Emma told Eddie that her niece was as dear to her as her own son and that she was beautiful and intelligent and should be stumbling over suitors whenever she stepped out. The trouble was, she refused to step out; in fact she almost never left her mother’s apartment.
Eddie pondered this for a moment and quietly asked why.
Emma explained that her brother, Margarete’s father, had killed himself three years earlier and Margarete could not seem to break out of the habit of mourning.
After expressing sympathy for Emma’s and Margarete’s loss, Eddie asked Emma what she thought he could do to help.
Emma was ready with a scheme to reintroduce Margarete to something approaching a normal social life for a young woman in Hamburg. She told Eddie that she would somehow induce Margarete to go with her to the Alster Pavilion, where he would “happen by” and would be introduced as a “dear friend” and invited to join their table. After talking for a while and enjoying the music and a glass or two of sekt, Margarete might be persuaded to dance. Emma said that Margarete had loved to dance before her father’s death and that dancing could be the tool to crack the shell of grief that had thickened around her. Emma made it clear that she was not interested in matchmaking, but was determined to crack that shell nonetheless.
Emma’s stratagem worked far better than expected. Margarete discovered that she liked dancing with Eddie, and that dancing drove away her depression. Eddie was attracted to Margarete from the beginning and became increasingly enamored as she regained her confidence and vivacity. He also helped her brother, Hans, to reconnect with friends and worldly interests. Rosa at first was disturbed by Eddie’s courtship, which she believed could only lead to further disappointment for Margarete, since he was not a Jew. But he gradually won her over with his charm, his helpfulness to Hans, and his veneration of Rosa Luxemburg. For more than a year Eddie’s relationship with Margarete also seemed to be somewhat fraternal. But after they won first prize in a tango competition at the Alster Pavilion, it turned torrid.
Despite the government’s disapproval of jazz and swing, Hans played swing tunes at the reception following the wedding of Margarete Singer and Erhard Ernst Emil Oestreicher. The wedding took place roughly a month after Chancellor Adolph Hitler rode in triumph through the streets of Hamburg and a year before the Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935, outlawed marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
Margarete and Eddie welcomed the birth of a daughter at Hamburg’s famous Jewish Hospital two months after the Nuremberg decree, when the world’s response to Germany’s proudly announced persecution of its Jews could not be heard above the sound of falling leaves. Fortunately for me, the doctors at the hospital founded by the uncle of poet, Heinrich Heine, to heal people regardless of race, religion or nationality, ignored the government’s orders to refuse to help Jewish babies who were having difficulty catching the breath of life.
Mother and Father before the war.
My grandmother with my father in 1902.
Chapter 3
Poisoned Air
I learned early on that neighbors were encouraged to inform on neighbors and that even private criticism of Nazi policy could be fatal if the authorities found out. A boy on our block had been promised a new bicycle by the secret police if he reported on his parent’s private conversations and activities. After he complied, his parents were arrested and deported to a concentration camp, and the boy was left with no one to provide for him and no new bicycle. Shunned because of what he had done, the boy, too, eventually disappeared. The impression he left was indelible, though not as painful as one created about the same time by Monica, the girl who lived two floors below us, when she told me she would no longer play with me because I was a “Jew pig.”
Because he was married to my mother, my father was a living affront to Nazi racial policy and the growing consensus that Jews were not fit to live with Aryans. For this apostasy he was subjected to increasing pressure to divorce Mother and abandon their children. Also, because he had been a confirmed internationalist until the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact in 1939 destroyed his faith in Communism, Father was doubly suspect in the eyes of Nazi Party and police officials and was the object of intense hostility by the brown-shirted thugs known as Storm Troopers.
Throughout the prewar years, Father wore his bad reputation with calm assurance, maintaining his marriage and his friendships with Jews as well as Gentiles, giving no one reason to think he was dispirited or even discouraged by official or communal hatreds. Unlike the arrogance of those in power, Father’s obvious confidence was balanced by a genuine interest in others. Strangers as well as friends turned to him instinctively; beggars opened up to him, and he to them. He loved classical music, art, friendships, women, and jokes. His wit was seasoned by years of travel, reading, and a fascination with eccentric behavior and temperamental machinery. Eventually the Storm Troopers got to him. They tied him to a lamppost and beat him until they permanently injured his kidneys, and they told him that he and his Jewish family would be killed unless he divorced Mother and joined them. He placated them by agreeing to join the Luftwaffe.
Because the beating did not break Father’s spirit, it did not make Mother or me more fearful for very long. She quickly recovered her outward air of defiance, and he very soon seemed to find a comfortable niche in the special procurement arm of the Luftwaffe, which made our entire family feel more secure. The deportations in November 1941, however, were devastating. Although I was only six at that time, I understood that the worst thing in the world that could happen to me would be to lose my mother, and that Mother’s loss of her mother, her brother, and her aunt was unbearably painful. As further deportations of Jews occurred over the next year and a half, and the hate campaign against us intensified, I also understood that any day Mother might be taken as well. I watched and tried to help as she and Father did their best to find a way for us to live with all the hurt and anger and uncertainty. She remained defiantly proud in public but brooded much more frequently indoors. I managed to suppress my fear for her safety when we were together, but it inevitably emerged whenever we were separated.
