A Moral Compass
Arthur Shostak[*]
Roses in a Forbidden Garden: A Holocaust Love Story, by Elise Garibaldi, Mount Vernon, NY, Decalogue Books, 2016, 236 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Along with its intriguing subtitle, so rare among Holocaust-related publications, this book has five distinctive merits. First, it sheds light on a significant type of Jewish prisoner, specifically, a Jewish family head (Carl Katz) who, desperate to improve his family’s chances of survival, agreed to help administer a major facility in Thereseinstadt, a then infamous Nazi holding camp. His dual role—prisoner and yet also administrator—was held by scores of captive Jews in various formats in hundreds of other camps. Second, the book tells of a tender love affair of Carl’s young daughter, Inga Katz, in that camp. Her ability to cautiously have a romantic relationship with a fellow prisoner challenges a common misimpression of camp life as utterly devoid of positive human experiences. Her wide-ranging recall bolsters the reader’s grasp of the creativity with which such prisoners resisted the never-ending Nazi effort at dehumanization. Third, the book details the valiant efforts of Inga’s fiancé, Schmuel Berger, to survive his unwelcomed transfer to Auschwitz, then to Dachau, and finally, to one of scores of death marches, an agonizing progression of near-fatal hardships. Fourth, the book breaks new ground in calling overdue attention to forbidden efforts of certain Jewish prisoners to aid others. It thus goes beyond the conventional ‘horror story’ form of Holocaust narrative by offering a ‘help story’ that touches the good and true in human beings. To its great credit the book strengthens the case to develop a redemptive and inspiring, rather than only as at present a dark, doleful, and even harrowing Holocaust memory. Finally, the book is distinctive in that it owes its existence to a non-participant, an empathetic American-born family member, Elise Garibaldi. She weaves far-reaching memories of her elderly grandmother, Inga Katz, into an enlightening and uplifting biography. One closes her engaging book hoping far more relatives of aging survivors, especially creative and energetic grandchildren, will soon provide their own engaging accounts of ways in which other Jewish victims—much like Carl, Inga, and Schmuel—refused to be victimized.
Background
As one of the disproportionately high number of Jewish males who served in the Kaiser’s Army in WW1, Carl Katz earned the Iron Cross for bravery. As a civilian he later became a highly respected business owner. He and his wife Marianne raised their daughter Inga in a comfortable middle-class Jewish home in Bremen, Germany, where Carl became a leader in the local Jewish community. In 1935, however, two years after Hitler had been elected to power, the infamous Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and, worse yet, of their fundamental status as fellow human beings. Accordingly, eleven-year-old Inga was suddenly barred from attending her public school, using local public facilities (libraries, movie houses, parks, theaters, etc.), and socializing with (former) gentile friends, a painful forerunner of cascading humiliations and penalties suffered for the “crime” of having been born Jewish.
All this came to a head when on November 9, 1938, Germany was wracked by a systematically organized, government-sponsored pogrom called ever since Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass). The Katz home was unexpectedly invaded by heavily armed uniformed Nazis who brutally vandalized it, smashing dishes and slashing artworks, after which they sent Carl off to prison. Throughout the country Jewish homes were trashed, and Jewish-owned stores looted, while their glass storefronts were shattered. Synagogues were burned (191 out of 275), and Torahs were desecrated. Hundreds of German Jews were severely beaten in the streets and 96 were murdered.[1]
Like Carl, over 30,000 Jewish men across Germany were taken to local prisons or sent to three of the first German concentration camps, ostensibly to “protect” them from outraged neighbors who allegedly blamed them for the destruction and criminality of Kristallnacht. Some 1,000 such men died under “mysterious circumstances” (beatings, denial of medicine, harsh conditions, malnutrition, etc.).[2] Many returned home sorely wounded in body and spirit: when Carl, for example, was released after three weeks in prison, Inga remembers him looking so much older, thinner, and tired that she found it hard to believe he was her father.
