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A Jewish Family in Germany Today
An Intimate Portrait
By Y. Michal Bodemann Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3421-6
Chapter One
Berthold and His Father
1950 Albert builds house with hotel in F. 1952 Albert and Eva marry in F. 1954 Berthold born in F. 1967 family moves from the hotel to a new house 1960s family arbitration panel set up 1970 Kalman firm at its peak: 81 stores 1975 Ignaz leaves Kalman firm 1975 Albert increasingly ill; first heart attack 1977-78 Berthold fully involved in Kalman firm 1978 Berthold completes his studies, diploma. 1978 Jurek leaves firm; Albert's family now sole owners 1983 Kalman firm in difficulties; Berthold arrested; house is searched 1984 Kalman firm in receivership 1985 Albert Kalman dies
No one would deny that in the Kalman family, Albert, the eldest of the four surviving siblings from Slawkusz, was the family's towering figure, "der Motor der Familie," the "family engine," as his son Berthold put it. Without him, there would never have been a Kalman Haushaltsgerate, and without him, the three brothers would never have come together in a single firm. Albert died in 1985, and all we can do to lend him voice is to try to reconstruct some aspects of his biography from how the rest of his family perceive him and his life's work, the Kalman firm. In the best position to do this next to his widow, Eva, is his eldest son, Berthold. Like virtually all the Kalman children, Berthold helped out in the firmas a youngster; however, he was the only one to work in the firm full time after completing his studies, and he was also the family member who attended to the firm until the bitter end. It is Berthold who provided the most detail about his father's life and family background. Where necessary, observations made by other family members will be added to Berthold's story. We met for the interview in an open air cafe in Munich's Schwabing district.
BERTHOLD: Let me try to pull this together somehow. My father was the eldest of eight children. He was a Zionist, and the way the Zionists were at the time, he was a follower of Jabotinski, he actually still knew him personally. About my grandparents, there are a couple of stories. The grandparents were Hasids, that was a very pious family, very pious. My father was member of Betar, and he knew all those things. My father was a bit of a revolutionary. In Betar, he was not that religious, but he had gone to a yeshiva, I believe he even wore peyes, it really was a strictly religious Jewish family. But as I said, my father was a bit of a revolutionary and he went to Zakopane in the Tatra mountains to go skiing. For a Jew at that time, before the war, that was exceptional, nobody was allowed to know that, he also ate treife there. He always told me, the best thing they had there was sauerkraut with smoked bacon. If someone had found out about that [laughs], I cannot imagine what a scandal this would have caused in his family. Also, his father sawed his skis in half twice. Because a Jew was not supposed to go to sports activities in Zakopane, to all these goyim and treife food and so on. That's how my father was at the time.
Eventually, my father's Zionist commitment brought about a conflict that had a decisive influence on his life. As I said, he was in Betar, and it got to the point, especially with all the preparations-he was madrich and so on-where he was selected, before the war, to go on aliyah, to Israel. And he kept telling his parents about that, he said, he was going to go to Israel. So the day arrived when he was to leave. And this is how Jewish life happens, Jewish fate: his mother started saying, if you leave us, you will kill us, and if you go, your mother will die. I am sure you know all those emotional assaults and blackmail. So he stayed home, and the result was that sometime thereafter, he ended up in a concentration camp.
EVA: He had an incredible love for his mother; he wanted to emigrate to Palestine, and thought of his mother so often and how he had to leave her. He was in Betar. And he went through everything, all the training, everything, and his mother-she must have been a very smart woman-she let him do it all. When it came to the point where he was supposed to leave for Palestine, in 1937 or 1938, she apparently said, and I can only quote what Albert told me, "If you do that, then I am going to throw myself out of the window." So he gave in and he did not leave. Later, when he ended up in the concentration camp, he said to himself, yes, yes, she did not allow me to go. And now I have landed here. For four and one-half years, my husband was in the concentration camp, he was one of the first they picked up. A concentration camp can change a person, a person's character.
