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Prisoners of Memory - A Jewish Family from Nazi Germany
von: Joan Gluckauf Haahr
Full Court Press, 2021
ISBN: 9781946989901 , 364 Seiten
Format: ePUB
Kopierschutz: frei
Preis: 8,32 EUR
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CHAPTER 1
Zwingenberg an der Bergstrasse
A few days before her death, having spent the past three months in a Bronx nursing home, my mother suddenly blurted out: “I want to go home.”
“Home?” I asked. “Where is home?”
“Zwingenberg,” she said. “I want to go back to Zwingenberg,” naming the small German village of her birth that she had left in 1930, seventy years earlier, and to which she returned only once for a brief final visit to her family in 1934. The full name of the village, Zwingenberg an der Bergstrasse, translates literally as “Between the Mountains on the Mountain Road,” the mountains in question the low hills of the Odenwald, whose many vineyards produce the robust white wines for which the region is famous, and the Bergstrasse the old post road running alongside the mountains between Heidelberg and Darmstadt.
Like many young Jews of her generation with liberal leanings and few resources beyond intelligence and ambition, she had left Germany permanently after the Nazis came to power. But in 1962, while visiting Europe for the first time since her departure so many years earlier, she made an afternoon’s stop at her old village. That visit, in its way, reflected many of the ambiguities of postwar German life. Exiting the train, she walked from the station toward her childhood home, but hesitant to ring the bell she continued down the street toward the opposite end of the village. There she encountered an old schoolmate, whom she recognized and who immediately recognized her. He greeted her warmly, informing her that other members of their class still lived in the village and offering to lead her to the house of one of her old girlfriends. Gratefully she followed. They rang the bell, he made the introduction, and, after the excitement of the unexpected reunion had calmed, he left with a hug and a handshake. Imagine my mother’s feelings when, as soon as he was gone, her old friend burst out: “Gott in Himmel! I was terrified when I saw you coming with the SS!” Shocked, my mother learned that this friendly and helpful man had, during the Nazi period, been a member of the local branch of the SS, the Schutztaffel, the military police most responsible for initiating and carrying out Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the genocide of the Jews. Without doubt he had been a prime persecutor of her parents.
Later that same year, in a visit no less revealing of postwar German complexities, I made my first trip to Zwingenberg. It is the oldest of the several towns and villages along the Bergstrasse, and to this day four- and five hundred-year-old houses edge its narrow, cobbled streets. On my first visit, in January 1962, the houses were a uniform drab gray, their half-timbering rotting and deteriorated; the cobbled streets were uneven and treacherous, the stones having lain without repair since before the war. I have been there five times since then, and each time the village looks better, with the bright pastels of the restored stucco houses—now cheerily painted as if in a Disney fairy tale—contrasting boldly with their dark wood half-timbering. And the village now extends far beyond its original boundaries, housing affluent professionals from nearby Mannheim and Darmstadt.
My grandmother’s ancestors had owned the house at Obergasse 3 for many generations. It stood then, as it still stands today, on the old market square at the intersection of the two original main streets, the Obergasse (“high street”) and the Untergasse (“low street”). At the time of my initial visit, it was inhabited by the same family of Jehovah’s Witnesses who had purchased it for a meager token price in 1939, when my grandparents, like all Jews still remaining in the towns and villages on the Bergstrasse, had been forcibly relocated to the newly established ghetto in Frankfurt. My German half-sister, Lotte, had driven me there from her home in Mannheim. Lotte, ever intrepid, rang the bell and introduced us both to the old woman who answered the door. I was, Lotte announced, the granddaughter of the previous owners, Moritz and Martha Schack. Nervously wiping her hands on her apron, the old woman invited us in, leading us up the stairs and towards the rear while spilling out a non-stop litany of grief, regret, and fear. On and on she rambled: They too had suffered, lost their business, been forced to rely on the generosity of neighbors for food. Her son had been deported and killed.
