How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  At this moment of arrival, when I encountered his grave and saw the name, I did something I had never done before: I bowed low until I felt I had extended to this man the reverence due to an ancestor whose life was a hinge between two worlds; who continues to lie alone and in dignity in the land of his forebears; and who will hopefully remain there, undisturbed, forever.

  48.

  The Jewish cemetery of Trier

  The next day, after a winding train ride from Cologne to Trier, cutting through hills, crossing verdant meadows, overtaking fast-flowing streams, and stopping at hamlets in the beautiful Eifel region, I stood before another ancestral grave: that of Ferdinand’s father, my great-grandfather Moshe May. This was an altogether more ancient cemetery, dating back to 1652, and defiled not by the Nazi regime but by Allied bombing, followed by vandals who desecrated it in 1982, and then again in 1983, 1992, and 1995.34

  My mother had told me about this cemetery. She and my father had come to Trier after that first trip back to Cologne when they had been showered with cakes by the owner of his favourite childhood cafe; and she remembered my father stopping an old man in the street, who was in his nineties, and asking him if he had ever known a Moshe May. Incredibly, the man had. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, ‘I remember him vividly! The old May! He lived in a house with a turret, and when I passed by he was usually in his living room on the ground floor studying the holy texts. After the death of his beloved wife, he was there more than ever. He was a Bible scholar. A fine man.’

  My mother had repeated those words to me so often. The meeting had moved her and my father. They had been taken by the old man to the house with the turret where Moshe had lived and shown the room where he’d studied all day.

  ‘Here lies a kind-hearted descendant of a line of upright people and a family of scribes’, begins the inscription in Hebrew on his tombstone, one of the more recent. A few yards away is the grave of Karl Marx’s paternal grandfather, Mordechai Halevi ben Schmuel Postelburg, a rabbi who died in 1804. Unlike Moshe’s, its headstone is all in Hebrew, with not even the concession of the name and dates of the deceased written in the German form. And there are even older stones, many of them so deeply sunk into the ground that only their tips can be seen, peeking up from the earth.

  Then I saw other Mays: Moshe’s wife Bella, who died at forty-five. Their little son Eliahu, secular name Eduard, who passed away at fifteen. (Is this why Ferdinand named my uncle Edward, in memory of the little brother he lost?) Their daughter Chava, who lived only to her twenty-first year.

  I learned that Trier’s Jewish community at the end of the nineteenth century, when Moshe thrived, numbered around 300 – similar to Christburg’s, in which Ernst was raised. Occasionally, spouses would be found among the Jews of surrounding villages, but the few families represented in this cemetery mostly intermarried. Three hundred feels claustrophobic; I could understand why Ferdinand, like Ernst, left once assimilation became acceptable – within the community as well as to its non-Jewish neighbours.

  Yet, wandering around the tiny plot, which is well-tended and pervaded by timeless quietude, I was besieged by an identity passionately lived – not one fraught with life-sapping riddles, or that flees into a labyrinth of internal exile, as in the lives of the three sisters; not one that takes, as it took me, half a lifetime to excavate in the face of denial, obfuscation, and fury. And again I felt a profound sense of arrival, as I had at Ferdinand’s solitary grave the day before; but this time I’d arrived not just at a monument to lost family but also at the portal to an immense heritage, which these stones somehow rendered vivid, real, thinkable, legitimate – and mine. This surely was restitution.

  I wasn’t allowed to visit the cemetery unaccompanied. It is surrounded by a wall and always locked. Access could be gained only by arrangement with the city’s synagogue, where I was told to report first and to ask for Peter Szemere. But when I showed up, the receptionist said that he couldn’t see me then after all. A party of schoolchildren was visiting and I should return an hour later, when he would be free.

  Rather than waiting, I thought, Why don’t I join the schoolchildren’s visit? I slid into the meeting room just as Herr Szemere was starting to tell two dozen teenagers about the basics of Judaism and that it is not an alien religion but rather that of a parent to their offspring: Christianity and Islam.

