The following day, Sunday, we spend the morning sleeping late, enjoying a splendid breakfast with Hilu and Roland, and taking a walk through a nearby nature preserve. We delight in the day’s brilliant sun and puffy white clouds, which race across the sky at the urging of a frisky breeze. As we walk, I prepare myself emotionally for the task I’ve scheduled for the afternoon: scattering my father’s ashes.
Since his death and cremation in the spring of 2009, his ashes have reposed in a heavy cardboard box in an upstairs closet in our home in Maryland. The many tender, though fanciful, conversations my father and I enjoyed in his last years at Arbor Place, during which we planned his return to his hometown and the park where his warmest memories were born, convinced me that it was meet and right to allow his dust to mingle with the rich soil of the Schlossgarten. On Friday night, I told Pastor Jacoby of my plan and asked her to please accompany my father on his homecoming. She readily agreed.
So on this Sunday afternoon, Roland, Amy, and I drive down to Gartenstrasse, Amy holding the box containing the ashes on her lap. We leave the car on a side street and walk solemnly to the Schlossgarten entrance that is nearest the splendid old house where my father grew up, walking the path that he, Bertha, and Elsa undoubtedly took when they visited the happy realm they called the Anemonen Reich, their Anemone Kingdom. Dietgard Jacoby is waiting for us.
Our little four-person procession enters the park and turns left onto another of the Schlossgarten’s well-tended paths, the weighty box in my arms. My deliberate steps bring me to a grove of rhododendron bushes, ablaze in red and purple blossoms. My father spoke lovingly of the rhododendrons of his youth and I know this to be his proper resting place. But now that the appointed time has come, I find myself frozen, fearful of the finality of what we are about to do.
My loving wife comes to my assistance. She takes the box from me and opens it. I stare at its contents, not comprehending that this grey ash, no different from the substance I recall from countless campfires and cozy fireplaces, was once the man who gave me life.
I look then at the three serious faces gathered around me and try to smile. “Günther Ludwig Goldschmidt was born here in 1913,” I say slowly. “George Gunther Goldsmith was my father. May he rest in peace.”
The ash is smooth and silky. I grasp a handful and toss it over the nearest rhododendron. I pass the box to Amy, who scatters her handful. Then Dietgard takes her turn, and finally Roland, who accompanies his toss by intoning, Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad. We continue until the box is nearly empty and the red and purple blossoms have taken on a grayish cast. Dietgard hugs me then and whispers in my ear, “He will always be here. He will always be with you.”
I struggle with a trembling voice to proclaim, “The king of the Anemonen Reich has returned to reclaim his kingdom.” Then, for the second time in twenty-four hours, I am crying, partly because I am saying a final farewell to my father and partly because I suddenly have a vision of Günther as a boy of ten, romping through this magical park with his dear little friends and without a care in the world.
On the way back to the car, I make a detour to 34 Gartenstrasse and sprinkle the remaining ashes over a pink rosebush in the front yard. So even though Alex was forced to sell his beautiful house, Günther will always be there.
That evening, we pay a call on Anneliese Wehrmann, an acquaintance of Hilu and Roland. Now ninety-one, she was a friend and classmate of my Aunt Eva years ago when her name was Anneliese Meyer. The two girls attended the Cecilia School and spent many hours together, at least in the years before the Nazi accession. Anneliese enjoyed the great privilege of “Aryan ancestry.”
She invites Amy and me into her snug apartment and offers us tea and cookies. Her nearly white hair is up in a neat bun and her eyes sparkle as she recalls her earliest memories of Eva Goldschmidt. She was a good-natured and good-humored girl, says Frau Wehrmann, although her bad leg made it difficult to run and play with the other girls and she was further isolated by being one of the few Jews in her class. Eva was sometimes mischievous and enjoyed speaking in a hushed voice to lure Anneliese closer and then shaking her head briskly to playfully lash Anneliese with her braids. Eva would then break into such a merry laugh that Anneliese would have no choice but to join in the laughter.
