Tom Lewinsohn and his family lived comfortably among their non-Jewish neighbors in Berlin. Throughout the 1930s Tom experienced early Nazi persecution of the Jews. He was forced to attend an all-Jewish school, his father was only allowed to treat Jewish patients, and in 1938, the family hid through Kristallnacht. Though his parents considered sending their children on a Kindertransport, the family eventually chose to stay together and remain in Germany until January 1941, when a police official informed his father that the family was about to be deported. Boarding a train in the middle of the night, they fled to Shanghai – the only place then open to Jews – where they lived in a ghetto of 17,000. In 1948, Tom emigrated to the United States.
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Testimonies may be used for individual research with proper citation. All other uses require written permission from MCHE. The above video testimony is edited from a full-length testimony that may be viewed onsite at the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education or at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University