Holocaust

Prologue

Part One       The Family Weiss

Part Two       The Gathering Darkness

Part Three     The Final Solution

Part Four       The Saving Remnant

Kibbutz Agam
Israel
November 1952

Below our tiny house, on the soccer field, my sons, Ari and Hanan, are kicking a ball. They aren’t bad, especially Hanan, who is five. Ari is a year younger, thinner, shyer. He doesn’t seem to like the body contact as much.

I’ll have to work with them. Teach them the moves, how to pass off, to feint, how to “head” the ball.

Watching them, I’m reminded of the way my brother Karl and I used to play in the little park opposite our home in Berlin. Our home was also my father’s medical office. Sometimes my father’s patients would stop under the shade trees and watch us.

I can still hear their voices—maybe Mr. Lowy, who was his patient for as long as I can remember—talking about us.
Dr. Weiss’ kids. See the little guy? Rudi Weiss? He’ll be a professional someday
.

Karl was three years older than I. Thin, quiet, never an athlete. He’d get tired. Or he’d want to finish a painting or read. I guess we both disappointed our father, Dr. Josef Weiss. But he was a gentle and thoughtful man. And he loved us too much to ever let us know.

All ended. All over. Karl and my parents and all of my family died in what is now called the
holocaust
. A fancy name for mass murder. I survived. And today, seated in this cinderblock bungalow above the Galilee—I see its dark-blue waters in the distance beyond the fields and peach orchards—I finish this chronicle of
the family Weiss. In some ways, it is a chronicle of what happened to millions of the Jews of Europe—the six million victims, the handful who survived, those who fought back.

My wife, Tamar, an Israel-born sabra, helped me prepare this document. She is far better educated than I am. I barely finished high school in Berlin, being too busy playing soccer, or tennis, or roaming the streets with my friends.

Tamar attended the University of Michigan in the United States. She is a child psychologist and is fluent in five languages. I still have difficulty with Hebrew. But I am no longer a European. Israel is my country. I fought for her liberty in 1947, and I will fight again, and again, and whenever I am asked to. In my days as a partisan in the Ukraine, I learned that it is better to die with a gun in one’s hand than to submit to the murderer. I have taught this to Ari and Hanan, and, young as they are, they understand. Why should they not? Several times a week Syrian artillery from across the Jordan drops shells on Kibbutz Agam, or on some of our neighbors. Fifty meters from our little house there is an underground shelter, complete with beds, water, food, toilets. At least once a month the bombardments become sufficiently strong so that we must spend the night there.

My sons, Tamar and I sometimes watch our soldiers moving our own guns across the dusty roads below, to pay the Syrians in kind. More than once, my own unit has been called up to assist in “neutralizing” the enemy artillery. I find no pleasure in these duties, but I do them willingly. Nor am I overjoyed at the necessity of teaching small children, infants, about the need to battle for one’s life. But I have learned a great deal about survival and I would be less than a good father if I did not impart this knowledge to them early. Already they know not to yield, not to bow one’s head.

The information I collected for this narrative about my family came from many sources. Twice during my summer vacations I visited Europe. (I’m employed as
athletic director at the local high school, and like all members of the Agam community I am required to turn my entire salary over to the kibbutz; however, special grants of funds are sometimes made, and Tamar’s parents helped me.) I corresponded with many people who knew my parents, my brother Karl, and my Uncle Moses. I have met scores of survivors of the camps here in Israel, people from the Warsaw ghetto. Tamar assisted me in translating most of the material, and with much of the writing.

A major source for information on my brother Karl came from his widow, a Christian woman named Inga Helms Weiss, who is now living in England.

Approximately a year ago, hearing about my search for the story of my family, a man named Kurt Dorf wrote to me. He was a German civilian engineer attached to the German army, and he had been a prominent witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. He had located the diaries of his nephew, an SS officer named Erik Dorf. Kurt Dorf was kind enough to send me a copy of his nephew’s lengthy, detailed account. These diaries are of a fragmented and desultory nature. Oftentimes, Erik Dorf did not even date his entries, but fortunately he did mention enough places and dates in his rambling account so that I have been able to determine at least the month for each entry. There is a gap between the years 1935 and 1938. The material from this period has apparently been lost or destroyed.

I have interspersed sections of these diaries with the account of my family’s destruction. It seems to me (and Tamar) that the motives of the murderers are of as great importance to us as the fate of the victims.

I never knew Major Erik Dorf, but in one of those crazy coincidences with which those dreadful years are filled, he and his wife had at one time been
my father’s patients
in Berlin. Three years after my father had taken care of him and his family, this same Erik Dorf was signing orders and establishing procedures that would lead to the murder of Karl, my parents, my Uncle Moses—and six million other innocents.

It seems unbelievable that it is only seven years since
the nightmare ended, since we were delivered from the murky hell of Nazi Europe. Tamar says that actually we are never delivered from this tragedy. Our children, and our children’s children, must be told about it. And so must the children of the world.

