WEDNESDAY, MAY 11, 2011. We land in Switzerland. Writing from Interlachen 120 years earlier, Mr. Twain called Switzerland “the cradle of liberty” and enthused that “it is healing and refreshing to breathe air that has known no taint of slavery for six hundred years.” But we grounded our choice of this country as the starting point of our journey more in practicality than idealism. After following my uncle and grandfather for what we assume will be a fairly harrowing venture, we plan to decompress at a splendid old hotel in the Swiss Alps that was a favorite destination of Amy’s uncle, so we chose Zürich as our landing site.
At the airport, we wheel our bags through the maze of corridors and duty-free shops to the rental car counter, where we are given possession of a sleek silver Opel Meriva. My first order of business is to borrow a single strip of adhesive tape from the rental desk, which I use to affix the small photos of Alex and Helmut to a space just above the Meriva’s rearview mirror. With this physical reminder of our journey’s purpose set firmly before us, we are now ready to begin. I note the odometer’s figure of 1,063 kilometers, and we set out into Zürich’s daunting traffic, heading west.
The great Irish writer James Joyce, who left Dublin for good when he was thirty years old, moved to Zürich in 1915 and spent the rest of the Great War there working on his epic retelling of the story of Ulysses, the immortal wanderer. In 1940, Joyce fled Paris in advance of the Nazi invasion and returned to Zürich, where he died in January 1941 of a perforated ulcer. He is buried in Zürich’s Fluntern Cemetery, hard by the city’s zoo. Joyce’s widow, Nora Barnacle, declared of her husband, “He was awfully fond of the lions—I like to think of him lying there and listening to them roar.” On this sunny May morning, we see signs for the zoo but, alternately fighting fatigue and pumping adrenaline, we make our determined way to the Swiss expressway A3, which in turn takes us over cow-dotted hills and through long winding tunnels toward Basel. Just east of Basel, we cross the legendary River Rhine and enter my ancestral homeland, speeding north.
Our route skirts the edge of the Black Forest, where Alex would take his family on vacations to such lovely spa towns as Baden-Baden and Eisenbach. Every now and then, we spy castles perched precariously yet triumphantly on the brow of jagged hills, reminding us that we are not rolling along a familiar American interstate. We pass Karlsruhe, where my father lived as a young student and where he received his fateful summons to join the Kulturbund, and maneuver our way around Frankfurt, where my parents met and first lived together as young musicians in love. Amy, embracing her navigator duties with vigor, announces that the town of Giessen, about fifty kilometers ahead, appears to be a promising destination. We leave the autobahn, creep our way into Giessen, and on only our second attempt, find a perfectly serviceable inn in which to pass the night. We enjoy a light Abendbrot, or evening snack, take a brief walk in the farmland on the edge of town, then return to our inn and fall into bed. It’s been a long day and a half since our departure, but we’re on the road and very satisfied with our initial progress.
Our first full day in Europe dawns cloudy, and as we resume our way north our view of the countryside occasionally yields to a thick fog. We endure hours of autobahns, with heavy trucks making our plucky little Meriva shiver and vibrate as we maneuver around them and shiny black Audis and Mercedes-Benzes whizzing past us at 150 kph on their hip yet efficient way to Berlin and Leipzig. Finally, a little past noon, we leave the thundering traffic for a more peaceful two-lane highway, which takes us gently to the lovely town of Bückeburg, the site of the official archives of the German state of Lower Saxony. We have arrived in the land of my forebears.
Lower Saxony is the second largest and fourth most populous of the sixteen states of Germany. It covers much of the territory of the ancient Kingdom of Hannover, which has supplied royalty to both Germany and, since the eighteenth century, England. Lower Saxony appeals to me geographically because it borders more neighboring states (nine) than any other German state, in much the same way that my birth state of Missouri borders more states (eight) than any other American state. It’s largely agricultural land, producing wheat, potatoes, rye, and poultry, and featuring the sort of sandy soil that fosters grasslands, the raising of cattle, and the breeding of horses. Indeed, the Lower Saxony coat of arms is a red shield on which rears a white Saxon steed. Horses played a large role in my family throughout the nineteenth century, and I’ve come to Bückeburg, a town about fifteen miles southwest of Alex’s birthplace of Sachsenhagen, to learn what I can about how the Goldschmidts lived.
