by Guy Stern
And then something even more galling took place. Paraphrasing Shakespeare—“fear also makes cowards of us all”—we felt compelled to become the censors, or rather the book burners of parts of our own library. We had amassed a solid collection of sociopolitical books on the shelves of our Saturday afternoon meeting room under the tutelage of Cantor Seppl Cysner, who really wasn’t much older than we. During Saturday morning services, a frightening rumor made the rounds. Several of our community leaders had been arrested and their homes searched. We youngsters aggregated in the vestibule of the synagogue. We were struck by fear. Would our fathers be next? What could the Gestapo bloodhounds find? Someone mentioned our own library in the community house across the street. By Nazi standards several books could be considered “demagogic” or “subversive.” We rushed across the street, started sorting books, and ignited a bonfire in the stove of the assembly room. All that in utter silence. Then someone, loud of voice, stormed into the room. To our relief, it was our shammus, Mr. Kaminsky, the caretaker of our community house and synagogue. “What are you doing?” he screamed. “You built a fire on the Sabbath?” His accusing words carried the conviction of orthodoxy. One of us threw a saying of the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of Our Fathers), learned in this very hall, at him: “The saving of lives takes precedence over rules.” Bookish, I quoted the chapter and verse by way of reference. Mr. Kaminsky withdrew; the bonfire continued. Georg Prager, one of the youngest of our group, threw up right after the last contraband book had been reduced to ashes. His outrage at our cautionary action rivaled mine. But my persona as an “invisible ink” person restrained me from giving vent to my indignation, even though I felt as though if those flames were lapping at me.
When I returned to my high school class on the following Monday, I found a tiny respite in the usual antagonism from my classmates. There was one fellow student in our class with whom I had exchanged blows ever since we started high school. My father had admonished me several times to lay off. That wasn’t easy; our classmates egged us on. But then, after us three Jewish fellows had been demeaned and chivvied, he could no longer be urged to start the attack. It was a small gesture, but when you are surrounded by hostility, a token of decency goes a long way.
On a perfect June day in 1933, defiled by yet another outdoor activity of the Hitler Youth that kept us at home, a new dawn seemed to descend or rather burst upon us. It was wielded by four torchbearers from Hannover, the nearest large-size city to our hometown. I still remember two or three of their names. There were the obvious leader, Herbert Sichel, introduced as Hesi, Peter Heller, and Eto, the German abbreviation for “Ententeich” or duck pond, bestowed upon the fellow after his comrades had tossed him into a lake because of his outrageous behavior.
On that Sunday morning, they rang our bell and proclaimed that they held a letter of endorsement by Mr. Rehfeld, the vice president of our Jewish community. Once let in, they assumed a sort of military courtesy stance vis-à-vis my parents, reinforced by their uniform of spotless white shirts and dark blue knee pants. “We represent the Hannover branch of a German-Jewish youth group,” they began, with the emphasis clearly on the German. “We are here to help found a Hildesheim branch of the Schwarze Fähnlein [Black Pennant]. We want your Günther as one of the founding members,” they concluded. I could not take my eyes off these athletic, vigorous prototypes. I idealized them. The one-word characterization “zackig,” borrowed from a word in vogue at the time, meaning snappy or snazzy, intoxicated my brain. “We won’t let a bunch of hoodlums deprive us of our Germanness,” they declared. The four heroes spread out the ideals of the Schwarze Fähnlein.
It appealed to my parents. “Well,” said my father, “if you were recommended by Mr. Rehfeld and Günther wants to join, that’s fine with us!” And then he asked whether they had found a leader for the group. Yes, they had: Fritz Schürmann, the son of my father’s former employer. That clinched it. “Günther will join!”
