The Memory Generation
Episode 11: Betty Grebenschikoff
INTRO
Rachael Cerrotti: Hey Everyone, I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Welcome to The Memory Generation – a podcast about the memories we inherit and the stories that are passed from one generation to the next.
Today we have a story that starts with two girls – best friends who grew up in Berlin in the 1930s. Together, they experienced rising antisemitism and in 1939, each of their families fled. During a tearful goodbye in the schoolyard, they promised to keep in touch, but neither knew where the other one went or if they even survived. One of these girls, a woman named Betty Grebenschikoff, who is now in her 90s, never stopped looking for her best friend. And amazingly 82 years later, she found her. That’s what today’s episode is about.
Betty Grebenschikoff USC Shoah Foundation Testimony: My name is Betty Grebenchikoff… My name at birth was Ilse Margot Kohn.
Rachael Cerrotti: That’s Betty telling her story to USC Shoah Foundation in 1997. Betty was just around 10 years old when her family fled Germany after Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht is also known as the night of broken glass and was in November of 1938. It was the first major organized act of violence against the Jewish people during the Holocaust. It prompted a huge emigration of Jews out of Germany. Tens of thousands of people lined up at foreign consulates seeking visas and immigration papers. And in the year that would follow, more than 115,000 Jews would leave. Most went to Western European countries and Palestine, nearly 30,000 people went to the United States. And at least 14,000 made their way to Shanghai. That is where Betty went with her parents and older sister. Her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins stayed behind.
Betty Grebenschikoff USC Shoah Foundation Testimony: Unfortunately, I never saw most of these people again. Ever. They were all killed in the war. In the camps.
Rachael Cerrotti: Betty assumed that her best friend had the same fate. But still, she kept talking about her and hoping that just maybe she survived.
Betty Grebenschikoff USC Shoah Foundation Testimony: I had one particular girlfriend whose name I always mention. Can I mention her here… I'm always wondering if maybe she's somewhere and she can hear this… Her name was Annamarie Wahrenberg and we went to school together and we played together and all this. And when we left for China, we said goodbye to one another. And it was very difficult then because we were best friends, you know. And we were going to write to each other, but we never did. And I never heard from her again. And I don't know what ever happened to her. She probably died in the war.
Rachael Cerrotti: Eight decades after the tearful goodbye in the school yard, USC Shoah Foundation helped find and reunite these best friends.
FIRST PHONE CALL: Are you sure that's Ana Marie Wahrenberg?
Rachael Cerrotti: There is a long and technical story about how that happened and I’m going to briefly tell it to you at the end of this episode. But for now, I want you to hear this unlikely reunion unfolding.
FIRST PHONE CALL: Oh, This is so exciting. I can't believe it.
Rachael Cerrotti: Betty and Ana Maria, who used to go by the name Annemarie, were reunited on Zoom in November of 2020. They spoke in German – the language of their childhood.
REUNION, Ana Marie (in German) : [translation: so how are you then Ilse, it’s a wonder what has happened to us here].
Rachael Cerrotti: And then finally met in person a year after that.
REUNION, Ana Maria & Betty (in German)
Rachael Cerrotti: I got to be a part of this team who reconnected these best friends and I can absolutely say that it was one of the personal and professional highlights of my life.
REUNION, Betty: We have to celebrate you know, this is a celebration…
Rachael Cerrotti: What I love about this story is how it shows how our own memories can change shape over time. Betty has told me that her war story had long been narrated through the lens of separation and loss, but now she tells it differently. Not everyone was lost after all.
REUNION, Betty & Ana Maria: [German…]... We both have champagne in our refrigerators. We should pop it at the same time…
Rachael Cerrotti: Next up, we have a short conversation between myself and Betty that was recorded on April 6, 2022 at her home in St. Petersburg, Florida. After a couple years of knowing each other, it was the first time she and I finally met in person. And remember to stay tuned after the conversation for the details of how USC Shoah foundation identified these childhood friends from their testimonies.
INTERVIEW
Rachael Cerrotti: You just say hello for me.
Betty Grebenschikoff: Hello, for you.
Rachael Cerrotti: Thank you. I would love for you to just introduce yourself.
Betty Grebenschikoff: My name is Betty Grebenschikoff. and I live in St Petersburg in my wonderful little condo here where I can look out on water and palm trees and everything. And I love it here. And you want to know how old I am, too?
Rachael Cerrotti: Sure.
Betty Grebenschikoff: Okay, I'm 92 and a half. [laughter].
Rachael Cerrotti: I like how after we get to a certain age in life, the half becomes important again.
