Growing up in Peru in the 1940s and 50s, Maria Scurrah didn’t know what a “Jew” was. When she was told she was one, she was mystified. “What? Was I supposed to have horns growing out of my head? I had no idea what it was all about,” she said.
Maria, who now lives in Newcastle, NSW, with her Australian husband, Martin, spent much of her childhood in South America blissfully unaware of antisemitism and of the horrors that in the 1930s drove her parents to leave their homes in Germany to make a new life in a very unfamiliar land.
Both her parents – Wilhelm and Lisbeth – were from well-to-do families. Her father’s father had a coffee importing business in Hamburg and her mother’s father was the city architect at Breslau (now in Poland). On her father’s side, the family traced its roots in Germany to the 14th century. Her father’s great-grandfather is buried in the Jewish cemetery in the Rhineland city of Worms. Her mother’s family traced its tree to Eastern Europe but had long integrated into German society, converting to the Lutheran branch of Christianity.
To say the families were deeply assimilated would be an understatement. But that counted for nothing when the Nazi Party decided there was political advantage in fanning the flames of hatred. Like many other German Jews, her parents chose to leave. Her father had a distant contact in Peru who had assured him he would find work and safety there. He left in 1935. Her mother almost left her escape attempt too late, just managing to get aboard the last ship from France to Argentina in 1939, shortly before war was formally declared. Even then the fact that Lisbeth’s passport was stamped with a “J” – for Jewish – almost cost her entry to Nazi-sympathising Argentina.
The couple had met years before when her father had stayed in a house owned by her mother’s family in Breslau, the town where he was apprenticed. They were not in love, and had not been, although they were good friends. “They took excursions kayaking together in the Oder River, and my mother visited my father and his parents in Hamburg,” Maria said. When Wilhelm heard that Lisbeth had arrived in South America he sought her out and proposed marriage. It was, Maria said, a pragmatic arrangement.
Peru proved to be a very good escape option and the couple had reason to be deeply thankful that they were able to spend the war years in safety and security. Tragically, many of their family members were not so lucky. Some found other ways to escape, but others died in the Nazi concentration camps. Information about the fate of many family members was not available until after the war ended and even then, details were often scant.
“My mother had been dux of her school,” Maria said, “but the Nazi laws barred her from university. She was lucky to be accepted by a gardening school in Switzerland. She was a brilliant gardener.” Her mother’s older sister married a Frenchman. She had a law degree but couldn’t use it and wound up teaching German studies at the University of Bordeaux. Her brother, an engineer, escaped to Argentina from where he was able to help others get out of Europe. Her younger sister ended up teaching violin in Buenos Aires.
Escape to South America
Maria’s father’s cousin managed to get to Australia, against the odds. “He was living in a car, trying to buy a passage out,” she said. “He was a qualified chemist and he managed to meet a fellow chemist who was willing to sponsor him to Australia. He brought three young daughters. His son, who was born in Australia, was Chris Winter, who became well-known as a founder of Double-J Radio in Sydney. Chris also made an effort to travel to meet his dispersed family and stayed with us in Peru for six months in 1976. He discovered Andean Music and wanted to bring it to Australia, but he got severely ill with Hepatitis A and had to return home,” Maria wrote.
Once Wilhelm Mayer arrived in Peru he got a job with a German company that made notebooks. Next he started working as a travelling salesman and that’s how he came to visit the regional city of Huancayo where he decided to go into business. He partnered with some other people and wound up with his own hardware store. After the war they brought out their aunt and uncle to Peru. “My Aunt Franciska spent the entire war years working at the Grenfell Mission in Labrador (somebody waived the visa requirement, seeing that they had no other applicants for the job),” Maria said. “After the war she got a displaced persons visa to the USA, and taught weaving at Black Mountain College. I was two when she arrived in Peru. She founded a weaving workshop with 12 Swedish model looms built in Huancayo and trained locals to use them.”
