transcribed by Howard Wasserman
Editor’s Note: Baltimore’s iconic Wasserman
and Lemberger butcher shop is still located on Reisterstown Road, owned now by
Mr. Arie Benjamin. But old timers will remember when both Mr. Wasserman and Mr.
Lemberger, with their white butcher’s coats and gracious European manners,
stood behind the counter and served customers. Here is the story of Mr. Bernard
Wasserman, told in his own words.
I was born in 1923, in Emeruth, Bavaria, in Germany, which is located
approximately 30 kilometers from Nuremberg and five kilometers from the town of
Edensdorf, where the train station was. The town was a farming village of
approximately a thousand people. It was a real hick town – no paved streets.
Jews were allowed to settle there around 1700 or so, as the cemetery’s
tombstone’s go back to that date. It had a nice shul, built around 1850 from
sandstone, and a thriving Jewish community composed of cattle dealers and
tradesmen.
My grandparents on my father’s side were Jacob and Babette Wasserman. My
grandfather was a cattle dealer and also, at one time or another, a butcher, who
processed small animals, such as goats and calves, when the slaughterhouse was
in one of the rooms of a house in Emeruth. They sold the hindquarters to
non-Jews and the forequarters to Jews. Jacob was a religious man as people were
in those days in the small villages; so was my grandmother. They kept Shabbos,
Yontif, kashrus, and never did any
business on Shabbos or holidays.
My father was born in1892, in Emeruth. He was the only son and had two
sisters. The older sister, Pauline, married a man named Steinhardt in Widen,
near the Czech border. She never had any children. They had a successful rag
and old iron business. She was one of Hitler’s victims. The other sister’s name
was Sophie. She married very late in life and was sent to Theresienstadt and
never returned.
My grandparents on my mother’s side were Berthold and Ida Wolf, from
Koenigsbach in Baden, near Potsdam. My grandfather Wolf I never knew; he died
before I was born. My grandmother was a tiny woman. I saw her several times.
I had two brothers and a sister. I was the oldest, the first grandson.
Werner was born next, in 1925. Kurt was born in 1927. Bella was born in 1929.
My mother kept the house, cooked, cleaned, and took care of the family. We had
only one small room with heat. When we visited Germany in 1976, we saw the same
stove that was there when I left in 1937. The house had stone and wooden floors
with electricity and running water and two outhouses, but no bathroom.
My grandfather Jacob Wasserman was a very tall man with a full white
beard. My grandmother was a very short woman. I recall distinctly that when she
went to shul with us, she always wore a white veil on her head, like the women of
that time wore in shul. My grandparents spoiled us very much, as much as you
could spoil children at that time, because things were pretty rough.
My grandfather came to live with us after my grandmother died, and he was
pretty old already. His bedroom was off our living room. I remember when my
grandmother died, in 1932, and I remember when my grandfather died; I believe
it was 1935. There were not enough Jews there to perform the taharah. Some of the women helped at
that time, which is against Jewish law, but it was done, nevertheless. We went
to the funeral with my parents, and some of the townspeople went there. First,
the coffin had to be carried on a hearse, drawn by animals, because the
cemetery was way up on a hill.
* *
*
My mother was born in 1897, in Kernersbach, in Baden. She was sent to
America at a very young age because my grandparents had six daughters and two
sons. I mean, if you had a lot of daughters – in Germany, in all of Europe, in
fact – it was very hard to marry them off unless you had substantial amounts of
money. Each daughter had to get a dowry. So, my mother went to America before
World War I, and so did her sister, her brother, and another sister. My mother
came to Baltimore because we had an aunt living here, and they got jobs. She
worked for Mrs. Benno Cohn and the Hutzler family for a time. She returned to
Germany with her savings – I believe it was in 1920, after World War I – hoping
to get married. Then, from what I heard, my father was supposed to marry my
mother, and my mother’s brother was supposed to marry my aunt. But the deal was
never completed. My father married my mother in 1922, but my aunt did not marry
my mother’s brother – for what reason I don’t know.
After my parents were married, my father went into business. As I
mentioned, my grandfather was a dealer of cattle and horses. We had two
stables, a large stable that was in a barn, where you could put in
approximately 30 animals, and a smaller stable, which was right in the house.
There you could probably put six or eight cattle or horses. My father traveled
extensively around the area to trade and to do business in various items.
