LITMIR.BIZ

      Located southeast of Frankfurt in the Main Valley, the village of Kleinheubach was one of the few Protestant enclaves in an otherwise Catholic region of northern Bavaria. Many of the family names still have Huguenot origins: Dauphin, Zink, Willared. In the early 1930s, news in the modern sense, as in Tab, was still in the process of being invented. Few villagers had enough money to buy the newspapers that existed. And after Hitler's rise to power, the press was anything but free and objective. The village was roused out of its rural slumber when the wealthier families acquired a radio, or Volksempfanger, the so-called people's receiver. Promoted by the Nazis, it was sold at low cost so that villagers could begin to partake in the events of the wider world —operettas by Franz Lehar from Vienna, soccer matches from Rome and Amsterdam, Hitler's speeches from Berlin, and Nazi propaganda about Germany's noble past and the murderous designs of its enemies.

      During Hitler s speeches, village activities almost came to a stop, as if by command of an invisible wand. Scurrying home through the deserted streets, one could hear the Fiihrer's staccato voice blasting out through open windows here and there or even through the walls of some houses. His voice seemed to be everywhere while families hovered around their radios listening to heroic stories of World War I and ominous assertions about outsiders ready to destroy the “German soul.” One place villagers might read about Nazi Party opinions was in Der Sturmer, a weekly that was posted publicly in a vitrine on a wall on Main Street. Everyone knew the reputation of its editor, Julius Streicher, the quintessential Nazi anti-Semite. Printed in Nuremberg, the paper was full of venomous propaganda against the Jews.

      Hitler had come to power on January 30, 1933, and in the fall of that year my father moved my mother and me from San Francisco back to Kleinheubach. Though a German citizen, in California my father had worked as a professional violinist in Bay Area movie theater orchestras. But the depression was in progress and the talkies had made theater orchestras obsolete. I was three years old, and as my father once explained, he returned to Germany, not to become a Nazi, but to feed his wife and son. Other family stories told of how he was moved by letters he received in California from family and friends that extolled the bright future being shaped for all Germans ready to participate in the Nazi movement.

      By the time we arrived in Germany, the Ermächtigungsgesetz (law of empowerment) had put the power of the German state into the hands of Adolf Hitler, all opposition parties had been forbidden, all unions had been disbanded, all non-Aryan bureaucrats had been fired, and Jewish professional activity had been severely curtailed. Moreover, the first concentration camps had been erected in Dachau and Oranienburg.

      In that year, 1933, Kleinheubach had 48 Jewish citizens—23 men and 25 women—at least 4 of whom were sent to the Dachau concentration camp.¹ Three of them, Adolf Sichel, The-odor Weil, and Ernst Sichel, who was nicknamed “Judenernst,” were arested together in March and jailed. Without a trial or sentencing, they were sent to Dachau. Fritz Sichel was arrested and sent to Dachau in a separate action in May. He was released toward the end of 1935 and in 1937 was able to emigrate to America. Ernst Sichel was released after sixteen months and later emigrated to Argentina. Theodor Weil was imprisoned for six years before his release and emigration to the United States in 1939. Adolf Sichel was also released but never made it out of Germany; in 1942 he met his death in the concentration camp at Maydanek, Poland. As I grew up during the next nine years, until April 23, 1942, when the last 3 Jews were deported to extermination camps, 8 Jews died of natural causes and were buried in the Jewish cemetery, 16 moved elsewhere in Germany between 1935 and 1941, and 19 managed to emigrate to Palestine, the United States, Venezuela, and Argentina. The fates of 2 are not in the record.²

      The year I turned five, the Nuremberg Laws forbade Christian-Jewish marriages and Jews lost their German citizenship. On our arrival in Kleinheubach, we moved in with my paternal grandparents and my father found his first job playing the piano in a hotel. Soon he landed a better job working for the Nazi Party. A Nazi who worked for the DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the worker's wing of the NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers' Party) had learned of his musical talent and asked him to work in the KDF (Kraft durch Freude, or Power through Joy), a division of the DAF involved in organizing social events and vacations for workers to wean them from socialist leanings and bind them to the Nazi Party. My father was eager for a better job, and when this Nazi bureaucrat learned that my father was not a Nazi Party member because he had recently returned from America, he arranged to take him in retroactive to March 1933, a date that increased my father's seniority. Germans who had joined the Nazi Party before Hitler came to power enjoyed enhanced status as the “best,” most reliable Nazis. This elite of so-called Alte Kämpfer (old warriors) also generally enjoyed the greatest prestige within the party.

      Whereas Orthodox Judaism structured the everyday life of Bernat Rosner's family, politics had a major impact on mine. The adults in our house were always in an uproar over faraway events, village rumors, and even opinions expressed within the narrow family circle. My family was politically split. Frequent verbal altercations were led by Uncle Ernst, a convinced communist, on one side, and by my father, on the other. My grandfather, a conservative who still had loyalties to the monarchy, insisted that the fights be kept zwischen den vier Wänden (within the four walls) —a frequently used phrase. Even someone as talkative as I was as a child quickly learned to Mund halten (keep quiet) when it came to political opinions outside the confines of our home.

      One of my earliest memories of family life involved these heated arguments among rival brothers. If the subject wasn't politics, they competed over who could more quickly identify the composers of the music broadcast on our newly acquired radio. My youngest uncle, the quiet and retiring Ludwig, who usually shied away from the political fights, used to win these music contests. Although the political split in the family was severe, all the adults agreed with the Nazis about the “dark days” of unemployment and cultural decadence in Weimar Germany. I remember pamphlets in the house critical not only of the high crime rate of the Weimar Republic but also of its “degenerate” art. The Tubach family members were without exception anti-modernist defenders of classical art and music (hohe Kunst) and felt threatened by modern trends. I recall my grandfather Tubach's pun on the name of the composer Hindemith: “Hindemith, her damit, weg damit,” which meant roughly, “Hindemith, take him and throw him away.”

      Regardless of the nature of the disputes or alliances that formed in the verbal trenches, my grandmother, who raised me after the death of my mother, kept everyone fed—primarily on my grandfather's meager World War I invalid's pension. During the depression that lasted into the mid-1930s, my uncles and my father added whatever else they could bring home from their various jobs to this steady, if small, source of income. As an employee of the

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