Divided Lives: The Untold Stories of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi Germany by Cynthia A. Crane, Cynthia A. Crane

From the Publisher

Divided Lives is a book that brings together the horrifying life stories of women from Jewish-Christian marriages whose families were persecuted under Hitler’s Third Reich. These women, the “Mischling,” “half breeds,” or “half Jews,” were subjected to an onslaught of anti-Jewish laws that divided spouses, family, and friends. From the early Hitler years through post- war Germany, the book chronicles these women’s personal struggles, joys, losses, and terror as well as how they maneuvered in a country that had betrayed them. Relatively little has been written about the plight of Jewish-Christian “mixed” families, perhaps because of the complex and controversial split between their Jewish and Christian roots. Crane, whose family suffered under these laws, has collected, translated, and interpreted the life stories of ten women who survived. These are universal stories of hope and survival that transcend time, race, religion, class, and gender.

Marion Kaplan

Crane allows the voices of the victims to shape their own history, and therefore offers an important contribution to Holocaust studies.

John E. Dolibois

Divided Lives is a well-written, intelligent must-read.

Publishers Weekly

In recent years, Holocaust scholarship has begun to uncover many little-known tragedies, such as the persecutions of homosexuals and Gypsies under German national socialism. Crane (an assistant professor of English at Raymond Waters College in Ohio) focuses on the persecution of "mischlings," children of mixed Jewish and Christian marriages--specifically, 10 women whose racial identity was frequently unclear, as some were not practicing Jews and some did not even regard themselves as Jewish. Supplemented by an overview of the history and details of the intricate laws that determined which German citizens were to be classified as Jews or mischlings (literally "half-breeds"), the interviews offer the reader a precise and often frightening inside look at life for mischlings under the Third Reich. In each of the 10 transcribed monologues, each woman's cadences, complexities and individuality come through, along with startling details. For example, Ilsa B, who was born to an "Aryan" father and Jewish mother and who lost relatives in the Holocaust, is able to say of the attention that has been paid to the Nazi persecution of Jews, "'I don't know why this Jewish thing stands out so much." Most powerful is the sheer repetition of everyday details and incidents, such as the observance of Christmas in a mixed marriage, a child's walk to school past "Hitler" oaks and swastika flags, and the ways that natural quarreling among family members became frighteningly loaded under Nazi repression. While none of the historical material is new and Crane makes no pretense to original interpretations, the voices and stories she collects have not been heard in such detail before and are a welcome addition to Holocaust and Jewish studies. (Dec. 1) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

These tales of "mixed families," considered "non-Aryan" by the Third Reich, bring home the awful discrimination of that time. In some cases, Aryans were pressured to divorce their non-Aryan spouses; children from these families were denied educational opportunities and barred from prestigious careers. Crane (English, Raymond Walters Coll.) was naturally drawn to these stories, as her grandparents were such a mixed couple who left Europe in 1938. Her interest lies in the uses of autobiography to heal such trauma. For this book, she has interviewed ten now-elderly women about their wartime experiences. After a brief introduction to each chapter, she lets each woman tell her story in her own way. Although none had previously identified with the Jewish tradition, each experienced the loss of family and friends in the camps. All remained in Germany after World War II or returned after living abroad and now think of themselves as German, despite their ordeals. Crane has succeeded in telling new stories on an old theme. Recommended for Holocaust and women's studies collections.--Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Ten women recount their experiences as what Hitler called half-breeds, children of mixed Jewish-Christian marriages. Most had never thought of themselves as Jewish before the new laws, being fully assimilated into German culture, and not particularly religious. They also remember having half of their families in concentration camps and the other half free but under a cloud. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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Table of Contents

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Chapter One

PART I

The Spirit

History took hold of me and never let me go thereafter.

