Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (29 page)

In Berlin, the Gestapo converted the old synagogue at the Grosse Hamburger Strasse 26
,
built in 1829, into a
Sammelstelle
(assembly camp) from which thousands of Jews were shipped to the east. Martin Riesenburger recalls: The building was a prison—with iron bars at the window and guards posted at the gates. Large searchlights were set up in front and the rear of the building to prevent any escape. Herded together like cattle—kept on the floor—the elderly and the young, men, women and babies had to wait till they were finally called up for the final barbaric removal—professors, doctors, lawyers, prominent artists—a never-ending death march of the condemned.
⁸⁴

one of the largest
Judenhäuser
emerged in Berlin. when in June 1943 the Reichsvereinigung was liquidated and Germany’s capital declared
judenfrei
(free of Jews), the hospital in the Iranische Strasse continued to offer—under the control of the Gestapo
—
a confined last space for Jewish life. The vast complex of buildings contained a medical ward and administrative center, a prison for Jews caught in hiding, and a
Sammelstelle
(assembly camp) for “privileged” Jews, a total of 800 occupants, almost entirely composed of spouses of
Mischehen
and
Mis-chlingen,
and a handful of foreign Jews. The statistician Bruno Blau, a patient at the hospital until the liberation in 1945, describes the final days of what he terms the
Krankenhaus Ghetto
(hospital ghetto): Cut off from the world, without freedom of movement, exposed to all the dangers of the terrible war, 800 Jews lived through these days and awaited the dawning of a new era; filled with hope and longing, how they looked forward to liberation; knowing that salvation was coming, how gladly they took upon themselves every trouble and hardship—nowhere else could that be experienced with the same intensity as in the Berlin hospital ghetto. For in no other place were as many Jews crowded together as here, where all the institutions that either positively or negatively affected the continued existence of Jews in Germany could also be found, where everyone without exception was inspired by one and the same thought, where on everyone’s lips— whether voiced or not—there lingered the one anxious question: Is the end near? when will it come? will I live to see it! . . . when we finally came out of our live entombment into the light of the day, the Nazi nightmare was over . . . First we took off the Yellow Star, and the compulsory Jewish middle names disappeared. once again the Jews were human beings.
⁸⁵

whenever
Sternträger
left the German ghettos without walls, they not only encountered manifold barriers restricting their movements, but they were also exposed to a hostile environment in which they experienced the most profound dehumanization and ostracism. Curfews closed the door of their living quarters from dark to dawn. The strain of traveling became an integral part of everyday life. Motor vehicles and driving licenses had already been confiscated after the November pogrom in 1938. Bicycles were requisitioned in 1942.
Sternträger
could use buses or trams, underground trains, or municipal railways only if they had a special pass. This privilege was granted for forced laborers if the distance from home to work was more than seven kilometers, or over an hour’s walk. They were allowed to sit on public transport only when all Germans had found a seat. enforced detours were frequent, as Jews could not travel through designated roads, squares, and parks. They were not permitted to enter public phone booths, and restrictions were imposed on shopping. Seeking refuge during allied bombard-ments in air raid shelters was in most cases not allowed. In addition, public space was no longer available for recreation and play, especially for Jewish children.

Confined within ghettos without walls, the Jews lived a life on bor-rowed time. The waiting, the uncertainty, and the fear of being evicted again and “evacuated” to the east became torturous for many, as did the fear of attacks by fanatical antiSemites
. Judenhäuser
were preferred targets for members of the party or Gestapo officials bent on showing their hatred of the Jews in acts of brutality.
Kontrollgänge,
inspections or “spot checks,” provided the perfect excuse for molestation, looting, and ill-treatment. Marion kaplan has described the daily life of Ger-man Jews under Nazi rule, and concluded that the remaining Jews, trapped in Germany, created on the eve of their deportation and mur-der “a community of connection and concern, some even finding a new ‘extended family’”:

