Once inside our house, I was met with a horrifying scene: A crowd of people gathered on the street in front of the house with rocks in their hands

By Shlomo Meir Guttentag, as told to Riki Goldstein

Iwas living in Manchester with my young family, part of an active frum kehillah, when in August, 2018 I received an email through the Geni website that would impact the lives of many of my family members:

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are a small group of teachers/pedagogues in Northern Hesse (Germany).
We try to find some biografical notes [sic] of Mrs. Doris Mathias Guttentag, born in Treysa, Northern Hesse. What we know is that she was born on 15/10/1929 in Treysa … as the only child of Simon and Hannah Mathias, running a small ironware store in the centre of the small town. She was saved by a Kindertransport in May 1939 — first she went to England, then to Israel. Either she married Mr. Max Guttentag in England or in Israel. Maybe you know something about Doris Mathias Guttentag?

We are preparing with our schools an exhibition about the Kinder of Kindertransport of our region. But we have only a few biografical notes about Mrs Mathias Guttentag. May you give us a support?

Thank you very much, Jürgen JUNKER

I recognized the name Treysa, Savta’s childhood hometown, where she had lived with her parents before the war. This looked interesting. Apparently, the school in Treysa was preparing an exhibition about the Jews who had lived there before Hitler wiped them out. The school had the names of the three Jewish children from the town who had been saved by leaving on the Kindertransport, and one of them was Doris Matthias. Using Google and Geni, they found a record of her marriage to my grandfather, Max Guttentag, and then they tracked me down.

I spoke to my brother, Benzion, who was very excited about this contact, and said we had to go to Treysa. But I thought we couldn’t do this to Savta.

This was Savta, who never said a word about her Kindertransport experiences to her own children while they were growing up. I remember the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht in November 1988. I was eight years old at the time, and after Shabbos lunch at Savta’s house in Gateshead, we sat down and bravely asked her if she remembered it. She spoke to us openly, and my father was amazed, because these memories were the first he’d ever heard about his mother’s previous life in Germany. During his childhood, there was not one word. In Savta’s view, what was the point? She remembered that before she left home, her own mother had told her, “Always look forward, and don’t dwell on the past.”

“I have a good life, why complain?” she’d say. “And I want the children to have a good future. I don’t want to burden them with my past.” Those were her characteristic lines, and although her view had changed slightly over time and she had even given an interview to Yad Vashem, I realized there was no chance she would open up for these unknown German children.

In any case, taking Savta to Germany was out of the question. Years ago, my grandparents experienced a delay while traveling from Gateshead, UK, to Tel Aviv via Paris. They were offered an option to book a connection through Frankfurt instead, but Savta wouldn’t hear of going back to “that country.”

But I was interested. I went back and forth with the teachers’ association via email, and raised the idea that some of the children and grandchildren of Doris Matthias could visit the town. They were very keen. Through the Geni website, a distant cousin who has visited Northern Hesse, where our roots lie, put me in touch with a very knowledgeable local historian in Treysa.

My father was interested, too. He called Savta, who lives in a retirement community in Jerusalem, and excitedly told her about the email. It came as no surprise that she was not at all interested in writing an account of her childhood in Treysa for the German schoolchildren or discussing her story with the teachers.

“I can’t see any benefit in it,” she said.

But when my father said that the family members wanted to go, Savta said she didn’t have a problem.

We scheduled the trip for Isru Chag Shavuos of that year. All of Savta’s four children joined, two from Eretz Yisrael, one from the US, and one from the UK, along with dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Doris Guttentag relates:

I was an only child, born in Germany in 1929. Not many Jews still lived in Treysa, our northern German town, in the 1930s. There had once been a local Jewish school, but in my time I was one of only three Jewish children in the local public school. My paternal grandparents lived with us in our home, my father had a busy shop, and we were a quiet, frum German family. In 1928, my father’s sister realized that Germany was not a good place for Jews anymore, and she left to America. She did try to persuade my father, but he wasn’t convinced.

“Nothing will happen to the Jews in Germany,” he believed, and so we stayed, until the point where my mother was only able to get me out on the Kindertransport, and I left home alone.

I never suffered any anti-Semitism until 1938. But one day that November, my father came home, took off his hat, and commented disbelievingly, “Now I’ve seen everything.” Our next-door neighbors, the Korrells, owned a bakery, and that day, like all the other local businesses, they had put up a notice stating “No Jews Allowed.” I was friendly with their daughter, and this was a big shock to us.

