It’s January, with Holocaust Memorial Day – HMD for short – approaching at the end of the month. The national theme this year is ‘Bridging generations’. That’s set me thinking about the importance of keeping Holocaust stories alive through the generations.
I don’t have a generation to succeed me, but through the charity Generation2Generation I’ve been giving talks on my mother’s family story to schools and adult groups. I always include with a few thoughts about why it’s important to remember how Germany under the Third Reich got drawn into a spiral of madness, ordinary people scapegoating blameless victims. It can so easily happen again. In southeast London in the 1970s I remember the racist National Front posters showing ‘the changing face of Britain’, with a face partly white on its left side and blending into a black on the right. At my school, a quiet studious boy called Reilly wrote in the sixth-form magazine ‘Why I support the National Front’. No one commented on it. Then in England in summer 2024 we saw Islamophobic riots involving hotels housing innocent asylum seekers being set alight by mobs. It eerily conjured up images of the November 1938 ‘Kristallnacht’ pogroms in Nazi Germany.
That’s the dutiful side of communicating story of my family story, the Neumeyers. Then more personally, it’s a memorial to people I never met. And an acknowledgement that it actually happened to my mother Ruth and uncle Raymond – which I still find it hard to believe. Throughout childhood my mother screened me from her traumatic past. She didn’t share any of those terrifying moments with me, and I don’t blame her at all for that.
I didn’t connect with Ruth and Raymond’s story for years. I’m not Jewish, so have never felt part of the exiled Jewish second generation. I suspect the same applied to Ruth, who although brought up a Lutheran, had the unwelcome surprise in 1935 of the status of Full Jew foisted on her and Raymond by the Nuremberg Laws. And then I didn’t really get who all these adopted English ‘relations’ were that seemed so important – Uncle Frank, Aunt Bea, Uncle Oscar, Aunt Joan and the rest. Now I know they were an extended family connected only by a chance acquaintance in 1914, who helped get Ruth and Raymond on a Kindertransport to safety, and new lives. Like many survivors the pair depended on fantastic luck, getting out of Nazi Germany and into the hands of very generous strangers. If that hadn’t happened, my brothers and I wouldn’t be here to tell the story.
Ruth didn’t conceal anything from me, as far as I’m aware. In the 1980s, the Sud Deutsche Zeitung journalist Hans Holzheider came to London to interview her and Raymond for a book he was writing on the Jews who were thrown out of Dachau on 8-9 November 1938. My father said her experience of talking with a sympathetic stranger noticeably exorcised something of the past, and subsequently she found it easier to face up to what had happened. She was often poring over her old family photos – she explained lots of bits to me, but never really joined it all up into a narrative, or said how she really felt. I’m left with a jigsaw that I can’t quite fit together and there are quite a few pieces missing.
My grandmother Vera (top left) with her parents Hildegard and Martin Ephraim; front row her nephew Gernot, niece Ursula and sister Dora
When Ruth died in 2012, my brothers, my wife and I cleared the house she had lived in for 56 years. I knew there was a lot of stuff relating to her past in Germany but had never been through it all. As we sifted through everything, I put all the items of that portion of family history into a trunk, to be dealt with as and when. Then I started this blog, and so much began to click together on the way. I contacted the Imperial War Museum, and was very chuffed when they said they’d like to have all the items for their archives (which will happen, eventually). I’ve eagerly accepted invitations to speak along with my brothers and cousin to public and school audiences in Dachau.
The bits and pieces that have gone on permanent display in the Imperial War Museum represent only a tiny fraction of everything. For me it’s her teddy bear that steals the show. The very first time I spoke publicly about the family story, at Holocaust Memorial Day in Lewes in 2014, I showed the photo of the Neumeyer family having tea in their garden in Dachau in around 1929, with the teddy on the six-year-old Ruth’s lap – ‘watch out for the bear; there’s a twist at the end of the story’ I told the audience. Then after reading my grandmother’s haunting letter written on her deportation to (probably) Auschwitz, I said – ‘and that bear – well he survived, came over with Ruth on the Kindertransport, and making his public debut – here he is!’ I pulled the bear from a carrier bag and wasn’t prepared for the applause and cheers that followed. That bear had always been there during my childhood, having spent years upside-down in our toy basket, then in a more dignified position on a chair in Ruth’s bedroom. But only at that moment did I realise what a wonderful symbol of survival the bear was.
When I started writing this blog back in 2014, it was mainly a means of making sense of a huge archive I had inherited from my mother. It’s led to so much more than that, with all sorts of events, contacts and new information. Here are a few highlights from 2025 so far.
Hans gets some posthumous recognition
Happily the paltry amount of music by my grandfather Hans Neumeyer that has survived is getting noticed. So far this year his music been performed at concerts to mark the 80th anniversaries of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps, and there’s a possibility of more of his music being performed in Newcastle later this year or early in 2026.
The concert on 3 May 2025 at Dachau took place at the Helig Kreuz Kirche in Dachau, with a performance by the Dachau Youth Symphony Orchestra (Dachauer Jugend Sinfonie Orchester). The organisers asked for my permission to include music by Hans Neumeyer (the Andante Moderato from his duo, composed for violin and viola but played here by violin and cello). marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp. As well as Hans’ music, the organiser included extracts from my great aunt Irma Kuhn’s poem written for Hans while they were both incarcerated in Theresienstadt in 1943.
I went along to the Imperial War Museum event for the Bergen-Belsen anniversary on 15 April, where the English Chamber Orchestra played in the museum foyer – a programme of music associated with the notorious camps, including Schubert’s Marche Militaire and Johann Strauss’s Radetzky March, which were played by the camp orchestras at Auschwitz. It began with an extract from Hans’s duo.
The programme for the IWM event. The cover shows Ruth’s mother’s illustration for music written for her by Hans in 1940.
My brother Stephen (left) with two members of the orchestra and myself (right)
The May 2025 newsletter for the Generation2Generation (G2G) focused on music and the Holocaust. My article ‘Hans Neumeyer and the music no one will ever hear’ about Hans’s musical world covers his life from his early training to his final days in Theresienstadt. G2G is a charity set up to train speakers who are second and third generation Holocaust survivors and I’m one of the speakers. Their bi-monthly newsletter is free (I’ve just given a link to the article in my Dropbox folder) – you can subscribe here.
Hans’s blindness somehow didn’t seem to affect his intellectual powers as a musician and composer, and I’ve always thought that needs investigating – how on earth did he survive nine years under the Third Reich? I was approached in March by Teryl Dobbs, Professor Emerita of the University of Wisonsin-Madison, who had found this blog. She announced herself as a scholar studying the connections between music (performance, composition, pedagogy, etc.) and the Holocaust (especially Theresienstadt and Warsaw) as well as Disability Studies. That evidently fitted Hans Neumeyer’s story quite remarkably well. Her lecture on 4 April at the 4th Biennial Disability Studies and Music Education Symposium was titled ‘Layers of Exclusion: Hans Neumeyer and the Intersection of Disability, Music, and the Holocaust.’
Hans also is briefly featured in a new book published this July: Navigating Landscapes of Dalcroze Practice: Histories of Music and Movement. Selma Odom and John Habron-James co-authored the chapter in which he’s mentioned, entitled ‘Health and Well-being in Contexts of Dalcroze Practice: Education, Therapy, and Medicine’.
At last a home for the Dalcroze material
Long ignored in the mass of material in our family archive are the notebooks of my grandmother Vera Ephraim when a student at Hellerau during 1912-1914. They don’t on the face of it look that inspiring – lots of neatly written out notes about eurhythmics and music written on manuscript paper with impenetrable comments alongside. And I can’t really make any insights into them. While the family archive relating to the Holocaust and all that preceded and followed it is going to the Imperial War Museum, this is specialist material relating to the work of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, the teacher at Hellerau. I’m hoping some day someone will be able to analyse them in full.
In May I met up with Andrew Davidson, senior lecturer in acting and musical theatre at the University of Surrey, who walked me over to the university archives. He immediately recognised the importance of the notebooks.
And Jo and Helen produced a letter from my mother in 2002 in which she mentioned to a researcher that her mother’s Hellerau notebooks ought to be in the archive. So they’ve finally reached the right place.
Some of Vera’s notebooks from Hellerau, 1912-14. Hopefully they’ll make sense to a dance/Dalcroze specialist one day.
Other snippets
In February I contributed some source material for the exhibition catalogue of the touring theatre project From Here On – a kind of contemporary dance creation about the Kindertransport and other refugee journeys.
I’m mentoring (as a volunteer) a couple of potential speakers for Generation2Generation (G2G), the charity that trains second and third-generation Holocaust survivors to give presentations about their family stories to schools and adult groups, and give my own presentations in the East Sussex area and on Zoom (bookings for my talk can be made through G2G). Ewan Atkinson contacted me in March for a project he is working on about Generation 2 Generation (G2G), and interviewed me about my motivation for telling my family story through G2G.
Published this July: an analysis of the Holocaust Galleries at London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM)
Back in 2023 I was asked by James Bulgin of IWM and Stephan Jaeger to contribute a chapter to an academic book entitled ‘The New Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum London: Conception, Design, Interpretation’, published August 2025. I checked the final proof version in April. (The first few chapters can be viewed here.)
My chapter was fun to write and not at all academic in tone, and I was given freedom to select my own angle:
The brief is fairly loose. Essentially they are keen to get some sort of insight into what motivated you to donate objects to the museum for the Galleries, and what your perspective on the whole thing was. How you approach that would be completely up to you.
So I’ve mentioned this blog, and the family’s longstanding connection with the IWM and the transition from family possessions to museum artefacts, along with how I’ve unravelled the story of my mother’s family and the impact of the IWM’s new Holocaust Galleries. I concluded by highlighting some of the many unknowns in the lives of the Ephraims and Neumeyers.
My DNA test result
And finally – the results of my recent DNA test. It’s very polarised between paternal and maternal sides. My father’s side is entirely England and northwest Europe, while my mother’s side is 84% Ashkenazi Jewish (as I’m half that – 42%) – higher than I supposed, as I thought her grandmother was not Jewish, but seemingly had some Jewish blood. That may indicate Vera and her sisters would have been fully Jewish by the Nuremberg Laws definition – having three or four Jewish grandparents – rather than Mischling/mixed, even after Vera had divorced her Jewish husband. So that’s another aspect to follow up.
Vera’s statuette, made in 1913 by her sister’s father-in-law, the Italian sculptor Emilio Bisi.
This is a story of two escapes from Germany, quarter of a century apart, and how the study and love of eurhythmics forged a crucial friendship. In 1914 an English family managed to get to safety just as the First World War was about to break out. That family was key to saving my mother Ruth and uncle Raymond in 1939, enabling them to board a Kindertransport and avoid almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis.
For many years the symbolic importance of this bronze statuette of my grandmother Vera Ephraim (who married as Vera Neumeyer) eluded me. Dated 1913, it shows her as a 19-year-old woman performing eurhythmics. This was a hallowed object in my childhood home in Sydenham. Ruth and Raymond took it in turns to look after it in an informal rota – one took the statuette and the other the family photo album.
Eurhythmics is a discipline of group exercises based on the core elements of rhythmic gymnastics (movement and breathing responding to changes in rhythm and tempi), solfège (ear training) and improvisation (harmony and composition).
In 2023 I had a Zoom session with Selma Odom, a Canadian academic and dance historian who specialises on eurhythmics, who revealed that the statuette depicts Vera as wearing the costume of the Furies in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice as performed at Hellerau – an opera that turns out to have a remarkable impact on this family story.
Dalcroze, Hellerau and Orfeo: an international melting-pot
Hellerau, established in 1909 as Germany’s first development based on the garden city concept pioneered in England by Ebenezer Howard, is a suburb of Dresden with curving streets and plentiful greenery. Before the First World War it brought together a community of cultural visionaries – among them Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950), a Swiss composer and leading exponent of eurhythmics, who founded a school of eurhythmics there in 1910, in a training college designed by the architect Heinrich Tessenow centred on the neoclassical Festspielhaus – the performance space itself the creation of the Swiss stage designer theorist Adolphe Appia. It was recognised as “the first theatre of modern times to be built without a proscenium arch and with a completely open stage”.
Vera was one of the hundreds of young students who attended shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. A plethora of the cultural elite came to Hellerau between 1912 and 1915 from all over the world – among them George Bernard Shaw, Franz Kafka, Oskar Kokoschka, Sergei Diagilev, Emil Nolde, Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky.
This method of movement in response to music was used in a groundbreaking performance of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Eurydice at Hellerau, in 1913. No opera had ever been staged in this way before, and the original concept from 1913 was faithfully replicated in Britain in a production at Warwick University in 1991.
Vera at Hellerau, seated in the middle
Vera in eurhythmics pose
The neoclassical exterior of the Festspielhaus
Booklet owned by Vera for the Dalcroze school at Hellerau, 1912
Orfeo in performance or possibly rehearsal
Orfeo performance with audience
My grandfather Hans Neumeyer was at Hellerau as one of the teachers. As he was blind, we can assume all his input was with improvising at the piano, as he can have had little idea of what the eurhythmic classes were actually doing. Selma Odom told me Dalcroze wrote that it could indeed be possible for blind people to work in conjunction with teaching. Then at some point Hans and Vera met and their relationship developed. They married in 1920 and moved to Dachau.
Hans or Vera or both of them made friends with Beatrice Eckhard, an English student at Hellerau, who was there from October 1913 until summer 1914. Their mother Marie was also a Dalcroze practitioner, and it is possible she and Beatrice’s sister Joan were also there for the academic year. Marie had met Dalcroze at Manchester University in 1912, and became founder of the Dalcroze Society in England in 1915. The same year Beatrice graduated from the London School of Dalcroze Eurhythmics, after which she taught eurhythmics in northern England. She later married the economist Frank Paish, and in postwar years they were tremendously supportive to my family – first in getting her family to act as guarantors to Ruth and Raymond so they could take the Kindertransport to England in 1939, and later to my parents in providing financial support in setting up their family. Some time in the 1950s Beatrice donated her Broadwood piano – my brother Stephen and I both learnt on that instrument, even playing from sheet music that originally belonged to Vera.
Testimonial from Jaques-Dalcroze when Hans Neumeyer was desperately seeking work in 1934
Beatrice writes about Hellerau
While at Hellerau, Beatrice wrote this vivid description of daily life there for her former school magazine:
If there is anyone in lack of an occupation, I advise them to come out to Hellerau for a course of eurhythmics. Besides being an excellent musical and educational training, I think nearly all would find the life a jolly one.
There are at least 14 different nationalities among the students, and hence a good opportunity for airing one’s knowledge in 14 different languages. Japan and Greece have two representatives, and every other person seems to be either a Pole or a Russian.
One of the things most striking to visitors is the variety in dress. At my first meal I sat opposite to a Russian girl in Greek costume, sandals on her bare feet, and flowing hair. Near her was an American, the height of conventional respectability; a German with a dress so low that I wondered why on earth she was wearing evening dress in the middle of the day; and a French Countess in Paris clothes. The men, too, seemed to have sprung out of some fairy tale; three of them wearing brightly coloured tunics and shorts, and with hair so long that when they played tennis they were forced to wear a hair band, or rather fillet, to keep the rebellious locks out of their eyes! Now that winter is upon us and the days are dull and gloomy, most of these airy costumes have disappeared, and one lives once more among ordinary mortals.
A plastic lesson given by Herr Jaques [Dalcroze] to all the students is a weird, almost uncanny sight. Imagine three enormous circles composed of people clad simply in tricot [a black-skinned bathing dress], the bare legs and arms gleaming strangely white in contrast with the black garments. Herr Jaques sits down to the piano to improvise; melodies seem to flow out of his fingertips and one’s feet begin restlessly to tap the floor. The circles begin to move, the inner one in the opposite direction to the two outer ones, faster and faster the legs leap through the air till one’s eye becomes dazzled by the swirling numbers and the glare of the black and white. At the word ‘hopp’ two of the circles immediately drop to the ground on bended knee, and remain motionless, the remaining one still leaping triumphantly. At the word of command all the circles are again in motion, this time to break up and scatter so that the room is filled with a seething mass of figures jumping wildly in every direction. The music comes to an end, the breathless crowd scatters to put on gaily coloured mantles, green, purple, blue, and in a moment the great hall is empty and alone.
“The hall is oblong in shape, the rows of seats rising one above another. The stage is made of movable blocks of wood of different sizes, covered with blue baize, so that it is possible to make the stage any size or shape suitable for grouping and plastic dances, or to remove it altogether.
No lights are seen, all being behind thin white stuff which covers the ceiling and the walls, and when they are lighted gradually it seems as if sunlight is slowly stealing into the room.
From The Bedales Record, 1913-14
Review (January 1991) in the Times Higher Education Supplement of the Warwick University production of Orfeo ed Eurydice, re-creating as far as possible the famous Hellerau staging of 1913, choreographed by Selma Odom.(By a stupendous coincidence, the reviewer is a very near neighbour and friend of mine.)In 2017 I took part in an amateur production with New Sussex Opera of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, oblivious to the fact that Vera had taken part in that historic performance in Hellerau 105 years previously. (I appear in the first photo, bareheaded and facing away from the camera in the foreground, and to the left.)I started learning the music for the opera using Vera’s personal score (which she acquired after leaving Hellerau – this is marked as ‘Kriegsausgabe’ – wartime edition), having no idea of its significance in this family story.
Escape from Germany in 1914
Beatrice came to Hellerau for three terms, starting in October 1913 (I do not know if Joan and Marie were also there for that period, though they certainly travelled back together, as is revealed below). During that time the family rented a chalet and they spent an idyllic ten months, joined by the father in summer, when they rented a house nearby in Sparbrod. But the world then turned upside down, with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo sparking off the outbreak of war.
War was imminent, and on 30 July their father told the family – the sisters Beatrice, Joan and Rachel, their mother Marie and their helper Chees – that they had get home as fast as possible. Following an evening of frenetic packing of suitcases, they left the next morning in a hired car, while their father, Chees and Rachel went by train. The roads were empty, the landscape poignantly beautiful, and they had friendly exchanges as they made their way, yet Germany was already at war with France and Russia.
It was a hugely stressful journey, particularly for Marie, who had to drive for hours without a break, before they managed to find a chauffeur to take over. Garage services did not exist outside the towns, and we were afraid all through that the car might break down far from a town. They just made it out in time.
