Free Alex's Wake by Martin Goldsmith

could not win the national lottery. Jews were forbidden to keep carrier pigeons and other pets. Curfews were announced in German cities; Jews had to be off the streets by 8:00 p.m. in winter and 9:00 p.m. in summer. Jews were only allowed to shop for food after 4:00 p.m., by which time most of the fresh produce had been cleared from the bins. And all Jews were required to adopt a new middle name: “Sara” for women and “Israel” for men.
    In these and countless other ways, the Jews of Germany were rendered the Other, stateless strangers in their own land. These decrees represented interim solutions to the Jewish Problem, as the Nazis did their best to convince Jews to emigrate.
    Throughout this legal and social onslaught, Alex Goldschmidt remained unconvinced that he and his family were in genuine danger. “I fought for the Kaiser,” he declared confidently to anyone who would listen. “Hitler can’t touch me.” But Alex’s certainty and self-assurance were no match for the unrelenting venality of the forces aligned against him. His proud boast about his military service must have rung a little hollow even to him once the Reich Propaganda Ministry ordered the names of Jewish soldiers stricken from the lists of honored dead on World War memorials. Business at “the premiere house for coats in all of Northwest Germany” began a steady decline after the April boycott, and within two years the Goldschmidts had to abandon their apartment on Würzburgerstrasse for an even smaller dwelling at 53 Ofenerstrasse, a large blue apartment building that had become a refuge for many Jewish families.
    My father became convinced of the prudence of leaving Germany and made plans to move to Sweden in the spring of 1936, when he was twenty-two years old. He leased an apartment above a milk bar in Stockholm and was days away from leaving his homeland when he met a young violist in Frankfurt and decided to stay in Germany to be with her, a story I have told elsewhere. His older sister, Bertha, immigrated to England and became a gardener. She married late in life and died in 1998, just days before her eighty-ninth birthday. But his younger sister Eva and his brother Klaus Helmut had to navigate their perilous way through the 1930s as schoolchildren in Oldenburg.
    I never met my uncle, of course, and my father professed to have retained few if any memories of his younger brother, perhaps because of the passage of time, perhaps due to deep feelings of guilt. He once told me that I bore an unspecified physical resemblance to Helmut, but other than that, he said next to nothing about him. So virtually everything I know about my uncle’s childhood I owe to the extraordinary cache of documents unearthed by the filmmaker and longtime Oldenburg resident Farschid Ali Zahedi.
    As I mentioned earlier, Klaus Helmut was born on September 14, 1921, during the halcyon days my family spent living in the beautiful house on Gartenstrasse, when business was booming at the Hausder Mode and the Goldschmidts were certified machers in the affairs of Oldenburg. He spent his first decade in the protective care of his parents, playing in the nearby Schlossgarten and studying at home with his mother. In time for the Easter term of 1931, he left the nest and enrolled in the fourth grade of the city’s Wallschule. One year later, on the strength of his performance on an entrance exam, Helmut was admitted as student number 2555 to the fifth grade of the prestigious Altes Gymnasium, which had been founded in the sixteenth century and numbered the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers among its graduates.
    At the time he matriculated at the Altes Gymnasium Oldenburg (AGO), in the spring of 1932, Helmut was ten-and-a-half years old, stood just under five feet tall, and weighed ninety-one pounds. He was described in a teacher’s evaluation as “good-natured, polite, enthusiastic, and conscientious,”