RR
Congradulations on a brief, chronicle, well laid out description of
Dr. Werner Weinberg's experience of the Jews on Hitler's rise to
power. However I remember reading that the 'final solution' (death)
to the Jews was not Hitler's but some one else's proposal at a
meeting which Hitler approved of.
Comrade B.
In a message dated 2/3/2013 6:56:20 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
ristad@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Jewish Holocaust survivor Dr. Werner Weinberg describes how even as late
as 1944, after they were told about the gas chambers, Jews still did not
believe it, and how those who got out of Germany early were ridiculed by other
German Jews.
-RR
1. I was 18 when Hitler came to power, and I was beginning my education
toward a professional career.
2. During the first year of Hitler’s rule most of us thought that he would
disappear from the stage now that he had been given responsibilities. We
had no doubt that he would fail, just as those before him had failed, and
that would be the end of him and his histrionics.
3. For the next three years (approximately through 1936) we thought we
would be able to endure the discrimination, the impoverishment, the threat to
life and limb to some of us, as other Jewish generations had endured. For
together with the blows that fell on us there grew an inner regeneration, an
awakening of Jewish consciousness, a pride in our Judaism, a readiness to
suffer for it and eventually to triumph through it which I do not believe is
paralleled in any three-year period of Jewish history. Far too, little is
known as yet about this short-lived inner Jewish renaissance under outside
pressure. But just count the publications of the Schocken-Verlag or the
Jüdischer Verlag in Berlin during those three years. And let us not forget
that along with this newly found wellspring of strength we were still proud of
and practicing our German heritage, and often we felt that we were the
only true Germans.
4. How many people have ever given thought to what it means to tear
oneself up by the roots and leave an environment that has been one’s physical,
cultural and emotional home perhaps for generations? The uprooting I mean is
totally different from the “Get thee out of thy country” imperative that
went out to Abraham, which carried with it God’s promise about “a land I
will show thee” (Gen. 12:1). An uprooting that is totally involuntary causes
great pain. Even in the concentration camp, moving to a different camp or
having to leave a barracks with which you had become familiar and go to a
different one was a misfortune. Strangely, in the flight of refugees we seldom
consider the initial stage: that of being uprooted. We begin to develop a
degree of empathy only after they have become “boat people,” so to speak.
5. I readily admit that many of us feared the shock of being uprooted and
tried to avoid it if at all possible. But to understand this reaction, you
will have to believe me when I say that nobody could possibly have foreseen
the “final solution.” I am quite sure that this also applies to the Nazi
leadership during the earlier years. To me, everyone who says that he or she
foresaw the slaughter of our people, and that it was all written in Mein
Kampf, is a liar, or has forgotten the limits of the human mind before
Auschwitz. When in October and November 1944 the first evacuees from Auschwitz
arrived in Bergen-Belsen (a camp where prisoners died only from starvation,
exhaustion, disease and maltreatment) and told us about the gas chambers,
we did not believe them.
6. There was even a moral objection against emigrating. I remember that as
a child I sometimes caught the phrase: “Der musste nach Amerika” -- that
is, “So-and-so had to go to America.” This was said of someone who,
perhaps generations ago, emigrated to avoid army service, to evade the police,
to
escape creditors, or someone who just could not make a living at home. In
short, the association with emigration was negative; a person “in good
standing” did not emigrate. We had been brought up on the precept Bleibe im
Lande und nähre dich redlich: “Stay in the land and make an honest living.”
Ironically, most of us had no idea that this so typically German proverb was
nothing but Luther’s translation of a verse from the Hebrew Psalms (37:3).
In some families this prejudice against emigration in any form went back
to emigrants after the political upheavals of 1815 and 1848, to the very
scions of “our crowd” in this country.
7. In the summer of 1935 the graduating class of my Hebrew Teachers
Seminary organized a trip to Palestine. One of the students stayed there
illegally; a second would have liked to stay, but his father forbade it
sternly.
All others returned and assumed their new positions in Germany.
8. Many Jewish leaders felt they had to stay as shepherds of their flock.
But some of the most highly placed leaders advised other Jews to remain as
well. This feeling of duty to stay was not limited to, say, rabbis; I felt
it strongly as a teacher in a Jewish grade school, and also as a son. For if
an opportunity had offered itself to me as a young man, it was certain
that I would have had to leave my mother in the midst of the danger I sought
to escape. Many cases of able-bodied young persons who were given the chance
and left, of rabbis who made use of their special standing outside the
immigration quota, filled us with sadness and indignation. The situation was
not yet one of “everyone for himself,” and for some it never came to that.
