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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/24660/full/24660/-war-orphan-in-san-francisco/ <br /><br /> <b>‘War Orphan in San Francisco’</b> <br /> Friday, December 24, 2004 | by dan pine <br /><br /><p>The letters could have come from any mother anywhere, anytime.<br /><br /> "My dear girl," begins one. "Have you got all your things? Please don't worry about me, be happy and cheerful ... I kiss you from the bottom of my heart."<br /><br /> But in this case, the letters come from a Jewish woman trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe writing to her 10-year-old daughter living safely in America. A daughter who never saw her mother again.<br /><br /> Phyliss Mattson has called the Bay Area home ever since she arrived here from Austria in 1940. Her first few years in San Francisco were a blur of orphanages and foster homes, but the letters to and from her parents became a lifeline.<br /><br /> Mattson saved every one.<br /><br /> Now, decades later, many of them have been published in Mattson's memoir "War Orphan in San Francisco" and excerpted in "Don't Wave Goodbye," the story of a little-known Kindertransport in which 1,000 Jewish children were sent to America during the Holocaust.<br /><br /> Last October, the Bill Graham Foundation, a supporting foundation of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, held a launch party for "Don't Wave Goodbye," attended by several survivors from the American Kindertransport, including Mattson. <br /><br /> "In the first letter I sent to my father, I asked him to save everything," says Mattson, 75, now a Cupertino-based anthropology professor. "People used to save letters, so maybe it wasn't such an unusual request. Every time I moved from one location to another, I found the letters and would reread them. They must have given me strength."<br /><br /> It wasn't until she was in her 70s that Mattson decided to write a memoir. But it required more work than she initially thought.<br /><br /> "It was overwhelming," she recalls. "There were over 200 letters. I finally put them each in a separate binder by date, then had them translated [from German]. As I worked with them, they seemed to be perfect chapters."<br /><br /> Born in Vienna in 1929, Felicitas (Phyllis) Finkel enjoyed a relatively idyllic childhood until the 1938 Nazi invasion of Austria. A year later, her parents shipped her off to America. Her mother stayed behind, ending up in labor camps and ultimately murdered. Her father rode out the war years incarcerated in Britain and Australia. Scattered across the globe, the three (along with extended family members) communicated by letter.<br /><br /> Felicitas, then renamed Phyllis, lived for a time in Homewood Terrace, San Francisco's now-defunct Jewish orphanage. She quickly learned English, and it soon became the language in which she and her father communicated.<br /><br /> In one letter from 1943, she writes to him: "Jewish New Years was here and Atonement Day. On those two days I thought of you and Mommy, as a brief summary of how fate did things to us ... before another year is passed I hope we are united again."<br /><br /> Though he probably knew very well that Mattson's mother was in grave danger, Samuel Finkel tried to reassure his daughter. In one letter from 1940, while imprisoned by the British, he writes: "Soon your Mutti will be with you ... Over here it is very beautiful; I live directly by the sea."<br /><br /> It all seemed so far away to his rapidly Americanizing daughter. "There was a war," she recalls, "and as kids we were interested in it. But in San Francisco there was more interest in the Pacific than in Europe. I followed [the war in Europe], but I didn't feel this was my story."<br /><br /> Still, she was well aware of the trauma inflicted on her family and fellow Jews in Europe. This tempered her sensibilities, even as a pampered American. "I was a camp counselor at age 20," she remembers. "The 10-year-olds would cry because they missed their mothers, whom they would see again in two weeks. I had no empathy for them."<br /><br /> Eventually, Mattson was reunited with her father in America, though the two never discussed the fate of her mother. Her father went on to adopt Orthodox Judaism while Mattson became something of a rebel.<br /><br /> "The first thing I questioned was religion, as many teenagers do," she says. "I wanted to know more about whether there was a God and whether I believed."<br /><br /> In the end, she decided she did not, and after discovering anthropology as a student at San Francisco State University, she abandoned religion for good.<br /><br /> Mattson traveled extensively, teaching English in China, serving in the Peace Corps in Nepal and working as a social worker in Wisconsin. But the Bay Area was her home and where she ultimately settled. Now divorced, Mattson has two grown children.<br /><br /> Though she eschews Jewish religious tradition, Mattson still identifies as a Jew. "I'm Jewish," she says, "that's a given. I love Jewish music, I go to the Jewish Film Festival, I've been to Israel. But because I'm an anthropologist, I see ritual as very automatic, and I'm a very independent soul."<br /><br /> Still, she hopes her book and "Don't Wave Goodbye" will inform the world of yet one more untold tale of the Holocaust. <br /><br /> "I feel my book is important historically, that's why I published it," she says. "The more I read the letters, the more I got out of them, the more I saw how my parents loved me. That gave me a lot of comfort in my old age." <br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /> <b><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/j04b-20/detail/0976165619/102-3330115-2812901">"War Orphan in San Francisco"</a></b> by Phyliss Helene Mattson (356 pages , Stevens Creek Press, $14.97).<br /><br /> <b>"Don't Wave Goodbye"</b> edited by Philip K. Jason and Iris Posner (273 pages, Praeger, $44.95).</p>

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