Never Forget Your Name. Alwin Meyer
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‘In spite of the home help, my mother liked to cook. We were all particularly fond of her turnovers with jam filling.’
Janek had nice clothes and – memorably – leather boots, which he liked to wear whenever the weather permitted. ‘My mother dressed smartly. She was a good-looking woman with dark eyes and long shiny hair. My father was relatively light-skinned. My brother Jakob and my sister Ita took after my mother and had dark eyes and a dark skin. I had fair hair as a boy and took more after my father.’
As there was no Jewish school in Gdynia, Janek went ‘where everyone went, the Catholic state school’.
As in all classrooms, there was a picture of the Polish president Ignacy Mościcki hanging on the left-hand wall and a portrait of the prime minister, General Józef Piłsudski, on the right. On the back wall, there was a crucifix in plain view during the lessons. Every morning the first class was religious instruction with a prayer service. We called it ‘catechism’. The two or three Jewish pupils in my class didn’t have to attend religious instruction lessons, but we usually went anyway. We didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves, and besides all our friends went. We didn’t think about it much. I soon knew more about Catholicism than Judaism.
The Mandelbaums celebrated the major festivals such as Pesach, the eight-day commemoration of the exodus from Egypt, and ate matzo, the bread made with water and grain but without leavening. ‘I also recall that we got new clothes for the holidays. My mother took me to the shirt- and shoe-makers and to the tailor to be fitted for a new suit. In those days we didn’t by anything off the peg, because the quality was not normally good enough.’
There was no synagogue in Gdynia, just two prayer houses. The community had no rabbi but a cantor, who led the prayers:79 ‘As far as I can recall, most of the Jewish families living there were moderately religious. They met for the holidays and prayed together, for which in our faith a rabbi is not required.’
The first Jewish inhabitants of Gdynia moved into the present-day district of Chylonia in 1876. According to the second Polish population census, there were eighty-four Jews in the city in December 1931, of whom twenty-three put Yiddish, and one Hebrew, as their mother tongue. The records state that there were sixty-five permanently resident Jewish children, women and men. The other nineteen were presumably temporary residents. The Polish government decided in the 1920s to develop Gdynia as a port and gateway to the world. As the work progressed, the city became increasingly attractive for Jewish families. By around 1935, there were already 700 Jews living in this Baltic city, and by the end of 1938 around 4,500.80
Janek had lots of interests and enjoyed sports. One day his father gave him a bicycle. He trained on Skwer Kościuszki. This square had a street on each side leading directly to the Baltic Sea. It is still one of the most popular places for the people of Gdynia. Cycling became Janek’s great passion. He took part in school races. ‘Once I even came third.’ In winter, he preferred ice skating at Kamienna Góra, the stone mountain. This small hill close to the beach also gave its name to the smallest district of Gdynia, with magnificent villas on its slopes. ‘I loved to skate there. It was very cold in winter right next to the sea. We also played ice hockey. I often used to take my little brother Jakob with me. He loved sports as much as I did. And when there was snow or ice on the paths and roads, we slid down the hill on wooden boards.’
As far as he can recall, neither he nor the other Jewish children suffered from antisemitism. Janek and his classmates and friends didn’t care who was ‘Jewish or Catholic or whatever else’. He would play football in the summer or hang around the harbour area with friends, always ready for a new adventure. ‘For example, we would jump into the harbour and swim alongside the ships.’ This was forbidden, of course, and also dangerous, because they could have been crushed by the ships’ hulls. His parents knew nothing about this. ‘Yes, I was a lad ready to get into all kinds of mischief.’
‘It was great the way the boys played together and looked out for one another.’ He never felt, or was made to feel, any different from the non-Jewish children. One indication of how Polish they felt was the fact that Janek’s family almost always spoke Polish at home. ‘I didn’t know any other language.’ His parents still spoke Yiddish to each other and with friends and relatives. Majloch and Cyrla Mandelbaum came from large families. Janek’s father had four sisters and three brothers, and his mother had nine sisters and brothers, including two sets of twins.
Many Poles living inland – including the Mandelbaums’ relatives − would visit the port cities during the holidays. Janek got on particularly well with Uncle Sigmund, his father’s youngest brother. ‘And don’t forget Hinda, my mother’s youngest sister. She was cultured, very good-looking, fashionably dressed and had lots of admirers in Gdynia.’ She once stayed with them for a whole year. ‘We all got on well with one another. My parents loved each other and we loved them. I can’t remember any major arguments. Without exaggeration, I would say that we had a good and interesting life.’
Jiří and Zdeněk Steiner The children’s German nanny was called Trude, and she was very fond of Jiří and Zdeněk Steiner. The twins were almost inseparable. ‘We were always fighting but loved each other a lot.’ Their father Pavel ran a wholesale business with a partner in Prague. Fabrics were purchased and delivered to businesses throughout the country. Their mother Jana sometimes took the orders.
The Steiners lived in the Žižkov district, not far from the city centre, in a large modern apartment. The family was well established and was part of the liberal Jewish community. ‘But we celebrated all the holidays and went to the synagogue on Saturday mornings.’
The origins of the Prague Jewish community date back to the tenth century. Its Jewish scholars enjoy a legendary reputation. For example, the renown of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (born probably in Posen (Poznań) around 1520 and died in Prague in 1609) extended over centuries.81 Rabbi Loew, as he was referred to for short, devised a fundamental reform of the Jewish school system. He suggested that the main principle of the learning process was the logical progression from simple to complex content. He was interested above all in understanding the material. His tomb states that he wrote fifteen books, addressing fundamental questions of human existence – the philosophy of religion, teaching, ethics. He was a great thinker, far ahead of his time, whose writings were notable for ‘a worldview characterized by intense humanity’.82
Rabbi Loew’s grave, along with that of many other leading figures in the Jewish community, is to be found in the Old Jewish Cemetery, possibly the most famous Jewish cemetery in Europe. The graves and the inscriptions on them tell the history of Prague’s Jewish community between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. During this time, more than 100,000 Jews were buried there. As space was limited and the Talmud states that graves are inviolable, a layer of earth was placed over the old graves in order to bury more people. In total, the Old Jewish Cemetery consists of twelve layers. With every layer of earth, the old gravestones were planted higher and higher, next to the new ones.83 In this way, a cemetery with a unique atmosphere was formed over the centuries.
‘Yes, these old gravestones speak a powerful language’, wrote Abraham Stein, a rabbi from Radnice (Radnitz), around 25 kilometres north-east of Plzeň (Pilsen), in the early twentieth century:
They tell of tongues of flame from the terrible suffering and martyrdom of previous centuries, of the Jewish persecutions and mass murders and of the slaughter by Christian fanatics and zealots … of innocent people for the glory of God.
If the graves opened, if the earth gave forth its stony treasures, the world would be amazed at the precious items – not glittering and magnificent objects and clothing, not Pompeian antiquities made of gold, silver and marble, but invaluable scientific material for the cultural history of Judaism.84
From the thirteenth century, and for several centuries thereafter, there was a Jewish district in Prague called Josefov.85 The Jewish town hall – something that no other Jewish community in the Diaspora had – was mentioned for the first time in 1541. It was the residence of the mayor of the Jewish district and the headquarters of the Jewish self-administration,