For many years, when hearing others speak German, my ears would perk up at the familiar and not so familiar sounds of my mother tongue. I was born in 1937 in the town of Suhl in Thuringen, about two hours from Leipzig. My father was imprisoned just after the burning of the synagogues on Krystalnacht, November 9, 1938. Tickets sent to my parents from New York by his Aunt Elsa and her felicitously named husband, Uncle Sam, miraculously secured his release, and within days we were en route to America. We had escaped the Holocaust and the war. I was 21 months old.
I grew up in Cincinnati with no memory of those frightening days, and my parents never alluded to that disruption in their lives. My two-year-old's German almost receded into the background, kept alive by my mother's slowness in learning English. As a traveling salesman, my father necessarily and quickly picked up English. As we were at war with Germany, I was embarrassed by my rather Teutonic sounding name, Manfred, and changed it to Fred.
As I got older, although I was quite Americanized, whenever I heard strangers speak German I would ask them, in an apparently perfect accent, where they came from. They would answer Hamburg, Dusseldorf, München or any of dozens of small towns. Inevitably I was asked where I came from and I would reply, “Ich war in Suhl geboren.” Though Suhl was not well known to West Germans, they all knew of the region Thuringen and its beauty and would smile approvingly. Was Suhl a paradise I had lost? As I grew up I often wondered if I would ever revisit my place of birth, inaccessibly behind the iron curtain until last year.
I had also often wondered how differently my life might have unfolded had not history intervened so fatefully. My father said I would have gone to Heidelberg instead of to Harvard if Nazism had not emerged. He never mentioned Buchenwald, a scarce 50 miles from Suhl, had we not fled in the nick of time.
With the collapse of the Eastern bloc this past year and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rapid reunification of Germany seemed inevitable. But more than that, I began to realize that a “reunion” with my own beginnings was feasible. For fifty-three years I had wanted to see the town listed as my birthplace, in kindergarten records, on school and employment applications, and on my passport.
My wife, Joelle, and I decided to travel through Eastern Europe on the way to Germany. We flew to Budapest where I had a chance to practice my German. We visited Krakow and then Prague before renting a car for the trip into East Germany. While in Krakow we spent a day at Auschwitz, an unspeakably terrifying reminder of what I had escaped. Why was I making this journey back?
Driving to Leipzig for our first night in East Germany was as easy as driving from New York to Connecticut.
That night in Leipzig I slept fitfully, knowing that the next day I would finally see my birthplace. Was I also reliving what I imagined to have been my parents' fitful last night of sleep fifty-one years ago, as they were about to leave their own birthplace, never to see it again? For weeks I had been having nightmares of chaotic travel and lost luggage.
The International Hotel, where we were staying, had quaint prewar elevators with sliding wooden doors in the car and heavy outer iron doors. The room had an old double sink and I sank into the largest tub I had ever bathed in. At breakfast the next morning, after two weeks of practice in Budapest and Prague, I was comfortable enough with German to tease the waiter about the piped-in rock-and-roll that grated on my nerves. Why not the music of Bach, who had taught just a few short blocks away? The party at the next table applauded my sentiments and asked where we were from. “New York,” I said with pride. “How did you come to speak German so well?” “Ich war in Suhl geboren,” I replied. “But when did you leave?” Their reply to my answer, “1938,” startled me. Rather than the pregnant silence, or a knowing nod, or a guilty averting of their eyes, responses that I had been accustomed to, there was a spontaneous, “Well, at least you missed the war.” Indeed, unlike the many taxi drivers and shopkeepers my age or older who had lost kin or limb, I had missed the war. Cincinnati could not have been a safer or more hospitable place in the 1940s and 1950s.
Before making my trip, back in New York, how and if I could make contact with someone in Suhl who might still remember my parents? Were neighbors or any of my father's girlfriends from his carefree bachelor days still alive? Was my father's prison guard, also a school friend, who, although otherwise following orders, allowed him to keep his pocket knife when he was imprisoned? Might I meet someone who, if I had stayed, would have been a school chum of mine?
