by Simon May
At the same time, it would be necessary to navigate the network of official German agencies – diffuse, mutable, but critical – each of which had some sort of responsibility for Eichenberg and to that extent would be involved in its restitution. There was the Treuhand, which had been established in June 1990 to take formal possession of the businesses and properties that had been in the hands of the soon-to-be-defunct East German state, to prepare these assets for sale, and, where they had been stolen from Jews, to return them to their rightful owners. There was the District Court in Berlin and its associated land registry. Above all, there was LAROV – the Landesamt zur Regelung offener Vermögensfragen (the ‘State Office for Settling Open Questions about Assets’) – which verified the identity of heirs and adjudicated rival claims for properties. LAROV was the crucial player: it would be responsible for issuing the final verdict on the restitution.
It wasn’t, though, always easy to figure out who had responsibility for what. At that early stage after the fall of the Wall, when the parallel worlds of East and West were colliding and everything was being improvised, no single authority in Berlin had control over former Jewish properties. Eichenberg’s building in East Berlin was managed by two organizations with different interests, one of which, the Treuhand, was keen for the building to be sold, while the other, a relic of East German rule that administered its apartments, was resolutely opposed to a sale – understandably, because they had long-term tenants who for the time being had nowhere else to go.
Meanwhile, the Treuhand’s character was changing as we were speaking to them. A turgid government bureaucracy was morphing into a commercially savvy real-estate agency. The staff in charge of the Eichenberg file were visibly transforming themselves from uppity officials, whose only interest was to police the rules and do as little work as possible, to a pair of aggressive salespersons intent on convincing us that we had no choice but to have them dispose of Eichenberg’s property whenever we found all its rightful heirs. Even their dress changed from the plain outfits of desk-bound East German bureaucrats to the designer clothes of deal-hungry executives. But no sooner had they switched their identity than another German government edict abolished the Treuhand altogether.
Bizarrely, amid the chaos of those times, our Aryanization file went missing. Only one day after Stahlke discovered it squeezed into the company’s registration documents, it had disappeared. She was flummoxed: how could a file survive the Third Reich, the Allied bombing, the defeated Nazis’ destruction of their archives, armies of occupation, and the division of Berlin, only to vanish just when the past to which it bore such detailed witness could be restituted?
Luckily, she had immediately realized that this was an extraordinary historical document – it turned out to be the only complete Aryanization file that she ever encountered in the dozens of restitution cases she handled after the fall of the Wall – and had photocopied almost the whole thing then and there. As she had stumbled on the file at midday, and the closely supervised room where lawyers were allowed to consult official papers would shut at 2 p.m., she’d quickly copied as many pages as she could using her own portable copier before slipping the file back into the registration documents at exactly the place where she had discovered it, and leaving for a late lunch.
It was just as well she had had the presence of mind to copy the file. Without it, the past might have been a lot more resistant to our claims on it.
52.
Finding the heirs
Now, the hardest part had to begin: tracking down the heirs.
Stahlke decided that there was an obvious place to start: with the only investor who had listed themselves as Aryan when the business was confiscated. This was my grandmother, Emmy Liedtke, into whose sole ownership my grandparents’ shares had passed after Ernst’s death. An Aryan’s descendants would probably still be living in Germany. They would be the easiest heirs to find.
Provided, of course, they were male. Women would have lost their family names on marrying – and Emmy Liedtke had had three daughters.
But thanks to the Nazis’ prohibition of mixed marriages, Ernst’s disapproval, Ilse’s Catholicism, or whatever had stopped her marrying Harald Böhmelt, she had passed the Liedtke name to her son; and so it had been preserved.
On a freezing day in December 1991, he received a phone call from Stahlke. She had started her search simply – with the Berlin telephone directory. Armed only with the address at which Emmy’s shares had been registered by the Nazi authorities when Eichenberg was Aryanized, she managed to trace him, and so our whole family.
