LETTERS FROM OMI: Carl and Irmgard's Early Years in Köln and Wermelskirchen

Dearest grandchildren,

We continue now with my father’s description of his early years in Chemnitz, Germany, from his birth in September, 1928 until 1933, when Hitler rose to power.

As I’ve been doing throughout, I’ll be “interrupting” Thomas’ Rim of the Volcano narrative to contribute my own experiences, opinions, and perspectives. (For ease, his narrative is indented, while my contributions are left-justified.)

Thomas continues:

“My father was brought up Jewish, the oldest of four brothers.

My grandfather Leberecht died when my father was ten, so it was left to Carl and his mother to raise his three younger brothers in a fatherless family. The second oldest son, Hans, died at the young age of 21. I know almost nothing about him.

We do know that he was buried in the Judische Gemeinde graveyard in Dresden and that his gravestone is located at the "8th row from the back wall” (per my aunt, Thomas’ sister, Ulli’, based on her visit to Dresden in 1998). It is not known how Hans died. Suicide has been mentioned, but not confirmed.

I have tried for years to learn something about Leberecht (whose name I was given as one of my middle names), but I have been utterly unsuccessful in digging up any information on him - where he came from, what he did for a living, why and when he moved to Dresden, when his family came to Germany, with what family name, etc. I have not even been able to find a single picture of him. Any possible documents about him were either destroyed by the Nazis (because he was Jewish) or by the bombs in Köln (Cologne), where my father was born. I only know that he is buried with his wife Selma in the Jewish cemetery in Dresden.

I’ve been utterly unsuccessful too! I’ve been able to obtain names of his parents and even his grandparents and great grandparents, but I haven’t been able to find out anything at all about them!

(I circled the people discussed in this post. It always helps to have a visual, right?)

Here’s a rather telling anecdote about the relationship of my father to his younger brothers William and Edgar: One day, maybe in the 1920s, the three brothers were walking down a street in Berlin. William and Edgar were smoking cigarettes. Edgar, who also had lived briefly in France, had acquired the suave French habit of letting the cigarette dangle out of the corner of his mouth. So my father scolded him: "Edgar, put the cigarette in the center of your mouth, where it belongs!" In other words, ‘Draw on it momentarily and properly, holding it between two fingers, and then bring it to the center of your mouth. Don't keep it hanging there!’ What would passers-by think of them?

I keep looking for this photo on my PC to include here. I swear, I have a photo of the three brothers in their 20s, strutting down the street, cigarettes hanging from their mouths! But now that I think more about it, that “photo” is in my imagination! Dad described this scenario so often and so vividly that I actually thought I had the matching photo!

Yes, Carl Heumann, as I remember him, was an extremely strict, very proper, rule-abiding man. One of the principles that ruled all his actions and behaviors was to "get a good note from the people.” I personally believe that this attitude had a lot to do with why he was personally respected to the end, why he could exploit his position to the limits of legality and why he was spared deportation even when other Jews were taken to the Theresienstadt Concentration camp, even shortly before the end of the war. (More about that later.)

I disagree with my father here. Remember that Carl died when my father was only 16 and that my father adored him. As I mentioned before, my father remained forever Carl’s child, looking for his father’s approval, even from the grave. In a way, I think it’s kind of sweet that my father believed that Carl was spared transport to Theresienstadt because of his desire to “get a good note from the people” (which I think of as part being part suck-up and part bad-ass). We all know, at this point, that no Jew was spared because he was a mensch – even Carl. I believe that Carl was spared because he had a protectorate – and I even have a theory as to who that person was. I’ll dive a bit deeper into that theory later. For now, suffice it to say that Carl being the only Jew left in Chemnitz three months before the end of the war cannot, in my opinion, be attributed to him “getting a good note from the people,” no matter how a good a guy he is.

There are two things I still remember my father saying repeatedly when I was young. One was apparently Goethe’s motto “Wie es auch sei, das Leben, es ist gut.”^{^[1]} I think it was the single most important philosophy that helped him face with confidence and acceptance whatever life threw at him. I quoted it often and used it like a life ring as I experienced my own ups and downs.

Of even more practical use was my father’s advice that one must do whatever is required at any given time and in any given situation to do the very best one can. It not only feels good, but it also goes a long way toward getting “a good note from the people” which, as you remember, was of utmost importance to my father.

In the last years of his life my father often quoted the refrain from a Clemens Brentano poem about a frail old woman who lived in a little cottage in the 1700’s, when Russian and Swedish soldiers maliciously roamed the country. Eine Mauer um uns baue!^{^[2]} the old woman prayed. In the poem, her prayer is answered with a snowstorm that buries her little cottage. In my father’s case, I believe a wall was built around him, or he built it himself. I still do not know to this day what the wall was made of, but it saved him to the end of the war.

Again, I think someone helped Carl build this wall, and I think they worked together to build it – slowly, secretly, and brick by carefully placed brick. Of course there’s no documentation of this happening, but there are some vague pieces of evidence that lead to this possibility. I’ve done some of my own research and connected with some people who agree with me. We’ll discuss this a bit later.

My mother Irmgard came from an old (non-Jewish) family living in the Rhineland north of Köln (Cologne). Her father, Arthur Buddecke, was the CEO of whatever company would take him and give him enough status. He ended up as CEO of a major steel and machine tool factory in Chemnitz after “The Great War” (now called World War I). I believe from Mother’s letters that her parents were already living in Chemnitz when my parents married. My grandfather, Arthur and my father, Carl -- a factory CEO and a banker -- would have common interests.

My brother, Christopher Arthur, was named after our great grandfather Arthur who, it turns out (poor Chris), was an ass. He wasn’t nice to his wife Adele (who everyone adored) and, from what I can tell from some of my grandmother’s and aunt’s letters, he didn’t like having a Jewish son-in-law, at best, and was a Nazi sympathizer, at worst. We’ll leave it at that. For now.

Mother’s ancestors included the founder of a shoe factory in Wermelskirchen, named Eugen Kattwinkel, from whom I received my other middle name. Eugen’s factory is now the city library on Kattwinkel Strasse, and his family’s villa, which they called das Märchenhaus (the fairy tale house), where my mother grew up, is a beloved local retirement home today. My grandmother, Adele Buddecke, wrote a delightful memoir about the Märchenhaus, which I have translated for my American descendants.

There’s enough in that paragraph for another six blog posts! My great grandmother Adele, it turns out, wrote a memoir about growing up in the Märchenhaus and my father lovingly translated that memoir. I’ll include her memoir on this blog, under the tag “Das Märchenhaus (the fairy tale house) in Wermelskirchen.”

Here’s a little teaser, with a quote from Adele’s memoir:

In 1999, my parents (that’s Dad in the red tie and Mom in the white jacket) traveled to Wermelskirchen to visit he Märchenhaus. They were treated like celebrities in the town that still lovingly remembers my father’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. In fact, one of his cousins a few times removed even manages the retirement home in the house that my father’s grandparents built in 1872!