Silent Refuge
Margrit Rosenberg Stenge
The Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs
Naomi Azrieli, Publisher
Jody Spiegel, Program Director
Arielle Berger, Managing Editor
Farla Klaiman, Editor
Matt Carrington, Editor
Elizabeth Lasserre, Senior Editor, French-Language Editions
Elin Beaumont, Senior Education Outreach and Program Facilitator
Catherine Person, Educational Outreach and Events Coordinator, Quebec and French Canada
Stephanie Corazza, Education and Curriculum Associate
Marc-Olivier Cloutier, Educational Outreach and Events Assistant, Quebec and French Canada
Tim MacKay, Digital Platform Manager
Elizabeth Banks, Digital Asset Curator and Archivist
Susan Roitman, Office Manager (Toronto)
Mary Mellas, Executive Assistant and Human Resources (Montreal)
Mark Goldstein, Art Director
François Blanc, Cartographer
Bruno Paradis, Layout, French-Language Editions
Contents
The Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs
Series Preface: In their own words...
About the Glossary
Introduction
Map
Dedication
Acknowledgements
My Early Years in Germany
My First Cruise
Norway on the Cusp
Tracks in the Snow
Life in Sweden
Back in Norway
An End and a Beginning
Arriving on a New Shore
Parenthood
Family Life
Venturing Out of the Nest
My Return to Norway
Alone Again
Joy and Sorrow
Global Connections
The Medal
Old Friends and New
Retirement
Epilogue: Stolpersteine and a Growing Family
Glossary
Photographs
Index
Copyright
The Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs: Published Titles
About the Azrieli Foundation
Series Preface: In their own words...
In telling these stories, the writers have liberated themselves. For so many years we did not speak about it, even when we became free people living in a free society. Now, when at last we are writing about what happened to us in this dark period of history, knowing that our stories will be read and live on, it is possible for us to feel truly free. These unique historical documents put a face on what was lost, and allow readers to grasp the enormity of what happened to six million Jews - one story at a time.
David J. Azrieli, C.M., C.Q., M.Arch
Holocaust survivor and founder, The Azrieli Foundation
Since the end of World War ii, over 30,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors have immigrated to Canada. Who they are, where they came from, what they experienced and how they built new lives for themselves and their families are important parts of our Canadian heritage. The Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program was established to preserve and share the memoirs written by those who survived the twentieth-century Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe and later made their way to Canada. The program is guided by the conviction that each survivor of the Holocaust has a remarkable story to tell, and that such stories play an important role in education about tolerance and diversity.
Millions of individual stories are lost to us forever. By preserving the stories written by survivors and making them widely available to a broad audience, the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program seeks to sustain the memory of all those who perished at the hands of hatred, abetted by indifference and apathy. The personal accounts of those who survived against all odds are as different as the people who wrote them, but all demonstrate the courage, strength, wit and luck that it took to prevail and survive in such terrible adversity. The memoirs are also moving tributes to people - strangers and friends - who risked their lives to help others, and who, through acts of kindness and decency in the darkest of moments, frequently helped the persecuted maintain faith in humanity and courage to endure. These accounts offer inspiration to all, as does the survivors’ desire to share their experiences so that new generations can learn from them.
The Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program collects, archives and publishes these distinctive records and the print editions are available free of charge to educational institutions and Holocaust-education programs across Canada. They are also available for sale to the general public at bookstores. All revenues to the Azrieli Foundation from the sales of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs go toward the publishing and educational work of the memoirs program.
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The Azrieli Foundation would like to express appreciation to the following people for their invaluable efforts in producing this book: Doris Bergen, Sherry Dodson (Maracle Inc), Barbara Kamieński, Karen Kligman, Therese Parent, and Margie Wolfe and Emma Rodgers of Second Story Press.
About the Glossary
The following memoir contains a number of terms, concepts and historical references that may be unfamiliar to the reader. For information on major organizations; significant historical events and people; geographical locations; religious and cultural terms; and foreign-language words and expressions that will help give context and background to the events described in the text, please see the Glossary.
Introduction
Margrit Rosenberg Stenge’s memoir, Silent Refuge, finds its place within the much larger story of Holocaust memory. Arriving in Canada in 1951, she and her husband are two of the close to 40,000 Jews who found post-war refuge in Canada.1
The story of the Holocaust is now quite a prominent part of our culture. Impressive institutions devote themselves to Holocaust memory, institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, or Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel. Even in Berlin, the city where Germans planned and instigated the horrors of the Holocaust, there is both a Holocaust memorial and a Jewish museum with exhibits that highlight the history of the Holocaust. Narratives of the Holocaust have also become a part of popular culture, starting with Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Schindler’s List.
