Carsten speaks then, and Roland translates. “Ever since we learned from the newspaper story that a Jewish family lived here and was forced out of this house,” he says, “we have tried to think of a way to acknowledge what happened. And here is what we would like to do: we would like to erect a plaque on the outside gate, right on Gartenstrasse, that says something like ‘This house was owned from 1919 until 1932 by a Jewish businessman, Alex Goldschmidt. He was forced to sell it for far less than it was worth during the time of National Socialism. He was later murdered in Auschwitz.’ Carsten pauses. “What do you think of that idea? Would we have your permission to do that?”
I pause for a moment, then quickly say that, although I would have to think about the particulars of the plaque’s wording, the idea itself is very welcome, very moving. I tell him and Monica, “Vielen Dank! Thank you both very much for your kindness.”
We exchange addresses and phone numbers, promise to keep in touch regarding the plaque, say our goodbyes, and silently drive back to the Neidhardts.
That night it takes me forever to fall asleep. Again and again, I move through the beautiful house, admiring this or that aspect of its treasures. I imagine Alex’s family celebrating holidays there, birthdays, graduations, and the coming of spring. I remember Alex’s strawberry patch and Günther’s chicken run. I estimate that the house is probably worth 2, 3, or even 5 million dollars and recall that Alex received a paltry 26,000 marks for it, approximately 10,400 U.S. dollars. I think of the Meyerbohlens’ offer of a plaque and my ready acceptance of the offer. As I lie awake, staring upward through the darkness, I find myself wishing that my response had been different. I imagine being back in the elegant dining room with its clinking wine glasses, saying to the Meyerbohlens, “Yes, a plaque would be a nice way to acknowledge the crime that took place here nearly eighty years ago. Or we could do something else. I could give you twenty-six thousand marks and you could give me back my fucking house!”
That, of course, would be unreasonable. The Meyerbohlens are completely innocent, as I’d assured them. But those who were guilty have managed to slither away through the broken foundations of history, and who is left to settle up? The deadline for filing a claim with the German government passed long ago. My father never filed such a claim, preferring to wash his hands of all bureaucratic reminders of the murders. So what is left for my generation? Plaques? Memorials? Marches? How do these well-meaning but inadequate gestures compensate for what we have lost? Is restitution many decades after a crime rendered meaningless by the passing of those decades? Would a plaque outside my family’s house on Gartenstrasse in the tiniest way make up for the legalized theft of that house, to say nothing of the murders of its owners? And would the placement of a plaque allow the good burghers of Oldenburg to heave a contented sigh and say, “Good. That’s taken care of. All better now”? Would it take them off the hook? And yet, is no plaque—the continuation of the silence Roland spoke of this afternoon—a more fitting solution? Might someone passing by 34 Gartenstrasse read about Alex Goldschmidt and recognize the plaque as an eloquent warning not to repeat the crimes of the past—especially if that plaque spawned other plaques throughout Oldenburg and across the country?
I try to silence these thoughts and welcome sleep. My journey recommences in the morning with a train trip to Hamburg, and I need rest. But, as I know so well, this is as much a journey into my family’s past as it is a venture of the complicated present. Try as I might, I cannot escape those years of pain and sorrow. And I remember the words of William Faulkner that I quoted as an epigraph in my first book. “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
4
Hamburg
TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2011. We awaken to find fair May overthrown, her sweet state usurped by an illegitimate and bullying November. Rain falls in sheets, often flung in our faces by sudden squalls, and the mild temperatures of our first week are mere teasing memories. But I enjoy the thought that we will be experiencing Hamburg rather as a sardonic anonymous traveler described its weather back in the eighteenth century, calling it “on the whole somewhat raw, damp and cold most days of the year, just like most of the people.” Alex and Helmut had a similar climatological encounter on a May day in 1939 during their one visit to Hamburg, when they thought they were bidding their final farewells to their European lives.
