STRALSUND, Germany (JTA) – This captivating medieval town located on the country’s Baltic coast becomes an unlikely setting for the reunion of a prolonged circle of relatives separated by the Holocaust.
On August 18, against all odds, a score of descendants of Julius Blach and his brother Felix Blach piled up for 4 days in the village where the Blachs lived and ran the Jewish family’s leather business at Heilgeiststrasse 89, in the village’s grocery shopping center. center.
More than 80 years after the Holocaust, few descendants of the circle of relatives knew there were other relatives. Some grew up with Jewish traditions, others were unaware of the deep Jewish roots of their circle of relatives. Some have visited Stralsund and the site of their business circle and home of relatives, but the maximum has never done so, and many have never met.
The long-awaited meeting, postponed twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic, reconnected two branches of the circle of relatives from six countries on 4 continents. no connection to the Blach.
Fechner, who is not Jewish, has spent more than eight years tracing the history of Blach’s circle of relatives and locating and connecting more than 30 descendants from Germany, Holland, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States and Brazil.
The meeting was a way to “return the circle of relatives to their roots and show them where they came from,” Fechner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Her role as a family circle columnist began in 2012 when Fechner and her husband Martin bought the construction at Heilgeiststrasse 89. They had moved to Stralsund from their home in Hamburg in 1994, motivated to help revitalize the former East German city. The space was almost in ruins, in ruins for more than seven decades of oblivion and after the war years, when Stralsund was part of the Communist-ruled German Democratic Republic.
In 2014, the Fechners’ rigorous recovery of construction won the city’s prestigious historic preservation award. In preparation for the award ceremony, Fechner enlisted the help of the city’s archivist and studied the history of construction. As his studies progressed, the history of the Blach circle of relatives has become apparent.
For about six decades, from the early 1880s to 1938, two generations of Blach marketed their leather goods on the ground floor of the building, owned by Julius. Several members of Blach’s circle of relatives lived in his apartments on the top floor and others lived nearby.
The Blach, whose German roots go back centuries, belonged to the small but active Jewish network of Stalsund. It housed a synagogue (now defunct) and a Jewish cemetery that survived the war.
In 1938, under the excessive pressure of Nazi persecution, Julius Blach’s nephew, Carl-Philipp, who ran the company, was forced to abandon it.
“I shout to you, my deceased ancestors, that there is no guilt on my part for the decadence. . . I shout to them that I have tried to maintain their legacy, but this will have to have given way to fate,” he said. wrote, promising to protect his values in his long-term plans.
Carl-Philipp fled to Berlin with his circle of relatives and survived a concentration camp, but died of health problems in 1946. Many members of Blach’s circle of relatives perished in the Holocaust, adding 4 of Julius’ sons; Paul Samuel, brother of Carl-Philipp; and two of Carl Phillip’s sons. Some survived the brutality of the concentration camps.
Others, besides Julius Blach’s son Friedrich, fled the Nazi regime and dispersed around the world.
Fechner delved into the history of the Blach family, deciding if there were living descendants. Now he has amassed a treasure trove of archival curtains and created a detailed portrait of the 300-year-old Blach lineage.
On a recent sunny morning, Fechner welcomed a guest to the former Family Business Blach at Heilgeiststrasse 89, a magnificent gabled terracotta construction dating back to the seventeenth century.
Outside, embedded in the paved sidewalk, are 3 brass-plated “stumbling stones” commemorating Carl-Phillip Blach and his two sons. Thanks to Fechner’s efforts, five more stolpersteines were placed around the corner for other members of Blach’s circle of relatives who perished in the Holocaust.
Inside the entrance, which is open to the public, Fechner wall panels reveal the history of the Blach family’s ties to Stralsund and the building.
The discovery of the pre-war Jewish afterlife of the building struck a chord with Fechner. She was interested all her life in Jewish history and more specifically in the genocidal Nazi regime in her country. Growing up, as his circle of relatives talked about the war, he heard little about the Jews who suffered the Holocaust.
