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Introduction: New Manners From Zbaszyn to Hildesheim BERNWARD NEDDERICH (A pseudonym) was a so-called Eastern Jew (Ostjude ). He was born in Warsaw in 1914 but grew up in Hildesheim, a socially diverse, mid-sized, provincial town in northwest Germany. On 27–28 October 1938, the Nazi regime expelled some 17,000 Polish Jews to an internment camp in Zbaszyn, Poland.1 Bernward’s sisters had all been born in Hildesheim and possessed German passports, but they too were deported because their parents were Polish citizens. Bernward and his brother escaped this fate only because they had already emigrated to Palestine. As Lotte, his oldest sister, wrote (in a letter to him dated 1 November): Everything happened so suddenly that it took us totally by surprise. In the evening, four men came and said that we must leave Germany in two hours. You can imagine our state. We could not take anything with us. Papa took a few suits with him and a little linen. Don’t worry about us. . . . We have written to our relatives in Warsaw and have already received an answer. . . . We hope to see you soon. Without an immigration certificate from the British in Palestine, Bernward could not get his family out of Zbaszyn. On 2 December 1939, Lotte reported that the families Beim, Schwer, Zinn, and Zucker, all former Hildesheimers, were still trapped in Zbaszyn, though she had heard that the camp would soon get overfilled. Bernward lost track of them after they moved back to Warsaw. He never heard from any of them again. Sarah Meyer had been friends with Gustie Beim in spite of the fact that Sarah’s family were German Jews and Gustie’s were Polish Jews; relations between these groups had not always been smooth. Sarah never heard from Gustie after Gustie too was deported to Zbaszyn in 1938. When I interviewed Sarah (see note on reference system),2 Bernward’s letters served as sufficient verification of what she had long suspected but never fully accepted about the fate of her playmate: Gustie had been killed in a ghetto, camp, or gas chamber. 1 2 Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times Around the same time, Georg Brzezinski was stationed at an army depot near a Polish city that contained a large Jewish ghetto. The depot subcontracted some 140 Jews from the SS. Georg insisted that, in spite of the risk of retribution from the SS, “they” treated “their” Jews well, and he even developed a friendship with one of them. Yet whenever I asked him about the ultimate fate of these Jews, he spoke of their murder in the passive, as if he had been only an ordinary German. Quite beyond his control, the SS came under cover of “night and fog,” he explained, and took the Jews away.3 In keeping with his view of himself as an ordinary person, Georg had described the so-called Final Solution (Endlösung) to the Jewish Question using a phrase taken from Nazi propaganda. Yet back in Hildesheim, the Brzezinskis had lived quite close to the Nedderichs and the Meyers. At times over the course of the interwar years, they had even been neighbors. Studies of the Holocaust and the implementation of Nazi racial policy are typically prefaced by the long history of latent antisemitism in Germany and Europe; Nazi ideology and propaganda; and the Nazi seizure of power, their anti-Jewish legislation, and their violence against the Jews during the 1930s. The story of the Holocaust per se usually begins with the so-called Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) of 9–10 November 1938. In response to the plight of his family (like Bernward’s, it had been expelled from Germany), Herschel Grynszpan shot a diplomat in the German embassy in Paris. Using this incident as an excuse, the Nazi regime orchestrated a nationwide pogrom. Concluding with the first wave of deportations of German Jews to concentration camps, Kristallnacht marked a major step towards state-sponsored genocide.4 The Nazi regime began to organize a bureaucratic–industrial system of mass murder in 1941. In Hildesheim, the next wave of deportations took place in 1942. On 31 March and 23 July, the Nazi regime relocated most of the two hundred or so remaining Jews to ghettos, concentration camps, and ultimately death camps: Theresienstadt, Belzec, Majdanek, Sorbibor. Only twelve Jews remained during the rest of the war, all of whom were involved in mixed marriages. The deportations to Zbaszyn thus marked a critical...

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