'Look what Hitler missed.' Holocaust survivor, veteran celebrates 90th birthday
Lisa MacVittie still gets teary-eyed when she thinks about the first time she saw the Golden Gate Bridge. She was aboard the USS Gordon in 1949 with her Jewish family after spending a decade in Shanghai, China, as a Holocaust refugee.
Now, some 73 years later, Lisa is an Air Force veteran who lives in Clermont County. She recently celebrated her 90th birthday with a family reunion at home. Relatives traveled from out-of-state to catch up, share a meal and visit the Cincinnati Zoo.
But what made the reunion extra special was Lisa's idea for a family portrait. It features all of her living descendants with the caption "Look what Hitler missed."
Lisa's granddaughter, Jenny Lowrance – who affectionally calls her "Omi," German for grandmother ‒ was one of many relatives featured in the portrait and praised Lisa as "an amazing woman" with an "amazing story."
At the reunion, the MacVittie home buzzed with activity on the main floor as family members ate and unwound from an event-heavy weekend. Downstairs, Lisa recounted her family's journey that would, decades later, lead to her current life in Greater Cincinnati.
Lisa MacVittie's 'amazing story'
Lisa, who was born Liselotte Isaack in Berlin, Germany, in 1932, was only 6 years old when she remembers "things getting really hot for Jewish people."
It was Kristallnacht – a 1938 Nazi-led attack on Jewish-owned stores, synagogues and homes that left thousands of Jewish men incarcerated and over 90 dead – that sealed her parents' decision to flee Germany.
"That's when my parents and my father's brother decided this isn't going to stop," she said. "My father's parents kept saying, 'This will blow over. Jewish people have been persecuted many times throughout history. This will pass.'
"Both my grandfathers had the Iron Cross from the first World War," she continued. "They fought for that country only for it to turn on them like that."
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The following summer, Lisa's parents, uncle, 7-year-old sister and 12-year-old brother readied to make their escape. At the time, Lisa was hospitalized with polio, which had paralyzed her right side.
"They pulled me out of the hospital in the middle of the night," she said. "I remember when we got to the house, everything had changed. My mother packed up what she could, but you couldn't let them know that you were leaving."
Lisa remembers saying goodbye to her paternal grandparents, which is when her grandmother gave her a necklace with the Star of David. "She said, 'When your parents say this is OK to wear, I'd like you to wear it,' " Lisa recalled.
Her body cast would be a "dead giveaway" if anyone tried to identify them as they fled. So, her mother turned a stroller into a flatbed, which they would use to transport her out of the country. Thanks to her father's hobby as a stamp collector, he had several friends across Europe and one who owned a German travel agency.
"He said he could get us a visa to China, but we'd have to get ourselves to Naples, Italy, first," she said. "We took only the baggage that we could carry. We finally got to the edge of the Alps, the junction for Switzerland, Germany, Italy and France where all the trains meet."
The family was on the road for quite some time, Lisa recalls, making their way to Rome, Naples, and then taking a six-week cruise to Shanghai, where a doctor onboard removed her cast and she had to relearn how to walk.
During their travels, Lisa's Star of David necklace was accidentally left behind at a train station.
"Me being 6 years old, I howled loud and clear," she said. "But, I've thought about it so many times, that maybe someone found it and they are wearing it. I hope it makes them happy."
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Life in Shanghai
Lisa's family fled persecution in Germany only to arrive in the midst of the Second Sino-Japanese War in China, two years after the Battle of Shanghai.
"When we arrived, my mother looked at my father and said, 'What have we gotten ourselves into?' " she said. "The stench of the air was terrific. China had just come out of a very brutal battle with Japan and they had dead bodies all over the place."
With help from fellow European migrants, Lisa's family was able to find a home and integrate themselves into the Chinese and Japanese community. However, life further changed after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Nazi Germany demanded that Japan, its wartime ally, kill the approximately 20,000 Jewish refugees that were living in Shanghai. Japan refused, and instead, Lisa's family and thousands of others were moved into a restricted camp, which brought new problems of overcrowding, disease and starvation.
"There were 18 families to a room, with three or four bunk beds high," she said. "No flush toilets, no running water. For my mother, who was 'Mrs. Super Clean,' it was absolutely horrific."