“My aunt had promised her mother that she would always look after her brother, and she kept that promise,” Maria said. Maria’s uncle had been studying medicine when he suffered a psychotic episode and the Nazis sent him to a concentration camp. Somehow the family got him out and he managed to flee to Scotland where he worked on a dairy farm through the war years. “After that he became ultra-religious. He learned Hebrew and got circumcised as an adult. Later he went to Israel but he didn’t last there,” Maria said.
Wilhelm and Lisbeth were married in 1941 and, as Lisbeth often expressed it, “lived happy through the war in Huancayo”. Maria, born in 1946, also has fond memories. “I had a super-happy childhood,” she said. “We spoke German at home and Spanish outside the home. I wasn’t aware of ‘white privilege’, but I had it. I was the only blonde kid in my class. We were welcome everywhere. Only as an adult did I become aware of how well-off I was compared to a lot of the Indigenous people, who were usually treated badly.”
Maria’s mother ran a kindergarten for the children of European families in Huancayo, and Maria said she was surprised in later years to realise that her parents mixed cordially with other German families who were known to have links to the Nazi Party. While Maria attended a missionary school she was never interested in the religious instruction. “There was a silence about religion in our house. My father was not interested in it at all. He considered it hocus pocus,” Maria said. “His philosophy was that we should be the best people we can be in the here and now. He certainly did not believe in the idea of ‘chosen people’. He said there was no such thing.”
“I thought my school was a pretty good one,” she said. “It was only later, when I got a scholarship to the United States, that I realised it had actually been very mediocre. When I first went to university I had never even written an essay.” Still, the American teachers at her school had helped her learn English well enough to pass the scholarship exam and in 1963 she found herself at Brandeis University, studying biology. After that she went to Cornell University to study plant breeding. That’s where she met her husband, Martin, who was studying business subjects.
“I was at Cornell from 1967 to 1972. It was an amazing time, with so many opportunities. It was the time of the Green Revolution, when we thought we were going to save the world with high-yielding plant varieties,” she said. Maria’s expertise got her a good job back in Peru, working on potato varieties. Martin followed her and also found work there.
“Shining Path” and another escape
While life might have been very pleasant for some people in Peru in the 1970s it was less comfortable for large number of the indigenous people who found themselves mired in poverty and subject to severe discrimination. As an apparent reaction to this, an indigenous university professor named Abimael Guzman established the “Sendero Luminoso” or “Shining Path”, a Maoist communist revolutionary and terrorist organisation that wanted to topple the government of Peru and establish its own form of state. Popular at first, Shining Path soon lost support because of the extreme cruelty of its actions. Tens of thousands of Peruvians lost their lives during the conflict between the government and Shining Path. Guzman was caught and jailed in 1992, dying in prison in 2021.
Among Shining Path’s key targets were foreigners and well-to-do whites. This made life for Maria’s family in Huancayo increasingly tense. “At first my mother said she was not going to be driven from her home, but after a while it got to the point where every knock at the door was frightening,” Maria said. Her aunt and uncle moved back to Hamburg for their final years while her parents sold up and moved to the relative safety of the capital, Lima where they too lived out their time.
Maria and Martin, meanwhile, moved with their daughters to Australia – which they had visited periodically during their time together in Peru. They lived for most of a decade in South Australia, with Maria working at the state’s plant research institute and Martin teaching Spanish at Flinders University. In the late 1990s the pair moved back to Peru – Martin had got a job there with Oxfam – and they stayed this time until 2022 when they came back permanently to Australia.
Today Maria involves herself deeply in social issues. She participates in peaceful demonstrations in support of the environment and has a deep and sincere sympathy for the cause of the Palestinian people. “My parents would have been horrified if they saw how the state of Israel has been treating the people of Palestine,” she said. “My father always closely followed news about Israel, but even in the early years of the state he was troubled by that aspect of things.”
Maria’s parents, it seems, did a good job of shielding their children from the impact of trauma inflicted on them during the period when they were forced to flee their home country. In later years, however, she learned that her father had written an account of his experiences. This was addressed to her older brother, who thoughtfully transcribed the hand-written document for the benefit of his wider family and relatives scattered across the world.
