Unanswered questions and post-war chaos

Dear grandchildren,

At the end of this entry, Thomas introduces a mystery that has not been solved to this day, 76 years later:

Why had Carl, a full Jew, not been deported? Why, after leading the life of a prominent German citizen until he was booted out of his own bank, was he allowed to lead a completely withdrawn life, almost as if living in exile in his own four walls?

I discussed this question with my father many times. I believe that he was truly convinced that Carl was spared because he was such a good person, a man of the very highest ethical and moral standards. This made no sense to me when I heard it and it makes no sense to me today. My father was a rational, intelligent person. He knew that Nazis had no regard for a Jew’s societal standing, nor for a Jew’s impeccable ethical or moral convictions. Dad knew, logically, that Hitler wanted ALL Jews dead – especially the ones who had wealth and societal standing! But somehow, in Dad’s mind - the part of his mind that forever remained Carl’s devoted and faithful young son - Carl was left alone because he was, in his own words, “given a good grade by the people.”

Dad could not have been more wrong, but there was no convincing him – even 70 years after his father’s death – that perhaps Carl had a Nazi protectorate. That would mean that Carl was willing to act nefariously and illegally, and I just don’t think my dad could ever accept that possibility.

I believe that there were two possible people who might have protected Carl – his brother-in-law, Heinz (the same brother who had urged his sister to “divorce the Jew” years before), with whose family little Ulli had lived since her father’s death, and fellow art enthusiast and fellow art museum board member, Waldemar Bellerstedt, the devout Nazi who had met Carl years before the war began (and for whom Carl was even a mentor), who clearly admired Carl, and who insisted in a letter to Rainier written in 1957, after he was released from a Russian gulag, that he had secured a secret apartment for Carl.

This topic deserves an entry of its own, so next,  I will take a break from transcribing The Rim of the Volcano  to focus more on Waldemar Bellerstedt – who he was and the role he played in Carl’s life. I have a few theories of my own!

But first, Thomas’ musings:

And what, we all wondered out loud, had happened to our older brother Rainer? How had he survived the camp and the bombing? Or had he survived at all? Several attempts to send letters to him in München were unsuccessful, which was not surprising since mailing a letter in Germany in 1945 was about as reliable and as fast as dropping a bottle with a message into the ocean.

(It turns out, THIS is where Rainier had been.)

All communication systems had collapsed exactly when they were most needed. Millions of people were displaced and families that had been scattered in all directions were trying desperately to find each other. Prisoners of war returned from Russia, greeted by piles of debris where their homes had been, with no indication as to the whereabouts of previous inhabitants. Millions had fled their homes as the battlefronts approached and the resulting human pandemonium was so chaotic that even the bureaucracy of compulsory registration with the police was no longer functioning.

There was, however, an amazing word-of-mouth communications network. “Have you heard from so-and-so?” “Do you know someone who’s going to Frankfurt who could take a letter?” “Which POW camp were you in? Do you know someone who looks like this picture?”

Rainer was probably trying to reach us via the same tangled web. Would it work?

I visited Nora almost every day. We sat and talked about ourselves, about our future, about the names we were going to give our children (Nora wanted Bärbel – Barbara - just like her mother. I had my mind set on Klaus-Edward — a healthy Anglo-German mix). We went on hour-long walks in the forest and tortured ourselves and each other with unfulfilled longings. “We are not ready, we must wait until we are both mature enough. We have so much to learn!”

The more time we spent together and the more time we spent with Nora’s parents, the more our relationship turned into a family-sanctioned liaison. Although we weren’t officially engaged, we were regarded by family as an openly engaged couple, as it was the proper grown-up thing to do. Nora, probably encouraged by her resolute and revered mama, began to see herself as the successful doctor, the wife of the young man from the good family, the husband who would eventually be able to support his wife in the manner acceptable to both her and to her parents.

Often my visits were cut short by Nora’s self-imposed obligations. Having decided that she will be a great doctor (and soon!), she studied hard to get high school behind her. I would come to see her, bringing a bunch of wildflowers picked in a meadow on the way, or with a book of poetry in my pocket, ready to shower her with my love (as expressed in poems by others), but much to my chagrin, Nora would talk of how she would combine her career with motherhood, how she would have a beautiful wardrobe, and how she would furnish our house. I spoke of my love to Nora; Nora spoke of the role she was going to play in it — in practical terms.

Eventually, I needed to look after my own future. How was I going to finish school? The improvised classes at the Adelsberg school were certainly not the answer. I needed to talk to teachers from my old school. How much credit would they give me for the private lessons I’d had? What grade would I start in? Would I be in my old class? What would my former classmates say? They all, without exception, had been in the Hitler Youth (albeit with greatly varying degrees of enthusiasm), but now would they all be newly converted anti-fascists, or even Communists?

Being German, I knew that the first thing one needs is something official, an affidavit attesting that the bearer is certified to be politically clean and racially impure, that he was a persecuted Jew under the Nazi regime, that he was in a slave labor camp, and that he is not one of those recent converts.

I borrowed the bike from Onkel Heinz and rode to Chemnitz, which was easy because most of the 8 km trip was downhill. It was my first return to town in several weeks, and it became immediately apparent that I had been living in a vacuum — again. Very little of the rubble had been cleared away yet, except where collapsed buildings had blocked streets, but the closer I got to the center of town the more frequent were the façades of ruins that were covered with huge pictures of Lenin, Marx, and Engels, much larger than Hitler’s pictures had ever been, somewhat more heavy-handed in their pictorial message. Surrounding them were immense red banners with slogans that had a faintly 1930’s ring to them: UNITY OF THE PROLETARIAT! STATE OF WORKERS AND PEASANTS! CRUSH THE FASCIST JUNKERS! Gone were the statues of German war heroes, and in their place were blood-red obelisks, made from plywood, draped with red flags and topped by cardboard stars, erected under Russian supervision, bearing the inscription WE SALUTE THE VICTORIOUS RED ARMY! Some of them were already falling apart from last week’s rain.

Surprisingly, in the very center of town, much of the Rathaus was still standing, all of its windows blown out, much of the roof gone, but at least partly usable in the midst of an ocean of destruction. On the third floor I found an office for Victims of Nazism, and without really knowing exactly what I was after, I spent two hours in line with what I realized must all be former inmates like me.

Looking around in the line, I felt that I wasn’t in the best of company. While most of these people just looked ragged and emaciated, some looked rather scary. Besides, they talked more like underworld figures than like liberated political prisoners. It seemed rather incongruous to me that I had to distance myself again. Some of these people now were playing recent resistance fighters against the Nazis, but in reality they had only recently thrown away their Nazi Party buttons. Others undoubtedly were escaped criminals who now found it useful to masquerade as political victims.

To my surprise, I found behind the desk one of the people from my own barrack, a repulsive bully, who had been a loudmouth even in camp. Although we had never spoken to each other in camp, the personal recognition made it easy for me to get my trilingual certificate without a lot of witnesses and formalities, and as long as I got this official identification paper it didn’t bother me much to be greeted with a raised fist and be addressed as “comrade.”

(Certification that Thomas had been a victim of Nazi persecution and that he had been interned at a Nazi labor camp.)

