Every week the death trains left the Westerbork transit camp. And every week, Erna Pinto managed to stay off of them.
“The food wasn’t too good. There was too much to die on and not enough to live on,” recalled Pinto’s brother, Fred Heilbronn, of the Dutch transit camp.
“Actually, as long as you did your duty, they left you alone. But you never knew if you were on the list to be shipped out. You just never knew.”
Pinto, who survived the camp to immigrate to America, marry and raise a family died May 3 following a lengthy battle with lymphoma. She was 82.
Born Erna Heilbronn in 1922 in Lengerich, Germany, she was evacuated to Holland on the Kindertransport when she was 16. Like virtually all Jewish refugees, she was placed in the Westerbork camp, which was established to keep the flood of Jews and others from displacing Dutch workers and possibly igniting a wave of anti-Semitism.
When Hitler invaded the Netherlands, however, the Nazis conveniently found all the Jews in one spot, which was converted into a transit camp. Erna Heilbronn managed to land a job as a cook’s assistant, and babysat his children.
While she and her brother Fred were fortunate, their father, stepmother and sister were shipped to Theresenstadt.
“At that time, Erna and I wanted to go along and my dad said no,” recalled Fred Heilbronn.
“Our brother, Philipp, was hidden in Holland and [my dad] said ‘you stay here’ in case he got picked up, then we could stay together.”
It was sound advice. Their father died in Auschwitz. Their stepmother and sister, Hilla, survived the war, as did Philipp, who died in 1949.
Erna first met her future husband, Erich Pinto, in Westerbork. A fellow German Jew, he was nine years her senior. After the war, when he found out she’d moved to Chicago, he asked her to come and visit him in San Francisco. The two were shortly married.
Erich Pinto sold his kosher butcher shop in 1951 and the couple moved to Petaluma, where he was a cattle dealer and she a manicurist. They were an integral part of the small town’s tight-knit Jewish community; daughter Ellen Page noted that people she went to Sunday school with showed up for her mother’s funeral.
“She didn’t have much of a family life. Her mother passed away when she was 7 years old and just a couple of years later she wasn’t allowed to go to school anymore because of Nazi laws,” said daughter Beverly Pinto.
“With her not experiencing much of a childhood, really, what she loved most and gave her the most fulfillment in life was her family, being a mother, a homemaker and a wife.”
The Pintos left Petaluma in 1976, moving back to San Francisco to be closer to a dialysis unit for Erich, who died in 1979. Over the last 26 years of her life, Erna enjoyed socializing, spending time with friends and family and attending services at Conservative Congregation Ner Tamid. But she never found the happiness and fulfillment she experienced as a wife and mother in Petaluma, said Beverly Pinto.
“My mother never really had a mother figure, so she almost had to wing it, being a mother,” recalled Ellen Page.
“She did an absolutely wonderful job of it. She liked to take care of people and see the fruits of her labor.”
Erna Pinto is survived by daughters Beverly Pinto of San Anselmo and Ellen Page of Calabasas, brother Fred Heilbronn of Modesto, sister Hilla Weiss of San Francisco, and four grandchildren.
Contributions in her memory can be sent to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, 1390 Market St., Ste. 1200, S.F., 94102 and the Jewish Home, 302 Silver Ave., S.F., 94112.