—Simone de Beauvoir

* * *

Growing up, I myself do not remember ever feeling like anything but an "outsider." Something deep in my stomach told me, somewhere stretched across the ocean was a piece of myself. I do not remember the exact moment that my family's history began to unravel. People always asked me if I was related to this Crane or that one, and I would smile and say No. As I grew older, it became more irritating, "No, none of my relatives live near here," I would all but shout to the inquisitor. I wondered where all of my relatives were. I always knew my name was different from my grandmother's, but I did not know why. Something was amiss, but when I attempted to ask my father, his face paled and I retreated. My paternal descendants, I discerned, were twilight zone people. I always felt as if I belonged in another place, that there was a dormant world embedded in me via my grandparents and father. Shreds of stories leaked out in whispers when I was young, until my grandmother started to toss out one story at a time, until she broke down and confessed to me that she had written a book. It took me some time to persuade her to retrieve the manuscript out of her basement, where it had been hidden away. Through her stories, I allowed my grandmother to reweave my life, to put back in the original stitches. But not until I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Hamburg, Germany, and wassitting in the Hamburg State Archives (after having waited weeks for my file requests to be fulfilled, and now having all eyes upon me as I checked out the folders) looking through my family's immigration files, housing inane letters my grandmother had to write to the Gestapo just to keep her husband's stethoscope, lists of all the beautiful family heirlooms the Nazis would "pick up," as well as papers regarding the Aryanization of the company Arndt and Cohn, owned by my great-grandfather and great-uncle, did I realize the enormity of what had been missing from my identity, a history that, once seemingly daunting, vivified me the longer I stayed in Germany.

* * *

My father and his family, like the women in this book, survived the Third Reich. They are here to talk about it, but millions of others are not. My own family's experiences parallel many of the women's stories recounted here, and because of my relatives' persecution, the women felt a kinship to me and I to them. The subject matter is not only tragic but also reaffirming of the human spirit and its ability to persevere. I have attempted to illuminate for all readers universal stories of human strength and weakness, of hope and survival, that transcend time, race, religion, class, and gender. This is not the story of my family, but it begins with them.

    My paternal family, the Cohns, has been traced to 1755 in Germany. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they resided in Neustrelitz, now a part of the defunct German Democratic Republic (DDR), and then gravitated to Hamburg in northern Germany. My grandfather Felix Cohn was a private practitioner and also a prison doctor in Hamburg when Hitler came to power. His medical license was revoked under Hitler's laws in 1938. As a designated Jew, he could no longer practice medicine. He was supposedly fired from the Grosshamburger Gefängnis (prison), where he served as prison doctor from 1922 to 1934; there he had entered on the prison records the factual reasons for injuries to some of the prisoners, namely that they were beaten. My grandfather endangered his life by helping prisoners to escape who had wrongfully been imprisoned. He also helped "enemies of the state"—Socialists and Jews—by misdiagnosing them or claiming they needed certain medicines and sending them to hospitals from which they could then flee. He also drove ostensibly ill people to the edge of the Baltic near Travemünde, where they fled in boats. Informants tipped off my grandfather that he was on a Gestapo list to be rounded up and most certainly tortured.

    He escaped Nazi Germany to the United States in 1938 before Kristallnacht, "the night of broken glass," thanks to an affidavit from his younger brother, Rudolph, who lived in the United States. My grandfather was not Jewish but was considered a Jew because of his Jewish "blood": his grandparents had been tied socially to Jewish culture but were not observant, religious Jews. My grandmother, Herta Bahlsen Cohn, was considered "Aryan," or pure German. She was pressured, unsuccessfully, by the Gestapo to divorce my grandfather—"Why would a beautiful young woman like you stay married to a Jew?" Before he left Germany, my grandfather insisted that his children be baptized immediately to protect them. They had been attending Sunday School at a Lutheran church. Nevertheless, because of my grandfather's "blood-line," my father and his siblings were considered Mischlinge, Hitler's derogatory term denoting "half-breeds," or "hybrids," those that were "outsiders," not fully German or "Aryan" or even human. Hitler referred to the racially "impure" as "monstrosities halfway between man and ape." After Hitler's rise to power, their lives became a struggle for survival, hanging precariously between life and uncertain death. My book is about Mischlinge and their divided lives.

