One Family's Shoah

Victimization, Resistance, Survival in Nazi Europe

H. Lindenberger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137084057
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Deploying concepts of interpretation, liberation, and survival, esteemed literary critic Herbert Lindenberger reflects on the diverse fates of his family during the Holocaust. Combining public, family, and personal record with literary, musical, and art criticism, One Family's Shoah suggests a new way of writing cultural history.

PART I

FOUR FATES

CHAPTER ONE

DECEIVING: NATHAN LINDENBERGER AND THE DUPLICITIES OF THERESIENSTADT

Deceptive Camp

My uncle, Nathan Lindenberger, died with a dignity denied to most other victims of the Shoah: after all, he was honored with a death certificate (see figure 1.1) that listed his street address in Theresienstadt, the camp to which he had been deported; his precise birth and death dates; the causes of death, reported here as “tuberculosis” and also “adynamia cordis,” which is then explained in German as Herzschwäche (weakness of the heart). To be sure, a large number of the deaths at Theresienstadt were attributed to these causes—a phenomenon related to various possible factors, for example, the shortage of doctors available to produce an accurate diagnosis of a patient’s condition; or the malnutrition endemic to the camp; or the rough physical labor demanded of an elderly population foreign to this type of work; or, perhaps most plausibly, the duplicity that pervaded all phases of life and death at Theresienstadt.

Indeed, the incidence of death from cardiac causes was so high that one suspects the few available attending physicians automatically had recourse to this diagnosis when the real causes, whatever they may have been, were not immediately evident. The Latin term that this physician, Dr. Hans Edel, employed means simply “lack of movement within the heart.” According to H. G. Adler’s magisterial history of Theresienstadt, by far the greatest number of deaths—some 4,000 altogether during the year that Nathan Lindenberger died—were attributed to heart problems.¹ Peter Weber, the non-Jewish office manager for my family in Berlin, reported to me after the war that my uncle, who was communicating regularly with him, complained not of the two diseases mentioned on the certificate but of the fact that his chronically anemic condition had become exacerbated by the camp’s refusal to supply him with the iron pills he had been accustomed to take.

The duplicity of Theresienstadt can also be seen in the certificate’s notation of a street address. In the course of my uncle’s stay, the camp changed its street names from what were originally simply letter designations such as L2 or G7 to names that simulated the addresses of persons still living in a state of freedom. Thus, Nathan’s street address changed from L3 to Langenstrasse 11, an address that, to judge from a map of Theresienstadt, was located on the central square; the large building housed elderly inmates as well as an auxiliary hospital. The building was located on a square that, during Nathan’s stay, was covered by a tent under which prisoners performed work for the German military.

Figure 1.1 Nathan’s Lindenberger’s death certificate, issued in Theresienstadt, 1943 (reprinted by permission of Národní Archiv, Prague, HBMa, box no. 27).

Still, Nathan Lindenberger died with relative dignity. He did not have to undergo a selection process in which, upon arrival at a camp, he was directed, as at Auschwitz, either to the left or to the right, toward an almost immediate death or a period of forced labor that, if he had later proved lucky, might eventually have resulted in his survival; nor the humiliation of having his head shorn and then being ordered to strip himself; nor, as experienced by vast numbers of Polish and Russian Jewish victims, the terror of standing at the edge of his own impending grave before the massed guns of some German Einsatzgruppe (operational group).

How was it that Nathan was chosen for deportation to Theresienstadt rather than to Auschwitz or some other extermination camp in the so-called East? There are two possible explanations. The first of these derives from the fact that, according to Weber, who remained in Berlin with my family until all of them had either died or been deported, the family had enjoyed a privileged status as a result of Nathan’s connections with the police chief of Berlin. This status, Weber claimed, provided them with immunity from deportation, at least during the earlier stages of the so-called final solution. After Nathan’s niece, Hanni, who lived in the family house, was arrested for her role in the May 1942 sabotage of a Nazi outdoor exhibition—a topic around which chapter three is centered—the family lost its privileges, and all were subsequently deported.

