It was only in 2016, a decade after my first visit to Klaus Meltzer’s apartment in Cologne, that I overcame the inexplicable inertia which had prevented me from searching for traces of my father’s family in Germany, whether in this city where he had been born, or in the small town of Trier, 200 kilometres to the south, where, my mother said, earlier generations of Mays had lived for hundreds of years.
My inertia seems inexplicable because it is, above all, my father and his German world that I crave to recover – and, through a kind of reverse emigration, to reclaim for myself. It was his death at the German Embassy in London, as Ursel had tantalizingly re-enacted it all those years ago, that triggered my lifelong quest to find a living relation to him and to what I see as the sacred inheritance of the German Jew.
Until then, the only route that seemed available to me lay through my surviving parent and her sisters: the world of Marianne, Ursel, and Ilse; of their mother Emmy; and above all of their father, Ernst, the totemic source of it all.
Though I had uncovered so much of Ernst’s life and legacy, there was one remnant of it that still eluded me: his grave, in Berlin. As my mother had no memory of his funeral, except that everybody came to it, I was bereft of clues. Over the years, she and I had made numerous enquiries in Protestant, Jewish, and civil cemeteries in both east and west Berlin, to no effect.
Back in the summer of 1991, I decided that, if I couldn’t track down his earthly remains, I would try to find the graves of his father and grandparents, who, my mother was sure, had died in the place where he was born and raised: Christburg in West Prussia, or, since 1945, Dzierzgoń in Poland. When Ernst was a child, in the 1880s, Christburg had a Jewish population of around 250 (out of a total population of just under 3,300), at least one Jewish cemetery, and its own synagogue. But the sepulchral communist-era offices where we went yielded neither Jewish burial records nor pre-war lists of residents. We should see, though, what we could find at the surviving cemetery, an official said, sketching a little diagram with directions.
We found a rectangular plot, hemmed in by forest, strewn with broken stones bearing traces of Hebrew script, and overgrown with vegetation. A few gravestones still stood, but they seemed mute and expressionless, as if they’d lost the will to bear witness to an extinct community and had allowed its secrets to flee. Desecrated by the Nazis and then abandoned for decades, this habitat of the dead had itself died. Tall trees, their trunks reaching serenely towards the sky, clustered just beyond its wall; but, far from casting a protective eye over the scattered stones, they and their colonies of singing birds seemed oblivious to them. This was a world so inert, so shockingly emptied out, that even melancholy could find no home in it.
A rustling noise by the entrance heralded the arrival of an elderly couple and, discovering that they spoke some German, we fell into conversation. If anyone in the vicinity was in a position to identify the dead in this cemetery and to tell us where registers might exist, the man said, it was him. After being forced to work as a doctor in Auschwitz, he threw in matter-of-factly, he had been a local official until his retirement; so he had some knowledge of where and how the Nazis, and afterwards the Polish communist authorities, kept records. As far as he was aware, the Germans had destroyed all archives of the Jewish community along with most of its gravestones – and of course the synagogue. Besides, he was sure that almost nobody ever asked after the Jews of Dzierzgoń, the last of whom disappeared in the 1930s; we must be the first people for a long time who’d come looking for relics, and certainly the first from abroad.
Our attempts to loosen his tongue on Auschwitz and what he had done or suffered there were unsuccessful. By now it was late afternoon, and we decided that we’d better stay overnight in the vicinity rather than drive, as darkness fell, to a larger city. Could they recommend a hotel? No, they replied, the hotels from communist times had all closed their doors, and they didn’t know of any decent new ones. After all, it was only seven months since Lech Wałęsa had become the first freely elected head of state following the fall of communism. But there was a couple who let out rooms and might be able to put us up. They were old enough to have lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, so we’d be able to converse with them in German.
After a long wait, a woman, probably in her seventies, with bright-red hair appeared and, without vetting us, introduced herself as our host for the night. ‘I have a lovely apartment, which you can have all to yourselves,’ she declared. Stammering our gratitude for this astonishing flexibility, not to mention trustingness, we asked how much she charged. ‘Nothing,’ she answered. ‘You’re my guests!’
When we arrived, her husband was waiting for us with a dinner of cold salads and meats and bread, along with beer and vodka. Soon, we were all sitting down to eat.
‘We Poles suffered terribly under the Germans,’ the wife began. ‘My husband had just finished an apprenticeship in a milk shop when he was forced into slave labour.’ As she told us the story, he pulled an identity card out of his jacket that had the letters ‘PK’ on the front, which stood for polnische Kraft – Polish [Labour] Force. She had seen members of her family shot before her eyes, others arrested and never heard of again.
Of course: our speaking to her in German and driving a car with a German number plate meant that she was taking us for Germans. And, plainly, my mother was of a reproachable age. Perhaps our hostess had waited decades for this moment when she could let people like us know, to our faces, what our nation had inflicted on her. Bizarrely, I felt guilty. I wanted to apologize for the unspeakable cruelty that Germans had visited on Poles.
