![[Logo Auswärtiges Amt]](/images/logo.gif){kind=logo}
A Quest for Family Roots in Germany
By Jeff Kelly Lowenstein
I traveled to Germany in 2004 searching for my family’s ghosts. The answers I discovered instead surprised me.
-
- Enlarge image
- At a train station in Germany, children and families bid farewell. The image is from the documentary "Kindertransport."
- (© picture-alliance / dpa)
It had been a long quest. Being named for my great-grandfather Joseph Lowenstein, a physician and our family patriarch who was murdered in the Auschwitz death camp, I carry the Holocaust's legacy with me every day. In May 1939 my father left Germany at 5 years old on the Kindertransport, a program sponsored by the British government that gave refuge to about 10,000 German, Czech, Austrian and Polish Jewish children 4 to 17 years old. Dad left just weeks after having had his appendix removed. My grandfather Max had taken his ailing son from doctor to doctor throughout Essen-Steele, the town where our family had lived for five generations and nearly 150 years. None would operate on my father because he was a Jewish child. Grandpa Max finally convinced a non-Jewish doctor to perform the procedure in my great-grandfather’s office.
Several days later, my grandparents sent my father to join his older brother Ralph, who had already departed for England. In late 1940, the boys were reunited with my grandparents in New York—part of the 10 percent of Kindertransport children who ever saw their parents again.
My brothers and I called Dad “Reagan” as kids. We gave him the nickname not because of his political leanings, but because of the answer he inevitably gave to our questions about his childhood: “I’m sorry, boys. I just don’t remember.”
When I was 12 years old, the weeklong miniseries, “Holocaust” aired for the first time. We had watched but half an hour of the first episode before Dad’s body stiffened and he turned off the television. He did not talk about his past, then or later. Although I came to understand as an adult that Dad was not deliberately withholding information from us, his silence left me with a hunger to know him and that time.
I took many actions to fill that hunger. I visited and interviewed elderly relatives who had fled the Nazi regime as adults, and thus had more and clearer memories of Germany than my father. I read voraciously about what many Germans called “the period of National Socialism.” And I worked for years for Facing History and Ourselves, an educational non-profit organization that has students study the choices people confronted before and during the Holocaust to understand their own lives.But something stayed locked. No matter how many times I visited my great aunt Ilse Goldberg in her one-bedroom apartment in Queens, where she lived for the last 25 of her 103 years, no matter how many explanations I read of the Nazi’s rise to power, no matter how many survivors' stories I listened to, a visceral understanding of my family’s history remained elusive. By going to the places my relatives had lived, I hoped, I would learn about who they had been and how they had shaped me.
