by Guy Stern
Hyams, the roving reporter, also called me a “menschenfreund,” a friend of humanity. But to be honest, when she saw me placing a wreath at the cemetery, could my face have mirrored anything else at that heart-wrenching moment? Only a very hard-hearted person would have been able to resist such an expression of empathy when suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, music began resonating from a loudspeaker across miles and miles of graves, intoning an anthem fought for long ago, followed by the familiar taps that will sound for us all.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In Pursuit of the Past
In the years following my departure from my hometown, a building in Hildesheim visited my mind at regular intervals and became a living symbol. It is a tower without a function, unless you believe in the magic power of its name: “Kehrwiederturm” (“Tower of Return”). It serves as the of antithesis to Thomas Wolfe’s famous slogan, “You can’t go home again.” It worked its magic on me repeatedly and unexpectedly, and some of the most surprising turn-about pilgrimages resulted from letting my more mature judgment overrule my rash decisions during my youth.
Thomas Wolfe’s admonition has fortunately been disregarded by innumerable writers. Add me to the list! As a scholar I could write an article, say “Echoes of the Past,” without much additional research. I would start with the German Romantic Age and go beyond, and quote such lines as, “I dreamt my way back into my childhood” (Adelbert von Chamisso); “My soul spread its wings, homeward bound” (Joseph von Eichendorff); and “Sometimes the boy who bore my name comes visiting” (Oskar Loerke). The imaginations of these writers let all of them reconquer times and places once inhabited.
In my personal case such forays are incessant, even though many are far from being “romantic.” But their insistence on being heard tells me once again that the well-meant advice of friends to “forget that horrible past” are futile. All of us are composites of our experiences. Mine are geographically fixed and are centered on my hometown, Hildesheim. That is easy to explain. As a child, up until the time I left for America when I was fifteen, I only sporadically visited other parts of Germany.
Right after the war, when I returned to Hildesheim still in uniform, the news I received from the parents of one of my schoolmates was crushing. The faint hope of finding any member of my family alive was shattered. Encounters with former acquaintances also reinforced my impression that I had no longer any ties to this society. One remark made me leave a party, as I recalled how the woman’s brother had harassed my brother and me at the local swimming pool. The incident evoked nothing but revulsion. At the end of my first visit to Hildesheim, I would have scoffed at any prediction suggesting that there might be a rapprochement between me and my former home.
But was it a homecoming? Virtually every exile, then and now, who has returned to his/her former residence has asked him/herself that question. The answer hinges on the individual’s perception of “Heimat,” or home. The Return of the Native is the title of a nineteenth century novel, Childhood Country the title of a more recent one. Other authors perceive “home” as something spiritual or religious or ideological. Or you can be cynical about the concept. The dramatist Bertolt Brecht claims that moving to a different town means that you no longer know to whom you must kowtow or whose face you can slap. One Berlin theatre critic, Alfred Kerr, told his disconsolate young daughter, who had to flee her home during the Nazi period, “a person can have many homes.” I am inclined to agree with him.
But that first visit, while it didn’t in any way reestablish ties to my hometown, did return me to the day of my earlier departure. It forcibly impressed upon me the thin thread that had led that “invisible ink” fifteen-year-old boy from Hildesheim to Saint Louis. I pondered how there must have been additional forces at work, still shrouded in mystery that allowed me to escape my family’s terrible fate. Concrete questions came to my mind, the answers to which were held at bay for an additional forty years or so.
I asked myself, wasn’t my rescue an unlikely story? Here was an unemployed baker who had pulled the wool over the eyes of a seasoned consular official. And why did he, Malcolm C. Burke, pitch that ridiculous question to me, “How much is forty-eight plus fifty-two?” that someone half my age could have answered? And why, during my emigration, did I encounter so many members of a committee whom I’d never heard of before? Surely there were gaps in my understanding of my own story!
