Overview
Rita Goldberg recounts the extraordinary story of her mother, Hilde Jacobsthal, a close friend of Anne Frank’s family who was fifteen when the Nazis invaded Holland. After the arrest of her parents in 1943, Hilde fled to Belgium, living out the war years in an extraordinary set of circumstances—first among the Resistance, and then at Bergen-Belsen after its liberation. In the words of The Guardian, the story is “worthy of a film script.”
As astonishing as Hilde’s story is, Rita herself emerges as the central character in this utterly unique memoir. Proud of her mother and yet struggling to forge an identity in the shadow of such heroic accomplishments—not to mention her family’s close relationship to the iconic Frank family—Goldberg offers an unflinching look at the struggles faced by children and grandchildren whose own lives are haunted by historic tragedy.
Motherland is the culmination of a lifetime of reflection and a decade of research. It is an epic story of survival, adventure, and new life.
“A double memoir that braids her parents’ story with her own, and succeeds in articulating a difficult truth.” —The Economist
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620970744 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Press, The |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 386 |
| Sales rank: | 647,433 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Berlin
Hilde had lived in Amsterdam since the age of four and considered herself Dutch. But she and Jo had been born in Berlin. Their parents, Walter and Betty, were German Jews who had made their way to Holland in 1929, largely for economic reasons and well before the larger migrations after 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and Anne Frank's family arrived in Amsterdam. To Hilde as a child, her Berlin life had been miraculously full of music and play. Betty was one of four Littauer sisters, all of whom were working women and only two of whom married. With the help of a well-to-do uncle based in Berlin who had brought them to live in the city for their schooling, they had been unusually well-educated for the time. They had some training in foreign languages and literatures, and loved music.
These aunts appeared at all the children's birthday parties with presents, treats and songs, and they came along on summer vacations at Travemünde on the Baltic Coast. Though the sisters themselves came from a little village called Polajewo, then in the German province of Posen, now part of Poland, and were probably considered Ostjuden – Polish Jews – by the longer-established Jewish citizens of Berlin, they were German-speaking. (Yiddish was déclassé in those circles before the war.) They thought of themselves as Berliners, with all the attendant snobberies that entailed. They came of age when Berlin was one of the brightest artistic capitals in the world, during the last days of the reign of Wilhelm II and then under the short-lived Weimar Republic. They were full participants in the life of the city and were formed by its modernity. Hilde adored their liveliness and sense of fun and remembers many of her infant adventures in their company.
Her father, Walter Jacobsthal, was as playful as the aunts, only much taller. Betty had met him just before World War I at the ready-to-wear firm where they both worked, she as a secretary and he as a salesman. Betty, like her children after her, learned languages easily. She was an excellent organizer, and had made herself indispensable in the business. Walter traveled abroad six months of the year and didn't come to the office very often when he was in Berlin, so Betty hadn't encountered him before, despite having been at the firm for some time.
Walter was a hard man to miss. He stood six foot six, with a full head of shining black hair swept back from a dramatic forehead. He had an arched nose, a long, dimpled chin, big ears, and a small face. Women liked him for his elegance and his humor. He was high-spirited and fun to be around: my grandmother Betty liked to tell Hilde and Jo about the time he jumped over the back of an unoccupied seat at the opera to sit next to her.
A precocious sense of responsibility had been forced upon him when his father died suddenly at the age of forty-eight. At that time, Walter was sixteen and about to launch on his training as a painter. His talent had already been noticed by Max Liebermann, the pre-eminent German painter of the period, who had remarked upon a picture of Walter's at an exhibition of work by local high school students. Liebermann offered to teach the boy himself. But his father's death ended all that. Walter went to work to support his mother, older sister and younger brother.
The family had been well off at first. Walter's father had owned a textile firm and had lived rather grandly, but the money gave out soon after his death. Walter dissolved the family business and joined the same company where Betty had made herself so useful.
From the sound of it, the young couple bumped into each other at the events they both loved as much by accident as by design. Neither was a stay-at-home in that worldly city. Betty was used to being independent and had her three sisters – Paula, Herta and Jenny – for company, and Walter was often pressed into the role of escort to his formidable mother, Ida. Despite the diabetes that eventually killed her, Ida was an active and dominating woman. When the children arrived, she became Grosse Oma, Big Grandma, to distinguish her from the Littauer grandmother, tiny Ottilie. Under her severe skirts, Ida must have had the high waist and long legs of my grandfather, mother and uncle.
Despite Ida's unwavering opinion that a young man of Walter's standing could do a lot better, Walter proposed to Betty soon after they met and was joyfully accepted. By then there were bigger obstacles ahead than the disapproval of a prospective mother-in-law. In August 1914, war had broken out after the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, and Walter was soon drafted. He told Betty that he considered himself engaged to her, but that it would be rash to marry when he might be killed at any moment. She would be free to release herself from her promise to him during their separation, and he hoped she would marry another man if he didn't come back.