But by 1936 or ’37, when the girls were sixteen and seventeen years old, it became increasingly dangerous for non-Jews to associate with Jews. There was no written law, says Frau Wehrmann, but the Nazis had created such a toxic climate of fear that people naturally concluded that spending time with a Jew could bring consequences. There was a time, for instance, that Anneliese wanted to invite Eva to her house to study. Her parents thought it over for a long time and finally gave their consent, but only under certain conditions. When Eva knocked, insisted her parents, Anneliese should open the door immediately and hustle her friend upstairs to her room. When the studying was over, she must usher Eva out herself, without involving them in order that they might maintain a position of plausible deniability should the authorities inquire. Similarly, when Anneliese attended a birthday party at Eva’s apartment, Anneliese was to look both ways carefully before knocking, to reduce the chance that anyone would see her entering a Jewish home.
Frau Wehrmann must see the sadness on our faces as she tells these unhappy stories, for she pauses, looks away, and then says softly, “I had no choice, you see. None of us had a choice.”
She rises then to get more hot water for our tea. Then settling herself heavily into her chair, she shares her last memory of her long-ago friend. Eva was one of the Jewish children dismissed from her school on November 15, 1938. A few days later, Anneliese saw Eva across the street and waved to her. Eva’s eyes widened, she looked around her, then she covered her mouth with her hand to indicate that Anneliese shouldn’t call out, that it wasn’t safe for her friend to be seen talking to her. Eva then ducked her head and hurried away.
Frau Wehrmann looks at us then and I see tears in her eyes. “That was the last time I ever saw her. To this day I am haunted by that image of her running away from me.” She is silent for a long moment. “And . . . I suppose . . . what happened to her?” she asks in the smallest of voices.
I answer far more coldly than I intend to. “She was murdered,” I say. “In Riga. Along with her mother. My grandmother. That’s what happened.”
I rise to leave. “Please don’t blame yourself,” I say, trying to be kind, but a hardness remains in my voice that I cannot dislodge. “Thank you very much for the tea and for your memories of my aunt.” At the door, I turn to her and add, “And thank you for being her friend. Not everyone was.”
For the rest of the evening and well into the night, I turn my thoughts and feelings regarding Anneliese Wehrmann around and around in my head. She was my Aunt Eva’s friend, she risked her safety and that of her family to see her deep into the 1930s, and yet it doesn’t seem right—in fact it makes me clench my fists in frustrated anger—that in the end it was Eva who dragged her afflicted leg and her despised “race” away from Anneliese in order to protect her. Dammit, I tell myself, it should have been the other way around: Anneliese should have protected Eva. But how could she have done that in the face of the full force of the brutal gangsterism arrayed against her? As she said, she’d had no choice.
Yet, with no other individual to blame for the violence visited on my family, Anneliese Wehrmann becomes a convenient scapegoat, and I drift off to sleep with malice toward her in my heart.
On Monday morning, the rain has returned. Again, the four of us pile into the Meriva and drive downtown to the Altes Gymnasium for my session with the students. Although the school dates back to 1573, since 1878 it has been in its present prime location, across the street from the Old City and the soaring steeple of the Lambertikirche, just steps from the venerable State Theater, its back bordering the beautiful Schlossgarten. From the outside, it’s an imposing building, and yet inside, with students rushing through the corridors, laughing and w
histling, greeting friends and teachers, intent on relaying and accepting messages on their cell phones, dropping books and swapping caps, it displays the unmistakable atmosphere of a vibrant school community. We are met by Jörg Witte, the teacher who invited me on Friday evening. He leads us to the site of our gathering: the very assembly hall that was the setting for Helmut’s outburst in the autumn of 1938.
As I walk into the room, with its somber black walls bordered by dark wooden carvings, I feel what in the past few days has become a familiar prickling sensation at the corner of my eyes, and the thought rages through my mind, “Can you please stop crying for five minutes at least?!” But I cannot rid my imagination of the image of Uncle Helmut staging his hopeless protest against the lies that were being ruthlessly marshaled against his country, his city, his school—lies that he recognized and would not allow to stand. Then my tears give way to a broad smile; I am just so proud of what J. D. Salinger would have called Helmut’s “testicularity” at that singular moment.
