Second letter to Kari at Farm Hill School , part 2
Walter Felscher (walter.felscher@UNI-TUEBINGEN.DE)
Sun, 8 Feb 1998 14:44:26 +0100
part 1 ==>
As for Jews, there were Jews among the camp's inmates,
particularly among the journalists where their percentage
had been higher than average before, but also the occasional
small Jewish shopkeeper with whom a local NS leader had been
in debt and now would settle his account. But these were
exceptions; in general, it would seem, in those early years
Jews were hardly brought into the camps for no other reason
than being Jews.
Of course, and you probably will know this already, the life
of Jews was made hard in other ways, and sometimes
unbearable. By 1934 , all Jews had been dismissed from public
employment - including teachers and professors. By 1935 ,
they were forbidden to have sexual relations with non-Jews,
and Jewish doctors lost their patients, Jewish lawyers
their admission to plead before the courts. Jewish
shopowners were put under pressure with additional taxes
(and, keep in mind, always under the threat that any
utterance of complaint might lead to their disappearance in
a camp) and were, in this indirect way, forced to sell their
businesses - and that much below their actual value. In this
way, Jews suffered what you may call 'civic death': careers
were terminated, professional and business life was ended
for them, no possibility to resume any other work: no way
out but emigration with the ensuing breakup of families,
or the attempt at hidden hibernation, or simply suicide.
Civic or actual death in a terrorist state.
After these developments, by 1937/38 , the circle of knowing
observers was, of course, much larger. No teacher could
avoid to read in the official teacher's magazine that Jews
must not teach anymore. No doctor could avoid to notice that
some colleagues with Jewish names did not appear in the
professional register anymore (and the, maybe not too
numerous, patients of Jewish doctors noticed their departure
as well). And even people leading leading a sheltered
private life had to notice that the large department stores
of Konitzer's and Lewandowski's changed their name to Fauser's
and Schrepffer's. The larger one's circle of acquaintances,
the more of information, with business men maybe best aware
that 'this was not right.' There was a tune maybe from the 1920ies
toeff, toeff, toeff,
was kommt da angefahren,
toeff, toeff, toeff,
mit einem Motorwagen,
toeff, toeff, toeff,
wo will das Auto hin ...
Playing with other boys, maybe in 1937/38, I had heard them chant
kling, kling, kling,
was kommt da angefahren,
kling, kling kling,
mit einem Kinderwagen,
kling, kling, kling,
wo will der Jude hin,
er will ja nach Amerika
wo alle Juden sind.
It did not enter my mind that they might not have gone there
voluntarily; my parents knew. When I repeated the verse at
home, they forbade me to say such words.
On the morning of November 9th, 1938, a young man entered
the German embassy at Paris, stepped into the office of
some higher diplomat, drew a hand-gun, and shot him
point-blank. The representative of the terrorist state was
killed. The young man, apprehended by the police, had an
obviously Jewish name. In the afternoon, when the news had
become known in Berlin, telephone calls went into the
provinces, asking the local NS organizations to show, as a
revenge, its hate of everything Jewish; at the same time,
the police was asked not to interfere with whatever might
happen to Jews. Once more, the already dormant SA was called
up: they went out and set fire to almost all Jewish
synagogues; they smashed up and devastated what there was
left of Jewish stores, and beat up their owners. [In
particular, the glass of the display windows of the stores
was smashed in. Such large glass plates must be produced
especially, in order not to distort the view, and the
expensive glass they are made from is called 'crystal', or
Kristall in German. A short while later, people critical of
the state supported violence began to refer to that night
with the ironical word "Kristallnacht" which, of course,
disguised the true horror. In the meantime, people from
later generations without experience of their own have begun
to use that name perfectly seriously - even as if it had
been an officially used name of the event !]
While the riotous anarchism of the SA gave the day its name,
the more ominous event took place in the early hours of the
following morning. GeStaPo and SS knocked at the doors of
several thousands of Jewish families, arrested the men and
transferred them to concentration camps: the first time that
Jews were put into the camps for being Jews - period. It is
true: after a few weeks they were permitted to go free again
(a huge ransom had been asked from the Jewish community) -
but it was the sign of things to come.
This time, the writing on the wall had been read: whoever
had the means [namely to pay a high exit tax, as well as the
railway and boat tickets] left for abroad. Left for an
insecure future in a strange land. Left with two suitcases
of clothes, whichever valuables being confiscated at the
custom's controls. There remained those without means and
those too old. The thing then to come first was the yellow
star. Three years later, in 1942/43, the death camps had
been set up, and the tranports began.
Again, the question of knowing observers: in towns which had
Jewish shops, which maybe even had a synagogue, it required
a very sheltered life indeed not to notice their being
devastated and burned down. As for me, then at age 7 , this
time my parents managed to shelter me from it, presumably
by keeping me in the house: I do not remember anything to
have happened on the night of the Kristallnacht - though I
remember my father later using that name. The arrest of
Jewish males in the morning of November 10th probably become
less known - generally because the separation and isolation
of Jews from Germans in civil life had already taken effect,
and in particular because the victims and their families
would not talk in order to avoid additional repression.
* * *
Separation and isolation of Jews from Germans in civil life
after 1938 was also one of the reasons that the transports,
of Jews to the East from 1941 on, went mostly unnoticed.
After 1941/42 , a very few soldiers reported about the mass
executions of Jews in the conquered Baltic states, but in utmost
secrecy and only to friends they had known for years as
critical of the regime. This then created very few knowing
observers in the civilian population. About the death camps,
nothing became known at all until 1944 ; the few railway
engineers conducting the trains, of course, did know, but
did not dare to talk.
