Two More Generations Back! The Amazing Seligmanns

Posted on February 4, 2016 by Amy

Get ready for a real brain twister here.

As I mentioned in my last post, my cousin Wolfgang sent me several new documents relating to our mutual Seligmann ancestors. Wolfgang and his mother received these from Beate Goetz, who had also sent me several important documents over a year ago. I continue to be amazed by how much information is available about my Seligmann forebears.

The first document is a death certificate for Jakob Seligmann, my four-times great-grandfather, father of Moritz Seligmann and grandfather of Bernard Seligman. Until now Jakob was the earliest relative I had found in the Seligmann line; he was born in Gaulsheim, Germany in 1773 and died there in 1851. His wife, my four-times great-grandmother, was Martha Mayer.

Jakob Seligmann death record

With help from Wolfgang, his mother, and my friend Matthias Steinke, I learned that this document says that Jakob Seligmann died on December 21, 1851, when he was 78 years old. He was born in Gaulsheim, the son of Seligmann Hirsch, deceased, a merchant in Gaulsheim, and Mina nee Mayer. The informants were his son Leopold Seligmann and Konrad Vollmer, not related. What was most exciting about this document was that it revealed the names of Jakob’s parents: Seligmann Hirsch and Mina Mayer.

Seligmann Hirsch and Mina Mayer were thus my five-times great-grandparents. I now had another generation back to add to my family tree. And then something occurred to me. When I saw that Mina’s birth name had been Mayer, I was puzzled. Was she related to her daughter-in-law Martha Mayer? Of course, it could be. But when I thought about it a bit more, I realized that when Mina was born in the mid-18^th century, Jews were not using surnames. Instead, they were using patronymics—Mina was probably the daughter of a man whose first name was Mayer, not whose surname was Mayer. She was Mina bat (daughter of) Mayer.

So if Jakob Seligmann’s father was Seligmann Hirsch, it meant that he was probably Seligmann ben (son of) Hirsch. That meant that the Seligmann surname really came from Jakob’s father’s first name. When Jakob had to adopt a surname in Napoleonic times, he must have taken his patronymic of Jakob ben (son of) Seligmann and compressed it into a first name and surname, creating Jakob Seligmann. Seligmann ben Hirsch was thus the original source for the Seligmann surname that survives to this day in my family with Wolfgang himself.

And that meant that Seligmann ben Hirsch was the son of a man named Hirsch, who was my six-times great-grandfather.

That hunch was corroborated by another bit of evidence that Wolfgang brought to my attention. Back in July 2015, I posted about Moritz Seligmann’s sister, Martha Seligmann, who had married a man named Benjamin Seligmann, son of Isaac Seligmann and Felicitas Goetzel. Martha and Benjamin’s son Siegfried had married Moritz and Eva Seligmann’s daughter Caroline. Caroline and Siegfried were the parents of Emil Seligmann, who created that very long and detailed family tree I wrote about here. That is, Emil was the grandson of both Moritz Seligmann AND his sister Martha Seligmann. He was his own second cousin.

Here’s the chart I posted last time. I know this is all confusing, but if I don’t write it down, I will never remember my own thought processes.

Pedigree Chart for Emil Seligmann

Or as I wrote then, “Emil’s father Siegfried was the son of Martha Seligmann; his mother Karoline was the daughter of Moritz Seligmann. Moritz and Martha were siblings, so Siegfried and Karoline were first cousins. Thus, Emil’s paternal grandmother Martha and his maternal grandfather Moritz were sister and brother. Now if in fact Benjamin Seligmann, Martha’s husband, was also a cousin, there is truly a remarkable amount of inbreeding there.”

And I think that’s in fact the case: Benjamin and Martha were also first cousins. Back in July I had thought that perhaps Benjamin Seligmann and his wife Martha Seligmann were cousins since both had the surname Seligmann. I thought that their fathers, Isaac and Jakob, respectively, could have been brothers, but I had no way of proving it. But now I know from Jakob’s death certificate that his father’s name was Seligmann ben Hirsch. Was that also the name of Isaac’s father?

A look at Isaac’s gravestone from the Steinheim Institute website revealed this, one of the most beautiful grave inscriptions I’ve ever seen:


האיש החשוב משכיל וטהור		Here lies the respected man wise and pure,
החבר ר’הירש בן כ”ה זעליגמאן		the Torah Scholar Mr. Hirsch, son of the honored Mr. Seligmann of
גוילסהיים: למלאכתו מלאכת		Gaulsheim. For his work was Heaven’s work. As swift as
שמים כצבי מהיר אור תורתו	5	a deer was the light of his Torah. Like a sapphire.
כספיר תאיר צדק קדמו פעמיו:		righteousness was before him. A wholly righteous man, great in deeds, doing
איש תמים ורב פעלי’ גומל חסדים		many acts of lovingkindness for the
רבים: לרעבים וצמאים		hungry and thirsty.
אורו נגנז יום וי”ו ך”ה ובא		He died on six, 25 Iyar, and he came
למנוחתו כבוד יו’ א’ך”ו אייר	10	to his honored resting place Day 1, 27 Iyar.
לפרט יקר בעיני ד’המות’ לחסידי’		Especially dear in the eyes of the Lord is the death of the pious.
תנצב”ה		May his soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life.

(Thank you to Neil, Bracha, and Gerald from Tracing the Tribe on Facebook for help in translating the Hebrew; the original German translation on the Steinheim site did not translate well into English using Google Translate, so I decided it would be better to get a translation of the Hebrew directly rather than getting a translation of the translation. If the lines of the translation do not line up exactly with the Hebrew text, that is my error, not that of my translators.)

And thank you to my friend Dorothee who told me about the link to the photograph of the headstone.

Hirsch “Isaac” ben Seligmann headstone
Found at http://www.steinheim-institut.de/daten/picsbng/xl/0358_bng.jpg

“Isaac’s” Hebrew name was Hirsch, son of Seligmann. His father was thus named Seligmann, as was Jakob’s father. Furthermore, Jewish naming patterns suggest that Isaac’s father could have been Seligmann son of Hirsch, the man who was also Jakob’s father. Hirsch/”Isaac” was older than Jakob; when Seligmann son of Hirsch had his first son, he named him for his own deceased father, Hirsch. Jakob and Hirsch/“Isaac” were most likely brothers, both sons of Seligmann ben Hirsch.

Why then is Isaac referred to as Isaac, not Hirsch as his gravestone indicates? I don’t know. The Steinheim Institute site notes that “Hirsch from Gaulsheim called Isaac Seligmann. He was a schoolteacher in Bingen,” without further explanation. On the page for Hirsch/Isaac’s son Benjamin, the Steinheim site comments that “Benjamin Seligmann was in Gaulsheim (today district of Bingen), the son of school teacher Hirsch (later: Isaac) 1798 Seligmann and his wife Felicity born.” [Translation by Google Translate] Hirsch must have changed his name to Isaac.

So that means that Benjamin Seligmann, son of Hirsch/Isaac, and Martha Seligmann, daughter of Jakob, were first cousins. Their son Siegfried was thus not only their son but also a first cousin removed from each of his parents. Oy vey. Siegfried then married his first cousin Caroline, daughter of his mother’s brother Moritz. ENDOGAMY, anyone?? No wonder Emil’s tree was so convoluted!

Here is an updated pedigree chart for Emil Seligmann. Notice that Seligmann ben Hirsch and Mina Mayer appear as his great-grandparents in three different places:

Extended Pedigree Chart for Emil Seligmann

Where am I? Oh, right. I now know that my six-times great-grandfather was named Hirsch and that he had a son named Seligmann, who had at least two children, Hirsch (who became Isaac) and Jakob.

But what about Jakob Seligmann’s wife Martha, daughter of Mayer, my four-times great-grandmother? The second document Wolfgang sent to me was her death certificate. Martha died on December 17, 1849 in Gaulsheim when she was 76 years old. She was born in Oberingelheim and was the daughter of Jakob Mayer, deceased, a merchant in Oberingelheim, and Odilia, nee Simon. The informants were her husband, Jakob Seligmann, and Konrad Vollmer, who was not related to her.

Martha Seligmann nee Mayer death record

Thus, I now know another set of five-times great-grandparents, Martha’s parents: Jakob Mayer (probably Jakob ben Mayer) and Odilia Simon (probably Odilia daughter of Simon). And I know where to search for them: Oberlingelheim. And if I am right about the patronymics, then I know two more of my sixth-great-grandfathers, Mayer, father of Jakob, and Simon, father of Odilia.

All that from two pieces of paper dating from the mid-nineteenth century.

Thank you, Beate Goetz, Wolfgang Seligmann and his mother Annlis, Matthias Steinke, and the members of Tracing the Tribe, for all your help.

Why I Love the Internet: The World Wide Web

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Amy

Internet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Internet continues to provide me with so much more than access to information. Through my blog, Ancestry, Facebook, Google, and ordinary old email, I continue to find and be found by cousins all over the world. In the last two weeks, I have seen my network of cousins expand and greatly enrich my knowledge and understanding of my family history. So a few updates.

First, I heard from a relative of Margaret Swem, the wife of Felix Schoenthal, my Boston relative, and she filled me in on the background and family of Margaret. Quite interesting information that I will add to the post about Felix and his family. Once again, having a blog proved useful because Margaret’s relative found my blog by Googling Margaret Swem’s name.

Second, an Israeli second cousin, once removed, of my husband found me through my tree on Ancestry. I haven’t even done very much yet on my husband’s family, but through this new cousin we’ve learned a great deal about the Shrage family in Zabarazh, a town once in Galicia but now part of Ukraine. It’s been very exciting learning from our new Israeli cousin.

Third, I’ve heard from a descendant of Hettie Schoenthal, one of Simon Schoenthal’s younger children about whom I’ve yet to blog. This new cousin has shared some of Hettie’s own remembrances of her life as well as other stories. I am looking forward to incorporating some of those into the blog as well as some photographs.

Fourth, I’ve been in touch with two British relatives of the UK Selinger cousins, relatives of Julius, Alfred, and Frederick Selinger, all of whom married my Cohen relatives. I then put the two of them in touch as they had not previously known each other despite being cousins. That gave me great satisfaction, and now all three of us are hunting for answers about the connections among some of the Selingers.

Fifth, I am in touch with a Goldfarb cousin and hoping to learn more about this recently discovered branch of my Brotman family line. I just received a huge package of information that I need to go through, enter into my tree, and research.

Sixth, another Hamberg cousin just contacted me this morning.

And last but definitely not least, my cousin Wolfgang in Germany sent me new information about our Seligmann family line. He and his mother received four new documents about our ancestors. The first reveals two more generations back in the line of Jacob Seligmann, my four-times great-grandfather from Gaulsheim, Germany. I will be blogging separately about these documents and what they revealed in the next few days before I return again to the children of Simon Schoenthal.

English: internet Español: internet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Turning on my computer in the morning has become a real treat, waiting to see who has found me, who has responded to my inquiries, and which cousin has new information to share. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by my good fortune. Sure, there are still many people who don’t reply to my emails or Facebook messages, but for every person I have found or who has found me, I am so deeply grateful. The family tree keeps growing, and with it so does the world-wide web of fascinating and generous people whom I can call my cousins.

Photo Analysis: Why You Should Ask an Expert

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Amy

Sometimes you need to hire an expert to help with hard questions. With the help of the genealogy village—my fellow bloggers and the members of the various Facebook groups and JewishGen—I have been able to find and learn more than I ever imagined. But when it came to some of those mystery photos that bewildered and frustrated me, I decided it was time to find an expert, and the expert who came highly recommended—for good reason—is Ava Cohn, a/k/a Sherlock Cohn, the Photo Genealogist.

I had originally sent Ava this photo of my grandfather Isadore Goldschlager because I was curious about identifying the other people in the photograph.

Isadore Goldschlager and unknown others

But Ava and I discussed it, and she concluded that without more information and more photographs, it would be impossible to make much progress identifying total strangers who lived over a hundred years ago. I really appreciated Ava’s honesty, and when she asked if I had any other photographs that might be more amenable to her analysis, I looked back to consider some other options.

I sent her this photograph from Fred Michel’s album, which I had discussed here and here and here, but about which I remained somewhat mystified.

I had concluded tentatively from my own analysis and comparison to other photographs and the inscriptions on the photograph that the older woman was probably my three-times great-grandmother Babetta Schoenfeld Seligmann, and the two men labeled Onkel Adolf and Onkel Jakob were probably Babetta’s sons, Adolf and James, brothers of my great-great grandfather Bernard Seligman. Adolf, like my great-great-grandfather Bernard, had left Germany and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and James had moved to Great Britain. I had learned that James was not a common name for boys in Germany in the 19th century so it was likely that he was born Jakob and adopted the name James after emigrating. Also, my cousin Lotte, who had met James Seligman when she was a young girl, thought that “Onkel Jakob” resembled the man she remembered as James Seligman.

But I was not at all sure who the two younger women were, especially the woman to the left in the photograph. I’d asked on the blog if anyone could read the inscription near her picture, but no one was certain what it said. The woman in the center appeared to be labeled Anna Oppenheimer, but I couldn’t understand why she would be in the photo. Anna Oppenheimer was the daughter of Pauline Seligmann and Maier Oppenheimer and the granddaughter of Babetta. But why of all the grandchildren would only she be in this photograph, especially since her mother was not included, just two of her uncles?

Ava studied the photograph as well as my blog posts, my family tree for the Seligmann family, and other photographs of the Seligmann family, and then sent me a detailed and thorough analysis of her own conclusions, which I found well-founded, fascinating, and persuasive. With her permission, I am sharing some of her report.

I thought Ava’s analysis of the overall relationships among those in the photograph based on traditional posing in studio photographs of families was quite interesting:

In the mystery photograph, the family is posed in a typical family grouping of five individuals seated and standing around a large library table upon which is a dog, perhaps the family pet. The photo has been taken in a photographer’s studio with an appropriate backdrop for the time period. The two individuals on the left hand side appear to be a married couple while the elderly woman seated on the right could be mother or grandmother to one or more of the individuals in the photo. The man on the right, probably a son and the young woman in the center holding the dog could be related but are not married to each other.

Ava concluded that the photograph was taken in 1896-1897. Here is part of the reasoning for her conclusion:

To establish a year for the photograph, I looked at the clothing worn. Since what we know of the family’s comfortable economic status, it is logical that they are wearing up-to-date fashions, for the most part. The elderly woman, as is customary for many older women, is not as fashionable as the two younger women. Her dress, with multiple small buttons down the bodice, is a typical style of the 1880s as is her bonnet. The other two women are wearing clothing from the latter half of the1890s, post 1895. By this point in time the enormous leg-o-mutton sleeves of the 1893-1895 time period have become less full with the vestige of fullness above the elbow. The man on the left is wearing a high Imperial collar, common in the 1890s.

Ava agreed that it was reasonable to conclude that the elderly woman labeled “Grossmutter Gau Algesheim” was Babetta Schoenfeld Seligmann and that the man on the right, labeled Onkel Adolf, was her son Adolf Seligman, brother of Bernard and a resident of Santa Fe in the 1890s. At that time Adolf was in his fifties (born in 1843) and unmarried. Ava thought that the man labeled Onkel Adolf in the photo appeared to be in his mid-fifties. Ava did not think the woman in the center was Adolf’s wife, Lucy, since Lucy would have been only about fourteen in the mid-1890s and did not marry Adolf until 1902.

Rather, Ava opined that the woman in the center was in fact Anna Oppenheimer as labeled. She would have been nineteen or twenty in 1896-1897:

It appears that she is wearing a wedding or engagement ring in the photograph. The writer of the inscription has used Anna’s maiden name, Oppenheimer, as opposed to her married name, Anna Kaufman, so, along with the absence of Max Kaufman in the photograph, I believe that this photo was taken before her marriage to Max. Again, having a marriage certificate for Anna and Max could confirm why the writer used Anna’s maiden name here instead of her married name.

