It was a burning June day when we buried her in the ancient Jewish cemetery high on the Mount of Olives overlooking the city she had loved. Few friends joined the small cortège of cabs which followed the hearse; this was East Jerusalem and the steep, narrow lanes bounded by high stone walls could not be considered completely safe. It would have been more convenient to have arranged the funeral elsewhere, but it felt appropriate to lay Steffi to rest in the same cemetery where Eva had been buried back in the Mandate days, before the State of Israel had been declared in 1948 and the city riven in two by the War of Independence. Remarkably, a space had been found where the two women could lie not quite next to each other but at least head to foot, and resume after sixty long and battle-ridden years their sisterly companionship in their final resting places.
After the grave had been filled with dust-dry soil and the memorial rites completed, I went for the first time to visit Eva about whose early death my father had so rarely spoken. I read the words on her gravestone:
Our precious daughter and sister
Chava Elka Wittenberg
daughter of Raphael z’l,
born on the 18th of the month of Menachem Av, 5682 (1922)
and taken in the midst of her days
on the 22nd of the month of Tammuz 5704 (1944)
This was puzzling. The letters ‘z’l’ stood for zichrono liverachah (‘may his memory be for a blessing’). Eva’s father Raphael, my grandfather, must therefore have been dead when these lines were composed. Yet he only passed away in 1954, ten years after Eva, a time in which those extra letters could scarcely have been added since the Mount of Olives was under Jordanian rule from 1948 until 1967 and Jews were allowed no access, even to the cemeteries. The inscription continued:
Granddaughter of the great Rabbi Jacob,
son of Rabbi Avraham Chaim Freimann,
who was born on the 21st of the month of Tishrei 5627 (1866)
and died on the 19th of the month of Tevet 5698 (1937)
and of Rebbetzin Rachel, daughter of Rabbi Yisrael Meir,
who was born on the 1st of the month of Shevat 5629 (1869)
and killed in the Holocaust for the sanctification of God’s name,
in the month of Shevat 5704 (1944),
may God avenge her blood.
May their souls be bound up in the bond of life.
‘For the sanctification of God’s name’ was the traditional phrase with which those killed for their faith were honoured. The objection that the Nazis persecuted the Jews not on account of their beliefs but simply due to their Jewish blood could not be raised here: my great-grandmother had perished not just because of, but deeply immersed in, her faith. As for the words ‘May God avenge her blood’, they had been found scrawled in blood itself on the insides of cells and on the stony surfaces of fortresses where Jews had been shot, kicked or bludgeoned to death.
I walked slowly through the rows of graves to the wall at the edge of the ancient terrace, looking out over the Temple Mount and the city beyond. When did the family first learn of my great-grandmother’s fate? I remembered how my father had shown me a copy of the postcard she sent from Theresienstadt late in 1943, at the Nazis’ behest of course, explaining to her family that all was well and that conditions in the town were perfectly satisfactory. But when did they know for certain that she had been murdered? It could not yet have been in that summer of 1944 when her granddaughter was laid to rest. The brutal facts of the Final Solution were not then understood in their entirety and the family wouldn’t have relinquished prematurely the hope, however improbable, that they might yet hear when the war was over from der lieben Mama, their beloved mother, and that somehow she might have managed to survive.
It struck me then that years later, sometime after 1967 when the Mount of Olives was once more a part of Israel and she could again visit her daughter’s grave, my grandmother must have chosen to commemorate her parents and her husband here, where her precious child already lay, bringing together in death all her loved ones who were prevented by visas, quotas, and decisions the ill-fated nature of which would only be revealed with hindsight, from ever meeting again while they were still alive. Her thoughts would have taken her not only to the memory of her beloved daughter, but of her whole family as once it had been, her father, mother, sisters and an entire world destroyed.
My father’s last remaining sibling, Hella, died nine months after Steffi, just before the carnival festival of Purim. She too was buried on the Mount of Olives, close to her sisters. I went to Jerusalem for the funeral, then hurried home to be with my father during the shivah, the seven days of prescribed mourning. He was suffering from an unspecified illness associated with an autoimmune condition and had been growing progressively weaker for several years. But, as all the family agreed, it was the news of Hella’s death which destroyed his will to live.
Before I left Israel, my cousin Michal and I met at the flat in Jerusalem where the family had lived since the end of the 1930s to go through their remaining possessions. It was the close of an era, especially for my cousin, to whom that apartment, on the first floor of 29 Rechov Ramban, the main route through the centre of the Rechavia district where so many German Jews had settled, had been home from her earliest childhood.
I too had strong associations with that apartment, where I had stayed many times on visits to Israel. There was the bookshelf with the old prayer books from Germany, most of which are now in my own home in London; here in the dining room hung the portrait of Rabbi Yacob Ettlinger, known after his chief work as the Aruch LaNer; outside on the balcony was a pile of old suitcases. As I remember, the case we opened that afternoon was one of those large wood-ribbed travelling trunks that used to be fashionable in the days when railway stations still had porters. Inside was a smaller suitcase in which we found an inauspicious-looking off-white linen bag. In it was a bundle of old papers, letters, bills and documents. In another package were notebooks written in a small, tidy hand. A quick examination showed that they were commentaries to verses from the Bible and jottings for lectures, presumably by my great-grandfather Rabbi Jacob Freimann.
But it was the letters that captured my curiosity. I picked up random envelopes and began to unfold the delicate sheets they contained. A brief glance showed that they were mostly written in German; the paper was thin and time had turned the ink of the addresses on the envelopes from blue to fading turquoise. It was the dates which caught my attention: June 1938; November 1938; March 1939. I began to read. Much of the handwriting eluded my first, hasty efforts to decipher it, but some of the letters were readily legible and a few were typed. I sat for several minutes absorbed and oblivious.
17 June 1938
Dear Mama,
Hopefully the parcel arrived safely. This Saturday is going to be sad for you … What’s happening about your coming to visit us, dear Mama? Have you still not received any information?
The sender was Sophie, my father’s aunt. Scarcely a month later she wrote again:
11 July 1938
Dearest Mama,
The weather has become so nice and cool that I’m going to send off a small box tomorrow. It’ll hopefully be a duck and a chicken, and I’ll pack the gaps with Omega and flour.
What, I wondered, was Omega, and why was her eldest daughter sending poultry to her mother through the post?
There was a list several pages long in pale black ink; the letters were slightly blurred around the edges indicating that this was probably a second or third copy, made by inserting a sheet of carbon paper between the pages. Every conceivable