Although eager now to emigrate, the Katz family and many other German Jews could not find receptive countries. So having been ordered to sell his business to a gentile, Carl accepted an administrative role as leader of Bremen’s Jewish community. Its traumatized members were soon after ordered by the Gestapo to relocate in a crowded ghetto-like quarter of the city, a cold-hearted move that convinced Inga the family’s “days of comfortable and proper living were now gone” (45).
Foremost among Carl’s administrative responsibilities was overseeing the boarding by Bremen Jews of trains going “East.” Bewildered passengers were assured by the Third Reich that they would soon arrive at “settlements” where they could survive by working in factories to aid the Nazi war effort. Terrifying secret rumors, however, warned that mass murder awaited them at the journey’s end. Although uncertain of the truth of these rumors, neither Carl nor anyone else had any alternative save to nervously trust to official German assurances, much as the Jews had to do for centuries in the Fatherland.
On July 24, 1942, the Katz family was ordered to board the last train of Bremen Jews scheduled to go East. Days later to their great relief it did not stop at a death camp, as had almost all of the previous trains. Passengers were discharged instead to struggle to endure a demoralizing sunbaked two-mile walk to the barbed-wire gates of Theresienstadt, a holding camp in the German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia.
Theresienstadt
Historians now agree that the Theresienstadt camp differed radically from scores of other holding camps, and also from six death camps, some 27 major concentration camps with close to 1,000 sub-camps, and about 40,000 slave labor camps spread across 24 occupied countries (Eric Lichtblau, “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking,” New York Times, March 3, 2013, SR-3).
Today the second-best known after Auschwitz of all Nazi camps, the Third Reich saw to it that Theresienstadt had an unusually high proportion of Jewish artists, composers, craftsmen, educators, musicians, poets, storytellers, teachers, and writers. Accordingly, as a calculated exercise in duplicitous public relations, Theresienstadt was the only camp that allowed rare, highly controlled, visits from selected foreign observers, such as delegates of the International Red Cross. (Inga recalls that before such visits many oldsters and handicapped prisoners were first rushed off by train to death camps.) It was also the setting for a major Nazi propaganda film made to romanticize camp life and (falsely) show the Third Reich preparing Jewish prisoners for a pleasant postwar life in Palestine. The film featured shots of camp art shows, concerts, plays, and even a soccer match.
Nazi flimflam notwithstanding, Theresienstadt was actually an overcrowded, disease-ridden, high-anxiety site “where there wasn’t enough of anything and only the limitations imposed on [prisoners] had no limits.”[3] Worse yet, it was also secretly a conduit to the gas chambers. Of nearly 141,162 Jews held there at one time or another some 88,162 were sent by train to death camps, where fewer than 4,000 survived. Another 33,456 prisoners died in the camp itself from disease, and exposure to the elements, filth, malnutrition, overcrowding, overwork, plagues, starvation, torture, and so on. In all, by the war’s end only about 17,100 or so former Theresienstadt prisoners were alive.[4]
“Prominents” and Role Conflict
A very small number of prisoners were high-profile Jewish celebrities (artists, politicians, writers), known collectively as “Prominents.” The Third Reich thought they might someday be traded with the Allies for high-level SS and military prisoners. Some were offered camp administrative posts in return for which they would receive precious life-aiding perks (extra bread, food, and somewhat better living quarters). They were also led to believe they and their family members were exempt from being shipped out by train to a death camp so long as they measured up (such arrangements existed in some other major camps).
In short order the Council of Jewish Elders (aka Judenrat), a governing body beholden to the SS, asked Carl if he would agree to administer a very large dormitory, one that housed the elderly and insane inmates, and a large cooking site. The post included the prestigious title—Prominent—along with the standard perks. Ever suspicious, however, of SS promises of “exemption” from harm, Carl declined the title, but accepted the post.
At this point Roses in a Forbidden Garden delves into a subject rarely if ever explored elsewhere, namely, the unenviable, uneasy, and unsafe situation of a captive Jew at once a powerless life-endangered prisoner and yet also a privileged Nazi camp administrator; a person, in short, obliged to maintain two opposing and fateful roles, each rife with its often contradictory demands. Readers get a rare and revealing look behind the scenes, as in the cruel limitations on Carl’s (overrated) administrator perks: example, while his family’s new dormitory room had a much appreciated toilet along with running water, it was located directly above a ward of screaming insane prisoners; moreover, in that barren room there were blood-sucking bedbugs whose bites left Inga so ill she almost died.
