Episode 5 of 'Resistance, Resilience & Hope: Holocaust Survivor Stories': Ernie Heimann

On this episode, we hear from Ernie Heimann.

Ernie Heimann was born in 1929 in Mainz, Germany, 30 miles west of Frankfurt. During Kristallnacht, November 9th and 10th, 1938, Ernie’s school and synagogue were destroyed. In the aftermath of these events, his parents knew that they had to get Ernie out of Germany. Days later the British Parliament passed a bill that would allow the temporary admission of 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children into the United Kingdom. His aunt was in England visiting friends at the time and she made provisions for Ernie to come to England. On his tenth birthday he learned that in one week he would leave for England to live with a family in a suburb of London.

Before Kristallnacht, Ernie had been asking for a 26-inch bike, but he says that with all the events that occurred, a 26-inch bike became “not so important,” and that nothing greater could have happened on his 10th birthday than the gift of leaving Germany. It was February 1st, 1939, exactly seven months before the start of World War II, when he departed for England on the Kindertransport.

[Ernie Heimann] I tell you, it’s kind of surreal because all of this had been pre-prepared. In other words, this wasn’t a last-minute deal; this was all planned out ahead of time. They knew that England was an island surrounded by the sea, and across the channel, Germans.

In 1943 Ernie Heimann came to Chicago where he would eventually enroll at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He was drafted into the 101st Airborne, serving out the Korean War at Fort Benjamin Harrison near Indianapolis. Ernie made a career as a material manager in the furniture industry, and between he and his second wife, Roslyne, has four children, five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

We spoke at his home.

Photo credit: John Pregulman

“Resistance, Resilience &Hope: Holocaust Survivor Stories,” a co-production of Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center and Studio C, is a podcast series hosted by Andy Miles which tells the stories of nine Holocaust survivors in the Chicago area. Each episode features a conversation with a survivor, each traveling back in time to tell their story as it happened in Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, England, Shanghai, Israel, and America. During the Holocaust, the survivors in the series ranged in age from toddlers to teenagers, some of them held captive in urban ghettos and remote concentration camps, others in hiding and on the run.

The series is generously sponsored by Wintrust Community Banks.