American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest

by Hannah Nordhaus

  Wolfgang didn’t remember Julia; he had lived almost a century, but he was still too young. He remembered some of Julia’s sisters, though. They were, he told me, a “very distinguished Jewish family in Westphalia.” Their children studied at the best schools and universities, joined tennis clubs, collected art. The Schusters broke barriers: children of merchants and peddlers, they were elected to the Reichstag and became leaders in the banking sector, in the law, and in publishing. America wasn’t the only place where a Jew could make inroads into the larger world. Julia’s nephew, Arthur Nussbaum, son of the irksome Uncle Bernhard who had so annoyed Bertha in Bad Pyrmont, became a renowned expert in international law and eventually moved to New York to teach at Columbia University. Two other nephews, Wolfgang’s uncles Heinrich and Charles, served in a hussar regiment during World War I. Charles became a commissioned cavalry officer; a Jew could not have dreamed of such a thing a generation before. It was a short-lived dream, of course—and Wolfgang’s family would come to understand that intimately.

  Wolfgang remembered his grandmother, Emilie, well. She was the last-born of her siblings, seventeen years younger than Julia. Neuhaus, the small town where she lived, lay only twenty minutes by streetcar from the city of Paderborn, where Wolfgang grew up, and he saw her often. At age six, he went to her home to recover from pneumonia and stayed for a full year, with Catholic nurses watching him around the clock. Emilie was nervous and domineering, Wolfgang said. He suspected that these traits were common to Schuster women, Julia included. “They had a little bit loose screw,” he said, twirling thick fingers at his temple. “My grandmother was not easy to get along with. I was supposed to love my grandmother but I never liked her that much.”

  In her younger years, Wolfgang said, Emilie had been “extremely good-looking. Magnificent!” She was also very wealthy. Emilie’s husband, Louis Rosenthal, owned a six-story flour mill whose grinding wheels spun on the river Alme, which ran through the center of Neuhaus, a pretty town with winding streets of Fachwerk homes and a moated, white-baroque castle fortress. The family’s home, on the main road leading into the village, was a mansion in the art nouveau Jugendstil manner, with a tremendous yard, a tennis court, rosebushes, hazelnuts. Emilie donated generously to the local church and gave dresses to the town’s young girls for their Catholic confirmations. “They called her the Angel of Neuhaus,” Wolfgang told me.

  Louis died of a heart attack in 1912 while swimming in the North Sea, leaving Emilie to raise their teenage children alone—three boys, three girls. She hired a manager to help her run the mills, and ran them ably until 1933, when she was seventy-two and the Nazis came to power. First they took the mills. Next, her home. Then she was told to pack a bag. She packed carefully: tailored dresses, starched undergarments. “And they marched her down the street in Paderborn, this old woman,” Wolfgang said, “and they put her on a train, and took her out of town.”

  I had always assumed that my family had lost relatives to the Holocaust—distant ones. But I had never known names. Now I did. Wolfgang gave me a detailed Schuster family tree. Below the names of those who had perished, someone had typed, “Died in concentr. camp.” Most of Julia’s siblings had been lucky enough to be born too early; they didn’t live long enough to die in a “concentr. camp.” Emilie did, however.

  Wolfgang escaped such a fate, and my family in New Mexico is one reason why. Wolfgang was thirteen in 1932 when the Nazis won huge gains in the German parliament; his father said not to worry, it was just politics. “My father was more German than the pope was Catholic,” Wolfgang said. Wolfgang hadn’t thought of himself as particularly Jewish until the Nazis took over. Then friends were arrested and taken away, and he grew afraid to go to the local swimming pool for fear others would see that he was circumcised. “I hated that I was Jewish,” Wolfgang said. “You were like an insect.” When a teacher entered his classroom after Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, the students were required to say “Heil Hitler.” Wolfgang refused. The principal knew Wolfgang’s father, and told him to send the boy out of the country.

