Alex's Wake (10 page)

That night and well into the next morning, supposedly spurred on by righteous anger over the assassination in Paris, gangs of Nazi thugs, many in the brown and black uniforms of the SA and SS, roamed through German cities, looting Jewish homes and businesses. Synagogues and the treasures they held were set on fire. People were dragged from their homes and beaten and stomped, sometimes to death. Thousands more were arrested. The vandals smashed so many windows with clubs, chains, bricks, and stones that the shattered glass lay in heaps, reflecting the glare of spotlights and the flicker of flames. The Nazis christened the action
Kristallnacht
, or the Night of Broken Glass. The Jews simply called it the November Pogrom.

By the time the national spasm of violence was officially called to a halt by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels on November 11, more than two hundred fifty synagogues had been burned, seventy-five hundred Jewish shops and businesses had been looted or destroyed, nearly 100 Jews murdered, and more than twenty-five thousand Jews arrested, among them Alex and Helmut Goldschmidt of Oldenburg.

The knock came on their door at 53 Ofenerstrasse shortly after 5:00 a.m. on Thursday, November 10. By this time, my father was living in Berlin, so only the two remaining men of the household, Alex and Helmut, were ordered to throw on some clothes and accompany their arresting officers to the wide expanse of the
Pferdemarkt
, Oldenburg's old horse market. Once at the market, they joined other Jewish prisoners of both sexes, who were commanded to line up on opposite sides of the square, the men on one side and the women on the other. They remained standing in the bitter wind and slowly breaking dawn until about 9:00. At that point, all of the women and the men under eighteen years of age, including my Uncle Helmut, were dismissed. The remaining prisoners, forty-three men, were then marched through the streets of Oldenburg, past the still smoking remains of the synagogue on Peterstrasse, over the
winding cobblestones of the Old City, into the heavily traveled thoroughfare called the Damm, then right onto Elizabethstrasse along the border of the splendid Schlossgarten, and finally left onto Gerichtestrasse and into the courtyard of the squat and ugly Oldenburg Prison. As the dazed and disbelieving men, many of them elderly and leaning on canes, shuffled along the humiliating march past the empty eyes of their fellow citizens, their captors occasionally called out, “These are the criminals, these are the traitors, these are the enemies of the Reich!”

Alex and his 42 fellow “criminals” spent the rest of that day and night in prison. Early the next morning, they were loaded onto a bus and driven to the Oldenburg train station. There they met another 34 Jews who had been rounded up from the surrounding countryside and had spent the previous twelve hours at gunpoint, cleaning up the rubble from the burned synagogue. These 77 men were then loaded onto a train headed east, a train with 938 Jews between the ages of fourteen and eighty-two crammed into a series of cattle cars, a train bound for a concentration camp called Sachsenhausen.

Built during the summer of 1936, the “protective custody” camp of Sachsenhausen was located just outside Oranienburg, a town about twenty miles north of Berlin. Its commandant was Hermann Baranowski; his second in command was a young man who would soon achieve much greater notoriety when he was appointed commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz: Rudolf Höss.

When the prisoners arrived from Oldenburg on Friday evening, they were herded, along with hundreds of others, through Sachsenhausen's black iron gates, which proclaimed the infamous and cynical motto of the camps,
Arbeit macht frei
, or “Work makes you free.” They lined up at attention in the Appellplatz, or roll-call area, standing in the cold wind with the harsh glare of spotlights trained on them from the nine lookout towers built into the camp's eight-foot-high walls. There they stood until morning, faced with the threat of a beating if they fell or urinated, a need that many yielded to as the dark hours passed. According to a searing report in the
News Chronicle
of London, dozens of the men were severely beaten that night, twelve of them to death, “their skulls smashed, the eyes of some knocked out, their faces flattened and shapeless.”

When dawn finally broke, my grandfather, who had managed to remain upright throughout the ordeal, was issued the standard graystriped prisoner's uniform, given prisoner number 9961, and assigned to barracks number 42. For the next twenty-five days, he arose every morning, lined up for roll call, and then marched to the work zone outside the barracks area, where he assisted in the manufacture of bricks and shoes. Alex Goldschmidt, son and grandson of equine nobility, was fifty-nine years old.