Joan wrote a long letter to her eldest sister Marjorie on the eve of war, now fully aware of the peril of being in a soon-to-be enemy country.
Mother drove 7 hours the first day, and is tired, in fact we all are. It was doubtful when we left Fulda whether we could get any more petrol on the way therefore we bought a goodly supply there; enough, or nearly enough, to take us to the boundary. You cannot think what a whirl and uproar things are in here. Ever since about Wednesday things have been uncertain and excited, we kept hearing rumours that the war had begun, then that mobilisation had begun but that war was not yet declared…
… We heard last night that the last ships between England and Holland were running last night, whether it is true we are not sure. Beatrice sent a postcard to Father in England last night, and it was returned to her this morning, when we shall get to England we do not know, but in any case we shall be in Rotterdam within two days.
….The passport took us safely over the Rhine bridge and past the numerous sentries posted at all the bridges and in the villages. We were stopped 20 or 30 times. About 3 we reached Kaldenkirchen, a few miles from here. At some of the cross-roads the police have put up the most ridiculous barricades of carts, fences, chairs, chains or ropes across the road, and stakes with a maze of string tangled around them. There was one of these here, and a policeman in his shirtsleeves who had been putting it up let us through it. In the middle of the village we were stopped again. Crowds collected round us, Mother went indoors with her pass and interviewed the Bürgermeister. After a long time she came out, two soldiers jumped into the car, and we drove to another police office where the Oberkommandant and a crowd of green coated officers were, the crowd following, although the officers were very angry with them and would not let them come near us. The car stopped, carts were drawn across the roads, we got out, Mother went inside. There she showed her papers and set down, while the men went away. Presently Mother said to an officer who was in the room that she was hungry and might she go and get some food. Whereupon he looked confused, and she said “Are you guarding me?” He replied “Yes”.
(3 August, Holland) . We are over the frontier at last; we have met Father, Chees, Rachel, by a marvellous coincidence. Last night we arrived in Düsseldorf, and had to go to three police stations, but a most delightful policeman took us to all of them, helped to put on a new wheel when the tyre burst, and finally showed us a very comfortable and expensive hotel. Meanwhile, we were anxious about Father and Rachel, and we went to the station, hoping to see their train if it came through and find them if they were in it. We waited on the platform for two hours. We heard most disquieting news that the last trains to England were running that night.
…The chauffeur was ordered to take everything out of the car, even the cushions. Every little thing was examined with great care, cushions poked and pinched, boxes opened, bags felt and looked into, letters read, coats shaken, pockets turned inside out, even the engine was looked into for letters, so fearful were they lest we werе spies. Meanwhile Mother was made to undress in the presence of two women. Then we had to undress. The OK was dreadfully angry with chauffeur because he spoke to Mother and they said they would put him in prison, but in the end they let him go back to Düsseldorf.
In the 1980s, aged in her eighties and living in Cambridge, Joan added some reminiscences:
I remember that a train full of young soldiers was slowly crossing a railway bridge as we approached; they were jubilant, cheering and waving to us. I wondered how they could be so jolly when they were going to fight. Nobody would have pictured the horrors to come.
Our 16 pieces of luggage had been left among the enormous piles on Cologne station, and we never saw them again, nor the car. We slept in that hotel, and next day proceeded by slow train across Holland to the Hook of Holland.
At Breda we had to change and wait for four hours. Mother, Rachel and I wandered into a public park. It was intensely hot, we were tired, all the seats were occupied, so, in spite of “verboten” notices, we sat on the grass. A policeman appeared, and took us into custody; we had no common language, and no doubt dishevelled from travelling, looked like vagrants. We trailed after him, when suddenly Father was seen approaching. He invariably looked neat and businesslike, and his appearance reassured the policeman, who let us go. I have often thought since, how absurd to be had up for sitting on the grass, when the day before we were in danger of being detained as spies! This was on 3 August. We crossed to Harwich by the night boat, and woke up to find that war had been declared by Britain at midnight, or just before.
I shall always remember that kindly German policeman at the Rhine crossing, who, with his country already at war, helped us with the car and in other ways.
Surviving manuscripts from Vera
What we have from Vera’s time in Hellerau is a remarkably rich archive. There are densely written notebooks – written in ink; her handwriting never falters, and nothing is crossed out. And as well as printed material we have her purple-covered music manuscript booklets filled with pencilled notes and musical sketches, and even her score of Orfeo ed Eurydice. It’s curious how much has survived when virtually nothing remains of Hans’s musical compositions.
Some of Vera’s eurhythmics notebooks from Hellerau
Music and notes about eurhythmics written out by Vera, probably when a student at Hellerau
Twenty-five years on: salvation and a Kindertransport to England
Fortunately – extremely fortunately – Vera kept in touch with Beatrice. When news reached Britain of the widespread November 1938 pogroms in Germany, the British government started allowing unaccompanied children under 17 to come on a Kindertransport to Britain without a visa, providing they could be backed by a £50 guarantee to enable their eventual repatriation. Vera now sensed the immense danger the Neumeyer family was in, deemed fully Jewish under the 1935 Nuremberg laws, and virtually destitute as they were, the Neumeyers could not afford to pay for the guarantee. She and Hans wrote in their very good English to Beatrice (now married to Frank Paish) asking if the children could come to stay with them in England and if £50 for each child could be provided. To her great joy, Beatrice and Frank said their family would be glad to help – with Ruth and Raymond staying initially with Beatrice’s brother Oscar and his wife, and their relatives Lady Simon and Edith Zimmern acting as guarantors.
We accept the noble-hearted offer of your brother and your sister-in-law with joyful relief. The contents of your last letter came to us as a light sent by God through the hopeless dark of the night around us. All we can do is to stretch out our hands to you, dear Mrs Paish, as well as to your brother and his wife, to thank you and to pray to God that He may reward you for all your kindness.
Hans Neumeyer to Beatrice, 7 January 1939
Vera added her own separate letter to Beatrice:
I can but repeat my husband’s words and express to you my deepest thankfulness and sympathy for the kindness and readiness with which you offer a new home to my children who have had such sad experiences during the past months. Yet they are brave and reasonable little souls and they both are looking forward to the new life, and I trust they will soon get accustomed to the new surroundings and the English language which they are already studying here. I think the separation will be harder for me than for them, but I do hope I shall soon be able to follow them, as I have already got a passport and so all I want is only to be required by some family or institution as a household-help or for the education of children, or as a lady companion. In all these spheres I have got a good practice.
Vera Neumeyer to Beatrice, 8 January 1939. Despite obtaining a passport, Vera never made it out of Nazi Germany.
So if that meeting at Hellerau hadn’t happened over 120 years ago between Beatrice and Vera, my mother and uncle would almost certainly have perished like their parents in the Holocaust. As it was, Beatrice and Frank got them out. Vera later said to a friend ‘If I had known that I would never see my children again, I would never have let them go.’ In old age Beatrice and Frank (always known by our family as Aunt Bea and Uncle Frank) told Ruth that getting her and Raymond to England was ‘the best thing they ever did in their lives’.
Beatrice and Frank Paish in 1970, at their house, Shoreys, near Ewhurst in Surrey
Dela Blakmar and Hans Neumeyer at Hans’s sister Betty’s house in Garmisch in the 1930s
As the world closed in around them in Nazi Germany in 1937, my grandfather Hans Neumeyer carried out a secret correspondence with his secretary Dela Blakmar. As Jews, they were in huge danger, but they were cocooned in passionate affair that was only unveiled in March 2022, when – as I’ve reported previously on this blog – a bombshell came in an email from Sweden from Marianne, then a total stranger, who had discovered a mass of material relating to Dela – including some 40 love letters from Hans.
The connection with Dela was that Marianne’s husband’s father had taught at a school with Dela’s close friend Sara Liljeblad. After Dela’s death, Sara inherited from her, and after Sara’s death various items were passed on to Marianne’s family, including this archive, which ended up forgotten in her basement until three years ago.
I have now gone through all of them to the best of my abilities and attempted to read between the lines and see what glimpses of their lives the letters offer.
Recap of previous blog posts (click on ‘Dela‘ in the ‘Category posts’ in the right-hand margin to see them all; it will have this post at the top): Dela Blakmar (née Mankiewitz) was Jewish and well connected with musicians and avant-garde artists. In 1933 had a marriage of convenience with Helge Blakmar, a Danish resistance leader based in Copenhagen. She met Hans soon after that time, I think in the German Alpine resort of Garmisch through a mutual friend Erna Bial. She became Hans’s secretary and wrote out his music for him as he composed it, and was a very gifted violinist and violist, playing professionally. Her cousin Franz Kaufman played an important role in the Berlin underground movement, smuggling Jews out of Nazi Germany and into Switzerland, but was captured, taken to Sachsenhausen and shot. In 1942 she was with Hans’s wife Vera on the day Vera was deported. She returned to Denmark in 1943, then as the Nazis were about to invade Denmark she escaped with some of the Neumeyers’ jewellery on a boat to Sweden – being blown in by a favourable wind for the last part. After the war she wrote a rather frosty letter to my mother Ruth but relations between the two seemed to have thawed somewhat after that. She sent over two surviving pieces of Hans’s chamber music compositions. I met her once, in 1968, when she visited our family in Sydenham and gave me her spare violin, a large three-quarter sized instrument by the Berlin violin-maker Michael Dötsch. I never knew what my mother really felt about her.
Dela’s silent suffering
I learnt from Marianne that Dela never discussed anything about life before 1945, and that she remembered when visiting Dela’s house that there was a picture in her hall of a man with dark glasses – who was evidently Hans – but never said anything about him. It seems that Hans’s death had an absolutely devastating effect on Dela, both as a lover and as a fellow musician, and after the war she could no longer bear to think of the past. I think the loss of nearly all of Hans’s musical compositions had been a hammer blow of similar magnitude.
Hans’s typed chronology of six months of 1937
Nearly all letters are all from 1937, typed out by Hans from the family home in Dachau. He’s often in Munich, where he teaches. As he was blind, what he types isn’t aways that easy to read even though he was extremely literate. The letters are full of typos, with words run together, characters missing and words mistyped. Sometimes the ink in the typewriter ribbon has run out and some sentences appear almost blank. The language is full of poetical turns of phrases, and references to things unexplained. People and places are mainly just given initials, though I can deduce some of them, such as M for Munich and G for Garmisch. Remarkably the letters are in pristine condition, as if they were typed yesterday.
There’s also a single letter from July 1939 describing with some humour an uncomfortable train journey from (presumably) Berlin to Munich.
Here I have attempted to pick out some of the details of the letters. They get us a bit further in working out what was going on in their lives in 1937. The letters stop after 13 July, when the two of them were likely together in Bavaria, probably in or around Garmisch.
A lot of what Hans writes to Dela is about their relationship. The two are in their own world, seemingly trying to shelter from the threats that are closing in around them. Every letter – from January to July 1937 – overflows with romantic language:
“Let me at least enclose you protectively in my arms in my thoughts and love you and kiss you until all the clouds and sadness slip away from your beloved heart.”
“…you are what I have ever dreamed of a woman, I have known that since I know you. Ever since we met in the summer. The wonderful magic of your voice told me clearly when I was allowed to take it in for the first time, my heart pricked up, something sounded that I had been looking for all my life…”
In addition to the typed letters are a few Hans wrote himself on special textured lined paper designed for the blind. He had learned to write at school when he still had his sight. I haven’t yet been able to decipher them.
People mentioned in the correspondence
We don’t know how Dela responded to these letters or how often but I imagine they were similarly frequent and passionate. The letters indicate she was in Berlin for much of the period but in June spent part of that summer in Copenhagen. Although she was Jewish she managed to travel from Germany to Denmark as she had Danish nationality, having gone through a marriage of convenience in 1933 with Helge Blakmar, a leading member of the Copenhagen resistance movement.
She returned in summer 1937 when her mother, living in Germany, was ill. I think that must have been Berlin, and from there she and Hans made plans to meet up again in Garmisch, the Alpine resort near the Austrian border where Hans’s sister lived along with various musical friends.
Hans records a few places: their previous visit to somewhere in the Harz mountains, Dela’s former address Fasanenstrasse in Berlin (the same street as the synagogue), and Römersgade 7 in Copenhagen where she was in 1937.
Hans wrote in June 1937 that it was three years exactly when he and Dela met in Munich – 7 June 1934. That may have been their last meeting in person since then.
The cover of the piano music I have, with Bial’s name on it. It was among the sheet music we had in the house I grew up in, and I only recently found out while researching for his blog who ‘Bial’ was.
The cast of other names in the letters draws quite a few blanks but some of it is familiar. Erna is based in Garmisch; Hans reports her being ill in January, and two months later feeling lonely – she is almost certainly their mutual friend the dancer Erna Bial, who introduced them originally. Five years ago I wrote on this blog that I had found a reference to Erna online, in that she performed dances to Scriabin’s preludes for piano in 1921. It dawned on me that I had inherited an old copy of the preludes with the name ‘Bial’ written on the front cover, and pencilled inside were the numbers of 16 of them, presumably the ones she performed.
There is also another mutual friend, Babettl, based in Garmisch. She knows about Hans and Dela’s affair and Hans feels she can be trusted. There are various people in Munich (“You know, my dear, it is a shame that I cannot introduce you to these lovely, good people”), including Käthe, a friend for 27 years whom he visited in Kaulbachstrasse in April.
He mentions the pianist Renata Borgatti, a former student of his, who specialised in the works of Debussy. The daughter of the Wagnerian tenor Giuseppe Borgatti, she was a former ballerina who enjoyed a bohemian lifestyle in Capri, having lesbian affairs with local baroness and later with Faith, the wife of writer Compton Mackenzie.
On 10 June he writes of meeting Herr Weil at Trotsch. Could this be the mysterious Leo Weil, who in 1939 decided to flee Germany for Shanghai, writing to Vera in rather loving terms that he had hoped she would come with him?
Hans makes virtually no mention of his own family, though his children were very fond of him. Just once he mentions that Ruth brought in the post for him to read. And on 10 June he writes about his friction with his wife Vera, who was ducking the issue of Hans’ affair with Dela. I find hard to fathom quite what Vera thought about it, but she certainly knew: on 21 June his letter to Dela was returned as he had not put sufficient postage on it, and Vera opened the letter before he could intercept it. In her interview with the Imperial War Museum, Ruth says that there was tension between Hans and Vera, but I think she and her brother Raimund were not aware of the affair. Despite everything, Dela was living with Hans and Vera in the Munich address (Thorwaldsenstr 6) in 1942, and was the last person to visit Vera right up to the moment of Vera’s deportation. She kept in touch with Ruth after the war until her death.
Happy family? Hans, Ruth, Vera and Raimund Neumeyer in the Alps. Ruth was born in 1923 and Raimund in 1924 so this was probably around 1932.
References to Hans’s music
From what I know of Hans, he was a hugely respected musician and devoted much of his time to composing. His letters refer to the contemporary composer Hindemith (“I am very excited about Hindemith”, he writes, without saying any more), his wish to edit some Bach sonatas and cryptically that “the Beethoven discovery is great news”. Tragically virtually all of his work went up in smoke in Berlin, where Dela was for some time – she wrote to my mother Ruth after the war with the bad news. Dela managed to rescue two chamber pieces written during 1939-1940 – a duo for violin and viola, and a string trio. He sent Ruth when she was living in Cambridge two little recorder duets in he wrote 1940, and Raymond a Christmas song in 1939. But that’s it: everything else has gone, and we’ll never know how posterity might have regarded him as a composer.
His letters give tantalising hints of pieces he was writing but a few years later disappeared into oblivion. He has written sonatas in A major, B minor and E major:
18 June: “I read the Adagio, the Allegro and the first half of the Andante of the B minor Sonata there and read it yesterday, so to speak, from sight. In the afternoon I added the second half. Apart from a few technical things, the first three movements are finished.”
We get just the outline of a duet in D minor in three movements, written in 1933 or 1934. It gives some idea of the piece’s musical form though obviously not the music itself. He gave a copy to a violinist by the name of Max Schöpper. The ellipsis dots are Hans’s – I don’t know what they are supposed to signify:
The first movement consists of two themes. A small connecting motif emerges from the contrasubject of the first theme, which leads to the second theme in A minor. The violin first brings this theme with the initial notes: F#-G, F#-G, F#-E, D-… It thus forms the riposte to a mirror canon, whose mirror-shaped riposte: B-A sharp, B-A sharp, B- C sharp, B C C… in the viola. The canon runs into the same transmission motif that first introduced it and introduces the return of the first theme in D minor. From then on the free recapitulation begins in the course of which the canon in F minor appears as a straight canon in abbreviated form, followed by the ending.
The second movement is in rondo form with a theme and a connecting theme. The main theme of the second movement consists of exactly the same notes as the canon theme of the first movement. They just have a completely different rhythm behind them, from which a few insignificant octave shifts are included.
The third movement is actually a fugato whose theme is formed from a motif that occurs at the end of the second movement and is incidental to itself. Likewise, the introduction of the final phrase emerges from the conclusion of the third phrase and in turn forms the core idea for the final part.
Then on 4 June he mentions a recording. Could he be referring to a recording of his own music?
“If you see Herr P.B., just ask him how the recordings are going. How much they cost, how good they are and whether they can be exported. I can of course get information about the latter from you too. Perhaps something like that would be a good bridging activity. We should try to get a colleague to help us finance the whole thing to start with.”
Escape plans
Hans’s sister Betty with her son Gustl at her house in Garmisch in the 1930s. The identity of the baby is unknown.
The letters reveal the dates Hans’ fully Jewish nephew GustlBraun (the son of his sister Betty) managed to get out of Nazi Germany. All I previously knew was that Gustl found work in working for a bus company in Columbia. It transpires that his plan came into germination during 1937, when and Betty were clearly worried about their predicament, and he was desperate to leave the country. On 6 April Gustl received a letter Columbia from a motor firm he had contacted: with it was a letter of employment certified by a notary. “Gustl won’t get the ticket for the ship until Saturday at the earliest, and only then can he apply for foreign currency”, wrote Hans on 18 June. Happily things fell into place a few days later: a ticket got him a berth on a ship departure from Hamburg to Liverpool, from where he wrote saying he was very relieved to be there.
Meanwhile Hans and Dela were considering Ecuador as a possible route out of danger. Hans purchased a Spanish text book so he could start learning the language and urged Dela to do the same. But nothing came of it.
