When the Jews Fled to Germany. a Forgotten Chapter of Postwar History by Hans‐Peter Föhrding and Heinz Verfürth

Sample Translation (Chapter 1 and 2)

When the Jews Fled to Germany. A forgotten chapter of postwar history by Hans‐Peter Föhrding and Heinz Verfürth

Translated by Jefferson Chase

Publication: March 2017 (Hardcover) 352 pages ISBN: 978‐3‐462‐04866‐7

Foreign rights with: Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG Iris Brandt ibrandt@kiwi‐verlag.de Aleksandra Erakovic aerakovic@kiwi‐verlag.de Chapter 1

The Safety of the New Ghetto in the Middle of Germany: Jewish Refugees after 1945

Aron Waks is nervous. The young man is waiting impatiently for an American jeep, which left the camp in the western German camp of Ziegenhain that morning, to finally return. It was sent out to pick up a family, a couple and their five children, from another camp in the neighboring town of Schwarzenborn.

Around noon, the turnpike barrier at the wide front camp gate is raised, and the open jeep slowly rolls down the dusty street. The Lessers have arrived in Ziegenhain, their final destination after weeks of dangerous traveling. Aron greets everyone heartily. But only after he’s given the Lessers’ eldest daughter Lea a prolonged embrace. The young man in his mid‐twenties has been in love with her for a few weeks.

Lea, too, has feverishly awaited their reunion. That morning she was suddenly called to appear before the camp administration. Some wanted to talk to her urgently on the telephone, she was told. Who would be trying to reach her here, in an isolated provincial German village, she asks herself? Most probably, she decides, it’s just one of those enquiries that her family has had to endure in various places since they left Poland. The questions are always the same: where do you come from, where are you headed and why? But after taking the telephone receiver she cries out in joy. It’s Aron. He’s quite nearby, in Ziegenhain.

Aron’s and Lea’s embrace completes a story that began four months ago in Poland. They didn’t know one another back then, but both had survived the terrors of the Lodz ghetto and then, thanks to a last‐minute stroke of luck, miraculously escaped being murdered. The rest of the Lesser family was able to flee to the Soviet‐occupied eastern Poland after Hitler’s Wehrmacht marched into the west. They were later taken to Siberia – a harsh turn of fate that ironically saved their lives. After the end of the Second World War in 1945, all of these people were shocked to discover that they were greeted as Jews in their home city of Lodz with hatred and threats of violence from their former neighbors. Increasingly they came to fear a new wave of anti‐Semitism and felt threatened by the murderous excesses of pogroms.

So Aron Waks and the Lesser family, who had gotten to know one another in the small Jewish community remaining in Lodz, devised a bold plan. In early 1946, they prepared to flee once more – this time to Germany and the protection of the American occupying powers. Their ultimate aim is to get to Palestine as soon as they can. They depart from Lodz at different times. In summer 1946, Aron becomes the first to leave, taking his things and heading off with a group of young Zionists. A few

2 weeks later the Lessers followed. Because they took separate paths they lost contact with one another. It’s a near wonder after the confusion and uncertainty of their respective journeys that they have been reunited so quickly in post‐War Germany. In Ziegenhain, they can once again breathe easily.

A photo from those days documents their relief. Lea is sitting with Aron on a bench in front of one of the camp barracks. She’s wearing an elegant dress, he, a proper jacket, shirt and tie. To either side of them are Lea’s sisters Salle and Manja, also looking well turned‐out. In the background, her brother Schaje and father Leib Lesser look out from one of the building’s dark windows. Of course, this arranged scene is one of those typical keepsakes, photo‐album pictures. “That’s how it was,” people say when they flip through such albums many years later. “That’s what we looked like.” Yet this photo expresses something more. It says: “Yes, we’re all together. We’ve survived terrors and flight and can once again look ahead to the future.” It’s an almost defiant demonstration of familial happiness amidst the sadness of camp life.

This little group of people can, no doubt, use a bit of optimism. In the late summer of 1946, Ziegenhain is a relatively large camp with over 2000 refugees, most of them from Poland. Aron Waks has a special position within this arbitrarily assembled community as the chairman of the camp refugee committee. Inside of it, he’s nicknamed “Präses,” which means something like “head honcho.” His function is to mediate between the refugees, the American camp commander and various aid organizations. As a roll‐up‐your‐sleeves sort of fellow, he and his small team are establishing set structures in the strange place they now live. The US Army pretty much lets the refugees organize everything themselves, including daily essentials like accommodation, food, clothing and hygiene. The army and various Jewish aid groups provide the refugees with enough to eat and whatever else they absolutely need. But Waks and the committee see to it that these goods are distributed in orderly fashion. It isn’t always easy, for instance, to offer the large contingency of Orthodox Jews kosher food.

And the needs of this community of necessity go a lot further than that. The refugees require kindergartens, schools, vocational training and workshops so that the children and young people can be adequately prepared for the future. To ensure a stable order among people so tightly cramped together, there also has to be a camp police force constituted of refugees.

