My Father’s Resistance: A Memoir

In the winter of 1974, my husband, Jehuda, and I visited my parents, Max and Ilse Rothschild, who lived in New Jersey. Just as the four of us sat down to eat, the heating system growled and shut down. No one knew what to do, so my father, a rabbi, sent Jehuda, a historian, to the cellar to “fix it.” As a sociologist, I came along to assist.

After rummaging around the basement, Jehuda decided to kick a large, unidentifiable machine. To get at it, we pushed away some disintegrating cartons nearby. Strangely, the heating suddenly sprang to life even before the kick. With this success behind us, we opened one of the cartons and found a large collection of notebooks and correspondence in my father’s handwriting along with documents in various languages. My father was not a hoarder—he didn’t buy things and he didn’t save things—so we were curious about the crumbling mess he had collected in these boxes. We brought one of the notebooks upstairs. “What’s this?” we asked my father. “Oh, that’s nothing—in fact, I don’t really know what it is. You can throw it away.”

We didn’t comply because it was clear that the material was about Dad’s life, beginning with his German ancestors, focusing on his experience during the Holocaust, and culminating in his interpretation of postwar life in the US. So, with his permission, we took the contents of about ten of those decrepit cartons back home with us to Ann Arbor. I unpacked the boxes and put each item in a plastic sleeve and then placed all of these in three-ring binders, labeling them by date. Unfortunately, I was too busy with our lives and my academic career to read this newfound family geniza. So we packed up the binders and dutifully schlepped them with us wherever we moved for the next forty-five years, adding other items scattered throughout my parents’ house that I found every time I visited.

When I retired from teaching at Brandeis in 2017, I finally started to wade through all of the binders. I hired a German translator and several Dutch translators. A friend of mine translated from the French. Jehuda checked the German and Hebrew material to improve my preliminary translations.

Next, I dug deep into my father’s report cards; correspondence; certificates; journal articles; diaries; and a long, unpublished memoir (parts of which I later published and discussed in Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir). Aside from learning a great deal about my witty, philosophical, ironic, Jewishly committed, exasperating, and loving father, what did all of this mean? As I worked through the material, I also studied the research literature on each topic he had touched, letting his writings illuminate the research and vice versa. What I discovered, above all else, was a life of quiet, determined resistance.

My father was born in Gunzenhausen, a small town in Bavaria, in 1921. The previous year, Julius Streicher, who would go on to found the infamous, ferociously antisemitic weekly tabloid Der Stürmer, had visited Gunzenhausen to address its German Socialist Party. That month, some of the citizens who appreciated Streicher’s views formed a local chapter of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the Nazi Party.

In 1924, when my father was three years old, the “good citizens of Gunzenhausen,” as he always sarcastically labeled them, elected members of the Nazi party to the Gunzenhausen town council. A decade later the town’s gradual transition from normal, unofficial antisemitism to vicious, official Nazism seems to have been seamless. In fact, these townspeople became so enthusiastic about their “mini-pogroms” that when Berlin officers became aware of what was going on, they sent a message to “slow down”—so that the Nazi party could take credit.

Materials in one of the cartons showed me poignantly that Gunzenhausen’s Jews avoided reality by focusing on their internal communal and synagogue life. While boycotts, pogroms, and even murder erupted around them, the synagogue’s executive committee calmly debated what color carpet they should install.

But one day, the synagogue hosted a guest speaker who wanted to “shake us out of our lethargy,” as my father later wrote. Giora Josephthal was a twenty-one-year-old man from Nuremberg, a member of Habonim, the Labor Zionist movement, and a rising star among Zionists in Germany. My father, then twelve, was persuaded by Josephthal’s certainty that Zionism was the solution to the Jews’ problems, a solution that could come about only if Jews banded together in collective action. The next day, Dad gathered all of the Jewish boys his age to build a “‘sports facility’ with our own hands, and study Hebrew and Zionism.” Banding together for sports was something he knew his friends would understand. “No adults were involved,” he wrote proudly. Looking back, he called this ideologically inspired adolescent adventure his first act of resistance. “To me, it represented departing from the role of weakling and victim. It was a positive, nonviolent form of resistance.”

