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The History Podcast
Half-Life: 7. The City That Forgets
00:28:44
Joe traces a family history left out of his great-grandfather’s memoir.
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- [00:01]
Joe Dunthorne
BBC Sounds Music Radio podcasts. After years of chasing his evasions and half truths, I finally put aside the foot high stack of my great grandfather's memoir and his psychiatric notes which I'd hoped would unpack the burden of his chemical weapons work, but didn't. It was a relief to spend time with his sister Elizabeth instead. She'd grown up in the same grand apartment in Munich, but made very different choices. In 1899, when she was just 17 years old, she started running her own improvised kindergarten for the Jewish refugee children she saw on the streets of Munich. While her brother was busy making plans to study chemistry under the great minds of German science, she brought half a dozen children to the back room of her parents apartment and gave them all her toys. Her parents didn't think this appropriate behavior for a girl of her upbringing. They assumed it was just a phase. I'm Joe Dunthorne and you're listening to Half Life. This is episode seven the City Forgets. Did you feel like she had a special relationship with you as a child?
- [01:27]
Rachel
I did.
- [01:28]
Joe Dunthorne
Because you were a child?
- [01:29]
Rachel
Yeah, I think so. You know I, I now understand that her calling was to work with children and I think I felt that as a child. But I really had no idea of the innovative work she'd done. I only really discovered it after her death.
- [01:49]
Joe Dunthorne
Speaking to Elizabeth's granddaughter Rachel, I, I began to understand how Elizabeth had started caring for a handful of children in her old playroom and kept going so that 34 years later, as the Nazis came to power in 1933, she had built a full blown Jewish social care organization. She was now in charge of a kindergarten, after school, clubs, apprenticeships, evening classes, access to health care and for young people without a home or whose homes were unsafe, 50 permanent beds laid with fresh linen. Reading about her work, I admit I was glad to wrestle my family narrative away from Siegfried and the weapons laboratory by the river and towards Elisabeth and a corner building on Antonienstrasse with fruit trees in the garden.
- [02:41]
Rachel
I've always wondered where my interest in political activity came from and I do connect that characteristic to her. The need to try to do something that was politically or socially responsible.
- [02:58]
Joe Dunthorne
The Nazis first tried to shut the home down in the spring of 1933. But Elizabeth used all her influence at the council and after two months it reopened. Though still with their funding cut, they counted themselves lucky as across Munich many other Jewish organizations buildings had been confiscated. In Oranienburg. Meanwhile her my brother Siegfried, my great grandfather, was now living in his large company apartment with two grand Pianos, a bomb shelter in the basement, and a boss who told him not to worry, that he'd start to like Hitler once he got to know him better. I wondered if Elisabeth told her brother the story of how in the summer of 1933, she did go out of her way to see who Hitler really was.
- [03:52]
Rachel
She wanted to see him, to actually have a visual encounter with the person who was threatening her life.
- [04:02]
Joe Dunthorne
In Munich. She and her son Ernst watched a line of sleek black cars drive past, and knowing this could only be one person, decided to follow them. The cars stopped outside one of his favorite hangouts, the Cafe Heck.
- [04:19]
Rachel
And you know, it was my grandmother's idea to go. She and my father went to this cafe.
- [04:26]
Joe Dunthorne
He was there, at the far end of the long room. Hitler was chatting with his colleagues, his back to the wall, a bodyguard watching from nearby. Elisabeth and Ernst were not allowed to take the nearest empty table, but got close enough to observe him in detail. In an interview years later, Ernst remembered how slight and unimpressive Hitler looked. His grey complexion and lank hair, the dainty way he held his coffee cup. They could not match his physical self with the damage he was doing to their lives. They watched him drink and chat, and Ernst felt a rising need to scream.
- [05:09]
Rachel
He said that he was absolutely overwhelmed with fury in the presence of the man and had to get up and leave.
