Stories

My mother used to recite a poem, I don't recall all the words but the most penetrating lines were about a tired glance and someone not being recognized anymore by one's domestic ("... müde ist das Angesicht,/ meine Minna geht vorüber, meine Minna kennt mich nicht."). To me this poem gave expression of my mother's feelings about what had been done to her and to her family. ("To her" and not "to mine?") Indignation and disbelief over the destruction of the social fabric, the humiliation, but mostly the betrayal of the very trust that had upheld one's life before the turn of events that propelled my mother out of her protected German-Jewish bourgeois village childhood.

The Koch Family in Rodalben, Palatinate. Ca. 1926

The Koch Family, ca. 1926 (Rodalben/Palatinate). Back row: Frieda Koch, nee Frank; Hans Knopp; Heinrich Koch. Front row: the twins Rosel and Seppel (b. 1922) with their paternal grandmother, Helene Koch, nee Schwarz

The stories she told, ever disjointed as they were and still are, apart from listing names and relations, had to do with returns to Rodalben, a village near the erstwhile shoe-manufacturing metropolis Pirmasens. No more such returns for her after the last one where, as she hints, she was assaulted by a former midwife who, she says, held a grudge against the Jew because instead of her a surgeon from the city hospital had been called in to deliver the twins, Josef and Henriette Rosel.

She speaks of her first return in 1938 but not all that much about her life before. She tells about her admiration for her cousin Hans Knopp who used to drive up to her parents' house in a cart drawn by two beautiful horses. Until shortly before his death in 1987, when he considered whether to have his mother's remains relocated to a Jewish burial ground, Hans agonized over his mixed parentage.

Hans Knopp with his paternal grandfather and uncle in Simmern (Hunsrück). The Christian part of his family kept him in hiding in their village during the Holocaust.

More precisely, Hans never forgave his mother for marrying a non-Jew. He himself had been brought up by an observant Jewish aunt, apparently the only strictly orthodox person in the family. My mother despised the fact that Hans could think poorly of his father even after his family and village in the Hunsrück had saved his life by hiding him during the war after the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, where he had worked as a surgeon, was closed.

Adolf and Johanna Knopp, nee Koch, Hans Knopp's parents. Adolf was a butcher's apprentice in my greatgrandfather's butchery. His daughter eloped with the Christian apprentice but did not convert to Catholicism until days before her death because she wanted to be buried with her husband. Her Jewish son, Hans, grew up with his orthodox Jewish aunt, Emma.