Justice to these forgotten Jewish souls
As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, I was invited to attend an international gathering in Munich in 2008 which included a visit to the Foehrenwald Displaced Persons (DP) camp and an unscheduled stop at a Jewish cemetery in the town of Gauting. Interred in this small burial ground situated in a larger Christian cemetery are the remains of 128 Jewish patients who died in the nearby Gauting Sanatorium. Having survived the hardships of the Holocaust, these unfortunate souls from countries scattered throughout Europe succumbed within a short time of liberation to the tuberculosis and related conditions they developed in concentration camps, the Dachau death march and other horrific circumstances.
Little did I know that this unexpected stop at the cemetery would have a major impact on my life.
The Gauting Sanatorium was not just a name to me – it was the place that separated me from my father during the first five years of my life as he slowly recovered from the tuberculosis he developed while in hiding. Fortunately, he was cured to the extent that he was able to go on to lead a normal existence, although beset by ill health throughout his life and consequently denied the precious visa that would have allowed him to immigrate to the United States or England. Accepting the fact that we would not be granted permission to emigrate, in 1957 we left our “home” at the DP camp in Foerenwald and settled in nearby Munich, where my hard-working, resourceful parents created an economically stable life for me and my younger sister.
A deeply religious man, my father raised an Orthodox Jewish family while both my parents instilled in their daughters a strong identification with and pride in being Jewish. Following an ugly anti-Semitic incident in my 9th grade class, where I was the only Jewish student, I knew I could not remain in Germany, and within six weeks of that fateful incident, I found myself, aged 14, living with my aunt in Los Angeles and ultimately marrying and raising my own Orthodox family in the United States.
My father was one of the lucky ones to have survived his debilitating tuberculosis, but this was not the case for the 128 men and women in the Gauting Cemetery, who perished in the prime of life with almost no known survivors to claim them, memorialize them, or recite the kaddish. Having lost their families, their homes, their rightful place among humanity, they lay buried in a German cemetery. It was this knowledge that made me realize that I could not return to my suburban life in New Jersey without trying to bring some measure of justice to these forgotten Jewish souls.
Upon my return home I began exhaustive research into the histories of the Gauting Sanatorium patients, which led me to the authoritative book by Prof. Dr. Walter Fuernrohr and Felix Muschialik (2005). It was in this book that I came upon the heart-rending poems and writings, in Yiddish, of the Jewish patients, many of them reflecting their fervent wish to begin life anew in their ancestral home of Eretz Israel, some poignantly expressing the hope that the good air and sunshine would help cure them. For me, to have abandoned these victims after learning of their existence would only have compounded the crimes perpetuated against them.
My mission was finally realized on May 30 with the placement of a plaque at Yad Vashem bearing the names of each victim buried in the Gauting Cemetery, bearing witness to the fact that these were not just 128 anonymous numbers within the six million, but real people who had led real lives before meeting their cruel, inhuman fate. Attesting to the significance of this memorial, among the speakers at the ceremony were Dr. Clemens von Goetze, ambassador of Germany in Israel, and Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. I was particularly moved by the fact that Dr. E. Knobloch, former mayor of Gauting, who has been instrumental in placing memorials along the route of the death march from Dachau through Gauting, and former mayor Brigitte Servatius both came from Germany especially for the ceremony, as did Sabine Baumgartner, who to this day continues to tend to the Jewish graves in Gauting Cemetery.
There should be no moratorium on acknowledging a single victim of the Holocaust, and nearly eight decades after this tragic chapter in our history, 128 individual Jewish souls are now counted among our brethren in the land they prayed to see.
The author was born in 1949 in DP camp Ulm, Germany and transferred to DP camp Foerenwald until 1957, then moved to Munich, leaving Germany in 1963 for Los Angeles.