Читать книгу Never Forget Your Name - Alwin Meyer - Страница 11

Heinz Salvator Kounio enjoyed his life as a young boy. He loved his parents, his sister Erika, who was a year older than him, and his grandparents. Of course, there were things he didn’t like so much: the disputes with boys in the neighbourhood or with classmates in the school yard. But in retrospect they were trivial.

Thessaloniki – also known as Saloniki, Salonika (Judeo-Spanish), Selanik (Turkish) or Solun (Bulgarian/Macedonian/Serbian) – the second-largest city in Greece, where he lived, fascinated him and promised a good life for a Jewish boy. Until he was 11.¹

At the age of just 24, his father Salvator Kounio had opened a small photo supply shop. That was in 1924. He sold photographic paper and cameras to the many street photographers in Thessaloniki. He obtained his goods from Germany. At the same time, he and his brother exported sheepskins in the opposite direction. He bought them untreated from the farmers in and around Thessaloniki. The skins were then dried and transported by road or sea to Germany. Heinz’s father and brother were very hardworking and were soon well respected far and wide, not only in Thessaloniki but also in Germany. Their customer base grew rapidly.

Every year Heinz’s father visited the photography fair in Leipzig, which was part of the Leipzig industrial fair. There he found out about new products and placed orders for photographic paper, cameras and accessories for the whole year. On one of his business trips, he met the ‘self-assured, obstinate and intelligent’ Helene Löwy (known as Hella). The 18-year-old was a fifth-semester medical student in Leipzig. The two fell in love at first sight. They wanted to get married. Hella was determined to abandon her studies to go with Salvator Kounio to Greece.

The young woman’s parents lived in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) in multi-ethnic Czechoslovakia. Her father, Ernst Löwy, was a well-known architect and engineer; her mother Theresa, ‘a beautiful and educated Viennese woman’.

The Jewish inhabitants of Karlsbad have a turbulent history. For around 350 years, they were not allowed to reside permanently there. Only during the spa season from 1 May to 30 September were Jews permitted to stay and do business there. Afterwards, they had to leave again.²

Many Jews had moved since the mid sixteenth century to the surrounding villages, from where they could reach Karlsbad on foot to sell their goods. They were thus able to quickly improve their impoverished situation.

A large number of Jews living and working in Karlsbad during the spa season came from Lichtenstadt (Hroznĕtín). Die Juden und Judengemeinden Böhmens in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart [The Jews and Jewish Communities of Bohemia in the Past and Present] by Hugo Gold, editor-in-chief of the Brno magazine Jüdische Volksstimme, and published in Brno and Prague in 1934, says of this period:

We do not know whether individual Jews lived in those cities before 1568. But after that time a larger Jewish community was gradually established … in the town of Lichtenstadt, just two hours’ walk from Karlsbad. It has an ancient Jewish cemetery and an old synagogue. According to legend it is 1,000 years old, which is naturally a great exaggeration. But it is nevertheless a few centuries old, as the oldest gravestones reveal.³

Over the centuries, the Jews living in the villages near Karlsbad attempted in vain to be allowed to reside permanently in the spa town. Their efforts were not to come to fruition until the mid nineteenth century: a Jewish cemetery was laid out in 1868, and the Great Synagogue was officially dedicated on 4 September 1877.

The Jewish community of Karlsbad grew rapidly: in 1910, there were around 1,600 Jews living there, and by 1931 their number had grown to 2,650, representing 11 per cent of the total population.⁴

Back to the year 1924 and Salvator Kounio and Hella Löwy’s desire to get married: ‘Neither family’, says Heinz Kounio, ‘was keen on the marriage plans.’ The Löwys asked: ‘Where do you intend to go? Saloniki? To the south? You will be a long way from the vibrant cultural life!’ And the Kounios said of the north: ‘Where does she come from? Karlsbad? The people there have no culture!’

The young couple finally had their way and got married in Karlsbad in 1925. Beforehand, with the help of his parents, Salvator Kounio had had a nice two-storey house built for himself and his young wife right by the sea in Thessaloniki. ‘She should be made to feel at home’ in this part of Europe, which was completely foreign to her.

In fact, Hella Kounio’s new home could look back on an old and vibrant Jewish culture dating back more than twenty centuries. It is thought that the first Jewish families settled in Thessaloniki around 140 bce. The community received a decisive boost from 1492 onwards with the arrival of 15,000 to 20,000 Jews who had been expelled first from Spain, where Jews had lived for more than 2,100 years,⁵ then a year later from Sicily and Italy, which was ruled by the Spaniards, and then in 1497 from Portugal. At the time, Thessaloniki was part of the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed the Jews with open arms and also guaranteed them freedom of religion.⁶

The situation remained unchanged for centuries afterwards. The Baseler Nachrichten reported in 1903: ‘The Jews, who manage their affairs independently and in complete freedom, are staunch supporters of the Turkish government. They know that no other power offers the same freedom as they now enjoy under the sign of the crescent.’⁷

Among the Jewish refugees from 1492 were important and knowledgeable academics, writers, artisans, merchants and Talmudists – students and experts in the Talmud, the primary source of Jewish religious law.

This massive new impetus brought about a radical change in Thessaloniki. The Jewish refugees introduced novel methods of working. Many artisanal businesses were established – silk mills, goldsmiths’ studios, tanneries and, above all, weaving mills, where a large number of new immigrants found work. The conveniently located port became a hub for trade with the Balkans and a centre of European Jewish scholarship.⁸

Thessaloniki held a great fascination for students from all over the world. The Talmud Torah school founded in 1520 was both a cultural centre supported by the Jewish community and a school of higher education for trainee rabbis.⁹ It was to produce celebrated doctors, writers and rabbis.¹⁰

Over the centuries, other schools and institutes, such as a trade school, boys’ school, girls’ school and apprentice training school were established. The Jewish cultural magazine Ost und West wrote in January 1907: ‘Saloniki has a well-established apprenticeship system. There is none of the frequently insurmountable difficulty found elsewhere in finding a decent master for the young trainees. Most of the master craftsmen in Saloniki are Jews.’¹¹

This development, the spread of modern teaching and training establishments in Thessaloniki, was mainly due to the Alliance israélite universelle, founded by French Jews in Paris in 1860. In Thessaloniki by 1914, around 10,000 students had graduated from the Alliance’s educational institutions.¹²

Many synagogues existed for centuries in the city. Their names give an indication of the places where the inhabitants had arrived from: Aragon, Kalabrya, Katalan, Kastilia, Lisbon, Majorca, Puglia, Sicilia,¹³ to cite just a few. During the heyday of Judaism, there were around forty synagogues and prayer houses in Thessaloniki.¹⁴

‘Of all the synagogues that of “Arragon” seemed the most picturesque. It is large, and the Alememar [bimah or raised area in the centre of the synagogue where the Torah is read] is a lofty dais at the extreme west end, gallery high. The Ark is also highly placed, and many elders sit on either side on a somewhat lower platform.’¹⁵

These lines were written in the late nineteenth century by Elkan Nathan Adler, son of the chief rabbi of England, who called himself a ‘travelling scholar’ and visited Jews in many countries between 1888 and 1914.¹⁶

‘“Italia” was more striking’, wrote Adler, who visited Thessaloniki in autumn 1898, ‘for the synagogue is but half-built, the floor not yet bricked in, and the galleries of rough lathes, and yet the women climbed up the giddy steps of the scaffolding, and the hall was full of worshippers.’ In practically all of the synagogues in the city there was a two-hour break between musaf (midday prayer) and mincha (afternoon prayer), when some worshippers took a siesta. Many went to the coffeehouses, full of people, who neither smoked nor drank. During the services, the streets were deserted.¹⁷

