The Children and Grandchildren of Caroline Blumenfeld Hoxter: Leaving Germany

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Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you had a good holiday season and are safe and healthy. I have been trying to relax and gain some perspective on 2021, a tough year, and prepare for 2022, a year I expect to be just as tough. But genealogy and family history always help me put things in perspective, so I am ready to return and find new meaning and new discoveries in the history of my family.

Let me refresh your memories of where I was back in December 2021. I have been writing about my Blumenfeld branch and more specifically the line that begins with my four-times great-uncle Moses Blumenfeld and goes from his son Abraham Blumenfeld IIA to Abraham’s daughter Caroline Blumenfeld Hoxter. We saw that Caroline’s son Siegmund died fighting for Germany in World War I, that her husband Simon died in 1932, and that her daughter Toni Hoxter Goldschmidt and her family had all escaped from Nazi Germany by 1940.

But what about Caroline herself and her two other daughters, Betty and Gerda? What happened to them and their families?

Again I want to thank the Shoah Foundation for allowing me to have access to the interview done with Arthur Goldschmidt,1 Toni’s son, so that I could learn more about the fate of his family, including that of his aunts Betty and Gerda. I am also deeply grateful to Peter Keibel, grandson of Gerda Hoxter Goldschmidt, for sharing the speech his mother Jane Inge Goldschmidt gave to a middle school in Vermont in early 2020 about her experiences during the Nazi era.

Like Arthur and Miriam, her nephew and niece, Betty Hoxter Oppenheimer and her husband Max and their two children Lotte and Franz Siegmund left Germany not long after Hitler’s rise to power. According to Arthur, Max Oppenheimer was a doctor, and once he was restricted by Nazi law from being able to practice medicine fully, he and his family left for England. But they must not have stayed there long because on November 26, 1934, they arrived in Palestine. Max was a physician, Lotte, their daughter, was an orthopedist, and their son, who became Shimon, was a carpenter. By 1938, they had all obtained citizenship to Palestine.2

Max and Betty (Hoxter) Oppenheimer, Palestinian citizenship cards found at the Israel State Archives, at https://www.archives.gov.il/en/

Lotte Oppenheimer, Palestine citizenship card, found at the Israel State Archives, at https://www.archives.gov.il/en/

The family of Gerda Hoxter Goldschmidt, the youngest child of Caroline Blumenfeld and Simon Hoxter, had a harder time escaping from Germany. Gerda’s daughter Inge Goldschmidt, who became Jane in the US and who is Peter Keibel’s mother, provided this description of her family’s life in Germany before and during the Nazi era in a speech she gave to a middle school in Vermont in early 2020:3

My father owned a department store in that town [Wuppertal]. My sister and I attended public schools. My father was well known because of the store and we were in comfortable circumstances. … In 1933 when Hitler came to power my father’s store was closed to make the population aware that the owner was Jewish and to discourage the people from doing business with a Jewish establishment. Some days later business resumed at a normal rate, but our lives changed. It seems that every year another law was passed that made our lives almost unbearable. We could not attend school any more or use public pools. Park benches were marked where we could sit. [The Nazis] burned books by Jewish authors and … destroyed Jewish businesses. On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht started, the synagogues, Jewish houses of worship were destroyed. Many Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.

Our parents were well known and liked. Our father was tipped off by an official and was therefore able to leave town and avoid internment. The Gestapo did come to our house to look for him, but we were not molested, and our house was not ransacked. We did not know where he went. Occasionally he called, but those were very tense days for us. His safety was always on our minds. After his return, he was seriously looking to leave the country.

We had received a quota number from the US Embassy, but we were also aware that it was a very high number and there was no way we could leave before a year or two. So my father searched for a country that we could go to while waiting for our quota number. Of course, the store was closed and had to be sold to the Germans for a very minimal amount. He preferred to leave Europe as he did not think it was safe to stay there. America let only a designated number of people to immigrate into their country. My father purchased Visas ($250 for each person which in today’s dollars is $4,362) for Cuba and booked passage on the ocean liner, SS St. Louis that belonged to a German shipping company.

Thus, Gerda and her family were among those who sailed to Cuba on the ill-fated St. Louis in May 1939.

For those who don’t know the story of the St. Louis, it is one example of the shameful and tragic ways the US government failed to respond to the cries for help of those seeking to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. Jane’s telling of the story will continue in my next post.

 

 

  1. Arthur Goldschmidt, Interview 8542,  Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation,  November 10, 1995. Accessed 15 August 2021, from the archive of the University of California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, found at https://sfi.usc.edu/what-we-do/collections ↩
  2. The Palestine citizenship papers can be found at the Israel State Archives by searching for their names. Unfortunately, the site does not provide specific links to those results, but the site can be found at https://www.archives.gov.il/en/ ↩
  3. Jane Inge Goldschmidt Keibel, Speech to Hazen School, Hardwick, Vermont, 2020, shared by Peter Keibel. ↩

33 thoughts on “The Children and Grandchildren of Caroline Blumenfeld Hoxter: Leaving Germany”

  2. Canada was not any better in treating refugees trying to escape the horrors of the holocaust. During the 12-year Nazi regime in Germany, from 1933 to 1945, Canada accepted fewer Jewish refugees than any other Western nation. The government also blocked the entry of the SS St. Louis.

    Liked by 1 person

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    • I didn’t know that about Canada. How odd since England was one of the countries that was most open to accepting refugees (although they did send many to the Isle of Man and to Australia in internment camps). I just read a review of a book about post-WWII Germany that made me think of your family’s experiences. Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955,” the Berlin-based journalist Harald Jähne

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    • I did not know that about Canada. I guess I would have thought that since England was fairly generous in taking in refugees (although it did send many to the Isle of Man, Australia, and other internment camps), Canada as a Commonwealth country would have been also.

      I thought of you recently when I read a review of a book about post-war Germany. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955,” by Harald Jähne

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  5. My heart sank when I saw the reference to the St Louis…and it’s true, Canada also turned a blind eye to the plight of the Jewish people fleeing Europe. It was a very closed country for many, many years, with those in power wanting to keep it as WASP as possible. Don’t even ask what the government was doing to the indigenous people during this period – it was shameful.

    Liked by 1 person

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    • I’ve read a little about the schools for the indigeous population—not unlike what happened here as well. And yet today Canada is one of the most diverse and open countries. I wonder what and when the shift occurred. I assume after the 1960s?

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  7. I just read your last three posts and my iPad would not let me comment. So I switch to my phone and I will try to leave my comments. This post has such a heartbreaking ending. Voyage of the Damned.

    Liked by 2 people

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  9. Every so often I begin to mourn the decline in American values and start to consider leaving, and ironically the place I first consider is Germany, because of my dual citizenship. It’s very hard to think deeply about that choice.

    Liked by 2 people

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    • Yeah, I am not so sure things are that great in Germany with the AfD and so much anti-immigrant sentiment in some parts of the country. I think overall Germany is a lot like the US in many ways—haves and have nots, polarization. And except in the bigger cities, there is not much Jewish life there, unfortunately.

      Liked by 1 person

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  10. Glad you’re back. I always learn something from your posts. Janes account is chilling. I looked up the St. Louis. I had heard of this but didn’t know the boats name or the full story. It’s just so hard to wrap my mind around all the details.

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  11. Pingback: Friday’s Family History Finds | Empty Branches on the Family Tree

  12. Pingback: My Cousins on the SS St Louis: The Shameful Conduct of the US Government | Brotmanblog: A Family Journey

  13. Pingback: The Fate of Caroline Blumenfeld Hoxter and Her Children: Final Chapter | Brotmanblog: A Family Journey

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