“They didn’t communicate about it,” he said in a lengthy verbal exchange in the tea room, which is one of two department stores on the ground floor of the renovated Blach building. “When we bought the house, we thought, ‘We need to participate in the recovery of the old town. “We didn’t know it would expand so emotionally. “
Although the search for the family took a long time, it was rewarding. “But it also showed me, once again, how terrible and violent our history is in GermanyArray,” he added.
Among those taking part in the assembly was Casey Blake, a researcher in American studies at Columbia University, who was the first member of the Blach family with whom Fechner came into contact.
His grandparents, Friedrich and Kate, escaped from Berlin with their two children under the Nazi regime and settled in New York, he explained in an email to Fechner.
His father, Peter Blake, Americanized his last call and served in U. S. Army intelligence. U. S. during the war. He later became an influential architect and critic.
Fechner and Blake began a correspondence that extended to Blake’s sister, Christina Blake Oliver, in the Greater Boston Area. Since then, both have traveled to Stralsund with their adult children.
“There’s that feeling of that hand crossing the Atlantic Ocean and going through a century of war, suffering and loss,” Blake recalled in a phone conversation.
“Even now, I am still amazed at what happened. I keep getting information from new parents I didn’t know I had. It’s very rewarding to know that more of us have survived than we thought in the past. “
He and Oliver were only aware of a handful of parents, each said in separate conversations. While his father and grandfather were immersed in German intellectual life and culture, they said they had never spoken about the war or the tragic losses of their families. They were raised without a devout faith, for the annual collection around their grandfather’s candlelit Christmas tree, a culture he brought with him from Germany, Oliver recalls.
Oliver, whose mother is an Episcopalian, is an active member of a congregational church. He never felt like making a stopover in Germany, he told JTA, knowing that so many relatives were killed in Nazi concentration camps. But his scale in 2017 to Stralsund and the spending time with Fechner uplifted and left a brilliant mark.
“I needed to see where my grandfather came from,” he told JTA in a phone conversation. “It’s a position I loved. ” She remembered that he had a beautiful old Stralsund card hanging in his kitchen. The stopover at Stralsund “made me feel closer to him,” she said.
For Gaby Glassman, the reunification of the circle of relatives crowns a life of searching for the roots of her circle of relatives, adding visits to Stralsund long before Fechner contacted her.
Glassman’s mother, Rosemarie Joseph, grew up in Stralsund and is the granddaughter of Julius and Selma Blach. Rosemarie’s parents, Gertrud and Max Joseph, owned a branch on the corner of the Blach business (they were later killed in the Sobibor death camp).
In 1937, Rosemarie and her first husband fled the Nazis to the Netherlands with their young son Peter, who first hid through a circle of Dutch relatives and was then deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Surprisingly, they all survived the war.
Glassman, a psychologist who specializes in the transgenerational trauma of the Holocaust, grew up in Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter. She moved to London where she lives with her husband.
Fechner, who identified himself by his work, among others, through the U. S. -based Obermayer Foundation for the Promotion of German-Jewish Relations. founder of the Initiative for the Commemoration of Jewish Life in Stralsund, an organization that fights anti-Semitism and racial intolerance for today’s generation of young people.
I’ve felt so much tension because I felt bad about what our country has done to the Jewish people.
Through his public lectures, articles and programs, Fechner brought the city’s Jewish history to a wider audience, Neumerkel wrote in an email.
“Stralsund owes him the fact that we are dealing with this of our history more than before,” he wrote.
Fechner embraced the new friendships he developed with descendants of the Blach family, which gave him the opportunity to speak more openly with Jewish people about the Holocaust.
“I felt so much tension because I felt bad about what our country has done to the Jewish people,” he said.
Fechner is asked why he embarked on this huge undertaking. Beyond the reunion of the family, it was motivated by the forces of history.
“I sought to give friendship a chance and give another impression of Stralsund. . . and the Germans that memory still hangs like a dark and heavy cloud,” he wrote in comments he shared with JTA.
“The ultimate and painful rejection of those innocent and suffering individuals would be in the continued refusal to remember. “
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