I recently spoke to Maria and she generously shared the transcript of her father’s diary, which I have clumsily rendered into English using a free online translation service. In this post I am sharing portions of this document more widely, believing it to be extremely interesting, especially in light of the times in which we in the “democratic” West now find ourselves living.
Maria’s paternal grandfather was a highly respected businessman in Hamburg, where he operated a coffee importing business named Thompson, Hildesheim & Co and was a proud member of many commercial and cultural organisations.
I have read first-person accounts of other Jewish people in Germany in the 1930s and a common theme is the extent to which many families identified themselves with German culture. Many had converted from Judaism and become Lutherans. Many older German Jewish men at this time were combat veterans of the First World War and were intensely patriotic to what they regarded as their “Fatherland”. There was, however, somewhat of a divide between German Jews and Jewish people of more recent Eastern European origin. Wilhelm Mayer’s father certainly considered himself German, first and foremost.
The emergence of Nazism
The coming to power of Hitler and the Nazis was not a sudden thing, and it wasn’t easy for Jewish people to grasp its implications for them, and those implications weren’t uniformly applicable, at first, to all Jews.
To set the scene a little, Germany in the years after the First World War ended in 1918 was full of hardship and strife. Germany’s triumphant allies forced it to sign the Treaty of Versailles, under which Germany had to surrender its overseas territories, an eighth of its own homelands (land annexed as the result of previous continental wars), agree to a huge reduction in its armed forces, accept a 15-year occupation of some of its most important territory on the Rhine river and pay huge monetary reparations – the equivalent of more than five billion dollars at that time – to compensate its enemies for the damage caused by the war.
The war had impoverished the country. Hunger and unemployment were widespread and socialist factions strove to take control. Pitched battles raged on the streets of the cities. The victorious faction formed a government, based in the small town of Weimar – a move designed to cut ties with the monarchist and militarist past. But no government and no policies could help the situation. Inflation ran amok in the Weimar Republic – perhaps partly due to deliberate policy aimed at inflating away the debt – and the famous scenario arose where Germans lucky enough to have money and access to food had to use wheelbarrows to transport their cash to the shops.
The United State of America loaned Germany large sums to help it pay its war debts, but this hardly seemed to help most ordinary people and the country’s mood began to swing to the right. By 1924 right-wing nationalists were the second- largest faction in the Reichstag – the German parliament. In 1925 ageing Field Marshal Hindenberg – the right-wing candidate – became president, promoting images of military renewal. The foreign money was fuelling a building boom, however, and also helping to create some significant industrial enterprises. Berlin flowered, in some measures, becoming an international byword for cutting edge art and social and sexual permissiveness.
The foreign money taps were turned off by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. By then the “National Socialists” – the Nazis – had made their appearance and they set their sights on power and on communists and Jews, whom they portrayed as having “stabbed Germany in the back” in the First World War. Brown shirts appeared on the streets and anti-semitism started to come out of the shadows and into mainstream propaganda. By 1930, with Hindenberg still president, austerity measures were applied that had a terrible effect on ordinary people. Both the Nazis and the communists opposed the government, but they opposed each other even more and soon they were fighting on the streets of the cities.
Make Germany great again . . .
Adolf Hitler emerged from this mess. Crazy he may have been, but he had prodigious self-belief and he exerted a magnetic pull over the masses with his “make Germany great again” rhetoric. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels fanned the flames of antisemitism with outrageous speeches: “The Jew,” he pronounced at Nazi rallies, “is the real demon of destruction”. Nazis were enemies of Jews “because we identify ourselves as Germans,” he shouted. “The Jew is our greatest curse. But this will change, as surely as we are Germans.”
The German government, worried by the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, mistakenly believed they could use these extremists for their own benefit. However, a series of intrigues and elections resulted, in January 1933, in Hitler becoming chancellor. The next month the Reichstag building mysteriously burst into flames. The Nazis swore it was part of a communist plot and the voting public largely believed them, rewarding them with a majority at the next election. The Nazis used their majority to take crucial powers from the elected parliament and vest them directly with the Nazi cabinet.
