Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (6 page)

Nevertheless, children also heightened family discord by confronting their parents with their desire to leave Germany behind. Children, reacting almost viscerally to present dangers at home, wanted to cut all ties with Germany, but parents feared an unknown future abroad. Many, like Ruth eisner, had pressed for their whole families to emigrate. when her father refused, the sixteen-year-old begged: “At least let me go!”
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others insisted on leaving for training

programs—usually agricultural—either inside or outside Germany, in the hope of eventually emigrating. By 1939, 82 percent of children aged fifteen and under and 83 percent of youths aged sixteen to twenty-four had managed to escape Germany.
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Many of these left with their families, and many did not. In the early years, parents had tried to keep the family together, that is, to go or to stay as a unit, but as conditions worsened, some parents made the agonizing decision to send their children into safety alone, splitting the family in the hope of an uncertain reunion.

Deciding Whether to Go or to Stay

emigration became more and more crucial as Nazi policies against Jews escalated. women usually saw the danger signals first and urged their husbands to flee Germany.
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Marta Appel described a discussion among friends in Dortmund about a doctor who had just fled in the spring of 1935. The men in the room, including her husband, a rabbi, condemned him:

The women . . . found that it took more courage to go than to stay

. . . “why should we stay here and wait for our eventual ruin? Isn’t it better to go and to build up a new existence somewhere else, be-fore our strength is exhausted by the constant physical and psychic pressure? Isn’t the future of our children more important than a completely senseless holding out?” All the women shared this opinion . . . while the men, more or less passionately, spoke against it. I discussed this with my husband on the way home. Like all other men, he simply couldn’t imagine how one could leave one’s beloved homeland and the duties that fill a man’s life. “Could you really leave all this behind you to enter nothingness?” “I could,” I said, without a moment’s hesitation.
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Rural Jewish women had similar reactions. Interviews of former vil-lagers indicate: “The role of women in the decision to emigrate was decisive . . . the women were the prescient ones . . . the ones ready to make the decision, the ones who urged their husbands to emigrate.”
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The different attitudes of men and women described here seem to reflect a gender-specific reaction remarked upon by sociologists and psychologists: in dangerous situations, men tend to “stand their ground,” whereas women avoid conflict, preferring flight as a strategy.
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But there were more important reasons why men and women responded differently to the idea of emigration. Those men who could still earn a living felt that, as breadwinners, they could not simply leave and force their families to face poverty abroad. women, on the oth-er hand, claimed to be ready to become domestics if they could flee with their families. women’s subordinate status in the public world and their focus on the household probably eased their decision since they were already familiar with the kinds of work they would have to perform in places of refuge.
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one woman described how her mother, formerly a housewife and pianist, cheerfully and successfully took on the role of maid in england, whereas her father, formerly a chief ac-countant in a bank, failed as a butler, barely passed as a gardener, and experienced his loss of status more intensely than his wife.
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even when both sexes fulfilled their refugee roles well, women seemed less status conscious than men. Perhaps women did not experience the descent from employing a servant to becoming one to the same degree as men, since women’s public status had always been derivative of their father or husband anyway.

In general, women were less involved than men in the economy, even though some women had been in the job market their entire adult lives and others had entered it for the first time.
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This had two effects. First, since Jewish men worked mostly with other Jews in traditional Jewish occupations (retail trade in specific branches of consumer goods, in the cattle trade, or in independent practices as physicians and attorneys), they may have been more isolated from non-Jewish peers (though not from non-Jewish customers—and those who continued to come gave some cause for hope).
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A Jewish work environment spared them di-rect interpersonal interactions with hostile peers, but also prevented the awareness garnered from such associations. As the boycotts of Jewish concerns grew more widespread and more insistent, those Jewish men whose businesses remained intact saw their clientele become predominantly Jewish, isolating them further. Moreover, discriminatory hiring meant that Jewish blue-and white-collar workers found opportunities only within the Jewish economic sector. In 1936, Jewish voices de-cried a “Jewish economic ghetto” and in 1937, the Council for German Jewry in London reported that the German-Jewish community lived in a “new type of ghetto . . . cut off from economic as well as social and intellectual contact with the surrounding world.”
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Thus, Jewish men, working increasingly in a “Jewish ghetto,” may have been shielded to some extent from “Aryan” hostility, whereas Jewish women (even those

who worked in the same “Jewish ghetto”) picked up other warning signals, as they were sensitive to their neighborhoods and their children.

