by Kathy Kacer
Anneliese whimpered.
“I thought I was safe,” Erna muttered.
The life in Herr Bromberger’s eyes had faded.
The open train door was right in front of us. The thumping of my heart rose up into my throat. Another shove from behind, and Willy Latter was the first to step up. Herr Bromberger followed, head still low. Erna wailed and then lifted herself up to join them. Papa and I were the next in line.
And that’s when Herr Weidt called out to the skinny soldier once more.
“Wait, my friend,” he said. “Let’s start again.”
I’m not sure what made the soldier stop. But this time, instead of pushing Papa and me into the train, he turned. Something had changed, something that—at first—I didn’t understand. Suddenly, Herr Weidt was smiling as he stepped forward and threw an arm around the startled soldier’s shoulder. He pulled the soldier away from the rest of us and huddled with him. I could still make out what they were saying.
“I have something here that might interest you.” Herr Weidt reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small glass bottle. “Do you have a wife?” he asked.
The soldier nodded, still wary.
“This is the finest perfume in all of Berlin. And there’s more where this came from. Just release my Jewish workers, and I’ll bring you more bottles.”
Herr Weidt was trying to bribe the guard into letting us go, just like he had during the raid of the factory weeks earlier. But would it work this time? These Gestapo soldiers were so far past the point of looking the other way.
The soldier reached out to touch the bottle of perfume. “What do you care what happens to these Jews?” he asked. “You can get some more. Besides, they’re blind. They’re worth even less than others.”
In spite of my fear, I felt a flash of anger. He was talking about my father and the others like they were scraps of garbage.
The soldier still hesitated as Herr Weidt held out the perfume. “You’ll be a hero at home with this. And if that’s not enough, I’ll make sure that a crate of champagne is delivered to you first thing in the morning.”
The soldier glanced over at us; three already on the train, and the others standing at the open doors. Then he looked over at Herr Weidt and down at the perfume bottle, back and forth, up and down. We waited. A minute passed and then another.
“What’s happening?” Papa asked one more time.
“Don’t say a word, Papa,” I whispered. “Herr Weidt is trying to figure this out.”
“Champagne, you say?” The soldier’s voice was curious.
“Only the finest in all of Berlin. You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?”
The soldier shifted his gaze back at his comrades, then over at us, then at Herr Weidt. The other soldiers raised their heads, curious as to what was happening.
“What are you staring at?” the skinny soldier called out to them. “Guard the prisoners!”
The soldiers turned to us once more. I stretched my neck, desperate to hear what Herr Weidt would do next. But now, it was harder to hear his conversation with the skinny soldier. Their heads were bent toward one another. I could only catch a few words. “Between you and me,” I heard Herr Weidt say. And then, “No one else will know.”
And still we waited, Erna Haney, Herr Bromberger, and Willy Latter on the train. Papa, me, Anneliese, her sister, and the others still on the platform. The cold and wind wrapped itself around us.
And then, I watched as the skinny soldier pulled a small piece of paper from his pocket and wrote something on it. He handed the paper to Herr Weidt, who folded his fingers around it, and said, “I’ll make the delivery to this address tomorrow.”
Finally, the soldier pulled his shoulders back and grabbed the bottle of perfume. “Jawohl, okay,” he said, raising his voice. “Get them out of here before I change my mind!”
Just before turning away from the soldier, Herr Weidt said, “By the way.” And then he tapped his temple, just like he had done when he first spoke to me in the factory so many months earlier, and he said to the soldier, “Just so you know, I am quite blind, too. And I think my life has great value, just like the lives of the people over there.”
The guard’s jaw dropped open as Herr Weidt rushed over to us. “Get off the train,” he hissed to the three who stood above us. Willy Latter and Herr Bromberger jumped down and turned to help Erna back onto the platform.
“Hold on to each other,” Herr Weidt said in a low and urgent voice. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have provoked that guard, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to tell him off, for all of us! Now, we need to leave before he changes his mind.”
“My Papa said you’d come for us,” I whispered. “And here you are.”
Herr Weidt smiled briefly and reached out to place something in my hand. When I looked down, there was my cornflower pin.
I gasped and looked up at Herr Weidt. “But how…?”