But later on, there was a knock on our window in the narrow passageway that separated our home from the Korrells. Mr. Korrell stood there, and these were his words: “It doesn’t matter what it says on the outside. We have not changed. If you need something, ask our daughter and she will get it for you.” The Korrells were prepared to go shopping for us, and they also kept the shop open until 7 p.m. so the Jewish customers could do their shopping after official business hours were over.

On November 8, at 11 a.m., my teacher told me that I could go home from school. There was nothing unkind or foreboding in her words — she simply said that the next part of the program was not for me. When I arrived home, my mother sent me on an errand to take the daily newspaper to the two elderly sisters with whom we used to share it. I stayed there a while, but suddenly my mother was there to pick me up. I asked her why she’d come, but she didn’t answer. Strangely, we walked home through back streets, not main roads, and entered our house through the back door, but my mother didn’t offer any explanation.

Once inside our house, I was met with a horrifying scene: A crowd of people gathered on the street in front of the house with rocks in their hands. Then a man came by, and said loudly to the mob, “Leave him alone! He’s a good Jew!”

My father sold ironware in his shop, offering everything from nails to a tractor. He did business with the non-Jews and got along well with everyone, and I suppose some people remembered that.

But the crowd didn’t budge. They hurled rocks, shattered our window, and the hooligans tried to get our furniture out through the gap. It didn’t work. The items they wanted were simply too big to fit through. Disappointed, the people left, calling behind them, “We’ll be back tonight at midnight.”

That night was Kristallnacht. We trembled. We didn’t go to bed and instead, we put on two layers of clothing in case we’d have to run away. Late at night, one of the Korrell daughters knocked on our side window and said, “Father just came home and said the attack has been called off for tonight. You can go to bed.” We didn’t though, and at seven o’clock the next morning, the Gestapo came and took my father.

I think they took all the Jewish men of the town that day. The women were told that they could bring lunch along to the train station at midday. My father was a man used to eating with silver cutlery, but the Gestapo said that only one spoon was allowed to come along with the dish of food.

My mother went, of course, taking along a hot meal. But when she came an hour later, as ordered, to collect the dishes, the men were no longer there. No one knew where they had been taken. Bravely, my mother went with another woman to the Gestapo offices to inquire. They were given a curt answer: The men had been taken to a place called Buchenwald.

After that, I never went to my school again. November 8 had been my last day. Father wasn’t home. My grandfather, who lived with us, was an invalid and nearly blind. My father used to carry him downstairs each day so he could join the family, but now that there was no one to do that, he had to stay in bed all day.

My mother made efforts to find out about my father’s condition and when he would be released. When they heard that some men had been freed from Buchenwald after proving they had served in the German army during World War I, my mother and the other women hurried to the Gestapo to bring their husbands’ proof of service. My mother brought these papers to the Gestapo office in a bigger town nearby, and was told that the men would be released on a certain day, about a week after their arrest. I remember that day well. Some of the Jewish women had gathered in our house, and my grandmother went upstairs to take a cup of tea to my grandfather. Suddenly, she let out a scream — he had passed away.

This all happened while my mother was out of town, and two or three of the other women took umbrellas and walked out into the gray, rainy day to meet her at the train station and tell her what had happened.

Although I was just a child, I understood the worried discussion around me. We could not hold a levayah for my grandfather in our town, Treysa, because the new German laws forbade gentile gravediggers from digging graves for Jews. Eventually, arrangements were made for him to be buried in Kassel, a nearby town that had a bigger kehillah, a rav, and enough Jewish gravediggers.

My father came back from imprisonment in Buchenwald just before the end of the shloshim. I remember being shocked at seeing him with a shaven head.

As that bleak November of 1938 progressed and the anti-Jewish atmosphere in Germany intensified, my mother first tried to send me away to a cousin in Holland, but she could not get permission. (Soon after, Holland became unsafe as well, and this cousin fled to England on the last boat.)

I don’t know how my mother heard about the Kindertransport, but she put my name down and somehow managed to get me on. She had a sister who lived in London, so while she was sending me away, at least she knew she was putting me in good hands. This was in December, at the end of 1938, and I was nine years old. None of us could have known just what was going to happen, but after those last few weeks, my parents knew they couldn’t hesitate. I said goodbye to my mother and my grandmother at home, and my father took me to the train station in the German city of Hanover, where I joined a large crowd of Jewish children. We got on the train to the port of the Hook of Holland, and traveled to England by boat.

I was the only child who knew where I was going, because my aunt was going to take me in. The other children were being taken away from the nightmare Germany had become to the utterly unknown. Sadly, there were not enough Jews in England who would take in all these refugees, and two children I knew were placed with non-Jews, who were nice enough to them, but didn’t really enable them to keep anything Jewish. Another girl went to a family who never let her forget she was Jewish, but forced her to go to church. A boy I knew missed his bar mitzvah completely. He went to a rabbi afterward, and the rabbi arranged for bar mitzvah lessons a month before his fourteenth birthday and gave him an aliyah and tefillin on his fourteenth birthday instead.