It was not always so. In the first decades after Nazi Germany collapsed in 1945, Jewish survivors rarely talked about their experiences. This silence was at least partially self-protective, as they tried to stifle recurring nightmares or other symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Additionally, however, survivors often discovered that many people did not want to hear their horrific stories, or, worse yet, did not fully believe them.2 This disinterest and skepticism was seen even among those who might have been considered a sympathetic audience. For example, one of the three dozen survivors of the death camp at Sobibor, Thomas Blatt, tried to tell his story in Israel in the late 1950s. Hoping to find a publisher for his memoir, he was told he must have “a tremendous imagination.”3 His story about Sobibor, the death camp where 250,000 Jews were murdered and where a mass breakout occurred in 1943, was virtually unknown and had to wait until the 1980s to find an audience. Escape from Sobibor, a book by Richard Rashke, finally told the story in 1982.4 Escape from Sobibor then became a bbc-produced film in 1987, starring Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer among others. Thomas Blatt assisted in the creation of that film. Finally, in 1997, Blatt was able to publish his own memoir, From the Ashes of Sobibor.
Awareness of the Holoc
aust did not begin in the 1980s, of course. Newspaper stories appeared even as the Nazi persecution of Jews was taking place.5 Anyone paying attention knew of Hitler’s antisemitism as he came to power in January of 1933. They could follow the story as German laws placed harsher and harsher restrictions on the 500,000 Jews living in and fleeing Germany over the next few years. These were the sort of restrictions that pushed Margrit Stenge and her parents, plus about 300,000 other Jews, out of Germany by the end of 1939. After Germany started World War ii by invading Poland on September 1, 1939, stories about the brutal mistreatment of Central- and Eastern-European Jews made it into news stories in the west. When the widespread, methodical murder of Jews began in 1941, some portions of this secret but shocking story even got reported.6 Finally, in the summer of 1945, the story burst upon the pages of newspapers and magazines when photojournalists such as Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White followed Allied troops to camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald and Mauthausen. After years of rumours and partially buried press reports on horrible conditions and mass murder, this physical evidence shocked Allied troops. When photojournalists placed their photos in publications such as Life magazine, the images shocked the world. The first of the Nuremberg Trials, held from November 1945 until October 1946, then received considerable news coverage and added to the body of evidence available to observers.
Despite the enormity of this story, awareness of the Holocaust receded after the war. This near disappearance of Holocaust memory was rectified first by historians. The enterprising scholarship of historians such as Raul Hilberg, whose book The Destruction of the European Jews appeared in 1961, and Christopher Browning, who, along with many other critical works, published his path-breaking study, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Holocaust in Poland in 1998, created what is now known as the field of Holocaust Studies. Since the beginning of Hilberg’s work in the 1950s, and Browning’s in the 1970s, the number of Holocaust scholars has grown extensively. While historians followed the lead of Hilberg and Browning, adding to our store of Holocaust memory, scholars in literature, religion, psychology, political science, sociology, art and other fields studied the Holocaust through their own lenses. Together these individuals have built our scholarly foundation for Holocaust memory. There is another essential source for Holocaust memory, however: people like Margrit Rosenberg Stenge who personally remember it. She and many others can tell us about the Holocaust because they are the ones who experienced it.
Personal Holocaust testimony began to expand in the 1980s, at about the same time Holocaust scholarship was beginning to take off. By that time, Holocaust survivors were more likely to speak only to their children and grandchildren. But many also started telling their stories at schools, libraries, synagogues and churches. I have been teaching college-level courses in the Holocaust since the late 1970s, and my students have regularly described the visit of a Holocaust survivor as a highlight of the course. The courage and willingness of survivors to tell their stories in person is a particularly human and effective way to make this horrendous story real, especially for generations born after 1945.
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Silent Refuge gives us one very specific story of the Holocaust and its effect on individuals. Six million Jews were murdered. Margrit Stenge suffered the loss of both her maternal grandparents, sent to Theresienstadt and then murdered in Auschwitz. Her father’s sister Karolienchen (as Margrit called her) and her husband, Natan, were sent to live in a Jewish house in Cologne and then deported to Nazi-occupied Riga, where they died. Her father’s sister Selma, along with her husband, were deported and murdered as well. That means six close family members were among the six million dead. Margrit and her parents were among the more fortunate ones, since they survived. They were also lucky in their comfortable start in life, given her father’s successful business, their beautiful and impressive house in Cologne and the servants who watched over Margrit and handled most household tasks for Margrit’s mother. All of these extra advantages, along with some good timing and good fortune, helped Margrit and her parents survive the Holocaust, but their survival was often frightening, and sometimes very dangerous.