We drive our Meriva to the Oldenburg Bahnhof, or train station, and purchase, for twenty-nine euros, a ticket that would allow Amy and me to travel anywhere by train throughout Lower Saxony and as far east as Hamburg, and to take as many rail journeys as we’d like, between 9:00 a.m. today and 3:00 a.m. tomorrow. We are deeply impressed by this evidence of Germany’s support for public transportation We consult the bright-yellow schedules that adorn the central waiting area, and learn that we can board a train on Track 7 at 9:46, arrive in Bremen at 10:39, change trains, and pull into Hamburg at 11:42, having traveled a distance of roughly two hundred kilometers. At precisely 9:46, I discover, and not for the first time, that in Germany the trains do indeed run on time.
Our train to Bremen is a local that stops at several hamlets along the way and in the larger community of Delmenhorst. My father used to tell me that, in his day, Delmenhorst was known as a linoleum manufacturing center and that you could always smell the nascent floor covering from the station. So as we roll into town, I lower a window and inhale deeply, but perhaps because of the wind and rain and perhaps because I have no idea what linoleum smells like, I notice nothing out of the ordinary.
I think of my father again during our brief stopover in the bustling train station in Bremen. As a boy, he frequently accompanied his mother on rail journeys to Bremen to visit her family of well-to-do coffee importers. As a child, he made many a visit to the city’s thirteenth-century St. Peter’s Cathedral and a single visit to the crypt of the eleventh-century Church of Our Lady, where he was so terrorized by its collection of mummified remains that he still shuddered to speak of it in his tenth decade of life.
Our next train leaves promptly—naturally—at 10:50 and pulls into the immense Hamburg Hauptbahnhof two minutes early. The Central Station, as it’s known in English, opened for business on St. Nicholas Day, 1906, and claims to be the busiest railway station in Germany and, after Paris, the second busiest in all Europe. Today, the hordes of Hamburgers thronging the station are made more imposing by the umbrellas they wield as they stride rapidly through the vast interior, which includes twenty separate tracks and an overhead emporium with restaurants, flower shops, bakeries, and a fully stocked pharmacy.
We find our way to the U-Bahn, or subway, and navigate the underground system for a distance of six stops, emerging at St. Pauli Landungsbrücken, just steps from the River Elbe. The foul weather surprises us anew with its undeniable rudeness. Leaning into a stiff wind, our eyes assaulted by sheets of horizontal rain, we trudge slowly down one of several movable bridges leading to the long landing pier that for more than a century and a half has been an embarkation point for transatlantic voyages. The tide is high, gulls wheel and shriek overhead, and the clouds and mist conspire together to reduce visibility to mere yards. Through the gloom, however, it is possible to see a neon sign on the opposite bank of the Elbe advertising a long-running production of the musical The Lion King.
The long pier, more than the length of seven football fields, was heavily bombed during the Second World War and rebuilt during the 1950s and ’60s. Despite today’s wind and weather, restaurants along the pier are serving English-style fish and chips and traditional German brews. Several hundred yards to the west, a sizable Greek tanker is tied up, and immediately in front of us, a small catamaran is readying for a tour to the island of Helgoland in the North Sea. It is, apparently, just a normal Tuesday on the Hamburg docks.
On such a day as this, I repeat to myself over and over, on a May evening seventy-two years ago, my grandfather and uncle set off on a voyage from this very spot—a voyage that was supposed to end in freedom for them and event
ually for the whole Goldschmidt clan. I lean on a railing and squint through the wind and rain, trying to peer past the decades and conjure up a vision of their unfortunate vessel. There is water on my cheeks, the fresh mixing with the salt in the manner of the River Elbe giving way seventy miles downstream to the inexorable pull of the sea.
BEGINNING IN 1847, a new fleet of ships began weighing anchor from the port of Hamburg and sailing to destinations all over the globe. Most of the journeys ended in the New World, in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Guayaquil, and Havana; in New Orleans, Baltimore, Boston, Montreal, Halifax, and New York City. These were the ships of the mighty Hamburg Amerikanische Packetfahrt Actien Gesellschaft—literally, the Hamburg American Packet-Shipping Joint Stock Company—or HAPAG for short, also known simply as the Hamburg-America Line. In the company’s early years, HAPAG ships made the crossing from Hamburg to New York via Southampton in forty days. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the journey had been reduced to less than a week.
