brother was on their list. They broke into his house and arrested him. When he asked, “Why am I arrested? What am I accused of?” they replied, “You're a Jew, and that's enough.” He was taken away and executed.
Although he was outgoing and communicative, Bernie had no Christian friends in Tab. For one thing, the strict Orthodox family rituals that structured his everyday life prevented friendships from developing. Even more important, the instilled hostility of the non-Jewish children created a barrier to friendly encounters. Gentile children often bullied and even threw rocks at Bernie and Alexander, targeted because of their Orthodox side locks, especially when they walked unaccompanied through the village. Bernie still remembers one particular tormentor and his frequent daydreams about beating him up. This bully grew up to volunteer for the Hungarian army, and Bernie recalls being pleased at the news that he had been killed in battle.
On March 15, 1944, the Hungarian National Holiday, a group of Jewish boys from his school who were carrying a Hungarian flag joined the parade through Tab. The other villagers taunted them as impostors with no right to participate and said that they were defiling the flag. They jeered and chased them away from the celebration. Bernie remembers it was usual for the hostile encounters with non-Jewish kids to deteriorate into fistfights and to end with the flight of the Jewish kids, who had not been raised to resort to violent actions or to fight back.
But the Jewish community had its own defense against such hostility. They would sing Yiddish songs for each other that were unintelligible to the Hungarian-speaking villagers. When I asked Bernie what kind of songs they were and whether he remembered any of them, he asked me to wait while he excused himself for a few minutes. When he reemerged from the downstairs of his home, he carried a tape recorded off a scratchy old record that contained some of these Yiddish songs. When he played one of them for me, I could catch no more than a few words at first. Bernie also had difficulty understanding the text of this melodious, seemingly plaintive song, sung in a minor key. Only after he replayed it did I realize that the message of the song was anything but plaintive. It told in a subtle, almost insinuating way about Christians who behaved violently and got drunk in taverns, in contrast to the Jews, who were pious and hardworking and attended synagogue regularly. We had a good laugh over this subversive piece of musical resistance that had been languishing for years in a bottom drawer. The only other contacts between Jews and Christians took place between poor Christian villagers and the Jewish households who employed them as servants. In Bernie's home, these Christian servants had the task, among other things, of switching the electricity on and off during the Sabbath so that the Rosners could live up to the Orthodox tradition of not working on the Holy Day.
All villagers, rich and poor, shared an everyday communal life that changed only with the seasons. In springtime the various fruit crops were harvested—cherries first, plums later, followed by apples and pears. Walnuts developed in their soft green outer shells until ripe for picking and peeling toward the end of summer. The threshing season started in August, first with the wheat and afterward, the rye. Sharecroppers would bring their loaded wagons to the threshing machine that ground on all day and into the night, separating the kernels from the chaff. Sacks were attached to one end of the machine, and by moving a lever, they were filled with the ripe grain. According to a certain rhythm and accompanied by an incredible racket, the tightly packed straw would emerge in neat bundles at the other end of the big machine.
During midsummer, a fair was held in Tab. Large tents were erected for this rural spectacle. Animals, crops, peasants, and merchants all shared this special time that obscured the general poverty. Bernie was forbidden to go to the fair but found the opportunity to sneak away nevertheless and watch the activities.
Early winter was the season for slaughtering pigs. From sunrise to sundown, the squeals of dying pigs were heard all over the village. Blood was collected from their neck arteries, and sausages were cooked in a huge pot at the end of the day.
In midwinter our footprints marked the snow as we carried lanterns to light the way home through the dark night. And in the morning, after a night of heavy snowfall, the village was transformed into an enchanted landscape. Timeless moments of the seasons, with no beginning and no end. These memories of the boy from Tab are also the memories of the boy from Kleinheubach.
But these times came to an end. They ended for Bernie in early spring 1944, when the seasonal rhythms were replaced by the shouts of Nazis. Those harsh new voices disrupted life as the Jews of Tab had known it, and in less than three months ordered their deportation and extermination at Auschwitz. There, or in other camps, most of the Jews of Tab were killed —Bernie's literate mother, who thought she had a bad heart, and severe Aunt Libby of Kiskunhalas, and Uncles Joe and Willy and their children, and Bernie's father, preoccupied with his work, and the nice spinster aunt of Tab, and Bernie's own little brother, Alexander, a talented drawer of horses, and, if he lived that long, the wise and learned grandfather of Kiskunhalas, and the devout Orthodox Jew from the next pew in the synagogue whose book Bernie stole, who pleaded with Bernie's father for leniency. And…and…and. There is no end to this list. The only survivor among family members, friends, and acquaintances was Angel Tralala.
Located southeast of Frankfurt in the Main Valley, the village of Kleinheubach was one of the few Protestant enclaves in an otherwise Catholic region of northern Bavaria. Many of the family names still have Huguenot origins: Dauphin, Zink, Willared. In the early 1930s, news in the modern sense, as in Tab, was still in the process of being invented. Few villagers had enough money to buy the newspapers that existed. And after Hitler's rise to power, the press was anything but free and objective. The village was roused out of its rural slumber when the wealthier families acquired a radio, or Volksempfanger, the so-called people's receiver. Promoted by the Nazis, it was sold at low cost so that villagers could begin to partake in the events of the wider world —operettas by Franz Lehar from Vienna, soccer matches from Rome and Amsterdam, Hitler's speeches from Berlin, and Nazi propaganda about Germany's noble past and the murderous designs of its enemies.
During Hitler s speeches, village activities almost came to a stop, as if by command of an invisible wand. Scurrying home through the deserted streets, one could hear the Fiihrer's staccato voice blasting out through open windows here and there or even through the walls of some houses. His voice seemed to be everywhere while families hovered around their radios listening to heroic stories of World War I and ominous assertions about outsiders ready to destroy the “German soul.” One place villagers might read about Nazi Party opinions was in Der Sturmer, a weekly that was posted publicly in a vitrine on a wall on Main Street. Everyone knew the reputation of its editor, Julius Streicher, the quintessential Nazi anti-Semite. Printed in Nuremberg, the paper was full of venomous propaganda against the Jews.
Hitler had come to power on January 30, 1933, and in the fall of that year my father moved my mother and me from San Francisco back to Kleinheubach. Though a German citizen, in California my father had worked as a professional violinist in Bay Area movie theater orchestras. But the depression was in progress and the talkies had made theater orchestras obsolete. I was three years old, and as my father once explained, he returned to Germany, not to become a Nazi, but to feed his wife and son. Other family stories told of how he was moved by letters he received in California from family and friends that extolled the bright future being shaped for all Germans ready to participate in the Nazi movement.
By the time we arrived in Germany, the Ermächtigungsgesetz (law of empowerment) had put the power of the German state into the hands of Adolf Hitler, all opposition parties had been forbidden, all unions had been disbanded, all non-Aryan bureaucrats had been fired, and Jewish professional activity had been severely curtailed. Moreover, the first concentration camps had been erected in Dachau and Oranienburg.
In that year, 1933, Kleinheubach had 48 Jewish citizens—23 men and 25 women—at least 4 of whom were sent to the Dachau concentration camp.1 Three of them, Adolf Sichel, The-odor Weil, and Ernst Sichel, who was