I grabbed my father’s shoulders as a manly sign of gratitude. A few weeks later I sported the same uniform as Peter, Hesi, and Eto. For the half year that it lasted, the Schwarze Fähnlein became a near-surrogate for much that we had lost. Fritz took over, after gaining clearance from the organization’s central headquarters. Before Hitler’s ascent to power, he had belonged to a group called dj111, an anti-Fascist but suspiciously superpatriotic youth outfit. Under his guidance, we launched ourselves on exaggeratedly long hikes, assembled in the evening around a sparse campfire, learned traditional youth group songs stimulated by the guitar playing of one of us recruits, listened to our leader reading German youth literature and loved every line of the text, though it was sometimes undeserving of our enthusiasm. On outings we drank lukewarm tea out of thermos bottles and returned home with a halfway restored sense of self-respect. Of course the latter was hammered out of a thin overlay of patina. Sure, we felt some pride when we could sing those pathfinder songs better than the non-Jewish members of our high school choral class, often to the obvious resentment of our Nazified fellow students. But there were also some fear-inducing moments.
On yet another beautiful summer Sunday morning, we hiked to one of Hildesheim’s landmark outings with the rather off-putting name of Galgenberg (Gallow’s Mountain), a moniker recalling its function as a place of execution during the Middle Ages. Our path was narrow; we were walking in single file. Suddenly a group of men approached from the opposite direction. They were, to be sure, not dressed in Nazi uniforms, but rather in the less malign camouflage green of hunters. Yet as they filed past us, the leader of the group, turning to Fritz, saluted us with the newly fashionable greeting, despised and feared by us, of “Heil Hitler.” How would Fritz respond? To respond in kind was unthinkable and strictly forbidden to Jews. Fritz answered, “Good morning.” This greeting and reply repeated itself as each hunter passed us. By the time the last hunter had gone by, our mounting fears had seemed to become a reality. Their lead-off hiker had turned around and was walking back to Fritz. “I just realized who you are,” he said. “We didn’t mean to put you down.” Now we breathed again. But the youngest in our group had befouled himself out of fear. Fritz proved himself, once more, as a leader. He helped him to clean up.
When, within the year, one of the never-ending decrees of the Nazi government did away with the Schwarze Fähnlein, we were not really surprised. Growing more politically savvy, we saw the perverted logic of the Nazis at work. How could they tolerate a German-Jewish group that proclaimed its rights not only to its Jewish heritage but to their German one as well?
Prepared for the demise of the Schwarze Fähnlein, another, less pronouncedly German youth group stood in the wings. I immediately joined the Bund deutsch-jüdischer Jugend (Association of German-Jewish Youth). Needless to say, in our short-sighted perspective, joining one of the Zionist groups was not considered an acceptable alternative. The BDJJ was not only less ideological but also far more easy going and relaxed. An outward symbol of this greater “Gemütlichkeit” was the fact that it also admitted girls as members. Another symbol of the transition: We no longer gathered around campfires and yes, some Hebrew songs snuck into our German repertoire. “Leiloth chorew koariwim,” a song of a relaxed summer evening, unrealistically entered our world. Sometimes we even could indulge in such an illusion of complete repose, for example, when the Berlin-based president of our organization, Günther Friedländer, did us the honor of a presidential visit.
But matters got infinitely worse for my family and me. Germany’s most vicious anti-Semitic weekly, Der Stürmer (The Attacker), had “uncovered” the nefarious plot that world Jewry was all set to assassinate Hitler. Some clown had placed the first page, with its glaring headline, on the school’s bulletin board. During a recess the most fanatical of my fellow students descended on us, his Jewish classmates. He and his faithful followers carried us from the schoolyard to the bulletin board, presumably attributing that murderous conspiracy against their beloved Führer to the Jewish students of our school. W
e emerged beaten and bloodied.
The final proof of the vicious lawlessness of the Nazi Party was agonizingly demonstrated to my family while my mother and I were away on a short trip to her mother in Vlotho. Late one evening my father, as on many occasions before, walked to the postal mailbox across the street after completing some urgent correspondence. As he was depositing letters, he was accosted by a uniformed SS man, who brutally beat him. He made it home with the help of a policeman, but could not resume his route the next day, so he served customers at home. Toward noon my mother and I returned home from our trip. Mom entered the store first. “Julius,” she cried at the top of her voice, drowning out the customers, “they have beaten you up!” The shock to me was visceral. I turned heels and ran to the bathroom.