Once the capital city of the tiny municipality of Schaumburg-Lippe, Bückeburg today is within the borders of Schaumburg, a district of Lower Saxony. In 1750, the year Johann Sebastian Bach died, Prince Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe recruited the great man’s ninth son, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, to come to Bückeburg as court harpsichordist, where he stayed, writing keyboard sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, and oratorios, until his death in 1795. Present-day Bückeburg boasts a helicopter museum containing early drawings of flying machines by Leonardo da Vinci, in addition to forty working helicopters. But our destination on this still-overcast Thursday afternoon is the ornate Bückeburg Palace, a yellow castle with turrets and fountains and gently manicured gardens that for over seven hundred years has been the official residence of the princes of Schaumburg-Lippe. We enter a side tower of the palace, climb stairs past royal red walls hung with portraits of generations of Schaumburg-Lippe royalty, until we come to the archive reading room.
Dr. Hendrick Weingarten of the Bückeburg Archives, with whom I struck up an Internet correspondence some weeks ago, meets us here. He arranges for several immense leather-bound tomes to be brought to us from the dusty depths of the castle holdings. We all stand silently when three aides enter the reading room bearing their burden of books and the many years, lives, and events contained within them. When the hands that wrote these documents passed over the pages and left their trails of ink, human beings still measured distances by how far a horse could pull a carriage in a day, flight was reserved for the winged creatures of the air, the telegraph was the new means of communication, and at night people lit their lives with fire. I am holding a folder of yellowing but still stoutly legible papers contained in a soft blue binder tied together by a forest-green ribbon. And there before me, on a page dated 10 January 1879, is the notice that in the hamlet of Sachsenhagen, on the first day of January in the year one thousand eight hundred seventy-nine at six o’clock in the morning, was delivered to Moses and Auguste Goldschmidt a male baby whose first name was Alexander.
My grandfather, whom I have come all this way to save, has been born.
THE HISTORY OF SACHSENHAGEN goes back to the thirteenth century, when it was a lonely cluster of houses and barns existing in the shadow of a grand moated castle built by the reigning duke of Saxony to secure the countryside from thieves, cutpurses, highwaymen, and other lowlifes of those Dark Ages. It was then a swampy region located along an old trading route running southwest to northeast, roughly the same path as today’s B65 federal highway. Both castle and hamlet are first mentioned in local chronicles in the year 1253; forty-four years later, in 1297, the castle changed hands as the result of a dispute over an unpaid dowry.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Sachsenhagen had become a rural center for farmers, merchants, traders, and craftsmen. A great fire swept through its thatched-roofed wooden buildings in 1619, nearly destroying the entire village, sparing only the Rathaus, or city hall, and a single tower from the medieval castle. But the town persevered, rebuilt, and on March 1, 1650, was granted the honor of being designated an official Stadt, or city, rather than a mere hamlet. It must have been a gala day, full of pomp and pageantry, when Her Highness the Countess Amalie Elizabeth von Hessen, daughter of His Highness Philip Ludwig II, Count of Hanau-Münzenberg, swept into Sachsenhagen to sign the royal decree allowing the newly minted city to build its own church, hold three grand market fairs each year, and design and maintain its own coat of arms.
For years, Sachsenhagen belonged to the holdings of Schaumburg-Lippe; then in the mid-seventeenth century, it was annexed by the Hessian principality. Finally, in 1974, it became part of the district of Schaumburg. Today it can boast the honor of being the second-smallest city in all of Lower Saxony, with a population of about two thousand souls.