- [05:22]
Joe Dunthorne
In fact, Ernst soon left the country entirely and tried to convince his mother to do the same. But she wanted to stay, working at the children's home to help keep it running while the city around it became openly, proudly hostile.
- [05:41]
Ernst Gruber
It's so difficult to explain the stuff because at the spot there's nothing left of what had been here before. Here is the spot where the three apartment buildings were standing.
- [06:02]
Rachel
So this is your family's apartment building.
- [06:07]
Joe Dunthorne
We had come to Munich to meet another Ernst, Ernst gruber, who was six years old in 1938 when he and his family were evicted from their apartment. It was positioned between the city's central synagogue on one side and on the other, the Kunstlerhaus, another of Hitler's favorites.
- [06:26]
Ernst Gruber
This is a so called Kunstler House artists house. And this was the meeting place for the Nazis when they had conferences or had things to talk about and to decide. It is being said that because Hitler was among the people quite often he met there, that he didn't stand to look at the synagogue anymore. So he wanted the synagogue to be teared down.
- [07:09]
Joe Dunthorne
This stone is the memorial for the synagogue. Yeah. The landmark synagogue with its three octagonal towers was bulldozed At Hitler's personal request, in the summer of 1938, with no other options, Ernst's parents decided that he, his older brother and his baby sister would be best looked after at the children's home.
- [07:35]
Ernst Gruber
If the children's home would not have existed, he doesn't know how his life would have gone on. So in a way, the existence, the pure existence of this children's home was something very positive and helpful.
- [07:55]
Joe Dunthorne
Now, age 92, Ernst was giving us a tour of his Munich childhood, but also showing the formidable energy he dedicates to making sure the events of his youth are not repeated. We trailed after him and his partner Helga, as they glided from interviews to packed lecture theatres, attended protests and exhibitions. He carried a walking stick, but hardly seemed to use it and refused to to cancel any appointments when he lost his voice. Ernst sees all this as his duty, what he's called the very strenuous but necessary task of remembrance, which is particularly challenging in a city like this one, the birthplace of the Nazis.
- [08:47]
Ernst Gruber
Munich always had some kind of difficulty with its memory. Only in some special cases they were ready to remember.
- [08:59]
Joe Dunthorne
In 1920, the Nazi Party was founded in Munich's Hofbrauhaus, the city's oldest beer hall, which is now a kind of party pub with a seven piece umpah band, a gift shop and no mention of its history, though until it was recently repainted, you could still see remnants of the swastikas that had once adorned the ceilings.
- [09:22]
Ernst Gruber
Munchen was very important for Hitler because this is where he started to come up from very, very much down. Because these people of the Munchner bourgeoisie, they were the ones who supported him to come. It was very well off, private people who were running businesses like Editorials and so who had the possibility to introduce him into society and to normalize him.
- [10:02]
Joe Dunthorne
We went with Ernst to Antonienstrasse, where the children's home had once stood. It was now a bland residential block with pot plants on the sills and a stone Buddha in a first floor window.
- [10:16]
Ernst Gruber
His brother and he wanted the street to have a different name. Now it's called Antonienstrasse and they wanted to call it Antonien Heimstrasse to remember the children's home. But this was refused by the local council.
- [10:38]
Joe Dunthorne
Even having a plaque on the wall was opposed by the new building's landlord. In the end a compromise was reached and a large memorial stone was erected on the pavement. It included an image of two teenage friends from the children's home looking down at the street from a window. It Has a really amazing photo, I think of two young women who were in the home. And I think it's in 1942 and they're looking down and they're laughing from a window of the home.
- [11:15]
Rachel
Do you remember these two?
- [11:29]
Joe Dunthorne
One of the young women laughing on the memorial plaque was 15 year old Judy Hirsch.
- [11:35]
Rachel
Hi, Judy. Happy birthday.
- [11:38]
Joe Dunthorne
From her residential home in Montreal, I spoke to Judy on her 97th birthday.
- [11:44]
Judy Hirsch
Hi, Mom.