The journalist Esriel Carlebach, born in Leipzig and later living in Israel, who visited Jewish communities in Europe and beyond, wrote in the early 1930s, about Thessaloniki, that booksellers there offered collections of prayers everywhere for the holidays. But each one recommended a different version. ‘Saloniki had thirty-three synagogues with thirty-three different rites, and a member of a Castilian family would never dare to call to God with Andalusian poems and songs.’¹⁸

The Jewish inhabitants formed separate synagogue communities based on their places of origin. They were extensively autonomous and even had their own (limited) jurisdiction. They also administered the districts they lived in, with delegates elected to represent the communities, who met regularly, consulted and adopted decisions on affairs concerning them.¹⁹ And the first Jewish printing works was established as early as 1506. Hundreds of publications appeared, and Thessaloniki became ‘the centre of printing in the Near East’.²⁰ The first Jewish newspaper – also the first newspaper in the city – El Lunar, was launched in 1865. It was followed by La Época²¹ in 1875, and El Avenir²² in 1897. Between 1865 and 1925, seventy-three newspapers were published in Thessaloniki, thirty-five in Judeo-Spanish, twenty-five in Turkish, eight in Greek and five in French.²³

Thessaloniki became the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’, the ‘Mother of Israel’ or the ‘Mother of Jerusalem’, as the poet Samuel Usque – who was born in Portugal, fled to Italy and later lived in Safed, Palestine – described the city during a visit in the mid sixteenth century:²⁴

Saloniki is a devout city. The Jews from Europe and other areas where they are persecuted and expelled find shelter in the shade of this city and are as warmly welcomed by it as if it were our venerable mother Jerusalem itself. The surrounding countryside is irrigated by many rivers. Its vegetation is lush and nowhere are their more beautiful trees. Their fruit is excellent.²⁵

According to official Turkish sources, in 1519 over 50 per cent of the population of Thessaloniki were Jews: 15,715 children, women and men, compared with 6,870 Muslims and 6,635 Christians. The situation had barely changed by the end of the nineteenth century, when there were over 70,000 Jews in the city – again, half of the population.²⁶

Thessaloniki’s privileged position in international trade gradually declined as a result of the transformation of the world economy. The burgeoning transatlantic economy, particularly the rise of the Netherlands and England, shifted the traditional balance.²⁷ It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the revival of trade relations with the Mediterranean ports of western Europe helped the city to flourish again.²⁸

At this time, Jews were present in all professions. There were 40 Jewish chemists, 30 lawyers, 45 doctors and dentists, 150 fishermen, 500 waggoneers and carters, 220 self-employed artisans, 100 domestics, 3 engineers, 10 journalists, 2,000 waiters, 8,000 retailers and wholesalers, 60 colliers, 2,000 porters, 300 teachers, 250 butchers, 600 boatmen and 50 carpenters. There were also several Jewish businesses: a brewery, nine flour mills, twelve soap factories, thirty weaving mills and a brickworks.²⁹

At the end of October 1912, during the First Balkan War waged by Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia against the Ottoman Empire, Thessaloniki became part of Greece,³⁰ bringing many Greeks to the city as a result.³¹

In August 1917, the city was extensively destroyed in a huge conflagration. The Jewish districts were particularly hard hit. Around 50,000 Jews became homeless. The Greek government promised to compensate them for their losses, but the Jews were not allowed to return to certain parts of the city. This prompted many Jews to leave Thessaloniki. They emigrated to Alexandria (Egypt), Great Britain, France, Italy and the USA.³²

After the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22), an exchange of populations was agreed. A large number of Greeks living in Anatolia in Turkey were forced to move to Thessaloniki. In return, the Muslim inhabitants had to leave the city.³³ As a result of all these events, within a few years the Jewish population became a minority.³⁴ According to the first Greek population census of 1913, 61,439 of the 157,889 inhabitants were Jews.³⁵ By the early 1930s, Jewish children, women and men made up only around 20 per cent of the population.³⁶ One contributing factor was a law promulgated in the early 1920s prohibiting the inhabitants of Thessaloniki from working on Sundays, prompting a further Jewish emigration.³⁷ For several centuries previously, the Jews had not worked on Saturdays: during Shabbat, no ships were unloaded and no stores were open.³⁸ This was still the case in 1898: ‘All the boatmen of the port are Jews, and on Saturdays no steamer can load or discharge cargo.’³⁹

For over 400 years, the language brought from Spain remained the lingua franca of the persecuted Jews who had fled to Thessaloniki. Anyone visiting the city between 1500 and the early twentieth century who sat down, closed their eyes and listened to the people talking could imagine they were in a Spanish city. For many generations, the city was mostly Spanish-speaking and Jewish. The Greek Christians, Slavs and Muslims in Thessaloniki also spoke Spanish and conducted their daily business in it.⁴⁰

‘There are people and lifestyles that are rightly called Sephardic, which means Spanish’,⁴¹ wrote the journalist Esriel Carlebach around 1930. He continued: ‘When two Sephardim met, they spoke Spanish; when two families married, the ceremony was performed according to the rites of Seville and Cordoba; when they built a house there was a patio in the centre surrounded by a small number of cool rooms with mosaic floors, grated windows and Moorish paintings.’⁴²

The Jewish version of Spanish spoken in Thessaloniki was sprinkled with terms and phrases from Hebrew, but also from Portuguese, and, in the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, also from Turkish, Italian and – particularly during this time – French. These influences blended over the centuries in Thessaloniki to produce an autonomous language of particular beauty, known as Judeo-Spanish, Spaniolish or Ladino, although the latter refers not to the vernacular Judeo-Spanish but to the liturgical language: ‘Ladino is used to introduce worshippers to the Hebrew original in a manner that is not genuine Spanish but rather a … hispanicized Hebrew.’⁴³ ‘Indeed, the amount of Ladino introduced into the service was quite astonishing’, wrote the travelling scholar Elkan Nathan Adler in the late nineteenth century. ‘Most of the Techinnoth, Confessions and Selichoth were in the vernacular, and the Reader seemed really moved as he held forth in that language.’⁴⁴

From the second half of the nineteenth century, French became increasingly the language of ‘culture and elites … on account of the economic western orientation’, but the vast majority of Jewish inhabitants continued principally or exclusively to use Judeo-Spanish as their everyday language.⁴⁵

Myriam Kounio, Heinz and Erica’s grandmother, also spoke almost exclusively ‘Spaniolish’, as the language was called in the family. For that reason, the children, although they could also speak it a little, were not able to communicate very well with her. At home, the younger family members and their grandfather, Moshe Kounio, spoke Greek. With their mother, Heinz and Erica spoke her native language, German. Thus, the children grew up with ‘two and a half languages’.⁴⁶ ‘We were not a strictly religious family’, says Heinz Kounio. They went to the synagogue ‘of course’ on Shabbat and all major holidays. And on those days, he and his sister didn’t go to school. ‘But we were an open-minded family interested in culture. Books, theatre and concert visits were part of our lives.’

Heinz and his sister attended the Greek school from Year 1. ‘But we also had classes in Jewish schools. And religious instruction took place in the Jewish community. In the holidays we went to Karlsbad. It was fantastic there. Where my grandparents lived there was a lake of around 1 hectare in size. We often took a boat out. We went on walks a lot, and the forests there were marvellous.’ They strolled through Karlsbad, a well-known spa, with their grandparents, who looked forward impatiently to the children’s visit every summer. They drank the water – at a temperature of 42 to 73 degrees – from the healing springs, and the highpoint of their excursions was a visit to the expensive cake shop at Hotel Pupp. ‘It was a completely different world from Saloniki. But just as nice. The weeks flew by. I have a very fond memory of those times.’

In Thessaloniki, they also spent every free minute outdoors. ‘We played a lot. Our friends were the neighbourhood children – also non-Jewish children, although several Jewish families lived in our street. Most of my friends were Christian. But there were also four Jewish boys I got on well with.’

