Neuengamme was not a tourist destination like Dachau, nor did it have the name recognition of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. It had “merely” been the biggest camp in northwest Germany, one of the many camps spread across the countryside. A long path led from the bus station to the grounds. The wide-open parade ground in front of the barracks, which now served as the exhibition hall, took forever to cross. The horizon line was dotted with the scraggly silhouettes of bare trees and seamed by barbed-wire fences; the long brick buildings went on without end. So did the low-riding memorial wall, made of heavy gray flagstones. We had the large exhibition hall to ourselves, and our steps echoed even more here than they had in Dachau. Crowds looked back at us from the black-and-white pictures: from 1938 to 1945, more than one hundred thousand people had been imprisoned in Neuengamme and its eighty-six smaller outer camps.
It was a forlorn place. Tourists weren’t carted here by the busload, and many a fate lay forgotten in a ditch. I could only fathom what desperation anyone who had been imprisoned here in the past must have felt, staring out at a horizon that offered nothing but endless barbed-wire fences.
We visited happier memorials, too (if there can be such a thing)—newly renovated synagogues, for instance, buildings that had survived Kristallnacht and that cities and towns had restored and reopened, with much fanfare, for nonexistent Jewish communities. They were intended as monuments to postwar Germany’s welcoming of the Jews. However, they struck me as the most fitting memorials of all: gleaming but empty synagogues.
One Sunday in 1987, Harry and I made a day trip to visit the newly renovated synagogue in Straubing, a town two hours northeast of Munich, close to the border with Czechoslovakia. We had read about the reopening in the newspaper and were curious. Straubing is a Bavarian city reaching back to the Middle Ages. Its synagogue survived Kristallnacht. We drove there on a glorious day, the windows down, Dire Straits blaring. The city center was deserted, as it would be on a Sunday afternoon when the shops are closed, but some welcoming soul opened the synagogue for us. The inside beyond the thick old walls was cool and as blue as the sky that day. It was quiet, very quiet. I could hear the emptiness. A brass chandelier hung down into the silence, ready to illuminate the space and the meticulously painted walls. The women’s balcony seemed especially high up, as if it were a cloud, ready to float away into the ether of an unassuming Bavarian summer day.
In the vestibule we found a pamphlet from the reopening ceremony. It explained the synagogue’s fate during Kristallnacht: Apparently, the SS had already prepared the containers of gasoline to set it on fire, when the local fire chief objected. He feared that burning the synagogue would damage adjacent buildings, especially the nursing home next door. Therefore, “only” its interior was destroyed. After the war, a box containing the Torah scrolls, a menorah, and other artifacts was left at the police station. It was unknown, according to the pamphlet, who among the SS had saved and harbored them during the war.
Then there are the less-obvious memorials, those we stumbled upon, reminding us that death, torture, and murder were everywhere.
One time, after meeting Harry’s Viennese friend in Salzburg, we were driving back to Munich. We left the congested Autobahn and traveled the two-lane state road. Not far past the Austrian border, we passed a sign by the side of the road that read KZ FRIEDHOF, concentration camp cemetery. We had not been aware of a concentration camp in this area, but then again, there had been so many small camps all over the German Reich, little places of horror outdone by the unbelievable death factory of Auschwitz. We followed the sign and came upon a small cemetery centered on a stone altar with a towering black cross. Wooden crosses, barely knee-high, poked out from the bushes and trees that surrounded the grassy area around the cross. Set back from this arrangement was a wide low-set house, and beyond it a church. A nun approached as we got out of the car. We asked what had happened here, and she told us that shortly before the Nazi surrender, one of the death marches from the dissolved concentration camps of Buchenwald and Flossenbürg had reached this area, called Surberg. One morning, as US troops were approaching, the accompanying guards fulfilled their last order and shot the sixty-one former concentration camp prisoners, before dumping their guns and uniforms and fleeing.
“Weren’t most of the victims Jewish?” Harry asked.
“Oh, yes,” the nun answered.
“Why, then, is there a big cross on the grave?”