Gustl Güldenstein
Hans was also trying various avenues of work, lecturing or teaching, but seemingly in vain. He considered applying for a post as an organist in “B” – denoting probably Basel, where his great friend the musicologist Gustl Güldenstein, to whom he mentioned the idea, was based. He made contact for this purpose with the Munich synagogue chasan (cantor) and composer Prof Emanuel Kirchner.
In April he was becoming very worried about the lack of work possibilities. Gustl Güldenstein asked Hans if he would teach a course at the Laxenburgerschule (in Austria), with which he had a close relationship: the head of dance training was the celebrated dancer Valeria Kratina, who had set up a Dalcroze school in Munich with Hans; this ran from 1915 to 1925. The school could only offer food and board and could not afford to pay teachers. Hans felt he had so few students that he might as well take up the offer as it could be a stepping stone to something else. But the idea failed to materialise.
The following month he wrote to Emil Hauser, of the Music Conservatoire in Jerusalem. No success there either.
Fast forward to 1944: Theresienstadt
Hans was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto on 4 June 1942. Although blind and in an increasingly weakened state he survived nearly two years there on a meagre diet of watery turnip soup and bread, and maybe ersatz coffee, lentils or the odd yeast dumpling. Thankfully he avoided the dreaded transports to death camps such as Auschwitz. He certainly made friends there – the Czech music students who took lessons from him may well have helped by looking after him. The four postcards written in 1944 are all from his final two months before he succumbed to a lung disease (and very probably starvation) that was rife in the appalling conditions and overcrowding of the ghetto. He died on 18 May: friends witnessed his body being removed to the crematorium: the barrier came down – “that was the way our dead left us”.
The cards show Hans’s address as Langestrasse 135/11, Theresienstadt and have been written out by someone assisting Hans. Dela had escaped from Denmark to Sweden in 1943 and was now staying with Vera Lindfors, Stockholm-Bromma, Spångavägen 35. Two of the cards are receipts for parcels. In the other two from February and May 1944 he thanks Dela for the packages from Lisbon. He remarks that he has had now news from friends in Munich since October and on the final postcard, which is typed, urges Dela to visit Countess Marianne Mörner, a Swedish concert singer: “she will surely remember her old teacher”.
Dela Blakmar. Date and location unknown. This was one of many photos discovered in 2022 with all the letters and other papers.The dog may be Hans’s guide dog.
[1 May] “In chaste shyness, I carefully put the little candle in my hand and carry it to the altar of my soul. Then it was unlocked by the primal force and blessed, God-filled, we became one for ever and ever. And today, on the day that you touched the earth, I kneel before you full of happiness and gratitude and everything, everything that God gave me, I give to you, its sweet heavenly glow at your feet seems small and small compared to the gold of your aura.”
[21 June] “Forgive me, my dear, for the narrow positioning of the lines. I don’t have any thin paper on hand at the moment and would like to save space and postage.”
[1 June] “I have had a strange letter from Maxl. It seems that the church has been fabricating a bunch of gossip, which has given rise to all sorts of distortions and misinterpretations.”
[8 June] “Lind wants my songs at a Nazi singing event and spoke to a party member who was in agreement with this. But I told her not to, because it’s pointless and not stimulating for her and for me. But I’m still not quite sure if she won’t do it anyway.”
[16 March] “a fortnight ago, I had to attend a meeting that was convened for the purpose of voting on the dissolution of the Dachau Evangelical Confessional School. Then the district leader said something about the convent school that went against the grain. At the end, for the sake of form, the meeting was asked whether they had anything to say about the district leader’s statements. Of course nobody had anything to say, only the Jew Neumeyer had something to say and said quite a lot and quite clearly and took a devilish delight in the rigid horror he [I] felt at the dead silence that trickled through the whole, well-bred People’s Assembly when I spoke the last word and everyone except me expected that he would be arrested and that something similar would happen. Then the funny thing happened: the Gauleiter and mayor, who was also present, took the floor, visibly encouraged, and completely agreed with my explanations. National comrades are really a laughable invention.”
[6 April] “You say that I shouldn’t curse the Jews, especially not the people of Munich. Ultimately we ourselves are nothing else and also because you found many good qualities in Jews that are probably inseparably linked to the fact that they are Jews. I never will deny or forget that I am Jewish. When I speak of Jews, I actually only think of German Jews, Since I hardly know anyone else, their values and their children’s values are not clear because there is very little mediocrity. Either they have an incredibly sharp mind or they are completely stupid. They are strong and good, great and noble, and unbendingly upright, or they are bad and baseless, just a pile of dirt. The Jewish strong sense of belonging makes us jointly responsible for everything bad in our circle.”
[4 May] “And together we want to think about how we can respond to this and build this foundation stone of the little house of our lives. Not a magnificent house, but a weatherproof, warm and peaceful house, don’t you think? As wonderfully as we found each other, we will also discover the place on earth that will welcome us hospitably. God protect you on your journey. My outstretched arms are waiting full of vision for you, beloved Dela.”
[10 June] “Oh, my beloved, you know how it supports and lifts me up when I feel that you and I are building our future. Inside and out I would like to tell you, there is nothing, there is not a single step in our lives that I do not want to take and complete in the deepest connection with you, united and full of joy, and like you, I am filled with the wish that we must not miss or postpone anything we undertake. Without haste, but without hesitation, we must pave our way together.”
Eighty-five years ago, 9-11 May 1939, my mother Ruth Neumeyer and her brother Raimund Neumeyer (later became Raymond Newland) travelled to England on a Kindertransport from Munich, and never saw their parents again. Ruth and Raimund set off at midnight on 9 May, and travelled across Nazi Germany with a hundred other children, on a journey fraught with uncertainty.
Ten years ago, 10 May 2014, I began this blog, exactly 75 years after that fateful journey. My reason for doing so was partly a way of sorting out the family history in my own mind. I started with what I knew about already, using artefacts I’d found to tell the story. To view that post, click here.
The ferry ticket gave the date of the journey from Hook of Holland to Harwich, and the name of the ship, SS Amsterdam. The silver cutlery our family had used on a daily basis bore the monogram of Vera’s parents Martin and Hildegard Ephraim: that accounted for the two knives, two forks and two spoons each child was allowed to take with them to England. Ruth’s teddy bear, which she’d brought with her, had spent many years upside-down in the toy basket along with a menagerie of other cuddly items, had been purloined by Ruth since around 1990 and given a seat of honour in her bedroom. Those objects in themselves were my starting point for this blog.
Making sense of it all
There were so many things not understood. When Ruth died in 2012, we spent nine months sorting out the possessions in the rambling Sydenham house where our family had lived since 1956, and where I was born two years later. It dawned on me that her bed was the very one on which I entered this world: sawing up the bedframe so the bits could fit in the wheelie bin was one of life’s stranger experiences.
By her bedside was a day-per-page diary for with printed dates for 1940, re-used for economy reasons for 1943-45. It flopped open automatically at what was perhaps the key entry and the reasons she kept it by her bed: the recording on 17 September 1945 of the news of her mother Vera’s almost certain death in ‘a part of Poland from where there is little news’.
Diaries dating from 1937 have proved a fruitful source of information, though Ruth’s earlier ones are near-impossible to decipher. (Click on arrows for slideshow.)
I’ve filed away hundreds of letters, photos and much more.
On the upstairs landing I finally looked into the trunk which contained bags full of prewar family letters, forbiddingly tied up in tight bundles of string. There seemed to have been an unwritten rule in our family during her lifetime that we shouldn’t look at these, and in any case she always played down the importance of the mass of inherited bits and pieces. They turned out to be a treasure trove of correspondence, including over fifty letters sent by her parents in Munich during 1939 to 1940, and letters from them to Frank and Beatrice Paish, whose family’s generosity meant Ruth and Raymond could escape persecution – and almost certain death – at the hands of the Nazis, and begin a new life in England.
Once we started looking into cupboards and drawers in the house, there were reminders of her past life everywhere: among them were photos crammed into in a decrepit shoebox, a complete set of diaries, Vera’s handwritten recipes in the kitchen, prewar Alpine walking maps mixed up with the modern British Ordnance Survey maps, Ruth’s neatly written exercise books from her schooling in Dachau tucked away in her desk, and a lifetime of correspondence needing careful sifting.
IWM and academia take an interest
Staff at London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) have been following the blog closely, and although it was Ruth who made the initial contact with them, it was really the content of the blog and the order that I’d started to make of the family archive that resulted in the museum’s offer to take the entire collection into its own archive at Duxford (outside Cambridge), and in particular to display some of the most significant items in the new Holocaust Galleries that opened in 2021. So Ruth’s teddy bear, the photo album, various letters and photos as well as three prewar suitcases all ended up in displays. The vast bulk of it is still here at home, but eventually will make its way to Duxford for perpetuity.
Some of the family objects now on display in the Holocaust Galleries
A number of academics, writers and researchers have contacted me via the blog. Amy Williams visited me in Lewes as part of her PhD research into memorialising the Kindertransport. I had a fascinating Zoom session with Selma Odom, a dance historian who specialises on eurhythmics. She filled me in with some of the background about Hellerau, the institution where Vera was studying eurhythmics in 1914, and where she met Hans as well as Beatrice Eckhard (who was the link with England, the family that saved the lives of Ruth and Raymond by enabling them to come to England). Alice Tofts, a doctoral student with the University of Nottingham and Imperial War Museums, made contact for her PhD focusing on family photographs of Holocaust survivors and their families.
James Bulgin, Head of Content at the IWM Holocaust Galleries, put me in touch with his colleague Stephan Jaegar, Professor of German Studies at the University of Manitoba with a view for contributing a piece for his forthcoming academic book about the Holocaust Galleries. My brief was to focus on why I had donated artefacts to the IWM, and how my perception of them and their meaning had changed over time. The book is due for publication in 2025.
Mike Levy, researching refugees, particularly those on the Kindertransports, gave me some invaluable information about the refugee community in wartime Cambridge, and led the project to erect a memorial to the Kindertransport at Harwich, where my brother Stephen and I attended the opening ceremony in 2022. Mike also put me in touch with Irene Anderson (nee Burlin), a German Jewish refugee living in Fifeshire. Her mother Alice Burlin worked at St Chad’s, a hostel for refugees in Grange Road, Cambridge, which trained young women in domestic science, and where Ruth was from April until November 1941. In her diary Ruth mentions her as well as Irene, who was then eight. Irene’s daughter Jill very kindly offered to translate Ruth’s diary during those months at St Chad’s: and Jill and Irene found reading through it a rather wonderful experience, making this emotional connection with Ruth, and much regretted never having met her. Another Cambridge contact came via Mike Levy: the former master of Peterhouse, Rosemary Pattenden, who had written a biography of Greta Burkill, who was a leading light of the Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee, and whom Ruth also mentions in her diaries.
My guess is that this still life by Dachau artist Aranka Wirsching given in 1953 as a present to Ruth for helping persuade the British authorities that her son Anselm, who had served in the German army, was not a Nazi.
These and other items of jewellery we found hidden in Ruth’s wardrobe after her death. It now seems that they were smuggled out of Nazi Germany and into neutral Sweden in 1943 by my grandfather’s secretary Dela Blakmar.
Dela Blakmar gave me her violin in 1968. This cloth is what it was wrapped in: I now know that DM stands for her maiden name – Dela Mankiewitz, and that she had Russian Jewish origins.
Among the mass of music kept in Sydenham were the preludes for piano by Scriabin, with the name Bial written on the cover. Erna Bial was the link between Hans Neumeyer and Dela Blakmar. A newspaper reported in 1921 she performed modern dance to this music – presumably using this very (much annotated) score.
The suitcase belonged to Edith Zimmern, who I have now discovered was the official guarantor for Ruth allowing to come to the UK as a refugee from Nazi Germany.
Hans Neumeyer’s Christmas song: this lay in our piano stool in Sydenham. I have since found a reference to it in a letter from Hans in December 1939 in which he says he has written a song for Raimund.
These cases, used for many years, turned out on close inspection to have been the very ones Ruth and Raimund took on the Kindertransport in May 1939.
We always used these nail scissors at home.They turn out to be pre-war, made in Germany.
We found these pencils were made between 1935 and 1942, so they must have come on the Kindertransport and were very possibly the ones Ruth used to colour her school books.
Speaking publicly
Writing the first few blog posts started to set the outline of the story in my mind. In January 2015, eight months after my first post, my home town of Lewes hosted its first ever Holocaust Memorial Day event – a mixture of speeches, readings and klezmer music under the theme ‘The Survival of the Human Spirit’ in front of over 150 people in a packed hotel conference room. It was the first time I had ever spoken publicly about the family’s experiences under the Third Reich: I condensed the story into ten minutes, showing a photo of the Neumeyers having tea in their garden around 1929 with Ruth and her teddy bear in evidence, reading out Vera’s letter written on the train while she was being deported in 1942, describing how Ruth and Raimund escaped on a Kindertransport in 1939, and hoisting the hitherto unseen teddy bear out of a carrier bag to unexpected and enthusiastic applause – it dawned on me that that well-worn toy had become a potent symbol of survival.
Since then I’ve helped with annual events with the Lewes Holocaust Memorial Day Group, with support from the town and district councils, as well as the local Depot cinema, and have been interviewed a couple of times for BBC Southeast News (the interviewer rather dauntingly asked me on the spur of the moment if they could film me playing a bit of Hans Neumeyer’s music on the piano, despite it being written for violin and viola, and despite the fact that I’d never actually played it before – so I stuck to the first few bars before the music’s complexity threatened to put me well out of my comfort zone).
In 2021 I was invited as a speaker at the Association for Jewish Refugees (AJR) conference at Chelsea football club, on a panel shared with the Wiener Holocaust Library, the National Holocaust Centre and the Imperial War Museum, each in conversation with a person about a specific item they had donated to a museum. For me, I discussed my uncle Raymond’s letter, which he wrote in 1946 and in which he denounced Sturmbahnführer Dobler, the Nazi official who had kicked the Neumeyers out of their Dachau home in November 1938.
I’ve also developed my talk with hugely helpful guidance from the charityGeneration2Generation (G2G for short), which trains up second and third-generation Holocaust survivors to speak publicly to school groups and adult organisations (and takes bookings from any organisations wishing to have a speaker on their own personal story; there’s no charge for the talks, incidentally, and they warmly welcome enquiries and bookings, as well as potential speakers who have family testimony). They honed my presentation for style, content and historical accuracy, and it was through that process that I learnt how the Nuremberg Laws rules defined Jewishness based on the number of grandparents. I’m now also mentoring prospective speakers.
From the Generation2Generation website: promoting the talk the charity has trained me to deliver
Immersing myself in all this has led to a stronger personal bond with Germany. I have been in close contact with the Dachau Kulturamt and Dachauer Forum, and my brothers and I have been invited by the town for two hugely valued commemorative events, the most recent being in November 2023. In the wake of the disaster that is Brexit, I decided to apply for German citizenship – more as a symbolic gesture than for practical reasons: when at Munich airport last year I used my new German status for the first time, the machine scanned my passport and it was a strange feeling of acceptance when the green light came on as the barrier opened.
Bolts from the blue
The names and events in the blog posts have been picked up round the word. From time to time, I’m contacted by someone completely unknown to me who has a connection, and I’ve even discovered two unknown relatives from the other side of the Atlantic. One of the more obscure snippets that found their way to me was from John Hutchinson, who had worked at the Natural History Museum in Görlitz, and flagged up a mollusc collection acquired from the estate of my great-great-grandfather Lesser Ephraim after his death in 1900. There’s quite a lot of the Ephraim molluscs stashed away in the museum, with their original handwritten labels.
One Saturday night in 2021 one Bruno Sandkühler, emailed from Germany:
While working on my biography, I just wanted to check on some details concerning the ways my parents came together. I knew that both of them were friends of Hans Neumeyer, and that they first met when they accompanied Hans on a journey from Munich to Garmisch, but I was hoping to find further details in the Internet. That’s how I came across your blog, and I am so thrilled by this discovery that I could not go to sleep without writing this short message.
Bruno’s parents it transpired, had met each other through Hans before the First World War, all drawn by a love of playing chamber music. More about that story here.
Ron Kammer was astonished to read that his great aunt Malwine Porsche was sitting next to my grandmother Vera in the third-class compartment of a train destined probably to Auschwitz (although no one is sure where it ended up):
I came across your blog while doing a google search today and felt I must immediately email you as it was so personally profound for me. Your grandmother mentions in her letter she sat next to a Frau Professor (Malwine) Porsche (nee Kammer). That woman was my paternal great aunt (the sister of my paternal grandfather). In fact my middle name is Melvin in her honor (she was my father’s favorite aunt). The internet is so amazing that I found your blog site.
Malwine Porsche: photo from her identity paper
Hans’s secretary Dela Blakmar has turned out to be a key figure in the story. Jan Qvick posted this illuminating comment on one of my blog posts about her:
It was interesting to read about Dela Blakmar, my teacher in music in Norberg, Sweden, in the 1960s. I have always known, she had an exciting story to tell even if I nothing was said to us pupils and we were strongly asked by our parents not to ask anything. Probably because, it was known in the Community that she started crying if anyone sang, hummed or whistled, Lili Marlene. There were a lot of rumours about her, of course, because anyone did not know.
I learnt first to play recorder and then violin with her until she left Norberg in 1967. However, I visited her in southern Sweden in 1975 together with a friend. She mentioned a husband she had left and left for Denmark and escaped to Sweden over Öresund with a boat together with many other refugees. The engine of the boat hit a problem and German patrol boats followed them in the complete dark searching with floodlights, but they were lucky the wind was from the west (which it normally is in this country) and they drifted into Swedish territorial water and were picked up by the coast guards.
So from Jan’s comment I think it’s likely that Dela escaped to Sweden carrying the jewellery belonging to Martin Ephraim which eventually ended up with us, along with the two surviving bits of chamber music Hans had composed.
Then in 2022 came a bombshell from Marianne Hellman in Sweden, who had found a box of love letters from Hans Neumeyer to his secretary, Dela Blakmar, mostly written in 1935, along with other material relating to Dela. I read it, blinking, then read it again to check it was real:
To make a long story short; I have in my possession several letters from your grandfather Hans Neumayer to Dela Blakmar, written from 1937 up to his death in 1944.