  Wolfgang’s parents quickly enrolled him in a boarding school in England. And this is where Julia’s New Mexico family came in. When it became impossible to send money out of Germany to pay the tuition, Wolfgang’s parents asked Bertha’s husband, Max—Bertha had died a few years before—to pay Wolfgang’s tuition in England. Max did so willingly; he had already brought over or sponsored a number of German relatives now living as refugees in America. After a few months of supporting Wolfgang in England, Max offered to bring him to America to work—he was in the mercantile business, as Abraham had been. For Wolfgang, it was more than a rescue. He was a voracious reader of the German Western novels of Karl May, and New Mexico was the place of his Cowboy und Indianer dreams.

  In 1936, at age sixteen, Wolfgang boarded a boat to New York. The journey was a grand adventure for him—he had no idea, as he steamed to America, what was in store for his relatives in Germany. He enjoyed the trip immensely. On the ship, he reigned as the boat’s Ping-Pong champion and “befriended a young lady.” In New York, he took in the sights, ate a banana split at an open-air ice cream stand, and went to Minsky’s to watch a burlesque show. Finally, he boarded a train across the plains to Albuquerque.

  He arrived to bad news. Max had died only days earlier—a heart attack, at his desk. Max’s children—my grandfather and great-aunts Lizzie and Maxine—knew nothing about Max’s plans to hire Wolfgang. But they took him in gladly. Accustomed to wartime scarcity, Wolfgang was amazed by the “opulence” of his first breakfast: pastries, juice, grapefruit. The family set him to work, giving him no special dispensation except an occasional invitation to a family dinner, and paying him fifteen dollars every two weeks. To start, he packed piñon nuts to be sold in the East. On the bags he wrote, “Packed by Wolf, a Zuni Indian.”

  Two years later, in the fall of 1938, Wolfgang’s mother, Anna, visited him in Albuquerque. She had been there only a short time when his father sent a telegram telling her to delay her return. Kristallnacht had intervened—the “night of broken glass,” of arrests and beatings, of burned and looted Jewish shops and homes and synagogues—and it was too dangerous for her to go back to Germany. Anna possessed only a visitor’s visa, however, and these were no longer the days when the Santa Fe Ring ruled the state; no number of pulled strings could change Anna’s documents. She couldn’t legally stay in Albuquerque.

  But Mexico was not far away. So Anna moved to El Paso, where her uncle Bernhard—Emilie and Julia’s brother—had settled after leaving Santa Fe in the 1880s. She obtained an address across the Rio Grande in Juárez, Mexico, and each month she’d walk from Bernhard’s house in El Paso across the bridge to Mexico to renew her immigration request.

  Wolfgang had never met his uncle Bernhard before. Bernhard had once had a mercantile business in El Paso and also owned a 115,000-acre ranch across the border in Mexico, where the family had farmed and made wine. Now he was in the insurance business. He was quite old, close to eighty, and short, like all the Schusters and Staabs. He wore a sombrero, had a waxed mustache and a perpetual cigar in his mouth, and spoke perfect Spanish. Bernhard’s wife, also named Emilie, was half Mexican, half Jewish. “She was like a queen,” Wolfgang said, imperious and regal. Their only daughter, born in 1900—four years after Julia’s death—was named after her aunt: Julia.

  Wolfgang’s mother lived in the basement of Bernhard’s home and gave manicures part-time in a beauty parlor. When Wolfgang visited on weekends, he and Anna dined with Bernhard and his wife. They served chili and beans, Wolfgang said, and at dinner, “there was not much conversation.” Anna stayed with her uncle Bernhard until she was able to secure a visa, then moved to Washington, DC, to be with a daughter who had moved there.

  Wolfgang was drafted into the army soon after—he served as a translator in the Intelligence Corps, interrogating German prisoners. Wolfgang’s father, Ernst, a successful lawyer before the Nazis took power, escaped to
London after he learned he was about to be arrested, borrowing money from cousins in Paris to make the trip; those cousins were later killed at Auschwitz. In London, he made his first pennies carrying furniture out of houses bombed by the Nazis. He met a woman in London who made him happy, and persuaded Anna to give him a divorce. She later regretted it. She and Ernst had lost all they had: their money; their home; their community; their marriage.