Many of the camp inhabitants want to practice their religious traditions again, so synagogues and prayer rooms have to be set up. Arrangements are made with the Jewish army “field chaplains” for regular religious ceremonies. It’s also necessary to establish Talmud and Torah schools in order to remind people, especially young ones, of the importance of the written word in the Jewish faith. And

3 of course they want to preserve the venerable language of Yiddish, the camp’s most frequently spoken tongue.

The directorial team thus faces enormous challenges, if it is to create for the refugees a small social and cultural unit, based on the Eastern European shtetl, in a foreign country. It must follow the rules of the camp as it attempts to resuscitate a venerable tradition which the Nazis tried systematically to eradicate. Looking back on those days, so full of improvisation and getting used to novel things, Lea will only remember the positives about this new microcosm: “What did we have to complain about? After all the terrible things we’d been through, we were so happy just to be back together again. That was all that mattered!”

Yet at least from the outside, the conditions in Ziegenhain looked anything but appealing. Under the Nazis the camp was run as Stalag IX A Ziegenhain and was the largest holding facility for POWs in the western German state of Hessen. Built upon a cow pasture shortly after Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the overcrowded facility would ultimately house more than 35,000 people from Poland, Russia, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy and wherever else the Wehrmacht fought and took prisoners. After the war, the American occupiers initially interned NS functionaries, members of the SS and SA, Wehrmacht soldiers and women active in the League of German Girls there. There they conducted a brief and thus unavoidably insufficient attempt at politically re‐educating Germans infected with National Socialist ideology.

Before long, the US military administration had no choice but to use the facility for another group of people whose numbers had been swelling month by month since the start of 1946: Eastern European Jews. The anti‐Semitism that had broken out in their home countries, especially in Poland, but also in the Baltic nations, Czechoslovakia and Hungary led to a mass exodus. Usually illegally, large numbers of these people tried to cross the borders into the West, especially into the US‐ occupied areas of Germany and Austria, where they thought that they would be safe and protected. Historians have written of a “flight of panic.”

That description is apt for a number of reasons. In Poland, for example, enmity increased to the point that the minority of surviving Jews became the targets of incendiary tirades, and isolated instances of violence developed into frenzied mobs hunting down people. In mid‐1946, 42 people were killed and 80 wounded in a pogrom in the small town of Kielce. The murderous campaign lasted for two days. After this barbaric excess, there was little to keep Jews in Poland any more. In the fall of 1946 alone, 50,000 of them left the country. A large wave of refugees headed west, and the migration continued in 1947.

4 But could Jews find refuge in the land of the perpetrators so shortly after the Shoah? Few of those who had survived the Nazi catastrophe in Eastern Europe seem to have doubted that this was possible when they left their homelands. In their eyes, they were fleeing not to Germany or the Germans, but to those who had vanquished the Hitler dictatorship, first of all the Americans, and then the British and French. They were – or so they thought – temporarily entrusting their fates to the western Allies. But their ultimate goal, after being racially persecuted by the Nazis and marginalized by their anti‐Semitic countrymen, was to get to Palestine, to emigrate to the Biblical homeland of the Jews. For the refugees, Germany was cursed, blood‐soaked ground, which they were only passing across as they set out to found new lives. They saw the refugee camps as extraterritorial islands, unavoidable intermediary stations and necessary transit zones.

To get there, as many of them probably suspected when they set out from Eastern Europe, they would have to endure all manner of privations and hardships. That was true in any case of the Lessers in Ziegenhain. When they arrived in September 1946, the camp was a barren, desolate place, and it wasn’t hard to see traces of its initial use as a place for incarcerating POWs. There was an endless, grim central road with identical mortar‐and‐beam‐style wooden barracks to the right and left, as though attached to a string. Many of the one‐story flat‐roofed buildings were weather‐beaten and decrepit. They were furnished with what could better be called junk than furniture. The camp had been chaotically abandoned by its earlier inhabitants so that the first refugees had to spend days cleaning the buildings out. Between those structures was flat earth where nothing grew other than scaggy grass brush and thorn shrubbery. There was a tall barbed‐wire fence, reinforced and bent inward at the top, surrounding the camp. The rectangular grounds were flanked by six massive watchtowers – structures that recalled nothing so much as terrible memories in the traumatized new arrivals. What the US military administration called “D.P. Camp 95 433” may have been an island, but it was certainly no Elysium.

The living spaces were a study in a cramped chaos, furnished with triple bunk beds, a table and a few chairs – otherwise they were empty. Families were allocated one such space each. There was dirt everywhere, and the hygienic conditions were indescribably bad. In a report from November 1946, the director of one of the aid organizations working in the camp wrote: “The wooden barracks are only partially insulated and in poor condition. Nonetheless, the head of the camp thinks that it can be made habitable for the winter. The food situation still isn’t good, and the water supply hardly satisfactory. New water mains are needed.”

