cities like Frankfurt and Berlin.
In November 1933, Germany held its first national election since Hitler had taken control of the government. All opposition parties had by then been banned, and voters were presented with a single slate of Nazi Party candidates. The voting was not by secret ballot, and in most locations, voters had to hand their ballots directly to party officials. Setting the tone for future elections during the Nazi era, voter intimidation was commonplace. Citizens were threatened with reprisals if they voted against Hitler, or even if they failed to vote. As a result, voter turnout was 95 percent, and the Nazi Party received nearly 40 million votes, some 92 percent of all those cast.
Manfred’s uncle Solomon went to the polls proudly wearing the Iron Cross he had earned fighting for Germany in the last war. Like so many other Jewish war veterans, Solomon, who owned the Josbach hardware store, believed that he would be protected against Nazi persecution because he had fought for the Fatherland. Like most German Jews, Solomon considered himself a German first and a Jew second. This feeling of security and a desire not to be ostracized led Solomon Steinfeld to vote for the Nazi slate. He was not alone; other Jews in Josbach, including Grandma Johanna, voted for the Nazi candidates, if only to avoid being identified as “no” votes.
In Josbach, it was local custom for Jewish families to gather each week—usually on Fridays after dinner or on Saturdays after lunch—to discuss topics of interest to them and their community. Most children would run around and play instead of paying attention to the grown-ups, but Manfred was fascinated by the adult conversations. One discussion he overheard had to do with Hitler and the Nazis. Most of the adults thought there was little future for the Nazis, and that Hitler and his party, for many years the minority, would not last long in power. Many chancellors and cabinets before them had lasted only a short time. Josbach had only one known Nazi in town, a man named Heinrich Haupt, who had joined the party in the 1920s.
A few of the adults were convinced, however, that the Nazis were a growing threat, and to bolster their argument, they pointed to surrounding towns, which were known to have more Nazis and had seen increased reports of persecution against Jews.
It took some time before Manfred sensed any divide between the Jewish and non-Jewish students at his school. But one day they were told that their teacher had retired. His replacement was a younger man from out of the area who preached Nazi doctrine. The appearance of this new teacher signaled a shift for Manfred and the other Jewish children. From that moment on, in the classroom and during recreational activities, the Jews were increasingly ridiculed by the teacher and bullied by their classmates.
The next summer, Manfred spent part of his vacation with his mother’s brother, Arthur Katten, and his wife, Lina, in nearby Rauschenberg. After befriending some neighborhood boys, Manfred was invited to attend a local meeting of a national organization, Deutsches Jungvolk, for boys aged ten to fourteen. Manfred was excited to hear that they would be participating in sports, camping, and hiking. However, the group was affiliated with the Hitler Youth movement, and when they learned that Manfred was a Jew, he was promptly excluded as being unfit.
Not long after Manfred returned home, the first of his family members was picked up by the Nazis. To his shock, it was his uncle Arthur. Arrested at home by uniformed storm troopers, his mother’s brother was held in “protective custody” for six weeks before he was released without any charges being filed. Arthur had honorably served his country in World War I, but he realized now that this meant nothing under the Nazi regime. He immediately began making plans to try to get himself and his family out of Germany as quickly as possible.
Anti-Semitism grew ever more prevalent in the daily life of Josbach, and the local Jews became convinced that the Nazi regime had entrenched its power, with Hitler in full control as the supreme leader of Germany. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, making Jews second-class citizens and revoking most of their political rights. Only Germans with four non-Jewish German grandparents were deemed “racially acceptable,” and Judaism was now defined as a race rather than a religion. It was irrelevant whether people practiced Judaism or were even practicing Christians; by law, if they possessed “Jewish blood,” they were Jews.
Guided by Third Reich dogma that encouraged “racially pure” women to bear as many Aryan children as possible, mixed marriages between Jews and persons with “German or related blood” were made a criminal offense. Hitler and his Nazi Party promulgated the notion that an enlarged, racially superior German population was destined to expand and rule by military force. One early step toward that goal—and the global conflict that would soon follow—took place in 1936, when Hitler sent German military forces to occupy the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone in western Germany established under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
In that same year, Manfred’s teacher, who kept a swastika pinned on the lapel of his jacket, herded all the students outside and lined them up like young military recruits along Josbach’s main street, where he told them a “special” motorcade was scheduled to pass through town. Some of the students eagerly pushed their way forward, but Manfred hung back. He had an idea it was going to be some Nazi-inspired demonstration, and he had no desire to be standing in front. Their wait wasn’t long. A black, open-roofed car approached at moderate speed. As they had practiced in school, upon the teacher’s command nearly all of the children snapped their right arms straight out.
“Sieg heil!” shouted a crescendo of high-pitched children’s voices.
Manfred did not raise his arm or his voice. He just stared at the mustachioed man in the backseat. He had seen his picture many times.
As the car passed, Hitler seemed to raise his hand to the side of his head in acknowledgment of the mass salute. Then he let it drop out of sight.
“Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”
The salutes ended only when the car turned a corner and was gone.
Young Manfred sensed that the mustachioed man in the black car meant danger to him, his family, and every Jew in Germany.
The day that two men in Nazi uniforms came to threaten his grandmother with arrest, she and Manfred were home alone. What crime could an old, sickly woman be guilty of? It seemed that Johanna Steinfeld held a first mortgage on a property in another town that these two men owned. But they had never made any payments and were thus greatly in arrears to her. Now they threatened the elderly woman with jail on a trumped-up charge if she didn’t agree to cancel the mortgage on the property. She went ashen. Turning to Manfred, she told him to run as fast as he could and bring back the mayor.
In 1930s Germany, a town’s Bürgermeister held a great deal of authority, even with outside officials. By then, the man who had once been Josbach’s first and only member of the Nazi Party, Heinrich Haupt, was serving as mayor. He was well liked by all, and even got together with some Jewish friends on Saturday nights to play Skat, the most popular card game in Germany.
Haupt hurried back to the house with Manfred and immediately asked to see the men’s credentials, which they showed him. But when he demanded to see a court-issued arrest warrant, the men admitted they did not have one.
“You have no jurisdiction here,” Haupt said sternly. “Mrs. Steinfeld is a citizen of this town, and your attempt to arrest her is totally unfounded.”
With that, Mayor Haupt kicked the uniformed men out of town.
For the Jews of Josbach, even their traditional Saturday morning stroll to the synagogue in neighboring Halsdorf had become unsafe. Whenever a flour-mill operator saw them approaching, he released his guard dogs with the command: “Los, fass die Juden!” (Go, get the Jews!) After several incidents, the procession of well-dressed men, women, and children started taking the long way around to bypass the