Second, Jewish men had a great deal to lose. They had to tear themselves away from their life-work, whether a business or professional practice, whether patients, clients or colleagues, status or possessions. The daughter of a wealthy businessman commented, “when the Nazis appeared on the scene, he was too reluctant to consolidate everything and leave Germany. He may have been a bit too attached to his status, as well as his possessions.”
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But, even businesswomen appeared less reluctant than their spouses to emigrate. one woman, whose husband managed her inherited manufacturing business, wanted to flee immediately in 1933. He, on the other hand, refused to leave the business. Although the wife could not convince her husband to flee, she insisted that they both learn a trade that would be useful abroad.
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In short, from women’s perspectives, the family could be moved more easily than a business or profession. In light of men’s deep-seated identity with their occupation, they often felt trapped into staying. women, whose identity was more family-oriented, struggled to preserve what was central to them by fleeing with it. Summing up, Peter wyden recalled the debates within his own and other Jewish families in Berlin:

It was not a bit unusual in these go-or-no-go family dilemmas for the women to display more energy and enterprise than the men . . . Almost no women had a business, a law office, or a medical practice to lose. They were less status-conscious, less money-oriented than the men. They seemed to be less rigid, less cautious, more confident of their ability to flourish on new turf.
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women and men also had gender-specific, distinctive connections to public organizational and political worlds. one man declared in his memoirs that he could not depart from Germany because he thought of himself as a “good democrat” whose emigration would “leave others in the lurch,” and would be a “betrayal of the entire Jewish community.”
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women’s memoirs rarely use such lofty language, nor did women see themselves as so indispensable to the public.
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Having led relatively distinct lives, men and women often interpreted daily events differently. whereas men focused on government pronouncements, news broadcasts, and business, women were more integrated into their community. Raised to be sensitive to interpersonal behavior and social situations, women possessed social antennae that were finely tuned and directed towards more unconventional—what

men might have considered more trivial—sources of information. For example, a US Jewish couple that resided in Hamburg during the 1930s heard about the danger from their hired help.
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Thus, women’s political analyses were often more penetrating, interspersed as they were with personal observations. They registered the increasing hostility of their immediate surroundings, unmitigated by a promising business prospect, a loyal employee, a patient, or a kind customer. Their constant contacts with their own and other people’s children probably also alerted them to warning signals that come through interpersonal relations—and they took those signals very seriously.

Men, on the other hand, felt as though they were more at home with culture and politics. Generally more educated than their wives, they cherished what they regarded as German culture, the culture of the German enlightenment. This love of German
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(cultural education) gave men something to hold on to even as it “blunted their sense of impending danger.”
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In fact, one could argue that men were more “German” than women, more imbued (perhaps from their war experience) with a sense of patriotism even in a situation gone awry. when else Gerstel fought with her husband about emigrating, he, a former judge—he’d been fired—insisted “the German people, the German judges, would not stand for much more of this madness.”
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war veterans also refused to take their wives’ warnings seriously. They had received reprieves in 1933 because of President Hindenburg’s intervention after the exclusionary “April Laws” (although the reprieves proved to be temporary). The wives of these men typically could not convince their husbands that they, too, were in danger.
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one woman, who pressed her husband to leave Germany, noted that he “constantly fell back on the argument that he had been at the front in world war I.”
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while the front argument had a deep emotional core to it—many of these men still felt the deep patriotism that the war experience invoked
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—most men expressed it in terms of having served their country and, hence, having certain rights.
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A widespread assumption that women lacked political acumen— stemming from their primary role in the private and domestic sphere rather than the public and political one—gave women’s warnings less credibility in the eyes of their husbands. one woman’s prophecies of doom met with her husband’s amusement: “He laughed at me and ar-gued that such an insane dictatorship could not last long.” even after their seven-year-old son was beaten up at school, he was still optimistic.
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Many men also pulled rank on their wives, insisting that they were

more attuned to political realities. one husband insisted, “You mustn’t take everything so seriously. Hitler used the Jews . . . as propaganda to gain power—now . . . you’ll hear nothing more about the Jews.”
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often, the anxious partner heard the old German adage, “nothing is ever eaten as hot as it’s cooked.”

Men claimed to see the “broader” picture, to maintain an “objective” stance, to scrutinize and analyze the confusing legal and economic decrees and the contradictory public utterances of the Nazis. Men mediated their experiences through newspapers and broadcasts. Politics remained more abstract to them, whereas women’s “narrow-er” picture—the minutiae (and significance) of everyday contacts— brought politics home.
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Notwithstanding the gender differences in picking up signals and yearning to leave, it is crucial to recognize that these signals occurred in stages. Alice Nauen and her friends “saw it was getting worse. But until 1939 nobody in our circles believed it would lead to an end” for German Jewry.
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And, women, too, could be confused by Nazi policies and events. when Hanna Bernheim’s sister returned from France for a visit in the mid 1930s, the sister wanted to know why the Bernheims remained in their south German town. Hanna Bernheim replied:

First of all it is so awfully hard for our old, sick father to be left by all his four children. Second there are so many dissatisfied people in all classes, professions and trades. Third there was the Röhm Purge and an army shake-up. And that makes me believe that people are right who told us ‘wait for one year longer and the Nazi government will be blown up!’
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