By way of introducing me, Dr. Witte tells the students, all of them from the tenth and eleventh grades, of the important connection my family has to this auditorium. He points out that Helmut in 1938 was roughly the same age as they are today. “Who among you,” he asks, “would have the courage to do what Helmut Goldschmidt did? Who among any of us would?” he asks us, faculty and guests alike. I speak for perhaps ten minutes, telling the story of my family and of the journey I am just beginning. Then I invite their questions, virtually all of which are echoes of the question asked at Saturday night’s film screening: how does it feel to be back here at the scene of the crimes committed during what in German is called the NS Zeit, the time of National Socialism. Again I try to sort out my complicated feelings and I tell them that the pain of what happened years before I was born is still very present for me but that it has been tempered by the kindnesses shown me by so many Oldenburgers.
But even as I repeat these words, I am reminded of my angry reaction to Anneliese Wehrmann’s story and I ask myself just how well-tempered my true feelings have become.
After the students have been dismissed, we spend a few minutes admiring the memorial that stands at the entrance to the auditorium. It is a simple plaque, bordered in green, accompanied by an austere wooden sculpture. The plaque reads, in German, “The murdered Jewish students of this school.” The names are Paul Gerson, Helmut Goldschmidt, Ludwig Landsberg, Julius Meyberg, Franz Reyersbach, and Max Wallheimer. The students of the AGO see those names every day. I am very glad to read Uncle Helmut’s name and to know that he is celebrated for his courage and mourned as the very last Jewish student at the AGO during the NS Zeit. But I am also aware of the deep grief this well-meaning plaque cannot now ease, nor ever will.
That afternoon I try to explain my complicated feelings to Roland and learn that his emotions are no less in turmoil. He has been wrestling with the guilt of his German childhood for all of his adult life.
“It is so tempting,” he says, “to think that modern German history has a clear line of demarcation—the year 1945—and that on one side of the line there is National Socialism and on the other side democracy. But the reality is so much different. I was born in 1941 and in my first fifteen years or so I hardly ever came into contact with people who had not been Nazis—and many still were.”
Roland tells me that, with very few exceptions, all of his teachers were former Nazis. In his teenage years—the 1950s—he encountered a wall of silence when he tried to talk about the NS Zeit in his hometown. Sometimes, he heard words that were far more painful than silence. “You would think that those few brave souls who had stood up for the Jews, those who sheltered them or brought them food or performed even the simplest acts of charity such as that woman who bought those little fish from your grandmother, that these people would have been lauded and held up as model citizens,” Roland says. He shakes his head sadly, and when he resumes speaking, his eyes are blazing. “But no! People here looked upon such people with mistrust or even disgust. They did not want to hear about such heroics. Rather they wished to emphasize that they were being discriminated against by all these efforts to compensate the Jews for the property that had been stolen from them. For instance, my uncle Dieter, a master of figures and statistics, calculated that a certain house had been seized from a Jewish family in 1938 and the owner had been paid about 5 percent of its value. Efforts were underway to make things up to the victim’s family. And yet so many people here in Oldenburg were angry about those efforts, saying that the original transaction had been carried out in an orderly and lawful manner. These people would declare loudly, ‘Was rechtens war, kann heute nicht Unrecht sein!’ ‘What was lawful then cannot be unlawful today!’”
Roland is silent again for several long moments. Then he closes his eyes and tells me about his parents’ family doctor. “This man had participated in the euthanasia campaign of the National Socialists in which handicapped and other ‘undesirable’ people were put to death. Ghastly experiments on human beings this man had also done. He had been sentenced to prison in 1945. And when after ten years he was released from ‘internment,’ as people called it, in some parts of the Oldenburg population it was considered a matter of honor to choose this man as one’s family doctor, just to make a statement.”
“It is hard to imagine,” Roland says to me sorrowfully, “how hypocritical the established citizens of Oldenburg were.”
