Their Story Their Voice
Their Story Their Voice
Cracking the Code of Silence: A Woman's Fearless Crusade to Reclaim History
This episode I was joined by Joanne Inrator who talked to me about the challenges she faced and overcame during her decade-long search for restitution for 16 Wallstrasse, a major center-city Berlin property that was taken from her family by the Nazis.
Her book has been featured in international magazine articles and museum exhibits.
Joanne was born and raised in New York City. Her parents fled Hitler's Germany as refugees. As a psychiatrist for 30 years, she conducted groundbreaking research on brain imaging of the criminally insane. The associated paper was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry and is frequently cited. The New Yorker magazine wrote about her scientific work.
Please note transcription accuracy may vary.
Music by - Neffex - don't want to let myself down
Neffex - A year go
https://joanneintrator.com/books/summons-to-berlin/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Summons-Berlin-Theft-Daughters-Justice/dp/1647425131
https://joanneintrator.com/2021/01/19/a-tribute-at-16-wallstrasse/
Hi, hi, hi, hi. Welcome to another episode of Their Story, Their Voice. This episode, I'm joined by Joanne there's many tangents that I go off on. I'm going to keep my introduction really short. Hope you're all good. Hope you're all well. Thank you so much for joining if we just start with you telling me a bit about you, your name, your background, anything that makes you who you are,
Joanne:Well, I'm, my name is Joanne Intretor, and I'm a New Yorker, born and raised in New York, and I am a psychiatrist, been for almost 40 years, and I love my work, and I will work forever, um, and I just completed a book called Summons to Berlin. Which is a true story. It's about my nine years going back and forth to Berlin to fight, uh, for a building. It's not a home. It's actually an extremely large manufacturing building in the center of Berlin that was hidden behind the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall came down, and that's how we knew that the building existed. And the building had been there, you know, obviously for, you know, 100 years, and then the Nazis took over, and then the Berlin Wall went up, and then it went down, and when it went down, Joanne went to Berlin.
Ad:Okay, I'm going to just ask you, why did you go to Berlin? Did the building mean something to you? Because you didn't go just because there was a building that was then visible because the Berlin Wall came down,
Joanne:You're so correct. My father was dying. It was, uh, April of 1993 and I was sort of keeping him company in a hospital room in Florida when all of a sudden he sat up and he looked like a young man. He sat up and he looked at me and he said, Are you tough enough yet? Do they know who you are? And I, I was shaken. And I said, Yes, Dad. Yes, yes. And he went right back down again. And two days later, he was dead. So that was our last exchange. if you could even call it that. I knew that he had heard and had written, gotten some paperwork about it. This large building in East Berlin, and he knew that it was likely going to be his daughter that was going to be taking his role and, making the claim for the building. So, he wanted to know, did you have it? Are you tough? Are you finally tough? And are you going to, you know, speak out and let them know who you are? And he asked those particular questions because I had a lot of trouble in my life not being that person. Actually, the very first time I went to Berlin was in 1967. And my father had asked me to visit this man who had taken care of his parents during the war and to thank him, And I was in this little hotel. And this man was at a certain address, and I kept breaking the date. I couldn't go. I couldn't walk the two or three blocks to see him. And then I had a full blown panic attack. And I called my father and I said, I have to come home. And he never spoke to me about it again. He didn't ask me We never discussed my Berlin trip. and... That was the, while he was dying, he then wanted to know how much have you grown up since 1967? Are you a grown up person now, now that you're a psychiatrist, now that you're doing brain imaging research on the bad guys, on psychopaths? Are you tough enough now to let them know who you are? That's, what was happening. And that was the whole, This book is really the challenge of my father and my own anxieties and real fears and the fact that people didn't want me to find out any information about the building and I didn't, no one helped me.
Ad:why did you choose the profession that you chose? What influenced that?
Joanne:Good question. I grew up in a household of refugees. I experienced relatives dying very young pretty quickly after making it to the United States from Nazi Germany. there was no a boundary of mother child. I was the helper from when I was a little girl, and I was what they call a parentified child. I was needed particularly by my mother to take care of my brother, to do the grocery shopping, to do all of those things I was needed by my mother to I had a lot of anxiety. Some of it I think was inherited and some of it was from the experience of, my household. So I want, and my father got very, very sick when I was eight. And. There are lots of doctors and nurses around and I decided I wanted to be a doctor and, but that, that like my Berlin story was a long story because I had so much self doubt that it took me going into other careers, finally into psychotherapy to get the guts to do it. Take even the math and science courses that I never took when I went to college and I did it all and I got into Columbia University, my first choice. I was the oldest woman in my class and I've always wanted to take care of people.,I still do all the time, um, whether I'm a psychiatrist or help people that have medical problems, get the right doctors that's part of my life.