In the year 1601, while it still languished in hamlet status, Sachsenhagen welcomed into its midst, though admittedly on the outskirts of the settlement, a family by the name of Leffmann, the first recorded Jews to make Sachsenhagen their home. Over time, a small, steady stream of Jewish families flowed into the village, provided that they followed a few regulations. In order to live in Sachsenhagen, at least for the next century, a Jew was required to purchase a letter of safe conduct from the sovereign—a prince of Schaumberg-Lippe or a Hessian count—a letter that had to be renewed regularly. These letters of safe conduct amounted to nothing less than a protection racket for the rulers, providing them a steady income from a population that had learned hard lessons of the perils of an unprotected existence. A Jewish household also considered it prudent to supplement its safe-conduct fee with the occasional additional gift, perhaps a finely wrought saddle or the fruits of a plentiful harvest.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Jews made up about 7 percent of the population of Sachsenhagen; in the census of 1861, of the 695 people living in the village, 52 were Jewish. In 1855, after years of sending their children to Jewish schools in the nearby towns of Rehburg, Hagenburg, and Rodenberg, the elders of Sachsenhagen decided that the distances traveled to those places were too demanding and established their own school. That same 1861 census reveals that the Jewish school in Sachsenhagen taught fourteen young scholars and that they huddled together in a building that measured only twenty feet long, nine feet wide, and ten feet high. The dimensions of the salary the Jewish community was able to offer its teachers were meager as well: fifty thalers per year, though room and board were generously included. Not surprisingly, it proved difficult over the years to attract and retain competent, highly motivated teachers at such wages.
On July 28, 1869, the local newspaper reported on a joyous ceremony in Sachsenhagen, blessed with fine weather and attended by a large and festive crowd, which featured the laying of the foundation stone for the city synagogue. The building was completed and consecrated the following year and was commodious enough to offer space to the Jewish school and living quarters for the teacher. Life in Sachsenhagen was good for the Jews.
Death had also been provided for. In 1823, the electorate of Hessen issued the following ordinance: “Each synagogue is permitted to have its own cemetery but its layout, enclosure, the time of its burials and the depths of its graves must follow the regulations established by the police. With regard to Jewish cemeteries that already exist, it is expected that their future use will conform as much as possible to this order.”
A Jewish cemetery had already existed in Sachsenhagen for nearly a century prior to 1823. Though a map of the village dated 1714 shows no sign of one, it appears that within a couple of decades, a graveyard for the Jews had been acquired. Such an acquisition was no routine matter. Land had to be purchased, and for many years European authorities had frowned on selling land to Jews; even when such transactions were allowed, the land that changed hands was often of substandard value, perhaps swampy or riddled with stones, making it unsuitable for agriculture. But the Jews of Sachsenhagen were fortunate: the land purchased for their cemetery, though outside the boundaries of the village, was flat and arable. Hops grew along the edges of the cemetery, and the soil produced sturdy oaks and elms and a healthy hazelnut bush. The oldest surviving headstone in the Jewish cemetery dates from 1787. But the oldest headstone that is marked by both German and Hebrew inscriptions belongs to Levi Goldschmidt. In Hebrew, the text reads, “Here lies a decent and God-fearing man. He was honest and just. He died at age 60.” He was my great-great-grandfather.
The former house number 17, now number 9 Oberestrasse, where my great-great-grandfather Levi lived with his wife Johanna and their “poor man’s cow.”
Levi Goldschmidt was born on July 18, 1799, the son of Jehuda Goldschmidt. Where he was born remains a mystery, although some evidence points south about twenty miles from Sachsenhagen to the town of Hameln. Known as Hamelin in English, it’s the site of the legendary Pied Piper, who rid the town of its plague of mice and rats and then, in revenge for not being paid for his services, rid the town of all its children. When Levi moved to Sachsenhagen is also unclear, but he bought a house there in 1834, at age thirty-five, and married Johanna Frank. Within a very short time, the Goldschmidts were among the most prominent of the Jewish families of Sachsenhagen.
