We learn a little more every day about this camp, which since 1933 has been run by Munich’s chief of police, Heinrich Himmler, an SS officer close to Adolf Hitler. Dachau was set up in a former munitions factory. The first prisoners had to do the construction work themselves, using their bare hands to build their own bunk-houses and those for the SS guarding them. The Nazis have published photographs depicting the camp as an exemplary place for “re-education,” complete with a swimming pool—some prisoners would be happier there than in their own homes! The truth is, it’s a place where they execute prisoners. Aunt Erna told us that Hans Beimler, a member of the KPD, the German Communist Party, who was interned in 1933, managed to escape and published a book in Great Britain and the USSR, chronicling everyday life in these camps.
“But why don’t the Russians, French, English and Americans say anything?” Mama asks. “I just can’t understand how Daladier and Chamberlain could sit drinking tea with Hitler when they knew about this. Why don’t they intervene?”
I don’t think Papa will ever come home.
It’s been over a month.
December 20. He’s home! But I hardly recognized him. A shriveled little man with a shaven head and thin body, his eyes sunken in dark sockets, his gray face patched with purplish-blue bruises. He stood hunched on the doorstep, swimming in his clothes that were now too big for him. He took me in his arms and I was wracked with sobs. He didn’t speak. I think he wanted to, but the sounds wouldn’t come out of his mouth, his body shook as much as mine. Mama appeared. She gave a little cry and clung to the two of us. Night was falling. We stood motionless in the doorway, huddled together. Papa didn’t want to tell us anything about it. He went off to bed.
The next day he still lay there. Mama took him his meals in bed. Over the next few days, he started getting up, and soon he was back as the elegant, shaved, fragranced man he had been, taking breakfast in his same suit from the old days, a little roomier than it had been, leafing through the morning papers, taking notes again, and occasionally scowling furiously toward the window, before going back to his usual place at his desk, drafting letters in his clear, precise handwriting, and sending me out to post them for him as he used to.
“We’re going to leave, Bürschi,” he tells me one evening by the light of our menorah, which is lit for once. “You’ll see, we’re going to leave this hell behind, and we’ll finally stop living opposite that man, that bastard.”
I’ve never heard him curse. It’s Christmas Eve. On the other side of the street, Adolf Hitler spends the festive evening alone, as usual, served by Frau Winter.
By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
—ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF
I’ll be fifteen soon and Hitler’s been living opposite us for ten years now. Mama tells me that when I was little he was less famous than Uncle Lion. He even helped my uncle on with his coat once, treating him to a “Herr Feuchtwanger” on the terrace of Café Heck, where my father used to order lemonade.
In the public gardens where Jews are now banned, I used to play with my hoop and chase pigeons. I like it when Mama reminds me of my childhood in the days of the Weimar Republic, before the Nazis, before Adolf Hitler became chancellor. Germany was a democracy, we were free. At the time of the great crash, when Munich was so poor and you were in danger of being robbed on every street corner, beggars used to greet us in the street because they knew my uncle’s books. They came to the house and we’d let them share in my favorite meal: hot crispy sausages. My father was an editor. I’d set off in the mornings with Rosie, a young woman who lived at home with us and loved me like a mother. Memories come flooding back…Rosie must have left when the racial laws were introduced. My mother often played tennis on the courts behind our house. My father sometimes worked in the drawing room. Writers would come visit him, and I used to serve them tea. In summer he would send me out to deliver books to his writer friends. I went to Thomas Mann’s house with Rosie, and made it a point of honor to be the one who carried those precious parceled-up-with-string books that the two men exchanged. We used to go away for weekends to glorious lakes where we rented villas; we spent the summer staying with friends’ families. Yes, I remember my childhood…I was often invited to birthday teas with Aryan friends. We didn’t say “Aryan” in those days. We didn’t say anything. There was no distinction.
