As we turn to leave the cemetery, we notice amid the ragged grass two long parallel depressions in the ground running the length of the graveyard from south to north. They are, we learn later, the ghostly tracks of the heavy wooden wheels of that cart driven so long ago by Georg Buschmann.
Sachsenhagen is too small to sustain a proper hotel, so we drive our Meriva back to Stadthagen, where we’ve reserved a room in the Gerbergasse, a former tannery. By now the clouds have produced a steady rain, which adds its note of solemnity to the atmosphere. But the next morning arrives with abundant sunshine, and we return to Sachsenhagen eagerly anticipating new discoveries.
For weeks, ever since plans for my journey began to take solid shape, I have been in e-mail contact with Theodor Beckmann, a member of Sachsenhagen’s historical society. He has sent me a great deal of information, always in the kindest manner imaginable. I am grateful for his assistance and also for his excellent English. Despite several years of high school German and many trips to the country, my German has never advanced beyond the barely serviceable stage. So I was sorry to learn a week or so ago that on this particular Friday the 13th, Herr Beckmann would be in France with his wife. His very able colleague, Erika Sembdner, would meet us instead; alas, her English proves to be no better than my German.
But her pleasure at our arrival seems unbounded. We ask for her at the Rathaus, and she immediately hurries from her house to greet us. For the next ninety minutes, Erika leads us on a sentimental journey through Sachsenhagen. First she shows us 9 Oberestrasse, the house where Great-Great-Grandfather Levi lived with Johanna, their two fruit trees, and a single goat. The imposing white house with its high sloping roof is situated directly on the main road that leads south toward the cemetery. We then visit the grand house on Mittelstrasse where Great-Grandfather Moses lived from 1864 until his death in 1908. Erika tells us that it’s among the oldest houses in Sachsenhagen and has been expertly restored. Built by a master carpenter in the seventeenth century, not long after the great fire, it’s a stunning example of the traditional fachwerk style, in which heavy wooden beams are fastened together by mortise and tenon joints. Such ancient grandeur. And it belonged to my family. Amy and I stand silently, amazed.
Erika then leads us to a small building just off the market square. Here the Sachsenhagen synagogue and Jewish school once stood, from its gladsome dedication in 1870 until the night of November 9, 1938, when it and countless other shuls across Germany were plundered and set afire during the orgy of violence known as Kristallnacht. Today the land is occupied by a private house and garden. In 1885, when Grandfather Alex was six years old and attending the Jewish school, there were 58 Jews living in Sachsenhagen, a number that represented 7 percent of the total population of 840. In 1939, in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Jewish percentage of the citizenry still measured 8 percent, 88 of 1,089. But then on July 20, 1942, the Gestapo ordered Jewish citizens of Sachsenhagen out of their homes and told them to assemble in the market square. They were rounded up, placed in secure trucks, and deported to the East. None of them returned. Today, the Jewish population of Sachsenhagen is zero.
As I sadly ponder this grim statistic, Erika says brightly, “Jetzt besuchen wir die Schule,” and herds us back to our car. Following her directions, we drive about a mile to Sachsenhagen’s one primary school. We arrive shortly after lunchtime and the grounds and play areas are nearly empty. Erika walks with us into a cheerful red-brick entranceway that declares in brass letters that we have arrived at the Gerda Philippsohn School.
Today there are no more Jews living in my ancestral home of Sachsenhagen, but the village school is named for a Jewish girl who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942. Amy and I were welcomed as near celebrities.
Gerda Philippsohn, born in Sachsenhagen in 1927, began attending school in 1933. She was an eager learner and bright student. On the afternoon of November 15, 1938, six days after Kristallnacht, she was summarily dismissed from the school because she was a Jew. On March 28, 1942, Gerda, her parents, and eleven other Sachsenhagen Jews were deported. At age fifteen, Gerda was murdered at Auschwitz.
In 2000, at the urging of former teacher Rita Schewe, the school changed its name to the Gerda Philippsohn School. The entranceway bears a memorial plaque to Gerda, exhibiting her picture and a brief explanation of her fate.
