opinions & letters
I Can’t Forget
What the Nazis Did
P Rabbi Michael Meyerstein
icture a cute-looking, 6½-year-old girl with curly
braided hair. She is standing on a sidewalk, on
a cold, dreary day in Leipzig, Germany, together
with her parents and my wife and me. My granddaughter
Vivi is staring intently at a 75-year-old worker, kneeling
on the ground. He is digging a hole through the pavers to
install several 4” x 4” brass plaques mounted on cement
cubes — memorials to relatives who perished at the
hands of the Nazis more than 80 years ago.

In February, we traveled 9,500 miles round-trip to
dedicate 12 Stolpersteine plaques in memory of relatives I
never knew or even knew I had. They were just some of my
late father’s aunts, uncles and cousins who were murdered
in the Holocaust, and we regarded the ceremony as a
pseudo-levaya, a quasi-funeral that would be the fi nal act
of respect and farewell Hitler had denied my relatives.

I couldn’t have imagined, 60 years earlier when I
fi rst visited Germany, that I would ever return in a
spirit approaching forgiveness, or that I’d feel a deep
connection to a country that was once synonymous with
brutality, pain, humiliation and suff ering.

Stolpersteine, a German word meaning “stumbling
block,” refers to a design brilliantly conceived by the
non-Jewish German artist Gunter Demnig in the early
1990s. Installed in front of the homes where innocent
Jewish victims last freely lived, the brass plaques simply
and artistically memorialize, honor and personalize those
brutally persecuted. On each plaque are engraved the
victim’s name, dates of birth and death. As Demnig once
said, “A person is only forgotten when his or her name
is forgotten.” Hence, 100,000 of his plaques throughout
Europe remind us that Jews are part of a shared history,
and a common memory.

Whether consciously or not, the “stumbling pedestrian”
instantly recalls the extraordinary evil unleashed by
ordinary people, on once vibrant Jewish communities,
and the terrorized Jewish neighbors who lived within
April 13 Poll Results
them. This evil was driven by a blind loyalty to a
gratuitous hatred of “the other,” meaning non-Aryans.

Who were these relatives I recently memorialized?
Recently uncovered documents suggest my relatives
were all decent, law-abiding citizens who contributed
to Leipzig’s economy, enriched its cultural life and
strengthened its social fabric. Sadly, being model citizens
did not spare them from torturous fates.

One of those relatives, Elfriede Meyerstein, my paternal
grandfather’s sister, was born Feb. 27, 1871, in Breslau. At
20, she came to Leipzig where her husband Menny ran
a textile trading company with his family. They lived at
the same address for many years. By 1931, after Menny’s
death, she lived with her daughter Käthe Huth.

The Nazis, once in power, immediately expropriated
Elfriede’s assets, comprising foreign stocks meticulously
accumulated by Menny. The Nazi “Ordinance on the
Registration of Jewish Assets” of April 26, 1938, forced
her to surrender those securities to the state. In 1939,
shortly after Kristallnacht on Nov. 9-10, 1938, the Nazis
collected a “reimbursement tax” as “atonement,” from
Elfriede and the rest of Germany’s Jewish community.

Just prior to her Sept. 19, 1942 deportation to
Theresienstadt at age 71, Elfriede was forced to sign
a “home purchase agreement,” the Nazis’ fi nal act
of expropriation. The document falsely and cynically
promised her a “retirement home,” with free lifetime
accommodation, food and medical care, but paid for
by her, in advance. The Reich Security Main offi ce
confi scated 65,000 Reichsmarks ($300,000 in today’s
currency). Her “retirement home” was in a ghetto with
disastrous hygienic conditions, starvation and no medical
care. Elfriede died one month later.

After considerable soul-searching and three visits
to Germany, spaced over 60 years, my attitudes and
feelings today, vis a vis Germany and its citizens, are
dramatically diff erent from when I fi rst visited in 1966.

Then, I came with unprocessed emotional baggage. In
1939, my father, Ralph Meyerstein, fl ed Dusseldorf and
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my mother, Cecily Geyer, fl ed Dresden, both for England.

My paternal grandparents, Alfred and Meta Meyerstein,
were deported from Dusseldorf on Nov. 8, 1941, to Minsk,
where they were killed. My maternal grandmother, Salcia,
was deported to Riga in January 1942; in November 1943
she was sent to Auschwitz and murdered.

My parents met in Ware, a small town north of London,
where some German Jews took refuge. They moved
to London where they married during the Blitz, and we
came to the United States in December 1947.

As an only child, I shouldered much of my parents’ guilt
over abandoning their parents, even though it was their
parents who, thankfully, had urged them to fl ee Germany.

When retelling their survival story, my eyes still well up
with tears, revealing a lifetime of trauma I’ve absorbed
on their behalf. That fi rst visit felt almost adversarial in
tone. It was I, representing my parents’ personal losses
and those of the Jewish people, versus Germany and
Germans. I reacted viscerally to hearing guttural Deutsch
See Can't Forget, page 15
letters A Victory for Freedom of Speech
It seems that Jonathan Tobin believes in two things (“A
Resistance Coup Just Defeated Israeli Democracy,”
March 30). One is that a person should only be per-
mitted to express his/her opinion on Election Day
under the cover of curtains. Another is that lawmak-
ers should have unlimited power.

It’s important to know that it was the German
Parliament that gave Hitler absolute power.

What if the lawmakers in the United States had
absolute power? Schools could be segregated. States
could prohibit interracial and same-sex marriage.

Lawmakers could restrict what’s being sent over the
internet. Schools could limit freedom of speech.

In Israel, people exercised their freedom of speech.

Conservatives could have had counter-demonstra-
tions but chose not to do so.

What happened in Israel is a victory for freedom of
speech and the preservation of democracy. ■
Charles Wolfsfeld, Philadelphia
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