  He did a superb job regaling them with lively biblical stories, but the children were restless and bored. When we moved from the meeting room to the hall of worship, they’d found it amusing and possibly absurd that men had to cover their heads. Tracksuit hoods were reluctantly put on and boys wearing kippas for the first time laughed at each other. It was a disconcerting session, void of any trace of reverence on the part of the children before a tragic history or at the power of faith to keep a people going through unspeakable odds. But I was impressed by what a patient and articulate rabbi Trier had, and afterwards I congratulated him on his entertaining introduction to the story of the Jewish people.

  How long, I asked, had he been the rabbi here?

  ‘Rabbi?’ He looked puzzled. ‘I’m not the rabbi. When we have services, a rabbi drives over from Luxembourg.’

  ‘How long have you been a congregant?’ I persisted.

  ‘I’m not a congregant. I’m Christian.’

  He saw my surprise and chuckled. ‘This is Germany. We don’t have enough Jews to fill all the positions in synagogues, so in a small city like Trier a Christian has to contribute.’

  ‘Are you from Trier?’ I asked. I imagined that he represented the Jewish community because he was an elder of the town, perhaps with ancestors who had known Jews, like my family, who’d once lived here.

  ‘No, I came from Munich.’

  ‘So why did you look for a position in a synagogue?’

  ‘Because I worked for El Al, the Israeli airline, at Munich airport, and when I had to retire at sixty I needed another job to make ends meet. I spoke some Hebrew from having to deal with Israeli passengers – modern Hebrew, of course, but still better than nothing.

  ‘I’m from a family of Hungarian aristocrats,’ he continued. ‘We fled the communists in 1956, after the Hungarian uprising against Moscow. We lost all our wealth. In Germany, we had to work hard for a living.’

  ‘And why did you go to work for El Al?’

  ‘Very simple: they paid better than Lufthansa. It’s the security risk of working at an El Al counter. You’re a terrorist target.’

  His journey from Hungarian Christian aristocrat to official of the synagogue at Trier via Munich airport cast me into that clichéd emotion that I try to avoid in Germany: melancholy. Jewish life in this city of my ancestors felt threadbare, empty, artificial – and Moshe’s tomb, along with the world to which it so eloquently points, achingly lonely. Unlike in Berlin, where the Jewish ghosts of pre-Hitler Germany still retain a foothold, in this city they were silent. The past is a graveyard.

  ‘For being a terrorist target, the Israelis had better pay you well,’ he added with a smile.

  49.

  The survivor file

  My quest to recover my German ancestry had encountered a magnificent gift in Klaus Meltzer. Through him, I found myself closer not just to Theo, but also, and quite unexpectedly, to my father’s family, which had always seemed beyond my reach, cocooned in unbreakable silence. Without Klaus I might never have lingered in Cologne and from there gone on to Trier.

  And then there was another, equally unexpected, connection to my German roots that offered itself – one that, however, would be decisive in taming my imaginings of a restituted Heimat and in disbanding the infantile fantasy of Germany as the magical ur-world that would embrace and root me like a primal parent, forever holding me close. Instead, it would force me to confront how intensely partial, even hollow, any restitution of the past is likely to be.

  This was the return, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of the J. Eichenberg Garment Factory AG, which had started out making shirts and coll
ars, and then diversified into sleepwear and aprons. Until the early 1990s, neither my mother nor her sisters had known that Ernst and Emmy bought 15 per cent of the business in 1924, the rest being owned by a chain of my grandfather’s distant cousins, whose descendants were dispersed all over the world, from Colombia to Chile to Britain to the United States.

  Eichenberg had been Aryanized on 1 February 1939: forcibly sold to Deutschblütiger – people of German blood – at a bargain-basement price that, after successive valuations by the Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce, the German Workers’ Front, and the Nazi Party itself, had been revised down from an already nominal opening offer. The little money paid to the Jewish owners was then largely confiscated in emigration tax – the Reichsfluchtsteuer (or Reich escape tax) – levied on Jews for fleeing a country that had stripped them of citizenship and almost all legal rights, and was soon to exterminate those who were unable or unwilling to leave.