    Like many of the Mischlinge and their families, my grandfather did not want to leave Germany. He loved his country and was a nationalistic German. He had served in World War I as a doctor in the trenches in France, ran an evacuation hospital, and was rewarded for his bravery with a first and second Iron Cross. He could not fathom that his country would renounce him. He did not think of himself as a Jew. He thought of himself as a German, the son of a famous Hamburg finance senator, Carl Cohn. He could not turn his back on his history very easily. Had my grandmother not been so strong-willed, he might never have made it out of Germany. She had been talking about leaving for years. As early as 1922, at age nineteen, she could see the growing movement of the National Socialists, the Nazi party. My grandfather had merely silenced her. I think, deep down, that he knew she was right. At the time he left, he was fifty years old and my grandmother thirty-five, quite a generation gap when one is thinking of starting over one's life in a foreign land. My grandmother mentioned that he wrote her letters from the United States in the year after he left Germany. She still has these letters. My grandfather later told her she did not need to keep them because they were all lies. He had said everything in the United States was fine to try to keep her spirits up, when, in reality, nothing had been fine with him. Nor was life fine for her. My grandmother claims that once he got to the United States he forgot about her fighting for all of them in Germany. He thought she and the children could remain yet another year. In her view, he had no idea how hopeless life was in Germany and how difficult it had become to get out.

    Before my grandmother left Germany, she attempted to help my grandfather's brothers, Carl August and Werner Cohn, who had been rounded up on Kristallnacht. Because she was "Aryan," blonde with blue eyes, she could maneuver through Germany more readily. Carl August was not sent to a camp; instead he was cast into the prison in Fuhlsbüttel. Carl August was more protected; perhaps he was important to the Nazis because he was a partner of Arndt and Cohn, an import/export business that accorded him many connections, and the Nazis could not afford to lose German business. My grandmother became aware that he had plenty of help and did not need hers. They had a cordial, but not close relationship, and Carl's wife, who was "Aryan" and quite alert to the political situation, was in a position to exercise some influence through friends and family. Carl did not remain in prison long after Kristallnacht. On the other hand, Werner, who had never even been in military service, was taken to either Osnabruck or Marinberg, camps north of Berlin. Utterly traumatized by his camp experience, he refused to talk or write about it before he died a few years ago in South Africa.

    Indicative of the pervasive secrecy of these times, my grandmother found out about the men's capture in a roundabout way. The nephew of a neighbor of my great-grandmother told his aunt, who told my grandmother, that Werner was on a truck to Berlin. To help him, my grandmother went to the Fuhlsbüttel prison director's home in the middle of the night. The director lived in a five-story apartment building in Eppendorf, a refined suburb in Hamburg. My grandmother remembers climbing all of the stairs in the dark, concentrating on appearing serious. The director had recently come from southwest Africa, where my grandmother's sister lived with one of the first settler's families who were very well known. During the meeting with the director, my grandmother cleverly dropped their names, and he agreed to tell her the official procedure for getting men out of the camps. He could have told her nothing. Within his limits, he tried to be helpful. The wives were supposed to appeal for the release of the men. They needed to gather all of the men's official papers, and then the men had to leave the country immediately. Mausi, Werner's wife, did not believe any of this; nor did others who could not fathom the Nazis' actions. She said if her husband, a lawyer, could not get himself out, she did not know who could. Like some of the women whose husbands had been rounded up, she was in denial. Because she did not believe my grandmother, Mausi went to an elderly Jewish lawyer, who confirmed the truth of what my grandmother had said. Mausi went to Berlin, where she and other friends were hidden in a house. Through a tedious, bureaucratic process, my grandmother managed to get Werner released. When he returned, his clothes needed disinfecting and his head had been shaved. Werner mentioned that the men had been forced to march out of the camp and many had collapsed. Both Werner and Carl emigrated at different times and settled in South Africa. Werner told my grandmother that if she ever needed help getting herself and the children out of the country, he would help. And he, among others, did.

