All right. Interview with Thomas Elias, the son of Hans, or Mika, in Hans Elias.
Or Elias, as he pronounced it.
All right. All right.
And we are in Santa Monica and this is September 15th, 2008.
What I would like to ask you is, first of all, going back about the family.
So your father was, give me his birthday again, June 28th, 1907.
And your mother, June 9th, 1904.
So she was a little older. That's just three years older.
Yeah. And his death date.
It would have been April, I think April 11th of 1975.
And her?
No, excuse me, 1985.
Yeah. And her.
And she died in early March of 1991.
I'd have to look up the precise date.
And where did he die? And where did she die?
They both died in San Francisco.
In the house, which I visited the once, right?
For how many years did they live in that house?
From 1973 until their death.
I respect that.
All right. I think took long periods during the 1970s, in particular.
They would go six months at a time to Germany, where my father was a visiting professor at Heidelberg.
Oh, I see. And where at the medical school?
I don't know which faculty to be sure.
It was an amusing story. He bought a little citrion dishabot, he called it a duck.
And he delighted in driving slowly all over Europe.
Very slowly.
Why do you say that?
Driving slowly. He liked driving people nuts on the highway.
The dishabot was the perfect vehicle to do that.
All right. Getting back to him.
So he was born in Downstad.
Correct.
And his family on his side were they all downstadters?
Or did they come from?
No, they came from Kussel nearby.
But the grandparents, which is far back, as I know for sure,
what their occupations were.
I mean, Elias side were peddlers, literally with a pack on their back.
Based in Kussel, but all over Hesse.
Uh-huh.
And so are you talking about your grandfather or your even father back?
My great grandparents.
Or great grandparents.
My grandfather had studied to be a rabbi.
And he was quite literate then.
And he was a bishop, Michael.
Oh, yes, I've seen that name.
He wanted to become a rabbi.
But he had rickets as a young man and became hunchbacked.
And it was deemed unfit for the rabinate because he wasn't direct
and dignified enough in appearance.
And he ended up starting a private secondary school,
which basically took wealthy youngsters who didn't have the marks
to go to the official gymnasia.
And this was in Darmstadt.
This was in Darmstadt.
And so he became a longer than us.
Darmstadt was carpet bombed, as you know.
And so I have never seen this building.
Where are there other buildings on the site now?
Oh, I see.
I see.
And then, so that was your grandfather, I mean, the father of your father.
Correct, that was Nisha.
He died pretty young in his 50s.
Again, that was related to the rickets and the hunchback,
which, it leads to heart problems.
And he died when my father was 18, so that would have been 1925.
And my father did pay a portrait of him.
And my brother is in possession of that.
Oh, I see.
That's a pretty accurate portrait.
Yeah.
And now, going back, I'll do your already mentioned this.
And then his father, your great-grandfather,
was this pedler.
Yes, pedler.
And where did he live?
Custlet.
Oh, in Custlet.
Yeah, but then traveled all over.
Yeah, on foot.
Yeah, of course.
And do you know still another generation back?
No, although we have a family tree.
Well, you do.
That goes back some distance.
The family legend is that an ancestor, the most illustrious ancestor,
was a scholar by the name of Elias Levita,
who was a Venetian scholar and printer,
and a close friend of Gutenberg, who...
Oh, it goes back that far.
Well, the family tree thing does not go back that far.
This is a family legend.
Elias Levita is an historical character who did the first
Talmud in Moveable Type, which he learned from Gutenberg,
and was a friend and associate of Gutenberg.
So we're now talking 16th century.
Exactly.
But that's the reason for the family name.
As you probably know, in 1797 Frederick the Great of Prussia
decreed in an imitation of Napoleon that the Jews
would have family names like everybody else,
and they would no longer be known as Joe the Son of Harry, etc.
Which is what the Jews' names always had been.
Yeah.
The Jews would also be citizens, but they had to go and register
in the city hall, or wherever, in the government office,
and the register in name.
And of course this is why Jews have names like Greenberg
and Rosen, and so on, because they chose these lovely names,
Rosen's Garden, and Rosen's Garden, or Steinberg.
And so on.
And in the case of my mother's family,
this family booked all the valley of books.
And our family chose the name of the Celustrius ancestor,
Elias Lovita, and so we became Elias.
Or Elias, in English.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's the derivation of the name as my father told it to me.
But in terms of your knowing something about your ancestor,
it goes back to your great grandfather,
and then the legend about the printer.
Correct.
Yeah, okay.
Now, to your...
Oh, yeah.
Did your father have any brothers and sisters?
He had one sister.
Her name was Magda.
Oh, Magda, I've seen her name.
Yeah.
Well, you've seen...
You have copies of letters from her.
Yeah, right.
She was a prolific letter writer.
Of course, she was with everybody in the family,
and a lot of others...
What happened to her?
