SUMMONS TO BERLIN: NAZI THEFT AND A DAUGHTER’S QUEST FOR JUSTICE
At my father’s death bed, he challenged me with two questions. “Are you tough enough yet?”, and “do they know who you are?” Though we hardly discussed his life during the Nazis, I did know that he recently became aware of a property in East Berlin that belonged to our family. His questions challenged me deeply because twenty-seven years before that day, I was sent to Berlin on a family errand, to thank a man who had been helpful to my grandparents during the war. Though our meeting spot was close to where I stayed, I couldn’t bring myself to go as I was filled with anxiety. I had an actual panic attack, and I asked my father if I could come home. Over the years my father witnessed that college student morph into a medical student and at the time of his death, a mother and a wife, doing groundbreaking research on psychopaths, using nuclear brain imagining. He knew I was both fascinated and terrified of the Nazis. His last words were meant to dare me to take the case on, knowing full well that I would take him up on it.
The most consequential action taken by me as a result of my father’s dare took nine years and became the subject of my book Summons to Berlin. It was insisting on digging into the facts about the theft of my family’s building in a forced auction just weeks before Kristallnacht 1938. After the destruction of the Berlin Wall, Nazi and communist plundered real estate became available for claim.
For my family that meant retrieving a large center city building owned by my grandfather and his nephew since 1920. Our ownership was challenged by the very descendants who won the building in the auction. They claimed my grandfather couldn’t pay his mortgage because he was an incompetent businessman not because he was a Jew. 1938 was five years into the Nazi takeover, with five years of punitive taxes, harassment, loss of citizenship, and forced closure of businesses. The lawyers who purported to help me and the Judges, whose job it was to decide on the merits of our claim incessantly pressured me to make a deal with our opponents. Their reasoning was that Berlin was overrun with thousands of claims, and ours, because it was contested was more complex.
“Split the proceeds of the sale,” they urged, as if it was a piece of cake. Had I agreed I would have made a sizeable chunk of money for my child’s college fund and saved years of time back and forth to Berlin, but the accusations of my grandfather’s incompetence infuriated me, as I knew that prior to the Nazis he was very successful. I was intensely interested in the details of the takeover and determined to know exactly what happened. A financial payoff, though tempting, was not important compared to knowing the details of my grandfather’s plight.
Stalemated, trip after trip, and told that the circumstances of the auction and the backgrounds of my opponents were unavailable, I finally hired an international investigator who quickly found the details I had been asking for. My opponents were descendants of card carrying Nazis who systematically rid the building of Jewish tenants to make room for another businessman who would mass produce the Nazi flag. And, then, in September 1941, that flag maker received the order to manufacture one million Jewish patches for Jews to be worn for easy identification which ultimately led to deportation and death.
The irony was my grandparents likely were forced to wear those very patches as they were still in Berlin. Unable to take Hitler seriously, initially convinced that he wouldn’t last, they became trapped as all exits out of Germany were shut to them. Finally, my father was able to book them on seats on the last sealed train from Berlin in October of 1941. After waiting in Lisbon for a trans-Atlantic ship they lived in Cuba. In April 1943 my grandparents made it to the United States. Sadly, the day after he arrived in NYC he died right after his brief reunion with my father whom he had not seen for six years.
Though I ultimately won the negotiations, though having to pay a small percentage to the opponents, nine years is a long time. My own personality contributed to the long duration. When I was in Berlin, I was susceptible to lies or partial truths because of the recent loss of my father and psychological weaknesses emanating from my unprotected childhood, partially due to the impact of the Holocaust on my parents and the matter of being surrounded by grownups in various states of medical illness and angst.
Naively, perhaps, childishly, I wanted to be in safe hands in Berlin, helped by people with my best interests in mind, people working to contribute to the repair of the world through restitution. Raised in a Germanic household, I so easily fell into line amongst the German lawyers embracing the role of a dutiful and grateful client, inhibited from challenging my lawyers or deeply questioning their methodology when my gut told me otherwise.
I wanted to believe the word Wiedergutmachung, “to make good again,” the German word most associated with restitution, a word that delivered its promise to our household when I was a little girl in 1953 when my father was desperately sick and unable to work. That 1953 word Wiedergutmachung propelled me to Berlin forty years later. By using my skills as a psychiatrist, listening carefully to the language of those urging me to settle enabled me to go against an entrenched bureaucracy and lawyers who just wanted to close a deal independent of the historical facts. Wiedergutmachung, did not exist, nor never could because one can’t make good again the horrors of the past.
The details that I learned of my family’s everyday life under Nazi rule had personal meaning for me, but the lessons from their failure to see the oncoming menace of the Nazis in the 1930’s and my own somewhat dissociated state in Berlin in the 1990s apply aptly to us now.
We must be vigilant in pursuing the truth, especially during challenging times. Currently we are facing a “firehose of falsehood” from various directions. And humans are vulnerable to so-called strong men, charismatic types, trying to dismantle democracies or sabotage nascent ones. Why is this so? It is an innate human desire to feel safe and it is easy to be fooled. Sadly, assured safety is impossible, given we know we will die and have little control over when. If we are fortunate, we have had chunks of time when we can distract ourselves from these thoughts because we have been engaged in our life’s activities. But in times of danger—such as the pandemic, economic reversals, the worldwide effects of climate change, or war— it is harder to be diverted from our fears. I say this as a psychiatrist and as an ordinary human being. We are vulnerable to lies when we are afraid.
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Joanne Intrator’s life has been shaped by being the daughter of German Jewish refugees. From childhood, she pondered why people perpetrate atrocities on their fellow human beings. After studying German history at Connecticut College, she received an MD from Columbia University and became a psychiatrist with an expertise in abnormal behavior. She spearheaded the first brain imaging research on well-characterized psychopaths, which was published in the Journal of Biological Psychiatry. Following her father’s death in 1993, she took it upon herself to fight for restitution of a building in Berlin; her professional insights into the behavior of bureaucrats were critical to her understanding of how to negotiate with obstructionists. Her journey has been the subject of news articles, television interviews, and museum exhibits. Joanne practices psychiatry in New York City and writes a blog on psychopathy for Psychology Today. For more, see her website, JoanneIntrator.com.
Category: On Writing
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