Those who resided there accepted this fully inadequate world, with all of its extraordinary shortcomings and day‐to‐day hardships, without complaint. The camp was only a short‐term place in which they were quartered. It didn’t need to be outfitted like a home, the refugees believed.

5 Creature comforts seemed to be of secondary importance. It is strangely moving today to see old photos of Ziegenhain in which individuals and small groups pose before the barbed‐wire fence, smiling gladly into the camera. Such happy images in front of such a macabre backdrop underscored the primary feeling among the camp inhabitants: I’m safe here. After many years of being terrorized and threatened, this voluntary ghetto radiated security and allowed inhabitants to regain an ability to trust, a precondition for renewing social contacts and relationships and making plans for the future. Some of the most common goals were to start a family, to complete some vocational training and to return to the rhythms of religion.

Beyond the fences and towers, where at the start GIs still kept guard, was an environment Jews perceived as imminently hostile. Out there was the empire of evil, the realm of the Nazis, persecutors and murderers. Wherever possible, the refugees avoided contact with Germans – it was seen as tantamount to betraying the memory of Jewish victims. The only entities to which the refugees addressed their interests, wishes and desires were the Americans and the aid organizations, both international and Jewish. German communities, officials and institutions had been utterly discredited by the fascist past. The refugees’ self‐isolation helped create a sense of internal solidarity.

Ziegenheim was thus a bizarre alien and isolated organism in the middle of the German nation after its great collapse, and this one camp wasn’t the only place where Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe rebuilt and reprised a piece of lost shtetl life. There were similar facilities all around, including Schwarzenborn, where the Lessers had lived earlier, and Neukirchen, which was also close by. The entire state of Hessen was dotted with such points of flight, with larger ones in Kassel, Eschwege, Wetzlar and Zeilsheim bei Frankfurt, and smaller ones in Bensheim, Fulda and Hofgeismar. Jewish “assembly centers,” as the Americans called them, were particularly common in Bavaria, which was also under American occupation, in particular Munich and environs. With its large DP camps in Feldafing, Pocking, Landsberg and Föhrenwald, this area developed into a major focus of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe.

Many people wanted to live in such camps, where US military authorities conferred upon refugees the coveted status of displaced persons. A category that had been introduced by the United Nations at the end of the war, it was originally intended only to designate people who had been forcibly moved, torn from their roots or otherwise rendered homeless by the war. But the Americans took it upon themselves to broaden the definition – a decision which markedly increased the flow of Eastern European Jews into their occupation zone.

The British, however, followed a different line in their occupation zone, sending large number of refugees to Bergen Hohne, not far from the former concentration camp Bergen‐Belsen. With at times

6 more than 10,000 inhabitants, it was the largest camp of its sort of West Germany. There were also several smaller refugee camps in North Rhine‐Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Schleswig‐Holstein. The British often treated Jewish refugees with reluctance, even severity, especially when it came to giving out displaced person status. That was an independent legal category beyond nationality, and Britain had a UN mandate to govern Palestine. It doesn’t want to do anything to encourage the creation of a state of Israel, which would have put them at odds with Arabs. The ambivalent situation caused permanent friction and tension in Camp Hohne between the British military administration and Jewish representatives.

The French, who had the smallest occupation zone in southwest Germany, only maintained a handful of camps of Jewish refugees, and these were modest‐sized facilities accommodating a few thousand people. Citing the need to repair war‐time destruction in their own country, the French kept almost completely out of discussions about the future of Jewish survivors and refugees in Germany. The same was true of the Soviet Union. Stalin didn’t even acknowledge the status of displaced persons. For him, the millions of people who were taken away or who fled during the course of the war remained Soviet citizens who had a duty to return home. Stalin was also busy Sovietizing Eastern European states, which in turn convinced more Jews to seek exile in the West.

At the zenith of the flight of refugees from Eastern Europe in 1946 and 1947, between 250,000 and 300,000 Jews were in West Germany. At the end of World War II, no one had envisioned such a development, and the victorious Allies were not just surprised, but positively overwhelmed in every respect. Ways of housing such a number of people had to be found immediately in a country, where whole cities had been destroyed, apartment buildings bombed out, factories ruined and entire infrastructure systems demolished. Millions of Germans were also looking for somewhere permanent to live at this juncture.

It took a while for the Allies’ efforts to address this problem to work, and it required severity and compulsion. Everywhere from Flensburg in the north to Reichenhall in the south, quarters had to be found for Eastern European Jews. Sometimes they were in former POW camps, as was the case in Ziegenhein, or in slave‐labor facilities with their primitive, sparse furnishings. More solid and comfortable were former military barracks and factory buildings. Some lucky refugees were put up in pleasant villas, hotels and sanatoria, cloisters and castles. Private apartments formerly occupied by Nazi collaborators were also often requisitioned.

This historical upheaval passed without most of the German populace fully realizing what was going on. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in Germany? Hadn’t Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels boasted to his Führer in 1943 that Berlin was “Jew‐free?” Germans had, of course, heard about the

7 few thousands of survivors who had somehow overcome the death marches from Buchenwald and Dachau or the absolute nightmares of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. But those amounted to only around 15,000 of the 600,000 Jews who had lived in Germany when Hitler had come to power. Such small numbers were hardly worth mentioning.

