Free Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses by Francis R. Nicosia, David Scrase Page A

labor on the collective farms ( kibbutzim ) where the children would work. 124
The growing disproportion of Jewish women in the German-Jewish population also came about because, to begin with, there were more Jewish women than men in Germany. 125 Thus, in order to stay even, a greater absolute number of women would have had to emigrate. In 1933, 52.3 percent of Jews were women, resulting from such factors as male casualties during world war I, greater marrying out and conversion among Jewish men, and greater longevity among women. 126 The slower rate of female than male emigration meant that the female
proportion of the Jewish population rose to 57.5 percent by 1939. 127 In 1939, one woman wrote:
Mostly we were women who had been left to ourselves. In part, our husbands had died from shock, partly they had been processed from life to death in a concentration camp and partly some wives who, aware of the greater danger to their husbands, had prevailed upon them to leave at once and alone. They were ready to take care of everything and to follow their husbands later on, but because of the war it became impossible for many to realize this intention and quite a few of my friends and acquaintances thus became martyrs of Hitler. 128
A large proportion of these remaining women were elderly. 129 Since many of the young had emigrated, the number of aging Jews also increased proportionately, among them a large number of widows. 130 In 1939, there were over 6,000 widowed men and over 28,000 widowed women in the expanded Reich. 131 Thus, 20 percent more Jewish wom-en than men, especially, but not only, the elderly, remained behind. when elisabeth Freund, one of the last Jews to leave Germany legally in october 194l, went to the Gestapo for her final papers, she observed: “All old people, old women waiting in line.” 132
In conclusion, Jewish families faced the maelstrom of Nazi brutality by adjusting long-standing gender and age dynamics. Because men faced danger and often lost their jobs, women took on more assertive public and economic roles. Although parents tried to protect their children, children themselves disagreed with these strategies and urged parents to take different action, which was focused on leaving Germany. The elderly, normally cared for and protected, were unable to escape and were left behind. Families that in ordinary times would not have considered disbanding, broke up in order to save individual members. Tragically, in the end, no strategy could save them all.
Notes
Trude Maurer, “From everyday Life to a State of emergency: Jews in weimar and Nazi Germany,” in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, ed. Marion kaplan (New York: oxford University Press, 2005), 285: For example, in königsberg in 1925: 13.1; 1933: 6.6; 1936: 6.5 births per thousand Jews. See Stefanie Schüler-Springorum,
Die jüdische Minderheit in Königsberg/Preussen, 1871–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 369.
Sibylle Quack, Zuflucht Amerika: Zur Sozialgeschichte der Emigration deutsch-jüdi- scher Frauen in die USA 1933–1945 (Bonn: Dietz, 1995), 58.
Maurer, “everyday Life,” 286, quoting CV-Zeitung (hereafter CVZ ) 12, no. 12 (23 March 1933): 100.
Maurer, “everyday Life,” 285–286. See the painting “Sabbath Afternoon” reprinted on the High Holidays with the surrounding text (translation): “The good old days were the days of the family. everyone was together. Tranquility and peace radiated from the rooms and the people. The family and the house were the pillars of life.” ( Gemeindeblatt der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde Hamburg , September 1936). on the ideology of the Jewish family in the weimar Republic, which aimed to preserve a “noble past,” see Sharon Gillerman, “The Crisis of the Jewish Family,” in In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933, ed. Michael Brenner and Derek Penslar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 186–195.
Christopher Lasch,