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Overview
A heart-stopping survivor story and brilliant historical investigation that offers unprecedented insight into daily life in the Third Reich and the Holocaust and the powers and pitfalls of memory.
At the outbreak of World War II, Marianne Strauss, the sheltered daughter of well-to-do German Jews, was an ordinary girl, concerned with studies, friends, and romance. Almost overnight she was transformed into a woman of spirit and defiance, a fighter who, when the Gestapo came for her family, seized the moment and went underground. On the run for two years, Marianne traveled across Nazi Germany without papers, aided by a remarkable resistance organization, previously unknown and unsung. Drawing on an astonishing cache of documents as well as interviews on three continents, historian Mark Roseman reconstructs Marianne's odyssey and reveals aspects of life in the Third Reich long hidden from view. As Roseman excavates the past, he also puts forward a new and sympathetic interpretation of the troubling discrepancies between fact and recollection that so often cloud survivors' accounts.
A detective story, a love story, a story of great courage and survival under the harshest conditions, A Past in Hiding is also a poignant investigation into the nature of memory, authenticity, and truth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466868311 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 592 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Mark Roseman teaches modern history at the University of Southhampton in England and has published widely on many aspects of twentieth-century German history. He is the author of The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution. He lives in Birmingham, England.
Read an Excerpt
A Past in Hiding
Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany
By Mark Roseman
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2000 Mark RosemanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6831-1
CHAPTER 1
Childhood in a German-Jewish Family
Marianne told me the story of a much-prized family document, an elaborate family tree commissioned by her mother, Regina Strauss, and produced by a professional artist. Regina, or Ine as everyone called her, and her husband, Siegfried, were immensely proud of their ancestors' long years of respectable settlement in Germany and had carried out a great deal of research. On both sides of the family, forebears could be traced back to 1740. The assiduously collected dates and names of Strausses, Rosenbergs, Weyls, Sterns, Reisses, Behrends, and Nrdlingers were incorporated into a beautiful chart of almost two hundred years of births, deaths, and marriages.
Marianne told me that Ine was so proud of the result that she sent it off to the Jewish Museum in Berlin for safekeeping and display. At the time, Marianne said, she herself gave the document very little attention. "All that" meant little to her as a girl. Now she wished she had been more involved. Above all, she was sorry to have lost so much evidence of her family roots. She told me that on Kristallnachtthe Jewish Museum in Berlin had gone up in flames and with it the family tree. The burning of the family tree seemed to me poignantly symbolic. It represented the destruction of a German-Jewish identity. It was also full of sinister portent. Modifying Heine's famous dictum about books and people, we sense that where you begin by burning family trees, you end up by burning families.
Sometime after Marianne died, I was conducting research in Berlin, and took a tour through the recently built extension to the Jewish Museum. My guide, a final-year architecture student, talked mainly about the building's design but he did say one or two significant things about the museum's history. The original Jewish Museum, I learned, was created in January 1933, only six days before the Nazis came to power. I later found out that in 1936 the museum put on an exhibition titled Our Forebears, and it would have been for this exhibition that Ine submitted the family tree. Her gesture now took on a different quality. I had made the mistake at first of seeing in it ostentatious pride. Now I saw a more conscious act of self-assertion at a time when the Nazis were trying to deny German Jews their right to call themselves German.
On 10 November 1938, the day after Kristallnacht, the museum was closed but, I now learned, had not been set alight. Indeed, a number of the museum's paintings turned up after the war, and some of the former owners recovered their works. No one knows what happened to the rest of the artifacts. When Marianne told me the museum had gone up in flames, she had, probably unconsciously, created a literary metaphor dressed up as memory. The uncertainty about what had actually happened to the family tree was perhaps too painfully reminiscent of her lack of final knowledge about her family's fate.
