Willy from Baltimore

If it weren't for Hitler, Willy Weinberg would have been a cattle dealer in Rindheim, Germany like his father and grandfather and great grandfather. Instead he ended up as half owner of a kosher butcher shop in Baltimore, Maryland—and credits God. Willy, one of two Jews out of eighty-seven from this Black Forest village to survive the concentration camps, was deported on his eighteenth birthday and released four years later, in 1945. Yet his smile is real. "I thank Hashem (God) every day for His kindness and mercy Baruch Hashem (Blessed Be He) "because I have nineteen wonderful grandchildren and nine great grandchildren," says this small, good-natured man of seventy-eight. Many who survived the Holocaust declared that "God is dead," but not Willy or his sons. Both became rabbis, Willy says proudly (though maybe with a hint of regret that they didn't take over his business).

He's now retired, but the butcher shop still has "Weinberg" in fat, black letters above the doorway. "You see? The new owner didn't change the sign!" Willy says with delight as we drive by on our way to lunch at "the kosher Chinese restaurant." He eats here often since his wife died two years ago, and the Chinese owner greets us like old friends. "Just remember, it's my treat!" Willy says, as we are seated, order, and return to the past, where we spent all morning. I am here to find out what the other Jews I interviewed from my father's village didn't know: what happened in the village after they left for America, Hitler invaded Poland, the borders closed, and no more Jews could leave Nazi Germany.

* * *

"If you buy a cow and make a profit on it, you don't want to leave!" Willy says about why his father and uncles, unlike my father, ignored the early signs to emigrate. By 1934 Juden Sind Hier Unerwuenscht! (No Jews Wanted Here!) signs were posted, literally, at every marketplace they visited in southwest Germany. The Weinbergs and their non-Jewish trading partners continued trading cattle as before. I always imagined Jews who didn't obey Nazi orders getting beaten, hauled away, or shot on the spot. Which is why I never understood how anyone could kid himself into staying in Germany after 1935 when Nazi law stripped Jews of their civil rights and left them unprotected, at the mercy of anyone's hatred.

"So how did you get away with it?"

"We managed," Willy says, and sips his egg drop soup. "People were loyal. They helped us, and so my father's business lasted until 1938 when the last of the inns he stayed in became unavailable." How gradual everything was! No wonder the Weinbergs got lulled into false safety, if it took four years for one lodging to become a Nazi headquarter; another to be off-limits because of a young Christian woman who lived there (a law prohibited Jews from being under the same roof with her); and a third, owned by "two lovely old people," to be unavailable because of their fear of reprisal. It was five years until the farmer who came to the house at night to trade cows disappeared.

"People became too afraid," Willy says without rancor. I'm thinking Same old, same old. It's just what the other Rindheim Jews I met said: People were afraid. What could they do? But then I realize their empathy was rooted in having escaped to America, whereas Willy lived through the Holocaust nightmare in Germany. So where does his empathy come from? And where's his rage? Could it be that his survival with a smile depends on conquering it, or at least containing it?

"Most of the older Rindheimers didn't change their behavior towards us—except for one ne-er-do-well who strutted around like a real Nazi," says Willy. "But the children were a different story." Every day in school they learned that the Jews were vermin destroying German purity. And the belief took hold quickly because, unlike their parents, they had no sense of...