A letter in Is It Night or Day? alludes to the similarity between the Jim Crow laws and Germany’s Nuremberg laws. Some book club members have asked me about that reference.

I found this comparison of the laws in a Teachers’ guide:

It is highly apparent that Hitler used the Jim Crow Laws as a premise for the Nuremberg Laws. Both laws specifically targeted an “inferior” people by depriving them of their natural and civil rights.

If one were to briefly scan through the countless numbers of pages, one would notice the similarities between the two documents. For instance:

1. Nuremberg Laws – First Supplementary Decree, ARTICLE 4
The conditions regarding service of teachers in public Jewish schools remains unchanged until the promulgation of new laws on the Jewish school system.

Jim Crow Laws – Missouri Law
Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school.

2. Nuremberg Laws – Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,
SECTION 1- Marriages between Jews and nationals of German or kindred blood are forbidden.

Marriages concluded in defiance of this law are void, even if, for the purpose of evading this law, they are concluded abroad.

Jim Crow Laws – Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Wyoming Law
The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu shall be null and void.

These two examples are significant in the demonstration of similarities between the laws. Both laws strip civil and human rights of the minority group in a foreseen effort to extinguish the minority.

Hadassah Magazine’s review in the November issue:

Is It Night or Day? by Fern Schumer Chapman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 224 pp. $17.99) is a moving work of historical fiction based on the little-known One Thousand Children program endorsed by Eleanor Roosevelt, which rescued Jewish youngsters from Nazi Germany and placed them in American foster homes. Twelve-year-old Edith, her story based on the experience of the author’s own mother, was rescued through the program and traveled alone from her small German village to Chicago.

Schumer Chapman skillfully chronicles the bewildering trans-Atlantic journey, the chaotic arrival in New York and at the home of unwelcoming relatives. Despite her sadness and sense of alienation, she bravely attempts to raise money to help her parents escape from Germany. She takes comfort from the achievements of Hank Greenberg, an American hero who proudly proclaims his Jewishness. Her grief when she learns of her parents’ deaths is somewhat mitigated by her recognition that while one part of her life was ending, another was beginning. Schumer Chapman’s narrative both engages and instructs.

Author Dinaw Mengestu

I’m often asked why I write so much about my mother’s experiences. Even though I never directly experienced the trauma, I inherited it.

Journalist and fiction writer Dinaw Mengestu’s new book, How To Read the Air covers the same emotional terrain. A recent New York Times article describes his work as “populated by exiles, refugees, emigres and children of the African diaspora, all struggling both to find a place in the American landscape and to make sense of their attenuated relationship to the world they left behind.”

“We had no memories in our house,” Mr Mengestu said in the NYT interview. “We were never allowed to, we never spent time talking about it, and yet you’re very aware that it haunts everything. It’s that absence that creates the concern for it. Nothing can be passed on.”

“You know there is this history that precedes you, but you have no access to it whatsoever.”

To me, there is a presence of absence and, at the same time, an absence of presence.

Gert Krell

My German blog partner, Gert Krell, has responded to my entry below called My grandfather’s life and death. Here are some of his comments:

“Next time I go to Darmstadt to visit my grandparents’ grave (they are urn-buried), I will also visit the Jewish cemetery at Groß-Gerau and look for your grandfather’s tombstone. I deeply regret what my country has done to your family, that your grandfather was murdered and thus died long before his time, and that you never had a chance to get to know him. My grandfather died at the Elisabeth Hospital in Darmstadt in 1961 at the age of 75, from cancer. I loved him very much, and I am beginning to get a sense of what you missed and probably still do.”

A retired professor of international relations from the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main, German, Dr. Gert Krell was a director of research and also the executive director at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). He briefly served as the assistant director for regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. Gert writes scholarly articles and is working on a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To read our ongoing conversation, please visit: www.shadowsoftheholocaust.com

Rwanda - Stories for Hope http://storiesforhope.org/

The New York Times Business section on Sunday, October 10, 2010 profiles Patricia Pasick, Director of Stories for Hope in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The foundation was started to help Rwandans tell their stories from the 1994 genocide.

After his entire family was killed in the genocide, a Rwandan secretary general asked Ms. Pasick, who was visiting the country at the time, “What do I tell my children as they get older?” Ms. Pasick reports that he was worried that when his children learned about their grandparents’ deaths, the stories would traumatize them.

“As a family therapist, I knew that it would be damaging if people remained quiet,” Ms. Pasick said. “We learned from the Holocaust that many in the next generation really suffered from the silences. If you don’t know what happened in the past, your mind can distort the facts. These distortions can create a disturbing intergenerational legacy.”

Consequently, Ms. Pasick created Stories for Hope to train counselors and conduct interviews with Rwandian survivors. “We hope to bring balanvce to stories of loss so that survivors don’t think they’ve lost all he richness in their lives and culture.”

