“Remember Amalek, and may his name be blotted out. Do not forget”. These words are the theme of today, Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of remembrance. As we prepare for Purim, a celebration of survival, we are instructed to both remember and blot out the name of our tormentor Amalek. The memory is collective, not individual, and it is our responsibility to recover the memory, to explore and extend it, and to pass it on to our descendants and to our community.
It is in this spirit that I would like to share with the Kahal my experiences visiting Germany this past October with my mother, who had not been in Germany since May of 1939, when she was lucky enough to leave on a Kindertransport. She is unusual among Kindertransport survivors because her entire nuclear family left Germany, one person at a time, and the family was reunited in England before immigrating to the United States in 1940. Since I want this talk to focus on our 2008 trip, not on my mother’s experiences there under the Nazi regime, I will leave here on the Amud after services some copies of the article she wrote about Kristallnacht, which started it all, and on the other side my explanation of how this article over twenty years, two books, and one very significant reunion, resulted in our trip.
It is part of our tradition to structure experiences from darkness to great light. While great light is still difficult to find in Germany, I will structure these tales from most depressing to most uplifting, rather than in chronological order.
Our host for the trip was Gaby Franger, a professor of Social Work at the Technical College in Coburg, the town my mother was from. She had written the grant to pay for our trip, the anthology about the history of women in Coburg that my mother contributed to, and she had prepared the public exhibit on the lives of six different Jewish Women who had lived Coburg before the war. Of these women, my mother is the only one still living and capable of travel. Gaby recruited two English speaking graduate students, Irina and Kathrin, to serve as our tour guides. I mention this now, because it was Kathrin who shared the most painful parts of the trip with me, taking me to the Holocaust memorial sites.
Gaby insisted that I visit the Documentation center in Nuremburg before visiting a concentration camp. Since Gaby’s husband runs the documentation center, I couldn’t say no. The documentation center is housed in a stadium like building that the Nazis started building but did not complete. The remainder of this immense building is used for storage by the city of Nuremburg.
The Documentation center differs from most Holocaust museums in two ways. First, it starts in 1922, when Hitler took over the party, not in 1933 when the party took over Germany. Second, it attempts to address the question of how could this happen, by focusing on the Nazi uses of propaganda. For, example, while we have all seen the films of the Nazi party rallies at Zeppelin field in Nuremburg, the documentation center exhibit points out that those rallies followed the same format and cadence as traditional German church services. This offered a familiar format to those attending, and also promoted the image of Hitler as head of a religious movement as well as a political party. Another disturbing exhibit at the documentation center showed anti-Semitic toys that German children played with – a Judenrein board game, for example, as well as anti Semitic German schoolbooks. Another exhibit shows the growth of the concentration camp system and the shift from political prisoners to Jewish ones.
After seeing this museum, Kathrin and I walked over to nearby Zeppelin field. The large granite grandstand is still standing. The huge flat area in front of the grandstand that once sat 200,000 people is now a city parking lot for large trucks. We walked up the steps to the level where the speakers podium is. We walked over to the podium, and as Max Stern had done on his visit, I spat. Twice, actually, once in memory of Max and once for myself. And as Max said he had felt, my action was totally inadequate to the evil of the place. Kathrin said that Hitler hated for anyone to sit on the granite lip of the grandstand, so she made a point of sitting on it whenever she was there. So we sat on the lip of the grandstand for a few moments. Then I took out a pencil, and under the stone of the lip, on a mostly covered section of the low granite wall, I scribbled “Am Ysroel chai” in Hebrew script. An assertion, yes, but again, totally inadequate to the evil of the place. And then we left.
The next morning Kathrin and I drove to Flossenburg concentration camp. Flossenburg was one of the smaller camps, located east of Nuremburg. We went there because Dachau is closed on Mondays. While small, Flossenburg is still horrible. It is probably the most horrible place I have ever been. It took three days for the terror, fear, and deep sadness of the place to sink in and a week more before I felt like myself again. There is a museum in the building that had been the camp laundry. The recorded testimony of surviving prisoners is beyond chilling to listen to. There is a large assembly space, an execution yard, a crematory, a large cemetery with many plaques, some individual graves, and some mass graves, the largest of these contains the ashes of about 15,000 victims. There are two chapels, one Christian and one Jewish. Kathrin visits Flossenburg every year. Her custom is to bring a rose with her and to leave it on the large mass grave. I also brought a rose and left it at the memorial to the Jewish victims, where I recited El Moleh Rahamim. As we were leaving the camp, we stopped in the museum office to ask directions. There, I bought something I had not noticed on the way in, the tour guide brochure of the camp printed in Hebrew. Again, Am Yisroel Chai. Again, totally inadequate.
You may or may not know that it was the policy of the American army, instituted by General Eisenhower, to make the townspeople of the nearest town or towns bury the bodies that were found when a concentration camp was liberated. This policy was to insure that the German townspeople could not claim that even at the very end of the war that they did not know about the atrocities committed. The distance between Flossenburg concentration camp and the town of Flossenburg is maybe half a mile. In the camp museum are photographs of local residents carrying caskets to a cemetery in the middle of the town. This cemetery looks like an American military cemetery, with one large statue at the entrance and the graves in neat geometric rows with a cross or star of David on each marker. Seeing this cemetery made me feel very proud to be an American.
Michael Berenbaum often reminds us that whatever redemption is to be found is found in small acts. On the drive to Flossenburg, Kathrin told me that her grandfather had been one of the surviving prisoners there when it was liberated. That is why she visits every year.
“What was he doing there?” I asked. He wasn’t Jewish.
