Interview with Bernie Schoenburg # ISG-A-L-2009-006 Interview # 1, Date: March 9, 2009 Interviewer: Mark Depue
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Interview with Bernie Schoenburg # ISG-A-L-2009-006 Interview # 1, Date: March 9, 2009 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 A Note to the Reader This transcript is based on an interview recorded by the ALPL Oral History Program. Readers are reminded that the interview of record is the original video or audio file, and are encouraged to listen to portions of the original recording to get a better sense of the interviewee’s personality and state of mind. The interview has been transcribed in near- verbatim format, then edited for clarity and readability, and reviewed by the interviewee. For many interviews, the ALPL Oral History Program retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. DePue: Today is Monday, March 9, 2009. My name is Mark DePue; I’m a volunteer with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, working on a project on Governor Jim Edgar. Bernie, you’re my second interview. I interviewed Mike Lawrence, one of your colleagues in journalism, just this last week, and thoroughly enjoyed that and expect just the same in talking to you today. So good morning. Schoenburg: Good morning. DePue: We always start with the basics: when were you born; where were you born? Schoenburg: June 26, 1954 in Chicago, Edgewater Hospital, which I think closed a couple years ago. Hillary Clinton was born there, too. I lived in Evanston. My parents had recently moved to Evanston, to a home in which my father still lives. He’s always had the same telephone number for fifty-four years.DePue: Well, that’s convenient. Schoenburg: It is. Bernie Schoenburg Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-006 DePue: What did your father do? Schoenburg: My father, William, was in the wholesale produce business with a family business, Louis Schoenburg & Sons—L-o-u-i-s—on, I think, the South Side of Chicago. He was one of eleven children, nine brothers. I think they all at some point or another worked at that business. He ended up leaving that business when there was only he and one other brother still in it, when he was about forty. Then he became an insurance agent, got a try-out and made it for Prudential, and made a good career out of that for thirty years. He retired when he was seventy two, and he’s now ninety. DePue: When did he go into the insurance business? What year? Schoenburg: Well, 1940, so that would be...let’s see. Something like...something like near fifty years ago. Wow. DePue: So then you were growing up while he was an insurance agent… Schoenburg: I was growing up. I was six or eight. No, I was probably about six, that’s right, so probably about 1960. Yeah. DePue: I know you’d like to tell us a little bit about your mother, and I certainly want to hear that story, so... Schoenburg: Well, my mother— DePue: Her maiden name. Schoenburg: Was Youngman. DePue: Her first name? Schoenburg: Edith Youngman. Y-o-u-n-g-m-a—I think she used one N, although her parents, I think, used two, or someone in the family did. But they were from Austria. She grew up in a small town not far from Vienna and was an only child. DePue: When was she born? Schoenburg: She was born in, I’m thinking ’26. Let’s see, she died in October of ’08. She was eighty-two, so...yes. They had pretty much an idyllic life there, that she sometimes stayed with her grandparents; they had a store, and her father, I think, drove a truck some. He had various jobs. They were Jewish in a town that had almost no Jews, but when the Nazis came, they were evicted— basically told to leave their home within a day or two—went to live with relatives in Vienna, ended up… 2 Bernie Schoenburg Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-006 DePue: That would’ve been about 1938, ’39? Because the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, so... Schoenburg: Yes, I think it was ’38. They ended up getting some money to do things like buy visas and try to bribe people who would move refugees around; I think that came over a period of years. But they were refugees. They lived in Brussels for a while. My mom worked in somebody’s home, didn’t have a lot of food, I think taught some children a little bit, just during the day as part of taking care of them. Learned French because she was very nimble—she was a teenager. They ended up… DePue: The whole family was there? Schoenburg: The whole family was there, and I think that her parents got employed in various ways. My daughter is named after my grandmother Elly, although her name was Gabriella from the old country. We decided on Elyse, but to name her after her so they could both be called Elly. My grandmother was always very good with making clothes. She was also a hard worker, talked about the fifty-pound or -kilo sacks that she would carry of—maybe it was 100, I don’t know—heavy things. She was a strong woman, very hard worker. But she was always a seamstress. She could make dresses. She made most of my mother’s clothes when I was growing up. But she would work. I’m not… probably some kind of physical labor that my grandfather found there. They were in Brussels for a while. I think they sold off some of the family jewelry or used it as bribery. They were also getting some money from one of her uncles, who was already in America, because he had come in the early thirties and got a good job; he became a buyer for a department store in Chicago. He would send money, which helped them book passage to America eventually. But they were smuggled across Germany one night and shot at going over a wall, and lived in the hills of France for a while. DePue: Was that after the Germans had invaded Belgium and France, then? Schoenburg: They were in Belgium when the Germans invaded Belgium. My mom remembers seeing what looked like a bunch of birds or something. She said the sky was full—it was apparently the airplanes coming that started bombing. So they took a train ride out of Belgium. It’s interesting, because I didn’t know I was going to go into all of this. (chuckles)I had interviewed her some, doing what you do, over a number of years, just a couple of times—but I had put some things together, and I had written a column in 1984, when Reagan went to Bitburg. Then I wrote a column again upon her death, which was kind of an update of that, with some information from a subsequent interview that I had done with her, and also an interview I had done with her mother back in the eighties. So I’m not exactly sure of the timeline, although I think I had it there pretty well. But yeah, they had to leave Belgium when the Nazis came there. That might have been when they were smuggled and were taken in by people in the hills of the Pyrenees, I think, in France. 3 Bernie Schoenburg Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-006 DePue: So way in the south of France. Schoenburg: Yeah. As she tells it, she believed that the people weren’t particularly happy to be taking on these refugees but thought they were told to do so. She ended up staying, I think in a stable—possibly like a crawl space underneath a barn. They were in some building that had animals in it, which may have even been the farmhouse itself, but it wasn’t a great situation. While they were there, they were separated from her father, who somehow had been taken away and put in a camp. DePue: Well, if I can, you mentioned in the article that you wrote at the time of your mother’s death that soldiers came to the house and asked for your father. And I assumed that the soldiers— Schoenburg: My grandfather, her father. DePue: Your grandfather. Yeah, I’m sorry. But these would have been Belgian soldiers. Schoenburg: I had always assumed they were German soldiers, but I’m not sure at that time...because I’m not sure I asked that question, so... You know, we’re a few years out from when it occurred. DePue: Sorry to put you on the spot, Bernie. Schoenburg: No, that’s okay. DePue: What happened to them after they were in southern France? Schoenburg: Let me recall. My mother befriended, somewhere near where they were living, a teacher, who ended up working with them to write letters to try to find out where her father was. They ended up locating him in some kind of detention camp, and I believe my mother and my grandmother went to visit him.