Unfortunately, I do not have a marriage record for Anna, and there is no record of any children born to her and her husband Max Kaufman so it is impossible to determine when exactly they married.

That left the two remaining people in the photograph: Onkel Jakob and the woman sitting on the left side of the picture whose name I could not decipher in the inscription. Ava agreed that “Onkel Jakob” was James Seligman. So who was the other woman?

Ava believes that she was James/Jakob Seligman’s wife, Henrietta Walker Templeton, who was born in England in 1866 and married James Seligman in London in October 1887. Ava read the inscription next to the woman to be “Tante Heni:”

Heni is a nickname for Henrietta and clearly shows the relationship with the writer of the inscription because of the informal use of a nickname. Tante (Aunt) could be one by marriage not necessarily by blood. In the mystery photo Heni appears to be about age 30-31.

In addition, Ava interpreted the posing as indicative of a marital relationship between Jakob and the woman seated in front of him, saying, “The manner in which he is posed with his arm around the back of Heni’s chair suggests their relationship.”

This made perfect sense to me. Ava speculated that perhaps James and Henrietta had come to Gau-Algesheim to celebrate their tenth anniversary with the Seligmann family, which would have been in 1897. I also recalled that Lotte had mentioned in an email dated July 6, 2015, that James and his English wife (whom Lotte referred to as Hedy) had visited “the continent” once. Lotte was born in 1921, so would not remember a visit in the 1890s, but the fact that James and his wife visited during Lotte’s lifetime in Germany makes it even more likely that they had in fact visited on earlier occasions. Lotte also said that James returned after Henrietta’s death in 1928.

Ava even analyzed the dog in the photo.

Given that the same dog appears in both the mystery photograph and the one of Bettina Arnfeld nee Seligmann (born 1875), I thought I’d include that here. It is clearly the same dog. I had considered that the dog may have belonged to the photographer but given how calm he/she appears in the photographs, I believe he was a family pet. The photo of Bettina was taken roughly 3 years after this one, circa 1900. The photo of Bettina may have been an engagement picture as she and Adolf Arnfeld married in 1900.

Bettina Arnfeld nee Seligmann

Bettina Seligmann Arnfeld was the daughter of Hyronimus Seligmann, Babetta’s son and brother of Bernard, Adolf, and James, among others. She was Anna Oppenheimer’s first cousin. So whose dog was it? Certainly not James or Adolf since neither lived in Germany. Perhaps the dog belonged to Babetta? She is the only common link between the two young women pictured with the dog. Babetta died 1899; if Ava is correct and the photograph of Bettina was taken in 1900, perhaps Bettina inherited the dog from her grandmother?

I was quite satisfied and persuaded by Ava’s analysis of the family photograph. But she didn’t stop there. I had also supplied her with additional photographs to help with her analysis of the family photograph. For example, I sent her this one, which I believed was a photograph of Babetta as a young woman.

I had based that conclusion on the fact that another photograph that I paired with the one of the woman was labeled Grossvatter and thus presumably was my three-times great-grandfather Moritz Seligmann.

Courtesy of the Family of Fred and Ilse Michel

But Ava disagreed about the identity of the young woman:

I did a comparison of the older photograph of a young woman that you supplied. This photograph is roughly dated circa 1859-1861 based on clothing and hairstyle as well as the type of image, most probably a daguerreotype popular in the 1850s and very early 1860s. The young woman appears to be in her teens and no more than 20 years of age. This eliminates the possibility that this earlier likeness is Babetta who would have been 49-51 years old. But there is a possibility given the provenance of the photograph and the resemblance to Babetta that this is one of her daughters, Pauline or Mathilde. It is unlikely to be her niece/stepdaughter, Caroline. Given that the photo was obtained from the Michel descendants, Pauline is the most likely candidate. Further research, documentation and comparison photographs would be needed to make a positive identification.

Although I was quite disappointed to think that this was not Babetta, the more I considered Ava’s analysis and the more I looked at the photograph of the young woman and the one of Moritz, the more I realized my error. The frames on the two photographs are quite different as is the style and the posing. I had just jumped to the conclusion that because Suzanne had sent these two photographs in the same email that they were of a couple. That’s why sometimes you need to hire an expert!

Finally, Ava also did an analysis of the wonderful photograph that my cousin Davita had sent of a man she said was her grandfather, Adolf Seligman, and his favorite sister, Minnie, riding camels in Egypt:

I was quite surprised but also persuaded by what Ava had to say about the identity of the people in this photograph; she is quite certain that the woman is in fact Henrietta Walker Templeton, and the more I studied the photograph, the more I agreed.

The Egypt photo is roughly dated based on her suit and hat as being taken in 1910. That would make Heni 44 years old. Her face has aged from the earlier photo and she’s put on a bit of weight, not uncommon approaching middle age. She is very stylish in the 1897 photo and likewise in the 1910 one. In both, she has chosen an up-to-date suit rather than a dress. Her dark hair is the same style. Notice the “dip” in her bangs on the right side of her forehead. It’s the same as the earlier photo. Her eyebrows, nose and mouth are the same as is the overall attitude captured by the photographer.

Tante Heni

After I read Ava’s comment, I checked the emails that Lotte had sent me and saw that she had described James’ wife as “big and pompous.” The woman Ava concluded was Henrietta certainly does have a certain air of superiority in both of the photographs.

Also, I have absolutely no record of any kind supporting the existence of a Seligmann sister named Minnie, so already had had questions about Davita’s description. Thus, I was open to the idea that it was not Minnie, but someone else. I hadn’t considered Henrietta since I believed that the man was Adolf, as Davita said. Why would Henrietta from England be riding a camel in Egypt with her brother-in-law Adolf, who lived in Santa Fe?

But Ava raised a question as to whether this was in fact Adolf. If the photograph was taken in 1910, why would Adolf, who had married in 1902 and had three children by 1910, be traveling to Egypt? The more I looked at the earlier photographs of Adolf and Jakob/James, the more I became convinced that the man on the camel is in fact James, not Adolf. Ava also agreed that it seems quite likely that it is James, not Adolf, in the photograph, but that without more information, we can’t be entirely sure, especially since Davita, the source of the Egypt photograph, believed that it was her grandfather Adolf. (Adolf died before Davita was born, so she had never met him in person and only had this one photograph that she had been told was of her grandfather.)

James or Adolf?

James Seligman

Adolf Seligman

Thus, although without more photographs and/or records we cannot be 100% certain, I am persuaded that Ava’s conclusions are correct about the likely identities of the people in the group photograph, the portrait of the young woman, and the Egypt photograph.

It was well worth the fee I paid to have the benefit of Ava’s expertise. I highly recommend her to anyone who has questions about an old photograph. If you are interested, you can email Ava at Sherlock.cohn@comcast.net or check out her website at http://sherlockcohn.com/ You will probably have to wait quite a while because her services are very much in demand and she devotes a great deal of time to each project, but it will be worth the wait.

[I was not paid or required by my contract with Ava to advertise her services; I am writing this blog post as a service to others who might be interested.]

The Memoirs of Lotte’s Sister Doris: Another Perspective on Life in Hitler’s Germany

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Amy

Many of you enjoyed the memoirs and other writings of my cousin Lotte Furst, which are posted here, here, here, and here. You will recall that Lotte and her family lived in Mannheim, Germany, and were living a comfortable life in a good home; Lotte’s father was a doctor, and her mother was the granddaughter of Hieronymous Seligmann, younger brother of my great-great-grandfather Bernard Seligman. When the Nazis came to power, Lotte’s life changed forever. After suffering through years of anti-Semitism and deprivation of their rights, her family finally decided to leave Germany and came to the United States. Lotte’s writings described in vivid terms her perspective on all of this as she experienced it as a young girl and then as a young woman.

I recently learned that Lotte’s older sister Doris also wrote a memoir. Doris was four years older than Lotte, and thus I was curious as to how her perspective was like or different from that of her younger sister. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Doris was seventeen and thus would have had a more adult-like view of things. Doris died in 2007, and her daughter Ruth was kind enough to share her mother’s memoirs with me. Much of it is quite personal, so I am going to focus on those sections that provide insights into the larger questions: what was life like before Hitler came to power, how did it change when he did, and what led to the decision to leave Germany? [All material quoted from Doris Gruenewald’s writings is protected by copyright and may not be used without the permission of her children.]

By Snapshots Of The Past (Parade Place and Kaufhaus Karlsruhe Baden Germany) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

By Snapshots Of The Past (Parade Place and Kaufhaus Karlsruhe Baden Germany) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Doris was born in October 1916 in Mannheim; Germany was in the midst of World War I, and her father, Joseph Wiener, was drafted into the German army as a medical officer soon after she was born. Her mother, Annie Winter Wiener, went with Doris to live with her parents, Samuel and Laura (Seligmann) Winter in Neunkirchen, where Samuel owned a women’s clothing business. Annie’s brother Ernst had recently been killed while serving in the German army after volunteering against his parents’ wishes. Doris wrote:

He had been the apple of their eyes and his death dealt a terrible blow to both. My grandmother wore only black from then on, and my grandfather’s health began to deteriorate. They also lost their sizable fortune, having bought war bonds as their patriotic duty, which at the end of the war were not worth anything anymore. My grandfather’s business was dissolved and then reestablished on a much smaller scale.

Ernst Winter
Courtesy of Lotte Furst

Doris compared her grandparents’ home in Neunkirchen with her own home in Mannheim:

The house in Neunkirchen had a large garden in back of it, most of which was rented out. The smallest part, directly behind the house, was used for growing some vegetables and flowers. I remember loving to play in the garden and watching earthworms after a rain as well as other living creatures. In Mannheim there was little opportunity for this kind of nature watching as we lived in a built-up urban area with little greenery, other than a well laid out park some distance from our apartment.

Neunkirchen

For several years while the French occupied parts of Germany after World War I, several family members housed French soldiers, and the neighborhood school Doris would have attended was also being used by the French military. Thus, she had to go to a school somewhat further from her home for those years. Like her sister Lotte, Doris pursued a highly academic path in school and was one of only six girls out of thirty students in her Gymnasium classes and then the only girl in her class when she reached the final years of her pre-university level education.

This excerpt provides a sense of the family’s lifestyle:

My parents employed a cook and a housemaid, and when my sister and I were still young, a “Kinderfraulein” who used to be an untrained young woman with an interest in children. In other words, not quite a “governess.” My father had help in his office and for some time also employed a driver after he developed a painful condition in his left arm, due to having to reach outside the car for shifting gears. ….

We had a Bechstein Grand piano in our living room. This instrument had been given to my mother as a young girl. She had really wanted to study music on a professional basis. But her parents felt that “proper” young ladies did not take up that kind of profession and did not allow her to pursue her wish. Instead, they bought her the Bechstein and let her have piano lessons.

I began taking piano lessons at age seven, with a teacher considered among the best in Mannheim. My mother, although an accomplished pianist, no longer played much. But occasionally, she and my father, who had learned to play the violin in his youth, would play duets together. That always was a special treat.

By Annaivanova (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

By Annaivanova (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

I was particularly interested in what Doris wrote about the role of Judaism in the family’s life.

I grew up through the years with some awareness that we were Jewish, without knowing what significance that had then and later. Neither my parents nor my grandparents when I knew them observed any religious tenets. However, I was told that in past years my grandfather had been the head of the Jewish Congregation in Neunkirchen. My grandmother, who was president of the local Red Cross chapter for some time, used to fast on Yom Kippur. She reluctantly told me, when I kept asking her, that she had promised her dying mother to keep that tradition. As for me, I was kept home on the Jewish High Holy Days. My family did not attend any services. ….

At eight years of age I happened to be visiting my grandparents at the time of Passover. They had been invited by friends to a large Seder. Unfortunately, nobody thought of explaining to me what that was all about. My grandparents may have assumed that I knew, but I did not. I understood nothing of what was being read in Hebrew or spoken in German. I was utterly bored! Furthermore, when the ceremony asked for tasting the so-called bitter herbs, I bit off a piece of the horseradish on my plate and soon experienced the consequences of that act!

Unfortunately, I think far too many children, here in the US and elsewhere in the world, have that experience at seders.

The family was, however, required to provide some religious instruction because of the school system’s requirements:

There having been no separation of Church and State, religious instruction was part of the official curriculum. The students were separated one period per week according to their denominations. Most were Protestants, some were Catholics, and a few were Jewish. Since the number of Jewish children was so small, and in the case of my first-grade placement non-existent, my parents were required for that year to hire a private instructor in order to comply with the legal requirement. Thus, there suddenly appeared a not very clean looking young man with a greasy book, from which he proceeded to read and attempt to teach me-at six years of age-the Hebrew text. My recollection is that he came to our house only a very few times. I do not know how the religious instruction requirement was fulfilled after that disaster.

When, at fourth grade level, I changed schools, religion was taught by a little old man, a retired rabbi, who was very nice and even made some of what he taught rather interesting. But I developed no feeling for or interest in it at all, as it was totally divorced from the rest of my life.

Then, as Lotte also described, their father decided to withdraw from the Jewish community:

When I was fourteen, my father had some kind of a dispute with the Jewish Community, which was the official agency for collecting taxes. These taxes were legally mandated as a percentage of one’s general income tax obligation. I nearer knew exactly what the problem was, except that it had something to do with the amount owed, to which my father was apparently objecting. The Rabbi came to our house to straighten the matter out. Apparently he was not successful as subsequent events proved. (This rabbi became my brother-in-law at a much later time. He knew that I was far removed from religious observance, but he was always very tolerant and friendly to me.)

Whatever the problem had been, my father decided to leave the Jewish Congregation. Since I was already fourteen years old, I was required to state my personal intention. As I had no ties to the Jewish community, that was no problem for me. From then on I was without any religious affiliation, called “konfessionslos.” In practical terms it meant that I no longer had to attend religious instruction at school. I used the weekly free hour to visit the Art Gallery opposite the school building and saw a lot of very interesting, good art works.

Dr. Joseph Wiener Courtesy of Lotte Furst

Of course, the family’s withdrawal from the Jewish community and lack of religious involvement did not make any difference in the eyes of the Nazis once they came to power. Doris wrote:

Between 1932 and 1935 I had a valid German passport, used during those years primarily for trips to the Saar to visit my grandparents and take the then permitted two hundred German marks to be deposited outside Germany. In those years the Saar was still under the administration of a French post-World-War I governing authority. My grandmother took care of such transactions. By the time I needed a new passport, the Nazis had decided that a big “J” had to be stamped on any so-called non-Aryan, meaning Jewish, person’s passport. Word had gotten around that one of the clerks in the passport office in Mannheim would issue a “clean” document without the dreaded J, for suitable consideration. I went to that office, saw the clerk in question, and for the small sum of five marks was issued a regular passport without the J. I still have this passport as a memento.

When the Nazis assumed power in 1933, we as a family re-joined the Jewish Congregation as a matter of honor. Not that it would have made any difference had we not done so as the Nazis classified people not necessarily by religion but by their so-called racial identity.

An example of German Jewish passport. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As Doris approached the end of her time in the local schools in the 1930s, she was both the only girl and the only Jew in her class. She wrote that things did not change dramatically at school despite the political changes around them, but she did describe one troubling incident:

I entered the classroom in the morning, as usual. Upon approaching my desk, I saw that someone had pasted a viciously antisemitic sticker from the “Sturmer,” a rabidly anti-Jewish paper, on my desk. By that time, one of my classmates had begun wearing the SS uniform. I more or less assumed that he was the culprit, which in the end turned out not to have been the case. However, at that moment I decided not to confront him or anyone else. I sat down at another desk and waited for the right time to act. This came with the second period when the “Klassenlehrer”-the equivalent of our Home Room teacher-was due for his hour. … I waited for this teacher outside the classroom and told him my reason for doing so, adding that I knew there was nothing I could do about official policy and insults, but that I was not willing to put up with personal attacks.