In a registry of assets for the year 1841, Levi and Johanna are listed as living in house number 17 in Sachsenhagen. (At the time, all the town’s houses were simply given numbers, regardless of the street. Today, the address is 9 Oberestrasse, the main thoroughfare through town.) In 1841, the Goldschmidt family’s assets were modest: two fruit trees and a single goat, considered in those days to be “the poor man’s cow.” By comparison, 108 of the 128 families living in Sachsenhagen had at least one cow, including all three of the other Jewish families. By the end of the decade, however, the Goldschmidt family fortune had soared; Levi had become a Pferdehändler, a dealer of horses.
As far back as the Middle Ages, European laws prevented Jews from owning land and encouraged them to practice professions that Christians largely avoided. Scriptural strictures against lending money and charging interest led Christians to shun the financial vocations, and thus it fell to the Jews to become bankers and moneylenders. In the nineteenth century, Jews were still barred from journalism, most professorships, and the law. As late as 1905 in Europe, there was little chance that a Jew could become a judge, and even then only if he renounced his faith and converted to Christianity. Although excluded from certain professions, Jews often flourished in those they were allowed to practice, and in the European countryside, they embraced the horse business. In Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the horse trade was largely a Jewish enterprise, and in Germany, most of the prominent suppliers of horses to the well-born and well-connected were Jews. So identified were Jews with the buying and selling of horses that by the 1930s, the rise of National Socialism was accompanied by municipal attempts to expel and ban Jews from the profession.
In much the same way that the automobile dominates our lives in the early twenty-first century, horses were nearly indispensable in the nineteenth. Urban dwellers depended on horse-drawn conveyances for transportation and commerce. In the countryside, farmers relied on horses to plow the earth and transport goods to and from market. In the 1840s, Levi Goldschmidt recognized that there was no dealer of horses in Sachsenhagen, so he stepped into the breach. Within a few years, he had established himself as a reliable judge of horseflesh and a shrewd businessman and was accepted as one of the trusted elders of the village’s Jewish community.
Levi was called upon to speak for the community in a dispute involving the Jewish cemetery and a local wheelwright named Georg Buschmann. Not until 1908 was a fence erected around the perimeter of the cemetery, and in 1845 Herr Buschmann began taking a shortcut through the cemetery on his way home. Because the path between the graves was so narrow, the heavy wooden wheels of Buschmann’s wagon would often rumble over a gravesite. Naturally enough, the Jewish families considered Buschmann’s shortcut an act of desecration and demanded a hearing of the district authorities to force the wheelwright to use the common path around the cemetery. Levi was chosen to represent the Jewish side in the dispute, but after more than two months of arguing and proposing several solutions to the problem, the authorities simply threw up their hands and walked away, leaving the matter as it was. Buschmann’s wheels continued to roll through the cemetery.
Within a few years, however, Levi achieved a healthy measure of satisfaction. Herr Buschmann died and, with his business booming, Levi sold his house number 17 and bought the wheelwright’s much larger house from Buschmann’s widow in 1848. The more spacious home, number 35 on the market square, was a necessary investment; Levi and Johanna had eight children. The eldest was Moses, my great-grandfather, followed by Marianne, Samuel, Ruben, Emma, Hermann, Friederike, and Helene. When he died, Levi’s household comprised his wife, their eight children, a maid, and two servants.
The Goldschmidts had achieved remarkable wealth in a short time. The profession of Pferdehändler had been good to them, and in turn Great-Great-Grandfather Levi had been good to Sachsenhagen. At the time of his death, on September 17, 1859, in addition to being remembered as decent, honest, and just on his headstone, Levi had acquired a reputation for magnanimity. He had made gifts to the community that amounted to more than the value of his considerable property, which included the market square house and several fields in the countryside.
His widow, Johanna, known also as Hanna or Chana, lived nearly another thirty years. She died in Sachsenhagen on October 15, 1887. The inscription on her headstone in the Jewish cemetery reads, in Hebrew, “Here rests a decent and kind woman. Her path was just and charitable. She taught her children the Torah.”