  They were, of course, the lucky ones.

  twenty-three

  OTHER MOMENTS CONTRIBUTE

  Emilie Schuster Rosenthal with her daughter, Hilda.

  Courtesy of Margit Naarmann.

  Julia’s sister Emilie was not one of the lucky ones. She was wealthy. She was strong of mind and constitution. She had been generous to the people of Neuhaus and Paderborn. But none of these things could save her in the end.

  I visited Neuhaus and Paderborn on my trip to Lügde with my mother. A local historian named Margit Naarmann took us around. She was tall and elegant, with big, round features and plush cheekbones. She wore a hairband in her dark hair, and silver button earrings. Margit was not Jewish. She had grown up in a small village in the countryside, knowing nothing as a child about what had befallen Germany’s Jews. But as a young woman, she had worked in Scotland as an au pair for a German Jewish family that had emigrated during the war, and she was horrified by their stories. She’d returned to Germany determined to educate others about what had happened. She taught at the University of Paderborn, and she wrote books about Paderborn’s Jews, including one that told the story of Emilie and her family.

  Paderborn was a well-tended city—cobbled streets, old baroque buildings, new buildings that looked like old buildings, and striking modern buildings, too. The Pader River welled from under the city’s heart, thousands of underground springs spreading tendrils and branches throughout the city. The people of Paderborn were tall, I discovered. My mother and I, five foot three and five foot five, respectively, felt lilliputian by comparison—how the Schusters must have stood out! The Paderborners were quite pleasant, if reserved. It seemed an altogether moderate place.

  But of course Jews fared no better there than elsewhere in Germany. It was no Nazi stronghold—the city voted for the Catholic party, Margit told me. Nor had Paderborn’s citizens initially supported the Nazis’ restrictions against Jews. Julia and Emilie’s sister Amalie, for instance, had married into a family that owned the largest department store on Paderborn’s main square. When the Nazis ordered a boycott of Jewish businesses, many Paderborners refused and continued to shop at the store, until party thugs blocked off the entrances and made it impossible to do so. Amalie died of natural causes soon after: in retrospect, hers was the kinder fate. Her grandson Karl Theo, who ran the store, was sentenced to a nearby prison in 1938 for the crime of “racial transgression”; he sold the department store at a fraction of its value. After his release in 1940 he escaped to Palestine, where he worked as a chauffeur.

  Emilie’s mills in nearby Neuhaus were similarly “Aryanized.” Her partner in running the company, Carl Schupmann, wasn’t Jewish, so in 1933 they changed the name of the company from “Rosenthal and Schupmann” to “Schupmann and Rosenthal.” In 1935, they changed it again, to “Schupmann and Co.” That wasn’t enough: they sold the company in 1937—the rye, wheat, and threshing mills; the office, millwright house, pond garden, and meadows along the river Alme—to three businessmen who had no troublesome Jewish associations. A year later, on Kristallnacht, Emilie’s son Arnold was arrested and briefly imprisoned, bused past a mob of screaming Hitler Youth and Paderborn’s burning synagogue. In September 1939, Emilie was forced to move to a Judenhaus—one of five buildings crammed with Paderborn’s remaining Jews. Her sons, Heinrich and Arnold, and Arnold’s wife, Hilde, were sent to the same house.

  Emilie tried to leave. She was almost eighty years old. Cuba was still accepting Jewish refugees, but the visas cost money. So did the draconian “departure taxes” required by the Nazi government, and Emilie had no more money. In the United States, her daughter Anna—Wolfgang’s mother—worked frantically to make arrangements. “We are all very happy that mother has finally agreed, so to speak, to make plans to travel to Cuba,” wrote Emilie’s son Arnold in the fall of 1941 in a letter to Anna, reprinted in Naarmann’s book. Arnold and his wife, Hilde, hoped to emigrate with Emilie; another brother, Heinrich, refused to leave. “We are getting everything ready,” wrote Arnold, “and we very much hope that you will soon be able to hold mommy in your arms.”