The school’s principal, Frau Herrmann, comes out eagerly to shake our hands, take our picture as we pose in front of the little memorial to Gerda, and present us with a pen and pencil set embossed with the school’s name. We feel a bit like visiting celebrities as we are escorted through the school, looking into a few classes, and are introduced as descendants of people who lived in Sachsenhagen many years ago. I feel deeply touched by the decision to rename the village’s single school for a long-dead victim of the country’s villainous past, yet also curious as to what prompted the decision, seeing that none of the children currently attending the Gerda Philippsohn School shares the one characteristic that marked its innocent namesake for murder.
Perhaps by way of an answer, Erika announces that the final stop on our tour will be a visit with Rita Schewe, the teacher and local historian who led the effort to rename the school. We drive out into the country, where Rita lives with her husband and dog. Erika has phoned ahead, and when we knock, Rita throws open the front door and envelopes me in a mighty bear hug. “Herr Goldschmidt!” she keeps exclaiming, and when she finally releases me, I see tears in her eyes.
For an hour, we sit on her patio and enjoy fruit and lemonade and a conversation that rises above its poor practitioners of English and German to achieve an unexpected warmth. Rita has made Jewish Sachsenhagen a private passion and has researched its past and tried to create a new present. How did she come upon the idea to rename the school? She shrugs, smiles, and says that it has fallen to her generation to try to right the wrongs of the previous generation, even if that proves to be an impossible task. I ask her if I am related to Gerda Philippsohn, since my great-grandmother was a Philippsohn. Very likely, she tells me, although the Philippsohn family is a large one; Gerda may well have been a third or fourth cousin.
Eventually I explain that we must be on our way, that we are expected elsewhere that night. At the door, there are more hugs and tears. We promise to return one day. They promise to welcome us. We drive Erika back to her home and thank her profusely for her time, patience, knowledge, and understanding of the many emotions that have colored this memorable day.
As a final goodbye to Sachsenhagen, we return to the cemetery. I place small stones on the graves of Levi and Johanna, of Moses and Auguste. I gaze across the fields and try to imagine our family living on this land with horses as our livelihood. Then I recall my father, as the shadows deepened on an Arbor Place afternoon, telling me about the few times he had visited his grandfather’s house and how every spring the family would eagerly await the return of the storks to their snug nest on the roof. There was peace in my father’s eyes as he shared this precious memory and, leaning on the cemetery fence under a cloudless May sky, I begin to understand that there is more to my family’s story than murder, loss, sorrow, and shame. There is honor and respect for a job well done; there is a certain standing in a single community over multiple generations; there is success, wealth, and a large, well-cared-for family; and there is a pair of storks that return in the spring, bringing forth precious new life.
What might have happened had Grandfather Alex chosen to stay in this sweet little town? His fate would likely not have altered much, as the Nazi noose tightened around urban and rural regions alike. But perhaps my father would have absorbed a bit more of the happy portions of his heritage and passed them on to his sons. He might not have been inspired by his surroundings to become a professional musician, but maybe . . .
To stop my thoughts from curling around each other in endless serpentine speculation, I take Amy by the hand and walk slowly past my family plot and out of the graveyard. We settle into the Meriva; I smile at the faces of A
lex and Helmut and turn the car north to follow my grandfather to the city where prosperity and sorrow awaited him.
3
Oldenburg
FRIDAY, MAY 13, 2011. In broad afternoon, under a full and friendly sun, we drive through the flat farmland of Lower Saxony. Our route takes us north and west, through the towns of Wölpinghausen, Nienburg, Lemke, and Syke, but mostly past fields of rye, soybeans, and wheat that stretch their still-new shoots upward through the warm May air toward the sapphire sky. Occasionally we spy open pastures in which the white Saxon horses of the state coat of arms graze, rest, or trot. I think of Great-Grandfather Moses, smoking his fat cigar and smartly cracking his whip as he shows off his latest equine acquisitions to a potential buyer, and I smile so fully and wistfully, it brings a prickle to the corners of my eyes.