Marianne's Grandparents
Marianne must have met one of her great-grandparents, since her great-grandmother Sophie Stern died at the age of one hundred in 1928, when Marianne was five. But Marianne's recollections go back only as far as her paternal grandparents, Leopold and Saly (Rosalie, née Stern) Strauss, as well as her mother's parents, Isaak and Anna Rosenberg. Both couples were settled in little towns on the fringe of the Ruhr Valley, the Strausses in the lower-Rhinish community of Dinslaken, the Rosenbergs in Ahlen, a Westphalian market town. Both families combined positions of great respectability in their respective communities with a reasonably observant Jewish way of life.
Leopold Strauss was the only one of eleven siblings to receive a secondary education. He trained as a rabbi and teacher, and in 1896 was appointed headmaster of Dinslaken's Jewish school. He was also the cantor for Dinslaken's Jewish community. At the same time, he was invited by the mayor to be a teacher and later honorary director of the town's vocational school. (The mayor's letter in elegant copperplate Gothic script still survived in Liverpool.) He became a town councillor and served on the town's Youth Welfare Committee. When Leopold retired from teaching in 1927, the Dinslaken mayor made a formal announcement to the council and gave Leopold the town's best wishes.
One of Marianne's vivid recollections was of her grandparents' wonderful garden, which, to a child at least, seemed enormous. Grandmother Saly grew apples and pears and other fruit, from which she would make vast quantities of bottled fruit and jellies. She also kept poultry, and Marianne remembered feeding the chickens and the pleasure of a fresh egg every morning for breakfast. These happy memories coexisted with the less happy experience of having to receive extracurricular Hebrew lessons and tuition in mathematics from grandfather Leopold. Coming as they did during the holidays, the extra lessons seemed "very unfair" to Marianne, but she was compensated by the time she spent with Saly, a "lovely person." Saly and Marianne would go out shopping, meeting and greeting other members of the Jewish community. After Saly, a chronic asthmatic, died in 1934, Marianne began to sleep in a room of her own on the second floor of the Strausses' house. "It was very nice and very, very snug and very comfortable ... I always loved having this room to myself, away from everything."
Marianne had equally warm recollections of her mother's parents, the Rosenbergs, whom she visited regularly. If the family went to Dinslaken for Passover one year, they would go to the Rosenbergs in Ahlen the next. "It was all done with great style" in Ahlen, Marianne told me. Isaak Rosenberg's father had established a successful grain and fodder business, and Isaak, the fifth of seven children, had taken it on to become one of Ahlen's most prosperous citizens. He played a leading role in local civic associations such as the Bürgerschutzverein and in the voluntary fire service. He was also a member of the nationalist-patriotic Kyffhäuser-Bund.
Like Leopold Strauss, Isaak remained a religious man and was president of Ahlen's small Jewish community. Marianne remembered that at Passover Isaak would sit at the head of the table in his kittel and talit. Once, when very young, Marianne asked why her grandfather wore a kittel, and learned that the whole garment would serve as his burial shroud. Wearing it reminded one that life is fleeting and that everybody must die. This was Marianne's first remembered encounter with the idea of death. When Isaak died of heart disease in 1932, the eight-year-old Marianne had her first encounter with the reality of dying. The firemen's band turned out to play at his funeral.
The Rosenbergs' house, on one of Ahlen's main streets, fascinated Marianne. It was step-gabled like a Dutch house, and inside there was a large winding staircase. Even as a small child Marianne had an eye for art, and later remembered the top gallery being chockablock with old copper engravings. Halfway up the stairs was a dark room stuffed full with sacks of sultanas, currants, and sugar. In the attic, there was storage for grain and a large hook outside for lifting sacks up on chains. Behind the house were offices and a yard. The family did its own slaughtering. Twice a year the butcher would come, and the women would make sausages and smoke the meat. Isaak used to go pheasant shooting, and Marianne remembered braces of pheasant being sent to her parents in Essen. Marianne's overall impression of Isaak was of a larger-than-life character, picking people up off the street to invite them to dinner in a house full of family, guests, and servants.