Here is the link to the project: http://storiesforhope.org/

My grandfather, Siegmund Westerfeld, was born in Stockstadt am Rhein on September 22, 1891. His mother, Sarah Westerfeld, gave birth to him in the family home that their ancestors had built in 1721. (I believe my mother, born in 1925, was the first child in the family who was born in a hospital in Crumstadt.) Siegmund was the third son. (Both my grandparents, Sigmund and Frieda, had the same family constellation – three boys and a girl.)

Siegmund Westerfeld and his parents

Siegmund served in World War I and received the Iron Cross for his service in the German Army. He became a successful businessman in Stockstadt and something of a community leader; no one in town brought crops to market without Siegmund’s services. The Westerfelds were trailblazing, owning the first car and installing the first telephone in the area. Sigmund introduced the cucumber as a cash crop. In addition, he was known for his sharp wit and tasty homemade sausage.

Perceiving the dangers in the late 1930s, Siegmund and my grandmother Frieda decided to send their daughters to America. Most rescue programs only took one child per family, yet somehow, they were able to place both daughters on ships out of Germany (I suspect Siegmund bribed the authorities.) He hoped that he and Frieda and his mother, Oma Sarah, would follow. However, Oma Sarah refused to leave her homeland.

Complicating matters, Siegmund and Frieda had signed a deed that decreed that the couple would care for Oma Sarah for all her remaining days. In exchange, they would inherit the Westerfeld home and all of its belongings. As Nazism intensified, Siegmund’s brothers and sisters escaped Germany, fleeing to Palestine and South America. But that deed essentially locked Siegmund and Frieda into staying in Germany and caring for Oma Sarah. She wouldn’t leave because she said, “I was born a German and I will die a German.” Siegmund wouldn’t emigrate without his mother.

In time, no one would do business with Siegmund since an SS guard was stationed at the front door. Eventually, without any income, the Westerfelds were forced to sell their large home, which had been in the family for over 200 years. As a prominent Nazi took ownership of the house, Siegmund, Frieda and Oma Sarah were forced to rent and live in one room. Eventually, the Nazis made the family leave Stockstadt in the early 1940s and live in a Jew House on Sudetengaustrasse in Darmstadt (his last known address). While there, local companies such as Volkswagen forced Siegmund and other Jews in the house to serve as slave laborers.

Sadly, Siegmund was taken to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp on June 14, 1941. I learned from the Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen that Siegmund Israel Westerfeld (all Jewish men in Nazi Germany were assigned the name “Israel”) confessed to “mosaisch” — that he believed in the laws of Moses. The record shows that he was assigned the number 38067 and he lived in hut 38. He died on February 15, 1942. The record does not report the cause of his death.

Siegmund Westerfeld’s grave

As you know, there are no markers or graves for Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. However, in the Jewish cemetery in Groß-Gerau, there is a headstone for Siegmund, though it is highly unlikely that his remains are buried there. No one knows who placed the stone there. Engraved on it is my grandfather’s full name, Siegmund Westerfeld. Just beneath, someone has scratched with a sharp tool the words, “Sarah Westerfeld.” On the other side of the headstone, Siegmund’s name is written in Hebrew.

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Freiburg, Sept. 26, 2010

To: Christel Goettert Publishers
re: Fern Schumer Chapman
“Mutterland – nach dem Holocaust”

I have read many books about the topic: memoirs from the Holocaust and after, including those from the perspective of daughters or sons of survivors.

No other book so far has moved and occupied me so much, and I feel compelled to thank you for the publication of this text. I wish that this book finds a much larger audience. I also would like to thank the authoress for having taken on the arduous task of remembering, describing, and reporting.Perhaps you can pass this on to Ms. Chapman.

The German edition of "Motherland"

With all my best wishes for your work as a publisher. Please send me your catalog.

Sincerely,

M.-El. v. Gemmeren

Author Jessica Stern

From Jessica Stern’s book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror:

“…when observers become complicit in the victim’s desire to forget, they become perpetrators, too…When authorities disbelieve the victim, when bystanders refute what they cannot bear to know, they rob the victim of normal existence on the earth. Bystander and victim collude in denial or forgetting, and in so doing, repeat the abuse. Life for the victim now begins anew. In this new world the victim can no longer trust the evidence of her senses. Something seems to have happened, but what? The ground disappears. This is the alchemy of denial: terror, rage, and pain are replaced with free-floating shame. The victim will begin to wonder: What did I do? She will begin to believe: I must have done something bad. But the sensation of shame is shameful itself, so we dissociate that, too. In the end, a victim who has suffered the denial of others will come to see herself as a liar.”

Close readers of Is It Night or Day? will see that Edith suffered a primary trauma in her permanent separation from her parents through childhood immigration and a secondary injury in being placed in an unloving American home.