In my essay about growing up in England (A Pilgrimage) I wrote that my early childhood places in Germany were a story for another day. That day came in April 2013, thanks to my daughter Lisa’s fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.
It was unpleasantly cold in that old university city on the edge of the Schwarzwald (Black Forest). But a day-trip to the beautiful Titisee resort and a generous slice of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (cherry cake) helped move the season along.
Three days later we got down to business, starting with a four-hour train journey to Neuwied. Our goal was Irlich, a village at the confluence of the Wied and the Rhein (Rhine) rivers. Here was the childhood home of my mother, youngest of six surviving children of the village’s kosher butcher. Lisa discovered in county archives that my maternal grandmother had actually had nine children. Until this discovery, I was ignorant of the three who died in infancy. My mother must have known but never talked about them.
The Metzgerei (butcher’s shop) in Irlich
Note sign attached to house level with second floor.
The village is now incorporated in the city of Neuwied, which has taken measures to contain the perennial spring floods with which my mother was so familiar. The entire side of the street on which my grandparents’ house and shop stood has been replaced by a levee to keep out the floodwaters. The train station where I got off as a child is gone.
Memories of Irlich remain, among them my cousin Inge, three weeks younger than I, whom I routinely bullied to tears (she’s safe in Australia now), and the experience of watching my uncle slaughter a lamb. The latter was an awesome spectacle for a seven-year-old, but not upsetting enough to dull my taste for its meat.
Prior to my trip in 2013, I had a 75-year-old mental image of the butcher’s shop, amplified by even older photos and stories of my mother’s legendary youthful exploits, among them leading a horse into the living room. But decades of progress have erased whatever hope I had of seeing the old homestead preserved. The closest reminder was a house across the street whose stonework matched that of the old Metzgerei. Unexpectedly, two Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) were embedded in the sidewalk, one with Oma’s (Grandma’s) name and one with Tante (Aunt) Karola’s. (There are now tens of thousands of such brass-coated stones in Germany and other European countries, in front of the houses where victims of the Holocaust had lived.)
I never knew my maternal grandfather, who died when I was less than a year old. But dear Oma, a typical doting grandmother, still lives in my memory. Of Oma’s large family, only she, my parents, Tante Karola, and Karola’s son Herbert failed to escape Germany before the war. All but Herbert were imprisoned in Terezín (German name Theresienstadt), Czechoslovakia, in 1942; Herbert’s destination remains unknown.
My mother was first assigned to split mica, later to cook in the camp kitchen; my father did office work. These skills made my parents useful to the camp administration and contributed to their survival until the Soviet Army freed them three years later. Oma and Tante Karola were not deemed useful, so they were sent early on nach den Osten (east — to the death camps). My parents did not know which camp; neither, evidently, did any of the other family members who had spent the war years in England or the New World. But Lisa found out.
Outside Neuwied is the Jewish cemetery, in which my maternal grandfather Isak Kaufmann was buried in 1931. At the bottom of the headstone is a dedication to Oma, Valentine Kaufmann, but her body does not lie in the grave. The last line of that inscription, ordered by my mother’s brother Max in New York, reads: “starb im Sept. 1942 an unbekanntem Ort” (died in Sept. 1942 in an unknown place). The “unknown place,” Lisa discovered, was the Treblinka extermination camp. At reasonable cost and without any hesitation, the stonecutters honored our request to add both the place and the cause of death — ermordet (murdered). We decided furthermore to cross out the original error rather than try to obliterate it. My mother, who was infuriated by the seeming exoneration of her mother’s murderers, would have appreciated the correction. (The Stolperstein in Irlich incorrectly names Auschwitz as the place of Oma’s death.)
Two connecting train rides next morning brought us to Krefeld, my birth home as well as my father’s and brother’s. (Krefeld — then spelled Crefeld — was the departure city of a group of 17th century Quaker and Mennonite immigrants to America. Their colony, Germantown, eventually became part of Philadelphia. Frank Rizzo, mayor of Philadelphia 1972-1980, had a home at 8919 Crefeld Street in the Chestnut Hill section of the city.) Krefeld, in common with other childhood places revisited decades later, seemed to have shrunk in proportion to my growth from an eight-year-old to an adult. The four Wälle, once defensive walls and now boulevards, enclose an area easily covered on foot in an hour or so; I remembered it as the nucleus of my daily life as a child. In fact, my last address in Krefeld was right on the edge, at Südwall (South Wall) 11.