We don’t go out now so my mother tells me stories all day long. She describes her younger days and my childhood. It was fun, she says. When she talks about those years, her smile lights up her face again, and I could listen to her for hours. I forget the drawn curtains, the gray skies and the SS pacing the sidewalks. She and my father used to go to parties that went on all night, and they’d totter home smiling happily. It was the Roaring Twenties. They were good years, she says.
“Bavaria’s a magnificent country, my darling, with its onion-shaped church towers and its green, flower-filled meadows. It will be like that again one day.”
Application forms for visas are piling up on the table in the drawing room. We fill out new ones every day and open the letters of reply in the mornings. They’re always negative. Today’s form is for El Salvador. I study in detail the entry about this country in the encyclopedia, and picture myself exploring this land with its twenty volcanoes. The main thing is the ocean, and beaches over twelve miles long. I’ve never seen the sea. At night I pray we’ll be able to escape. I beg the Lord not to call me to him before I’ve seen the horizon.
When my father tells us we’ve been granted a family visa for Great Britain I don’t whoop for joy. My first thought is to wonder how I’ll live there when I don’t speak the language. I’ve lost the habit of celebrating anything, and I daren’t now. And yet I feel something not unlike happiness. We can leave. Uncle Heinrich fought valiantly from Paris to secure this visa. He contacted my father’s sisters in Palestine and Uncle Lion in the South of France, as well as my uncle by marriage Jacob Reich. Between them they amassed the thousand pounds needed to buy the visa. Thanks to a contribution from a London-based organization and through its connections in the Jewish community in Bavaria, our file managed to be submitted to the British Foreign Office, and now it’s received official confirmation.
I’ll leave first, on February 14, 1939, in ten days’ time, and my parents will join me in a few weeks. I’ll make the journey alone, taking the train across Germany and the Netherlands, and a boat over the English Channel, then by rail again up to London. A friend of a former colleague of my father’s will be waiting for me at the station and will accompany me across London to catch another train. A volunteer English family will host me until my parents arrive. No one knows how long that will be. Before they come, they need to arrange for our belongings to be shipped, and will probably have to abandon the most valuable. By Nazi law, these things belong to the German people and not to the grasping hooked fingers of the Jews we are.
Since we received confirmation that we’re leaving for London, I can’t help smiling when I see the Führer’s window lit up at night. He doesn’t know I’m watching him, or that I’m here at all; he has no inkling that here, just opposite his apartment, a child has grown up over the last ten years, a child who will one day bear witness. My heart beats harder when I walk past the window. I still jump at the sound of an engine starting up in the night or footsteps on the stairs in the early hours.
I look at the furniture in our apartment, the door handles that I’ll never hold in my hand again, the molding on the ceiling, the shadows on the floor when the sun spills through the house. If I survive, if I leave, I’ll be happy, I swear it.
My parents are in the drawing room making a list of things we have to leave behind. We’re not allowed to take traditional objects that are now the property of the “German nation.” On that basis, the menorah that belonged to my great-grandparents has to stay.
“But that’s absurd,” says my father, “you can’t get more Jewish than a menorah! We’ve only ever use
d it once, this Christmas, and actually I wonder why now!”
My mother can’t find any way to calm him. He’s shouting. I’ve never seen him like this.
“It doesn’t matter, my darling. You yourself have said it’s pointless, it’s no more than a knickknack.”
“But it belonged to my ancestors. I’ve known it all my life, it’s ours. What are they going to do with it?”
“Melt it down probably…”
Papa blanches at the thought, picks up the candelabra, throws it to the floor and tramples on it, screaming, “Well, let them melt it down, let them!”
Mama stays silent. The menorah’s reduced to a hunk of gnarled metal. Mama goes over to him, puts her arm around him, holds him to her and kisses his neck.
