Hath Not a Jew Eyes?
[In acknowledgment of Holocaust Memorial Day]
The current lockdown was already looming when I made my last visit to Ennis library just before Christmas. Knowing it might be a while before I would get there again, I made sure to take out my full allowance of books, without devoting too much time to selection. Quantity took priority over quality.
To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942–1945 was one of the books that came away with me. To be honest, it was an accident. I misread the name of the author, thinking it was Otto Klemperer, the famous conductor. But he left Germany shortly after the Nazis took power in 1933, migrating to the US in 1935 where he remained until after the end of the world war.
Victor Klemperer was Otto’s cousin. The son of a rabbi, in 1933 Victor was a professor in Dresden, married to Eva, an “Aryan” German. The couple had no children. He kept a diary of the entire period of Nazi rule during which he effectively had no choice but to stay in Dresden. The first volume, I Shall Bear Witness, details events from 1933–1941.
As a Jew, Victor was dismissed from his academic post in 1935 and in the interval between then and 1942, had already suffered significant privations. At the opening of To the Bitter End, he and Eva are living with other mixed couples in a “Jews’ House” to which they had been consigned in 1940 without employment and very little money. The house is subject to periodic “inspection” at any time by the police during which their living quarters can be casually desecrated and their few possessions plundered. In his entry for 2 June of that year, Victor lists other “decrees” governing his life.
Many of these could be summarised as an effective ban on participation in normal public life including, for example, the following. No radio, telephone, libraries or subscriptions to periodicals. No theatres, cinemas, concerts, museums, restaurants, public parks. No buses, trams, trains or taxis (and, of course, no private car).
Others might be described as direct, dehumanising personal privations. Ban on purchasing “goods in short supply”, any kind of smoking materials, having reserves of foodstuffs at home. No flowers, coffee, chocolate, fruit, condensed milk, milk ration or clothing card. Deprivation or administrative obstacles in the way of access to traded services like maintenance, shoe repairs, laundry or hair care, compulsory surrender of typewriters, bicycles, furs, woollen blankets, deck chairs, dogs, cats or birds.
That is a non-exhaustive list of the petty obligations, prohibitions and restrictions on everyday life.
But all together they are nothing as against the constant threat of house searches, of ill-treatment, of prison, concentration camp and violent death.
And also the obligation to wear the yellow star that identify them as Jews at all times, stitched into rather than attached to their clothing.
In Victor’s case, to all these must be added the risk of maintaining the diary. If discovered by the authorities, it would certainly have been the end not only of him, but of others who might be implicated by the recording of their private utterances. Also of Eva who would, from time to time, bring clusters of recent pages to add to those already being stored in the home of a non-Jewish friend, Anne Marie, who would also therefore be complicit.
The first “evacuation” of Jews from Dresden is recorded as happening in January 1942 — to Riga. Thereafter throughout the year, there are regular transports of around 50 at a time to the camp at Theresienstadt 90 kilometres away and later direct to Auschwitz, several hundred kilometres further. Victor’s marriage to an Aryan provides a veneer of protection against that fate, but he is not immune to risk.
In his entry for 16 June 1942, he illustrates the tightrope thinness of the line between survival and perdition:
A family by the name of Jadlowski (or something like it), elderly married couple, the woman 68, blood pressure 220. House searched a few weeks ago. ‘Open the refrigerator!’ The key not to hand, the officers let the matter rest. Afterwards the woman shouted with joy: ‘What good luck, I had half a pound of fish in it which the kind sales assistant…’ Someone hears it and denounces her. Investigation by the Gestapo, the couple interrogated separately. He confesses. She denies. He is released after a beating, she is sent to the police cells, and from there, a few days ago, to a concentration camp. Which she will certainly not survive. For half a pound of fish.
So, fast forward to his entry of 1 August 1943:
Since Saturday afternoon I’m facing death. Card from the Gestapo: ‘Requested to appear at 16 Bismarckstrasse, 3rd floor, Room 68 at 7.30 a.m. on Monday, 2nd August 1943. Concerning: Questioning. With reference to goods in storage. Transport and Warehousing Ltd.’… Perhaps they only want my furniture, perhaps my life.