Ad:Because of your profession that you chose, did that help you? on your journey when you went back to Berlin.
Joanne:Absolutely. I've a specialized interest in personality disorders, serious personality disorders that you see in severe narcissism, and you see in psychopaths, people that are cold and ruthless that have no empathy. I can recognize that. I can see people's behavior and I've learned to sort of pick up when people are lying to me or giving me information that's not very specific. And that ultimately helped me realize that I wasn't getting any help from the people that I, I had hired to help me, that they were speaking in platitudes, telling me about rumors, nothing specific about this building. And it allowed me then to say, I need. an expert and I hired an international investigator and I'm six years into this book back and forth to from New York to Berlin. Obviously, I'm only going five, six days at a time, maybe just once a year trying to find out about the building and really kind of getting nowhere and I'm being urged. To make a deal with the other people that were claiming the building and claiming my grandfather was a lousy businessman. And that's why he lost the building.
Ad:who were these people who were claiming the building? Who, who were they?
Joanne:At the time, in the beginning when I heard about them, they said that they, won the building in a forced auction in September 1938. My grandfather could no longer pay the mortgage. The Nazis that had been in power for five years and were just bleeding Jews dry. so he did not have the money. So these people said, well, we won the building in this, our auction. And it's not because your grandfather was Jewish. It was because he was a lousy businessman. this to me was such a slur and insult in 1938 to talk that way to me. So that's, they, so when the wall came down, they claimed the building also. They said, Oh no, no, no, it's not your building. It's our building. your grandfather was a lousy businessman. And the lawyers that I had said, well, why don't you split it with them, split it and get out of Berlin. Um, You make some money now and split it. And I said. Anybody that gets a building in the end of 1938, such a big building, they have to be Nazis. Oh, well, we can't find out if they were Nazis. That's not possible. All of which wasn't true. In the beginning, I believed them. I was like this good German daughter. German children are very well behaved. They may not be anymore now, because they've kind of woken, you know, uh, but in my day, you kept your mouth shut, or you got a slap across the face. It's very strict. And I behaved that way initially when I went to Germany. I was like this good girl. And then I started to realize I'm getting a lot of, you know, nonsense here. about who these people are and what and how they thought of my grandfather and that kept getting me to have more and more courage to say, I'm not getting the whole story here. And then I heard at one meeting that I had with my lawyers, he said, you know, there was a rumor that the Nazi flag was made in your building. And I said to myself, Joanne, you're smart. You know when people use the word rumor, they're really trying to tell you something, but they don't want to admit it. So, I started to wake up, like, uh, started to listen to the language better, which I'm very good at in a clinical setting like my office, but not so good at when I'm in Germany, scared, half out of my mind most of the time, um, but I started to realize that I'm not getting the information I need to get.
Ad:Where was the lawyer that you used? Where was he from? Was he from Germany also?
Joanne:He was a very well known German lawyer who, had a business of restitution. There was enormous amount of money to be made. When that wall came down, we're talking about probably more real estate, more developed real estate than anywhere in the world in West, in East Germany. And he, like a bunch of other lawyers, looked for clients and I was one of them. And he had a fantastic reputation and yet he wanted to make a deal and he kept saying I should. Split the proceeds with these other people and we'd make the money and get out of Germany. I would have nothing to do with it.
Ad:I'm so sorry.'cause part of me wants you to just continue, but then my brain just keeps going and then I have these questions that I want to ask. I'm so sorry. I will try my best not to do that. I will let you continue. from what you are saying, he didn't really want to help you. he just wanted the money.
Joanne:Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Ad:So where do you go from there? Where do you go from there? If the person who's supposed to be helping you, who's in Germany and you're not based in Germany all the time, where do you go from there?
Joanne:You get some help. You get some other help. And that's when I hired an investigator. When he said rumor about the Nazi flag, I knew this was now out of my hands. Now, I needed some real professional help to find out. When I asked this guy, uh, you know, could I find this out? He said, Oh, no, these things are not possible. That's when I began The idea of getting an international investigator who found out, of course, that the Nazi flag was made in the building, and 1941, one million Jewish stars, fabricated Jewish stars that get sewn on people who are manufactured in the building. So those things that you see in movies. On Jews, as they get shipped to the east to get killed, those were made in the family building.
Ad:I can't imagine what that must've felt like because for you, ultimately, it w it was never about the money. That wasn't what it was for you.
