by Guy Stern
Close to my ninetieth birthday, the Kehrwiederturm (The Tower of Return) bid me once again to retrace my steps. The Tower of Return had the assistance of my wife. Susanna took the initiative to glamorize the occasion in a most imaginative way—without a single word of warning to me. She contacted an acquaintance of ours, Herbert Reyer, the archivist of the city of Hildesheim. She wrote: “On the occasion of the ninetieth birthday of Guy Stern, my husband, which is on January 14th, 2012, wouldn’t it be the crowning achievement of his life if he were to be named an honorary citizen of Hildesheim? He has not even an inkling about my inquiry, hence it will come as a surprise.” Dr. Reyer, as the ensuing correspondence demonstrated, created a dossier showing my efforts on behalf of my city of birth. He relayed my wife’s suggestion, and the relevant credentials found in his archive, to the office of the city’s mayor, Dr. Kurt Machens, and asked for a date for the event, if the mayor and the city council would approve. He suggested that it should be coordinated with my next trip to Germany in the spring of 2012.
The two conspirators should be proud of their work. On the day in question, Susanna and I found the auditorium of Hildesheim’s city hall to be completely jammed. Many of my friends and colleagues had travelled to Hildesheim, sometimes from far-away cities in Europe. The mayor gave an eloquent speech, stressing my efforts to have the new generations understand, but by no means endorse, the crimes of a heinous past, and to restore the spontaneous feelings between the various religions in our common hometown. Across the width of the back wall hung a large display board recounting my life through articles and pictures. I came to the realization that my hometown had done all it could to extend its hand to me. I knew that the dark years that had robbed me of my citizenship had not as yet completely faded, but I also felt that a beam of light had broken through the darkness.
The formal ceremony had several repercussions. My wife and I were having breakfast in our hotel the next morning when visitors arrived, about ten of them in fact. A spokesperson emerged who introduced himself as Rolf Altmann, the president of the gym club Eintracht. “The entire board is here to apologize for your exclusion from our club in 1934,” he said. “You are now a lifelong-honored member.” During a later visit, I astounded members of the club and the press when I divested myself of my coat and dress shirt, thereby displaying the club’s logo on my T-shirt. I then mounted one of the machines to prove anew that I was a qualified member of that venerable club.
Beyond this amazing coming together of circumstances, in which Hildesheim again figured in my experience, the town appeared often in my thoughts and dreams. And as this memoir draws to a close, I want to mention a few other times when the place of my birth and my childhood suddenly emerged in the life I was living decades later.
In 2008, Christian’s film The Ritchie Boys opened the yearly Toronto documentary film festival. My friend and war buddy Fred Howard and I were there. Christian’s introduction emphasized the impact of his mother’s description of her Jewish classmates in Hildesheim on his resolve to film the story of the Ritchie Boys. After the screening a woman introduced herself as Debbie Filler, dramatist and actress. “My mother was a Rothschild; she also attended the Jewish school in Hildesheim.” I knew her as Ruthie, who irritated us “older” students. I met her again as a grandmother in New York. She now lives in Australia. I asked myself, how many more links from this chain of astonishing chance encounters would emerge?
Eight years earlier, in 2000, I’d been sitting in my study in West Bloomfield, Michigan with the latest publication about exile and exile literature in my hand. What began as a little-known specialty is now an expansive area of research. One has to work hard to stay current. I reached for a title, Escape to Manila, the first scholarly work about the Philippines as an asylum country. Interesting topic! Soon I was on page 37 and suddenly thrown back once again to the Hildesheim of my youth.
For eleven years I’d met every Saturday with nearly all the youth of the Jewish community. We sang patriotic, folk, and Hebrew songs, listened to a round robin reading by the participants, read a verse in German from Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) and discussed its meaning. This was all under the leadership of our cantor, Joseph Cysner, born in Bamberg, Germany. We had taken him into our hearts and nearly cried as the “diabolical” and much larger Jewish community in Hamburg hired him away from us in 1937. We surprised him with a gift upon his parting. Having gone through our “Heimnachmittage” (Saturday afternoon meetings) minutes and reports, we collected the typed and handwritten pages. They blossomed into a grand tome, bound by an excellent bookbinder. On the cover was the ambitious title Our Work. Seppl was moved to tears. After his departure, we listened for news from and about him—his success in Hamburg, for example—until we Hildesheimers were scattered to the winds or tragically to various concentration camps.
