It is an image 75-year-old Inge Rabinowitz will never forget.
In the midst of the family’s Sunday lunch — a large and festive meal for Germans — the good mood was broken by an alarming phone call. A family friend warned that all Jews of Polish origin would be hauled off to concentration camps, so anyone in the family with his or her papers in order should leave the country. Now.
Her oldest brother, Eric, and sister, Lela, didn’t need to hear more.
“They literally left their food on the table. Their forks were sticking there, the way they left them, and they got their suitcases, put a couple of things in it, and took off,” recalled Rabinowitz.
Within three weeks, her father had been deported to Buchenwald, never to return.
“Of course, Eric would have been taken also. He did realize the importance of getting the hell out more than the rest of the family. So his papers were in order.”
Eric Berger, who escaped the Nazis and went on to live the American dream, died June 22 in Alamo. He was 93.
His abrupt departure over lunch wasn’t his first near-brush with death.
Earlier, the entire Berger clan, along with the rest of Munich’s Polish Jews, had been forced into train cars.
“They got all the Polish Jews from Germany to the Polish border, all in one day. Bing, bang, boom. Our train was the very last train. And, for whatever reason, God or whatever, they didn’t have space for us or they were tired, I don’t know what, they sent our train back to Munich. We had to pay for it ourselves. Luckily our father had money with him. I don’t know how, but he did,” recalled Rabinowitz, a Long Island, N.Y., resident about 19 years younger than her eldest sibling, Eric.
“The Jews that were let go in Poland, to my knowledge — and I belonged to a Holocaust support group for a while — they told them to get out of the train and shot at them from both sides, the Polish side and the German side. And those who made it, made it, and those who didn’t, didn’t. We went back to Munich like nothing ever happened.”
Arriving in the United States virtually penniless in 1939, Eric Berger immediately went to work. He got a job with the Navy as a machinist in New Jersey, and, two years later, was able to get his mother and Inge out of Germany. The three briefly lived in a small apartment in Newark, N.J., but Inge didn’t remember seeing much of her brother.
“He went to work immediately. He was a hard worker. That’s the thing I most remember. Whatever he did, he worked very, very hard.”
After the war, Berger was sent by the Navy to work on submarines on Mare Island. His mother died in 1944 in New Jersey, and two years later on the West Coast, he met and married Sylvia Zimmerman. He was starting a new life.
“His life really started when he went to California. He was 33,” recalled Rabinowitz.
Berger, whose family ran a men’s wear shop in Munich, bought New York Fabrics in Oakland with his wife shortly after the war. Over the years he had a chance to demonstrate his business acumen, opening nearly a score more New York Fabrics stores. (Anyone who grew up in the Bay Area in the 1970s and ’80s remembers his homegrown commercials featuring a chorus line of dazzlingly outfitted young girls singing the praises of “New York Fabrics, the fabulous fabric store.”)
“When all of us were growing up, every Saturday we’d be at the store. Our parents were both working, and child care would be expensive, so the whole family was at the business,” recalled son Steven Berger of Berkeley, who went to work cutting patterns at age 9.
“It’s very hard to describe my father apart from the business, because his life was the business.”
As Berger prospered, he managed to give back to the community. He was the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay’s representative on the Hebrew Free Loan Association’s board for several years in the 1980s.
“He had a passion for helping others. He was passionate about helping Jews in the area who were less fortunate than he was, given what he went through in his earlier days,” recalled Art Becker, the HFLA’s board president in the mid-1980s.
“He knew the situation of émigrés coming to this country and not knowing anybody and working to get themselves established. And he wanted to help other people. That’s what drew him to Hebrew Free Loan and we were proud to have him as a board member.”
Berger, a congregant of Temple Isaiah in Lafayette and a former resident of the Reutlinger Community for Jewish Living in Danville, is survived by his sister, Inge Rabinowitz, of Plainview, N.Y.; wife Ann Rosenbaum of Danville (his first wife, Sylvia Zimmerman died in 1996); son Steven of Berkeley; daughters Judy Berger of Lafayette and Karyn Peck of Danville; four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
At his request, no service was held. Donations in his memory can be made to the Hebrew Free Loan Association, 131 Steuart St., S.F., CA 94105.