At the same time, something made us cautious about exculpating ourselves by owning up to a Jewish origin. What if our hosts despised Jews as much as Germans? Or more? Just as in some of those German homes back in my childhood, we rolled out the official story about my mother following her violin teacher to England before the war, so that we would neither be implicated in the Nazi time nor be suspected of Jewishness. This version of events really did have its uses.
I think they understood that, though my parents were German, they hadn’t been in Germany during the war. But I don’t know whether they nonetheless assumed that the rest of my father’s and mother’s families had been innocent of Nazi crimes. It did sound like they were trying to make us realize how they had been abused under ‘our’ yoke – and now wanted to be asked for forgiveness.
But this was all a long time ago, they eventually said, and today’s Germans were very different. They had apologized again and again; they were good neighbours; and they were helping Poland’s economy.
The really unredeemable people, on the other hand, were the Jews. They would never be friends of the Polish nation; they would only exploit and extort. German crimes were in the past, but the real and present danger were the Jews.
For the first time ever, I felt relief at concealing Jewish origins, grateful for our trusty kaleidoscope of identities. Trapped for the night in this communist-era apartment with prejudices that, a few decades earlier, had been murderous, I was frightened. I understood what Ernst had feared his whole life. Instinct told us to keep my father silently in the background, and mercifully our hosts never enquired after his ethnicity.
Yes, she continued, the Jews are responsible for Poland’s terrible economic problems. The inflation, the closure of factories, the imposition of brutal, capitalist, so-called ‘reforms’ that have created mass unemployment and forced women into prostitution – all this is the work of Jews. Their aim is to destroy Poland so that its assets can be bought up on the cheap by greedy bankers in London and New York who are in league with Lech Wałęsa, ‘the Jewish President of Poland’, and the ‘Israelite’ Tadeusz Mazowiecki.
This was giddying stuff. Lech Wałęsa, the former trade unionist who had been instrumental in the fall of communism, was certainly not Jewish, and the same went for Mazowiecki, the country’s first non-communist prime minister since 1946. Besides, we attempted to explain, there were almost no Jews left in Poland. But we were getting nowhere. ‘Where do you think all those people who escaped from Auschwitz went?’ our hosts enquired. ‘They stayed here, of course, to rob us and to live off us. Under communism they had to keep a low profile. But now they, or their descendants, have free rein. That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in.’
Escaped from Auschwitz only to rob Poland? The accusations were so fantastical, I argued when they’d gone for the night and we found ourselves alone in the private space of these generous strangers, that it was oddly impossible to take offence.
The next morning, as we were eating breakfast, my mother announced that she’d been awake all night. She looked terse and shattered and vulnerable. Of course: it must have been horrific for her, whose life had been wracked by the destruction of the world of Blumeshof, by those terrible words, ‘Get out of here immediately, you East Asian monkey!’ which had sent her beloved father to his death, and by the insoluble unbelonging of exile, to experience such hate first-hand. And then to climb into the bed of the strangers who nursed it. And before that to find no trace of Ernst or his family in the place of his birth. And to encounter the doctor from Auschwitz. And to see all those smashed and abandoned Jewish gravestones – monuments no longer to lives but to the utter nothingness of a vacated world. How grossly insensitive I had been not to cut off that whole loathsome conversation.
‘No,’ she said, in a quietly anguished tone, ‘it was none of that; it was your face last night. I’ve never seen such haunted grief in anyone. As your mother, it was terrible to witness, Simon.’
I was stunned. Not just because I had no recollection whatsoever of feeling haunted grief, but also because my mother never proffered intensely personal comments about how I looked.
By the time we were in the car, an hour or so later, and had found the calm to talk about it, the fierce shape of whatever she’d seen in my face had dissolved and she couldn’t describe what exactly had overwhelmed her. Or else she found it too painful to disclose. But her reaction left me in shock: shock that I hadn’t wanted to take the anti-Semitism seriously, though I certainly felt fear and even terror when I imagined being unable to flee; and shock at how grateful I was for the protective lie, which normally infuriated me, about my mother merely following her teacher to London – at how swiftly I’d embraced self-concealment at the merest provocation.
Before this sobering insight into my own loyalty to family tradition – loyalty which might have anaesthetized a much deeper horror that my mother had glimpsed in my face – had had a chance to take root back in the apartment, our hosts had marched in, full of fresh morning energy and I think ready for more conversation.
But by then everything felt different. We had to leave. At once.
Embracing us, they’d thanked us for our visit, which they said they had so enjoyed, and still refused to accept any payment. When their heads were turned, we’d left some money next to a flowerpot, and headed back to the safety of Berlin.