Germany: Roots & Remembrance

It’s just an hour’s drive to Frankfurt from my mother’s hometown. The Frankfurt cathedral is our new neighbor.

Jeffrey drives carefully on Autobahns without speed limits. It’s a relief to arrive.

Friends Anna and David met us for a personal walking tour. Our first stop was the memorial to the nearly 12,000 Jews who were deported from Frankfurt and murdered.

This the grove of trees stands in place one of Frankfurt’s synagogues on what was the Jewish street or Judengasse.

My words fail to convey the impact of 12,000 small cubes, each with a name of a person, the date of birth and date and place of murder (if known) on a wall that stretches around a city block. Here I felt deep sorrow.

We came to pay tribute to my family, Marcus and Theresa Strauss born Steinberger, who lived in a beautiful house in Alsfeld (Grünbergerstraße 20) shown in my last post; and to Therese and Heinrich Freund who lived in Fulda until the Jewish school was destroyed and they were forced out. All moved from their small towns to Frankfurt around 1939 for the big-city anonymity that gave Jews some short term cover, though in the end, no better outcome.

The beautiful synagogue was burned to the ground on Kristallnacht.

In the same location is an old Jewish cemetery. The earliest provable burial was nearly eight hundred years ago. Jews lived in what has become Germany since Roman times.

Anna and I posed in front of Karl the Great, better known as Charlemagne, born in 748 (no digit missing), who went on to be Kaiser.

I’d never seen anything quite like this human food truck.

Lunch was out of the tourist area where locals dine. The food was good, the weather cooperated and the company of our friends was wonderful.

And then is was time to say goodbye. We have been busy from morning until night; today, we took it a bit slower. Wishing everyone a good Saturday.

To read prior essays, click HERE.