    On January 30, 1939, more than a year after my grandfather left, my grandmother and my father, Carl, ten years old, along with his siblings, left Hamburg for the United States on the SS Washington, part of the United States Line and the largest steamer ever built in America. They were only allowed to leave with DM10 per person, which was equivalent to 4.59 in U.S. dollars. After stopping in Le Havre and South Hampton, the ship arrived in New York on February 9, 1939. My father recalled hellish seas, but the children found a way to have fun, sliding by the force of the seas from corner to corner on the ship deck. My grandmother equated America with guaranteed, irreversible freedom. When she arrived in the United States, she ran down the streets in New York, never glancing behind her because no one's eyes were upon her anymore. The youngest children, Johann and Anna, lived with my grandmother at a house in upstate New York where she worked as a maid. Immediately after disembarking the boat in New York, my father and his other sister left for a farm in Doylstown, Pennsylvania, owned by my grandmother's friend from Hamburg, Berta Schroeder. They remained there until my grandfather passed his medical exams and moved everyone to Hamilton, Ohio, to start again in medicine.

    Over the years, the German government sent my grandfather information about collecting monies owed him. Like most of the Mischlinge, he had a legitimate claim to social security (for his prison work) and for Wiedergutmachung ("to make good again"), reparations given to German-Jewish victims of the Third Reich. But my grandfather never wanted to deal with Germany again. Before he could throw out the unopened letters, my grandmother answered them and took care of any future correspondence from Germany.

* * *

In the 1950s because of continued adversity, my father, at age twenty-five, changed his last name from Cohn to Crane but did not explain it to me until I was a teenager, and even then he preferred that I not discuss it with anyone as "It's no one's business." Many of the women in this book talked about their Jewish or "Aryan" name that either marked them for or protected them from persecution. Although we in the United States may think that all this was "only in Germany," the fact is that anti-Semitism was everywhere. Even though my father's identity was a German Christian and, later, an American Christian, his past, which identified him as a Mischling, as a "race" that did not in reality exist and that he never understood, followed him. My father's own tormenters haunted him: the Nazi teacher, Herr Stolp, who, in 1938 beat him mercilessly everyday in front of the class (causing permanent hearing loss) to prove what a Jew hater and good Nazi he was; the Americans who saw him as the enemy because he was German and who banned him from walking down certain Midwestern streets; the American high school principal who told him he was not mature enough for college (despite my father's lengthy resumé of jobs and responsibilities) and that, anyway, Michigan State was the only college that took Jewish students (this despite the fact that all of my father's school records classified him as Protestant, which he had always been); and his employer on the West Coast, Long-Bell Lumber Company, in 1954, who would not promote him because, he said, "We can't put a salesman with a Jewish name into the Midwest calling on lumberyards and expect him to meet sales goals. He would not be accepted by his customers!"

    Two weeks after the job incident, my father changed his name legally to Crane, and the company promoted and transferred him to Kansas City. My mother, Joan Cummins, had married my father despite some protests from her mother. My mother was only twenty-one, obviously in love, and not too concerned about what was "in a name." My father had talked with his father about changing his name, which my grandfather understood was necessary, as other family members had done the same. My parents sat down with the phone book, and because in those days all their towels and silver were monogrammed, they wanted the last name to remain a C and be monosyllabic like Cohn. They decided that Crane sounded okay. Later, when he returned to his hometown in Ohio as a Crane and not a Cohn, my father sensed that the Zion Lutheran church to which he formerly belonged and the Jewish community alike were miffed. Yet my father was tired of the discrimination he had faced, and he did not want his soon-to-arrive children (who would be raised and baptized Presbyterian, like his wife) to face any unnecessary hassles because of a last name. Interestingly enough, many parents of the Mischlinge in this book also had done this. They may not have changed their names, but they baptized their children and were adamantly Christian. They severed all Jewish roots so that they could be "officially" assimilated into German culture. For my father, there was nothing inherently wrong with being Jewish, nor was it a religion to scoff at, but the only remnant of my paternal family's "Jewishness" was a last name that prior to Hitler had no major significance. This identity of "being Jewish" was imposed on them. With the rise of Hitler, their name and bloodline marked them, changing all of their lives forever.

