Don Gropman's Blog

I wrote this last month, but just got around to posting it.

Kristallnacht: Is the Past Ever Dead?

Every year around this time I find myself thinking about Stephen Rossmer whose journey to America began in the late afternoon of November 8, 1938. As he was leaving his dentist’s office in Bamberg, Germany, he was arrested and taken to the local jail, already full of his Jewish neighbors. That evening, as he stood in his crowded cell, organized rioters rampaged through the streets of Germany, looting and trashing Jewish owned businesses and burning down hundreds of synagogues. We know the event as Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Shattered Glass.” It was the first state sponsored nation-wide violence against the Jewish citizens of Germany.

Next morning Stephen and all the other Jewish men of Bamberg were herded onto train cars and taken to concentration camp Dachau (Jews arrested elsewhere were brought to other camps.) In 1938, before he had arrived at the so-called Final Solution, Hitler’s plan was to drive the Jews out of Germany: The purpose of Kristallnacht was to frighten them into leaving.

While Stephen was in Dachau his wife, Erna, went to Nazi party headquarters to show that their papers were in order and that they were prepared to emigrate. Six weeks later he was released from Dachau. Three months after that Stephen, Erna and their infant daughter Gabrielle boarded a ship in Hamburg and sailed for New York, where they settled in Washington Heights, soon to be the largest community of surviving German Jews in the world. Stephen’s parents, Hugo and Rosa, did not make it out in time; they were murdered by the Nazis.

Stephen became a citizen and discharged his civic duties: he supported his family, paid his taxes and always voted. He also wrote a poem for his infant daughter to read when she came of age:

 

Seven hills, Regnitz, Main*

Woods, fields, lush groves,

Quiet dreamy hedgerows.

 

This lovely and familiar image

Has been transformed. Savage,

Yes, filled with terror.

 

What once was homeland now is Hell

Our old neighbors now brutal,

Disdainful, scream for blood.

 

Gaby, you are only one year old

Don’t know how it was

As we raced away in horror.

 

Over the ocean, God let us land

Where freedom was

once more at hand.

America, you great land!

 

Grandparents who never came

A sacrifice to Germany’s shame

We will always remember you.

We are tied to you

By an eternal bond.

 

(*The two rivers that run through Bamberg. Translation by Gabrielle Rossmer. For original German language version, go to Gabriellerossmer.com and click on “In Search Of The Lost Object.”)

Forty years after fleeing Germany, Stephen and Erna were interviewed by their granddaughter Sonya for an oral history project. When the subject of Germany was broached Erna said, “I’m so full of hatred I cannot stand to see German people.”

Stephen replied, “I can understand your grandmother’s feelings, but I have different feelings. Bamberg is a beautiful medieval town and I loved it very much. When I think of Bamberg I have a hatred for the Nazis, I’ll never forget or forgive them for what they did. But I feel no hatred for Germans, you cannot generalize. In Bamberg we had such loyal and wonderful friends.” Years later Stephen’s daughter met some of those friends, German women who had risked their lives to help Stephen’s parents when they were under house arrest before they were sent off to Poland to be murdered.

Of his time in Dachau Stephen said, “We lived in barracks. It was cold and the food was terrible. The guards were mean to us, but I wasn’t beaten or anything. Many of the men were old and I tried to help out as best I could. You couldn’t do much, but I tried. Of course it wasn’t nearly as bad as things got later, this was not an extermination at that time, but terrible things happened. They told us it was forbidden to look out the window. An old man I knew looked out to ask the guard a question, without even one word he shot him dead on the spot. I saw that.

“I was 33 years old at that time. I was a young man and you are not…sure, you dread every day, but you have hope. I was a man full of great optimism and I always hoped they would release us. When they are packed into masses Germans can be dangerous,” he continued, “but the average German, he’s not worse than anybody else, I mean except the Nazis, and haven’t we got Nazis here, haven’t we got Nazis in France, haven’t we got Nazis all over now?” (Stephen was referring to the Nazis who marched in Skokie, Illinois in 1977 and to Jean-Marie Le Pen of France.)

I wonder what Stephen would have thought and said about the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia and the judgment of president Trump that there were “some very fine people” among the neo Nazis. Stephen knew better than Mr. Trump, he knew there were no “fine” Nazis. But would he feel compelled to modify his cry of praise, “America you great land!” or would his eternal optimism lead him to believe there were better times ahead?

Stephen Rossmer was my father-in-law. I admired his optimism, but I struggle to share his optimism. This year I hear the echoes of shattering glass sounding down through the decades and recall William Faulkner’s chilling remark: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”