Next stop: Dr. Epping. I found him in high spirits. The apartment house where he lived had not been bombed, he was once again principal of the girls’ high school, the Russians were his occupiers, and, at long last, he could freely and proudly advocate his Social-Democratic ideals. He, too, gave me a certificate about all the private schooling I had received after I had to leave school.

(And here, in addition, is a certificate of “total destruction via bomb” of Thomas’ childhood home in Chemnitz.)

On my return from Chemnitz, I experimented with a travel technique that I would perfect on future trips. Just beyond the hospital, Zschopauer Straße to Adelsberg started its long, steady climb with a short, steep section of road. The Russian gasoline-driven trucks and the few propane-driven cars had no trouble negotiating this short stretch, but the German trucks that had been converted to run on producer gas (generated from wood chips in a big stinking cylinder behind the cab) would invariably sputter to a near halt after a short run-up, and if a bicyclist placed himself just at the right spot, he needed only a short sprint of uphill pedaling to get up to the speed of the coughing truck, hang on with the left hand (the tailgate latch usually made a well-designed handle!) and be pulled up all the way to Adelsberg at a leisurely pace unless, that is, the truck gave up altogether and the driver had to stop halfway up the grade to stoke the wood chips in his smoldering generator.

I visited Dr. Epping and other friends of the family several times during the next few weeks, partly because I was fascinated by Herr Epping’s socialistic enthusiasm and partly because I wanted to find an answer to a nagging question:

How could it be that, in this town of 350,000 people with a formerly sizable Jewish population, my father was one of (I assumed) only a few Jews who had survived? Why had he not been deported? Much of his property had been confiscated, but how did he manage to live in his own house, a house he hardly ever left? Why, after leading the life of a prominent German citizen until he was booted out of his own bank, was he allowed to lead a completely withdrawn life, almost as if living in exile in his own four walls?

Summer, 1945: Adjusting to life under Russian occupation

My dearest grandchildren,

It is almost 100 degrees in Gig Harbor, WA today. Tomorrow is forecast to be about 103, and on Monday the anticipated temperature will be a whopping 109 degrees! The all-time high for the Seattle area is 103 and that has only happened twice in history. Clearly, climate change is a real thing and I shudder to think what kind of world we are leaving for you. I want to apologize for my entire generation – and those before me – for leaving you such a mess to clean up.

I can only imagine that in the summer of 1945, many Germans asked what kind of world they were leaving for their own children and grandchildren. Germany was in ruins, German infrastructure was in tatters, and German citizens were starving. The future must have looked bleak, indeed, and I’m sure many adults wanted to apologize on behalf of their entire generation for leaving their children such a mess to clean up. Literally.

My father speaks in this post about severe food and water shortages and soup made from potato peels in water because no other food could be secured. He speaks of being lucky enough to secure water in a pail and then spending hours heating it over a flicker of a flame because fuel was so scarce.

Dad was just 17 in 1945. My American kids were going to the senior prom at 17, applying for college, enjoying their independence at friends’ parties, and looking forward to a long, prosperous, and secure life. But Thomas was just looking at surviving another day. Can you imagine? Food, water, and a roof over his head – those were his concerns at 17.

In the summer of 1945, we began the process of adjusting to life under Russian occupation.

The initial disappointment over not being liberated, but rather very much occupied, soon gave way to a new resignation. The political conditions were pretty much unchanged; only the polarity was reversed. What had been the far right had flipped to the far left. Now, instead of Bolsheviks being the bad guys, it was the Junkers, the aristocratic landowners. They hardly existed any more in 1945, especially not in Saxony, but they provided a good target. In order to build a new system, like a “Workers’ and Peasants’ State,” one has to provide an enemy. Besides, the Junkers were the best rationale for the land reform in which every land holding, even a modest farm, was classified as a “Junker’s estate” and was nationalized and made a part of a collective farm.

It wasn’t entirely unrealistic of the Russians to expect that in Chemnitz, of all places, Communist ideas would find fertile ground. Chemnitz had never been very sophisticated, but rather was a busy smokestack town, a center of machine tool and textile industries - exactly the reason my grandparents and father had settled there as a banker.

It was the kind of place where the proud emotion of socialism runs deep. That is why of all German cities, Chemnitz would eventually be picked to have its name changed to “Karl-Marx-Stadt.” Not because Chemnitz ever had anything to do with Karl Marx, but rather that it was considered a worthy place for that name of honor.

Chemnitz seems to have always been a politically charged city. In August 2018, less than a year after my amazing trip to Chemnitz, riots broke out there after a German citizen was killed by Iraqi and Syrian immigrants. In response, mass protests against immigration were ignited by groups of German civilians. Many were not surprised that this happened in Chemnitz where right-wing German nationalists are especially prevalent. In fact, protests to “denounce immigrants” apparently still happen in Chemnitz now, on a weekly basis.

Dad never spoke of Chemnitz in glowing terms. I wonder what he’d think of it now. Hopefully he’d denounce the strong anti-immigrant movement there now – though, to be honest, I’m just not absolutely sure.

(But in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 76% of the inhabitants voted to change the name back to Chemnitz!)

Amazingly, even under the “reversed political polarity,” German bureaucracy survived - and even flourished - in Russian-occupied Chemnitz. That’s how it was designed. The procedures and the paperwork of the highly efficient Nazi machine remained essentially the same, and in fact not much different from pre-Nazi Germany. The most visible difference was that on the endless stamps, seals, and forms, the Reichsadler (an eagle with a swastika in its claws, now called Pleitegeier — “bankruptcy vulture”!) was now obsolete. The civil servants who staffed the bureaucratic offices were not important enough to be removed, and the new bosses - now likely to be survivors of concentration camps rather than, as before, Nazis too old to be in the army - were glad to rely on the routines entrenched in the bureaucracy to provide a semblance of order in the chaos.

Of course, even red tape had to be adjusted. Instead of specific ration cards for specific foods — fats, meat, bread, etc. — there were now cards with numbers only. Depending on local supply, each coupon had a declared value, publicized on the Bürgermeister’s bulletin board, and from there by word of mouth. On Friday, for example, coupon “June E-4” would be good for 250 grams of brown sugar or molasses and “K-3” — only children got it — would buy a liter of milk. When word got out, members of the household (usually children) would take turns waiting for the store to open, and those who were not in line by 6 AM were often left holding worthless ration coupons because the supply had run out.

The main staple, the pillar of existence, was the potato. Potatoes were served in every conceivable form (and in some barely conceivable forms).

The recipe for Fitzfädelsuppe (loosely translatable as “can-of-worms soup”), the staple, went like this:

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add salt. Grate three raw potatoes into the boiling water, using a grater to make long strings. When strings are done, serve.

Or another favorite — potato pancakes:

Press out grated potatoes through a cloth. Collect the settled starch on the bottom of the liquid for soup. Moisten the pan with Ersatzkaffee and spread the dry grated potatoes on it. Fry.

With recipes like this, no one needed to spend long hours preparing a family meal. What took the time and effort was procuring the ingredients.

