Personal Recollections of
Beckum
By Zeev (Heinz) Raphael
My
birth certificate
states: Heinz Raphael, born on 30 January 1927 in Beckum. This was duly registered
in the Register of Births at the Registry Office in the Town of Beckum. I was thus born six years to the day, before
the
Tag der Nationalen
Erhebung, which means something
like Day of National Revival, - i.e., the day Adolf Hitler came to power in
Germany (30 January 1933) and became
Reichskanzler. That day was to influence my entire future
life. But it
also had the pleasant consequence that during my first six school years I had a
day off on my birthday, as the day had been decreed a public holiday…
In general, my
childhood memories of Beckum are not particularly happy. The Jewish community
was small, and I had only few playmates of my age. I had of course no "Aryan" friends.
I remember very well our
house at Nordstraße 8. It was the
Gemeindehaus
(community house), consecrated on 13 July 1867. The
synagogue
and the Jewish School were located in that same building. Our living room was behind the two downstairs
windows facing the main road, to the left of the stairs leading to the entrance
of the house. Now and then our
windowpanes were smashed, also those of the
synagogue,
usually at nighttime, by
SA storm troopers, accompanied by their anti-Semitic
slogans and obscene songs.
The Jewish School, an
elementary school, had existed in Beckum for many years (at least since 1828,
see H. Krick’s book).
During the four years I attended the school, there were never more than
10 or 12 children, I think. Almost
everyone was of different age, so the teacher had a problem.
Jacob Raphael, my father, had been the
teacher and
Hazan,
in fact the spiritual leader of the community, since 1924. That was the custom in those days in the
smaller Jewish communities in Germany.
The teacher usually performed all the functions normally carried out by
a rabbi - including weddings and burials - but
not
those
of the shochet and
the
mohel... Incidentally, one of my father's predecessors in
Beckum had been Lehrer Josef Osterman, the grandfather of Uri Avnery…
My father was a strict
teacher and a firm believer in discipline. We got a distinct Zionist and Jewish
national education. We learned
Neu-Hebräisch,
i.e. Modern Hebrew, and were told about
Kibbutzim
and
Chalutzim
and about current affairs.
I distinctly remember hearing about the new Haifa Port, which was built and opened in those days. We knew the Jewish calendar better than the
average
Tsabar, and regularly commemorated such dates as the
jahrzeit
of Herzl and Bialik, and the day Trumpeldor
was killed...
On Purim (Adloyada
1934) it was only
natural that the ‘little boy’ would dress up as a
chalutz
with the appropriate garden tools. When asked "what do you want to be when
you grow up?” the natural answer was
ein
Chalutz in Palästina…
My mother
Lilly used to
take me for walks to the local park, the
Rosengarten,
with ducks & swans. There was no kindergarten, so until school age I spent
much of my time with my mother.
She was also busy with
voluntary work, such as the
Frauenverein.
That included visiting and helping the sick and others in need of
assistance. Our house was big, since it
included Synagogue as well as school.
There was also considerable social life and entertainment. So we had a permanent house help. I remember the jolly Änne,
and later (after 1935 when employment of
Aryan
house
helps became forbidden) the Jewish Emmy Marx. There was much activity connected
with the
Jugendverein
and the Zionist movement. There were also regular card
game (“Skat”) evenings, including Bruno Heine, Max Grünbaum our dentist, Podemsky
and Dr Walter Kronenberg (father of the late Miriam
Weinberg of Nahariya). The "winnings" were used
for an annual dinner party. Mama often spoke about the
gefüllte Ente
(stuffed duck) she used to prepare... The treat for me was that
I was allowed to stay up a bit longer in the evening,
to watch these activities...
After I started to go
to school, I often played with
Gert Heine. They
(Bruno and Renate Heine) had a
business for household articles. He had
a younger brother Ernst, and we used to roam around in their backyard, which
was full of boxes and empty crates, of which we used to build houses and secret
retreats...
Occasionally we went on
travels. A typical Sunday outing was by
train to nearby Ahlen, to visit Papa's colleague the
Lehrer
Adolf Tint. He had a son Herbert who was a year or two older
than I was (and who subsequently became lecturer at the
London
School of Economics). Once he introduced me to my first visit
to the cinema:
Der
Berg Ruft
(Call
of the Mountain),- some adventure story connected with
the
Zugspitze... In 2004, some seven decades later, Herbert and
I had a
brief exchange of e-mail messages.
A longer journey was to
Berlin, in August 1933. I don't remember
where we stayed, but we saw my grandfather Isidor Raphael who was a glazier in
Pankow,
and also my uncle Walter at his work in the carpet department of "Tietz", one of Berlin's big
department stores. We also visited Papa's sisters Fanny
and Zylla, and according to my photo album I was taken
to the Kinder-Zoo, and also treated to ice cream at the
Tempelhofer Flughafen.
Other journeys were to
my maternal grandparents (Josef Fischer and Julia Adler) in Fürth.
There had been an earlier visit about 1930 when I was three, and the one that I
remember, in 1935. It was the 100th
anniversary of the first railway in Germany, from Fürth
to Nürnberg (1835 – 1935), and I was
shown the
old locomotive with its characteristic slim and tall chimney.
It was exhibited on one of the main squares (the “Plärrer”?). I also remember a huge 'battery' of automatic
vending machines,
located in some roundish building at the Plärrer. There one could choose from all sorts of
sandwiches etc. Coming from a small
town, this was new to me and a great thrill...
Opa
Fischer used to have a tailoring business, which I don't
think existed any more when I was there in 1935. (In earlier years
his oldest son, my
Onkel
Arthur, used to work with him.)