German law and order had taken a perverted course, disintegrating before our eyes. The policeman, still trying to do his job, had identified the assailant with the help of a witness by the name of Höhnlein, and a warrant for assault and battery was filed. A week later, when Mr. Höhnlein visited us, he said, “Oh sure,” he would testify. But he was in financial straits, and “couldn’t my father help him out a bit?”
A few days later, flaunting their full SS uniforms, a high-ranking functionary named Dr. Pilz, a dentist by profession, and two of his flunkies, came to our apartment. They had hardly entered the living room when Pilz started shouting at my mother in a voice that carried every word to Werner’s and my bedroom. “You Jewish swine have brought charges against one of my men. You, Mrs. Stern,” he added in sarcastic politeness, “will call the police and the state attorney and tell them to withdraw all charges. Here are the numbers.”
Mom got on the phone, and she had the incredible courage to tell the answering voice that SS-Standartenführer Pilz was at our house and was urging her to withdraw legitimate charges for assault and battery. “He tore the phone out of my hands,” she told us the next morning, “identified himself to the police, and said that he was speaking on my behalf to close the case.” The policeman on duty merely told him that such a request could only be made in person.
“You dumb cow,” he yelled at my mother, before he and his flunkies stormed out. In addition to his physical injuries, my father had an emotional breakdown that night. As soon as the SS hoodlums had left, Werner and I rushed to the living room. For the first time in our lives we saw our father, usually unperturbable, crying without any restraint. The case itself became moot. Adolf Hitler, by fiat, granted a countrywide amnesty to all who felt that niceties of the law no longer applied to them.
When I left Germany, my youth group was still in existence. In my new American life, I made friends and joined American-Jewish youth groups. But I thought back, not infrequently, to my Hildesheim alliances, both with nostalgia and melancholy. My German-Jewish friends, through a sense of comradeship and total acceptance during a time when the outside world began to shun us, had given me, had given us, a tiny restoration of our former feeling of belongingness. The ranks of us adolescents was shrinking. Some of my friends had already been able to escape the Nazi hell. The two Goldberg girls, one a year older, the other, one year younger than I, were already sending us letters from Washington, DC. The two Blomendal boys with some ancestral roots in Holland had already crossed the border to Germany’s neighbor. Their upbeat news from abroad made it appear to us, staying behind, more like an adventure story than a flight into exile.
My parents knew that the time for action had come. They had long acquainted me with their plans to send me to Saint Louis, where my aunt and uncle resided. It had come as no surprise to me, and when I turned fourteen, my mother mailed SOS letters them. My mother had corresponded throughout the years with her brothers who were still living in her hometown of Vlotho. One of them was no longer alive. Her brother Felix had served his country in World War I and had been killed in action. Uncle Willie answered his sister’s letters only sporadically; he had been severely injured in the gas warfare that concluded World War I, one of the most senseless wars in Western European history. Uncle Benno had lived in Saint Louis, Missouri since his fourteenth year. How he ended up there is easily told. My grandfather was a Prussian patriarch. When the adolescent Benno started to sass him, the son was promptly dispatched to my grandfather’s brother living in Saint Louis. Misbehaving children at that time were exiled to the wild Midwest. Ladies and gentlemen, some of you may well be the offspring of one of those rebels. As chance would have it, Uncle Benno’s punishment turned out to be one of the springboards to my escape.
My mother asked if Benno and Ethel could take in her eldest child, meaning me. Could they furnish the necessary guarantee—called an affidavit—that I would not become a public charge? They wrote back that they were most willing but were in no position to give such an assurance by themselves. Benno, after coming to Saint Louis, had become a unionized baker and pastry maker, but as so many employees during the tail end of the Great Depression, he had lost his job. Fortunately, his union furnished him with enough substitute positions so he could provide for his family. In the meanwhile, my parents also contacted the newly installed Jewish governing body in Germany. They also promised their best efforts on my behalf.