Walter remained in Flanders, sometimes in France, sometimes in Belgium, for the duration of the war, almost five years. The anti-Semitism which German Jews took for granted in those days meant, according to my mother, that he was assigned to an all-Jewish brigade, where "real" Germans wouldn't have to rub up against Jewish soldiers in battle. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant, an unusual honor for a Jewish soldier, but Betty knew that lieutenants led the charges and were the first killed. Walter was wounded, spent months in field hospitals and convalescent homes, and was returned to the trenches. When a house exploded and collapsed on him during a bombing raid, his left eardrum shattered and he was finally injured enough to be discharged, but by then the war had ended.
Betty, on her own in Berlin, lived in a state of torment. She had never taken life lightly, despite her ready laugh. Underneath, there was a dark anxiety about the rightness of things. She feared that her happiness would be snatched away before she had tasted it, that terrible things would happen, and that Walter's witty letters, complete with his drawings of life in the trenches and hospitals, would one day arrive to tease her when her fiancé already lay dead in the Belgian mud.
She tried to keep her fears at bay by working harder than ever. After she left her job at the office, with its greater demands and longer hours, she took to visiting her future sister-in-law, Walter's older sister Lucie, who had a baby, Marion. As food grew scarcer, the task of motherhood became more and more demanding. Betty traveled across the city to help Lucie, and often went out into the countryside to scrounge and barter for food. The contacts she established then helped her through the war and through the hungry 1920s, when her own small children accompanied her. Many years later, after the next war had brought Marion to Leeds in England, she told Hilde that she owed her survival to Betty.
Betty talked freely to her children about the war years when they were growing up, but she emphasized the public stories of national madness and of general suffering. She hinted at an inner darkness much later, when my mother was an adolescent old enough to understand. Once, in the mid1930s, there was a mysterious solo trip to Arosa, a mountain resort in Switzerland. My mother speculates that this was a sort of emergency, and that Betty needed the break. Because their business didn't allow both of them to go away at once, Walter arranged the holiday for his wife. Did he want her out of the way because another woman had appeared on the scene? He didn't seem the type, nor did he need to use such a device, since he traveled such a lot. I suspect that depression, the shadow on my grandmother's happiness all her life, almost got her that time. She also suffered from the migraine that she passed on to my mother and to me, and I feel how she was harried by those vulnerabilities. She had her own front during the war, and there she fought without companionship as best she could.
Walter, on the other hand, enjoyed the company of his fellow soldiers, although he was frequently in combat. In a handful of photographs, he clowns with the shortest man in his regiment, who pretends to tower over my seated grandfather. I ask my mother if he ever talked about the war, and if he suffered from shell-shock or nightmares. She says that he didn't talk much about his experiences, nor were there lasting effects, at least any a small child might notice. He did tell the children that books by Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, were an accurate rendering of trench warfare, and he particularly liked Remarque's Drei Kameraden (Three Comrades). The novel is dark and pessimistic, full of the poverty and broken hopes of the young veterans at its center. Clearly there was much about Walter that his young daughter didn't see. Nonetheless, he had gotten along so well with the Belgian family upon whom he had been quartered that they corresponded for some years after the war. I react with disbelief to this news. Surely she must be romanticizing him, I tell her. He was the enemy, in an army of occupation. But my mother is adamant, insisting that she saw the letters in her girlhood. I try to reconstruct a man charming enough to befriend the people he was invading, and sturdy enough to be a good soldier, one who could survive four years of warfare. Did he ever kill anyone, I wonder? He must have, in four years. "He was at Ypres and Verdun," my mother says, "and I think at the Battle of the Marne too."
I look at the pictures again. Walter stands in a mock-heroic pose, arms folded across his chest, alongside Captain Rosenbaum, his superior officer. The men wear the tight, uncomfortable-looking tunic of the Kaiser's army, and tall tight boots, but they look like civilians all the same. "This is ridiculous," they seem to be thinking. Such thoughts don't make good soldiers; and all soldiers must transform themselves back into good civilians when the war is over. My grandfather seems genuinely to have managed the feat of being valiant in war and peaceable afterward, though his inner wounds must have made him suffer. He came back in 1919 with a medal, the Iron Cross First Class, and with an affection for the Kaiser which persisted long after the defeat. When Walter moved his family to Holland, where Kaiser Wilhelm had lived in exile after the war, he took the children to see the former Emperor's residence at Doorn. It was 1929, and my mother was four years old. She remembers it because they had to stand very still and be respectful.
In the end, Betty's misgivings about Walter were unfounded. He came back a war hero, only slightly damaged by his hearing loss. On August 7, 1919, the newly returned Walter Jacobsthal, of the Mosaic religion, married Betty Littauer of the Mosaic religion in a ceremony conducted, my mother was always told, by the leading Reform rabbi of Berlin (most likely Leo Baeck). Walter was twenty-nine; Betty was twenty-seven.
CHAPTER 2Berlin and Amsterdam
My mother says that her unusual talent for remembering relies on song. If she thinks hard, a song associated with a certain place or person will come back to her, and once she has the melody, she has the image as well. It has always been a joke in our family. "I know a song about that," she used to say, as we teenagers rolled our eyes. I admit with disbelief that I'm teased now for the same remark.