The second and more likely explanation for Nathan’s deportation was simply his age, for, beginning in 1942, the Germans sent many, though not all, Jews over the age of 65 who lived within Germany and the former Austria to Theresienstadt. The camp had opened late in 1941 at the site of a former Austrian garrison town founded in 1780 by Emperor Joseph II, who named it after his mother, Empress Maria Theresia, and intended it as a defense against Prussian invasion. With its barracks and rationally designed grid of streets, it could easily be converted into a camp. The original intent was to use it to house Jews from the so-called protectorate, that is, the parts of Bohemia and Moravia that the Nazis had taken over in 1939 but had not incorporated into Germany itself. These Czech Jews started colonizing the camp, and, indeed, were expected to help set it up, in November 1941. Soon thereafter, at the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, it was decided to use the camp also for the housing of elderly Jews from within the German Reich as well as for Jews who had distinguished themselves during service in World War I. Reinhard Heydrich, who was assigned to run the protectorate and who also officiated at the conference, designed Theresienstadt as a model camp that could show the world the Nazis’ “humane” side—or, as Adolf Eichmann once put it, “to save face in regard to the outside world.”² There were to be no extermination facilities here—though executions resulting from violations of rules did take place.

At this point the Nazis were still experimenting with methods of mass extermination. The shootings of Jews by Einsatzgruppen in Poland and Russia had not proved efficient, partly because they could not systematically target the whole Jewish population, partly because of the difficulties inherent in disposing of large numbers of bodies. During 1941 the Nazis tried out gassing, first in vans (a procedure that had been used earlier to eliminate the mentally ill), after which they set up extermination centers, designed to kill large numbers at once and then send the corpses to a nearby crematorium. Theresienstadt’s role within this system was to serve not only as a deceptively positive model but also as a transit camp from which, as new inmates arrived, members of the existing population could be transported in increments to the Polish extermination camps, above all to Auschwitz.

As a supposedly “humane” site, Theresienstadt sported at least some of the trappings associated with resorts. Indeed, many of its residents believed they were going to a resort and chose the belongings they brought with them accordingly. They even enjoyed a degree of self-government, decisions supposedly being made by a Council of Jewish Elders with a chief officer at its head. Moreover, the residents formed a so-called Freizeitgestaltung (free-time organization) that enabled a number of artists to devote the universal work requirement to their own creativity.

Not so my Uncle Nathan. Despite the fact that he entered the camp at 67, the work he performed was anything but creative. As he informed Weber, he was assigned to the water-carrying squad. H. G. Adler writes in his history that the camp suffered from severe water shortages during 1942–43 (p. 120); Adler also cites 62 inmates, or 0.4 percent of the workforce, engaged in this activity (p. 408). Nathan Lindenberger told Weber that he spent all day hauling water from wells and springs to the camp. In view of his known anemic condition, it is little wonder that, whatever the true cause of death, his stay in Theresienstadt was only ten months—though he was, of course, spared the fate of most of his fellow inmates, who faced their humiliating and frightening last moments in the now well-known routines instituted at Auschwitz.

And, of course, the idyllic aspects of Theresienstadt that the Nazis sought to celebrate in a propaganda film made toward the end of the war were a sham. The cultural life, to be sure, was a real thing, as I shall illustrate in the next section, among other examples, with the great opera composed in (and surreptitiously about!) Theresienstadt, Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis. But behind the façade of self-government, there stood the constant supervision of the SS, whose three successive commanders actually called the shots. And none of the many later accounts of life in Theresienstadt hides the facts about the crowded living conditions, the shortages of food and drugs, and the frequent acts of SS brutality.

Whatever the reasons that Nathan Lindenberger was assigned to Theresienstadt—his advanced age or his earlier privileged status—he came close to escaping internment altogether. Those familiar with stories of the Shoah can cite innumerable instances where some minor incident, some random gesture, some chance impression on the part of an official, even one’s place on an alphabetical list, determined whether one was to perish or survive. Uncle Nathan, as it turned out, was desperately waiting for a visa to the United States, which his younger brother, Robert, had said he was trying to procure for him. After considerable procrastination, Robert had obtained visas for the two family members with whom Nathan had shared a household for many years: my 90-year-old grandfather, Isaak Lindenberger, and the latter’s youngest child, Lotte, who set off from Berlin at the beginning of 1940 to pick up a steamship in Genoa, from which they were to go to New York and then by train to Seattle, where three of the Lindenberger sons lived. (For a family tree to help identify the persons in this narrative, see figure 1.2.)