This was the signal for many dissidents to leave, in a hurry, if they could. Hitler used his new powers to wipe out trade unions and democratic associations, harass Jews out of public life, abolish freedom of speech and freedom of the press and cement his dictatorship. Hitler had used his loyal “brownshirts”, the stormtroopers known as the SA, to intimidate and bully his opponents, but by 1933 he had to pull this enormous force into line. Hence the “Night of the Long Knives”, in which the SS (a separate paramilitary bodyguard force sworn to personal loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi party) was ordered to assassinate hundreds of SA leaders. This was to ensure the brownshirts could not become a weapon against the regime.
In this new climate in Germany, saturated in furious propaganda and in which no real dissident opinion was tolerated, antisemitism became a key article of faith. In much the same way that 21st Century Israel has worked to dehumanise Palestinians and Arabs, and in which the Trump administration in the USA has striven to portray refugees, asylum seekers and other “illegals” as subhumans who need to be cleared away, Hitler made it dangerous to be Jewish. Jews were not his only targets. The Nazis also wanted to clear away Slavs, Romani, homosexuals, people with disabilities, communists and other political opponents. They did so, systematically and very efficiently.
The pressure against Jews in Germany was cranked up steadily. To begin with, being a German Jew with deep roots in the country was some protection, as was front-line service in the First World War, marriage to non-Jews or possession of a non-German passport. While some Jewish people fled quickly, many others believed the madness that had gripped the nation would pass. Many had extensive family and business ties in Germany and could not imagine where else to go.
This is the environment in which Maria’s father, Wilhelm, found himself. Born in 1912, he was aged 21 and living in Breslau (now named Wroclaw and part of Poland) when Hitler came to power in 1933. In Breslau he met his future wife, boarding in a house owned by her father, the well-respected city architect. Wilhelm was working for a company that traded in imported goods, mostly foodstuffs. As he wrote to his son years later:
Back then, in 1933, it was not clear to many, including me, what boundless misfortune had befallen Germany and the entire world through Hitler’s seizure of power. But I remember how Peter Behrendt (your uncle) sat with a friend, pale and frightened, and when I entered the room, told me that the Reichstag building in Berlin was burning. Of course, what the National Socialists (Nazis) claimed back then, what all the talk was about, was that this fire was meant to be a “beacon” for the communists, a great torch signal for the revolution.
Back then, there were marches and rallies every day, but only the herd mentality of the masses was expressed; patiently, even enthusiastically, letting themselves be instructed on how they should bring about the downfall of the fatherland and willingly allowing themselves to be used to make many fellow human beings unhappy and then to collect what had been sown with interest and compound interest.
What horrified Wilhelm the most, as he watched the Nazis marching and saw examples of petty local Nazi leaders taking out their personal grudges against enemies, was “the reaction of the masses, who did not silently endure these scenes, but participated enthusiastically and horribly”. In one case, while going home from work with a colleague, the pair walked into a noisy crowd. A vicious local Nazi named Heines had dragged an elderly former governor of Silesia named Lüdermann into a public street to be humiliated. The old man’s “crime” was that years ago he “had done what he was ordered to do (unfortunately, too little) under the Social Democratic government in Prussia to keep the Nazi hordes in check”.
He “was now being dragged through the streets in the middle of a group of teenagers in brown shirts. Lüderman towered over the Hitler boys surrounding him in head and shoulders, and stood upright and dignified, his face completely composed and cool. The people were thrilled, enraptured, intoxicated by the appearance of the fallen great man. Suddenly, Heine also appeared in the crowd. He was so tall that one could see his head, which was covered with a blood-red cap, above the heads of the enthusiastic crowd. He roared: ‘Where is the pig?’ and first the boys who surrounded Lüderman, and then the crowd pointed at him.
“Where is the pig?”
“There—there—there.”
They had the old dignified gentleman, who didn’t flinch; they sang the Horst Wessel song, in which it says: “The day for freedom and bread is breaking” and forced the old Social Democrat to raise his hand in the “German” salute.