She and her husband Otto,
who changed his name to Asher,
upon moving to Israel.
They lived a long time in Israel.
They immigrated there in 1964, 65.
And she died there in the late 1990s.
I think it might have been 2000 or 2000.
How did they get out of Germany?
Well, that's a long story.
But that was another story.
How my father and his mother and sister,
and my mother, my father's wife,
were living together in Rome,
where my father was working for the Vatican,
making scientific films.
Oh, really?
And what kind of films?
Oh, films about art, skin of toads,
scientific films.
Oh, I see.
My father had his PhD in the zoology, don't forget.
Yeah, they're trying to follow other things.
And that's how he became an anonymous.
But he used to tell the story of how his parents,
of how his mother and my mother
and his sister, nagged him incessantly,
to go and sign up on the American immigration quota.
And this was an era, apparently,
when women didn't take these things and do it on their own.
So he didn't do it because he liked it in Italy,
and the Italians were not anti-Semitic.
And even under Mussolini,
Mussolini was not particularly anti-Semite.
But one day, he was in Naples on business,
as he told the story.
He came out of this government building that he was in,
and looked across the street,
and there was the United States consulate.
So he said, well, they've been nagging me for many months.
I'll go over there and sign up for the American immigration quota.
Sign us all up.
And that he did.
And the next day,
in the year, are we talking about this?
Probably would have been 1938.
Oh, and the next day,
and the next day,
the Italians adopted the Nuremberg loss,
which was apparently pressed on to
Mussolini.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so my father and my parents and my grandmother and my aunt Amata
got onto this immigration quota,
and the next day,
the miles were five miles long,
at that same office,
whereas the previous day,
there was nobody there.
I'm sure you know this,
that everybody who escaped has some sort of a story like that.
Oh, yes, yes.
So the upshot is seven months later,
they took the boat to America.
And who helped them?
How did they manage financially?
In America?
No, no, how did they pay for the trip?
I mean, how did they work for the Vatican?
And he did not get fired from the Vatican.
Oh, no, I should correct that.
I should correct myself.
Yeah, fine.
When they were first living in Rome,
he was working for the Italian government making these movies.
But when the Nurember laws were adopted and they fired all the Jews,
he went to work for the Vatican.
Oh, I see.
Which actually did bail some people out in that manner.
Uh-huh.
Okay, so you were talking about your father in Italy.
How did he,
in my research from back up,
I started asking you about your aunt.
So how did your aunt and her husband get out of Germany?
Well, they weren't married at that time.
And my aunt was the second wife of her husband.
Uh-huh.
And my uncle,
Ossher, who was at that time married to a woman whose maiden name was Wally Mele.
And she was a cousin of the famous Finzi Continues of Milano.
There was a movie made about the kids.
Yes, yes.
And she was a cousin of that family.
And they made their way out of Italy to Switzerland after the Nurember laws were adopted.
You mean out of Germany?
Out of Italy.
No, out of Italy.
They've been living in Italy.
Oh, oh, I see.
I see.
At the same time as my parents.
But they didn't.
My uncle knew my aunt from the time when my father and his sister and mother lived together in Milano.
When they first went to Italy in 33.
And my father had a variety of jobs.
He tutored a rich kid.
You'll find a reference to that on the tape I gave him.
He did any kind of job he could.
And he started to death.
There was a six month period where he lived exclusively on peanuts.
And he never ate another peanut for the rest of his life.
And he met my mother because the two families had a mutual friend.
And somebody suggested that he go look up to a woman in Venice where my mother had also gone after the boycott night.
Her mother sent her out of Germany after the boycott night.
When they, well, you'll hear her describe that.
I don't know.
But her father was already dead by that, but not related to the Nazis.
Anyway, so he went to Venice.
And as he described it, he took his bicycle from Milano to Venice.
And he said he would hold on to the rear handles of some commercial advance.
And they would drag him along for miles.
So that he could make better speed.
Anyway, but he thought he was visiting some old lady in Venice the way he tells it.
Told us only to discover this gorgeous young woman when he arrived.
And he was taken with her immediately.
And eventually moved in with her and they got married in Venice.
Yeah.
Okay. Good enough on that.
We sort of got jumped ahead of us.
I was wanting to ask you about your father's education.
Let's back up.
It was in Darmsstad.
I wasn't Darmsstad and his PhD was from...
No, go back even if you can.
I don't know.
But he went to a gymnasium.
I believe so.
But his university education was in Giza.
Oh, in Giza.
And then I think how come his choice was a choice or a homology?
I don't know.
You don't know that.
I don't know.
I don't know.
You'd have to read his autobiography.
Well, I'm still trying to get as much as I can.
From your point of view.
I have memorized this, unfortunately.
Maybe I should not, but I don't know.
All right.
So he went to Giza.
I think my son knows why I made all the choices I made either.