Starting with the water. Since some of the water reservoirs and much of the supply routes were destroyed, water was a very serious problem and a rare commodity. Luckily, Försterstraße had its own deep well shaft, a leftover from the days when this suburb had been a farm. Luckier still, it was located right across the street from our house. Several times a day, I would take the bucket with a long rope to get water. The well was deep, and there was a trick to filling the bucket: you had to leave the rope completely slack, then drop the bucket upside-down, all the way down the center of the shaft. If it hit the wall or the rope got tangled, it would turn right-side-up and would end up floating helplessly on the water, so you’d have to start all over again. Once carried home, the drinking water had to be boiled, of course, which easily could take several hours because if there was gas at all, the pressure was usually so low that there was hardly a flame.

The ration cards, too, were not always free; often they were issued only in exchange for performing community service. There was virtually no farm machinery available due to the complete lack of fuel, and the only field help available to farmers were undernourished horses and oxen or equally starved people from the community, pressed into service by conscription.

In the city itself, the main chore in exchange for ration cards was brick cleaning - clearing away the unimaginable mountains of rubble (almost five million cubic yards of it) by separating remnants of burned-out houses — whole city blocks of multi-story apartment houses — into cleaned, reusable bricks in one pile and unusable rubble in another. It seemed that, for months on end half the population did nothing else.

In researching this and looking for an applicable photo, I learned that much of this work was done by women – “Trummerfrauen,” or “rubble women”!

        

 

And here is a whole library of 7,348 photos of Germany in 1946, portraying, in ways words alone never could, the struggles my father speaks of here.

In the village center of Adelsberg, there was a completely intact school building. Parents of the children of Adelsberg arranged for two hours per day of instruction in German, Math, and French. Nora and I felt rather sheepish sitting together in a classroom again, convinced that it was somehow beneath our dignity to be back to such adolescent pursuits as learning vocabulary after all the growing up we had done together. But actually, I rather enjoyed it. I had not been in a classroom for three years, and just being an accepted member of a class again made up for everything else.

One afternoon on the way home from school, the world had a strangeness about it that took us a few moments to understand. The sky was a deep, uniform blue, by all appearances it was a hot midsummer afternoon, except that the sun felt cool, and its light was strangely dimmed, like on a summer day when the sun suddenly disappears behind a flying cloud, but there were no clouds in the sky. Being without newspaper or radio, we did not know that there would be a solar eclipse that day. It was the first one I had ever seen.

Not much later, there was some confusing news: the Americans had dropped some kind of super-bomb on Japan which, it was said, reduced an entire city to nothingness in one instant. It was called an “atomic” bomb.

“Oh my God!” Onkel Heinz exclaimed as he heard it. “Now we are all done for — this is it!” And in a mixture of a then-popular science fiction book called “Atomic Weight 500,” his own partially-digested knowledge of physics, and a mistrust of Americans, he proceeded to predict what will happen next: “Now the radioactivity is going to sink down into the water table, and from there it will spread in a chain reaction to every drop of water in the world through the moisture in the soil, through all the oceans, and up all the rivers, right up into our own well across the street. Now we’ve had it!” And he paced back and forth, hands clutched behind his back, his forehead in deep furrows.

Yes, in 1945 people must have been pretty sure the world was coming to an end. Most of Germany was completely destroyed, other European countries suffered major destruction as well, and now two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had been completely leveled. Millions of people had been killed in all these acts of war. Would anything ever feel normal and whole again?

Thomas, the hopeless romantic

Dearest grandchildren,

Your great grandfather Thomas was a hopeless romantic!

I hadn’t realized when I first read his book, The Rim of the Volcano, how much sappy (sorry, Dad!) romance he wrote about. Surely that’s because I skipped over all those parts back then! But I can’t skip over them now because I promised Dad I would tell the whole story, and that means reading and editing all the schmaltz!

So here you go.

Warm days and peace were back in Germany. In Adelsberg at the Buddeckes’ house, nine people squeezed into a house designed for three, but it was a house, undamaged by bombs or shells. No matter what hardships would await us, peace was the pervading reality now, and summer added some luster. As the realization that we really had escaped alive took hold, timid smiles returned to the gray and fallen faces of people who had worried and cried and feared too much. No other feeling on earth could quite match the elation of knowing that the war was over and peace had arrived. There would be no more bombs and hope could take hold again.

The meter-thick brick wall outside the windows of the basement bomb shelter needed to be dismantled, and Onkel Heinz had no trouble finding volunteers. The whole family worked together. Onkel Heinz and I chiseled the bricks from the wall, and Tante Gert, Ulli, and Gaby hammered and chipped off the old mortar and stacked the newly reclaimed bricks for a later use. Perhaps they could even be bartered for bacon, or a pair of shoes, or bicycle tires.

The basement was returned to its civilian use. No longer would a basement shelter need to serve as a livable space during air raids or, if the house were not habitable, a semi-permanent “home.” Like a groundhog peeking out of its burrow, Germany came out of its basement, “by the skin of our teeth.” Beds, blankets, and candleholders were carried back upstairs, and the fire buckets were returned to the basement, where they belonged.

During the war, a hole had been broken into the firewall between the Buddecke’s basement the Werner’s basement next door to create an emergency exit for each family. Now it was time to rebuild the firewall. I was assigned the job of filling up the hole with bricks — there was no mortar.

What if Gisela, my love from what now felt like so long ago (before I knew of the real love I had discovered with Nora) happened to go to the basement while I was working there? I knew I would have had to tell her about Nora, but I wasn’t ready to face her. Not yet. My own thoughts shocked and even angered me. How could I regard Gisela, who had so recently meant so much to me, in such sober terms?

To my relief Gisela did not show up that day. But it wasn’t possible to avoid her for long. The next morning I saw her in the garden. Although I had no idea of what I would say to her, I called out to her, and we met on the path behind our gardens.

There was no embrace, only a handshake and an awkward exchange of meaningless questions that required no answers. I found out that Gisela had already heard (from Ulli and Gaby, no doubt) enough about Nora to draw some painful conclusions, and all I had to do was confirm what she already knew.

“It’s all so different,” was all I could say by way of explanation or apology. Gisela said she understood.

Or did she? Did she pretend? She, who was so innocent, what did she know of carnal desires? I was so convinced that I now really knew what love meant. The summer of 1944 had been ours, Gisela’s and mine, our very own. It wasn’t without a certain amount of bragging that I now could speak of it in a condescending tone designed to show Gisela how much I had grown beyond that kind of thing.

We walked slowly down the path, being careful not to touch each other and saying very little. Oh yes, Gisela was as lovely as ever, I thought, but what a sweet, innocent child!

Suddenly she stopped and turned. She looked me straight in the eye, and shot out the one question that included all previous questions and precluded all future ones: “And what about the 8th of August?”

I had feared she would ask that. The 8th of August. Almost a year ago now — Augustusburg — the smell of summer and the closeness of Gisela’s hair… the broken shade of the birch tree… her blue summer dress… the blades of grass and wildflowers on both sides of her fresh face… her eyes darting back and forth between my eyes… her hand in my hair… sounds of bees and a distant train. It was so long ago. It was childhood, I thought. We had no right then to promise to wait for each other.

I did not answer Gisela’s question. I never answered it that day, nor all that summer, nor the next summer. I did not answer her, nor did I answer myself. The question sank to the bottom of my consciousness, was forgotten, neglected, pushed back down into the dark whenever it gently reminded me that it needed to be answered. For two years it lay hidden, alive, wounded but growing stronger all the time, until the spring of 1947 when ...