Two months before leaving New York I decided to write to “the newspaper” and to “the hospital” in Suhl indicating that I would be at a certain hotel in Erfurt in mid-August and would appreciate hearing from anyone who may have known my family or who was born in Thuringen in 1936-7. When we arrived in Erfurt, only thirty miles northeast of Suhl, there were, indeed, two letters awaiting me. One was from the Rehfeldt family, a ninety-four year-old woman and her sixtyish son and daughter-in-law, who, as they wrote, had been “friendly” with many Jews, especially with an Isidore Sander, with whose children in England they still corresponded. They indicated their delight in showing me around the town. The other was from a Dr. Vollmar, chief of pathology at the new regional hospital in Suhl, who wrote that he had been born in Erfurt in 1936 and had lived in Suhl most of his professional life. He looked forward to meeting me.
The drive from Erfurt to Suhl through the Thuringer Wald (forest) was uplifting. The hills around Suhl reminded me of the Berkshires, where, at home, we spend our weekends. We stayed in the midst of these hills in Oberhof (ten miles from Suhl), where as my Uncle Siegfried later informed me, my father had won a bobsled race in 1935 and had received his prize, at that late date, from a Nazi officer! What could my father have been thinking about that?
On our first day, though emotionally exhausted by the drive to Erfurt from Leipzig, we had nonetheless driven on to Suhl and Bahnhof (Railroad) Street, where according to my Uncle I had been born. Frantically I ran up and down the street looking for something recognizable but nothing was familiar to me, of course, because I had left when I was not yet two. I had a sinking feeling of unreality. Had my father's family indeed lived here in Suhl?
My wife and I began to walk around the town. I asked where the Jewish cemetery was remembering that, just a few days before, we had seen how the Jewish gravestones in Krakow had been crushed in order to pave streets and then later resurrected into a memorial wall. But we were given directions up a narrow street. At once I noticed a stone marking the spot where the Synagogue had stood. “Built in 1906 and burned by the Fascists on November 9, 1938.” Another hundred yards up the hill, just past a well kept flower laden Christian cemetery and then a seedy used auto parts store was a white wooden gate, leaning askew, its padlock broken. My heart began pounding. I walked in slowly noting what seemed to be about 50 tombstones shaded by large trees. The cemetery was intact. Ironically, the first gravestone I saw was my grandfather's Sigmund Sander. Born in 1856, he died in 1934. I knew this man only from a photograph of him leaning over his stamp collection. Next to him was a space for his wife, my Grandmother Flora, the one grandparent I had known. She had left Germany and died in Cincinnati where I grew up. At her funeral in 1950 I remembered an older cousin and I giggling nervously. I was then thirteen. Now, at fifty-three, I burst into tears with both relief that I was finally in my hometown and sadness at the enormous pain that leaving had created for my family and me.
On the second day, intent on finding my actual house, I went to the city hall to check for the exact address on Bahnhof Street. The records said it was #9. I arranged to meet the Rehfeldts there the next day at 4:00. When we arrived they had not yet come. Moreover, between #8 and # 10 there was only a vacant lot. Had the house been torn down? Bombed? A childhood memory surfaced of some uniformed U.S. Army officers coming to our apartment in Cincinnati, asking my father to locate, on a map, the munitions plants at Suhl (Suhl is still known for its manufacture of small arms.) At age seven this was proof to me that we were on the Americans' side. But now I worried, had the Americans bombed my town?
We waited forty-five minutes for the Rehfeldts; they did not show up. I had their letter, however, and searched out their home. While I was talking with the 94 year old Mrs. Rehfeldt, her son and daughter-in-law came in. Very apologetically, they explained that Bahnhof Street had been renamed 7 October Street (the date commemorating the founding of East Germany in 1949). It hadn't occurred to them that I would end up on the street across from the railway station called “Am Bahnhof” on the town map. The taxi drivers, who had directed me there, born after 1949, were as ignorant as I of the change in street names.
We spoke together for quite some time during which they told me that in their going to my home, they had met a Mrs. Endte, a woman who still lived there at #9 and who remembered my parents well! As it was now after 6:00 P.M. we decided to visit my home on our third and final day in Suhl.
“But when did you leave? Their reply to my answer, ‘1938,’ startled me. … Well, at least you missed the war.”
We rose early and found the street and #9 easily. An impressive four story light green brownstone, the entrance way was graced by a keystone of a smiling woman's head. Broken stained glass windows in the door and a lobby entrance reminiscent of homes throughout Eastern Europe indicated it was no longer in good repair. We rang Mrs. Endte's doorbell and an 84 year old woman answered. It turned out that her father had built the house in 1906. She lived on the second floor right below what had been my family's apartment and which had the same floorplan. She chose not to show it to us because it was occupied by “asozialistes” who had let it run down and were not paying their rent to the state. She explained that she had given the house to the state because she could no longer afford the repairs.
