The Nurnberg Laws Become Personal

Grandchildren dearest,

In this excerpt, my father Thomas discusses his father ‘s Jewish heritage and background.

I don’t have much to add, since these are my father’s memories, opinions, and conjectures, but I do still read two things between the lines here. One is a hint of my father’s own anti-Semitism and another is evidence of his elitism, which we discussed in the previous post.

Is it just me? Am I being overly critical of my own father, unfairly viewing him through the lens of the world in 2021 (and we still have so far to go!)? Perhaps.

You will undoubtedly view my words, too, through the lens of the world as you’ll know it as adults.

Here are my father’s memories.

Children usually know more than they let on. In a sea of public antisemitism that surrounded us, I somehow knew that my father was the "dirty Jew" that everyone talked about. I don't know exactly how I knew this, since it was never talked about at home, but kids have a way of picking up on those undercurrents with their intuitive and untainted sixth sense. I was confused, but I never dared ask.

One day in 1939, when I was eleven, my homework consisted of filling out a form which showed my family background on a form that was issued by “The Party” - the NSDAP (or Nazi Party). My father told me to fill in what I could, and to ask him and Mutti about the rest.

I went to my mother first, although there was hardly a question; I knew my grandparents on my mother’s side very well, and birth dates and religion were easy to get from Mother.

When I asked my father for information about his family, however, he told me sit down. I knew something was up.

(Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.)

“As for my parents”, he said, “You know their names: my father was Leberecht, after whom you got your middle name. My mother was Selma -- remember her? You were only five years old when she died."

(Selma with Thomas and cousin Edith, c 1929)

"For them… for their religion, you should put down ‘Mosaic.’”

"What's that?" I asked. 

"It's the same as Hebrew," he answered, not being able to tell me that his parents were Jewish.

That's how much the Nazi propaganda machine that surrounded us and everyone in Germany had twisted the term "Jewish" into a dirty word - even for a Jew!

So that was it. Something was happening.

Everywhere around me, I read and heard that “Jews are bad; they’re the worst.” And now, this? At home? About my own family? I was still confused, but I knew to keep my confusion to myself.

Never again did my father say anything about his family - not about his parents, not about his brothers. I found out why much later, when I was doing research about what it meant to be Jewish under the Nazis. What I found out was this:

There were informers everywhere. One never knew what children might say, and to whom they might talk. If Vati had told us more about his Jewish family, and if we spoke a word of it, who might overhear us? So, the easiest and safest way was to practice “totschweigen,” or “dead silence.” In a way, that was literally true. Father’s parents were both dead, as was Hans, one of his brothers. His other two brothers had left the country for America, so they were incommunicado. If there was anybody else, no one knew. ‘When in doubt,’ my father must have reasoned, ‘do the safest thing.’ And the safest thing at that point was absolute silence. My parents must have expected that we would likely tell our friends that we had Jewish relatives. Kids will say anything that makes them interesting in the eyes of others, and my parents knew that.

I will forever regret not asking more questions about my father’s family. After the war, I spent months trying to dig up information, both here in America and in Köln (Cologne) regarding my father and his Jewish family – where Vati was born, what his childhood was like, anything at all about his early life. I could find absolutely nothing – nothing on the Internet, nothing in synagogues in Germany, nothing in city offices, nothing from anyone still living who knew anything about my family.

As one official in Köln told me, “The Nazis destroyed everything, and what they didn’t find, the bombs got.”

It was an iron curtain for me, impenetrable beyond the names of Leberecht, Selma and Hans along with their dates of birth and death on the grave stones in the Jewish cemetery in Dresden. Not a single photo, nothing about where they came from. Just nothing at all. Did they have a different name once? If so, what was it, and when and why did they change it to Heumann? When and where did my grandparents get married, what were their personalities like, what did they do professionally, when did they move to Dresden, and why? Nothing. Nothing other than a letter from my mother in which she mentions that Father’s family had lived in Germany since the 18th century. Even the information about my father’s childhood, about his schooling, his time in Paris, how he came to his position at the Bayer & Heinze bank in Chemnitz, when and why he converted to Christianity, when and how he found my mother -- nothing but guesses. How did my mother’s family, full of proud German Nationalist officers, feel about one of their family members marrying a Jew? Any papers my father had that would have shed some light on all of these questions must have burned, along with my father and our home in Chemnitz, on March 5, 1945.

My own personal take on my father’s Jewishness (and it is ONLY that, just a guess) goes something like this: There has always been a sizable layer in society -- the merchants, tailors, scribes, leather dealers, textile peddlers, scholars -- who were Jewish, and thus outcasts of society around them. Germany was the only homeland they had ever known. In their youth, they were taught that reading and writing was a central part of life. Studying and arguments about minutiae are in the Jewish blood. Learning texts by heart came naturally to them. My father’s well-sharpened pencil and his eraser (and mine!) were the tools of getting it right and clear, of becoming a proficient in whatever it might be – details of accounting, expertise in German Romanticist Art, or learning the handling of a sailboat, including all the terminology that goes with any and all of it. At the end of the 19th century, The Heumanns in Cologne were brought up as well as they could, with the highest moral standards, I’m sure. My grandfather’s name -- my middle name, “Leberecht, “ which means “live righteously,” speaks for it.

A great number of Jews managed to escape being outcasts, especially in the 18th century, by converting to Christianity. I believe (with no proof) that my father converted when he was about twenty, at the beginning of a career in banking, when he was no more than an office apprentice. The reason was purely secular, not religious. At that time, anti-Semitism in Europe was wide-spread and completely accepted by the population. Hitler did not invent anti-Semitism, but he knew how to take advantage of it by exploiting the fears and resentments that are at the root of anti-Semitism. So often, Jews were simply better at whatever they were doing, from making money, conducting music, or sewing suits. For centuries, the response of many Jews to anti-Semitism was to convert to Christianity, adjusting to the society around them. I would think -- conjecture again, from knowing history -- that many had been Jewish in name only, not in practice, They were not religious people, not before conversion and not after conversion. It’s ironic that it took pressure from the Nazis for many Jews to either re-discover their Jewishness (if they were rebellious), or make them more Christian (in order to become “privileged,” and thus much safer.) That pressure, I think, made many Jews practice Christianity seriously and made their children do the same. Without that pressure I would suspect my father would have lived without much religious practice either way.

My father brought many of the sayings he must have heard as a Jewish child into his Christian adulthood. One of his favorite sayings was “Man muss die Feste feiern wie sie fallen” (festivals are to be celebrated on the day they occur). The origin of this saying didn’t become clear to me until 2011, when I took a class on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It turns out that much of the Book of Leviticus which is represented in several of the surviving sea scrolls contained a set of strict rules on millennia-old practices of religious observances. The date of Yom Kippur is strictly fixed on the Jewish calendar, but since that day (as well as the Sabbath) required fasting, some rabbis altered the date of Yom Kippur when it fell on Friday or Sunday because, they reasoned, it would have been hard for people to fast for two days in a row. Leviticus ruled that practice to be forbidden - therefore, “Festivals must be celebrated as they fall.”

And I had always thought Vati meant, “When ‘they’ declare a holiday, be thankful and observe it!” As in: “When they make Hitler’s birthday a day without school, enjoy it!”

Lifelong Learning indeed!