When I found this treasure in our basement (as I said, long story…), I contacted Forum för levande historia in Stockholm, since I was aware that they are collecting material for a new museum regarding Holocaust victims with connection to Sweden.
Since Dela was said to be Jewish and to have fled to Sweden via Denmark during the war, I thought her letters might be of interest to them [it has since been agreed that the letters will go to the Imperial War Museum’s archive in Duxford].
These letters from a “Hans” – I had no idea who Hans was. I thought he could be Dela´s unknown husband Blakmar, since she was born Mankiewitz. The letters were love letters, apart from telling tales of every day life and people they both knew. But why was Dela and her husband separated? So many questions for the new museum, I thought.
A few weeks ago and just before I had a scheduled telephone meeting with a person at Forum för levande historia, I realised I had not even googled Dela. So I did that, and that´s when I found your blog and realised who Hans was and that there are relatives to him that might be interested in the letters too. The letters I found did not only speak of Dela’s past, but also of your grandfather’s.
Earlier this year, I had a delightful exchange of emails with Claudius Massinger from Frankfurt. He was amazed to find a photo of his father, Manfred Massinger, whom I had featured in a post about Ruth’s years in Cambridge – mentioning a photo she had of Manfred, who had written on the back “Dear Rüthy, You gave me in a time without freedom joy and happiness. May this happiness return to your own heart. All the very best to you, with kindest regards“. Ruth had written “POW” underneath. Manfred, it emerged through Claudius, was born in 1927, conscripted into the German army at the age of 16 and captured by American forces (to his great fortune, as it transpired) in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. He was then sent to various POW camps in Britain, ending up in Trumpington in 1948, on the edge of Cambridge, which is presumably where he met Ruth shortly before returning to Germany.
Claudius painted this very heartening picture of his father’s experiences as a prisoner of war:
When I was a child my father often talked about his time in England to my elder brother and me. Following his narrative I imagined in my childhood fantasy that being a “prisoner of war” was a long holiday. Years later I learned, what “war” really meant – and that his stay had had another purpose.
He experienced great hospitality! Today, it seems to me, that he experienced these three and a half years as the best of his life: He felt free (for the first time, because he had been totally socialised in a Nazi environment – even our grandfather was a communist, but that is another story). As a POW he was able to learn another language, about arts and culture, about freedom of opinion, and about free speech and politics. He was able to do an apprenticeship (typesetting). And, the most important, he met people like your mother who certainly opened his eyes.
Interestingly my father never said a single word about his war experiences. After his death I found some notes with names of places in Belgium and postcards he had sent to his parents before going to the front and after his capture from the camps. Based on this I could track his deployment. I only know from my mother that he had nightmares for many years remembering the tanks that drove over him in a trench. I hope that he had a good encounter with your mother and maybe heard from her about that what happened to her and her family. It is unbelievable that this insanity is still in the world and it horrifies me that currently it becomes louder.
Manfred in 1947 as a prisoner of war in England: a photo sent to me by his son Claudius
The photo of Manfred I found among Ruth’s papers
The reverse of the same photo.
Thoughts still racing through my mind…
The blog has opened up so much – links with people (too many to list in full) and places (Dachau and Görlitz among them) and I’m hugely grateful for all who have made contact.
I’ve solved quite a few unknowns, but those answers in themselves have often raised more questions.
Where did Vera end up?
It is now established that Vera wasn’t deported to Piaski, as previously thought. My contacts in Dachau town alerted me to the Munich city website’s list of deportations, which indicate she was deported on 13 July 1942 on a train bound either to Auschwitz or Warsaw. Tantalisingly the list shows it as the only deportation from Munich of which the destination is uncertain. We’re unlikely ever to know the answer, or what happened to her on arrival – though if it was Auschwitz, Vera as a 48-year-old woman would very probably be sent straight to the gas chamber. Originally she was due to be deported to Piaski in April 1942 but she got taken off that train. Why? Was there some sort of last-minute appeal? Or some doubt about her Jewishness – she was a Mischling (mixed race) of the First Degree (i.e. with two Jewish grandparents), which made her fully Jewish and therefore liable to persecution if married to a full Jew, as she had been to Hans until their divorce in 1941. Her two First Degree Mischling sisters Marianne and Dora (not married to Jews) avoided deportation – so why was Vera treated differently?
Hans as a musician
I’ve unearthed quite a bit of new material about the Neumeyer family, but that has brought up a series of unanswered questions with it. Hans was blind, but a brilliant pianist: how did he learn new music to play? Writing out music for him in braille might have been possible but would have been hugely time-consuming – and if his secretary Dela or wife Vera played notes for him to memorise that would have been similarly challenging for all concerned.
One big nagging question: did any of Hans Neumeyer’s music survive, other than the four pieces we know about? The trio and duo show great skill in composition, but he was composing for much of the time, dictating presumably via the piano so that Dela could write it down for him. Ruth’s abiding wish was that his music could be played in public. I think the only public performance she went to was at the Imperial War Museum, where on Holocaust Memorial Day the programme included a movement from the trio. She would have been pleased to know that I’ve had several requests from musicians from various countries to perform the music. The trio and duo are as yet unpublished, but I will happily forward a pdf of the scores to anyone who would like to play them.
In May 2014, following the installation in Görlitz of commemorative Stolpersteine to Holocaust victims including my great-grandfather Martin Ephraim, the town staged a talk about Martin in the synagogue of which he contributed towards the building. The second half featured musicians playing Hans Neumeyer’s two chamber works – the first time both pieces had ever been played together to a public audience.
The musicians in Görlitz’s restored synagogue playing Hans Neumeyer’s string trio.
In 2016 students from the North Herts Music School included in their concert the first ever performance of Hans Neumeyer’s little recorder duets, which I later found from correspondence were composed in Easter 1940. The illustration is probably by Vera Neumeyer.
Spanish musicians performed Hans’ trio in a concert in Murcia in 2015.
The concert in Murcia.
A piece I wrote for a programme of music, including the Hans Neumeyer trio, performed in Dachau’s splendid Schloss in February 2018. At that time it was thought Vera was deported to Piaski, but we now know that was not the case. The concert was titled ‘Violins of Hope’, with musicians using restored instruments that were played in concentration camps.
Schloss Dachau: the first time Hans Neumeyer’s music had ever been played in Dachau.
The trio was also played at a fund-raising dinner for the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Gallery at Chelsea Football Club in April 2019.
A letter from Dela to Ruth in 1947 mentions that all the other music was burnt, presumably in bombing. She does mention she has ‘the beginning of a great work’ which they had started on in Munich – though that might have been an academic book rather than a composition. That is the only reference to it that I’ve yet found.
Hans and Vera’s domestic arrangements
Hans was certainly having an affair from about 1935 with Dela – that is proved by the love letters that were recently discovered. And in 1938 the pair of them applied to emigrate to the United States, but they never got there. A letter about this plan from Hans to the Jewish composer Herbert Fromm is somewhere in the Jewish Theological Seminary of America archive in New York, where Fromm lived: hopefully one day I’ll manage to unearth it.
What Vera made of this relationship between Hans and Dela is not clear. According to documents I’ve seen, they appeared to be living together – all three of them – in an apartment in Thorwaldsenstrasse in Munich as late as 1942 (and Dela stayed on after Hans and Vera were deported). Dela continues to pose questions: she has intriguing links via her husband and cousin to resistance movements, and her extraordinary report about her life under the Nazis as a Jew in Munich tells us much without revealing the purpose for which it was written. Meanwhile, the mysterious Leo Weil enters the story in 1939, with a series of very affectionate letters to Vera pleading with her to accompany him to Shanghai, where Jews were relatively safe. Leo is clearly a friend of the family – so it all sounds quite a bohemian set-up.
Betty’s miraculous escape
Hans’ sister Betty lived before the war in Garmisch, in the German alps. This is where Hans and other musicians got together from an early date (before 1914), and in the 1930s he first met Dela there. It sounds almost like a musicians’ colony; did Hans’s sister Betty arrange all this at her home, the Starenhäusl? Betty escaped to Columbia in the nick of time: Trans-Siberian railway in 1941 to China, then ship to Columbia just before the Japanese attach on Pearl Harbor made such crossings out of the question – but how did she organise that trip and pay for it? Did she have fake ID papers?
The Neumeyer’s personal effects
I posted about the lengthy compensation claim Ruth made against the Bavarian state after the war, but don’t know what riches the Neumeyers had. I suspect there was art and applied art in the house. Some of the possessions – particularly books and sheet music – were sent to Ruth in England after the war. I can only presume the Neumeyers suspected they were about to be made homeless in 1938 and got friends to look after some of their things, in which case that was fairly canny of them.
Some mysteries, left to right: Betty, the Köbners in Thorwaldsenstrasse, and Dela and Hans
What happened after the Neumeyers were forced to leave Dachau?
The Neumeyers were told by the authorities to leave Dachau town before dawn on 9 November 1938. This they did, and Ruth talks about it in her interview with the Imperial War Museum. But what she doesn’t mention is the danger of arriving that morning in Munich, as the massive pogrom known as ‘Kristallnacht’ happened on that very night. She, her brother and mother were presumably out of harm’s reach in a loft somewhere in the suburbs – but had the Neumeyers no idea of the mayhem that was taking place in the city centre, as the synagogue was being burnt down, Jewish homes ransacked, Jews beaten up and made to scrub pavements, and Jewish shops smashed up and looted?
We know from letters Hans and Vera were still desperately trying to escape to England in summer 1939. With their connections in Switzerland and England, they could have got out earlier – but I have to assume their domestic/romantic relationships complicated matters too much.
A few weeks after that the Neumeyers were living with the Köbner family in Thorwaldsenstrasse, Munich. Ruth never mentioned them to me, so we don’t know if they were friends or if this was a commercial arrangement. I assume Dr Köbner and his family were fully Jewish and what happened to them later is a mystery.
Where are the photos of Irma?
Then we have Hans’ elder sister Irma Kuhn, who died in Theresienstadt, where she wrote that extraordinary poem, whose significance I only discovered in 2021 through historian Lauren Leiderman. What I don’t get is why Ruth never talked about her. And among the hundreds of family photos, there is not a single one identified as Irma. Her image might be among the uncaptioned ones, though I can’t spot any obvious candidates. Ruth never mentioned this poem, which was sent from a Theresienstadt survivor, Alois Weiner, via Dela, but I suppose she never realised what it was or who wrote it.
A fairytale ending
Part of Vera’s notes on a children’s performance of Hansel and Gretel
One final thought: the story of Hansel and Gretel. It has occurred to me there is something quite profound in Ruth’s huge affection for the story, as well as Humperdinck’s romantic opera (I chose the poignant Evening Prayer from the end of act 1 for the music for the committal at her funeral). I do wonder if she ever rationalised her feelings for it. I remember her encouraging us as children to put on a play about that story on the landing of our house; I had a non-speaking role as a toadstool, but on the day of performance chickened out through a fit of stage shyness at the last moment. Only very recently have I been struck by the parallels with her own childhood in the Dachau house, staging plays in the biggest room with neighbours and friends watching. And sure enough, among the family papers I spotted Vera’s stage notes for Hansel and Gretel, with musical interludes. The story is how things should have turned out for the Neumeyer family: two children cast out of their home, and an encounter with an evil witch who wants to put them in the oven. Virtue triumphs over evil, the parents reappear and the family is together again – and in the opera all the dead children the witch has turned into gingerbread come to life once more.
It’s a grey, chill day in November 2023. My wife Anne and I have ventured to Lohhof, a district of Unterschleissheim, a far-flung dormitory suburb of Munich. It’s not exactly tourist territory. The friendly local who helped us make sure we had the right S-Bahn ticket from central Munich had never heard of it.
The reason we’re here is because of a badly faded photocopy dated 2 April 1965. It’s part of a sworn statement made for my mother Ruth in her compensation case against the Bavarian government for the losses the family had incurred under the Nazis while living in Dachau. The statement concerns my grandmother, Vera Neumeyer (murdered, probably in Auschwitz in 1942). This was given in German by family friend and Dachau resident Aranka Wirsching. Most of the script is now illegible but the word Lohhof is there. “She told me that she had to walk to Lohhof and there had to do manual work. She didn’t tell me about language lessons… [rest of text illegible, on a faded photocopy].“
The line from Aranka Wirsching’s statement saying that Vera Neumeyer was made to go to Lohhof
Lohhof was one of some three hundred places in and around Munich where Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis were made to do slave labour (Zwangsarbeit). A number of Poles who were deported with my grandmother Vera Neumeyer on 13 July 1942 were also working here, and she mentions in a letter that she is learning Polish from some of them. Only a couple of months earlier in 2023 I spot that statement from Aranka Wirsching. After some googling, I then find out that in September 2023, only a few weeks before our visit, a memorial site has been inaugurated at Lohhof, in a modern industrial estate.
I have arranged to meet Veronika Leikauf here. She works at the Munich City Museum and is in charge of the Lohhof memorial project and fills us in with the details. Little was known about the site until about ten years ago when an archive in Berlin revealed the extend of slave labour at Lohhof. There’s now a series of nicely set out and very informative display boards with photos and captions in German. The footway from the station to the former factory site is now a Path of Remembrance, paved with tiny pieces of blue concrete depicting flax flowers, and edging the pavement are metal plates bearing names of some of those forced to work there. Veronika points out the surviving tower and gateway of the otherwise vanished flax factory. We can’t go beyond the entrance, as it’s a private business.
The project isn’t yet complete. Doubtless more names of those who underwent slave labour will emerge – in fact three of the Poles who were deported with Vera are recorded in the Munich archive as being installed at Lohhof aren’t yet listed on the project’s website, in addition to Vera herself.
One of dozens of flower motifs in the pavement marking the route forced labourers took from the railway station to the flax factory at Lohhof. [Click on the arrow to advance the slideshow if you are viewing on a computer rather than a phone]
Memorial information boards near the station
Historic photo of the Lohhof flax factory on one of the information boards
A portion of rail track that once served the flax factory
Veronika and I outside the gate pillars to the former flax factory, with the original tower behind us
Flax newly planted by the final information board
The flax-processing factory opened in 1935 and operated until 1945. Some 200 Munich Jews and 68 Jewish women from the Łódź in Poland ghetto were brought in to work there in summer 1941. In the autumn they were deported and murdered, and the following winter were replaced by others, including men and women from Poland and the Soviet Union.
They had to pluck the flax, soak it in cold water to soften it up and ferment, loosen the fibres from the woody core and chop them up for processing into yarn which was used for a variety of purposes – including uniforms, backpacks tents and ropes for the Wehrmacht and from it oil was extracted for use in the German navy. It was nasty work, very hard on the hands. The workers were there for long hours and beatings were regular. Vera ended up being deported on a Straftransport (‘penal transport’), very probably because she was too weak to work.
They were given a very meagre pay or else nothing in return for the rough existence that constituted ‘board and lodging’, and regularly beaten by the foremen and by the German women who worked there. Transgressions could result in death, and no contact was allowed with the public, who must have been aware of the labourers living on camp and arriving by train daily.
The manager would select older or weaker forced labourers for deportation. By autumn 1942 the Jewish forced labour was disbanded and replaced by workers from elsewhere.
Conditions for those forced to work here were harsh in the extreme. Some 90 workers were housed in a barracks on site but others had to travel in – they were not allowed to ride the tram, so had to undertake a long walk to the station in Munich: some Jewish forced labourers travelled from the assembly camp of Milbertshofen. One survivor reminisced that she had to walk five to six hours in addition to the long working day. ‘In the evening I just fall into bed, I’m so tired. Hopefully it won’t take too long, because I can’t go on for much longer.’
The Lohhof memorial website denkmal-lohhof.de has a wealth of information and photos of the flax factory.
There’s work underway to increase awareness of the 300 or so places where slave labour was carried out under the Nazis. Not a lot is known about many of them. Certainly local people would have been aware of the fact that people were being brought in as labourers on a daily basis.
Berg-am-Laim: where Vera spent her last Munich days
That afternoon we cross over Munich to emerge at Josephsburg U-Bahn station, in the eastern suburb of Berg-am-Laim. Near here, the former Kloster der Barmherzigen Schwestern (Sisters of Mercy) monastery, which was used by the Nazis as one of two assembly camps in the city (the other being Milbertshofen) for those awaiting eventual deportation.
The Neumeyers’ former lodger and great friend Julius Kohn, nicknamed ‘Onki’ by the family. He was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.
I’ve been steered here by two bits of information. First, the Munich City Archive website, which states that Julius Kohn, the Neumeyers’ lodger and friend who was known to the family as ‘Onki’, was incarcerated here from 29 June 1942. And second, a letter from Vera dated 10 July 1942, three days before her deportation, stating ‘We’re leaving on Monday morning. Onki is here, but put on reserve.’ That confirms Onki – Julius Kohn – and Vera were in the same place: the Sisters of Mercy Monastery in Clemens August Strasse, Berg-am-Laim.
We don’t have precise dates as to when Vera was working at Lohhof, and when she was moved from the apartment she was sharing with the Köbner family at Thorwaldsenstrasse, in the western suburbs, to this assembly camp. She was also at some time doing slave labour in a market garden in the southern suburbs.
A typed Nazi document records that of the 50 who were deported on 13 July 1942, 27 were at Clemens August Strasse and six were actually living in the barracks at Lohhof. Vera’s address is still given as Thorwaldsenstrasse, where she had been since late 1938 or early 1939, but in the light of the article quoted above this does not seem to be correct, and she had moved – perhaps only days before her deportation – to Clemens August Strasse.
We wander along the narrow street, and St Michael’s Church (Pfarrkirche St-Michael) comes into view. Only when we reach the entrance do we spot the former gateway, an art nouveau structure – presumably dating from around 1900. It’s blocked by a huge stone cube and we notice the Star of David carved in the bottom corner with the dates 1941-43. There’s no explanation about what it is. No one is around, but others have placed stones on the top as a memorial, so I do the same.
Inside the grounds, the former monastery buildings now house a home for the elderly. In the middle is the church: the door is open and inside is a real surprise – a magnificent baroque interior by the great church designer Johann Michael Fischer. The whole place seems almost bizarrely benign in its tranquility: not a hint of what happened there during 1941-43.
