Memories of the Denver Sheltering Home for Jewish Children

Eric Cahn honors his mother’s memory by speaking to groups about the Holocaust. He stands by a simple shrine to her in his office, a dried arrangement and painting of winter

by Kathy McKoy
NORTH DENVER Eric Cahn wants others to know that living in a Denver orphanage was the highpoint of his youth. “Strange as that might seem,” Eric Cahn muses, “being in an institution, those were the best years of my life. It’s true.” From age 16 to 18, Cahn lived at the Jewish National Home for Asthmatic Children (originally the Denver Sheltering Home for Jewish Children), once located on the city’s west side, just east of Sloan’s Lake. It’s only when one knows something about his earlier childhood that one can make sense of his statement. It is described in his autobiography, Maybe Tomorrow: A Hidden Child of the Holocaust.

Cahn’s traumatic childhood was largely shaped by Hitler’s rise to power, World War II and the Holocaust. Born in Mannheim, Germany in 1938, Cahn was only a toddler with a newborn sister when, on October 22, 1940, his family and all the city’s Jews were forcibly deported by boxcars to Camp Gurs in the south of Nazi – occupied France. One of the goals of the French Resistance was to rescue children from the internment camps. Many Jewish couples, including Cahn’s parents, made the heartwrenching decision to relinquish their children into the safekeeping of non – Jewish families. In August 1942 fouryear – old Eric went to live with one French couple, his sister with another. One month later, Eric’s parents were sent to Auschwitz in Poland. His mother died there but his father survived.

Eric was kept hidden in his French rescue family’s basement until 1944, when he and his sister were reunited in an orphanage near Paris. Their father located them in 1946 and took them back to Germany. In 1950 he sent the children to Pueblo, Colorado to live with their maternal grandparents who had escaped Germany in 1939. Three years later, the poor and ailing grandparents could no longer continue raising their teenage randchildren.

After brief foster care in Denver, Jewish Family Services eventually placed Eric and his sister in the Jewish National Home for Asthmatic Children, which also housed small numbers of orphans. After a childhood full of tragedy and dislocation, Cahn later recalled, “I arrived at the Home full of hope, and from the very start, it truly felt like home.” The institution’s administrator, Jack Gershtenson nicknamed “Mr. G”), was one of the reasons why. Gershtenson became the kind and caring father figure the young man desperately needed and had never had. After graduating from North High, Cahn attended University of Colorado, Boulder. While other college students returned home for weekends, holidays and summers, Mr. G worked out an arrangement whereby Cahn could return and stay at the institution in exchange for working with youth. When a permanent job opened up three years later, Mr. G offered it to him. Cahn worked as director of residential programs from 1964 to 1968, when his career went in another direction. He is grateful to Mr. G who he says “did a lot to give me opportunities to develop and grow and go on to do things that I might not have done otherwise.”

Cahn’s life took yet another turn in 1991 when he attended the first International Hidden Child Conference in New York City. “It was one of the greatest weekends of my life… I was able to find people who had similar experiences that I’d had.” But the conference also unleashed a Pandora’s box of painful memories. Soon after he returned home, Cahn helped start a local support group for Jewish child survivors of World War II, which has been meeting ever since. The conference also inspired Cahn to speak publicly about his past to a variety of groups, especially to schoolchildren. He explains why: “It’s important to me, especially with young people… that they hear from someone who had an experience with the Holocaust, so they know it firsthand from someone that it did happen, and what happened.” It is also a way to honor his mother’s memory.

Denver’s orphanage for Jewish children was torn down in the 1980s. How does Cahn feel about the fact that there is nothing left of it, the one place in his childhood that felt like home? He vividly recalls the day he discovered by accident that all the buildings had been demolished. “I didn’t realize until I drove by one day… and it was completely razed, nothing left. I went by expecting to see it, expecting to walk through and just reminisce and there was nothing. It was a very sad moment for me.”

Clara Gertz too was surprised and disappointed to discover some years back that the Denver Sheltering home for Jewish Children was gone. She lived six years at the home, from age 9 to 15. In many ways, Gertz was typical of the children who lived in Jewish orphanages in the early 20th century. Born Clara Cohen in 1929 in Harlem, NY, her parents were Russian immigrants. The family moved to Denver during the Great Depression because times were tough and a relative lived here. When her parents divorced a short time later, Clara and her sister Bernice were made wards of the court then placed in the Denver Sheltering Home.

Gertz says life at the orphanage can best be described as “regulated.” everyone got up at 6 a.m., washed, then marched singlefile through an underground tunnel to the dining room to eat. The younger children walked together to nearby Cheltenham School. After school, the children were given a snack, then it was time for chores. Daily duties might include working in the dining hall, the kitchen, or the laundry. ertz learned to use the sewing machine and mended clothes. Children who dusted had their work inspected by a matron’s white glove. Evenings were spent studying in the library until bedtime. “I think that living a regulated life was wholesome and beneficial,” says Gertz. “I never it looked at it as so terrible, having lived that kind of regimented life. You adhered to the rules. I mean there was no other way…” While a predictable daily routine may have had its benefits, the same philosophy

Mending clothes was one of the routine chores preformed by the girls.

applied to cuisine made for a monotonous diet. What did Gertz think of orphanage dining hall fare? “I think in terms of sameness,’ to the degree that today I will not eat a sweet roll because we had them every day.” She ponders a moment recalling another dining hall memory: “If there’s something I dislike in this world it’s bread pudding. I would take the napkin and I’d put it on my lap and I’d drop the bread pudding on it and then I’d run to the bathroom and flush it down the toilet. I hate bread pudding!”

At the end of the school week, activities changed but were equally regimented. “There was always Friday night service. We always had chicken. We had Sunday school on Sunday morning, even if you had company or were going out.” (Sunday was visiting day.) Was Saturday a free day? Only “to a point,” said Gertz. That was the day when volunteer instructors came to teach music or dance lessons. One of her favorite Saturday afternoon activities was going as a group to the movies. In winter, children from the home ice – skated on Sloan’s Lake.

Mending clothes was one of the routine chores preformed by the girls.

Discipline at the home was meted out in different ways, ranging from corporal punishment to loss of privileges. “The matron in the girls’ building had a radiator brush and she’d pound your bottom or you were restricted from going to the show on Saturday,” Gertz recalls, adding later, “I must also tell you I was a very bad child, I mean bad! At one point in the religious class at night I’d get all the kids to stare at the teacher and it made her very uncomfortable. And at one point the superintendent said to me, If you don’t behave, we’re going to put you out as a domestic!’”

Cahn leads children in their morning exercise routine. Orphanage administrators recognized play and exercise were an important part of a childs healthy development. 1962, photo courtesy Eric Cahn

Gertz already knew from her mother’s example how hard life could be in the real world. With no job skills and poor English, her divorced mother worked as an aide for the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society, which provided her room and board. She visited the girls every Sunday, Gertz recalled, often taking them on outings. As a teenager, Gertz was sometimes embarrassed by her Orthodox mother’s oldworld ways. “For Jews it’s always been important to fit in,” she confided. “It’s an important part of life, to fit in.” Gertz was 15 years old before the New Deal program, Aid to Dependent Children, made it possible for her and her sister to live with their mother. By that time, these children of Russian immigrants were well on their way to becoming “Americanized,” in large part due to an orphanage experience and involved west side community which taught them how to “fit in” without abandoning their Jewish faith and traditions.