My Dear Ones: One Family and the Final Solution - Jonathan Wittenberg

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found in the old trunk were a number of telephone bills, but they carried no itemised list of calls or of the dates on which they were put through, so they were sadly of no use in discovering whether she still had a network of relatives and friends in the city. She may also have been aware that the phones were probably tapped and would have been cautious of sharing news over the telephone on such a delicate subject as emigration. The text of a telegram testified to her deep anxiety: ‘Palästina-Amt total versagt. Hilfe dringend gebraucht’ (‘the Palestine Office has let us down completely. Help urgently needed’). But the message wasn’t dated and was probably not her first, immediate response; it was sent by her and Sophie, her eldest daughter, together, and Sophie didn’t travel from Czechoslovakia to join her mother in Berlin until a few weeks later.

      Of her six children, three had already fled Germany. Alfred, the youngest, was the first to leave, in 1933; Wally had followed him to Palestine in 1937. Ella, my grandmother, went later that same year. My grandfather, Robert, owned a timber mill in Rawitsch, a small town near Breslau. The city was the centre of one of the most swiftly Nazified regions in Germany and had a particularly vicious local leader. Tipped off by a German official that he was high on the Gestapo’s list, Robert took his family and fled the city that same night. ‘We laid the table as if we were planning to return very soon and packed just one small bag each so that nobody would be suspicious. Then we left for ever,’ my father recalled. He put the place so far behind him emotionally as well, at least at a conscious level, that he never, to the best of my memory, even mentioned to his children the address at which he had lived.

      Regina’s other three children were still in Europe. Sophie had married and stayed in Holleschau, the small Moravian town where her father had served as rabbi for twenty years. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the First World War it became part of Czechoslovakia and was renamed Holešov. Trude lived in Poznań, the second of Jacob Freimann’s major rabbinical positions. Ernst, the only other son, a doctor in Frankfurt-am-Main, was closest in distance to Berlin. But, thanks to the Gestapo, he was in no position to help his mother. In fact, Regina, a pious and selfless woman whose first thoughts were always for her family, was almost certainly much more worried for Ernst and his wife and children than she was about herself.

      More than anyone, though, Frau Dr Regina Freimann, as she was formally addressed on the envelopes of the letters, must have missed the presence of her husband. It was less than twelve months since he had died, suddenly, on 23 December of the previous year, while they were travelling to celebrate Sophie’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in Czechoslovakia. He had been suffering from high blood pressure for a number of years and had already experienced several strokes. He was taken ill while on the train and died in the early hours of the following day in a hotel in the mountain resort of Spindlermühle.

      A separate bundle inside the bag in the trunk contained letters and receipts pertaining to his funeral. Throughout 1938 Regina naturally remained preoccupied not only with the emotional but also with the practical aftermath of her husband’s death. She had carefully kept all the relevant papers. A bill for two night-time visits showed that the local physician, Dr Franz Kindler, had twice been in attendance. There had evidently been nothing he could do to save the ailing rabbi’s life. It may indeed have been a mercy that death came swiftly. A quote from Gustav Fischer’s funeral services, based in Hohenelbe in the mountains of northern Czechoslovakia, itemised the expenses involved in the collection and transportation of the body, including the price of the coffin, the cost of procuring essential documentation, and smaller amounts for sundry telephone calls and telegrams. There were bills and receipts from the Burial Society and the Jewish Community of Holleschau, who provided the plot in the cemetery and supervised the actual funeral. A separate invoice from Leo Klein of the same town showed that there had been five Sterbe-Wäscher (washers of the dead), members of the Sacred Society privileged with the task of conducting the ritual preparation of the body and dressing it in the plain white linen vestments in which Jews are traditionally buried. A further list gave the costs of these garments, as well as of the sheets in which the body was cleaned and dried.

      On a more mundane level, there were bills from the hotel in Spindlermühle, as well as from the establishment where they later stayed in Holleschau itself. The former listed every item separately: cups of coffee and tea, even a glass of cognac, no doubt badly needed, as well as linens, and four candles, probably for placing by the head of the dead man as Jewish tradition required. A receipt from the Prager Tagblatt (the Prague Daily) dated 30 December indicated that the family must have listed their loss in the then equivalent of its ‘hatched, matched and dispatched’ column. Strikingly, the bill for 400 thank-you cards and envelopes was dated earlier, 28 December. Overwhelmed by the numerous letters of condolence with which they would have been inundated, the family must have turned their attention quickly to how they would manage to acknowledge them all. Each major expense was carefully recorded by Josef Redlich in a letter he later sent to his wife Sophie, who had followed her mother back to Berlin after the period of ritual mourning was over. It was on account of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary that everyone had gathered in Moravia. But instead of celebrating, they, as the wealthiest members, seem to have marked the occasion by defraying the costs of this family tragedy. ‘My dear Sopherl,’ he wrote, before proceeding to detail the various amounts including both those for which he had receipts and those for which no acknowledgement could normally be expected. One of the more substantial items was the distribution of 400 kroner to the local poor, prior to the commencement of the funeral service.

      It had been Rabbi Freimann’s wish that he be buried according to traditional rites and without undue fuss in the Jewish cemetery closest to the place where he died. In the event, he was interred in Holleschau, which probably wasn’t the nearest orthodox burial ground but lay close enough to Spindlermühle and recommended itself both because it had been the seat of his longest rabbinical incumbency and because his daughter and son-in-law still lived there and could take care of the practical arrangements and later look after the grave. At any event, his body was not taken back to Berlin; had he died there he would surely have been laid to rest in the Sonderfeld, the special section of the vast Weissensee cemetery. It was there, amid the elaborate memorial chambers, that some hundreds of Jews, the starving and spectre-like living dead, managed to conceal themselves from the Nazis among the tombs and mausoleaums of the blessed dead in their eternal peace.

      Rabbi Freimann was laid to rest in Holleschau’s Jewish cemetery on 26 December 1937, on a freezing winter’s day, next but one to the grave of Rabbi Shabbetai Hacohen, known after his initials as the Shach, the illustrious commentator to the key sixteenth-century code of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch, and also a former leader of the local community, who had been buried there in 1663. One of Rabbi Freimann’s most important rabbinical tasks had been to deliver a learned lecture each year on the anniversary of the Shach’s death, in which he shared the latter’s teachings with the many scholars who came to visit his tomb. The field, with its tall gravestones and old funeral hall decorated with murals, remains undisturbed to this day.

      Many people from all around the world attended the funeral of Rabbi Freimann, that is, those who were able to get to Holleschau. The ceremony reflected the great love and high esteem in which this towering figure was held … The practice of all the traditional rites by the Chevra Kaddisha of Berlin, as well as the active participation of many rabbinical figures from our city, ensured that the parting from our teacher was conducted with due simplicity and ceremony.2

      ‘Those who were able to get to Holleschau’ included neither Rabbi Freimann’s older son Ernst, to whom the Nazis refused permission to leave Germany, nor his younger son Alfred, who observed the traditional mourning rites in Palestine together with the two of his sisters who by now also lived there. Regina would have been comforted by her other daughters, Trude and Sophie. Photographs shown to me by my father portrayed a long procession of men and women dressed in thick black coats and hats following the coffin on foot through the deep snow.

      Ernst and his wife Eva wrote from Frankfurt:

      It’s terribly hard that we’re not able to be with you. I had always believed that whatever happened we would be able to be together at once, but now there are mountains in between. Last time I parted from you, dear Mama, your heart was so heavy.

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