Joanne:That's terrible. you're completely correct. we're now sort of nine years into this and there's still negotiation and fighting and stuff, even though I found this information out, um, I was the sort of the youngest of the claimants. There were many other relatives that had a piece of the property. My piece was 3. 15%. It was a very small amount of money, but there were these relatives who were. older and had, you know, I guess needed the money. There was pressure on me to pay these people off because these people were not going to go away. The people that claimed the building was theirs because my grandfather was a bad businessman. And Eventually what happened in, in the year 2000, started in 1993, I had this wonderful elderly, lawyer in the United States who was also a, had been a refugee, um, and he was like an advisor to me, like a rabbi, and he got very worried about me, and he said, I think you need to give them something, because this will never end. And a lot of your relatives, they need the money and the pressure is going to be on you for a long time to give in. I was the only, so see if you can find your way to, to come up with some sort of compromise, give these people some money. I still didn't do it. What I decided to do was organize the group of relatives and make us one unit. And the way I did it was that I had studied all the letters in my father's files. His files are all in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They're unbelievable letters that go on through World War II. Very moving and very touching. And there was one relative... That was related not only to my side of the family, but to this other, to the other part of the owners of the building. And I said, look what happened to Max. And I had the letters describing how Max was rounded up by the Nazis and taken here and taken there. And then finally taken to this place and murdered. I said, we are his relatives. We can't just, you know, give in when this has happened to a member of our family. So I organized all the people that were saying, Come on, Joanne. Come on, Joanne. You know, let's make a deal. So they received Max's letters from me, and I brought the family together, and ultimately, we gave these people a little bit of money, the other ones, and the case ended I was a mess at this point. You know, without this Hans Frank, this wonderful lawyer, who's no longer with us, he sat me down and said, Joanne, you have a life in New York. You have a career. You have a son. You keep at this and you're destroying yourself. You have to find a way out of this with pride. Thank but you've got to get out of it because your life, when I found out about the Jewish stars, I said, if I didn't have any family, I'd be, I'd fight these people for the rest of my life. That's how I felt.
Ad:how you were able to keep going? Because I know what you wanted to do it for your dad, but actually it was more than that. It, to me, it just, to me, it's more than that. It's more than just your dad.
Joanne:right, right. it was my own self respect, my own anger at what the Nazis had done. Not, you know, I wanted to fight whoever I could fight because of what happened in World War II. And again, the lawyer said to me, Joanne, you're not going to bring one person back. you giving up your life fighting this case forever.
Ad:I agree and I understand why he said that, but it's more than that. It's more than that because when you know something has happened and you just sit by and you just let it go that's almost saying, well, that bit of history, that was okay, but this, this is just me. I'm very much a, sometimes even if they're not around, we still have to fight because it wasn't fair. So by you leaving it. would have been you saying, I don't know, sometimes we have to fight and sometimes we have to fight for those who aren't here anymore. That's what I believe.
Joanne:exactly. Well, that's why I wrote the book. Everything is there. And how I feel about these situations and decisions that I've made. I think I've crafted a very good book. Giving you my personal story. As we've discussed, but also the whole notion of what's going on and what, when we have to say no, and when we have to say enough, and how that's coming on us now, my author's note in the, at the end of the book really speaks to, you know, similarities in our world now and then, and the necessity for telling the truth and standing up for what is right.
Ad:in your opinion, because obviously, I know Germany is not the same as it was then, but are there still some, you know when you live in a situation and this is what it was like years ago, and is it still, is there something still ingrained just in the community that those wounds for the German people, actually, they're still there.
Joanne:I think the Germans have done an amazing job trying to, uh, repair as, as much as they can repair from what happened then. Of course, they can't fix it. There's no making good again. And I think the young people in Germany are very oriented to having shame and, about what happened in the past. however, There's a very strong, not very large, but very strong, extreme right party. It's gotten stronger in the last few years. I don't know who they are or where in Germany they are. I don't suspect they're in Berlin. They're, Berlin seems so cosmopolitan. I expect it not to be in some of the modern cities, but that the extreme right in Germany exists as we have here. We have an extreme right, and we have, and we're seeing it all over the world, the ascendants of tyrants who have the answers, who like to tell people who are afraid what to do, it's very pervasive in our world right now. And it's a time in our world when people are afraid. And what, because of climate change, because of the movement of refugees, there's more movement of refugees now than there's ever been at any time in the history of the United States. It frightens people. I mean, the refugees have to move. They can't stay where they're staying. But the influx of refugees is frightening to people. The climate change and the effect, the physical effect of climate change and the problems that heat causes on human beings. And that's going to affect, you know, vegetation. these things are fodder for so called strong men that play on people's fears. and that makes it a kind of a dangerous situation
Ad:so you correct me if I'm wrong. does history just repeats in a different way. Do we actually really learn?
