in the heart of an innocent 10-year-old?
In late January 1939, my beloved old mother had a stroke brought on by the distress of the preceding weeks. For three days she lay unconscious before she was fortunate enough to be taken from this world. During these three days, just after it got dark, Aryan men and women visited us in order to enquire about her condition. A Christian woman whom my mother had always supported and whose children she had helped to bring up was with her day and night. This woman said over and over: ‘Never did I love my own mother as much as this true and good mother who now lies there so helpless. She was always ready to help me and my family in word and deed, and now we cannot help her. When she dies, I will lose my mother a second time.’
One of this woman’s sons, a soldier, came in the evening, in full uniform, even though in Germany soldiers were strictly forbidden to enter Jewish houses, to see how my mother was doing. Tears rolled down his face when he said goodbye to her. ‘Never have I so much respected a Jewish woman as I do your mother,’ he said. In the evenings, neighbours sent coffee and fruit, even though these treats were by now very rare in Germany, and wished her a prompt recovery. The whole town knew that the old woman lay dying. And yet schoolboys leaving school at noon stood in front of the house and sang:
Now the Jew is
Finally finished.
Sad German youth …
To us mourners, my mother’s burial seemed like a dog’s burial. The hearse took her to the cemetery. Some twenty Jewish men and women followed at a distance on the pavement, to avoid attracting attention. Aryan acquaintances and neighbours had sent messages saying things like: ‘We mourn with you’ or ‘Our thoughts are with you’ or ‘We will never forget her.’ Within an hour, we were home again, alone with our heavy hearts and thoughts.
When I was in prison after the pogrom night in November, my wife telegrammed her old American uncle in connection with an affidavit. To tell the truth, up to that point I would have found it very difficult to leave the old homeland and my parents’ house, where I had dreamed my youthful dreams and where my two children had grown up. But when I stood in my pyjamas with that drunken vandal holding his revolver to my head on that cold, dreadful night, while other inebriated thugs in brown and black uniforms were destroying my house, I made up my mind. I was going to get out of this country of infamy and disgrace, where people who had never in their lives done anything bad could no longer live and breathe, merely because they were born Jews. Where Jewish children were beaten by others their age, where they were insulted and had stones thrown at them, because they were Jewish children. The poison of persecution, cast like a terrible seed into children’s hearts and souls, will inevitably yield a hundredfold harvest that in the end will turn against those who spread this poison. In this country, there can no longer be any place for members of such a people whose first and most noble article of belief is: ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’
So we prepared to emigrate. The few possessions that we were left with after 10 November were quickly packed. When we had to go to the American consulate in Stuttgart, we found in that city no restaurant or café that did not bear the inscription: ‘Jews not welcome here.’ Unfortunately, the few places where Jews could find lodging, to which I had first turned, were also full. Late at night, we were lucky enough to find beds in a small inn. When we told the friendly innkeeper we were Jews, she said: ‘I don’t care. I have not put up the signs. Any decent person who pays for his room and meal can stay in my inn.’ When we got our visas the next day, there was no one in that whole city happier than we were.
I spent the last days in Germany saying farewell to the old homeland. With my children I walked in the spring weather the old familiar paths that I had walked so often in the course of four decades, the paths through woods and fields that I had first trodden holding my parents’ hands, every tree and house evoking a memory. Never in my life was I to walk those paths again, for we had to rip out of our hearts the memory of almost half a century of our lives.
And this, because a man appeared, the leader of a nation of eighty million people, who declared that a Jew can have no homeland, that Jews are nomadic peoples who belong to Asiatic desert tribes and who must always wander and leave behind them a devastated world …
Back to the cemetery, in which four generations of my ancestors rest. The gravestones, overturned four times by the Hitler Youth, had been put more or less straight again. There was the grave of an elderly couple from the neighbouring town, who were well known to us, and who had been murdered by the Nazis on the night of 10 November, bound together with wire and thrown into the river; their bodies had surfaced a few days later. We were assigned to bury the dead, ‘but no burial mound must be visible.’ We waited at the cemetery for the dead, who were brought there in a cart. We buried both of the old people in the same grave, and we did not make a burial mound.
So rest in peace, beloved ancestors, and may your blessing accompany us in our wanderings. Wherever we are, our thoughts will always be with you, and you will always be with us. We are not leaving your graves behind willingly; we are being driven away. So we put your last resting place in the hand of our God.
A last glance backwards, and then that, too, was past, over.
My children, most of whose lives had been lived in the shadow of these difficult and terrible events, were delighted by the prospect of a sea voyage. Their thoughts were taken up entirely by the ship that was to take them to the new, unknown land, and by the land itself. Their hearts easily embraced the new future; nothing bound them to the land of repression and persecution. In contrast, we adults were leaving the graves of our ancestors, our youth and our childhood behind us. For what had we lived, fought, suffered and striven for almost half a century? For what?
To be sure, we have to forget, we must forget, what lies behind us. But can one just wave away the experiences of half a century of life? May my children, for whose sake we had to leave our homeland behind, succeed in building a new future in the new land. May God bless the country that has welcomed with open arms us poor, stricken people. And yet, I know that the shadows of the past will creep into my dreams. The homeland that I have had to leave in order to escape the death threats of the Nazi gangs, in order to find a new and final homeland, will live on in my memories and dreams, the old paths, the buildings, the mountains, forests and fields. What does the earth of our homeland know about the monstrous products of these hellish fantasies of a savage regime that took from hundreds of thousands of people their freedom, their honour and their lives?
Earth is earth and people remain people.
Our Aryan friends commiserated with us as we made our preparations to leave. They brought us gifts, flowers and good wishes. A few of them said to me: ‘Take me with you. Here we’re headed for war, and we have no desire to play war again.’ Others said: ‘You’re lucky, we envy you. You’re going towards freedom; we’re staying here under the rule of violence.’
Two Aryan friends accompanied us to the railway station, even though we were leaving at noon. With tears in his eyes, one of them said on the platform: ‘Some day we will pick you up here again in triumph.’ As the train pulled out, tears were rolling down his cheeks, and for a long time we looked back at them, waving their handkerchiefs. Germany lay behind us.
But not yet; there was still the border to cross. In our compartment sat a Dutch businessman who was returning from the Orient, and a Dutch woman who was coming from South Africa to visit her aged mother in Holland. Half an hour before the border, the door of the compartment opened and an SS man bellowed: ‘Any Jews in here?’ I identified myself, and there followed an excruciating interrogation regarding the purpose of our trip, an interrogation so nasty that even the foreigners blushed. Among other things, the SS man said: ‘If only all you swine had left Germany in 1932.’ That was our final farewell from Germany, the last words we heard spoken by a German. The two foreigners had understood every word,