This teacher, who, incidentally, had been an officer in World War I and had lost an arm, rose to the occasion. He and I entered the classroom together, and he immediately asked who had done this deed. Somewhat to my surprise, and perhaps his too, not one of the students admitted having put the sticker on my desk. There was nothing further he could have done: I do not remember whether he spoke to the class, but his earlier behavior had given ample proof of his opinion. … The incident occurred about one week before the final exam, the Abitur. It cast a pall over that important event.

Embed from Getty Images

Imagine being the only girl and the only Jew in the class and standing up for herself that way. What courage it must have taken to do this. What if her teacher had not been sympathetic? Despite this stressful incident, Doris successfully passed the Abitur. Although Doris was entitled to enroll in the university based on her father’s military service during World War I, Jews were prohibited from enrolling in either law school or medical school. Instead, Doris decided to audit a few courses while awaiting a visa to leave Germany. She wrote:

I had known for some time that I had to get out of Germany as there was no future there for me, and I was willing to take whichever came first [she had applied for both a US visa and a certificate to immigrate to Palestine]. However, I admit that I was relieved when the American visa materialized first.

The American Consulate closest to Mannheim was located in Stuttgart. In due course I was summoned for an interview with the American consular officials. I was in a somewhat unusual position in that my father had learned of a legal means of transferring money abroad, which was then discounted at the rate of fifty percent. The permissible amount was sufficient to enable me to show the U.S. Consulate that I had the requisite five thousand dollars for obtaining an immigration visa to the U.S. In this way I did not have to await my application number to come up in regular order, which would have taken a great deal more tame. I got my visa rather quickly. By that time I had also received a so-called Affidavit of Support from one of my grandmother’s cousins, whose father had emigrated in the nineteenth century and had settled in Cleveland, Ohio. This cousin was in very good financial circumstances and readily responded to our request for an affidavit. …

I was very interested in determining who this cousin might have been. If she was Laura Seligmann Winter’s cousin, she might have also been a cousin of mine, depending on whether she was a paternal cousin or not. The only clues I had from Doris’ memoir were her married name (Irma Rosenfeld), her residence in Cleveland, her children: a son who was in his 20s in 1937, a daughter who was married, and another daughter who was a student at Vassar.

I found one Irma Rosenfeld living in Cleveland at that time who had two daughters and a son and was married to a man named Mortimer Centennial Rosenfeld (I assume the middle name was inspired by the fact that Mortimer was born in 1876, the centennial of the Declaration of Independence). I sent Lotte the photo from that Irma’s passport application, but Lotte was unable to confirm from the photograph that it was the right Irma Rosenfeld.

Irma Rosenfeld and daughter passport photo 1924
Ancestry.com. U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2007.
Original data: Selected Passports. National Archives, Washington, D.C.

After reading Doris’ memoir, I went back to all the documents I had for her and examined more closely the passenger manifest for her trip to the US in 1937. I had not seen the second page of it my first time through, but this time I noticed that it not only named Irma Rosenfeld; it had her street address in Cleveland. It only took a glance at the 1940 US census for me to confirm that I had in fact found the correct Irma.

Doris Wiener 1937 ship manifest part one

p2
Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010.
Original data: Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820-1897.

A little more research revealed that Irma’s birth name had been Irma Levi, daughter of Isaac Levi and Fanny Loeb. Since Doris and Lotte’s great-grandfather (and my three-times great-uncle) Hieronymous Seligmann had married a woman named Anna Levi, I believe that that is the connection between Doris and Irma. Anna Levi was a contemporary of Isaac Levi; perhaps they were siblings, and thus Irma Rosenfeld would have been a first cousin, twice removed, of Doris and Lotte, their grandmother Laura’s first cousin. Obviously, the family had stayed in touch with these American cousins, and even though Irma was American-born and had never met Doris before, she reached out to help her escape the Nazi regime.

Continuing now with Doris and her emigration from Germany:

Necessary preliminaries having been taken care of and good-byes having been said, it was time to arrange for the journey to America. We bought a ticket for me on the SS Washington, a twenty-thousand ton ocean-going passenger boat, and also obtained railroad tickets for me and my mother who wanted to accompany me to Cherbourg, the place of embarkation. …

In Cherbourg I said good-bye to my mother, for whom the separation was very hard, more so than for me. For one thing, I was looking toward something new. But perhaps more importantly, I had unwittingly insulated myself to some degree from the impact of events. This condition lasted for a long time and to some extent gave me some emotional protection….

In contrast to so many, I confess that I had an easy time. Not only was the way for coming to America smoothed. My parents also were well able to pay for my ticket and whatever other expenses arose in connection with my leaving. I was twenty years old at that time. …

Doris Wiener and her mother Courtesy of Lotte Furst

Doris explained why her parents and sister did not come with her:

The question has often been asked why my parents and sister did not come at the same time. Like a great many people, my father kept believing that the Hitler episode was just that, and he refused for a long time to see the situation realistically. Not so my mother. She was instrumental in organizing their own as well as her parents’ emigration to Luxembourg, and later their own to America.

Doris wrote that she arrived in New York in 1937 with $400. Her parents had arranged for friends to meet her at the boat, and Doris stayed with them for a week before moving to her own apartment on the top floor of a building at 96^th Street and Central Park West. Doris also described a visit to Cleveland to see her grandmother’s cousin, Irma Rosenfeld, the woman who had provided the affidavit in support of Doris’ visa, as discussed above. “The slightly more than four weeks I spent with the Rosenfelds were very pleasant, with visits to their country club and other social activities.” But Doris preferred to remain in New York City.

After returning to New York, Doris soon found employment in a dentist’s office and also soon met her future husband, Ernst Gruenewald. They were married in May 1938. Her mother Annie came to New York for the wedding, not only to witness the wedding but also “to gain insight into the international situation uninfluenced by German propaganda.”

My mother had intended to stay in America for about six weeks. But as she listened to the broadcasts available to us, she became increasingly agitated and decided to cut her visit short in order to initiate their emigration from Luxembourg to the United States. She had always been a very intelligent woman capable of making important decisions, many of which were advantageous. She returned to Luxembourg and was able to convince my father that this was the right thing to do. They arrived in the U.S. in April 1939, three weeks after the birth of our first child and about half a year before the outbreak of World War II.

Her grandparents, as we know from Lotte’s memoirs, did not fare as well:

During my childhood I had spent a good deal of time with them in Neunkirchen and was very fond of my grandmother. I knew her only from her mid-forties on, when in my eyes she was an old lady. She was a very reserved but warm person and managed their life very competently. My grandfather was a short, slim man who from the time I knew him as a person, was not well. … My grandparents had applied for a visa to the United States before the outbreak of World War II, but failed to be granted immigrant status. In retrospect, I am convinced that my grandfather’s condition was the reason, as they had enough money to qualify for a visa. My parents also could have vouched for them. My grandfather ended up in Theresienstadt, where he died of pneumonia, as we were told after the war. My grandmother had suffered a fatal heart attack while still living in Luxembourg.

Doris and her husband Ernst and their family ended up relocating from New York to Chicago for a business opportunity a few years after her parents and Lotte arrived . During the 1950s, Doris went back to school and obtained her bachelor’s degree while also raising her children; in 1961 she received a masters’ degree in psychology as well. She then went on to get a Ph.D. in psychology, specializing in neuropsychology, which was itself still a relatively new field. After obtaining her degree, she worked at Michael Reese Hospital in the Adult Inpatient department where she eventually became the director. Sadly, after twenty years there, she found herself forced out on the basis of their mandatory retirement age. She had just turned seventy.

By Zol87 from Chicago, Illinois, USA (Michael Reese Hospital) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

By Zol87 from Chicago, Illinois, USA (Michael Reese Hospital) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1987 Doris and Ernst moved to California, where the winters were milder and where her sister Lotte was living. Doris had obtained a California license before moving and was able to continue to practice as a psychologist when they moved, but did so only for a short period before retiring. Ernst died in 1989, and Doris died almost twenty years later in 2007.

It was fascinating to me to read Doris’ memoirs after reading Lotte’s; both sisters wrote so clearly and so powerfully about their lives. I can see that they had much in common: great intelligence, dedication to hard work and to family, astute powers of observation, and a love of language. Doris struck me as the more thick-skinned of the two sisters, often talking about her independence and emotional distance from others, even as a young child. Doris wrote about being somewhat of a loner and keeping her thoughts and feelings to herself. I would imagine that those qualities served her well as she endured her teen years in Hitler’s Germany and a voyage alone to America in 1937 as well as her adjustment to life in America.

Overall, I am struck by how strong these two women were, both as children in Germany, as new immigrants to the US, and as women experiencing all the changes that came in the years after World War II. I’d like to think some of that is the Seligmann DNA that we share, but I doubt that I would have been as resilient and brave as they had to be, if I had had to endure the challenges and hardships they did.

My Cohn Cousins: Journalism, Sports, and, Most Importantly, Family and Love

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Amy

The first post about my cousin Bob Cohn and his family discussed the lives of his grandparents—both Joseph and Rose (Kornfeld) Cohn, his paternal grandparents, and Minnie and Moses Kremenko, his maternal grandparents. It also discussed his parents, Harold and Teddi (Kremenko) Cohn and their untimely deaths, which left Bob and his brother Paul as orphans at a young age. Bob and Paul went to live with their aunt and uncle, Beatrice (Kremenko) and Sol Berman, after their mother’s death in 1945.

Despite these tragic losses, both Bob and Paul went on to enjoy successful careers and full family lives. Bob wrote:

Seven years later [in 1952] I joined the United States Air Force for four years and served in Texas, Alaska, and Montgomery [Alabama] editing base newspapers. When I was discharged from Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery I used the GI Bill to enroll at the University of Alabama where I met [my wife] June in 1959.

I asked Bob how he became interested in journalism, and he told me he was inspired by his role model and uncle, Barney Kremenko. Bob had told me that his Uncle Barney was a famous sportswriter, but I had no idea how famous until I read this entry about him at Baseball-Reference.com, one of the best resources for information about baseball.

Barney Kremenko was a sports writer with the New York Journal American; there, he covered Willie Mays’ first – and the Giants’ final – seven seasons and was, reputedly, the one responsible for Mays’ famous nickname, The Say-Hey Kid.

Upon joining the Journal some years before, Kremenko’s initial assignment had been Madison Square Garden, where he covered hockey, college hoops and track and field. In relatively short order, however, he would find his metier when chosen to succeed outgoing Giants’ beat writer, Pat Lynch.

When the Giants left New York in 1958, Kremenko led the campaign to restore National League baseball to New York. When that call was finally heeded in 1962, he was the logical choice to cover the fledgling Mets. Thus, the eulogy delivered many years later by UPI’s Carl Lundquist: “Barney was with the Giants, the Mets, and now he’s with the Angels.”

By 1966, however, the Journal was absorbed in a three-way merger. Kremenko continued with the short-lived World Journal Tribune, but when that paper went under in 1967, he went to work in a PR capacity for both the NHL’s New York Islanders and the NBA’s New Jersey Nets. At the time of his death in 1990, he was still listed as a communications consultant in the Islanders’ guide.

Throughout those final years, however, Kremenko maintained his membership in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and continued to edit The Scorebook, the journal presented annually to those attending the BBWAA’s New York chapter dinner. As fate would have it, Kremenko’s death came exactly one day before 1990’s New York dinner.

Paul C. Barton, Barney Klemenko, and Bob Cohn
Photo courtesy of Bob Cohn

After reading this, it was no surprise to me that Bob was inspired to be a journalist. He was very close to his uncle, who often took him to sporting events as a child, and remained close to him as an adult. At the University of Alabama, Bob became the editor of the student newspaper and after graduating got a job at the Montgomery Adviser in Montgomery, Alabama, covering the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Bob wrote:

As a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, N.Y., I was improbably assigned to cover the Montgomery Police Department. I was such an underdog that two brothers who were officers “adopted” me and made certain I got all the breaks on news stories. Montgomery was the hotbed of racial violence and black protest. It was there that the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., lived and preached. It was in Montgomery that the “Freedom Riders” were beaten at the Greyhound Bus Station by the Ku Klux Klan while the police were deliberately absent from the scene. I was there reporting on the violence.

Bob Cohn and Bobby Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the KKK, Montgomery, Alabama

I would love to hear more about Bob’s experiences during that time.

Eventually, Bob became the bureau chief in Atlanta for Morris Publishing, which owned several daily newspapers in the region. His brother Paul had also settled in Atlanta after graduating from Emory University there. Paul had changed his name from Paul Barton Cohn to Paul C. Barton after the bombing of the Temple, a Reform synagogue, on October 12, 1958, by white supremacists angry with that synagogue for its support of the civil rights movement. Concerned about anti-Semitism, Paul decided to change his name to something less obviously Jewish.

Bob’s brother Paul C. Barton Courtesy of Bob Cohn

Both Bob and Paul married women they met in college. Paul met his wife Joan Belger at Emory, and they had three children, Harris, Todd, and Jennifer.

Jennifer, Todd and Harris Barton
Photo courtesy of Bob Cohn

Their son Harris Barton was a star player for the San Francisco 49ers, definitely the first cousin I’ve found who had a career as a professional athlete. Here is the entry from International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame website:

San Francisco 49ers offensive tackle Harris Barton was a Natiional Football League All-Pro selection four consecutive years: first team in 1991, 1992 and 1993, and 2nd team in 1990. He played in the 1993 Pro Bowl. Barton anchored the storied offensive line for superstar quarterbacks Joe Montana and Steve Young that provided the foundation for three 49er Super Bowl victories–1989, 1990, 1995. During his ten-year pro career, 1987-1996, Barton played 138 career NFL games, including 89 consecutive games. The 1986 University of North Carolina All-America was the 49er’s #1 draft choice in 1987. In his first season with the 49ers, Barton was named to the NFL’s All-Rookie team by the UPI, Pro Football Writers of America, and Pro Football Weekly.

Bob Cohn and Harris Barton after the NFC Championship game in Chicago Photo courtesy of Bob Cohn

Wikipedia also has a detailed entry as does the Pro-Football Reference website. This article, from the Los Angeles Times and written in 1993 after Harris learned that his father was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, reveals how important his father was to him. Titled “The Good Son : 49er Lineman Harris Barton Discovers What Really Matters Is His Father,” the article, dated December 7, 1993,and written by Bill Plaschke, describes how learning of his father’s illness affected Harris and his focus on football. Although Harris continued to play well, his priorities had shifted.

Barton also believes he is having a good year–as the right tackle, he has done well protecting left-handed Steve Young’s blind side. But suddenly, preventing sacks is not as important as making sure his father can live the rest of his life in peace and dignity.

“When it comes to my family, football is on the back burner,” Barton said. “If anything comes out of me talking about this, it is that people should appreciate their parents while they still have them. Appreciate them now.”

Paul C. Barton died on May 25, 1994, at the age of 56. Ten years later his wife Joan died from the same horrible disease, brain cancer. She was 62. They are survived today by their three children and seven grandchildren.

Bob Cohn with Joe Montana and Harris Barton
Photo courtesy of Bob Cohn

As for Bob, as noted above, he met his wife June at the University of Alabama. Bob wrote this about June: “She was a student from a small Alabama town about 17 miles from Tuscaloosa and she was (and is) gorgeous.” They married on June 5, 1960.