When Dad became a bar mitzvah, his father sent him to Munich to “escape Gunzenhausen’s antisemitism” and live with his grandmother while attending high school. “Among the most important positive aspects of my new life in Munich was the opportunity to become part of an actual Zionist youth group,” he later wrote. Among those he met in Munich was the teenage girl who would become my mother, Ilse Strauss. She had left her antisemitic school in Ludwigshafen in the hopes of better circumstances in Munich. Dad also became close friends with Joachim Simon, a restless, charismatic boy everyone called “Shushu.”

Dad did well in high school academically, but most of the students and faculty shunned him. Fortunately, his positive relationship with the only nonantisemitic professor on the faculty and his good grades helped him get through. But when graduation neared, young Max carried out his second major act of resistance. He deliberately failed part of his Abitur graduation exam because the test involved translating a passage of Mein Kampf into English. In this excerpt, Hitler claimed that Jews did not fight for Germany in World War I. Dad knew this was a slanderous lie. In fact, his own father had served in the war as a medic, and his uncle had died on a battlefield in France at age eighteen. The fact that Dad’s failing grade on the exam meant that he would be barred from participating in the graduation ceremony meant nothing to him. He had refused to participate in a lie and was proud to have maintained his honor and identity as a Jew.

In spring 1938, Max and Ilse left their families and moved to a Zionist farm near Ellguth in Upper Silesia. Called hachsharah (preparation), working on this farm laid the groundwork for moving to Palestine and working on a kibbutz. For a few months, this camp was a Labor Zionist paradise. But on November 9, 1938 (Kristallnacht), it became the first step into hell. Local Nazi thugs in Ellguth attacked the one hundred or so young Jews at the farm, beating and harassing everyone and fondling the girls. All the Jewish youngsters were taken prisoner and shuttled by truck back and forth between Germany and Poland several times. Eventually the boys and girls were separated; the girls were sent home and the boys were dispatched to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

The more I read through Dad’s papers, the more I realized that a person committed to resistance can do it anywhere, even in filth and freezing conditions, even when facing beatings and death threats, and even while existing on a starvation diet. At Buchenwald, he and his friend Shushu studied Tanakh together in the near total darkness of their bunk at night, using a tiny Bible that Shushu had smuggled in.

Once, Dad was summoned by SS officer and Buchenwald Camp Director Karl-Otto Koch, who had noted, among other things in my father’s files, that his father was a doctor. This is what my father later wrote of this experience:

While I was being interrogated, a few guards pointed their guns at me, making it difficult to stand erect. My knees would literally give in every few minutes. First, I was shown some photos and told to identify the people; most of them were my old friends of our Hachsharah group, including my best friend, Shushu. Then came the personal questions—about my school, my plans, etc. I pulled the old trick that I had tried a year earlier in a forced school essay, namely about my wanting to fulfill the Führer’s wish to see the Jews leave Germany, and that I had taken up agricultural training in a Zionist camp to make it possible for me and many others to help the Führer carry out his plan. . . .

Then they asked about Father, and all my protestations that he had been on active duty for the Fatherland during WWI, that he had been awarded the Iron Cross, and that I was named after his only brother who had died fighting for Germany—all of this led nowhere. What they were after was something else. They wanted to know whether Father examined non-Jewish women and girls in his medical office; whether I had watched him, and I quote verbatim, “pull their legs apart on his examination table.” Furthermore, they wanted to know how many non-Jewish girls I had fucked—there was no inhibition whatsoever in their language. When this part of my interrogation was reached, the commander and at least one other SS crony touched their genitals and seemed to derive great pleasure from masturbating. It is as disgusting for me to put this on paper as it will be for you who are reading these lines.

Pretending to be confused, Dad looked blankly at them as if he was unable to answer their questions. Frustrated by my father’s seeming cluelessness, Koch threw Dad out of his office. Once again, he maintained his dignity as a Jew.

Meanwhile, people in the Zionist headquarters in Berlin were trying to free from Buchenwald the prisoners who had worked on the Hachsharah farm. Their approach was to partner with a Jewish group in the small Dutch city of Deventer to get temporary work visas for the several hundred Zionist youth prisoners who wanted to enter Holland. After endless paperwork, in January 1939, Dad and others, including Shushu, entered Holland as “Palestine Pioneers.” The conditions were simple: Max and people like him were accepted into Holland for a maximum of two years. During this time, they would help a farmer for almost no pay, and then they would leave the country. This was fine with Dad and his friends, who had no interest in becoming Dutch citizens. They wanted only to leave Germany, learn to be farmers, and make aliyah to Palestine.

