by Walter Hess

In 1938 I was 7 years old, but the events of those several days in November are more sharply inscribed in my memory than most of the events of last week. First a bit of background: I grew up in a tiny agricultural village in the Rhineland about 20 miles east of Bonn, in an area that somewhat resembled the Berkshires. In a village population of about eight hundred people there were fifteen Jewish families. There was a synagogue of which my grandfather, my “Opa” was the khazn, the unofficial rabbi, and the leader of this small community. It was my Opa who usually took me, hand in hand, to services. My father and grandfather worked together as cattle dealers and we lived together in the same house. There was a barn behind the house and further back a meadow with apple and pear trees.

I was quite aware of the various pressures on my parents that came with and from the Nazis. I knew who were the Nazis in town and who were not. Not were our neighbors on one side, the Füllenbachs, where from Mrs. Füllenbach I would receive sweaty hugs and often chocolate, and on the other side was Mrs. Schuhmacher who, each Easter, invited me to join with classmates in the Easter egg hunt in the meadow behind her house. The year before I was not invited, and that was a terrible blow. I went to the “Protestant” school, where my teacher had told me that if I did not want to sing the patriotic songs that everyone else sang so loudly, it would really be all right. One day at school, in the yard during recess, someone called out, “Look down there. Smoke.” We all rushed to a low wall that ran the edge of the school playground. From the wall, we could look down on the roofs of the town. Down below, I could see, though it was somewhat hidden by other houses, that it was our synagogue from which the black smoke rose. Children moved away from me as if I had committed something foul. Our teacher, Herr Lehrer Hahraus, came over and took my hand. “I’m going to walk you home.” We found my younger brother Karl. He was in first grade, I in second. Our teacher took each of us by the hand and so, hand-in-hand, our teacher walked us home. There were more people than usual out on the street, many women in aprons who, it seemed, had just stepped out of their houses, some with towels still in their hands, chatting. A crowd stood in front of the synagogue: townspeople milling, gray uniformed policemen, Brown Shirts, some SS. White smoke billowed from the front door of the synagogue. My grandfather, my Opa, appeared in the smoke. He stood in the doorway with a Torah on his shoulder as if he had just lifted it from the Ark. I wanted to run to Opa. The teacher squeezed my hand hard, looked down at me and shook his head. At our house, there was Oma, my grandmother, on the front steps. Our teacher nodded at her, maybe bowed, then turned and left. Grandmother came down and hugged us. She was crying, we were crying. Minutes later, Opa came into the house smelling of smoke and carrying a Torah. “I have to go back, get the others.” He laid the Torah on the kitchen table and hurried out again. A few minutes later he came back with another. He started out again. Oma said, “The shul is burning.” Opa said nothing and hurried out. Several of the older men, Gustav and Otto Gaertner, old Mr. Isaaks, Oma’s brother, Julius, all came to the kitchen carrying either Torahs or an armful of thick black books. The Torahs lay on the kitchen table and all the old men sat around on chairs with their hands in front of their mouths. The town policeman, Laddach, appeared in the kitchen door, there were several SA men behind him. Laddach was about to say something when one of the brown shirts yelled, “You! Old men! Pick them up and get outside.” Officer Laddach nodded. Opa first and then the others picked up a Torah and filed out the door. Outside, in front of our house the Brown Shirts yelled, “Start marching,” and then, screamed, “Left foot, right foot,” over and over again. Soon all the Brown Shirts began yelling, “Left foot, right foot.” I saw them move out. I tried to follow, but Mamma pulled me back and pushed me into the house. Someone, later, told us that the old men were made to march through all the streets of the village with the SA men yelling, “Left foot, right foot,” laughing and enjoying themselves. The old men and Opa were then made to stand in front of the synagogue where a bonfire had been started and with guns pointing at them the men were made to throw the Torahs into the fire. ### The next few days are jumbled. I was in my Oma’s kitchen when there was a loud knocking on the front door. Police officer Laddach, stood at the door. He pulled off his cap, “I’m sorry, Oma. I’m looking for Oscar.” My father in his shirt and undone collar came down the stairs from our upper floor apartment, my mother behind him. Pappa stood in the middle of the room turning in a circle, looking at his mother, at my mother. “What do you want, Laddach?” said my mother. “I’m sorry, Melli, but I have to take Oscar.” “Why Oscar?”

