To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Travel Sept. 18, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/travel/feature/1999/09/18/germany1 My Jewish roots in Germany Reluctantly and without a plan, an American uncovers his family's poignant past. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Robert L. Strauss For many years I thought about traveling to Germany. My father, who died when I was 3, and my mother's second husband, the man who brought me up, were both German Jews. Although curious about their roots, I had an ingrained hesitation, an aversion to Germany and things German that kept me from traveling to their ancestral homes. It was only when my wife Nina became pregnant that we decided it was time to learn about the past before starting a new future. When we crossed into Germany, the border was nothing more than a small creek on a small country road: no guards, no passport inspection, nothing but a welcoming sign. The skinheads we imagined lurking behind every corner were nowhere in sight. My grandmother, Hannah Eichenbronner Strauss, came to America from Germany as a teenager in the 1890s. Her only child -- my father, Fred Strauss -- predeceased her in 1959. Three years later, my mother married Henry Levinstein, my father's best friend. It was Henry whom I came to know as Dad and came to think of as my father. Unlike Fred Strauss, who had been born and raised in New York City, Dad had been born in Germany, in a little town called Themar that wound up in East Germany. Dad died in 1986, never having spoken a word about his first 14 years in Germany. Neither did his mother, Nanette, who lived more than half her 101 years in Germany and left there only in 1941. I don't know that my mother or two brothers ever asked much about their experiences. I knew that Dad's father, Moritz, had died in Germany in the late 1930s. I remembered conflicting stories, that he had died in a concentration camp -- or perhaps not, but that he had been in a concentration camp. After Dad died I found a few postcards in an old desk. Some were from Moritz, from Buchenwald, making it clear that he had at least passed through a camp. My wife and I left for Germany equipped with very few pieces of information to guide us. One was the name of the village where my grandmother Hannah had grown up. Weisenbronn is much too small to appear in most atlases. I found it on a tourist map given to me by an old friend of my father who knew a little of the family history. The other piece of information we had was a photograph of Dad as an infant. There was almost nothing to give away the location of the picture except that the uppermost part of a building could be seen in the background. In the photo, Dad couldn't have been more than 2 years old, so we imagined it came from 1922 at the latest. The picture could have been taken in Themar or in some other town; we had no idea. By the time we decided to visit Germany, there was no one left who could tell us. As we drove deeper into rural Germany, Nina and I were surprised how much it looked like the Germany of fairy tales. The dark dense forests. The villages, perfectly nestled in the folds of soft hills, each with its narrow church steeple. The ancient houses, spotlessly maintained, no window without flowers. We found ourselves making fewer comments about skinheads lurking behind each bend and more about the natural beauty of Deutschland Mitte, as our map called the country's midsection. "Do you have a plan?" Nina asked me for the dozenth time as we approached Weisenbronn. I didn't. I supposed only to go to the cemetery and see what we might find. It wasn't actually until we passed Rödelsse, a neighboring village, that the name Weisenbronn finally appeared on one of the directional signs that were set at every crossroads, pointing to all the tiny villages in the area. Weisenbronn was one of those tiny villages. It sat in the melded laps of a few low hills and seemed almost to be smug, solidly content in its beauty and long history. There were no large signs welcoming us to town. No drive-through restaurants. Very little that proclaimed itself loudly or garishly to be modern or hip or new or improved. Fields of corn, hay, sunflowers and grapes extended in all directions until interrupted by the red roofs of neighboring villages. From the summit of a large hill above Weisenbronn we could see half a dozen such small farming towns, each with its church steeple and gingerbread Rathaus (town hall). It was easy to imagine winter smoke rising from hundreds of chimneys, fueled by the endless cords of stacked firewood that crisscrossed the area like hedgerows. But we arrived in summer, on a warm, sunny Saturday afternoon. A cluster of crosses on the village directory marked the Friedhof, the cemetery. It took just a few minutes to walk there. Four women were working in the cemetery tidying up. Not a blade of grass was out of place, no stone unpolished. Every grave was blanketed with plants and fresh flowers. We said our "Guten Tag" to the ladies and began looking around. "You know, there aren't going to be any Jews in this cemetery," Nina said, pointing out what perhaps should have been obvious to us right away. There was no Hebrew, no Stars of David, on any of the stones. "Bitte," I said to one of the ladies. "Meine Obermutter, Eichenbronner, aus Weisenbronn," I explained, using up all the broken, incorrect German I had absorbed. The ladies shook their heads. They didn't know Eichenbronner. They didn't know Strauss either. Sometimes Nina and I travel well equipped, with guidebooks and