In the event, it was all quite harmless. It was only an administrative enquiry, but it could so easily have been otherwise.
Victor keeps as low a profile as possible through 1942–1944 as the evacuations continue. By 1944, despite censorship, official lies and dissembling, it becomes accepted fact that the Germans have had to retreat from North Africa and that the Allies are chasing them up the spine of Italy, Germany is also in retreat on the Eastern front and the Allies have invaded Normandy and are making their way through France. There is no room for rational doubt that Germany will lose the war.
His circumstances change abruptly in February 1945. First, on 12 February, he is advised by community leaders that the next “transport” will take place two days later. This one will “mop up” most of the few remaining Jews, including some like himself in mixed marriages. By now, rumours that the transports are preludes to inevitable death have the status of certainty. He spends the following day delivering notices to those who have been summoned. Although he himself has dodged the bullet this time, there are too few Jews left to leave any doubt that he won’t the next time.
That evening though, everybody’s world is thrown upside down by the blanket Allied bombing raid over the city. Disorder reigns. Most Jews survive and, under cover of the mayhem, remove their yellow stars, collect such belonging as they can carry and make themselves scarce. Victor and Eva make their way south towards Bavaria, by train and on foot, cautiously initially because the war will not be over for another 12 weeks, relying on their remaining cash and the kindness of friends and strangers for food and lodging, which are occasionally no lodgings at all. Only on 21 May, a fortnight after hostilities have ended, do they begin the meandering journey from Munich back to Dresden, 450 kilometres away, where they arrive on 10 June.
The ending at least is a happy one. Their own house in the village of Dolzschen just outside Dresden from which they were effectively evicted during the war has survived, is unoccupied and freely available and their formerly close neighbours alive and reasonably well. The last lines of the diary:
This was where the day turned into a fairy tale. Frau Glaser welcomed us with tears and kisses, she had thought us dead. Glaser himself was somewhat decrepit and listless. We were fed, we were able to rest. In the late afternoon we walked up to Dolzschen.
Thereafter Victor resumed his academic career within the new East Germany, dying in 1960 aged 78, survived by his second wife, Hadwig who he married in 1952, a year after Eva’s death.
His diaries including the period of his post-war life were first published in German in 1995, later translated into English and published in three volumes; the two covering the period of Nazi rule and the last his post-war life.
There is a reason why I am telling what might be seen as a stereotypical, story of the Jewish experience in Nazi Germany, exceptional only in that Victor Klemperer survived.
On 16 January 2021, on the BBC Radio 4 programme From Our Own Correspondent, Rob Cameron reported from Prague about street protests there ostensibly in support of Donald Trump (that fact alone sends its own message) but at which a number of participants wore yellow stars to signal their grievance that non-adherence to COVID related norms: mask wearing, testing and vaccination, exposes citizens to risk of public disapproval and possibly sanction.
There is a world of difference between the circumstances of people who were persecuted and, in most cases, executed simply because of the inalienable fact of who they were and those who might be subject to mild restriction or sanction because of how they choose to behave in relation to COVID.
It is an entirely secondary consideration, but nonetheless relevant to point out, that there is nothing inherently harmful or risky to others about being a Jew. By contrast, non-adherence to COVID-related norms of behaviour involves assignment of risks to others as well as their acceptance by oneself. We have laws against smoking in indoor public places not to signal our collective disapproval of smoking or to protect smokers themselves, but to protect others from its harmful effects.
The use of the star to imply any similarity, let alone equivalence, between potential COVID related perceived “persecution” and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany goes far beyond cultural misappropriation. It is exaggerated egotistical exaltation of ersatz victimhood and martyrdom. Those who display the yellow star today do so as a matter of casual choice. They can take it off as easily as put it on. Those who wore it in 1940s Germany did so as a matter of enforced obligation and at risk of the sanction of execution if they removed it. Enough.