She looked startled and said, “We do have Jewish symbols as well, you see. Here and over there.” She pointed to a relief of a Star of David on the side of the stone altar and gestured us toward a cylindrical podium with an iron menorah on top that stood on the edge of the grassy area.
“This is in memory of the Jews who were killed,” she said.
“Yes, but weren’t most of the victims Jewish?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“Well, then why have a big cross on a grave for Jews?”
She stood, her hands folded over her gray apron, tilting her head to look up at Harry. Her face, framed by the black habit, was still friendly and eager, trying to comprehend what this visitor’s problem was.
“This is the symbol for death,” she said, bending forward as if she were explaining something to a small child.
“Not for Jews it isn’t,” Harry said. I found myself wanting to hush him as I squirmed at the thought of his getting into an argument with a nun. At the same time, I knew he was right. If no one spoke up about a small injustice, or an injustice against the dead, who would speak up against a big injustice, or one against the living, when things could still be rectified? Who would ever come by here and notice that the graves were for Jews when there were crosses on top?
The nun kept smiling benevolently. “We do have the Star of David here as well.”
“Yes, but if this memorial is for Jews, then there shouldn’t be a cross on top of the graves.”
“Well,” she said, “you might be right about that. But, you see, this is a convent. And it is important, don’t you think, to have a memorial?”
“Yes, but with the right symbols.”
“Well, we do the best we can,” she said, still smiling.
I hooked my arm into Harry’s and pulled him toward the car. What needed to be said had been said. As we got in, I said, “It’s better to have this site than none.”
“I’m not so sure,” Harry answered, turning the ignition key. “Those people died because they were Jews, and now they’ve got crosses stuck on top of them. It’s like the ultimate triumph.”
“Yes, but if there were no site, they’d be forgotten and what happened to them would be forgotten. That would be the ultimate triumph. Plus, there is that Star of David and that menorah.”
“Yeah, off to the side.”
“Still, it’s better than nothing. How many massacres were there where there’s no memorial?”
Harry drove back onto the main road. For a while he said nothing and stared into the late-afternoon sun glaring at us. Then he sighed. “I guess you’re right. It just rubs me the wrong way.”
We never forgot Surberg. Maybe coming upon it so unexpectedly while driving along a road winding through bucolic Upper Bavaria heightened our awareness. We still remember the cross on top of the Star of David, towering over the menorah, and the little wooden crosses on graves for Jews. In our language as a couple, the memorial at Surberg became the symbol for how one could never get away from the past and how one could never win, could never be fully understood as a minority by the majority. “Remember that cross not far from Salzburg?” we say.
In the meantime, on a website featuring images of the Surberg memorial, the caption under an image of the small wooden crosses among the underbrush reads: HOLZKREUZE (FÜR JÜDISCHE TOTE UNPASSENDE SYMBOLIK!) MARKIEREN EINZELNE GRÄBER. Wooden crosses (an inappropriate symbol for Jewish victims!) mark individual graves.
The little crosses are still there. So is the big one.
SANATORIUM BREY
Brothers-in-law: Guido and my grandfather
Guido’s health had deteriorated. He was fifty-eight now, and the thirteen-year age difference between him and Resi was palpable. He puffed from climbing the stairs to their apartment, and he was completely out of breath after walking up the incline behind the Museum of Natural History to the house my grandparents had bought the year before. He would stand by their garden gate, gasping for air, and my grandmother Hanne would hurry out with a stool for him to rest on.
Resi traveled to Vienna to find out how Guido’s relatives were getting on and what could be done to protect them. She returned with a heavy heart. Nothing much could be done to protect anybody; people were scrambling to get out, to flee, to France, to Switzerland, even to Czechoslovakia, which was still free. Many were already “interned.” When later a nephew of Guido from Vienna showed up in Reichenberg and reported that Jews were scrubbing the sidewalks in Vienna, Guido’s confidence sank even lower. He saw no alternative to preparing for a catastrophe.
