How Can I Forget?
“Forget what has happened over there. You are now in this golden country. Start a new life.” Those were the words uttered by my American cousins every time I mentioned the Holocaust.
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An Ominous Night Call
About two weeks after Kristallnacht, my father and I returned to our house in Bremen. During that fateful night, my father had fled over the roofs and had been hiding with family in Hamburg. He was lucky, for if he had been found at home, he would certainly have been taken and sent to a concentration camp like my brother and all other men. I had met my father again in Hamburg when I was released from imprisonment in Würzburg.
Negotiating with the Gestapo
After Kristallnacht, I returned to my hometown in Bremen, in northwest Germany. A number of Jews had been released from concentration camps. I had been set free after eight days of imprisonment. I was then in Würzburg, Bavaria, where I had gone to school. The Nazis called these arrests “protective custody.” From whom did we need protection?
An Unexpected Letter
It was the summer of 1997 when I received an unexpected letter and a picture from a former non-Jewish playmate. The picture had been taken by a street photographer and was of a group of neighborhood youngsters near where we lived in Bremen, my hometown. We boys were then about 10 or 15 years old. It was taken shortly before Hitler came to power, when Jewish and non-Jewish children still played together.
My Life in Stanestie
How do you describe a little town you loved when you were young? I never thought of it as a little town. It had everything. I lived with my father, mother, and sister. I went to school, played there, and had lots of friends. I also had my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins nearby.
The Golden Cockroach
The apartment on Broome Street on New York’s Lower East Side is steamy in the sweltering heat of July. Odd smells waft from the old furniture; the dark brown wood casts a depressing mood over the crowded room. Only a single bright square—crisscrossed by shadows of the fire escape—illuminates the floor, its shellac worn by generations of tenement dwellers. Emma kneels on the floor and tries to concentrate on her book.
The Watch in the Window
The window of the pawnshop on Second Avenue had not been washed in a long time. Peeled black paint showed ridges of rust on the heavy iron frame that surrounded the window, and only the three globes hanging above the doorway appeared to have received any maintenance care.
Grosse Hamburgerstrasse
“Have your husband and son report tomorrow morning to the deportee collection center on Grosse Hamburger Street!” the Gestapo officer ordered my mother. She had accompanied friends who had received their deportation orders to the collection center in the Levetzow Street synagogue, where the officer questioned her, wanting to know why she was concerned about “those Jews.”
Tedium!
“The roof tiles are here, take your places on the steps.” Oh not again we thought; why all this nonsense? We work all day to get the heavy brick tiles up to the roof of the apartment building, and tomorrow morning, after an air raid, they probably will all be in small pieces on the ground. But we had to do it.
Dear Papa
Dear Papa, During the day I think about you. In the night I dream about you.
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