05.2 Hist 20 podcast: Hedda 1940-1949

Hedda in the 5th decade of the 20th C

Transcript

University of California UCOP | podcast 5.2

Hi, guys. In the last podcast, we left Hedda recently arrived in Belgium with her family in Brussels, faced with the

failure of their plan to leave to Australia. They were just too late. The world was at war, and there was not going to

be a boat to take them to their new life in Australia.

So I thought I'd start this podcast about the 1940s and Hedda's life by actually telling you what I knew about this

before I started researching. What I knew about the 1940s was from my grandmother, Ruth, Hedda's daughter.

Ruth had had to come back to Belgium. Well, not come back, she'd never been there. She'd been in London. I

don't know if you remember. She'd been sent to London in early 1939 to go to school there and live with one of

her uncles.

But once Britain declared war on Germany, Britain considered all German citizens living in England enemies. Not

unlike what happened with Japanese-Americans in the US, the British rounded up German citizens in England and

put them in internment camps. Never mind that Ruth was a 16-year-old German refugee who had to leave

Germany because she was Jewish. In the eyes of the British government, she was German. And therefore, she

was an enemy.

And so she boarded a ferry and joined her parents in Brussels, a place that wasn't home to her. Right? She'd

never been there. She'd left Berlin. And she joined her parents there.

And the story she told me was that she missed Britain very much in the '40s because she loved it there, but that

she soon met the man of her life, my grandfather, Leonardis. And they were madly in love. And they immediately

started having children during the war. And so she met him at a concert. And she told me that, ah, you know, the

war in Brussels really wasn't so bad. She happily, so she said-- happily wore her yellow star and rode her bicycle

and fell in love and had four children by the time the decade was over.

So I had this perspective on life in Brussels during the war that was not exactly accurate. Because as I've been

doing research on Hedda's life and looking at documents that she left behind and reading through some of these

things that an uncle of mine has put together, it seems that what happened is that my grandmother Ruth was

shielded from the harshest realities of life under German occupation in Belgium. And she might have also been

completely in a haze of love, lust, and happiness. Her parents protected her from the harsh realities.

And maybe she was young enough not to notice. How many of us had been so preoccupied with our own

existences that we don't notice our parents' struggle? It's easy to only think about yourself, about your girlfriend or

your boyfriend, and the next party you're going to go to. And I suspect that that was my grandmother during World

War II, which is such a strange thing to say. But I think she was kind of oblivious to the risks that people aroundher were taking in order to make sure she had as happy a life as possible. It's either that, or she knew how bad it

was, and she completely blocked it from her mind after the war, which is another way of dealing with trauma, that

you just erase it.

But anyway, I've had to, in a sense, relive the trauma of the war, because I didn't know about it.

So let me tell you how the 1940s go for Hedda. So the first thing they do once they realize they're not going to go

to Australia and that the world is at war, they have to figure out how to get their daughter back from London.

Right? So one of the first things was mobilizing to get her back and figuring out where to live and how to live.

Now, the Germans invaded Belgium. And not all German soldiers are equally well-trained or equally capable of

fulfilling the wishes of the German government. And it is really largely due on the one hand to lackadaisical

German soldiers on the one hand and the very good contacts that my great-grandfather had with the Jewish

community that had expatriated itself to Belgium that I think they survived. But both my grandparents-- sorry, my

great-grandparents, were twice given orders to report for duty at a work camp, from where they would then have

been put on a train to Auschwitz. They twice avoided that reality. But I just don't think that you can-- I mean, I think

the worst thing would have been to be on that train. But I don't think that they managed to avoid it without

consequences.

I think of Hedda and her outlook on life, which was rather practical, not particularly romantic. In a sense, the same

way that she told people not to bother with too many excuses if they couldn't come to her parties, she pretty much

told her great-grandchildren not to bother with too many excuses if they couldn't do something she'd asked them

to do. She wasn't interested in excuses. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that she was on the edge for

five years, the first five years of the 1940s.