So, of course, of course, that's how it is.
Yeah.
But his first...
Sometimes, I don't know if it was his first job.
He was going to school for the deaf in Berlin at the time
that the Nazis took over.
Yeah.
So how come...
Did he get from East-Sent to Berlin?
Do you know that?
No.
So after...
You got a job there.
After getting his degree in East-Sent, he then went to Berlin.
Right.
And I think he studied at the University of Berlin as well.
But I don't know the details of that.
But he told stories about refusing to seek
and telling the classroom and the Nazi stuff.
And actually they fired it.
And that's when he moved to Italy.
Oh, I see.
And in what year did he move to Italy?
They both left in 1933.
Yeah, both my parents.
And it took him until...
In other words, but separately.
Separately.
Yeah.
And your father, both left 1973.
Yeah.
And my mother became the first physical therapist in Italy.
Working at Osperdalle on the Lido in Venice.
Oh, yeah.
Uh-huh.
And...
And that's...
And she was a physical therapist.
Yeah.
And that's the real life of her children.
And trained in Hamburg.
Uh-huh.
Well, let's continue with your father for a little while longer.
So he then met your mother.
And they stayed...
And then he...
Or you mentioned that he made films.
And registered for...
And then what year was he able to leave Italy?
1939.
Uh-huh.
About seven months after this day when he...
You'll know the precise date.
If you know the date, let me tell you, it's adopted to Nuremberg.
Oh, I see.
He's the day before that that he went to the cousin.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
I don't know the precise date, but this is the story.
Uh-huh.
So what...
Do you remember the date of that departure from Italy?
Or the arrival in New York?
No, I'm sorry.
I don't know.
So, anyway, it was 1939.
It was 1939.
Yeah.
They were met at the dock by my father's cousin, Hans Oppenheimer.
Uh-huh.
And Hans was a journalist and a printer.
And he had done a lot of work for the...
Udishik and Mindshuff in Berlin in the earlier years of the Nazi era.
Uh-huh.
He had a lot of contacts among the foreign press.
Uh-huh.
He had been a source for them as to the treatment of Jews.
Um-hmm.
And the story of Hans getting out is another interesting story.
Hans Oppenheimer.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um-hmm.
This was my father's first cousin.
So they were always known as the Grossa Hans and the Kleiner Hans.
Because Hans Oppenheimer was older.
I see.
And I see, my father was the Kleiner Hans.
Little Hans.
And, uh-huh.
So, Hans Oppenheimer, one of his friends who worked for the New York Times, uh-uh, somehow
caught wind that there was going to be a raid on his home the next one day, and-and warring
house.
And he and his wife, Herzai, went out to Temple of Airport to take the first plane to answer
them.
And they were arrested by five minutes to their great regret.
But it crashed.
Oh, wow.
So they-and everybody on it died.
Oh.
And they took the next plane, Hans.
And they survived.
And in which year are we talking about?
Uh-huh.
We were talking about 1937 approximately.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Now, I tried to get Hans Oppenheimer to do a tape with me before he died in 85.
He died about a month before my father.
Um-um, maybe six weeks before my father.
And so he was a journalist.
Well, he was a journalist in Germany.
In New York, he started off as a-uh-when it came to New York as a-from Amsterdam.
Um-um.
And, uh-uh, he-he started off as a courier, uh-uh, bicycle courier, messenger.
And, um-he eventually ended up owning a significant printing operation in New York, in New York.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
What was-he was not a journalist in New York.
Yeah, what was the name?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
I don't, but he, um-compiled a book, um-I kind of a one-volume encyclopedia of the Jews basis,
called the Lexicon Vis Student Dokes.
What was his first name?
Oh, I'm not so good at that.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, I think I knew him.
Oh, yeah?
I'm good.
He just needs to be sort of bright.
Uh-uh.
The, uh-uh, Jews and-and sports chapter.
Uh-huh.
Or in the Lexicon, which I did.
Uh-huh.
Oh, that-that's-I-I'm sure we're talking about the same person.
So I will see if I actually have a tape.
I probably do.
So I will check on that.
So, how was the, um-was the, um-brother of my grandmother on all of the Niner?
And he was there for the son of this cantor of darmstadt that you heard about on my father's tape.
Uh-huh.
Gives you a little more perspective on him, perhaps.
Uh-huh.
And no, he wasn't as sight.
He was the grandson of Hiner Shepenheimer.
He was the son of Seagfried Ovenheimer, who was a physician.
And he won the Iron Cross in World War I through the Germans.
And, um-uh-later, uh-was killed with his wife and-and-terrezion stuff.
Oh, so he didn't get out?
Oh, no.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, all right.
He was my father's favorite uncle.
His name was Seagfried, my father called him Uncle Friedle.
Uh-huh.
Oh, okay.
Let's-let's move on.
So they're both in New York.
