Harry Grenville
Journeys
I am thinking of three railway journeys on the continent. From a very early age I was a railway enthusiast forever watching trains from our sitting room window. In July 1939 when I was 13 I travelled to the UK on a Kindertransport. My father came with me from Stuttgart to Frankfurt where he put me on the Kindertransport train which had started in Vienna and picked up Jewish children at major stations en route. It was obvious that many of them were deeply upset at having been separated from their parents but I was so certain that we would all be reunited in New York that I was hugely excited by the journey along the scenic route alongside the Rhine all the way to Cologne and beyond. The train stopped at Koblenz where the Moselle flows into the Rhine and all eight of us in the compartment leaned out of the window to see what was happening on the platform. To stop myself falling out I grabbed a rail above the window, only it wasn’t a rail it was the emergency brake, so the train could not restart until the guard had re-adjusted the vacuum. Had the Gestapo been around this would have been a disaster: the whole thing would have been called off and we would have been sent back. As it was, the guard demanded a spot fine of 25 Marks from the lady in charge of the transport. We crossed the Dutch border in the late afternoon and were met by ladies of the Red Cross who dispensed milk and bread rolls. When we embarked at the Hook of Holland it was dark and when I got on deck at Harwich at about 7 a.m. I found a typical English summer’s day, overcast, chilly and drizzly. At Liverpool Street I remember admiring the clean lines of the LNER engine, in contrast to continental locomotives with a their untidy spiders’ webs of pipe work on the outside. I was taken to spend the night at a hostel in South Kensington and put on a train at Waterloo to north Cornwall the next day to be reunited with my sister who had come on an earlier transport. We were fostered by the same non-Jewish family who were very kind when later it became obvious that there would be no emigration to the USA for my parents.
I was not on the second journey but I can imagine only too well what it was like. In 1942 my father, then aged 65, mother 47 and grandmother 72 were interned at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. This was not an extermination camp but conditions were grim. When the International Red Cross asked to be shown a concentration camp the Nazis spruced up Theresienstadt with new paint, children’s playgrounds, reasonable food in the canteens and various cultural events. The Swiss Red Cross delegation were completely taken in, but the camp quickly reverted to its former level of dreadfulness. Once a week a trainload of internees were sent off to the extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and others. About 800 Jews at a time were herded into cattle trucks for the two-day journey and many died on the way. I can barely believe that my grandmother with her heart condition survived, but the records show that she was murdered in the Auschwitz gas chambers in October 1944 on the same day as my father and mother. About two years ago a letter written by a Theresienstadt survivor dated July 1945 came into my hands. It was addressed to a relative of hers in Switzerland and mentioned, among many other things, that only my mother had been selected for transport to Auschwitz but that my father and grandmother had gone voluntarily on the same train. No news from Auschwitz ever reached Theresienstadt but everybody knew what was at the other end of the line.
My third journey is in a way the reverse of the first. You already know that many of the second and third generation descendants of the Nazi era are doing what they can to atone for the crimes committed during their ancestors’ time. In October 2009 my daughter and I travelled to my hometown of Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart by Eurostar and TGV. No crossing of the North Sea this time: we left St. Pancras at 11 a.m. and were met at Stuttgart station at 7 p.m. having travelled in superb 21st century comfort at 200 m.p.h.. Both my sons, one daughter-in-law and one granddaughter came too, by air and by car. We had been invited to witness the ceremony of laying commemorative stones set in the pavement in front of our last flat, in the presence of the Lord Mayor and a crowd of about 200. I take a great deal of comfort from this and many other acts of reconciliation. It helps a lot towards counterbalancing my sorrow at having lost my parents and grandmother in such gruesome circumstances.
Nazis
I’ll start by saying that I have not always been Harry Grenville. When I was born I was Heinz Greilsamer, but when I joined the British Army in 1944 I had to change my name. The war was still going on and if anyone with a German-sounding name were to be captured there was no question of prisoner of war status. You were shot.
To understand what happened to me between 1933 and 1939, I have to deal briefly with the history of the Nazi party and to say something about my family.