The eldest child, Moses, was born on February 18, 1835, in the house on Oberestrasse. As the first male offspring, Moses was perhaps fated to take over the family business, but he took to it enthusiastically and with quite spectacular results. Demand for horses increased throughout the nineteenth century; in 1850, there were about 2.7 million horses in Germany, and by the end of the century, at the dawn of the age of the horseless carriage, that number had risen to around 4.2 million. Moses’s customers were his neighbors in Sachsenhagen and the surrounding rural communities who needed horses for transportation and farm work, and he also sold horses to the hotels and hackney cab companies in Stadthagen, Bückeburg, and Hameln that required fine horses for their elegant carriages, and to the military for its elite cavalry troops. A good horse might fetch a price of 800 marks, roughly the annual starting salary for an average worker. Several times a year, Moses would travel to Hannover and Hamburg to purchase horses from north German breeders, and occasionally he’d even go abroad in search of a fine steed at a good price. On one such journey, he went north to Denmark, where he not only bought three horses but also found a reliable worker named David Larsen whom he brought back to Sachsenhagen as his assistant and right-hand man.
In 1859, the year he turned twenty-four and lost his father, Moses married Auguste Philippsohn, four years his junior and a member of perhaps the most prominent Jewish family in Sachsenhagen. Auguste’s father, Joseph Philippsohn, a successful merchant, had been born in Sachsenhagen in 1813 and could trace his ancestry back to Itzhak Philippsohn, born in the village in 1761. Like his father before him, Moses sired eight children, seven boys and a girl, Bertha, who died in infancy. In time for the birth of their first child, Albert, in 1860, Moses and Auguste moved from the house on the marketplace to a grand house at 94 Mittelstrasse, a place that could boast something only a few other homes could claim, a baker’s oven. On the roof of the house, there were two wooden planks on which, early every spring, a pair of storks would build a nest and care for their young throughout the languid days of summer until the whole family would depart in September in search of a winter refuge farther south.
My great-grandfather was a pillar of his community, remembered by his neighbors as a kind, generous man and also something of a character, a “Sachsenhagen original.” Julius Geweke, who was born in Sachsenhagen in 1902, asked his father, a saddler, to recall life in the village in his day: “The horse dealer Moses Goldschmidt lived behind our house, over on Mittelstrasse. Whenever Goldschmidt received a shipment of horses he’d place a notice in the newspaper. And when a potential buyer came by to look at the horses, Goldschmidt would have the animals pranced through the streets of Sachsenhagen, his workhand Larsen trotting along keeping pace. Goldschmidt himself would stand in front of his house, smiling, smoking a big cigar, and cracking his whip smartly. The buyer would watch this parade of horses and then pick one out for closer inspection, looking into its mouth to verify that the animal was of the age advertised. After a bit of wrangling, the deal was sealed with a hearty handshake.”
The family business was not without its conflicts. On January 28, 1884, a dispute between Moses Goldschmidt and a carter named Heine was formally entered into the proceedings of the law courts of Stadthagen. There is no evidence today indicating what the dispute was about, but it took a long time to be resolved. Not until November 5 was a decision rendered, but for Moses, it was apparently worth the wait. The judge ruled in his favor and awarded him the not-inconsiderable sum of 350 marks.
The grand house at 94 Mittelstrasse was filled with not only the children of Moses and Auguste but four servants as well, who slept next door at 93 Mittelstrasse. They were the butler Fritz Wiebe, the valet Johann Wiltgreve, the housekeeper Fanny Schwarz, and the maid Luise Meuter. There was nearly always a fire burning in the big oven, keeping the house comfortably warm in the winter. And the Jewish holidays were always observed.
Into these secure and prosperous surroundings my grandfather, Alex, was delivered on New Year’s Day 1879, the seventh of Moses and Auguste’s children. On the same day, in London, the noted writer E. M. Forster was born. That year would also witness the births of Albert Einstein, Wallace Stevens, Ethel Barrymore, Will Rogers, and Joseph Stalin. And on the very last day of 1879, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison would demonstrate incandescent lighting to the public for the first time.
