What was left behind
Jews had lived in Germany and Austria since Roman times.
However, they had only been allowed to enter German society fully after the Enlightenment. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Jews made an enormous contribution to German and Austrian cultural and economic life.
Jews were prominent by their success in certain fields, though they formed only a tiny proportion of the overall population. They proved to be loyal and patriotic citizens, fighting in large numbers as German or Austrian soldiers in World War I. They tended to cluster in the cities and also in certain commercial and professional occupations. The assimilated Jews from urban, middle-class backgrounds were often those best equipped to overcome the numerous obstacles to emigration to Britain after 1933.
During the nineteenth century the Jews of Germany and Austria had been granted civil and political rights and had integrated into mainstream society. But in the 1930s a change in political conditions radically altered their situation for the worse. The upheavals following the First World War, the instability of the Weimar Republic and the mass unemployment caused by the Great Depression paved the way for a reactionary backlash and for Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.
The decades of gradual integration into gentile society had made the Jews of the German-speaking lands feel secure in their position, despite anti-Semitic manifestations. The abiding impression left by Jewish home and family life in the period before the Nazi onslaught was its peaceable normality.
Well my father always said that he fought for the Germans in the First World War. He couldn’t see that they would do that to him. Of course they did do it to him.
Ruth Taylor
My memories of Halle are… very small, and very fleeting. I remember going with my grandfather to a farm in order to get milk, because he was very, very observant of kashrut and the milk that you would buy locally was not suitable. I remember going with him when I was about four. I remember when my mother’s younger sister got married in Leipzig because I must have been about three. I was a flower girl. She got home, got married in this big apartment. I was throwing flowers along the way. I think, looking back on what happened, what must have stayed in the back of my mind was the Nazis everywhere…which I think greatly, hugely, hugely frightened me. Because, oh, and I do remember also going on a picnic by the river and lying in the grass looking at the trees with the sky. All beautiful, as you can see, happy, sylvan memories. And then I remember leaving Germany, in 1939. We flew out. And I remember looking down from the plane at the rows of the houses below. And that, on one hand, are basically my memories of Germany.
Eve Kugler
My father believe it or not was born in Auschwitz when it was a tiny little village known for its green background. That is probably why I like trees so much. And he was born in 1898 on the Jewish Easter, Pesach, so he was called Peisach Mendzigusrky.
Fay Shaw
I’m old enough to have been in the German Youth Movement - the Deutscher Republikanischer Pfadfinderbund. You would call that Boy Scouts, if you like, loyally Republican. In some youth movements, Jews were not desired; in others there was no problem. In the Deutscher Republikanischer Pfadfinderbund every third member must have been Jewish, very strong.
Arnold Paucker
In Paks…all children learned some kind of instrument and playing sports. This was very broad-minded, sort of orthodox in a proper sense. You had to be. You lived in a small town with all our Christian neighbours. We were like sister, brothers, we just accepted each other. It was very peaceful. I can only remember nice things for upbringing and non-Jewish neighbours.
Judith Steinberg
The place I was born was very small, almost like a kibbutz, there were 35 inhabitants and they were all Jewish. The only non-Jewish person was the one who looked after the flock. Everybody was issued with a plot of land, because there was plenty of land in Poland, not inhabited. All the inhabitants of that place were farmers. My father acted as the Rabbi there and, he was the shochet [kosher butcher].
Rabbi Jerachmiel Cofnas
My father played the violin and my mother played the piano. Because my father had a married sister in Vienna, my parents, as far as I remember, left about three or four times a year for about a week or ten days to go to Vienna to breathe in the culture there – the theatres, concerts…
Steve Mendelssohn
I was always very popular at school, had lots of friends, who were all non-Jewish of course. We had our secret hideout and the roads in the suburbs were reasonably wide. There was very little traffic. If you saw a motor car once every twenty minutes, that was an event. And because we all had bicycles, we bicycled around in perfect safety. We played robbers and police, on bicycles. But our main activity really was playing football in the streets. And we often broke the neighbours’ windows, for which we used to get a good hiding from our parents because they had to pay for the repair. We also did a lot of scrumping. These houses had lots of fruit trees. It was fantastic.
Steve Mendelssohn
I do remember my auntie’s house a bit, ’cos they had an old-fashioned coach in their garden, which I used to use as a play-room. The type of coach that the queen goes in. Well that’s what they used to use...before they had cars or vans.
Bella Adler
One uncle who was carrying on the business from my mother’s birthplace. They were looking after the land, dealing in cattle and he was a shochet. That was in Munzesheim by Bruchsal in the province of Baden. My family lived there for well over 400– possibly close on 500 years.
Norbert Barrett
In Hockenheim there were just under 30 souls left, when I sort of grew up. The rabbi who looked after us came from Heidelberg and before my Bar Mitzvah, they used to take the Sefer Torah out of the ark. The rabbi said, ‘We’ll put the little Sefer Torah in the corner and call it minyan man!’ We did things like that. Maybe not exactly to the law and the rules, but this is how we did things.
Norbert Barrett
In 1925 …I was very much already interested in the arts generally, in theatre, which was very cheap. The Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus under Dumont was quite outstanding. We had perhaps the best performance of Goethe’s Faust. Technically it was ahead of its time; people came from Berlin to visit it. As far as museums were concerned, modern German Expressionism was very much to the fore. Life was between ‘24 and ‘28 easy, and enjoyable, and fruitful and productive in every respect.
Eric Kaufman
