Two weeks ago on Yom Hashoah, the Jewish day of Holocaust remembrance, I remembered how lucky I was to be sitting in a balmy lecture hall listening to a boring lecture about Native American history. On an April afternoon 70 years ago my grandma Ethel was in Siberia, where she and her mother landed after fleeing Poland, peddling trinkets after school. Grandpa Sam might have been hopping a train to the Russian-Chinese border or waking up from a nap on top of a gravestone.
I spent a lot of time on Yom Hashoah thinking about my grandparents’ post-Holocaust wanderings. My mind floated down a bike path in Waldram, Germany, where I had been four months earlier, staring at the snow-capped Alps glistening in the distance. And before my mind left the doldrums of the Holocaust and its aftermath, it stopped in front of the memorial to Fohrenwald, the Jewish displaced persons camp that once occupied Waldram, and wondered what my grandparents think of the their former home.
“This place is covered in blood,” I thought as I ambled through Waldram on a chilly, December day.
Waldram is a quaint neighborhood with tightly packed homes and well-manicured lawns. It has all the amenities of a suburban enclave, with a sporting goods store, bank, bus stops and a school. But you quickly learn that the town occupies the site of a former German labor camp, and of Fohrenwald. When you arrive at Seminar Platz you’re standing at what used to be Adolf Hitler Platz. The house with the Christmas lights may have been the former home of a laborer who worked at a nearby IG Farben munitions factory. (IG Farben was a chemical conglomerate that manufactured Zyklon B.)
Why was I surprised Grandma and Grandpa never mention their time at Fohrenwald? Only a few short years before they arrived, the town’s sole mission was to aid in the destruction of their friends, families and homes. Now, the war over, my grandmother lived there in a “displaced persons (D.P.) camp” there, nothing more than a refugee camp. She slept in rundown barracks and ate crappy food. The towering Alps probably reminded her of how many more obstacles she had to climb before leaving Germany and Europe once and for all.
Though he lived in in Munich after the war, my grandfather worked at Fohrenwald as a doctor and spent a lot of time at the camp socializing. He probably fumed when he watched the goldenrod sunsets in the sprawling fields, aware that he would no longer be able to wander the meadows near his hometown in Ukraine.
On the train that night to Munich, I thought I had solved the mystery of my grandparents’ relationship with Fohrenwald. I had experienced the same eerie feelings walking down Waldram’s streets that they had felt on a daily basis. I now understood how a village that looks like it should be on a postcard could be tainted by its past.
When I returned home and I spoke with my grandparents, I learned that I was right – to an extent. My grandparents had two different experiences at Fohrenwald. I was right about my grandmother. She could not wait to leave. But my grandfather was more forgiving.
Grandma Ethel had been a transient since she was nine. She and her mother shuttled between three D.P. camps in Austria and Germany before finally settling at Fohrenwald in 1946 for what turned out to be a five-year stay.
By the time my grandmother arrived at Fohrenwald she probably craved the same things that most 16-year-olds pine for: nice clothes, a boyfriend, a good education and independence. None of those were possible at Fohrenwald. She shared a cramped room with her mother. Relatives in the United States sent her clothes because there was a clothing shortage at the camp. Instead of raising adolescent hell with her friends, she spent her days meeting with immigration officials and taking sewing lessons. She never learned German because, she told me, she “didn’t like the Germans.”
My grandfather was also focused on leaving Germany for the U.S. He said the reason he went to Germany was because he knew he had a good chance at getting to the United States. But my grandfather did not see Germany and Waldram as the home of the laborers that indirectly supported the German war machine that killed his parents and torched his hometown. He enjoyed studying at medicine at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and was friendly with the locals in Wolfratshausen, just down the road from Waldram.
He talks fondly of downing beers in Munich’s beer halls. He smiles when he talks about his visits to Berlin. “Germany is a very cultured country,” he told me recently. “They just had a bad period with Hitler. Otherwise it’s a normal country.”
But to me Waldram will never be a normal town. Although it brought my grandparents together, it will always be tarnished. It will always be my grandmother’s unwanted home.
Gabe Weinstein is a junior studying journalism at Ohio University. He enjoys running, reading and rooting for Cleveland’s cursed sports teams.