The poignancy of a mere street sign: Clemens-August Strasse, where hundreds were detained between 1941 and 1943
Approaching the former Sisters of Mercy monastery
The memorial outside the monastery grounds: a huge stone cube blocking the former entrance
Detail on the memorial: a Star of David with the dates 1941-43
Next to the stone memorial, this plaque remembers Dr Else Behrend Rosenfeld, who worked as a Jewish social worker and was in charge at Clemens-August Strasse. Fearing deportation, she went underground in Berlin in 1942, then fled to Switzerland, where she published her diary in 1945, describing her experiences under the Nazis
The Sisters of Mercy monastery, Clemens-August Strasse, Berg-am-Laim. It is now a retirement home.
The monastery church, with decoration by the renowned baroque architect Fischer
Alois Weiner: the great mutual friend
My uncle Raymond wrote to his sister (my mother) Ruth while stationed with the British army in Germany – he managed to get leave to visit Munich and Dachau in November 1946. While there he went to visit Alois Weiner in Moosburg and the two of them got on very well. It was the first time they had met.
Alois, Raymond recorded in a letter to Ruth, was with Vera’s husband Hans and her father Martin in Theresienstadt. Only Alois survived.
I look at that very long letter of Raymond’s from November 1946: one important detail has until now eluded me – ‘Er erzählte mir vieles über Mutter – er hat mit ihr vor der Deportierung in Lohhof arbeiten müssen.’ – ‘he (Alois) tells me a lot about Mother – he was made to work with her in Lohhof before deportation’. So they were both there, together: further confirmation that she was there.
Part of Raymond’s 18-page letter to Ruth in November 1946, describing his meeting with Alois Weiner, a man who befriended Vera just before her deportation and Hans while in Theresienstadt. Alois tells him that he and Vera were together in Lohhof (on the fourth line is the word Lohof [sic]).
Alois was from Moosburg in Bavaria, and survived Theresienstadt, returning to his home town after liberation in 1945, where he took part in the democratic reconstruction of municipality and became deputy mayor. He died in 1953.
Alois Weiner
Alois’ shop in Moosburg
Alois’ photo on his identity card
Alois wrote to a mutual family friend Gustav Güldenstein in July 1946 with the news that Hans Neumeyer had taught Czech music students in Theresienstadt and died there.
The Munich city archive records that he was at the Sisters of Mercy monastery in Berg-am-Laim immediately before being deported to Theresienstadt.
So that leads me to think this is how it happened: Alois meets Vera, originally either at Lohhof or the Sisters of Mercy Monastery in Berg-am-Laim. They were both at both places, but I don’t know which came first. Vera learns that she will be deported to somewhere in Poland, so starts learning Polish from some of the Poles in Lohhof. She knows also that Alois will be deported five days later than her to Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia, where her former husband Hans was deported the previous month (Vera and Hans divorced in 1941; Hans was having an affair with his secretary Dela, but he and Vera still seem to be on good terms). He is blind so Vera asks Alois to look out for him in Theresienstadt. This Alois does; he is with Hans in the final days of Hans’ life in 1944, and writes to a mutual family friend Gustav Güldenstein after the war with the news of Hans’ death. Alois returns some of Hans’ possessions to Dela, who passes them on to the family. These are two photos of the children (presumably to show to other people, as Hans could not see them) and an extraordinary poem written by his blind sister Irma in Theresienstadt in 1943 which I found among the family papers in 2022.
Back in 2021, when I didn’t know about Vera being at Lohhof with Alois, I made a 11-minute talk about Alois Weiner where I’ve explored the links between him and my grandparents Vera and Hans: you can listen to it here.
Although Hans and Vera had tragic fates, it’s very good to know Alois Weiner touched them with his humanity.
November 8 1938: fifteen Jews evicted by the Nazis from their home town, Dachau. November 8 2023: seven descendants from those people are in Dachau again at the invitation of the town. They are from three former Dachau families: Jamie Hall from the Wallachs, Alex and Mark Tittel from the Jaffés, and Tobias Newland, Stephen and Nic Locke plus myself, Tim Locke, from the Neumeyers.
It is the first time we have all met each other. Our Dachau antecedents lived a few hundred metres from each other: a five-minute stroll along Hermann Stockmannstrasse passes the Stolpersteine (memorial brass plaques) to each of those families. Parts of our families made it out of Nazi Germany to the United Kingdom, which is why we ourselves exist. We’re now geographically dispersed: Jamie in Athens, Alex and Mark in Texas, Nic in New York and Stephen, Tobias and myself in England.
Jamie’s antecedents owned a textile factory in Dachau that supplied the celebrated Wallach store in Munich, selling colourful textiles, dirndls and the like. That came to a catastrophic end under the Nazis, with the family forced to sell the business and Max and his wife Melitta perished in Auschwitz. The Wallach store kept going, and was returned to Wallach ownership until its sale to the Loden-Frey department store in 1983, who kept the Wallach name until the store’s closure in 2004. Jamie has tracked down a huge store of Wallach fabrics in a Bavarian village, and has established the Wallach Project “to preserve, re-tell, and re-imagine the artistic and cultural heritage of the Wallach brother’s company.” Click here to read more. (I have previously posted about the Wallachs on this blog here.)
The memorial statue on the site of the Wallach factory. The women are wearing Wallach textiles.
Click arrow for slide show.
The former Wallach shop in central Munich
Outside the former Munich store is this memorial marker, installed in 2023 in the memory of Melitta and Max Wallach
Detail on the memorial
Jamie’s school workshop on our busy morning on 8 November, with a class of 17-year-olds
Jamie (left) and myself
Trading stamps of pre-Nazi Jewish businesses in Munich: I spotted this display in the Jewish Museum in Munich – the Wallach store is the green stamp, far left in the fourth row, while second from the left in the bottom row is the trading stamp of the Neumeyer clothing store that belonged to Hans’ father Nathan.
Alex and his brother Mark Tittel are the great grandchildren of Alice Jaffé and grand nephews of Johanna Jaffé, both of whom were residents of Dachau during the 1930s. Their father Frank Tittel (originally named Klaus) who was born in Germany in 1933 is a survivor from those darkest of times. His father, Dr. Heinrich Tittel, who was not Jewish, was killed in an avalanche in Austria during a ski trip in January 1941. Less than 3 months later, Klaus’ two-year-old brother Rolf contracted an ear infection and died after the local hospital in Schweinfurt refused to treat his illness because the mother of Rolf and Klaus, Hilde Tittel (née Jaffé) was Jewish.
Later that same year, Klaus made the grisly discovery of his mother’s lifeless body in the kitchen next to the gas stove Hilde used to end her life after facing an increasing amount of Nazi persecution, including the threat of deportation. His aunt Johanna Jaffé (‘Tante Hanni’) had managed to escape to England in 1939; however, her mother Alice Jaffé was murdered in a Auschwitz in 1944. Tante Hanni successfully pleaded with the British authorities in 1948 to allow Klaus, the orphaned son of her sister, permission to live wither her in England.
Subsequently and to his aunt’s great pride and joy, Klaus was able to get a scholarship to attend Oxford University where he earned a PhD in physics and would later became a pioneer in laser research and a distinguished professor of Electrical Engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Letter sent in 1948 by Johanna Jaffé to ask the Home Office to allow her nephew Klaus Tittel for permanent residence in England
Alex’s and Mark’s great-grandmother, Alice Jaffé, born 1875
Alice with her daughters Hanni and Hilde, 1920
Alice’s photo on her identity card. She was deported in 1942 and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944
Hanni (Johanna) as a young woman in 1919
Hanni with Klaus in 1937
Hanni and Klaus in 1983. Hanni was then living in Chedworth, Gloucestershire and for some time ran a tea room there
Face to face with the town
The seven of us spend the morning of our final day giving hour-long presentations/workshops – different ones for each of the Tittels, Jaffés and Neumeyers – to classes of schoolchildren: ours were all 15 years of age – the same age as our mother Ruth when she came to England with her brother Raymond on a Kindertransport, leaving their parents behind on the platform of Munich Hauptbahnhof at midnight on 9 May 1939. We deliver the presentation in German. A large proportion of our attentive audience are refugee children. One is from a family that had to flee from the war in Bosnia, another from Albania, whose family escaped to Greece where they were forced to take up the Greek Orthodox religion.
That evening we’re in the Ludwig-Thoma Haus conference centre in Dachau, with the local MP, mayor, press and over a hundred members of the public. Pupils from the Josef Effner High School read the audience to the stories of the three families. Those children who escaped to Britain along with Ruth and Raymond Neumeyer were Jamie’s grandfather Franz Wallach (who later changed his name to Frank Wallace) and Johanna Jaffé, the great aunt of Alex and Mark, whose father Frank himself is still alive but was too frail to travel to this event.
I can only fully agree with Abba Naor when he says that a Palestinian mother mourns for her child just as much as does an Israeli mother. And yet against the backdrop of the mass murder of European Jews carried out by Germany, it is also our duty to clearly state from whom the terror against Israel, from whom the massacres of completely innocent women, men and children were carried out with bestial brutality on 7 October 2023. Hamas alone bears responsibility for this and for the current war, just as Germany bore responsibility for the Second World War and the Shoah, and thus ultimately also for the civilian victims of the Allied war against Hitler’s Germany. My appeal to all of you here and also to the pupils present is that we must always keep these connections in mind. It began in 1938 with pogroms and ended in 1945 with the mass extermination of 6 million people. This must never be allowed to happen again.
Extract of the speech given by Florian Hartmann, Mayor of Dachau, introducing the seven of us to the stage
Wreath laying outside Dachau Rathaus (Town Hall). The woman by the wreath is in Bavarian dress made from textiles from the Wallach factory
The audience for the panel event
After our school workshops, we sign off a publication about Vera Neumeyer’s story, meticulously researched by Sara Brunner and Sabine Gerhardus. The memorial sheet was created as part of the “Remembering Project” of the Bavarian Teachers’ Association (BLLV) and the history workshop in the Dachau district.
The memorial outside the town hall in Dachau to the Jewish inhabitants who perished in the Holocaust: Julius Kohn, Max Wallach, Melly Wallach, Hans Neumeyer and Vera Neumeyer
The seven of us go on stage, along with the chairman, Jürgen Müller Hohagen. We know Jürgen well: he met Ruth and Nic back in 2005 when Stolpersteine were being installed outside the Neumeyer house, which coincidentally is immediately next door to the pretty villa he lives in with his wife Ingeborg. He is a psychotherapist, and since moving to Dachau some years ago has a specialism in the effects of the Holocaust on the human psyche. His questions stimulate lengthy answers from us all – we speak in English and he paraphrases into German, though most of the audience seem to get what we say.
He asks us to single out family members who perished in the Holocaust. I slightly circumvent the question by recollecting both my grandparents. I never met them, of course, but they had a vast presence in our house in Sydenham, where I was born and grew up. The photo of Vera was in a frame by my mother’s bed, her beautiful face among two other pictures – a postcard of Dachau and the outside of the Neumeyer house. Upstairs in the often chilly, uninhabited sewing room at the top of our strangely rambling house was the pen and ink portrait of a benign-looking man in dark glasses, whom I learnt was Hans; his blindness terrified me from an early age.
In a moving panel discussion, the descendants of three former Dachau families, Jaffé, Wallach and Neumeyer, spoke about their persecuted parents, grandparents and great-grandparents and also about how they themselves live with the legacy of these difficult memories.
The conversation was moderated with a lot of empathy by the Dachau psychotherapist Jürgen Müller-Hohagen, who that evening saw himself “first and foremost as a neighbor”: He and his wife Ingeborg live next to the Neumeyers’ former home. Both have been in contact with the descendants of those expelled from Dachau for years and looked after the guests during the three days of their visit to Dachau.
This personal, friendly relationship and Müller-Hohagen’s expertise in the effects of persecution-related trauma that last generations created an atmosphere in which the descendants could also talk about painful memories. It was a very special evening that made it clear that the work of remembrance has lost none of its necessity and relevance.
Sabine Gerhardus of the Dachauer Forum, who posted this on the Forum’s blog.
When Jürgen asks us how we learned what had happened to our families, we all have the same sort of response: it was gradual, we only learnt fitfully, no one ever sat down and told us the whole story at once, and survivors wanted to put the past behind them and not talk about it. Nic mentions whispered conversations in German. In my case I was always aware of a German connection – our house was full of German books and other objects, there were German relatives and we had German-style Christmases. But I didn’t get the picture at all until I was about nine, when playing some war game with various boys – England against the Germans – and one of them said ‘I hate Germans’. My friend Peter, whose parents had obviously found out more by talking with my own parents, said ‘don’t say that, as Tim’s mother is German and she had to escape from the Nazis on a train to England’.
Thereafter things slotted into place very gradually, but was made much easier when Hans Holzhaider, a journalist from the Sud Deutsche Zeitung, came to England in the mid 1980s and interviewed Ruth and Raymond while preparing for his breakthrough book about the Dachau Jews who were thrown out of town that darkest of nights in November 1938 – Vor Sonnenaufgang (Leave Before Sunrise). After that she found it easier to speak about what had happened: she would tell us the facts when we asked about them. But the emotions of what she suffered were locked away, like the letters from her parents, locked away in the trunk on the landing of our house. I confessed to the audience that I’d once opened that trunk in her lifetime, when she was out of the house, and found the transcription of the letter Vera wrote on the train as she was being deported to whatever destination in Nazi-occupied Poland (most likely Auschwitz, or possibly Warsaw).
Press coverage
The stories waft around the stage for almost an hour and a half. There is no clear structure, the microphones have dropouts, and mostly English is spoken, sometimes German, but none of that matters. On the contrary, it suits this attempt to find words where darkness and the patina of many decades often obscure the memories. But not everything reported on this stage is dark. In his intensive examination of his parents’ history and the material they left behind, he realized that “the Holocaust affected people who were pretty normal,” says Stephen Locke. His grandfather Hans Neumeyer was a man who liked to go hiking and laughed a lot. A blind music teacher who was still composing even in the Theresienstadt ghetto…
…The evening could go on forever. The stories are probably never finished. And yet, shortly before the end, the entourage on stage turns back to the present. Müller-Hohagen asks how the guests see the world now. Stephen Locke answers without beating around the bush and in German that his view of Germany today is a positive one. Despite everything, he has become one of its defenders. There is a burst of applause, almost as if the audience is relieved at a little absolution. But the present is not one that promises relief. Nicolas Locke agrees. “The consequences of the Holocaust never end,” he says. “In the Middle East, two powers are trying to destroy each other. Without any sense.” The only way out of this eternal repetition is the unconditional recognition of others for what they are: human beings. And although the perfect final sentence seems to have already been spoken, his brother Tim digs up a quote from his grandfather Hans out of his long-term memory. Hans’ story taught him one principle, he says: “Not to hate”. Not to hate.
Sud Deutsche Zeitung: Landkreis Dachau. Click here to read the full article in English.
“The lively dialogue, delivered in English, shows that many of those affected have never spoken to their families about what happened. It is all the more important that the descendants agree to do remembrance work for their families so that this part of the past is not lost.”
Münchener Merkur: (click here to view the full article).
The panel event at the Ludwig-Thoma centre, Dachau. Left to right: Jürgen Müller-Hohagen (chair), Jamie Hall, Stephen Locke, Tim Locke, Nic Locke, Tobias Newland, Alex Tittel, Mark Tittel
Finales
We dine late into the night at the Italian restaurant across the road, with acquaintances old and new from the town: I sit next to Björn Mensing, the pastor of the Chapel of Reconciliation at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial – he has had that job since 2005, and very early in that job he met Nic and our mother Ruth. We’ve remade acquaintances with Tobias Schneider and Tanja Jörgensen-Leuthner from the Kulturamt who sorted out all the details of the trip, as they did when we last visited in 2018. At this finale dinner there’s a wonderful atmosphere of bonhomie, and in the impromptu speeches the Mayor Florian Hartmann says it’s like a family reunion.
An events organiser from the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial said the panel discussion was the best event at the Dachau November commemorations for many years.
And Jürgen emails us afterwards with the following anecdote about what happened a day or so after we’d left:
I would like to describe something very special: In our bakery, a young shop assistant whom I had never seen before suddenly spoke to me: “Aren’t you the one who spoke at Ludwig-Thoma Haus the other day? I only recognised your voice because I was sitting in the back row with my friend. What was said there was so good. It gave us goose bumps.” Wow! I asked her if she wanted to tell me her age. “Eighteen.” Wow again! So young and such a reaction! That gives us hope. That’s what I said to her.
Losing the Neumeyer family home and its contents, loss of livelihoods, arrest and murder of my grandparents Hans and Vera Neumeyer as well as Vera’s father Martin, wearing the yellow star and loss of education: these were all subjects of a long correspondence with lawyers that, unknown to me, stretched into my childhood. All I knew was that my mother Ruth and my uncle Raymond had managed to get some compensation after the war from the Bavarian State Compensation Office.
What wasn’t covered by compensation was the mental suffering through the emotional loss of having parents murdered and having to flee the country. The money offered was based on quite narrow assumptions of loss of earning power and material objects.
I have to confess steering clear of the contents of a file of legal papers, which superficially promised little. However, sorting through them and getting translations (some of them rather rough and approximate) cast new light on the family story.
The legal letters span 21 years, from 1950 to 1971, with the bulk of the correspondence in the 1960s. A number are missing, and only in a few cases do I have a draft of what Ruth wrote – typically on the back of an envelope – to her London-based lawyer George Cohn, who corresponded with the Munich lawyer Georg Ott, who was acting on behalf of the state. I can only guess at the frustration and anguish the whole slog must have caused Ruth and Raymond – but they did get something for their efforts.
There are requests for affidavits and all sorts of evidence – how Ruth’s and Raymond’s education in Dachau was curtailed, how Ruth had to train in caring for small children in Cambridge, evidence from witnesses as to the contents of the house and of Hans and Vera Neumeyer’s reduced earning capacity after 1933.
Numerous challenges were made to Ruth’s case, such as this :
I have the affidavit sent to me submitted to the Bavarian State Compensation Office. During an interview, the clerk responsible explained to me that the documents handed over so far did not prove that the persecution took place on racial grounds.
Reply to an affidavit Ruth made in 1962 about her loss of education in Dachau
What they claimed
The house On 9 November 1938 Nazi authorities forced the Neumeyer family to leave their home at Herman Stockmannstrasse 10 in Dachau. My grandfather Hans Neumeyer was made to pay for costs of repairs, and the contents were lost forever. In 1950: the Restitution Authority of Upper Bavaria ordered 10,000 Deutschmarks (£850) compensation to be paid to Ruth and Raymond who were officially recognised as heirs to the house, now occupied by Martina Mayer. The first 1,000 Deutschmarks were to be paid straight away and the rest annually with a 5% interest rate added, and a wealth tax of 7.5% subtracted from the amount and the interest. This is the earliest legal letter, and seems to have been quite straightforward.
