Leo and Hertha Mohl chose to live in interesting times, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes through their own making.

That’s according to Bob Mohl, who will deliver a presentation about the colorful lives of his Austrian parents, who fled Nazi persecution during WWII, immigrated to the U.S. in 1940, and wound up living in Colorado Springs for more than half a century. The free event is part of the biannual Pikes Peak Library District’s Peak Legacies series. It’s Feb. 7 at East Library.

“I like doing this because I’m spending more time with my parents,” Bob said. “It’s bringing them back to life, in a way. I’m reliving their life story and also reliving my own childhood.”

Though they didn’t know each other in Austria, Leo and Hertha shared a similar path in the 1930s, when they were both involved in the anti-Nazi resistance. Leo was a major organizer and leader, while Hertha liked to distribute leaflets; she was stopped once by police while passing out literature. But when they searched her bag, they encountered only a wet swimsuit and let her go, failing to find the bag of leaflets underneath.

Leo, however, was not so lucky. Though they both had a Jewish background, they weren’t practicing Jews; it was Leo’s activity in the resistance that landed him in Dachau, one of the first concentration camps built by Nazi Germany in 1933. 

“A lot of this happened after the annexation of Austria by Germany,” said John Jarrell, PPLD’s program coordinator for regional history and genealogy. “WWII is a part of history people are really interested in. It’s interesting that a town like this, even before the military bases were really established here, already had connections to larger international wars and histories.”

On the same day he arrived at the camp, his future wife fled Austria for England, thanks to her fraught police interrogation. It was May 31, 1938.

Leo was transferred to Buchenwald, another concentration camp, before being released nine months later and fleeing to London.

“Both have talked about how you could tell when someone had been in a camp. They have this thousand-yard stare, and they wouldn’t look around. They were blanked out,” Bob said. “They were shell-shocked. The advice they gave him in the camps was don’t draw attention to yourself. That’s how you get into trouble. You don’t want the guards or Gestapo to notice you.”

Bob believes his father’s release was the result of being segregated into a political prisoners group in the camp.

“Camps were organized into groups affiliated with each other. There were the criminals, the religious, both the Jews and other religions, and there were political prisoners,” he said. “There were also trade union leaders outside who had influence and connections and could work deals with the Gestapo.”

Hertha had another theory: “They let them out not because they wanted to release them. They let them out to spread the horror stories, what happens in concentration camps to scare others so they wouldn’t dare to do anything,” she says in an audio clip from Bob’s presentation.

The future husband and wife met in London, married in Edinburgh, and set their sights on the U.S. once Britain entered the war, an event that required aliens to report themselves and also restricted their movements. Leo wound up in an internment camp, from which he was released once Hertha secured a U.S. sponsor, whom she cleverly found in a New York telephone book after searching for families with the last name Mohl.

After arriving in New York City in 1940, the couple lived and worked for a period of time before growing weary of the winters and embarking on a hitchhiking adventure to find their next home.

“The first thing I did was get out of slacks and put a skirt on,” says Hertha in an audio clip. “I stood there alone in a skirt, and Leo was hiding. The moment a car stopped, Leo came out of the bushes.”

After a cross-country trip, they arrived in the Springs in the summer of 1942.

“They always knew they’d go to Colorado Springs because they had seen a picture on the ship coming over, and it reminded them of the Alps,” Bob said.

At first, they lived and worked downtown, opening The Book Home, a bookstore, and Hedda Mohl Ladies Tailoring (she changed the spelling of her name because people had trouble pronouncing it) side-by-side at 16 E. Kiowa St. The businesses later moved to Dale Street.

“If it’s a hole, go to Mohl,” was Hertha’s shop motto.

The family, which included three children, unexpectedly wound up running a dairy farm, while still operating their businesses, when Leo and Hertha bought a ranch where the Air Force Academy is today. Later, after the AFA bought them out, they leased land near Pulpit Rock where they herded black Angus cattle for many years.

“They did things in ranching that nobody thought of doing,” Bob said. “The first calf Leo bought at the auction, the guy goes where‘s the trailer and he goes just put it in the jeep. They drove home with this calf in the back.”

After living on the ranch, they moved back to town, purchased a two-story house on Colorado Avenue that had to be relocated, and moved it a mile to where it stands now, at 28th and Uintah streets.

“They had the optimism, confidence and gumption to figure out how to live their lives,” Bob said. “Of course, growing up, I didn’t know. I was embarrassed because they had accents and they didn’t know a thing about American culture. Probably like a lot of immigrant families, the parents are not integrated into the culture.”

Hertha died in 1997 at 84, Leo in 2003 at 94. But it wasn’t until half a dozen years ago, as he recounted the tale to a friend, that Bob realized his family’s history was such a gripping historical thriller. He approached PPLD with documents and other materials the family had saved, including Leo’s framed certificate showing his entry and release dates into the camps, which he smuggled out. The materials are now being digitized into PPLD’s archive.

“Leo appears in our archives because he sold books, and we’d sometimes purchase books from him in the 1970s. He donated an entire encyclopedia set,” Jarrell said. “He’s part of our institutional history on top of being part of international history and local history. It’s hyper-localized. He appears in our board minutes.”

For Bob, the concentration camps aren’t the most compelling part of the story. It’s what he learned from his parents.

“I appreciate the way they enabled us to grow up with independence, self-reliance and creativity. Figuring things out and the confidence to do that, which is what they had done,” he said. “The most interesting part of their lives was the way in which they managed not only to survive but to thrive, how to get out of Austria and to the U.S., and live life to the fullest.”

Details

Peak Legacies series, featuring the story of Leo and Hertha Mohl, by Bob Mohl, 1-3 p.m. Feb. 7, East Library, 5550 N. Union Blvd., free; ppld.org/peak-legacies