Marianne's Parents
Though remaining observant Jews, the Strausses and Rosenbergs were part of a trend of acculturation that had begun in Germany in the eighteenth century, as a result of which Germany's Jews came to resemble their eastern European counterparts less and less. Although Marianne's grandparents had all come from large families, for example, both couples chose to have only four children. They gave their offspring, particularly their sons, fine-sounding Teutonic names rather than biblical ones. There was Siegfried (Marianne's father) and his twin brother, Alfred, born in 1891, followed two years later by their younger brother, Richard. Only their sister, Bertel, born in 1900, had a Yiddish-sounding name. The Rosenbergs, for their part, produced a Johannah (Hannah) (1894), an Adolf (1896), Marianne's mother Regina (Ine) (1989), and a Karl (1907).
Equally characteristic of the trend was that the Strausses and Rosenbergs placed greater emphasis on a good secular education than on religious instruction. Leopold sent Siegfried and Alfred to a state elementary school in nearby Duisburg rather than to his own Jewish school in Dinslaken. A photo of the two boys at primary school survives, with their round, thin-lipped, intense faces and their identical sailor suits. In 1902, the twins transferred to secondary school, a Realgymnasium in Duisburg-Meiderich. The Rosenbergs made similar choices. At this time, German-Jewish families probably took the education of their daughters more seriously than their non-Jewish counterparts. The typical pattern was that the girls were educated for a career which they then did not pursue after marriage. Isaak and Anna sent Ine to a convent lyceum run by Ursuline nuns, because of the good classical education offered there. According to Marianne, her mother also absorbed much of the moral atmosphere of the place.
The Strauss boys' choice of career — the grain trade — was also characteristic of Jews in the region. For all their efforts to acculturate, German Jews both in the Ruhr area and elsewhere retained a highly distinctive occupational profile. By the time of the First World War, the Ruhr was dominated by heavy industry, but very few of the region's Jews went into coal, steel, or engineering. Instead, the majority remained in trade, and, of those, by the far the largest group were in clothing and food.
Siegfried, Alfred, and Richard trained as apprentices to a Duisburg merchant. After completing their apprenticeships, they gained practical experience in the processing and storage of grain and fodder with the company Siegfried Heineberg, Jewish corn brokers in Düsseldorf. Some of Siegfried's references and curriculum vitae survive. They tell us that he and his twin brother mastered, among other things, business correspondence, bookkeeping, stock management — and telephone conversation. Evidently, telephone conversation was still considered sufficiently arcane to rank as an acquirable skill. In those days, of course, the receiver and mouthpiece were two separate parts. One of Siegfried's nephews told me that Siegfried and Alfred were such a double-act that later, when they had their own business, one of them would do the speaking and the other the listening. After a year's military service in 1910–11, Siegfried spent three years working for Heineberg as a grain, seed, and animal fodder salesman. The First World War interrupted his career.
For her part, Ine attended a commercial college, graduating with good grades in March 1916. She then trained as a teacher and was briefly employed at a commercial college in Münster, where a surviving reference suggests that she was a great success. A cultured and intelligent person, in a later generation she would surely have gone to university. She had some training as a painter, and until her marriage painted for pleasure with considerable success. She was also a great linguist, one of her lifelong interests being the local dialect, the Westphalian Platt.
The Call to Arms
For both Siegfried and Alfred, as Marianne remembered, the First World War was a defining experience. Keen members of the Reserve before the war, both rushed to the colors and spent the whole of the war in the field. Marianne's documents include Alfred's army pay book, which shows that he joined the 220th Reserve Infantry Regiment on 1 October 1911, at the age of twenty, was called up on the second day of mobilization, and rejoined the regiment for war on 30 August 1914. He served with the regiment, primarily on the eastern front, until July 1918 and then with the mine-laying Batallion 20. Siegfried fought on the western front with Füsilier-Regiment 39 Düsseldorf. In total, about one hundred thousand Jews, 18 percent of the entire German-Jewish population, served in the course of the war.