Betty Grebenschikoff: Very important. Yes. Yes. The half is very important. But I'm happy to have come as far as I did and I'm perfectly happy here. And I have some of my children around me and I have good friends.
Rachael Cerrotti: What is a memory from your past – one that either maybe you inherited from a family member or an experience that you had that you feel as though defines who you are today, your identity and your place in the world.
Betty Grebenschikoff: Well, I have many different memories. For one thing, I remember my grandmother's potato soup. She had these lovely big German style soup plates and the big silver spoons, you know. And whenever we went there, this was in Berlin, to see her. My mother, my sister and I - we would go every Friday and bring her a chicken for Friday for Shabbos, you know, and she would make potato soup. Now why potato soup? Because it was cheap and they were not well off. And she did make a wonderful potato soup. And that's one of the memories that I have which is very satisfying for me because my grandmother, Jeanette, my mother's mother in Berlin, was a wonderful, wonderful lady. I used to climb on her lap and she was warm and snuggly and she smelled good. And it was just one of those wonderful memories. Of course, I never saw her again after age of nine, but that's one of the memories that somehow I think about when I can't sleep at night. And of course I have many others. Finally coming to America, which was a dream of mine for many, many years. At the age of 23 with my husband and two small children, we came to America and five years later we became citizens. And that was a very proud and wonderful memory. We were now Americans. We were not refugees anymore. And that was very, very important to me.
Rachael Cerrotti: You and I have had countless conversations at this point since we were introduced and the way that you and I were introduced to each other was through this incredible reunion story. So tell us what happened in, what was it, November of 2020.
Betty Grebenschikoff: Well, I was shopping for Thanksgiving and one of my daughters called me up and she said, ‘Mom, are you sitting down?’ And I said, ‘No, I am looking at pumpkin pies actually.’ And she said, ‘I have some news for you. Why don't we wait till you get home?’ I said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. Tell me now I am not waiting till I get home.’ So she said they found Annamarie. And then as I went home and I talked to my kids and I found out what was going on that they had found my childhood friend Annamarie Wahrenberg. Then it gradually sank in that this was a momentous occasion.
Rachael Cerrotti: And as you started to process that, as the hours went by and the days went on? What was the most visceral feeling that you felt?
Betty Grebenschikoff: The feeling was that my life had some purpose, that I had come to this age, that there was a reason for me to wait this long to find a friend that I had when I was from the age of six till nine in Berlin to find her again. I had talked about her for all the years that I was giving talks and I always said to my audiences, ‘if anyone ever meets a lady called Annamarie Wahrenberg, please let me know because she used to be my best friend and I think I lost her and I'll never see her again.’ And the children were very enthusiastic about that and they would write down the name. And I never heard another word, but I had talked about her all the years that I was giving speeches. And of course, I gave testimony to the Shoah Foundation and talked about Annamarie there.
Rachael Cerrotti: So you had mentioned Ana Maria's name every time that you spoke. And from my understanding, you for many years have told your story in schools and museums and to various communities. So I'm curious, since you know, this show is all about memory and how it's passed from one generation to the next, the story as you tell it has changed just in the past few years, in the decade of your nineties. So talk to me a little bit about how you have chosen to tell this story differently based off of this reunion that happened.
Betty Grebenschikoff: Well, it's a story of hope and it's a story of fulfillment. And I look at things quite differently now that I've found Annamarie again because we have become really good friends in a different way from the time when we were nine years old. When I give a talk nowadays, I say to the children or whatever audience I have, I say, ‘well you know, I used to have a good friend in Germany and I had to leave her there when we were both nine years old. We had to say goodbye because my family went to China and her family at that point did not have a place to go to yet. And I thought that she was probably killed in the Holocaust - that she couldn't get out. So I never heard another thing for 82 years.’ And I say to my audiences, ‘I'll tell you about my girlfriend when we were children, but I'll tell you the end of the story at the end of my talk.’ And so that way they all have something to look forward to that might be very interesting. And it is.
Rachael Cerrotti: And before when you were telling this story, you said that you kind of had assumed that she likely had died in the Holocaust - perhaps killed in a concentration camp, her family murdered. And of course, that turned out not to be true, but assuming that that was the case, why did you choose to keep including her name over and over again as you spoke? Because you didn't speak about her as if she had likely died. But in your body or in your mind, you felt as though likely she had.