Germans had problems other than what to do with Eastern European Jewish refugees. Germany city centers were full of rubble, people were starving, employment had to be found, and women who were starting to rebuild the country sought to track down their missing and captured husbands and sons. Additionally, there were masses of German refugees and displaced people from Eastern Europe who were a burden on society. And now there were supposedly a quarter of a million Jews in Germany. How could that possibly be true?

There was also a moral dimension to the German denial of reality. Shoah survivors weighed upon Germans’ consciences. They raised the question of who was culpable, fully or partially. After all, not so long ago, Jews had been excluded and then deported from German society, and the masses had applauded racist Nazi fanatics and their apologists. In its wars of conquest in Eastern Europe, the Wehrmacht had also been involved in the annihilation of Jews. And the genocide of millions of people was hardly the absolute secret many pretended it to be. If questions had begun to be asked, it would have placed an oppressive burden on German society. So people simply didn’t ask them, retreating instead, as a means of relieving their own consciences, into racist clichés. The poison of Nazi racial ideology continued to have its effect in the long term.

When Jews appeared in post‐war German culture, they almost always possessed discriminatory, negative attributes. That was particularly true of the inhabitants of the DP camps. They were seen not as victims and survivors, but as black marketeers, fences and usurers who profit from the privations of Germany’s post‐war destiny. Large numbers of people availed themselves of anti‐ Semitic stereotypes and even Nazi jargon. In a never ending loop, newspaper articles and official government reports criticized black market activities as typical of an economy where supply could never meet demand. Conspicuously, Jews were the only ones specifically named and defamed as being active in this flourishing illicit trade, as though Germans and American GIs weren’t equally heavily involved in the illegal exchange of goods.

At the main police headquarters in Stuttgart, investigators wrote that the upper part of Reinburgsstrasse, where Polish DPs were housed in a number of buildings, represented “the center of a black market and contraband trade.” It was “vigorously and directly working against attempts to feed the city.” The police commissioner of the town of Lüneburg, too, called the “Jew‐camp of Belsen” the “center of the black market.” A report by an agricultural council in Bergen contained

8 similar language: “The moorland has become an untamed hive of activity for foreign peoples who engage in dirty business and ruin public morals.” In October 1946, Frankfurt’s Social Democratic mayor went such statements one better, saying of the DP camp Zeilsheim: “Crime, delinquency and violations of the law have become part of everyday reality. The camp has gradually turned into a plague for the area.” Finally, Stuttgart’s police complained about the “increasing flooding of the city by inferior foreign elements,” adding that they could well pose a security risk.

Such statements and accusation were not just full of envy and resentment. They oozed with the distrust and defamation the Nazis had constantly sown as a way of stimulating racial hatred among the German populace. In post‐war Germany, with its supply bottlenecks, rationing of necessities and lack of sufficient housing, deep seated animosities could be easily activated. A particular bone of contention was that the Eastern European Jews were being provided for and taken care of by the occupation forces, who allegedly gave them special privileges. DPs had access to goods that were unobtainable or unaffordable for ordinary Germans, things like cigarettes, coffee, soap, whiskey and medicine. In turn, that gave the former the opportunity to obtain other goods and services not under control of the camp directorship. Lea Lesser confirmed that she was involved in illicit trading practices. After she had married Aron and was expecting her first child, for instance, she needed a baby carriage – and obtained one on the black market.

Historian Susanne Urban summarizes the ambivalent relationship between Germans and Jews, particularly Eastern European refugees in the DP camps as follows: “There was hardly any empathy for the survivors, even though Germany bore responsibility for their displacement. Most Germans concentrated on themselves and their own needs. There was hardly any room in post‐war German society and history for DPs.” Thomas Rahe, the academic director of the Bergen‐Belsen memorial, uses similar words: “The German public’s perception of Jewish displaced persons was heavily conditioned by anti‐Semitic stereotypes. There were scarcely any reports about the everyday reality, fears, concerns and dreams for the future of the Jewish DPs, which showed any empathy at all.”

The Lessers and the other inhabitants of the Ziegenhain camp saw their hopes of emigrating to Palestine increasingly dwindle. The British were not about to ease immigration restrictions, accepting a contingent of only 1500 Jews a month. Moreover, the US – which many refugees kept in the back of their minds as an alternative final destination – had no plans of revising its own strict immigration laws. The way out of the camp seemed to have been closed off for the indefinite future.

“We were so disappointed,” Lea Lesser later recalled. “We wanted to leave as quickly as possible.” In their desperation, camp inhabitants organized demonstrations. They marched down the facility’s long central road carrying banners and demanding that the British open up Eretz Israel to

9 Eastern European refugees. The protest culminated in passionate speeches venting inhabitants’ growing frustration. Zionist leader Jacob Zerubavel came from Palestine to attend. For half a century, the Jewish writer and newspaper publisher had fought for the Jewish cause, serving time in prison for his activism. As one of the heads of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, Zerubavel was the embodiment of resistance and persistence, a figure whose red‐hot rhetoric warmed people’s souls. But that was scant compensation for the hopeless everyday situation of the DPs.