This incident stayed in Wilhelm’s memory for years.
Schadenfreude, which one says is the purest, probably played a part, but so did sadism, the pure joy in others’ suffering, and probably also the joy of the crowd in that spectacle, be it only a poor monkey who has to hop around on a barrel organ, or the cinema, or a car.
Perhaps, so one consoled oneself, the Nazis would soon calm down and realize that there were indeed good, patriotic Jews; perhaps this and that would happen; “hoping against hope,” as they say, because one doesn’t want to admit that the game is already lost.
Wilhelm took a cycling tour of northern Germany shortly after the Nazis took control. He described a visit to the small town of Gedibusch:
Since it was now dusk, I had to consider where I would stay overnight. In the marketplace of the small town, a group of Hitler Youth (five) stood in their uniforms, and I asked where one could sleep in the straw. They asked me why I wasn’t going to the youth hostel, and I lied to them, saying I had forgotten my ID at home. “Well,” they said, then I should continue on the country road towards Ratzeburg where there were a lot of large farms with good barns where one could stay comfortably. I found the farms described, which formed the village of Gauzow, and a thin old woman allowed me to into the barn, on the condition that her husband, who was not at home, agreed to it. I washed myself under the pump, took out my bread and cheese, and began to eat.
When the elderly farmer arrived he quizzed Wilhelm about what he had seen in Gedebusch. The farmer was troubled because his son, an officeholder in the SA (brownshirts) had been ordered to go to that town in full uniform.
We were talking to each other when the son drove into the yard on a motorcycle and stopped. I didn’t feel comfortable seeing the man in his full war paint with medals and decorations, honorary dagger, revolver, and an incredibly agitated demeanour. I pulled myself backwards into the barn, but the old farmer wouldn’t let me leave. “Stay here, son, we won’t hurt you . . .” Again and again he needed to use this misunderstood word.
So there I stood watching the young man, completely beside himself, as he rather disjointedly and unsteadily brought out that he had gone to Gadebusch and there all the Party, SA, and SS officials . . . had been gathered and suddenly were demanded to swear a new oath to Hitler, and then informed that Mr Hitler felt compelled to have Mr Röhm, the supreme SA leader, shot – and with him a great number of other criminals against Führer and Fatherland, such as Heines, General Schleicher, Gregor Strasser, and many others. [This must have been June 1934 – the “Night of the Long Knives”, referred to earlier in this post.] This had the young man of course very excited but unfortunately he did not take the opportunity to realize what kind of people Germany had been delivered to.
In the evening I was already lying on my straw when the young man came into the barn to talk to me. At first, I wasn’t entirely comfortable, but soon I realized that these people hadn’t yet been completely permeated by the poison of National Socialism, because otherwise he wouldn’t have shown me that I would be lying more comfortably on the oat straw in the other corner than on the rye straw I had been lying on. But nevertheless, these people had already so dulled their sense of good and evil, of the decent and the indecent, that he calmly told me stories from the “struggle” of Nazism that should have shamed him: how he was always equipped with good weapons, how they attacked people known as Social Democrats in their homes at night and beat them half to death, how one such victim almost caught him with a pitchfork, but of course, the fine 16mm! Callouses on the soul . . . From such people, it was easy to assemble concentration and extermination camp crews. They saw the horrific murders that took place on June 30th and did not demand justice or a court. He had eyes to see and ears to hear, and yet he saw and heard nothing.
Wilhelm realised that if Hitler stayed in power “I would have lost my homeland, that I couldn’t be there where my ancestors had lived and worked”. Suddenly it was unsafe to speak your mind in front of others, and other dangers quickly crowded in. Little by little, new rules and regulations began to deprive Jewish people of their rights and their freedom. Shoppers were forcibly discouraged from patronising Jewish businesses. Jews were barred from public schools, from universities, from many jobs – even from public transport. It was made clear that Jews should leave the country if they could. They were forced to sell businesses, homes and other property, usually to Nazis and usually at crushingly low prices.