Bob and June’s wedding Photo courtesy of Bob Cohn

Bob and June Cohn in more recent days
Photo courtesy of Bob Cohn

They had three children. As Bob described it:

Our first child, Terri Paula, was born [in 1961] in Montgomery and delivered by Dr. Robert Lightfoot whom I had met at a train wreck. I was officially introduced to fatherhood when I held Terri in my lap and she peed on me. … Susan was born in Augusta and Greg in Atlanta. June noticed that every time we moved we had another child so she didn’t want to move again.

Terri, Greg, and Susan Cohn Photo courtesy of Bob Cohn

With three children to raise and a need to earn more money, Bob left journalism in 1970 and founded his own public relations firm, which later became a partnership named Cohn & Wolfe. It must have been difficult to leave his chosen field, especially after winning fourteen awards from the Associated Press and United Press. But Bob’s decision proved to be a wise one as he had incredible success with his new business. The firm was sold to Young & Rubicam in 1998 and now has 71 offices all over the world and still uses its original name despite the fame and reputation of its parent company.

Bob and June’s children were highly successful students and athletes, as are his grandchildren. He wrote:

Both of my daughters were captains of their tennis teams at Lakeside High School. Terri was a finalist in the state tennis tournament. My son Greg, a pitcher, went to the University of Virginia on a baseball scholarship. During his runup to that he played on teams that won so many championships… I can’t remember how many. His three children—Grace (high school volleyball), Samantha (soccer, basketball, volleyball and fast pitch softball) and Owen (football, basketball, an all-star baseball player and now playing lacrosse for the first time. Samantha’s team finished third this summer for the soccer national championships in Tulsa, OK. She and her team travel all over the country—San Fran, San Diego, Chicago, New York, Florida, etc. since she was 9 years old. Teams from Jacksonville and Orlando are in town this coming weekend to play Sam’s Tophat team, No. 1 in the state of Georgia. Samantha was tapped by the Olympic Development Program in soccer and is one of 60 girls in the South so honored, including Texas and Oklahoma.

Greg pitching for UVa

Terri and her husband David skiing

Susan cheerleading

The photos below are of Bob and June’s grandchildren engaged in various athletic endeavors.

Tragically, Bob and June’s daughter Susan died at age 46 on May 11, 2011. She is survived by her husband Robert and their two sons, who continue to live in Atlanta. Bob and June also continue to live in Atlanta as do their two surviving children, Terri and Greg, their spouses, and their five grandchildren.

Despite losing his parents at such a young age and then losing his brother prematurely and his daughter as well, Bob is a man of incredibly positive energy. Listening to him talk about his family, his marriage, his children,and his nieces and nephews and all of his grandchildren, you can only hear a man who is filled with love and gratitude for what he has and no bitterness about what he lost.

I will close this post with some photographs of the next generations in the line going backwards from Harold Cohn and Teddi Kremenko to Joseph Cohn and Rose Kornfeld to Mary Seligman and Oscar Kornfeld to Marx Seligmann and Sarah Koppel to Jacob Seligmann and Martha Mayer, my 4x great-grandparents from Gaulsheim, Germany.

Photos courtesy of Bob Cohn

Some Broken Brick Walls: Thank you, Cousin Bob!

Posted on August 28, 2015 by Amy

In my post about the descendants of Mary Seligman, the youngest child of Marx Seligman, I wrote that I was hoping to be in touch with one of Mary’s descendants to learn more about what happened to some members of the family. Specifically, I was trying to connect with Bob Cohn, who is the son of Harold Cohn and Teddi Kremenko (sometimes called Tillie, sometimes Theodora). Harold Cohn was the son of Joseph Cohn and Rose Kornfeld. Rose was Mary Seligman’s daughter with her husband Oscar Kornfeld. Here’s a chart showing how Bob and my father are related as fourth cousins, making him my fourth cousin once removed.

After jumping through a number of hoops, I finally reached Bob after emailing someone at the public relations firm he founded in Atlanta forty-five years ago, Cohn & Wolfe. Although Bob has retired, the man I contacted at the firm immediately emailed Bob, and within minutes Bob and I had exchanged emails. It’s a long story as to how I figured out that the Bob Cohn at Cohn & Wolfe was the right Bob Cohn. I won’t describe all my crazy sleuthing on this one!

My cousin, Bob Cohn All photos in this post are courtesy of Bob Cohn

Anyway, Bob is himself a family historian and has generously shared with me a great deal of information and a wonderful collection of photographs. He, however, did not know very much about his grandmother Rose or her family, so he was delighted to learn what I had discovered about Rose and her Seligman(n) family roots. By sharing what we each knew, we each were able to fill in some of the gaps that we each had in our research.

For example, I had been unable to find Rose and Joseph on any record after the 1930 US census. At that time they were living on West 90^th Street in New York, and after years in the printing business, Joseph had become an investor in the securities business. Obviously that was unfortunate timing because, as Bob told me, Joseph lost a great deal of money in the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Depression.

Joseph Cohn and his grandson Bob. Note the family resemblance as you can see in the photo of Bob above.

Bob also told me that he had no memory of his grandmother Rose. Since I knew Bob was born in 1934, I assumed that Rose might have died sometime between 1930 and 1940 if he had no memory of her. Although a death record had not shown up in my initial search, this time I was able to find it. Rose had died on June 24, 1930, shortly after the 1930 census. She was 52 years old and died from a cerebral hemorrhage caused by hypertension.

Rose Cohn death certificate

Since I had not found Joseph on the 1940 census or elsewhere after the 1930 census, I was hoping Bob would know when he died or where he lived. Bob believes that Joseph died in a nursing home in New Rochelle sometime in the late 1950s. Those death records are not publicly available, however, except to close family, so I don’t have any record of Joseph’s death. But knowing that he was a widow after 1930 led me to search again for him on other records. I still, however, ran into some trouble. On the 1940 US census, I found a Joseph Cohen (with the E), a widower of the right age, living in Newark, New Jersey, working as a storekeeper in a restaurant. (You will have to click on the images below to see them more clearly.)

Joseph Cohn and lodger 1940 US census

Full page: Joseph Cohn 1940 census Year: 1940; Census Place: Newark, Essex, New Jersey; Roll: T627_2414; Page: 4B; Enumeration District: 25-132

Bob has no memory of his grandfather living in New Jersey. The man on this census record was living with a woman, Mary Miller, listed (I think) as “occupant,” working as a laundryman (?) in a hospital. Although the enumerator wrote that Joseph was living in the same place in 1935, he also wrote that he was living in Matthen (??), New York, in 1935. Maybe that’s Manhattan? The same page has lots of other strange entries. I think perhaps this enumerator was not very careful.

So why would I think that this is Joseph Cohn, Bob’s grandfather? Because I also found a World War II draft registration that shows that Joseph Cohn was living in Newark, New Jersey, in 1942. This is definitely the right Joseph Cohn; he lists his closest relative as Harold Cohn of East 9^th Street in Brooklyn, which is where Bob and his parents and brother Paul were living in 1942. On the draft registration, Joseph was living on Court Street in Newark. The Joseph Cohen on the 1940 census was living on Bergen Street in Newark, less than two miles away. Joseph was working for L. Loeb in Newark in 1942 at 317 Mulberry Street in Newark.

Joseoh Cohn World War II draft registration

Joseph Cohn World War II draft registration

I decided to search Newark directories for 317 Mulberry Street to see if I could find out what Joseph was doing in Newark. I did not find Joseph in the 1942 Newark directory, but at 317 Mulberry Street in 1942 I did find a listing for a butcher named Samuel Cohn. Bob had told me that his grandfather Joseph had had a brother Samuel, but he had not been able to learn what had happened to his great-uncle. When I saw the name and the same address that appeared on Joseph’s draft registration, I assumed that this had to be Joseph’s brother Samuel. I searched further in the Newark directories and found that in 1934 Sam Cohn was located on Bergen Street, where Joseph CohEn was living in 1940, according to the 1940 census. In 1941, Sam was located at 69 Court Street; Joseph was living at 59 Court Street in 1942. I was quite certain now that Joseph had moved to Newark after his wife Rose died in order to be closer to his brother Samuel.

That made me curious to know more about Samuel, the great-uncle Bob had not been able to locate. Knowing now that he was a butcher, I was able to find him living in New York City in 1940 on the US census; he was living with his wife Minerva and adult son Phillip as well as two boarders. The census indicated that he had been living in Newark in 1935 and that he was a butcher. Now knowing his wife and son’s names, I found Samuel on the 1910 and 1920 census (but not the 1930), working as a butcher and living with his wife Minerva (or Minnie) and his son Phillip in the Bronx.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any records for Joseph or Samuel Cohn after 1942. All I know is what Bob told me—that Joseph lived until sometime in the 1950s and was living at a nursing home in New Rochelle when he died.

Harold and Teddi

Harold and Teddi 1926

When I first wrote about Bob’s parents, Harold Cohn and Teddi Kremenko, I knew that Harold and Teddi had married in 1928, but then they disappeared for the next sixteen years. I couldn’t find them on either the 1930 or the 1940 census. All I knew was that Harold had died of coronary thrombosis at the age of 39 in 1944. I didn’t know what he had done for a living, I didn’t know what had happened to his wife Teddi, and I didn’t know whether they had had children. Fortunately, one of Teddi’s relatives, a granddaughter of one of her sisters, has a tree on Ancestry.com, and by connecting with her, I learned more and eventually found our mutual cousin, Bob.

I had been unable to find Harold and Teddi on the 1930 census, but one clue from Bob helped me locate a Harold Cohn who seems likely to be the right one. I asked Bob what his father had done for a living, and he told me he’d been in the silk importing business. I’d had no luck looking for a Harold Cohn married to a woman named Teddi, Tillie, or Theodora, but by entering “silk” into the search form, I came up with this Harold Cohn. (You will need to click and zoom to read it.)

Harold Cohn 1930 census See lines 11 and 12. Year: 1930; Census Place: Manhattan, New York, New York; Roll: 1556; Page: 8A; Enumeration District: 0449; Image: 1030.0; FHL microfilm: 2341291

Yes, it says his father was born in Germany, whereas Harold’s father Joseph Cohn was born in New York. But his grandfather Philip was born in Germany. Harold’s mother Rose was born in New York, as the census reports. He was a silk distributor, as the census reports. His age is not exactly right, but it’s close, or at least within the range of accuracy that census records generally report. They were living on West 86^th Street, the same neighborhood where Harold’s parents were living in 1930. All that certainly supports my assumption that this is the correct Harold Cohn.

But then it says his wife was Fay, not Tillie, Teddi, or Theodora. It says she was born in New York, but Teddi was born in Russia. It says her mother was born in England, but Teddi’s mother was born in Russia. How do I explain these inconsistencies? I can’t. Did the census enumerator talk to a neighbor who knew more about Harold than he or she knew about Teddi? I don’t know, but I still think this is the right Harold. But am I certain? No. What do you think?

The 1940 census is even more problematic. In 1940, Bob turned six, his brother Paul turned three. Bob said that they were living in Brooklyn when he started school at PS 99. But I can’t find them in Brooklyn. Even looking at the census report for everyone living on East 9^th Street between Avenues J and K where Bob recalls the family living, I couldn’t find them on the 1940 census.

I only found one possible entry for Harold and Teddi on the 1940 census, and it is even more of a stretch; I have serious doubts about whether these are the right people. I found a Philip Kohn married to Lillie with a four year old son named Michael, living in Queens. Why would I even for a second think this was Harold and Teddi Cohn? Because Philip Kohn was in the silk business. But it says he was born in Russia, not New York. But it also says Lillie (could be Tillie?) was born in New York, not Russia. Had the enumerator switched the birthplaces? And gotten all the names wrong? And forgotten a child? Probably not. Especially since Bob says they never lived in Queens. So the Cohn family remains missing from the 1940 census as far as I can tell.

Could this be Harold Cohn? See line 74 Year: 1940; Census Place: New York, Queens, New York; Roll: T627_2749; Page: 1B; Enumeration District: 41-1623B

For the rest of the story, I have the great benefit of Bob’s memories, experiences, and research. I think it best to let him tell his story mostly in his own words.

First, a few pages that Bob wrote about his mother’s family, the Kremenkos.

As for his father’s family, Bob wrote:

The Cohn family history covers three generations. Bob’s father, Harold, was born in New York City and was the only child of Joseph and Rose Cohn. Joseph was also born in New York to Adela and Phillip Cohn in 1876. … Phillip and Adela immigrated to New York in 1866 and married four years later. Adela was from the Alsace Region of France hat sits on the west bank of the Upper Rhine River next to the German border. It is one of France’s principal wine-growing regions. Phillip was born in Baden in July, 1842 and later worked as a banker there.

From the collection of family photographs Bob shared with me, it looks like Harold Cohn and Teddi Kremenko and their sons were living happily up until 1944:

Harold and Teddi

Harold and Teddi

Harold, Bob, and Teddi Cohn

Teddi and Bob, 1937

Mom, Paul and I, 1944 at Bungalow Colony

Paul, Teddi, and Bob Cohn 1944

Bob

Harold and Teddi Cohn, Barney Kremenko, and others

Harold and Teddi

And then, as noted earlier, Harold died unexpectedly. Bob wrote:

When I was 9 years old, I remember my father giving me a nickel on the front porch of our home on East 9th Street between Avenue J and Avenue K. The money was for a Red Cross Fund Drive. My Dad died that day, February 1, 1944, at the age of 39 from a heart attack.

As if that wasn’t tragedy enough for two young boys and their mother, less than two years later, Bob and Paul’s mother Teddi died at age 42 from throat cancer.

My mother, Theodora (Teddi) Cohn died on Oct. 13, 1945, barely a month after World War II ended. For my Oct. 12th birthday Uncle Barney (Kremenko) took me to Yankee Stadium’s press box to watch undefeated Army play a highly ranked Michigan team. Army had two Heisman trophy winners in the backfield—Doc Blanchard and Glen Davis—and four consensus All-Americans. At halftime the score was 14-0 when Uncle Barney got a call to rush home because my mother was dying. We got there before she passed away and she gave me an ID bracelet that was popular in those days. Everyone in the family called me Robert, including my Mom, but she knew I preferred the name Bob. So it was the first time she acknowledged my preference and gave me the sterling silver bracelet with Bob Cohn inscribed on the top. On the reverse side she had inscribed “From Mother, Oct. 12, 1945.

As it turned out Army won 28-7 and it was a historic day in college football.

(According to Wikipedia, “Outmanned by Army, Michigan’s Coach Fritz Crisler unveiled at halftime the first known use of the so-called “two-platoon” system in which separate groups played offense and defense.” Click the link for more on the game.)

Thus, by the time he was eleven, Bob Cohn had lost both his parents; his brother Paul was only eight years old. Where would they go?

Bob wrote:

There was a family circle meeting to decide who would take my brother Paul and I in. Aunt Diana and Uncle George said they wanted to have us but the others voted against them because they would not be right for young children because they had no experience, having no children of their own. Then Aunt Rose and Uncle Louie put in their bid but they also were turned down. The decision was made by the family for us to live with Aunt Beatrice and Uncle Sol because they had two young children and could best deal with the situation. Aunt Diana understood but over the years spent a lot of her time with the two of us. Ann [a cousin] said she loved us deeply.

Bob pointed out that his Aunt Beatrice and Uncle Sol had two children—Barbara and Morton—who became like siblings to Bob and Paul. Barbara is three years older than Bob, and Morton is seven years younger.