You described the circumstances of Ovenheimer picking your father and your mother from the boat.
They were never in by that time.
Yes, and my grandmother, his sister, once came to me and magda, uh-huh, his other cousin.
They all came on the boat together.
They came over on the sartournia.
Oh, oh, he was going to sit in there.
And they were the ships of Sartournia.
Yeah, yeah.
I know the name.
I know the name, yeah.
Okay.
And then how did his life continue?
Well, he got a job early on.
Um, his first job in America was at the Middlesex Veterinary College in Walpham, Massachusetts.
Uh-huh.
And you've seen the picture of a boat upstairs in my office, a robot, that he used to commute to work across Terrell River.
Um, and he taught at Middlesex, uh, from about 40, 1940 till Middlesex folded in 1944, I believe.
And what did he teach?
He talked anatomy.
Uh-huh.
And, um, then...
And what did your parents live at that point?
They lived on a riverside drive in Walpham.
Oh, in Walpham?
They had a little house, which, um, in some of these papers, you're bound to follow me address.
Yeah, I'm sure.
And, um, the house still...
Well, last time I was out there, it still existed, but Middlesex went bankrupt, and the property was eventually purchased and is the campus of Brando's University today.
Oh, that's human.
Yeah, yeah.
And there's one building remaining from Middlesex is a kind of a castle-like building in the middle of the campus, too.
Uh-huh.
So only one left from Middlesex called.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
So, what's the next step?
How for you?
What's now called the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, making scientific films?
Also, your father was always interested in the visual representation.
Well, that's why he invented some of these medical illustration techniques that transfer into these.
Oh, I see.
But, yes, he was always interested.
He always...
He took his art...
He didn't just paint landscapes in the life.
He painted these anatomical drawings as well.
And all through the 50s and 60s, he would make extra money on the side by doing these booklets for companies like CERO and Pfizer.
Oh, I see.
And you will find some of those in those bomb volumes.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, always.
I see.
Yeah, the dollos draw paintings or his.
Yes, yeah, okay.
And they're done in great detail.
And, you know, he invented the technique of using the transparencies so you could flip and see what it looks like in different sections.
You can see from this angle looking in this direction, this is what this organ looks like internally.
Oh, no.
If you can turn it to look the other way, that's what it looks like.
Oh, I see.
And so how long...
So he did this one number of years.
Yeah, this is for many years.
Yeah, he would get commissions from pharmaceutical companies to do these booklets that they would then give out to doctors.
Yeah, I suppose promoting their products.
Uh-huh.
The two companies...
Well, I remember particularly that he did work for Pfizer and for CERO.
But he also did work for sandows, I believe, Swiss company.
And, uh, other others, but I don't remember them all.
This was childhood stuff for me.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
All of a sudden there would be an infusion of money when he would do one of these.
He would get a thousand or two for doing one of these booklets.
Oh, and suddenly they could buy a car or whatever.
Oh, I see.
I see.
Okay, so to keep the chronology, so your parents, well, you too, at that point, are living still in Walton.
Yes, my brother was born there in 1941.
Uh-huh.
He grew the first 41.
I was born there in 1944.
I really ate the 44.
Uh-huh.
And so you know that it wasn't until 1944-45, the middle sex went bankrupt.
Uh-huh.
Because my parents then, with a brief hiatus in New York, again visiting with the upenheimers,
uh, they moved to Atlanta.
And, uh, at first they lived in a small rental place in Marietta, Georgia.
Um, and...
How did he, how did he establish contact through the, through this center in Georgia?
I don't know, but at the time it was not called the Centers for Disease Control.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It had the same initial CDC.
It was known as CDC as it is today.
Uh-huh.
But it was called the Communicable Disease Center.
Oh, nice.
It was part of the Public Health Service.
And I don't know how these people networking, you know, the scientists' types.
Uh-huh.
But they must be some networking.
My father went to conventions of various kinds.
Oh, I see.
And he met people.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, well, then I think Spain said, okay, fine.
Um, but I don't know precisely how it got here.
And so how long did your parents live in Georgia?
Three years.
Um, in, in Georgia also, he met two men that would be his lifetime friends after that.
One's name, David Ruof.
Are you David Ruof?
Oh, yes, yeah.
You see references?
Yes, yes, yes.
David Ruof was a physician and also worked at the CDC.
But more significantly, I think, for him and in his life, he became the head of the Baha'i community in the United States.
And their national headquarters is a temple in Wilmedo, a noya, the North Shore outside Chicago.
And then later he became the worldwide head of the Baha'i movement and moved to Haifa.
Was your father somehow involved in that?
No, no, no.
They were just very good friends for life.
Uh-huh.
And, um...
And so they met in Georgia.
They met in Georgia now.
They had another friend by the name of Vic Basiloscus who also worked there.
But the three of them, I think, left the CDC at about the same time in 1948.