“They’re taking everybody, the Regensburgers, the Gärtners, everybody.”

Oma went out into the barn. “Oscar, you have to get dressed. Dress warm.”

“Where is he going?” Laddach pressed his lips together. “Laddach,” she persisted, “you two were in the band together, in the soccer club.”

“First to Cologne, then I don’t know.”

Mamma ran upstairs. Laddach and my father looked at each other. My father turned in circles. He didn’t see me. My grandmother returned from the barn.

My mother and grandmother ran at my father with clothes. My father just stood there, helpless while they seemed to dress him, my mother with coat and tie, my grandmother with a scarf, my mother with a sweater, then a heavy overcoat, then a hat. Laddach said, “All right.” Pappa moved toward the door and my grandmother screamed, “Wait, I have to make some sandwiches. He has to take some sandwiches.” They all, except grandmother, stood there saying nothing. Grandmother came with sandwiches. She embraced my father. Then my mother embraced him. Laddach took him by the arm and they went out.

Somewhat later in the day. Laddach appeared at our door again. “Melli, you have to come. You and the kids.”

My mother’s knees buckled; she fell to the floor. Laddach and my grandmother helped her up,

“They want you at the synagogue. They just want some pictures.”

A small crowd still stood about the synagogue, among them, several of my classmates. We were told to stand in front of the crippled doors of the synagogue, my mother, my grandmother, my brother Karl, myself. My mother held our youngest brother, two and a half year old Peter in her arms. Smoke still rose from the synagogue, and there was the smell of burning. Two men were taking pictures. My classmates, my playmates, Willibald and Horst as well as some of the others picked up clods of dirt and threw them at us. Two SS men stood in back of the crowd and as the flash bulbs popped off they began to yell at us:”Just wait, soon you’ll be burning too. Just wait. Just wait.” They were laughing.

The following morning, Opa came out of hiding. He had spent that November night, first outside in the field and then, when he thought he heard some men, he ran down to a nearby brook where he spent most of the night immersed in the freezing water. What I remember about that particular morning was my Opa, outside the house, somewhere, screaming, in great pain, “I’m pissing blood. I’m pissing blood.”

The next day we watched our mother make frantic telephone calls trying to find out where our father had been taken. The morning after that Mom and several other women went off to Cologne to find out about their husbands and sons. I was taken along. I was not to open my mouth but to hold on to mother’s hand. If she squeezed my hand, I was to cry. We went to the offices of Jewish community organizations, but there were lines of women already there when we came, many with children holding fast to their mother’s hands. We went to police stations and to the offices of the Gestapo, and always there were long lines and nobody would tell us anything. We returned home and as we got off the train, Laddach was there waiting for us. He said, “Dachau. Dachau is where he is going.”

Six weeks later, through the intervention of a wealthy aunt in Amsterdam, and the almost insane efforts of our mother, Dad was able to emigrate to Holland. The rest of us made it six months later. From Holland we got to Ecuador, and late in 1940 we arrived in New York City.

My Oma and Opa had remained behind. They died in the concentration camp of Terezin.

Walter Hess is the author of Jew’s Harp, a new book of poetry from Pleasure Boat Studio. Hess was born in Germany and emigrated to the U.S. in 1940, via Ecuador. He is a retired documentary film editor who has worked on projects that have won two Peabody’s and three Emmy’s. In 2001 he received an award from the Academy of American Poets, and in 2003 a cash award from the Nyman Foundation for a portion of his memoir.