My cousin Bernhard Dehn had discovered that he could no longer continue studying law, that they wouldn’t accept him at an agricultural school, and so he decided to go to South Africa. I traveled from London to Southampton, where his ship stayed for a morning, which we spent together. Will we ever see each other again?
Time to leave, if you can
Wilhem’s brother Reinhard went to Denmark to study agriculture and his sister, Franziska, went to Sweden to learn weaving. Wilhelm spent a year in England, working for planning firm Hilton & Wallace, learning English and reading. He was back in Hamburg in 1934, but knew that the writing was on the wall.
I knew I had to leave and looked at everything as if it were the last time (which it usually was) that I would see the most familiar things . . . the old church steeples of Hamburg, everything filled me with a great melancholy, but also joy, because I had never seen all this so consciously. My friend Simon Windmüller often told me how it seemed to him during that time as if nature itself, the trees, the meadows, the sky had changed, as if they were now threatening and unfriendly where he had previously seen only home and familiarity.
Wilhelm recalled the small town of Dammgarten where he used the small amount of money in his pocket to buy a pastry from a local bakery. The “friendly, plump baker’s wife” gave him:
. . . a wonderful snail-shaped cake with icing and raisins, and I sat down on a bench and ate the spiral cake comfortably, unwinding the spiral from the outside in. When I was finished and ready to leave, the woman came over and, somewhat embarrassed, gave me another snail-shaped cake and explained that her son was also out on a bike trip and, as she hoped, I should accept this small gift, which I gladly did. I also started to unroll this pastry when she continued her story and told me that her son was in the Hitler Youth and was travelling with his group. So there it was again. Just a moment ago I could still feel at home, and then the final abyss opened up again.
So, grain by grain, the ground gave way beneath our feet. What had been valid yesterday was worthless today.
The experience with the baker’s wife reminded Wilhelm of an episode during Easter, 1933, when he and some friends did a cycling tour in the same area. They spent a night in the small town of Sternberg and in the morning he went to look at the small gothic church there, “because even in the most insignificant villages there are beautiful buildings to see”.
Besides me, a small group of boys from the “Christian Association of Young Men” had also gathered, which was the German branch of the YMCA, which Hitler dissolved soon afterward, because the swastika faith was the only one that could bring salvation. We saw this and that in the church, looked up into the vaults, and read the inscriptions on the old gravestones and plaques, and finally entered the chapel, where an extensive wood carving hung on the wall.
“Here you see the burning of the Jews of Sternberg in the year…” said the sexton, and now one could clearly see a group of men wearing the typical bell-shaped hats that medieval Jews were forced to wear. They stood, only their chests and heads visible, their hands outstretched, in a carved sea of flames.
“And why were they burned?” asked a boy. “You can see it here,” replied the leader, and pointed to a gray stone in which a footprint was visible, just as it looks when someone steps on a still fresh cement floor and no one repairs the damage before the cement hardens. “There was, at that time, the belief that the Jews desecrated the host, which is the body of Jesus Christ, on Easter night, i.e., they pierced it with needles. This was supposedly done by the evil Jews of Sternberg in that year, and as a result, the host began to bleed. The terrified Jews wanted to throw the bloody host into the river to hide their shameful deed from the witnesses, but the stone on which the man who wanted to drown the host stood fell.” He gave in and the next day the stone clearly showed the culprit’s footprint. This footprint, and the floating of the host, was sufficient to bring about the event that the medieval woodcarver had recorded in such detail. The stone with the footprint and this carving are now among Sternberg’s sights. The carving also had great artistic value; I believe it is even listed in the catalogued handbook of German art monuments.
The innocent young Christian who had asked earlier couldn’t express his astonishment at how anyone could ever believe something so stupid and senseless. He was so honestly naive and appalled by such blatant cruelty. That was 1933. A few years later, he himself may have operated the crematorium ovens in Auschwitz and other death camps, and his sin, his cruelty, was far greater than medieval burning, for he could not even use the perhaps true belief in a sacred thing as a pretext. I stood there now in the dimly lit chapel and wondered if one of my ancestors had been carved in that image . . .
