Eva Feldenkreis
THIRD DAUGHTER – She is more complex, more artistic. She danced six years in a regional ballet school and she draws. Imagination goes for her. She likes company, she is very beloved by her peers – more than her older sisters. They are appreciated, she is beloved.
ABOUT NAZISM – It is very dangerous to say that only the Germans could do it. Every nation could do it under certain circumstances. When I hear about an economic crisis in England or Europe I am afraid because I think crisis can bring a nation to such a thing. Even the Jews against other nations. Perhaps not in the same way.... Not only the Germans, no. We don't have to kill the Mengeles, nature will do that, we have to do whatever it takes so that such a thing won't happen again. |
Jutta Muenker
ABOUT JEWS – In my home I got a completely false impression of the Third Reich and the Nazis. My family was very National Socialist-minded. My father was in the S.A. and his sister was a big shot in the B.D.M. (an association of young women in the Nazi Party). We had many pictures of Hitler on the wall. During the war we were actually quite well off. I remember when I came to Munich after the war to study for the first time. I had a colleague, and someone told me that he was a Jew. I remember thinking, "How can he be a Jew – he is a perfectly normal person. I had grown up with the notion that Jews were abnormal or that they were troublemakers. I was very surprised to see that Jews were like other people and, to this day, I take it ill of my parents for having raised me with those notions ABOUT NAZIS – I was never able to talk about it with my father. I would have liked to ask him if he knew about the gassing of the Jews, but you could not talk about these things with my family. They were absolutely unteachable. Even long after the war, in the 1950s, when we had family celebrations at home, when it was my father's birthday, he always said, "April 24 – four days after the Fuehrer's birthday." When we celebrated his birthday, we always closed the shutters and then sang those Nazi songs. The whole family got together and revelled in Hitler memories. It was totally useless to ask why. I never really tried. I don't know why.
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MOTHER – My mother, with other Jewesses from the town, were taken in railway carriages. It was Rosh-Hashana or Yom Kippur. She was very religious, and she said. "If God can do such things, so we can go by carriage, we can profane the Shabbat or the holiday." I think about a moment in her life, before her death, that is connected to me. I see it in my imagination, but I have not really seen it. When she went to the train to go to her death – and she knew she was going for death – she had dollars in her coat, American money. And she took it out and gave it, some hundred dollars, to one of the boys who was from our town whom she knew would remain in the town and would perhaps see me. I lived as a Polish girl. She thought that I would come back to the town and ask about my parents and about my brothers, so she gave him the money and said, "Eva or Chava (my name at home was Chava in Hebrew), when Chava comes back, give her the money. I don't need it anymore." And he told me this. He was a friend of our family. A young boy of my age.
FATHER – I think about him. He escaped for some weeks only. He escaped to his house to the attic. I came back home to see my parents. I knew that this was the time of the actions in every town in that area (action means when they took us to death). I asked the young Jews who remained to work, to gather all the things and all the belongings of the Jews: "Where are my parents?" "Your mother and brother have gone but your father still lives; he is in the attic with three neighbors of your house." I am skipping over all the history of how I came to the house, how difficult it was, and how dangerous it was. At night, I came to the house, to the second floor, and then I stood beneath the attic, and knocked on the ladder. I said "Tate (father)" and he came to me from the attic and embraced me. He was so thin at this moment I felt, I feel it now, that he was a child and not like my father. Like a child. And he said to me, "Mother and your youngest brother left. It cannot be, it is impossible, they left." And then he said, "Can you take me from here? Can you take me away from here?" Like a child. Where could I have taken him? The situation changed and after some weeks the Nazis proclaimed that they would establish a new ghetto, and all the Jews, all the hidden Jews, should come back and they will live peacefuIly, until the end of the war. So they gathered 10,000 Jews, the thousands of hidden Jews from the whole district. It was autumn 1942 till January 1943. They sent them all to Treblinka except for a small group of young men for forced labor. My father was a young man. He was 42 years old. They took him to forced labor camp but he perished there. So I remember this moment when he was like a child and I was like a mother.
FIRST BROTHER – (In 1940 she fled to Russia, posing as a Polish Christian, and was arrested and interned by the Russians. After Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of Russia, she was let go by the Nazis.) Half a year later I came back. My family thought that I had been killed on the border. They were sure that I didn't live. And one Saturday, I came back. It was at the end of 1941. And they saw me, my mother and father. My brother was not at home. And the neighbors went out to look for him. And they said to him, "Your sister came back, your sister came back." And he came to see me. He was so pale. So happy and pale, and he cried. And I remember him at that moment.