But that’s the story of another year.

Read on, dear grandchildren. You’ll never guess what happened in 1947!

Love and war through the eyes of a no-longer-innocent young man

Dearest grandchildren,

In this excerpt, Thomas describes the transition from the carefree innocence of a boy to the ominous obligations of a young man.

As I read my father’s description of his first real sexual encounter with Nora as a “madonna,” I had two immediate responses. My first response, as his daughter, is the proverbial childish, “Ew, Dad…!”

But that quickly gives way to an appreciation of my father as a deep romantic. Later in his life we spoke of him – and he also spoke of himself – as “an engineer with the soul of a poet.” And yes, he wrote a lot of poetry in his early adulthood – unfortunately, almost all of it in German. (Perhaps I’ll need to explore those more?!) I can only imagine that my father longed for the passionate intensity of those days with Nora for the rest of his life. Not only had he fallen deeply and intensely in love, he had experienced this love during some of the most tumultuous and intense weeks and months in history!  He alludes to this ongoing longing in some of his later writing, which I will hopefully include on this blog sometime in the future.

My second response is the rekindling of a memory from my own life, in which my father seemed to recognize my own transformation from innocence to womanhood.

I had come home for Thanksgiving break in fall of 1975, during my freshman year of college at UC Santa Barbara. Like my father decades before, I had recently fallen madly in love. And like my father, I had experienced my own “loss of innocence.” As we sat down for dinner that evening, my father insisted that something about me looked different – that my eyes had “lost their innocence.” He wasn’t teasing or belittling me, just pointing out a subtlety that he had noticed. I was embarrassed… but also impressed. Was my father really this perceptive and sensitive? It was only many decades later, when I read my father’s description of his sexual awakening with Nora that I put two and two together.

In looking for photos for my father’s description of his and Ben’s encounter with Russians during the final days of the war, I came upon many descriptions (and photos) of the horrendous atrocities that were committed by the Russians upon the Germans. I cannot even fathom what life must have been like during those months – and even during the first two years in Germany after the war ended. But certainly, the saying “Enjoy the war; peace will be hell!” came to be true.

My father’s words continue:

By day, the foursome of Nora and me, and Ben and Ulli usually stayed together in Wernsdorf. The world now seemed safe enough again to risk short excursions away from the inn, just to leave the confinement and the eyes of the Gasthaus for a while. Nora and I would have liked to have gone alone, but Ben and Ulli usually tagged along. We tried to buy or barter food from the surrounding farmers. After the “Russian breakfast” we knew that somewhere around here there were eggs to be had. And bacon!

Nora and I encouraged our close-knit double-pairing of the two brother-sister couples, as it had a particularly romantic appeal. But Nora and I, being older and wiser in the understanding of love (or so we thought), looked down on the puppy love of our younger siblings with good-natured contempt. How could those two kids, mere little sister and brother, possibly have any inkling of the depth of emotion and passion we two were feeling for each other? We were sure that we had uniquely discovered a love that was much deeper and more profound than the “love” that other people talked about.

One late evening that week, we had lost all sense of time, growing ever bolder and closer in the search to discover each other. When the time had come to reasonably part for the rest of the night, Nora said: “Just wait a couple of minutes — I’ll kiss you good-night when I come back,” and when she returned, wearing her long blue robe, her arms not in the sleeves, but holding the robe by the collar from the inside, I got up, cradled her face in my hands and kissed her, and as we kissed I could feel the robe slipping from her shoulders and fall to the floor. There she stood in the light of the candle, with a small smile playing around her lips, and I stood looking at her, curious at first, then more and more bewildered. It was the first time I had seen a woman’s body, and images flashed through my mind, images of drawings and paintings from my father’s art collection. So women really looked like that, with full round breasts and wide hips, and although my hands had touched the body in front of me, to have my eyes see it as one continuous, unified picture startled and unsettled me deeply. What took me aback, almost in disbelief, was that by the simple act of revealing a little more of her body than she did every day in her bathing suit, the impish, sometimes flippant girl Nora had been transformed into a woman, like the women in the pictures, mysterious somehow, almost solemn, and even the familiar smile in her face had lost all girlishness, all playfulness, and had assumed a new dignity. Almost like a madonna, I thought for a split-second. No, not like the madonnas I had seen, more like the faces of Eve in Father’s art collection, always inseparably linked with the image of an apple and a snake. It occurred to me that this sudden revelation must be what the Bible meant when it said ‘...and their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked.’

(Venus – Sandro Botticelli)   

One day many years later, when I looked back trying to remember whether there was one instant in my life when I turned from a boy to a man, I recognized the precise moment. It wasn’t the time I had to work with the men in the labor camp, nor was it the hour when I buried my father. It was when both the contrast and the unity of “woman,” the every-day one and the naked one, first revealed itself to me.

Word had reached Wernsdorf that the US Army, which indeed had originally taken Chemnitz, had pulled out again, and the Russians had followed on their heels and had occupied the town. And it seemed that rail service (of sorts) had been reestablished to the point where maybe one train per day would run on the small local line from the Erzgebirge through the foothills to the vicinity of Chemnitz. No train could travel to the Hauptbahnhof in Chemnitz, though, as those tracks had been destroyed.

A council was held at the Wernsdorf Gasthaus and it was decided that Ben and I should try to get to Chemnitz in a few days, or rather to the Adelsberg suburb, to assess the situation. After so many weeks of being incommunicado in the seclusion of Wernsdorf, everyone who was from Adelsberg — which was most of us — was dying for a report on how their homes were faring.

Ben and I set out very early in the morning for the train station located a half-hour walk downhill from the Gasthaus, but it wasn’t until mid-morning that the little train came chugging along. It looked just like little local trains had always looked, except that now two blood-red flags were attached to the locomotive, extending up and out on each side, like wings on an angel of revolution. It took hours of stop-and-go, wait, crawl, and wait some more, to travel the 40 km to the end of the line where a huge bomb crater in the tracks put an end to the journey. At that point, we disembarked and began to walk the rest of the way.

There were Russians all over the place, but they didn’t bother us until, when we were almost home, two Russian officers motioned us over to one of the wealthy-looking villas that apparently had been commandeered as living quarters. We first tried to ignore them, but that didn’t work, and after the Russians tried to make us understand with gestures that they needed someone to sweep and chop wood, Ben and I tried valiantly to put up an argument which, with not a single word of language common to arguer and arguee, proved to be a rather hopeless endeavor. French didn’t work, and neither did English. A hastily drawn sketch of a locomotive and a watch face (“we don’t have time; we have a train to catch!”) was either incomprehensible to the Russians or they had simply lost patience. In any case, we two scouts who had been sent out to explore the territory ended up spending the rest of the afternoon chopping wood, carrying coal upstairs, and sweeping the house that once belonged an obviously well-to-do family but was now occupied by a bunch of rather good-natured Russian officers who did not see why they, the victors, should have to chop wood while two strong bourgeois boys of the defeated country had obviously nothing better to do than to ride railroad trains.