About eight years ago, Stephen M. Goldman, then director of the Holocaust Memorial Center at which I am employed, charged me with curating an exhibit dealing with the Ritchie Boys. Well, I needed help. So I solicited it from two friends, living in or near the District of Columbia. They were to do hands-on research at the Library of Congress and the National Archives. While they were digging up manuscripts and artifacts, one of them, Dan Gross, who had become a fan of the Ritchie Boys, found a curious entry at the Library of Congress. He, together with Steve Goodell, another helper and past department head at the US Holocaust Museum, called me one afternoon. “Guy,” they said, “We have run across a document in which you are labeled as one of the Thousand Children. What on earth does that mean?” In an attempt at humor they added: “And we always thought of you as unique!”
“I haven’t a ghost of an idea,” I replied. But being a curious sort, I hastened to my favorite research person at the Holocaust Memorial Center, Head Librarian Feiga Weiss. I always say about her in German or Yiddish, punning on her name, “Feiga Weiss alles!” (Feiga knows everything!)
“Oh yes,” she said, “you are talking about a group of Jewish women who banded together in 1933 under the label of German Jewish Children’s Aid Project. They pledged themselves to rescue at least one thousand children from Germany and Austria. Therefore, people referred to them as the Thousand Children Group. You can compare them in a way to the British Kindertransport. Were they successful? Oh yes, by the end of the war they had rescued 1,400 youngsters from Germany, Austria, and a few other countries.”
“Thank you, all-knowing Feiga,” I said, “but why haven’t I ever heard of that organization?”
“Oh, that is explained in one of the articles that we have in our archive and in a book about the organization. Knowing of the anti-Semitism in our State Department, they wanted to avoid any publicity and sail under the radar of the Foreign Office. Their fear was, of course, that those ideologues in Washington could stop their efforts.”
“I see,” I answered. “Apparently I was one of those thousand youngsters. Would there be a file about me?”
“Quite likely,” she answered, “all the papers are at the YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research) archives in New York.”
“Well, I would love to get a hold of a copy of my files.”
“Sure. I will call Gunnar Berg, my opposite number at YIVO.”
Within three weeks I had my complete file in hand, consisting of more than fifty documents. My father had petitioned the German-Jewish committee in Berlin on my behalf. They, in turn, had forwarded his request to this wonderful group of determined women, who immediately started working on my case. The New York Office entrusted my application to the Summers Children’s Bureau, a collaborating Jewish children’s organization in Saint Louis, close to the home of Uncle Benno. It finally landed on the desk of one of their social workers, the amazing Mrs. Margaret Esrock.
The agency conducted a lengthy correspondence that weighed the pros and cons for extending help with my emigration. I read that correspondence with great excitement, as if the decision were still pending. Mrs. Esrock became my heroine. She highlighted all the points that spoke for me, including the recommendations I had received from my teachers, even those from my high school; she praised the goodwill and the experience of my aunt and uncle in raising children, and emphatically recommended favorable action by the Saint Louis office. She downplayed any strikes against me. For example, I was close to the upper age limit of sixteen (should my journey be delayed, I would no longer be eligible for assistance).
Also she i
gnored that the Summers Children’s Bureau had already overdrawn the budget allocated by the New York office, and the fact that the national office preferred helping youngsters with no relatives in the United States. As I pored over the reading of that correspondence, I noticed with growing excitement that it was all coming to a head at a meeting scheduled for July 1937, devoted completely to my case. Mrs. Esrock, however, was at that point already looking beyond the meeting. For the first and only time, she wrote directly to the New York office to get their endorsement, assuming the Saint Louis meeting would turn out favorably. In short, she went over the head of her superior in Saint Louis, when she sent off a letter with her signature. The decision of that meeting in Saint Louis is contained in the next letter within the file. It speaks for itself:
And then, the committee in New York wasted no time; it sent eight copies of a perfect affidavit to the collaborating Jewish committee in Germany. Perhaps influenced by Mrs. Esrock’s unauthorized enthusiastic endorsement, my name was on that list. But the committee’s care and concern for me didn’t end with my move to my relatives’ home. After my arrival in Saint Louis, I got to know her. She came to our house once a month and inquired about me, much to the chagrin of Aunt Ethel, who called her “Buttinsky” behind her back. At the time, I certainly didn’t know whom she represented. Of course, in the final analysis, she represented me.
