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Holocaust Stories Shared at Pasadena Village

On October 10 and October 28, Pasadena Village members gathered for two powerful programs exploring the personal legacies of the Holocaust. Villager Arline Golden shared the story of her mother’s dramatic escape from Berlin just before the outbreak of World War II, and later in the month, Helen Kraus told the story of her father and grandmother’s perilous journey out of Vienna.

Though their paths were different - one made possible through sponsorship, the other through courage and stealth - both families’ escapes reflected extraordinary resilience and the will to survive.

Arline Golden: An American Rescue from Berlin

Arline Golden began her presentation with the story of her mother, Bea, who lived in Berlin during the rise of the Nazi regime. Now 102 years old, Bea was a child of the Weimar Republic who witnessed firsthand the gradual erosion of freedom and the escalation of antisemitic laws in Germany during the 1930s.

“As a non-Aryan,” Arline explained, “my mother and all Jewish children were expelled from public school.” Bea grew up under the tightening restrictions of Nazi Germany, living through the propaganda spectacle of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and, two years later, witnessing the terror of Kristallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass - on November 9, 1938.

That night, Nazi mobs destroyed synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses across Germany, murdered 91 Jews, and sent 30,000 men to concentration camps. “This was not yet genocide,” Arline told the audience, “it was extortion. To be released from the camps, Jews had to surrender everything - homes, property, jewelry. My mother carried the family silver in her bicycle basket to turn over to the authorities.”

Bea’s escape depended on both luck and generosity. To leave Germany, Jews needed a sponsor abroad and a payment for their release. In Bea’s case, an American synagogue and relatives in the U.S. raised the funds and secured the necessary documents.

In 1939, at only 15 years old, Bea was placed on a special children’s ship organized by a Jewish women’s agency in New York. “She traveled completely alone,” Arline said. “If she hadn’t left when she did, she would have been trapped when Hitler invaded Poland later that year.”

Arline described how Hitler’s government worked to erase Jewish identity. “Every Jewish woman’s passport was stamped ‘Sarah,’ every man’s ‘Abraham,’” she said. “You weren’t a person anymore, just a member of an unwanted ethnic category.”

Her presentation included remarkable family photographs, including her biological father Albert, several family members who were affected by Nazi persecution, and Bea’s 1938 passport marked with a large red “J” for Jude (Jew).

In 2007, Arline and her husband, Dan, accompanied Bea to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. There, Bea placed her original German passport—bearing that red “J”—on the museum wall alongside hundreds of others. “That act,” Arline said, “was her way of giving testimony. She wanted her story to join the collective memory, so that others might understand what it took to survive.”

Arline’s presentation reminded everyone that her mother’s rescue was not only an act of survival but also an act of faith—in family, in community, and in the power of strangers to help others across oceans and borders.

Helen Kraus: A Father’s Escape from Vienna

Two weeks later, Villager Helen Kraus presented the story of her father, Hans Felix Kraus, and grandmother’s escape from Nazi-controlled Vienna. Hans was a gifted young artist who studied at one of Vienna’s most prestigious art academies and began exhibiting his work as a teenager. When Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938, he was just 22 years old.

“By then,” Helen said, “Jews were forbidden to hold jobs or study in the universities. For artists like my father, survival depended on finding a way out.”

When the Gestapo came to their apartment looking for Hans, he went into hiding. Securing an exit visa was nearly impossible, but after weeks of fear and persistence, he managed to obtain the necessary papers. Together with his mother, he began a dangerous journey that took them across several European borders.

Helen showed a map so people could see how far he traveled—from Vienna to Lisbon. They crossed 5 treacherous borders to arrive at one the few ports still open to refugees.

By the summer of 1938, Hans and his mother reached Portugal, where they waited for months until they could board a ship to the United States. They finally sailed for New York in March 1939, only months before the start of the war.

In New York, Hans rebuilt his life through art. He wrote art reviews for newspapers, created illustrations, and even founded a small company that designed and published books. “He worked in many styles - watercolor, woodcuts, oil, acrylic - and his early pieces reveal an artist of tremendous sensitivity,” Helen shared.

Her own exploration of her father’s past became a journey of rediscovery. She described visiting archives in Vienna, uncovering records of his early exhibitions, and reconnecting with the young artist he had been before the war. During her talk, Helen displayed several of his paintings - evidence of his enduring creativity despite exile and displacement.

“In researching my father’s past,” she reflected, “I was really finding the self he left behind in Vienna - the young artist he was before he became a refugee.”

Shared Reflections

Together, these two presentations gave Pasadena Village members an intimate view of history—told not from textbooks, but through the lived experiences of two families.

As Villager Paula Rao reflected afterward, “Listening to Arline and Helen, you realize how much strength it took - not just to survive, but to rebuild a life, to create beauty and meaning again after losing everything.”

The Village thanks Arline Golden and Helen Kraus for sharing their families’ remarkable journeys. Their stories remind us that resilience, memory, and creativity can carry light through even the darkest moments of history.