Germany: Roots & Remembrance

I’m home and thinking about our trip to Germany.

Many smart, kind, generous people made this trip possible and special.

Already, I miss the coffee and my new friends.

On prior trips to Germany, I couldn’t sleep. I feared that Hitler would jump out of the closet in my hotel room or that I would be arrested on the street. In those days, former German Nazis were alive and well.

Today, the youngest Hitler voter would be 110 years old. A Nazi soldier aged 18 in 1945 would be 95 now. My fear of the old Nazis is gone.

Many thoughts whirl in my head. This trip involved visits to my family’s hometowns and to historic sites, and talking about the present and the past with today’s Germans. This was not a cemetery tour. We did not say Kaddish for people I never knew or met. “Been there, done that.”

This tour engaged me with Germans born after WWII. We put aside who was responsible for the war. None of us in the post-war generation was responsible for anything.

Like me, these Germans were raised by parents who had suffered. My parents’ trauma came from being frightened and uprooted, from being strangers in strange lands. The Germans’ parents were scarred by invasions, bombing, hunger, years of military service, years in prison camps; some screamed in their sleep.

Our parents’ traumas great and small influenced our childhood development. We shared stories and the effects the war era had on us, the second generation. We lived with parents who acted out their pain, or refused to talk about their experiences, or searched for their lost childhoods. Sometimes this made us anxious and scared. Sometimes we pass our anxieties on to our own children.

My German contemporaries and I became friends. Our friendship has eased my mind. Our exchanges were meaningful and cathartic for all of us. My hope is that we can heal some of one another’s pain.

As I traveled from place to place, I couldn’t escape the fact that the Jewish people rooted in Germany for centuries, have vanished. Larger cities have a few Jews and synagogues, but most of those Jews are from the former Soviet bloc. There are a few Israeli transplants. The Jews who spoke and ate and joked and kept house and lived like my parents and their parents, are gone. They left Germany or were murdered.

It makes sense that the German Jews made new lives elsewhere for themselves and their descendants. But many Germans today miss the diversity that my family and others brought. Some of my new friends told me that they’re sad that people like us don’t live in town. They said that with Jewish neighbors, their communities would be more vibrant and interesting. We would have been friends.

Yet although most of Germany is as Hitler wished—Judenrein, free of Jews—my people triumphed in the end. My grandparents’ Jewish granddaughter stood atop the annihilated dictator’s Nuremberg platform. I towered over him!

As my husband says in Yiddish, the language of his grandparents, mir zaynen do.

I thank everyone who made my trip so meaningful. There are too many to name. A few of the many who stand out:

I thank my German tutor of four years, Daniela. Her teaching let me connect with (and impress) German speakers. She worked with me to translate old family letters to better understand what my parents and grandparents lived through.

I thank my therapist for helping me handle the complex emotions stirred up by this trip.

I thank my children and their spouses, and my sister and my dad for supporting me along the way. That my dad, now almost 96, traveled with me vicariously was wonderful. He answered questions and spoke to me daily, adding color and context to our family’s journey to America.

And most of all, I’m beyond grateful to my supportive husband, my beschert, my soulmate, Jeffrey, a Litvak for whom Germany is a disconcerting and alien land. He drove me over 1,000 miles and put up with hearing hours and hours of German every day. This was an emotionally difficult trip for him. Married for 42 years, best friends for 43, I’m lucky to have him in my life.

At the end of a trip, I’m always happy to return to familiar sights, sounds and smells: to my own house, family, food and coffee. It’s hard to imagine never returning home, as my parents and so many immigrants experienced. The fear of being forced to live where you don’t speak the language is hard to grasp.

Thank you for reading my blog, commenting and sending me messages of support. It means a lot to me.

I hope that this journey inspires us all to have more empathy for those fleeing tyranny, and to welcome newcomers as they try to make a new life in a place they never wanted to call home.

I wish you all a safe journey.

—Nancy

To read prior essays, click HERE.

Jeffrey here.

With Nancy.

In Germany.

“Not my country, man!”

Nancy’s parents and grandparents thought they were German—until the hate and violence of their German neighbors forced them to flee. My grandparents, who escaped the Russian Empire 30 years earlier, had no such illusion of belonging.

Still, Nancy and I are not so different. As in Nancy’s family, all my relatives who didn’t escape Europe by 1939 were murdered by the Germans and their allies. My kin died not in Germany, but in Belarus and Lithuania. All the military-age men in my family served in the U.S. Army in WW2, and thanks to the Germans, not all of them came home.

As I am the only member of our family without German roots, and I am Nancy’s only companion on this journey, Nancy asked me to share my point of view.

But first: ancient Heidelberg.

It’s a beautiful university town.