At about the same time, Dad took me out of high school and hired an English tutor for me. It was a relief not to have to endure the daily taunts. My parents were determined to send their oldest child, me, out of Germany with the mission of rescuing the entire family. That was a tall order and I nearly succeeded, but that word “nearly” denotes a tragedy. At the time, I obviously had no premonition that my efforts would come to naught. On the contrary I had the strong optimism of my adolescent years that I would succeed. Werner continued at his Catholic high school, which he started in Germany at age ten. Eleanore, not yet of school age, was receiving home instruction from Mom.
As for me, hiring a tutor introduced me to American ways even before my immigration. The tutor’s name was Mr. Tittel. He had emigrated from Germany during the Great Depression, landed a teaching position at an orphanage in Brooklyn, and then returned five years later, in 1931, to his home town of Hildesheim. Now he was eking out a living by teaching Americanese, only slightly tinged with Brooklynese, to various Jews of Hildesheim. Many foresaw that English, in this watershed year of 1936, might soon be their primary means of communication, if they found asylum in an English-speaking country. He was a slight, stooped, somewhat emaciated, greying man of sixty, easygoing and eccentric. He sometimes would start humming an American ditty in the midst of a desultory English conversation. He taught me more practical English in a few months than my “Gymnasium” English teacher, a ruffian, box-on-the-ears specialist who bore the apt nickname “Der Boxer,” had got across to me in three years.
Mr. Tittel, in his circumlocutious ways, also peppered his lessons with reminiscences. He had become a baseball fan in America and rose to something close to epic lyricisms when he extolled the pinpoint pitching of Grover Alexander or the mighty swats of Babe Ruth. When I ultimately arrived in the United States, my arcane training nearly dislodged the eyeglasses of my Chicago welcoming committee, a Jewish volunteer social worker. I accepted a candy bar, a Baby Ruth, from her, with a question as to why its name deviated by one letter from Mr. Tittel’s venerated baseball idol. America, only dimly perceived before Mr. Tittel’s arrival, was taking on concrete forms, and immigrating there was moving from a dream to a distinct possibility. Some of the other members of our youth group, for example, two girls and one boy, also foresaw the possibility of an impending departure from Germany. We felt joy and despondency at the same time. My private English teacher imbued me with the conviction that the passing of the American frontier had not diminished its unbounded opportunity for exotic adventures, ranging from coast-to-coast trains to coed high schools.
Because my friends and I had seen so little of our own homeland, we decided to undertake a very courageous adventure. We planned a long trip to Germany’s fabled Rhineland on bicycles, even though we knew full well that Nazis might
attack us while we were en route. Since Jews were no longer permitted to spend the night in youth hostels, we contacted Jewish communities in cities intersecting our itinerary and asked for their overnight hospitality. The plan worked and we traveled one thousand kilometers over a four-week period, arriving back safely. I should include that one of the girls on the trip was my beloved, Gerda, but I should also add that we, in our innocence, didn’t indulge in boy-girl relations throughout the trip.
Our anticipation of enjoying the Rhenish landscape wasn’t fulfilled. Germany had turned into an armed camp. The most vivid memory I have is a harbor that was filled at every anchoring place by small, fast boats equipped with the latest weaponry, as best I could judge. After my return from that trip, my parents immediately called me aside and spread out a document before me: “Uncle Benno and Aunt Ethel have sent you an affidavit. We will now try to get a date with the American Consulate in Hamburg.”
How had my uncle and aunt managed to get a notarized affidavit, given their straitened circumstances? My uncle, having been told that he had to show the financial resources to support me, had hit upon an ingenious device. He called upon all his union buddies, friends and relations, urging them to deposit goodly sums of money in his bank account. His loyal supporters came through for him. At the end of two weeks, he asked the bank for a notarized statement which portrayed him as a gentleman of fabulous wealth. A few days later, he returned every last penny of that borrowed money.
