Broken Promises (eBook)

The Story of a Jewish Family in Germany

Bonnie Suchman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
314 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-9207-9 (ISBN)

'Broken Promises' tells the story of the Heppenheimer family, who came to Germany from Poland in the eighteenth century and ultimately became wealthy scrap metal dealers. When the Nazis rose to power, the family was reluctant to leave their successful lives. Most of the family was able to escape, but some waited too long and were murdered in the Holocaust. This book tells the stories of both those who were able to emigrate and those who perished.

My father-in-law Kurt Heppenheimer came to America as a German Jewish refugee in 1937, changed his name to Curtis Heppen, and raised a family. But Curtis shared little of his German past with his family or the fact that he had family that died in the Holocaust, including his grandmother and two aunts. After extensive research, I was able to piece together Curtis' life in Germany, as well as the history of the Heppenheimer family. "e;Broken Promises"e; tells the story of a family who experienced first-hand the key moments in the history of Germany's Jews and who, as owners of successful scrap metal businesses, played a role in the development of Germany as an industrial power. This book follows the individual family members who were either able to escape Germany after the Nazis came to power (many just before the borders were closed), or were unable to escape and found themselves in the most notorious of ghettos and the most notorious of Nazi death camps. Ultimately, this is a book about a family who was driven to succeed, but was also strongly patriotic, who believed the promises made when the German government provided Jews with the same rights enjoyed by other German citizens, and were repaid for the important contributions they made to Germany by either having all of their property stolen or by being murdered in the Holocaust.

Prologue

It is traditional for Jews to name a child after a deceased relative, and American Jews often give their newborn both an English name and the relative’s Hebrew name. When our son was born, we decided to name him after my grandfather, giving him the English name Jonathan and the Hebrew name Nacham. We also decided to give our son the middle name “Max” after my husband Bruce’s two grandfathers. While our son would not be given a Hebrew name for his middle name (since the great-grandfathers had different Hebrew names), we still wanted to honor these ancestors. A few days before the bris, when our son would be named, Bruce called his mother to ask her to ask my father-in-law Curtis to speak at the bris about his father.

As our families gathered at our house for the bris, Bruce reminded his mother about his father Curtis’ speaking role. My mother-in-law told Bruce that his father would not be speaking because it would be too painful, given how Curtis’ father died. Bruce had always assumed that his grandfather had died of heart troubles brought on by “the times” in Nazi Germany. and so he asked his mom why speaking about this would be too painful. She then told him that his grandfather had committed suicide. Shock does not fully convey the reaction Bruce had upon hearing this news. Bruce then asked each of his two siblings if they knew anything about their grandfather’s death. Each had also thought the death was the result of natural causes. Curtis shared virtually nothing about growing up in Germany with his children, and his children knew not to ask. Thus, sensing that this, too, was forbidden territory, none of his children asked Curtis about his father’s suicide and Curtis volunteered no additional information.

Many years later, and long after my father-in-law’s death, Bruce and I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. During our visit, we were encouraged to look up in the museum’s database of Holocaust victims Heppenheimer family members, which I did when we came back to the U.S. When multiple Heppenheimers came up, and only one name was familiar to Bruce, I became curious about the connections these other Heppenheimers had to my husband’s family. I had an existing Ancestry.com account (from research I had done on my own family) and I began to try to build a family tree of Bruce’s family, exploring each name I found on the Yad Vashem website. Unable to make much headway on my existing limited Ancestry.com account, I added the international version and gained greater access to German records. I soon discovered that Curtis’ grandmother and two aunts were among the Heppenheimer family member who died in the Holocaust, and that virtually every Heppenheimer listed in the Yad Vashem website was a family member.

Suicide is often an embarrassment for a family, and so one can understand why nothing was said about the circumstances of Curtis’s father’s death. But why did Curtis never tell his children about the grandmother and two aunts he lost in the Holocaust? And why did Curtis never even mention these losses to his wife?

Wanting to know more about these relatives of my husband (and hoping to understand why they were never mentioned, particularly the grandmother and two aunts), I began looking for more records. I explored the websites of the relevant German states and began ordering tax, reparations and other family records. Knowing almost nothing about German history, I began reading books about the history of the relevant period, particularly Jewish German history. I also reached out to previously unknown relatives I found while doing the family research, discovering things I would not have found in the various archives. Finding much of the relevant material in German (particularly the family records), I started taking German language classes. Through this research, I began to understand the strong connection his family had to Germany, and why it was likely very painful to discuss what had happened. Until this research into the Heppenheimer family history, I did not fully appreciate the extent of this pain, both because they were forced to leave a country they thought had been theirs and because of the loss of those left behind.