Joanne:I think the fact is there are times in history that are more threatening than others. When they're, when those times come up, you know, come upon us, where more vulnerable for, to repeat the things that have occurred in previous times. It's, human nature. It's human nature to when you're afraid to want to look to someone to tell you what to do or or you want to be part of a group that feels strong. It's human nature. And so I think that's what repeats itself is human nature and not the actual facts of human nature that is comforted by the tyrant. That has definitely happened since the beginning of time. We have to be educated. We have to talk out loud about it. We have to talk to our children. We have to make sure our children are safe. we're in a difficult situation right now, here in this country. And in other countries, on the other hand, There's a lot of goodness in human nature, too, and a lot of people come forward and show their very best selves during this time. So, we have to hope that, that happens more and more. I think that, so far, in the history of this country, It's turned out that way. There've been really rough times, and we've done okay. There've been rough times before this rough time, and we've come out okay. That doesn't mean we have to not pay attention to the things that can, you know, uh, threaten us.
Ad:I do like to think there's more good than there is bad. in a sense, do you believe that it's easier now in a way, because we're more informed? when everything was happening in Germany with Hitler, I remember watching a documentary and it when people were coming to say I was a prisoner of war, this has happened, but nothing was, nothing was documented. Or when the allies were finding these graves, which they didn't know that was happening. I don't know if this is me being ignorant, but I like to I believe through the internet, through social media, we're better informed now. It's harder to get away with things.
Joanne:That's true. Absolutely. I agree with you.
Ad:I wanted to ask you something you said you, you love your job and you're going to keep doing it for as long as you can. And you mentioned something which I wish I'd written down because you mentioned about, mentioned about narcissists and. And you used another word. What was it? Why is it that particular area interests you? Why did you choose that?
Joanne:you mean the bad guys? The psychopaths?
Ad:Yes. Yes.
Joanne:I guess sort of on the line that I wanted to be alert to seeing these things, you know, in real time, I wanted to know what to look for. It probably came out of my background. You know, uh, what do the bad guys look for? Am I going to be up front and know what to do to make these things not happen? But it was really also, what is it in human nature that makes us do these kinds of things to each other? You know, I was very interested in that, but it came really, As a result of my parents experience and my family's experience in Nazi Germany, I wanted to try to understand how human beings could do the things that were done to one another there.
Ad:Does understanding why, I don't know, does it, does it make it easier? Does it? Is it easier when you understand why?
Joanne:it feels as if understanding gives me a chance to do something. not that I've been able to do anything about anything really. Well, my understanding did allow me to stop the nonsense that was going on, keeping me from having information in Berlin. My ability to know these kinds of things. Did help me. So I think it makes me feel less helpless to know about stuff like this, you know, and, I also think as a psychiatrist, it helps me with my patients when they have decisions to make. and there may be ethical decisions that need to be made and thought out. I think I'm better able to think out the pros and cons of certain types of behavior and communicate that to my patients so that they make better choices in their life.
Ad:You are helping. because they need to speak to someone, they need someone to be able to look at their thought process from a different side, a side that most of us, I couldn't do that. I can barely deal with most of the thoughts that go on in my head most of the time. I need to ask you one more question, because I got so carried away with just asking you things about you. what's happening with the building now? In 2023, what has happened with the building?
Joanne:it was sold, When the case was over, it was sold to, I don't remember who bought it, and monies were divided up. And then the building was bought by a company in Zurich, a wonderful company that was very much interested in the building's history and did a major event for, me and In 2018, where a plaque was placed on the building with my family's name on it and what had occurred in the building and now they're no longer there. So the building is like a combination of different types of stores and warehouses, manufacturing and stores. It's a kind of a hip looking building, in the middle of East Berlin and. I go periodically and just take a look at it. and, you know, it's interesting. It was bombed during the war, you know, and rebuilt by the East Germans. it's a handsome building, but A very large manufacturing building that's now sort of in a hip area. So there's shops in it, good places to eat,
Ad:it's a place where happiness happens, you know, people go and eat there.
Joanne:That's right. Life happens.
Ad:So, a place that. At the time before, it didn't represent something that was positive, it represented negativity and just the worst of, and I am going to say this, the worst of human beings. I love that. Thank you. Thank you so, so much. I'm so glad that I actually got to speak to you I'm so glad. thank you for wanting to represent something more. For fighting. For fighting for what was right. Not just because I know it started with your dad, but actually, in the end, you were led by your heart.
Joanne:Thank you for asking me that question because it allowed me to organize my brain a little bit in that, and that's exactly what happens in, in this office is that information comes, I can help people sort things out, sort the consequences out, help them they are then more informed to make better choices. That's what happens. Many times a day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Ad:Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Their Story, Their Voice. in the show notes I'm going to put links to Joanne's book, and just relevant information regarding the building that she fought so hard for an obvious reason. So have a good day, have a good week, and I'm going to do it. I'm so sorry. Let's just all try and do better by ourselves and by one another. Bye bye bye!