The railway station, just south of the corner of Ostwall and Südwall, was not damaged in the war. On one of its platforms, to the hiss of the majestic steam locomotive (I can still see it in my mind), we bade farewell to Tante Sofie and her family in 1938. Months later they would be settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, and we would be edging closer to Kristallnacht.
That fateful evening, November 9, we knew that our synagogue had been burned to the ground, but we were not prepared for the brown-shirted night visitors, with their swastika armbands, who burst into our home in the wee hours of the night, smashed our furniture, swept the contents of our china closet onto the floor, and turned on the gas before they left. My mother smelled the gas and turned it off before harm was done. Next day my father was arrested, but the local official, possibly moved by my father’s paralyzed arm — a wound for which he earned an Iron Cross in World War I — sent him home instead of to the Dachau concentration camp. We spent the next three days with relatives in Cologne and made plans to abandon our home.
Ironically, of all the places I lived at during my first nine years, only that one, at Malmedystraße (now named Lewerentzstraße) 55, is still standing. Lisa and I were allowed in by the present resident, who listened to my story with polite interest but was evidently too young to be impressed by the awful history of her own house. In any case, the alterations incident to the establishment of a daycare center had obliterated most visual reminders. I can imagine that, had our roles been reversed, I’d have shown the same lack of understanding.
My other homes had been erased by bombs or bulldozers. Except for an overgrown yard where my father played soccer with me, the addresses themselves were the only reminders of my years there. We did not have access to the yard at Breitestraße 66, from which I had seen the airship Hindenburg in 1937 — doomed to destruction that very year — with the terrifying roar of its engines. (At age six I was easily terrified by loud sounds.) My two-room school on St. Antonstraße no longer exists — only a group of Stolpersteine with the names of my schoolteacher’s family.
Matching other childhood memories with present locations was not easy. The interior of the post office, still on Ostwall, has been extensively remodeled and evoked no image of the time I lost sight of my father and panicked. I think I was five years old.
The season, early spring, precluded a blackberry-picking excursion to the Stadtwald (city park), once the destination of many a brambly family outing. As an irrelevant substitute, we had coffee and cake at both locations of the Heinemann (two n’s, like mine originally) confectionery. The owners are not related to us; we simply have the same, fairly ordinary name.
Not all historical facts are to be found in archives or structures. Where there are living witnesses, there’s a trove of unrecorded memories. So Lisa called my cousin Gus, once a sports fan and excellent athlete in his own right; with a childhood divided, like mine, into German, English, and American periods. He now lives in Jerusalem, where he has become ultra-orthodox, changed his name to Yakov, and disowned me for “marrying out.” He brushed off Lisa’s telephone call and refused to give her any information because he doesn’t acknowledge her as a relative. Thus has the iniquity of the father been visited upon the child. According to the Old Testament, Divine retribution carries to the third and fourth generations, so Gus aka Yakov won’t live to see the descendants of his wayward cousin restored to grace.
It’s a shame: Gus knows things I don’t. Herbert, murdered by the Nazis, was his brother; and his two older sisters, Therese and Erika, escaped to England.
To give credit where it’s due, this pilgrimage, along with its English counterpart, was Lisa’s project. Her knowledge of the German language has surpassed mine, so she did most of the talking with local people. My contribution was twofold: I knew which places I wanted her to see; and — so she said — I charmed the archivists, by my presence alone, into showing her the materials she asked for without going through tiresome formalities. Those materials, in turn, she shared with me, and I learned things I’d never known.
I was a month short of nine when I left the country of my birth, to be temporarily adopted by a compassionate new homeland. I was six months short of eighteen when I left England for the United States. Two sea crossings had cut my life into three discontinuous parts.
People hear me speak and wonder where I’m from, their guesses ranging as far afield as Ireland and Australia. I’ve never come up with an answer that’s both short and true, so I often say “Pittsburgh.” That’s where I was married and my children were born, so my family at least is from Pittsburgh. But of course my accent doesn’t sound like that of a Pittsburgher — or of someone from any other place. German, British, and American just don’t add up to anything people easily recognize. On top of that, my friend in Berlin has told me I speak German with an American accent! Confusing? Look at it this way: My linguistic center of gravity is four-fifths of the way across the Atlantic Ocean and moving west, but it will never make landfall. In this country I’ll always sound like an immigrant from someplace where English is spoken.
Only a German could think that I’m American.