I think they came aware that one of their bosses was taking kickbacks.
I don't know all the details of this.
Uh-huh.
There was some kind of crooked checanery going on.
And my father went to the next level up and reported this.
The next level above their boss and reporting this.
And the result was that he got fired.
And he landed, fortunately, pretty decently at the Chicago Medical School.
Not the University of Chicago, but in independent medical school called the Chicago Medical School.
And where was it located on Walcott Street in Chicago?
I'm size a dresser, I don't know.
Later in his career it moved to a dresser on organ avenue.
But so it was an independent medical school.
Very standing medical school.
Oh, that's interesting.
Here it was literally a blocker too from the Cook County Hospital.
And just around the corner from the University of Illinois Medical School.
I see.
But the students were often not of a level academically of the students at these other institutions in Chicago.
But the school gave out to...
I know it was a great place.
Yeah.
And the students were frequently quite devoted to him.
But he taught there from 1948 until 1971.
Well, that long.
And then came compulsory retirement.
One of his stagias is called compulsory retirement.
Yes, I know.
I know him.
I'm telling you.
And he found much this great surprise.
He found a female lawyer to handle the case.
And so when they retired him, he managed to extract an additional year's pay out of Chicago Medical School.
And what kind of a...
Did he have a decent salary there?
At the school medical school?
I don't know how good it was.
I do know that through the 1950s when I was a young boy.
Yeah.
And at early teenager, he would...
During the summers when the school was on vacation, he would work as a house painter to earn extra money.
Then they must not have been paying old that well, probably not.
And my mother was working part-time as a physical therapist in Chicago now, in the loop.
So they made the ends meet, but it was not all that well-off.
I mean, tell me a little bit more now how come that...
I guess this is what I wanted to ask.
I mean, he published a great deal.
And how come that he did not try or that someone did not offer him a better job?
My mother was always unconventional.
And his papers were often read contrary.
His theories often read contrary to the accepted medical beliefs of the time.
You give me, for instance, what the liver, for instance.
Before he published his seminal stuff, and he was best known for his work on the liver, as you probably know.
He had to make a lot of money.
But the liver was believed to be some kind of a mass of cords.
And he determined the whole different structure of the liver.
And people who had made their living, prevailing as other theory, were deans of medical schools and whatnot, they weren't real happy with this.
It wasn't until my father always felt, and he said that he knew he was a success.
Only when the medical textbooks printed or described the liver anatomically in the way that he discovered it to be, without citing him.
But now that his work was accepted, then he knew that his work, as he put it, was part of the body of human knowledge.
It was roughly what, 1960 or later?
How much later?
Later, in the early 80s.
Oh, I see.
But he did not sue anyone for copying his discovery, without permission.
No, he published them.
Oh, he published them.
Okay, yeah.
But you said they didn't want to refer to it.
They became the accepted theory.
But for many years the textbooks said, you know, as Alias says, you know, they attributed this to him.
Oh, I see.
Okay, okay.
Whereas when they did it without attribution, then it just was accepted fact.
And that's the way he had wanted to understand it.
But he had theories about cancer that were very much counter to accepted norms, he thought.
Such as, in a way, his theories haven't turned out to be as good on that as they've been on the liver.
Yeah, he had a theory of recruitment, where cancers, more or less, recruit neighboring cells to become cancers.
And I think the accepted theory now is that they multiply, when a tumor grows.
It's not pulling in other cells the way my father theorized, but his cells are multiplying out of control.
Yeah.
What do you remember about him writing all these many articles in scientific journals?
Were the scientific journals available to him?
Did they accept?
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
As you see, there's a stack of books over here that's hundreds of papers were published.
Yeah.
And textbooks.
But his work didn't become really widely accepted until he was probably in his 50s and 50s.
And that would have been in the 1950s.
Yeah, yeah.
And who are his professors that are in their 50s?
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
So he had ten year of the Chicago Medical School, and that's where he stayed.
Until early 70s.
So early 70s.
And then what's the next step?
Well, they stayed in Chicago, I think, in other two years.
And they sold the house and bought a house in seven systems.
Or the house which I know.
Yes.
And that's where they lived out their lives.
Aha.
Yeah.
All right.
And so, but when he moved to Chicago, he had no connection for instance to David Ruhr,
but David Ruhr was there.
And as it happens, well, no, Vesalowska's wasn't there, but the rabbi from Walten,
by the time my father got to Chicago, was the rabbi of a large synagogue in the south side of Chicago.
And of course this man ended up marrying my wife and me.
And who was that?
His name was Client Pearl Miller.
Oh, of course, of course.
He had been to the rabbi at the little temple in Walten and his first job out of rabbi school.
I see.
And then in between Client had a job in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in between Walten and Chicago.
But by the time my parents got to Chicago, there was Client and there was David Ruhr,
so they had some friends in Chicago for a minute they got there.