It was dark by the time we were dismissed and finally reached the Buddecke’s’ house where, much to our relief, no Russian officers had settled in. The two refugee families who lived there welcomed us and put us up for the night. The next morning, we found a similarly happy situation at the Jaeger’s home and returned to Wernsdorf like the dove with the olive branch who returned to Noah: “Leave your ark, oh people of Adelsberg, and return to your homes, for the flood is receding and there is peace in the land!”

On the Precipice–Who would liberate Chemnitz, the Russians or the Americans ?

Dearest grandchildren,

Look at the date of today’s entry. My last entry of Thomas’ writings was on February 25th, over three months ago.

As I mentioned in my last post, I took a break to have a prophylactic surgery that would result in a 3 - 5% risk of breast cancer instead of an 80+% chance of breast cancer, due to my inherited (from whom, though – Dad or Mom? I still don’t know!) BRCA2 gene mutation. I’m happy to be back, but there is a chance I’ll need to take another break for a few weeks after my next surgery (reconstruction), which will occur this Friday. I’ll try to not stay away so long this time.

In today’s entry, Thomas describes an encounter with soldiers from the Red (Russian) Army. As I edited this entry for grammar and punctuation, as I’ve edited all Dad’s writings, I had to resist the temptation to edit my father’s obvious xenophobia.

My father was a kind, loving, and devoutly moral man. But if I am to be honest with you and with myself, I must acknowledge the fact that Thomas was also a xenophobe, an elitist, and a bigot. My guess is that he learned these attitudes from his parents and from the elite German society of his younger childhood.

To a certain extent, Dad carried these attitudes with him throughout his life. It usually manifested as “educational elitism” (‘we’re better than them because we’re more educated than them’), but Thomas’ prejudice is something I still grapple with – especially during the current “Black Lives Matter” movement. What would my father have made of this critical cultural shift? In spite of living in hyper-liberal Berkeley, CA during the tumultuous 1960s, when my mother was a student at Cal and my brother participated in the creation of People’s Park, I believe that my father remained a cultural, racial, and intellectual elitist. I challenged him on some of his attitudes during the last decade of his life, but my challenge was always met with some defiance and defensiveness – ‘but some people ARE better than others!’

I adored so very much about my father, but I did not adore his elitism and bigotry.

Again, Thomas writes about Nora, his first great love, with whom he experienced “commotions and emotions that few people are privileged to experience simultaneously, with such intensity, and so closely intertwined.” I believe that, throughout the rest of his life, Thomas yearned for the return of such emotional intensity, and that he never really found it again. Not with my mother, not with his life in America, and not within himself.

But could anything ever match the intensity of a half-Jew experiencing first love during the most turbulent first months of 1945 in Nazi Germany?!

Once again, here is Thomas’ story:

 

The time had come for Nora and me to rejoin the real world.

We went downstairs where everyone was now assembled in the “ward,” each in a costume, ready to play their assigned roles, if needed. The long column of military troops had dwindled to intermittent small groups of soldiers who rumbled through and quickly disappeared. When everything was quiet for a while, one could venture outside to see whether the world had changed, now that we were on the other side of the front.

But what front? At that point, our world hadn’t yet changed. The sun was warming up for another fine spring day and dogs were still running in pairs along the road, sniffing here and there. Only the sparrows were more excited than normal because of the unexpected feast the army horses had left behind for them.

The next contingent of the Red Army was more of an unorganized band than an army patrol. We all scrambled inside again and braced ourselves for whatever would happen next. Suddenly the front door flew open and two young Russian soldiers stood firmly, submachine guns drawn and at the ready. “STOP!” one of them shouted as he saw the medical staff inside, probably larger than he had expected. Our arms instinctively flew up and stayed there while the two Russian soldiers inspected the “hospital ward,” keeping their eyes solidly on us as they moved about and yelling at each other – and us - in Russian. Were they buying into our ruse? What if they weren’t?

(https://www.reddit.com/r/wwiipics/comments/k539of/russian_soldiers_outside_the_reichstag_berlin/)

While one soldier intentionally intimidated us with his submachine gun, the other soldier apparently had found what they were looking for - the kitchen.

“Yitsa!” he commanded repeatedly, drawing blank stares from his audience. Then they motioned the innkeeper and grandma Wacker, who were dressed up as cooks, to the kitchen, put a huge frying pan on the stove and left no doubt that they wanted it filled, and NOW! The cooks sprang into action on command, slicing boiled potatoes into the frying pan, then cutting some of the gooey bread, and spreading margarine on it.

“Nyet” said one soldiers, dumping the contents of the frying pan on the floor and demanded “Yitsa!” But there were no yitsa - no eggs, keine Eier by any name. Eggs had hardly been seen at all in the village for weeks, though everyone knew that some of the farmers had some chicken that must be laying eggs.

In clear disgust, the two soldiers left - but not for long. They quickly returned, accompanied by some of their comrades, one of whom carried a whole load of eggs, two or maybe three dozen of them, in a sling made from the bottom of his uniform shirt. It was an unbelievable sight. Nobody had seen such a mass of eggs since the beginning of the war six years ago! Where had the eggs been all this time? Another soldier was carrying an equally nonexistent treasure - a whole slab of bacon! We watched in fascination as all the eggs went into the frying pan, accompanied by big chunks of bacon. As the Russian rolled up his sleeves, he proudly displayed two arms full of wrist watches all the way up to the elbows. And several of the watches were women’s.

This sight, and the realization of where the watches must have come from and how they must have found their way onto this Russian peasant’s arms, was a tremendous shock. Sure, everybody had heard it over many years of Nazi propaganda: Russians steal, plunder, and rape their way across the subdued land. But we had not believed it, dismissing it as just more war rhetoric to whip the people into a will to fight. Could it be that, for once, the Nazis had only been exaggerating a truth? Here it was, right before our eyes, damning evidence and with it, a profound disappointment in what we hoped would be an army of liberators. We ardently wished that this would not be the wave of the future. We’d hoped that the Americans or, even better, the British would be our occupation army in Chemnitz, that the American unit we saw yesterday was not a mirage, but the harbingers of a more civilized reality.

I studied the cook carefully. His uniform jacket — a smock rather than a jacket, the bottom hanging loosely over the pants, held with a belt on the outside — was dirty, almost grimy. It could have been a farmer’s shirt had it not been for the huge epaulettes. His helmet was pushed back into his muscular neck, revealing a low forehead and a messy bush of bright blond hair, so light that even in its present state of weeks of neglect it looked like bleached straw. He had large, healthy-looking teeth, displayed not in a smile, not laughter, but an empty grin as he joked with his comrades. He did not look brutal, just coarse and primitive, almost like a little boy, a street urchin who was up to some childish mischief.

The Americans we’d seen yesterday had looked like a well-disciplined, efficient military unit. By contrast, the Russian contingent had the frightening look of the steppes of Central Asia, there was something of Djinghis-Khan, something of the 30-Years’ War about them. Not a single word, not a sound of what they spoke, sounded in any way familiar or related to a ‘civilized’ language. Did the refugees who streamed west ahead of the approaching Red Army know something about the Russians that our group of intelligent people, living in voluntary semi-underground internal exile, did not know?

