When Renate Dollinger joined the British land army and the Royal Timber Corps during World War II, she requested the service of herding sheep.
Instead, the young German refugee who fled to London in 1939 was assigned to the forest service. There the 5-foot-3-inch “lightweight” cut down 18 trees a day with a 9-pound ax.
But Dollinger’s genuine involvement in World War II actually came as it drew to a close. In 1945, serving with the U.S. 3rd Army, she helped to open the newly liberated concentration camps.
“I was barely 21 years old and all I was worried about was getting a good tan,” recalls Dollinger, 76, a successful painter who lived most of her adult life in the Bay Area before moving to Salem, Ore., in 1986. “I had about as much sense in my head as a grasshopper.”
Assigned to the 3rd Army, under Gen. George Patton’s command, Dollinger worked as one of four female interpreters. She then spent time looking for Nazis by censoring mail and listening in on telephone calls.
“The dullest thing in the world,” she says, recounting a typical phone conversation: “Did you find a place where we can buy potatoes? I found a place where I can buy potatoes.”
Her personal aim, which was to find her family, was never achieved during the two years she served. All, except a sister who fled to California, had been killed in Auschwitz.
Yet, despite her first-hand glimpse of the horrors and pain caused by the war, Dollinger’s 46-year painting career has never focused on doom and gloom. Rather the Jewish expressionist painter depicts an earlier, more carefree time and place. She brings the shtetl back to life through her art.
“I have always painted the shtetl,” says Dollinger, “because that’s the world which I came from, a world which is no more. What I never did paint are the Holocaust horrors. I guess I’m still too close to that.”
In her most recent work and first-ever book, a children’s story called “The Rabbi Who Flew,” the shtetl and its daily routines take a mystical turn. Under the narration of a fictitious grandma named Hanne Sheyne, a rabbi who flies keeps the villagers on their toes.
The book, illustrated and written by Dollinger, is just one in a series of Grandma Hanne Shayne fairy tales planned for publication. In fact, Dollinger, who says Hanne “lives inside my head and is the one who has told all the stories for years and years and years,” has already finished the next two books.
“Maybe, in my next life, I’ll write about the Holocaust, but for now I just want to write fairy tales that delight children,” says Dollinger. “I don’t want to preach to them, I just want to make them daydream a little bit.”
Dollinger was born in 1924 in the Silesian Alps of what was then Germany. She later moved to Breslau — now Wroclaw, Poland — where her mother worked as director of a Jewish center near the rabbinical seminary. As a preteen she often sat with the 18- and 19-year-old rabbinical students as they drank tea and told tales.
“They used to hold a cube of sugar between their teeth and sip the tea through like ‘shlup, shlup,'” she says, imitating the sipping sound. “Then, they’d talk about their wonderful rabbis, trying to outdo each other: ‘My rabbi is so holy he doesn’t have to open the envelope to read his mail.’ They all had these magic rabbis.”
About six months after Kristallnacht, Dollinger’s mother sent her to England on a Kindertransport train. Once in England she attended art schools, including Reiman School of Art and the London Polytechnic Institute.
Dollinger came to the United States in 1947 on a complimentary visa, provided for her service in the 3rd Army. She joined her sister in Oakland and soon after met her husband-to-be, Jerry Dollinger, at a “typical Jewish community center dance.”
“I didn’t want to go at all,” she recalls. At the time, she was working as a window-dresser and staying at the YWCA. “My brother-in-law made me, because I kept bringing home such awful young men. Max, he was a rabbi, said, ‘You will meet a proper boy.’ Then he left my sister and me there and went off to the movies.”
Jerry, she says, “was the only attractive guy there. He asked me to dance and we got married soon after.”
The Dollingers, who lived in South San Francisco, Redwood City and Palo Alto, were founding members of Congregations Beth Am in Los Altos Hills and Kol Emeth in Palo Alto.
It was after she married in 1948 that the full effect of World War II began to take its toll on Dollinger. While she was serving, she never really reacted to the tragedy. But a year after marriage, “when life was good, with a lovely husband and child,” it suddenly began to torment her.
“I began to have bad dreams, really bad dreams,” she says. When she had to go to the bathroom, she took her dog with her “and I was afraid to look in the mirror for a while.”
But Dollinger turned to happier subjects in her paintings and began exhibiting professionally in 1957. Since then, it has been displayed in the Western United States and Canada as well as in England and Israel.
Her work has received rave reviews, including from the late San Francisco Chronicle critic Alfred Frankenstein, “an absolute terror, who is probably sitting in heaven with a cigar in his mouth.”
The mother of four and grandmother of eight — who has helped found five Bay Area congregations — says she will paint as long as she’s standing.
“Seventy-six isn’t that old,” she says. “I have another 10 years left in me. In that time I should be able to come up with at least four more stories.
“There’s nothing awful about being old,” she adds. “It happens to the best of us.”