Their house was right next to the sea. ‘It was a fantastic district. As soon as the weather allowed, my sister and I spent the entire day on the beach or in the water.’ They had a small white rowing boat, which they used extensively.

Even as a small boy, Heinz had a great passion – namely, fishing. He would get up early and prepare the bait, a well-kneaded mixture of bread and cheese, and then sit with his fishing rod for hours, above all catching mullet, of which there are around eighty varieties worldwide. And with his sister Erika he caught crabs, which their mother cooked. ‘A delicious special treat.’

Heinz still recalls the ‘chamalis’ or porters:⁴⁷ ‘They were almost all Jews.’ They carried the goods unloaded in the port of Thessaloniki to the city and the nearby mountain villages in horse-drawn carts, or pulled them in elongated handcarts on the narrow mountain roads.

The chamalis were very strong and could carry over 100 kg on their backs up to the third or fourth floor of the houses. And when they came down from the mountains and ran down the streets at great speed with the handcarts, they made a lot of noise and shouted: ‘Watch out! Get out the way!’ The carts had a bell that rang constantly. And when they came to a crossroads, everyone stopped. They always had priority. The chamalis were very well known and a typical feature of Saloniki at the time.

The hardworking Jewish dockers in the port of the picturesque city on the Thermaic Gulf were also famous. The Viennese newspaper Die Stimme – Jüdische Zeitung reported on 20 November 1934: ‘Aba Houchi, member of the board of the Histadrut ha-Ovdim [labour federation] of Haifa, arrived in Saloniki to choose 100 to 150 Jewish dockers for immediate resettlement in Palestine. These dockers will work mostly in the port of Haifa but also in Jaffa. There are already 300 Jewish dockers’ families from Saloniki living in Palestine.’⁴⁸

Heinz Kounio: ‘If you get into a taxi in Haifa today and ask to hear a Greek song, the driver will put one on for you. Many of these taxi drivers are descendants of those first dockers from Thessaloniki.’

In spite of the recurrent expulsion, persecution and pogroms,⁴⁹ there was Jewish life everywhere in Europe. The creativity and work of Jewish researchers, industrialists, painters, doctors, musicians, politicians and writers had a far-reaching impact in many countries. In large parts of Europe, they were and are part of the history not only of the Jewish people but also, for example, of the people of Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Ukraine.

Before the Nazi era, there were few cities in Europe, large or small, which did not have Jewish children, women and men living in them, often for several hundred years, in some cities and regions for over 1,000 or 2,000 years. Well over 30,000 localities in Europe had Jewish inhabitants.⁵⁰

Dáša Friedová spent the first years of her life with her parents, Otto and Kát’a Fried, and her sister Sylva, three years older than her, in the small Czech village of Odolice. It was around 40 kilometres north-east of the German border. The parents owned a large farm with 360 hectares of land. The village had around 150 inhabitants, Czechs and Germans. The Frieds were the only Jews.

When the neighbours slaughtered a pig, they gave some to the Frieds. ‘We did the same. We gave them grain or whatever our neighbours and friends needed. This was the way we were, and the Germans living in the village were not excluded.’ The Frieds did not keep kosher. ‘We cooked and ate just about everything.’ They regarded themselves as Czech but still celebrated Pesach, recalling the exodus from Egypt, and Purim, commemorating the rescue of the Persian Jews. These were large family gatherings. But they also celebrated Easter and Christmas with their Christian friends and employees.

Dáša and Sylva’s closest friends were the daughters of her father’s employees who worked on the farm. ‘We played together every day and were good friends.’ Dáša and Sylva went to the village school like the other children. The school consisted of two rooms, one for the smaller children up to Year 3, and the other for the older girls and boys. ‘We were the only Jewish children in the school and village, but it was not an issue. We never felt any antisemitism, not even from the German children.’

The Fried family travelled regularly to Most, a short drive from Odolice. The town was a trading hub and centre of the large brown-coal field in north-western Bohemia. In 1930, Most had a population of around 28,000, including 662 Jews. The history of the Jewish community dated back to the fourteenth century, and since 1872–3 it had had its own synagogue, which was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938.⁵¹ The old Jewish cemetery survives to this day as the last relic of the Jewish citizens of Most.

In the 1930s, the Frieds travelled to Most to do their shopping, visit the theatre or spend their Sundays in the park of the nearby spa resort Bílina. Jews had been documented in Bílina since the fifteenth century. The Jewish cemetery was laid out in 1891 and a synagogue was dedicated four years later. In the early 1930s, the rabbi of Bílina, A. H. Teller, noted: ‘[The Jewish community] has 120 souls and around 50 taxpayers. The community has a temple and cemetery in good condition. May the community be allowed to continue in future to work for the benefit of Judaism through the peaceful collaboration with all members.’⁵²

The main attraction for the Fried family was the public mineral spring in the park. ‘My father played cards and my mother chatted with other women. Sylva and I played with our governesses or with other children whom we met by chance in the park.’

On the major holidays, the family went to the Moorish-style Jubilee Synagogue,⁵³ built in 1905–6, Prague’s largest Jewish prayer house on Jeruzalémská, among other things to meet up with their relatives. The parents also took their children to the Jewish cemetery in Prague, where they placed small stones on the gravestones in memory of the deceased. ‘Visitors to a cemetery always left a stone. It’s a Jewish tradition all over the world.’ The family travelled once a week to the capital, 80 kilometres away. ‘We had lots of relatives in Prague – aunts, uncles and cousins. We were all very close and enjoyed each other’s company. It was always a great family occasion.’

‘I have only good memories of the first nine years of my childhood. It was a nice, happy time.’

Gábor Hirsch The ‘King of Trains’ – more precisely, one of the routes of the Orient Express – passed from the 1920s through the town of Békéscsaba in south-eastern Hungary.⁵⁴ Even as a boy, Gábor Hirsch was fascinated by it, imagining the adventure, glamour and unknown worlds associated with this special train.

Gábor’s father János owned an electrical supply and radio shop in Békéscsaba, which he had opened around 1925 with his uncle Ferenc. The uncle emigrated a few years later to Egypt, after which János ran the business on his own. His wife Ella was one of the sales assistants. In its heyday, the business had between ten and fifteen trainees.⁵⁵

Békéscsaba had a population of around 50,000 at the time, of whom some 2,500, or perhaps 3,000, were Jews, like the Hirsch family.⁵⁶ The Jewish community of Békéscsaba dates back to the end of the eighteenth century. The oldest gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of the Neolog (reform) community is of Jakob Singer, who died in 1821. A monument in the town park commemorates the victims of a cholera epidemic of 1825, including eleven Jews. According to Gábor Hirsch’s research, there were two independent religious Jewish communities in Békéscsaba after 1883: the orthodox, and the liberal – or Neolog – community, which the Hirsch family belonged to. The first synagogue was built in 1850, and a second one for the orthodox community was built in 1894.⁵⁷ The two synagogues faced one another on either side of Luther Street.

Gábor’s Austrian nanny was called Hildegard. She was around 25 years old and he got on well with her. His mother wanted him to learn languages. ‘She believed it was important. That’s why we had Hildegard.’ From 1933, Gábor attended a private German-language kindergarten, and in 1936 he started at the Neolog community’s Jewish elementary school. ‘There were only three boys and thirteen girls in my class, two of whom were not Jewish.’

The Hirsch family were so-called ‘three-day Jews’. They celebrated the High Holidays: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, at the end of the summer, marking the start of autumn; then, ten days later, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement at the end of forty days of repentance.

