Hidden History

��, Arches

For years, Henry Haas ’60 didn't know about the horrors his family escaped. Now, he's making sure the story doesn't get lost.

Henry Haas ’60 grew up in the 1940s in a refugee settlement in Shanghai, in a single 10-by-12-foot room he shared with his parents. There was no toilet, no running water. A simple sponge bath involved his parents going out among the crowds to buy hot water from street vendors. Haas walked to school, where he and other Jewish kids learned their lessons in German and English.

It was a hard childhood, to be sure. But Haas had no idea what his parents had gone through simply to get him to that point—to keep him alive during a horrific chapter of human history. He didn’t know that his parents had fled Berlin in 1938, when he was an infant, to escape the Nazis. He didn’t know about Adolph Hitler. He had no idea about the fate of his maternal grandparents, who stayed behind in Germany in the hope that things would get better—and who would end up perishing in a concentration camp. He didn’t know that 53 other members of his family would suffer the same fate.

Fifty-three.

“My parents wanted to give me the most normal life possible as a child,” he says now of the choice not to burden him with the reality of his family’s experience.

Henry Haas' grandmother Gerda Buchheim — Haas’ mother, Gerda, at age 20. She had hoped to attend a university and become
a teacher, but was turned down because she was Jewish.

It wasn’t until Haas was a teenager living in Washington state that Gerda Haas began to tell her son, in bits and pieces, about the family’s dangerous and complicated journey to freedom. They had escaped death twice, it turns out—first in Germany, as the Nazis came to power, and then in Shanghai in 1943, when the Nazis ordered the Japanese to annihilate Jewish refugees living in that city. (For reasons not fully known, the Japanese never carried out the plan.) But in the mid-1990s, when Haas was a Tacoma lawyer and a married father of three, he finally learned the full story of his family’s escape from Nazi Germany. Around the dinner table, he and his wife, Kate, would listen intently to Gerda’s stories. One day, Kate said to her mother-in-law, “I really want to write your story.”

"Who would want to hear my story?”

“Your grandchildren,” Kate replied.

As it turns out, plenty of others, too. Kate first convinced Gerda to write an outline, then filled in the details based on many more in-depth conversations. Taking notes by hand on yellow legal pads, Kate began to weave the notes into a narrative. Eventually, she typed them into a document titled History of Gerda Buchheim Haas—Holocaust Survivor. The story opens with a message written by Gerda herself: “Our story is outlined in the ensuing pages,” she wrote, “and I hope it serves to provide a record of a point of time in history when prejudice and antisemitism, along with sheer madness, ruled this world.”

Gerda Buchheim and Hans Haas were married in 1935. Soon after, with the Nazis closing in, Hans applied for Czech citizenship—a move that may well have saved their lives.

Henry and Gerda began to tell their story together, informally, and kept telling it until Gerda died in 2012. A few years ago, Henry signed up to be part of the speakers’ bureau of the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle. Haas, who at age 84 is still a practicing attorney, gives a PowerPoint presentation featuring a faded family photo that includes 11 family members who died in the Holocaust.

“I realized I had a story to tell, and I wanted to share it on a more regular basis,” he says. “I know there are kids out there who are in the same position I was, and I wanted them to hear my story."

The story begins before Henry Haas was born. His parents, Gerda and Hans, were teenagers in Berlin—not even a couple yet—when the ominous signs started.

Haas' grandparents, Max and Paula Buchheim — Haas’ grandparents, Max and Paula Buchheim, refused to flee Germany. Max had served in the German military in World War I and was sure his veteran status would spare him. Both were murdered at Auschwitz.

Gerda worked in her father’s butcher shop and studied hard at school, hoping to get into university and become a teacher. But she was rejected, because she was Jewish. New laws were closing in on their middle-class world. The Nazis declared that Jews could only work for Jewish organizations, so Gerda worked in Jewish summer camps and day care—until Hitler closed Jewish businesses altogether.

In 1935, she married Hans, who had been her childhood friend and was now a salesman in the fur trade. Anticipating the trouble that was coming, Hans applied for and was granted Czechoslovakian citizenship, because his father, Samuel, had been born there. The citizenship certificate, good for 10 years, would later prove invaluable.

