Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (8 page)

1. 1. The combination of age and gender, as already intimated, was the most lethal. Fewer women than men left Germany. why was this so? There were still compelling reasons to stay, although life became increasingly difficult. First, women, especially young women, could still find jobs as teachers in Jewish schools or in Jewish social services.
      ¹⁰⁸
      Dr. Martha wertheimer, for example, worked as a journalist prior to 1933. Thereafter, she plunged into Jewish welfare. She escorted children’s transports to england, worked twelve-hour days without pausing for
      

      meals in order to advise Jews on emigration and welfare procedures, and organized continuing education courses for Jewish youths who had been drafted into forced labor. Ultimately, she wrote a friend in New York that, despite efforts to emigrate, she no longer wanted to escape: “It is also worthwhile to be an officer on the sinking ship of Jewish life (
      Judenheit
      ) in Germany, to hold out courageously and to fill the life boats, to the extent that we have some.”
      ¹⁰⁹
      

      while the employment situation of Jewish women helped keep them in Germany, that of the men helped to get them out. Some husbands or sons had business connections abroad facilitating their immediate flight, and others emigrated alone in order to establish themselves and then send for their families. Also, families believed that sons needed to establish economic futures, whereas daughters would, presumably, marry. Despite trepidations, parents sent sons into the unknown more readily than daughters.
      ¹¹⁰
      

      Another reason why more women remained behind was the fact that before the war, men faced more immediate physical danger than women and were forced to flee promptly.
      ¹¹¹
      After the November Pogrom, in a strange twist of fortune, the men interned in concentration camps were released only upon showing proof of their ability to leave Germany immediately. Families—mostly wives and mothers—strained every resource to provide the documentation to free these men and send them on their way while some of the women remained behind. Alice Nauen recalled how difficult these emigration decisions were for all Jews:
      

      Should we send the men out first? This had been the dilemma all along in my father’s work . . . If you have two tickets, do you take one man out of the concentration camp and his wife who is at this moment safe? or do you take your two men out of the concentration camp? They took two men out . . . because they said we cannot play God, but these are in immediate danger. Those had to come out.
      ¹¹²
      

      even as women feared for their men, they believed that they would not be subjected to serious harm. The regime had, in fact, beaten, tortured, imprisoned, and shot Jewish men, but had spared women as a group
      ¹¹³
      from the worst brutality even during the November Pogrom.
      ¹¹⁴
      

      Further, as more and more sons left, daughters remained as the sole caretakers for elderly parents. one female commentator noted the presence of many women “who can’t think of emigration because they don’t know who might care for their elderly mothers in the interim, before they could start sending them money. In the same families, the
      

      sons went their way.”
      ¹¹⁵
      In fact, leaving one’s aging parent—as statistics indicate, usually the mother—was the most painful act imaginable. Ruth Glaser described her mother’s agony as her mother realized that she had to join Ruth’s father, who had been forbidden re-entry into Germany. Ruth’s mother “could not sleep at night thinking of leaving her [mother] behind.”
      ¹¹⁶
      

      As early as 1936, the League of Jewish women saw cause for serious concern regarding the general “problem of the emigration of women which is often partly overlooked and not correctly understood.”
      ¹¹⁷
      Not only did the League realize that far fewer women than men were leaving, but it turned toward parents, reminding them of their “responsibility to free their daughters too.”
      ¹¹⁸
      As late as January 1938, the Hilfsverein, one of the main emigration organizations, announced that “up to now, Jewish emigration . . . indicates a severe surplus of men.” Blam-ing this on the “nature” of women to feel closer to family and home and on that of men toward greater adventurousness, the Hilfsverein suggested that couples marry before emigrating, encouraged women to prepare themselves as household helpers, and promised that women’s emigration would become a priority.
      ¹¹⁹
      Yet, only two months later, the Hilfsverein announced it would expedite the emigration of only those young women who could prove a minimum competence in household skills and were willing to work as domestics abroad.
      ¹²⁰
      In general, fewer women than men received support from Jewish organizations in order to emigrate.
      ¹²¹
      

      Young women and their families were often reluctant to consider Palestine, and the
      kibbutz
      , as an alternative for daughters. Statistics for the first half of 1937 indicate, for example, that of those taking advantage of Zionist retraining programs, only 32 percent were female.
      ¹²²
      There was also a gender imbalance among children who went to Palestine with Youth Aliyah,
      ¹²³
      which required 60 percent boys and 40 percent girls because of what it considered the division of labor on the collective farms (
      kibbutzim
      ) where the children would work.
      ¹²⁴
      

      The growing disproportion of Jewish women in the German-Jewish population also came about because, to begin with, there were more Jewish women than men in Germany.
      ¹²⁵
      Thus, in order to stay even, a greater absolute number of women would have had to emigrate. In 1933, 52.3 percent of Jews were women, resulting from such factors as male casualties during world war I, greater marrying out and conversion among Jewish men, and greater longevity among women.
      ¹²⁶
      The slower rate of female than male emigration meant that the female
      

      proportion of the Jewish population rose to 57.5 percent by 1939.
      ¹²⁷
      In 1939, one woman wrote:
      