Jews lived here since at least the 1200s—except during periodic mass murders and expulsions. You know the drill.

And they live here again. A synagogue was built in 1994. It has about 400 members, almost all of whom are refugees from the former Soviet Union.

Jews from the east found a haven here. Jews with deep roots in Germany, like Nancy’s family, don’t live in Germany anymore.

Nancy’s family didn’t live in Heidelberg at all. So for us, being here was a bit of a rest. There are no family sites to see. No cemeteries with Freund/Steinberger/Grünstein ancestors. No inherited memories. To a greater extent than in our prior stops, we could just . . . be.

Still, Jews haunt this city. There are monuments.

Outside of Israel, anything Jewish is likely to be vandalized, of course.

Happily, there’s a silver lining to this vandalism of the site of the former Heidelberg synagogue.

Kind Melina is from the Alsfeld area, as was Nancy’s mother’s family. Melina isn’t obsessed with the past. But she knows it, has learned from it, and wants others to learn too.

Here are my early thoughts on our exploration of Nancy’s roots.

This trip was difficult for me. Every day I saw something that overwhelmed my emotions. Every day I visited sites where terrible things were done to Jews in Germany. Every day I felt a mixture of horror, sadness, anger—and gratitude to the Germans who by acknowledging their history, show their love for humanity and their regret for what their families and neighbors had done.

My experience isn’t far different from when I biked through the Deep South of the USA and saw monuments to black American victims of white lynch mobs.

Horror, sadness, anger—and gratitude. It’s a lot to process in America. And in Germany.

These emotions—plus the disconnect between the richness and beauty of this country, the kindness I see in the people I meet, and the horrors my people and others suffered at German hands—make Germany a hard place for me.

A hard place. Yet it’s a good place.

A few summers ago in a hot NYC subway car, a loud German tourist complained that the subway in Munich was much better than the NYC system. I silenced his obnoxious boasts by reminding him that his city’s facility was newer and better . . . because the USA bombed the old one. A new subway, and a new and more humane Germany, arose from the wreckage of WW2.

I think of this as I watch America’s recent slide toward fascism, never mind the deterioration of our infrastructure.

I ponder Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

I fear that blood might be shed in America by the hard-right cult of today’s pretend patriots who trample our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. They imagine as tyrants the honorable American officials who obey the law.

And I wonder whether we will learn from today’s Germans. With our help, since WW2 they have largely if imperfectly faced up to their history, and built a society in some ways better than our own.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

[First, some housekeeping: To see my latest post, and to scroll back through prior posts, always go to nancysgermanyroots.com/home .]

I have been interested in our family history for decades, asking my parents to share their stories. Getting a feeling for how my relatives lived fascinates me. Understanding the Nazi period is hard. As my family lived in Germany from the 1600’s (if not earlier) until 1942 (when the last of my relatives who had not escaped was murdered), much of the genealogical information is in old Gothic German script and is hard even for natives to read.

Some Germans have dedicated themselves to recording the Jewish experience so it is not forgotten. They teach children, and find and post old documents online. Fortunately, I have met some of these warm, intelligent, selfless people. They are Freunds indeed. As many of you know, Freund (“friend” in German) is my maiden name. (Americans have trouble pronouncing it; my mother would say, ”just add an ‘n’ to the last name of Sigmund Freud.”)

One Freundin is my friend, Iris. We were introduced via email and met in person on this trip. Bilingual in German and English, Iris has helped many Jews with translations and tours.

Without Iris, my research on cousin Louis Joseph (the savior who helped my family when America was ready to bar the door and God was silent) would not have been possible. It is Iris who found and translated the missing family link.

Iris is kind, smart, understated and modest. She arranged and joined us on several private family history tours and took us herself on a grand tour of Aschaffenburg.

Iris has a 1920 phone book that lists the Freund family. It was eerie to see so many familiar names written in old German with their residences, occupations and phone numbers. Call 599 for my great uncle the engineer!

In other times, Iris and I would be neighbors as well as friends. Delightful Iris would have been a Freundin of her contemporaries in the Freund family, were my cousins still in Aschaffenburg.

Sadly, there are no Freunds here.

There is no Jewish community here.

Iris and I will remain pen pals and Freunds.

Miltenberg is a beautiful medieval town. Cruise ships dock for the day so tourists can walk in the woods, see the castle and shop along the old cobblestoned streets. Both my parents came here as children to visit their loving grandmother Selma.

My skinny mother was sent to Cafe Sel to eat Schlag (cream) off a spoon. It was there that we stopped for cake. I was flooded with memories of my New York grandmother as I ate Zwetschgenkuchen (plum cake). Jeffrey had apple strudel (I had a taste), another of her specialties.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

We were greeted in Miltenberg by the mayor and his deputy, and gifted with a monogrammed umbrella against the rain.