Aha.
All right.
So, what did he do then in, he speaks in some of the statements, which I did very quickly only looked at,
about, for example, such questions, why I became a sculptor, let's say there's one statement.
So, when did he start, oh, well, he painted all his life, or drew all his life and drew all his life.
Aha.
And it's a sculptor.
He said, I think he mentioned...
What he mentioned, he did some sculptures, but when he was quite young.
And he did some busts of people, portraits, sculpture.
Also, but he didn't concentrate on sculpture until some time in the 60s, 1960s,
when he decided to work in that meeting, and he built a little studio, a separate little structure behind their house,
and Deerfield, little annoying.
Outside Chicago.
Deerfield, that same man built it, I mean, he built it quite in his hands.
Yeah, he seems to have been a person of many talents.
But this building, this little studio that he built was not built until after I left for college,
so I'm not that familiar with it.
But he was, in a sense, a filmmaker, as well as a biological researcher,
and then a sculptor and an artist.
Yeah, he did all those things.
Yeah.
He liked to be considered a Renaissance man.
Yes, that phrase occurred.
And it idolized Leonardo da Vinci.
And in fact, he started, you know, rather than...
Some of the stuff didn't get published, and he would...
He didn't want to do things that were self-published.
And he invented a publishing company.
He called it the Da Vinci publishing company, because he idolized Leonardo.
He identified with some stuff.
Leonardo did anatomical drawings and...
Yes, of course.
...cannot drawings, all kinds of things.
Besides painting them on a Renaissance.
Yeah, of course.
Oh, okay.
What about your mother now?
What did she come from?
What did she study and learn her profession?
Okay.
She was born and raised in Vitten on the Rour.
Oh, I see.
And always kidded my father about how he spoke a low dialect of German.
She spoke Holtberg.
And...
Vitten is now combined with another town called Elberfeld as known as Vupertal.
Oh, he's of course.
And Stanstead, which I remember from performing at the Olympics here in Los Angeles in 1984.
The Vupertal on stage.
Anyway, so...
Yeah, she grew up in Vitten.
Her father was a wholesale grocer.
And he died.
And...
Yeah, what about her parents?
Well, that's up there.
You've seen the portrait I have upstairs of her mother.
And you've seen the portrait that my brother has of her father.
Okay.
And she also had a brother.
His name was Fritz.
He was a distinguished scientist in MD.
He was the director of the neurophysiological institute at the University of Copenhagen for many years.
That was your mother's brother.
Yeah.
And he was a personal friend of figures and like Neil Bohr.
And what happened to him?
My uncle Fritz.
I lived to the age of 93 and died in Santa Barbara.
So he also left Copenhagen.
He left Germany.
He left Copenhagen in the boat lift to Sweden.
And he spent the warriors in Sweden.
Oh, I see.
And he was on the same literally, the same little fishing boat with Neil's board.
And then I went, you know, many of the Jews escaped from Denmark.
And with the help of the dance, the Malia, after the dance.
And so then he went to Sweden.
Yeah.
And stayed in Sweden for how long?
Until the war was over and then he went back to Denmark.
Oh, oh, I see.
And only later came to Santa Barbara when he retired Santa Barbara.
Oh, I see.
I see.
And that was my uncle had two wives.
But he had no children in his own.
And so he had his last name was...
Oh, well, yeah, of course, I see him on this.
Yeah, Fritz, booked off.
But Famous in his own writing, there was a certain amount of rivalry between my father and him.
And the real effections and attention of Aliza.
And certain tension between them, certainly.
And in any case, my mother went through the Gimnazio and so on.
And her take will tell you about some of the anti-Semitism she encountered already in the young girl.
And she went to study physical therapy in Hamburg.
Well, yeah, you mentioned that.
I may have a photograph of her class.
I think I do someplace.
In any case, in Hamburg, you would ask earlier about Houston Steinfeld's.
Yeah.
Oh, yes, yes.
That's where she met Steinfeld's.
Steinfeld's an interesting figure, very interesting figure in his own writing.
Yeah, when he was a journalist.
He edited in the early 1920s.
He edited a weekly newspaper and mentioned where the first exposés of the Nazis and what their ideology was.
Do you remember the name of this?
I don't know as much detail about Steinfeld's.
I should, but I don't see why he couldn't find it out.
No, no, I probably wouldn't.
Now that I'm aware of my name.
Yeah, Steinfeld's moved at some point.
But so he became an enemy of Hitler very, very early.
And Steinfeld's then became an editor of a weekly newspaper in Hamburg,
which is where my mother knew him in the late 20s to the 30s.
And when the Nazis took power, Houston Steinfeld was, I believe, number five on the list to be arrested.
And he was arrested quite early.
But he knew the warden of the local prison who let him out.
In Hamburg.
In Hamburg.
In Hamburg and let him loose.