BERTHOLD: My father was somehow involved in Jewish community affairs in Slawkusz, people wanted him to be elected to the so-called Judenrat in order for him to help compile the lists that would get other people picked up and sent onto the transports. At the same time, they promised that nothing would happen to him and his family. This my father did not do. He refused to compile the lists and so on, and so it happened that he was the first one in the area to be arrested and sent to the camp. My father said this was unusual because at the beginning they picked up only the very poorest and the social misfits, beggars and peddlers, a big group in Poland at the time.
But my father came from a well-to-do and respected family, they owned houses and a tobacco wholesale company, very respected and well-to-do people. Normally people from these groups were arrested and deported only much later. Despite all of that, he was one of the first to go, because of his refusal to enter the Judenrat. My father was therefore already in the concentration camp before 1940. What I don't know is when Jurek and my father's other siblings were picked up and when his parents got there, I don't know that, nor did he remember that.
EVA: We know little about my husband's time in the camps. Only in later years did he speak about how he was picked up. He did not want to talk about it. It was only when the children began to ask, around the time they were in school, he began to talk, very slowly and he did not like to talk about it. Only when he got together with some people, for example with the elder Schenfeld, the father, because with him he was in the camp. Then they started talking, "Do you remember when ..." and so on. But with me personally and on his own initiative he did not like to talk. With Schenfeld they even laughed at times. "Do you remember what I did then? And then, remember, you had ..., and I told you, No! and because you did that, I did not give you ..." It was a communication into the laughable. Laughing, yes, but later, when the children began to ask, he started talking, but then it got to be serious. With tears, too. I really almost could not understand what a human being could suffer there, how a person could bear that.
BERTHOLD: There are very few stories that my father told from the camp. He told a couple of stories about where he had to work, in some clay pits, in winter without shoes and in water and so on, about all this forced labor, and he also spoke about beatings. Once in a while, he also talked about people helping him, guards, peasants, outsiders who slipped him a piece of bread or hid some bread for him somewhere, so he talked about these things, too. These things were important to him, I believe. That there were people who helped him. I believe my father was someone who could negotiate much by communicating. He also had some charisma and he was a skilled negotiator. That helped him a great deal at that time, saving himself by communicating. More than once he succeeded in saving himself and probably Ignaz as well.
As far as people helping him is concerned, he also told me a story once about the time after the war. Once he met an ss man in F., it was after the war. He urgently wanted to speak to him because, he said, this was an ss man who was okay I mean, I cannot imagine an ss man who was okay because they did not simply get into the ss by accident. But for him, this ss man was okay, he wanted to speak to him and perhaps help him.
I know that in 1941 Albert met his brother Ignaz in a labor camp. I know the story from how my father has told it, but Jurek might tell the story differently. I don't know what is right, because my father never told us the terrible things about that whole concentration camp business. He did not want to burden us with that. He only told us a couple of things where you can say, oh, well, sometimes you can also laugh about it. The terrible things he had buried before himself, he was pretty good at this process of repression. My father, as far as I know, worked in the carpentry shop in Buchenwald. Ignaz had been there already, and Jurek was there as well, I don't remember the sequence. It was an accident, at any rate, that all three of them met in Buchenwald. Earlier, my father and Ignaz were together in another camp, working at different ends of a rail line or road. It was a labor camp, and my father found out that his brother was working on the opposite end, so he tried to arrange it such that they could be together. Later, I believe, they ended up on a march to Buchenwald, and there they met Jurek.
At the time, Jurek was in the Buchenwald Kinderlager, and according to Jurek, he smuggled his two older brothers into the Kinderlager where they were hiding out underneath corpses, so they did not have to go on a death march. Buchenwald was being evacuated at the time, and one of my father's close friends, Schenfeld, whom you probably know, was sent on the march. My father, Jurek, and Ignaz were liberated by the Americans. The only reason they survived was because during the evacuation of the camp, they were hiding in this mountain of corpses, and so they were left there. Jurek also talks about how they were hiding out in some attic, but they were caught and then hid with the dead. And many stories before that one. Of the entire family, my father was the first one to end up in concentration camp.