Readers learn of Carl’s desperate efforts to save lives. Inga remembers, for example, that when he heard of a train heading East that would not accept bedridden passengers, he rushed about the dorm urging his elderly wards to stay bedridden, thereby saving them from at least that particular trip to a death camp. readers learn about the ethical and moral quandaries inherent in this convoluted role. Some aggrieved survivors maintain to this day that the Israeli Government should indict all Jewish prisoners who in any way aided the operation of a Nazi facility.[5] The role did not, in fact, exempt Jewish prisoner/administrators from finding themselves and their families from being ordered to board trains going East.
A typical situation they might have found themselves in was the situation Carl was placed by Inga. She came to his office and begged him to use his influence to get her a job in a camp bakery. This would have enabled her, at great personal risk, to “organize” [steal] extra bread for her ailing, depressed mother. Carl, however, was quick to reject her request: “The last thing I need is for someone to use any excuse whatsoever to badmouth us, or worse, to accuse us of having taken an unfair advantage” (151). Little wonder, then, that the survey interviews of 251 survivors in the late 1990s, conducted by survivor-scholar Alexander J. Groth and his team, found that “many more see Jews [with such role conflicts] as doing what they could to help and ameliorate conditions for fellow Jews rather than the opposite.”[6]Consistent with this, ex-camp administrator Carl Katz, on returning to Bremen in 1945 after liberation, re-established the Jewish Community Center, and by 1961 was able to dedicate a new synagogue to replace the one destroyed in the 1938 Kristallnacht.
Inga’s Romance and Schmuel’s Odyssey
Even in the hellish setting of Theresienstadt, some prisoners could sometimes develop and maintain love relationships, the Nazi prohibition of public displays of emotion not withstanding. Elise Garibaldi gracefully relates how Inga and her fiancé, Schmuel, consciously blunted the horror around them by taking every opportunity to meet and walk together after work. Aware they risked being beaten by SS guards who noticed their smiles, they took care to talk softly and discretely about the prospects of having a wonderful post-liberation life together (which, in fact, they later enjoyed for nearly 60 years after marrying in 1947).
Especially valuable is Garibaldi’s sensitive recounting of how Inga managed to stay sane after Schmuel was shipped off with other males to another camp, possibly a death camp, and was not heard from for the next fifteen months. She credits their romantic resolve for enabling them to continue their struggle to survive over the period of their separation, especially because giving up was sometimes an almost overwhelming temptation.
The unnerving account of Schmuel’s close calls after being sent out of Theresienstadt will likely haunt readers long after the book is closed. He had to endure backbreaking slave labor although he was grievously malnourished; to face cold-hearted SS guards who had leeway to execute prisoners at any time for any reason; to recover from exposure to contagious disease; to survive the strafing by Allied planes of a “death march” train carrying Jewish prisoners; and before being rescued by American troops, he had to convince ordinary Germans not to harm him and a fellow Jewish escapee, and to provide them with indispensable aid. Caught up in a skin-prickling horror story, he drew on his unswerving faith in God’s protection and desire to be reunited with Inga, the two faiths whose awesome power blunted the terror and motivated him to surmount the ordeals he faced.
Altruism
This brings me back to Inga’s response to her father’s refusal to use unethical favoritism on her behalf. To her credit she did not mope, but went directly to the camp bakery and asked for a job. Quickly employed by bakers desperately in need of workers (males like Schmuel having been sent off to slave labor camps), Inga was surprised to learn of a precaution being taken against just the sort of roll thievery she had intended. To lessen any temptation a starving prisoner/worker might have to steal a roll, which would run the risk of detection and fierce SS punishment, each worker just before quitting time was given a roll to eat then and there. Inga recalls “while the temptation to consume the warm bread in her hand was almost too great to bear, she always brought it back with her to share with Carl and Marianne” (153).
