Читать книгу A Jewish Story - Sheldon Cohen - Страница 3

Ben Frohman arrived in Germany with his Torah wrapped in leather; a Torah penned by his great-great grandfather and passed down from generation to generation. He kissed it and stored it for safekeeping. He would breathe easier now, finally free of the pogroms that plagued the Jews of Eastern Europe.

His father, also planning to leave Tiktin, Poland and follow his family was not as lucky, falling victim to the violence.

Upon hearing the news of his father’s death, Ben and his mother sat in mourning for the traditional seven days. Their grief knew no bounds, but they sought comfort based upon the knowledge that he would want them to survive and live in peace in their new country.

Although there was some anti-Semitism in Germany at the time, it was not government policy as it had been under the Czar. The early part of the twentieth century was a golden-era for Jews in Germany and beside the occasional anti-Semitic rant, verbally or in print by individuals, there was no organized anti-Semitism affecting Jewish life and the ability to make a living.

As Ben grew up, his ambition remained to become a physician. His academic collegiate achievements allowed him to enter the University of Berlin medical school in an era when Germany and Austria were the world leaders in medical education and care.

When he graduated, he went to a dance with a friend and fellow male classmate to the Jewish Community center. It was here that his life changed when he walked into the dance hall and caught a glimpse of a young woman sitting against the wall who took his breath away. She was short and slim with coal black hair fixed upon her head in a bun. There was not a hint of makeup on her beautiful face, nor was any necessary he thought. He was close enough to see her large, brown eyes. She was dressed in a long green skirt with a green sweater. Tremulously, he approached her. “Uh…excuse me, please. My name is Ben Frohman. Would you care to dance?”

She looked at him, a slow smile crossing her features, and as Ben stared back nervously, she said, “Why yes, I’d love to. My name is Leah Friedberg.”

As they danced, she said to him, “Do I sense an accent?”

“Yes, and I thought I lost it all.”

“Your accent is very, very faint. I’m good with languages,” she answered.

“That’s a Russian accent. My mother and I came here in 1904. My father was killed in Russia during one of the pogroms many years ago.”

“Oh, I see. I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

“Thank you,” was all Ben could say.

Leah added, “We know all about the pogroms, and we’ve had many people flee to Germany. I’m sure that your life has been much better here.”

“Yes, it has been. Very much better.”

They sat together after the dance, and as they did, he was relaxed and comfortable in her presence. Before he had to leave, he whispered, “Leah, would you care to accompany me Wednesday evening to the Burgerstrasse Café?”

Ben saw her turn and smile at him. There was a moment of silence as he could feel his heart thump in his chest. Then she said, “Why, yes. I’d love to.”

A mutual interest was there from the start for the both of them. He learned that Leah was a nurse working in a private clinic. Her parents were Reform Jews and had arrived in Berlin from Byelorussia.

Both of them found that they had many mutual interests and they spent every moment together that he was free from his medical responsibilities.

This was their first love and every passing day brought them closer. They married shortly before he completed his internal medicine residency. He started his practice and Leah continued nursing. They were on the threshold of a happy life.

They thrived in this milieu, but worried as the newspapers told of Europe’s unstable search to form alliances in preparation for the war that many feared would soon engulf the continent. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Serbia set the conflagration in motion that everyone had feared. In 1914, World War I started, and Germany called up many young physicians including Dr. Ben who had to turn over his developing practice to an older physician while he fought for the glory of his adopted country.

Germans, overcome with an intense patriotic fervor, gathered in street rallies to support the war. At one of these rallies on the Marienplatz in Munich, a young man stood in the sea of cheering faces. He screamed his support for the Fatherland. This twenty-five year old vagabond in search of a destiny would later write, ‘to me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today, I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm; I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of permitting me to live at this time. A fight for freedom had begun, mightier than the earth had ever seen; for once Destiny had begun its course, the conviction dawned on even the broad masses that this time not the fate of Serbia or Austria was involved, but whether the German nation was to be or not to be.’

His name was Adolph Hitler. Even though he was an Austrian, he joined the German army where he distinguished himself by earning the Iron Cross and after the war would enter politics, join and then lead the fledgling party, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nazis, for short), and, in the next twenty-five years, almost bring the world and the Jewish people to complete destruction.

