A Danish-Israeli Holocaust survivor's remarkable life journey

The recent Eurovision contest in the Swedish city of Malmo was marked by angry demonstrations intended to make Israeli contestant Eden Golan feel entirely unwelcome.

But 81 years ago, Malmo rolled out the red carpet for Danish Jewish families when the Germans planned to take them to a concentration camp.

With the help of good people in the underground, Robert Bachmann and his family – after hiding with a Christian family – spent five hours on the high seas, in the wind and darkness of October 1943, first on a fishing boat and then on a lightship.

“The coast guard came and took us from there. I can still see my mother climbing the rope ladder outside the lightship,” Bachmann says.

“When we arrived in Malmo, three nice policemen greeted us. We stayed there a few nights and then went to Stockholm, where my mother had family. We were saved!”

Bachmann, born in January 1932, was already the product of somewhat miraculous circumstances.

“I am the younger of twins, born five hours after my brother. Nobody knew I was in there – not the doctor, not the midwife, and not my mother. That was the first shocking thing. The second is that I was much bigger than my brother,” Bachmann says.

A year after his dramatic entrance into the world, the family had to leave their home in Altona, a suburb north of Hamburg. Their father received a letter from the German Justice Ministry informing him that, as a Jew, he could no longer practice law in Germany. (Robert Bachmann donated the letter to Yad Vashem, which arranged to film his family’s story.)

The family fled to Denmark, his mother’s homeland. “And then the Germans came to Denmark in 1940 and chased us in 1943, and that’s how we landed in Malmo,” he says.

Bachmann, who speaks German, English, Danish, Swedish, and basic French, celebrated his bar mitzvah in Stockholm. “We had a good life there for one and a half years. A month after Denmark was liberated, we went back to Denmark.”

Initially, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps, earning a university degree in law. However, the field didn’t interest him, so he earned another degree in marketing, business development, and advertising.

Over the course of a remarkable career, Bachmann developed many innovative designs and slogans for a variety of clients and organizations.

For eight years, he served as the elected head of the Copenhagen Tourist Office. “One of the highlights was changing the tourist image of Copenhagen from a serious place to an inventive and fun place,” he says.

Copenhagen experienced a large influx of tourists due to Bachmann thinking out of the box. “Once, Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek came to learn how we established the world’s longest pedestrian shopping mall,” he says.

The only problem was that Copenhagen didn’t have enough hotel rooms to accommodate the increased tourism. Again thinking creatively, he procured empty warehouses at the port and transformed them into hotels.

He also helped inaugurate El Al flights between Copenhagen and Israel and worked closely with the Israel Tourist Office.

Another of his life highlights was when the Royal Danish Ballet asked him to head its sponsor contracts. In that capacity, he worked directly with Queen Margrethe II on marketing designs. “I have a personal signed lithograph from the queen reminding me of our nice cooperation.”

The road to Aliyah

SIXTY-TWO YEARS ago, he was traveling around the world for meetings with advertising agencies, and his last stop was Israel. On the beach of the Dan Accadia Herzliya Hotel, he met his future wife, Ramona, who was born in India and raised in Israel. She would later write a very popular book, Jewish Cooking. Their wedding took place in a beautiful old Copenhagen synagogue, and then they settled in the city.

The couple has two children. Their daughter lives in Denver with three children (“We speak to her every day”); and their son, who has five children, lives in Komemiyut, a hassidic moshav in south-central Israel.

“We decided 33 years ago to move to Israel,” Bachmann says.

He was not sure if he’d be able to continue in his career and was fully prepared to sweep the streets if need be. When they first arrived in Ra’anana, he volunteered to drive armed night patrol officers on Friday nights, which he continued for years. But quite soon, through an acquaintance of his wife’s, he landed a job helping a freight-forwarding company rebrand. “The client actually cried when he saw my ideas,” Bachmann recalls.

Walking through a shopping center in Ra’anana looking for a printer to finalize the design, he chanced upon Maxine Levite, and they ended up being business partners for the next 30 years.

Their highly successful joint endeavor, Israel Scandinavia Business magazine, was a valuable promotional tool for Israeli embassies in Scandinavia. When fellow Ra’anana resident Naftali Bennett was the economy minister, he wrote the introduction in the magazines. The publication closed four years ago, being less relevant in the digital world.

Bachmann keeps quite busy in Ra’anana, where many Danish Jews live. For several years after his retirement, he volunteered to teach English in a local school. He received many expressions of gratitude from students, parents, teachers, and administrators for delighting the children with challenges in art, riddles, famous quotes, and current events.

He has offered the mayor of Ra’anana suggestions for improving the city’s quality and safety. “I once suggested an event for newcomers at our lake, and he did that and gave me credit.”

Though Bachmann had to give up morning tennis at age 91, his daily routine includes writing a “fun poem in Danish,” listening to two hours of classical music, getting together with friends in a nearby park, and two hours of resting.

He mentions that one of his forefathers, renowned German painter Moritz Oppenheim (1800-1882), was honored with a special exhibition at the Israel Museum a few years ago.

He and Ramona have unusual keepsakes, such as a 300-year-old grandfather clock; a collection of antique maps of Palestine – the oldest one from 1600; and a 4,500-year-old copper bracelet he found in a shoe box in a camel market in Beersheba and bought for NIS 2. His suspicion that it was an antique was confirmed by the scientific museum in Denmark and the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. This artifact hangs next to a signed Marc Chagall artwork.

Bachmann is as spry as ever and feels he has been privileged to enjoy “a rich life.”■

ROBERT BACHMANN, 92

FROM COPENHAGEN TO RA’ANANA, 1991