Many celebrated ships flew the blue and white HAPAG flag. In September 1858, the SS Austria caught fire in the middle of the North Atlantic and sank, killing 463 of its 538 passengers. Among the survivors was Theodore Eisfeld, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who had managed to lash himself to a plank and drifted on rough seas for two days and nights without food or water before being rescued. In 1900, the 16,500-ton SS Deutschland made history by sailing from Hamburg to New York in just over five days, maintaining a speed of twenty-two knots. Twelve years later, HAPAG’s Amerika was the first ship to send radio signals warning the luxury liner Titanic of icebergs in the vicinity.
But in the storied chronicles of the Hamburg-America Line, which merged in 1970 with Bremen’s North German Lloyd to form today’s Hapag-Lloyd Corporation, no ship rivals the infamy of the SS St. Louis. She was built by the Bremer-Vulkan Shipyards in Bremen, at the time the largest civilian shipbuilding company in the German Empire, and launched on May 6, 1928. Her maiden voyage, with stops in Boulognesur-Mer, France, and Southampton, England, en route to New York City, began on March 29, 1929. The St. Louis was among the largest ships in the entire HAPAG line, weighing 16,732 tons and measuring 575 feet in length. Diesel powered, gliding through the water on the strength of twin triple-bladed propellers, she regularly reached speeds of sixteen knots as she sailed the trans-Atlantic route from Hamburg to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New York, and on occasional cruises to the Caribbean. Her cabins and tourist berths were designed to accommodate 973 passengers. She was, in every measure of the phrase, a luxury liner; her gleaming brochures proclaimed, “The St. Louis is a ship on which one travels securely and lives in comfort. There is everything one can wish for that makes life on board a pleasure.”
By the spring of 1939, the St. Louis had been serving its largely well-heeled clientele for ten years. The single voyage for which she remains most famous was about to commence, brought about by the confluence of several interlocking events.
On January 24, 1939, Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göring appointed Reinhard Heydrich to direct the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. The Final Solution to what the Third Reich termed the Jewish Problem still lay several years in the future; for now the goal was simply to get as many Jews out of Germany as possible. Heydrich knew Claus-Gottfried Holthusen, the director of the Hamburg-America Line, and knew also that, since 1934, the Reich had become the majority shareholder in HAPAG, thus compromising the independence that the shipping company had enjoyed for the past ninety years. And Heydrich was aware that HAPAG had recently been troubled by financial setbacks exacerbated by the uncertain international situation. On its last voyage from New York, for instance, the St. Louis had sailed with only about a third of her berths occupied.
Heydrich immediately recognized an opportunity that would be mutually beneficial for the Reich and for HAPAG. He informed Göring and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels about the facts as he saw them, and by the middle of April, they had arranged that the St. Louis would sail from Hamburg to Havana, Cuba, on May 13, bearing nearly a thousand Jewish refugees. Everyone involved was satisfied. Göring relished the opportunity to demonstrate to Chancellor Hitler that he was ridding the Reich of Jews. Goebbels perceived the nearly perfect propaganda possibilities: Germans would be pleased that more Jews were leaving the country, while the international community, still shocked from the reports of Kristallnacht violence, would observe that Germany was graciously allowing its Jews to leave unharmed and unimpeded—and on a luxury liner, no less. The Hamburg-America Line would turn a profit on a voyage at a time when it sorely needed one. (While the St. Louis passengers would be refugees, to be sure, they would be charged the standard fares of 800 Reichsmarks for first class and 600 Reichsmarks for tourist class.) And last, and certainly least, the Jews themselves would surely appreciate this highly civilized manner of being booted out of their own country.
The unmistakable message of the November Pogrom had sunk in for a majority of Germany’s Jews, and they began a determined scramble to flee. In 1938, the number of Jewish émigrés from Germany numbered about thirty-five thousand. During the following year, that figure nearly doubled, to sixty-eight thousand. In the days and weeks following Kristallnacht, lines were long outside foreign embassies and consulates in all major German cities, as Jews waited to obtain the necessary papers to apply for visas. While every German Jew felt the pressure to leave, some were under more immediate duress than others.