From the top of the aforementioned book and its page 37, I was back in the community room of our synagogue. Seppl Cysner had ended up in Manila, as the book reported:
With his hard-won consent [to hire a Cantor] Rabbi Josef Schwarz turned to his old acquaintance Joseph Cysner, who served with him in Hildesheim and whose last-known post was in Hamburg. A telegram was sent to Hamburg, which in English read, “Do you want to come? Minimal salary. Supplemental work supplied. Send response today. Heartfelt regard. Schwarz.”
The telegram reached him indirectly. Cysner was the son of Polish immigrants to Germany and was soon after the Night of Broken Glass deported to an improvised internment camp between Germany and Poland. He responded to the invitation immediately. His choice was no choice at all.
As before in Hildesheim, he became the leader of the German Jewish youth in Manila, and also one of the leading forces of the growing Jewish community.
Heinrich Heine writes, “When words leave off, music begins.” The story of the haven for Jewish refugees ends here, but the music and songs of beloved Cantor Joseph Cysner that sustained the Jewish community and particularly the children whom he loved, are everlasting. The young man who was twenty-six years old when he arrived in Manila in 1939 brought with him a golden voice, a personal warmth, and an infectious spirit. For more than seven years Cantor Cysner taught Jewish history and music to children and adults, and every festival centered around his immense artistic capabilities. The Torah sections each Bar Mitzvah boy in Manila learned to chant were taught him by Cantor Cysner, and the Temple choir that he had organized, trained and directed was his and the congregation’s pride and joy. He taught secular courses when schools were closed or unavailable. For both young and old his home served as a center for Hebrew language, Jewish history—and, of course, his memorable skill for giving piano and singing lessons.
The book describes the happy turn of events in his life, and his untimely death. Cantor Cysner left Manila with his mother, after the Japanese occupation, for the United States in the spring of 1945. There, in San Francisco, he was reunited with Sylvia Nagler, whom he had first met at the Bamberger Synagogue in 1934. She had escaped from Germany and spent the war years in England. They were married on August 22, 1948, at Temple Sherith Israel in San Francisco, where Joseph served as cantor. In 1950 he accepted a post in San Diego with Congregation Tifereth Israel, and the cantor’s melodious voice resounded in the synagogue as he led liturgical passages of the service.
While leaving behind an enduring legacy, his life was cut short. Just past noon on March 3, 1961 Sylvia Cysner answered the phone at home to receive the tragic news of her husband’s death. A massive heart attack had felled the man who, more than any other individual, had always given his heart to the Manila Jewish community. He was forty-nine years old.
I can still see him before me, even hear his singing. Just by changing a few minor details, my own tribute to my former teacher in Hildesheim would be as resounding. I have come to believe that Seppl was the most important influence on my life during my adolescence. With positive memories of those happy, beloved Saturday afternoons spent with Cantor Cysner and my friends,
I would in time restore a guarded attachment to the city of my birth.
In Basel, Switzerland, in June 2011 Dr. Vincent Frank, the son of writer Rudolf Frank, born in Mainz, and Wilfred Weinke, a Germanist and curator from Hamburg, collaborated on an exhibit sponsored by the main library of the University of Basel. My connection to this event is quickly told. Rudolf Frank’s emigration novel Ahnen und Enkel (Forefathers and Grandchildren) was my favorite book. It was the last Hanukah gift from my parents, one of the few books by a Jewish author that in 1936—obviously under the aegis of a Jewish publisher—was allowed to be sold in Nazi Germany, though to Jewish buyers only.
The exhibition opening was a rousing success that had to be celebrated. Spontaneously, Vincent Frank and his wife Melinda invited presenters, librarians, speakers, friends, and acquaintances to a party. “Incidentally,” added the host, when asking me to come, “the daughter of a deceased lady from Hildesheim will be there. Aren’t you also from Hildesheim?” At his home Vincent introduced us. I was stunned. Before me stood the reincarnation of my first love.