Mrs. Esrock completed periodic reports after each of her visits to our house. She even inquired about me at my high school and communicated with my university teachers. And then it was finally time to let go. She reported that her former protégé was now serving in the US Army in Europe.
Reporting this at a time when we hear so much about the selfishness of human behavior, I feel unending gratitude to a largely unrecognized group of American Jewish women who saw to it that Günther Stern took a boat to a harbor in New Jersey rather than a cattle car to Auschwitz. I’m currently hoping to prepare an exhibition of “Jews Rescuing Jews.” Margaret Esrock rightfully belongs in it.
My two subsequent visits in the 1980s to Hildesheim, prompted by an invitation to speak at my former high school and at the local university, left me largely uninvolved because I was lecturing on being a former student there. I approached this task as an academician; my emotions were neutralized. Yet my step-by-step path of reconciliation with new and progressive generations in the country of my birth did finally include the streets of Hildesheim after all. The extraordinary attempts to ease my steps, undertaken by the kindest people possible, became the palliatives. I received an invitation to speak once again at the University of Hildesheim. A colleague, interested in my contributions to Exile Studies, asked me for a guest lecture in his seminar. As I observed elsewhere in Germany, the attending students represented a new breed—informed, inspired by the exile writers, and enthusiastic when posing questions. My sponsor, Professor Ernst Cloer, was in tune with me on a subject we both were diligently pursuing in our research.
In 1988 my home city once more remembered me. The spot where our synagogue had stood was to become a commemorative site. Four sculptors had collaborated in creating a stunning monument. I had been invited to the unveiling. I attempted to resurrect in spirit the glorious interior of the violated building. My presentation was well received, but more dramatic and lasting was the speech at the end of the ceremony, given by my former German youth leader, Fritz Schürmann (Fred Sherman). He closed his speech with a stentorian recitation of the Hebrew declaration of faith, a prayer that hadn’t been heard in public since that disastrous November of 1938.
In 1988, I was on a specific assignment when I once more came to my hometown. The US Holocaust Memorial Center, then being built, asked me to do further research on one of the American rescuers during the Shoah—the Holocaust. The person the museum wanted to honor was Varian Fry, who, working out of his headquarters in Marseille, had been instrumental in the rescue of hundreds of German-speaking artists and writers. After finding a few less-than-sensational documents at the Library for Contemporary History in Munich, my task was made effortless. I had mentioned my mission to my friend and former colleague, Dr. Oskar Holl. “Interesting,” he commented. “You will have seen the Varian Fry documentary by my good friend, the filmmaker Jörg Bundschuh.”
“What are you telling me?” I exclaimed. “You know of a recently produced film about Fry?”
He answered, completely matter of factly: “Exactly! It’s playing right now at one of the movie houses in midtown.”
I saw it, was enchanted by it, interviewed the director, Jörg Bundschuh—and was immediately told to invite the filmmaker for a showing and commentary at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Rather undeservedly, I was lauded for my research skills.
I also went to the Kennedy Center for the showing, and afterward Jörg and I had an opportunity to talk in private. We talked about our past. “What did you do during the war?” he asked me. “I was in Military Intelligence,” I answered.
“What!” he yelled. “Were you trained at Camp Ritchie?” I was flabbergasted. How could this German know about such a secret facility? Jörg explained, “My collaborator, Christian Bauer, is familiar with your former unit. He’s planning a documentary about it. So I have an urgent plea. Please come to our studio the next time you’re in Munich!”