Hans’ loss of freedom In 1959 damages for Hans Neumeyer’s loss of freedom was assessed as 4,800 Deutschmarks , calculated from the time of the wearing of the yellow star and the time of imprisonment from September 19, 1941 to his death in Theresienstadt on May 19, 1944 and a request for the certificate of inheritance from Vera so that damages for her loss of freedom can be claimed.
Martin’s persecution One of the saddest documents in the large file itemises the compensation in August 1962 of 450 Deutschmarks for Vera’s father, Martin Ephraim – once a very wealthy benefactor and patriotic German, murdered in Theresienstadt at the age of 84 – presumably the low valuation was based on his old age. Five beneficiaries were awarded 90 Deutschmarks (just under £9) each:
The award of just 450 Deutschmarks, split among five beneficiaries for Martin Ephraim’s persecution (click on arrow for second page)
The stark facts: imprisonment in Berlin, wearing the yellow star and deportation to Theresienstadt
Haft (= imprisoned) in Berlin 1942 – 7 days
Sterntragen (= wearing yellow star) in Berlin from 7 January to 6 April – 2 months 7 days
Deportation to Theresienstadt 1944
Total = 3 months, 6 days
Personal financial loss More bad news followed in 1962, as the Munich lawyer Georg Ott explained:
Since you had to emigrate at a very young age, there is hardly any personal financial loss. You are only eligible for compensation if it amounts to at least 500 Deutschmarks. Unfortunately, the office has already rejected your brother Raymond Newland’s educational damage.
Loss of Vera’s professional advancement For Vera, who was deported to an unknown destination in Nazi-occupied Poland (probably Auschwitz or Warsaw) in July 1942 compensation arrived 23 years later, in 1965: 6,000 Deutschmarks for her loss of professional advancement. We have no record of compensation for her arrest and having to wear the yellow star: if it happened, that letter is lost.
Loss of education Also in 1965 Ruth received 5,000 Deutschmarks for loss of training: she had really wanted to paint stage scenery but was denied that career. Happily in 1950 she attended the Canterbury School of Art, and so managed to realise that part of her dream.
Forfeiture of Munich property A payment of 23,000 Deutschmarks made in 1966 for land or a building in the Munich suburb of Grosshadern was paid in 1966. This had been owned as Hans – perhaps as an office or a teaching room – but I know nothing else about it.
Loss of house contents In November 1962, a claim for loss and damage to property and assets within the house was rejected as Ruth and Raymond failed to submit evidence before the deadline.
Quite what happened to the claim for the contents of the house is unclear. Ruth put in a claim but missed a deadline. Ruth appealed, though I don’t know on what grounds.
The probability speaks for the fact that a large part of the extensive furnishings had to be left behind in the Dachau house and were lost there due to a lack of supervision.
As heirs, the plaintiffs require proof of the whereabouts of the furniture left behind by husband and wife Neumeyer.
In her affidavit dated February 14, 1967, Ms. Locke made credible statements regarding the fate of the furniture. Apparently, the Bavarian State Compensation Office did not take this sufficiently into account. It is clear from the testimonies that there were two grand pianos. It contradicts every life experience that a grand piano was placed with friends. As is well known, the transport of a grand piano is only carried out by special transport companies. So, at least one grand piano remained in the house in Dachau. Surely this was not the only item of furniture. Everything indicates that objects had to be left behind when the family moved in great haste.
Letter reporting the decision, 18 September 1967
Evidence and testimony
Here I have picked out some of the most illuminating statements that were made for the claim.
What happened to Ruth
Several new bits of information here. Testimony states how she moved from the Klosterschule (convent school) in Dachau to another school Obermenzing (a short distance out of town) but she was bullied for being Jewish under Nazi law, and returned to Dachau. After Jewish children were barred from schools in 1938, nuns at the Klosterschule secretly gave her lessons. Also the date Hans was offered a post at the Academy of Music in Munich is confirmed as 1935 (not 1933, as I had originally supposed):
It was about this time [1933] that economic difficulties between races began for both parents, since they taught privately and only the most loyal and strongest of the students went with them continued to study. However, the difficulties only became public in 1935, when my father had to turn down the offer to become a professor at the music academy.
After about a year I also left the school in Obermenzing, as it was under quite a lot of Nazi influence. In Dachau I attended the newly created Protestant school, which had a short lifespan and where my brother and I were often expelled from school functions, with [Hitler Youth] shouting and throwing stones at us.
The last school year took place in the same convent school where my school life had started. The sisters suffered visibly from the various prohibitions they had to assign me. At the beginning of 1938 they advised me to come to them only at night, which I did for a few months. It is easy to see from this that further training was then impossible. Unfortunately, I have no proof of these times. At most, a few who stayed behind could vouch for it.
Draft of letter from Ruth, 1962
Above: Ruth (far left, front row) at school in Dachau, c.1935)
This affidavit from Ruth gives a succinct summary of her life in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939 and the her training in England:
I, Ruth Locke, née Neumeyer, born 1923 in Dachau, attended the elementary school from 1931 to 1938. Since from 1933 my parents were no longer allowed to practise their professions in music theory, they were unable financially to send me to a secondary school in Munich in 1935. It was then planned that it should continue with my education after 8 years of elementary school on the junior high school in Munich. However, it was no longer possible to visit any schools after a Nazi attack in our home where they threw out participants and audience of a theatrical performance. I had some lessons in secret at night with the nuns in the monastery, until we were then thrown out in November 1938 overnight from our house.
Until May 1939 we lived in Munich mostly in hiding among different people until we then managed to emigrate with a children’s transport to England. I immediately attended the Hall School in Weybridge. After the outbreak of war, this school was evacuated to the countryside and I to Cambridge, where I hoped to do my Matric exam with the help of private friends. I would very much have liked to have trained eventually in an art school for stage painting, so I also took private lessons in drawing.
In April 1941, however, these plans were thwarted. The Refugee Children’s Committee considered it better that foreigners should be educated in the home school. That’s why I had to stop everything again and visit a household school for some time and then, as provisionally, go through a course for nursing sisters. Because of the war conditions, I was only able to continue working in the nursery school. Later, in 1949, I accepted the offer to attend an emergency training for teachers set up by the State.
All of these were temporary, provisional measures that in no way corresponded to my original intention to study art as my life’s career, which my parents, who were murdered by the Nazis, had in mind for me and which was repeatedly prevented by tragic circumstances.
Ruth arrived with Raymond on a Kindertransport in May 1939, initially staying in with the Eckhard family Weybridge. In 1940 she moved to another branch of the family in Cambridge, where training was organised by the Cambridge Refugee Children’s Committee, led by the formidably energetic Greta Burkill, who had arranged for hundreds of refugees to enter Britain, including those arriving on a Kindertransport. Greta gave this reference in 1960, confirming Ruth’s nursery training:
I hereby confirm that Ruth, now Mrs Locke, was in the care of the Cambridge Refugee Children’s Committee when she arrived in England in September 1939. She lived with Mr and Mrs Stirland and had private lessons. In April 1941 she attended the household school in St Chads, for the further education of refugee girls which our committee had founded. She attended this school until November 1941, where she passed her final exam. Then she briefly helped Mrs Cole, 5 St Peter’s Terrace, while the committee for Ruth arranged the visit to Wellgarth, at reduced study fees, which were paid by guarantors.
She started this training on December 3, 1941, and carried it out. In April 1943 Ruth returned to Cambridge and took a position in the day care centre for small children.
What was lost from the house
Ruth stated that the various household effects were housed with various friends and a lot of it was destroyed during air raids on Munich. It is unclear how much if anything was successfully claimed. It was suggested that some items might have been sold off before the house was seized. There were originally two grand pianos, but the office could not accept that the Bechstein had been moved from Dachau to the the Köbners’ apartment Thorwaldsenstrasse in Munich, where the Neumeyers lived from late 1938 until Hans and Vera were deported from there in summer 1942.
We were no longer allowed by the Dachau authorities in November 1938 to live in our house in Dachau. My parents were later given permission to come back for one day to take some bare necessities from the house. Some furniture was stowed away in Munich, was completely destroyed during the war by air raids and other actions. Only one grand piano is said to survive, with one of my father’s students. Any precious metals more than two pieces per person we owned had to be handed in.
Statement from Ruth
Vera’s sister Marianne (known as Janni) survived the war and made a statement (not in my possession) describing the contents of the house. We have some excellent detail provided by Raymond supplementing what his aunt had reported:
The living room furniture was made to the best of our knowledge at least partly from lemon wood or with lemon wood. It was all in prime condition but its age is unknown to us. A considerable part of the furniture of the whole house was most likely acquired by my parents in the 1920s and 1930s, but there were also a greater number of antiques among them; this applies especially to the mentioned showcase, the buffet, the desk and some chests and cupboards. The mentioned “girls room” owed its name not to the fact that it was inhabited by our maids, but that it contained a part of the furniture that brought my mother from her girlhood in the marriage. The bedroom set also included a small table and desk; this furniture was in the Biedermeier style but whether real or imitation I cannot say.
Some additions to my aunt’s composition: we had two French stoves in the style of Louis Quinze and at least one stone sculpture, about 25 cm high, which stood on a pedestal in the studio room. My mother had a taste for cut glass – in the mentioned buffet stood a large number of conical wine and liqueur glasses and decanters, etc.
There was also blown and coloured glass in the Venetian style – I remember especially coloured vases and a magnificent blue sugar bowl. Of course, we have no way of accurately assessing the value of household effects because we were still children at the time and because we do not have the necessary expertise. However, we should emphasise that both parents came from decidedly wealthy backgrounds and brought much into the marriage and later still when the households of the grandparents were dissolved. In addition there is the artistic disposition, especially from my mother, to conclude that among the things was hardly anything without aesthetic value.
Part of the household was in our last apartment in Munich (Thorwaldsenstrasse 5) from where my parents were deported in 1942. The remainder was put to the best of our knowledge among various acquaintances. We have never heard of details because the correspondence with our parents after the outbreak of the war was limited to censored telegram-like news about the Red Cross. In the postwar years 1946-1952 we found only a smaller number of garments books and notes with those acquaintances whose addresses we had. What has become of the majority of the household, including that left in Thorwaldsenstrasse 5, we have never been able to find out.
Hans’s secretary Dela stayed on in Thorwaldsenstrasse after his deportation, and created this list of possessions stored in the apartment. The list only came to light after its discovery in Sweden in 2021. Did some or perhaps all of these belong to the Neumeyers?
The inventory of objects owned by Dela Blakmar. (Click on arrow to view slide show)
Raymond then scored an own goal by making this statement, which effectively admits that the Nazis did not take these items from the house in Dachau:
After we were expelled from Dachau, the furniture and household effects from our house in Dachau were housed at various places, and a large part of it was destroyed during more serious air raids on Munich. Among these items was a Bechstein grand piano. It was part of the furniture and household effects in our two-room apartment in Thorwaldsenstrasse and had to be abandoned at the time of my parents’ arrest.
Vera’s work as a teacher
Marianne confirmed Vera wrote and composed songs and rhythmic games used in student performances and ran courses in Munich, Genoa, Rome and Schreiberhau, as well as training classes at Catholic nursing colleges. This is the first evidence I have had that Vera composed music.
Another new piece of information is in the form of a handwritten note from Ruth lists testimonials from seminaries written in 1938 and sent to her lawyer: St Elisabeth Anstalt in Bamberg (closed by Nazis in 1941), Maria Ward Schule in Wurzburg (dissolved by Nazis in 1938), the Kindergarten der armen Schulschwestern, Niedermünster in Regensburg (dissolved by Nazis 1938), and a seminary in Aschaffenburg.
Vera with a eurythmics class for children in Dachau; Ruth is fourth from the right
Three Dachau friends gave evidence to the Bavarian State Compensation Office about Vera’s work:
Aranka Wirsching, a family friend who lived in the oldest house in Dachau. Ruth wrote to the British authorities after the war to defend her son Anselm from accusations of being a Nazi. He had been in military service and a POW in Egypt. Her evidence tells us that she was also a pupil of Vera’s, and that Vera also taught piano, which I was not aware of.
The major piece of new evidence here is that Vera did slave labour at Lohhof, the notorious flax roasting works outside Munich where she would have been for long hours each day and under atrocious conditions. Previously all I knew that she worked in market gardening in Munich and that some of the people she was deported with had been at Lohhof.
I was the first student of the Dalcroze rhythmic gymnastics system for the deceased. I therefore know that the deceased gave lessons from 1924 onwards. I believe their business was at its peak around 1931.
In the course I took part in from 1927, there were 6-8 students. Participation in the lessons was so lively that we were able to approach each other and then the next participants came. We in Dachau had the courses in the mornings, in the afternoons the deceased drove to Munich.
The deceased also gave piano lessons. From 1927 to 1936 I sent girls from my teaching household there to give piano lessons. I remember that the girls were very enthusiastic about the musical and rhythmic style of the deceased.
I paid 2RM for the gymnastics lesson. I don’t know the price for the piano lessons because the girls paid for them themselves. From 1933 to 1938 times were very bad. I still remember that the deceased was afraid she had to go because the children were being bullied while they were on the street. From 1938 the deceased gave no lessons. She only told me that she was going to teach nuns in Munich and that the nuns were very enthusiastic about her. The deceased informed me of this under the seal of secrecy. Between 1940 and 1942 I visited the deceased once in her apartment in Thorwaldsenstrasse.
She told me that she had to walk to Lohhof and there had to do manual work. She didn’t tell me about language lessons… [rest of text illegible, on a faded photocopy].
It was also known throughout the city that in the years 1935/1936 the mayor at the time, Dobler, broke into the house of the deceased and disturbed a celebration, probably a Christmas party. This caused a great stir in Dachau at the time. There were anti-Semitic statements. As far as I can remember the deceased moved away in 1938. Whether her husband left by then, too, I cannot say. It was my personal impression that the deceased’s work did not generate much income, but enough to enable her to live as a family with her husband and children. I still remember that a kind of domestic help was often to be seen there.
The Neumeyer family enjoyed great respect in Dachau, they were very popular because they were very friendly and approachable.
The Lohhof flax-processing factory in 1937 (Stadtarchiv München)
Anni Broschart, a girlhood friend of Ruth’s, who mentions ‘the incident with the then major Dobler’ when Nazis burst into the house when a children’s play was being performed, shouted to the audience ‘aren’t you ashamed to be in the house of a Jew?’ and arrested the lodge Julius Kohn, taking him to Dachau concentration camp. We learn here that Anni also took eurythmics/rhythmic gymnastics lessons from Vera:
I was in the same elementary school class with the daughter of the deceased, Ruth. That’s why we got to know each other. At first our acquaintanceship was more sporadic, but over time it became more solid.
I also frequented the Neumeyer home and was therefore also actively involved in the 1933 Christmas play. As far as I can remember, such plays took place three more times.
The incident with the then mayor Dobler is only known to me insofar as the participants in the Christmas play were already in costume waiting for the instructions to begin. Suddenly, dismay was felt among the spectators, most of whom were the children’s parents, and I learned that the plays were banned.
Anni Broschart (right) with Raymond, around 1930
I am quite certain that I received piano lessons from the deceased from the beginning of 1934 when the deceased left Dachau. I worked an hour every week and had to pay 1.50 Reichsmarks for it.
I was also involved in learning rhythmic gymnastics. However, after 1934 I no longer had time for these lessons, because I then went to secondary school. From 1934 I only took piano lessons.
I still remember with certainty that in 1935 I once again took part in rhythmic exercises that were performed in Munich in front of the nuns of the Order. I attended the Lyceum of the Servite nuns in Munich.
I would like to add that in the end the situation had become dangerous for the deceased. She once said to me that she shouldn’t let herself be caught doing rounds. So she came to my house alternately, sometimes I went back to her house.
Anna Kürzinger, who acted as the nanny for the family and was also a close friend:
From April 1930 to October 1935 I was employed by the Neumeyer family as a nanny. I received the money from the deceased.
I received 15 Reichsmarks, most recently 30 RM a month. I had Sundays off and was busy from 7am to 7pm on other days.
I don’t know how many students the deceased had and how many lessons she gave. But I can say that she had lessons every day. She drove to Munich every day to give lessons there. I know that the deceased lived in a certain way because of the constant change.
I well remember that the deceased gave me the fees for gymnastics and piano lessons several times, but unfortunately I forgot these figures. When it is pointed out to me that the witness Broschart only paid 1.50 RM for the piano lessons, I would like to point out that the deceased was very accommodating towards others, especially since Miss Broschart played with her daughter Ruth.
I lost my position at Neumeyers because they were no longer allowed to employ me.
With the best will in the world, I can no longer give any information about the number of students. I only know that the deceased was quite busy until 1933, starting at 9:00 am.
Anna Kürzinger, with an unknown small child
Later, the number of students also decreased.
[She presented a letter from the deceased dated 30.9. 1941, stating that Vera worked doing market gardening in Neubiberg 12 hours a day from 7am and could only give a few private lessons at the weekends. From the letter it can be seen that the deceased worked in a garden centre in Neubiberg from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and that was only able to give a few private lessons on Saturdays and Sundays. She had to wear the Star of David.]
I have another letter which shows that the deceased received 35-45 pfennigs an hour. The deceased also gave lessons to individual well-to-do people.
Upon further questioning: I remember that the plaintiff spoke about a divorce. She thought it would make things easier.
I know that Herr Neumeyer was wealthy by birth and that the family could therefore afford a good standard of living.
Spending the legacy
My parents lived frugally, with five of us based in a house in what was then inexpensive southeast London on my father’s teaching salary. They had something of a fatalistic and disapproving attitude to money. Ruth’s dislike of ostentatious wealth was very likely linked up to the history that the family once had a lot of it but it had all gone, first through the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s with the sale of her grandparents’ villa in Görlitz and then with the systematic seizure of family property by the Nazis.
Revisiting the German Alps, 1967 – Ruth is on the right: the simple mountain hut called Berghäusle. I am in the red top, on the roof.