They moved three or four times because they lived in apartments first where Jews were allowed to live. Then they

had to move because Jews were no longer allowed to live in the neighborhoods in which they had moved. And

then they had to hide more than once. And they were hiding not because it was illegal to be Jewish, or because

Jews were being persecuted all the time, but they had to hide when calls were made for Jews to report to be then

taken away.

So one of the features of the cruelty of the racist policies the German Reich, the Nazi Reich, was not that Jews

and anybody who was considered to be lesser than the Aryan race were indiscriminately carted out and killed in

the street and tortured for all to see. But this was done very methodically. People were given notices. They were

told, you must report here. And from here, you will go somewhere else. And then, in a sense, it was all given a

veneer of organization and a veneer of formality and a veneer of legality. You were told that you needed to reportsomewhere.

And the one thing that Germans are is they're very good at doing what they've been told. And remember that

Hedda might have been Jewish, but she thought of herself-- she was culturally German. And so if she was told to

do something, she would have done it.

And so you can imagine the tension that had been building up, and then ever since they had to leave Germany

that they realized that essentially the things that they trusted, namely, the impartiality of government and the

needed to follow rules, was no longer something they could rely on. Right? In fact, government was not impartial.

And if they wanted to survive, they could not follow the rules. They had to effectively break them.

So twice, they were giving these notices and asked to report to a work camp outside of Brussels. The first time,

they just didn't go. And nobody knew where to find them. This was the first time they went into hiding.

The second time, the Gestapo showed up on their doorstep. And this was Ernst and Hedda, Robert and

Wolfgang, all four of them, were sent to this war camp in Mechelen, outside of Brussels. And they'd been

scheduled on Train number 23. Jeanette was also there.

Oh, I forgot to tell you. So Jeanette, Hedda's mother, survives. She is alone in Berlin. So I'm saying this with a

happy voice. But in fact, it's not happy at all. Alexander [? Zilommen, ?] Hedda's father, died in 1941. Jeanette had

been alone in the big house, as I had mentioned. And really, the only way Jeanette had survived that year alone

was because the daughter of a shopkeeper-- whom Jeanette had befriended and had helped study, had paid for

her studies in Berlin, had become a member of the Communist Resistance, a very small Communist resistance in

Berlin, and had helped Jeannette that entire year that she was alone with Alexander. And when Alexander died--

and Jeannette, at the time, I think she was 62 years old. She was still relatively young-- got the help of Elisabeth [?

Uchbach-- ?] that was her name-- who essentially mobilized her network to get Jeanette into Brussels.

And so it seems incomprehensible how this 62-year-old woman, who had spent a year alone in Berlin, managed

to sneak out of Nazi Germany during the war and find her daughter in Brussels. But she did.

So she manages to escape Berlin, arrives in Brussels in 1942. And a couple of months later, they're sent to

Mechelen. And they're each given a number. Jeannette's number was 98. And they're scheduled to get on Train

Number 23 that is heading to Auschwitz. Nobody really knew what Auschwitz was. They wouldn't have known

what Auschwitz meant for them. But there was a sense that getting on the train would be bad.

Somehow, somebody intervenes and buys them time. And so they're rescheduled. And now, they're going to be

sent off in late April on a train, the April '43, Train Number 24. So they've got some time. And the same person

who intervenes on their behalf to get them onto this later train also continues to intervene and finally gets Ernst ajob as a member of the Jewish Council in Brussels. And in that job-- and I'll explain in a second what that was--

actually gets all of them out of the work camp and guarantees that they are not going to be on that Train Number

24 to Auschwitz.

Ultimately, there were 625 people on Train 24 to Auschwitz in '43. And only 127 were ever repatriated to Belgium

after the war.

What did the Jewish Council do? What was the need for a Jewish council in Brussels in occupied Germany?

Remember what I told you about the organized nature of German cruelty during the war? The German occupying

armies knew they had to move people around. They needed to impose order. They, in fact, had an edict by which

Jews were only allowed to live in four cities in Belgium.