He was fully aware of the deadly threat that was mounting for the Jews. The German Reich had passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, and anywhere the Nazis had control, they quickly set about eradicating what they considered the “Jewish influence.” And where they weren’t ruling yet, anti-Semitism was boiling. Once the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia, every family would have to obtain an Ahnenpaß (passport of ancestry) proving their racial lineage. Guido would be classified as a Volljude (full Jew); the Nazis classified anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents as such, and grandparents were defined as Jews if they had belonged to a Jewish religious community. There was no doubt that this applied to Guido, no way to hide the fact that his father had helped build the synagogue. A “J” would be stamped on his papers, and he would have to wear a yellow star pinned to his coat. How would his children feel seeing him like that?
Kauft nicht bei Juden (don’t buy from Jews) would be scrawled on his shop windows, as he had seen in the newspaper pictures from Vienna. Already, acquaintances did not sit with him and Karl in the Café Post and avoided him in the street when they saw him coming. Da geht der Jud—there walks the Jew—they must have thought. One time boys yelled after him, “Wart nur, bis der Hitler kommt!” (Just wait until Hitler comes!)
But Guido wasn’t so concerned for himself. As his health worsened, he must have given up on himself; his wife and children, however, were another matter. Resi would be classified as “Aryan,” although blemished because she was married to a Jew, while Herta and Ludwig would be considered “non-Aryans,” a murky category. The “half-Jew” status was contested, and blood was not everything. What people said about you and your family could make a big difference. A half Jew whose Jewish parent did not practice Judaism and who was brought up in a Christian household supposedly had higher status than a half Jew who had been brought up Jewish. A higher status in the Nazis’ racial hierarchy meant a higher chance of survival.
While friends and relatives fled, Guido could not imagine uprooting himself and his family. What could he offer them somewhere else? His business was a good one, and Resi could run it. She was capable enough, and she was also “Aryan.” With her, the children might have a future.
Guido must have decided that he had lived his life and that he must do all he could to put Resi, and Herta and Ludwig, in the best possible position. The Nazis were sure to come. As the summer of 1938 drew to a close, he filed for divorce. His health had declined to the point at which he needed permanent care, and he checked into the Sanatorium Brey. In early September, on his sixteenth wedding anniversary, the court delivered the divorce decree to him at the sanatorium.
Only Guido and Resi knew whether their divorce was his idea or hers, whether one persuaded the other that it was the most practical thing to do or whether it was a mutual decision. To the family it was presented as Guido’s decision, but Resi must have supported it. Divorcing him was a pragmatic way of minimizing the “Jewish connection” of the family and of erasing the Jewish ownership of the business. Thus, they had saved the family’s livelihood, as Jewish businesses would be “Arysized”—i.e., transferred to non-Jewish owners—once the Nazis came.
The divorce also meant that Guido’s ties to his family were cut. Resi claimed that she had to keep up appearances, and she therefore did not visit Guido anymore. The only connection that remained was to my grandparents, and mainly to my grandmother Hanne, who visited Guido almost every day. Resi was under the scrutiny of the eyes of the energized Germanic populace; Hanne wasn’t, or was at least less so. The Sanatorium Brey was also located in the same part of town where my grandparents lived, at the edge of the garden city, opposite the parklands of the Tiergarten.
Following the Munich Agreement between Hitler and the leaders of Britain (Chamberlain), Italy (Mussolini), and France (Daladier) who had ceded the Sudetenland to the German Reich, German troops marched into Reichenberg on October 8, 1938. After that, a woman hurrying along the streets attracted less attention than a man, especially if she carried a wicker basket and seemed intent on an errand. Hanne knew a way along the side streets and through the park. She stayed in the shadows where the street lights didn’t reach and kept close to the hedges and wrought-iron fences, the sleeve of her coat brushing the boxwood or bumping along the black sharp-edged pickets.