Inga’s high-risk smuggling exemplifies the brave ways in which Jewish victims dared to aid one another despite fanatical opposition. The Gestapo and SS were determined not to allow any evidence that the untermensch (subhuman) targets of their genocidal Final Solution were actually moral human beings… as in the example of a starving daughter who gave her precious food to her still hungrier mother. Other examples of defiant altruism enrich the book. In her work as a Thereseinstadt keeper of official data on daily deaths, Inga dared to keep a secret record of the names and death dates of fellow Bremen Jews. She later explained to her granddaughter that this was “the only way she could think of to honor them; that is, to retain some record of their existence and of their death” (88). Discovery of the illegal record, one that had not been authorized, would probably have had Inga—and possibly Carl and Marianne as alleged collaborators—sent to the gas.
In his turn, Inga’s fiancé, Schmuel Berger, when still a bakery worker in Theresienstadt, secretly gave his daily bread allowance to Inga to give to her frail mother. Later, when forced to travel for several days between camps on a train “filled beyond reasonable capacity,” he “felt obliged” to share his bread and cheese with other emaciated prisoners (163). Had the SS noticed or been informed about such forbidden deeds, his altruistic generosity could have led to his being beaten up and/or sent directly to the gas.
Inga gives credit to certain gentiles who dared to try to aid the untermench, Nazi prohibitions and pledges of severe punishment notwithstanding. When, for example, the Katz family was barely surviving in Bremen, she remembers that “there were even some [gentile] shop owners who threw in something extra [when she gave over inadequate ration coupons], sometimes even food Jews were being forbidden to purchase” (44). Similarly, a cooperative Gestapo-appointed overseer shared an eerie self-conscious forecast when seeing Carl and Inga for the last time in Bremen: Inga recalls that “smiling all the time,” he told them “if we ever do see one another again, you will find me hanging by my neck from one of Bremen’s lampposts” (74). In the war’s last weeks, this fate befell hundreds of Germans the Nazis suspected of having secretly aided Jews. Called stealth altruism by this reviewer, such high-risk behavior was the mainstay of the Help Story, an all-too-little known account of what victims—European Jews and supporting gentiles—dared to do for one another. A mix of quiet bravery, deep-set compassion, uplifting empathy, high morality, and informed sacrifice, it persisted in defiance of unforgettable and unforgivable evil.[7]
Thus, as a moral compass, this well-told story of the Holocaust trials of a German Jewish family highlights three memorable characters: Carl Katz, a mensch whose integrity as a prisoner/administrator helped save lives; Inga Katz, who managed to stay human in an utterly unnatural setting; and Schmuel Berger, whose post-Theresienstadt survival testifies to the power of prayer and romantic commitment in extremis. Roses in a Forbidden Garden emphasizes altruism more than atrocities; care, more than cruelty; and valor, more than victimization. Readers are reminded of our ability to transcend the worse—as did Carl, Inga, and Schmuel—when we help one another hew to the best.
Notes
[*]Alameda, CA 94501: Drexel University, USA. Email: arthurshostak@gmail.com
[1] Thalmann and Feinermann, Crystal Night, 116
[2] Hogan, The Holocaust Chronicle, 144.
[3] Kluger, Still Alive, 86.
[4] Levin, The Holocaust, 493. See also Adler, Theresienstadt.
[5] See, for example, Frilling, A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz.
[6] Groth, Holocaust Voices, 220.
[7] Shostak, Stealth Altruism.
Bibliography
Adler, H. G. Theresienstadt: The Face of a Coerced Community. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017ed. (1955, 1960 eds).
Frilling, Tuvia. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz: History: Memory, and the Politics of Survival. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014.
Groth, Alexander J. Holocaust Voices: An Attitudinal Survey of Survivors. New York: Humanity Books, 2003.
Hogan, David J., ed. The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International, 2000.
Kluger, Ruth. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: The Feminist Press, 2001.
Levin, Nora. The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1968.
Shostak, Arthur B. Stealth Altruism: Forbidden Care as Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust.
Abington, UK: Routledge, 2017.
Thalmann, Rita, and Emmanuel Feinerman. Crystal Night: November 9–10, 1938 (1974). Translated by Gilles Cremonesi. New York: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , 2000.