      Mostly we were women who had been left to ourselves. In part, our husbands had died from shock, partly they had been processed from life to death in a concentration camp and partly some wives who, aware of the greater danger to their husbands, had prevailed upon them to leave at once and alone. They were ready to take care of everything and to follow their husbands later on, but because of the war it became impossible for many to realize this intention and quite a few of my friends and acquaintances thus became martyrs of Hitler.
      ¹²⁸
      

      A large proportion of these remaining women were elderly.
      ¹²⁹
      Since many of the young had emigrated, the number of aging Jews also increased proportionately, among them a large number of widows.
      ¹³⁰
      In 1939, there were over 6,000 widowed men and over 28,000 widowed women in the expanded Reich.
      ¹³¹
      Thus, 20 percent more Jewish wom-en than men, especially, but not only, the elderly, remained behind. when elisabeth Freund, one of the last Jews to leave Germany legally in october 194l, went to the Gestapo for her final papers, she observed: “All old people, old women waiting in line.”
      ¹³²
      

      In conclusion, Jewish families faced the maelstrom of Nazi brutality by adjusting long-standing gender and age dynamics. Because men faced danger and often lost their jobs, women took on more assertive public and economic roles. Although parents tried to protect their children, children themselves disagreed with these strategies and urged parents to take different action, which was focused on leaving Germany. The elderly, normally cared for and protected, were unable to escape and were left behind. Families that in ordinary times would not have considered disbanding, broke up in order to save individual members. Tragically, in the end, no strategy could save them all.
      

      Notes
      

      1. Trude Maurer, “From everyday Life to a State of emergency: Jews in weimar and Nazi Germany,” in
         Jewish Daily Life in Germany,
         ed. Marion kaplan (New York: oxford University Press, 2005), 285: For example, in königsberg in 1925: 13.1; 1933: 6.6; 1936: 6.5 births per thousand Jews. See Stefanie Schüler-Springorum,
         

         Die jüdische Minderheit in Königsberg/Preussen, 1871–1945
         (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 369.
         

      2. Sibylle Quack,
         Zuflucht Amerika: Zur Sozialgeschichte der Emigration deutsch-jüdi- scher Frauen in die USA 1933–1945
         (Bonn: Dietz, 1995), 58.
         
      3. Maurer, “everyday Life,” 286, quoting
         CV-Zeitung
         (hereafter
         CVZ
         ) 12, no. 12 (23 March 1933): 100.
         
      4. Maurer, “everyday Life,” 285–286. See the painting “Sabbath Afternoon” reprinted on the High Holidays with the surrounding text (translation): “The good old days were the days of the family. everyone was together. Tranquility and peace radiated from the rooms and the people. The family and the house were the pillars of life.” (
         Gemeindeblatt der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde Hamburg
         , September 1936). on the ideology of the Jewish family in the weimar Republic, which aimed to preserve a “noble past,” see Sharon Gillerman, “The Crisis of the Jewish Family,” in
         In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933,
         ed. Michael Brenner and Derek Penslar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 186–195.
         
      5. Christopher Lasch,
         Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged
         (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
         
      6. Hans Gaertner, “Problems of Jewish Schools during the Hitler Regime,”
         Leo Baeck Institute Year Book
         1 (1956): 138.
         
      7. Maurer, “everyday Life,” 286, citing
         CVZ
         14, no. 46 (14 November 1935): 1, 2. See also:
         Jüdische Rundschau
         , 25 May 1937, cited in Jacob Boas, “The Shrinking world of German Jewry, 1933–1938,” in
         Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
         31 (1986): 255.
         
      8. Maurer, “everyday Life,” 286.
         
      9. Blätter des jüdischen Frauenbundes
         (hereafter
         BJFB
         ), February 1935: 12.
         
      10. Maurer, “everyday Life,” 286.
          
      11. Maurer, “everyday Life,” 286. on Jewishness as a problem for children, see also
          Israelitisches Familienblatt
          (hereafter
          IF
          ) 36, no. 36, 7 September 1934: 9, and ernst Loewenberg, memoirs, Leo Baeck Institute, New York (hereafter LBI), 78.
          
      12. Maurer, “everyday Life,” 287, citing from Ruth weiss,
          Wege im harten Gras: Erinnerungen an Deutschland, Südafrika und England
          (wuppertal: P. Hammer, 1995), 20.
          
      13. Ruth kluger,
          Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
          (New York: Feminist Press, 2001), 15.
          
      14. elisabeth Drexler sought employment in a department store in Magdeburg. Ms. in Collection BMS GeR 91, Houghton Library, Harvard University (hereafter Harvard).
          

15.
IF
, 13 January 1938: 13–14. See also
IF
, 14 July 1938: 12.

16.
BJFB
10, no. 1 (1934): 11.