If her parents were singing in the ten years between 1919, when they married, and 1929, when they left Berlin for Amsterdam, it must have been to keep their spirits up, for that postwar period was full of hardship and turbulence. Revolution broke out immediately after the war, often with open street battles in the cities, especially in Munich, Berlin and such port cities as Kiel. Germany suffered from the reparations exacted as punishment through the Versailles Treaty by the victorious Allies. Food shortages and inflation led to political unrest, and would contribute eventually to the downfall of the short-lived Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler in 1933.
In the photographs from the period, my grandmother Betty looks plump and tired, and generally older than her chronological age. My mother Hilde, born in 1925, looks too serious for a little girl, but Jo, born in 1921, seems fully at ease. I recognize his smile from those early photographs, but Hilde, with whom I associate a similar broad and ready grin, looks worried, rather like her mother. Perhaps Hilde had picked up some of the anxiety of those difficult years. Or perhaps her reserve had something to do with her older brother, who by all accounts was a handful.
My mother says that Jo was her parents' golden boy, handsome and temperamental. Both children were considered frail, after their precarious arrival during the hungry years of the 1920s. Jo got his own bread ration upon his birth in 1921, and the children were put on fattening diets to supplement the meager provisions meted out briefly by the state. Jo had to drink a pint of cream a day, despite the expense, and my mother remembers the ghastly concoctions they were required to swallow, including a cod liver oil for children which, though flavored with vanilla or orange, didn't fool them for a minute. These supplements were paid for by the garment workers' union, to which both parents belonged, but food was still scarce and expensive.
In the extended family of aunts and parents, there was constant discussion of the children's thinness. My grandmother got special permission from Jo's school for Hilde to join the class for free milk every morning, probably because she had rickets in the first few years of her life. Once or twice during the winter, wearing only their underpants and a pair of sunglasses, the Jacobsthal children had ultraviolet treatments administered by the family doctor, who lived conveniently in the apartment upstairs.
Betty took Hilde along on her expeditions into the countryside, lugging suitcases full of worthless postwar currency to pay for the fruits and vegetables they bought from farmers. The coins alone weighed a lot, being made of rough earthenware. Hilde, a city toddler, saw her first potatoes, radishes and peas growing in the ground. Later, she "helped" her mother prepare the vegetables on the balcony of their apartment at Helgoländer Ufer 5, on the banks of the river Spree that runs through the center of Berlin. Those moments, she says, were especially sweet. They ate a number of the beans or peas before they ever reached a cooking pot, and chatted, and her mother held her close.
Children were especially valued in those austere days, when everyone was weakened by years of starvation, or near-starvation. There had been miscarriages before Jo, and there were more between the children. Betty counted herself lucky that she became a mother at all: there were many fertility problems after the first war among women lucky enough to marry. Serious health problems became real crises in those days before antibiotics. My mother still remembers seven-year-old Jo's infection after he stepped on a needle, which had to be removed surgically. Jo got what was known as blood poisoning and spent many weeks recovering, keeping his foot elevated and being coaxed to eat.
Still, my mother remembers the children's songs from that period in the context of a very happy early childhood. Her mother and aunts taught her the art of celebration, as my sisters and I learned it from her. On her third birthday, the aunts threw a fancy-dress party whose theme was cats, with an original musical revue. The dining room sliding doors divided the stage from the audience, and everyone had masks and tails. Hilde, the star, was too small to perform reliably, so she was cast as a kitten and allowed to meow at will. Birthdays were always a particular excitement, but there were also Sunday walks, picnics, parlor games and, above all, music: "A little rabbit slept in his burrow. Why can't you hop, bunny, are you sick?" Or the dance from Hansel and Gretel – songs that I remember myself, because they were passed on to me. On special days, Hilde was allowed to have hot chocolate from a special demitasse cup, pink on the outside, gilt inside, with lions' feet and a golden tail for a handle. In that household, according to her, special days were not all that rare.
This handful of memories centers on my grandmother and her sisters, the female society of Hilde's first years. My grandfather spent half the year abroad as a garment industry representative, viewing collections and making sales. There was one episode in the late twenties when there was a major train crash near Nuremberg in which scores of people died. Walter was on that train, and as a result of a back injury he was sent to a sanatorium. He came home after two months completely cured, and in excellent spirits. My mother wonders now whether he benefited from the glamorous social life there as much as from the medical treatments. He was away such a lot, with work that kept him constantly in the company of fashionable women. If he was unfaithful, not a word was breathed of it. My mother remembers my grandparents living lovingly together, though they did fight about money, which was always short.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Motherland"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Rita Goldberg.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Notes on the Text,
American Prologue: Mother and Daughter,
Amsterdam: July 1943, Dawn,
1. Berlin,
2. Berlin and Amsterdam,
3. My Mother Comes of Age,
4. Invasion, Amsterdam 1940,
5. In the Ardennes, 1943,
6. Bergen-Belsen, April 1945,
7. Displaced Persons, Bergen-Belsen,
8. Love Letters: Amsterdam, Basel,
9. War Again, Israel 1948,
10. An American in Germany, 1971,
Epilogue,
Notes,