Figure 1.2 Lindenberger family tree.

Although Germany’s war had started some months before, travel was still possible through Italy, which had not yet entered the war. Getting to Genoa entailed an overnight stay in Munich, to which my grandfather and aunt headed with at least one large cabin trunk full of the most valuable possessions they were able to crowd in—family linen, china, and some of the art books that Nathan had collected over the years. As soon as Nathan’s visa had been approved, he was to follow on whatever ship could offer him passage. My grandfather at that point suffered from dementia, which had become evident some seven years before, soon after the death (just weeks before Hitler’s accession to power) of his wife, Esther. And he was sufficiently frail that his accompanying daughter knew the trip would be difficult.

For one thing, Munich had only one hotel, the Bavaria, near the railway station, that accepted Jews. When the two arrived there, they were told the hotel was full but that excess Jews were allowed to spend the night on the lobby floor. When Isaak saw all the sleeping bodies stretched out on the floor, he refused to stay in the hotel, and, in fact, became hysterical. As it turned out, nothing could be done to calm him down. At a certain point, Lotte realized that a decision needed to be made. Isaak was determined to go home to Nathan. In desperation, Lotte phoned her brother, who immediately took a train to Munich to pick up their father and return him to Berlin. Even if the visa should come through soon, both Lotte and Nathan realized that Nathan would not be able to leave their father, although another son, Adolf, and his family were now living in the family house; and Isaak’s relations with Adolf had always remained cool. Nathan and Lotte determined that she was to go on alone, for, at 42, she was young enough to begin a new life in the United States. Together with the trunk, whose contents were eventually distributed among the family, she continued the trip to Genoa and thence to New York and Seattle. (Well over 70 years later, as I write these words, I am looking across the room at one of my uncle’s art books, an edition of color lithographs by Lovis Corinth illustrating the Book of Judith—a singularly appropriate acquisition for a German Jew like Nathan who valued art.)

As one hears stories of the Shoah, one is aware how quickly decisions needed to be made—and often with deadly consequences. What if Lotte had decided to tough out her father’s hysteria? Surely, he would have calmed down eventually, if only from fatigue. Had she coaxed him to go on, he would have probably forgotten what had upset him and, had he survived the rigors of the trip, he might have arrived in Seattle, and I, a ten-year-old at the time, might have personally known a grandfather who otherwise remains a ghostly figure and whose presence for me had to be mediated by other members of my family. But Lotte, trunk and all, arrived in fine shape and quickly chose me as her favorite nephew; her subsequent story will be told in chapter five.

Nathan returned to Berlin with his father and with little hope at that point of ever emigrating. And even if he could have left his father behind, the visa that his son Robert was supposedly arranging never, as far as anybody knows, arrived. Isaak Lindenberger died in October 1941, less than two years after the incident in the Munich hotel. Nathan was left sharing the large family house with Adolf, the latter’s wife, Dora, and their daughter, Hanni, whose political resistance led to the loss of the protection they had enjoyed. Their son, Manfred, had fortunately emigrated to the United States in 1937. Because of Adolf’s inability to earn enough to support his family, all four had moved into his father’s house a few years before. But the families, according to Weber, did not get along sharing a household, and Weber soon after moved Nathan to a different part of the house with its own kitchen. Adolf died of apparently natural causes on December 12, 1941, just after hostilities had broken out between Germany and the United States, and no communication was possible any longer. After the war, Weber reported that in his last days Adolf had had an open wound on his leg but gave no more details about the cause of death. That left only Nathan and Dora, among my Berlin relatives, to be deported after Hanni’s execution.

Why, one may ask, had all these people waited so long to leave Germany? After all, of the 160 thousand Jews in Berlin at the time of Hitler’s rise to power—the largest number by far of any German city and fully a third of all German Jews—more than half had emigrated by the time the war broke out in 1939.³ The reason that it took so long had to do with America’s highly restrictive immigration policies and, above all, with the differing financial circumstances within my family. Anybody emigrating to the United States needed a sponsor to provide an affidavit guaranteeing that he or she possessed sufficient means to support the person. By the late 1930s, Nathan and my grandfather were so strapped for funds that Weber, their longtime employee, claimed after the war he was himself supportin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   Four Fates
• Part II   Aftermath
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index