Gerda Schönenberg and I had known each other from grade school onward. The sister of my schoolmate Robert, she was one year older than I. After grade school she went on to the Goethe High School for Girls, joined the Sabbath youth group of Cantor Cysner, and like Robert and me, she was a member of the scout-like troop Bund deutsch-jüdischer Jugend (Association of German-Jewish Youth Group). In addition she also belonged to a sports group under the aegis of the Hildesheim Center of National Jewish Veterans. She had made a strong impression on me. When our gym leader had taken umbrage at the fact that girls and boys were changing in the same room, Gerda admonished him, “Don’t get hyper.”
We fell in love at Lappenberg Place, right after an afternoon with the good Cysner. Before we separated I offered a suggestion. “Would you like to go for a walk?” It lasted almost two hours, beginning in front of our synagogue, passing Lake Kahlenberg, and ending at the aptly named Liebesgrund (Vale of Love).
Our walk became a weekly routine. We talked for hours. In between discussions we learned the pleasures of kissing. We participated in a three-week-long bike tour along the Rhine with our friends, Lieselotte Rosenberg and Fritz Palmbaum. We occasionally embraced, but “nothing happened” during that trip, which was the same year I would leave Germany. As that day drew nearer we stopped once in the Liebesgrund. We held each other and cried.
As I related this to Gerda’s daughter, she in turn told me of her mother’s many struggles during her years of exile in Switzerland. All around us the excitement of the party in Basel continued. We had no part in it. Hildesheim with all its memories expunged what was probably a wonderful party in Switzerland’s capitol.
In 2012 after I gave a lecture in a high school near Konstanz, Germany, the teacher huffed that her students had called me an “old fogey.” As a ninety-year-old, one can laugh at the obviously inapplicable nickname. But the smile passed me by when, back at home, I found a balled up advertisement for a chain of cremation services under a pile of birthday cards. In light of my advanced age, the ad said, I should take care that my burial fees wouldn’t leave my progeny in ruins. “Compare!” I was admonished. They had kindly printed a table, which explained how inexpensively the heirs get off if the oldster—in this case me—prearranges for his cremation.
The tactlessness enraged the birthday geezer. I was ready to call the Better Business Bureau when a sudden reminiscence from Hildesheim displaced my displeasure. As a schoolboy I had walked across the marketplace at least once a week, leaving the city hall on my right and the cremation service on the left. I still can remember every step of that walk, including the more elegant and homey advertising for making the right choice in selecting our post-mortem disposal. In the show window was a dignified sign displaying a poem, which translated, reads:
No revolting worms on my corpse will feed,
The cleansing flames are what I need!
I’ve loved the warmth and daylight bright,
Therefore, friend, burn me—let there be light!
The poem is by Peter Rosegger. Peace to his ashes.
I once recited this poem to my friend, colleague, and fellow Hildesheimer, Dieter Sevin—and he also recalled that deathless poem. In fact whenever I met with my late friend and colleague Dieter Sevin, we reminisced about Hildesheim. We could still swim with the same correct strokes we’d learned from the swim instructor we’d both had there, the somewhat corpulent Mr. Bode. Either he or I cracked a pun regarding this common experience. “We were both baptized with the same bath and Bode water.” Once Dieter and his wife offered their beautifully located Hildesheim home to Susanna and me for a few days. After this lovely stay, my wife said, “I couldn’t have imagined that we would routinely spend a week in Hildesheim.” Hinting at my always tight schedule, she expressed her joy and gratitude that we had spent a whole week in Hildesheim: “I really fell in love with this town. The town has grown on me.” Immodestly, I was moved to make this declaration of dual love myself.
To round off this chapter—and this book, I need to relate one more moving encounter with the city of Hildesheim and its inhabitants. A year after being awarded the title of honorary citizen, I received another invitation. At the house 36 Hoher Weg, where I spent a large part of my boyhood, a memorial plaque was being placed to honor my family. I stood by as Mayor Machens said some fitting words, followed by a small band playing Klezmer music. Around us stood a whole group of Hildesheimers, once more my fellow citizens. I gave a short thank you speech and more light broke through the darkness of the past. As I am writing this, my good feeling toward my hometown continues. When Mayor Machens left office, he was replaced on the strength of a bipartisan vote by Dr. Ingo Meyer, who has been equally eager to make me feel that I truly belong to my place of birth. He placed me on a committee meant to showcase Hildesheim as the “Cultural Capital of Europe.” I feel honored.