Food in the camps "got pretty darn scarce," Lisa said. Her father, a tall man at 6 feet, 4 inches, dropped to just 90 pounds. Her 2-year-old sister, who had been born in China, did not survive.
Lisa and the other children at the camp attended a school owned by the Kadoorie family, a wealthy Jewish family originally from Baghdad. Jewish refugees, students and Chinese locals created a "tightknit" community that was "all we had," she said.
"If someone got ahold of some soap and water, they would share it with a friend, who would share it with a friend. Once it was passed around and got to you, you were happy to wash some socks, or at least get them wet.
"It was not as harsh as Auschwitz, and that's where we would have gone," she added.
Lisa remembers a community corkboard with mail from refugees' families trying to find them from another part of the world. There were no notes delivered for Lisa's family. None of her relatives that stayed in Germany survived.
Rescue and journey to San Francisco
At the executive order from U.S. President Harry Truman, American ships were sent to China to rescue Holocaust refugees after the end of World War II. Lisa and her mother, older sister and new baby brother boarded the USS General W. H. Gordon to San Francisco in 1949.
Lisa's older brother was able to board a ship to the U.S. before them and went to New Jersey, where her uncle and aunt were now settled. Her father was killed during the family's stay at the camp. Lisa's mother had to let police record his death as an accident because a murder would've prompted a police investigation, delaying the family's departure from China.
Lisa remembers the ship stopping in Honolulu, Hawaii, due to storm damage, where she drank orange juice and saw a water fountain for the first time. After years of malnourishment in the camp, she said the food on the ship was "just like heaven."
"When we finally came to San Francisco, it was 2 a.m. and the ship was coming under the Golden Gate Bridge," she said. "There wasn't anyone who wasn't up on the deck. Those are happy moments."
From California, the family traveled by Pullman train to New Jersey, where their relatives had rented them a room. Lisa's sister got a job at a bakery, where the owners supplied them with bread, and Lisa found employment at a corset factory and enrolled in high school.
"I didn't have any documentation to show that I had been in school. I didn't even have a birth certificate," she said. "But hey, they let me into this country and I was absolutely delighted."
'I figured I owed this country something, and this was one way to do it.'
In 1954, a 23-year-old Lisa became an American citizen. One month later, she joined the U.S. Air Force as an academic instructor.
"There were very few women (in the military)," she remembered. "They had mainly nurses. There weren't even women doctors (in the military) at that time."
She met her husband, Herbert MacVittie, who was a technical instructor, in the Air Force. Lisa left the service three years later after the birth of their first child, but continued to support the branch as a civilian.
"I figured I owed this country something, and this was one way to do it," she said. "That's why we put an American flag at every mailbox each Fourth of July. I try to teach my grandkids a little bit of patriotism. I have 144 flags, and they've been putting them at each mailbox since my husband and I bought this house 30 years ago."
Herbert remained in the service for over 20 years. One of his assignments brought Lisa and their children to Germany.
"I had second thoughts about (returning to Germany)," she said. "I decided I was going to go over there and enjoy it, and that's precisely what we did."
The family of six later moved to Oscoda, Michigan, while Herbert worked at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base. He eventually retired as an Air Force Master Sergeant and a member of American Legion Post 72.
"The military's been good to us. It's been good for us," Lisa said.
The couple began a lineage of service members, including their son, Herbert Jr., an Air Force service member, who died in 2004.
"My daughter-in-law is a flight surgeon in the Air Force and her son is an Air National Guardsman," Lisa said proudly. "He's only 19."
Herbert and Lisa considered spending their retirement in Kentucky to get away from Michigan's harsh winters. They settled on Summerside, Ohio, roughly 10 miles from the Ohio-Kentucky border, and bought a house in 1992.
"We liked it," Lisa said. "I'm not going anywhere."
Lisa has been an active member of her eastern Cincinnati community since, including being an American Legion Post 72 Color Guard guest speaker every year at Nagel Middle School. She shares her story with the students as well as a message of optimism, which she says she learned from her father.
"You have to have hardship in your life, because without it, you'll never know what happiness is," she said.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Holocaust survivor celebrates 90th birthday: 'Look what Hitler missed'
