Göttingen Revisited

By Diana K --- “Six million is just a number. Here I want to give a voice to two people who perished in the Shoah, my grandparents, Max and Trude Hahn.” This is how I start my presentations to high school students at the Hainberg Gymnasium in Göttingen, the school my mother was expelled from shortly after her 16^th birthday in spring 1938. 

This was my second visit to the school. Thanks to the foresight of my grandparents who sent many documents and belongings to Sweden and Switzerland for safekeeping before the war – and my mother and her brother to the UK – we have a very detailed history of the Hahn family from 1840 to 1940. It must be one of the best documented continuous stories of a German Jewish family in existence.

Max Hahn was a WWI patriot, a philanthropist, an art and Judaica collector of considerable importance, a successful and innovate businessman and president of the Jewish community of Göttingen for 20 years before Kristallnacht. He and Trude had family roots in this part of Germany going back to the mid-1700s. Max and many Jews like him were the motor of the German economy between the two wars. My grandmother was very active too. They led a fulfilling and happy life and Mum was born into a beautiful and loving home – which still stands. To have to change her charmed life suddenly in 1938, leave home at 16, learn a trade in Hamburg and then move to England with precious little in her pocket, is a common story. And for my grandparents to perish in Riga in early 1942 was a common fate.

But for today’s high school kids, this is pretty much ancient history. One teacher told me the Holocaust could be as far back as Ancient Rome as far as these students are concerned. So to meet the daughter of someone who attended their school (and whose photo is shown permanently in the school entrance together with the other three Jewish girls expelled the same day - see below), is poignant for them (and for me).

And I explained that if it wasn’t for Hitler, I may have gone to their school, my kids too, and my grandchildren could be beside them in the classroom. Not difficult to make the story relevant and immediate.

My mother Hanni Hahn, second from right

While it was difficult to prepare the presentation as it brings back such tough memories, it is so rewarding to stimulate interest and curiosity among young minds. And I got great questions. Could I live in Göttingen (no, too many ghosts); could I live in Germany (possibly as I do feel that the country has faced its shame and keeps the Shoah story alive). What would you have asked your grandfather if you had met him (why didn’t you leave while you could). What does being Jewish mean to you (a long story, mainly linked to the fact that being Jewish meant we were displaced and that my parents had to make a new life in a new country). I explained that it had knocked the Jewish heritage right out of my mother, that my parents anglicized their names, and did everything to integrate in their new country.

One boy came up to me at the end of class, asking how did I manage to stay in touch with a family now spread all over the world? He could not imagine a family like this as his whole family was local. Welcome to the diaspora.

Cleaning my grandparents' Stolpersteine

The school has volunteered to maintain my family’s stolpersteine outside my great grand-father’s first home and warehouse on the city’s main street. We went to clean them together. Every school in Göttingen has been assigned stolpersteine to look after. This is a new initiative.

The thank you notes from the high school kids have been very moving.  I felt I was doing important work. Tough but oh, so meaningful.