Such episodes made Wilhelm aware of the long tradition of Christian antisemitism in Europe and helped him realise the fearsome monster that had again been unleashed in the country his family called home.
These last months in Germany passed by for me. Mother felt the same way, and when we went somewhere together to run errands, had a cup of tea at Rediger’s on the Neuer Wall, or sat on the Sülberg and looked down at the Elbe, life was lived very intensely. One knew these were precious hours that had to be used wisely. The randomness of our world was all too apparent, even though Hitler managed to maintain outward order and civility after the first few months. Friends and journalists came to Germany and found that the refugees had greatly exaggerated. Everything was proceeding perfectly.
Hoping it would all blow over
Wilhelm’s father didn’t want to believe what he saw happening around him. He hoped against hope that things might still be all right for his family. Not even when he was forced out of the associations to which he had proudly belonged did he understand the danger he faced. He was forced stand down from his beloved “Association of Companies Involved in the Coffee Trade”, from the local stock exchange board, from the Patriotic Society and even from the Goethe Society. Wilhelm wrote how his father had been visited by his friend and colleague, a Mr Dietrich, to tell him that the Patriotic Society had received an ultimatum from the government: remove non-Aryans from its membership or face compulsory dissolution. Mr Dietrich found the ultimatum appalling and disliked the ordeal of informing the affected members, he said.
Did Mr Dietrich not see that through his actions he had already dissolved this society, which had been founded in the 18th century in the spirit of the Enlightenment for the “promotion of useful trades and sciences,” had established the first savings bank in 1827 and had shown new paths in many other areas? It would have been more in line with the founders’ wishes to let the society die a dignified death than to make this concession. But in the town hall, the spirit of the elders was probably not alive. They had certainly had the Latin inscription carved on the town hall portal: “May the descendants preserve the freedom that the fathers acquired”.
Wilhelm worked for a little more than a year in his father’s coffee importing business.
There were the small electrically operated sample roasting drums, the long rows of tin sample boxes, the black “coffee paper” on which the samples were poured, all the many known and unknown coffee merchants and brokers who treated us so kindly, there were aisles to the stores, conversations with the warehouse keepers and quartersmen, as they were called, there were steamers, and one might see a brown-skinned man with a turban coming down from an English freight tramp steamer, or even a Chinese man. So, I was part of it, and every morning I could read the mail with my father, stand there when he bought coffee from the brokers and did “test-roasting” (that’s what they called it, because you pierce the bags with a pointed tube, and then a stream of the goods flows out of the bag) and brewing, and showing me how to taste the black brew, always spitting out the tasted coffee, because otherwise you would inevitably have a heart attack. I could go to the coffee exchange in the mornings . . . and I could perhaps visit the customers myself, or establish direct relationships in South America, or this, or that. But I knew that all of this was useless; Hitler tolerated no more daydreams.
Father easily indulged in the illusion of his successful business and wanted to buy me a car and withdraw from the business himself. But everything was written: The end, the end. The emotional pressure became so great that my mother kept saying: “Go away, go away, you can’t live here.”
Jewish people who wanted to leave Germany had a variety of options, depending on their connections, resources and luck. Many went to Shanghai because no visa was required to go there. Others put their names down on the long waiting list to go to the USA. Others fled to countries that bordered on Germany, only to be swept up by the SS and Gestapo when Germany invaded those countries. Huge numbers were sent to what were at first thought to be labour camps, only to be murdered by disease, starvation, shooting or the gas chambers.
South America was a popular destination for those able to arrange a passage. Wilhelm’s friend Ulrich Neisser’s father had a distant relative who had emigrated to Peru via Argentina and Chile. A letter was written and reply received: “‘for two hard-working young people, there is always room in the land of the Incas’. He couldn’t make firm contracts or promises, but there was no doubt that we wouldn’t starve if we came. But one doesn’t give up one’s homeland so easily”.
Wilhelm left Germany for Peru in 1935. The Nazis confiscated his father’s business and sent his parents to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Wilhelm’s father died there.
