Silent Refuge

by Margrit Rosenberg Stenge

  For example, the Rosenbergs considered themselves good Germans. Margrit’s father earned an Iron Cross for bravery fighting for Germany in World War i. He thought that his Jewish family would not be in danger under the Nazis, since their roots in Germany went back to the sixteenth century. Margrit mentions her fondness for German songs and her continuing commitment to certain German values, like organization and hard work. In the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century, many Jews throughout Europe shared this positive view of Germany held by the Rosenbergs. Large numbers of them moved to Germany for a better life. Germany, at that time, promised better legal protection for Jews, better educational options, greater economic opportunity, and a less virulent antisemitism than could be found in Russia or in the Polish or Ukrainian portions of the Austrian Empire. Many Jewish families found great success in Germany, whether newly arrived or, like Margrit’s family, having enjoyed centuries of residence. One of the other features of this German-Jewish symbiosis can be found in some of the greatest geniuses produced by Germany, individuals such as Albert Einstein.

  Another complicated feature of Jewish life in Germany involved the partial loss of Jewish identity. As one sees in this memoir, German Jews were far more likely to be secular than the mostly Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking Jews growing up in an Eastern European shtetl. German Jews were often more likely to identify first as German, rather than as Jewish. Ironically, these German Jews, with their great longing to be German, were the first Jews of Europe to come under the iron boot of Nazi antisemitism. It also might seem ironic that the suffering of Jews tended to nurture rather than destroy their pride in being Jewish. Margrit’s sense of being Jewish certainly increased a great deal as she suffered persecution. It is common to find the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors being more religious than their parents or more likely, perhaps, to move to Israel.

  This complicated relationship of Jews to Germany does not necessarily mean approval of Germans or the loss of antagonism. Some survivors would never buy a Volkswagen or set foot on German soil. Others, however, are willing to return to Germany, as Margrit has done, and, fortunately, many Germans now acknowledge their guilt and show respect for the Jews whose lives and families were destroyed. One example of this respect is the commemorative stones that Margrit describes in the epilogue of her memoir. These “Stolpersteine” (sometimes called “stumble stones”) set in sidewalks publicly acknowledge the homes where Jews lived before being gathered up and sent off to their deaths, or at least forced to flee.

  It is important to recognize that Jewish families such as the Rosenbergs appreciated their German identity. It also is important to note the crisis atmosphere suffered by Germans in the years leading up to the rise of Hitler. They lost World War i. Two million Germans died in that war. They suffered the loss of big chunks of German territory and they were told they had to pay huge reparations for war damage. Then they experienced a crisis of hyper-inflation in 1922 to 1923 and the Great Depression from 1930 to 1933. These multiple crises help explain why Germans were willing to turn to a leader as radical as Adolf Hitler.

  Germans made some extremely poor decisions in their response to the crises of the 1920s. As one historian has written, “It should be stated clearly that Germans became Nazis because they wanted to become Nazis and because the Nazis spoke so well to their interests and inclinations.”9 Although Hitler never won a majority of German votes before coming to power, his level of popularity and support was very strong throughout the Third Reich.10 Some Germans rose up against him, but always at great risk and as a tiny minority. The German children in this memoir who threw stones at young Margrit or who broke all the windows in the Rosenberg family home point toward another reality - those Germans willing to collaborate with the new German regime. And many more Germans would soon be perpetrating the crimes of the Holocaust itself.

  The Norwegians and Swedes Margrit met acted quite differently from the Germans she had encountered. Norway accepted the Rosenberg family and gave them legal status when they fled Germany. Many individual Norwegians showed respect and compassion during the nearly three years the Rosenbergs lived in Norway. This included the many strangers who assisted them in their flight from Oslo into the safer, more remote countryside; the village policeman who never turned them in and warned them at moments of danger; and, especially, members of the Norwegian Underground, who offered them a dramatic and dangerous escape from Norway to Sweden when the German occupation threatened their survival. As Margrit notes in her memoir, she was later able to recommend one of those heroes, Einar Wellén, to Jerusalem’s Holocaust Remembrance Center, Yad Vashem, which honoured him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

  We see the best side of Norway in this memoir. There is more to that positive history, including a strong teachers’ union that defied German efforts to enforce Nazi ideology in the schools. Lutheran clergy in Norway also showed courage in resisting Nazi efforts to control their message. However, there were other Norwegians who collaborated with the Nazi occupation. They formed their own version of the Nazi Party, the Nasjonal Samling, and Vidkun Quisling led a national Norwegian government that worked as a puppet under German control. Ultimately, Norway failed to protect the approximately 760 Jews who were sent to Auschwitz and murdered, more than one-third of the about seventeen-hundred Jews then living in Norway. Denmark, by comparison, dramatically rescued over ninety per cent of its Jewish population.11

  The Danes are widely admired in Holocaust memory for their willingness and ability to save Jews. In October 1943, Danish citizens rose up to save more than seven thousand Jewish lives. Owners of fishing boats and even small rowboats ferried Jews across to the shores of Sweden. This is the best known and probably the most successful national effort of rescue during the Holocaust. The narrative of Denmark’s resistance has some complications, however. For example, there is a myth that King Christian X of Denmark donned a yellow star himself and encouraged other Danes to wear a yellow star in order to protect Jews from being singled out. This did not happen. It is important to remember that the occupation of Denmark, based in part on the Nazi admiration for and desire to bond with Nordic peoples, was quite benign. Until 1943, Denmark was allowed to be largely self-governed, in part because Danes also agreed to cooperate with Germans. In actuality, the Danish effort to save Jews depended in part on German restraint. However, the act of saving more than seven thousand Jews remains remarkable.