With Mother’s family gone, the authorities seemed to be closing in on Father’s as well. His father had died at sea when he and his six brothers and two sisters were still quite young, forcing his mother to fend for the entire family. When grown each of the sons actively opposed the Nazi regime in one fashion or another. Earlier that summer Father’s favorite brother, Eugene Oestreicher, had been arrested for aiding the Resistance while serving in the army in occupied France. Turned over to an SS unit known as the Ascension Commandos because of their reputation for killing those in their custody, Eugene had taken his own life rather than risk incriminating others. Shortly after his suicide, the Gestapo had searched a garret room Father rented in a Brussels pension and used for subversive activities. But while the police were making their way up the stairs, the chambermaid had saved his skin by quickly removing a batch of incriminating papers.
Father had laughed during his last visit as he told us about the heroic chambermaid and presented me with the licorice mask of Winston Churchill. Such stories not only thrilled me, they made it possible to imagine that the Nazis m
ight not be as all-powerful as they appeared. But Mother understandably felt constrained to protest. “You can’t keep taking such risks,” she would say, reminding him that his brother, Eugene, had been arrested and had died in SS custody and that we would face deportation if Father was arrested.
Before returning to Belgium, however, Father succeeded in imparting his quiet but intense will to resist and his confidence that we would live to witness the downfall of the Nazis. Mother was then ready to face the Gestapo when she reported to them each week. Sometimes I had to go with her but only once had I seen her break down and weep. That had been shortly before the previous Christmas, when I had looked down an air shaft in the Gestapo offices and seen the bloodied face of Uncle Fred in the room below.
Uncle Fred was not my real uncle but my parents’ friend, a huge, red-bearded bachelor who treated me as a favorite niece and always brought gifts—food and flowers for Mother, licorice and a flower for me. He lived with his mother, who was a member of an old Hamburg family, but his father, who was dead, had been from Scotland. The father ran the Hamburg office of a company that insured ship cargoes and had offices in Glasgow and Hamburg. As a boy, Uncle Fred had spent his summers and attended university in Scotland. Before his father died, Fred had served as an officer on a German freighter on which my father also sailed, and the two men had become good friends. After his father’s death, Uncle Fred was extremely wealthy, with a Rolls Royce, a chauffeur, and a valet who trimmed and brushed his beautiful beard. He had his clothes made on Saville Row in London but was not fond of the English and accused them of having abused the Scots for centuries. Although German, he liked to wear the kilt, shawl, silver buckles, feathered cap and other strange attire of his father’s family on occasions such as my parents’ wedding.
I moved away from the air shaft without saying anything, but the smaller of the two Gestapo officials questioning Mother, a man whose hair was so pale it looked almost white, had seen me look and made Mother look too. He insisted that our friend was a British agent, and accused Mother of helping him.
Mother began to shake and cry out that they had made a terrible mistake, that Uncle Fred was as loyal as Hans Albers, Hamburg’s favorite movie actor. She said they must be mad to think he was a spy.
The official calmly stepped forward and slapped her face like a woman who has been insulted by a man’s crude remark. Then he shouted, “We ask the questions! We decide who is loyal and who is mad!”
Mother quickly agreed and apologized, but insisted that their informer must have been mistaken.
The larger official interrupted her and then both men questioned her about our relationship with Uncle Fred. Mother told them he was named after King Frederick of Prussia and that Father always called him “Barbarossa” because of his name and red hair. She said Father knew him because he was connected with a shipping company Father had worked for years ago. She tried to add that she believed he was a patriotic German, but she was cut short.
“He admitted that he talks to the British as well as Jews,” the smaller agent said, “which means he is a traitor twice over!”
“He has family and property in Scotland,” Mother pointed out.
“We told you that he has already confessed!” the larger man shouted, pounding his fist into his hand. He threatened that we would be executed with Uncle Fred unless Mother also confessed everything she knew about him. He said this with bone-chilling matter-of-factness. When Mother insisted that she knew nothing, he suddenly grabbed a handful of my hair, pulled my head sharply down to one side and shouted at me to tell what “the traitor” and my parents talked about.
I protested that Uncle Fred was not a traitor and would never hurt the Fatherland.
The agent shook my head and said I didn’t have a Fatherland. Then he let go of my hair and said Mother and I would be allowed to go home as soon as I told him what he wanted to know. He added that I would get a nice little present besides.
His last remark reminded me of the boy down the street from us who had been promised a new bicycle in return for information about his parents. I said that my father was in the Luftwaffe and wouldn’t talk to a spy.
