Germany: Roots & Remembrance

Today we are in Aschaffenburg with our dear friend Iris. Iris volunteers with a local organization to digitize the history of Jewish families (complete with family trees, birth certificates and other documents). She even enters phone book information. A former English teacher, Iris is the main contact for English speakers who visit and she is a great tour guide. We met Iris last summer though we have been corresponding for years. How I wish we were neighbors.

Iris has opened her heart and her house to us. We demolished this delicious homemade strawberry cake with cream (Schlag in German) at the end of the day.

I get ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the start of our day now that you have seen the end.

Iris took us to a farmers’ market to shop for the dinner she will cook for us tomorrow night. Tomorrow is Ascension Day, a national holiday in Germany, and everything will be closed.

It was Freund/Heller laundry day, which is not an official German holiday.

Aschaffenburg is an important stop for me because many Freunds moved from little Kleinwallstadt (population 6,000), where yesterday we spoke to students, to busy Aschaffenburg (pop. 45,000 when my family lived here, 30,000 after WW2, 70,000 today).

Where did they live? What did they leave behind?

Great Uncle Emanuel Freund was a university educated engineer with a very successful family business called “The Brothers Freund” that provided electricity to towns and homes in the area. The business also sold cars and bicycles. Emmanuel (born 1882) lived in a big beautiful house with his wife Betty Fromm and three daughters.

Emanuel and most of his family emigrated to Chicago at the eleventh hour, in 1939, where his engineering knowledge lit up houses and businesses. There is something poetic in this story: German Jews exiled and American cities light up. Despite frantic family efforts, the eldest daughter (Liselotte Siddy Solinger, born Freund) could not escape; their fellow Germans murdered her.

We walked the path Emanuel would have taken to work, all the while thinking of him and his family and the comfortable existence they had enjoyed before Hitler. Leaving their home was hard. I often wonder how I would have acted under these circumstances.

Though I have been to Aschaffenburg several times, I never had been to the Jewish cemetery in the city itself. Iris showed us family graves that we had never seen. Dad participated on FaceTime.

Emanuel was child number four of eleven children. My grandfather Hugo (kid #11) was his brother. Another brother, Moritz Freund (#9), died in France in 1916, fighting for his German Fatherland. Moritz’s parents were given a memorial book, shown below.

I stood at Moritz’s grave.

Other family members are buried in this cemetery, including Fanny (born Kochland) and Lippmann Freund. This couple had one daughter, Irene Freund.

What would my 19th Century Aschaffenburg family think of their American relative who came to photograph their gravesites and honor their lives.

In this same cemetery are graves of German soldiers who died in WWII. Some German soldiers were innocent victims of the Nazi regime. Not these men. They were in the SS.

Slave laborers from Eastern Europe who survived WWII are buried in this cemetery, near a memorial to WWI Russian prisoners of war.

No one on earth actually remembers any of these people. Time makes the horror seem distant. But it’s still horror.

Remembering the past is useless unless we learn from it, and apply that learning.

I hear the voice of my mother’s father Adolf Steinberger in 1933: “In a country where you have no rights, you cannot live.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said on January 6, 1941, “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.”

What I saw today evoked my family’s suffering during and between the World Wars. I hope it inspires thoughts and actions, in me and in others, to help repair our broken world.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

It was just a half hour drive from last night’s stay in Miltenberg to Kleinwallstadt.

Kleinwallstadt (population 6,000: “SmallWalledTown”) is where my Freund family lived from at least 1773, when German families began to have surnames. For centuries, the town had a thriving Jewish population. In the late 1890s, my great-grandfather was president of the synagogue and owned a successful dry goods store.

Achim Albert, the expert on the town’s Jewish history, greeted us.

Near Kleinwallstadt is Elsenfeld (population 9,000). These two towns are in Bavaria, the Deep South of Germany.

We might call these beautiful small villages one horse towns, though I saw two horses on the way in.

But don’t be fooled. The high school students in these towns are engaged, respectful, smart and inquisitive.

About 120 students in these towns heard my father via Zoom and me in person speak about the Jews who once lived here and my family’s experience during the Nazi era. Teachers, principals and the heads of each school were grateful for our visit and presentations.