Holding on to their bourgeois values and way of life was a matter of integrity and identity, or a resistance against “Aryan” dehumanization. Jews shared and bartered food with each other, consoled each other after the arrest of friends and family members, gave gifts and services. No longer integrated into German neighborhoods . . . most “full” Jews were spared much of the public enmity they had previously faced and could aid and comfort each other.
⁸⁶

Jewish youngsters found the strength to resist. Banned from schools and conscripted into forced labor, some attempted to break out of the cycle of demoralization and isolation. They listened to banned gramophones and forbidden music, organized social and cultural gatherings, and enjoyed the brief moments of dancing and dating. In the
hachschara
, agricultural retraining camps described by the Nazis as “living communities for Jewish forced laborers” and liquidated in 1943, Jewish and Zionist ideals survived and found expression in the will to emigrate and the longing for a new life in
Eretz Israel
(the Land of Israel, or Palestine at the time)
.
In 1942, a Zionist youth group by the name of Chug Halutzi (Pioneer Circle), comprising some forty members, escaped into the Berlin underground. Groups were also formed in factories and firms. In many cases, social barriers had to be to overcome before new friendships could be made. This problem was most severe for young Jews who had grown up in middle-and upper middle-class environments. As forced laborers, they made their first-ever contacts with their companions-in- suffering from working-class backgrounds. Most of the members of the Herbert Baum Group
,
the largest Jewish Communist resistance organization in Germany, were recruited from the two “Jewish departments” of the Siemens plant in Berlin. Their spectacular, abortive sabotage attempt against the Nazi exhibition, “The Soviet Paradise,” in May 1942 represented the highpoint of their anti-Fascist resistance. The Gestapo and the People’s Court put a rapid end to the existence of the group.
⁸⁷

Some German Jews sought refuge from the onslaught in the Jewish faith. In many places, prayer services continued, first in communal offices under the control of the Gestapo, then in secrecy and in private circles. Fräulein Rabbiner Jonas, Germany’s first woman rabbi, shared a room with her mother in a Berlin
Judenhaus.
She continued her rabbinical services both within the Jewish community and in a German armament factory in which she was deployed as a forced laborer. She gave her last sermon in october 1942. Soon afterwards she was deported to Theresienstadt and murdered.
⁸⁸
Rabbi Martin Riesenburger, protected by his non-Jewish wife, continued to bury the dead in the weissensee cemetery until liberation. In June 1943, he performed a Jewish wedding, probably the last in Germany. The groom was aged 40, the bride 37. A few days later, the couple was deported to the east. Riesenburger compiled a calen-dar containing the dates of the Jewish festivals. Handed over to fugitives, the list of dates helped them to keep the rhythm of Jewish life. Some of them survived in secret locations in the cemetery. Riesenburger also knew that Jews who had died in hiding were not only brought at night to the cemetery, but also to secluded places at the outskirts of Berlin to be bur-ied. Those Germans who had attempted to save the Jews and then had to carry out their burials remembered the exact locations, to ensure that one day, a burial according to Halachic ruling could be performed.
⁸⁹

only 8,000 German Jews returned out of the 134,000 who had been dragged from their last refuges and loaded on to the trains. when they embarked on their journeys to the east, they had already experienced ostracism and banishment and a total expulsion from society. There was a further awareness that many took with them on their way to the murder and burial sites, the consciousness that they had been forced into a Jewish community united by a common fate and shared suffering. else Behrend Rosenfeld witnessed the animosities and tensions among 320 Munich Jews from many walks of life, incarcerated in the
Heimanlage,
the barracks at Berg am Laim, and she recalls the creation of a “true community”: orthodox and Liberals, those baptized as Catholic and Protestant, the formerly rich and poor, the highly educated and those from very simple social circles had to live and get along with each other. And, naturally, not everyone demonstrated good will. we did our best, and then it became clear . . . that we had been successful: In Berg am Laim we had become a true community.
⁹⁰