THE BEGINNINGS OF KALMAN HAUSHALTSGERATE (HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES)
They came crawling out of every hole and bought mattresses
BERTHOLD: So he survived after all, and after liberation, the three brothers and one sister ended up in the Landsberg dp camp. Not long thereafter, my father moved first to N. and then to F. I cannot even tell you why. Maybe he did not know that himself. N. was pretty badly hit by Allied bombing, so he ended up in nearby F. He wanted to go on to the U.S., right after the war, but that did not happen for some bureaucratic reasons. Evidently, he got entangled with something or other. It was the black market period, and he got caught, so he did not get a card, a visa. He wanted to emigrate. Ignaz, a few years later, went to the U.S., but he only stayed for a year and then came back. He had planned to emigrate. But then he would not have met my mother and so on and so forth, and the story would have gone very differently.
So let me describe to you how the Kalman firm developed. First, there were these three brothers. And this is probably a subjective account, because from one's own experience you will not get complete objectivity, even though today, after a distance of so many years, one can see things in part differently as well. There were these three brothers who started with different businesses. My father began in car sales, then he slowly slipped into the household appliances field; he bought used equipment in bulk from the Americans. At the time and from military supplies, you could make bids on wall to wall carpeting, fridges, cabinets, and God knows what. This is how the appliances business began. Ignaz he had with him, and they did everything together. At some point, when I don't know, they also took in Jurek, who until then was working a little in the textile area. Then they founded the Kalman firm, they bought a large piece of property, my father bought that also on behalf of his brothers, because he always included them. Maybe he did all this for reasons of, let's say, family welfare, because he was the eldest brother and because the parents were no longer there. He always brought his brothers into his business activities, he tied them in even where these were private affairs that had nothing to do with Kalman Appliances.
Somewhere, they bought a large piece of land near F. and he got his brothers into the deal even though they did not even want it. Yes, it was a favor to them. It was out of a sense of duty for the welfare of the family which he perhaps could not relinquish. He might not even have wanted his brothers there, but he felt this duty of caring for the family.
The firm-this was in the time of the economic miracle in Germany- grew in leaps and bounds, and very quickly, they had over seventy stores in Germany, from Garmisch to Kassel; it was a major firm then, with over seven or eight hundred employees, and after some time, they began to argue. In the 1950s, there were still real sales, you did not even sell, you distributed. The demand in Germany then was greater than the commodity supply. They said then, "Today we are selling mattresses," and people came crawling out of every hole and bought mattresses. The goods were not even unloaded often: a truck drove up, they pulled back the tarp, they said, "Today we have mattresses," and they sold them from the truck. And they were gone, finished. Out of that, the stores developed. In the early years they were not even real stores, more garages or storage facilities, not a store with a glass window. All this was built into a network of branches for retail. Those seventy stores opened and closed irregularly and so on, but later they were consolidated and ended up being perhaps forty stores, a real retail system with normal daily opening hours.
The business and family life were closely intertwined. My parents married in 1952, my father was thirty-three years old then. They lived in the hotel my father built in 1950; he was surely one of the very first people in F. who built a house after the war. I'd say this really indicates that they were settling down. First, they set up a hotel with my mother as the manager.
JUREK: The hotel must have been built around 1949-50. The house was bombed during the war, it was a ruin. It belonged to a Jewish family before. The previous owners in America were contacted, and it was bought somehow or other; I cannot tell you the details; they were Jewish owners who had lived in F. before the war and who subsequently emigrated to America.
BERTHOLD: My father was involved in entirely different business activities. It was a house that could be used as a hotel, and we moved into the house. Later it was turned into apartments pure and simple. So at first we lived in the hotel, but in the late 1950s, they gave it up because my mother did not want to manage that anymore. The house was turned into a complex of apartments and we lived on one entire floor. On the ground floor was a store of Kalman Appliances.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Jewish Family in Germany Today by Y. Michal Bodemann Excerpted by permission.
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