After nearly a month of unspeakably harsh treatment in Sachsenhausen, Alex Goldschmidt was released on December 7, 1938, and informed in no uncertain terms that he had six months to leave the country of his birth or face a second arrest. So my grandfather shakily returned home to Oldenburg and, after spending a week or so recovering from his ordeal and talking matters over with his family, he took the train to Bremen and visited the Cuban consulate. There he applied for permission to emigrate to Cuba in the spring, filling out an application for himself and one for his son Helmut. They planned to establish residency in the New World and to send for the rest of the family a few months later. It must have seemed an eminently logical and sound strategy.
Cuba was among the few places on earth that even considered taking in Jewish refugees during the months following the November Pogrom. In July 1938, delegates from Cuba and thirty other countries gathered in France for the Evian Conference, to discuss what to do about the increasing number of Jews who wanted out of Nazi Germany. Once both the United States and the United Kingdom made it clear that they had no intention of increasing their quota of immigrants from Germany and Austria, the Evian Conference adjourned with most of the countries following the lead of its major players. The conference was ultimately considered a tragic failure, with Chaim Weizman, the future first president of Israel, declaring that “the world now seemed to be divided into two parts: those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.” Cuba, at least, presented itself as a theoretical haven, and Alex, his determination still intact despite his weeks in Sachsenhausen, saw the island nation as a practical solution to his family’s latest challenge.
Over the next several months, the Goldschmidt family did all it could to conserve its resources, as Alex knew that many fees, both legal and extralegal, would accompany the emigration process. Now that his business had been officially liquidated, he had no steady source of income. So on December 28, Alex moved his family from the apartment on Ofenerstrasse to a smaller, less expensive apartment on Nordstrasse, just a few blocks from the railroad station.
Alex, Toni, Eva, and Helmut spent the next few months nervously waiting for news from the Cuban consulate in Bremen. Finally, in early March 1939, the family learned that Cuba had granted visas for Alex and Helmut. But the next day, a letter arrived from Manuel Benitez Gonzalez, the director-general of Cuba’s Office of Immigration, informing them that Alex and Helmut would each have to purchase a special landing certificate if they intended to disembark in Havana. The price for each certificate w
as 450 Reichsmarks, a small fortune given the ever more Spartan circumstances of the Goldschmidt family.
Alex realized that they would have to tighten their belts yet again before the journey west. So on March 21, they moved to an even smaller apartment at 17 Staulinie. They were now only a block from the train station, close enough that the constant chug and chuff of engines caused their walls to shiver.A month later, the so-called Benitez certificates arrived. Alex placed the precious documents along with the visas into a cardboard folder, which he stored under his mattress. He checked their safety every night and every morning and several times during the day; other than his wedding ring, he owned nothing of greater value than those four pieces of paper.
The time had now come to secure passage to Cuba. He purchased two tourist class tickets for the May 13 voyage of the St. Louis, at a price of 600 Reichmarks (about $240) each. Alex was also obliged to pay an additional 460 Reichsmarks (about $185) for what the Hamburg-America Line termed a “customary contingency fee.” This additional expense covered a return voyage to Germany should what HAPAG called “circumstances beyond our control” arise. The line insisted that this “contingency fee” was fully refundable, should the journey proceed as planned.
Alex returned to Oldenburg in triumph, bearing his precious purchases. They had been extremely expensive, but now he had everything he needed—visas, landing certificates, tickets—to apply for a passport. On Monday, May 1, he and Helmut visited the Oldenburg offices of the Emigration Advisory Board to fill out individual applications for the “issuance of a single-family passport for domestic and foreign use.”
The photos taken of Alex and Helmut that they used for the passports that enabled them to board the St. Louis. These were also the photos that, attached to the space above our rear-view mirror, accompanied us on our journey.
Alex's Wake Page 9