At age nine, my Aunt Charlotte, whose turn it was to visit her Grandma Selma, saved a five year old girl, Elizabeth, from drowning in the river. The newspaper in Miltenberg carried the story in 1932. After the Nazis took power in 1933, my aunt was permitted to stay in the regular school because of her heroism. (She, my mother, and their parents fled Germany for British Palestine later that year.)

We were welcomed in Miltenberg by Elizabeth’s family! Elizabeth’s nieces Dorothea and Ulrike, together with local Jewish historians Gabriele and Georg and other locals, gave us a tour of the town and the Jewish and family landmarks.

Great-Grandmother Selma ran a Miltenberg shoe store after her husband died. By all accounts, she was an excellent businesswoman and a loving grandmother. Today, the store is a pizzeria.

My parents talked lovingly of the freedom their grandma gave them to wander in this forest, something I never had done until yesterday.

At the edge of the woods, outside the city wall, lies the old Jewish cemetery where several of my forebears are buried. The grass is cut twice a year.

From the fountain we walked to the top of the hill, overlooking the river.

We walked by one of what once were three local synagogues (now there are none), saw salvaged Jewish religious objects in the local museum, and stopped at some of the Stolperstein (“stumbling stones”) that memorialize a few of the Miltenberg Jews who were deported and murdered.

Today no Jews live in this town.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

My Freund family from Nuremberg was saved from certain death by a distant cousin, Louis Joseph. Though everyone in the family knew his name, it took me almost a year to figure out our exact relationship.

Louis arrived in New York in 1893 at age 16 from Reichelsheim, with two teenaged cousins, as third class passengers. The Joseph boys had no visas. In those days, they were not required. Louis had older brothers, so he had a bleak future in Reichelsheim: in Germany, only the eldest son inherited the family house and land. Poverty pushed many people abroad in that era, not just the Jews.

Louis became a well-paid manager at the Wilson Meat Packing Company, and in 1901, a U.S. citizen.

In 1936, the Jewish men in Nuremberg (including my grandfather) were arrested and forced to run around a track until they dropped from exhaustion. Someone secured my grandfather’s release, perhaps through a bribe. His trauma was the impetus my family needed to leave.

Among other requirements for U.S. visas, my grandfather had to show that he and his family would not become ”a public charge”. He wrote to Louis, whose mother was a Freund; even so, Louis never had met my grandfather. No matter. Louis provided an affidavit of support, and later sent a bankbook that my grandfather could show to the U.S. consul as evidence of financial means. Louis provided such documents to any relative and anyone from his home town who asked.

I created a short photo essay journal on Louis’s life and personally delivered a copy of the book to the Rathaus in Reichelsheim to be sure that they knew the story of their native son. I also have thanked Louis’s distant relatives in Australia, Chicago and New York, as he had no children.

Our journey to Reichelsheim began when I wrote to the mayor (Bürgermeister) who put me in touch with Gerd Lode, the former mayor, who has been documenting the Jewish history of Reichelsheim for 18 years. Gerd gave us a warm welcome and an introduction to the current mayor. We were given a book with the history of the Jews in the town, Not to be Forgotten: The Jews in Reichelsheim, a list of all the Jewish families that once lived there, and a tour of the pretty town.

The Jospeh family was large. One branch owned a matzah factory. Another branch were cattle dealers. They lived in harmony with their non-Jewish neighbors. The town has not forgotten them, and Gerd has done all he can to document what is knowable, to ensure that the Jewish cemetery is kept up, and to see that the Jewish community’s history is preserved and remembered. We are impressed and grateful.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

Zeppelin Field was the site of the Nazi’s biggest rallies and where we started our day on Wednesday. It was chilling and brought tears to my eyes as I stood on the same platform where Hitler roused hundreds of thousands of stiff-arm saluting Nazi supporters. The stadium design was based on the ancient Greek Pergamon Altar and was originally topped with a towering swastika, which was blown up by the U.S. Army after capturing Nuremberg in April 1945.

Click here to watch a video of its destruction.

Clowning around or gesturing on the platform is illegal. While the Nazis rallied, the Nuremberg Jewish population would lock their doors, close their window shades and stay home. When the rallies took place, even before Hitler took power, my father often was sent to his grandmother’s house in a nearby town. Mixed with my fear and sadness was a little triumph: Hitler and his murderous empire were destroyed, and I, a Jewish woman, stood free atop his ruins.

We then drove to Aschaffenburg where we met my pen pal and friend, Iris, with whom I have lively email conversations. She has been hugely helpful in my genealogy work. She’s a person of thought and ideas, a wonderful tour guide, and an outstanding cook.

