Back in Germany

“It was like a bullet to the head,’ Gunter said, thinking back to 9 November 1938, when he was an eight-year-old in Herne, a mining town (now twinned with Wakefield) with a population of about 160,000 and some 70 miles from my mother’s home town of Duisburg. Two days earlier, Gunter’s father – awarded the Iron Cross in the First World War – had been warned of what was to happen ‘spontaneously’ on what came to be known as Kristallnacht by the ‘outraged people’ of Germany! Gunter, his father and brother had entered the magnificent synagogue in Herne, built in 1911 and featured with pride on the front page of the local paper – the same paper that would 27 years later scream out ‘Don’t buy from Jews, buy German’ – and removed the Sefer Torahs, one of which is now in Ramat Gan. My mother’s second cousin, Editha Jank- leowicz, aged six, gazed out of her bedroom window on the evening of 9 November, watching, terrified, the black smoke and flames of the burning synagogue. Soon after began the frantic efforts of parents to at least get their children out of Germany. Editha, an only child, was put on a Kindertransport to Belgium (and, when Belgium fell, on a goods wagon to France, then to Vichy France, then, towards the end of the war, to Cadiz, and then on an old, battered boat to Palestine – a story for another time). Gunter was more fortunate – a Kindertransport to England, ultimately a British citizen, now residing in New York, enjoying what his parents never would – a grandchild. How was the choice made? Who would go and who would stay? Who would live and who would die? Neither Editha nor Gunter had any idea. Both remember the time of parting at the railway station in Herne as if it were yesterday. My mother, Toni Berger, 17 years old and living in Duisburg, was sent out of Germany by her widowed mother early in 1939 in a desperate attempt to obtain visas for her mother, Channah, her sister Lottie and her brother Max. Among the few possessions she was able to take was her pocket-size siddur. 29 January 2010, Herne. Editha (now named Esther), with one of her daughters Irit and one of her grandchildren Carmi; Gunter, his wife and children with two other survivors from Herne; myself, my brother Jeff and 250 or so local dignitaries on a freezing snow-filled day, so symbolic of the hardship of camp life – all witnessed the unveiling of a beautiful memorial to the Jews of Herne who had perished in the Holocaust. A memorial illustrating every name, date and place of death, composed of concrete (mixed to the colour of Jerusalem stone) and glass with a black-slate ramp displaying the names of the camps and ghettos in which millions of Jews and others had died. In the background, the doleful sound of a Yiddish folk song ‘You watch whilst my village burns’ found by Editha and played on trumpet, trombone and tuba drifting into the cold midday air. Editha had fought long and hard to achieve this memorial service. Gunter, now over 80, well over 6ft, upright, spoke. Reliving those days back in 1938, he visibly crumpled. Editha spoke – again her memories of life in Herne. She took out the only photographs she had from her childhood: one as a sixyear- old holding a doll, the other her first day at the Jewish school. Both had been sent by Editha’s parents to my mother in England for safe-keeping and given to Editha by my mother when they found one another at the end of the war by chance. Editha’s speech, a reflection of her very being – having learned as a child how to survive: trust no one, rely on no one – was uncompromising. The speeches at an end and a minute’s silence observed, I took out of my pocket the black, leather-bound siddur – my mother`s siddur – and, after a brief explanation of the journey it had made since 1939, in memory of our uncle Max who did not survive and all the other victims of the Shoah, I and my brother Jeff recited Kaddish from that siddur, back once again in Germany.”