While skyping with my brother David, a professor at Penn State University, I learned he would be in Germany for a conference in June. I suggested we meet afterwards in Berlin, which is where our parents came from. Israeli friends recommended the city and its respectful way of paying tribute to the Jewish community destroyed by the Nazis.
All of Mom's family escaped Nazi Germany and she and her divorced mother left on the last boat to Havana, Cuba, where they spent a year. The next boat, the St Louis, was sent back to Europe where most passengers met their deaths.
Dad was sent in 1937 by his parents Betty and Albert Rosenbaum to his uncle in Philadelphia while his brother Gerry, aged 13, was sent to England on the Kindertransport in 1939. Throughout his lifetime, Dad was tortured by the fact that he was unable to save his parents who were transported to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941/1942. They wrote hundreds of increasingly desperate letters and postcards from 1937 – 1942. In 2006, I took those letters to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, for safekeeping and left my contact details. The Yad Vashem volunteers traced the names mentioned in the letters and found most had been taken to concentration camps; a few had escaped to other countries.
2010 arrived, and my husband Igal decided to join me, making the flight and Ludwig Van Beethoven Hotel reservations.
About a month before the trip, I received an indistinct cell phone call in the car. A 14-year-old girl named Sophie from Potsdam, near Berlin, mentioned the word "Stolpersteine", a school project and the names Betty and Albert Rosenbaum. There would be a ceremony at their former home. I was stunned and overwhelmed that the ceremony would happen just when David and I were to be in Berlin. I gave Sophie my email address.
I discovered that Sophie's class at the Goethe School in Potsdam, along with their teacher, Mrs. Ulrike Boni-Jacobi, were preparing a Stolperstein ceremony and an evening presentation. Sophie asked for more background on Betty and Albert.
I looked up Stolperstein and found it meant a stumbling block, to which the artist Gunter Demnig has given a new meaning: that of a small, cobblestone-sized memorial for a single
murdered victim of Nazism. They now extend to several countries.
I sent Sophie the only picture I have of Betty and Albert. They are standing in front of their home in the town of Babelsberg, Potsdam. Dad, maybe 15 years old at the time, is standing between them. I told her Albert was an actor, later noting that Babelsberg in the 1930s was, and still is, the film-making capital of Germany.
I wrote to Sophie that Betty stayed at home and took care of the garden, growing vegetables. She had a wonderful voice and sang in the synagogue choir.
My brother and I were asked to prepare speeches. I realized that a Stolperstein was another way of saying "Each of Us Has a Name" - the poem by Zelda recited on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I knew my speech would be on that topic.
My brother and I toured Berlin visiting the Jewish Museum, Holocaust Memorial and main Synagogue. After Germany beat England at soccer I found the excitement in the streets almost frightening.
As we walked outside our hotel, Igal noticed something shiny on the sidewalk. It was our first Stolperstein. We found the most striking Stolperstein for a boy transported to Theresienstadt on Alte Jakobstrasse, which was the street on which my mom and her extended family lived.
When Sophie arrived she told us there would be three Stolperstein ceremonies. The artist Gunter Demnig personally placed all the small stones. A representative crowd was present. A member of the Brandenberg parliament even spoke to us in Hebrew having spent six years in Tel Aviv while her father was posted at the German embassy.
A Potsdam official welcomed us in German. At the conclusion of the ceremony, we walked to Betty and Albert's home at Kornerweg 4 in Babelsberg, Potsdam – an address I have heard my entire life, and the return address on the hundreds of letters and postcards Betty and Albert wrote to Dad in Philadelphia. The only other return address I ever saw was on their one desperate postcard delivered by the Red Cross from the Warsaw Ghetto.
Standing at Kornerweg 4, I saw the front door was the same rust color we had painted ours in Zichron Ya'acov the previous week!
The crowd which appeared for the ceremony included Sophie's mother, who was eight months pregnant, and her grandmother.
