Doing what could be done when the worst came

At a mass meeting in San Francisco working on responses to the Trump presidency last March, I was hanging about in the back of what felt like a repetitive session. A man who I recognized from many such gatherings and demonstrations, but had never spoken with, approached me to chat. He turned out to be Bruce Neuburger; he handed me a card about his recently released book Postcards to Hitler: A German Jew's Defiance in a Time of Terror, published by Monthly Review Press. This is a small press book very much worth searching out. 

A print copy can be found from Powells, an audiobook (that's what I read) from Audible. The San Francisco Public Library was also my source for a copy. 

Bruce Neuburger has created a vivid history of the life and fates of his grandparents. Benno and Anna were prosperous middle class Jews living in Munich. Benno had served honorably, if without enthusiasm, as an over-age draftee in the German army in World War I. After that war, he built a business and invested in land. The family lived through the terrible postwar inflation of the 1920s and the political instability of the Weimar Republic. Times were sometimes bad -- and sometimes better -- for Germany's Jews and for Germans at large. When Hitler's Nazi movement came to power in 1933, the family could hope this was just another turn in twenty years of both prosperity and sporadic insecurity. 

Nazi rule proved enduring and lethal for Jews. Jewish life -- both business and family -- was forced into smaller and smaller crevices of the society. Some of the younger generation quite rapidly decided to flee the looming catastrophe. Benno and Anna's children were among the very few who escaped to real security in America -- the U.S. in the 1930s was not a welcoming destination for Jewish refugees. 

Benno held out a long time before listening to the entreaties of his children to join them across the Atlantic. By the time he was ready to uproot himself in 1939, German Jews had been forced into ghettos. Germany then invaded Poland, western Europe, and eventually Russia. Benno expressed his secret confidence to his friend that Germany would lose the war -- but he had lost all chance of escape.

And so he performed the one solitary act of resistance he could imagine: he wrote postcards denouncing Hitler and the Nazis and dropped them in the postal stream. This wasn't effectual, or even meant to be -- there were no addressees. But Benno had found a tiny way to speak his necessary truth. The book offers an imagined account to the first time he dared to do this:

At the corner, a young woman appeared. Benno looked down. He had an urge to turn away but thought that would look suspicious. The woman looked at him as she passed the corner. 

Did she see the star? [the mandatory star of David sewn on his jacket] All he was sure of was that the mark was doing what it was meant to do -- rob him, rob Jews, of their last remnant of dignity. ... 

[Benno Neuburger] looked down at the words he'd written in large letters where an address would normally be: "THE ETERNAL MASS MURDERER, HITLER, I SPIT ON YOU!" He put the card in the mailbox, turned, and walked back to his apartment. 

It took nearly a year for the Nazi postal service to figure out who was carrying on this treacherous practice. But he was caught, imprisoned, tortured, and, perhaps because of his veteran status, brought to trial rather than being summarily shot. A full judicial record survived which formed some of the raw material for his grandson's book.

The Nazi judicial records from the Berlin People's Court concluded:

Benno Israel Neuburger has been executed on Sept. 18th, 1942. The convicted offender denigrated the Fuhrer, and the National Socialist government and committed high treason against the German Reich.

The Reich Ministry of Justice ordered fifty bright red posters announcing the execution of Benno Neuburger to be put up at visible locations in Munich. 

Anna was killed the next day at the death camp at Treblinka, Poland. Bruce Neuburger makes no suggestion that the date of her murder had anything to do with the date of Benno's. The machinery of extermination just ground on for them both.

• • •

The author/grandson, Bruce Neuburger, makes no pretense of writing a conventional academic history. He certainly consulted as many sources as he could find. The reunification of Germany after the 1990 collapse of the East German Soviet-aligned state led to release of the judicial and other records which enabled him to discover particulars about his grandparents' murders in 1942. Neuburger canvassed surviving family members. Recent German historians have also found many lost details of German Jewish resistance to Hitler. 

On this information, Bruce Neuburger wrote a novelistic account of life and tragedy that honors the experience of his family and so many like them. He explains his aim and defends telling his family story his way:

In my effort to bring to life the people whose stories are told here and the social environment in which they lived, I have necessarily imagined situations and relationships beyond the facts that I acquired directly [through historical sources.] I have sought to use the knowledge I gained through extensive historical research and travel to reconstruct the drama of those times. I can promise you, the reader, that I have taken care to reflect the historical moments recounted here as accurately and truthfully as I can.

Ever wonder what it was like to live under, stand against, and die under Nazi rule? This is a book to be read, experienced, and pondered.