The spectacle of the Red Army band was repeated a few more times in the next few days, with some variations. For the most part, the soldiers were so scared of VD that they bought the hospital story, or at least didn’t want to take the chance of testing it. The primitive, child-like, bewilderingly foreign character of these people became particularly clear late one night when an already half-drunk gang demanded shelter for the night. Luckily, they had only seen the old innkeeper, and none of the women. In the morning, the only damage was a hopelessly drunk innkeeper, who was not used to the vodka they poured into him, a broken chair, and a few broken glasses and bottles.

The next morning, Nora, Ben, and I wondered aloud whether the Nazi’s stories about the Americans were equally true.

“Remember,” I asked, “The movie called Rund um die Freiheitsstatue^[1]?”

“I sure do,” said Nora. “I thought it was very funny, the wrestling match where they were smeared with lard, or when they swallowed the live goldfish!”

“That’s not what I mean,” I replied. “I mean the slaves they showed, the slums, the cruelties, the poverty, the vulgarity of Hollywood — do you believe all that?”

“Oh, it may be true. It probably exists somewhere, but that can’t be the whole story of America.”

“What is democracy anyway?” Ben wondered. “It can’t be all like that movie.”

Neither Nora nor I had an answer. The only connection in which we had ever heard the word “democratic” was in phrases like die demokratischen Verbrecher im Weißen Haus^[2] , or the Jewish-democratic world conspiracy.

“My Dad was in America before the war,’ Ben said. “From what he told me, I guess “democracy” just means that people can basically do what they want.”

And that - the absolute antithesis of the propaganda of the dictatorship we had known all our lives - was the most meaningful definition we three children of Nazi propaganda could muster - or, for that matter, would understand in regard to our future for quite a while, at least until the next definition came along: communism under the label of ‘Volksdemokratie.’

1945 had been a year of death and rebirth, a year of ferment. Nor and I experienced commotions and emotions that few people are privileged to experience simultaneously, with such intensity, and so closely intertwined. We had survived for the time being and, during the critical hours of that very survival, had experienced the birth of a new romance that grew deeper and more passionate as the weeks went on.

---

^[1] “All Around the Statue of Liberty”

^[2] “The democratic criminals in the White House”

Omi has the BRCA2 gene mutation

Dearest grandchildren,

After adding stories from my father’s writings to this blog almost every day for many months, I recently took a three-month break - and the reason for this break might be important to you someday.

In February, 2020, I discovered that I have the BRCA2 gene mutation (specifically: C3648dup (p.Arg1217), Alternate name: g32912140(duo, BIC:R1217X), Transcript: ENST00000544455, Heterozygous). I don’t know whether I inherited this gene mutation from my father who, as we learned, was an Ashkenazi Jew, or from my mother, who died of ovarian cancer. Both point to a possible BRCA2 gene mutation. Until and unless more of my relatives decide to undergo genetic testing, we won’t know the answer to that question.

I didn’t need to immediately know which parent I inherited the mutation from, but I did need to know more about my chances of getting a variety of cancers, especially breast cancer. After Mom’s death of ovarian cancer in 2004, I monitored carefully and, once I was through menopause, had a salpingo-oophorectomy (removal of Fallopian tubes and ovaries) in 2014. I’d already had a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) in 1993, due to fibroids. Because I’d already had these procedures, my risk of ovarian cancer was very low.

But what about my risk of breast cancer? Did any of my direct ancestors have breast cancer?

Neither my mother nor any of her three sisters had breast cancer… that we know of. But I don’t have access to full factual information, so I can’t know this for certain.

My father had one sister, Ulli, who is still alive today (though with severe dementia/Alzheimer's), never having been diagnosed with breast cancer. As we know, Irmgard, my father’s mother, died of a suspected brain tumor. But in her letters to her mother she mentions a “tight feeling in my breast” as one of her symptoms. Could she have died of metastatic breast cancer?  We will never know, but my genetic counselor did recommend that I consider the possibility in deciding which action, if any, to take to mitigate my own risk for cancer.

Since elective surgeries were cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic, I had time to decide whether or not to have a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy (removal of both healthy breasts to prevent future breast cancer). I’d been monitoring closely since discovering I had the BRCA2 gene mutation, with mammograms and breast MRIs, alternating between the two every six months. At my last mammogram in September, 2020, the tech mentioned that I could find results of the test on the web portal – “unless it’s not good, in which case you’ll get a call from your doctor.”

The next day, my doctor called me. I missed the call and it took me five harrowing hours to talk to my doctor. At the end of those five hours I was absolutely certain that I had breast cancer and I’d wished I had already had the mastectomy. It turns out that my doctor had called to personally give me the all-clear, but after my reaction, I knew what I had to do.

On March 3, 2021, I had the prophylactic bilateral mastectomy. The recovery was tougher than I’d imagined, but I have not regretted my decision once, not even for a second.

I’ll be having another (easier) surgery on June 11th – removal of the rock-hard flying saucers (expanders), insertion of implants, and some fat grafting. It won’t be fun, but this whole thing is a process and a journey that will take months to complete.

My boobs were very possibly trying to kill me, so they had to go. I want to be around to play with you. my dear grandchildren, and to watch you grow up. Knowledge is power and I decided to use that power!

Hopefully, by the time you’re old enough to worry about what gene mutations you might have inherited (Papa/Tom has the ATM gene mutation, so that’s another one you need to know about), science will have found ways far less drastic than a mastectomy or hysterectomy to address the situation. But I want you to know what I know NOW and how important it is for me to have a future with YOU.

Because I love you!

Next time we’ll get back to my father’s story, I promise.

Carl, Thomas, and I are featured guests for the Third International Day of Provenance Research, 2021!

Dearest grandchildren,

A few weeks ago, I was interviewed for the International Day of Provenance Research which highlights the social and academic relevance of provenance research on an international scale. In that interview, I spoke about your great-grandfather, Thomas (my father) and your great-great grandfather, Carl (my grandfather), whose art collection is still quite relevant today.

The article (in German), along with the audio file of my interview (in English) can be found HERE:

https://www.lenbachhaus.de/blog/erinnerung-leben-der-kunstsammler-carl-heumann-und-seine-familie-heute

Here is an English translation (with thanks to Google Translate and apologies to my mother, your great-Omi, who was a dedicated German teacher and is turning in her grave; she would have asked me to translate it myself! Apologies, too, for the bizarre formatting – attempting to fix it just made it all worse!):

 

LIVING MEMORY - The art collector Carl Heumann and his family today. A conversation with Carl’s granddaughter, Carol Heumann Snider

Several German museums are currently researching the art collector Carl Heumann (1886–1945), who created an important collection of German and Austrian art from the 18th and 19th centuries with a focus on Romanticism in the 1920s and 1930s. Because of his Jewish origins, he was persecuted under the National Socialist regime. In recognition of the fate of his persecution, the Kupferstich-Kabinett of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München turned to the descendants of Carl Heumann to jointly find a just and fair solution regarding the Find works of art from his collection.

In a conversation on the "Day of Provenance Research" on April 14, 2021 with provenance researchers Dr. Katja Lindenau (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) and Melanie Wittchow (Lenbachhaus) Carol Heumann Snider, the granddaughter of the art collector Carl Heumann, discusses her grandfather and her father Thomas Heumann. She describes how she preserves the stories of the two of them and their memories for their children and grandchildren. She gives a deep insight into the life of her family and shows how the fate of both ancestors affects all family members to this day and what possible restitutions mean to them.