Betty Grebenschikoff: I think in my heart I always had a spot for her because she was my best friend. And in those days in Germany as young children, it got to the point where we couldn't go to playgrounds or swimming pools or theaters or anything. So the result was that we played in each other's home. The two of us either at my place or her place in Berlin and we became very close. And she just stayed with me. She must have been in my heart all the time. Although I thought that she had died in the Holocaust, I hope that she hadn't. And then when we found each other again, when the Shoah people called me and said that, you know, this was real and we'll get you two together on the Zoom because she lives in Chile, in Santiago. It was just an amazing, an amazing situation. It was like the end of the rainbow. I still feel that very strongly. It was like it was a miracle and it was something that was supposed to be that way. And I don't know why. All these years I had her in my thoughts, I always remembered her so well. But when we finally saw each other again, we didn't even cry. We just laughed. And, we would talk to each other in German. I dusted off my German which was not that good anymore. Hers is better than mine and all our families were on the Zoom program and everybody was drinking champagne. It was just such a miracle, such a wonderful thing. This was the best thing that could have come out of this terrible, terrible time for us, for the two of us. And I just hope that other people that are still alive have the same experience because it just makes you so thankful and so grateful for all the people who helped bring us together and for the way life goes. That every now and again when you really don't expect it, something like that happens and it changes your whole viewpoint. It's an amazing change in your thinking.
REUNION, Betty: [champagne pops]... German Speaking… “Ana Marie - L’chaim, L’chaim, L’chaim… and here’s to us, the two survivors.”
RECAP
Rachael Cerrotti: Okay – so I promised an explanation of how exactly this reunion happened. And I’m going to give you the short version of a long story, but here we go. Back in 2020 when everything was on Zoom, a USC Shoah Foundation staff member named Ita Gordon was invited to a program commemorating Kristallnacht and featured a Holocaust survivor from Chile.
Ita has been working at USC Shoah Foundation for like 25 years – nearly as long as the Institute has existed. She is a researcher and indexer. And, what that means is that her job is to watch testimony. Testimony are these oral histories that you hear in various episodes of this show. She watches these interviews very carefully and takes note of every single family name, place, event and theme that is mentioned and makes notes of it at one point in the testimony where it comes up. That way, people like you and me can more easily access this archive and use these stories as research, education, for storytelling or to discover details of their family history. Ita was curious if Ana Maria, the survivor she was listening to speak on this Kristallnacht program, was in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. There are more than 50,000 Holocaust survivor testimonies in this archive so it is often the case that a survivor is in there. But, Ana Maria wasn’t. For some reason though, something in Ita compelled her to keep digging.
Ita Gordon: I couldn't let go. I then went into our archive. And search and search.
Rachael Cerrotti: That’s Ita. She kept trying different spelling of the names. She searched the archive for the various places Ana Maria had been along her survival journey. Family member’s names that she had said throughout her talk. And, of course she searched the database for survivors in Chile and throughout South America. She finally found a lead when she tried Ana Maria’s name in German – Annemarie. And that’s when Betty’s testimony came up.
Betty Grebenschikoff Testimony: Her name was Annamarie Wahrenberg. And we went to school together.
Rachael Cerrotti: So, from here the story unfolds. Ita called her colleagues to share what she had found and word got around the Institute, including to me. And, after lots of discussion, research, fact checking, and fact checking again – we really wanted to make sure that we had the right people – it was determined that Ana Maria was Betty’s long-lost Annemarie.
Ita Gordon: Betty kept on saying, I had a best friend. And after Kristallnacht they had to go to a Jewish school. I jotted down the name of the Jewish school. I put everything down together. All the information.
Rachael Cerrotti: Testimony is incredible in this way. In 1997, Betty mentions a friend who she assumed had died during the war just in case there was a chance she was alive and it would take 30 years for that seed of a question to become this epic reunion. And to give credit where credit is due, without Ita Gordon’s incredible curiosity and diligent research, these two women might still be wondering whatever happened to the other.
Ita Gordon: This incredible teamwork that we put together. So powerful, so beautiful and a triumph. Truly, truly a triumph!
OUTRO
Rachael Cerrotti: Thank you to Betty for joining me today. And of course thank you to Ita Gordon at USC Shoah Foundation for your incredible research and curiosity. This story went viral and there are plenty of videos and articles linked on our website for you to check out if you want to learn more about this reunion and each of these women’s incredible survival stories. Also linked will be Betty’s 1997 testimony. You can find all of that at memorygenerationpodcast.com.
This podcast was created in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation which is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. You can learn more about their work and the Visual History Archive at sfi.usc.edu.
Our editor is Lene Bech Sillesen. Our executive producer and co-creator of this show is Stephen Smith. The music is from Kodomo. I’m Rachael Cerrotti. We’ll be back next week.