When Curtis stepped off the S.S. Pennland in Hoboken, New Jersey on April 13, 1937, he was Kurt Heppenheimer. He was 17 years-old, blondehaired and blue-eyed, and 5’6” tall, and spoke only German. He had travelled alone from his hometown of Mannheim, Germany, and was met at the boat in Hoboken by a distant and unknown relative, Adolph Keller, who had sponsored his immigration to America. Kurt was given some money by Keller, who had found an apartment for him in New York City. Kurt was on his own in a strange country, and he felt guilty about leaving his family behind. But Kurt would soon be joined by his widowed mother and younger brother.

Because he was Jewish, Kurt had been forced to leave his college preparatory school in 1935, and worked for two years before his emigration as an apprentice at Süpag Süddeutsche Papiermanufaktur, a paper manufacturing plant in Mannheim. During that period of time, Kurt worked to obtain his immigration visa to the United States. But he was subject to constant taunts from fellow workers and at the technical school he was attending for his apprenticeship. Kurt knew he was no longer welcome in the country that had been his home and the home of his ancestors, and feared for his future. Kurt was finally able to leave Mannheim in 1937 for America. As the train approached the Belgium border, an SS officer checked Kurt’s passport, causing one last moment of anxiety for the teen. Kurt breathed easier only after the train crossed into Belgium.

Once his mother and brother were able to join him in 1939, Kurt and his family moved to Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in Queens, New York. He had a number of jobs, ranging from kitchen worker to a manager of a hosiery store. He was drafted into the Army in 1943, which shortened the process for becoming a U.S. citizen. Kurt anglicized his name to Curtis Heppen and, after his discharge, attended Pace College in New York on the GI Bill and graduated with a degree in accounting. Curtis embraced his new life and his new country. He married Millie Hertz, also a Jewish refugee from Europe, had three children, and lived the American dream.

But the scars of fleeing Nazi Germany never fully healed. In 1970, Curtis and Millie went on a vacation to Europe. Curtis wanted to visit his father’s grave in Mannheim, the first time since he had left Germany in the 1930s. He asked Millie to remain behind at the train station, which was highly unusual, since they did virtually everything together. On his own, Curtis went to the grave, and then took a short walk to visit his old neighborhood. He then went back to the train station and he and Millie immediately left Mannheim. The old feelings of anxiety and fear had returned during Curtis’ brief visit to Mannheim, and he breathed easy only after their train crossed the Swiss border. This trip was obviously so painful that he could not even share his time in Mannheim with his wife. Curtis swore that he would never return to Germany, and he never did.

Curtis had some family in and around the New York area—also refugees from Germany—that he and Millie would visit. Because Curtis rarely spoke about his life in Germany to his children, they were often confused about how their Dad was related to these relatives. And they certainly never really understood their family’s business interests in Germany. They had heard that Curtis’ father was in the scrap metal business and that he had been in the business with his brothers. They understood that, in Germany, the family had been well-off, but hearing about a scrap metal business suggested to them a business like the scrap peddlers in the movies, hawking their wares by horse and buggy. Curtis’ children had no idea that the Heppenheimers were quite successful in the scrap metal business and that the scrap business actually helped Germany grow into an industrial power. They were unaware that Jewish families like the Heppenheimers played an important role in the economic development of Germany.

I became part of the Heppen family when I married Curtis’ son Bruce. My family origins are very different from the Heppenheimer family origins. My family were Eastern European Jews. Never fully accepted as citizens, my family came from areas that are now part of Belarus and Ukraine, but whose borders and governments were constantly changing. Living in shtetels, or segregated Jewish towns, they only felt connected to their Jewish community and were suspicious, or downright frightened, of the government of the country in which they lived. Subject to one pogrom after another, my ancestors never considered it a possibility that they could become full and accepted citizens of any of the places in which they lived. And so, when the opportunity came to emigrate to America, they all jumped at the chance to become Americans and never looked back.

When I married my husband, I sensed from his family both a great pride in having been German (they boasted that they spoke “Hochdeutch,” or German, and not Yiddish) and pain and sadness in having been forced to emigrate. My family had no real emotional connections to the countries they left, but easily spoke about their life in “the old country.” Bruce’s family had complicated connections that I could sense whenever Bruce or his family spoke of...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	7.9.2021
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
ISBN-10	1-0983-9207-8 / 1098392078
ISBN-13	978-1-0983-9207-9 / 9781098392079

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