Thirteen months later, on February 2, 1880, Auguste gave birth to her eighth child and seventh son, Carl Goldschmidt. He may have been one child too many. On November 7, 1881, Auguste died, at age forty-two. On her headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Sachsenhagen are the words, in Hebrew, “Here rests an admired woman, the crown of her husband and children. She was modest and traveled the way of peace.”
So my grandfather lost his mother when he was only two. I like to think that his large family cushioned the blow somewhat, even though his oldest sibling, brother Albert, was nineteen years his senior. Alex was quite close to his two immediate brothers, Max, four years older, and Carl, and the three of them attended classes every day at the Jewish school in the synagogue. In 1889, when Alex was ten, a superintendent from Kassel, one of the largest cities in the Hessian principality, paid a visit and filed a report stating that the Jewish school in Sachsenhagen currently was teaching only five pupils and that three of them were Goldschmidts: Max, Alex, and Carl. The superintendent declared that with such minuscule attendance, there was little reason to keep the school open. Within two years, it closed its doors and the three young Goldschmidts began to attend the main public school in Sachsenhagen, arriving immediately after the morning religious class.
Despite the success of his father’s business, Alex had no desire to be a horse dealer. Instead, after staying in Sachsenhagen long enough to earn his Abitur degree (roughly equivalent to two years of college), he turned his back on his rural upbringing and moved northwest to Lower Saxony’s fourth-largest city, Oldenburg, in 1906. He was twenty-seven years old. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that his first apartment in Oldenburg looked out on the city’s Pferdemarkt, or horse market.
Two years later, just before midnight on April 15, 1908, Moses Goldschmidt died, at the age of seventy-three. Alex and his six brothers gathered for the funeral. Given the resources at hand, it could have been a lavish affair. At the time of his death, Pferdehändler Goldschmidt’s assets were estimated at 76,500 German marks. It’s not an exact reckoning, but in 1913, just five years later, a mark was valued at around four American dollars, making his estate worth approximately $306,000 . . . in 1908. Given the rate of inflation over the past century, when Moses Goldschmidt died, his total net worth exceeded 7 million in today’s dollars. He was by far the wealthiest man in Sachsenhagen and possibly for miles around. The equine occupation had been a runaway, some might say galloping, success.
But death comes for rich and poor alike. His headstone reads, in Hebrew, “Here lies Moses Goldschmidt, a god-fearing man. He loved justice and followed the road of righteousness. He fed the hungry. He died on a Thursday, the first day of Pesach 5668.”
THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2011. “Hier ruht unser lieber Vater Moses Goldschmidt, geb. d. 18. Febr. 1835 gest. d. 15. April 1908,” I read aloud to Amy. “Here rests our dear Father Moses Goldschmidt . . . ,” I translate from the German side of the headstone. We are standing beneath two tall, graceful trees within the boundaries of the Jewish cemetery in Sachsenhagen on a late afternoon that is turning windy and increasingly cloudy.
Earlier today, after several fruitful hours in the archives of Bückeburg Palace, we returned to our little Meriva and motored across the flat farmland of Lower Saxony along the ancient trade thoroughfare that is now federal highway B65. We drove into the city of Stadthagen and thence on country road L445 through fields of rye and over a small canal, until we reached the southern edge of Sachsenhagen. I was here once before, twelve years ago, on the dire date of November 9 in the company of my brother. We’d had the devil’s own time finding the cemetery, which is tucked off the road, securely away from view, but with my memory of its location clear in my mind’s unshakable GPS system, I was confident I could find it this time. But there was a glitch in the wiring, and finding the humble graveyard again took several attempts.
Now that we’ve found it, I note that, as in 1999, the cemetery looks ragged, overgrown, and somewhat neglected. The iron fence that surrounds the place sags here and there, the grass is high, and weeds flourish amid the graves, which seem randomly scattered about. The exceptions, however, are the families Philippsohn and Goldschmidt. My family’s headstones are standing side by side, with Levi on the far left and Moses on the far right, with Johanna and Auguste resting between them.