Rose Kremenko and Paul Barton Cohn

The five Kremenko sisters and their mother Minnie

What would happen to these two little boys who lost both their parents so young? Not only did they survive; they both thrived, as we will see in Part II of Bob’s story. That they did is a tribute to the love they had received from Harold and Teddi in their early years and the love they received from the family members who raised them and cared for them after they’d lost their parents.

Moritz James Oppenheimer: The (More) Complete Story

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Amy

Several weeks ago I received a comment on the blog from Angelika Oppenheimer, the granddaughter of Moritz James Oppenheimer, whose life I wrote about here. He was the successful businessman who owned the horse breeding farm in Germany that was appropriated by the Nazis. Moritz Oppenheimer died in 1941, an apparent suicide after being “visited” by the Gestapo.

Angelika found the blog because she was interested in knowing more about her grandfather’s family, and I am grateful because I now have learned more about her grandfather’s life and about the lives of his children and grandchildren.

Angelika Oppenheimer photo courtesy of Angelika

Angelika is my third cousin, once removed. Here is a chart explaining our relationship:

Moritz James Oppenheimer was born in 1879 in Butzbach, Germany, the youngest child of Maier Oppenheimer and Pauline Seligmann. As seen above, he was the grandchild of Moritz Seligmann and Babetta Schoenfeld, my three-times great-grandparents. Here is a photo of him as a young man from Fred Michel’s photo album,

Moritz Oppenheimer Photo courtesy of the Michel family

According to a resume provided to me by Angelika, in 1901 he founded the Mitteldeutsche Papierwarenfabrik situated in the Hanauer Landstraße and the Rheinische Sackfabrik. Moritz was a member of the board of directors of several companies throughout Germany, including the Kostheimer Cellulose und Papierfabrik (Kostheim-Mainz), the Danziger Verpackungsindustrie at Danzig, the Fabbrica Italiana Sacchi Ercole at Villanovetta, the Mechanische Papiersackfabrik A.G. at Saarbrücken, the Sankt Georg Verlag at Berlin and the Bayrische Reitschule at Munich.

Emma Neuhoff and Moritz James Oppenheimer
photo courtesy of Angelika Oppenheimer

Sometime before 1902, Moritz married Emma Katherina Neuhoff, who was not Jewish. According to Angelika, she was a descendant of Theodor Neuhoff, born in Cologne, Germany, who traveled throughout Europe and was at one time the king of Corsica. According to Wikipedia, “At Genoa, Neuhoff made the acquaintance of some Corsican rebels and exiles, and persuaded them that he could free their country from Genoese tyranny if they made him king of the island. With the help of the Bey of Tunis, he landed in Corsica in March 1736 with military aid. The islanders, whose campaign had not been successful, elected and crowned him king. He assumed the title of King Theodore I, issued edicts, instituted an order of knighthood, and waged war on the Genoese, at first with some success. But in-fighting among the rebels soon led to their defeat.”

Theodor Neuhoff

Emma Neuhoff was a gifted musician and an excellent horsewoman, according to her granddaughter Angelika.

Emma Neuhoff Oppenheimer Photo courtesy of Angelika Oppenheimer

Here are two pages from a German magazine discussing M.J Oppenheimer and his wife Emma. I think it’s a publication about thoroughbred breeding and racing, but I cannot read the pages. Perhaps some kind German-speaking reader can help?

(Angelika told me that the drawing of Emma illustrating this article was commissioned by the Historical Museum of Frankfort based on Emma’s reputation as an excellent horsewoman.)

Moritz and Emma had two children: Paula (1902) and Walter (1904), Angelika’s father. Paula married a Catholic man named Rudolf Spiegler, a doctor, and converted to Catholicism; they had two children, Gabriele and Wolfgang. Paula and her family did not face any persecution during the war.

As for Angelika’s father Walter, he married Suzanne Zier on December 23, 1933. Walter had been raised and baptized as a Christian, and his wife also was not Jewish, yet Walter faced substantial discrimination during the Nazi era. In April 1945, as the war in Europe was ending, he wrote the following essay, describing both his own life and what happened to his father Moritz after the Nazis came to power:

27 April 1945

Biographical memorandum

I was born on 10 July 1904, son of the industrialist and thoroughbred horse-breeder Consul M.J. Oppenheimer, in Frankfurt am Main. After three years at preparatory school, I attended the Goethe Gymnasium in that city for nine years; I left school, having obtained my school leaving certificate (Abitur), at Easter 1923. After studying for six terms at Frankfurt University (Law and National Economy), I sat the examination for articled clerk at the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court [Oberlandesgericht]. After a period as an articled clerk at the court in Frankfurt, in 1927 I took my doctorate under Professor de Boor. After a lengthy period of practical training as a fitter in an engineering works, and as a paper-maker in paper-mills, I then joined my father’s paper-products company, the Mitteldeutsche mechanische Papierwarenfabrik, in Frankfurt. From 1931 I was Chief Company Secretary of this company belonging to my father as sole owner. At that time it was the largest company of its kind in Germany, and for a period employed together with its subsidiaries more than 1,000 people. In 1932 I built a major subsidiary factory for my father’s company in Berlin.

My father was arrested in the autumn of 1933, at the instigation of two [NSDAP] party members (August Hartmann and Helmut Vögler) working in collaboration with the NSDAP. His entire assets were put in the hands of the lawyer [Rechtsanwalt] Max-Ernst Cuntz as prospective administrator. A bankruptcy was thus brought about, and the assets liquidated at the lowest rate, the said lawyer Cuntz selling each item at a rate far below its value, for the most part at one twentieth of purchase value. The stud farm and stables, for example (probably the biggest and best of their kind in Germany), were disposed of at a price below the level of profits from racing for the following year. The case was similar in respect of the factories, share portfolios, Hippodrome A (whose director I also was, and all shares in which belonged to my father), etc. I myself was immediately removed without compensation from all my posts by the lawyer Cuntz, on the grounds of my non-Arian status. I was also compelled to surrender my own stables, representing an approximate worth of between 70,000 and 100,000 Reichsmark, without receiving any compensation. My father was also quite illegally disqualified from receiving the stud prize. To satisfy the rules in this latter regard, for years my mother and I continued to hold two mares for my father, so that he could legally be assigned 10% of all racing prizes won by horses bred by him, in accordance with stud rules: except with the proviso that no stud prizes could be paid out to a Jew; the authorities retained this annual sum, comprising up to 100,000 Reichsmark, and finally had it credited either to themselves or to the Union Klub. My father, who was perfectly healthy, became ill owing to ill-treatment during his detention. He was declared unfit for detention in 1934/5, and finally took his own life when he was about to be arrested again in 1941 preparatory to being sent to a camp.

I myself with my mother had founded the company Paverk, Gesellschaft für Papierverarbeitung in December 1933. As I could not appear in person as a holder of shares in a limited company, an Arian uncle of my mother acted for me. Then, in 1937, I transferred this share in trust to my father-in-law Otto Zier, now [April 1945] of Friedberg in Hessen, Dieffenbachstrasse 25, together with a further 20,000 Reichsmark of shares created in settlement of my assets, so that, of the total sum of 40,000 Reichsmark in shares of the above company, 10,000 Reichsmark of my mother’s and 30,000 of mine belonged in trust to my father-in-law. By the beginning of the war, however, with a nominal capital of 40,000 Reichsmark the company had an actual value of some 250,000 to 300,000 Reichsmark, as, thanks to the diligent efforts of my employees, the company had been highly successful under my stewardship.

My wife having died suddenly from pneumonia in April 1935, at the beginning of 1941 my father-in-law saw fit to attempt to misappropriate the shares that had been transferred to him in trust. As, owing to my status as a person of mixed blood, I myself could not appear as a plaintiff, I assigned my claim to my mother, who instituted legal proceedings and won her case, at both first and second instance. The papers relating to the case are still available in their entirety: reference 2/5 2/9 0 30/41. These papers clearly demonstrate how Zier attempted to influence the court using the entire gamut of National-Socialist arguments, with reports against me and the company being sent to all sections of the Party, including district and financial counsellors (Kreis- und Wirtschafts-berater – [advisors to the Gauleiter under National Socialism]) Eckhardt, Degenhardt, and Avieny, the DAF [Deutsche ArbeitsFront – national trades union organisation under the National Socialists], the Gestapo, etc. At last instance, the High Court [Reichsgericht] awarded my mother only 10,000 Reichsmark unconditionally, while presuming improper concealment [unsittliche Tarnung] in respect of the remaining 20,000 Reichsmark. This finding is the subject of a new trial before the District Court [Landgericht] in Frankfurt (2/5 0 36/44), over whose outcome in my mother’s favour there may be little reason to doubt. Quite apart from these machinations on Zier’s part, which caused not only the Paverk company but also my mother and myself endless spiritual and material harm, we had also much else to suffer at the hands of the NSDAP.

When the company was heavily bombed in 1943, and totally bombed out in February 1944, Herr Hermann of the Gauwirtschaftskammer [regional economic organization under National Socialism] prevented the rebuilding of the plant and re-acquisition of machines. In addition, I myself was arrested by the Gestapo in the autumn of 1942, the only charge against me being my engagement to an Arian woman in contravention of the rules. I was not released again until 28 May 1943. My entire household effects to the value of about 70,000 Reichsmark (peacetime value), including art collections etc., had meanwhile been taken, and the Gestapo official Wildhirt installed in my flat. In 1943, my fiancée was conscripted to work at the Mayfahrt company under the harshest of conditions at the direct instigation of the Gestapo. The main initiator in these matters was Zier, who did not, however, proceed in his own name, but employed the services of his friends Fabian-Gramlich (insofar as I have been able to determine up to now), while my furniture was removed by a painter by the name of Baumann, who did work for the police.

I married on 11 April 1945, immediately after the liberation by the Americans. I was allocated a flat at Freiherr vom Stein Strasse 56/1, which I immediately had redecorated and furnished with furniture belonging to my wife, only to have the flat abruptly requisitioned by US soldiers on 26 April 1945.

Initialled “W.O.” at Frankfurt am Main on 27 April 1945

I, David M.B. Richardson MCIoL, certify this to be a true and fair translation of a photocopied document in German provided to me by Frau Angelika Oppenheimer, daughter of Walter Oppenheimer.

Westcliff-on-Sea, 11 August 2015.

Walter’s essay reveals so much about the hate-filled and carefully plotted system used by the Nazis to crush, humiliate, and destroy the Jews. First, they stripped them of their property, then they stripped them of their dignity, and finally they killed them and stripped them of their lives. Moritz Oppenheimer, a man of great wealth, was brought to his knees by the Nazis and demoralized to the point that he took his own life rather than be subjected to further humiliation and abuse and ultimately murdered. One aspect of that humiliation and abuse not mentioned in Walter’s essay was the forced annulment of his marriage to Emma Neuhoff because of Moritz’s Jewish background.

Moritz and Emma’s son Walter, a highly educated and successful man in his own right and not even raised as a Jew, was denied his property and his rights and had his own father-in-law betray him and his trust after his first wife died in 1935. According to Angelika, Walter’s brother-in-law was in the SS. Only because Walter had a non-Jewish mother who bribed the local Nazi official in Frankfort was he allowed to survive.

As he wrote above, Walter married his second wife, Elsa Lina Wiegandt, in 1945, and they had a daughter, my cousin Angelika. In 1946, Walter sought the return of the property that had been taken from him by the Gestapo, primarily the books he treasured so much. Here is the letter he wrote and Angelika’s translation of that letter:

Dr. Walter Oppenheimer Frankfurt a. M., den 25. Oktober 1946 Niedenau 45

An das Archival Depot

Offenbach am Main

Mainstraße 167

Concerning: stolen books

With polite reference to the notice published the 22^nd October under the above mentioned headword in the ‘Frankfurter Rundschau’, I take the liberty of presenting you the following:

I was arrested by the Gestapo the 26^th October 1942 for purely political and racial reasons. My apartment was handed over to the Gestapo officer Wildhirt while my furniture was first and foremost transferred by a Gestapo agent to the second principal of the Gestapo here, Mister Grosse. The biggest part of my library was taken away with it. A part of the books was rubber-stamped with my name but the bigger part of it was without the name of the legitimate owner.

If there are any books of mine in your office, I ask you nicely to furnish information to me. Especially the following books mean much to me:

A 17-vlume gilt-edged edition of GOETHE in red morocco leather;

A complete half leather edition of HAUFF with gold ornament on the spine;

A half leather edition of KLEIST’s writings with gold ornament on the spine;

MUTHER: 3 volumes of history of painting, green cloth binding;

SPRINGER: 5 volumes on art history, half cloth binding and cloth binding respectively;

20 – 25 volumes of monographs on artists, partly half leather editions, partly with half cloth binding and cloth binding respectively, red with gold ornament, edition of the Stuttgarter Verlagsanstalt;

A five volume edition of HÖLDERLIN, grey pasteboards.

Many thanks indeed for your efforts in anticipation.

With all due respect to you!

I was impressed by the diversity of subjects in his library and by how much he valued his books. I also was struck by how polite and almost deferential he was in asking for the return of what was already rightfully his own. At least some of the books were returned and remain today with Angelika. Here is a photo of her father Walter.

Walter Oppenheimer 1972 courtesy of Angelika Oppenheimer

Walter Oppenheimer
courtesy of Angelika Oppenheimer

Angelika shared this photograph of her family and friends at her Lutheran confirmation celebration taken in about 1961.

Angelika's confirmation Courtesy of Angelika Oppenheimer

Angelika’s confirmation c. 1961
Courtesy of Angelika Oppenheimer

From left to right: Paula Oppenheimer Spiegler (paternal aunt) , Emma Neuhoff Oppenheimer (grandmother), Christiane Wiegandt (Angelika’s maternal cousin), Christiane Bott (classmate), Sylvia Berres (classmate), Elsa (nee Wiegandt) Oppenheimer (Angelika’s mother), Angelika,, Walter Oppenheimer (Angelika’s father), Karl Wiegandt (Angelika’s maternal uncle), Karli (Angelika’s maternal cousin), Annie Wiegandt (wife of Karl), Herta Dorner (friend), Gabriele Spiegler (Paula’s daughter), either Wolfgang Spiegler or Gabriele’s husband.

I feel very fortunate that Angelika was able to find me through this blog. Her family’s story is yet another lesson in the destructive power of prejudice, on the one hand, and the ultimate power that human beings have to survive and overcome those destructive forces, on the other.

Angelika and I have lived very different lives; we grew up with different religious backgrounds, we live in different countries, we speak different languages. My immediate family lived through World War II in relative safety; hers was scarred forever. But despite those differences, we know that we share a common history that ties us together as cousins. Isn’t that remarkable?

Lotte’s Story, Part III: Coming to and Settling into America

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Amy

In Parts I and II of Lotte’s story, we saw how my cousin Lotte’s idyllic childhood as the daughter of a successful doctor in Mannheim, Germany, was shattered after Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. By 1937, her sister Doris had left for the US, and a year later, Lotte and her parents Joseph and Anna (Winter) Wiener had moved to Luxembourg, where Anna’s parents, Samuel and Laura (Seligmann) Winter had already relocated.

After visiting her daughter Doris in the US, Anna returned to Luxembourg and convinced Joseph that they also should relocate there. First, they had to obtain visas to travel to the US. Lotte wrote:

The nearest American consulate was in Antwerp, Belgium, necessitating a fairly long trip. My grandparents were rather disabled by that time and in no condition to undertake the long journey. Reluctantly, we had to leave them behind when we made the trip. After a long wait we were admitted to the consul’s office where he sat, pipe in the corner of his mouth and feet on his huge executive desk. A most unfriendly man, he asked my parents all the necessary questions. When my turn came up, he quizzed me in some of the simplest arithmetic questions. When he was satisfied that I was not imbecile, he condescended to tell us that we could expect the visas in “six months to one hundred years”. Fortunately it took only a little over six months before we could sail.