In 1940, Gábor switched to the Evangelical Rudolf-Gymnasium. There were fifty-four boys and girls in his class, including four Jewish pupils, ‘more than usual for the time’. While the non-Jewish children had religious instruction, they were allowed to play in the school yard. ‘We had religion classes at other times in the Jewish community rooms.’ One of his teachers was the rabbi Jakob Silberfeld, who was murdered in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.⁵⁸

And, ‘naturally’, Shabbat, the weekly day of rest from Friday to Saturday evening, was particularly important for the Hirsch family. ‘On Friday evening, we lit the candles and ate the Shabbat bread, the braided poppyseed loaf.’

On Saturday morning, however, Gábor went to school, which was held on six days a week. On Saturday afternoon, he attended the service in the synagogue in preparation for his barmitzvah, the religious coming of age of young boys when they turn 13. Some non-Jewish boys made occasional reproaches to Gábor: ‘If you’re a Jew, you must like the English.’ One was the son of a doctor. After the war, ‘this boy, of all people’ attended an English grammar school and ‘later went to the USA’.

Dagmar Fantlová

Kutná Hora is a typical Czech town. There was a German man living in our building. He came from somewhere near the border. Later, he proved to be a Nazi. Before, he had lived there without attracting notice.

My father was a doctor, and my mother a housewife. I had a younger sister called Rita. We lived peacefully in Kutná Hora until 1939.

These were the first sentences that Dagmar Lieblová (née Fantlová) related about herself.

The town, founded in the twelfth century as a miners’ settlement, became very wealthy towards the end of the thirteenth century on account of its silver mines. The famous Prague groschen were minted there at the time.⁵⁹

For a long time, Jews were not allowed to live in the old central Bohemian town. On 30 July 1526, the mayor and elders of Kutná Hora adopted a decision: ‘The Jews may not stay in Kuttenberg [Kutná Hora] except on market days or if they have to appear in court. Non-observance of this regulation will be subject to a fine of 5 schock groschen.’⁶⁰ A bill or clearance called a ‘bolette’ had to be acquired beforehand.⁶¹ It remained that way for several centuries.⁶² Almost without interruption since the early fourteenth century, however, there had been a large Jewish community in the neighbouring town of Kolin,⁶³ where many Jews who did business in Kutná Hora lived.⁶⁴ The old Jewish cemetery in Kolin, with over 2,500 graves, has survived to this day. The oldest legible gravestone dates from 1492.⁶⁵ The seventeenth-century baroque synagogue is also still standing.⁶⁶

Jews were not allowed to settle permanently in Kutná Hora until the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1871, the first Jewish religious association was constituted, with fourteen members. A good twenty years later, there were 159 Jews in the town, and by 1910 their number had grown to 206. An imposing synagogue had been built eight years earlier. There was no Jewish cemetery in Kutná Hora, and the autonomous community buried its dead in the cemeteries in Malešov, Zbraslavice and Kolin. The Jewish inhabitants lived above all from commerce, or owned businesses making consumer items. There was a textile factory, the Teller sugar factory and the Strakosch shoe factory.⁶⁷

Like most of the Jews in Kutná Hora, the Fantl family regarded themselves first and foremost as Czech. They ‘naturally’ celebrated the main holidays and went to the synagogue. On Shabbat, Dagmar was allowed to go to school. ‘I wasn’t supposed to do any homework. My grandmother didn’t want me to, but my father always said: “No, the children have to do their homework on Saturdays.”’

The Fantls celebrated Christmas.

It was a major family celebration. Relatives came to our house. We also had visitors at Easter and Pesach. We bought matzo, unleavened bread, and baked cakes ourselves. My mother would prepare little packages as presents for various acquaintances. That’s how it was in those days in a town like Kutná Hora. The Jewish and Christian holidays were mixed up. And during the Nazi era people said in surprise: ‘Dr Fantl is a Jew? We didn’t know.’

In 1932, when Dagmar’s younger sister Rita was born, the family bought a nice large house with several apartments. On the ground floor was Julius Fantl’s surgery. In the new house there was also a Sudeten German lodger called Zotter. ‘He worked in a small shoe factory owned by a Jew.’

Dagmar’s maternal grandparents moved into the house in 1935. They brought their old housekeeper Františka Holická with them. She had been with the family since the 1920s and was affectionately referred to as Fany, Aunt Fany or Fanynka.

Dagmar started learning German when she was 8. Her parents and grandparents knew German ‘of course’, but it was never spoken at home. ‘It was customary to learn languages.’ Two years later, Dagmar started learning English. ‘My German wasn’t particularly good at the time. And my grandmother always went on about it.’

Jürgen Loewenstein and Wolfgang Wermuth are real Berlin boys – or at least they were once. They never met.

Jürgen grew up in the Scheunenviertel district of Berlin. Now in the Mitte district, not far from the television tower, it was originally outside the city walls. There were stalls, sheds and barns, where Berlin farmers stored hay and straw. This is how the district got its name [‘Scheune’ is German for ‘barn’], which it retained long after the barns had disappeared. From the late nineteenth century, it was often the first port of call for Jews fleeing the pogroms in eastern Europe. The colloquial language was Yiddish.⁶⁸

Jürgen lived in highly impoverished circumstances. His mother Paula was divorced and worked writing addresses on envelopes in which advertisements were sent out. She later married Walter Loewenstein, who worked as a chemist in the perfume section of a large department store. They sublet an apartment at Oranienburger Strasse 87. The building still stands today.

As a boy, Jürgen lived with his grandparents Berthold and Agathe Sochaczewer at Gipsstrasse 18, then Kaiserstrasse 43. When the Nazis evicted them from this apartment,⁶⁹ they moved to Grenadierstrasse 4a (now Almstadtstrasse 49) in the Scheunenviertel in the centre of Berlin.

Grenadierstrasse was inhabited above all by Jews from Poland. Most of them were small tradesmen, tailors or shoemakers. There were small rooms everywhere which served as synagogues. The people dressed differently from us and spoke Yiddish, which I barely understood. The Jews in the Scheunenviertel were unimaginably poor. People at the time said that the Jews were to blame for everything and that all Jews were rich. This was in blatant contradiction to the social situation in which my family and others lived in the Scheunenviertel.

‘The Wuthe toy shop’, says Jürgen Löwenstein, ‘was at Gipsstrasse 18, the Loser und Wolf cigar shop on the corner of Rosenthaler Strasse.’ The Bio cinema was on Hackescher Markt. You had to climb a stairway. There was a cinema called the Imperial in Hackesche Höfe, the Babylon near Bülowplatz (now Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse 30), the Imperial at the former U-Bahn Schönhauser Tor (now Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz), three others in Münz- and Memhardstrasse, and two in Neue Schönhauser Strasse. He also vividly recalls the Lehmann lending library in Kaiserstrasse and the WILPA (Wilhelm Pappelbaum) ice cream shop ‘on the left-hand side of Rosenthaler Strasse at the beginning of Hackesche Höfe’.

In 1923, under the pseudonym Linke Poot, the doctor and writer Alfred Döblin described the street where Jürgen Loewenstein lived from 1938 in a newspaper article entitled ‘Östlich um den Alexanderplatz’ [To the East on Alexanderplatz]: ‘Left (into) Grenadierstrasse. The street is always busy. The Damm is full of people, coming in and out of old twisted houses.… The few shops have Hebrew inscriptions; I see first names, Schaja, Uscher, Chanaine. In the display windows a Jewish play is advertised: “Jüdele der Blinde, five acts by Joseph Lateiner”. Jewish butchers, craftsmen’s workshops, bookshops.’⁷⁰

Jürgen attended an Evangelical kindergarten, then the Jewish boys’ school at Kaiserstrasse 29/30 (now Jacobystrasse) and the Jewish middle school at Grosse Hamburger Strasse 27, still standing and now the site of the Jewish Moses Mendelsohn secondary school.

