Reconnecting after the war

Henry Lowenstein: Well, during the war, I mean, I would be glued to the radio, and I would listen nightly—you see there was what was called Radio Calais, which was actually a British station broadcasting from Britain, pretending to be in France, broadcasting propaganda to the Germans. And they would obviously delight in giving the locations of where bombs had hit the night before. If they would bomb a city, they would list street by street where the bombs... Because the idea was to demoralize the German troops who presumably were listening. Or whoever was listening. And would—I had made myself a map of Berlin from memory—what I could remember about the streets, and clearly sat there, night after night, wondering whether they would mention streets that obviously were in our neighborhood to see what had happened. And hoping and praying that my folks were safe. But no way of knowing. We—I think the last communication that I actually received was about 1943, it was a 25-word message through the Red Cross. And conversely, as I found out later, they only heard very infrequently from me, too. And so the—you know one went through the war.

Henry Lowenstein: One day, in May—it was in June of 1945, he called me up. He said he had just gotten back from Berlin and he had just come—he flew back and forth between Berlin and London because he was part of the first group of British officers to go to Berlin to check out what was going on there. And he had just talked to my mother, and that they were all alive and well and sent their best. Which was miraculous! How he managed to connect it, the story was that she—despite all the obstacles and after these terrible years of the war and everything—made her way to the British legation, didn’t speak any English, was referred to him because he spoke German, asked about her son in England, mentioned my name, and he said, "Oh, I just saw him last week!" Which was so bizarre and incredible, I mean it was nothing short of a miracle. And then later, within a month or so, I had another call from a man with whom I later became connected here in Denver. At that time I hadn’t maybe even heard of Denver. And he brought me—in the best tradition of the fairy tales he brought me a ring from my parents and the message that they were well. He was an American, he worked with the State Department. So anyway, now we were in touch and sending parcels to one another, I was sending food parcels as much as I could. And we still didn’t know what was going to happen. You know, there was no assurance of the future.