My Maman Grete: An educator from Germany for orphans of Holocaust victims in France and other family portraits

above.

To Maman Grète

Grète with Micha in Le Raincy in November 1951

Nobody was as present in my life as you, Maman Grète;¹ I missed nobody as much as you. Why did you leave me so early? You abandoned me twice. First by taking sleeping pills on March 22, 1953, when I was but one year, four months and two weeks old. Deliberate action, irrational act, or Freudian slip? No one knows; I shall not know.

Second, without you being accountable for it, by and by, in the underground, you disappeared from conversations, evocations and pictures to look at.

I cannot bring you back physically, alas! But my desire is to erase the unspoken law of silence that weighed on me like a lead helmet. I want to call out your name to the whole world, Maman Grète! You have no grave anymore. Then this book shall be a monument to you.

Why do I call you Maman Grète? Because Papa, Rémy, married again two years later and there then also was a Maman Magali. As a matter of fact, my sister Catia and I used to speak for a while of Maman Grète and of Maman Magali. At that time for us still existed both the Margaret from Germany and the Margaret from Provence.²

Afterwards, speaking of the former, looking at her photo albums was discontinued, and the latter simply became Maman, voluntarily or not. Particularly after Gilles, our half-brother, was born, who had but one Maman. Later on, she became Mam, then la Mère (the Mother) and eventually just Magali.

My whole childhood was a blend of knowing and silence. As a young widower, Rémy was temporarily discharged from your children’s care by your parents in Hamburg. They were the only grandparents I have known, because Rémy’s parents perished in the Camps. As far as I can remember, they too did not speak of you to me. To have the offsprings of their own flesh and blood before their eyes without feeling allowed to speak of you, whom they had cherished so much, what a pain for them also!

Then I said to myself, in my little child’s head, that this is how it goes: ‘once people are dead, one should not speak of them anymore, it is unmannerly. The grief for the survivors is too unbearable, one should not let them suffer, that is nasty.’ Above all, I was thinking of Papa who, after having suffered a thousand martyrdoms in the so-called ‘Concentration’ Camps (what an understatement!), having lost there his father, mother, brother, uncles, aunts, cousins and others, furthermore had to endure your passing away, Maman Grète. I was to protect him, to keep at least him. Therefore I did not feel permitted to mention what burned my tongue.

My only conversations about the subject were with Catia, my elder sister. She would speak with a mysterious facial expression of these sleeping pills of which nobody knew whether or not you had taken too many intentionally when you were feeling too miserably. Of that falling out of the window that might have happened to you previously, perhaps while cleaning windows. Of that plaster corset that you seemed to have had to wear afterwards. But with adults… nothing anymore.

Room had to be made for the re-composed family, in that the first one, your family, had to withdraw by being ‘swept under the carpet,’ in spite of the connection with your parents, our grandparents, being preserved. What a paradox! Up to Gilles, whom they generously treated like another grandson, without any discrimination. He will have to suffer from this situation, by the way.

Since then, I bear all this within myself, still now as a retired man, one prostate cancer later.

You were the Maman Grète of whom I was not to speak and therefore, in a certain way, a shame, a stain on my history. You have not deserved such a fame, neither have I deserved this diffuse feeling of guilt. In fear of another severe disease, I have taken again a psychotherapeutic support to get some help, so that all these things might clear up and calm down. One conviction came out of it: I had to loudly proclaim your virtues, your nature, your history.

To help me for these tasks, I am not without tools. First, Genealogy; Danielle, my wife and life companion, had started previously a comprehensive and exciting research on her family, in which I am taking an active part. When I felt that my father was going downhill, and when he told me some particulars about his relatives, I felt as early as in 1999 the desire to pick up the torch of memory. I was certain now that it was my turn to deal with the history of our family. In wide portions, it is your story, Maman Grète, and the one of your relatives.

Second, as sole heir of your brother, my dear Uncle Jacki, I came in 2007 into possession of the house your parents had built. And, because they never disposed of anything, I found in it treasures of memories: photograph albums and negatives, your school notebooks, your diary as a teenager, the diaries your mother kept from 1917 to 1943, as well as the complete family letter exchange, including your letters from France to your parents and Jacki, from 1947 to March 1953.

Your letters tell a lot about your personality, your intelligence, your culture, your manual and artistic capabilities, your commitment, your sincerity, your care for others—especially for children—, your humor and your joyfulness. They do not tell much about your moments of discouragement which eventually will tear you of this life, because you do not want your dear ones remaining in Hamburg to worry. However, as they are, they can be an invaluable source of knowledge about you, my own pre-history and the story of my beginnings.

Of course, these letters were written in German. Their style is very familiar to me. I almost could have written them myself (except that my script is not as regular and neat). No wonder since I had partly the same educators as you, having spent many months with your parents. The spirit of your family is also in me.

It was your choice to travel to France and share the life of Rémy, your great love, and to become an educator for orphaned children of Holocaust victims.

For some time, I have been in touch with some of them who knew you and can tell about you, which is very soothing for me because you left only good memories to them. On the insisting request of one of them I started to translate from German to French your 150 letters from France.