The compensation of course did not make up for the loss of four family members to the Holocaust and the upheaval that followed, but must have been a welcome boon for Ruth and Raymond. We did have some very special family holidays using this money, including two to Germany.
In 1966 we stayed at an idyllically simple Alpine mountain hut named the ‘Berghäusle’, lit by oil lamps and with just a chemical loo, all alone on a hillside above the town of Sonthofen and looking into the high peaks of Austria. Absolute perfection for Ruth, whose happiest memories of Germany tended to be of the mountains.
We revisited the same spot the following year, after a couple of weeks in a huge village farmhouse in the Taunus. The latter was a house exchange with the Martens, an extremely compatible family who became close friends after we met in Germany at the end of our respective stays. Gero Marten had served in the German army in the Second World War, at the end of which he swam across a river to surrender to the Americans rather than be taken by the Russians, and subsequently settled in America and married an American, Linde. My parents got on extraordinarily well with Gero and Linde and we shared a later holiday in Norfolk with the family.
We also spent a few days at the end of our 1967 trip in Dachau with Anselm Wirsching and his family in the oldest house in town (the Pollnhof). There Ruth re-established contact with Anna Kürzinger and the Steurers, and had a brief look inside one of the apartments converted from the former Neumeyer house.
The Neumeyer family photo album is full of happy pictures of a seemingly idyllic life, a childhood to cherish: walks in the mountains, playing in the garden, dressing up for home-made theatricals. Strange as it may now seem, Dachau was a good place to grow up before the impending catastrophe of the Third Reich. The town’s name was not yet tainted: it was primarily known as an artists’ colony.
There’s tantalisingly little in the extensive family archive about the early years of darkness, in particular when Hitler came to power ninety years ago, in 1933. My mother Ruth said to me that her parents told her and Raimund (then aged nine and eight respectively) “Don’t worry, nothing will happen to us. We’re not rich, or important, or Jewish”.
They wouldn’t have been the only ones who thought things would soon blow over but who later suffered terrible fates under the Nazis.
Ruth and Raimund at this early age probably thought themselves safe at the time – brought up as Lutheran by their Lutheran mother Vera, whose father was Jewish but whose mother was of non-Jewish descent (and also Lutheran). But their father Hans was fully Jewish, and things took a turn for the worse almost immediately.
The Neumeyers walking in the Alps in the early 1930s, probably near Garmisch: left to right – Hans (my grandfather), Ruth (my mother), Vera (my grandmother) and Raimund (my uncle; he anglicised his name to Raymond Newland when he joined the British army in 1943)
Dachau in early 1933 would have been a peaceful, rather sleepy town. It wasn’t at all pro-Nazi: socialists and communists were much more in evidence.
When the Nazis attempted to hold a meeting in the Hörhammerbräu inn, Rudolf Hess was prevented from making a speech as the socialists and communists took over, barring anyone else entering and booing Hess off stage.
The town’s Jewish population was tiny – fewer than 20 – and there doesn’t seem to have been any bad feeling towards them from others. The Neumeyers had many local friends, and just up the road their Jewish near-neighbours the Wallachs owned a flourishing textile factory that produced hugely popular folksy items sold in the Wallachs’ Munich store.
A prewar postcard view of Dachau, showing the old town clustered beneath the onion dome of the Jacobskirche (St James’ Church)
The elections and the Nazi takeover
The political landscape was changing rapidly. On 30 January, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, heading a coalition government, two days before the Reichstag (the German parliament) was suspended. During February, decrees imposed restrictions on freedoms of assembly and of the press, as well as allowing the arrest of political prisoners without charge. The newspaper Der Stürmer promoted hatred of the Jews and became the official news outlet of the Nazis on 4 February, proclaiming as its motto “The Jews are our misfortune”.
The Nazis became the largest party after the elections on 5 March, although they came fourth in Dachau, behind the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), Social Democrats (SPD) and Communists (KPD), and that with an extremely high turnout of 89.6%. Election day itself was quiet, interrupted only by the occasional plane flying over town and daubed with swastikas and Nazi flags. The town was in general reluctant to put its faith in Hitler and try anything new. There were no Nazi celebrations that night: the SA stormtroopers aborted their planned visit to Dachau when they learned that the SPD, KPD and trade unionists had gathered at the local trade union building to defend themselves.
The election results in Dachau (left), won by the Bavarian People’s Party with 1402 votes (only eight fewer than in the 1932 election), followed by the Social Democratic Party with 1335, and the Nazis third, with 1151 votes. However the headline in the local paper, the Dachauer Zeitung, proclaimed that the Nazi politician Ritter von Epp “übernimmt die Macht in Bayern” (takes power in Bavaria).
The Nazis took over the police headquarters in Munich and Dachau on the night of 9 March. Hans-Günther Richardi in his history of Dachau observes that few households had radios, and the news did not travel quickly. Armed with carbines, clubs and pistols, the Dachau SS and SA marched into the town square and raised the Nazi flag, sang the national anthem then celebrated at a local pub by jeering at and assaulting a Jewish cattle dealer.
Dachau SS Sturmführer Karl Dobler – who in November 1938 ordered the Neumeyers and other Dachau families to leave town by dawn the next day or else go to prison – became the Deputy for the Reich Commissioner for Bavaria. The Dachauer Zeitung announced on 10 March:
Police authority in Dachau has been transferred to the SA and SS as of 8pm, 9 March 1933.
The people of Dachau are asked to remain calm as events unfold over the next few days.
Let this be a warning to the Marxist enemy. Any countermoves or provocation will be put down by force of arms without hesitation.
A railway worker protested at the takeover and set fire to a Nazi flag that was flying over station. He was arrested and forced to make amends by accompanying a torchlight procession to the station and raised a new flag; he remained in prison after that for a further couple of weeks before his release.
Dachau’s concentration camp opens
There were local rumours of Communist terrorist plots, and this gave a pretext for seeking out and arresting political opponents. On 22 March the Nazis opened one of their first concentration camps, on the edge of town (Oranienburg, in Prussia, opened a day earlier). It was converted from a derelict munitions factory, on the far side of Dachau from where the Neumeyers lived. The camp was initially a place of imprisonment for political prisoners and trade unionists as well as anyone considered an enemy of the Nazi regime, but later Jews and others were taken there. Its first commandant was Theodor Eicke, who had been released from a psychiatric hospital for that specific purpose.
Round-ups of Communists and socialists must have been noticeable in town, and the atmosphere would have become increasingly tense. I suspect the Neumeyer parents shielded their children from their fears and from what was going on in town.
My mother told me that no one would dare to look at the gates of the camp, should they happen to walk past it. In her interview recorded by the Imperial War Museum she recalled:
When you went for walks and got anywhere near this camp, no one said anything – they said it was a powder factory and some people get sent there – no one spoke about it but you knew there was something sinister behind those walls
The original entrance to Dachau concentration camp. In 1936 this was replaced by a larger gatehouse, constructed by prisoners.
Hardship and persecution
The noose gradually tightened across Germany during that year: in Cologne Jews were banned from using sports facilities and playgrounds. Jews in the legal profession faced severe restrictions as to their practice. A national boycott of Jewish businesses and shops took place on 1 April, and six days later a law was imposed barring Jews and Communists from holding jobs as civil servant, lawyers, doctors and university professors. This was presumably the date – 7 April – that Hans Neumeyer was barred from taking up a teaching post at the Academy of Music in Munich: the first real hammer-blow for the family. From then on he resorted to teaching private pupils – with some success, as far as I can gather. Vera was also teaching – eurythmics as well as Italian and English.
Hans was still well connected and highly regarded in musical circles. In 1939 he sent seven testimonials to England dated between 1934 and 1938 and typed out in English – evidence that he was certainly still in touch with other musicians and teachers. The testimonials are from Jacques Dalcroze (the pioneer of eurythmics – the music and movement discipline that Vera taught and Hans played music for); Gustav Güldenstein (his close friend in Switzerland, who during the war was the family’s intermediary for sending post between Germany and England); Dr Ernst Mohr, Walter Muller and Dr R Edlinger (Academy of Music and Conservatoire, Basel); Aug. Schimid-Lindner and H W von Waltershausen (professors at the Royal Academy of Music); Anna Hirzel-Langenhat (Castle of Berg); and Prof Dr F Klose and Prof Theodor Kilian (Public Academy of Music in Munich and teacher of violin).
Money must have been a constant and increasing concern for the Neumeyers, although Vera’s recently widowed father Martin Ephraim probably helped them with what remained of the family’s dwindling fortune. Friends helped them out – the Steurers owned a grocery store in Dachau and gave them food, and Ruth said the Wirschings, the artists who lived in the oldest house in town, were also generous:
We had some very loyal friends there in Dachau, actually. There was an artist woman who was a great friend of my mother, very supportive. We had very simple people, lots of peasant people who came and helped and occasionally we went to their house and they gave us a wonderful meal or they gave us some extra fruit – that sort of thing.
How the rest of 1933 panned out for the Neumeyers I can only speculate. Ruth and Raimund continued to attend school in Dachau – they learnt little but were not initially, as far as I am aware, treated that differently at the outset.
But the Nuremberg Laws enacted in September 1935 labelled them as fully Jewish because they had three Jewish grandparents, and that surely made them realise the looming danger.
Then the taunts of ‘Saujude’ (‘Jewish pig’) and stone-throwing ensued, and things got a lot worse.
Related stories in this blog
The Steurers: “anyone might end up in a concentration camp” – postwar letters from the Dachau family
The Wirschings: how the tables were turned after the war when Ruth was asked to give a testimonial to the British authorities that her childhood friend from Dachau Anselm Wirsching was not a Nazi
The Wallach family: the other Kindertransportee from Dachau, and the Jewish family that lost their business empire
Reference
For a detailed account of the town and concentration camp, see Hans-Günther Richardi’s book Dachau – A Guide to its Contemporary History (Wallstein Verlag, 2014)
This post concerns a remarkable 8,000-word, 11-page typed report made by Dela Blakmar, my grandfather Hans’ secretary (and, it now appears, lover). I am publishing it a few days before Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), 27 January 2023 for a very specific reason, that the national theme for HMD this year is Ordinary People. People who were victims as well as perpetrators, and people who stood by as well as those who helped those in danger. I’ve only just discovered and translated the report and it illuminates ordinary lives – of Dela, as a Jew in Munich and Berlin, and what she saw around her during the first ten years of the Third Reich.
I have just pulled out a few extracts for this post, observations that particularly struck me. Dela describes all sorts of aspects: the anti-Jewish laws, the rise of anti-Semitism, the reaction and aftermath of the pogroms of November 1938, deportation (including, seemingly, that of my grandmother Vera), the expropriation of Jewish property, the effect of the persecutions on ordinary German citizens, the ordinary people who helped Jews and those who stood by, the desolation of ordinary lives in war-torn Berlin… and so on.
What this document was meant for is not clear, but it would have been written in Sweden during the last years of the war or soon after. She escaped there from Denmark at the end of 1943, and which became her permanent home. It is striking that Dela does not give any names and makes locations unspecific, as if such information is sensitive, which makes me think she may be writing before the war had ended.
The report was among the papers relating to my family found in the basement of a house in Sweden a year ago. A pdf of the original report in German can be downloaded here.
What makes this report particularly interesting is that Dela was Jewish but had a privileged position in Germany of having the protection of Danish nationality, following her marriage of convenience in summer 1933 to Helge Blakmar, a Danish resistance leader who was Aryan by Nazi law. They divorced in 1939.
Dela was born on 3 May 1897 in Berlin to fully Jewish parents, and studied music. She was employed as a violin teacher at the adult education centre in Hamburg. Additionally she gave private lessons, and concerts together with the harpsichordist Ilse Thate. In 1931 she founded a viola quartet, and around that time broadcast on radio. She left Germany in 1933 to marry Helge Blakmar, but returned to Germany in early 1938 to be with her mother, whose life was nearing its end.
She was not allowed to practise her profession in Munich, and when the war broke out she was not allowed to leave Munich. However she did eventually get permission to leave for Berlin and then to Denmark in March 1943, and “was allowed to take DM200 as a special privilege”. Later that year she escaped on a boat to Sweden, settling in the town of Norberg.
In 1959 she filed a claim for compensation for the suffering she had incurred under the Nazis.
Arrival in Germany, 1938
Dela had left Germany for Denmark a few years earlier, but returned to Berlin. She was obviously aware of the anti-Semitic sentiment that the Nazis promoted, but she needed to be with her mother, whose life was drawing to a close.
Being married to a Dane meant she wasn’t subject to the full thrust of the anti-Jewish laws and she clearly wanted to be with Hans. They were together in Berlin and even planned to emigrate to New York that summer. They wouldn’t however have guessed how bad things were to become later on.
In the spring of 1938 I came to Berlin. At many cafés and restaurants you saw signs saying “Jews not wanted”. In some cases, the owners of these restaurants had been threatened that their licence would be withdrawn if they persisted in putting up such posters. Suddenly, yellow benches with the inscription “only for Jews” appeared in squares and green areas, and signs at the same time drew attention to the fact that Jews were forbidden to use other benches under penalty of punishment. People accepted that, looked away in embarrassment use of certain benches was forbidden and subject to a penalty.
On April 27, 1938, a decree was issued that all Jews should immediately list their names, cash assets, bank papers, valuables (works of art, real carpets, jewellery, silverware, etc.) and submit them, stating the value of each item. The purpose for which this was to be served was not initially disclosed.
In the next few weeks, all objects made of precious metals and jewellery specified on the lists submitted had to be handed in – a receipt was issued for each delivery in accordance with the number of pieces. Over the next two years, Jews who had delivered such loads received a request from the official authority to collect the money for the delivered goods, whereby the value was of course ridiculously low, 3 pfennigs per large silver regardless. whether it was a matter of simple everyday objects or for antique works of art
In the summer of 1938, house searches began in Jewish households, which led to secret abuse by the officials. Works of art, carpets, furniture that someone might want to have were simply taken away. Suddenly overnight one saw the names in big white letters on the shop windows of all the shops that were assumed to be in Jewish.
Dela, in the 1930s
Observations on anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism had been brewing in Germany for many years – it wasn’t a Nazi invention by any means, but Dela remarked that it had been confined to the official circles of the upper bourgeoisie, the arts and science, not the German working class. But with the arrival of Hitler a blood-tainting element came into being, prompted by accounts of the German “noble breed”.
When the “Nuremberg laws” were issued on September 15, 1935, anti-Semitic actions were expressly considered undesirable or to a certain extent safe, albeit the restrictions were felt bitterly. However, there was no reason to fear that the situation would worsen, and for a long time no threatening action was taken by the authorities. Jews were given their own Jewish cultural association, which had its sections in all larger cities. There was a Jewish publishing house, theatre and concert performances with Jewish literature and Jewish music. Jews were still allowed to practise their professions as long as they could take place within the defined framework of Jewishness.
Jews were now expelled from public life in Germany, they lived in invisible ghettos, the walls of which, however, had not yet completely sealed them off from the German environment.
The November pogrom (“Kristallnacht”): referring to the Neumeyers?
It is very likely Dela was still with Hans when the mass attacks against Jews and their properties occurred throughout Germany around 9 November 1938 in what the Nazis euphemistically termed “Kristallnacht”. My mother Ruth and uncle Raymond Neumeyer and their mother Vera were in Dachau the night before, when they were ordered by town officials to leave town by dawn or else go to prison. Ruth described the incident in an interview recorded by the Imperial War Museum, adding “my father was away in Berlin learning how to make flutes”, but without mentioning that he had been with Dela in summer in Berlin, and presumably was still with her.
Fortuitously, when Ruth, Raymond and Vera arrived at Munich station on the morning of 9 November, they seem to have avoided the worst of it.
Then came November 9, 1938, when synagogues throughout the Reich were set on fire and all Jewish shops were systematically demolished. I was staying with Jewish friends at the time. On the morning of November 10, two ladies who were friends of mine were able to ask me, both “pure Aryan” folk comrades, whether their landlords wanted to entrust them with important papers or valuables for safekeeping, which no longer were secure in Jewish households. So these two women went from one Jewish family to another to offer their help; they were not the only ones. Suddenly all classes of people wanted to help, in contrast to the officially attested spontaneity of the uprising against the Jews, throughout the Reich at exactly the same time of night.
I am virtually certain that the passage below refers to my mother’s family – the Neumeyers – and that the location is Dachau, as it was indeed there that all non-Aryan residents were told to leave the house and district by 6 o’clock the next morning, although this was actually on 8 November rather than the following day, arriving at Munich railway station on the morning of 9 November. Assuming it is the Neumeyers, it mentions the requirement for them to pay for repairs to their house, and that any money received was paid into a blocked account – both of which did indeed happen.
Jews had to be removed from rural communities and suburbs. For example, on 9 November at 10 o’clock in the evening, all non-Aryan residents of a residential suburb were informed that they had to leave the house, the town and district by 6 o’clock in the morning. The men were immediately transferred to the concentration camp, women and children were allowed to take as many handpicks as they could carry themselves. On 10 November many camped in Munich Central Station with nowhere to go.
Before leaving their house, the owners were forced to hand over their entire possessions to a law firm with a Power of Attorney to entrust their entire property to a law firm “in trust”. Thousands of such powers of attorney were issued these days, but cancelled again a few weeks later by the government because they were trying to enrich Jewish property. Gradually one piece of land was sold after the other, mostly for only a fraction of the actual value. The purchase price had to be paid immediately in cash into a blocked account with the foreign exchange office, from which the Jewish account holder was allowed to withdraw a small monthly amount to cover his living expenses upon request.
A villa owner I know received, 6 months after the sale of his house, a claim for a larger fine for repair costs, which a new tenant of the former house had justified as necessary. The claim was issued by the local burgomaster; in the event of refusal to pay, there would be an immediate transfer to the concentration camp.
Meanwhile a new office had been set up in Munich, the Treuhänder des Gauleiters, Stelle für Arisierung (“Trustee des Gauleiters, Office for Aryanisation”). The name explains only partially the function of this office, whose directors, including a former carousel employee from the funfair, who had the power to decide about expropriation, evictions, forced labour – i.e. about the life and death of several thousand once respected German citizens. Two years after the sale of the same house, that official demanded several percent of sales price at the time, on the basis that the sum was needed to cover the fee and administrative costs of the law firm, to which that general power of attorney was compulsorily transferred two years before.