And he took his family to Berlin where they lived undercover for a while.
And then they went to Prague.
And when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia that night.
Houston and his family and two children, they swam the Vistula River to Poland literally.
And they ended up getting to Warsaw somehow and I don't know how.
But he had been a friend and acquaintance in H.G. Wells.
He was British.
Yeah, I know that.
And Wells went down to Whitehall.
This would have been 1939 already, or maybe 38.
And Schleinfeld's knew that Poland would be invaded.
And he knew he had to get out of there.
So he Wells arranged a visa for him.
And his family ended up in England.
And how come that he knew Wells from literary conferences and the like?
Oh, yeah.
He was very literary man, Schleinfeld.
And he corresponded with my mother for the rest of his life.
And there were only some letters.
Well, I know, but I'm not available.
And I have what I found in their house.
And I don't know what my mother did with all the letters.
I see.
Or, I mean, she kept.
But I do know that they corresponded regularly.
And I would hear about it.
And he wasn't England.
He wasn't England, but there was no further drama to his life in particular.
My wife and I met him when we were on our honeymoon.
In September of 68, we were in England for three weeks.
My wife and I were three months around Europe on our honeymoon.
And one of our excursions from London was to go see Schleinfeld out in Cambridge.
I met him in Cambridge, but he lived.
His town was a town called Baldurk in Hartfordshire.
And he took us around Cambridge.
Showed us the sights, but he was incontinent by that.
It was a shame to see this.
That's the only time I met him.
And that's all I know about him.
Do you know what didn't just over?
Once he got to England, I don't think there was much more drama in Houston's time in Belfast life.
But he himself came from Hamburg or from Munich.
I don't know where he originated.
Oh, I see.
But he knew your mother in Hamburg.
Correct.
I have a baby girl.
I see.
I kind of a liberty in the community in Hamburg.
That my mother and he were part of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Continue with your mother.
How did she get to Italy?
What did she study in Hamburg?
Yeah.
And by 1933 she was already a physical therapist.
At the time of the boycott night, she was in Vitten at the family home with her mother,
father had died several years earlier.
And they took shelter in their basement.
And one of the drivers of one of their trucks essentially protected them from the gangs of thugs that were running Nazi bronchers.
And street's trying to kill every Jewel.
And I've warded them off of the grocery business.
It was eventually confiscated.
Yeah, I saw some letters about the property in Vitten.
What do you know about that?
Only that my uncle and my mother got some reparations.
So they did some.
And I do know that I'm a vice of her brother.
My mother bought a lot of standard of New Jersey stock, which is now ax on mobile.
And she had dividends from it regularly.
I'm always proud to own some stock.
But I'm sure that what they got was a small fraction of what the building should have brought.
There has been a historical book published on the Jews of Vitten by the city administration.
Do you have a copy of it?
I might.
And you can get it from the city of Vitten.
Okay, I understand.
They at one point they did correspond with me.
I sent them some material.
They had a city history and they hired somebody to do this.
It's all part of the guilt of the Germans.
I'm just like this is, I supplies.
So after the boycott night, her mother insisted that she get out of Germany.
And she went to the...
That's her mother stayed behind.
Her mother stayed behind.
Her mother eventually, within a couple of years of that, you've seen some of the postcards.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But her mother eventually had a brain tumor.
And I don't know if it was malignant or benign, but she died at an operating table at Stockholm in 1935.
Oh, I see.
I see.
So the letters of her mother are there.
I read the last letters.
Well, last couple of years.
Yeah, last couple of years.
That's why I wanted copies of them.
But I can't re-script German.
I just...
Yeah, everywhere.
Yeah.
Well, you will have them all on Xerox, maybe on the large than household.
Yeah, okay.
It's still script.
And then, as I say, my parents were away, and the rest of their story is joint.
Yeah, it's fine.
Yeah, yeah.
Did she try to be active professionally at the coming to this country?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
You've made some union materials from Chicago.
She worked for the place...
Well, she first worked for a physician as an in office physical therapist for some private physician.
And then later got a job at something called the Union Health Service, which was a medical clinic for union members of a variety of unions.
And she worked there as long as I live in Chicago.
So that's why you can find the educational union whose letter is on the list.
Oh, I see.
I see.
Okay.
Yeah, what I...
So you've mentioned so far, Justin, and Openheimer, and Buchtal, the scientist, those three.
Can you think of...
A lot of these people, there was a family named Salm, Arthur and Ernest Salm, who lived in...
S-A-L-M?
Yes.
And they were quite wealthy, and they were...
I think Ernest Salm was a childhood friend of my father.
But I don't know the precise connection.
But Arthur Salm had a very distinguished step collection.
I know that.
And so that was one connection.
He was a businessman of some kind.
Yeah, I don't know what his...
But now, Arthur, there's another fellow who I met quite by accident.
