68 Friday, February 3, 1984
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
xiles in New York' Describes Agony of Those Who Fled Hitler
By BETTE ROTH
Holocaust
survivors
have, as a group, been a sub-
ject of consuming interest
for the past decade. Time
seems to have heightened
the desire for knowledge of
. those terrible 12 years, the
Holocaust era in European
Jewish history. Most of the
memoir literature, diaries,
novels, oral histories, and
reminiscences have focused
upon Eastern Europe,
where Hitler's most brutal
machinations occurred.
The Jews of Western
Europe, more specifically
those from German-
speaking countries who es-
caped before 1939, have re-
mained largely unnoticed,
their traumas eclipsed by
those caught in the ghettoes
and camps. But they are
survivors, too, and they
have their stories to tell.
"Exile in New York"
(Wayne State University
Press) by Dr. Helmut Pfan-
ner, professor of German
language and literature at
the University of New
Hampshire, brings together
an extraordinary number of
hitherto unknown stories,
plays, diaries, and memoirs
written by German and Au-
strian exiles.
Many are translated
from the German for the
first time in this volume.
They add another chap-
ter to Holocaust history,
bringing to life the ex-
r
perience
of
the
German-Austrian New
York exile community, a
group of reluctant refu-
gees who saw them-
selves, not as Jews or as
emigres primarily, but as
Germans on leave from a
country temporarily in
the hands of a madman.
Many were simply wait-
ing it out till the madman
was gone.
Europe's "teeming shore";
they were upper middle
class, cultured" and learned
professionals, the "best and
brightest" of Weimar
society.
To quote Martin Gum-
pert, a physician whose
gift with words matched
his professional skills:
"We did not sit in the
steerage with our bundles;
we were tourist passengers
Over 250 survivors tell on some of the giant boats
their tales in excerpts in- and the adventure started
terwoven in a most sensi- like a vacation journey
tive narrative. While Dr. without a return ticket."
Pfanner only incidentally
But perhaps most impor-
identifies the Jewish exiles, tant was their overweening
the great majority of those attachment to the
quoted in the book were, in fatherland. They saw them-
fact, Jews.
selves not as members of
Many, such as Raoul Av- Klal Yisrael, as had their
ernheimer, Lion predecessors, but as loyal
Feuchtwanger, Alfred Pol- citizens of a pre-Hitler
gar, and Stefan Zweig, have Germany. So at home had
found their ways into the they felt in Europe that over
pages of the "Encyclopedia 40 percent returned after
Judaica" and "Who's Who in
the war.
World Jewry." It is appro-
The almost-compulsive
priate, however, that Pfan-
need to put the exile experi-
ner almost ignores this fact; ence on paper was shared by
his subjects almost ignored professional writers, physi-
it too.
cians, attorneys, artists,
And this "fourth wave" of philosophers, and teachers.
American-Jewish migra- They wrote of the agonizing
tion differed dramatically frustrations of wading
from the 17th- and early through the official red
18th Century Sephardic, tape, Nazi and American; of
the middle 19th Century first impressions of New
German, and the turn of the
York; of accepting -low-
century East European.
status jobs; of trying to
These mid-20th Century overcome the language bar-
exiles were not the riers; of trying to hold on to
"wretched refuse" of their beloved German lan-
guage; of disillusionment
and finally rejection of an
American culture many
saw as too plebian.
1 75 1 5 W. 9 Mile Rd.
Pfanner captures
every
phase in quoting
Suite 865
their painfully exquisite
recollections, eloquent
Southfield, Mich. 48075
understatements in-
formed by an overriding
dignity.
Hundreds of excerpts,
many translated from the
German for the first time,
allow the emigres to tell the
story in their own words, so
that by the end of the vol-
ume we know them, not as
individuals, but as a group
of intensely introspective
minds in pain.
Martin Gumpert writes
in his autobiography of his
decision to leave Germany:
"I had loved Berlin, I had
loved Germany. I had loved
Europe. It is difficult to de-
termine the point where
one's usefulness to one's
country ceases to exist,
where one acknowledges de-
feat or clings to the right to
continue life without
threats .. .
Paste in old label
"The events of these
years had deeply
alienated me ... from
myself, from the people
around me, to the point
where I would have felt
like a fool to sacrifice my-
self for them. ... It was
indeed a matter of life
and death whether I
should witness the dis-
tortion and decay of
every kind of value in a
state of utter helpless-
ness or whether I would
cut the strings of birth
NAME
and tradition and affec-
tion to which I was at-
Effective Date
To: The Jewish News
WEAVE JUST
From
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tached."
These "strings of birth
and tradition and affection"
were almost impossible to
break for most of the exiles.