Wolfgang Wermuth’s father Siegmund was born in Lübben in the Spreewald. The ‘Jewish street’ in this town was first recorded in the annals in 1525. After being expelled several times in previous centuries, in the mid nineteenth century a few Jewish families were allowed to settle permanently in Lübben. The community had a small synagogue with a schoolroom, a mikvah – the ritual bath for spiritual and bodily cleansing before Shabbat – and a cemetery outside the town. The synagogue was burnt down by the Nazis in November 1938, the Jewish cemetery destroyed and the gravestones used for road-building.⁷¹

Wolf Wermuth, Wolfgang’s grandfather, was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, Berlin. This important Jewish site was ceremoniously opened on 9 September 1880 – 4 Tishri 5641 according to the Jewish calendar. Today, it is the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. Major artists, scientists, doctors and industrialists are buried there: Micha Josef Bin Gorion (writer), Samuel Fischer (bookseller and publisher), Adolf Jandorf (founder in 1907 of KaDeWe, the largest German department store), Lina Morgenstern (social worker and writer), Ferdinand Strassmann (head of the Berlin health service) and Lesser Ury (painter and graphic artist).⁷²

Wolfgang Wermuth’s mother was from Berlin. His maternal grandfather arrived from Poland in 1892, and around 1910 became a ‘privileged honorary citizen with German nationality because he was supplier of timepieces to the imperial court’.

His grandmother came from Altenkirchen in the Westerwald, where her family had lived for around 300 years. Her ancestors were thus among the earliest Jews to live there. The first are said to have settled in Altenkirchen at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1852, there were eighty-six Jews living there, and the highest population was reached in 1908 with 260 Jews. Here, too, the synagogue was burned to the ground in the night of 9–10 November 1938, Jewish houses and businesses were demolished, and some years later all of the remaining Jewish inhabitants deported.⁷³

Wolfgang Wermuth’s father Siegmund was co-owner of an antiques business in Berlin and had a share in a silent movie theatre ‘which was unfortunately put out of business in 1928 by talkies’. This was a great blow for the Wermuths since it meant a considerable reduction in the family’s income. They had to give up the apartment at Duisburger Strasse 13 and move to Sybelstrasse 29 in Charlottenburg. Both buildings are still standing.

There were twelve large synagogues in Berlin in the 1920s, with an average of 2,000 seats, as well as over seventy smaller Jewish prayer houses. At the time, Berlin had more synagogues than any other city in Europe.⁷⁴ Over the centuries, it had developed into the hub of Jewish life in Germany. From the first mention of Jewish traders in a certificate authorizing the guild of wool weavers at the end of the twelfth century,⁷⁵ it became one of the most important centres of Jewish architects, scholars, writers, composers, painters, politicians and scientists on our planet.

Many innovations in the first three decades of the twentieth century were due to Berlin Jews: Max Reinhardt with his theatre productions; Arnold Schönberg with his twelve-tone music; Max Liebermann with his paintings and illustrations; Alfred Döblin with his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz; Theodor Wolff as editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tagesblatt with its articles criticizing Germany’s war policy during the First World War; and Paul Ehrlich, Nobel Prize-winner in Medicine and co-founder of modern chemotherapy.⁷⁶

In 1933, there were 160,000 Jews living in Berlin, out of a total of almost 500,000 in the whole of Germany. A good 50 per cent of the Jewish population lived in one of the ten largest German cities with over 100,000 inhabitants. The others lived and worked in other cities and, to a lesser extent, in small towns, villages and rural districts.⁷⁷ Jewish women and men worked in mid-1933 in Germany in trade and transport (61.3 per cent), handicrafts and industry (23.1 per cent), public service and professions (12.5 per cent), farming and forestry (1.7 per cent) and domestic service (1.4 per cent).⁷⁸

The Wermuth family participated in the life of the Jewish community, going to the synagogue and observing the holidays.

My mother was very liberal, more than my father, who came from an orthodox family. Shabbat was a day of rest, but that didn’t mean there was no work. We observed the High Holidays and the minor festivals. We acknowledged the religion, but it didn’t play a dominant role in daily life. We were aware of our identity and never denied it.

Janek (Manela) Mandelbaum Ships from all over the world docked in the port. Sailors of all skin colours could be seen in the streets. Lots of languages could be heard. The international flair was part of his life from early childhood. Janek Mandelbaum lived in the Polish port of Gdynia with his father Majloch, his mother Cyrla (née Testyler), his sister Ita, who was three years older, and his brother Jakob, five years younger. In the 1930s, Gdynia was a large city with over 100,000 inhabitants. The family also looked forward to the frequent visits to the nearby Free City of Danzig/Gdańsk, a partially autonomous and independent free city with Polish harbour rights under the protection of the League of Nations.

Majloch Mandelbaum was co-owner of the Ocean fish conserve factory, which offered employment to a large number of workers. Business flourished and the products were sold throughout Europe. ‘We weren’t rich, but we were comfortably off.’ This enabled them to live in one of the better parts of Gdynia. The 110-square-metre apartment was comparatively big for the time, and had large windows. The family occupied an entire floor.

The beach was 10 minutes away, and Cyrla Mandelbaum often spent entire summer days there with the children. Janek’s father joined them during his lunch break: ‘He would often buy us hand-made waffles filled with sweet cream. They tasted fantastic.’ A ‘pretty young woman’ came every day by tram to look after the household. Janek got on well with her and liked to tease her. ‘In spite of the home help, my mother liked to cook. We were all particularly fond of her turnovers with jam filling.’

Janek had nice clothes and – memorably – leather boots, which he liked to wear whenever the weather permitted. ‘My mother dressed smartly. She was a good-looking woman with dark eyes and long shiny hair. My father was relatively light-skinned. My brother Jakob and my sister Ita took after my mother and had dark eyes and a dark skin. I had fair hair as a boy and took more after my father.’

As there was no Jewish school in Gdynia, Janek went ‘where everyone went, the Catholic state school’.

As in all classrooms, there was a picture of the Polish president Ignacy Mościcki hanging on the left-hand wall and a portrait of the prime minister, General Józef Piłsudski, on the right. On the back wall, there was a crucifix in plain view during the lessons. Every morning the first class was religious instruction with a prayer service. We called it ‘catechism’. The two or three Jewish pupils in my class didn’t have to attend religious instruction lessons, but we usually went anyway. We didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves, and besides all our friends went. We didn’t think about it much. I soon knew more about Catholicism than Judaism.

The Mandelbaums celebrated the major festivals such as Pesach, the eight-day commemoration of the exodus from Egypt, and ate matzo, the bread made with water and grain but without leavening. ‘I also recall that we got new clothes for the holidays. My mother took me to the shirt- and shoe-makers and to the tailor to be fitted for a new suit. In those days we didn’t by anything off the peg, because the quality was not normally good enough.’

There was no synagogue in Gdynia, just two prayer houses. The community had no rabbi but a cantor, who led the prayers:⁷⁹ ‘As far as I can recall, most of the Jewish families living there were moderately religious. They met for the holidays and prayed together, for which in our faith a rabbi is not required.’

The first Jewish inhabitants of Gdynia moved into the present-day district of Chylonia in 1876. According to the second Polish population census, there were eighty-four Jews in the city in December 1931, of whom twenty-three put Yiddish, and one Hebrew, as their mother tongue. The records state that there were sixty-five permanently resident Jewish children, women and men. The other nineteen were presumably temporary residents. The Polish government decided in the 1920s to develop Gdynia as a port and gateway to the world. As the work progressed, the city became increasingly attractive for Jewish families. By around 1935, there were already 700 Jews living in this Baltic city, and by the end of 1938 around 4,500.⁸⁰

Janek had lots of interests and enjoyed sports. One day his father gave him a bicycle. He trained on Skwer Kościuszki. This square had a street on each side leading directly to the Baltic Sea. It is still one of the most popular places for the people of Gdynia. Cycling became Janek’s great passion. He took part in school races. ‘Once I even came third.’ In winter, he preferred ice skating at Kamienna Góra, the stone mountain. This small hill close to the beach also gave its name to the smallest district of Gdynia, with magnificent villas on its slopes. ‘I loved to skate there. It was very cold in winter right next to the sea. We also played ice hockey. I often used to take my little brother Jakob with me. He loved sports as much as I did. And when there was snow or ice on the paths and roads, we slid down the hill on wooden boards.’