SECOND BROTHER – He was young, 11 years old. It was 1942, autumn 1942. We knew that the end was near. It was the time of the actions. I lived as a Polish girl, and every time I went out and back home to see what was the matter at home, what was going on with them, and once he said to me, "Chava, can you save me?" But I couldn't. I couldn't. Really I couldn't. I didn't have any money, and what could I do with a Jewish boy looking like a Jew, and I didn't have friends, no Polish friends. And he knew that I couldn't. And then he said, "Never mind if you can't save me. I have a Polish friend from my class and he gave me his birth certificate. When the Germans come, I will run away. Or perhaps I shall run and hide in the toilet, (because we didn't have a toilet at home but a toilet in the yard). I shall hide myself there." So I remember him at this moment.
SECOND DAUGHTER – They are very different, very different. They look different and are different mentally. You cannot think that they are sisters. They are six and a half years apart.
SELF PAST – I thought, I am so fatigued with life. Too much. Too much. The reaction to the past was: so much! So much life, so much living, so hard.
SELF HOLOCAUST – I thought about the fight to survive, to survive.
And the pain that I was the only one to survive. And every time I think
about it, only myself. Why only me? I did not want to survive by myself,
no! The pain is that only I, only me, myself, survived. It accompanies
me all the time, all the 40 years.
SELF PRESENT – Tired, too much, it is too much for one human being. I am not alone, there are others like me. It is the Holocaust and the reality here, I suffer from the reality that our generation is dying out, one after another in kibbutz.
SELF FUTURE – I am afraid of the time when I won't be able to take care of myself. I would like to write about my experiences but I don't believe that I will.
MATERNAL
GRANDMOTHER – She was very loving and tender to me. I was the
only child of her only daughter. Since my mother died very young,
my grandmother, I believe, projected all her hopes, all her love,
onto me. I remember her with great pleasure. I think she was actually
the decisive person in my life.
PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER – After the bomb raids on Essen became stronger
and stronger, I was sent to my other grandmother. That was in Korbach
in Hesse. Essentially, she also showed a lot of understanding for me.
She had a beautiful house and a large garden. I actually enjoyed being
there too, but I do not believe that she had as much love and kindness
and understanding for me as my other grandmother.
MOTHER – I can hardly remember my own mother. I actually only know her from pictures; she was a tall, somewhat austere looking woman. She was sick for a long time and died during the war. I was five years old.
FATHER – No good feelings. When I was a child, I hardly knew my
father. He was a soldier from the first day on. Actually I only knew
him from when he came home on furlough. He always came in a splendid
uniform, carrying lots of presents. After the war he could not practice
his profession for a long time because of his Nazi past. He was a school
teacher, and he began teaching again in 1947. He then remarried and
I found that, in his second marriage, I was in the way. There also came,
one after the other, three sisters. During my school years I lived at
my father and stepmother's house. I always felt very misunderstood.
FIRST SISTER – I alrways had to look after her and drag her along everywhere. When I wanted to do something with my girlfriends, I was never allowed to go out because I had to take care of Ulrike. I think I never liked Ulrike.
SECOND SISTER – But the second, Beate. I was 15 when she was born and from the beginning I actually sort of raised her as a surrogate mother. I don't know. She was like a doll. I liked Beate very much. She was also a very funny person. It was not a real sister relationship because of the big age difference. You could squeeze her and dress her up nicely like a doll, actually like a living doll.
SON – As a single mother, I think you have a naturally closer relationship to your child, especially when it is an only child. A very harmonious, close and warm relationship develops between mother and son when there is no husband around who otherwise interferes and cuts in. I have found the position of being a single mother very positive.
SELF PAST – I thought back to the time when my son was very little, when I was still married.
SELF WAR – I thought about the time when I was sheltered in a bomb shelter, and the only thing I had with me was my teddy bear which still sits on my bed today. This teddy bear accompanied me through the entire war. It is the only thing left over. It survived all the bombings, all the destruction, the evacuation, everything. I thought of the teddy bear even though it did not have much to do with the war.
SELF PRESENT – Positive, very positive. I am glad that after 15 years in my profession (attorney) I finally found the courage to give up my unloved profession and start all over again. I find it very rewarding to study again, even though I am really a bit too old for it. It is nice, finally, to do what I enjoy doing.