Roland Neidhardt has spent many decades trying to forge relationships of trust between his German countrymen and the Jews. He has learned to read and speak Hebrew fluently and spends part of every year in Israel. It is obvious that he remains deeply wounded by the same long-ago events that continue to cause me pain and anguish. The past is still very present for Roland, too.
“But things are different today, are they not?” I ask myself. There is that memorial in the AGO, and every year on November 10 the city recreates the march through town of those forty-three Jewish men. There are so many good and decent people in Oldenburg, from Dietgard Jacoby to Jörg Witte to the citizens who attended Farschid’s film the other night. And there is the family that kept my grandmother’s fish for years until they could be returned to me, their rightful heir.
These people are deeply aware of those events of the 1930s and ’40s, I think, and are trying to make amends, even if that proves to be an impossible task. Are my countrymen doing as much to account for the sins of slavery and the annihilation of the Native American population? Is it not eventually up to us, the descendants of the victims, to offer some form of forgiveness?
As I ponder these questions, the phone rings. Hilu answers it in another part of the house and I hear her speaking rapidly, with unmistakable excitement in her voice. After a few minutes, she comes to tell us that a couple who saw a story in Saturday’s newspaper about my visit has called with some remarkable news: about ten years ago, they purchased the beautiful house at 34 Gartenstrasse. They want me to visit my grandfather’s former home. In mere moments, I register my pleasure at the invitation and ask Hilu to call back with our acceptance.
That evening, the four of us drive to my family’s home. We are greeted by Carsten and Monica Meyerbohlen, who usher us inside. He is an architect, tall and silver-haired, whose English is about as accomplished as my German. She is younger, dressed elegantly, born in England to an army officer who was later assigned to postwar Germany. They welcome us with great kindness and understanding for the welter of emotions they know I am experiencing.
“When we saw our address in the paper in this extraordinary context,” Mrs. Meyerbohlen says, “we knew that we had to get in touch with you, to meet you, and to welcome you here. Please, let us show you everything.”
Over the next hour, we tour the elegant house from top to bottom. The entrance hallway is lined with bookshelves and adorned with paintings. The living room is spacious, with dark beams high above well-crafted furniture, fronting a glassed-in veranda that overlooks the rear garden. There is an immense
dining room and an equally large library, each with twelve-foot ceilings, that look out through tall windows of heavy glass to the traffic that whispers past on Gartenstrasse. The floors of the entrance hall, dining room, and library are finely stained oak; lush woven rugs muffle our steps in the living room. The kitchen has been designed for someone who clearly loves to cook; a big stove with six burners dominates the room, which includes every conceivable culinary gadget.
The floor above boasts four large bedrooms surrounding a central master bathroom. The floor above that has been transformed into a gallery hung with Mr. Meyerbohlen’s architectural drawings and sketches, with a balcony that offers a view of the nearby Schlossgarten. The basement includes the former servants’ quarters, now converted into cozy guest rooms, and a well-stocked wine cellar.
My head is swirling as I attempt to take it all in. Yes, the mansion has been updated and modernized, but the essential “houseness” of the building is unchanged from when Alex, Toni, Bertha, Günther, Eva, and Helmut lived here in the splendor that Alex’s business acumen had won for them, until it was taken away in an instant.
We walk out into the back garden of deep green grass, rhododendrons in bloom, a sunken pool, and a host of fruit trees. One of them, an apple tree, has the wrinkled bark and twisted branches that suggest old age. I conclude that it was probably here in the 1920s, perhaps providing a dappled shade with its springtime blossoms while Alex enjoyed a well-earned Sunday snooze. I picture the peaceful scene, and it is finally too much for me. I lean against its sturdy trunk and weep anew for my lost family. Amy comes to my side and holds me tenderly.
Carsten and Monica, noting my emotion, retreat silently back inside. When we rejoin them a few minutes later, they invite us to the dining room to share a bottle of wine. We tell our stories, and our hosts explain that when they purchased the house in 2001, they had no knowledge of its history. I can see that they are uncomfortable, and I assure them that in no way do I hold them even remotely responsible for the theft of the house in 1932.
Alex's Wake Page 8
