Anne Hirschle - July 21, 2006
Religious Life
Now from my research-and I know-I, I've actually been to, well, Wrocław when it was that...
Yes.
...uh, Breslau was a very important center of German Judaism...
It was.
...all, all the way up to the time of...
It was, it, it was. In fact, I have a book-I was looking through my books yesterday. There, there is a book and um, I don't want to digress here, but there is a man in the Jewish cemetery-he's not Jewish, he's not German, he's a Polish man-my daughter discovered him when she went over there uh, who has made it his life's work to document the Jewish community uh, in Breslau be...before all this and apparently it was quite an intellectual group of people.
Oh, Abraham Geiger was there, and...
It was a highly educated and quite well assimilated...
Sure.
...Jewish community in, in Breslau. And uh, where were we before that? I was just digressing for a minute about...
That's okay, we were talking about the Jewish community in Breslau.
Yeah, it, it, it was, it was. And uh, my father uh, both my parents were instrumental in helping a lot of those people...
Mm-hm.
...uh, make it out. But, of course, a lot also didn't make it out.
Do you remember-you said you weren't very religious, but you did go to-did you go to synagogue on high holidays?
On high holidays I remember going to synagogue with my parents, yes.
Do you remember which one it was?
Uh...
It's okay if you don't.
It wasn't the Orthodox one, which I think was called Storch.
The White Stork.
No, no, it wasn't that one. It was, it was a more liberal, uh...
Okay.
...congregation. Uh, we didn't really keep very much at home um, as far as rituals or anything. But um, high holidays-my mother more so than my father. I mean, we were very much aware that we were Jewish, but it didn't really affect our daily lives.
Would you say that your father thought of himself as a German first and a Jew second?
I would think so, yes, absolutely, yes. And certainly his, his brother, who had been an officer in the, in the army. No, I, I think absolutely they saw themselves as, as Germans.
I think in a lot of cases that makes it even more of a betrayal to people that had served, you know, in the German army and to them they were just Germans. They weren't, you know, the fact that they were Jewish was just...
That's right. In fact, one thing...
...a religious deal.
...one thing my mother did and she was under the impression, naïvely, that if she had a family tree which showed all the different things that various family members had been involved in-including serving in the army, but also the education, everything-that that would be a consideration-considering you German. And so I'm quite fortunate that she actually sat down and laboriously-before the days of computers and Internet-to laboriously make up these family...
Wow.
...this family tree just to demonstrate to anybody who was interested-but nobody was interested-how well assimilated in German we had really been as a family. So um, at that time, yes, they definitely felt of themselves as German, but they never denied the fact that they were Jewish Germans, you understand.
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