Finding the other heirs, however, required more than a local telephone directory. They would surely be anywhere but Berlin. Advertisements were placed in newspapers from Sydney to Santiago, with remarkable results. Overnight, feuding relatives couldn’t wait to be reconciled. Long forgotten cousins were hungry for contact. Decades of silence were broken by flurries of visits and telephone calls – before communications would cease again, this time probably forever.
Most of the Americans, British, Colombians, and Germans sent in the required proofs of descendance in no time at all. Some others, including the Chileans, were agonizingly slow. The executor of one heir who had recently died refused to cooperate after he discovered that she had left him nothing in her will. It took over four years to track down and complete the paperwork for twenty-one of them, who together represented a tantalizing 76 per cent of Eichenberg’s ownership. Only three couldn’t be found: Eric Sonnenberg; Frank Lehmann; and whoever the heir was to someone called Adelheid Gerschlowitz.
It was vital to find this elusive trio who made up the remaining 24 per cent of Eichenberg’s shareholders. Meanwhile, the post-reunification property boom in Berlin had gone into reverse. The euphoria following the fall of the Wall and the hope that a world capital would quickly spring from the ecstatic fusion of two halves of a city that had been separated by a death zone for nearly three decades were – amazingly, in hindsight – evaporating.
A couple of intrepid investors were keen to buy out the heirs to Eichenberg’s property who’d already been traced. They offered half its market value to compensate for the risk that the missing heirs might never be found. But this was no time to give up. The hunt for them had to go on.
53.
Pip
The first of the three, Eric Sonnenberg, was the nephew of Herbert Liepmann, the manager of Eichenberg when it had been Aryanized. Renata had searched for all the Sonnenbergs in the UK. Then she switched her search to the US, in case he had re-emigrated. But none of the Sonnenbergs she contacted was an Eric or knew of one.
A year later, she happened to mention the problem on the phone to another of Liepmann’s heirs, a London-based lawyer called Rico Jonas. ‘You’re looking for Eric?’ Jonas chuckled. ‘He was here for lunch yesterday, on his way from the US to South Africa! He drops in on me twice a year, to and from his annual visit to Cape Town to visit his son. I’ll give you his wife’s phone number in Philadelphia.’
‘But why couldn’t I find him anywhere?’ Renata asked.
The voice at the other end of the phone growled with laughter. ‘He hasn’t been called Eric since he was a schoolboy in England fifty years ago. He’s Pip now!’
‘Pip?’
‘He used to go to a friend’s house after junior school and, the first time he appeared, the friend’s snooty mother demanded of her son: “Who’s this little pipsqueak you’ve brought home? Sit him down and I’ll give you both a cup of tea. No, first go and give yourself a good scrub, Pip! You look disgusting!” And from then on the name Pip stuck to him. He worked, and filed his taxes, and married as Pip Sonnenberg. He only wants to be called Pip!’
Frank Lehmann, the second missing heir, was a nephew of Rico Jonas, who had located Pip. Jonas was eighty-nine when the survivor file had surfaced in Berlin. At ninety-two, just eleven months before Eichenberg was finally restituted, he told Renata: ‘It will be a miracle if you get Eichenberg back. It will be even better
if I live to see it happen. But if I don’t, my will is with my lawyer.’
Jonas died eight weeks before Eichenberg was restituted and left his money to two former girlfriends, one of them a woman who lived in Fiji, the other a professional ice skater based in London – and to Frank Lehmann in New York. The first two were easy to locate, but Frank was harder. Jonas’s lawyer had been trying for some time, but his letters had gone unanswered.
Renata decided to fly to New York to track Frank down herself. She would go to the address for him that Jonas’s lawyer had given her and, if he was out, leave a message with a neighbour. But when she got there she realized this wasn’t going to work: in place of the apartment block was a burned-out ruin. A charred smudge on the face of the building framed a large black hole, where the fire must have started.
So what now? The New York telephone directory still had Frank listed at the black hole and neither the local post office nor utility companies would give out a forwarding address. But then she asked at a nearby store, and learned that Frank was now at a senior citizens’ home. The manager gave her its name and even its telephone number.