The Gestapo agent replied that any man who would marry a Jew would talk to Germany’s enemies.
“My mother is pretty,” was all I could think to say. Furious tears began to run down my cheeks as the agent laughed.
I hated him for laughing even more than for twisting my hair. But the two men eventually tired of us and let us go home. Before we left, however, they told me to return with Mother the following week.
* * *
All week long we worried about Frederick and dreaded another interrogation. But when we returned there were more than a dozen other Jewish children and mothers standing outside the building, looking cold and frightened. Several helmeted soldiers also were there, two of them holding large German shepherds. No one seemed to know why we had been rounded up, but all feared that we would be deported. One mother thought that we might be put to work clearing snow or placing sandbags around official buildings, the sorts of tasks performed by some of the thousands of war prisoners forced to labor in Hamburg’s factories and streets. Another mother silenced speculation by suggesting that, since it was the Christmas season, we might be compelled to sing “Silent Night” for soldiers or possibly prisoners. But minutes later, an SS officer told us that because Jewish children had been excluded from public school training on the use of gas masks, we would receive such instruction now, during the Christmas recess, while the facilities were not in use. Children of mixed marriages were being taken first, he said, which prompted one of the women in the group to comment that Hamburg’s program to prepare children for a poison gas attack was well known and quite safe.
My parents, Margarete and Edward Oestreicher.
But when we emerged from a truck after bouncing about for half an hour, we were surprised to see even more soldiers and dogs surrounding a clearing in front of fairly dense woods. About twenty yards in front of a line of scrawny pines there was a small hut or shed. On a small rise to the left was a machine gun surrounded by sandbags. Beyond that the long barrel of an anti-aircraft cannon pointed at the leaden sky. The soldiers nearest the machine gun were standing and smoking or drinking something hot, paying little attention to us. One mother exclaimed that she didn’t think this was the same place the authorities used to train the Gentile children. None of the others disagreed.
The Commanding Officer told us the gas masks being issued by the soldiers were the same ones used by Aryan children and that it didn’t matter if they didn’t fit well. Mine was much too large for me. While he was talking to the group, Mother quickly braided my hair, tightened the straps of the mask, and tucked the braids under the sides. When it still wasn’t snug enough she took off her leather gloves and stuffed them over the braids inside the mask. The soldiers made us line up before the door to the building with the tallest in front and the rest behind according to height. I was near the end, in front of a small boy in an oversized mask. The soldiers then herded the mothers to a spot about twenty yards away and told them to be silent so that we could hear the instructions. The Commander shouted for us to pay attention to him and held aloft a silver whistle, which was difficult to see through the lenses of the masks which were fogging up on the inside.
The Commander told us that we were to go inside the building and wait quietly until we heard him blow his whistle. He demonstrated the whistle with a shrill blast that made us shiver.
After we heard the whistle, he explained, we should remove our masks and then we would be allowed to come outside. But no one would be allowed to leave until all masks had been removed.
As he repeated the instructions, adding that if we didn’t do it right we would have to repeat the exercise, I looked about and noticed that the machine gunners were attending their weapons and the other soldiers, except for two near the door, had formed a line in front of our mothers.
“Attention!” the Commander sho
uted, and the door to the shed was opened.
We filed somewhat hesitantly into a room with very little light and hoped the Commander would whistle soon so we could get out of there. He waited for what seemed like forever, and some of the children began to stumble about, moan beneath their masks or fall to the floor. Finally he let loose a long blast and some of the children removed their masks. Several screamed and thrashed about while the rest of us pushed toward the door and began to pound on it wildly. I was near the door but was knocked off my feet. Holding on to my mask, I looked desperately for a shaft of light. In addition to the pandemonium inside I heard pounding and screaming on the other side of the door accompanied by barking and machine gun fire. When the door crashed inward I crawled toward the daylight over the other children. Before I could see clearly, Mother grabbed me up and we plunged into the woods, managing in the noise and great confusion to escape. When we paused to catch our breaths, we could still hear sounds of screaming and occasional gunfire, and I saw that one of Mother’s hands was bleeding, making ribbon patterns in the snow.
She said she must have cut it on the door but that I shouldn’t worry. She asked about me and, after I assured her that I was not injured and could breathe normally, said she thought she knew where we were and what direction to take to get home. We looked back anxiously at the trail of blood and footprints we had left behind. Mother stuffed her bleeding hand into a glove, and we started walking, trying at first to step under the cover of dense pines where there was little snow, so as not to leave such an obvious trail. A couple of hours later we reached a street that ran into Hasselbrook Strasse only a few blocks from our apartment. After resting in the apartment for a brief time, Mother retrieved Rena from Cousin Inge. I suppose Mother told Inge what we had been through, but we never talked about it again and never read or heard any explanations of what had happened. I felt sure that many of the mothers and children must have been wounded or killed, and wondered what had happened to the other survivors, if there were any.