The Nazis started as a small right-wing political party in the turmoil of Germany after the defeat in World War I in 1918. Hitler joined it soon after it was formed and very soon controlled it completely. He had a terrible childhood under the domination of a bullying father. He thought he was a budding artist but was entirely without talent, so became a drifter in Vienna before World War I. He joined the German army and distinguished himself by being a courageous front-line messenger. He had no trouble in persuading the Nazis that the Germans were a superior race and that the Jews were the cause of all their troubles after the first world war. There were many ups and downs, even street fights against the communists, during the 1920s but in 1933 they became the biggest party in the German parliament and Hitler declared himself the Fuehrer or Leader. From then on the persecution of the Jews and of the Nazis’ political opponents, the gypsies, homosexuals and even physically or mentally handicapped people gathered pace, all this in support of the crazy notion of the German master race. Without a doubt Hitler was a charismatic leader and had hypnotic power over millions of otherwise quite decent people. You have seen many film clips of his noisy rants in front of the enthusiastic multitudes. Somebody recorded some of the things he said during meals at his military headquarters during World War II. Here is an example:- “ a nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds and thousands of girls by repulsive bandy-legged bastards. With joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood. The final Jewish goal is denationalisation …by the bastardisation of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest… with the secret aim of ruining the white race.”
We lived in a middle-sized town called Ludwigsburg in the south of Germany, a few miles north of the city of Stuttgart. Our household consisted of my parents, Jakob and Klara Greilsamer, my younger sister Hannah and I and my mother’s parents, Josef and Sara Ottenheimer. Both my parents and my grandfather operated a wholesale business dealing in wrapping paper and paper bags. My grandfather had founded the firm after his previous cigar importing business had been wiped out in the hyper-inflation of 1923 brought about by the punitive terms imposed on Germany by the Allies after World War I. My grandmother did the cooking and housekeeping. I recall her superb cooking to this day.
I think we must have been quite comfortably off, but after 1933 things began to go downhill. The Nazis started their campaign against the Jews on 1st April 1933 with a boycott of all Jewish shops, and from 1935 Jews were no longer allowed to marry non-Jews. People began to think about emigrating but in our family there was still the hope that the whole thing would blow over. My grandfather was an ardent German patriot who had lost his only son in World War I and who had run the town’s food rationing system during that war.
I went to the local primary school in 1932 when I was 6 and hated the first two years. Our class teacher was one of the most boring people I have ever met: he had no talent for teaching and in any case I could already read before I ever went to school. Things changed in 1934 when we got a brilliant teacher called Herr Alfred Kuhn and to this day I use some of his mental arithmetic shortcuts. He read to us every day from the Greek and Roman classics but I’m sure he was not supposed to. All the other teachers used the time to indoctrinate their classes in Nazi theory. In 1936 we were kicked out of the local schools and my sister and I had to travel by train to Stuttgart where there was a Jewish school. I learned how to cross the road when detachments of the Hitler Youth came marching along but fortunately there was never any trouble. The teaching was excellent and I had my first acquaintance with science where my eventual future was to lie. We also learned English and modern Hebrew because many planned to emigrate to what was to become Israel.
The whole thing came to a grinding halt on the night of 10th November 1938 when the Nazis organised a nationwide pogrom. This was the time when nearly all the synagogues were burned down, including the one in our town. Many Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps including my cousin Johnnie who went to the notorious Dachau for 6 weeks and suffered terribly from the cold. When he was released he managed to get to some relatives in New York. I met him in 2008 when he was 87 and quite spry. The pogrom was known as Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass). The next day few Jews ventured out but my grandfather needed some medication from a Jewish doctor in Stuttgart and the family thought I might be inconspicuous enough to make the short train journey. I got the tablets and on the train back some workers from the Bosch spark plug factory got in and recognised a 12-year-old Jew. They spent the rest of the trip laughing their heads off at the little one there whose little synagogue they had burned a bit last night.
School, being next door to the big ruined Stuttgart synagogue, remained shut for a few months during time which my brilliant class teacher killed himself, his wife and baby son. By the time we went back to a depleted school it had become obvious that there could be no future for any Jews in Germany. It is to the eternal credit of the British House of Commons that they passed the so-called Kindertransport legislation in about 48 hours. Under this provision 10 000 unaccompanied children could be admitted to the UK without requiring any visas or other documents. My mother made arrangements for my sister and myself to join the Kindertransport trains in July 1939. We were unusually lucky to be fostered by a very kind non-Jewish family in north Cornwall where we went to the tiny local grammar school. They had two sons of their own with both of whom, also in their eighties, I am still in touch as well as some of my old Cornish school friends.