The house's new owners graciously invited us in. We saw the house where Dad grew up and from which our grandparents were transported to their deaths. Despite renovations, the original 1928 doors remained. The large garden once contained the vegetables Betty grew. We left in a highly emotional state after exchanging email addresses.
The two Stolpersteine were now set in the concrete engraved with the names Betty Rosenbaum nee Bukofzer and Albert Rosenbaum. Underneath were question marks indicating that, despite much research, it was never clear whether they were deported in 1941 or 1942. The words Warsaw Ghetto were engraved at the bottom.
My family does not know for sure where Betty and Albert died despite enquiries. We know they survived the trip to Warsaw because of the postcard from the Ghetto. We will never know the answer.
A vegetarian lunch was provided during which we learned from the students that Albert was not only a stage actor, but also produced plays, and we wondered if he had appeared in movies too. We asked Sophie to ask her stepfather, a professor of film, to try and find out.
Before the 6pm project presentations we invited the students to the ice cream parlor, and asked about their lives. These obviously very bright fourteen-year-old German schoolchildren, enjoyed many hobbies. David and I were thinking of our Mom - a wonderful, very positive woman, who never complained. When we had asked her about this extraordinary trait, she had answered, "All of my fourteen–year-old friends were murdered by the Nazis. I have no right to complain."
The mother of Ulrike, the teacher, had grown up next to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp and had witnessed the murder of Jews in the forests near her home. She could see the bodies piled up over the fence. These scenes had an enormous effect on her and could have contributed to Ulrike's commitment to the Stolperstein project.
Ulrike told us her father had been in the German army fighting in North Africa. My father had been in the American army fighting in North Africa. Our fathers had fought each other!
At the theater, I had my speech with me and brought along a beautiful book on Israel complete with 3D glasses as a gift I would present to Sophie. I had no idea what David would say although I was sure it would not be similar to my thoughts since we live in quite different worlds.
Ater a welcome by a Potsdam official, each school made a presentation about their Stolperstein family. The students enacted a short play about the deportation order, with a Gestapo officer in a trench coat. They had built a huge family tree with names of the Rosenbaum family. David's, Igal's and my name were hanging on the bottom branch.
David said in his speech that the entire ceremony which was being recorded by Igal would appear on YouTube for the whole world to see. He talked a lot about the psychology of evil and paid tribute to our mother, telling the story of my mother's pledge to never complain.
When it was my turn to speak I spoke very slowly and clearly. (Below are excerpts from my speech.)
"My grandparents Betty and Albert Rosenbaum were only two of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. The Holocaust (Shoah) was the worst crime in the history of the world. The Jewish people will never ever forget what happened here. The Holocaust, the Shoah, taught us that the Jewish people must have their own state. Since Jews lived in the land of Israel for thousands of years, with Jerusalem as its capital, the only place to establish our state was Israel. We teach our children in Israel to love peace, to be proud Jews, to never forget our history, and to fight our enemies who want to destroy us. Because after what happened here in Germany, the Jewish people will never be slaughtered again, never put in concentration camps with arms tattooed, will never know the gas chamber again. We have our own country now.
"It is important to remember that each and every one of the six million – men, women and children had a name – first names given to them by their parents, family names passed on from generation to generation. The number six million is so enormous, so incredible, that we may forget that each one was a whole world – each one had an identity. The Nazis took their identities away from them and made them into a number. What you are doing here is giving them their names back through the Stolperstein to remember Betty and Albert.
"In Israel, on Holocaust Day, we recite the poem by the Israeli poet, Zelda: "Each of us has a name'."
Afterwards, people congregated and shook my hand. I met an historian/archivist of the Potsdam government. He was holding a big book with which he had helped the students research Betty and Albert and had also worked closely with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
The archivist showed us the "phone book" from Babelsberg in 1934. We only learned Albert had a middle name when we saw the entry for Albert Moritz Rosenbaum at Kornerweg 4.
Emotionally exhausted, I arrived at the hotel feeling like the circle was now closed. With the help of Sophie and her classmates, we gave the names back to Betty and Albert Rosenbaum, my grandparents.