dictionaries and phrasebooks. This time we had decided to go without. In Germany we wanted to force ourselves to interact with Germans, to question them and depend on them. We arrived in Weisenbronn speaking no German, with no guidebooks and no English-German dictionary. "Why don't you ask her?" Nina suggested, gesturing to an older woman who stood a few feet away. "Namen?" she asked. Strauss and Eichenbronner, I told her. Hearing Eichenbronner, the older woman said to her younger friends, "Hebräisch" and "Jüdischer." Immediately I became apprehensive. I had no idea how people would react to interloping Jews poking around their towns, their cemeteries, their history. I as much expected to be told to go away as to be helped. But the ladies did not seem the least bit uneasy. I went ahead. "Ja," I said while pointing to Nina and me, "Jüdischer." I can remember as a kid thinking it better not to identify myself as a Jew, and even telling people that, yes, Strauss was German but that my family was Lutheran. Once I told my mother that I didn't feel Jewish at all. "Tell that to Hitler when he comes back," she said with uncharacteristic bluntness. And here we were, in Germany, telling complete strangers, the fathers of whom did who knows what in the war, that we were Jewish. The older woman said "Jüdischer Friedhof in Rödelsse, nicht in Weisenbronn." Before heading back to Rödelsse, we took a quick walk around the town. Weisenbronn itself was as tidy as the cemetery, immaculate homes and perfectly clean, smooth streets that hardly seemed in need of the repaving that was going on. In the center of the village were two inns, a convenience store and a bank with an ATM that would give us money from our account in San Francisco. And not 50 feet away were half a dozen homes that had barns right behind them filled with pigs, and front and back yards piled high with Misthaufen, neatly kept heaps of manure. Everything in Weisenbronn was the stereotype of German precision -- except the air, which reeked, almost burned, with the smell of fermenting pig waste. "Do you have a plan?" Nina asked again as Rödelsse came into view. "We'll go to the cemetery," I told her. "I can't believe we came to Germany without a German dictionary," she said. We didn't have to enter the Rödelsse cemetery to know we were in the wrong place. Beyond the gates were only crosses. Three women sat outside, keeping company. We greeted them and asked, "Bitte, Jüdischer Friedhof?" This inaugurated a prolonged discussion in which the women clearly disagreed about the least complicated way to find the Jewish cemetery. One of the women finally decided to show us. In the car she chatted continuously, in German, while directing us through town. (A characteristic of all the Germans we met was that even after it was completely apparent that we did not speak German, they would just keep prattling along.) "Schlüssel," the woman kept saying. We arrived at the tidy home of a pig farmer. "Moment," she said before going into the house. She came back a few minutes later. In her hand she carried a small canvas bag the form of which clearly outlined a book. "Juden Freidhof" was written on the canvas. She turned it over and out slid a key. "Schlüssel," she said. At the edge of town she told us to stop. She was going to her garden and would not accompany us any farther. Over and over she repeated the directions to the cemetery -- in German. Left, then right, then right again. We nodded our understanding, but in front of us there was nothing but farmland and open country. The road wound into the fields and disappeared from sight. At the first left we curved around a field of blossoming sunflowers. The first right took us among vineyards and stacks of firewood. The next right and we were off the pavement, heading into what seemed to be nothing but open fields. "Oh my," Nina said softly. Ahead of us a Star of David, silvery in the shimmering heat of the summer afternoon, rose above a small building that formed one corner of a large, walled compound. Inside we could see countless gravestones, most of them hip- or even shoulder-deep in vegetation. With only the name of a town, we had flown across nine time zones and driven a day and a half. A twist of the key and the lock on the gate popped open. Each link of the heavy chain rattled as I pulled it free. We went in. The weeds in the cemetery were not forgiving ones. Wild roses with stout shoots and thick thorns grew entangled among flowering purple thistles. Each step was like breaking trail in the brambles of a fairy-tale thicket. Flowers bloomed everywhere. Butterflies and bees swarmed, busily at work, unused to intruders. Many of the stones had sunken so that only the tops, carved as crowns, were visible. Those still high above the ground were mainly obscured by weeds. Only by stamping could we see the engravings. Within minutes Nina had to stop; the bristles of the overgrowth had already made dozens of small cuts on her bare legs. The weeds weren't the only obstacles. Termite mounds hidden in the thick grass gave way like rotten floorboards. My ankles caught on the rusting andirons and chains that outlined decaying plots. The jagged edges of broken slabs raked my shins. It was very slow going. Before I had made my way through the first row, Nina called out, "Did you see over there?" The cemetery was large, perhaps three acres or more. Nina pointed to a far corner I had not yet seen where there were hundreds of graves. It seemed pointless. Many of the stones were corroding, with large fragments flaking away as if from pieces of stale