While waiting for the visas to come through, Lotte worked at a baby hospital in Luxembourg. She worked long hours taking care of the infants, and in the end she earned a Red Cross certificate, which proved to be quite valuable when she later applied to nursing school in New York.

The atmosphere in Luxembourg grew increasingly tense. After the Munich agreement allowed Germany to take over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1938, more and more Jewish refugees were leaving Germany for Luxembourg.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R69173 / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Signing the Munich Agreement
From left to right: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R69173 / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

As Lotte described it:

Many Jewish refugees had arrived in Luxembourg, many only with their fur coats and jewelry in assets. Having nothing else to do but to wait for the possibility of a visa, most unlikely on the Austrian and Hungarian quotas, they spent a lot of time in the local cafés. That in turn aroused a certain amount of the latent antisemitism in the population. Or maybe it was not so latent. My roommate at the hospital, a devoutly Catholic young lady who went to mass almost every morning, confided in me that she needed to “confess” to the priest that she was sharing her room with a Jewish girl. She had to admit, however, that I neither had horns nor did anything evil as far as she knew.

It was becoming very clear that there would be a war in Europe, and the events of Kristallnacht in November, 1938, also frightened those who were still in Luxembourg.

Finally, in April 1939, Lotte and her parents received their visas and could leave for the United States. There was, however, no way to take Lotte’s grandparents, Laura and Samuel, with them.

Tickets for the voyage were booked, and soon my parents and I found ourselves on a train to Le Havre without them. We never were to see them again. As we found out later, Oma died of a heart attack while looking for an apartment, having been evicted when the German army took over Luxembourg in the spring of 1940. Opa was deported to Theresienstadt where he reportedly died “of natural causes”.

When I think about these separations, it tears me apart. I cannot imagine leaving my parents behind, as Annie Winter Wiener was forced to do. Anyone who has seen the recent movie “A Woman in Gold” will remember the scene when Maria Altmann leaves her parents behind in Vienna for similar reasons. It’s a scene that breaks your heart and stays with you long after the movie ends with Maria victorious in her legal battles over the Klimt painting. Maria was a real person, just as Lotte is a real person. These are not Hollywood stories written just to wring tears from viewers. These are the lives and the experiences that thousands and thousands of people endured.

But somehow these people, including Lotte and her parents, survived and found the strength to move on. Lotte’s description of her sea voyage to America, leaving her grandparents and her homeland forever, reveals that tenacity, the strength, that courage.

Below is the ship manifest listing, on lines 6,7, and 8, Lotte and her parents (her real first name is Leonore) and a photograph of the George Washington, the ship that brought them to the US.

Year: 1939; Arrival: New York, New York; Microfilm Serial: T715, 1897-1957; Microfilm Roll: Roll 6313; Line: 1; Page Number: 176

The George Washington, the ship that Lotte and her parents sailed on to the US in 1939
Ancestry.com. Passenger Ships and Images [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007.
Original data: Various maritime reference sources.

Lotte chose to write this section in the third person, which I found interesting and revealing. Was she distancing herself from that teenaged girl who was herself distancing herself from her past?

It was a grey and rainy day in April of 1939. A wet and blistery wind blew, adding to the girl’s anxiety. The security of her world had been shattered, slowly at first, but then with increasing speed and ferocity. Her best friend had been left behind – without her being able to say a proper good-bye – perhaps they would never have a chance to see each other again. Here she stood at the pier in Le Havre, ready to embark on the longest journey of her young life. Slowly she and her parents stepped on the planks of the ship, the ocean liner which would bring them from a Europe threatened by the certain relentless march toward war to the vast and unknown entity of America which lay before her.

The voyage was stormy and rough. The ship rocked from side to side with the huge waves. Most of the time she felt sick. Staying in the cabin was awful. When she stepped on deck, she felt even worse. Looking at the ominous grey sky above as well as watching the wildly moving waves below made her dizzy. Eating became a nightmare. Keeping any food down was impossible. They suggested broth. That wouldn’t work. Eating a baked potato– who had ever heard of a baked potato before? The English spoken on board did not sound at all like what she had learned in school. The ship’s entertainment was provided by an enormously fat and very jolly man with the incongruous name of “Tiny”. Was everybody crazy?

Finally, during the fifth night, the storm passed, and in the morning the sea was calm and the sun shone brightly. She stepped outside and saw to her right the exhilarating sight she had been told to expect: New York Harbor with the Statue of Liberty. Suddenly she felt well. Her excitement grew. Soon she would be able to set foot on the land which would be her new home. She resolved that she would accept whatever there was. She would not compare things with what had been.

Statue of Liberty National Monument, Ellis Island and Liberty Island, Manhattan, in New York County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lotte seemed to stay true to those resolutions. She quickly adapted to life in New York City, working as a babysitter while awaiting acceptance to a nursing program. She was accepted into Cornell University-New York Hospital’s nursing program for the fall of September, 1939, less than six months after her arrival in New York. Lotte wrote about some of the culture shock she experienced when she began her nursing studies in New York:

Once I was notified that I had been accepted at the prestigious Cornell University – New York Hospital School of Nursing, it took me exactly one week to purchase the few required items and to pack my suitcase. Actually admissions had been closed quite a while before, but they had made an exception for me. Of course I had lost no time getting all my documents together and to have my credentials translated and notarized. I had taken a six-week crash course at a private school in Manhattan, located on Sixth Avenue behind the Public Library. How I had sweated that summer, taking the Subway from Kew Gardens to Times Square and back, and then to take the Regents exams! The courses, American History, 4th Year English, and Civics, were required in order to obtain a “Nurse Qualifying Certificate”.

So one fine September morning in 1939 my father and I, all of 18 years old, set out to travel from Kew Gardens, Queens, to the nurses’ residence on York Avenue in mid-Manhattan. With two big suitcases we walked to the subway station, went downstairs, took the train to 59th Street and Lexington Avenue, dragged the suitcases back upstairs, walked to the Second or Third Avenue Elevated which was still running at that time, and then walked to the York Avenue address. As we entered, we saw several taxis pulling up, bringing some of my new classmates to the same destination. Only they did it the easy way. It had never occurred to us to take a cab as money was very tight. I said goodbye to my father and went about to register and to get settled in my new quarters.

The schedule of activities for the first day included a four o’clock tea for all the newcomers in the formal and somewhat stuffy library. True to my nature I was there right on time, the first one to appear, to be exact. All the others were still busy taking showers and changing into the kind of clothes you were supposed to wear for an afternoon tea. Little did I know that that was the thing to do. I was still in my travel outfit and felt rather sweaty. Well, I entered the library and found a stunning-looking white-haired woman in a gorgeous red dress seated at the solid oak table, “pouring” tea. I learned that she would be one of my nursing instructors. Soon the other students came, and we began to get acquainted.

*****

During the first six months the emphasis was on academics. Actually one of the entrance requirements had been one year of chemistry. Most of my classmates had two years of college with all the needed requirements behind them, while I had barely obtained my high school equivalent certificate. My European education had been superior in some ways, but badly missing in science. I did not even know how to balance a chemical equation. So here I was supposed to obtain a basic knowledge of inorganic as well as organic chemistry in all of six weeks. It seemed like it was going to be a disaster. But with the help of a fellow student who had dropped out of medical school, and with the kindness and understanding Miss Rynbergen, my teacher, showed to me, I did overcome that hurdle and even managed to get an “A” in the course. None of the other courses presented any problems, at least not academically.

Cornell New York Hospital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cornell_med_01.jpg#filelinks

Obviously, Lotte was an extremely gifted student. She had neither the academic background nor the social benefits of most of her classmates, yet she excelled in her studies, even though English was her second language. In fact, Lotte did so well that she tried to be admitted to NYU Medical School and met with the dean to discuss her application. Here is what happened:

I had mustered a lot of courage. After two years of practicing hospital nursing I really wanted to pursue the ambition I had nurtured since childhood – to become a doctor like my father. Thus I marched up the long corridor at my hospital’s medical school and entered the dean’s office. Of course the visit had been properly scheduled ahead of time. The dean, bespectacled, grey-haired, lean and stern-looking, listened to my brief story: that I was dissatisfied with the prospect of my future nursing career, and that I really would like to find out how I could be admitted to the medical school. The man just took one look at me and smiled. “My dear, you are asking for the impossible. First of all, you are a woman. There is quite a limit placed on the number of females at our school. Secondly, you lack the necessary college preparation. It would take several years for you to catch up with our requirements. Thirdly, you are Jewish. Do you know what that means? All kinds of difficulties along the way! You’d better forget about it.”

Lotte must have been devastated. She was being discriminated against as a woman and as a Jew. The fact that she had excelled in the nursing program was not enough to outweigh her limited pre-nursing school education. She had left Germany to escape anti-Semitism, and here it was, thrown in her face again.

In 1942, as World War II was in full force with the US now itself involved, Lotte graduated from nursing school and began working the night shift in the internal medicine department at New York Hospital. The family received news of Samuel Winter’s deportation to Theriesenstadt, and the news overall was quite disturbing. Lotte somehow kept a positive outlook.

Terezin

My mother was desperate. This war is going to end in a terrible nightmare of defeat, she stated. But I, being young and more optimistic by nature, I just KNEW that good had to prevail over evil, that things would eventually come out all right. I knew that history had its ups and downs. This was a down. Sooner or later there would be an up. I wrote so to my friends. I never gave up hope. In the end, I was right.

How incredible is it for Lotte to have concluded, after all she had experienced and all she would soon learn about her relatives in Europe, “that things would eventually come out all right?” It truly takes a real strength of character and a positive view of the world to see things that way. I greatly admire her for that depth of character and strength.

There is much more in Lotte’s memoirs—stories about how she met her husband, their courtship and wedding, and their happy marriage of 58 years. There are stories about their travels and anecdotes about various events in Lotte’s adult life. But I will end Lotte’s story with one that I think says so much about her—who she was as a child and who she is today. It’s a story that brought tears to my eyes. It has nothing to do with the Holocaust or the war per se; it’s about an incredibly sensitive and generous woman. I hope you find it as powerful as I did.

A PRIZED POSSESSION

There was a piece which was part of me. Ever since I was a teenager it went with me wherever I moved. But it is no longer in my possession. I gave it away. But I do hope that whoever uses it now appreciates what I did and gets as much enjoyment from it as it gave me at one time. It was my violin, my beautiful Italian violin bearing a label, glued to the inside, reading

“Matteo Albani fecit Bolzano anno 1698″.

How did I receive this beautiful instrument, and why did I dispose of it the way I did? It’s a long story which began in 1937 when my parents began to make preparations for our eventual emigration from Germany to the United States. Since they had been able to put aside a sizable sum of money which could not be legally transferred abroad, they had to find various ways to buy objects of value which might be suitable for a later sale in the U.S. or which might be useful to us. My mother schemed and bought a trousseau for my sister and also for me. They bought two Leica cameras, modern lamps, clothing and many other articles. But my father, who had at one time played the violin, insisted that he wanted to buy me a fine instrument which hopefully would not have to be sold so soon.

That’s why he traveled with me to Stuttgart, a city about two hours away, where, with the help of my violin teacher, he had located an internationally known dealer of fine string instruments, Hamma & Company, which incidentally is still in business at the present time. I did not have much to say in the matter, but between my father and my teacher they found a suitable violin, full size but not too large, for the acceptable price of DM 3,000.00, bargained down to DM 2,200.00, a substantial sum of money at that time. Proud as a peacock I traveled home with my new possession, my princess, carefully wrapped in a blue silk cloth and placed in a light brown leather case with light blue plush lining.

Now I must describe my pride and joy: It was beautiful to look at with its light orange-brownish varnish. The top was made of spruce with fine, even grain. The back, pleasantly curved for an aesthetic feel of form, was made of two pieces of maple with small, faint flames. The label, mentioned above, was found on the inside, to be seen through the F-shaped openings on the top. Later on I was assured that the label was authentic, and that the violin really was the work of Matteo Albani, a highly respected violin maker, and that it was a fine example of his work.

Yes, it was beautiful to look at, and beautiful to feel. But the most important quality of such an instrument is, of course, its sound. Played by my teacher it sounded magnificent. My own technique left something to be desired, but I had received the impetus to improve, and I worked hard at it. Friends in my chamber-music group admired it, envied me for it. I took good care of it. I treated it like the princess it was, what with the silk wrap and plush lining of the case.

From now on the violin went with me wherever fate took me. In 1938 we left Germany. After one year in Luxembourg we embarked for New York where I ended up living in my hospital’s Nurses’ Residence. I did not have much time to practice or to play, but I did have my own private room where I could do so at various times. I also once participated in a talent show where I played something or other in a miserable performance. My fellow student nurses were not very kind. They made a number of nasty cracks about my playing, but assured me that it was all meant in good humor.

My violin was with me on Pearl Harbor Day. I had been playing some chamber music on a rare, free Sunday afternoon and found myself on the platform of the A-train subway in Washington Heights when the terrible news broke. I will never forget it.

Later on, while raising my family and through most of my married years, I played only sporadically, sometimes in orchestras, sometimes in chamber music groups. At one time I even took some more lessons. But I found that I did not have it in me to work at it the way I needed to in order to really improve. Most of the time my precious fiddle was locked up in a hall closet. Yet I knew it was there.

And then disaster struck. At pretty much the same time I developed arthritis and a great clumsiness in my fingers along with a noticeable loss of hearing. The latter distorted many of the higher frequency sounds, thus making it impossible for me to play with the required accuracy. I grew discouraged and finally gave up. Much as I loved my violin, I knew that it was no longer of service to me. I also knew that it had appreciated greatly in value. Thus I made a very painful decision.

Selling my violin would have been like selling a piece of me. Leaving it to my children might create problems and certainly cause unnecessary difficulties. Yet it was not doing me any good. So I decided that I would give it to someone who would truly appreciate it. I made a number of inquiries and soon learned that there was a place for my intended gift right here in town. The non-profit Colburn Foundation collects instruments for use by aspiring artists, to be loaned and returned when they can afford to buy their own.

The decision was easy, the execution was hard. On one rainy afternoon in 1996 my husband and I traveled to the magnificent Colburn mansion in the Hollywood Hills. We were greeted quite cordially and even received a tour of the estate. That’s where we left my beautiful princess, still wrapped in blue silk and in her blue plush-lined leather case, to be given to someone who really needed it. I never found out to whom it was given, but I do hope he or she is taking good care of it. After all, although the wound has healed, it was a part of me.

For me, that final sentence says it all. It is not only about her lost violin, but also about every other loss she suffered: her grandparents, her home, her friends, her school, her country, her language.

An Albani violin

Perhaps someone reading this will know the fate of Lotte’s beloved violin. If so, like Lotte, I hope it is being well taken care of and played with all the heart and soul and passion that Lotte herself has demonstrated through her writing and throughout her life.

Thank you, Lotte, for sharing your life story with us.

Lotte’s Story, Part II: Life in Nazi Germany

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Amy

This is the second part of a three-part post about the life of my cousin Lotte, who was born in Germany, left in 1938, and came to the United States in 1939. You can read Part One here.

Although Lotte was only eleven years old on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany, she has vivid memories of that day and the events leading up to it.