“I felt something under my foot when I arrived at the factory and discovered that you had all been taken away. I heard it rattle on the floor and when I reached down to see what it was, I found your pin. I thought you might want it back.”
Tears blurred my vision. I reached up with shaky hands to attach the pin to my dress, right where it belonged.
Finally, Herr Weidt faced our whole group. “I need to get you out of here. Now!”
I didn’t hesitate for another second. I grabbed Papa with one arm and he reached out to Anneliese with the other. She clutched her sister, who took Herr Bromberger’s hand. He grabbed Willy Latter, who linked arms with Erna Haney, and so on, until we were joined together as one human chain. And then, with Herr Weidt in the lead, we marched away from the train station and back to the safety of the factory.
What Really Happened
If you walk down a narrow lane off Rosenthaler Strasse in the Mitte district of Berlin, you will find yourself in a small, rather unassuming courtyard, cobblestones on the ground, a few low-rise buildings, one café, and a couple of trees. In the middle and to one side is a plain gray door. It looks as if it might be the entrance to an apartment. But the sign in front tells a different story. It reads Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt, Museum Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind.
In 2018, I visited this small museum, inspired to write a book about the man who, I discovered, had protected dozens of blind Jewish men and women by employing them in his factory and saving many of them from deportation to the concentration camps.
In 1936, Otto Weidt opened this factory and began to manufacture brooms and brushes. He had learned the trade of brushmaking when he himself lost much of his sight as a teenager. When the Second World War began in 1939, Otto had his factory classified by the Nazi government as “essential for the war effort.” Many of his products were made to order for the armed forces of Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler. Despite the fact that Otto was providing supplies to the German army, he was strongly opposed to the beliefs of the Nazi party. In particular, he could see how badly Jewish people were being treated, and he vowed to do as much as he could to help these persecuted people. He began to employ both deaf and blind Jewish workers in his factory. He provided food and organized hiding places to protect them from deportation to the concentration camps. He sent supplies to Jews who had already been imprisoned in these places. He bribed the police and Nazi officials to release Jews who had been arrested.
His commitment to protecting these blind and deaf Jews was all the more remarkable for the fact that the Nazi government was determined to do away with anyone, Jewish or Christian, with a disability. These individuals were not “worthy” to be part of the “Master Race” that the Nazis wanted to create. Those with disabilities were often labeled as “life unworthy of life.”
Otto Weidt
The Otto Weidt Factory is small, not at all what one might imagine a factory to look like. Three or four long narrow roo
ms follow each other and end in a small room that was used to hide the Jewish workers when the Gestapo would search the factory looking for Jews. A large wardrobe had once been placed in front of this back room to disguise it as a hiding place.
Throughout the museum are brief stories about the many Jewish people whom Otto Weidt protected. I spent hours reading the small and often incomplete biographies, thinking about how I could weave the lives of some of these real people into the story I wanted to write.
In real life, there were the Jewish twins, Anneliese and Marianne Bernstein. They had come to Berlin in 1940, wanting to learn a trade. Anneliese became a dressmaker, and Marianne, who was blind, trained as a brushmaker in Otto’s factory. They remained safe until 1943. When it became too dangerous for them to continue working at the factory, they went into hiding, often sleeping in parks to avoid being on the streets. They eventually left Berlin and found refuge with farmers in the Breslau area. They survived the war and immigrated to the United States in 1946.
I learned about Willy Latter who became blind at the age of thirteen when surgeons bungled his “routine” eye surgery. He was a concert pianist and music teacher whose wife and two daughters were in hiding when he came to work in Otto’s factory. Willy’s wife was not Jewish, but had converted to Judaism when they married. Willy, his wife, and their children survived the Nazi persecution and left for the United States after the war. Willy passed away in 1974 at the age of seventy-eight.
There was Erna Haney, who had been born blind in 1895 in Lissa, Poland. She moved to Berlin in 1911 and worked for many years as a secretary. She married in 1921 and had two sons. At first, she and her family were spared from Nazi persecution because her husband was Catholic. But eventually, her husband and sons went into hiding, and Erna went to work in Otto’s factory. She and her family survived the war. Erna passed away in 1990 at the age of ninety-four.