Forgive
, Ben-Gurion once said,
but never forget
. I am not quite ready for forgiveness. Perhaps I never will be.

On August 8, 1935, my older brother Karl and a Catholic girl named Inga Helms were married. They were both twenty-one years old.

Clearly, I remember the hot summer sun over Berlin. Not a breeze stirred the leaves of the poplars and oaks in the beautiful garden of the Golden Hart restaurant. The restaurant was famous for its outdoor dining—white trellises heavy with grape vines, statues, fountains, and a thick lawn. Our wedding party had been given a private area, between high dark-green hedges.

I was then seventeen. My sister Anna was thirteen, the baby of the family. Vaguely, I recall her teasing me, and my chasing her, almost pushing her into the fountain. We came back to the long linen-covered table, with its bowls of fruit, champagne and ice cream, and with the wedding cake, and we were mildly reprimanded by my mother.

“A little decorum, children,” she said. “Rudi, your tie? What did you do with it?”

“It’s too hot, Mama.”

“Please put it on. This is a formal occasion.”

Of course I did, if a bit unwillingly. My mother had a commanding manner. She always got us to obey. When we were little, she sometimes spanked us. My father, on the other hand, Dr. Josef Weiss, was so gentle, easygoing, and preoccupied with his patients that he never, as far as I can recall, criticized us or bawled us out, let alone struck us.

There was an accordionist present, and I remember him playing Strauss waltzes, lively airs from
Rosenkavalier
and
Fledermaus
. But no one was dancing and I knew why.

We were Jews, already a marked people. Thousands of Jews had already left Germany, their businesses and properties stolen by the Nazis. There had been outbreaks of beatings on the street, humiliations, demonstrations. But we had stayed on. My mother always insisted that Hitler was “another politician,” an upstart who would be put in his place soon enough. She was certain that things would get better. Her family had been in the country for centuries, and she felt more German than any flag-waving bully in the street.

Still, the uneasiness at the wedding table was for more reasons than our Jewishness. The two families, the Helmses and the Weisses, really did not know each other. The Helmses were rather plain people. Inga’s father was a machinist, a flat-faced shy man. Not a bad sort, I suppose. His wife was a modest woman, rather pretty, in the same way Inga was—long-faced, blond, with clear blue eyes. Inga had a younger brother, who was about my age. His name was Hans Helms, and I knew him from soccer games. He was one of those athletes who puts up a great show when he’s winning, but folds when he’s pressed. We’d played opposite each other a few times, and I’d gotten the best of him. When I mentioned the games, he claimed he didn’t recall them. He was a private in the German army and was wearing his uniform that day.

Inga suddenly kissed my brother on the lips—perhaps to break the dull silence around the table. My brother looked embarrassed. Karl was thin, tall, a dark young man with thoughtful eyes. He had met Inga at the Academy of Commercial Art. She was the secretary to the director of the school, Karl a prize student.

My mother felt Karl was marrying beneath him. The humble working-class family seated opposite us confirmed her views that hot August day.

But Berta Weiss did not reckon with Inga’s unbreakable will. (My mother’s was fairly strong, but Karl’s love for Inga would not bend to it.) And they were truly, deeply in love. I think Karl saw in Inga strength, determination, a vigorous and vivacious girl, the kind
of woman he needed. He was a worrying, pessimistic man, not at all like Anna and me.

“Kiss me once more,” Inga said.

“I’m not used to it yet … in public,” Karl said.

She seized him, kissed him, brushing back her veil. She was lovely in her lace and silk gown, the little crown of daisies on her head.

Anna and I began to applaud. I whistled through two fingers. This seemed to relax the Helms family. They smiled hesitantly. Hans Helms winked at me—man to man.

On our side of the table were my parents, my father’s younger brother Moses, who had come from Warsaw for the wedding, and my mother’s parents, my grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Max Palitz. My grandfather was quite a man—white-haired, stiff-backed, decorated by the Kaiser for heroism in the war of 1914-1918. He ran a bookshop. He always said that he had no fear of the Nazis, that Germany was his country, too.

My mother was by far the most elegant person at the wedding party—slender, in a light-blue gown, white gloves, a big white hat. She touched my father’s arm.

“Josef,” my mother said. “It’s traditional for the father to make a toast.”

“Oh yes … of course.”

Papa got to his feet slowly. His mind seemed elsewhere, as if he were worried about a patient’s loss of weight, a hospital case, a woman who had died of cancer weeks ago. His practice had been reduced to the ill and the poor, Jews only, the ones who had not had the money or foresight to leave. He treated all of them with the same consideration he would have shown a Rothschild.

My father held up his champagne glass. People rose. Anna nudged me. “I’m going to get drunk, Rudi. The first time.”

“You’ll get sick first,” I said.

“Children,” my mother said softly. “Papa is about to make a toast.”

“Yes, yes,” my father said. “To the happy couple.
My new daughter, Inga Helms Weiss, and my son Karl. May God grant them long life and happiness.”