I am deeply grateful for all the goodness in my life, in England and now in Yerushalayim, and I never had any inclination to go back to Germany. That Treysa teachers’ association had my name and date of birth, and my parents’ names, and they emailed a grandson of mine in 2018, eighty years after I left there. They knew who I had married as well — where did they get all that information from? They said that people have to know what happened, and they were doing a program with 15 and 16-year-olds in Treysa to let them know what had happened to the Jewish people of the town.

The teacher who traced us kept in touch, and eventually said that the town wanted to put a plaque with our names in front of the house where my family used to live. He asked if I approved, and if I wanted to come and unveil the plaque.

I said no to both. I felt the plaque was pointless. It would likely only be vandalized. And I had no intention of going to Germany. But my grandson wanted to go, and I didn’t stop him.

We flew to Dusseldorf, drove to Treysa, and spoke in the school there to the teenagers who had researched the Kindertransport and Savta’s life story. None of them were hostile, and many of them were curious about our feelings toward Germany and about what it means to be a Jew. We walked together to the Jewish cemetery, and then to the center of town, to Braugasse, to see the home where Savta had lived with her parents, which was near the site of the shul, the Jewish school, and the mikveh.

The village historian wanted to put out stolpersteiner, those engraved paving stones in the streets of the town, memorializing the names of Savta’s parents. But Savta was not interested at all.

“As far as I am concerned, I do not want to know anything about Germany. I do not want my parents’ names featured on its paving stones,” she said.

Although I passed on that message, they did it anyway. Shortly before our arranged trip, the names of Simon and Hannah Mathias, Hashem yikom damam, the grandparents Sally and Julie Mathias, and Savta’s own name were installed on the streets where they lived. And something interesting happened: An eighty-year-old lady in Treysa read an article in the local newspaper about the laying of the stones for the Mathias family, and recognized the name. She had never known the Jewish family personally, as she had been just a baby in 1938, but she knew exactly who they were — her family’s neighbors. This German woman excitedly called her older sister, who had moved to a town a few miles away.

This woman was a Korrell daughter. Her sister was Savta’s neighbor, the girl from the kind German family next door who knocked on the window to bring food to the Mathias family, who defied the orders of the Reich to allow the Jewish townspeople to buy food in their store after hours, and who warned their neighbors about Kristallnacht.

A highlight of our trip was meeting 91-year-old Mrs. Trump, nee Korrell. She was overcome to see us and so happy to know that we were Savta’s descendants. It was a kind of closure for her. She tearfully recalled the morning Savta left Treysa.

“I remember seeing Doris standing on the corner of our street, and it was clear she was leaving home. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to go over to her, because it was forbidden to even speak to Jews. So I never said goodbye, and I never forgave myself for ignoring her then.”

The second day of our trip focused on the family history and kevarim in the local towns of Kassel and Borken. We knew we’d find kevarim on Savta’s mother’s side going back to the 18th century, and that we could visit the home and the graves of her maternal grandparents, Meier and Johannah Rosenbusch. But we didn’t know how we’d find the kever of her grandfather Sally (Alexander) Mathias who lived with Savta’s family and was niftar just days after Kristallnacht, while her father was imprisoned.

My aunt in America knew that she had a picture of this kever somewhere, but could not locate it. How did she have a picture, when neither Savta or any of her children had ever been back to Germany? Fascinatingly, Sally Mathias had two children who left Germany for the US in the 1920s. Both of them felt that Germany was not a place for Jews to live anymore, that things were worsening and Jews were fast becoming unwelcome. They made their separate ways to America where they assimilated, but managed to escape the Holocaust. The son, Savta’s uncle, would travel back to Germany, and had once given my aunt a picture of his father’s grave.

As my aunt was traveling to the airport for the trip to Germany, she suddenly had a clear recollection of where in her house that picture was. She called her kids to find it, and soon we had a scanned picture. Our local historian looked at it and recognized the kever, saying it was likely to be found in a certain section of the large Jewish cemetery in Kassel, the section where the last few Jewish burials were made between 1938-1940, with very few matzeivah stones. Indeed, that is where it is.

We davened there, two minyanim of descendants, and the surprising epilogue of Sally’s life was not lost on us. Sally’s son, who lived as a Jew and was murdered for being a Jew in Germany, has over one hundred Jewish descendants.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1060)