  Under Nazi rules, any purchaser of Eichenberg had to meet a non-negotiable condition: the name of the firm was to be Aryanized too. The authorities were adamant that getting rid of Jewish owners and staff wasn’t enough. Names conveyed history and meaning, and they had to be racially purified.

  This did not please the new proprietors, August Plöger and the brothers Heinrich and Albert Fischer; nor the supervisory board members who had replaced their ousted Jewish predecessors, one an SA-Oberführer, the other an SS-Untersturmführer. Though they had been given a deadline of five months from the date of expropriation to Aryanize the name, they pleaded and bargained for two long years with Berlin’s Police President to keep ‘Eichenberg’ for its brand value.

  Losing the name, they argued, would cause heavy financial losses, as international customers in particular turned to foreign competitors. Moreover, it was not intrinsically Jewish: the root ‘Eiche’, or ‘oak’, had ‘a primeval German ring’ to it;35 and these Germanic credentials were further boosted by the fact that an SS officer as well as a small town near Kassel bore the same name. Oh, and another firm, called ‘Eichenblatt’, or ‘oak leaf’, was continuing to trade under its original name – so surely, they implied perfectly reasonably, an oak’s Aryan character was no less robust if it qualified the word ‘leaf’ (‘Blatt’) than if it qualified the word ‘mountain’ (‘Berg’). But, in order to further enhance those primeval resonances, perhaps they could call the company ‘Deutsche Eichenberg’?36

  The Police President’s office flatly refused. Moreover, an opinion that they now commissioned from the Chamber of Industry and Commerce revealed that the ‘Eichenblatt’ company sported a logo depicting an oak leaf. This, the Chamber obscurely concluded, made it a very different case to Eichenberg, which employed no logo at all. Plöger and the Fischer brothers were given a further six months to change the name; 31 December 1939 was the new deadline.

  But, again, the trio weren’t taking no for an answer. New arguments followed, most bizarrely that the company had, in fact, neither been founded by a Jew nor had a Jewish owner in the previous forty years. After these, too, had been rejected, they switched to a more practical tack, claiming in October 1940 that a renaming was impossible because two supervisory board members were now fighting in the war, which had broken out in the meantime. They were therefore unavailable to endorse a decision that had to be taken by consensus. How about delaying the whole matter until the end of the war?

  After checking with the Chamber of Industry and Commerce whether corporate name changes really required consensus and being advised that this was nonsense, and, in addition, sending agents over to the factory to verify that the old name plates were still in place, the remarkably patient Police President’s office upped their game. If Eichenberg’s new owners didn’t obey at once, they would be severely punished and a new name imposed by force.

  This worked. Sort of. On 10 May 1941, the day on which Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s loyal deputy, flew on his strange peace mission to Britain, they replied that they were ‘determined’ to give the company a new name, which would be ‘United Garment Factory’ – Vereinte Wäschefabrikation AG, or VEWAG for short. Herewith, they declared, ‘all Jewish elements in the company will finally be removed. Heil Hitler! J. Eichenberg AG’.37

  It must have taken chutzpah to stonewall the Police President in a totalitarian state for this long, but they continued to drag their feet for yet another year before officially registering VEWAG on 24 April 1942, over three years after the expropriation.

  The change turned out not to harm the company after all. It thrived during the war, supplying the regime with jackets and shirts for the Wehrmacht. After Germany’s defeat, it was confiscated by the communist regime in East Berlin, where it continued to trade as a state enterprise until the collapse of East Germany in 1990.