Lotte wrote:

For years, the Nazis had been a minority party. Many people thought they could not possibly rise to power. But in 1933, Germany was in the grip of the world-wide depression precipitated by the crash of the American stock market and an enormous scandal involving Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish Match King, whose pyramid scam had caused the collapse of the European markets. Unemployment was widespread and severe. In addition, Germany’s pride, so badly hurt by the harsh and unrealistic provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, was crying for revenge. Thus the stage had been set for the dramatic rise of the Nazis whose promise of hope, and whose message of antisemitism, fell on accepting ears. In November of 1932 they succeeded in winning an election and joined up with the “German National Party”, a very rightist holdout of frustrated generals and army protagonists, frustrated because the German army was severely limited by the peace treaty. …But then, on that ominous day in January, President Paul von Hindenburg, a tottering and senile ex- general, appointed Adolf Hitler to be the chancellor.

Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring performing the salute at a Nazi party rally in Nuremberg (ca. 1928) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Like many Jewish residents of Germany, Lotte’s father at first was not overly concerned about Hitler and his party. Her mother was more worried.

My father, who was a decorated veteran of World War One, owner of the Iron Cross medal, and a respected physician in the community, kept on stating that nothing could really happen to us. That the whole thing would blow over. My mother, always a realist, an activist and somewhat of a pessimist, painted a different picture. She was a convinced Social Democrat with a leftist leaning, whereas my father supported the more centrist “Zentrum” party. There had been many heated arguments about politics in our house, and both Doris and I were quite up-to-date on what had been going on.

It did not take long for Lotte’s mother to be proven right about her concerns about the Nazis. By February, 1933, the father of one of Lotte’s close friends was sent to Dachau, and when he returned, he and his family left Germany. While the father was still in Dachau, his daughter and Lotte were assaulted on the street by three boys, leaving Lotte with a bloody lip.

Lotte soon became fearful of saying the wrong thing and getting her family into trouble. Lotte wrote:

A few days into February [1933] I found that a large picture of Adolf Hitler was hanging in my classroom. Without thinking I exclaimed more or less to myself: “Does that guy have to stare right into my face?” The boy sitting in front of me, known to be a “Nazi”, turned around and said “what did you say?” I don’t remember what I answered, but I was scared to death about the possibility that some harm could come to my father. Fortunately, the boy did not report the incidence, and nothing happened. But from there on I knew that I had to be extremely careful with what I said or did. There was always a certain pressure, a certain fear looming over my head, not a very healthy state for a child and then a teenager. And that fear increased as time went on.

By April, the Nazis had instituted a boycott of Jewish businesses, and Lotte’s father was directly affected by this:

A yellow sign with a Magen David (Jewish star) bearing the inscription “Jewish Enterprise” was plastered over my father’s medical shingle. An S.A. man (Nazi stormtrooper) was planted at the entrance to the building with instructions to prevent anyone other than residents from entering. But one well-meaning elderly woman told him to be ashamed of himself, that my father, who handled many deliveries, had actually brought him into this world, and the young man shamefacedly trotted away.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABoycot_of_Jewish_shops_april_1_1933.jpeg

A stormtrooper stands in front of a store being boycotted (Not Lotte’s family) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABoycot_of_Jewish_shops_april_1_1933.jpeg

In her memoirs, Lotte describes the various ways that life for Jews in Germany became increasingly intolerable between 1933 and 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. Jews were not allowed in restaurants, theaters, and concert halls. They could not ice skate or swim in public pools. Blatant expressions of anti-Semitism by storm troopers and others became commonplace. Even one of Lotte’s teachers espoused anti-Semitic rhetoric:

My French teacher, who had been known to have been a Social Democrat and who had quite opportunistically converted to Naziism, actually had the gall to try to console me by stating that none of the shenanigans were really meant to be antisemitic, but that the day would come when it would be discovered that the blood in Jewish veins actually was different from that of “Aryans”, the true Germans.

Although most Jewish children were forced to leave the public schools, Lotte was able to stay at the Gymnasium because her father had served in the army during World War I. However, she knew she was facing discrimination:

At the end of each school year the three best scholars received prizes donated by local merchants. Being Jewish, I never received such a prize. My home room teacher used excuses, or I was given an undeserved “C” in a minor subject. Twice I just received an “honorable mention”. Later on they no longer bothered to cover up, and I knew why.

Another incident occurred when Lotte attended a concert, violating the prohibition:

I attend a concert by the fourteen year old Yehudi Menuhin who, wearing shorts, looks like a little boy but plays beautifully. Of course being Jewish I am not supposed to be in the concert hall where I meet the grandmother of one of my non-Jewish friends. The lady looks the other way, completely ignoring me, although I have spent many hours at her house in friendlier times.

Yehudi Menuhin
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AYehudi-Menuhin-enfant.jpeg

Meanwhile, Lotte became more interested in learning about her Jewish identity. As described last time, her father had left the Jewish community, and Lotte’s upbringing had been completely secular. Her limited exposure to Judaism had occurred when she had visited her maternal grandparents in Neunkirchen. But once Hitler came to power, Lotte’s father Joseph rejoined the Jewish community, and Lotte felt a desire to learn more about what it meant to be Jewish.

First, she tried a class for Jewish religious instruction. Her description may seem familiar to many who attended Hebrew School growing up in the US:

The teacher had one look at me and promptly asked what I was doing there, but condescended to let me stay. There was a lot of noise in the classroom, nobody was paying any attention, and the teacher could only try to keep some order by slapping the faces of some and shouting louder than the others. After attending twice I was completely turned off and never went there again. Nobody ever asked me to come back.

Lotte then enrolled in a Zionist youth group, Die Werkleute, where she found a group of like-minded Jewish youth and learned a lot more about Judaism. Although her parents did not support the Zionist movement, for Lotte it became a political, religious, and social outlet.

As far as I was concerned, the concept of Zionism fell on fertile ears. I remembered the KKL box on my grandparents’ chest, and I needed something positive to look forward to, seeing how my future in Germany was being destroyed systematically. A few of my friends actually went to Israel by enrolling in the Youth Aliyah program which was in full force by then and was instrumental in to rescuing Jewish children. Others were planning to spend some time in preparation for their move to the Kibbutz by gaining work experience in agriculture, gardening and some of the trades. I was not quite ready to do just that, but I certainly expected to emigrate to Israel somehow at some time in the future. Fate had it that things worked out differently for me. But more about that later.

I learned a lot about Judaism at that time. Some of the members were very observant, and everybody respected that, but on the whole religion was downplayed. It was discussed in a more or less theoretical context. Jewish history, especially the history of Zionism, and Jewish peoplehood were the thrust of our education. At the same time the value of our background of German culture was stressed. We took our mission very seriously.

Werkleute group in Frankfort, Germany 1927 (not Lotte’s group)
http://www.infocenters.co.il/gfh/multimedia/GFH/0000065842/0000065842_1_web.jpg

In 1936, Lotte’s father was excluded from the state-run insurance system which had provided him with many of his patients. He finally realized that it might be time to leave Germany before it was too late. First, the family arranged for Lotte’s older sister Doris to emigrate; she left for the United States in 1937. Lotte’s parents then began to make plans for their own emigration. .

Lotte’s grandparents Laura (Seligmann) and Samuel Winter and her great-uncle Jakob Seligmann had already left Germany for Luxembourg a few years earlier. As explained by Lotte, Neunkirchen was located in the Saar region, which had been under French control after World War I, as agreed to in the Treaty of Versailles. In 1935, there was a plebiscite to determine whether or not the region should be returned to Germany, and the residents of the Saar region voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Germany (over 90%). Under the terms of the Treaty, however, anyone dissatisfied with the result could leave the area. Thus, Lotte’s grandparents and great-uncle had gone to Luxembourg, where German was spoken. Lotte beautifully described where her grandparents lived in Luxembourg:

With my mother’s help they managed to move to a lovely small apartment at the foot of a hill in the fairytale-like city of Luxembourg. The view toward the skyline silhouette, way above, was breathtaking. The ruins of an ancient watchtower and of fortifications lay on the way up to the city. Grand-duchess Charlotte ruled the country which had an army of about 100 men. At times you could see two or three of the soldiers marching behind each other, rifles on their shoulders. Had it not been for a shortage of funds, it would have been an idyllic place to live.



Embed from Getty Images

Luxembourg

Lotte’s mother Anna persuaded her husband to move to Luxembourg when they made the decision to emigrate. Lotte wrote:

Once the decision was made, all the following steps fell into place. I had to leave school and take the courses needed to prepare me for a different life. My father closed his office. We obtained the necessary passports featuring the addition of the name “Sara” for my mother and me. “Joseph”, my father’s name, was sufficiently Jewish to avoid any changes. The passports were not hard to get since one of the officials at the office was known to oblige when a DM 10.00 note was slipped into each application. Ours was the last family in Mannheim to be allowed to pack most of its belongings.

Lotte remembers what this meant for her education.

Unfortunately my schooling was rudely interrupted when my parents began to make preparations for emigration. Much to my chagrin I had to quit school in the middle of the equivalent of my junior year. Instead, I took courses in English and French shorthand, typing and commercial correspondence at a private school. I also learned the rudiments of using a sewing machine, courtesy of a school run by nuns. I must add that for a couple of years I had also studied English with a very proper Oxford-trained teacher at the private Berlitz School.

On a more positive note, Lotte’s parents saw to it that she would have a good violin before they left Germany.

In preparation for eventual emigration my father and I travel to Stuttgart to buy a new violin for me. Or rather, it is a beautiful old Italian instrument, bearing a label stating that it was made by Matteo Albani in 1698. It has a gorgeous flamed wood back, gracefully molded. The sound is magnificent. My teacher assists in the purchase which also includes a light brown case lined with light blue plush. A piece of matching blue silk serves as a wrapper for the instrument. It will soon become a part of me. I am ecstatic.

An Albani violin http://www.bromptons.co/reference/articles/details/sears-danelectro-history.html

I would imagine that that feeling of ecstasy was tempered by some sadness about leaving behind her childhood home, the city of Mannheim where she’d grown up, and her birth country. But Lotte’s memoirs do not convey sadness, just relief.

On the day scheduled for the packing, an inspector appeared whose job it was to supervise what we were doing. He was quite a jovial man. At lunchtime he attached a yellow ribbon across the doorway and announced that he was now going to be gone for about one hour. My mother took the hint and promptly hid a box with jewelry and cash in one of the suitcases destined for Luxembourg. After exactly one hour the good man returned. Luckily he did not ask any questions and did not inspect anything.

For a few more days we stayed at the home of some friends. On May 9, 1938 my parents and I boarded a train heading for Luxembourg. Again luck was with us. Our compartment was shared with a gentleman who turned out to be the Luxembourg consul posted in Stuttgart. The German border control officers of whom we had been afraid and who might have made a lot of trouble for us, they tipped their hats in deference and did not search the compartment very thoroughly. The Luxembourg officials were considered harmless.

Not long after settling in Luxembourg, Lotte’s mother traveled to New York to attend her daughter Doris’ wedding. When she returned better informed about what was going on in Europe, she persuaded her husband that they should leave Luxembourg and immigrate to the United States. How fortunate it was that Doris had moved to the United States a year earlier and that her mother had come to the US to attend her wedding. If the Wiener family had not left Luxembourg, it is very likely that Lotte would not be here today to share this remarkable story.

Next, the family’s departure from Europe, journey to America, and Lotte’s life in the new country.

My Cousin Lotte’s Story, Part I: A Childhood in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933)

Posted on August 14, 2015 by Amy

It has been a true blessing to connect with my cousin Lotte. Lotte is the daughter of Joseph and Anna (nee Winter) Wiener. Her mother Anna was the daughter of Rosina Laura Seligmann. Laura was the daughter of Hieronymous Seligmann, brother of my great-great-grandfather Bernard and son of Moritz and Babetta Seligmann, my three-times great-grandparents. Thus, Lotte is my third cousin, once removed. Her story is a remarkable story.

Lotte was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1921, and she left Germany with her parents in the late 1930s to escape Hitler and the Nazis. Her education in Germany was cut short as a result, yet she came to the United States and successfully completed a nursing program in New York City shortly after immigrating. But I cannot do Lotte’s story justice. Fortunately, I do not have to because Lotte shared with me her memoirs and much of her other writing as well as some anecdotes she shared by email. With Lotte’s permission, I am going to share some excerpts from her own writing and some of those anecdotes.

I am also including a link to her memoirs for anyone who wants to read them in their entirety. You won’t be disappointed. Lotte’s writing is poetic, evocative, and very moving. This post will cover Lotte’s early life in Germany; subsequent posts will cover her life once Hitler came to power and then Lotte’s early years adjusting to life in the United States. (To read Lotte’s memoirs in their entirety, click on My Story Lotte Wiener Furst. Copyright Lotte Wiener Furst 2015. Not to be reproduced in whole or in part without permission of the author.)

Lotte described her maternal grandparents Samuel Oskar Winter and Rosalind Laura Seligmann in these words:

My grandfather, born in Hülchrath, Westphalia, founded and owned a large dry-goods store. He had served his apprenticeship in a similar but larger store in Düsseldorf, having had to leave school at age fourteen because his mother was impoverished. He had a sister who never married, and a brother who later lived in Saarbrücken with his wife and two daughters, where he died quite young of syphilis. My grandfather was small of stature, but had a formidable mind and a keen, dry sense of humor. For quite a few years he served as a trustee of the local synagogue although he was not particularly observant.

My maternal grandmother was one of five siblings. Her family owned a vineyard in Gau-Algesheim, near Bingen, a place where my mother spent part of her childhood and which she always remembered very fondly. My grandmother also had left school at the age of fourteen in order to take care of her mother who was dying of tuberculosis, and to whom she had promised to always fast on Yom Kippur, and to observe Passover, promises she kept very faithfully. She loved poetry and could recite beautifully many of the sometimes very lengthy poems by the beloved German poets Goethe and Schiller. While my mother was growing up, my grandmother kept the books and otherwise assisted in the store. Keeping house was the task of Tante Yettchen, her spinster sister-in-law.

Laura Seligmann Wiener with two of her sisters, Bettina Seligmann Arnfeld and Johanna Seligmann Bielefeld Courtesy of Lotte Furst

Laura Seligmann Winter with two of her sisters, Bettina Seligmann Arnfeld and Johanna Seligmann Bielefeld
Courtesy of Lotte Furst

Samuel and Laura Winter had two children, Lotte’s mother Anna and her uncle Ernst. Ernst was killed fighting for the Kaiser’s army in World War I:

My mother had one brother, Ernst, one year her junior. At the beginning of World War I he enlisted in the German army along with all of his classmates, much to the horror of his parents. He was killed six weeks later in the first Marne battle. My grandparents never recovered from the shock. I never saw my grandmother in anything but grey or black clothing. My uncle’s room was left untouched, and I was never allowed to enter it. My grandfather lost all his drive for maintaining the business, gave up his large store and became a partner in a much smaller one which was now mostly run by my grandmother’s brother, Uncle Jack, a very distinguished-looking but not very capable gentleman.

(“Uncle Jack” was Laura’s older brother Jacob, about whom I wrote here.)

Ernst Winter
Courtesy of Lotte Furst

How painful it must have been for Samuel and Laura to lose their son and then have the country he fought for betray them less than twenty years later.

As for Lotte’s mother Anna or Aennie, she was afforded a fine education as the daughter of a successful merchant:

My mother’s higher education consisted of a year or two in a finishing school, followed by some time in England where one of my grandmother’s uncles had established his residence. Her stay there was cut short, however, because this uncle, who owned several hotels and was very wealthy, made some unsolicited advances, and she fled in terror. The time spent in England provided her with an excellent chance to learn the language, which turned out to be quite an asset later on. She also was an accomplished pianist. Actually she aspired to become a concert pianist or at least a teacher of piano, but my grandparents felt that to be entirely inappropriate for a young lady of good bourgois upbringing. Their denial made her very unhappy but was mitigated somewhat when she received a beautiful black Bechstein grand piano as a wedding gift.

