By Rhoda L. Friedrichs, second generation community member
I don’t remember ever being told about the Holocaust – and at the same time, I don’t remember a time in my life when I did not know about it. I was born in New York a year after the war ended (the only war that did not require a specific name, of course). My parents had fled from Nazi Germany in the ’30’s, and had met and married in New York. As a child growing up in a very mixed immigrant neighbourhood, I took it for granted that everyone’s parents had an accent of some kind, and none of my friends’ grandparents spoke English.
I had a grandparent, too: my father’s father, who had fled from Germany to Shanghai, and then to New York. He lived with us until his death in 1952, and my early childhood was spent in a three-generation family, complete with aunts and uncles and cousins who came and went and celebrated holidays together. Not only my father’s father, but his brother and three sisters had escaped from Germany and ended up in New York.
My mother used to say in later years that she was glad to be able to make a home for her father-in-law since she could not make one for her own parents. Her family’s fate had been very different from that of my father’s family. My mother and her sister had made it to the United States, but both their parents, Carl and Thekla Rosenberg, perished in the Holocaust, along with the rest of what had been a fairly large extended family. My mother had one cousin who had gone to Israel and another to Chile, but the rest of the relatives who had shared what she called her “German life” were gone. Except for her sister, the friends and relatives of her “American life” were all new-found ones.
Although I grew up knowing only my father’s side of the family, my mother’s lost family was a vivid presence. My mother had had a warm and happy childhood, and had been very close to her own mother. She loved to tell me stories from her childhood, and I would ask her again and again for the ones I especially liked. I knew all about the apartment house in Posen (later Poznan) where they had lived, right next to my grandfather’s lumberyard, and the English music hall songs he learned on a trip to London, and the way he had whirled my grandmother around the crowded furniture of the living room to dance as he sang them: “Komm, Mäuseschwänzchen, tanz!” He was proud of having seen something of the world, as well as being a successful businessman and a veteran of the German army.
My grandmother was far quieter, but when their world was turned upside down by World War I, she was also far more flexible. It was she who managed to persuade or bribe the Polish police to release her husband when he was arrested for being so persistently German in 1921, and she who adapted to the Weimar spirit after that, when they left Poznan for Berlin.
I heard a lot about the family’s Berlin years, too, at least until the mid-’30’s. I was always aware that it was not a good idea to ask my mother, usually so ready to talk about her father and mother, about those dark later times. I knew they were dead, of course, but when did I learn more than that? When I was a small child, in the early post-war years, I knew that my mother harboured an irrational hope that her mother had survived somewhere, somehow. I would sometimes imagine my grandmother appearing, and my mother’s joy. I wondered which room she would have. By the time I was ten or so I knew that my mother and her sister had struggled in their early years in the u. s. to put together the money and the affidavits and the visas for their mother to come to Cuba. Their father was sick and aging by then, and there was no hope of his immigrating. Thekla wouldn’t agree to leave him until she saw more and more Berlin Jews being deported, and by then it was 1941 and, as for many others, it was too late. A last message was smuggled out in November 1942 through a Swedish friend: “My children will have to search for me.”
The impress on my life of my maternal grandparents was a strangely powerful one. They had been essential in making my mother who she was, and were an on-going part of her life and thoughts. I sensed in their values, in the kind of lives they had led, major elements of my own life. Their legacy to me, their unknown granddaughter, was an enormously positive one. And at the same time, from my earliest years on, my thoughts of them have always been overshadowed by thoughts of destruction, about the growing privations and fear of their final years, and about their ultimate degradation and suffering and murder. A completed story always carries foreshadowings of its conclusion, and the Holocaust laid its hand on my perceptions of the entire lives of these unknown grandparents I knew so well.