I don’t need to say anything about my subsequent career in the army (acting as an interpreter in German prisoner of war camps, in Dorset among other places), or about my university and Biology teaching career, but I do want to mention recent events in the town of Ludwigsburg where I lived. The active citizens are the children or even grandchildren of the guilty Nazis and they have put themselves out in no uncertain way to atone for the crimes of their ancestors. The site of the erstwhile synagogue has been commemorated by outlining the ground plan of the foundations in stone and two memorials with the names of Jewish victims erected among some trees. The present committee, after wide consultations in the town, have felt that it is not appropriate to have a pleasant little green space on the spot where a great crime was committed. Rather, it should be more like an open wound to remind future generations of a great evil. The plan is to remove the trees and to erect a sculpture featuring a number of suitcases bearing the names of the victims to symbolise their departure from their home town. Most of them did not survive the extermination camps in Poland. My parents and grandmother perished in Auschwitz.
Between 2008 and the present time a local organisation spent a great deal of time and effort tracing surviving descendants of victims and they have organised a number of ceremonies under the so-called Stolperstein initiative. This translates as stumble stones and is the brainchild of a sculptor from Cologne who fashions 4-inch concrete blocks topped by a brass plate on which is inscribed the name, date of birth and the date and place of their murder. The stones are set in the pavement outside the last known residence of the victims. The committee somehow got in touch with me and invited as many of the family as could come to witness the artist laying the three stones outside our last flat (which I remember quite well). He insists that he has to cement all of the stones himself and has so far laid over 20 000 all over Germany and Austria. I went in 2009 with all my three children and even a granddaughter. We were made a great fuss of, even meeting the Lord Mayor at a reception in the town hall and he attended the ceremony along with about 200 people out on the pavement. There were two classes of Sixth Formers including a girl who played some Jewish tunes on her trumpet. We were asked to look at the flat which is now run as a private psychiatric clinic and were entertained to coffee by the director. I still write regularly to one of the committee members and I am being kept informed about their work. On the same day eight stones were laid for Jewish victims and one for a girl of 9 who had cerebral palsy and a non-Jewish railway guard who had developed a mental illness, all part of their euthanasia programme.. In 1938 I could not have dreamt that the town would make such wonderful amends 70 years later.
I will finish with a poem written by another Kindertransport child, now in her late 80s, in which she draws a parallel between the biblical story of Moses being pushed out by his mother onto the Nile in a basket in hopes that someone would find and look after him. (Pharaoh’s daughter in the event)
For all mothers in anguish Providing safety Became our baby baskets
Pushing out their babies In a hostile world Rattling to foreign parts
In a small basket Our constant gratitude Our exodus from death
To let the river cradle them As in this last century
And kind hands find The crowded trains
And nurture them Taking us away from home
. .
The Suitcase
It’s not quite the end for there is a sort of postscript. Last December the chairman of the stone-laying committee in Ludwigsburg received from a Polish photographer over the internet, completely out of the blue, a picture of a pile of battered old suitcases which are behind a glass screen in the museum at the Auschwitz extermination camp. Clearly visible in the bottom left hand corner is a case with my father’s name on it. I emailed Marek the photographer to thank him but received no reply. The great puzzle is how he associated the name of Jacob Greilsamer with the town of Ludwigsburg and its Stolperstein committee.
During 1942, 1943 and most of 1944 my parents and grandmother had been interned in a camp in what was Czechoslovakia. During this time we were able to exchange 25-word messages with them through the good offices of the International Red Cross. Their last message came in October 1944. They wrote that they were about to move “east.” We had a strong suspicion that this meant a Polish extermination camp. This was reinforced in 1998 when a local historian published a big history of the Ludwigsburg Jewish community from its earliest days in the 1860s. The author Joachim Hahn must have had access to records which the Nazis had failed to destroy, because the fate of all Ludwigsburg Jews is listed. My parents and grandmother are registered as having been murdered in Auschwitz at the end of October 1944. At the end of the war I went to the Red Cross headquarters in London to look at the lists of camp survivors. They were not listed.
So it comes to this: Marek’s photograph is the first hard and fast evidence that they were actually in Auschwitz. Almost all the Jews were murdered in the gas chambers within 24 hours of arrival and the bodies burned in big industrial crematoria.
James Pastouna 