Another wonderful true story was about a woman named Hedwig Porschütz, known to many as Hetti. Born in 1890, Hetti started out working in Otto’s stockroom. For years, she housed and fed Jewish workers from the factory, including for a time the twins Anneliese and Marianne Bernstein. She was eventually arrested and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. However, the conviction was not for hiding Jews. She was convicted of hoarding food! She never revealed the Jews she had protected. She served her sentence at the Zillerthal-Erdmannsdorf labor camp in Germany from October 1944 until the end of the war.
Many of the dozens of Jewish workers who were protected in Otto’s factory survived the war. Some were not as lucky. Among those who perished in the death camps was Bernhard Bromberger. He was born in 1877 in Adelnau, Poland. He married and had three sons and a daughter. He served as a soldier in the First World War, then moved to Berlin where he opened a textile shop. He became blind from an eye ailment as a young man. His four children managed to escape from Berlin as the war was ramping up. They found refuge in Shanghai, China, one of the only places in the world to accept Jewish refugees who were trying to escape persecution in Europe. Herr Bromberger and his wife chose not to leave their home, and he began working in Otto’s factory. In 1943, Herr Bromberger and his wife were deported to the death camp, Auschwitz, where they were killed.
There were many more stories like these that I read while I visited the Otto Weidt museum in 2018. It was difficult to choose which ones I wanted to include in the book. I knew I had to create a fictional father and his daughter, a girl whom I named Lillian Frey, who came to Otto for help. The truth is there were no children who worked in Otto’s factory.
It is unclear exactly how many Jewish people Otto protected. There are more than thirty stories documented in the museum, but possibly many more passed through the factory whose names and stories were lost. The real people whom I wrote about represent the dozens that Otto helped. Some survived, but some could not avoid eventual arrest and deportation.
After the war, Otto helped establish a Jewish home for children who had been orphaned during the Holocaust. He died of heart failure in 1947 at the age of sixty-four. He was one of those remarkable individuals who was willing to risk his own life to help Jews in need. In 1971, he was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, the highest honor that Israel bestows upon those who saved Jews during the Holocaust.
Otto Weidt and his workshop employees, 1942
Acknowledgments
Huge thanks, as always, to Margie Wolfe of Second Story Press, publisher extraordinaire! Margie’s advice, encouragement, and support of my writing is unwavering. I don’t take that for granted, and am eternally grateful for it all. Special thanks to the wonderful women of SSP: Emma Rodgers, Melissa Kaita, Phuong Truong, and Kathryn Cole.
It was a pleasure to work with Sarah Swartz who edited this book ever so carefully and meticulously. Her knowledge of Germany only added to the authenticity of the story.
And to my family—Ian, Gabi, Jake, and my newest “children,” Vanessa and Jeremy—I love and cherish you all.
About the Author
Kathy Kacer is the author of numerous books that tell true stories of the Holocaust for young readers of all ages, including The Secret of Gabi’s Dresser, The Brave Princess and Me, and To Look a Nazi in the Eye. Her books have won many awards, including the Silver Birch, the Red Maple, the Hackmatack, and the Jewish Book Award. A former psychologist, Kathy has traveled the globe speaking to children and adults about the importance of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. She lives in Toronto.
Copyright
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The brushmaker’s daughter / Kathy Kacer.
Names: Kacer, Kathy, 1954- author.
Series: Holocaust remembrance book for young readers.
Description: Series statement: A Holocaust remembrance book for
young readers
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200210092 | Canadiana (ebook)
20200210106 | ISBN 9781772601381 (softcover) | ISBN
9781772601763 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781772601398 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Weidt, Otto, 1883-1947—Juvenile fiction.
Classification: LCC PS8571.A33 B78 2020 | DDC jC813/.54—dc23
Copyright © 2020 by Kathy Kacer
Edited by Sarah Swartz
Photos on page 114 and 118 used with permission from Yad Vashem.
Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem, 671.
Printed and bound in Canada
Second Story Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through
the Canada Book Fund.
Published by
Second Story Press
20 Maud Street, Suite 401
Toronto, ON M5V 2M5
www.secondstorypress.ca