It is a profound and unsettling place, and as the wind freshens and the clouds thicken in the late afternoon sky, I am deeply conscious of my vastly diminished family, the loss of Peter is still keen and aching, and yet here are sturdy and lasting memorials to what was once a thriving, prosperous clan of Goldschmidts on whom fortune smiled. As linden branches toss overhead, I try to imagine these long-dead family members, conjuring with the concept that, should the impossible occur and should we somehow meet face to face, there would be a moment akin to looking into a mirror, of noticing with a start a familiar feature, an eyebrow, an ear, the curve of a lip or the curl of hair, a “Hey, don’t I know you?” moment of mysterious yet joyful recognition that I find at this time and in this place overwhelming. I miss my family terribly, those both recently and long departed, and I hug my remaining family, Amy, tightly.
As we turn to leave the cemetery, we notice amid the ragged grass two long parallel depressions in the ground running the length of the graveyard from south to north. They are, we learn later, the ghostly tracks of the heavy wooden wheels of that cart driven so long ago by Georg Buschmann.
Sachsenhagen is too small to sustain a proper hotel, so we drive our Meriva back to Stadthagen, where we’ve reserved a room in the Gerbergasse, a former tannery. By now the clouds have produced a steady rain, which adds its note of solemnity to the atmosphere. But the next morning arrives with abundant sunshine, and we return to Sachsenhagen eagerly anticipating new discoveries.
For weeks, ever since plans for my journey began to take solid shape, I have been in e-mail contact with Theodor Beckmann, a member of Sachsenhagen’s historical society. He has sent me a great deal of information, always in the kindest manner imaginable. I am grateful for his assistance and also for his excellent English. Despite several years of high school German and many trips to the country, my German has never advanced beyond the barely serviceable stage. So I was sorry to learn a week or so ago that on this particular Friday the 13th, Herr Beckmann would be in France with his wife. His very able colleague, Erika Sembdner, would meet us instead; alas, her English proves to be no better than my German.
But her pleasure at our arrival seems unbounded. We ask for her at the Rathaus, and she immediately hurries from her house to greet us. For the next ninety minutes, Erika leads us on a sentimental journey through Sachsenhagen. First she shows us 9 Oberestrasse, the house where Great-Great-Grandfather Levi lived with Johanna, their two fruit trees, and a single goat. The imposing white house with its high sloping roof is situated directly on the main road that leads south toward the cemetery. We then visit the grand house on Mittelstrasse where Great-Grandfather Moses lived from 1864 until his death in 1908. Erika tells us that it’s among the oldest houses in Sachsenhagen and has been expertly restored. Built by a master carpenter in the seventeenth century, not long after the great fire, it’s a stunning example of the traditional fachwerk style, in which heavy wooden beams are fastened together by mortise and tenon joints. Such ancient grandeur. And it belonged to my family. Amy and I stand silently, amazed.
Erika then leads us to a small building just off the market square. Here the Sachsenhagen synagogue and Jewish school once stood, from its gladsome dedication in 1870 until the night of November 9, 1938, when it and countless other shuls across Germany were plundered and set afire during the orgy of violence known as Kristallnacht. Today the land is occupied by a private house and garden. In 1885, when Grandfather Alex was six years old and attending the Jewish school, there were 58 Jews living in Sachsenhagen, a number that represented 7 percent of the total population of 840. In 1939, in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Jewish percentage of the citizenry still measured 8 percent, 88 of 1,089. But then on July 20, 1942, the Gestapo ordered Jewish citizens of Sachsenhagen out of their homes and told them to assemble in the market square. They were rounded up, placed in secure trucks, and deported to the East. None of them returned. Today, the Jewish population of Sachsenhagen is zero.
As I sadly ponder this grim statistic, Erika says brightly, “Jetzt besuchen wir die Schule,” and herds us back to our car. Following her directions, we drive about a mile to Sachsenhagen’s one primary school. We arrive shortly after lunchtime and the grounds and play areas are nearly empty. Erika walks with us into a cheerful red-brick entranceway that declares in brass letters that we have arrived at the Gerda Philippsohn School.