In the days following the November Pogrom the Nazi government acted swiftly to pin responsibility for the violence and destruction on the victims of the assault. The Jews had brought the righteous wrath of the German
Volk
upon themselves. Since Herschel Grynszpan was a Jew, they reasoned, Jews were responsible for cleaning up the mess that had resulted from the “spontaneous demonstrations.” Field Marshal Hermann Göring decreed that the Jews were to be fined one billion marks as “reparation” for the death of Secretary vom Rath. And the process of Aryanization, the legal theft of Jewish businesses, was to be promptly accelerated.

A few days later, on November 15, the few Jewish children who remained in German public schools were summarily expelled. The official announcement stated: “After the heinous murder in Paris one cannot demand of any German teacher to continue to teach Jewish children. It is also self-evident that it is unbearable for German schoolchildren to sit in the same classroom with Jewish children. Therefore, effective immediately, attendance at German schools is no longer permitted to Jews. They are allowed to attend only Jewish schools. Insofar as this has not yet happened, all Jewish schoolchildren who at this time are still attending a German school must be dismissed.”

Following his outburst at the VDA assembly some weeks before, Helmut must have known that his days at the Altes Gymnasium were numbered. Surely his mother knew as well. Yet on November 14, the day before the official decree that all Jews must be expelled from German schools, Toni sent the following brief note to Headmaster Westhusen: “Herewith I notify you that my son Helmut is leaving school. Kindly send his Leaving Certificate. (signed) Mrs. Toni
Goldschmidt.” In effect, she was saying, “You can't dismiss my son . . . he quits!”

The certificate that Toni requested, the
Abgangszeugnis
, duly arrived in a few days, signed by the headmaster and stamped with an official Nazi seal. It included a final rundown of Helmut's grades, including a 2 in German, 3s in Latin, Greek, French, music, mathematics, and biology, and 4s in physics and handwriting. Amusingly his very poor 5 in physical education had been drawn over and turned into a 6, the worst possible grade. It seems his nemesis, the sadistic physical education teacher, had uttered the last laugh.

A bit more than a month later, on December 19, the staff of the Altes Gymnasium, led by Headmaster Westhusen, gathered for a faculty meeting, the last of that tumultuous year of 1938. The second of eight items on the agenda was “Attendance by Jewish Students.” The recording secretary for the meeting wrote down a single sentence:
Es befindet sich kein Jude mehr auf der Schule
. “We have determined that there are no more Jews in the school.”

In the years since the April boycott of 1933, despite Alex's best efforts, business at the
Mantelhaus
had declined considerably. Money became increasingly tight in the Goldschmidt household. As early as July 6, 1934, Oldenburg's Minister of Churches and Schools had issued a directive to the AGO's headmaster that the salesman Alex Goldschmidt owed 106.80 Reichsmarks in tuition fees for his son Helmut. If those fees were not paid in full by the end of the month, the student would face dismissal from the school.

On August 2, a brief note was sent to the salesman Goldschmidt informing him that, pursuant to the order from the minister dated July 6, his son Helmut was being dismissed from the AGO because his tuition had still not been paid. Alex must have managed to scrape together those 106 marks, as Helmut's tenure at the gymnasium was never interrupted. But the strain on the family's finances must have been acute for the proud businessman to have courted such embarrassment.

In late November 1938, with her husband imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and the
Mantelhaus
shorn of most of its remaining customers, Toni came face to face with impending penury. Desperate for money,
she organized a sale of household items, some of them precious family relics, many of them homely everyday effects, from dishes and spoons to hand towels and small paintings. Most of her neighbors were in the same dire straits and couldn't afford to purchase anything, but there were a few meager sales for which Toni was very grateful.

Then came a final blow. In late September, State Ministry President Carl Röver had sent a directive to the minister of finance and the mayor of Oldenburg regarding the ongoing efforts at
Arisierung
, or the Aryanization of Jewish enterprises. President Röver informed them that it was official policy to run all Aryanization applications through him, but that, given the increased pace of the process, such formalities were becoming unnecessarily cumbersome. He was therefore empowering his economic consultant Hermann Fromm to decide on his own all questions of how to “de-Jew” a desired business. In this manner, the desired objective would be more speedily achieved.