My father and I are walking through the main station in Munich. He’s carrying my suitcase. He’s loaned me one of his suits. I can feel the chill wind sneaking through the weft of my scarf, and I puff out my chest. Soldiers check our papers. I have a one-way ticket to London, a passport, and a visa that’s perfectly in order. Papa has a return ticket to Emmerich on the Dutch border. They let us through without a flicker. In my head I practice the English sentences I’ve been learning frantically in the last few days: “My name is Edgar”; “How do you do?”; “How old are you?”; and the one that I know I’ll never have to utter: “I am a Jew.”
Bavarian landscapes, that I hope not to see again, unfurl through the window. Cows watch the train pass, along with farmworkers who I can’t help feeling look bovine too. They’re working in the fields, leaning in toward plows drawn by oxen, wearing traditional costumes that—I don’t know why—remind me of the Führer. My father doesn’t speak. He looks outside, holding my hand in his; his face, which I can see reflected in the window, suddenly looks calm; I almost think there’s a whiff of hope playing in the corner of his lips. Our eyes meet. Mine fill with tears. I bury my face against him.
Here we are at the border. I go to the door of the carriage with him. An SS soldier checks his papers. He asks Papa curtly why he too isn’t leaving Germany, indicating me with a disdainful nod. My father doesn’t reply. And neither do I. I know that deep inside him, and for the first time, he’s not afraid. We have nothing to fear today. In a few days we won’t be German anymore. Ever more.
Papa alighted from the train. I went back to my compartment. On the platform he walked alongside the train as it slowly pulled away. He pressed his hand to the window, I put mine against his, we smiled at each other. The train left. And he disappeared, swallowed up in the darkness.
DECEMBER
2016
A state which in this age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements must some day become lord of the earth.
May the adherents of our movement never forget this if ever the magnitude of the sacrifices should beguile them to an anxious comparison with the possible results.
—ADOLF HITLER, LAST LINES OF MEIN KAMPF
From that last journey, I remember only smells.
The noise of the train has been buried in my memory, as have the faces of other passengers, their voices and the content of their conversations.
I’ve forgotten what I thought about as I left the land of my childhood, leaving behind my parents and all my memories.
All I remember is the smell of sea spray when the train drew into the Hook of Holland.
I’m now ninety-two years old and I can smell it still.
It was nighttime.
I heard the murmur of waves mingling with the sound of the wind.
We boarded a liner. In the dark of night it was still impossible to make out the sea that I so desperately wanted to see. It finally appeared at dawn.
And, for the first time, I saw the horizon.
EPILOGUE
For revisionists who might question the veracity of this account—taking, as they do, perverse pleasure in doubting anything from the period—we’d like to clarify that only small details, such as what the weather was like on a specific winter day while scrumptious sausages were sizzling in the kitchen, could conceivably be contestable. It is true that Edgar doesn’t clearly remember the exact menu every day, or the temperature outside, or even the pattern of the tie his father chose on a particular morning. Those memories had to be augmented with additional detail. A bit. A tiny bit. Hardly at all. Because Edgar’s memory is teeming with such sensory memories from his childhood in Germany. Edgar’s life, in the ten years he lived opposite the most abominable individual the world has brought forth, is a ravel of poetic images and monstrous events.
Edgar was born in 1924. Hitler moved in across the road in 1929. Edgar often encountered him on the street. Sometimes he’s not sure whether the memories are really his own or his mother’s, because she described them to him so often. This is true of his earliest memories. Then everything becomes very clear. And, like everyone else, he can distinguish between what he saw himself and what he was told or what was in the papers at the time or in the history books he’s subsequently studied.
In 1929, when Edgar was five, Hitler was forty. Four years younger than Edgar’s father, Ludwig. This was four years before Hitler became chancellor, but he was already a major topic of conversation for the family, and everyone in the neighborhood knew he’d just moved in. There was a great deal of talk about him. Edgar’s uncle Lion Feuchtwanger, then forty-one, had just published Jud Süß about the lives of Germany’s Jews in the eighteenth century. With this book he became the German author with the highest international sales. He was one of the most famous personalities on Germany’s cultural scene. And he was so preoccupied with the rise of his brother’s neighbor that he decided to make him the subject of his next manuscript. This new book provoked such fury in Nazi ranks that they stripped Lion of his nationality as soon as they came to power. Abroad at the time, he could then never return to Germany. Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power was therefore a key preoccupation of the Feuchtwangers’.