Translating is different from just reading and making an inventory. Your spirit and your feelings penetrate much more into me. This is where I shall take most of the material out of which this book is made, as a complement to my research on our family tree and family history.

¹ Italics are used in this book for words and expressions reproduced in their original languages, as well as for pseudonyms and nicknames. Maman is the French form of Mommy. Grète is the spelling of her first name used by my mother herself when she was living in France.

² In German, Grete is a short form of Margarete. Some sources define Magali as a Provence dialectal variant for Marguerite; others rather from Magdalena; in the latter case, my sentence is not right anymore.

YOUR STORY

Your start in life

Grete and her parents

You come to this world as Grete³ Meitmann, without a middle name, on Sunday, September 2, 1923 at 3:15 a.m. at the Frauenklinik (Women’s Clinic) in Kiel.⁴ Your parents were born in that town, as will be your brother Jacki, two years later. Your parents, although descending from Lutheran Protestants, were Socialists and no friends of priests. That is why you were not baptized upon your birth. But you were in the Nazi period, probably as a national-political obligation.

‘Grete,’ your first name, was not chosen without reason. This was the (shortened) name of your father’s first great love, with whom he maintained a lively correspondence during World War I, while he was a combatant in the trenches. This other Grete renounced him shortly before he got his home leave from the army, causing him a great grief of love.

Is it not a little burdensome, even unconsciously, to be—so to speak—a compensation child for a lost love? These things are not easy to be seen through, however I cannot but keep thinking that the choice of your first name will play a part in your destiny.

On your civil registration birth record, based on a statement from the Frauenklinik, your father Karl Meitmann, aged thirty-two, is said to be a police auxiliary. He is in fact a civil commissioner with the mission of facilitating the transition of the Schleswig-Holstein Police from the Empire to the Republic.

Your mother, the beautiful Else Meitmann, née Adam, is then aged twenty-one, a trained furniture and home interior designer. After one year of marriage, you are their first child.

You reside in a western district of Kiel.

Kiel Hasseldieksdammer Weg 217 in 1925

From period photographs, I see that you live in a detached house where there is also a shop of the Consumer Cooperative. It has a garden where you can play in open air with Jacki, your brother, who will be born on March 12, 1925, and on this way discover Nature.

Your address is Hasseldieksdammer Weg 217 (Hasseldieksdamm Drive). This typical Northern-German dialectal name always would amuse your mother. You probably were provided with this residence by your maternal grandfather Hermann Adam, founder and manager of the Workers’ Consumer Cooperative, after he had lost his job on a shipyard because he had been part of establishing a socialist-oriented worker union and organizing a strike.

Your other grandfather, Johannes Meitmann, had a similar story, by the way, but he died on the day before your parents’ marriage. Too bad, you haven’t known that one.

Neither have you your paternal grandmother; your father had lost his mother when he was seven; he was raised afterwards by a stepmother, as I was. Who said once that History does not repeat itself but keeps stuttering?

Grete in 1925

You are a sweet little child, pretty round face, with blond, stiff, square-cut hair, wide-open eyes, rather more grey than sky-blue, like your whole family, including my sister. Mine are not; they resemble the water in a glass in which several water-color brushes were rinsed: the color of all colors mixed.

³ Grete is the German spelling. For pronunciation reasons, her name was spelled Grète in France. I’ll use the latter when appropriate, i.e. after her immigration in November 1947.

⁴ See maps with the main locations mentioned, in the Documents Section at the end of this book.

Farewell from Kiel

In 1927, when you are about four, your family moves some sixty miles southwards to Altona. Later on, it will become a part of the ’Free and Hansa City’ (city-state) of Hamburg, but at that moment this location still belongs to the State of Schleswig-Holstein, although it is within the urban area of Hamburg. Its name comes from the dialectal expression ‘all to nah,’ meaning ‘much-too-near.’

Your Vati⁵ has been provided by his political party, the Social-Democratic SPD, with new responsibilities. He has established the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold for Schleswig-Holstein, a kind of paramilitary force that he leads, and he was elected as SPD District Secretary. He is more and more involved in his duties, so you now see him less often.

Simultaneously, you discover the large city of Hamburg, its maritime harbor, its subway and commuter trains, the Rathenaupark, which is more or less to replace your garden. Your address, by the way, is then ‘Am Rathenaupark,’ showing that you are very close to this large and popular public garden.

Two years later, in 1929, a new commitment change for your father, new moving (you will know so many in your short life!). You leave Schleswig-Holstein for Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel, a few miles to the northeast, known for its international airport and its prison.

You reside in a little apartment house built out of dark red bricks topped by a high tile roof of with one upper story and roof apartments, located at Maienweg 231.

Fuhlsbüttel, Maienweg 231,in 2007

That house still is there in the twenty-first century century, the last one at the corner of the street to the indirectly visible prison, surrounded with a garden in which Jacki and you again will be able to tire yourselves out, even with little playing companions. Still today the architecture does not look old-fashioned; the pavement is tree-lined. A rather pleasant place.

Your father was promoted within the SPD; he was elected as Hamburg regional chairman, later as a member of the regional and civic Parliament, the Bürgerschaft. He is very busy; many appointments, speeches and