Hamburg Special

Houses are not always homes; neither are sandwich shops, but behind the counter of Elsie's Lunch, on the corner of Mount Auburn and Holyoke Streets, two people try to make the small shop as much like an informal home kitchen as possible. Whether their customer has a hunger pang or a hangover, Elsie and Henry Baumann stand ready to create a mammoth sandwich or to mix a Bromo-Seltzer.

Elsie and Henry have not always lived where people could drop in for a snack or just to visit. Such things were impossible in Hitler's Germany by 1938. Until then, Henry had been in the meat business in Nuremberg, where the Baumanns lived comfortably with their two small sons. The Nazis changed all that. "We never planned to leave Germany," Elsie recalls, "we were happy. Then Hitler came, and we saw there could be no more happiness."

Elsie remembers the night when eight armed men awakened her family, tore up her house, and terrorized her children. They took Henry to a concentration camp, and the Gestapo permitted him to leave the country only because his emigration papers had already been issued.

For six months Elsie waited inside Germany, not knowing whether she would be able to get out. "Those were awful days," she recalls, "The Gestapo was always asking me why I wanted to go." In July of 1939, they finally allowed her to board a German vessel bound for New York. She arrived in the United States with four dollars and two children.

Neither Elsie nor Henry could speak any English when they landed, but Henry found work in a meat factory in Lowell, and Elsie worked in Red Cross hospitals. "We were very happy and proud to be in America," Elsie explains, "the people were so nice, and at least you could go to bed at night and the police didn't pound on the door."

In 1944 the Baumanns became citizens and, as soon as the war was over, opened a restaurant on Broad Street in Boston. Things went smoothly until a new highway came along, and the restaurant had to make way for progress. Last spring, with the help of friends, they started all over again in Cambridge.

In seven months, Elsie and Henry has made the sandwich shop a thriving business. Their popularity is a much a result of their proprietorship as of their food. "We feel at home here," Elsie says. "The boys come from good homes and like a sandwich or a piece of home-made pie before they go to bed. But sometimes they come in and have had a little too much, not food--you know. Then I have a Bromo-Seltzer for them. I have my own boys, and I know how they feel."