MAY 2 • 2024 | 41

cise, in the offices where three physicians 
completed assessment forms. Two plus signs 
would doom the “useless eater.
” 
Nothing better expresses for me the 
moral distance Germany has traveled since 
those dark days than the association of a 
school devoted to children, once deemed 
expendable by the Nazi state, with markers 
acknowledging the fate of Jews who had 
been viewed as similarly superfluous. “We 
feel a responsibility for these stones,
” the 
school’s director had said, and the partici-
pation of his students exhibited the depth of 
that commitment. Those children, a teacher 
told me, had raised vegetables in a nearby 
garden allotment and secured the sunflow-
ers and other blooms by exchanging pro-
duce for the more delicate offerings.
Although Dieter had said a few words 
early on, he remained mostly in the back-
ground until the ceremony neared its end. 
With a nod to his violinist, he led the group 
in the song he had mentioned at the café: 
“Sag mir, vo die Blumen sind.
” A few bars 
were enough to purge any thoughts of 
Marlene Dietrich in a top hat. They were 
singing Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the 

Flowers Gone?” On a trip filled with 
coincidences, happenstance and unex-
pected connections, the great chanteuse 
had provided yet another. During a tour 
of Israel in the early 1960s Dietrich per-
formed the German version of Seeger’s 
song to much acclaim. She was the first 
singer allowed to perform there in the 
language of Wagner and Hitler.
To hear the haunting refrain “wann 
wire man je verstehen” (“when will 
they ever learn”) rising up from 
Mendelssohnstrae — by that partic-
ular group of singers, at that particular 
moment, in that particular setting — 
helped me to better appreciate Dieter 
Sander’s inspired compassion. This 
indeed is how it should be done, I 
thought, as the crowd offered itself some 
well-deserved applause.

MODERN-DAY HORRORS
Just over a year later I received an 
email from Dieter, with the subject line 
“Rachel Horowicz Mendelssohnstr” 
and an ominous brief note: “Maybe 
you remember Rachel. You met her in 
Mendelssohnstrasse. What a horrible 
story, what a horrible war!” At the bot-
tom was a link to an Instagram video. I 
clicked, immediately recognized Rachel’s 
face, and girded myself for the worst. I 
clicked again — then she started speaking to 
the camera.
Rachel said she was from Kibutz Kfar Aza, 
near the border with Gaza. When Hamas 
terrorists entered her home on the morning 
of Oct. 7, her daughter, who had also attend-
ed the stolpersteine ceremony, had had the 
presence of mind to alert her mother to be 
quiet. Along with the daughter’s boyfriend, 
they huddled in their shelter, covered in 
blankets.
Rachel then noted that she had overseen 
security for the kibbutz and that from under 
a blanket she continued to send and receive 
messages. “I was just focusing on trying to 
save people,
” she says in a weary voice. “Just 
focusing on what to do in the best way.
” She 
admitted they were lucky that the terrorists 
had not invaded their shelter, though she 
could not say for how long they waited for 
rescue. Eventually, the IDF came. 
More than 50 from her community were 
murdered and 17 taken hostage. In the zone 
for young couples and families, the losses 

were especially horrific. “One child had had 
his whole body burned,
” recalled ZAKA vol-
unteer Simcha Greineman, “but there was 
a knife stuck in his head from side to side.
” 
In another burned-out house, Greineman 
described finding five dead members of a 
family “standing in a circle, hugging each 
other.
”
The members of Kfar Aza had often 
employed Palestinians from Gaza and driv-
en others to medical appointments in Israel. 
Some of them are believed to have passed on 
details about the kibbutz to Hamas.
Rachel says in the video that she had 
received help. A neighbor of her sister Orna 
gave the family a house to live in, instilling 
a sense of hope that “we can still stay as a 
union, as a nation together,
” that maybe 
“something good will come out of it.
” Her 
spirit is indeed inspiring, as is her embrace 
of the hope, the hatikvah of Israel’s national 
anthem.
But as November turned to December, I 
found myself showing a clip from Claude 
Lanzmann’s Shoah to students in a course on 
the Holocaust. Filip Müller, one of the few 
Sonderkommando at Auschwitz to survive, 
recounts witnessing in Crematorium II the 
gassing of several thousand from the Czech 
family camp in March 1944: “
And sudden-
ly I heard, like a choir … singing spread 
through the undressing room … And then 
it became clear they were singing the Czech 
national anthem and … the ‘Hatikvah.
”’
The hope I felt for the future 
on that September day in 2022 at 
Mendelssohnstrae now feels far away. The 
children of the Helene-Haeusler-Schule may 
have sung waren wire man je verstechen, but 
the words now seem too innocent, beyond 
reach. And watching Rachel’s testimony con-
firms for me that, even after eight decades, 
the Holocaust remains not so long ago, not 
so far away. 
Her mother Charlotte (Lotti) had survived 
by being hidden with a Catholic family in a 
small Belgian village. Lotti’s mother, Gitla, 
had survived Auschwitz. Yet in the third 
decade of the 21st century, Gitla’s grand-
daughter and great-granddaughter were 
hiding in their home, awaiting murderers 
looking for the next Jew. 

Robert Franciosi is associate professor of English and 

Honors at Grand Valley State University. He is editor of 

Good Morning: A Holocaust Memoir.

The author’s wife, Jo Ellyn Clarey, and Dieter 
Sander.