Dr. Ben charged into the quagmire of World War I where destiny would take him far beyond his wildest dreams. His first wartime act was to pass through the trenches near Ypres. The battles had begun. The French countryside had already become desolate, with ruined villages, fields pockmarked with shell craters and littered with the bloated corpses of men and horses and cattle. The soldiers walked around with hollow eyes, their uniforms caked with mud, sweat and blood. In the first few weeks, they became battle-hardened veterans. Ben’s arrival coincided with these first bloody battles. He worked around the clock and the days merged into one utilizing his skills as a diagnostician on occasion, but mostly assisting in and performing surgery trying to save the lives of young soldiers with wounds of all degrees of severity on every part of the human anatomy.

The time was the time of the damned. The atmosphere of anesthetic agents and gangrene clogged the bronchial tubes like a thick, suffocating gruel. Two surgical masks helped a bit, but made breathing more difficult, so he often operated without them. Nothing prepared him for the volume and intensity of injuries, disease and death as both sides fought for temporary gains measured in meters.

He kept thinking about the Kaiser’s statement when the war started, that “The war would be over before the leaves start falling from the trees.” But his never-ending emergency schedule necessitated continuous work, and as the leaves fell three more times he garnered more experience than he could ever have achieved in a lifetime of practice; there was no part of the human anatomy he didn’t treat. He had learned to live on less than four hours of sleep a night.

Germany and its opponents were involved in the killing fields of a stalemated trench-warfare. Four years later in November 1918, by the end of the conflagration, eight million lost their lives and twenty million were injured. One hundred thousand Jews served in the German military, and twelve thousand died in battle. After years of battlefield stalemate, very little territory had changed hands. Hunger had become rampant on the home front. The German people had been reduced to eating dogs and cats, or as they called them—roof rabbits. The country was war weary and clamored for peace. Revolutionary movements developed on the right and left of the political spectrum, and general strikes paralyzed the country. The troops began to mutiny deserting in droves. Soldiers under their command attacked and killed officers that attempted to maintain discipline. The situation for Germany had become desperate and the country went down in defeat.

It was Hitler’s view that the German army did not lose the World War, but rather the civilian leaders who signed the armistice on November 11, 1918 and formed the new Weimar Democracy betrayed the military. Never mind that the German army was out of reserves and armaments to continue the battle, Hitler labeled the Weimar Democrats the “November Criminals” who stabbed Germany in the back. His view was that the world was in danger from Jews and Marxists who wanted to control the world. It was his mission to prevent that threat. With this in mind, he joined a fledgling party the Nationale Socialistica Deutcher Arbeiter Partei (National Socialist German Worker’s Party) Nazis for short. By a combination of stirring oratory and ruthless, uncompromising leadership, Hitler and his party would strive to overthrow gain control of the country.

After the armistice of 1918 ending the war, Dr. Ben was mustered out of the army and built up a busy practice as an internist in Berlin in spite of the raging street battles fought by the right and left of the political spectrum. In the attempt by these factions to wrest control of the new German Weimar Democracy established after World War I, many innocent civilians died. Through this all, Ben and Leah still managed to start their family: David, their first-born and Emily, their second and last child.

Germany, devastated by the war, had to endure the harshness of the Versailles treaty. Four hundred and fourteen clauses of the treaty dealt with German punishment:

Germany had to accept blame for the war.

Germany had to pay damages caused by the war.

German military reduced to 100,000 men, no tanks, no submarines, six naval vessels, no airforce.

The Rhineland was demilitarized.

The treaty prevented German union with Austria, returned Alsace Lorraine to France, Eupen and Malmedy became Belgian property, Denmark received North Schleswig, Poland and Czechoslovakia received some German territory and the League of Nations controlled Germany’s colonies.

These harsh clauses were in sharp contrast to the more generous peace treaty proposed by the United States president Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points turned down by the other allied powers.

By 1919, multiple problems beset the Weimar Republic including the crippling reparations of the Versailles Treaty, the violent opposition of radical parties (Communists and Nazis) and ten years later a world-wide depression and crippling inflation, which paved the way for Adolph Hitler.

The Frohmans could only stand by as post World War I political intrigues and world-wide economic conditions resulted in Hitler assuming power in Germany by 1933. Life for them and all the Jews of Germany would never be the same.