About six months later, I was able to comply. Christian Bauer was sitting across from me in his studio on Pfisterstrasse, excited about his first meeting with “a genuine Ritchie Boy,” and he came right to the point: “Tell me something extraordinary about your wartime duties.”
“No problem,” I said. “Imagine we are at that famous American breakthrough in France, at the Battle of the Falaise-Argentan Gap. I came upon a German prisoner of war and discovered that he, just ten years earlier, was in the same gym club as I had been, in fact in the same squad as me. I waited till nightfall before taking him into a darkened space, so he couldn’t recognize me.”
“What a coincidence,” interrupted Christian. “And where was your common gym club?”
“In Hildesheim,” I answered.
“Hildesheim?”
“Yes,” I explained, my civic pride a bit wounded, “a mid-sized town in Lower Saxony.”
“I know all about Hildesheim,” he shouted, and asked a question that floored me. “Did you attend the Jewish elementary school there?”
I affirmed that I had. Very excitedly he tossed the next question at me. “Then you must have known my mother!”
“No,” I said calmly, “There were no girls there named Bauer.”
“Nonsense,” he said, abandoning his role as a cool film director. “Before her marriage her name was von Rossen!”
“Eva von Rossen,” I responded, almost whispering.
Christian jumped up and crossed the room. “What are you doing?” I asked him, now a bit shaken myself.
“I’m calling my mom. She must speak with you!”
“But what would I say to her? There have been almost 70 years between now and our last meeting!”
A minute later I heard myself say, “Eva, how are you?”
Two days later, we met in a Munich restaurant; Eva had come in from Upper Bavaria. She was still that lithe and graceful person fixed in my memory. Our conversation began with a question from Eva that tolerated no delay in answering, “I have worried so much about our schoolmates. Do you know what happened to them?”
I gave her multiple answers. The geographical cues were Australia, London, New York, Switzerland, and Auschwitz. We became rather emotional. Recognizing the intimacy of the reunion, her son Christian and my wife Judy excused themselves. We were alone together with our memories.
Later, much later, I asked her, “How did you, a Catholic girl, come to attend our Jewish school?”
“Oh, I can thank my father for that. He noticed that I was turning into a wallflower in that enormous Catholic school in which I was enrolled. As a good father and sensitive artist, he went from one school to the other within Hildesheim to find
the right one for me. Finally, he came across our famous “Uncle Oskar” and they immediately got along. I arrived at my new school, was warmly received, and quickly became friends with everyone. Even you winked at me,” she laughed, “and I blossomed.” “I am glad I contributed,” I grinned.
Then she became more serious. “My father’s decision for me had a sad ending. As the Nazis came to power, they resented that he had sent his daughter to a ‘Jew School.’ He received no further artistic commissions from the city and was tormented. Almost overnight we moved to a secluded village in Upper Bavaria. I crawled back inside myself. But finally I followed in Daddy’s footsteps and became a painter.”
I visited Christian and Eva a few times in Landsberg. The last time she gave me one of her own creations, a copper etching of an illustration for the works of the German writer and composer, E.T.A. Hoffmann. It hangs today in my house in a suburb of Detroit, a memory of my schoolmate from Hildesheim.
This extraordinary chain of events was further validated when, a year later, I received in the mail Christian Bauer’s and Rebecca Göpfert’s book, The Ritchie Boys. In it, he described our first meeting, beginning with my memories of the interrogation of my Eintracht partner from Hildesheim’s athletic club, and extending to the memories Christian’s mother and I shared. He recalled his mother’s reports about her schoolmates, including me (“A most attractive boy with tar black curls, who would always turn around to her, when the teacher wasn’t looking”). He also supplied his reaction to our chance encounter: “It was a lucky day. Unexpectedly I wiped away a bit of the sadness and guilt from my mother’s life. I now knew why I became a filmmaker.” Of course I understood what Christian meant; but why did that wonderful woman, Eva, have to feel saddled with sadness and guilt?