Faced with the prospect of an extended stay in provincial Germany, camp inhabitants built a small memorial to the victims of the Shoah in front of the camp administration building. It was a symbolic monument, featuring a young green shoot growing out of a broad, broken‐off tree trunk whose roots were still firmly anchored in the ground. The memorial represented the Sheerit Hapletah, the “remaining ones who were saved,” which is how Holocaust survivors, with reference to the Bible, referred to themselves. “This is where the remnants of Judsism have gathered,” Zalman Grinberg, the spokesman for the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American Sector, said to describe the desolate perspective. “This is the waiting room. It’s a poor waiting room, but we hope that the day will come when Jews will be led to their rightful place.”

Hope springs eternally, as the saying goes, even for Aron and Lea in Camp 95 443.

10 Chapter 2

Stolen Childhood: How Hitler’s War Tore Apart a Family

The nightmare was waiting on the way home. It was the end of August, and as was their habit in late summer, the Lesser family had taken a trip for a couple of days to the country not far from the city of Lodz. To relax and recover from the frenetic activity of their neighborhood, that was the idea, and the children loved being outside in nature. But their idyllic getaway was disrupted by a terrible piece of news, which spread like wildfire. “Since 5:45 AM, we’ve been returning fire,” Germany’s leader has said on the radio. “From now on, bombs will be met with bombs.”

That was how Hitler justified invading Poland in a speech in front of the German Reichstag in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House on September 1, 1939. Black clouds had been forming over Europe for a while, but many observers still considered a war between Germany and Poland impossible. After all, Berlin and Warsaw had concluded a non‐aggression pact in January 1934. The Germans might have quit the treaty in the spring of 1939, but most people didn’t interpret that as a sign of military hostilities being imminent. They were wrong. On August 24, 1939, the Führer had signed a treaty with Stalin in Moscow that was named after the two countries’ foreign ministers. A secret clause in the Ribbentrop‐Molotov Pact, as it was known, agreed that Poland would be divided up into German and Soviet spheres of interest.

The Lessers – the parents plus their three daughters and one son – had no way of knowing about this secret clause, of course, but they could sense the peril and decided to return to the city immediately. Along the way, they experienced a terrible new reality. The Wehrmacht was launching airstrikes not just on the Polish capital Warsaw but Lodz as well, killing several hundreds of people.

Lea Lesser retains exact memories of the family returning to their home city. Holding their children by the hand, the elder Lessers repeatedly sought refuge in the bushes on the side of the road while enemy warplanes droned overhead. From one minute to the next, a physical and potential lethal threat had become a fearsome reality. Nothing at home was as it had been before. By September 9, German troops entered Lodz. From that moment on, as if a switch had been flicked, the destiny of Jewish families like the Lessers was completely altered. In retrospect, Lea speaks of a new era, one in which the clocks seemed to be running backward toward a zero hour of oblivion.

For the ten‐year‐old girl it meant the end of a carefree childhood that she would still recall decades later as very happy. As was typical for the Lessers’ social circles, Lea was raised in strict, Orthodox fashion, with her mother Esther taking the lead role. Still her parents allowed Lea sufficient

11 freedom to discover the world around her and make it her own. “I was always on the go everywhere in the city,” she would later say. “I was so curious and hungry for life.” Lea’s urban roaming was made easier by the fact that she could meet up with relatives – aunts, uncles and countless cousins – throughout the city. Just playing with the other girls was too boring for her. She wanted daring and adventure.

Her father’s gourmet food shop was also a popular destination while roaming around. Leib Lesser was trained as a baker, but he quickly opened up his own business. “It wasn’t one of those general stores,” Lea later said. Her “Tate” (the Yiddish word for father) dealt in specialties: select savory treats, foreign spices and exotic fruits. His store’s location ‐ ritzy Ulica Piotrkowska on Plac Wolnosci(Freedom Square) with its memorial to Poland’s national hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko ‐ demanded an exquisite selection of wares. The elegant boulevard with its cosmopolitan shops was where Lodz’s well‐heeled bourgeoisie did their shopping.

Even decades later, Lea still raves about the special aroma of the wares on display in her father’s shop.

Every so often she would shoplift something small from the store shelves with which she could impress her friends. “Today I can admit it,” she would later say with a smile, extending her hands palms up, as if to demonstrate her innocence. “All of those specialties. We felt as though we were in seventh heaven.”