pastry. Only the marble markers were legible. Yet many of those were in Hebrew. It would have taken us forever to decipher them. Nina, pregnant, impatient with the improbability of it all, waited uncomfortably. My "plan" was not working. I finished the first row having found nothing. There were Rossmans, Sterns, lots of Sondheims and one Einstein. But no Eichenbronners and no Strausses. From beyond the cemetery walls, fields rolled down to red-roofed Rödelsse. The cascade of a church carillon spilled over the cemetery. It was a gorgeous afternoon. My jeans were damp with sweat. Pollen caked my hands and neck. My every pore itched with the heat. I began the second row of 30 graves. It took me 45 minutes to work through the first two rows. I thought I would plod through the next four and then take a cursory look at the hundreds of other stones. A few graves into the third row I stepped on the overgrowth and saw "Samson Eichenbronner" clearly marked in black marble. The year of death: 1923. Next to Samson was Louise Eichenbronner, died 1926. I had never heard either of those names. Were these my great-grandparents? The grimy sweat that had soaked my jeans turned chill with the discovery. I continued looking. We spent two more hours in the cemetery, finding no more Eichenbronners. As I looked, Nina read through the visitors' book that we had been given with the key. There were excerpts from German books on Jewish cemeteries and hundreds of signatures, mainly in German but many in Hebrew and a few in English. As we left the cemetery an ultralight plane flew overhead. A hot-air balloon rose not far away, perhaps on a late afternoon tour of the vineyards. I leafed through the visitors' book and although I could understand almost nothing of what was written, I was overcome with a sense of connection and deep sadness. Here were dozens of people who had come to this out-of-the-way cemetery, trying to make sense of a senseless past. It felt as though history was washing through us even as it had ignored and abandoned these hundreds of graves. At the house where we had picked up the key it took a minute or two for the old man to answer his door. Thirty steps away, 50 pigs clustered at the barn gate. The smell was overwhelming. I handed him the book and the key. "Danke," I said. His face and hands were rough, hard-worked. He took the things from me and said nothing. I had no idea who he was or why he was in charge of the key. I had no way to ask. We sat in the car as I jotted down some notes. The old man came out of the house and slowly, stiffly, walked over. He leaned down and put his head in the window. Somehow we signaled that our visit had been worthwhile. He hung around for a few minutes as though he expected that we would learn German just from his presence. But we didn't. He nodded, and went back to his house. We had dinner that night at the only place that was open in Weisenbronn. Our waiter suggested what type of wurst we should have and what type of local beer I might try. We told him that we were looking for family roots. "You forgot one small detail," Nina said as the waiter went to the kitchen. I hadn't told him we were Jewish, still nervous about how that "small detail" might be received. The waiter came back and told us that no one in the place knew any Eichenbronners. That's when I told him we were Jewish and that there hadn't been anyone in the town for a long time. "Obviously," he said, quietly. In a word that might have been cynical, he somehow combined his limited English with melancholy and compassion. I explained that as far as I knew the Eichenbronners had left before Hitler. "Anyway ..." he said, as though that fact should give very little consolation. A while later he returned with a name and number. We should contact the Burghermeister, Herr Müller, who knew all the local history and spoke English fluently. He would be able to help us. The next morning I tried to call Burghermeister Müller. But the pay phone wouldn't take coins and, on a Sunday morning in a small town in Germany, there was no place where I could buy a phone card. Plus Nina was anxious to move on. We had found the cemetery. We had found names. Perhaps that was enough. "Let's at least drive around town before we leave," I said. In the car it wouldn't take long to cover Weisenbronn's few streets. We could have missed it just as easily as we saw it. In the first block one of the homes had a signboard with the name Müller carved on it. As we passed, a man came out the front door. "Herr Müller?" I asked. "Ja," he said. "Burghermeister Müller?" I asked to make certain. "Ja," he said. "Sprechen Sie Englisch?" I asked. "Nein," he answered. With my crippled, elemental German, I explained about "Meine Jüdischer Grossmutter aus Weisenbronn." "Moment," he said gesturing for us to wait as he left the house. Ten minutes later he reappeared with an elegant, 60ish woman. She had short gray hair and a chiffon scarf draped over her red jacket, which seemed very fashionable in a town whose every corner smelled of animal waste. I again explained about Meine Grossmutter Eichenbronner and Frau Hoffman answered, in very good English, that she knew "a great deal" about "your great-grandfather," Samson Eichenbronner. "What would you like to know?" she said. It was 10:30 in the morning. We spent the next five and a half hours with Frau Hoffman. On the patio behind the Burghermeister's home, Frau Hoffman told us of Samson Eichenbronner's service in the Prussian-French war of 1870-71 and how he had started the local veterans' club after the German victory. She