Our first stop was Kleinwallstadt (“small walled city”), the city to which the Freund family traces its roots to 1773. My great-great-grandfather, Liebmann, was a prosperous businessman who ran a dry goods store and raised a large family in a big house next to the business. Liebmann also was a leader of the Jewish community.

Standing in front of where my forebears lived brings the family history to life. I imagine meeting my relatives and get a feeling of the times. Jews from this town had to schlep miles uphill, following a horse drawn carriage, to bury their dead in the nearby town of Obernau.

The mayor (Bürgermeister) of Kleinwallstadt welcomed us warmly and introduced us to a musician and accountant, Achim Albert, a history buff who on his own time has been documenting the Jewish history of Kleinwallstadt for 35 years. He is dedicated to remembering the Jewish famiies and history and we were impressed and grateful to him. Achim showed us a document signed by my great uncle in 1917 regarding the costs of electrifying the Catholic church in town. Interestingly, this uncle used his engineering expertise in Chicago after he emigrated to the USA.

Achim walked us to Liebmann’s house and business. Today the house has six apartments. We could see holes in the doorposts where a mezuzah once hung.

Just outside the Rathaus and is a memorial to the Jews of Kleinwallstadt. A suitcase at a fountain symbolizes the expulsion and murder of the Jews who remained in the town after Hitler came to power.

We walked past the building that housed a Jewish day school from 1899-1917 and saw a contract signed by Liebmann Freund on behalf of the Jewish community to rent an apartment with heat (a big deal) to a Jewish teacher who was hired to educate up to 14 students. There still is Hebrew above the door.

Before the Nazi era, Jews were well integrated into the Kleinwallstadt community. Achim gave us an example: Jewish and Christian butchers would share cows, the kosher butcher using the kosher parts, and the non-kosher butcher using the rest.

The Kleinwallstadt synagogue was not burned down on Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938) because the last Jews had just left town and the building had been ”bought” by a non-Jew. Achim knew when the last Jews left because the new mayor at the time, an enthusiastic Nazi who wanted the town to be ”Jew-free”, posted the number of Jews living in town on a placard at the railroad station. Just before Kristallnacht, the number was reduced from two, to zero.

We met the current owner of what had been the synagogue, the son of the man who ”bought” the building as the Jews were running for their lives.

My great-grandfather served as a soldier in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War. His name is on a stone monument with other soldiers from Kleinwallstadt.

To stand in front of the house where my Freund great-grandfather and his family lived, the synagogue where he prayed and school where he sent his children was emotional. My grandfather went to that school as a child. This is where my Freund family comes from.

We ended the day Aschaffenburg (A’burg for short) where Iris treated us to a tour. As it is getting late here in A’burg, I will write about A’burg and our trip to Reichelsheim in my next post. Bear with me as I fall behind.

But first a coincidence. The City Hotel in A’burg where we are staying is at Frohsinnstrasse 23. Iris has a 1922 phone directory from A’burg showing the Brother Freund clothing factory at Frohsinnstrasse 25! Assuming the building numbers haven’t changed, I write this next door to the store that two of my great uncles managed. It kinda blows my mind.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

We had a very busy day and it is late in Germany. I will post the next two days’ adventures tomorrow.

To read prior essays, click HERE.

Often I wonder what life was like for my forebears. Today I had a taste.

Inspired by our train-loving friend Art Bilenker, we decided to visit Munich’s transit museum (not my usual museum choice) just across from our hotel. There we saw a Nuremberg city tram, built in 1926, the year my father was born. (Remember the year: 1926!)

A museum worker, Christian, told us that we had crossed into a forbidden zone next to the tram. We explained that I wanted a close look because my father, like all Jewish children in 1936, had been expelled from public school in Nuremberg, forced to travel by tram every day to the Jewish school in neighboring Fürth.

Christian understood. He welcomed me warmly, fetched a key, opened a gate, and guided Jeffrey and me onto the tram!

Christian showed us the heaters under the seats, the box of sand used to keep the brakes effective, and a sign that reminded riders to keep the doors closed from October to April to conserve heat.

The museum has a huge collection of trains, bicycles, motorcycles, and cars.

We arrived in Nuremberg at lunchtime. Our first stop was the Lebkuchen Schmidt store. Schmidt has made these local spice cookie specialties since … 1926! At my father’s suggestion, we bought broken Lebkuchen without a tin, for the same great taste at a fraction of the cost.

Beginning years before Hitler became chancellor, Nuremberg hosted many Nazi rallies. Some say that during WW2, it got what was coming to it.

After the war, Nuremberg was rebuilt, and German society was rebuilt, in ways that serve their people. Today this city and this country provide a good life for their people and resettle refugees rather than create them.

To read prior essays, click HERE.