together in March and jailed. Without a trial or sentencing, they were sent to Dachau. Fritz Sichel was arrested and sent to Dachau in a separate action in May. He was released toward the end of 1935 and in 1937 was able to emigrate to America. Ernst Sichel was released after sixteen months and later emigrated to Argentina. Theodor Weil was imprisoned for six years before his release and emigration to the United States in 1939. Adolf Sichel was also released but never made it out of Germany; in 1942 he met his death in the concentration camp at Maydanek, Poland. As I grew up during the next nine years, until April 23, 1942, when the last 3 Jews were deported to extermination camps, 8 Jews died of natural causes and were buried in the Jewish cemetery, 16 moved elsewhere in Germany between 1935 and 1941, and 19 managed to emigrate to Palestine, the United States, Venezuela, and Argentina. The fates of 2 are not in the record.2
The year I turned five, the Nuremberg Laws forbade Christian-Jewish marriages and Jews lost their German citizenship. On our arrival in Kleinheubach, we moved in with my paternal grandparents and my father found his first job playing the piano in a hotel. Soon he landed a better job working for the Nazi Party. A Nazi who worked for the DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the worker's wing of the NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers' Party) had learned of his musical talent and asked him to work in the KDF (Kraft durch Freude, or Power through Joy), a division of the DAF involved in organizing social events and vacations for workers to wean them from socialist leanings and bind them to the Nazi Party. My father was eager for a better job, and when this Nazi bureaucrat learned that my father was not a Nazi Party member because he had recently returned from America, he arranged to take him in retroactive to March 1933, a date that increased my father's seniority. Germans who had joined the Nazi Party before Hitler came to power enjoyed enhanced status as the “best,” most reliable Nazis. This elite of so-called Alte Kämpfer (old warriors) also generally enjoyed the greatest prestige within the party.
Whereas Orthodox Judaism structured the everyday life of Bernat Rosner's family, politics had a major impact on mine. The adults in our house were always in an uproar over faraway events, village rumors, and even opinions expressed within the narrow family circle. My family was politically split. Frequent verbal altercations were led by Uncle Ernst, a convinced communist, on one side, and by my father, on the other. My grandfather, a conservative who still had loyalties to the monarchy, insisted that the fights be kept zwischen den vier Wänden (within the four walls) —a frequently used phrase. Even someone as talkative as I was as a child quickly learned to Mund halten (keep quiet) when it came to political opinions outside the confines of our home.
One of my earliest memories of family life involved these heated arguments among rival brothers. If the subject wasn't politics, they competed over who could more quickly identify the composers of the music broadcast on our newly acquired radio. My youngest uncle, the quiet and retiring Ludwig, who usually shied away from the political fights, used to win these music contests. Although the political split in the family was severe, all the adults agreed with the Nazis about the “dark days” of unemployment and cultural decadence in Weimar Germany. I remember pamphlets in the house critical not only of the high crime rate of the Weimar Republic but also of its “degenerate” art. The Tubach family members were without exception anti-modernist defenders of classical art and music (hohe Kunst) and felt threatened by modern trends. I recall my grandfather Tubach's pun on the name of the composer Hindemith: “Hindemith, her damit, weg damit,” which meant roughly, “Hindemith, take him and throw him away.”
Regardless of the nature of the disputes or alliances that formed in the verbal trenches, my grandmother, who raised me after the death of my mother, kept everyone fed—primarily on my grandfather's meager World War I invalid's pension. During the depression that lasted into the mid-1930s, my uncles and my father added whatever else they could bring home from their various jobs to this steady, if small, source of income. As an employee of the Nazi Party, my father always had more money than the others.
I took it all in and was fascinated by the excitement that the outside world caused in our household. Because I was good at mimicking people, I was frequently asked to imitate Hitler or the Protestant parson of the village, Pfarrer Wagner, for the amusement of the assembled family members. I had a keen eye for personal mannerisms, and everyone in our house, monarchist, Nazi, or communist, would break up over my Hitlerian speech or my version of a pastoral sermon. But I was under strict orders never to reveal this skill outside our four walls. Once I broke the rule, causing my father great distress. On a visit to my father s sister, my aunt Gretel in Nuremberg, my father took me for a walk through the Reichsparteitagsgelände, the Nazi Party parade grounds, where he pointed out to me the concrete podium from which Hitler spoke during the rallies. It was too great a temptation for a small boy. I dashed up the steps and started my Hitler imitation. My father bounded up after me, yanked me away, and disappeared with me in the Sunday crowd that was strolling through the arena.
Many village men ran around in uniform, alternately angry or elated for reasons I could not understand, but their actions had an aura of importance. At one point, meek Uncle Ludwig had the opportunity to participate in the main Nazi Party rally held every year in Nuremberg, and I remember how he returned home glowing, transported by an enthusiasm quite uncharacteristic for his timid nature. The entire family joked about Ludwig's innerer Reichsparteitag (internal party rally), a phrase that gained widespread use during that period to designate any happy experience or emotion. Although my father worked for the party, he was disdainful of Ludwig's temporary transformation and ridiculed him for it. In fact, he had a keen eye for Nazi bathos and enjoyed making fun of it, from goose-stepping soldiers to Hitler's theatrical antics. My father once happened to meet Julius Streicher, the Nazi leader of the province of Franconia and editor of Der Sturmer, at a meeting in Nuremberg. At one point in the evening, Streicher spread a map of the moon out on a table and in all seriousness discussed its eventual colonization by Germany. My father found this hilarious and thought that his superior was crazy.
My father had lived a musician's life in the big open world of the 1920s and early 1930s in America and enjoyed telling everyone how considerate Americans were. He wanted to please his Nazi superiors for the sake of his own advancement, but he also liked to impress those around him with his savvy cosmopolitanism.
While the men tended to fluctuate in peculiar ways, my grandmother remained steady, always the same, always kind. My grandparents' house was the most stable element in my young life, as long as my grandmother was inside it. When she left the house for even a short trip, I felt lost and uncomfortable. To reassure myself, I would stare at the huge photograph of her as a beautiful young woman that hung in the living room. When I left the house, I loved to hear her voice ring out, calling me home for a snack. I knew I would get my favorite liverwurst sandwich if I begged. When I had a toothache, she would grind up some nutmeg to apply to the painful spot. One day during one of the endless, hot summers of my childhood, I saw her approach rapidly up an unpaved street that accentuated her stumbling gait. With her hand she shielded something from the sun, and when she approached, gave me the melting vanilla ice-cream cone she had carried home for me. If she had a personal fault, it was that she loved to buy fine clothes, to the consternation of my grandfather.
The few trips I took with her, proposed to me as an adventure, in actuality frightened me, especially because the first one turned into a mishap. On our way to her father's village near Wiirzburg—Königshofen, where he had been mayor—we took the wrong train and ended up in Walldürn, a well-known site for Catholic pilgrimages. After an hour of negotiation with the railway authorities, we were put onto one of the stifling pilgrimage trains, crowded with hundreds of people reciting Catholic prayers. I was forced to stand among the praying strangers, unable to move even as far as the WC at the end of the car, while outside a landscape moved by that was alien to me. Only after several transfers did we finally arrive, shaken and exhausted, in her native village. I much preferred her to stay home, and to stay home with her, where things were familiar and safe.
My grandparents' house was close to the railroad station, a marvelous and forbidden playground. Surrounded by shrubs, trees, and tall grasses, the station grounds provided ample hiding places