explained his cattle-trading business: buying them in Rhön, an impoverished area far away; shipping them by train to the railhead a few miles north of town; and then hiring local boys to drive them south to Weisenbronn. Frau Hoffman then took us down Kobaldstrasse and showed us the Eichenbronner home. She told us how the Jewish community leader, Herr Herbert, had resisted on Kristallnacht, the night of breaking glass, when the Nazis ransacked his house, and how he never returned after being taken away. I still wasn't entirely certain that Samson Eichenbronner was indeed my great-grandfather. From the pay phone on the corner, I called AT&T Direct and was talking to my mother in New York in seconds. "How many brothers and sisters did Grandma Strauss have?" I asked her. It was early in the morning in New York, and it took Mom a while to wake up and gather her thoughts. "Oh I don't know. There were a lot," she said. "Maybe 10 or 12. I think only three or four came to this country." Frau Hoffman had said there had been eight children. "What did Grandma Strauss' father do?" I asked. Mom said she thought he was a Pferdehändler, which is literally horse trader. But the German word is very close to Fleischhändler, or cattle or meat dealer. The numbers, the dates, the occupations were all close enough. Samson Eichenbronner was certainly one of the ancestors I had come to Germany never imagining to find. We wondered why this elegant schoolteacher had become so interested in local Jewish history. She explained that in 1982 one of her sons had begun a history of the Jewish population of Weisenbronn as a school assignment. Many people did not want to talk at that time, but one man, who had once worked for Samson Eichenbronner, spoke so voluminously that the son grew tired and called in his mother for help. Soon she became more interested than he. Now retired after 40 years as an art teacher, she continued to research local Jewish history. Nina asked her why. As a teacher (and a German), Frau Hoffman was very precise with her words. She told us that "bad things, evil things" had happened in Weisenbronn. She thought people, particularly the younger generations, should know -- even if some did not want to know. Frau Hoffman was also a religious person. She had been to church that morning, and to the cemetery and to her garden as well. She told us that there were things in her past, more precisely in her parents' past, that made her feel guilty. It wasn't so much guilt, she explained, but a sense of sadness and remorse. While she grew up knowing that bad things had happened to Jews, she first believed as she had been told: that they had only happened in Berlin and the other big cities. But there was also the memory of smelling fire as a 6-year-old in her home town of Nördlingen and then seeing the charred remains of the synagogue the next day. And the memory of the first time she saw an adult cry, when a Christian neighbor and family friend came to her childhood home after his Jewish wife had been taken away. He sat there among his neighbors and sobbed. Over lunch at the Gasthaus, we talked about how thrilled she was when Germany was reunified and how she had never believed it would happen, how she was certain it could never happen and how her relatives from East Germany showed up at her door the very day the border opened. I sensed that because of the separation she had experienced in her own family, she understood why Jews sometimes come back to Weisenbronn. She explained that the Rödelsse cemetery dated from 1432. "Can you imagine? That's 60 years before Columbus," I said to Nina, trying to grasp the notion of Jews, my ancestors, having lived in one place for 500 years. I have moved nearly 20 times in the last 20 years. Here families once lived -- and some still do -- in one place for half a millennium. Nina asked Frau Hoffman why the cemetery was even still there. She figured that the Nazis would have attempted to erase every trace of Jewish existence, even that of the dead. Frau Hoffman explained that the local people have always been deeply religious and even those who were the most ardent Nazis would not disturb the dead. Somehow that transcended their idea of who should live. From her file, Frau Hoffman pulled out the Weisenbronn census. The Germans had been very precise about record-keeping. In 1910 there had been 836 people in town and 44 Jews. In 1925, the population had risen to 882 but the number of Jews was down to 27. In 1939 it had fallen to nine. In 1942 the census became more precise, enumerated monthly. In February of 1942 there were three Jews left in Weisenbronn. In March, there were none. Eventually there were no more questions to ask. It was time to go. We thanked Frau Hoffman and told her as best we could that what she was doing was a very good thing. As we left Weisenbronn, Nina said, "You know what she does is so wonderful. And she's doing it just because it's the right thing to do." It seemed to us that we had been guided to her. There had been too many coincidences along the way for it to simply have been chance. Had the gravestone been illegible, as so many were, perhaps we would have driven on. Had we not seen Burghermeister Müller's sign, had he not been at home, had Frau Hoffman not been at her home when Herr Müller bicycled over, we would have left Weisenbronn with only memories of graves. There would have been no other pictures, because our camera battery had given out just after we arrived. In a little town in Germany, on a Sunday, there was no place to buy a replacement. salon.com | Sept. 18, 1999