  Remarkably, the complete file documenting Eichenberg’s Aryanization turned up in the attic of a Berlin district court in November 1991, hidden within the company’s registration deeds. It almost certainly survived the bombing of the city only because it had been left in the wrong office: records of a business’s Aryanization were not generally stored together with its deeds. In the tidy world of German officialdom, where each procedure was like a minor god, that sort of error was exceedingly rare.

  Then the Berlin Wall had to fall, East Germany had to collapse, and Germany had to be reunited before the heirs of the original owners could contemplate restitution. Before Mikhail Gorbachev obligingly triggered these world-historical developments, the business and the handsome building that it owned were out of reach, in communist East Berlin.

  50.

  We have Saddam Hussein to thank

  We also had the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, to thank for our recovery of Eichenberg. When the ferociously anti-Semitic dictator invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990, Inge-Margot Müller, a descendant of one of its other expropriated owners, happened to be living in Saudi Arabia, where she was married to a German oil executive. As stories of murder and destruction emerged from Kuwait, Inge-Margot was getting nightmarish flashbacks to 1943, when the SS had snatched her mother in Nice and she herself had narrowly escaped arrest.

  Now, in Dhahran in autumn 1990, she was taking no chances. If Saddam moved on to the bigger prize of the Saudi oil fields, Jewish civil rights in Saudi Arabia would hardly be high in his priorities. As the Americans were massing their forces in the Gulf for an attack on the occupying Iraqis, she flew to Florida to take refuge with her cousin, Renata de Jara.

  Inge-Margot and Renata had been raised in Germany and were granddaughters of Gustav and Henriette Wertheim, the single biggest shareholders in Eichenberg.

  The flood of news at the time about Kuwaiti assets stolen by Saddam Hussein and the violence done to their owners by his henchmen dredged up long-forgotten stories about a factory somewhere in Berlin and its expropriation by the Nazis. Inge-Margot recalled her mother showing her a building that was divided between staff apartments at the front and a factory at the rear. And then the name Eichenberg stole up on her! While the other world drama of 1990, the reunification of Germany, unfolded, the cousins tried to reconstruct the history of Eichenberg’s creation, growth, and confiscation; and they resolved to get it back.

  Inge-Margot at once wrote to her elder sister Marion, who had been thirteen when she last saw the Berlin building and might have more vivid memories. Marion’s reply was discouraging: ‘The factory did not belong to our family but was rented!’ she mistakenly insisted. Fortunately, her letter was delayed in the post. Before it arrived, Renata had left for Berlin, on the hunt for Eichenberg.

  Renata was feisty, businesslike, and tenacious, with a face like a bird of prey and a voice that rasped in mid-Atlantic German-American tones. She flew to Berlin armed only with the name of the firm – and the details of a legal secretary there, who had once done a little work for a neighbour in Florida. The legal secretary said that she could recommend the perfect lawyer to help: Elke Stahlke.

  It was an inspired tip. Stahlke was forensic, as sharp as her stil
etto heels, deeply committed to restituting expropriated Jewish properties – and patient.

  51.

  The file goes astray

  Stahlke needed her patience. It quickly came to light that we had a determined competitor for Eichenberg’s restitution: the son of one of the Aryanizers who had ‘bought’ it from my grandmother, Emmy, and her co-investors.

  Hans-Joachim Fischer, son of Albert, maintained that his family had also been a victim of expropriation – when the communists in East Berlin seized the property from them in 1949. As for the Jewish families, they had already been taken care of four decades earlier, in 1954, when a German court had ordered his father and August Plöger to pay 40,000 Deutsche marks in compensation to Herbert Liepmann, Eichenberg’s ousted managing director, and a few of the other original investors. He had therefore lodged an official claim to Eichenberg, which he was demanding back in its entirety.

  Stahlke’s advice was succinct: do nothing. Our priorities, she said, were very different. Most importantly, we had to track down the rightful heirs to Eichenberg, the descendants of all those who had been expropriated in 1939. There might be dozens all over the world. Many of the original owners of properties like ours had been murdered in the camps, or had died natural deaths without informing their living descendants, or were now ill and demented.