My father spoke about the 1935 Nuremberg laws. Jewish Germans lost their citizenship. Jewish workers lost their jobs. Non-Jews were told not to shop in Jewish stores. Dad was forced out of the public school and had to commute via tram to a Jewish school in nearby Furth. Former friends called him “Jewish pig” and spat on him. Older kids dumped him into a box that held sand used on slippery streets; my dad cried for help until someone lifted the heavy lid. Neighbors marched and sang, “When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, all will be better.” My patriotic German grandfather was arrested and beaten by German officials simply because he happened to be Jewish.

When it was almost too late, my father’s family escaped Germany to safety in New York City. The Freunds who survived dispersed around the globe.

I spoke about my family’s history before and after WW2. I cited the Brain Drain that hurt Germany and benefited the USA. I talked of the Jews from Germany who joined the U.S. Army and whose interrogation of captured German soldiers hastened Germany’s defeat in WW2.

Our description of our family’s deep German roots, persecution and exile left some of the students in tears.

The students wanted to know what life in America was like for my father. They asked whether I ever would consider moving to Germany.

These presentations were made possible by our friends Achim and Ronja.

Achim has been studying the Jews of Kleinwallstadt (the last of whom left the town in 1938) for 35 years, since doing a research paper in high school. Thanks to Achim’s research, we met our Freund cousin Chris for the first time ever.

Ronja coordinates programs for the local schools and also completed a project on the Jews who once lived in the area.

In both towns, we spoke about the Jews alive today, what Judaism is, and that Hitler didn’t invent antisemitism. Our slides and verbal presentations were in German.

On the wall in the Elsenfeld classroom is this sign with words from the Talmud in Hebrew and German: Save one life and you save the entire world.

We Americans can learn from these students who are confronting their country’s history. Our country’s treatment of (among others) today’s First Nations tribes and the descendants of enslaved Americans should command as much of our attention.

After the sessions, Achim treated us to refreshments.

Then he walked with us through Kleinwallstadt to visit houses and businesses, a war memorial and a former school, monuments and a former synagogue—traces of Jewish Germans who for centuries were part of this community until hatred and laws and violence made them disappear.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

DNA analysis confirmed what I already knew: I am 100% German Jewish. On this date some years ago, my German-born parents happily welcomed me into the world.

My wonderful, supportive husband (who would rather we were almost anywhere else in the world) gave me the silver necklace I’m wearing today, filled with a 1920 buffalo nickel to remind me of my American heritage. I love it.

This trip is hard. Every day we have spoken about the Holocaust, met people who are working on memorials or are otherwise focused on preserving Jewish history, or spoke to high school students. There is no escape, even on my birthday.

We have travelled far to remember my family. I felt the need to find the graves of my great-great-grandmother and her daughter because I may not return. In the wet, weedy grass, some of it chest-high, I found their graves and recited Kaddish (the Jewish memorial prayer), with tears in my eyes. Every day, something gets me choked up in Germany.

As we were leaving the cemetery, we met Barbara, who is on a bike trip. We stopped to chat. Barbara said that her parents and grandparents were silent on the Holocaust, saying that they had known nothing. During the unrest of 1968, teenage Barbara and her friends rebelled and demanded the truth from their elders.

I stood at my great-grandparents’ doorstep to pay tribute to them.

Next, we met Georg, Gaby and Iris for a tour of Miltenberg’s Jewish past. All three work to preserve the history of Jewish Germans. Georg and Gaby organized the installation of 44 Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) in Miltenberg and have helped families understand the history of this town. It is unfortunate that former synagogues here have no signs indicating their history. Outlines left by mezuzot can be seen on some houses.

This is not an easy topic to digest, particularly on one’s birthday.

My birthday lunch was at the Riesen Hotel. No one knows exactly how old it is, but official documents date it to 1411.

The same star is on the coat of arms at our hotel, founded in 1881. It’s a relative newcomer to the neighborhood.

Jeffrey and I walked along the lovely Main River at the end of the day.

We had a few moments between birthday calls to relax.

I am grateful to have been born in the USA, and thankful that my grandparents got my parents and themselves out of Nazi Germany before it was too late.