The war instilled in the brothers a powerful identification with the fatherland and a strong sense of having merited official recognition and honor. Among Marianne's papers are hundreds of photo-cards from the front, which her father and uncle collected to mark the experience. Marianne told me that her father was an officer in the German army, and this presumably was the way the family liked to think of him. In fact, the two Strauss brothers did not make it to full officer class, both remaining at noncommissioned officer level — Siegfried as corporal, his brother as sergeant. Of course, for Jews even this level of promotion was not easy to achieve, and only two thousand made it further to become officers. Marianne also told me that her father had been awarded the Iron Cross. Again, this may well have become family lore, but it does not seem to have been quite the truth. It is certain that both Siegfried and Alfred were among the thirty-five thousand Jewish soldiers who were decorated for valorous service, and both received the Honor Cross of Front Fighters, but it seems that only Alfred was awarded the more prestigious Iron Cross (Second Class), on 4 April 1915. Warm letters sent from his lieutenant convalescing at home to Alfred at the front testify to the esteem in which the latter was held by his superior officer.
Although Siegfried and Alfred had a good war, the conflict also brought tragedy to the family. Among the family papers, I found the last correspondence between their brother Richard and their father, dating from early December 1916. On 14 December 1916, at the age of twenty-three years and eleven months, Richard died of malaria on a transport in East Prussia. So the Strauss family felt it had made ample sacrifice for the fatherland.
We now know that the First World War and Germany's subsequent defeat were key moments in the resurgence of politically aggressive anti-Semitism. In 1916, in reaction to accusations that Jews were shirking their duty at the front, the Prussian War Ministry ordered a count of all Jews in active service. The figures showed that Jews were at least as well represented as the rest of the population, but, shamefully, the ministry refused to publish them. Defeat further poisoned the atmosphere, and the Reich Association of Jewish Combat Veterans (Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten; RjF) was formed with the intention of combating the defamation of Jewish participants in the war effort. Yet for the Strauss brothers and so many others like them, it was unthinkable that their services to the country should be forgotten.
Business and Marriage
For a brief period after the war, Siegfried worked in Dinslaken's municipal food administration. But on 26 August 1919, he and Alfred founded the grain and cattle-feed firm Gebrüder Strauss OHG, operating from Essen, then a major industrial center of around five hundred thousand inhabitants in the heart of the Ruhr Valley. At corn exchanges in Essen, Duisburg, Cologne, and elsewhere, the brothers bought grain from overseas suppliers. Then they traveled around the region and sold grain mixes as cattle feed to local farmers, retailers, and other large customers. It was a far from easy time to start up in business. The unsettled political atmosphere following the revolution of November 1918 and galloping inflation bankrupted many enterprises. But the brothers prospered. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that they knew how to turn the inflation to advantage, since they invested reichsmarks of little value in property and other fixed capital that was to make a good return in later years. In 1922 they bought land, and in 1923 they made their first property deal on the Brunnenstrasse in Essen. On the other hand, they were too solid to indulge in speculation. The company's listing of its debtors and creditors shows that throughout the inflation years the company was consistently owed more by its debtors than it owed to its creditors.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Past in Hiding by Mark Roseman. Copyright © 2000 Mark Roseman. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Abbreviations,
Epigraph,
Introduction,
1. Childhood in a German-Jewish Family,
2. Schoolgirl in the Third Reich,
3. Shattered Glass, Shattered Lives,
4. Blossoming in a Harsh Climate,
5. The Family, the Gestapo, the Abwehr, and the Banker,
6. Love Letters in the Holocaust,
7. Report from Izbica,
8. Deportations, Death, and the Bund,
9. The Escape,
10. Memories Underground: August 1943–Spring 1944,
11. Underground Chronicles: April 1944–April 1945,
12. Living amid the Ruins,
13. The Fate of Marianne's Family,
Living with a Past in Hiding,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
About the Author,
Copyright,