Their entry into an Ameri-
can society first in the
throes of the Great Depres-
sion, then at war with their
native land made both their
search for employment and
their German-accented
English sources for aliena-
tion, and their beloved
Germany became the only
solace left to them.
Doctors found themselves
taking positions as house-
men, their wives as maids;
writers found themselves as
day laborers, actresses as
streetwalkers.
Having perceived them-
selves as first-class citizens
of the inter-war German
Republic, they were thrown
instantly to the bottom of
the heap in the pecking
order of American society.
Hans Natonek speaks
to this in his autobiog-
raphy, when he sees a
man who had been prom-
inent in his old home now
dressed in a servant's
uniform, taking five dogs
for a walk down one of
New York's more elegant
streets. When their eyes
meet, Natonek detects in
his compatriot's eyes, the
"wish to let him pass by
as a stranger."
German men, tradi-
tionally the heads of pat-
riarchal families, found
that their wives felt the
necessity to take over, at
least temporarily, in an
American milieu. Bella
Fromm describes this in a
German-language novel,
"Die Engel weinen":
"In difficult hours women
are usually stronger than
men. I witnessed this after
only a few weeks with 'emi-
grated wives.' They cleaned
offices; they worked, as I
`did, in a factory. They be-
came housekeepers or
cooks, and if luck was with
them, they got a house-
keeper's position with room
and bath where their hus-
bands could live with them.
"If he was capable of
being a butler, all the bet-
ter; then the pay was in-
creased. If this was not the
case, the women simply
gritted their teeth and made
it possible for the former
bank directors or aca-
demicians to relearn their
professions here or to let
themselves be retrained in
order eventually to earn
their own wages."
And what of the men?
Frederich Sally Grosshut
was, to quote the author,
a typical exile lawyer. He
came to this country with
his wife in 1949. "They
worked for some time as
a servant couple in a
large Newburg, N.Y.,
household, but they soon
gave up that position be-
cause they felt
exploited."
Grosshut describes his
next job as a textile worker,
one he held for four years:
"I am sitting in a room to-
gether with 125 male and
female workers (many of
them Italians), ear-splitting
deutschen Sprache nur. Ich
bin kein Deutscher, wohl ist
mir darum.
I am the son of the German
language. But I am no Ger-
"Things have not im- man and I am glad of that.
proved, rather gotten worse.
The German/Austrian
During the day I have to lug exile was, in reality, a
and cut a wretched amount displaced person. Pfan-
. . . I am now here in my ner's work begins and
fourth year. Dull, monoton- ends on this note. And
ous days, the only consola- while the value of the
tion derived from music and book lies primarily in the
literature.
fact that it is an addition
"I have just finished a to the ever-growing body
long manuscript, an ac- of Holocaust literature
count of my factory . and provides for us an
years, of the clash be- understanding of the
tween the spiritual and German and Austrian
the physical realms. I experience, it has yet an-
have not treated it casu- other, more immediate,
value:
ally."
noise
from
cutting
machines, heat, sweat .. .
Now I have been working
there already for more than
two years.
Music and literature,
German culture and lan-
guage "functioned as a sub-
stitute for their (the exile
authors') lost homelands."
German was their only buf-
fer in an environment
which threatened to oblit-
erate their sense of self. The
preservation of their Ian=
guage became an almost
sacred raison d'etre and was
the cause around which the
exile community rallied.
Pfanner recognizes this
psychological need and
shares with us moving ex-
cerpts from two sonnets by
Ernst Waldinger. The first
is from "An -die Seutsche
Sprache in der Zeit der
Greuel" (To the German
Language during the Times
of the Atrocities):
Solange wir die Treue dir
nicht brechen Sind ouch im
neuen Land wir unverwaist.
As long as we remain faith-
ful to you, We shall not be-
come orphaned in the new.
country.
The second sonnet distin-
guishes between love for the
German language and any
love for Hitler's Germany:
Ich bin ein Sohn der
Most refugees to this
country duing the past two
decades share a socio-
economic profile similar to
that of the German Jew. An
understanding of that ex-
perience helps us to deal
with the problems of more
recent emigres; the Soviet
Jews have been, of course,
subjects for most pressing
concern. But Pfanner's
montage has an additional
and even more universal
message. In an era of rapid
social change, such as that
in which we live, many per-
sons find themselves "dis-
placed," be it in their jobs, in
their families, or in their
communities; their sense of
alienation is not all that
different from that of Hit-
ler's exile community.
How these terribly articu-
late survivors handled the
problem is instructive,
therefore, to members of our
global village at century's
end.
TAU Law Halls
TEL AVIV — A hall of
human rights and a hall of
human justice have been
opened at the Faculty of
Law at Tel Aviv University.
A Champion of Freedom
This statue of Mordecai Anilewicz, leader of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, stands at Kibutz Yad
Mordecai in Israel.