For many American Jews, the rediscovery of family history is a journey of nostalgia and pride. But for one Palo Alto couple, it has also brought poignant memories of the pain of the Holocaust.
Ruth and René Wildorff recently returned to Ruth’s hometown of Mayen, Germany, about 100 miles northwest of Frankfurt, to investigate how a local historical organization was handling the Holocaust’s impact on the town.
At the invitation of the Jewish-Christian Workgroup, an ad hoc assemblage of about 20 people, the Wildorffs recently spent several weeks touring Mayen and other sites in Germany. The Jewish-Christian Workgroup has spent the last 15 years researching and documenting the lives of Mayen’s prewar Jews.
The group compiled some of its findings — including many photographs — to create an exhibit that opened in 1987 at the town museum.
“My wife went with trepidations,” René Wildorff says. “But we felt there was an earnest attempt there to come to grips with the enormity of the Holocaust.”
In addition to sponsoring the exhibit, the Jewish-Christian Workgroup continues its efforts to research the lives of Mayen’s Jewish families and, as René Wildorff says, “tries to bring Jews back into the consciousness of society.”
Looking through the exhibit book, Ruth Wildorff found a very personal piece of history. She noticed a 1926 photograph of a bowling club, and “I suddenly realized my father was in it.”
According to René Wildorff, the Jewish presence in Mayen dates back to around 900 C.E. In the early 1930s, 30 or 40 Jewish families kept a visible presence in the town. Ruth Wildorff’s parents operated a workers’ clothing and shoe store, and she has vivid memories of townspeople boycotting the store in 1933 during an early wave of Nazism. Today, Mayen has no synagogue and only one Jewish family.
The Wildorffs arrived in Germany in June. They traveled to Kalkar, where Ruth Wildorff’s father was born, and they visited the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Ruth was interned as a teenager. When the couple visited Germany some 20 years ago, all the Germans they met seemed determined to avoid discussing the Holocaust.
“No one wanted to know anything,” Ruth Wildorff says.
On this recent visit, the Wildorffs found a small but visible group whose members are interested in documenting Germany’s destruction of Jewish life in the community. Similar groups have begun to probe the vanished world of prewar Jews in other cities, including Koblenz and Frankfurt.
“People who vaguely remember the war are beginning to realize there was a lot more to German history than what the older people had been telling them,” Ruth Wildorff observes.
By the Wildorffs’ account, the Jewish-Christian Workgroup is especially critical because it teaches the town of Mayen about its past — and its responsibilities. “We have to tell our children and grandchildren that this should never happen again, not just to Jews, but to any person anywhere in the world.
“I’m talking about Bosnia, Uganda, Rwanda, where killings go on all the time,” Ruth Wildorff says.
It remains to be seen whether the youngest generation of Germans will absorb those lessons. Most members of the Mayen group are middle-aged, and none is younger than 45. For Holocaust education to work, Ruth Wildorff says, people “may have to visit the concentration camps to see what really happened.”
For now, however, she finds the Mayen group’s personalized depiction of Holocaust victims, through photographs and other documentary evidence, is an inspiring lesson for others. “We could learn from them that you need to put human faces on people’s lives,” she says.
“If you don’t show their faces, they are statistics, and it’s easier to kill.”