Reaction to the Pogroms
The run on foreign consulates was desperate – who had relatives abroad who wanted and were able to guarantee that they would rescue completely destitute and almost unknown relatives? And did people in other countries know that this was literally about saving the lives of these hundreds of thousands? When, filled with this horror, I travelled to Paris at the end of 1938, I found no one there who had the slightest interest in the fate of German Jews, whether the French or German migrants. I met many people of different nationalities there — no one asked me what was actually happening with the persecution of the Jews in Germany; the only exception was an Indian! Also in Switzerland, in Denmark, during 1938-39 where I tried something for German-Danish friends, I found for the same indifference everywhere.
From the beginning of 1939 I had been able to experience living in Munich, the “capital of the movement”, and so I was able to witness the development of the “solution to the Jewish question” from there. This problem was dealt with differently in every city from that time onwards and above all from the outbreak of war until 1942. On 9 November Jews in a well-known Upper Bavarian health resort were forced to buy tickets to foreign countries, although they knew that border tickets to places abroad had to be purchased and that crossing the border without a valid passport was impossible – and Jews did not get a passport.
In Berlin, the chief of the police, von Helldorf, said that all emigrating Jews had to make an extra payment in addition to the statutory Reich flight tax, the so-called Helldorf donation, which – as previously stated – was to go to the “Reich Association of Jews in Germany” to finance the emigration of destitute Jews.
A member of the Reichsvereinigung told me that this money was actually deposited into an account in the name of the Reichsvereinigung, over which the Reichsvereinigung had no right of disposal.
Expropriation of Jewish property
From now on, the systematic expropriation of all Jewish property began, primarily property and all Jewish businesses. Personal wishes of more prominent party members played a role in carrying out this “Aryanisation”. On November 9, 1938, at around 11:00 a.m., a troop of uniformed Nazis appeared at the country estate of Herr von X, a member of a respected Catholic family of Jewish descent, and ordered all guests and domestic staff present to leave the house immediately. As a result, some of the access doors were locked from the outside and torches were thrown into the house. The villagers, who, woken up by the noise, came to help to put out the fire, were prevented at gun point and Herr von X was transferred to the concentration camp the next day, where he was held for several months.
Barely a week passed without new summonses, demands, restraints, insults. The Jewish food supply (special ration cards marked with J, on which the allocation was limited to textile goods, meat, eggs, milk, tobacco cards; other allotments were greatly reduced), the ban on entering other specially designated food shops and outside of prescribed times, a ban on entering certain streets and facilities, a ban on leaving home after 8pm, a ban on using public transport, a ban on leaving one’s place of residence, a ban on teaching Jewish children, registration of all Jews in evangelical work and finally the yellow Jewish star, without which no Jew was allowed to show himself on the street, and which had to be attached to the outside of every apartment inhabited by Jews.
A secret decree within the air protection organisation stated that in the event of fire damage from air raids, Jewish houses were not to be protected, it was forbidden to provide help to Jews unless a Jewish house was destroyed by fire. At that time there were still many Jews in other cities who lived in their apartments among the “Aryan people”; there were special Jewish air-raid shelters there, separate from the other air-raid shelters; and the inscriptions Juden verboten (“Jews forbidden”) in shops, guesthouses, in the middle of the stations, public telephones.
Dela’s list of possessions
We know that the Neumeyers had fine furniture and art in their house; it all disappeared, of course, though Dela managed to smuggle out some jewellery, which we still have. Vera’s father, Martin Ephraim, had stupendous wealth at one time, and even though they lost the value of their Görlitz villa in the hyperinflation of the early 1920s their home in Schreiberhau would have been opulently furnished too.
We do, however, have a list of Dela’s possessions – could some of these have belonged to the Neumeyers, and left behind in the apartment Dela lived in after they left?
The inventory of objects owned by Dela Blakmar. (Click on arrow to view slide show)
Also – possibly related to the above list – an application for tax clearance for the purposes of emigration. And the address is Thorwaldstrasse 5, Munich – the apartment belonging to the Köbners, where the Neumeyers lived from 1939 until Hans and Vera were deported in 1942. This is the first evidence I have found that Dela was also living there – whether concurrently with the Neumeyers for a time, or after they had left.
We don’t know the fate of the Köbners. Raymond found their apartment block bombed out when he visited Munich in 1946.
Dela’s application for a tax clearance certificate as a person intending to emigrate: this is the year she moved to Denmark, although the new address here is given as Berlin-Friedenau, Rheinstrasse 54
Reactions to the Jews’ plight
Dela illustrates several examples of the reaction of ordinary German citizens to the Nazis’ persecution of Jews. Sympathy towards Jews was by no means was prevalent across Germany, but Berlin was said to have harboured a considerable amount of opposition to the Nazis.
Of the 9 November 1938 “Kristallnacht” pogroms, she remarked:
Truckloads of valuables were thrown out of windows. I didn’t get the impression that many took the opportunity to enrich themselves, with the exception, of course, of those who had staged this spontaneous popular movement. For days people went through rubble and shards – similar to the scene four years later after English bombing raids. One example of many: a few days after 9 November, a chauffeur in impeccably new gear appeared in a large Berlin car park. When asked by his comrades where he got the fine equipment from, he proudly said that on 9 November he had taken it from one of the leading Jewish shops. The reaction from his comrades was not what he had expected, he was beaten up with the clear indication that if he were ever to be seen among them again, he could expect no different treatment.
In the course of the November pogrom, almost without exception, all Jewish men were arrested [this is an overstatement of what happened; according to the US Holocaust Museum, the total number of Jewish men that were placed in concentration camps after the pogrom was 30,000]. The fact that a few managed to escape the concentration camps is thanks to the willingness to help of “Aryan friends” – often among them caretakers and police officers who warned them in good time; but there were also many, including diplomats, artists, pastors, who offered Jews refuge in their homes.
According to Dela, the requirement introduced in 1941 for German Jews to wear yellow stars backfired to a certain extent:
This star did not have the intended effect – because now, for the first time, the astonished comrades of the people who are actually Jews realised that Jews were not the human scum as shown in “Der Stürmer”, but people, Germans, tall or short, beautiful or ugly, blond or dark, with straight or crooked legs, just like themselves.
Most people knew nothing, or hardly anything, about who was a Jew until the appearance of the yellow Jewish star. Suddenly it became clear and then the open good mood was very noticeable. Friends demonstratively greeted star-bearers, offered seats, although Jews were forbidden to sit in the trams, and protested against the expulsion of Jews from overcrowded trams. Shopkeepers smuggled large parcels of food to Jewish buyers. Often the Jewish guests found the normal meat ration in inns, which Jews were officially allowed to visit, under the mountain of potatoes and cabbage. And often peasant women in the street and in the church (a relatively large number Catholic Jews attended mass with their star) secretly put beer and butter in their pockets.
Those who just stood by
For ten years the German people watched as their Jewish fellow citizens were systematically deprived of their rights, tortured, hounded to death and exterminated. Without defending themselves against it, without intervening, without even protesting, they have accepted this guilt in its entirety. But a large part of the German people is fully aware of this guilt.
Of course, no protest against the persecution of the Jews reached the public – but what does publicity mean in a country like Nazi Germany? In a country in which every single citizen is hardly guarded, spied on, in which no place may be spoken, printed or read that is not acceptable to the official opinion of the state? In which every careless utterance, every deviation from the commanded the heaviest penalties, of which the deprivation of liberty is the lightest?
I was asked by German friends above, why do the Jews all tolerate this, why didn’t they emigrate long ago? One generally believed in Germany that National Socialism no longer wanted the Jews in certain places, but was only willing to let them out of Germany and did not understand that there were still thousands of Jews who did not want to leave Germany. Whatever one’s general opinion was that Jews were rich, broad circles had not known anything about the Jewish proletariat.
And those who helped
I could list hundreds of cases in which German people campaigned for Jews, not only secretly, but also tried everything with the authorities, with the Gauleitung and Gestapo, to rescue Jews. Generals who tried to free arrested Jews from prison or concentration camps by vouching for their innocence and had very sadly to experience that all the promises the official authorities had made to them remained empty phrases and their protégés were no longer alive. Church authorities, Evangelical and Catholic, who intervened on behalf of Jews of their denomination, artists, scientists, men and women in public life who jeopardised the position and safety of their families in order to help individual Jews. Rarely did they succeed but they it tried again and again.
There were dairymen and butchers, who declared that they would still supply their former Jewish customers, even though they could no longer get ration coupons for their goods. And tobacconists who served their former customers as before, however scarce their supplies were.
I remember the morning after the first severe bombing attack I witnessed when I was standing in front of a heap of rubble and shards, which the day before had been one of the biggest commercial buildings, an old woman walked by and said, shaking her head, “So that’s what they did to the Jews – now it’s your turn!”
And one will not forget her that German girl, member of the “B.d.M.”[Association of German Girls – the equivalent for girls of the Hitler Youth] and who grew up under National Socialism, brought up by Dr Goebbels’ propaganda, who went from one Jewish family to another during the period of deportation. When she made a speech, asked if she had nothing better to do than go to these traitors, she declared firmly that she didn’t know of any more important duty at that moment than to help those of their fellow human beings who were in dire need.
Forced labour (Zwangsarbeit)
Vera was forced to work in gardening in Munich, very possibly when she was forced out of the Döblers’ apartment in Thorwaldsenstrasse and made to live in the Sisters of Mercy Monastery, where Dela visited her.
Jews undertaking forced labour in gardening work (photo: Jüdisches Museum, Berlin)
Younger Jewish women up to 45 years old were used for heavy factory work, gardening and farm work, partly for heavy physical work in a flax roast, older women up to 65 years for factory work, men of all ages and occupations for construction work and heavier, often in the fashion industry factory work. Doctors, freer high heads of state, craftsmen, artists, merchants, scientists were assigned to erect a barracks outside the city.
You only had to pay a little something for the canteen food itself – this could only be regulated in such a way that those who still had a certain amount of capital in their blocked account voluntarily covered the costs for the many comrades who had meanwhile become completely destitute. When the camp barracks were finished months later, hundreds of Jews were driven out of their cramped dwellings and were allowed to survive in the camp barracks against a rent matched to their blocked account, using Catholic nuns for this purpose, some of whose homes were taken away and Jews quartered there. From these two camps, day in and day out, all men and women up to the age of 65 who could were only half able to work had to walk a distance of one and a half to two hours, in the snow and rain, summer and winter, and starting work in the morning at 7am or 8am. In the evening they went back the same way on foot, then had a lousy dinner, slept in overcrowded dormitories, the couples of course separated, and had to do the usual household chores such as cleaning, mending, washing up, etc.
Such, with small local variations, was the life of all Jews in Germany; the existence of the so-called “privileged” (Jews who had fathered children with Aryan spouses) differed only in that they mostly still lived together with their family members, did not need to wear a Jewish star and also received the normal ration cards but everything else, bans, blocked accounts, forced labour, bullying, denials and insults they shared with their other “racial comrades”.
Deportations and Vera’s final disappearance
Dela reported that she read many letters from the camps de Gurs, the detention camp at the foot of the Pyrenees, where deportations from Baden in Germany were carried out in late 1940, some time before the rest of deportations of Jews began. I don’t know if these were letters from a friend or how she saw events unravelling. They describe the appalling conditions but also the real sense of community, with people helping each other out – a shared life full of goal setting and bonding. Even when the end came “every death and every suicide triggered not sadness but relief and almost joy”.
Vera was at the Barmherzigen Schwestern (Sisters of Mercy Monastery) before being deported to somewhere in Nazi-occupied Poland. She was originally due to be deported to Piaski in April 1942 but somehow managed to appeal and did not leave.
If the “half-Aryan woman” Dela describes is my grandmother Vera Neumeyer, then clearly the Nazis took a last-minute decision to allow her to stay behind. Dela visited her there, and on the day Vera finally was deported , 13 July 1942, Dela went to the station to try to stop the deportation – but in vain. The letter to the family that Vera wrote on that train mentions the furniture van that took them to the station, confirming Dela’s description below.
Barmherzigen Schwestern (Sisters of Mercy Monastery), as it was in 1910. Vera spent her last weeks here before deportation in 1942
The transports of deportees to the train station were carried out in closed furniture vans, as passenger transport had become scarcer, and probably had to be saved for more important purposes than transporting Jews.
The first transport took place in Munich in November 1941. At that time it was still handled in such a “humane” way that those affected received a message a few days beforehand that they had to be ready from a certain day onwards, as they were being sent to “resettlement”. At the same time, all belongings had to be listed, such as cash, furniture, clothing, laundry. Hand luggage up to 30 kg was permitted, everything else went to the state. Large passenger transport cars went from house to house; four people came to each home: Gestapo officer, police officer, foreign exchange agent and a Jew as porter. Before leaving the living quarters, the list was handed in and the reverse signed, stating that the undersigned had lost his German citizenship as an enemy of the state. All those in the transport were sent to Jewish camps where the camp was hermetically sealed; the Gestapo and the SS took control of people and luggage.
It took on average three days for a transport to be dispatched. When the number was full, a train of heavily laden people went at night through a line of SS guards with revolvers to a goods station 2 km away, where they were loaded up and left, destination unknown. I learned these details from a half-Aryan woman who was left behind at the last moment. She even got her suitcase back, which had already gone through the SS control.
Watches were of course taken away, knives and forks, razor blades and utensils were forbidden, smoking materials and alcohol – about three days of travel provisions were taken, and only the most common medicines were allowed through.
The admirable bravery and willingness to help of some Jewish helpers made it possible to get some provisions to those who had already been cut off from the outside world, despite strict controls. The Jewish camp administration also did what it could to make these last days easier. Every deportee got a sleeping place, adequate food, no one left the camp at night without first checking in to get a good hot meal. Here too – willingness to help, mutual support, dignity and respect for fellow human beings. The regulation of the transport, selection of deportees, was now determined from Berlin. The Munich authorities, including the Gestapo and Gauleitung, had no influence on this.
With regard to the position of the compilation of this first transport, two aspects seemed to make the selection best: ability to work and the size of the blocked account. No authentic news ever reached home of this transport, which is said to have gone as far as Riga. This is in contrast to later transports that were directed to the Lublin area, from where shocking letters came: “send bread, send clothes, not a single item of the officially deposited luggage has reached us, send shoes and socks individually, not in pairs, otherwise they won’t arrive!” These things as well as cheap jewellery served there as objects of exchange for food. The diet there was a watery soup in the morning and at noon and 25 grams of bread a day. Those who could find farm jobs were a little better off, and could at least get a little more. On a card I read “morituri te salutant”, then after two or three months nothing else arrived.
Munich was now cleared of Jews fairly quickly, one transport after the other left, to Poland, to Upper Silesia, the sick, the physically handicapped, the elderly over 65 and all those who were somehow “preferential” (e.g. earlier holders of the Iron Cross, first class), as well as the Jewish widows from privileged mixed marriages, who had previously been spared, would go to Theresienstadt.
My grandmother Vera was deported from Liam Goods station in Munich on an ordinary third-class train with compartments, much like this one.
Berlin 1943: a snapshot
Stolperstein to Dela’s cousin, Franz Kaufmann
Dela certainly knew about Jews living “underground” in Berlin: her cousin Franz Kaufmann, was part of the web of residents helping smuggle out Jews to safety, although the Nazis eventually caught up with him and took him to Sachsenhausen, where he was shot.
In the week of the first heavy bombing on Berlin in March 1943, when one walked for days and weeks among rubble and broken glass, when thousands of Berliners had become homeless, thousands between broken walls, in houses without roofs, in rooms without ceilings and walls, living among charred rubble, that week the last few remaining Jews still working and living in Berlin were taken away from their living quarters without prior notice, picked up on the streets, taken from the factories, children without their parents, spouses individually from their places of work.
In that week, the majority of the so-called “privileged” people were suddenly picked up, but not deported, but collected in the houses of the Jewish administration. They never stayed there without their “Aryan” or “semi-Aryan” relatives being able to find out more about their whereabouts. After a few weeks or up to three weeks, they could suddenly be back home again.
SS formations had to be sent from Vienna to carry these actions out since the Berlin SS was so corrupt that it was no longer considered reliable.) The last remnants of those legally living in Berlin! On the other hand, thousands of Jews who had been reported to the police as dead or missing lived in Berlin were now living an “underground” life in broad daylight.
What it means to live in the Germany of 1943, where everyone was registered tenfold, unregistered with the police, without a work or identity card, is hard to imagine. Every bedroom was registered, not to be given a piece of bread or any other food without a permit. Military and civilian Gestapo checks on all railway lines, even in suburban areas – you had to be prepared for them.
You could expect racism in inns and on the streets every day – and yet there were 3,000 Jews living illegally in Berlin at the time.
Severe penalties threatened every German person who helped a Jew – and yet it happened in a devastating way and to the greatest extent. People from all walks of life took part in this response, and were filled with concern for those “in hiding”. Above all, it was a question of finding accommodation, holding cards, real or forged, foreign papers, real or forged, money (for a long time it had been forbidden for Jews for to sell anything of their possessions, cash was scarce, illegal life was not cheap), work under false names, the possibility of borrowing money, connections in other cities and in the country.
And people helped, people from all walks of life, all previous political leanings, former government clerks who would never have thought of anything illegal, took in strangers, allotment garden owners, bartenders and skippers, nurses and pastors, unemployed old ladies and official of the National Socialist state apparatus, who had to swear by oath that they had no connection with Jews.
Perhaps there was a lot of fatalism in the game – people who spent the nights in the air raid shelter, who didn’t know whether they would still have a roof over their heads the next day, whether they and their families would still be alive at all still lose these people? Was their fate essentially different from the fate of these thousands, who were driven into that homeless anonymity not by bombs but by criminal legislation? During these weeks something arose that no propaganda for a national community could have brought about in ten years—a real solidarity, a bond in the struggle against barbarism, reaching beyond all differences of class and race.
Women in Berlin removing rubble after bombing [US Holocaust Museum]
Conclusion
If I recall my impressions of the behaviour of the German people towards the Jewish question, it is not possible to make a sweeping generalisation. It would be unfair to saddle all Germans with guilt. Especially their experiences in Germany do not give rise to hope. The feeling of solidarity that crystallised more and more strongly between people and their fellow human beings, and the deepening abyss into which National Socialism drove the whole German people, gives me the conviction that people will still find each other again and again in Germany, ready to use their strength to build a new world.
The Ephraims and the Neumeyers 