Slowly the fields give way to more concentrated clusters of homes and businesses as we approach the outer suburbs of Bremen. We leave the pastoral byways and join the heavy westward traffic of another German autobahn. The suburbs of Delmenhorst slip past our windows and we’re once more in the countryside, speeding past farms and fields and the occasional insubstantial forest, as the brilliant sun sinks before us. The blue waters of the Tweelbäker See appear on our right and then the first houses and industrial parks that herald our arrival in Oldenburg. We cross the Hunte River, which flows north to merge with the Weser on its passage to the North Sea, and then exit the autobahn at Marschweg, a pretty, urban thoroughfare that leads us past the campus of Carl von Ossietzky University.
A pacifist and anti-Nazi, Carl von Ossietzky was arrested in 1933 just weeks after Adolf Hitler assumed the German chancellorship. He spent time in Berlin’s notorious Spandau Prison and also in the Esterwegen concentration camp near Oldenburg. Ossietzky was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize, but Hermann Göring ordered him to refuse the honor or risk being cast outside the community of the German people. But from the hospital where he was being treated for tuberculosis, Ossietzky wrote a note declaring that he would accept the prize as a means to “encourage understanding between peoples.” He was denied permission to travel to Oslo to accept the award, the Nazi press suppressed any mention of the honor, and the government issued a decree forbidding any German citizen from ever again accepting a Nobel Prize. On May 4, 1938, Carl von Ossietzky died in a Berlin hospital while under Gestapo surveillance. In 1991, the University of Oldenburg changed its name in his honor.
Leaving the campus behind, we drive along peaceful lanes to the home of our Oldenburg hosts, Roland and Hiltrud Neidhardt. I have known the Neidhardts since 1998, when I first came to this city in search of my past. Roland, a retired academic who turns seventy this year, has silver-white hair and beard and sparkling blue eyes. Hiltrud has been an active member of Germany’s burgeoning Green Party for nearly thirty years. Twenty years ago, she was elected to the Oldenburg city council and, beginning in 1996, served five years as the city’s vice mayor. They own no car and get around town by bicycle, which partly accounts for their superb health. Their home is light and airy, full of books, paintings, and the joy of an active life.
In the evening, after a savory meal of bread and pasta served in their garden amid irises, rhododendrons, and an enormous fir tree through which flit an array of swallows, swifts, and magpies, the Neidhardts welcome several old friends who wish to see us. Among them are two people whom I’ve known for years and to whom I owe a debt of the deepest gratitude. Farschid Ali Zahedi, an Iranian-born filmmaker, has uncovered so many traces of Oldenburg’s Nazi past that some in the city’s hierarchy have accused him of unnecessarily stirring up old enmities and opening old wounds. He has also done invaluable research into the story of the Goldschmidts. And Dietgard Jacoby, a Lutheran pastor who offered me cherished words of comfort at the end of a memorial march in Oldenburg in 1999, once more reminds me that there are a few rare human spirits in our midst who bring the word “saintly” to mind.
Roland and Hiltrud (Hilu to her friends) have also invited Jörg Witte, an English and geography teacher at Oldenburg’s Altes Gymnasium, the high school that both my father and uncle attended. He invites me to address the gymnasium students on Monday morning, an offer I eagerly accept. Last to arrive this evening is the remarkable Mrs. Annemarie Boyken, ninety-three years old, who pulls up to the house in her automobile, which she drives only at night. During the day she, like the Neidhardts and so many other Oldenburgers, commutes by bicycle.
Mrs. Boyken grasps my hands and beams, then embraces me vigorously. She insists on sitting across from me in the living room, the better to gaze at me without any interference. Naturally, I’m eager to learn the source of this rapturous attention. She speaks almost no English, and my German remains under construction, but through the translations provided by the Neidhardts, I learn her story.
