A visit to the ancestors

It’s a Saturday night in November 2009 and a group of Grodzinski cousins has met at Heathrow for a flight to Germany. We’re off on a visit to the Rhineland town of Pfungstadt, some 30 miles south of Frankfurt. Pfungstadt is the birthplace of our grandmother Bertha Jeidel (hereinafter Granny), who came to England in 1908 to marry Abi Grodzinski, one of the founders of the bakery business. She left her family behind and the purpose of our visit is to learn about their lives in Germany and those of the town’s Jewish community in the decades leading up to the Second World War. Jewish communities in Germany are funded by local councils, some of which have developed an interest in the history of their Jewish communities. Pfungstadt’s archivist, Stephanie Goethals, is a particularly devoted example and she has developed a close working relationship with Joni Grodzinski, our family archivist. P f u n g s t a d t ’ s Jewish community was founded in the early 1700s. At one time, Granny’s father, Joseph Jeidel, was its head. The Jeidels were the largest family in the town and they are to feature in an exhibition of its Jewish community which is being put on to mark the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Also, the local school is staging a play about the community from the 1860s until its dispersion in 1939. We began with a visit to the Jewish cemetery in Alsbach, which served Pfungstadt and its satellite communities and where many of our ancestors are buried. The burial plots have been marked on a plan by Wolfgang Roth, one of Stephanie’s colleagues, who helped us to identify several generations of ancestors as far back as the mid-18th century. Many of the gravestones are of red sandstone, a softish material, but even so we were able to identify many of them. It was very moving not only to find so many graves of our relations but also to see how well they had been looked after by the local community. There had been some vandalism recently, but it was minimal – more a few daubings on the cemetery wall than attacks on the graves themselves. In the warm autumn sunshine, the leaves on the trees a golden yellow, we stood in awe at the grave of our greatgreat- great-great-grandfather Loew Jeidel, who died in 1787. The writing on his tomb was still legible. We wondered what he would think of the idea that some 200 years after his death his descendents would come to his grave. None of us could conceive that our descendants might do such a thing for us! We held an Azkarah memorial service and said Kaddish at the grave of Joseph Jeidel, our great-grandfather. There was an interesting outcome to our visit to the cemetery. Wolfgang had invited a journalist, whose report duly appeared in a local paper a few days later. Immediately he was contacted by a 94-year-old lady who said she had played with my aunts Felice and Dolly when they were children in the 1920s and had fond memories of them. When we told Felice about this (she has been living in Jerusalem since 1935) she retorted somewhat acerbically that rather than being friendly, Lieselotte used to run after them in the street, calling them names. Before moving to Pfungstadt, the Jeidels had lived for about 150 years in Eschollbrucken, a sort of twin town, whose mayor had invited us to lunch in the town hall. The mayor made a speech, we responded with one in German and then had a walk around the town – seeing a pair of houses bought by our great-great-grandfather Lazarus Jeidel in the mid-1800s. The exhibition in Pfungstadt was fairly small but, for us, full of family treasures: an Iron Cross won by a cousin in the Great War, a great-aunt’s school report, and a letter written in 1939 on Granny’s behalf by a solicitor in London seeking to arrange exit permits for her mother, a nephew and two of her sisters and brothers-in-law. She succeeded in getting them out, though the last left in August that year, only a few days before war broke out and only after some scares. Moritz Mainzer, one of her brothersin- law, was a successful timber merchant and a leader of the community. During Kristallnacht he was arrested, beaten up and sent to Buchenwald, in those days fortunately only a concentration camp. After some months he was freed. He returned to Pfungstadt but, when he tried to resume business, he was offered two choices: you go to London or you return to Buchenwald! Another exhibit was a framed regimental roll call of the soldiers from Pfungstadt who had fought in the Great War. Above each name was a photo; those of the Jewish soldiers had been removed. We then moved to the partly restored synagogue for the play. The building is down a narrow alleyway. Before the war it was flanked by a paint factory and a barn, whose proprietors, fearful for their properties, saved it from being set on fire. Today, the ceiling has been restored (aquamarine studded with gold stars), as has the mikvah, where Granny must have gone the night before her wedding! The actors were sixth-formers from the local high school and, though they spoke in German, it was pretty easy to follow the story. For us, it was a peculiar and emotional experience. Here were 17-year-olds portraying in their thirties and forties great-aunts and -uncles and other relatives whom we had known in London in their sixties and seventies. The play also brought to life episodes we were aware of in theory but had never been told about: as with so many Holocaust survivors, our relatives never spoke to us about their lives in Germany before they came to live in England. After the play we chatted to the actors, who were curious to learn the fate of those they had portrayed. Warned that we were to be in the audience, they had been very nervous, expecting us to be very critical, and they were very grateful we had enjoyed it so much. In fact, the play turned out to be the highlight of our visit and to witness it in the building where Granny had davened (or at least gone to) every Shabbat and yom tov for 20 years somehow made it even more poignant. It was getting late when we left the shul and it was in the gathering dusk that we visited some of the sites of the town: the Franco-Prussian War memorial, featuring a number of Jeidels, one of whom supplied food and forage to the army, the Mainzer timber yard, still in its pre-war format, and the Jeidel ironmongery store and house, which, though rebuilt, was still recognisable from a 1908 painting given to Granny as a wedding present by her cousin Nathan Jeidel (and which now hangs alongside other family photographs in our ‘rogues’ gallery’). Nathan provides another, if sad, footnote. After a spell in art school in London, he went to Palestine in 1939, leaving his wife behind while he set things up. The War intervened and she was stuck in England. She finally made it to Tel Aviv in 1945 but he died on the day she arrived. The following day we took a tour of Jewish Frankfurt, the most moving part of which was a visit to the medieval cemetery in Battonstrasse, which contains nearly 600 years of graves of the community between the 13th and 19th centuries (though few today are visible). The surrounding wall is memorialised with the names of those Frankfurt Jews who died in the city or were deported during the War. Each name is engraved in black metal on a matchbox-sized rectangle of concrete, embedded symmetrically, into the wall. There are thousands and thousands of boxes, stretching along the wall as far as the eye can see. In the context of six million, tens of thousands doesn’t seem so many but, when you actually see the individual names, even if reduced to only a few square inches of concrete, the immensity of the tragedy is brought home forcefully. And a few of the boxes bore the name Jeidel, showing that not all of the family had been as fortunate as Granny’s immediate relations. Our visit helped us to put flesh on long-dead ancestors. We understand more of their lives in pre-war Germany, of the events that beleaguered them during the 1930s, and the sometimes heroic efforts of their non-Jewish neighbours to protect them from the worst of the atrocities. Sometimes hindsight can be illuminating and, in this case, knowing the fate of our relatives made their stories come alive. It was a worthwhile visit. Emmanuel Grodzinski