Across the Street From Adolf Hitler

About the Book

I am a woman who grew up, literally, across the street from Adolf Hitler. As I look back upon my life, I can see that much that I am flowed from the powerful historical events that swept through my childhood and adolescence. They sent my life off in a direction that it never would have taken, had Hitler’s rise to power not occurred. The most frightening and traumatic events of my youth became the very forces that enabled me to escape with my life from Germany, and opened up to me a whole new world of ideas and unexpected challenges.

Encounters with Hitler and the Gestapo

Born in Munich, in the middle of a left-wing revolution that raged all around our house, I grew up in a middle-class assimilated Jewish family. My father was a strict authoritarian, my mother, a woman obsessed with appearances who tried to crush my insatiable curiosity and spirit. Rebelling against her, I grew to question everything, to take nothing for granted, and to challenge conventional “truths”, all attributes that prepared me well for later becoming a research scientist.

Hitler was not a stranger in our neighborhood. Even before his take-over, he often visited an upstairs neighbor in our apartment house, who, it turned out, was his informer about the German Army High Command. When Hitler seized power, we were horrified to discover that his private residence was across the street from ours. Nazi terror engulfed us in 1934 when a grisly massacre of the leaders of the powerful storm troopers took place in our immediate neighborhood. Later that year, I came face to face with Hitler when his convertible slowly entered a roundabout I happened to be riding through on my bike. When I refused to greet him with the obligatory salute of “Heil Hitler,” SS officers in a second car began screaming at me to greet the Führer. Terrified then, I became even more so when I later learned that people had been killed for defying to salute Hitler.

My most harrowing experience with the Nazis was yet to come. I was summoned to appear before the Gestapo for mysterious reasons. I experienced one of the most agonizing moments of my life when the SS man who took me into a room for interrogation prohibited my father from joining me. At the time, we did not know if we would ever see each other again. Later, we found out that a young Jewish friend had used me, a blond, blue-eyed sixteen year old, as an alibi when he was accused of fraternizing with an Aryan girl. Panicked by this incident, my parents insisted that I leave for Switzerland immediately.

Liberation, Education and Underground Work

Rebelling at my mother’s suggestion that I attend a Swiss finishing school where I would be groomed to become a proper “lady,” I told her that instead, I wanted to further my education at a university-affiliated program. We found such a program at the University of Geneva, where I was interviewed by a professor who told me, “You are way too young to come here, but why don’t you come anyway?” That professor was Jean Piaget. And so began my career as a psychologist. When three years later, Hitler took over Austria, refugees began to flee to Switzerland, where, mercilessly, most of them were arrested and sent back to certain incarceration in concentration camps or death. A few managed to get to Geneva where they sought shelter in my Austrian boyfriend’s apartment and in my own. At great peril to ourselves, we guided these refugees to safety across the border into France.

Immigration, War and the Holocaust

After my father died in 1937, my mother managed to immigrate to New York where my two brothers had lived for some time. I followed them in 1938, arriving in the midst of the Great Depression with only a few dollars in my wallet. Anti-Semitism was widespread. Fortunately, with the help of a Jewish organization, I was able to obtain a series of scholarships that led to a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University.

When WW II

About the Author

Anneliese Korner-Kalman is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University School of Medicine. After studying with Piaget at the University of Geneva, she earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University and became a clinical and developmental psychologist. She published two books and over 200 scientific journal articles, mostly on issues of early development. Her memoir deals with the universal task of coming to terms with childhood.