“He had been caught feeding Jews” she replied. He had worked the day shift in a factory and would leave his lunch each day for Jewish prisoners working the night shift. His factory supervisor caught him doing this, and he was sent to Flossenburg.
While Flossenburg was the most depressing place I went on this journey, it occupied only one day. Mother and I spent five days in Coburg. I was surprised at what a cute and quaint town it is. Everyone in Coburg was most kind to us and treated us as visiting dignitaries. The Vice Mayor of Cultural Affairs welcomed us with a small reception at city hall. Mother was interviewed by several local reporters and newspaper articles were written about our visit. During our time in Coburg, Mother gave four talks, three at various schools and one general public lecture, which was attended by about 90 people.. This lecture was the culminating public event of the ‘Jewish Women of Coburg” exhibit. One woman spoke to Mother after her lecture. “You don’t remember me,” she said, “but I used to live upstairs from you.”
On the last day we were in Coburg we were asked to meet the Lord Mayor. He walked us through another building of the City Hall complex that borders one side of the central Marketplatz. He asked us to come out onto the wrought iron balcony overlooking the Marketplatz. This is a special honor given to distinguished visitors. As soon as we were out of the building and away from the Lord Mayor, Mother said that standing on that balcony was very upsetting and creepy for her. Hitler had spoken from that balcony.
We were in Berlin for Simchas Torah, where we attended the Masorti shul. I was disappointed that only 35 people attended the Masorti service. I was pleased however, that next to the shul building is a “kosher-style” restaurant , which was open before Simchas Torah services and served Israeli wine. So before we went into the synagogue for Simchas Torah services, we sat in this restaurant and ate soup, and I made Yom Tov Kiddush over my glass of Israeli wine. That felt truly wonderful. For my mother, dancing with the Torah in Berlin was the absolute pinnacle experience of the trip. A moment of gratitude for her own survival, and for the continuity of the Jewish experience. “To think,” she said, “that Jews are dancing again with the Torah, in Berlin of all places. The city that was supposed to be the capital of the Nazi empire.” Am Yisroel Chai.
In Berlin we learned the history of the last story I am going to tell today, about the Stolperstein, or stumbling stone memorial project. While several places in Germany had memorials to Holocaust victims, particularly plaques remembering the deportations at various train stations, the Stolperstein is relatively new kind of personal memorial. Stolpersteins are small brass plaques, about 4 inches on a side, with the name of a single Holocaust victim engraved on it. In addition to the name, the plaque contains some personal information, date of birth, maiden name if the victim was a married woman, and date and place of death or date of deportation if the date of death is not known. These plaques are placed in the sidewalk in front of the last known residence of the person. Since the plaques are individual, if a family of 5 was deported on a single day, 5 plaques are placed in front of the building they lived in, not just one. And since the plaques are brass, the more feet that walk on the plaques the shinier and more noticeable they become. Several, but not all, German cities are engaged in placing these plaques. In some cases, the information for a plaque is collected by a class of 5th or 6th grade students as part of their Holocaust education curriculum, and then the class participates in placing the plaque in the sidewalk. The entire Stolperstein program started as a guerilla art project in Berlin, with a single plaque, set in the sidewalk at night by the artist.
I don’t know much about my maternal great grandmother, Babette Kaiser. In our home, on the ancestors’ wall of black and white photographs, is a small picture of a very stern looking woman wearing a dark dress with a white collar. That’s her. More noticeable is the tablecloth that she made that hangs in our dining room. It is made of hand embroidered linen panels connected by hand tatted lace, and it became the Chuppah that Norm and I stood under at our wedding. As a geneticist, I can tell you that as my mother’s mother’s mother, she is the source of my mitochondrial DNA – haplotype W, if you are interested. The most important things that I grew up knowing about her were that she, at the age of 70, refused to leave Germany with the rest of the family, and that she committed suicide rather than allow the Nazis to kill her.
In planning this trip, my mother had asked our hosts that we visit Gotha, the town where Babette Kaiser and her husband Louis had lived and where my mother had lived for a few months immediately before leaving the country. We were hoping to find a gravestone for Louis Kaiser, who died on Kristallnacht, in the Jewish cemetery in Gotha. The Vice Mayor in charge of cultural affairs of the city of Gotha showed us around. I was most moved and impressed when he put on a yarmulke, which he took from his pocket, to enter the Jewish cemetery. We did not find a gravestone for my great grandfather, but he showed us something equally precious. So far, the city of Gotha has placed about 40 Stolperstein markers, and this is the one (show photo) with deep meaning to me. Babette Kaiser, it reads, born Adler, 1872. Fled into death the 17th of September, 1942, to avoid deportation. I had always thought that my great grandmother had killed herself once the rest of the family was safely out of the country, sometime near the end of 1939. From this marker I learned that she continued to live in Gotha for two more years. How she lived during that time, or what she thought about, I cannot tell you. Seeing this marker was to me the highlight of the trip. Two months later when we visited Columbus, Ohio, for a simcha on Norm’s side of the family, and I visited my grandmother’s grave, I was able to say that her mother now had a stone, on a sidewalk in Gotha, to mark and remember her life and her death.
Remembrance: That is what Shabbat Zachor is all about, and ultimately what my trip was all about. Recovering, extending, deepening, and moving our collective memories forward into the future. Babette Kaiser my great grandmother, Bertha Forchheimer my grandmother, Anne Rubin my mother, me, my children Andy and Stevie and to this community and all the children who grow up here and learn here, remember Amalek, that his name continues to be blotted out. As long as we remember, we are. Am Yisroel Chai. Shabbat Shalom.