Hazel Chowcat
In February 2019, I travelled to Germany with my husband to visit Jewish cemeteries where those members of my family who died before the Nazi period were buried. I had conducted extensive research into my German Jewish family using Ancestry. The sad news from this research was that 84 members of my family had perished in the Holocaust in camps and ghettos. Until I started on the research, I had no idea what a large family I had both my grandfather’s side – the Senders – and my grandmother’s side – the Honis, Schnogs and Prägers.
My mother, Edith Sender, was born in Cologne and together with her parents and siblings escaped to Palestine in the 1930s. My maternal grandparents returned to Germany after the war and are buried in a tiny Jewish cemetery in the village of Hennweiler in the Hunsrück where my grandfather, Benjamin Sender, was born. Through my research, I discovered that there were Senders in Sötern and Bosen as well as other villages and communities in the surrounding area. My grandmother, Elfriede, was born in Cologne but the bulk of her family, the Honis, were from Bad Laasphe. I knew from visiting my grandparents’ graves that Jewish cemeteries are normally locked.
Having established that I had ancestors buried in the cemetery in Bad Laasphe, I contacted the local council to ask who had the key and they put me in touch with the Bad Laasphe Circle of Friends for Christian-Jewish Cooperation (Bad Laaspher Freundeskreis für christlich-judische Zusammenarbeit) and we arranged to go the home of the organiser. Over coffee we examined a huge bundle of documents he had provided giving details about my family. Going through the papers was an emotional experience and we were all close to tears as we read about the fate of members of my family. We then visited the cemetery, and we took photos of those graves that were legible. My grandmother’s cousin, Max Präger, was a town councillor until the Nazis came to power and perished in Auschwitz in 1944. The Circle of Friends had arranged for Stolpersteine to be placed in front of Max Präger’s house and for a street to be renamed the Max-Präger Straße.
Our next stop was Kirn the nearest town to Hennweiler where my grandparents finally settled after they returned to Germany from Israel in 1959. There we met with a married couple who were friends of Max Sender, one of my grandfather’s cousins who also spent the war in Palestine. They had done extensive research into my family which we understood was their way of ensuring that the Sender family was remembered and honoured. It was their act of conciliation. We had coffee with them, and we were told the story about their grandfather who was a farmer. When the Nazis came to power, he spoke out against them but, following a visit from the local Gestapo, he remained silent.
Our next stop was Sötern. Through a German genealogy Facebook page I came across a woman who had co-authored a book about the Jews of Sötern and Bosen – a nearby town. Her mother had lived as a child in Sötern next door to a Jewish family. She played with the little girl of the family as they were both the same age. There were three religions represented in the town, Catholics, Protestants and Jews and there was no friction between them. In 1942, her neighbour knocked on her door and asked her if she would look after a doll and two small mugs and promised she would come and collect them when she returned to Sötern. She did not return.
We arranged to meet this contact at the cemetery in Sötern. She was proud of the cemetery because it had been well cared for and all the gravestones were upright, clean and legible. I had a list of my family members who came from Sötern and I easily found their gravestones in the winter sunshine. I took photos of all the Sender gravestones and posted them to my Ancestry account and was pleased to see they had been copied by other family tree owners who claimed them as relatives. We were given a copy of the book as well as articles which had been published by our contact’s mother detailing the violence meted out to Jews in her town up to and during the second world war. This was their act of conciliation.
From the cemetery, we were taken to a local hotel for coffee and introduced to the owner. He told us about his grandfather who had been a baker. During the Nazi period when Jews were prohibited from buying from Aryan shops, they suffered extreme deprivation. The baker was not permitted to sell to Jews and his accounts were monitored to ensure that the ingredients he purchased matched his sales. The hotel owner showed us a cupboard which was on display in the hotel which had been used by his grandfather to store flour. The lid was raised to reveal two hooks from which the sack of flour was hung. As he scooped out the flour some of it fell to the bottom of the cupboard and he saved this and used it to bake loaves for the local Jews who came during the night to collect it.
My mother met my father when she was a member of the ATS in Palestine. My father was one of 800 British servicemen who had been on active wartime service in North Africa who joined the Police Mobile Force under the command of the Palestine Police. They married in 1946 and went to England shortly thereafter. I was born in 1950 and as a young child learnt something about the holocaust presumably from adult conversations. Indeed, at the age of 7, when I went to bed, I made sure I knew where my slippers and favourite cuddly toy were so I could quickly pack them in my play suitcase in case “they” came for us in the middle of the night. I am sure this fear was not unique to me and that other children of German Jews grew up with similar fears and nightmares.
When my husband and I returned from our trip to Germany, I felt that a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I had met some very wonderful compassionate Germans: the organiser of the Circle of Friends for Christian-Jewish Cooperation was doing valuable work to preserve the memory of the Jews of Bad Laasphe; the couple in Kirn who welcomed us to their home and supplied me with information to enable me to research my family, and the co-author of the book about Jews in Sötern and Bosen who has dedicated her life to creating a lasting memory of this community, and finally the hotel owner, who is proud to tell the story of his very very brave grandfather who risked everything to ensure his Jewish friends had bread to eat. I now have German citizenship and am proud to honour these fellow Germans.