- [11:44]
Joe Dunthorne
Happy birthday.
- [11:45]
Judy Hirsch
Oh God, you're there too. Hi.
- [11:47]
Joe Dunthorne
In fact, I spoke to her and multiple generations of her family.
- [11:51]
Rachel
I think this is Jason, your grandson.
- [11:53]
Joe Dunthorne
Johnny says good morning, how are you? I'll join by video in just a moment. Thanks for everyone.
- [11:57]
Ernst Gruber
Am I in the meeting?
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Judy Hirsch
It's Evelyn. Am I in the meeting?
- [11:59]
Joe Dunthorne
Evelyn, hi.
- [12:00]
Rachel
Yes, we can hear you, but we can't see you.
- [12:03]
Joe Dunthorne
After digging around in documents for so long, trying to glimpse the life of the children's home, it was amazing to speak to someone who'd experienced it firsthand.
- [12:13]
Judy Hirsch
It would be my pleasure to answer every question you have. I remember quite a bit about it. I had to leave school. Jewish children couldn't go into school anymore. I think I was in seventh grade.
- [12:26]
Joe Dunthorne
That was in November of 1938. On the 9th of that month, hundreds of synagogues had been burned to the ground across Germany, including the orthodox one in Munich, the one Elisabeth and Siegfried grew up in. On the 15th, Jewish children were banned from public schools. And after that Judy came to Antonienstrasse where she helped with the children.
- [12:51]
Judy Hirsch
So for me, I was like. I was the mother they didn't have. And I love children. So it was even so. It was a sad time. We had good times there.
- [13:03]
Joe Dunthorne
One of the reasons I wanted to speak to Judy was that she had vivid memories of two women in particular. Alice Bendix and Hedwig. Jacoby had been in charge of the day to day running of the children's home while Elizabeth worked to stop the authorities from shutting it down entirely. Alice and Hedwig made sure that none of the violence that was so present on the city streets could reach inside the home.
- [13:30]
Judy Hirsch
There was a very good atmosphere, you know, the tribute. Didn't realize even myself. I was not a child anymore, but didn't realize what went around us. They really tried to protect us.
- [13:42]
Joe Dunthorne
I knew a little about Alison Hedwig because at the end of her life, Elizabeth had written short biographies about them. They were among the colleagues whose lives she had desperately wanted to remember and to record, but couldn't.
- [13:56]
Judy Hirsch
Alix Bendix was. She was strict. I remember her very well. You know, I mean, she had what she wanted, she got. Oh, my God. You follow the rules.
- [14:09]
Joe Dunthorne
And what way was she strict? Was it just her?
- [14:12]
Judy Hirsch
You better follow the rules, you know, otherwise you were put up in your room or you had to sit somewhere else. And, I mean, it was a handful. She was a disciplinarian.
- [14:23]
Joe Dunthorne
And how about Hedwig Jacoby? I've got a picture.
- [14:25]
Judy Hirsch
Yeah. She was the softer one of the two. Yeah. We went often to Hedwig Jacoby and told about whatever bothered us or what we wanted.
- [14:39]
Joe Dunthorne
It's interesting because I've read a lot of letters written by Alice Bendix from that time. You're not the first person to say she was strict. But it's funny that her letters are so the opposite of that. You know, she seems to feel the emotions of the house very keenly, and she's always paying attention to the atmosphere and how the children felt. I guess that must have been part of it. If you said that you weren't aware of the kind of or weren't fully aware of what was happening outside the house, you know, she obviously did a good job of protecting the children in her care.
- [15:14]
Judy Hirsch
She did him, and I must say, they were both wonderful ladies.
- [15:19]
Joe Dunthorne
In her correspondence, Alice said she heard the mood of the house as organ music could sense discord through the floorboards. But while she oversaw the harmony of the home, the noise outside it was growing. In Elizabeth's letters, she wrote about how that November of 1938, the Nazis had again fallen in love with the house on Antonienstrasse. She fought to keep the home open even as her husband had been arrested and taken to Dachau. He was locked up along with 10,000 Jewish men from Munich and the nearby regions. He emerged through the gate a month later.