Dad was placed alone on a family farm near Almelo, where he painted buildings, picked beets, and performed other manual chores. Shushu was placed at another nearby farm. Ilse had also managed to get to Holland, sponsored by a different Zionist organization. Unlike my father, she was given a group placement. Because Dad’s solo position meant that he had no one with whom to speak German, he had to quickly master Dutch, which, along with the relationships he formed with local farmers and townspeople, would prove crucial to his survival.

In May 1940, a year and a half after Max, Shushu, Ilse, and other Zionist youth entered Holland, the Nazis invaded. Quickly, Shushu became convinced that they all had to leave the Netherlands as soon as possible; he dedicated himself to contacting other like-minded Jews and scouting possible routes of escape. Evading the occupying forces, Shushu traveled throughout the Netherlands and across the border into Belgium and then into France. By then, he had become convinced that the only alternative to fleeing the country was to hide.

Shushu’s covert travels led him to discover the true nature of a forthcoming directive from the Nazi occupying force. This directive ordered all Jews on the day after receiving a notice to gather at collection points from which they would leave the Netherlands by train for Germany and points further east. Supposedly, they would be participating in the “Harvest Help” program. Although the official consequence for disobeying the order was arrest, it was clear that those who did not comply would be killed if they were caught. Shushu also understood that complying was just as dangerous as not complying. Both responses were likely to lead to the same conclusion.

On a day my father later called “the most important day of my life,” Shushu came to the farm where my father was working and persuaded him not to comply with the Harvest Help directive. In his memoir, Dad wrote that after his conversation with Shushu:

I started to contact my non-Jewish Dutch friends, and so did Ilse, whom I told about my talk with Shushu. One of our friends . . . the first farmer for whom I worked, promised me that very evening that he would help me when the time came. What an amazing man [he] was!

Even long after the war, when he was living in America, my father identified people he would ask to hide him if the time came, and he taught me to do the same.

Two weeks after Shushu had visited him, Dad received his mimeographed call-up notice to appear at a collection point. Disgusted, he tore the sheet of paper into pieces, walked half a mile to buy a stamp, put the scraps in an envelope, wrote “Return to Sender,” and mailed it. It was one of his “proudest moments,” he wrote. Tragically, most of Holland’s Jews complied with the order.

On his next reconnaissance trip, this time between Belgium and southern Holland, Shushu was caught and imprisoned in the small Dutch city of Breda. Since he knew the names and hiding places of many Jews who had gone underground, he was afraid that he would be tortured into giving up this vital information and “asked the warden for a brush, comb, and razor so that he could ‘look proper’ for his German interrogators.” He slit his wrists, dying before he could be interrogated. When my father later heard this, he was not only grief stricken but flabbergasted: “It cannot be. . . . How can such a life force be extinguished?” Half a year after the liberation, Dad gave the eulogy over Shushu’s grave. (After a great deal of trouble, I found the eulogy, written in Dutch, in the Breda city archive.)

Hiding or “diving under” (becoming an onderduiker in Dutch) was a complex process. One might say that it took a village to hide a Jew. But most of the Dutch villagers were not interested in helping or were too afraid to try. The Nazi party in Holland was the largest of any in Western Europe and was dedicated to flushing out Jews with a financial reward for those who hid them. It was not only dangerous but a logistical challenge for those people who did help. Extra food or ration cards had to be found and brought regularly but inconspicuously to the hiding place. Others had to locate and secure back-up hiding spots that would be available to flee to at a moment’s notice. Still other people had to be trained to act as couriers and spies.

One such person, a fearless Zionist named Lore Durlacher, guided my father and then my mother from their respective hiding places through occupied Holland to a new, safer location. She brought them to the Rotterdam home of Niek and Aag Schouten, under whose care they remained for the rest of the war (although the four of them didn’t always live together). While hiding my parents, Aag gave birth to two daughters, the second of whom she named Ilse so that even if my mother perished, her name would be remembered. My parents were heartened and inspired by the Schoutens’ brave resistance work and approach to life. They remained close after the war and, indeed, for the rest of their lives.