As a girl, she lived just down the street from the magnificent house owned by Alex Goldschmidt at 34 Gartenstrasse. My father was four years older than Annemarie, my uncle was four years younger, and she had a crush on both of them. She had hoped to catch Günther’s eye and wanted to play marbles with Helmut, but she somehow struck out on both attempts. On this soft May evening so many decades later, she tells me that I remind her of both my relatives and that seeing my face makes her feel years younger.
Then she tells another story. It was spring, sometime in the mid-1920s. Annemarie was eight years old, maybe ten. She went with her mother to shop for an Easter dress at Alex Goldschmidt’s Haus der Mode, where all fashion-conscious Oldenburg ladies bought their clothes and accessories. She found the perfect frock, but her mother took one look at the price tag and declared it too expensive. Heartbroken at the prospect of having to choose another dress in its place, Annemarie began to cry. At that point, Alex Goldschmidt came over to see what was wrong. He knelt down beside her, took her hand, and asked, “Aren’t you the little girl who lives on Taubenstrasse, the little girl who is such a fine marbles player?” Annemarie sniffled and nodded.
“And what has made you so unhappy this fine morning?”
“I love this dress, but my mother says it’s too expensive for us.”
At that, Mrs. Boyken recalls today, Alex looked at the price tag and exclaimed in a shocked voice, “But there has been some mistake! One of my employees has marked the wrong price on this item. Here is the correct price,” and named a figure that was considerably lower. And just like that, his children’s playmate got the dress she really wanted.
Annemarie Boyken takes my hand, beams at me again, and says to me, in English, “That is exactly the kind of man your grandfather was.”
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, in January 1911, Grandfather Alex purchased the property that would enable him, a decade and a half later, to so delight young Annemarie. His Haus der Mode, or “House of Fashion,” occupied the ground floor of a three-story building that gracefully followed the curve at the intersection of Schüttingstrasse and Achternstrasse in the maze of narrow cobblestone streets in downtown Oldenburg. As long ago as that seems to a visiting American, a century is less than a tenth of the time that this city has existed.
According to archeological digs, there has been a settlement here on the banks of the Hunte as far back as the seventh or eighth century. The city’s modern history dates back to the year 1108, when it was known as Aldenburg and was the most convenient spot to ford the river. As was the case with Sachsenhagen, Oldenburg prospered in the shadow of an enormous moated castle that would house dukes of Oldenburg for generations to come. Toward the end of the twelfth century, work was begun on the soaring church that still dominates the city skyline, a church dedicated to St. Lambert—martyred for his defense of marital fidelity—known as the Lambertikirche.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, due to several complicated conjugal relationships, the city came under the control of the king of Denmark. Oldenburg grew in size and wealth, much of its income deriving from the same horse trade that would in later years enrich the Goldschmidt family. A breed of horse known as the
Oldenburger Pferde was soon renowned across Europe. But the good times came to an abrupt end in 1676 when the Great Plague struck the city; at its height, the disease carried off thirty to forty people a week. That same star-crossed year, in another echo of Sachsenhagen, a fire begun by three lightning strikes from a single storm became a conflagration that nearly destroyed the entire town. The Danish crown, initially so eager to reap the benefits of a prosperous Oldenburg, now essentially turned its back on its southern holdings. With very little support from Copenhagen, the reconstruction of Oldenburg took nearly one hundred years.
In 1773, the city returned to German hands in the form of a duchy in the house of Holstein. This next succession of dukes rebuilt Oldenburg with gleaming classical architecture, reserving for themselves a grand palace and spacious royal gardens. The reign of the very last grand duke of Oldenburg, Friedrich August, ended in 1918 with the arrival of republican government in Germany. In the following year, the city of Oldenburg became the capital of the Free State of Oldenburg and the ducal castle was converted into a museum. The beautiful gardens became the public Schlossgarten, where every common citizen could admire its carefully tended flower beds, its stately old trees, its placid pond; where they could stroll on its gracefully curving paths, or rest and dream on its sturdy benches.
Alex's Wake Page 4