- [16:04]
Rachel
This is from a letter Elizabeth wrote to lillian. Siegfried on the 14th of April, 1939. He came home in a condition that can hardly be described, completely emaciated and dirty, but above all, so weak that he could not speak a word. If it had lasted one more day, he could not have endured it any longer.
- [16:28]
Joe Dunthorne
It was only now that Elizabeth started making plans to try and leave Germany again. I thought of my great grandfather Siegfried, who by then had been safely settled in Ankara with his family for four years, for most of that time receiving half his salary from his old employers in Berlin. For Alice and Hedwig, who were running the children's home, leaving Germany was also a possibility. Alice's brother in Switzerland was begging her to join him. Hedwig had money and could have tried to pay her way out. They stayed standing on Antonian Strasse. I knew that here in March 1939, Elizabeth said goodbye to her colleagues, Alison Hedwig to the children, and to the 40 years of her life she'd spent working on the home. She tried to stay in touch, writing letters from Tel Aviv every week. But Alice's replies grew steadily shorter and the paper on which they were written thinned. Elizabeth was 1600 miles away in Tel Aviv when she received word of the first deportation from the children's home.
- [17:47]
Ernst Gruber
20Th of November, 1441, the first group of children were deported. And there the bus came from this backside behind the garden somehow. So that's where the children were brought.
- [18:06]
Judy Hirsch
To, you know, when they started with the transport. It was. It was. To me, it was shocking, you know, having to dress the children. And we didn't know really what's happening, but we knew it was not good. So, you know, you had dressed those little children you cared for, and when the children were picked up, it was like, for me, it was the end of the world.
- [18:38]
Ernst Gruber
There must be a post of the old garden still down there.
- [18:42]
Joe Dunthorne
Look, come here, my fit. We walked around the side of the apartment building and into the garden.
- [18:59]
Ernst Gruber
And apple trees were here in the garden.
- [19:04]
Judy Hirsch
I remember there was an apple tree and we used to sneak out and shake the tree a little bit so we could get the apples, you know, it was big enough for us to play.
- [19:17]
Ernst Gruber
So it's the first time he's here in the back of the building, because usually he was in front of the house.
- [19:24]
Rachel
This is the first time you've walked back in here.
- [19:29]
Joe Dunthorne
Although Ernst had revisited Antonian Strasser on many occasions over the years, he hadn't been back to the garden since he was a child.
- [19:46]
Ernst Gruber
He didn't see the children going into the bus, but the way to the bus he saw and he saw that the children got some small package of food for the way. And that's it for him. This is a difficult memory. It gets close to him.
- [20:20]
Joe Dunthorne
That night, 23 young children aged between one and eight were taken by bus to Milbertshofen station, where they were lifted onto carriages. The train was so overcrowded that luggage had to be tossed out and left on the platform. Earlier on our trip, Ernst and his partner Helga had shown us photos from that night in 1941.
- [20:46]
Rachel
Deportation.
- [20:47]
Judy Hirsch
You see the police.
- [20:50]
Ernst Gruber
So there is a series of photographies of the first deportation that happened, obviously made by someone of the perpetrators.
- [21:01]
Joe Dunthorne
Yeah, this is really distressing, distressing photograph of one of the first deportations. November 20, 1941. This is in the middle of the night. Well, they're almost babies, really tiny children being passed up to presumably be put onto the transports. And just the sense of, you know, they look like they could be half asleep, you know, they're just being carried out of there, wherever they were living, and taken away for three days. They traveled north before reaching what is now Kaunas in Lithuania. They were among almost a thousand Munich Jews who were walked to a fort in which pits had already been dug. They were locked up and starved for two days, then shot in rows of 50, their bodies burned and buried. In Munich's official documents, the missing were noted as having emigrated to unknown. Even these photographs of the deportation told their own story of evasion. Handed over in an unmarked envelope.
