Forest Hills resident E. David Luria, a photographer and director of one of the largest photography training programs in the country, is also a Holocaust survivor. Here is the intriguing story he tells about how and why he immigrated to the United States.
“Cousin Frank? … He’s German, right? I don’t LIKE Germans!”
This was the bold assertion by 26-year-old Estela de Lima Luria in 1924, when her mother asked her to escort her distant Jewish cousin Frank Luria around New York City during his import business stopover. He was en route by ship to buy coffee in Venezuela.
Estela, my mother, had been a Red Cross driver during World War I, ferrying wounded soldiers from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to hospitals in a Model T Ford ambulance. She had seen firsthand the terrible carnage done by Germans to American soldiers. Like many Americans at that time, she became quite anti-German.
“I know you don’t like Germans, dear, but he is family. It would be very nice if you would show him around the city,” her mother said.
Having determined that her cousin Frank spoke passable English, my mother very reluctantly agreed. It turns out that he was debonair, charming and very likable. They hit it off and decided to get married, and my Jewish mother went off to live in Hamburg from 1926 through 1938, some of the worst years of modern German history: the Nazi era. Once there, she gave birth to two sons: my brother Carlos in 1928 and me in 1936.
A headstrong, take-no-prisoners early feminist, Estela was miserable during her whole time in Hamburg. She loved my father but hated his country, and seeing Nazis in brown shirts beating up Jews on the streets. Every day at breakfast she would lambaste my father with tales of how bad things were in his country. She pointed out that the hero worship of Hitler was exemplified by our next door neighbor, who would say “Heil Hitler” to his wife at each landing as he went down the stairs of the apartment building, and then turn to his wife’s window outside the building and shout “Heil Hitler” before going off to work.
“Frank,” she would say, “we have to get out of here. These guys are going to kill us.”
“No, they are not. Don’t worry, dear, we will be fine,” he would reply.
And that was the nature of their breakfast conversation each morning. My father, like many Jews in Germany at the time, was in denial about how bad things were. He stubbornly stuck to his beliefs until Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, in November of 1938. That convinced him that we should get out of town. It was my mother’s insistence and her American passport that saved our lives, and we were able to book passage on the last ship from Hamburg to New York City that December.
After coming to the States, my father became more American than most Americans, and was excitedly cheering the advance of the Allies across Europe and into Germany to defeat the Nazis. Like a football fan, he would cheer the advances of Generals Montgomery and Patton across his country, hoping that they would reach Berlin before the Russians did.
He also spent many hours behind his old Smith-Corona typewriter, typing out requests to the new federal German government. He was seeking compensation for the import-export business that he’d had to fire-sale to a Christian owner once Jews were no longer allowed to own businesses. Two years after he died in 1956, my mother received a check from the German government.
I will never forget the steadfast courage of my mother, in standing up to my father and to the Nazis. Her actions saved our lives and enabled my brother and me to enjoy happy, prosperous lives with children and grandchildren here in the States.
E. David Luria was raised in New York City, graduated in 1958 from Amherst College, spent three-plus years with US Army Intelligence in Germany during the Cold War, six years in Colombia and Panama with CARE Inc., moved to the DC area in 1970, studied photography in Paris with Parsons School of Design with a protege of Henri Cartier Bresson, moved to the Brandywine Apartments in 1993, became a professional photographer in 1995, and founded Washington Photo Safari in 1999.
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