We can imagine Lea in her late childhood as a happy, outgoing, even a little wild person. Of course, her radius of activity and circle of acquaintances remained embedded within the neighborhoods and subcultures of Eastern European Jewish orthodoxy. That included the Jewish calendar with its high holy days, the weekly Sabbath customs and the strict rules about what Jews should and shouldn’t eat. For Lea, all of these things came naturally, and she internalized them. Decades later, she recalls in detail how her family kept strictly kosher whenever her grandparents, particularly orthodox Jews, came to visit. The family members exclusively spoke Yiddish with one another. Polish remained a foreign language, used rarely and mostly for contact with government authorities. Lea retains clear memories of all that was on offer religiously in Lodz. Lodz had 250 synagogues in addition to prayer rooms, ceremonial bath houses, cemeteries, Talmud schools and specialty book shops. That’s hardly surprising, considering that Jews made up around a third of the city’s population of 700,000.

Despite the number of Jews in what was Poland’s second‐largest city, Lodz didn’t enjoy the status of historically more significant places like Warsaw, Krakow or Lviv. In only a few decades, Lodz had gone from being a backwater with a few hundred inhabitants to an exploding, largely industrial

12 metropolis. German entrepreneurs were the most important partners driving the economic boom. Lured by special concessions and privileges, the city attracted weavers of wool and linen from the Rhineland and the Eifel region, Silesia and Saxony, Berlin and Bohemia. They laid the foundations for Lodz’s textile industry. When production was mechanized in the mid‐nineteenth century, Lodz became the Eastern European Center for wool‐working. Jewish manufacturers arrived a bit later, bringing with them venture capital. Soon Lodz was known as the “Manchester of the East.” The city’s products were sold first and foremost in Russia, but also throughout Eastern Europe.

Lodz’s rapid development changed the cityscape. Its recently acquired wealth was on display everywhere in the new city center. Gigantic brick factories became proud cathedrals of industry. The mansions and villas of successful entrepreneurs – the Scheiblers, Geyers, Heinels, Poznanskis, Grohmanns, Silbersteins and Biedermanns ‐ resembled in their size and splendor medieval palaces and feudal castles.

But behind the pompous facades immense social divisions had opened up. Ethnic Germans and Jews formed the city’s upper and middle classes, while Poles, often impoverished people who had fled rural regions to the city, made up Lodz’s working class. In the novel of the same name, Nobel laureate Wladyslaw Reymont described the outgrowths of capitalism in Lodz around the turn of the century as the “promised land.” Many Poles used this phrase to describe the country’s flourishing urban centers because there was enough food and work there, albeit under miserable, exploitative circumstances.

Jews also tried to escape poverty by working in factories. The social environment meant that strikes and protects actions were by no means uncommon, and dissatisfaction increased in the 1920s, as the Polish textile industry began to feel the effects of the Great Depression. Businesses were going bankrupt every day. Unemployment shot up.

This was the world into which Lea Lesser was born. Her positive memories of childhood depended on the success with which Lodz stuck a balance between its three main social groups. Ever since 1918, the year Poland became an independent republic, the city council had consisted of twelve German, twelve Jewish and twelve Polish members. On the local political level, writes historian Daniel Gerson, “a kind of instable equilibrium” prevented excesses. Lea would later see the situation similarly, recalling that she used to play a lot with a Polish girlfriend in the back of her family’s house.

Nonetheless, there was something like an invisible border between Polish and Jewish neighborhoods – even individual streets were divided. As Lea Lesser described it, there wasn’t much mutual understanding between the two groups. Lodz may today make much of its multi‐cultural

13 past, but that is at least partly a myth that allows people to forget to the dark sides of relations between the city’s sub‐cultures.

Lea’s childhood was sheltered from the tensions and pressure that Polish Jews would experience in the 1920s and ‘30s. They included an exaggerated nationalism encouraged by government authorities, political parties, intellectuals and the Catholic Church. Moreover, economic setbacks hit Jews extremely hard. Their perspectives for the future already markedly worsened during the period between the two world wars.

Many Germans immediately think of the shtetl whenever Polish Jews are mentioned, but there were enormous differences between those small communities in eastern Poland, particularly in Galicia, and the large Jewish centers of Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Poznan and Lviv. The big Jewish communities in the latter were self‐confident and diverse, and their concept of Jewishness wasn’t restricted to religious rituals. The larger cities developed into intellectual hotspots with schools, centers of education, libraries, theaters, publishing houses and newspapers. Close proximity with other ethnic groups, although marked by unease, spurred Jews on to assert their social and cultural autonomy.

The atmosphere was entirely different in the shtetl, which was ruled by tighter‐knit and more isolated communities. The renowned Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer has published an extensive study about the “death of the shtetl” in the Kresy region of what was then eastern Poland. This unique form of social existence was destroyed, first by Soviet and then by German occupation regimes. Bauer defined the shtetl as follows: “A shtetl was a civil community with 1000 to 15,000 and Jews representing at least a third of the population. Its life was determined by the Jewish calendar and habits and customs that were based on a strict interpretation of the Jewish religion. Shtetl Jews were governed by an informal oligarchy from which representatives were elected to take over certain communal functions.”