Gradually I realized that she was terrified that I was there to reclaim the house. Only when she understood that my objectives were sentimental, not confiscatory, did she calm down and usher us through the tiny cluttered rooms. As I looked around, I understood why my mother’s invariable response to everything antique was a sneering, “That’s just like the old junk we had at home,” although she used a less polite noun.
What I know about my mother’s family begins with the marriage of my maternal great-great-grandparents, Loeb Rothensies and Marianne Blumenfeld, in the 1830s. The surname Rothensies is an unusual one even in Germany, and there exist two differing recorded accounts of its origin when, in the wake of the Napoleonic secularizing reforms, German Jews—who had hitherto followed Hebrew custom and used the patronymic ben, meaning “son of”—were compelled to take secular surnames. In both accounts, a member of the family has been asked by a figure in authority (a municipal official in the first, a teacher in the second) to declare the chosen surname and replies “Roten sie’s,” local dialect for Raten sie (“You advise me” or “You guess it”). Whether the response was a failed attempt at levity or derived from ignorance or confusion, the odd name evidently stuck.4
Loeb and Marianne had five children: three sons (David, Aron, and Joseph) and two daughters (Betty and Karoline), both sisters dying (as was recorded) “in the prime of life.” As family story has it, at some point during the tumultuous years following the 1848 uprisings in Europe, David and Joseph—the eldest and youngest of the Rothensies brothers—fled the German military draft and sailed to New York, eventually settling in upstate Delaware County, where they married two American Protestant sisters.5
The middle son, Aron, who remained home, was my great-grandfather. He and his wife, Sarah (née Dewald), went on to have six children — Lina (b. 1875), Max (b. 1876), Betty (b. 1877), Hermann (b. 1879), Martha (my grandmother, b. 1885), and Clara (b. 1888). Another son David (birthdate unrecorded) died in infancy.
I have in my possession a remarkable sepia photograph of the children, taken in 1889 or 1890, its occasion unknown. The four girls and two boys, ranging in age from teens to toddlers, gaze intently at the photographer—and at us. At the far left is Lina, fourteen or fifteen, wearing a dark, high-necked dress, its tightly buttoned bodice clearly revealing her developing figure. Her left arm encircles Clara, the youngest, about two, who stands on a chair and stares ahead unflinchingly, her tiny clenched fist the only sign of her unease at the photographer’s presence. Beside her, tall and handsome in his school jacket and tie, stands Max, perhaps thirteen; only his large, sad eyes hint at the misery that will lead him, already afflicted with the disease then called St. Vitus Dance (Sydenham’s chorea) to commit suicide at thirty. To the near right stands young Hermann, small for his ten years, in a military cadet’s jacket, his apparently restless arm stayed by his big sister Betty, to his right. Though only about twelve, she already shows the vigor and determination that will, in a few years, lead her to emigrate alone to America, where she will go on to play the role of family matriarch to her refugee nieces and nephew and their offspring until her death, in 1969, at the age of ninety-two. Only Martha, my grandmother, then a tiny four or five-year-old standing between two older siblings, looks anxious. Her hair (which I know to have been red) is cropped like a boy’s. Wearing a white ruff-like collar over her dark blouse, she is the only one of the children to seem intimidated by the evident solemnity of the occasion.
Martha was twenty-six when, in May 1911, she married Moritz Schack, the son of Nathan and Jüttel (Simon) Schack from the tiny farming village of Georgenhausen in the nearby Odenwald, where Nathan’s ancestors had lived for many generations. Two years Martha’s elder, Moritz had no doubt come to Zwingenberg to be married. Theirs was probably an arranged marriage, as finding suitable Jewish partners surely cannot have easy for those living in the small towns and villages of rural Hesse. Except for their Jewish religion, his family was no doubt indistinguishable from the other small farmers or shopkeepers in their community, with one exception: the undeniable Asian appearance of one or two in each generation, with the characteristic broad faces and ocular epicanthic fold of Asians. I am among them, as is my son and one of my granddaughters. Family legend attributes the Asian look to a purported ancestor from the Caucasus, a Jewish peddler (otherwise...