During the war, you could read every few months in our local
newspaper that, in the one or other town in Germany, some
people had been sentenced to death and had already been
executed because they had spread 'enemy propaganda' obtained
by listening to the enemy's radio stations. That this was
published in the press was, of course, a warning: do not
dare to do the same; do not listen to them (and do not
mention it to anyone who might report you to the authorities).
The technical background may be a bit difficult to
understand to today's Americans, because (1) in those years,
in the countries of Europe, the radio stations people
listened to were mostly located on the medium wave and the
long wave band [North American receivers nowadays hardly
have the latter; instead they have FM which then had not yet
been invented], and (2), and also in contrast to today's
North America, medium wave stations were often fairly
strong, and Europe being small, it was no problem to receive
in the evening, say in Germany, stations located in Italy or
in England. [Should you still have a receiver with a medium
wave band standing in the attic, you may be able to receive
at night in New England the rather strong French-Canadian
station in Chicoutimi at 1600 kHz .] - And so, when the
war had begun, the British had on several of their stations
set aside an hour or two in the evening, during which they
broadcast news and information in the German language. This
were the stations to which to listen the German government
punished its population by having heads separated from
bodies through the guillotine.
Of course, at home we never listened to them - and I doubt
that my parents attempted to listen when I was asleep. As
the war years went by, air alarms became more and more
frequent; by the summer of 1944, there was every other day
an alarm toward noon when the American planes came by to
bomb Berlin, and every night an alarm when the British plane
came by to do the same; maybe I will tell more about that at
another time. Air alarm, of course, implied that you had to
take shelter in your houses cellar; hence you had to arrange
life such that most things would take place when there was
no alarm. One day, a friend of my father's with the military
had given him a blueprinted map of Germany, covered with a
narrow grid, the vertical lines counted by letters and the
horizontal ones by numbers; if Berlin, say, was in field E5
then Hannover was maybe in C4 . And the friend had also told
him of an unmarked, unpublished military radio station;
most of the time it would broadcast only the tick-tock of a
clock, but then suddenly an man would start to speak through
the microphone reporting the fields where enemy planes had
entered the German air space. And when he said that there
were several squadrons in C3 proceeding SW , then we would
know that within 15 minutes the air raid siren would begin
its howl announcing an alarm.
In the winter of 1944/45 , I was a boy of thirteen, not
particularly good at, or for, anything. Wasting the time, on
a late, already dark afternoon, I was sitting in front of
our radio receiver, alone in the living room, and tried to
tune in the unmarked station. Yes, I found the tick-tock of
the clock. Toying around with the adjustment knob, I also
came across some other stations. One of them with a man
speaking German, though with a slightly foreign accent. He
commented on the recent war events, the progress of the
Russian troops in Poland - and now it became clear, that he
did not comment from the German, but from the enemy's point
of view. And then came the news. Progress of the troops. Air
attacks upon German towns. And then "more reports": on the
discovery of camps in the just liberated territories in the
East: camps with huge crematories, with death chambers to be
filled with poisonous gas. And with witness reports that
thousands, no: tens of thousands had been killed in these
chambers and their bodies been burnt in the crematory ovens.
It sounded inconceivable.
When the station signed off, it said that it had been the BBC
broadcasting from London. So I had listened to the enemy.
Was it believable what I had heard ? The following day, at
about the same hour, I turned on the receiver and searched
again - not for the tick-tock, but right away for the BBC.
And found it. More reports in the news, and then quotations
from Swiss newspapers. The Swiss were neutral, not an enemy,
and they took the reports about the death camps to be true.
And slowly, slowly I began to believe them. Believed them
sufficiently to never mention to my parents that I had listened
to the BBC and what I had heard. Not even to my parents -
because I knew that they would have been horrified about the
danger I had gotten myself into. The danger to be reported
as spreading enemy propaganda and have one's head cut off by
the guillotine.
On one of the next days, instead of the London station I
came across another one which, it turned out, was standing
in Paris. The broadcast was destined for Austrian listeners
and started with a then well-known Viennese tune to the
modified text
Erst wann's aus wird sein
mit Hitler diesem Nazischwein ..
Again, the deathcamps were described, and it was said that
small children, babys, had been thrown alive into the
crematory ovens ! Inconceivable again (but didn't we know
Schiller's ballad "Der Gang zum Eisenhammer" ? ) - and as I
never have heard it again, this story presumably was made
up.
Over the following weeks, I continued to listen to the BBC
whenever the occasion arose. It started with a deep sounding
drum, beating four times
bummm
bum bum bum -
the begin of Beethoven's Fifth, usually said to be sound of
fate, knocking at one's door. Their news appeared to be
objective, mentioning not only successes, but also losses (of
airplanes, ships and on the battlefields). There also was a
commentary, usually spoken by a certain Lindley Frazer. The
broadcast lasted for half an hour; then it was followed by
another one in a language I did not know. That one started
with a most beautiful orchestral tune which, many years
later, I found to have been arranged by Purcell under the
name "The Prince of Denmark's march". But I doubt that this
other language was Danish.
The question of knowing oberservers then depends on the
number of people who may have listened to the BBC at that
time. It remained a secret in their heart, and nobody seems
to know how many there were of them.
Over the following weeks ... the war ground to its disastrous
end. Maybe another time I shall tell more about that.
==> part 3