As Edgar grew up, he continued to meet Hitler in the street, and he watched the tyrant’s progress: a few more acolytes every day, the processions of cars growing ever longer, and the people who visited him ever more prestigious. Hitler may not have known who this child surreptitiously watching him was, but Edgar certainly knew about him, just as he recognized members of the Nazi general staff who revolved around him. Munich was the party’s capital. It was here that Hitler had attempted his first aborted putsch in 1923, an episode that led to a prison sentence (during which he wrote Mein Kampf), here too that the party had its headquarters, the Brown House, and the villas of the SA leader, Ernst Röhm, and Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, along with Hitler’s favorite restaurant, Osteria, and many other places familiar to locals.
Rarely has the expression “in the devil’s lair” been so apt: Hitler can be seen as the incarnation of evil. Never in the history of mankind has so much power been concentrated in a single person. Never has the world hung so fully on the thoughts, desires, whims and deranged extravagances of a single man.
The years 1929 to 1939 may well have seen the greatest concentration of events in modern history. Not one week went by without Hitler’s unilaterally deciding to introduce a procedure, institute a law or—later—launch an invasion. And with each of these actions, Edgar had to adapt to a new life because, although he didn’t realize it until the Nazi Party forced him to when they came to power in 1933, Edgar came from a family of Jewish faith. Before 1935 Ludwig and Erna Feuchtwanger were not practicing Jews. They almost never went to the synagogue. They were what is known as nonobservant. In their own minds they were Germans and, first and foremost, human beings. That was how they’d intended to raise Edgar. And yet Edgar had no choice but to see himself as threatened, in danger. As of May 1, 1933, three months after Hitler came to power, Edgar’s schoolmistress had him draw swastikas in his exercise book. He was eight years old.
This firsthand account, then, charts Edgar’s growing awareness not of his own identity but of t
he identity that other people decided to give him; or rather, one other person, the man who happened to be his neighbor, Adolf Hitler.
When Edgar left Germany, eight months before the Second World War broke out, he was fifteen. He’d been living opposite Hitler for ten years. Three thousand six hundred days and nights. Three thousand six hundred times he could go to bed wondering whether Hitler was going to bed too, and three thousand six hundred times he could wonder over breakfast whether Hitler was already up and what new insanity he would introduce that day. As Edgar reached adolescence he was haunted by these thoughts: Is he there? What’s he doing? Does he want to kill us? Will he kill us? Why? Why us? Why me?
I met Edgar in 1995. It is now 2016 so it’s been twenty-one years. The British daily newspaper The Independent had published a brief article about a Jewish child who’d lived opposite Hitler in Munich from 1929 to 1939: Edgar Feuchtwanger. I was a reporter for the French magazine VSD. I called the senior editor of The Independent, who gave me a telephone number for the author of the piece, Edgar’s daughter Antonia. She was happy to pass on her father’s number to me. Only minutes later a meeting had been set up, and the following weekend I was at his house.
I came with a photographer, Nicolas Reynard. We spent the day chatting over cups of tea served by Edgar’s charming wife, Primrose. Edgar described life in Munich under Hitler’s rule. The life of Jews under the Third Reich. His family’s life. He described the Führer’s facial expressions, those he himself had seen. With a child’s eye, because he often passed him in the street as a boy. He remembers major figures such as Ernst Röhm, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and several others who walked past under his window over a ten-year period. He showed us his school exercise book with pencil drawings of swastikas. Nicolas took a black and white photograph of Edgar at his window. And we left.
Hitler, My Neighbor Page 15