothered to vandalize Deutch’s home or terrorize its occupants because they were all women. (Remember, her father was no longer alive, Deutch pointed out - fatalism.)
Early in the morning - “I can see it when I close my eyes, I can still see it,” said Deutch, shutting her eyes briefly - a police bus went around town picking up all the Jewish men. The sadness and fear that enveloped those men 70 years ago was reflected on Deutch’s face in the cozy confines of her Jackson Heights apartment.
But Deutch was saved. A great aunt, who had a cousin in charge of the child transport, or Kindertransport, in London, added Deutch, who was 18 at the time, to a list of around 150 children who were being sent to the U.K. Deutch’s mother and stepfather, unable to get visas to come to England, managed to get on the last ship leaving from Holland to Chile before war was declared.
Realizing she owed a debt of gratitude to England, Deutch became a registered nurse and joined the British Army. Based in London, Deutch came face to face with war casualties and collected “the arms, legs and heads” of a troop transport that had been bombed. Deutch heard the first “buzz bomb” floating above London and at one point she, herself, was bombed out.
“I can still feel the ceiling on my back pushing all the people down the stairs,” she said.
But as destiny would have it, Deutch married a Canadian and crossed the Atlantic.
Still in the dark as to the extent of the atrocities in Europe, Deutch visited the Canadian Jewish Congress every week to check lists of displaced persons. She eventually learned that her aunt, uncle and grandmother, who had raised her for a time while her mother was ill, along with her two-year-old cousin, had died at the Riga concentration camp.
“If there had been no Hitler it wouldn’t have been a question of survival,” Deutch said, explaining that if there had been a war without the ruthless dictator, there would have been no Kindertransport and she might have been killed.
Despite her fatalistic outlook, however, Deutch still reels from the fact that Nazi Germany destroyed her family, stole her German identity and forever altered the landscape of world Jewry.
“It’s something that doesn’t leave you. You put it away in your brain so it doesn’t hurt you from day to day,” Deutch explained.
“But it’s there.”
