The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,116
March 5, 1943, she wrote down in block letters at the top. She double-checked—the date coincided with the so-called Fabrikaktion—the factory action—at the beginning of March 1945, when the Gestapo rounded up Berliner Jews from the factories where they were enslaved. They were forced into cattle cars bound East, the point after which Goebbels declared Berlin judenrein. So the suicide must have been an evasion of deportation, as Margaret had first believed.
She turned to the biographies and journals of Jewish women living in Berlin with non-Jewish husbands.
She suspended her tours and read under the feather bed at home, leaving the house only to buy cans of kidney beans and frozen spinach.
She learned a great deal.
Although officially exempted from deportation, mixed families, who were deprived of all chances of work, were on the verge of starvation in 1943. Jews were denied the papers that would allow them not only to work but also to travel, that would allow rations for meat, dairy, and vegetables. If the non-Jewish spouse did not divorce his spouse, he was in a terrible position. He was called a Rassenschänder—race defiler—usually denied work, denied food, marginalized and isolated as much as, or in some cases even more than, Jews themselves, mobs sometimes being even more enraged by their own kind “gone astray.” Denunciations to the Gestapo were a daily occurrence. Mixed families were hounded by continual visits from the police and random, inexplicable deportations of entire families. Although the non-Jewish half of the couple could easily divorce his spouse, the consequence was grave—the Jewish half would be starved to death or slaughtered. In Berlin at least, this consequence was known full well. So despite the official exemption of mixed families, Margaret began to see very well how the Strausses might have been driven to kill themselves.
But still the question of the children. Why, at least, wasn’t there anywhere to send them? Weren’t there non-Jewish relatives’ homes where the children could be sent, passed off as war orphans, camouflaged? The question would not leave her mind.
Margaret reread her copy of the entry in the police log yet again. This time she focused on the places of birth. Fritz Strauss, born 11/5/06 in Gross-Strenz, and Regina Sara Strauss née Herzberg, born 11/20/09 in Schwedenhöhe.
She began to search. She took out her atlas of Germany. Oddly, neither city was in the index.
She looked at the names again. Perhaps she had misspelled or mis-remembered. But no. She went to the computer. She put Gross-Strenz into Google and found only one reference—on a genealogical page tracing an American family’s origins—to Poland.
All was given away. Both places must be in the eastern realms lost to Germany during the war. Margaret took out a world atlas from 1938 and turned to the pages showing the old Germany. She found Gross-Strenz near Wohlau, a tiny place in lost Silesia, not so far from Breslau, in today’s Poland.
Then she looked for Schwedenhöhe. Today, it seemed, the place was called Szwederowo, in what was once Posen. But in the 1938 atlas, even after looking at Posen until her eyes ached, she found no trace.
She sat back in her desk chair. Half of today’s Poland was once German. This family that with such cunning laid itself into a mute and message-less grave to escape the Nazis—not only were they wiped away without a trace, but both husband and wife came from towns that no longer exist.
From the suicide note of a Jewish wife and mother married to a non-Jewish husband in 1943, Margaret copied the following into her notebook.
Please try to understand me. I am desperate, crushed, without hope. I can’t continue to breathe. I am afraid of the prison walls which await me … Forgive me that I leave you like this. I am powerless … my heart is tearing apart. I am perspiring with fright day and night.
Margaret read this. Her eyes flicked back and forth.
She would return to the Salzburgerstrasse, she decided. If there were a secret door that might crack open and let her approach the Family Strauss, then it would be there.
At the Salzburgerstrasse, she would look for the ghost of Regina Strauss one more time.
Having made up her mind to go, Margaret longed to already be there.
That afternoon, on her way out of the flat, she pushed her hand into the cabinet by the front door, looking for the second key to her bicycle lock. The old one’s shaft had broken off, that cheaply made thing.