* * *

In 1994 when I received the Fulbright to Hamburg, Germany, I could not envision how it would change my life. I was pursuing a project that encompassed my primary field of study in graduate school, personal narratives, which centered on the contextualizing of my grandmother's manuscript that I had retrieved from the basement, a twenty-four chapter historical memoir that discussed her life, hardships, and philosophy in the years from 1915 to 1939 in Austria and Hamburg before her emigration to the United States. I proofread and edited her original manuscript, which had been compiled from nineteen years of journal notes and typed at her kitchen table in Hamilton, Ohio. Although later she published her original manuscript, at the time I applied for the Fulbright, a definitive version had not been written. Therefore, initially my research was to provide additional information and to expand on the foundations of this manuscript. My grandmother's work touches on the specific political, social, and religious upheavals originating in the Weimar period that, she believes, transformed the Germany she had known. My grandmother had a degree from a business school, and had worked at a young age, treasuring her independence. Ironically, my grandmother had worked for my great-grandfather, Senator Carl Cohn, a formidable figure, years before she met my grandfather in a housing community where she was the bookkeeper and he the resident doctor. What interested me most, and what later became my focus, was her role as a middle-class Austrian Lutheran, an "Aryan," married to my grandfather, an upper-class German of Jewish descent, a "non-Aryan." Their marriage, considered a Jewish-Christian one, was labeled a Mischehe ("mixed marriage") and denounced as illegal under Hitler's laws.

    To better understand "mixed-marriage" situations, I conducted research in the Hamburg State Archives, locating my family's emigration documents that once had been overseen by an arm of the Gestapo. Ironically, these files had reappeared recently after years of being "lost." Because of laws governing these archives, I was not able to see these files until my family granted the archive permission to give them to me. Via a loophole in the laws, I obtained permission from the archives' director.

    This feeling of "Let's not speak of it" extended to all groups: Jews, Mischlinge, Germans, and the government. My own experiences of secrecy were directly related to what had occurred during the Third Reich. My study of these files helped me later in my interviews because I better understood the horrendous rigmarole, the endless, ubiquitous tracking system of the Nazis. Similarly, many of the women in their stories talk about the endless bureaucracy, and the letters of pleading and "proving" one's "Aryan" heritage. Seeing my family's names listed in an index pertaining to the records of an arm of the Gestapo, Oberfinanzpräsident (OFP), the head of finance, was harrowing. There had been many offices around Hamburg that were simply awful where one had to go to ask to leave the country. This meant that no one got out "illegally," as they went through this long, grueling process to leave. After 1939 it was nearly impossible to get out through "legal" means. I was fascinated by all the calculations of possessions. There were letters back and forth between the wicked OFP and the family. In every one of my family's files were documents from MM Warburg and Co. Family members sold jewelry to the company, which also had my family's Konto (bank) number; which means Warburg and Co. controlled their banking. Their official letters ended with Heil Hitler! which is what most people had to write, as if they were being watched. Other letters closed with Mit Deutschen Grüssen! (with German greetings), which today has been replaced with Mit Freundlichen Grüssen! (with friendly greetings). These signatures were imperative to show the writer's nationalism. I nearly had to get up and leave at times because I could feel the interrogation of the Nazis and the frustration of my grandmother in the letters, and the immensity of the endless calculations of the family's worth. There were letters begging that they be allowed to keep some of their possessions. For instance, my grandmother asked to take her typewriter. The official letters had her categorized as "Aryan," and when my grandfather was mentioned, "nicht Aryan" was written in parentheses. The mention of their status as divided from each other was shocking but certainly helped her get out of the country. The Mischling women, in their stories that follow, also repeatedly mentioned this pervasive classification system that was on every document in the Third Reich.