  Sweden, as well, played a largely positive role in the Holocaust, including as a place of refuge for Denmark’s Jews. The country also provided refuge for many Norwegian Jews, including Margrit Rosenberg and her family. Margrit and her family felt relief as soon as they heard “Welcome to Sweden.” The danger and the drama came to an end. However, this positive role played by Sweden was only possible because of Swedish neutrality during World War ii, a stance that benefited the Swedish economy, made large quantities of iron ore available to the German machinery of war and left a generation of Norwegians somewhat angry at their Swedish neighbours.

  Eventually, Margrit Rosenberg Stenge found refuge and a new life in Canada. A few years after the war had ended, Canada changed its policies to start generously welcoming Jewish refugees, at a time when the United States, for example, placed more restrictions on immigrants. Both nations had earlier made entry very difficult for Jews trying to escape the Holocaust. Residents of both Canada and the United States were hardly free of antisemitism in the first half of the twentieth century. It was only in the aftermath of the Holocaust that “respectable” antisemitism, now associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, became widely discredited.

  As we measure the nations Margrit experienced in her life, we can accurately contrast the violent antisemitism of the Germans at that time against the more welcoming actions and policies of the Norwegians, Swedes and Canadians. The Holocaust itself provides us the measuring stick. Today, nations and peoples who turn to vi
olence and violate human rights are rightfully condemned. Nations and peoples who show compassion and respect human rights, by contrast, earn our admiration. By this measure, Margrit Rosenberg Stenge, through all the hardships she endured, was lucky to find her way to Norway, then to Sweden, and, finally, to Canada.

  •

  What will happen to Holocaust memory when all Holocaust survivors are gone? Margrit Rosenberg was only four years old when Adolf Hitler came to power, and that was nearly eighty-five years ago. We know that the living voice of survivor testimony will soon come to an end. Furthermore, there is a greying generation of Holocaust scholars who began their work in the 1970s and 1980s and are now entering retirement. Will they be replaced by a new generation of historians? Continued scholarship requires not only young scholars interested in this topic but also colleges and universities able to replace retiring faculty, which in times of tight finances is never a certainty.

  There are several important responses to the question of Holocaust memory. First of all, as living voices disappear, this memoir and the other memoirs and filmed testimonies preserved by the Azrieli Foundation will maintain Holocaust memory. Other organizations do similar work, most notably the usc Shoah Foundation established by Steven Spielberg. The usc Shoah Foundation has created an archive of over fifty-five thousand video testimonies that preserve this history for future generations. Both Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hold large archives that document the Holocaust and use extensive filmed testimony to teach visitors about past atrocities and the importance of preventing future genocides.

  Perhaps the most important answer, however, involves the young. The story of the Holocaust can and should be passed to the next generation, and then from that generation to those who follow. One very important realization has developed in the past forty years: the lessons of the Holocaust are crucially important. The Holocaust is not just about Jewish victims. It is not just about German perpetrators (and their willing auxiliaries). It is a human story and a warning to all humans. It is the most graphic example in modern world history of how badly things go wrong when the most basic human values are distorted or lost. A better future requires that those who come after us focus on and continue to learn from the Holocaust.

  Robert P. Ericksen

  Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies Emeritus

  Pacific Lutheran University

  Tacoma, Washington

  March 2017

  endnotes

  “Jewish Canadians,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca. Other sources state that this number ranges between 30,000 to 40,000.

  See, for example, Dorothy Rabinowitz, New Lives: Survivors of the Holocaust Living in America (New York: Avon Books, 1976). See also a short story by Philip Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic.”

  Thomas Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), xxi.

  Richard Rashke, Escape from Sobibor: The Heroic Story of the Jews who Escaped from a Nazi Death Camp (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).

  See Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (New York: Touchstone, 1993).

  See Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution” (New York: Henry Holt, 1980).

  The death toll of the Holocaust is commonly set at eleven million. This number includes six million Jews, the group most intensely targeted for annihilation. It also includes five million others, from Sinti and Roma to Russian prisoners of war, from members of the Polish intelligentsia to political opponents of the Nazi state, from the disabled murdered in a so-called program of euthanasia to gay men. In all cases, the eleven million were killed because of the Nazi ideology that considered them “life unworthy of life.”

  That condemnation includes the Genocide Convention, a policy established by the United Nations after World War ii that bans genocide as an international crime against humanity.

  Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8.

  See, for example, Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  For an interesting description of Danish resistance, see Nathaniel Hong, Occupied: Denmark’s Adaptation and Resistance to German Occupation 1940–1945 (Copenhagen: Frihedsmuseet Venners Forlag, 2012).

  Map

  To my husband and best friend, Steven (Stefan) Stenge.

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not have been published without the generosity of the Azrieli Foundation. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the Foundation and to Arielle Berger and Matt Carrington for their professional editing and to Mark Goldstein, the designer of the book cover, who captured the essence of my story.

  My Early Years in Germany

  My life began on December 27, 1928, in Cologne, Germany. I remember where we lived because, when I was a very young child, I was taught to say my home address just in case I got lost: “Akkrepiner Hof 4” (which I believe now to be Aggripinaufer). However, the chances of my getting lost were almost non-existent, since I always had a nanny watching over me.

  I was very young when my parents and I lived in this apartment, so my memories of this first home are shadowy and vague. I believe there were many rooms in the apartment, all with high ceilings and large, tall windows through which I would stare on rainy days.

  My parents, Alice and Max (Markus) Rosenberg, met during a family gathering. They were distantly related through marriage, and their attraction for each other was instant. When they got married, my mother was twenty-one years old and my father was thirty-three. The idea that opposites attract held true for my parents. My mother was a beautiful young woman, blond and blue-eyed, perhaps a bit heavier than is fashionable today. My father was slim, dark and handsome, shorter than my mother. Their temperaments were also very different. My mother’s anger would flare up at the slightest provocation, although the storm would blow over quickly. My father, on the other hand, was calm and composed, but his rare outbursts of anger would be much more serious and longer lasting.

  Even my parents’ backgrounds were quite different. My mother was an only child, and her childhood was a happy one. She grew up in Germany in a small town called Beuel, near Bonn, where her father was a merchant and made a comfortable living. In keeping with the times, her mother stayed at home and looked after the household and her only daughter. Like most German Jews, the family was German first and Jewish second, and religion played a minor role in their lives. My memories of my mother’s parents, Simon and Selma Kaufmann, are strictly visual: my grandfather was a short, heavy-set man, and my grandmother was a grey-haired, stout lady. I saw them rarely and did not know them well at all. I called them Opa (Grandpa) and Oma (Grandma).

  My father’s family was much larger. I cannot say that I knew his parents any better than my mother’s, but I did see them more often. They lived in the same house as some of my father’s siblings, in a town called Wächtersbach, near Frankfurt am Main. My grandfather Jakob, who died when I was still very young, was wheelchair-bound and had obviously had a stroke, but even today I can remember him well. My grandmother Veilchen (Violet) suffered from severe asthma, and, to relieve her symptoms, she would breathe in the fumes from herbs that she would burn on a small plate. I can still picture her grey-haired head bent over the plate. My father’s brother Benjamin was killed in World War i, where he fought for Germany against France. My father’s older sister, Selma, lived in a small town called Neuss with her husband, Hermann Stein, and four children.

  The care of my father’s parents fell for the most part on Tante (Aunt) Karolienchen, my father’s sister, who lived with her husband, Natan, in the family home. They had no children. Another brother, Gustav, his wife, Selma, and their little girl, Elfriede, were a
lso part of the household. The men in the family were cattle traders, and my father augmented their income when necessary.

  My father’s family in Wächtersbach was Orthodox, and my parents and I often spent the Jewish holidays with them, which gave my cousin Elfriede and me a chance to get to know each other. As the years went by, we became quite close, since we were both only children.

  When my parents announced to their families that they had decided to get married, I assume that the Wächtersbach family had some objections. Although my father was no longer religious, his family must have felt that marriage to a young woman from a completely liberal family would further estrange him from the beliefs of his youth. But the die was cast, and the two were wed. Their first-born child was a boy, who died in 1926 when he was only six weeks old.

  I suppose that I must have been a rather lonely little girl in those early years in Germany. My companions were an assortment of young women, nannies or Kindermädchen, whom I would call Fräulein (Miss). My mother spent her days much like any other well-to-do young woman, shopping and playing bridge, while my father was at work in his paint manufacturing company, Kölner Farbenfabrik. My mother did not do any housework or cooking.

  There was little interaction between me and my parents, whom I called Mutti (Mommy) and Vati (Daddy). I was allowed to say hello and curtsy to my mother’s bridge friends. My mother would hug and kiss me in front of them, which embarrassed me. On Sundays, my father would also often play cards, a game called Skat, and he too would sometimes ask me to come and say hello. However, always sensitive to my needs, he would refrain from showing me his affection in his friends’ company.

  Another of my early and none too pleasant memories was the simple act of eating. In keeping with the times, I never ate with my parents but with the current Fräulein. Like many children, I had a small appetite, but since I had to eat everything that was on my plate, it would often take me hours to finish a meal. In the worst-case scenario, my mother would insist that I finish my leftover lunch at dinner, and only my father’s intervention would rescue me.