I never have met an immigrant who didn’t miss the sights, sounds and smells of home. For me, America is home. At the Passover Seder, Jews say “next year in Jerusalem”; today I say, next year in New York City with my family for my birthday.

Tomorrow it’s off to the Freund family hometown of Kleinwallstadt and nearby Elsenfeld for two more presentations to high school students.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

Picturesque Miltenberg sits an hour’s drive from Frankfurt along the Main River, where Viking tour boats stop.

In Miltenberg, our friend Ulrike Faust greeted us warmly. Our families have known each for about 100 years, as my two grandmothers (sisters) and their siblings grew up here and attended the local school. My great-grandmother, a smart businesswoman, ran a shoe store solo after her husband died. My Miltenberg based Grünstein family survived WWII, moving from Miltenberg to Haifa or New York before it was too late.

Our strongest family connection is through my Aunt Charlotte. In 1932, at age 9, she saved Ulrike’s 5 year old aunt from drowning in the Main River. The story made the local press. (Click here for details in last summer’s Essay #10.) After WWII, our families reconnected and now we, the next generation, are friends too.

We walked into the gorgeous Wald (woods), a favorite pastime of my parents when they visited their permissive grandma.

On these trips, I try to imagine the lives of my forebears. My Miltenberg family lived with their non-Jewish neighbors in peace for a long time. Then came WWII, when neighbors murdered neighbors, or looked the other way.

Tikkun Olam (Hebrew for “repair of the world”), means coming to terms with the past and building toward a peaceful future, often one person at a time. The Germans I have met on this trip acknowledge past evils and want to insure they never happen again.

My grandfather Adolf Steinberger said that one can’t live in a country where one has no rights. The Germans whom I call friends understand this. They promote human rights and denounce demagogues.

Though we had not planned to go into the old Jewish cemetery, we decided to jump over the fence. My great-great-grandmother and my great-grandfather (among others in my family) are buried here in Miltenberg.

We stopped at the Miltenberg museum. Several Jewish families were highlighted, their humanity shown in the face of their fellow Germans’ inhumanity. The museum displays a few Jewish ritual objects, some of them broken. I was left wondering what exiled or murdered family owned them and how they came to the museum.

I found it interesting that the whole town was invited to the dedication of the new synagogue in 1904. My family must have attended the ceremony. They were gone when their neighbors burned it to the ground in 1938.

Ulrike prepared a fabulous lunch! She introduced us to some of her family. We had a wide ranging conversation and quickly realized that we share views on the importance of human rights.

Gesine, Jeffrey, me, Ulrike and Toni

I need to add, that this morning, before we left Frankfurt, we stopped to peer into the Struwwelpeter Museum. Anyone with German parents will recognize these dreadful stories. If you have no idea what this is, look HERE.

We had another day to remember, a day of friendship (Freundschaft) for which we are grateful. But always in Germany, we feel the sadness of loss; the removal from Germany of our family, our people, our culture.

No Jews live in Miltenberg today.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

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.

We started the day in Alsfeld, my mother’s hometown and home to my Steinberger family for at least 300 years.

We were greeted by Sarah Schaefer, a smart and engaging English teacher at the Max-Eyth School. Sarah made this visit possible! Sarah and I have been talking for months on Zoom. The key, we thought, was to prepare a presentation that would bring to life the experiences of Jews who lived in town and were forced to emigrate or were murdered.

On this map, I showed the students the house where my family lived, the public school they attended and the synagogue where they prayed and where my grandfather was president. My family felt very German, yet my grandparents were smart enough to uproot their family, 8 months after Hitler took power, and move to Haifa.

I showed the students lots of photos, including where my mother was born, where the synagogue stood and where my grandfather’s factory with 130 workers stood. Of course they knew all the locations. Alsfeld is a small town. One student actually lives in my mother’s old house, though he was not in attendance.

Several students shared their thoughts and feelings. Ferdinand stayed to speak with with us and to be interviewed by the local museum, which filmed one of the classes. Ferdinand thinks that we should learn from the past. Some students apologized on behalf of their great-grandparents. One thanked me for sharing my story while others nodded agreement; she said my personal story and the setting in her own town made real the pain that went with emigration and the trauma that was passed on through the generations. Some mentioned that their ancestors never spoke about the Nazi times, or had said they were indifferent when the Jews disappeared. Others said they had great-grandparents who were in the SS.