    In the files of Carl August, my great-uncle, the selling of his house, to every single item he owned, is listed. There are letters he wrote to the OFP pleading, "Please, can I keep this?" The Nazis had marks or circles around some of his words, analyzing them for falsehoods. One of the Gestapo's replies said that the points he argued in his last letter were not solid enough. The last name, Cohn, was always underlined with red pencil, and the correspondents refer to him as Jewish. Curiously, copies of the anti-Jewish laws prohibiting his family from this or that were attached to one of his letters. My great-grandfather, a Hamburg senator from 1921 to 1929, also had a large file containing numerous articles about his death and funeral in 1931, and newspaper articles he had written. My grandmother was thankful that he died before he could see what his homeland would become. The Mischling women also mentioned how they were glad an elderly relative had died before Hitler's time, so they did not have to live through it. In another file, there was a list of all the people who contributed money to make my grandmother's exit possible. It was a lot of money by my calculations. I knew all about these events, but to see them in these official documents where entire lives were determined is something again. Not only sheer tension drove me from the archives, but also my grandmother's concerns about digging into the past. After I had been trekking to the archives for a while, I returned to the United States briefly. Talks with my grandmother started to steer me away from dead documents. Once again, just like the Mischlinge in their stories, the need to be secret and protective surfaced in my grandmother's personality.

    So I turned my gaze away from the family and searched for personal documents of Jewish women who had married German men, or, like my grandmother, German women who had married Jewish men. Women's lives at that time had been more of a private than a public matter; thus few documents mentioned women, no matter what their background. Because of the missing women's lives, the hunting quickly became a daunting task. In the archives, I was not only burdened with language barriers but also with gender barriers. It was telling that I found hardly any information on women at all, and I wanted to know why. Because life outside the archives had to be more invigorating, I decided to interview surviving Mischlinge. As I interacted daily with more Germans, it became apparent that speaking with living women was more immediate, despite the fact that I was told "you won't find anyone," as so many Jewish survivors were deceased. And, indeed, among the survivors, there was not a long line of anxious interviewees ready to disclose their traumatic experiences. Interrogation, violence, spying, mistrust, and silence constituted the sphere of "normal" behavior in the 1930s and 1940s. These women had learned how to dodge their oppressors, to lie, to protect themselves and their families. They were living peacefully with a hidden past. Nevertheless, I continued my search for women who were partners in or were daughters of a "mixed marriage." The "half-Jew" women had a higher survival rate than "full Jews," primarily because one of their parents had been classified "Aryan."

    Knowing that my father (who is of the same generation as the women I interviewed) vehemently opposed ever returning to Germany, I was curious as to why and how it happened that some Mischlinge never left. Why would those who were persecuted by their own people remain (even after the war), or if they had left temporarily, why would they return? As I maneuvered within Hamburg, a city of nearly 2 million people, it was no surprise that my investigations continued for six months. Curious listeners have asked me repeatedly, "How did you find the women?" "It wasn't easy" is my standard reply, and the digging process was lengthy. I began to receive letters from women who were potential interviewees after I developed contacts with community leaders, other researchers, and research institutions, and after a notice about my research was published in a popular weekend column, Von Mensch zu Mensch (from person to person), in the city newspaper on March 5, 1995. Once the first contact was tapped, all the subsequent contacts started to fall like dominoes.

    Despite their willingness to present themselves through letters and phone calls, most of the Mischling women were tentative about being tape recorded and became reticent when I arrived to interview them; they suddenly realized the enormity of disclosing their lives. Nevertheless, by the time I left Germany, I had twenty taped interviews, primarily with Mischling daughters, the products of Jewish/Christian "mixed marriages." As historian Claudia Koonz mentioned in Mothers in the Fatherland, "perhaps children felt the impact of anti-Semitism most strongly and earlier than their parents. Children of Protestant parents considered themselves Protestants even if they had Jewish grandparents. Suddenly, their Jewish heritage mattered."