Scholars have offered different names to define this “true community.”
⁹¹

1. Adler and many others refer to a
   Zwangsgesellschaft
   , a community kept together by force. wolf Gruner adds an adjective, describing it as a
   geschlossene
   (closed)
   Zwangsgesellschaft
   .
   ⁹²
   widespread and often quoted is the notion of
   Schicksalsgemeinschaft,
   a community formed by destiny. Avraham Barkai points to what he calls “Pariah existence and Resignation to Fate.”
   ⁹³
   As noted previously, Marion kaplan emphasizes the notion of “social death.”
   ⁹⁴
   whatever term one chooses to specify for the nature of this residual group of German Jewry, made homeless in Nazi Germany and, since the beginning of the war, prevented from seeking refuge in exile, it shared the fate of their co-religionists in countries conquered by the National Socialists, in Lodz and warsaw, Riga and kovno, Minsk and Izbica, Chelmno, Treblinka and Sobibor, Maidanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Theresienstadt, and other, smaller murder sites of the “final solution.”
   

   Ghettoization and forced labor deployment in Germany were no more than temporary reprieves. Both fulfilled two relevant, interrelated functions.
   Judenhäuser
   and
   Judensiedlungen
   served as a means to exclude Jews from society and to include them—temporarily—into a new “Jew-ish” place, a segregated Jewish living quarter.
   ⁹⁵
   This function was assigned to all ghettos set up by the Nazis in the occupied territories, be it in the form of a hermetically sealed ghetto, a “semi-open,” or an “open” ghetto.
   Judenkommandos
   and
   Judenabteilungen
   served as a means to absorb an army of impoverished and jobless German Jews into the production process, and to include them as forced laborers in the Nazi war economy, in “self-contained” units, “separated from the main body of workers.”
   ⁹⁶
   The gradual liquidation of
   Judenhäuser
   and
   Judensiedlungen
   commenced once the decision was made to remove the inmates for murder. Forced laborers were incorporated into the program of the “final solution” as soon as, often even before, replacements, in the shape of other non-Jewish forced laborers, could be found for them. The removal of Jews, both from their segregated homes and from their workplaces, eased neither the acute and growing housing crisis nor the shortage of workers, a situation described by experts since 1939 as “anarchy” in the labor market. within the Nazi system, based on racial hatred and mass murder, ghettoization and forced labor were only steps along the path to genocide.
   

   A few years ago, an artist, Gunter Demnig, conceived a remarkable idea. He designed a small stone, made of concrete and covered by a brass plate. The plate contains the name of a Jew or of another victim of Nazi terror, alongside the dates of birth and death. The stone is placed in the ground at places where the victim had once lived, committed suicide, was deported, or escaped into hiding. These public
   Stolpersteine
   (
   “
   stumbling blocks”) are now keeping the memory of the fate of Jews and other victims alive, at least for the new neighbors now living there and any visitors who may come.
   ⁹⁷
   More than 7,000 public memorials, dispersed over 130 sites, have been set up. It can be assumed that for some Germans and for other people, these
   Stolpersteine
   have become an offensive reminder of events that they would prefer to bury once and for all. This applies above all to neighbors like those to whom Joachim Prinz referred in 1935.
   

   Notes
   

   1. For assistance in producing this article, I should like to extend my warmest thanks to my friends and colleagues Dr. Beate Meyer (Hamburg), Dr. Jürgen Matthäus (washington, DC), and Lucy Davey (Sydney), and to my beloved wife Jane Sydenham-kwiet.
      
   2. Jan T. Gross,
      Neighbors. The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
      (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Gross’s revelations sparked a heated controversy both in Poland and abroad, disagreements that continue to this very day. See Dariusz Stola, “Jedwabne: Revisiting the evidence and nature of the crime,” in
      Holocaust and Genocide Studies
      17 (2003): 139–152; Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, eds.,
      The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland
      (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Marek J. Chodakiewicz,
      The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After
      (New York: Columbia University Press and east european Mono-graphs, 2005).
      