In real life, existence in the shtetl had nothing in common with Fiddler‐on‐the‐Roof romanticism or Marc Chagall’s fanciful, fairy‐tale paintings. Sholem Aleichem’s bitter‐sweet tales about Milkman Tevje and his daughters, set in the pre‐revolutionary Ukrainian village Anatevka, were the basis for a bittersweet piece of entertainment that was performed on almost every stage during the sixties. The actual conditions of the shtetls were far more difficult, base, draconian and corrupt. Religion and family were the only sources of lasting stability in places of upheaval and privation.

One of the most perceptive observers of how pitiable shtetl inhabitants were exposed to various dangers was someone who had been affected by them, the German‐Austrian writer Joseph Roth. Born in a shtetl named Brody in eastern Galicia in 1894, Roth wrote a number of excellent

14 novels about the gradual decline of the multicultural Austro‐Hungarian Empire, including “The Radetzky March,” “The Tomb of the Capuchins” and the Jewish parable “Job.” Roth was a journalist who wanted to sketch the “face of his times.” In the 1920s, he made detailed portraits of the “eastern Jews” and the “little Jewish towns.” His figures included artisans, water carriers, door‐to‐ door itinerants, credit peddlers, synagogue servants, Torah scribes, lawyers, doctors, mohalim (circumcisers) and beggars. They formed a universe unto itself, one which we today know only as ancient history.

Roth also brings to life the unique world of the ultra‐Orthodox, Eastern European Hassidim led by rabbis who attracted tight‐knit communities and who were regarded as miracle healers, if not saviors in their own right. He describes how people were transformed by services, prayers, songs and dance, falling into states of religious ecstasy in an attempt to come closer to God. “Lust and fervor, the dance of a godly service and the prayers were instances of sensual excess,” Roth writes. He pokes fun at the strange customs of Yom Kippur celebrations, at which the Hassidim appeared in the heavy black silk and dreadful white of their death‐bed garments while also wearing white socks and loose slippers. Roth wrote: “Everyone is suddenly a ghost, with the characteristics of ghosts. Every little rag dealer is suddenly a superman since today he is trying to reach God.”

Roth also shows his ironic distance in scenes depicting a Jewish funeral and the lavish wedding of two children of rabbis. And he sketches the strange profession of Eastern European Jewish “batlen”: entertainers, professional fools, storytellers who performed at parties, going from city to city, village to village with their fairy tales, offering their services in return for a couple of glasses of tea and permission to warm themselves on cold winter nights by people’s stoves. “In the West, people are not acquainted with this type of rural Eastern European Jew at all,” Roth concluded.

The Nazi’s hated these alienating Jewish worlds, and in all of the Eastern European territories they occupied in the 1940s, they brought waves of annihilation. Death was indeed a master from German, as poet Paul Celan would later write in his “Death Fugue.” The killing commenced immediately after Germany occupied Poland in 1939. By November of that year, a public execution was held in Lodz, and a short time later all Jewish and Polish schools were closed. The Great Synagogue, designed in the late nineteenth century by the Stuttgart architect Adolf Wolff in the style of an Oriental palace, was burned down by Nazis on November 10‐11, 1939, one year to the day after the so‐called Night of Broken Glass. Only a single one of the hundreds of Jewish places of worship in Lodz would survive German occupation.

This is incontrovertible evidence that German soldiers were willing to help the fascist elites in Berlin carry out their plans of anti‐Semitic annihilation. Nazi Germany waged not just a war, but a

15 war of cultures – decades before the latter became a catchphrase. And as far as Polish Jews were concerned, the German usurpers achieved near total victory.

Jews had been conscious of their problematic situation for quite some time between the wars. Since 1918, Poland had been an independent state. But the second Polish Republic was a geographic patchwork with little shoring it up either internally or externally. As a result, the leadership in Warsaw became embroiled with nearly all its neighbors (Germany, Soviet Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Czechoslovakia) in prolonged territorial conflict, sometimes carried out with military means. Parliamentary democracy failed, and 1926, strongman Marshall Jozef Pilsudski seized power and transformed Poland into an authoritarian state. He called his personal regime Sanacja, or “convalescence.”

Above all, Poland was unable to get a handle on its problems with minorities who made up one third of a population of 30 million and included Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Germans and Jews, the last of which numbering some 3 million and so made up 10 percent of the populace. Instead of promoting integration, Poland, like most of the states to arise from the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, pushed homogeneity as a way of securing the country’s newly won sovereignty.

A policy like that always comes to the detriment of minorities, and Jews quickly began to feel the string of the new spirit of the times. Jews were not only subject to traditional anti‐Semitism, in which they were seen as the murderers of Jesus and whose flames were fanned by the Catholic Church. They were also suspected of making common cause with the Bolsheviks in Russia, the constant threat across Poland’s eastern border. After all, anti‐Semites argued, didn’t a number of Jews occupy positions in the Soviet leadership? Hence the prejudice that Jews couldn’t be “true Poles.” As harsh as it may sound, anti‐Semitism was a constitutive element of Poland’s new national self‐understanding.