Beginning perhaps with the Nuremberg Laws in the fall of 1935, and from
then on increasingly through 1938, the terror grew and the belief of a Jewish
future in Germany faded away. Then many of us who had not done so before
began to contemplate emigration.
9. Before the open panic started, reaching the decision to emigrate was
still an individual process; some arrived at it earlier, others later. People
who were still employed or in business probably tarried longer than those
without means. But aside from this factor, individuals have different
thresholds, even with regard to acting and reacting in the face of grave
danger.
Once the decision had been made, the urgency grew quickly, and the feeling
was: the sooner the better. But at that time there was, connected to the
willingness to emigrate, still the consideration of where to go and how to
build a new future there.
10. Now there was this true tragedy: in the measure that the need to
emigrate became evident, in the same measure the opportunities for emigrating
decreased rapidly and radically. The American immigration quota was overdrawn,
and the consulates handed out waiting numbers that stretched ahead years
into the future. The certificates for Palestine sharply decreased because
the mandatory power did not want to alienate the Arabs. As far as England
itself was concerned, the demand for housemaids -- one of the few ways of
being admitted to England, except for a number of children transports -- was
saturated. Those countries that sold entry visas asked ever-higher sums, and
there were ever fewer Jews who could raise the money.
All in all, long before the German exit door was slammed shut, immigration
countries barricaded themselves effectively against the Jews. The causes
were economic and social, combined with the fear of displeasing Hitler or
outright sympathy with his goals and methods, among them anti-Semitism. By
that time, every Jew in Germany spoke his own “Get thee out,” but God did not
show him a land.
11. I wonder whether those who ask such a question as “Why did you not
leave Germany while there was still time?” realize that not everyone could
have emigrated. There were definite qualifications and conditions, and those
who did not meet them could not leave. Our conversations were governed by
such things as affidavits, sponsors, certificates, quotas and visas,
requirements of age, skills and health, relatives abroad, rumored loopholes in
immigration laws from New Zealand to Chile. Thousands, tens of thousands of
German Jews simply could not emigrate if their life depended on it -- which it
did. And if I, a healthy young man with a certain sense of adventure,
could not emigrate, what about young children and old people, the sick and the
handicapped?
12. The greatest irony, something that to us could only appear as a cruel
hoax, was the international conference on the refugee problem held at
Evian, France, in July 1938. If President Roosevelt had deliberately convened
it
as a political measure to demonstrate to his constituency in the U.S. that
the state of the economy, especially the unemployment situation, did not
permit the immigration of any more Jews, he could not have chosen a more
effective means. Strange that he should not have realized what the outcome
would be; we Jews in Germany knew that the conference would lead to precisely
nothing, for each of us had heard the regrets and refusals of the different
countries privately, before at that conference delegate after delegate from
country after country stated them publicly. There were gloating headlines
in the German press day after day during the conference: how right Hitler
had proven to be, how the world was beginning to see things his way, how
nobody wanted the Jews.
There were tiny sparks of hope -- and I want to single out Australia and
the Dominican Republic for a blessing -- but they only emphasized the total
darkness on the face of the earth. We read the newspapers with a growing
dread; we were glued to the radio in honor. Right there in Evian our fate was
sealed. We did not have to wait another two months for Chamberlain’s
journey to Munich to know that the world was buckling under to Hitler. As
directly as Chamberlain’s Munich led to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and
Poland,
as surely Roosevelt’s Evian made possible the Crystal Night. The message
was loud and clear: do what you want with your Jews -- it’s an internal
affair. And we, the rest of the world, won’t lift a finger.
13. It is commonplace to say that the Crystal Night was the dress
rehearsal for what was to come. It is seldom realized that it was also a last
chance. The world was being tested once more for its moral fiber, and once
more
the world failed. For a few days after the event, border police in
neighboring countries -- Holland, Belgium, France -- were less strict about
repelling Jews who dared the desperate nighttime dash over a frontier in the
woods. Then this loophole was closed too, and the trap shut on us.
As for the Jews left in post-Crystal Night Germany there was nobody
anymore who had any hesitation about leaving. Never mind tearing up old roots
or
striking new ones; it was a mad scramble. But emigration was available for
only a few; the rest were caught. Quiet despair settled over us. We
continued our different tasks under ever-worsening conditions; I went on
teaching
at my Jewish grade school. Many of us were very pessimistic, depressed and
gloomy; many anticipated still worse to come, even though nobody imagined
-- or could have imagined -- Einsatzkommandos and gas chambers.
One more thing I did not anticipate: that 40 years later a well-meaning
student of a brand-new academic subject called “Holocaust Studies” would ask
me: “Why didn’t you leave Germany while there was still time?”
"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the
government take care of him, better take a closer look at the American Indian."
-
Henry Ford