   3. Adolf Hitler to Adolf Gemlich, 16 September 1919, in
      Hitler
      .
      Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924
      , eds. eberhard Jäckel and Axel kuhn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1980), 88–90.
      
   4. Frank Bajohr, “‘The Folk Community’ and the Persecution of the Jews,” in
      Holocaust and Genocide Studies
      , 20 (2006): 192.
      
   5. Avraham Barkai, “Im mauerlosen Ghetto,” in
      Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte der Neuzeit,
      Vol. 4:
      Aufbruch und Zerstörung 1918–1945
      , ed. Michael A. Meyer (Munich: Beck Verlag, 1997), 319–349.
      
   6. Saul Friedländer,
      Nazi Germany and the Jews
      :
      The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939
      

      (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 113–144.
      

   7. Jüdische Rundschau
      , 17 September 1935, quoted from Gudrun Schwarz,
      Die nationalsozialistischen Lager
      (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1996), 41.
      
   8. Jüdische Rundschau
      , 5 November 1935, quoted from Volker Dahm, “kulturelles und geistiges Leben,” in
      Die Juden in Deutschland 1933–1945
      .
      Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft
      , ed. wolfgang Benz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 157.
      
   9. konrad kwiet, “To Leave or Not to Leave. The German Jews at the Crossroads,” in
      November 1938: From Reichskristallnacht to Genocide
      , ed. walter Pehle (oxford: Berg Publishers, 1991), 139–153.
      
   10. Marion A. kaplan,
       Between Dignity and Despair. Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
       (New York: oxford University Press, 1998).
       
   11. Quoted from Jürgen Matthäus, “Jenseits der Grenze. Die ersten Massenerschies-sungen von Juden in Litauen (Juni–August 1941),” in
       Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft
       44 (1996): 116.
       
   12. Yad Vashem, Righteous Among the Nations (per Country and ethnic origin), 1 January 2001.
       
   13. wolfgang Benz, ed.,
       Überleben im Dritten Reich. Juden im Untergrund und ihre
       Helfer (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2003); see also Beate kosmala and C. Schoppmann, eds., Überleben im Untergrund: Hilfe für Juden in Deutschland 1941–1945 (Berlin: Metropol, 2002), as well as the study by Mark Roseman, The Past in Hiding (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001).
       
   14. See Bajohr, “The Folk Community,” 183. See also Götz Aly
       , Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und Nationaler Sozialismus
       (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2005).
       
   15. Nathan Stoltzfus,
       Resistance of the Heart: Intermarrige and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Germany
       (New York: w.w. Norton, 1996). After the release of Margaretta von Trotta’s film
       Die Rosenstrasse
       , a heated debate erupted both in Germany and abroad that was centered on the filmmaker’s reconstruction and interpretation of this historic event. See Beate Meyer, “Geschichte im Film. Judenverfolgung, Mischehen und der Protest in der Rosenstrasse,”
       Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft
       , 52
       

       (2004): 23–36; wolf Gruner,
       Widerstand in der Rosenstrasse. Die Fabrik-Aktion und die Verfolgung der “Mischehen”
       (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2005).
       

   16. konrad kwiet, “The Ultimate Refuge: Suicide in the Jewish Community under the Nazis,”
       Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
       29 (1984): 135–167.
       
   17. kaplan,
       Between Dignity and Despair
       , 229.
       
   18. Steven M. Lowenstein, “The Beginning of Integration: 1780–1870,” in
       Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945
       , ed. Marion kaplan (New York: oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 95f.
       
   19. Avraham Barkai, “‘Volksgemeinschaft,’ ‘Aryanization’ and the Holocaust,” in
       The Final Solution. Origins and Implementation
       , ed. David Cesarani (New York: Rout-ledge, 2004), 41.
       
   20. Trude Maurer, “From everyday to a State of emergency: Jews in weimar and Nazi Germany,” in kaplan,
       Jewish Daily Life,
       273.