On the day that Joseph T. Loeb was to board the ship to New York, his aunt made one final plea: Stay in Germany; we’ll take care of you. But nothing would convince him to stay. He promised her that if he didn’t make it, he would come back. But he already knew that he’d make it, and he wouldn’t be coming back.
That was in 1948—the Allies had defeated Hitler’s Third Reich and World War II was over. Fourteen years earlier, at the age of 7, Joseph decided that someday he would have to leave Germany behind. He knew that the United States was where a better life awaited him. Eventually, the Nazi regime would bring terror upon millions of Jews, including many in Joseph’s family. His father would be one of those victims, leaving a 17-year-old Joseph to care for his mother, twin brother and younger sister. What Joseph and his family experienced during those years was probably not unlike what other German Jews went through. Yet it is those experiences that make his story so compelling to hear. Joseph’s story is about the determination to survive and the will to succeed—a determination and will that he fomented with the goal of someday calling the United States his home.
Born in 1925 in Frankfurt, Germany, to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Joseph Loeb was labeled a “half-Jew” by Adolph Hitler’s regime in the 1930s. Many on his father’s side of the family suffered the same fate as six million other European Jews: death.
But Joseph survived. The same year his father was taken away, Nazi officers came to the Loeb residence, ransacked the apartment and, to the tearful protest of their mother, arrested Joseph and his brother, Siegfried. In jail, the two brothers were a step away from a concentration camp, but Joseph would not allow that to happen. “They were no match for me,” he proudly recalls today. Only a teenager at the time, Joseph was wise enough to know how to evade his interrogator. But his brother was not. When confronted by his brother’s conflicting and damning testimony, Joseph coolly replied: “You have to forgive my brother. He’s a little weak. He just doesn’t have them all together,” indicating that his brother was not competent enough to answer.
It worked. By sheer cunning he was able to save his and his brother’s lives. Joseph escaped the jail, but the time that he spent in there got him thinking about what he wanted to do with his life. Food for prisoners was rationed; they got moldy bread and “whatever they called soup.” The little amount of bread Joseph was given, he saved to give to his brother. It was at this moment that he decided baking would be his trade. After all, he reasoned, bakers bake bread all over the world, and no matter where he ended up or what happened, he would “always have something to eat.”
From what otherwise was a nightmarish episode, Joseph manages to extract a positive—a tendency he has when recollecting his life. The most astonishing example of this is his professed admiration for the German nation. He loves the German language and admires the German work ethic, the way German cities are organized—he even notes Hitler’s “gift of speech.” Ask him what impact growing up in Germany had on him, and he’ll tell you how its educational system set him up for life.
“They make sure that when you get out of school—whether you’re going into higher education or going into the labor market—they make sure that you learn a trade or you keep on going for higher education. And when you get that certificate that hangs on the wall that tells you that you are a master of whatever it is you choose to work at for the rest of your life, that certificate speaks volumes. You have accomplished something.”
In Germany, Joseph and his family “lived in a country that was out to destroy them,” yet he harbors no hatred toward his birth nation and its people. Others who lived through what he did do not share this benevolent feeling—they are certainly not feelings shared by his wife, who is ashamed to even tell people that her accent is German. Having grown up in a nation dominated by racist hatred, Joseph says he “doesn’t know the feeling of hate.”
“I don’t hate the German people. I don’t hate their system from that time. It may be hard to explain. I don’t like what happened—but I could never hate.”
Still, the United States is where he longed to be. In his mind, the letters U-S-A were what kept him going during those rough years in the 1940s. He desired to live in America and be an American citizen, and he was determined to survive the Nazi regime in order to make that desire a reality.
In 1948, his dream came true. Sponsored by an uncle living in the United States, a 22-year-old Joseph set off from Germany for New York. When he arrived, he quickly settled into the Clinton Hills neighborhood of Newark where his family lived. He got his first job at a bakery, learned English by attending night classes and going to movie theaters, eventually moved into his own apartment and worked to become proficient in his baker’s trade. “I had a foot on the ground and a goal: I was going to make it.”
He did make it. With the same determination and desire that drove him to survive in Germany, Joseph strove for success as an immigrant in Newark. By the time he owned his own Newark bakery and met his wife-to-be, Joseph considered himself a true American. “When you really feel all of a sudden you’re an American is when you dream in English,” he explains. Joseph knew about the German-American Bund—a subversive organization that supported Nazism—but did not associate or talk with them. He did not associate with any German people because he did not care: He was an American and he was going to be an American. Not a German-American, but an American, sans adjective and hyphen.
As a young boy, Joseph said he would survive the system, and now as a septuagenarian resident of the Newark suburb of Hillside, he can say that he did. Nevertheless, Joseph did not escape Nazi Germany unscarred. He tells of his method of not allowing acts and feelings of racism to bother him:
“I have always been able to shut off my mind, and nothing is going to come in and nothing is going to come out. That comes from survival early on. If you give up and if you get under the wheels, you’re a goner. You have to rise above it, and you have to outsmart them. I outsmarted them.”
Today he still has that ability to block out any negative thoughts by shutting off his mind—an ability he must have learned under the most distressing circumstances. It is also curious to hear him speak about the Israeli state and the future of Jewish people in America. Joseph grew up under a regime that sent millions of lives to their extermination. It was a Holocaust unparalleled in modern history that should never happen again. Yet, Joseph Loeb fears that it can happen again, even in the United States. “If the time is right, and certain people are in power, and the proper temperature is under the pot for it to boil, it can happen here too. It can happen here too.”
You believe Joseph when he tells you that he is an American. His accent may be German, but his soul is American. His life story is the American Dream realized. He embodies the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness people speak of when describing the ideals of the American nation. To describe his life as “carousel-like,” as he does, is simply an understatement. Younger generations may never fully understand what it was to experience the world as Joseph did as a young man. And to know that he never gave up his life, that he dreamed something that was impossible at the time, and that he never stopped until he succeeded, makes his story ever so more inspirational.
When Joseph Loeb tells you that he is an American, he does so not out of blind patriotism or nationalism, but out of an unequivocal understanding and appreciation of what it means to be an American.
“I lived on two continents. One continent I was born in. I could not help that. This country, that is the country I choose. That is the difference. This country I wanted to be in.”
Sergio Bichao is an Honors College student at Rutgers-Newark.