This had dire consequences, as Jews were subject to constant social marginalization in the form of restrictions and discrimination. Being attacked, plundered, boycotted and even subject to violent pogroms was part of everyday Jewish life. The constant animosity made many Jews seek solace in socialism and Zionism. Others dreamed of emigrating to the US or Palestine. People seeking places where they could fortify themselves flocked to youth associations such as Hashomer Hatzair (The Young Watchman), which advocated collective, socialist settlements or kibbutzim. Other rival Zionist groups were the right‐wing Betar and the moderate and youthful social democratic Gordonia. Their members were all people utterly disappointed by their prospects in wider Polish society and looking for opportunities within their own social horizons to live their lives as Jews. When Pilsudski died in 1935, their pessimism only increased. “When we look at the lives of Jews in Poland between

16 the wars,” Yehuda Bauer writes, “we see a country that in many respects resembled a failed state.” And Jews, a “stateless minority,” suffered most under the conditions in the Polish nation.

The targeting of Jews for violence increased massively when Germany invaded its eastern neighbor in 1939, and the Lesser family in Lodz wasn’t spared the consequences. The Wehrmacht took Leib Lesser into custody and made him perform forced labor – a common practice by the German occupiers. And German soldiers were by no means content with extracting work from their prisoners. They played macabre games with Leib Lesser, sticking tubes into his nose, mouth and ears, flooding them with water and laughing at the tortured reactions of their victim. After several days, when he was released and allowed to return home, he told his terrified family in no uncertain terms: “I’m not staying here. We’re leaving.”

Leib announced that he was heading for the eastern part of Poland, which had fallen to Stalin thanks to his pact with Hitler. Some 400,000 Jews from western Poland decided to flee east, believing that they would be less endangered under the rule of the Soviet Union. It was a move of pure desperation and hopelessness. Leib Lesser’s sympathy with communist ideas may have played a small role in his decision, but it had more to do with the precarious situation of the Jewish community in German‐occupied Poland than with any fanatic ideology. In late fall, he made his way to Bialystok, which had just come under Stalin’s aegis. He promised to summon his family as soon as he could after getting the lay of the land.

Of course, the Lessers had no way of knowing what diabolical plans the Nazis had for Lodz. Having seen the economic usefulness of the city, the German occupiers soon abandoned their original idea of destroying it completely. The industrial metropolis offered ideal conditions for their goal of deriving the maximum benefits from Eastern Europe. In April 1940, the Nazis made a reality of the alternative plan of annexing Lodz and the surrounding area into the Third Reich as the Gau Wartheland (Wartheland Regional Unit), and they soon redirected the many resources of the local economy toward producing for the German war effort. They underscored the transformation by provocatively renaming the city Litzmannstadt after the ultra‐conservative German general Karl Litzmann, who had made his reputation in a 1914 battle near Lodz during the First World War. Litzmann had joined both the SA and the NSDAP in the 1920s, and he served as a Nazi deputy in both local and national parliaments. Litzmann was part of the original generation of German fascists who helped bring down the Weimar Republic. He was a model and a symbol for the Nazi’s policies of Germanizing Eastern Europe.

It quickly became apparent what this meant for Jews. On December 10, 1939, only three months after Germany’s occupation of Poland, Gau inspector Friedrich Uebelhoer called for the

17 formation of a ghetto in Lodz. He also didn’t conceal the nature of the true “final solution,” ending one internal memo with the words: “The formation of the ghetto is of course just a transitional measure. I reserve final judgement as to at what point and with what means the ghetto and the city of Lodz will be cleansed of Jews. The final goal must be for us to lance these pestilent boils without exception.”

The decree to form a Jewish ghetto was realized in February 1940. Police President and SS Brigade Leader Johannes Schäfer declared the impoverished northern neighborhoods of Stare Miasto, Baluty and Marysin to be “Jewish living areas.” The area was enclosed in walls and barbed wire. By late April 1940, Jews were forbidden under the penalty of death from leaving the four‐ square‐kilometer ghetto. The Nazis crammed 160,000 – later 200,000 – people together in this tiny space. Lodz was the first ghetto on Polish soil. The one in Warsaw would follow six months later, and those in Krakow and Lublin in the spring of 1941.

For Lea, who was just shy of her eleventh birthday, these measures of the German occupiers coincided with the personal tragedy of being separated from her entire family. Her father Leib had kept his promise and smuggled his wife and the rest of his family east with the help of a courier from Lodz. But at that moment, Lea was staying with an aunt in Baluty. From one day to the next, this familiar area was sealed off. What had been a cozy little neighborhood became an inescapable piece of hell.

Lea’s was an individual fate, to be sure, but it represents how Hitler’s war destroyed childhoods, cut family connections, annihilated homes and shattered lives. In the years that followed, millions of people would suffer comparable destinies, as the Nazis pursued their lust for aggression and racist insanity across half a continent.

And in the middle of it, Lea was left all alone.

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