‘Would it be possible to speak to Mr Lehmann?’ Renata enquired gingerly, imagining a decrepit figure with tremoring limbs, slumped in a large chair and possibly unable to talk or to remember anything.
‘Sure,’ the operator said briskly, ‘I’ll connect you to the director’s office.’
‘I really don’t want to bother the director. Can you please just connect me to Mr Lehmann’s room?’ Renata said. ‘Is he able to take calls?’
‘Mr Lehmann is the director,’ the voice said, becoming impatient.
An assistant took the call. No, Mr Lehmann wasn’t in; he was out dancing salsa. He did that every evening, so it wasn’t a good idea to call at this time. He rode to the salsa class and back by bike. He also cooked for the old people when the cook was ill or too lazy to turn up.
When he finally returned Renata’s call, Lehmann was suspicious, thinking someone was playing a trick on him. He had just lost a long battle with the German authorities over two other Aryanized properties, one of them a seven-room mansion, and had started to put all that behind him when this unknown woman called to offer him a share in just such a property. Odder still, she was desperate for his cooperation.
Nor did the name Eichenberg ring bells. It must be a misunderstanding, he thought. He hadn’t known that his uncle, Rico Jonas, had been a childhood friend of Herbert Liepmann; that Liepmann had left Jonas a small share in the business; and that this share had trickled down to him.
For Frank Lehmann, this was a triumph of historical justice. Where he sought, he hadn’t found; where he failed to seek, he had come into riches. When he got his inheritance, he didn’t give up being the director of the senior citizens’ home. He was dedicated to helping old people in their dotage; but now, thanks to the Eichenberg money, he could look forward to a comfortable retirement himself.
54.
The missing 1 per cent
With Pip and Frank, we had 92 per cent of the heirs on side. The Chileans, who accounted for a further 7 per cent, were still at war with their national bureaucracy over certifying the paperwork, but at least we knew where they were. There was one missing piece: the heir to Adelheid Gerschlowitz.
So what had happened to Adelheid? The hunt started, as it often did, with an enquiry to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial. Did they have her on their lists? No, they replied; the only murdered Gerschlowitzs from Berlin were a Jenny, a Flora, and a Nathan, and none of these names rang bells with Renata.
A couple of weeks after Renata received the reply from Yad Vashem, she happened to be in Berlin, and decided to visit the grave of her grandfather, Gustav Wertheim, who was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Weissensee. As she was about to leave, she thought she’d ask an official at the front desk if he knew how you could discover where your German-Jewish ancestors were buried, if all you had was a name and place of birth. Was there such a database?
‘Adelheid Gerschlowitz?’ He tapped into a computer. ‘She’s buried right here!’
Renata was stunned. ‘So how can we find out more about her?’
‘Speak to that young fellow in the next room,’ the official replied. ‘He’s researching the fate of Berlin Jews in the thirties.’
The young man thought this must be a set-up. ‘But I’ve researched the Gerschlowitz family!’ he said. ‘It was a few months ago now, but I’ll get you all the information I have.’
Adelheid, he reported, had been deported to Theresienstadt, survived the camp, and died in Berlin in 1956.
Died in Berlin? That would make the search for an heir so much easier. There must be a whole post-war paper trail on her in this city of files. For a start, if she had been imprisoned in a Nazi camp and then lived in Berlin after the war, she would surely have received some sort of pension from the German government. The bureaucracy that dealt with pensions for Nazi victims was the Entschädigungsbehörde, the Restitution Authority, the obvious next port of call.
Renata thanked the young man and was about to head for the Restitution Authority when he called after her: ‘Wait a minute! Adelheid had a daughter called Flora, who was born on 26 June 1893 and was also deported to Theresienstadt. You have an heir!’
He read on; then paused. ‘I’m sorry – she was murdered. Her mother survived, but Flora died within a few months.’
This matched the information on a Flora that Renata had received from Yad Vashem; that Flora must have been Adelheid’s daughter.
