Of the 600 hundred citizens in the village of Meimbressen, Germany, 70 of them were Jewish. It is now considered a lost community, as not one Jewish family is left. Lee Mason was born Leopold Juda, the only son of Solomon and Bertha Klee Juda. Lee’s parents saw the handwriting on the wall shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. When a villager who owed Lee’s father money came to him in his Gestapo uniform and held a gun to his head telling him that the debt had been repaid, they knew it was time to leave Germany. They managed to immigrate to the United States.
Lee Mason and Fred Vorenberg were childhood friends and grew up in Germany together. They were separated by the Holocaust and reunited ten years later, by chance, in Hawaii in 1944. Lee was a member of the American Air Force, and Fred was a member of the American Army.
After the war, Lee was introduced to Hilde Grunebaum, and they were married in 1946. Because Lee’s mother did not want her grandchildren subjected to anti-Semitism, she convinced Lee and Hilde to change their last name to Mason.
Connecting Stories: Hilde Mason, Fred Vorenberg