My father told my sister, brother, and me stories about the good Schoutens throughout our childhoods, leading to my mistaken belief that the Dutch were generally good to the Jews during the occupation. They were not. At least 75 percent of the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Holland were murdered. Because of their extraordinary personal characters, Aag and Niek understood what they had done and risked as normal, not noteworthy, and were reluctant to be treated as heroes. But despite their early reluctance to be honored, Aag and Niek finally did accept being included in the “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem. A tree was planted in their honor in Jerusalem, a ceremony that many members of my extended family attended.

The German occupation of the Netherlands from May 1940 to May 1945 was long and brutal. Even after regions of Eastern Europe were liberated, Germany remained entrenched in Holland. In fact, Rotterdam turned out to be the last place in Europe the Allies liberated from the Germans. As the war wound down to its inevitable end, the Germans did not relax. Rather, they intensified their vengeful military sweeps (razzias) of residential areas. My father wrote:

On November 20, [1944,] during one of these razzias, the Germans came to the little house in which we were staying. Under very difficult circumstances, Ilse saved the day and prevented both of us from being murdered. . . . This incident affected me so deeply that on that day, I resolved to change . . . [and] to take a more active part in the resistance movement.

Dad decided to be less passive than he had been until the razzia and to perhaps become more like Shushu. “I wanted to repay my debt for having been saved so far. I made a commitment to help others rather than just continue to hide. . . . Neither Ilse nor I could sit back any longer and let others risk their lives for us.” Dad began to write and mimeograph copies of an underground newssheet, which my mother covertly distributed riding on the rims of her tire-stripped bicycle wheels through the streets and tunnels of occupied Rotterdam.

In May 1945, my father and mother emerged from hiding to face a largely hostile Dutch populace, the majority of whom had no sympathy for what the Jews had gone through. Dad wrote that in many ways, the period after the war was worse than the occupation itself. Fortunately, by then, his parents and sisters had escaped to America, but my mother had to face the fact that her parents had died in the Gurs concentration camp in France, and one of her two sisters, Shulamit, had died in Palestine of an illness.

Shortly after liberation, my parents married, and my mother became pregnant with me. Because Mom’s pregnancy was difficult and medical care was hard to come by in postwar Europe, she became very ill toward the end of her pregnancy and remained so throughout her first few postpartum months. Perhaps this is why, when my mother finally recovered, Dad insisted that they move to the United States where his father had resumed his medical practice. Mom had wanted to remain in the Netherlands and try to obtain British certificates to move to Palestine. Giving up the ideal of aliyah was, I think, especially hard on my mother, whose fervent Zionism had sustained her through the war.

During the Nazi period, my father made several resolutions. While still a youngster, he promised his mother on her deathbed that he would survive. He swore that never again would he let anyone step on him or take advantage of him. He committed himself to working for the Jewish people. And he vowed that he would return to his hometown of Gunzenhausen and kill any Nazi he could find there. Of these objectives, he accomplished two completely: He did survive, and he dedicated himself to the Jewish people as a rabbi and a teacher. Another, he fulfilled only partially—he could be gullible and was always eager to help others, so sometimes he did let people step on him. And the last, he could not bring himself to carry out at all. He brought a gun with him when he went back to Gunzenhausen after the war, but he did not shoot anyone.

Looking back on my father’s role as a parent, he taught me many things. That the Holocaust will likely happen again. That I will have to hide at some point, and therefore I should choose my friends wisely, both Jews and non-Jews. That one can be a Zionist without living in Israel. That most people who speak about the Holocaust and some who write about it don’t know what they are talking about. That trying to master the Hebrew language and engaging in Jewish learning are integral parts of being a Jew. That one must always be ready to pursue justice and resist evil in any way one can.

My mother died at age ninety-three, and my father died one week later at age ninety-two. They are buried in Jerusalem, where their combined gravestone reads, “Beloved and pleasant in their lives; in their deaths, they were not separated” (2 Sam. 1:23). I believe that survival was my parents’ ultimate resistance.