The next year, the newlyweds attended the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The international visitors who poured into the city didn’t see the “No Jews Here” signs that had been removed from the benches just before the Games, only to be restored afterward. Gerda and Hans watched Jesse Owens, the great Black sprinter from the United States, win the 100-meter dash—then watched Hitler refuse to shake his hand.

Street-smart and plugged into the precarious political situation, Hans told her, “We need to leave.” At first, Gerda didn’t see the need. She had no interest in politics as a young woman, and believed her father, Max, who told her, “This garbage will go away.” But as the threat of violence continued to escalate, Hans pleaded with his now-pregnant wife. She agreed, but wanted to wait long enough for her child to be born in Germany. Henry was born in April 1938, and the family left the country three months later.

A 1926 photo showing Gerda Haas’ extended family. Of the 15 people in the photo, six were killed in the Holocaust.

They first traveled to the city of Nitra, in what is now Slovakia. Within three weeks, Nazis turned up in the city. So the family snuck through the woods to catch a train to Prague, where they stayed for seven months—but it wasn’t long until the Nazis began increasing their numbers there, and the family was on the run again. They split up: Hans traveled—illegally—into Holland, in hopes of selling furs to fund their ultimate passage out of Europe, while Gerda, her father-in-law, and baby Henry moved temporarily to Alassio, Italy. Three months later, they reunited in Paris and made a plan: They would work with a French Jewish Refugee organization to get tickets on a ship to Shanghai, which had a reputation as a safe haven. (Altogether, more than 20,000 Jews fled to Shanghai between 1933 and 1941.) On July 7, 1939, a year after fleeing Germany, the Haas family boarded the ship Président Doumer, for a three-week trip to China.

Henry Haas ’60 and his parents in Prague — Henry Haas ’60 was born in Germany in 1938, as Nazi violence was escalating. Three months later, the family fled to Nitra (now part of Slovakia) and then to Prague, where this photo was taken.

Instead of the haven they envisioned, they found oppressive conditions—it was 105 degrees on the day they arrived. They slept on the roof of their row house to escape sweltering heat.

In Shanghai, Hans—who had a scrappy, entrepreneurial spirit—started selling chocolate-covered bananas. But that business didn’t pan out, since the chocolate kept melting in the blistering sun. After several laboring jobs, he found more success selling nonperishable items, such as shoes and clothes. The family was impoverished, a stark contrast to the middle-class life they had had in Germany, but they at least escaped antisemitism—for a time, anyway. Henry attended the Kadoorie School, established by hotelier and philanthropist Horace Kadoorie for Jewish refugees. He doesn’t remember experiencing bias as a child.

But things took a turn in 1943, when the Japanese forces occupying Shanghai ordered all Jewish refugees to live in a one-square-mile ghetto called the “Designated Area.” Anxiety spiked as rumors spread that they were about to be killed. Col. Josef Meisinger, later dubbed the “Butcher of Warsaw,” told Japanese leaders to plan their own version of the Final Solution for the Jewish refugees living in Shanghai. The Japanese never carried out the orders.

The Jewish community remained sequestered in the ghetto for the rest of the war, enduring bombings that killed 125 refugees; Haas still remembers the frequent air-raid sirens. In 1945, after German and Japanese troops surrendered, American and British ships arrived in Shanghai. Haas recalls a day when his friend Rolf Preuss heard the jubilant sailors were handing out sweets, so they decided to skip school and go down to the waterfront. “I had never had chocolate,” Haas says. “Rolf commandeered a rickshaw and made a deal that we would split everything we got.”

A photo taken at a birthday celebration in 1928 shows Haas’ father’s side of the family. Nine of the family members shown here perished in the Holocaust.

“We wound up at the dock,” says Preuss, a retired architect who lives in Seattle and is still friends with Haas today. “The U.S. officer saw these two little European kids surrounded by thousands of Chinese. They picked us up and took us on a PT boat to the main ship. They gave us goodies.”

The jubilation of Hitler’s defeat was tempered by the sobering reality of what had taken place back home in Germany. Gerda desperately tried to find out what happened to her parents. Lists were posted in Shanghai of people murdered by the Nazis, and in 1946, she saw the names of her parents—Max and Paula—on one of the lists. They had been killed at Auschwitz.