    I created a collection of voices distinguished thematically. These voices recall the same historical experience with variations and with parts of the stories left concealed: All of the women are victims, but we get ten stories—distinct, varied personalities—out of possible hundreds. The women's stories can be likened to Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings, Opus 11," a quiet poignancy with strength. Variances of solitude and intense living are woven throughout their lives. Most stories end, as the piece does, with calm resolution, a slice of peace. As I cannot claim to be an objective, nonparticipatory viewer, my own personal odyssey—the experience itself and the resultant questioning of values and beliefs—surfaces throughout the book. My nomadic journey within Hamburg (with one satchel, wandering from lead to lead, moving from house to house) was more than an academic one; it was a quest for identity, a striving to become, in theorist Maria Lugones's words, a "world-traveller." The knowledge thrust upon me that I was "Other" bound me to the Mischlinge and enabled me to hear their stories judiciously; however, my connection also occluded any totalizing, integrative experience. I too felt a nagging, persistent suspicion of Germans.

    I was in Germany at a time of "new unrest." Although the country was unified, those not living in the East insinuated that "the East" was a needy, unwanted stepchild draining the economy—divergent political and economic philosophies and views of Germany's history could not be bridged. In addition, the fifty-year commemoration of the concentration camps' liberations had begun. Nonstop TV and public programs and gatherings and newspaper articles threw the 1930s and 40s into the present. When I arrived, talk of the Third Reich was everywhere in the media, but not on many citizens' lips. I heard moans of "not again" from my landlady when the topic appeared on the news night after night. I certainly knew what it felt like to have old wounds reopened, but I could not imagine the deepness of this cut.

* * *

If you were to ask the average Jew in America the question, "Do you think of yourself as a Jew first, or an American?" what would the answer be? Many in the Jewish community in America, especially those who emigrated from Germany, will say they are Jews first, primarily because of the persecution. I had this discussion with the women I interviewed, and they think Jews in America identify much more with their Jewishness. More progressive Judaic practices abound in the United States. In Germany, many of the Jews are Orthodox, which has alienated them from more progressive Jews there. As a few of the women mentioned, some Jews will not attend the synagogue in Hamburg, as it is too conservative and strict. A few interviewees commented on the large number of European Jews living in the United States who escaped from or survived the Third Reich. A number of the interviewees questioned if perhaps American Jews are not as forgiving as Israeli Jews, or if they are more disconnected from their origins. The women answered that many Jews in Israel still speak German and are tied to their former culture through the language; thus, they harbor, even nurse, a connection to Germany. The Jews in America have gained a physical and psychological distance from the past, which does not foster nostalgia. Often, for them, the German language and culture are dead, and quantified anger and the reality of what happened to them and their family stands in its place. Esther Bejarano, a survivor of Auschwitz with whom I talked, returned from Israel to live in Germany after having barely made it out alive from Auschwitz. Why return? The answer seems to relate, in part, to money. The persecuted returnees receive pensions, and, compared to Israel, the cost of living is better in Germany. Otherwise, as Jews, they may not have returned. After the war my great-uncle, Werner Cohn, and his wife returned to Germany. They lived in Hamburg only one year, then claimed they could not stand the climate and had to return to South Africa. Not many of the formerly persecuted people could return and remain. I am sure many Germans are proud to be Germans, whether Jew or Gentile. However, it is nearly impossible for Germans to display their pride in Germany. Certain acts of nationalism are against the law because this is part of what led Germany into difficulty in the 1920s and 1930s.

    My father called Germany his "graveyard," pondering why he should return for a visit. He readily recalled how he was beaten by Herr Stolp—day in and day out—as an example to the other school children of an "inferior." Did these children not understand, as my father did not? He just wanted to wear a uniform (forbidden to him) like all the other boys—to belong to whatever they belonged to. He was an outsider but he did not understand why. The schoolchildren were told he was the cause of Germany's ailments. They could tell their parents "a `half Jew' was put in his place today." From what source does this mentality derive? Perhaps the Third Reich is still a historical aberration. Primo Levi states in regard to the isolation of the Jews and the concentration camp system,

At no other place or time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty. No one wants to absolve the Spanish conquistadors of the massacres perpetrated in the Americas throughout the sixteenth century. It seems they brought about the death of at least sixty million Indios; but they acted on their own, without or against the directives of their

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