- [22:19]
Ernst Gruber
Ernst had a talk at the spot where the so called ghetto used to be. And afterwards somebody, and nobody knows whom, gave an envelope with this series of photos to Ernst's brothers.
- [22:38]
Rachel
The source is not clear, but.
- [22:41]
Judy Hirsch
But we suppose it must be children.
- [22:46]
Rachel
From SS or so persons who were there and could make photos.
- [22:52]
Joe Dunthorne
So you think that when the photo was passed to Werner, it was a child or a grandchild of that person who still had the photos and then passed them on? Possibly, yes. The second transport came in March 1942. This time a group of older children aged between eight and 15, along with several employees from the children's home, were transported to Piazki in Poland, A town that was used as a short term stop on the way to the extermination camps. Their dates and places of death remain unknown.
- [23:32]
Rachel
Can you describe the photo, Joe?
- [23:35]
Joe Dunthorne
So that is a group photo from in front of the children's home on Antonian Strasser in 1941. And it's 15 children aged between about five and 10, all in the sunshine and smiling in front of some trees in front of the children's home. All the children are killed. Also not Resistor, my newest.
- [24:07]
Ernst Gruber
All these children were killed. Besides his sister.
- [24:14]
Joe Dunthorne
Alice, Hedwig and the remaining children from the home were transferred in the summer of 1942 to a requisitioned monastery in Bergam Lyme on the edge of Munich. And from there Elizabeth received a final letter. This one came via the Red Cross and was closer to a telegram, 25 words or less and required to be strictly personal. Better accommodation since July. Health good. Always thinking of you. With love and warmest wishes, Alice.
- [24:52]
Judy Hirsch
Just looking at a picture in front of me at the children at Bergam Lyme with Ernest Grub in the front. And, well, I'd say two of them were survived. They were able to leave it at the rest, just the rest couldn't make it.
- [25:19]
Joe Dunthorne
On 12 March 1943, Alice and Hedwig and the remaining children in their care were taken by train to Auschwitz, where, according to a witness, they were selected on arrival. After undressing, they were locked inside a room with shower heads on the walls. The lights went off, pellets dropped in through overhead shafts. The children were the first to die as the hydrocyanic gas, heavier than air, filled the room from the bottom up. Afterwards, the Jewish camp prisoners who were forced to pull apart the corpses wore gas masks with a J filter. This was among the masks produced by my great grandfather Siegfried's former company in Oranienburg and the department he used to work for, the Protection Division.
- [26:20]
Judy Hirsch
You have times where maybe you have a dream about this time again or something which makes you kind of sad, you know, and when I look at the pictures, there are all those friends, you know, they're murdered, you know, it's 13, 14 year old kids or babies. Yeah. It just cannot be forgotten, you know, it cannot be forgotten.
- [26:48]
Joe Dunthorne
When, at the end of her life, Elizabeth wrote her biographies of Alice and Hedwig, she'd struggled to find many of the basic details. And even now, decades later, some events were only very slowly coming to the surface. An unmarked envelope of photos handed over without a word. I hoped to at least contribute to the remembrance work that Elizabeth started. But I also couldn't escape the fact that no matter how much I tried to look the other way, I kept finding traces of my great grandfather's work and the harm it caused. I wanted to steer the family story towards someone who tried to help rather than harm people, but that in itself began to feel like a form of distraction. Was it just another way to avoid being asked the questions I really didn't want to be asked? Half Life was written and presented by me, Joe Dunthorne. It was Produced by Eleanor McDowell and mixed by Mike Woolley. Lorenz Rolhauser was our translator in Munich. The music was composed by Jeremy Walmsley. The story consultant was Sarah Geiss and the executive producer was Alan Hall. It was a Falling tree production for BBC Radio 4 and the History podcast.