As far as he can recall, neither he nor the other Jewish children suffered from antisemitism. Janek and his classmates and friends didn’t care who was ‘Jewish or Catholic or whatever else’. He would play football in the summer or hang around the harbour area with friends, always ready for a new adventure. ‘For example, we would jump into the harbour and swim alongside the ships.’ This was forbidden, of course, and also dangerous, because they could have been crushed by the ships’ hulls. His parents knew nothing about this. ‘Yes, I was a lad ready to get into all kinds of mischief.’

‘It was great the way the boys played together and looked out for one another.’ He never felt, or was made to feel, any different from the non-Jewish children. One indication of how Polish they felt was the fact that Janek’s family almost always spoke Polish at home. ‘I didn’t know any other language.’ His parents still spoke Yiddish to each other and with friends and relatives. Majloch and Cyrla Mandelbaum came from large families. Janek’s father had four sisters and three brothers, and his mother had nine sisters and brothers, including two sets of twins.

Many Poles living inland – including the Mandelbaums’ relatives − would visit the port cities during the holidays. Janek got on particularly well with Uncle Sigmund, his father’s youngest brother. ‘And don’t forget Hinda, my mother’s youngest sister. She was cultured, very good-looking, fashionably dressed and had lots of admirers in Gdynia.’ She once stayed with them for a whole year. ‘We all got on well with one another. My parents loved each other and we loved them. I can’t remember any major arguments. Without exaggeration, I would say that we had a good and interesting life.’

Jiří and Zdeněk Steiner The children’s German nanny was called Trude, and she was very fond of Jiří and Zdeněk Steiner. The twins were almost inseparable. ‘We were always fighting but loved each other a lot.’ Their father Pavel ran a wholesale business with a partner in Prague. Fabrics were purchased and delivered to businesses throughout the country. Their mother Jana sometimes took the orders.

The Steiners lived in the Žižkov district, not far from the city centre, in a large modern apartment. The family was well established and was part of the liberal Jewish community. ‘But we celebrated all the holidays and went to the synagogue on Saturday mornings.’

The origins of the Prague Jewish community date back to the tenth century. Its Jewish scholars enjoy a legendary reputation. For example, the renown of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (born probably in Posen (Poznań) around 1520 and died in Prague in 1609) extended over centuries.⁸¹ Rabbi Loew, as he was referred to for short, devised a fundamental reform of the Jewish school system. He suggested that the main principle of the learning process was the logical progression from simple to complex content. He was interested above all in understanding the material. His tomb states that he wrote fifteen books, addressing fundamental questions of human existence – the philosophy of religion, teaching, ethics. He was a great thinker, far ahead of his time, whose writings were notable for ‘a worldview characterized by intense humanity’.⁸²

Rabbi Loew’s grave, along with that of many other leading figures in the Jewish community, is to be found in the Old Jewish Cemetery, possibly the most famous Jewish cemetery in Europe. The graves and the inscriptions on them tell the history of Prague’s Jewish community between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. During this time, more than 100,000 Jews were buried there. As space was limited and the Talmud states that graves are inviolable, a layer of earth was placed over the old graves in order to bury more people. In total, the Old Jewish Cemetery consists of twelve layers. With every layer of earth, the old gravestones were planted higher and higher, next to the new ones.⁸³ In this way, a cemetery with a unique atmosphere was formed over the centuries.

‘Yes, these old gravestones speak a powerful language’, wrote Abraham Stein, a rabbi from Radnice (Radnitz), around 25 kilometres north-east of Plzeň (Pilsen), in the early twentieth century:

They tell of tongues of flame from the terrible suffering and martyrdom of previous centuries, of the Jewish persecutions and mass murders and of the slaughter by Christian fanatics and zealots … of innocent people for the glory of God.

If the graves opened, if the earth gave forth its stony treasures, the world would be amazed at the precious items – not glittering and magnificent objects and clothing, not Pompeian antiquities made of gold, silver and marble, but invaluable scientific material for the cultural history of Judaism.⁸⁴

From the thirteenth century, and for several centuries thereafter, there was a Jewish district in Prague called Josefov.⁸⁵ The Jewish town hall – something that no other Jewish community in the Diaspora had – was mentioned for the first time in 1541. It was the residence of the mayor of the Jewish district and the headquarters of the Jewish self-administration, the meeting place of the Council of Elders and for jurisdiction on Jewish affairs.⁸⁶

In 1522, there were 600 Jews living in Prague. By 1930, the number had risen to a good 35,000.⁸⁷ When the Nazis came to power in Germany on 30 January 1933, many refugees went to Prague, to be joined later by Jews from Austria and Sudetenland, increasing the Jewish population to around 56,000.⁸⁸

The Steiner family knew some of them. ‘I remember a German woman’, said Jiří Steiner decades later, ‘who got on very well with my mother. She married one of my father’s business colleagues.’

In September 1935, the twins started school. At the time, the news filtering through to Prague from Germany was becoming more and more unsettling. Jiří Steiner recalls one situation in particular: ‘We were at home and the radio was on. Hitler was speaking at a party rally to great applause. My mother started to cry and my father said: “It’s terrible! What will happen to us now?”’

Even before the Germans occupied Sudetenland on 1 October 1938, many people had left. ‘An uncle of mine was one of them.’ He came to Prague and lived for a time with the Steiners before fleeing to Brazil.

Channa (Hanna) Markowicz Before the First World War, the small town in the Carpathians was part of Hungary and then the former Czechoslovakia, before being annexed by Hungary in 1939, From the Second World War until 1991, it belonged to the former Soviet Union and then afterwards to Ukraine. The town in question is Irshava⁸⁹ in the extreme west of present-day Ukraine, where the Markowicz family lived. They spoke Yiddish at home. ‘When they didn’t want us to understand them’, says Channa, her parents, Awraham and Zseni Markowicz (née Schwarz), spoke Hungarian, reason enough for her and her four brothers – Schmuel, Jakov, Herschel and Josel – to learn that language.

The two elder brothers attended the Czech middle school in Irshava. Lessons were in Czech and German. ‘We had a teacher who came to our house to help them learn German.’ Channa learned with them. She herself went to the Russian school, where the lessons were in Russian and Czech.

The family owned land and forest. ‘We children also helped working in the field. We did so because we liked it, not because we had to.’ Wood was chopped in the forest and exported, also to Germany. In 1930, there were 102,542 Jews living in the part of the Carpathians belonging to Czechoslovakia.⁹⁰ This was equivalent to around 15 per cent of the total population.⁹¹ In Irshava, Jews made up 30 to 40 per cent of the inhabitants.⁹² The Jewish community had two synagogues, a cemetery and a Jewish primary school.⁹³ In 1768, there were only two Jewish families there. By 1941, there were around 1,350 Jewish inhabitants. Many were businessmen or craftsmen, but there were also three Jewish doctors and three lawyers.⁹⁴

The Markowicz family kept kosher and observed the Jewish holidays. Channa describes them as religious but not orthodox. Her father wore ‘modern clothing’. The family was invited every Christmas by a Christian family. Her father usually went with the children to the party, her mother not always. ‘She didn’t like it so much.’ In return, the Christian neighbours visited the Markowicz family on Jewish holidays.

‘I didn’t initially experience any antisemitism. There were arguments in school, but they had nothing to do with antisemitism. At least I can’t remember any. I had both Russian and Jewish friends. That was not uncommon.’

Eduard Kornfeld was born in the western Slovakian town Vel’ký Meder (Hungarian: Nagymegyer), 70 kilometres from Bratislava and 20 from the Hungarian border. It had a population of around 5,000, with some 100 Jewish families, about 530 people.⁹⁵

The first Jews settled in Vel’ký Meder in the mid eighteenth century. The Jewish community grew steadily. In 1869, there were 217 Jews in the town, by 1919 there were 416, and in 1941 the town had 522 Jewish inhabitants, around 12 per cent of the total population. They were businessmen or craftsmen.⁹⁶

There was a large synagogue in Vel’ký Meder, a Jewish cemetery, the Beit Hamidrash school near the synagogue, and a mikvah.

The Jewish primary school had around 100 pupils, with two teachers for eight years in two classrooms. The ‘little school’ was for Years 1 to 3, and the ‘big school’ was for the other five. While the ‘little school’ teacher was occupied for half an hour with the youngest pupils, the other two years had to write or do arithmetic. The classes rotated on this principle every 30 minutes. The same system operated in the ‘big school’: Years 4 and 5 formed one group, and Years 6 to 8 the other.⁹⁷

When Eduard was 2 years old, the family moved to Bratislava, where Simon Kornfeld opened a flourishing linen goods shop. They lived in a large apartment. ‘The Danube was just a stone’s throw away.’

Bratislava at the time was the centre of orthodox Judaism. In the mid thirteenth century, it already had a sizeable Jewish community.⁹⁸ In the mid fourteenth century, there were probably several hundred Jews living in the city. They had a synagogue, a cemetery and their own jurisdiction.

There were expulsions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but from 1800 the number of Jewish inhabitants rose steadily, from 2,000 to 15,000 around 1930, 12 per cent of the total population. The Great Synagogue was built in 1864, and many other institutions were created, such as the Jewish hospital, boys’ and girls’ orphanages, and the Jewish old people’s home. In the early twentieth century, there were several hundred businesses owned by Jews, who exerted an influence on both public and economic life in the city.⁹⁹

Even today, countless pilgrims come to visit the grave of the orthodox rabbi, teacher and writer Chatam Sofer (1763−1839), born Moses Schreiber in Frankfurt am Main. He was principal of the rabbinical school in Bratislava, which became a centre of Jewish scholarship of international renown.¹⁰⁰

The Kornfeld family was ‘very religious’. ‘We went to the synagogue not only on the holidays but also on Shabbat. Anything else would have been unthinkable.’ They respected Shabbat as the weekly day of rest ordered by the Torah. It begins on Friday evening when the first three stars are visible in the sky or when it is no longer possible to distinguish between a white and a black thread, and ends on Saturday evening. ‘During this time, no fires could be lit or lights switched on, and no food could be prepared.’ On the other hand, the Kornfelds wore modern clothes and didn’t have payot (sidelocks). ‘Bratislava was more of a western city, just 80 kilometres from Vienna.’

From the age of 6, Eduard attended a religious Jewish, but German-speaking, school. ‘We had only a few compulsory lessons in Slovakian.’ At the time, there were over sixty Jewish primary schools in Slovakia. Half of the schools taught in Slovakian, twenty-five in Hungarian, and six in German.¹⁰¹

The Kornfeld family had little contact with non-Jewish families. ‘We had a good and friendly relationship with our closest neighbours.’ Otherwise, they barely met non-Jews. ‘We simply felt most comfortable among Jews.’

Eduard had a Hungarian nanny, enabling him to learn Hungarian as well as Slovakian and German, ‘which soon turned out to be a valuable advantage’.

He liked to play football and a wooden spinning top game with other children. ‘A piece of wood was sharpened to a point and made to “dance” with a kind of whip. Each person had four or five goes. The one who span the piece of wood furthest was the winner.’ A certain amount of skill and practice was required, ‘but then it would work’.

In winter, there was a ‘special hill’ that was highly popular. ‘I loved to go sledding there.’ He couldn’t get enough of it.

‘But my untroubled childhood didn’t last long.’

Ferenc and Otto Klein were born in 1932 in the eastern Hungarian town of Hajdúböszörmény. Their sister Ágnes was born two years earlier in August 1930.

Their father, Salomon Klein, was a hardworking businessman. He owned a wood and coal yard and a small roof tile factory. He was actually a rabbi ‘but didn’t practise’. ‘I only discovered that after the war.’ Their mother Lilly was a housewife and looked after the children’s upbringing. The family had their own house in the centre of the town. There was no ghetto. ‘The population was mixed.’ The Kleins were respected citizens of the town.

Around 1920, Hajdúböszörmény had a population of some 28,000, including about 1,000 Jews. The history of the Jewish community began in the early nineteenth century, and the synagogue was built in 1863.¹⁰²

The family valued Jewish rites, customs and traditions, ‘as it should be’. They kept a kosher household. Every Friday evening and Saturday, Salomon Klein went with the twins to the synagogue. The women only went on the High Holidays. ‘That’s how it was in Hungary at the time.’ Salomon and Lilly Klein spoke fluent Hungarian, Yiddish and German. ‘We children only spoke Hungarian. Our mother could also speak Slovakian.’ Her family had moved, around 1920, from Slovakia to Miskolc in northern Hungary.

From 1939, Otto and Ferenc attended the Jewish primary school in Hajdúböszörmény. In the afternoon, they both went to Talmud Torah school. There was a group of pupils in the neighbouring Christian school who made antisemitic comments. ‘They would fight us when we were coming home.’ The Jewish children didn’t put up with that for long and fought back. ‘Then they left us alone.’

‘There was not a lot of antisemitism, but we boys had few non-Jewish friends. Somehow, that didn’t work.’

Their father’s brothers and sisters lived in Debrecen, the second-largest city in Hungary, 20 kilometres from Hajdúböszörmény. It was the largest industrial and trading centre in the region. There were 9,142 Jews living in the city in 1941, 7 per cent of the total population.¹⁰³

‘We enjoyed being with relatives from Debrecen. Everyone got on well.’ The boys also enjoyed going to Miskolc, two hours’ drive from Hajdúböszörmény, where their mother’s family lived. ‘There was a small spa resort nearby where we would go swimming during the holidays.’

Miskolc, at the centre of northern Hungary, is the country’s third-largest city. The first Jewish families settled there in the late eighteenth century. In 1941, there were 10,428 Jews in Miskolc, around 14 per cent of the total population.¹⁰⁴

Otto and Ferenc liked to spend their free time at their father’s work in Hajdúböszörmény. They loved to play hide-and-seek on the large site. Sometimes, the adults could be persuaded to look for them. ‘They would look for an hour, but they could never find us.’ In the end, they had to leave a clue somewhere on the site. Only then were they found.

‘We had a good time playing together.’ They also played in the small brickworks. ‘When there was no one there, we would make roof tiles for fun. That was a fantastic game.’

Until his death in summer 2014, Otto Klein retained only good memories of the first years of his life. ‘We were a respected family. My parents loved each other and the children. We had a nice, happy life.’

Yehuda Bacon was born in the ‘city of black diamonds’, known far and wide for centuries as a city with large coal reserves – a mining and iron and steel city. It was Moravská Ostrava (Mährisch Ostrau), today part of Ostrava. The city is in the north-west of the Czech Republic, at the tripoint junction of Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

In the nineteenth century, it was one of the cities where Jews were not allowed to settle. Some skirted the prohibition by living outside the city, on the other side of the Oder in Poland. Jewish families managed to settle in Ostrava gradually from 1792, and more so after 1848. Brown coal was discovered in the mid eighteenth century, and industrialization made the city increasingly attractive for Jewish immigrants. They were strongly represented in economic life and commerce, as entrepreneurs and in the professions.

A Jewish school was established first of all, then, ten years later, a two-class and then four-class state primary school. By the end of the nineteenth century, the school had a good 300 pupils. In 1872, a plot was acquired for a cemetery, and four years later for a synagogue. On 15 September 1879, the new house of prayer was officially opened. Within fifty years, a total of six synagogues were built.¹⁰⁵

The historian Hugo Gold wrote of the dedication of the first synagogue: ‘This ceremonial act took place before a crowd of thousands, and the beautiful, truly uplifting ceremony presented to the people of Ostrava a dignified testimony to tolerance, of which the population of some other cities could be rightfully envious.’¹⁰⁶

In 1900, the Ostrava Jewish community celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. It had been built up from nothing. The rabbi recalled in his ceremonial speech:

It is easy to build up from something that already exists, to work where there is already something. It is easy to enlarge on what you already have, but it is difficult to build and plant where the ground is completely barren, where there are no traditions. To adapt the words of the poet: ‘Woe to you that you are not a grandson!’ That’s how it was in Mährisch-Ostrau as well. There used to be no Jews living in this city, there were no institutions or memories, nothing to connect to, everything had to be built up from scratch.¹⁰⁷

But the Jewish community grew quickly. In 1929, it had 10,000 members living in thirteen localities in and around Ostrava.¹⁰⁸

Yehuda Bacon was born on 28 July 1929 in Ostrava. Hanna (Channah) and Rella, his sisters, were six and five years older than him, respectively. Their father, Isidor Bacon, was a hardworking manufacturer and businessman. He owned a leather factory with his brother Baruch. Their mother Ethel was a housewife who looked after the children’s upbringing. The Bacon family was religious. Yehuda had religious instruction. Shabbat, the weekly day of rest from Friday to Saturday evening, was of ‘great importance’ for the family. ‘The candles were lit on Friday evening at dusk, the Shabbat bread eaten and a festive meal prepared.’

Jews were commonplace in Ostrava. Relations between Jews and non-Jews were relatively good. ‘I didn’t experience any antisemitism at first. We lived a completely “normal” life.’

Robert (Yehoshua) Büchler was born on 1 January 1929 in Topol’čany in western Slovakia, 110 kilometres from Bratislava, a town with a population of 12,000. Around 1 in 5 inhabitants was Jewish, like the Büchlers.

Some 70 per cent of the population worked in agriculture. Robert’s father Josef, however, came from a commercial family, selling hand-made suits, shirts and work clothing at markets. He was the only one of thirteen siblings to have attended secondary school. He wanted to study at university but was conscripted into the Austrian army during the First World War. In 1918 he obtained a position as a Prokurist (authorized signatory) in Produktiva, a farm trading company in Topol’čany. Here he met the office clerk Terezia Weinberger, his future wife.

My father’s ancestors had lived for around 200 years in the city. My mother came from a small village called Oslany, 30 kilometres away.

Our grandmother had stalls on the market square in Topol’čany and in the surrounding villages. It was a real family business. Of my grandparents’ thirteen children, five were tailors like my grandfather. Everything they sold was hand-made.

When I was a little older, I helped with sales. It was a great treat for me and I loved doing it.

There were Jewish merchants in Topol’čany already in the fourteenth century. The first synagogue was built in 1780. Five years earlier, the first Jewish cemetery was dedicated. It was one of the oldest in Slovakia. The Jewish population grew steadily and, in 1828, 561 of the population of 2,500 were Jews.

In 1895, a dream harboured by the Jewish community came true with the start of construction of the Great Synagogue. It was completed five years later. Hundreds of guests from all over the country, representatives of the communities, rabbis and the Jews of the city attended the opening. Thereafter, the 500-seat synagogue was the centre of Jewish religious life in Topol’čany. It was considered one of the most beautiful synagogues in Czechoslovakia. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, representatives of the Jewish community were elected for the first time to the city council, and two of its members later became deputy mayors. Around 1900, there were 1,676 Jews in Topol’čany.

The city received a further boost with the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in autumn 1918. Prior to that, Topol’čany had been part of Austria-Hungary. The republic recognized the Jewish minority as an ethnic group for the first time. The new democratic laws granted the Jews intellectual, religious and economic freedom.

There were great hopes for the future. Until well into the 1930s, a diverse Jewish life developed in the city. There were several synagogues, two cemeteries, a Talmud Torah school, a Jewish old people’s home, a soup kitchen for the needy, a kosher butcher, a matzo bakery, the Jewish primary school, Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard) Socialist Zionist youth organization groups and the Maccabi Association for Body Culture.¹⁰⁹

‘For the most part, the Jews were an acknowledged part of the population. One of my uncles, Karl Pollak, was deputy mayor. And the mayor was always one of the first to buy a Jewish calendar at the start of the Jewish year. The Jews were fully integrated in the life of the city. At least, we thought so.’ Robert’s sister Ruth was born in 1933. Three years later, Robert started at the Jewish primary school. Lessons there were in Slovakian, German and Hebrew.

Herbert Adler spent the first years of his life in Dortmund. In 1938, at the age of 9, the Sinti boy moved with his parents and siblings to Frankfurt am Main after his father, a post office worker, had gained a promotion. Sinti and Roma had lived for many centuries in Europe. They were mentioned for the first time in Hildesheim in 1407.¹¹⁰

Herbert Adler’s parents were born at the beginning of the twentieth century, his father in Debrecen, Hungary, and his mother in Berlin.

‘“Sinti” and “Roma” are words from the minority Romany language used in families as a second mother tongue besides the state language’, says Romani Rose, chairperson of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma.

‘Sinti’ refers to members of the minority living in central Europe since the Middle Ages and ‘Roma’ to those of south-eastern European origin. Outside German-speaking circles, Roma – or simply Rom (which means person) – is used as an umbrella term for the entire minority. Romany is related to Sanskrit, the language of the ancient Indian subcontinent, indicating that India was the original birthplace of Sinti and Roma. The widely used term ‘gypsy’ … [is] rejected by many Sinti and Roma as discriminatory, as it is mostly spoken in a derogatory fashion.¹¹¹

When they moved to Frankfurt in 1938, the Adler family lived initially in a three-room apartment in Klappergasse in the Sachsenhausen district. The house was destroyed during the war and not rebuilt. When Herbert’s parents, Reinhold and Margarete Adler, had further siblings, they looked for a larger apartment. They ultimately found one at Löherstrasse 21 in Sachsenhausen, on the site of which a modern building now stands. ‘It was a nice five-room apartment with all the trimmings.’

Herbert went to the Frankensteiner School – at the time, for boys only. ‘Our class teacher was Mr Erb. He must have been around 40. He was like a fatherly friend to us. There were around thirty boys in the class. I was never victimized by teachers or fellow pupils. I liked it there a lot.’ He also felt at home with the Löhergass boys. ‘I was a real Frankfurt lad.’ Football was his great passion. ‘We would play for hours on the Mainwiese.’ He was nevertheless aware that ‘something was going on with the Jews.… But what exactly? That I didn’t know.’

However, he had no idea that, in August 1937, the first fifty-five Frankfurt Sinti and Roma families were interned in a camp in Dieselstrasse,¹¹² near the Osthafen. His parents might have known, but they never spoke to him or his siblings about it.

‘One of my brothers was often hit by his gym teacher, a fanatical Nazi.’ And yet, if anyone had asked Herbert whether he was afraid, he would have looked at them wide-eyed and asked what he should be afraid of. They were ‘Germans, after all’, had work, a nice apartment – ‘Why should anything happen to us?’