History teacher Andreas Scheumann and his class joined us after a brief lunch. I somehow didn’t get a photo of him. His students were fully engaged and asked numerous questions.

I shared my complicated feelings about Germany. On the one hand, my home in suburban New Jersey was typically German, with German food and customs. When I came to Germany the first time, it felt much like home. On the other hand, many family members were murdered. It’s hard to reconcile except to believe in helping innocent young Germans to understand this history so it never repeats.

It will take time for the students and their teachers to process what happened to today. Millions of murders and millions of refugees are hard to fathom. The story of one family from your neighborhood is easier to grasp.

The teachers will speak with the students and share their reactions.

After class, we drove to Speier Haus in nearby Angenrod.

Dedicated volunteers have made Speier Haus into a center to educate students about the local Jews who were murdered or forced into exile; and to teach the students that Jews are not fossils, that We Are Still Here, even if not living in Alsfeld and Angenrod. I gave Speier Haus some Jewish ritual objects and information to help further their goals.

Then Jeffrey and I took our German friends to dinner. They gave me some sweet local treats and a book about Alsfeld published on the town’s 800th anniversary in 2022.

My brain is fried. It was a good day. A memorable day. An emotional day. And a German-immersion day.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

The first step on any trans-Atlantic journey is the trip to the airport (this time via the M57 bus and E-train) and the chaos of checking in. Only when I reach the Delta Sky club do my nerves begin to settle.

We landed in Frankfurt around 8am and drove directly to Fulda, where I was scheduled to speak to students at 2pm. Fulda is a town of 70,000, founded in 744 (no typo) around an abbey. Before WW2, there were about 1,000 Jews out of 30,000 inhabitants. Today there are 300 Jews, almost all from Eastern Europe.

I have a link to Fulda. My distant cousin Heinrich Freund (born in the Freund family hometown of Kleinwallstadt) and his wife Therese Freund (born Stern) resided in Fulda for more than 20 years. The couple lived in the basement of the Jewish school, though his job is unknown.

Henrich and Therese moved to Frankfurt in 1939 because the synagogue was destroyed on Kristallnacht and the school building was “sold”. Both were deported from Frankfurt and murdered by the Nazis; he in Theresienstadt (age 74) and she in Treblinka (age 75). The town of Fulda remembers them and other Jews who lived here. There also are memorial plaques for this couple in Frankfurt, which we plan to see next week.

We were greeted in Fulda by Anja Listmann, a quiet powerhouse, the Commissioner for Jewish Life in Fulda.

In researching my family, I came across the memorial stone in Fulda for Heinrich Freund.

The City of Fulda’s website lists Anja as the person responsible. One phone call later, I had a ton of information and an invitation to speak to her students.

Awesome Anja is an example of what one person can accomplish. In her teens, Anja listened to her grandmother speak about the Jews who once were their neighbors. Disturbed and inspired, Anja (who’d had no inkling of this) dedicated her life to recovering Fulda’s Jewish past. She teaches students about the Holocaust and human rights, unearthed the local mikva, and has convinced the city to rebuild the synagogue in some form. She unearths documents in the city archives to create family trees and family histories.

Anja has about 20 students per year who volunteer to research the Jewish history of Fulda. They visit Auschwitz with her and do other projects. There is no school credit. The students are people of conscience and character.

After a short introduction I spoke about my Bavarian Freund family and Hessian Steinberger family that came from the nearby town of Alsfeld, just 40 minutes up the road. The students were engaged. After my talk, they made comments and asked questions.

The students created an exhibition in City Hall after their visit to Auschwitz. The pictures and poems are worthy of any museum.

This year the students have partnered with a high school in Petach Tikvah (near Tel Aviv) to learn from each other. Next year, the Fulda students will visit Israel; the following year the Israelis will come to Fulda.

The first known Jewish presence in Fulda was about 1300 years ago. Records from 1423 mention a synagogue. The Jewish population was recorded at 1,137 in 1925 and 1,038 in 1933.