Samuel, Laura, and Anna Winter and Jakob Seligmann (Laura’s brother) Courtesy of Lotte Furst

The uncle in England referred to above was, of course, James Seligman, born Jakob Seligmann, the younger brother of Hieronymous and Bernard Seligmann, the same James Seligman whose estate created quite a ripple of activity in the family and provided me with all those Westminster Bank family trees. Lotte also shared with me her own memories of James Seligman. According to Lotte, “[James] owned one or several hotels in Scotland/England. He lived in one of them. Together with his wife Hedy he visited his family on the continent once. She was a big and very pompous woman. After her death he visited the family again to distribute her belongings. Everybody went out of the way to serve him fancy dinners. My mother hired a caterer and we had “omelet surprise” for dessert. My grandmother Laura made a very simple home-cooked meal which he found the best he’d had. “

James married Claire, his second wife, shortly after his first wife Hedy died. Claire had been his nurse. When James died, Claire had the right to the income from his estate for her life; when she died, the principal was distributed to the various heirs found by the Westminster Bank. According to Lotte, her mother’s estate received $200 in 1985. I guess I can’t cry too much over the fact that the Westminster Bank failed to find my father and my aunt while doing their investigation since it seems their inheritance would have been about $100 each, if that much.

My heart went out to Lotte’s mother Anna Winter, a young girl with dreams of being a concert pianist, whose dreams were thwarted by society’s limited ideas of what a woman could be back in those times. Anna married Joseph Wiener in December, 1915. Joseph was in the Germany army at the time and was a doctor; after completing his service during World War I, he and Anna and their first daughter Doris moved to Mannheim where he established his medical practice. Lotte was born there a few years later during the years of the Weimar Republic.

Lotte’s description of her childhood home creates a vivid picture:

We lived on the second floor of a six story apartment building. There were two units on each floor. Our living quarters occupied one of these units while my father’s office and the maids’ quarters were situated in the other half. The office consisted of my father’s consultation room and a large waiting area where 20 – 30 chairs were lined up along the four walls, together with a coat rack and a spittoon. Doris and I shared one of the two family bedrooms, while the maids had to sleep in a very small and primitively furnished room, I am ashamed to say. They were not allowed to use our toilet, I am ashamed to say. … In addition to the maids, we had a part-time nanny and, for a few years at least, a part-time chauffeur who was mostly busy driving my father who had to make innumerable house calls. In 1923 or 1924 my parents had bought their first car, a black Benz, which unfortunately came to a sad ending when the chauffeur “borrowed” it for a joy ride and totally crashed it. The car was replaced by a green Buick, the driver was fired, and my father did his own navigating from then on.

****

Originally we had separate stoves in the various rooms, one of them a real pot-belly stove called “Der Amerikaner”. But in approximately 1928 my parents obtained permission to remodel our two apartments, and central heating was installed. The furnace, placed in the kitchen, had a large flat surface on which to keep pots of hot water and to make baked apples at times. It also provided a lot of soot. The noise of one of our maids stoking the fire early in the morning usually woke us up.

The living room featured three wall-to-ceiling bookcase units, separated by two bay windows. There was a wealth of information in those books, and my parents placed no restrictions on our choice of reading material. I devoured almost everything: fiction, classics, history, you name it. But I certainly did not retain most of the material I read. Other furniture included three caned armchairs, a round coffee table with marble top, a green velvet-upholstered sofa, and a large oak desk.

A doorway, equipped with a curtain, led to the dining room half a small step above. For a while Doris and I used this setting to put on some improvised shows. The oak dining room table was large and massive. Other than for dining we used it as an improvised ping-pong table when extended. Of course the proportions were not right, and the ball would bounce off when it hit the extension crack in the middle.

… My parents’ bedroom had mahogany furniture and yellow wallpaper with green and red intertwined garlands. I would stare at them at the times when I was allowed to lie on Mutti’s bed when I was sick, and I thought they were ugly. Doris’ and my bedroom was not so fancy. It was equipped only with two iron beds, a dresser, a night stand, and a clothes closet.

Between the bedrooms was a bathroom, used only for bathing. We had a separate toilet a little further down the hall and next to the kitchen which featured to a stove, oven, furnace, table and two chairs and an icebox, later replaced by a Frigidaire which was usually kept locked.

Mannheim, Germany By Snapshots Of The Past (Parade Place and Kaufhaus Karlsruhe Baden Germany) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Lotte also wrote about her parents’ various responsibilities in the household:

My father (Vati) was a very busy general practitioner. He had long office hours and also made numerous house calls every day, frequently to people who lived on the fourth, fifth or sixth floor of walk-up apartments. Elevators were non-existent in the working-class neighborhood where we lived. But he was always home for lunch, the main meal of the day, which was served at 1 PM. Breakfast was not a family affair – Doris and I had rolls with butter and jelly, delivered fresh every morning from the bakery across th street, and a cup of tea before leaving for school which started at 8 AM. During morning recess we had a “second breakfast” consisting of a sandwich which we brought from home. The light evening meal was served at about 7 PM.

My mother (Mutti) attended to the household: instructing, supervising and hiring and firing the maid(s), and doing the marketing which in itself was a very complicated job. Because many of the nearby merchants were my father’s patients, she had to keep track of with which grocer, which butcher, which baker she had done business last in order to keep all of them happy. Butchers were especially difficult. There were some who had the best and most aged beef, suitable for roasts, and some who carried a poorer quality and therefore were only good for meat that had to be boiled or braised. Sausage came from other sources: regular, ordinary sausage was bought at a nearby store, but kosher sausage with its distinctively different taste came from a Jewish butcher who lived quite a distance away. Vati frequently questioned where the meat came from, and Mutti, quite peeved, would answer “from the fish store”.

In addition to the household chores, Mutti kept my father’s books. At the beginning of each calendar quarter she had to add up all the patients’ slips pertaining to their insurance coverage, and submit them to the local health insurance office and to the few private insurance companies involved. Since Bismarck’s time in the 1880’s Germany had compulsory and comprehensive health insurance laws covering most of the working population. Self-employed and professional people took out their own private insurance. During those busy quarterly events Mutti was extremely nervous and tense. We knew better than asking her any silly questions.

After lunch, Vati usually took a short nap on the living-room sofa, followed, at least in the early years, by a cigar which I helped him light. He then resumed his afternoon office hours while I went back to school or to my music lessons or other activities. At some time during the afternoon I did my homework, never too much of a chore, and practiced my violin music for which I did not need any coaxing because I enjoyed it.

Lotte and her sister spent school vacations visiting Anna’s parents Laura (Seligmann) and Samuel Winter in Neunkirchen:

My grandparents’ (Oma and Opa’s) house had four stories: a large basement with a fruit cellar, a downstairs “salon” and formal dining room with a large veranda which was hardly ever used, another floor with the actual living quarters (living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen), and three more bedrooms above that. The rooms were rather small, however. A rarely used dumb waiter connected the kitchen with the downstairs dining room. A mostly unkempt and unplanted backyard, except for some large clumps of rhubarb, was also featured. The house overlooked a large and frequently used soccer field.

There was not very much to do at the house. I usually accompanied Opa to the store where he spent most of his time. The salesladies and the office help all were very nice. They gave me odds and ends of fancy yarns, remnants of cloth, and various sundries. The secretary let me use the typewriter where, one index finger at a time, I would compose never to be published letters and poems.

Oma meanwhile would be busy with her household chores. Once a week she attended meetings at a housewives’ club, and I would come with her whenever I was visiting. I believe they did some charitable work, but all I know for sure is that they gossiped a lot and always had a big “Kaffeeklatsch”. Every time they saw me, some of these ladies would ask whether I remembered who they were, followed by “my, how you have grown”. The club was the only outside activity Oma allowed herself.

Town Gate, Neunkirchen By Daniel Arnold (Photo taken by Daniel Arnold) [CC BY-SA 2.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/deed.en), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Lotte wrote a wonderful description of a day she spent with her Opa, but it is quite long, so I will leave it for those who wish to read her entire memoir. I do want to include this description of her Oma, Laura Seligmann Winter:

My grandmother, Oma, was a fairly short, fairly plump woman. Her body, always dressed in rather shapeless grey clothes and bulging a bit in the center, did not seem to have any remarkable form of its own. But her oval face was kind and full of expression. Severely myopic, she had protuberant grey eyes. To help her poor eyesight, she used a lorgnette for reading. I don’t recall her ever wearing glasses. She also suffered from rheumatic heart disease, the result of rheumatic fever early in life, which incapacitated her a lot and finally contributed to her death.

To maintain her wavy, well-coiffured hairdo, Oma allowed herself the only luxury I was aware of. Once or twice a month she used the services of a hairdresser who came to her home to wash and set her hair, embellished by the use of a hot iron. She probably coordinated those appointments with the meeting dates of the “Hausfrauenverein” ( housewives’ club), a gathering of mostly Jewish old – or so it seemed to me – women who fairly fell over me when Oma took me along during my visits, exclaiming how I had grown and wondering if I still remembered their names. Whether the club members did anything socially worthwhile I do not know. I suppose they did. But I do know that they gossiped a lot while enjoying afternoon coffee and cake.

Oma’s most remarkable talent was her gift to recite poetry. With only a grade-school education, she had managed to memorize a great many of the famous German poems written in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, noticeably poems by Goethe, her hero, and also by Schiller. A glorified picture of Goethe adorned a wall in her kitchen, leading, to her bemusement, to a question by her milkman who wondered if that handsome man had been her father.

Rosina Laura Seligmann Winter, Lotte’s grandmother

For more on Lotte’s grandparents and their home, read MY GRANDPARENTS HOUSE by Lotte (Copyright Lotte Wiener Furst 2015. Not to be reproduced in whole or in part without permission of the author.)

Lotte, an exceptional student, also wrote about her early school experiences:

From first through fourth grade I attended the Hildaschule, the public school for girls in the district where I lived and about three blocks from our apartment. My first impression of the first grade classroom was that it smelled bad and was very noisy, featuring an enrollment of about 40 anxious little girls. The teacher was very strict – a real no-nonsense person by the name of Mrs. Seltenreich. The slightest kind of misdemeanor was usually punished by a sharp blow with a cane on the poor kid’s outstretched fingers. It required a great deal of courage to oblige her. I must admit that I never was in that predicament since I was a very good little girl. But I had one great shortcoming: From the very beginning my handwriting was very poor. I never earned anything better than a “3″ (on a scale of 1-5) in that course. Later, when we started to write with ink, I did not produce one paper without a smudge or an inkblot. I never could shake that weakness, and only with the advent of the computer did I learn to produce more or less perfect papers without any visible corrections.

Mrs. Seltenreich was replaced by Fräulein Unger from second to fourth grade. She was a very kind, stout elderly lady who really loved teaching, trying some innovative methods, thus commanding respect without the cruelty shown by her predecessor. I had one girlfriend at that time but did not spend much time with her. Once I accompanied her to the Catholic church across the street from the school, and she showed me how to make the sign of the cross and how to kneel, which I did because I did not know any better. When I told my mother, she instructed me never to do that again. I, however, knew hardly anything about my own religion except for the fact that I was Jewish and therefore different.

School hours were during the morning. In the afternoon I usually went to a park with my nanny during the early school years. There I mostly played by myself or perhaps with one other child, sheltered kid that I was. In school we also had to attend an outdoor playtime session once a week. I did not like it too much because I did not know the games which most of the girls had played frequently. I was rather ignorant in social skills and did not participate very well.

In fourth grade I befriended a girl by the name of Johanna who lived on a river boat which made periodic stops in Mannheim, traveling up the Rhine from Holland. During those stops she attended my school. I proudly presented her to the handicrafts instructor (embroidery, crocheting and knitting were compulsory and part of the curriculum), only to be asked if she was also a Yid (which she was not). My mother was infuriated when I told her about this, so much so that she went to the School Board to complain. After all, we were living in Germany during the time of the democratic Weimar Republic. Discrimination supposedly was not allowed. I never found out if the teacher was reprimanded.

Reading this made me realize how drastically German society changed once Hitler came to power. Here was Lotte’s mother, a Jewish woman, daring to complain about an anti-Semitic remark made by a teacher. Just a few years later such anti-Semitism was the official law of the land.

After her early years in the girls’ school, Lotte was one of a small number of girls who were admitted to the almost all-male Karl-Friedrich Gymnasium, where she had to work extra hard and even box some of the boys in order to prove herself and win approval from her teachers. Lotte also spent many hours in the nearby art museum. She loved music and was exposed to music throughout her childhood. She started taking violin lessons when she was eight years old and had the same teacher for nine years until she and her family emigrated.

Karl-Friedrich-Gymnasium Mannheim (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although her grandmother Laura always fasted on Yom Kippur and observed Passover, as she had promised her mother, Lotte grew up with very little exposure to Judasim. She wrote:

Prior to the Nazi rise to power I had a very cursory knowledge of the fact that I was Jewish. My parents were totally non‑religious. They agreed with Karl Marx that religion was “the opiate of the masses”. My father even resigned from the Jewish community since he did not see why he should pay the obligatory cultural tax. In school I was listed as “without religious affiliation.” None of the Jewish holidays were observed at our house.

But Lotte’s grandparents and other relatives of her grandmother Laura did provide her with some knowledge and experience with Jewish rituals and holidays:

But at my grandparent’s house I learned a little more about Jewish customs. My grandmother fasted on Yom Kippur. They only ate matzot during Passover. Best of all, they had a blue and white KKL (Jewish National Fund) box on their living room chest. Only pennies were inside, as I found out when I tried to fish out the money with a crochet hook (I always replaced the money, I only did it because 1 was utterly bored and had nothing else to do). But I do remember the outline of Palestine on the box, and I learned that it was the Jewish homeland far away.

Gilabrand at en.wikipedia [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Gilabrand at en.wikipedia [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

There also were some more observant relatives in Neunkirchen. One, a cousin of my grandmother, was married to the orthodox owner of a dairy store who did not make much money but beat up his poor wife and his three children every once in a while. I remember their son celebrating his bar‑mitzvah. A lot of complete strangers (to me) were assembled, including a very distinguished‑looking rabbi. Following the ceremony and the lunch people sat around talking and telling jokes. Since the rabbi looked so distinguished with his white beard, I asked him to write a word on a slip of paper as part of a puzzle I wanted to present. Well … The good rabbi told me very kindly that he did not write on schabbes, and that’s how 1 learned one of the basic rules of Judaism.

Lotte told me that the bar mitzvah boy was Heinz Goldmann, son of Anna Seligmann and Hugo Goldmann. Anna was the daughter of August Seligmann, my three-times great-uncle. Anna, Hugo, and their children were all killed in the Holocaust.

Overall, Lotte’s description of her childhood suggests that she had a very happy and comfortable childhood: a childhood free of economic or other struggles, a loving family, vacations and trips, school and art and music, and grandparents whom she adored. All of this would come to what must have been a shocking, heart-wrenching, and tragic end as Lotte entered adolescence and Hitler came to power.

Brotmanblog: A Family Journey

Adventures in Genealogy

Category Archives: Seligman/Seligmann

Two More Generations Back! The Amazing Seligmanns

Why I Love the Internet: The World Wide Web

Photo Analysis: Why You Should Ask an Expert

The Memoirs of Lotte’s Sister Doris: Another Perspective on Life in Hitler’s Germany

My Cohn Cousins: Journalism, Sports, and, Most Importantly, Family and Love

Some Broken Brick Walls: Thank you, Cousin Bob!

Moritz James Oppenheimer: The (More) Complete Story

Lotte’s Story, Part III: Coming to and Settling into America

Lotte’s Story, Part II: Life in Nazi Germany

My Cousin Lotte’s Story, Part I: A Childhood in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933)

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: