Читать книгу My Dear Ones: One Family and the Final Solution - Jonathan Wittenberg, Jonathan Wittenberg - Страница 13

While Regina was opening her letter, Ernst was in the concentration camp of Buchenwald. The Gestapo had found him at home in his flat above the synagogue in Frankfurt on the morning after Kristallnacht, and took him away.

Buchenwald, the concentration camp in which Ernst Freimann was interned after Kristallnacht. (Yad Vashem Photo Archive)

Ernst loved Frankfurt: ‘Wie kann ein Mensch nicht aus Frankfurt sein’ (‘How can anyone not hale from Frankfurt’), he wrote fondly in his memoirs, quoting the local poet Friedrich Stoltze, though no doubt the reputation of the Jewish community and its many illustrious rabbis interested him more than the renown of the great city itself. He’d lived there since his early twenties, when he obtained a much sought-after internship at the university hospital. ‘I found a furnished room next door to the apartment building where my uncle lived,’ he recalled; wholesome kosher meals were provided every day. The uncle referred to was his mother’s younger brother Aron, curator of the Judaica section at the municipal library.

Ernst had been halfway through his medical studies in Breslau when he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army as a health inspector; he was awarded the Iron Cross for his services. Following demobilisation he completed his degree in Würzburg with a dissertation on Arabic medicine. He began his career by serving there as assistant doctor at the pharmacological institute, before settling in Frankfurt in 1924, where ‘family connections opened me to even the houses of the richest and most choosy families.’ He faithfully recorded the names of the rabbis and relatives he met in the city, with whom he regularly studied Torah, and how his medical practice had functioned. As it began to thrive, he moved to a two-room apartment heated by a coal-fired stove and equipped with a gas burner which ‘I used for cooking and urine examinations.’ He was one of the first people in Frankfurt to acquire a direct-dial telephone. Initially most of his patients were poor East European Jews whom he treated for free, but he gradually acquired more affluent clients and was able to earn a respectable income. This was of particular importance because ‘it was the custom in Germany that one married only if one was able to make a living’. The best families were not slow in coming forward with suggestions as to whom such an eligible young man, son of a famous rabbi and an up-and-coming doctor, should meet. ‘Many attempts to get me married failed,’ he noted wryly. But then a lady patient whom he was treating for pulmonary tuberculosis suggested he be introduced to a niece of her friend, a young woman called Eva from the well-known and well-to-do Heckscher family. He took his aunt Therese, Uncle Aron’s wife, with him on his second visit to the lady in question because he ‘trusted her judgment in such important matters’. His confidence was to prove well-founded; Ernst and Eva would enjoy a marriage of over sixty years. I remember them well from their annual visits to London. He was a quietly spoken gentleman; she a spritely and down-to-earth lady concerned for the welfare of each and every member of the family. Ernst lived to be 97, Eva 102. ‘Every year I make a point of reading a different commentary to the Torah,’ Ernst told me, the sacred books he was currently studying lying close by on the table. It was a small glimpse into the world of Torah-learning coupled with excellence in the professions and a deep interest in culture which formed the hallmark of German Jewish orthodoxy at its best.

Ernst and Eva were married in Hamburg in November 1928, on the New Moon of the month of Kislev; it was no doubt a Jewish high society occasion. Eva grew close to her parents-in-law, who in turn welcomed her into the family and took her to their heart. Life was good to the young couple. ‘We often went to plays and concerts,’ Ernst recalled. He became deeply involved in the charitable life of the city. He sat on the board of the community, on the committee of a day centre for unemployed Jewish youth and as trustee of a fund to help the destitute Jewish elderly. More unusually, he also served as medical coach to the Jewish football club and as chair of the Jewish gymnastics association.

He became the medical director of the Jewish Hospital. His private practice prospered; to make house calls easier he even learnt to drive ‘and nearly bought a car, but was prevented by the change in the political conditions’. It was just as well; the Nazis presently disallowed Jews from holding a driver’s licence and enriched themselves by taking possession of Jewish-owned automobiles. In 1930 Eva gave birth to their first child, a son, who died three days later of internal bleeding. Ernst was to recall the night when he had to turn the guests away and inform them that no, there was to be no shalom zachar, no customary celebration with words of Torah and a glass of Schnapps on the first Shabbat after the newborn boy’s arrival, as the most painful of his entire life.

Jacob and Regina with Ernst and Eva on their wedding day.

In April of the following year Jenny was born; Jenny in whose beautiful New York flat I sat so many times and, plugging in my computer, plied her with questions about the family; at whose table I went through so many folders of letters and uncovered the record of so much suffering, courage and hope.

Soon after the Nazi accession to power, the Ministry of Employment removed Ernst from the list of doctors allowed to offer treatment under the national insurance scheme. On 1 September 1933 he was further banned from practising under private health insurance arrangements. He protested: as a recipient of the Iron Cross for his services to the German cause in the First World War he should surely have been exempted from such bans. He succeeded in having them lifted until the beginning of 1938, when not even having risked life and limb for the Fatherland could serve any longer as protection against the ferocity of the Nazis’ decrees.

Life grew ever more threatening. In 1937 the Nazis held a vast rally in Frankfurt. Hitler visited the city on 31 March 1938, shortly after the Anschluss with Austria, and addressed cheering crowds from the balcony of the Römer building in the old city. Everywhere were posters declaring ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück’ (‘The Jews are our misfortune’), the slogan penned by Heinrich von Treitschke in 1879 and popularised by Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic hate paper Der Stürmer. ‘One couldn’t react,’ my mother’s father, who was a rabbi in the same city, recalled. ‘Everywhere there were Nazis, watching.’

As well as having plentiful concerns of their own, Ernst and Eva were worried about Regina. With the summer holidays approaching, Eva wrote to her mother-in-law:

Frankfurt

19 June 1938

Dear Mama,

Your letter arrived today. I hope you’re also looking after yourself and taking lots of walks. One needs to keep one’s nerves in good order, and you know that our beloved Papa, may his memory be for a blessing, set great store by this. One lives for others, as long as one lives, and one has no right to neglect oneself. Jenny very much wants to visit you in the holidays. I’m very concerned though that it’ll be too much for you. I want to hear from you often about how you are. I also haven’t heard if there are any travelling companions. I want to hear from you first. Perhaps you could send me an answer soon, as I might enrol her for the holiday games and that needs to be done soon. We had a long letter from Trude. Here one could never invite thirty-eight people over for coffee. Ernst will write you out a new calendar, or I will. It may go on Sunday. Gertrud Rosenbaum is with us today. She is on the way back from a Kindertransport. Otherwise I know of nothing new. The children are all, thank God, in good health and happy and looking good. Jenny can read a lot better now and I hope she’ll manage until the summer holidays. She’s not so defensive any more. What are you going to have for Shabbat? I’ve got a stuffed pike, just like you make it, even though it’s become a real treat. Many greetings and good Shabbes. Are you on your own or will you have visitors? Your Eva.

Eva’s concern was touching. I had always thought of Regina as a strong woman, but Eva was clearly worried about her state of mind, reminding her that her late husband would have wanted her to look after herself and keep up her spirits by remembering that one has to go on living for the sake of other people. The domestic details suggested that the two women were very close and kept in frequent contact. In a small note, which had probably been tucked into the same envelope, Eva added: ‘Dear Mama! I just spoke about the thermos. If the flask isn’t completely full it doesn’t stay hot. Give it a try. Otherwise it needs to be exchanged. Greetings, Eva.’ Such gadgets were apparently new to her mother-in-law and her first attempt at using them to keep the water hot over the Sabbath, when it is forbidden to boil it back up, hadn’t been a success.

Stuffed pike was obviously a special family tradition. My father used to tell me how his mother would prepare it for Shabbat; now I knew where the custom had come from. I once saw whole pike for sale at the local fishmongers, their sharp teeth distinguishing them from the other fish on the counter. I thought of buying one for my father, but he was already too ill to have been able to tell me the proper way of cooking it and finding a random recipe in a book wouldn’t have been the same, even if I had succeeded in producing something edible.

The reference to the Kindertransport was especially interesting; evidently the term was current and children were being sent abroad in groups several months before the operation known as The Kindertransport par excellence, commenced, in which approximately ten thousand children were sent without their parents from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to find refuge in Britain.

The reasons no Jew in Germany would have thirty-eight people for a celebration were sinister; who could trust, with that great a number of guests, even were a gathering of that size permitted, that no one would betray them? My mother’s father told of an anti-Nazi friend, a non-Jew, who held a modest birthday party. He was arrested immediately afterwards. Fortunate to return from the Gestapo, he promptly invited the same group of people and asked them bluntly who had given him away. They all denied having done so. The man’s son then emerged from the bathroom and declared that it had been he who had told on his father. In the Nazi Youth, he explained, we were ordered to inform on anything our parents said.

By the autumn of 1938 Ernst and Eva had four children; Jenny was the eldest, followed by two boys, Hans and Alfred, and a little sister, Ruthie. When, on 10 November, the morning after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo came to arrest Ernst, a fifth child was expected at any time. It was to be a baby girl, stillborn while her father was in detention in Buchenwald. She was a breech presentation and specialist help was urgently needed. But, driven to despair by the hopelessness of his situation in Nazi Germany, the family obstetrician had committed suicide a few days earlier and, in Ernst’s forbearing words, ‘the young resident did not have much experience’.

Ernst and Eva explored all avenues of escape.

The Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria on 12 March 1938, brought a further 185,000 Jews under German rule. Very few countries were willing to offer shelter to the many tens of thousands desperate to flee the Reich. A conference was convened on the initiative of the President of the United States to consider how to respond to the refugee crisis. Representatives of thirty-two countries gathered in the French resort of Évian-les-Bains between 9 and 16 July. The event proved worse than a mere failure, the chief outcome being a propaganda victory for the Nazis. The British delegation argued that unemployment prevented the country from accepting further refugees; its sole concession was that British territories in East Africa agreed to admit a small number. France declared that it had reached the point of extreme saturation. The United States offered to fill those places which had not yet been taken up in its pre-existing quotas for Germany and Austria. Only the Dominican Republic was prepared to provide asylum for additional numbers, in return for significant sums of money. The unwillingness of the participating countries to offer shelter to those frantically seeking safety allowed Hitler and Goebbels to declare with superior irony how astounding it was that Germany was criticised for its treatment of the Jews when no one else wanted them either.

Eva’s brother, Alex Heckscher, who had moved to London with his family some years earlier, made a special trip to Chicago to persuade Leon Freeman, a wealthy uncle with no children of his own, to stand guarantor for his sister and her family. On the strength of his affidavit the American Consulate in Stuttgart allocated Ernst, who was born in Czechoslovakia, a place on the Czech list. He was fortunate; many others, including my mother’s parents, who had travelled to Stuttgart on the day before Kristallnacht, returned home to ponder the futility of their endeavours. Many committed suicide. On 18 August Ernst was allocated sixty-first place in the Czech quota. Even though this was a relatively high position, the wait was estimated at up to two years. Who could know if the family would be able to survive in Germany for that length of time? Ernst could not afford to abandon other plans and maintained close contact with Alfred in Palestine. But by then, he noted in his memoirs, the cost of a ‘capitalist’ certificate had risen to 60,000 marks. The figure was extraordinarily high given the sums cited just a few months earlier by Alfred’s friend after visiting Regina, but it presumably included the costs for the whole family of six. Places were hard to obtain at any price and Ernst had seemingly left the matter rather late.

They arrested him early on 10 November. ‘I don’t remember them coming for my father,’ Jenny, who was just seven at the time, reflected. ‘Later in the morning our relative Recha arrived with a big car to pick us up. There was a door from our flat which led directly into the robing room of the synagogue. From there, a second door opened onto the ladies’ gallery. That morning those doors were gone and I could see straight through into the ruins of the synagogue. The black sky and charred remains of the metal supports of the huge dome haunted me in nightmares for years.’ That was all which remained of the great and beautiful house of prayer on Frankfurt’s Boerneplatz. Strangely, my mother’s father, for thirty years a rabbi to Frankfurt’s liberal community, was at that very moment observing the same view from the other side of the ruins. Alleging that he possessed the keys, a claim they must have known to be false as it was a strictly orthodox synagogue, the Gestapo had ordered him to come immediately to the burning building. There were firemen present, he recalled, but no one did anything to extinguish the flames. As he walked through the crowds watching the spectacle he heard people say: ‘Das wird sich rächen’ (‘this will be avenged’).

Disregarding Regina’s remonstrations that, with his wife so heavily pregnant, Ernst was badly needed at home, the Gestapo took him away. They brought him first to the local police station and from there to the Festhalle, the concert hall, which my mother’s father also remembered all too well from his own arrest. There Ernst found his uncle Aron whom the Nazis had rewarded for his outstanding services to the city by dismissing him from his post just weeks after they came to power. When, at 1.20 a.m. on the morning of 10 November, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Service, issued orders that ‘as many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing jails’,1 he stipulated that only males in good health were to be taken and specifically excluded the elderly. But age did not protect Uncle Aron; they picked him up anyway. He was one of the very few later to be released from that hall, where hundreds of Jewish men were gathered, humiliated, intimidated and beaten, prior to their deportation to concentration camps. Soon afterwards he managed to escape to the United States with his wife and daughter.

Ernst himself was not so fortunate. Of the three camps to which thousands of Jews were deported in the following days, Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, the last was widely considered the worst. Construction had begun in 1937, but in the autumn of 1938 the site was still in a primitive state. What huts there were often had no floors, only wet earth. The water supply was almost non-existent and there was no proper provision for sewage; open latrines made even elemental hygiene virtually impossible. Ernst was part of the first group of men to be sent there from Frankfurt and was therefore able to find some kind of shelter. Prisoners who arrived later were simply left out in the open for hours or even days:

We came to a large barracks where there were bunks in three tiers. I at once went to the highest and found some people there. One of them felt bad because he had some money on him, which was forbidden. I borrowed 120 marks, which was useful for me as I decided to do as I did in the army – not to eat any of their treifa [unkosher] food. The next morning I found someone who had taken along his Tefillin [phylacteries, small leather boxes containing verses from the Torah worn during weekday morning prayers] which I could use at any time. They cut all our hair off our heads and gave us black striped prison uniforms. I managed to put my watch and money in my pockets.

These brief sentences convey little of what Ernst was made to undergo. The journey itself must have been appalling. He and three hundred other Jews from Frankfurt, all men, had been taken to a goods siding and loaded into fourth-class carriages. When they arrived at the station in Weimar, from where they had to walk the remaining distance to the camp, the platforms had, out of sheer sadism, been smeared with soap. On entering the camp many of the prisoners were severely beaten. ‘Of atrocities I saw only public flagellation,’ Ernst recalled. ‘The guards used vulgar words at any opportunity they saw a Jew. I tried to calm my neighbours down by telling them that they wouldn’t be offended if a dog barked at them in the street.’ Ernst was given the prisoner number 10205 and labelled an Aktionsjude, a Jew arrested during the ‘actions’, or round-ups, following Kristallnacht.

Keeping kosher, in so far as there was anything available at all which could be called food, no doubt took great courage. Reciting prayers also brought the risk of violence if caught. One political prisoner, Karl Wack, reported having to record the name of a dying man who had been hit over the head repeatedly by an SS officer for praying aloud.2 Yet Ernst faithfully maintained his strict standards of Jewish observance, as he had done throughout his army service in the First World War. His conduct must have served as an inspiring example to his comrades; it also saved him from an illness which plagued many others:

They put bicarbonate of soda into the food claiming that this calms people down, but it only caused diarrhoea. They made us stand for hours without permitting the use of a toilet.

Meanwhile the family were doing everything possible to obtain his release. Despite being nine months pregnant, Eva, like tens of thousands of other women across Germany whose husbands had been sent to concentration camps, did her utmost to gain the essential papers, which, with the promise of a visa, might procure her husband’s freedom. The British Consulate on the Guiollettstrasse in Frankfurt’s West End became a focal point for thousands of desperate people; queues often stretched across the pavement and round the block. The staff struggled to bring comfort and hope to the throngs of people waiting anxiously in every corner of the building and in the streets outside. ‘They offered us tea and sandwiches; they spoke to us like human beings and gave us back our dignity,’ one lady remembered. The Deputy Consul, Arthur Dowden, even drove round the streets seeking out terrified people, to whom he gave food and drink.

From Jerusalem, Alfred wrote to relatives in Amsterdam requesting their urgent intervention. By now he was all too familiar with every detail of the immigration process for Palestine. But how were matters to be arranged, with Ernst in a concentration camp and his heavily pregnant wife living in a hospital with their four young children because their home and the adjacent synagogue had been burnt down? In particular, how could the necessary funds be made available in Tel Aviv for a certificate to Palestine, when the Nazis had made it illegal to transfer money out of Germany?

Jerusalem

18 November 1938

My dear ones,

We have received news from Frankfurt that Ernst too has been arrested. Eva, who’s expecting a child any day, is in hospital in the Gagernstrasse, where the other children also are. They were living until now in the Boerneplatz, in what used to be the rabbi’s home, which is, as we suppose, no longer habitable. The only way to get Ernst and his family out of Germany is to obtain permission to immigrate into Palestine.

But because of the huge demand all the certificates have been taken, with the exception of the capitalist category. The only possibility still remaining open is to obtain one for Ernst by indirect means. This indirect route is necessary because he is not allowed by the German authorities to own any money abroad, and the British administration and its consulates require him to have a sum of at least 1,000 Palestinian pounds at his sole and free disposal.

After much breaking of our heads and after consultation with experts we’ve hit upon a plan that should work quickly and inexpensively and be difficult to object to. However, it requires the cooperation of friends abroad: Ernst needs to be given at least 1,030 LP (1,030 English or Palestinian pounds), from a source from whom such a gift is credible on personal grounds …

This operation can’t be undertaken in Palestine itself, because the immigration certificate is only granted where the above-mentioned minimum amount of fresh capital is brought into the country from abroad. My brothers and sisters in Posen and in Czechoslovakia are themselves subject to the local foreign exchange controls, so nothing can be done from that end. I must therefore turn to you for help in this extraordinary emergency. My big request is that you formally make available to Ernst this sum of 1,030 pounds. This amount must be transferred to the account of Dr Ernst Freimann at the Anglo-Palestine Bank Limited in Jerusalem. I have made all the arrangements here to ensure that the money returns to you as soon as Ernst has emigrated and his papers are in order. Should Ernst for any reason not be able to emigrate, I will be in a position to undertake the repayment.

Should you not at present have the requisite sum at your disposal, please ask Herr Sigmund Seligmann for his assistance. In these circumstances, where it’s a matter of saving lives, he will surely do everything within his power. I will gladly take responsibility for any costs incurred. With heartfelt greetings …

Alfred may or may not have known that even as he was writing his letter, the Nazis were sending the ashes of their victims back home to their families in urns wrapped up as parcels. ‘One dreaded the approach of the postman,’ my mother remembered; her father had been sent to Dachau on 14 November. They cremated the bodies, noted Ernst, so that it would be impossible to prove how their victims had perished. The families were then informed that their loved ones had ‘regrettably’ been taken ill and that it had ‘sadly’ proved impossible to save their lives. The truth, of course, was that they had been murdered.