Today there are no more Jews living in my ancestral home of Sachsenhagen, but the village school is named for a Jewish girl who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942. Amy and I were welcomed as near celebrities.
Gerda Philippsohn, born in Sachsenhagen in 1927, began attending school in 1933. She was an eager learner and bright student. On the afternoon of November 15, 1938, six days after Kristallnacht, she was summarily dismissed from the school because she was a Jew. On March 28, 1942, Gerda, her parents, and eleven other Sachsenhagen Jews were deported. At age fifteen, Gerda was murdered at Auschwitz.
In 2000, at the urging of former teacher Rita Schewe, the school changed its name to the Gerda Philippsohn School. The entranceway bears a memorial plaque to Gerda, exhibiting her picture and a brief explanation of her fate.
The school’s principal, Frau Herrmann, comes out eagerly to shake our hands, take our picture as we pose in front of the little memorial to Gerda, and present us with a pen and pencil set embossed with the school’s name. We feel a bit like visiting celebrities as we are escorted through the school, looking into a few classes, and are introduced as descendants of people who lived in Sachsenhagen many years ago. I feel deeply touched by the decision to rename the village’s single school for a long-dead victim of the country’s villainous past, yet also curious as to what prompted the decision, seeing that none of the children currently attending the Gerda Philippsohn School shares the one characteristic that marked its innocent namesake for murder.
Perhaps by way of an answer, Erika announces that the final stop on our tour will be a visit with Rita Schewe, the teacher and local historian who led the effort to rename the school. We drive out into the country, where Rita lives with her husband and dog. Erika has phoned ahead, and when we knock, Rita throws open the front door and envelopes me in a mighty bear hug. “Herr Goldschmidt!” she keeps exclaiming, and when she finally releases me, I see tears in her eyes.
For an hour, we sit on her patio and enjoy fruit and lemonade and a conversation that rises above its poor practitioners of English and German to achieve an unexpected warmth. Rita has made Jewish Sachsenhagen a private passion and has researched its past and tried to create a new present. How did she come upon the idea to rename the school? She shrugs, smiles, and says that it has fallen to her generation to try to right the wrongs of the previous generation, even if that proves to be an impossible task. I ask her if I am related to Gerda Philippsohn, since my great-grandmother was a Philippsohn. Very likely, she tells me, although the Philippsohn family is a large one; Gerda may well have been a third or fourth cousin.
Eventually I explain that we must be on our way, that we are expected elsewhere that night. At the door, there are more hugs and tears. We promise to return one day. They promise to welcome us. We drive Erika back to her home and thank her profusely for her time, patience, knowledge, and understanding of the many emotions that have colored this memorable day.
As a final goodbye to Sachsenhagen, we return to the cemetery. I place small stones on the graves of Levi and Johanna, of Moses and Auguste. I gaze across the fields and try to imagine our family living on this land with horses as our livelihood. Then I recall my father, as the shadows deepened on an Arbor Place afternoon, telling me about the few times he had visited his grandfather’s house and how every spring the family would eagerly await the return of the storks to their snug nest on the roof. There was peace in my father’s eyes as he shared this precious memory and, leaning on the cemetery fence under a cloudless May sky, I begin to understand that there is more to my family’s story than murder, loss, sorrow, and shame. There is honor and respect for a job well done; there is a certain standing in a single community over multiple generations; there is success, wealth, and a large, well-cared-for family; and there is a pair of storks that return in the spring, bringing forth precious new life.
What might have happened had Grandfather Alex chosen to stay in this sweet little town? His fate would likely not have altered much, as the Nazi noose tightened around urban and rural regions alike. But perhaps my father would have absorbed a bit more of the happy portions of his heritage and passed them on to his sons. He might not have been inspired by his surroundings to become a professional musician, but maybe . . .
To stop my thoughts from curling around each other in endless serpentine speculation, I take Amy by the hand and walk slowly past my family plot and out of the graveyard. We settle into the Meriva; I smile at the faces of Alex and Helmut and turn the car north to follow my grandfather to the city where prosperity and sorrow awaited him.