How were they going to enforce that? It would be difficult for German soldiers to communicate with French-

speaking Belgians. I mean, never mind that half of them were German Jews. So they would have able talk with

them. But essentially, what the soldiers didn't want to do was have to deal with these refugees and these Jews.

They didn't want to, essentially, have to manage it.

And so they outsourced this to a Jewish council. So the Jewish Council would be, in a sense, the communications

hub. They got orders from the German army. And then the Jewish Council communicated that to the Jewish

population and visited the people who were being called upon to report for duty. For example, they were the ones

that tried to explain what was going on.

The Jewish Council also had a completely illicit, obviously, role in producing massive amounts of fake IDs. And

Ruth's future husband was, in fact, actively involved in making all these fake IDs.

And so being a member of the Jewish Council saved my great-grandfather and my family. But it also meant that

someone else went to Auschwitz instead. And that's sort of what I've been dealing with as I've been researching

this and telling you the story. On the one hand, Ruth's husband was a Belgian soldier who was part of the efforts

to push the Germans back, and then was a member of one of the active cells in that Jewish Council that

subverted the intention of the Jewish Council as it was designed by the German occupying armies.

But at the same time, the fact that my family didn't end up on that train means that someone else's did. And that is

really, really difficult. And I'm sharing that with you because while I will forever be grateful to my great-

grandfather's contacts, his ingenuity, and his sheer will to survive-- because if he hadn't, well, I wouldn't be here

telling you this story. But I think I'm experiencing what people have often referred to as the guilt of survival, the

fact that if it wasn't you, it had to be someone else.And that gets us back to why my grandmother would have told me a story of the 1940s that was so far removed

from what the record suggests. Either her memory is wrong, or she is actively creating memories that allow her

not to think about that part of her story, her history.

For Hedda, the rest of the 1940s are complicated. The war ends in 1945. And you'd think, well, that's it. That's

great, right? You survived.

But the post-war isn't necessarily any easier than the war. For starters, Robert, her youngest son, falls in love.

Apparently, he was quite the lover. He had many girlfriends. But one of them particularly broke his heart. And it's

not exactly clear what the triggering effects were. But in 1947, Robert commits suicide. He turns on the gas oven,

closes the door, and kills himself.

And Wolfgang, in 1947 also-- and it's not exactly clear if it's related to his brother's suicide or not-- decides that

he's going to join the volunteer army in Palestine. And in fact, he's there when the State of Israel is declared. And

in many ways, this could have been a really-- it was not joyful, but certainly hopeful outcome to the trauma that

he'd experienced. But that trauma followed him to Palestine. And about five months after he left to be a member

of the volunteer armies, he had to be sent back to Belgium in an emergency. He was in catatonic depression.

That month he spends in Sachsenhausen-- remember, in 1939-- the one that had produced such a psychological

shock and breakdown for him, well, that would follow him the rest of his life. And that catatonic depression that he

experienced in Israel was part of that. And Wolfgang, for the rest of his life, would go between that kind of

catatonic depression and manic behavior. That's my memory of my Uncle Wolfgang. It's entirely due to the trauma

that he experienced in '39, and then perhaps again in '48.

So Hedda, by the end of the 1940s, has lost one son to heartbreak. Wolfgang, well, he hasn't died. But he's going

to be a complicated person for her to live with for the rest of her life, forever a reminder of the hardships that he

experienced, and in a sense, that she experienced. There was no way for her to ignore what had happened in the

late '30 and the '40s.

And in the meantime, Ruth, my grandmother, essentially had babies. She had four babies by the time this decade

ends. And she'd have another six over the next 15 years. Ruth was always a much happier person than Hedda.

And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that she chose not to remember. And I think Hedda did not have

that luxury. She could not not remember.

We'll talk about the '50s next time. And I'm sorry I don't have a better story for this decade. It's just a really tough

one. But I'm grateful that you're along with me for the ride as I discover these stories behind the stories of my

family. Thanks.