The Sanatorium Brey looked more like a little castle than like a hospital. Consequently, the Gestapo (short for Geheime Staatspolizei, meaning Secret State Police) found it suitable enough to set up its headquarters on the sanatorium’s upper floors. While the floor planks above Guido creaked under the Gestapo men’s boots, he sat semiconscious, confined to his room, waiting. His kidneys shut down, and his body slowly poisoned itself. He waited for Hanne and did not understand anymore what went on outside. He did not know that the Gestapo had set up above him. My grandfather did not tell him, when he did manage to visit Guido, that he had bribed the staff to let him stay. Guido did not know, and my grandparents did not tell him, that Jews were now openly chastised on the streets of Reichenberg. Jewish shop windows were smashed, homes and businesses looted. People switched sidewalks when my grandparents came along because of their “Jewish connection.”
Guido never found out that the synagogue his father had helped build went up in flames during Kristallnacht, the night of November 9, 1938. The Reichenbergers had been so eager that they didn’t even wait for the cover of darkness and set the synagogue ablaze at one o’clock in the afternoon. A mob gathered to watch; the fire brigade never showed up, and at 2:43 p.m. the dome with the Star of David came crashing down, to the cheers of the crowd. My grandmother spent that entire day at Guido’s side.
The synagogue in Reichenberg; Guido's father served on its building committee; the insert shows it burning on Kristallnacht in 1938
VERJUDET
A FEW DAYS BEFORE KRISTALLNACHT, ON THE evening of Thursday, November 3, 1938, my great-grandfather, Hanne’s father, Josef Rößler, walked up the hill of the Monstranzberg to the cemetery by the crematorium in Reichenberg, found the family grave, and shot himself.
The tall maples would have swayed in the breeze that always blows over this hill, and under them the gravestones would have stood cold in the late-autumn evening, their surfaces porous and scratchy from decades of exposure, or velvety soft with moss. The family grave would have been planted with mums, autumn’s last flowers. Did his body come to rest among their mauve and yellow petals? Did his weight flatten the little evergreen hedge that might have seamed the grave’s edge? Did the papery autumn leaves rustle from the whiff of his fall? Or was it a wet evening on which the leaves lay limp and their moisture seeped into the fa
bric of his suit? Did Josef Rößler smell, as he died, the damp earth and the decay of one more summer?
The explosion of the shot would have echoed among the trees and gravestones. Did anybody hear it, or was a single shot, fired in the evening, too commonplace to be noticed? Was someone else at the cemetery, brushing leaves off a loved one’s grave, and did that someone wander in the direction of the shot to investigate? Or did she ignore it, tuck in her head, tighten her scarf, and keep gathering leaves?
How did the family find out? Maybe someone discovered the body and hurried to the cemetery’s gatekeeper to sound the alarm. Or maybe that gatekeeper was gone for the day, and so that someone had to hurry farther down the hill to find a policeman or an open restaurant. Maybe nobody heard the shot and the family had to search for the missing man. Did he not show up for dinner, or did he leave after dinner, announcing an evening stroll? Did he leave a note for his wife to find when he did not return?
And what family’s grave was it? Josef Rößler was not from Reichenberg. He grew up in Warnsdorf, a town across the Jizera Mountains on the German border, so his family would have been buried there. Or perhaps there was a Rößler grave in Reichenberg, reaching further back than his immediate family. It is also possible that he went to the grave of the Berndts, where my grandfather’s parents were buried. But was he that close to my grandfather’s, his son-in-law’s, family? Or, if that was his choice, was he pointing a finger at who was to blame?
My grandmother never talked about her father’s suicide, and consequently no one else did. Everyone knew not to ask, even I, who, as a somewhat-morbid child, liked to quiz her about how the important people in her life had died. She had readily recounted those deaths, even the ones most painful to her: that of her sister at age sixteen from a kidney infection; of her son Klaus at age seven from diphtheria; of her sixty-year-old mother, sitting on the couch and suddenly keeling over the day before Christmas Eve; and of my grandfather, who passed away in the hospital after a heart attack in 1965, right after my father had brought his young family to say good-bye. But never her father’s death. It was referred to only as “after my father’s death.”
Jumping Over Shadows Page 6
