The Kuhn Family
Rita Jenny Kuhn was born November 29, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, where she remained until 1948. Her father was a banker, from a long line of Berliner Jews. Her mother was born into a Lutheran family and converted to Judaism before marrying Rita’s father. Both parents are listed as Jewish on Rita’ birth certificate, but under the Nuremberg Laws, her mother was considered an Aryan.
The Kuhn family were members of the Berlin Jewish community (Jüdische Gemeinde). Rita attended a neighborhood school until Nazi law expelled Jews from German schools. She attended a Jewish school from 1939 - 1941, as well as the liberal Fasanenstrasse Synagogue until 1939. Her memories of the years prior to 1939 were replete with Germany’s growing anti-Semitism. Her father lost his banking job because he was a Jew, and was eventually employed by the Berlin Jewish Community Center and the German emigration department. Her father actively assisted Jews leaving Germany but himself was unable to move his family abroad stating, “Kein Gelt, Kein Freunden,” (no money, no contacts).
Rita recounted the destruction in the streets the morning after Kristallnacht. She walked the fourteen blocks to her school at the Synagogue, “and I noticed the minute I turned into the (Kantstrasse) that stores—the windows were smashed. The glass was lying on the street… I remember … the writing on the glass that was not broken yet … on the walls next to the store was “Jew” and then the star…What struck me then … was that they were written in red letters, and it was dripping still, the red was dripping like blood…”
Her family was forced to move into a “Jewish House for Jews,” which was in a fortunate location a few doors down from her mother’s family. Because her family could not leave Berlin, her parents worried about their safety. As a precautionary measure, Rita’s parents urged a twelve-year-old Rita and her younger brother to be baptized in the Christian faith. Feeling a link between Christianity and Nazism, Rita was adamant against the move, but was convinced “lovingly” by her father.
Rita did finish primary school in Berlin but was made to wear the yellow Star of David before school completion. She remembered the shift to sewing stars on all her clothing garments and adding “Sara” as her middle name. In 1941, her father was drafted for forced labor in a railroad station in the city of Berlin. She finished primary school at the age of 14 and in 1941 she too was drafted into forced labor, in an munitions factory.
The whole family remained in Berlin throughout the war, her mother and younger brother staying home while she and her father worked for the Nazi regime. She had been working eleven hours a day for seven months when the Factory Action (Fabrik Aktion) Pogrom began on February 27, 1943. She recalls arriving at the factory at 7:00 AM that morning. At a few minutes past 7:00 AM, the room filled with SS officers. They shouted, “Jews out” (Juden Raus), and she was forced outside with the other Jewish workers and loaded onto a truck.
The SS unloaded them in front of the Clou building; she remembers walking through a line of SS officers and reaching a table where Jews were forced to present their identification cards and be separated by gender. After waiting all day in a room with thousands of other women, Kuhn’s name was called. She stood again at the table, and the SS officer sent her home.
After a week in which neither she nor her father were not summoned to work, her mother went to collect the ration cards which barely kept the family fed. They told her that her husband, daughter, and son must come collect the ration cards themselves. They went to the school for the cards and immediately Rita, her father, and brother were arrested, separated from her mother. As before, she waited (this time with her family) in a locked room that slowly filled with other members of their Jewish Community. From there, they were loaded onto another truck and taken to a holding center at Rosenstrasse 2-4.
At Rosenstrasse, she was separated from her father and brother, and sent to a room with three other women and thin mattresses. It was there that she learned of the protests that had been occurring just outside of Rosenstrasse 2-4. Rita and her family stayed at Rosenstrasse for one night and were released the next day. Rita was called back into work at a railway station in Berlin, where she cleaned the exterior of trains returning from the East. She worked there for the remainder of the war. Her father was also reassigned to forced labor.
Rita remembered the Soviet Army’s capture of Berlin, and the door-to-door notice by German soldiers of Germany’s capitulation. Rita, her father, and brother wore their yellow stars and waited for the Soviet tanks to reach the barricade on their street. They were met with suspicion by the Soviet soldiers, who questioned whether they were truly Jews, noting that German citizens/SS Officers were stealing yellow stars and identification papers from Jewish victims in order to not be captured. One of the soldiers asked them to say the “Sh’ma,” a central prayer in Judaism. It was only when they did so, that the Soviet soldiers believed them.
She recalls a period of a few days when the Soviet forces were given free-reign of Berlin and she was hidden from the men for her safety. A Russian headquarters was formed next to their building and later occupied by the British; her family home was in the “British zone.” At the war’s end, she and her brother Hans were sent to a displaced persons camp to receive medical care, food, and some education. She smuggled herself back into Berlin. In 1948, Rita was the only individual in her family ready and able to immigrate to the United States when the opportunity became available. A school friend, who lost her family in Auschwitz, and survived the camp herself, assisted Rita in immigrating to New York in 1948. Her family was supposed to follow but due to her mother’s ill health, they were unable to join her.
Rita married in 1951, had four children, and continued her education. In 1963, Kuhn completed a master’s degree in Classics at Cornell University, and in 1984, she completed a Doctorate in Comparative Literature at University of California, Berkeley. Between 1985 and 2015 she remained in the San Francisco Bay Area and shared her story with high school students; in 2013, she released her memoir, Broken Glass, Broken Lives: A Jewish Girl’s Survival Story in Berlin, 1933-1945. Her second book, Another Ruth, was published in 2018 and is a fictitious account, based on facts, of her parents’ courtship in pre-war Berlin. Dr. Rita Kuhn passed away in the New Jersey home she shared with her daughter on June 15, 2022.
Written by Carmelina Moersch and edited by Ruth Wiseman