Gerda and Henry in 1941 — In 1939, Gerda, Hans, and Henry boarded a ship to Shanghai—and safety. The family stayed in Shanghai for eight years; this photo was taken in 1941.

Meanwhile, the Haas family was still in limbo. They had no interest in returning to Germany, and the family had relatives in New York City, so they decided to apply to move to the United States. Jewish refugees in Shanghai were initially considered “stateless,” though eventually the Haas family was classified as Czechoslovakian. Because of U.S. immigration quotas, it took two years for their number to come up. In March 1947, they finally took a troop ship across the Pacific Ocean, arriving in San Francisco on the day before Henry’s 9th birthday. Initially, with help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, they were resettled in Portland, Ore.; then, when Henry was 11, the family moved to the small farming town of Centralia, Wash. Always the entrepreneur, Hans (who changed his name to John once he was in the U.S.) teamed up with a partner to open a Western store that sold jeans and cowboy hats. Henry began working in the store when he was 12.

The Haas family moved to Tacoma when Henry was 17; there, John opened another store, and his son worked there almost daily. Henry graduated from Stadium High School and attended the then-College of Puget Sound, juggling his studies in business with work. (One of his professors was Col. Burton Andrus ’55, the U.S. Army officer who had been in charge of Nuremberg Prison, which housed the accused Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.)

6-year-old Henry Haas ’60 — Six-year-old Henry at the Shanghai Boxing Club in 1944. China ultimately took in 20,000 Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi persecution.

Haas loved college: One day, his father offered him $800 a month to quit school and work full time in the store, and Henry responded, “But I don’t want to work at your store for the rest of my life.” Instead, he finished college, attended law school at the University of Washington, and then launched a career he has loved for 60 years and counting.

He started as a law clerk at the Washington State Supreme Court, then worked for a small law firm for two years before opening his own storefront law office. “I handled anything and everything that came through the door.” After 18 years, he joined the Tacoma law firm of McGavick Graves and stayed for 36 years before transitioning back to a home office during the pandemic.

“He’s well-respected in the law community,” both as a lawyer and philanthropist, says Laurie Davenport, director of development and outreach for Tacoma Pro Bono Community Lawyers. Not only did Haas serve on the nonprofit’s board and spearhead a major fundraising campaign, he is also known for his exemplary volunteer work with low-income clients. “He does whatever it takes to help the client,” Davenport says. “I think that comes from what he survived, what his family went through.”

Henry Haas ’60 with his parents at his high school graduation — The family arrived in San Francisco in 1947 and lived in Portland, Ore.; Centralia, Wash.; and then Tacoma. Haas (shown with his par- ents) graduated from Stadium High School in 1956.

Haas and his wife also have connected with other family members who scattered around the globe after fleeing Nazi Germany. The couple have met them on trips to Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, England, Israel, and elsewhere. In 1997, the 50th anniversary of arriving in the States, they took a trip back to Shanghai, posing for a picture in front of the row house where Henry’s family once occupied a room. In 2015, they returned to Berlin to dedicate stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” implanted in the sidewalk to memorialize Henry’s maternal grandparents—Max and Paula—as well as an uncle who also died at the hands of the Nazis. Haas also continues to make presentations about his family’s story, with Kate helping.

Bruce Mann, professor emeritus of economics at Puget Sound, has heard his talks (one of which can be found on YouTube). “It is an amazing story, and he is a very good speaker,” Mann says. “Everyone I know who has watched him present is quite moved.” Mann also notes Haas’ longtime leadership in the Pierce County Jewish community: “Henry offers an outstanding role model for what a caring and compassionate person can do,” Mann says, adding, “I believe his dedication to these efforts is a direct response to the help and assistance he and his family received as they fled the horrors of the Holocaust.”

Henry ’60 and Kate Haas on their wedding day

Henry and Kate Haas were married in 1963. It was Kate who helped encourage Henry’s mother to share the family’s Holocaust story more widely.

In one presentation a year ago, Haas was asked what message people should take from his experience.

“I guess the message I would have is we all have to have tolerance for others, regardless of differences,” he responded. “We have to under- stand that society has to cater to the needs of everybody, and the needs are all different.

“We need a society where we’re mindful of everybody’s needs, interests, and cultures.”

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