As we talked, she recalled my parents, me, an aunt and uncle and two then teenaged cousins of mine. I had brought a photo of my parents, which she studied intensely and with pleasure with her magnifying glass. “Those were difficult times for them,” she said, recalling the day the movers came to pick up the furniture, which my parents were able to bring with them. To this day I find it ironic that they were allowed to take out their furniture when they were only permitted to take six percent of their savings. It was also interesting that not only was I having a reunion in my birthplace but, Mrs. Endte's daughter-in-law and twelve-year-old grandson were visiting from West Berlin; the reunification of Germany has meant the reunion of families and friends for decades unable to see one another.
My first meeting with my other respondent, Dr. Vollmar, took place at the new large county seat hospital at the top of the hill going out of town. When I arrived I was shown to the Pathology Institute, located in a wing of the medical center. Dr. Vollmar met me and graciously led me into his office. With a greying crew cut and a warm smile he seemed eager to meet with his visitor from the West. His office had impressive soundproofed double doors. Wondering why a pathologist needed such doors, I mentioned they were familiar to me as a psychoanalyst and family therapist. He quickly grasped the importance of privacy in my work. Upon leaving I wondered if the sound-proof doors had served to protect him from the eavesdropping of East German police agents.
He knew little English and I relied on my rusty German to communicate. Quickly, our conversation became personal. The fateful year that my parents and I left for America, his father, a general practitioner in Erfurt, died of liver cirrhosis. He added that, had his father not died, he would have ended up in a concentration camp because he was violently anti-Fascist. By curious coincidence, both our fathers were named Kurt. Each had married in their mid-30s. Then I learned that his first name was Fred! At least that was the name his father had chosen for him. The Nazis felt differently, saying the name was not German enough. It had to be Manfred or Alfred! They settled on Manfred, the original name on my birth certificate that I ultimately changed to Fred! I was told many years later that I had been named after a racing car driver, Manfred von something who was apparently Germany's Mario Andretti. Coincidentally, his wife, Ellen brought out a newspaper clipping that commemorated the recent birthday of Manfred von Brauchitsch, the racing driver I had been named after!
Fred Vollmar handed me a six-page “life story,” more a narrative curriculum vitae. Included in this “biography” was the fact that he had graduated and married in 1963, the same year I had done both and that he had been accepted as a candidate into the Communist Party in 1971 the same time I was a candidate in psychoanalytic training. His narrative ended with his resignation from the party in November, 1989!
Before leaving the States, it had been my fantasy to find a contemporary in Germany, someone who would be willing to write about his life, as I would about mine, citing the differences and similarities in our lives. When
I proposed to Fred that we both write autobiographical sketches, he felt that there would be little interest in that kind of story in East Germany because people now were caught up simply in keeping their heads above water. “People have little time for leisure reading,” he told me.
Later that day Fred took me to visit his home to meet his wife Ellen and teen-aged son Kristof. They lived on “Panorama Way” overlooking Suhl. Their living room was lined with books, ranging far beyond medicine. “I leave my interest in medicine at the hospital,” he said. I commented that despite the hardships in his life he had done well. He said he was “glucklish” (fortunate). Indeed, I felt that we had both been fortunate given our rough beginnings.
Increasingly, I felt at home. His wife, a physician, brought out a homemade berry cake that was reminiscent of the cakes my mother used to make! They had a little spat over her collecting and filing everything; the identical division between Joelle and me except that I collect but don't file! Ellen brought out his misplaced family photo album so similar in its attention to detail to the one my parents had brought with them in 1938. There were pictures of babies held lovingly by their mothers. However, my “baby book” ended that year when my father was forced to sell his Leica camera. My father, too busy keeping his family afloat, never again took up his hobby of photography.
The time spent with the Vollmar's was warm, convivial, and interesting. As we were leaving, we exchanged addresses and the Vollmars showed us the guest room that is there should we visit again.
I was aware that I had satisfied my intense curiosity about the place in which I would have grown up if history had been different. I was also relieved to be returning to the country that had been my home for over fifty years.