And as for my gym club, Eintracht, Rolf Altmann, while still holding a leadership position, has yielded the club’s presidency to his friend, Hans-Jürgen Bertsche. The bonds hold, but will I be able to convince the new president that I can hold my own on the parallel bars, the horse, and the horizontal bar?
So with my Hildesheim relationships with Eintracht and other civic areas intact, I had to cope with the most sustaining part of my life, the human relationships that have vanished from it. As I have learned from close associations with fellow victims of the Holocaust, each person so afflicted, has found a highly individual answer. A frequent one is a fictional resurrection of the departed, often by immersion in genealogy. By intense research the information is unearthed to devise an elaborate family tree. A network of offspring of the victims demonstrates that they have not lived in vain.
My own version took recourse in a more concrete pursuit. A Hebrew saying had promised that “some shall survive.” I went in search of the few survivors of the relatives that had somehow escaped the mass extirpation. On this search born of desperation, I often located relatives who before were only loosely related to my immediate family. Even if before they lived solely on the periphery of our family circle I wanted them for their consanguinity, simply put, to regain the feeling that there was a spot where I belonged. The vestiges of my murdered family, however remote, were the solution.
And I found them. On my mother’s side there was my cousin Marianne, daughter of my mother’s brother, Willy, the wounded veteran of World War II. She had miraculously survived Auschwitz and reached New York a few months before she contacted me. I was able to help her, in a minor way.
My mother also had a cousin in Cologne, Rudy Minden, a bundle of energy he had smuggled his way across the Belgian border, together with his wife and small child. He had skirted capture by constantly changing hiding places in the capital city of Brussels and by entrusting little Renée to a Catholic family in Brussels. But where was Rudy now? I found a recent book, Juden in Köln (Jews in Cologne) in a specialty library. Lo and behold, on the very
last page was a list of the post-war Jewish community leaders. Rudy was one of them. My wife and son and I were in Munich at the time. I made one telephone call. The next morning our VW Beetle was taking us to Cologne. Rudy and his wife Lonny, Renée, and her two sons and their children became additional members of my inner circle. Five years ago I was present to help Renée, her son Alan, and his wife celebrate the Bat Mitzvah of their oldest daughter.
On my father’s side I also found a survivor. My father’s brother David, greatly respected as a teacher at Germany’s only ecumenical high school, had managed to escape to Argentina with his wife Thekla and his son Heinz. After the war he located me in Cincinnati and wrote a letter similar to mine, in short meant as a search for surviving Sterns.
We started to correspond. And then he came up with another suggestion. “Wouldn’t it be a great idea if our older son, now at high school age, would spend a half year with your family and “widen his horizon?” “We would greatly welcome that,” we wrote back. We enrolled Mario in Walnut High School, the highest-ranked secondary school in Cincinnati, and he thrived there. After his return we paid a countervisit at his parents’ lovely home in La Lucilla. Today we visit Mario and his brother Claudio every time we visit Munich. Curiously they both landed jobs in the Bavarian capitol as physicist and engineer. As scientists with language abilities they became welcome additions to the European Patent Office.
Even though I moved to New York after returning from the European battlefields, I maintained close ties to my Aunt and Uncle Silberberg, my rescuers from Nazi rule. They attended my wedding to Margith. With Uncle Benno restored to his pre-Depression job, they looked more elegant than I had ever seen them at 1116A Maple Place on Saint Louis’ West Side. And then there is my cousin, Bobby, now more formally known as retired Missouri State Representative Robert Feigenbaum. He is the grandson of my aunt and uncle and the son of their daughter, Bernice and her husband, Victor Feigenbaum. He holds a record: elected to office at age twenty-three, he is one of the youngest persons to be elected to the Missouri State Legislature and one of the first ones to sponsor bills for environmental protection in Missouri. He retained his seat for twenty years and became my conveyor into an in-and-out dive into Missouri politics.