Editor’s Note: In a departure from our usual format, we are sharing the story here of the remarkable life of Alice Isaac, as written up by her nephew, David Holden. (David is a dear friend of mine, the father of a former student, and fellow member of the Gaviota Writers’ Group; he had a long and successful career in the movie biz as a film editor, and used to raise zebras–why not?– with his wife Miki at the outskirts of Los Alamos, California.)
Alice was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1927, and was about six years old when the shadow of the Third Reich swept across Europe. While still in her teens, she worked briefly for the Resistance as a courier, but was captured, as the narrative tells, and her life, though not cut short, was certainly derailed, curtailed and rerouted. It is impossible to imagine what this brilliant young woman might have achieved in a less cruel and hateful world, but even so, her journey was a brave and wondrous one. She died in September, 2014 in Phoenix, Arizona, five years after the death of her husband, Ray Brown.
We are honored to share her story, in David’s words below, on The Living Stories Collective. May it help keep her memory alive.
And the stories continue.
Cut Short by David Holden
In these days of the pandemic, we are made aware daily of the numbers of individuals whose lives have ended prematurely. The remaining family and friends, who can’t even gather to mourn their loss, are left to conjure up what might have been – what fruits of life continuing would have accrued to the dead. (A recent study estimated fifteen years of life lost for every Covid death).
A couple of generations ago, there was a time when such abbreviations of life were commonplace, though not instigated by a pandemic or, directly, by disease. I know some personally by having been told or read about them in histories or first-hand accounts. “A Narrative of the Holocaust,” “A Diary of Bergen-Belsen,” “What Price Survival?” are but three of thousands. My aunt Alice survived Bergen-Belsen, but her sister Margot, her brother-in-law Harry, and her mother Meta did not. My father’s brother and the rest of his family did not.
Their lives were “cut short.”
I only exist because of the perceptiveness of my father, Max, who had the foresight to get out of Germany and to Holland with my mother while he still could. And then, to be smart enough to make arrangements with people in Oregon who vouched for his character and promised he wouldn’t become a burden on the United States taxpayer, all instrumental to his obtaining visas. Meanwhile, my Aunt Alice’s visa was denied (as were her mother’s and sister’s) in 1937 – the U.S. was profoundly antiSemitic and wouldn’t open up its borders to Jews until after WWII. So, my aunt Alice was forced to watch as her mother was removed, along with all the Jewish patients, from the Joodse Invalide hospital in Amsterdam so the Nazis could use it for their own. It was the last Alice ever saw of her. My brother’s research shows that Meta died in Auschwitz a short time later.
Alice was barely seventeen at the time. After her mother was hospitalized, she lived in the family apartment by herself. Though she worked for the Resistance as a courier (not wearing her blatant “J” identifying her as a Jew), she knew it was only a matter of time until she was picked up.
She survived the holding camp at Westerbork and then the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp because of her good looks. She befriended men who kept her alive – finding her work peeling potatoes, for example – so that at war’s end her life hadn’t been “cut short.” But it had certainly changed. She had experienced in a few short years so much misery and horror that, she told me many years later, it was more than she could even bear to tell her older sister – my mother.
(A personal note: she took me aside some twenty years after the war ended, as I was about to spend a year in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship, to share some gruesome details of her experience. She wanted me to be aware of what had happened to her so that I would appreciate how evil the Germans were, and I would suitably hate them. As it was, I spent a year burdened by this generalized hatred, the counterpart of which was the guilt felt by many of my German contemporaries who themselves hadn’t done anything vile).
Though Alice buried the memories of her past, including her Jewishness, as excruciating, her story has a positive resolution. After the war, while a Lewis and Clark College student in Portland, Oregon, she met a U.S. Navy veteran. She knew right away this was the man she wanted to marry. He, handsome and popular, wasn’t so sure about her, but he didn’t stand a chance against Alice’s single-mindedness. They had a fifty-year marriage – childless because of the chemicals added to the women’s rations in the concentration camp. (She and Ray suffered two miscarriages). They funneled their energies into teaching high school in Oregon and California before retiring to Arizona. The blazing desert was never too hot for Alice, who had endured sub-freezing roll-calls at Bergen-Belsen, where one was shot if one faltered and fell.
I never met any of my grandparents or my third aunt or my father’s brother. I’m a second-generation American who gazes at the few remaining photographs of “the old country” as if it were Kazakhstan or Imperial China. Of course, this has much to do with the exotic nature of the culture of Germany at about the end of Kaiser Wilhelm’s time as anything– haughty, stiff poses, starched collars, a totally foreign environment.
So, I am grateful not only to be alive but to have been born in this country. I haven’t been cut short – not in the least.
David and his brother Ron with Aunt Alice in Oregon.
* * *
I was born in 1944. Flash forward thirty-odd years. I’ve only been married for two years, but already separated from my first wife. I’m alone in the house in the Pacific Palisades, an ocean-fronting suburb of Los Angeles, when the phone rings. My sister-in-law, Glenda, is calling in a panic from the south of France where she and my brother, Ronald, and their two kids, Michael, nine, and David, seven, have gone to live for a while. Ronald has fallen off a chair onto the breakfast table. The local doctor orders an ambulance to take him to the American Hospital in Paris. One plausible diagnosis is meningitis. Another is a brain tumor.
I call my friend Verna Fields, fresh off an Oscar for editing the movie Jaws. She heads straight over with $500 cash (no ATMs yet) and drives me to the airport. I grab a plane to Paris via London. At Heathrow, I’m in the international transit area, with no British money. I buy a candy bar and use the change at a payphone. I attempt to call the American Hospital in Paris, but I don’t have the number. Every sixty seconds or so, the phone demands more coins. Finally, I’m patched through to my brother’s room, and Ronald answers, “Hello?” I’m out of coins, and the phone disconnects us. But at least I know he’s alive.
In one of life’s stranger ironies, I had made a documentary film segment in the previous year about Dr. Robert Rand, a U.C.L.A. neurosurgeon who embedded pacemakers in the brain. I call him up, and he agrees to accept Ronald as a patient. A week or so later, he removes a golf-ball-sized non-malignant meningioma from my brother’s brain.
So, another life not cut short. And, significantly, that life sires another life, that of Dominic Holden, named after Domme, the village in southern France where he was born after the family returned to France. Dominic drops out of high school and works as a waiter. But that doesn’t stop his advance. He now has over 26,000 followers on Twitter. According to his Wikipedia webpage, Dominic…is an American journalist. He was National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association’s 2016 Journalist of the Year Award awardee and one of The Advocate’s 50 most influential LGBTs in America in 2017. He was director of Seattle Hempfest and an editor at Seattle’s The Stranger alternative newspaper for six years, until 2014. As of 2015, he was a writer for Buzzfeed News. Holden appeared in the 2013 documentary Evergreen: The Road to Legalization. In 2019, The New York Times reported that he was one of the leaders of the effort to unionize employees at Buzzfeed. His father, Ronald Holden, is a Seattle food writer who worked at KING-TV and was executive editor at the other Seattle alt-weekly, Seattle Weekly.
Dominic–he’s the one next to Michelle–at the White House
It’s nice to know certain stories have happy endings.