In the 20th century, Fulda’s orthodox Jewish community thrived—until their non-Jewish neighbors betrayed them.

Thanks to Anja, the Jewish community’s long presence will be felt once again.

Her work is a paradigm of tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of repair of our broken world.

To read prior essays please click HERE.

What is awe?

From devoting.com: “Awe induces a sense of wonder/amazement so overwhelming that we are a bit afraid”—like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Nature can be humbling, and makes us feel small.

History humbles too.

I feel a sense of awe from my genealogy work, meeting new relatives, finding new documents, and talking to Germans who are preserving Jewish history.

I am moved by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s song (which originated when Nash was with the Hollies), Teach Your Children Well, with its call for parents and children to understand that each generation goes through its own “hell” (growing pains/life issues) and to respect and learn from each other. (Click on blue highlighted letters to open links.)

Last week, in the Lincoln Center Performing Arts research library, I paged through The Handbook of Biographies of the Jews in City and Region of Aschaffenburg. Having parted with my coat and purse, as required to prevent theft of this Columbia University book, I read in comfort and safety about my dead relatives in a town now devoid of Jews. I felt awe—tempered with dread.

When I started genealogy research, asking my parents hundreds of questions and creating photo-journal books and family trees, it never occurred to me that this project would grow into something much larger. I never imagined that I would teach German teenagers about their past from the experiences of my parents and from my view as a first generation American. I did not guess that I would work with local governments in Germany to establish family memorials.

I struggle with the idea that I am the right storyteller. As Clint Smith wrote in a recent article in The Atlantic magazine, Monuments to the Unthinkable, “Germans are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”

My German tutor reinforced the fact that from the ashes of WW2 arose a new Germany, just as the United States arose from the Revolutionary War. My tutor thinks that I have an open way of connecting with today’s Germans, as we share our trauma from the past and find a path to a better future. I hope she is right.

The generation that survived Nazi Germany is disappearing before the German people have fully faced up to their history.

WW2 is as ancient for today’s German high school students as the Spanish-American War was for me. I am grateful to the student and adult volunteers in small towns across Germany who engage with that history and its impact on Jewish Germans. I look forward to meeting them this summer.

This photo of my father (at right, age 9), with his sister and his father, was taken in Germany in 1935. That year the German government enacted the Nuremberg Laws.

Even before the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis barred Jews from their professions, their businesses were boycotted and they were subjected to harassment and violence. The new laws stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship, barred marriage between Jews and other Germans, and barred Jews from flying the German flag. My family had been German since the 1600s. With the stroke of a pen in 1935, they became stateless, hated Jews who happened to be in Germany.

In 1933, a local Nazi shot into my mother’s home in Alsfeld; thankfully no one was hurt.

If the United States treated me like this, I would pack a bag and run. Yet hindsight is 20/20. My grandfather, like many Jewish Germans, thought the madness would blow over; surely their neighbors would vote the Nazis out.

I find it hard to believe that the Holocaust ended barely a decade before I was born.

In May, I will meet in Fulda (pop. 70,000) with German 9th and 10th grade students who have volunteered for the Fulda-Auschwitz project. Project coordinator Anja Listmann, whom I met while I was researching my dead relatives, invited me to speak with her students.

From Fulda, I will drive to my mother’s hometown of Alsfeld (pop. 17,000). After the local Alsfelder Allgemeine newspaper published an article entitled We Are Still Here (send me a message if you want the English translation) about my visit last summer, I subscribed to the weekly edition.

Recently a different Alsfelder Allgemeine article caught my eye. It was about local high school students passing advanced English language exams. I reached out to the school. Plans are underway to visit teacher Sarah Schaefer and her class. The students are studying Naziism. I look forward to a good discussion in English and German.

From Alsfeld I will drive to Bavaria and the Freund family hometown of Kleinwallstadt (pop. 6,000) where Achim Albert has arranged for my father (from New Jersey via Zoom) and I (in person) to speak with students in the area.

Returning to my ancestral towns on this mission has special meaning. In The Atlantic article, Clint Smith wrote, “no stone [memorial] in the ground can make up for life. No museum can bring back millions of people. . . . Yet we must try to honor those lives, and to account for this history, as best we can.”

I will do the best I can.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

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