After the usual weeks assembling the necessary papers, Renata tracked down a three-inch file into which the Restitution Authority had compressed Adelheid’s life, where she discovered that there was a sole heir: Dr Werner Asch, Adelheid’s nephew.
Further enquiries revealed that he had married a woman called Dagmar, who had given birth to a daughter, Judith, born in Berlin in 1961.
So Judith Asch was the heir to Adelheid’s 1 per cent and she might be in Berlin, right under Renata’s nose. The hunt for Eichenberg’s heirs would end, as it had begun, in the improbable setting of the city from which the original owners had long ago been expelled. Finding her would just be a matter of searching the telephone directory.
But it wasn’t as simple as that. There was no Judith Asch with that date of birth registered in Berlin. Renata then tried the maternity wards of hospitals in Berlin: had any of them delivered a baby with that name on that day? No luck. What about baptismal registries, both Catholic and Protestant? Dagmar wasn’t Jewish and might have raised Judith as a Christian, but there too Renata drew a blank.
A breakthrough came with a search that Renata placed at Berlin’s Interior Ministry for all birth certificates marked ‘Judith Asch’. Four months later, Judith’s birth certificate was located. But Renata could have no access to it, they said, as she wasn’t a direct family member. Not that a birth certificate would have shed any light on where she was living over three decades later.
Renata pleaded with the official at the local registry of births and deaths. Judith Asch, she told him, probably had no near relatives and this concerned an inheritance from which she would benefit. He shrugged understandingly, but the rules were the rules. As she was about to leave, exhausted at this dismal end to years of searching for heirs, he said, ‘By the way, Frau de Jara, why don’t you try enquiring at this other office?’ And he slipped her a piece of paper directing her to the registry of Berlin residents.
Renata had left Germany too young to know that when you move into a new lodging there the first thing you must do is register at an office like this. If only she had asked Stahlke, she would have gone here immediately. And it duly took this office just ten minutes to resolve the mystery: Judith Asch had a new name. She was now Judith Bieling.
Renata ran to a public telephone across the road – she didn’t yet have a mobile phone – and grabbed the Berlin directory. There it was: ‘Bieling, Judith’! She left a message saying that if she was the former
Judith Asch, daughter of Dr Werner Asch, and great-niece of Adelheid Gerschlowitz, then she should call this stranger from Florida for some good news.
That evening, Judith was amazed to learn that, if she successfully laid siege to a chain of bureaucracies, she would become an heiress.
But why Bieling?
The answer was easy, Judith told me over coffee in Berlin in 2008: Bieling was the maiden name of Judith’s mother, Dagmar. When Judith was about to begin junior school, Dagmar wanted her daughter to think of herself as a Bieling and not as an Asch. The reason for this, she later told Judith, was compassionate: Judith’s classmates might insert an ‘r’ after the ‘A’ in Asch, and so make her an ‘Arsch’ – an arse, a backside – and Dagmar wanted to spare her the taunting and the humiliation.
For Judith, Eichenberg wasn’t just about the discovery of some money. It had given her a global family of which she was now part. By 2008, she had already spent Thanksgiving with Renata in Florida and New Year’s with Renata’s children in California. She and I had met and felt a bond through a common inheritance that was a surprise to us both. The community of heirs was her real windfall.
55.
The Aryanizers demand compensation from us
With Judith located, Eichenberg was swiftly restituted, in mid-1995, by an ‘incontestable’ ruling of the Berlin authorities. A thrilling piece of historical justice had been completed.
But ghosts don’t take easily to retirement. Within months of the restitution, a lawyer for Hans-Joachim, son of Albert Fischer, one of the original Aryanizers, appeared on the scene yet again. Now he was demanding back the 40,000 Deutsche marks compensation that his father had been ordered to pay Herbert Liepmann back in 1954. He wrote to Stahlke in October 1995, in July 1996, and again in August 1998. Stahlke did what she did masterfully under these circumstances: nothing.