Their home was austere and rather shabby, I recall, and I don't know of what they lived. There was no electricity, and they used
old-fashioned oil lamps. They were more religious than our family, and the
strangest thing for me was to watch, after the
Shabbat
morning
service, a line of Jews carrying their cooking pots filled with hot
gesetzte Bohnensuppe
(cholent?), walking from the
Bäcker Schatz
to
their homes...
There is photographic
evidence that both grandfathers
Fischer and
Raphael
stayed with us in Beckum, as well as my
Uncle Leo. In 1927
Papa's youngest sister Lotte stayed with us for a
long period. She died at a young age. A visitor that I was very fond of was Jetta Mamlock, a
Jugendverein
friendship
of my parents.
About 1935 our house was renovated. Modern WCs replaced the primitive outdoor
toilets, and a bathtub was connected to running water
and to the drainage.
After 1933 the
community shrunk steadily. The feeling was that in the smaller towns, where
everyone knew everyone else, it was more difficult to live with the anti-Jewish
legislation being introduced by the Nazis. In the larger towns one had a better
chance to
untertauchen,
i.e., to maintain anonymity; - anyhow, that was the theory. The Heines, the Kronenbergs and
several Steins gradually left, and when we left Beckum in May 1937 there
remained only
eight children in our school. The photograph on page 63 in Hugo Krick's book
Geschichte und Schicksal der Juden
zu Beckum, originated from
my album.
In 1937 my father took up his appointment as senior teacher with the Israelitische Gartenbauschule in Ahlem, near Hannover. There were two parts to the Ahlem institute. Chiefly it was a vocational school for young Jews, mainly for horticulture, but also for other manual trades, such as shoe-making, tailoring, cabinet-making and (for girls) household. The secondary function was the boarding school, for younger children like myself. My mother performed housemother duties. I was a boarding-school pupil (whose parents happened to live on the same floor). According to the records our family left Beckum on 20 May 1937.
40 years later, in 1967, our family spent one year in Seoul, South Korea, where I worked on a UNESCO assignment. Towards the end of the year, we planned our return trip back home to Western Asia, with stop-overs in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Katmandu, Delhi, Agra and Teheran. I was to continue to Paris for de-briefing at the UNESCO HQ, - after three days in Istanbul. On the last leg of the journey, from Paris to Tel Aviv, I planned a detour to Beckum. I wrote to my father in Ramat Gan, asking him for hints, such as the location of
the Beckum cemetery, etc. He did not like the idea at all, and I stopped mentioning it.
In January 1968 the European winter was in full force. In Istanbul I saw the famous mosques covered in snow. And at Orly airport several days later, there were delays. But the flight to Düsseldorf started normally. We had just filled in our immigration forms, closed our seat belts, and started the descent to land. Then suddenly the plane leveled up, and started to climb. There was an announcement: "Wir bedaueren Ihnen mitteilen zu müssen, daß wir leider nicht in Düsseldorf landen können, da die Landungsbahn völlig vereißt ist" (We regret to inform you that we are unable to land in Düsseldorf, because of ice on the landing strip). In Köln the situation was similar, and after a further hour we were back at Orly in Paris. After some time in the waiting lounge, we were offered rail travel to Frankfurt. I declined, and opted for the next flight to Tel Aviv. I thus arrived home one day early, and near midnight I knocked at the door of my parents in Ramat Hen: "Papa, you were right! I did NOT visit Beckum!" Had fate intervened? It was a bit uncanny. Of all our many flights, the only hitch had occurred during that particular flight to Düsseldorf...
In the summer of 1975 we traveled to Europe.
From Paris we set out in an AVIS car on our drive to Sweden, via Germany. The aim was a brief pilgrimage to Beckum. We had planned to spend the night on the Belgian side of the border, and chose EUPEN, which had been familiar to me from my stamp collecting past. A small inn, Zum Treppchen, was suggested to us. It turned out that the landlady Frau Brandt was pure German. Alice insisted on speaking French, and the daughter came to interpret... Next morning we crossed the border into Germany at Aachen. “Ausweise, bitte. Anything to declare?” That was all. There was no need to leave the car. In Beckum we parked the car at the Bahnhof, and started to walk. 38 years had passed, but I had no trouble finding my way. We visited Nordstraße 8. The street had been turned into a pedestrian mall, and looked clean and modern, with lots of flower boxes. There were the old familiar names: Drogerie (pharmacy) Richter, Hills, Pollklesner and Tenkhoff (the Konditorei where I used to be treated to an occasional Mohrenkopf). Our old house had been pulled down a few years earlier, in 1967, and an apartment house had taken its place. Outside the house we addressed an older man. He claimed to remember my parents. Mahlermeister (painter) Heese was his name. We had lunch at the Bahnhofshotel. At the Polizeiwache we asked for directions to the old Jewish cemetery. The gate was open. The place was well kept, and the about twenty tombstones were in good condition. We photographed the stone of Jeanette Osterman, the grandmother of Uri Avnery alias Helmut Osterman. Before leaving Beckum we had coffee at Steinhoff on the Weststraße. We stayed the night at the Rats-Stuben in the small town Vlotho, with pretty, old Tudor houses, - and car stickers Lasst Hess frei! (Free [Rudolph] Hess!). Via Hanover (we passed a signpost to Limmer, where I had spent a year 1937/38 at the Gartenbauschule in Ahlem), we continued to Belsen. We visited the site of the former concentration camp there. After that, we were just in time for the 4pm ferry from Puttgarden to Maribo in Denmark. That was the end of our 36-hour pilgrimage to Germany.
Footnote: By a curious coincidence, just these days (June 2007), exactly 70 years later, an Ahlem fellow-boarder Gad (Gert) Blumenthal has become my next-door neighbour here at our Haifa "Pisgat Hen" Retirement Home. My father had been one of Gad's teachers in Ahlem...