Born in Germany in late December 1928, Margrit turned four years old one month before Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power. Her father’s onset of ill health seemed far more serious to her than the political change, of which she was mostly unaware. At the age of seven, however, in her second school year, she was forced to attend a Jewish school. The following year, young German children threw rocks at her in what should have been the shelter of her own walled garden. Only her father’s arrival frightened them away. That incident ended her freedom to leave their home without a nanny or parent to protect her. In 1937, while visiting family where her father had grown up, a mob spent hours throwing stones at the house and breaking windows. This small mob foreshadowed the nationwide attack on plate glass windows, shops, homes and synagogues in November 1938, the “November Pogrom,” also called Kristallnacht. Even before the mob violence of Kristallnacht, Margrit’s parents had seen enough and decided they had to flee. Fortunately, her father’s business connections and resources made this possible.
Margrit and her parents were among the approximately 300,000 Jews who fled Germany before the worst of the persecution and the final policy of murder set in. However, they were also among those Jews not able to flee far enough, and so they remained in danger. Their first stop was in Brussels in September 1938. Margrit then spent three months with another German-Jewish refugee family in Brussels while her parents travelled to Denmark and Sweden. Finally, her father found a company in Norway interested in his Cologne company’s paint formulas, which he had managed to bring with him from Germany. Margrit and her parents settled in Oslo by January 1939, gradually learning the language and increasing their comfort level in this new city. Their new life in Norway meant changing from a grand house in Cologne to a small apartment in Oslo. It also meant that Margrit’s mother had to take on household tasks to which she was not accustomed. However, they were safe, comfortable and making new friends, especially among the Jewish community in Norway.
On the night of April 8, 1940, the Germans invaded Norway, ending the Rosenberg family’s brief period of comfort. Margrit’s father, anticipating the invasion, had already begun arranging their escape from Oslo. Early the next morning, a Norwegian from Mr. Rosenberg’s paint factory picked them up in a small car and drove them two hours out of Oslo to a country inn. There they felt the need to explain their German accents, so they admitted they were Jewish refugees now in need of shelter. The next day they travelled all day “on a truck, a milk wagon and a horse and carriage” to a remote village. Someone in the inn had thought a particular electrician and his wife in that village would have a room to rent, which proved true.
Although the Rosenbergs fled Oslo with almost no extra food, clothing or money, this was an escape that saved their lives. Jews in Oslo and other Norwegian cities immediately began suffering in 1940 and 1941. In November 1942, nearly 530 Jews were placed on a German ship, the Donau. They were transported to Auschwitz, where only two dozen survived. In the tiny village of Rogne, where the Rosenbergs had arrived, the village policeman assured them that he would not turn them in, nor would their neighbours. Even though he later joined the Nazi Party (the Nasjonal Samling in Norway) - to keep a “real” Nazi from being put in the job, he said - he stayed true to his word.
The experience of Margrit and her family during their escape to remote Norway was neither comfortable nor lacking in danger. During their first two days, before the Norwegian capitulation, they were shot at by German planes. Then, to avoid the need for identification papers, they spent the summers of 1940 and 1941 at a remote cabin in the mountains. Though the setting was lovely, they had no electricity, had to fetch water from a brook and chopped their own firewood. In March 1942, due to the threat of a German police raid, they were encouraged by their local policeman to flee to that mountain cabin, desp
ite the treacherous winter weather. Fleeing in the winter meant hours of travel on cross-country skis to get there, followed by struggles with ice and mounds of snow impeding all of their daily tasks.
During the fall of 1942, Margrit and her family heard the news of the nearly eight hundred Jews who were being rounded up and shipped from Norway to Germany, which, of course, really meant being shipped to their deaths at Auschwitz. Members of the Norwegian Underground responded to this danger by helping Jews escape to Sweden. During the summer of 1941 at their mountain cabin, the Rosenbergs had met a young law student named Einar Wellén. They saw him again in the summer of 1942, and he suggested that he contact a friend in the Underground to help them escape Nazi-occupied Norway.
In January 1943, Einar Wellén and his friend, Arne Myrvold, knocked on the Rosenbergs’ door in the outskirts of Rogne. They had travelled all night on an open truck bed to announce an escape plan. It involved leaving the next morning and travelling by truck and train to a barn near Oslo. Then they would be packed on the bed of a truck with about thirty others, covered by a tarpaulin weighted down by grass. They were brought near the Swedish border, then walked quietly through the snowy night until they heard: “Welcome to Sweden.”
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As we learn about the specific life of Margrit Rosenberg Stenge, we also learn something about the four main settings where her life took place. It is tempting to draw national stereotypes. In this particular story, the actions of Germans are violent and hateful. Norwegians, Swedes and Canadians are shown to be much more welcoming and helpful. We must search for lessons when we examine a historical episode as horrific as the Holocaust. The murder of six million Jews and about five million other Holocaust victims represents an almost unbelievable catastrophe and also a warning.7 The world has rightly learned to condemn this event,8 and a close look at the life of Margrit Rosenberg Stenge teaches us a particular part of this history. It also teaches us that attempts to assess national character are complicated.
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