His name was Henry Conn.
In Germany, his name was Heinz Conn.
My mother remembered him as Heinz Conn.
But what was he by profession?
He was a photographer and on the photo store here in Los Angeles, you know, a photograph.
Well, really.
Again, no longer alive.
Right.
Living in Pacific Palaces, his wife was a survivor of...
Robinsbrook, I believe.
And lost a daughter.
But neither one of them died on a hospital ship after the liberation of Robinsbrook.
But it was too far gone to survive.
Because I believe that the camp was liberated in the winter, that camp.
And the daughter of Lilo Conn from her first marriage didn't survive.
But Lilo did.
Anyway, Henry Heinz Conn, living in Pacific Palaces, my wife and I belong to a synagogue in Pacific Palaces.
And in the late 1970s, the whole time I was elected to the board of directors of the synagogue.
And on my self-in-a-bored meeting, sitting opposite Heinz Conn, who I didn't know.
And he looked across the table and he said to me, are you the son of all these are booktongues because of my looks?
And I said, yes.
And how would you know that or something to that effect?
And so I was able to get my mother in contact with a childhood friend.
I don't know.
He came from Dittin.
But neither of these are still alive.
I don't believe so.
But they had a daughter named Monica, who at least for a while lived in Los Angeles.
But the Psalms lived in Chicago.
Oh, I see.
Who else?
Oh, in his professional life, one of my father's colleagues and rivals was a man named Hans Puppert.
Oh, Hans Puppert, yes.
So you know about him?
Yeah.
They were not particularly good friends.
And disagreed with my father on the liver and did what he could to sabotage my father.
This was the well-known Puppert?
Oh, yes.
You may have done it.
Yeah, I don't know.
And not really, but I know that there are big information.
And people were not always allies.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Okay.
They certainly had rivalries.
Yeah.
And it was a dynamic thing.
It was not.
It was simple.
Yeah.
What else?
I'm trying to take to that.
How did your father manage all his publications?
He constantly working at home.
Did he work in the office?
What was his...
They bought a very simple home in the suburbs of Chicago.
And over time, as they could afford to, they added to it.
And one of the things they added at one point was a study for my father.
They added actually three rooms at that time.
One of the larger, larger stood those three rooms was a study.
And I can show you pictures, at least to the exterior of it.
Okay.
And he spent many, many days working there.
He worked in there continually.
You know, at the medical school, he had offices and laboratories.
And they were generally fairly small.
But he had assistants who went on to become quite distinguished.
One of his assistants at PhD, named John Paulie, P-L-Y,
became first the dean at the University of...
I'm losing out of State University Medical School.
And later the dean of the University of Arkansas Medical School.
And I mean, he had another fellow by the name of Christian Amorti,
who went on to become one of the top people at the Jimmy Fund.
In Boston, what is the Jimmy Fund?
It's a charity.
I've always seen it.
In Boston, there's a lot of research.
Well, what I mean is,
that a connection with the famous baseball player named Jimmy Piersall
that donated the first money for it.
It's the name Jimmy Fund.
But...
Yeah.
He was a famous baseball player of the 1950s.
Can you tell me a little bit about your brother?
How come he also went into medicine?
And you didn't?
How come he became interested in medicine?
I can't tell you how come he became interested in medicine.
I do know that he spent a lot of summers working in my father's lab.
And maybe this helped further his interest in it.
I have a summer job that he had.
They would pay jobs for my father's grant money.
There was one summer when I held four jobs that kept him fired when I was 16.
And I ended up...
This is actually quite ironic in a way.
I ended up in my father's lab as a job of last resort.
Board out of my mind,
I was working through a microscope and counting the glomerularity
of the filtration devices in the kidney.
I noticed there's a paper there of a structure of the glomerularity.
No, that's right.
Obviously results from some of this research that my father was doing in a lab.
But to do the sections properly,
I know how many there were in a particular area.
And so I was set to do this.
And of course the irony is that I had a genetic disease called polycystic kidney disease,
which basically consists of glomerularity that become cysts, developed into cysts.
And they become larger and larger and larger and crushed the surrounding tissue
so that eventually your kidneys aren't doing any filtration anymore.
And have to be taken out?
No, that's one.
I'm just built to that.
And I think my father had PKB as well.
But this is not official.
My brother says that his creatinine, which is kidney measure, I'm blood test.
His creatinine ran high.
But my father was built more or less the way I am with very little flap,
but round around the middle.
I don't remember him.
I remember him, which he looked like.
But he had no flap.
And he was athletic.
And so I suspect just from this that that's where I inherited the PKD.
It is an autosomal dominant disease.
If one of your parents has it, you have a 50-50 chance of getting this disease.
I did, Peter didn't.
And so there we are.
I have a kidney transplant.
It is ironic that I would be counting glomerulitis as a kidney.
Okay.