The interview was conducted in English on March 19, 2021, the 135th birthday of Carl Heumann, recorded and reproduced here in written form in German. You can listen to the original interview here:

(Go to original link, above, and click on the audio file.)

Melanie Wittchow (MW): Hello and welcome to our conversation "Living memories: The art collector Carl Heumann and his family today.” My name is Melanie Wittchow. I am a provenance researcher at the Lenbachhaus in Munich.

Since 2019, we have recognized Provenance Research Day on the second Wednesday in April. This year we are also celebrating »1700 years of Jewish life in Germany«. On this occasion, we would like to talk about how provenance research helps keep memories alive.

We warmly welcome Carol Heumann Snider to this interview. She is the granddaughter of the art collector Carl Heumann from Chemnitz, Germany. We want to talk about him and his family today. Carol, thank you for joining us from Gig Harbor, Washington, USA. It's so nice to have you here today!

A warm welcome also to Katja Lindenau. She is a provenance researcher at the Kupferstich-Kabinett of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. I am very pleased that you are here today for our conversation about the art collector Carl Heumann.

More than two years ago, the museum in Dresden, together with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, called on those museums whose holdings include objects from the Carl Heumann art collection to recognize the fate of the art collector and his family and to work with the heirs of the family to get in touch. The aim is to find just and fair solutions with them regarding the works of art from the Carl Heumann collection.

Katja, you are one of the researchers in Germany who initiated this. Can you explain how and why it came about?

(The participants in the conversation on March 19, 2021 clockwise from top left to bottom right: Robin Knapp (technical support), Dr. Katja Lindenau (SKD), Carol Heumann Snider (granddaughter of Carl Heumann), Melanie Wittchow (Lenbachhaus)

Katja Lindenau (KL): With pleasure. In my work as a provenance researcher, I check the holdings of our museum for unlawful acquisition. One focus is on the years 1933 to 1945, when the National Socialists were in power in Germany and many works of art changed hands during this time. Much of it has been confiscated by the authorities or the owners have been forced to sell them. A few years ago, colleagues from other museums in Germany and Austria made me aware of the collection of the art collector and patron Carl Heumann.

While looking through our collection, I found two watercolor drawings by the Austrian artist Peter Fendi and an oil-on-paper drawing by Jakob Gensler showing a girl with a parrot. All three works were bought in 1944 by the art dealer C.G. Acquired Boerner in Leipzig. Bit by bit, I tried to find out more about the fate of the previous owner and how these works of art disappeared from his collection. In the end, we knew that Carl Heumann had not voluntarily sold these works, due to his Jewish origins, and we began to contact other museums and the heirs of Carl Heumann.

MW: That's how Katja and I came into contact, and I was able to find out that the Lenbachhaus had also acquired a work of art from Carl Heumann's private collection, namely the drawing "Fischerweide" by the artist Albert Emil Kirchner.

Albert Emil Kirchner, Fischerweide, 1854, pencil drawing, washed, 30.5 x 28.7 cm, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich

KL: Carol, we spent months trying to put Carl Heumann's biography together. How and when did you find out about the fate of your grandfather Carl Heumann and your father Thomas Heumann? Did you talk about it in your family?

Carol Heumann Snider (CHS): When I was a child, we talked about my father's childhood. Since it was such a traumatic childhood, I think my father tried to protect us from the trauma he experienced himself. Paintings and watercolors hung on our walls. We knew where they came from. We knew that they came from his father, whom we of course never met. But we didn't know what my father was feeling and thought we just knew that they were from his homeland. Briefly about the background: It was obvious that my parents were immigrants. I knew my father was talking about a suitcase that he had with him when he came to the United States on the ship.

When we talked about his childhood it was mostly in situations where he couldn't escape us, and by that I mean, we were sitting in the car going to Lake Tahoe, for example, which was a four hour drive. We asked him to tell us stories. And he told us these charming stories, like when he and his brother nearly blew up the garage because they had misused their chemistry kit. Or how her little sister took a nap and they took a gingerbread cookie out of the oven and they said, "Oh, we burned your doll." I mean really funny little stories like these that every sibling does would tell.

But he never said, "I went and found my father's body and dug his grave."

These were things that we didn't find out until much later. It only started when I was going to college and my father suddenly felt the need to tell us more. He began to write his first book The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer. I think it was easier for him to talk about his trauma in the third person and give himself a pseudonym so as not to have to use the pronoun "I.”.

Most of my childhood he just wanted to protect us. But that changed later.

Thomas Heumann with his four children, Carol Heumann Snider in the middle, 2008, photo: Ulli Heumann Hanley

MW: Can you tell us when and how you first found out that works of art from your grandfather's collection are in Austrian and German museums? How did the collaboration with the provenance researchers develop?

Maybe you can tell us a little bit about Julia Eßl's visit to the USA in 2014?

CSH: Yes, it was a very special day. I think it was January 22nd, 2014. I won't forget it. I woke up, checked my e-mail, and there was a message from a woman named Julia Eßl.She said she was a provenance researcher in Austria and she thinks she had found some works from my grandfather's collection, and asked if I would be willing to speak to her. It was very exciting for me because I had never met my grandfather and only heard stories about him. And now here was someone who seemed to know something about him. So, as a granddaughter interested in her family history, I picked it up straight away.

This was also preceded by a meeting that my father had organized for our family, at which he came into contact with his children, his nieces, his nephews and of course his sister Ulli, who lives in California. He wanted us all to come together because he wanted to leave us things from his past, as he put it "with warm hands,” before he dies.

(Thomas Heumann (left outside) with his sister Ulli (3rd from left) and her family, February 2017, Photo: Claudia Bilbao (Ulli's daughter)

CHS: Among them were some official documents such as my grandfather's Jewish “ID card” and his identity card with the “J” on it. Or a document that said he had been persecuted and that he had been in a labor camp.

He passed all these things on to his family members. It was just amazing to me, it really touched me, and I wanted to know who this person was.

So that was before Julia's email. When this email came my family was planning a trip to Germany and Austria. All six of us - we have four children.

And I said to Julia that we would be in Austria in a few months and asked if we could meet.

The most important thing that stuck in my memory when I met Julia Eßl in the Albertina in Vienna was that she took me to her office and there were three or four very wide binders on a bookshelf with "Carl Heumann" on the spine.

My first thought was, "How is it possible that someone, whom I don't know, knows my grandfather so well that entire binders can be filled with information about him?"

That just aroused the curiosity and excitement regarding my grandfather between Julia and me. We got along really well and became fast friends. After our visit in Vienna, she wrote to me and asked: “What do you think about a visit from me? And that was just the beginning of an absolutely wonderful time.”

When Julia first contacted me and said she had the opportunity to come to America, my father blocked it. But then he gave in and said, "Okay, well, I'll talk to her."

Julia came and spent three or four days with my father. They were best friends. My father couldn't show her enough things. He found a document here and another document there, they spoke German and they became dear, dear friends. When it was time for her to leave there were tears everywhere, including my father. So it was a 180 degree turn.

KL: Thank you, Carol, for this lively report on Julia Eßl's visit and the relationship between Julia and you and your father. We are both very grateful to Julia Eßl in Vienna and Hanna Strzoda in Berlin, who did a lot of research and thankfully shared their findings with us.