  Emilie feared traveling to a strange land. “If Cuba actually comes about then everything changes, then I’m as good as lost, how sad for me!” she wrote to a daughter, Hilda Steffensmeier, who lived a hundred miles away in Essen and was safe, still, from the Nazis because she had married a Catholic (she would later go into hiding). “Our great worries don’t allow for much joyousness,” Emilie wrote. “Nevertheless we can hope for ourselves and our family that we reach the island where at least one can live like a human being!” Jews were beginning to starve in Paderborn; friends were being arrested and deported, some resorting to suicide as a last means of escape.

  Seeking aid for her relatives trapped in Germany, Wolfgang’s mother, Anna, traveled to New York, where a cousin lived—Arthur Nussbaum, the son of Julia and Emilie’s sister Bernhardine, who had visited Bad Pyrmont in 1891 with her bothersome husband, Bernhard. Arthur was the famous international law expert, now a professor at Columbia University. He lived on Riverside Drive. “He was an old man,” Wolfgang remembered, “very hard of hearing, very, very brilliant, very intelligent eyes.” Anna asked him to help her pay for visas for Emilie, Arnold, and Hilde—she needed $1,600 (in 1941 dollars) per person. Nussbaum agreed to give money but said he could provide only enough for Emilie. In Paderborn, the family grew more desperate. “Please, please dear sister take care of us as fast as possible,” Arnold wrote. “Keep in mind and do everything for mother, especially whatever you can to allow us to travel with her.”

  In December 1941, however, that door closed altogether. Nazi transports began to depart from Paderborn “to the East.” Emilie and her sons avoided deportation for a time, pleading poor health. In April 1942, they moved into the town’s Jewish orphanage—a charity to which Emilie had once been a donor. “I am gradually adjusting to my new surroundings,” she wrote to her daughter Hilda in a series of letters reprinted in Naarmann’s book.

  It’s not only the bothersome lack of space; other moments contribute. But when we hear what impossibilities others have to put up with, we just have to be satisfied and compliant.

  I really can’t complain about the “accommodations” here in the house. Everyone is very nice and pleasant; it is peaceful. Fifteen children have not been brought back from vacation, sad but true! My time is filled with activity. We often have visitors in the evening, but I prefer being alone most of the time because there is much to patch, to sew so I use the evenings for that purpose.

  Those small solaces wouldn’t hold, of course. Emilie wrote to Hilda again in May 1942.

  My dear Hildchen,

  These days I have so little good news to report that letter-writing provides no pleasure, neither for the writer nor for the reader. A threatening imminence hangs in the air again. . . . As of June 3rd, the orphanage has to be vacated. . . . The employees have all been dismissed.

  What is to become of the rest of us occupants has not been disclosed. . . . In any event we are facing in the near future another change of residence that surely will not turn out well this time. Barracks or something similar! What we all have had to endure!!!

  Naturally we aren’t very well provisioned; others of our acquaintance are in the same situation; so we really can’t complain.

  Where are my hairclips that I had earlier in my bag? I look so awful without my clips. . . . I hate to think of having to share a room with several other people.

  With love and greetings,

  Mother

  The move from the orphanage was
postponed to mid-June, then July. On July 12, 1942, Emilie wrote her last letter from Paderborn.

  My dear Hildchen,

  The worry about the near future weighs so heavily on me that I have no peace at all. Now the newest orders have been issued that all elderly people who are not bedridden will have to go to Theresienstadt. . . . It is supposed to be a privileged transport; we will be allowed to take 50 kilograms of luggage, as well as bedding, in addition to hand parcels. Appeals, it is said, are useless. So, now we have to get ready.

  On July 28, 1942, Emilie and her two sons, along with the rest of Paderborn’s remaining Jews, were taken from the Jewish orphanage to the city’s train station. Emilie was allowed to bring food and provisions for two days—anything else would be confiscated—along with her fifty kilograms of luggage. She was allowed to take two blankets, though they would be included in the total weight. Everything else she owned had already been taken: her cash, jewelry, gold, silver, watches (time no longer mattered), personal papers, pension cards, ration cards, lipstick (appearances were of no importance, either), everything except the identity card that exposed her as a Jew. They were given receipts for the things taken from them.