On November 26, Herr Fromm reported to his superior on the case of “the Jew salesman Alex Goldschmidt of 53 Ofenerstrasse”: “His business has been liquidated and I have added his name to the list of Jewish merchants who have been dealt with.” Just like that, my grandfather's store was gone, his inventory confiscated, his livelihood eliminated, his family imperiled, his future bleak.

S
ATURDAY
, M
AY
14, 2011. Rain falls softly but steadily from an iron sky. Hilu apologizes profusely for the weather, insisting that this is Oldenburg's first rainy day in almost seven weeks. We don't mind in the least, as it encourages us to stay abed an extra hour to catch up on the sleep our still jet-lagged bodies are demanding. Amy then goes for a run as I use my laptop computer to read about another improbable victory last night by my Cleveland Indians, who have defied expectations by sprinting out to what will soon become a seven-game lead in the American League's Central Division. It won't last, of course (as all true Cleveland fans know), but why question miracles as they are happening?

At noon, the four of us mount bicycles (Hilu and Roland own several bikes in addition to those they use regularly) and, dressed warmly
against the rain and chill, pedal into Old Town Oldenburg for lunch and to visit some treasured landmarks. We ride past the grand house on Gartenstrasse that was once the Goldschmidt family home and make our way through a portion of the beautiful Schlossgarten, raindrops dripping from its stately elms and linden trees, the surface of its serpentine lake wrinkled by a stiff steady breeze. We park our bikes by the stately Lambertikirche and walk solemnly through its hushed interior, its gloom brightened by dancing candlelight. Roland tells me that shortly after conducting its premiere in Bremen in 1865, Johannes Brahms came to Oldenburg to lead a performance of his masterful German Requiem in the Lambertikirche.

We find a cozy Italian restaurant on Achternstrasse and then, after lunch, walk down the street to the corner of Schüttingstrasse, the site of Alex's
Haus der Mode
and later his
Mantelhaus
. Though I have been here before, on this occasion I do something I've never done: I find the “private entrance” that Alex mentioned in one of his ads and climb the stairs to the apartment that was my family's living quarters in 1913, the year my father was born. On the second floor, there is now a shop selling LPs from the golden age of rock ‘n' roll: the Beatles live in Hamburg, the “Woodstock” soundtrack, and records by the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Pink Floyd. On the third floor, a door, shut and locked on this Saturday, announces that within lies an expert tattoo and body piercing parlor. And above that I find an open door that leads into an attic, with creaky, unfinished planks for a floor and holes in the woodwork that let in the rain and provide a view over gabled roofs and down to the wet, winding streets of the town below.

Comfortably numb, I wander slowly through the attic, under the same timber beams my family would have seen each time they climbed the stairs to rummage through a box in storage. I examine each rough surface for signs of their existence, perhaps initials carved into the wood by my father, uncle, or aunts, but I find nothing tangible. There are ghosts hovering in the dark corners, though, of that I am sure, and I pause before descending the stairs to kiss the door jamb and feel its cool, receptive wooden lips convey my love back through the decades.

That evening, Hilu has arranged a public showing of the short film Farschid Ali Zahedi made some years ago about me and my family. Given the late hour and the unrelenting rain, we decide to drive to the event in our rented Meriva. I park the car on Peterstrasse, very near the site of the Oldenburg synagogue before its destruction on
Kristallnacht
. Today, the site contains the preserved ruins of the temple, a memorial to the city's sad history. As we cross the street to enter the community center where the film is to be shown, I notice that someone has placed a bouquet of red roses on the memorial.

A crowd of perhaps fifty people has gathered to view the film and hear me answer a few questions. Farschid briefly introduces the film, the lights go down, and we see on the screen images of the store I had visited that afternoon, old footage of the Nazi boycott, and an interview Farschid conducted with me in 1999 as I was working on my first book, when so many discoveries about my family's story were still ahead of me. When the lights come back up, I quickly wipe my eyes and stand to take questions, starting off with one of my own: who was that younger man with the full head of hair pretending to be me twelve years ago?