At the moment, three museums in Berlin, Dresden and Munich want to return works of art in the near future. Carol, you are the representative of the heirs. That means you speak for all the rightful heirs of your grandfather and regulate the communication between the members of your family and the museums regarding the restitution process. Can you tell us a little bit about what it means for your family to get back the works of art that were confiscated from your grandfather 80 years ago through persecution? We are particularly interested in what the younger generation thinks about it.

CHS: That's a really good question. In fact, as a family, we are grappling with this issue. First of all, the fact that part of the art is being restituted means everything to us because of our connection to our grandfather. This is a man we have never known, but whom we have heard of all our lives. My father spoke of him with great reverence and instilled that in us too, so we knew Carl was a wonderful man. We were sad that we didn't get to know him. This little thread of a connection from Carl to his grandchildren, to his great-grandchildren, means everything to us.

Restitution is a strange thing because it has this very strong emotional aspect. Then there is this logistical aspect. There may also be a financial aspect that we don't want to emphasize at all. But it always finds a way in.

I was the executor of my father's estate, which means that after his death, I took care of everything related to his estate. So I became the main point of contact. I brought his direct descendants, that is six people in the direct line, together. That's a very manageable amount of people to work with. But if you add the next generation, with all of our children, that number goes up to 23. So we kept it pretty small and made decisions together. We met digitally last year, but before that we visited each other.

 

(Thomas Heumann with Carol Heumann Snider's four children, 2012, photo: Carol Snider Heumann)

CHS: About two weeks ago my 30-year-old son came to visit. He is very interested in history and speaks fluent German. He asked how everything was going and I said, “Well, there are some pieces that are being returned to us and we'd like some of them because we'd like to see them on our walls. We would like to see others stay in Germany so that they can be appreciated by the people there. And maybe we want to sell one or two of them. We do not know yet."

My son, who is a very strong personality, replied, “Mom, I would like to be asked to come to the table when these things are discussed. I am also a heir to Carl. He's important to me too, and I think I'm speaking for my cousins ​​when I say please don't make any decisions without us. "

Right now our challenge is how to deal with this issue. How can we respect the opinion of our adult children without turning it into a crazy situation? Perhaps we will talk to our children each time, get their opinion, and come back with a general opinion for our family. It's really important for us to include everyone, but it's not easy. This is where we are right now.

MW: Let's go back to your two blogs that you mentioned earlier. I always love it when someone says it's important to keep memories alive. But you're not just saying that, you're living this idea.

In your two blogs "Northwestladybug" and "Letters from Omi" you tell the story of your grandfather and your father. I especially like your blog Letters from Omi because I love the idea that the blog is aimed at your grandchildren. Each contribution begins with "Dear Grandchildren" and then you tell about family members who, of course, have never met them. This is a great thing to keep memories for the future.

Let's go back to the past one more time. Your grandfather, Carl Heumann was born on March 19, 1886 in Cologne to Jewish parents. He converted to Protestantism in 1917 when he met and married your grandmother,Irmgard, who was a Protestant. Nevertheless, Carl Heumann was regarded by the Nazis as a ”full Jew.” At first he was protected by his so-called privileged mixed marriage, but in 1938 he lost his job in his own bank, he had to pay the "Jewish property tax," and was not allowed to manage his own financial affairs. In short, he was persecuted by the National Socialist system. After the death of his wife  in January 1944, he was even more vulnerable. Tragically, he was killed in the bomb attack on Chemnitz on March 5, 1945.

(Carl Heumann (middle) with his wife Irmgard and the children Thomas (left outside), Ulli (middle) and Rainer (right outside) in the Reichsstraße in Chemnitz, around 1940, anonym)

MW: Your father, Thomas Heumann, survived the Second World War. He left Germany in 1953 and went to the USA. He was also persecuted under National Socialism because of his status as a “Mischling, a so-called half-Jew.

Many Jewish people do not consider themselves religious, but define themselves by their Jewish origin. Can you tell us what role your Jewish origins played in your father's life? Are there any Jewish traditions or rituals that have been kept alive in your family to this day?

CHS: To be honest, I wish they existed. It's kind of strange for me to be the descendant of someone for whom his Jewish heritage played such a tragic role. It didn't kill him directly, but in some ways everything changed for my grandfather because of his Judaism.

When I was a child, I wanted to have a menorah for Christmas. We had one, but there was nothing behind it. Perhaps my father could have made some of the Jewish heritage his own. I think he could have done more research on his Jewish heritage and shared some of it with his children. But maybe I'm too hard on my dad because I think he had a great trauma and I think when he came to the US he wanted to leave it all behind. So the short answer is no. We celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve. We never really celebrated anything related to Jewish heritage.

MW: Thank you Carol for giving us these insights into your family history. That’s so valuable. In our work as provenance researchers, it is wonderful to come into contact with the families and the heirs of the works of art. It is such a pleasant working relationship with you and your family. Thank you very much.

CHS: Thank you very much too! I really like working with both of you and everyone who has contacted us. If we can travel again, we would like to come to Germany, and it would be wonderful to meet everyone in person.

MW / KL: Yes, we'd love that too.

KL: I would also like to thank you, Carol, for your continued support in this very long process of research and restitution.

Through the posts in your blog, we got to know you and your family very well and also learned a lot more about Carl Heumann. But as I said, without the support of the other provenance researchers we would not have come this far, so once again a big thank you to the others who have supported us.

CHS: Yes, also from me. You have all been absolutely wonderful and some friendships have formed.

I would like to tell about another friendship. There was a man named Waldemar Ballerstedt in Chemnitz, who we think could have been a protector of my grandfather. You can read about it on my blog.

His grandson's wife just emailed me - I recently had an operation and she wrote to me, "Carol, we're thinking of you, get well."

So two or three generations later, there is a friendship between the descendants of a Nazi, who may have been my grandfather's protectorate, and the descendants of a persecuted German Jew.

It's just so heartwarming to me that we can forgive, forget and move on.

MW: Yes, that's great to hear. Really very touching.

KL: Nice! Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

CHS: I would like to tell you one more story.

I have a grandson, Leo, who is almost two years old. When he was very young, we showed him the picture of Sophia, a painting by Joseph Hauber from my grandfather's collection that had hung in my childhood home, and then in my parents’ houses, until my father’s death in 2017.

(Leo, the great-great-grandson of Carl Heumann in front of the painting "Sophia" from the Carl Heumann Collection, Chemnitz, 2021, photo: Carol Heumann Snider)

CHS: Leo looked at the picture and waved when he was just eight months old. It then became a tradition that when he slept in our house and woke up in the morning, the first thing he wanted to do was to say good morning to Sophia. And in the evening he insisted on saying good night to Sophia.

When Leo comes to visit now, the first thing he does is go to Sophia to say hello. To me, it's just the essence of everything we try to do to keep Carl's memory and story alive for future generations. Just seeing Leo look up while Sophia looks down at him - there is just this love bond that I can't explain. But the first few times it happened, I teared up. In my will, I will state that my grandson Leo gets the picture of Sophia so that he can have it on his walls when he grows up.

MW: Thank you for this wonderful story.