When the inflation hit Germany in 1923, they lost just about everything
they had. The only thing left was their house. They carried on like that. I was
born in 1923. After I was born, they moved to the small village of Schneider,
which is not far from Emeruth but bigger than Emeruth. After being there for
about a year, they moved back to Emeruth. I have no idea why.
* * *
My mother and grandmother did their own cooking and baking, and we ate
fairly well – not extravagantly, but we all ate, and we all grew up. I recall
they made challah every Shabbos, and we children took it to the baker, and he
baked it in his large oven. They also baked their own bread: big round loaves
that were put into straw baskets and taken to the village baker. After we got
the bread back, we kept it in a room upstairs, and it lasted us for four to
eight weeks. Of course, we had no refrigerator.
We grew vegetables in our garden. In the fall, we made our own sauerkraut,
and it lasted until Pesach at least. Usually, our neighbors made the
sauerkraut. They cleaned their feet and stomped the cabbage with their bare
feet and with one of those old wooden stompers.
We went to the woods to get blueberries when they were ripe. We had
gooseberries in the garden and also johannisbeeren,
which are currents in English. We made jelly from the berries.
We usually got our meat from Nuremberg or Bamberg. We had our own
chickens, but you didn’t eat chicken like you eat them in America. When the hen
was too old to lay eggs, then we used it for food. Sometimes we used young
chickens or young roosters for Yom Tov. We had our own milk from our cows. We
cooked it to get rid of the germs.
As for the weather, the town was in an area known as the Frankische
Schweiz. At the foothills of the Frankische Schweiz, the weather was pretty
nice in the summer, cold in the winter. A good amount of snow fell, especially
in the higher elevations around the town. The snow fell from September to April
or May, depending on what kind of a winter it was. And it was quite cold. We
had a sled, and we kids went sledding, ice skating, built snowmen, and threw
snowballs. We also had a sleigh with a horse and were able to travel from town
to town.
* * *
My parents were strict with us children – very strict according to today’s
standards. We all had our chores to do when we were old enough to do them, and
if we didn’t listen, we got it – on the behind or any place that was reachable.
One of my chores was to chop wood in order to keep the stove burning. Since I
was the oldest, I was usually the one pushed to do this with the axe.
As far as wealth goes, none of the Jewish families in the village were
what you would consider wealthy. They had what they needed, some a little less,
some more, but everyone was fairly independent. I don’t think they needed
anything from anybody else. They were all tradesmen or farmers, and they just
got along. No one in the whole village was michalel
Shabbos or Yom Tov. In other words, no one worked or opened their business.
The holidays were observed by going to shul when they had minyan. At one
time, Emeruth was a thriving community. I know we had a sukkah. In fact, we
found the roof of this sukkah during our trip to Germany in 1976. There was no
shul during the week, but I know that my father and grandfather laid tefillin every day. And we observed kashrus. I don’t think there was anyone
in the village who did not observe kashrus.
Some people were no doubt stricter than others, but on the whole, in the small
village like that, it was mostly observant Jews.
Come Shabbos, my mother cleaned the house more than usual. Besides
challah, she baked a bubala and a berges pletzin special for Shabbos. A bubala is a sort of plum cake, which you
don’t know in this country. The berges
pletzin is a kind of flatbread topped with onions made out of challah
dough. During the week, we only ate regular bread. Whenever there was a minyan,
we went with my father to shul, which was not very far from us. Shul attendance
was already declining, as young people were moving away. Sometimes there was
minyan; sometimes there wasn’t a minyan. They often had to import people from
out of town to get a minyan.
I remember distinctly that people dressed for Shabbos in high hats and
cutaway coats – to be dressed differently on Shabbos. But this custom ended for
various reasons. One of them was the antisemitic tendencies in the town, which
were prevalent even before Hitler came to power.
* * *
Pesach was a strict holiday. We had a separate Pesach kitchen upstairs. We
got matzos from out of town. People prepared all year round for Pesach. There were
geese, and we put away a certain part of the goose so we could have something
good on Pesach. The sauerkraut was for Pesach. We never had Pesach like you
have Pesach in America. We had only certain basic foods, such as matzos,
potatoes, and other vegetables. We had sugar. I don’t remember whether we had
coffee; I don’t think so. We had a special vessel for milk, and so on.
My mother used to make cremsel
(latkes) and other special dishes for Pesach. There was something she made from
apples and macaroons. The food tasted entirely different – and much better than
the commercial stuff you buy here. It was a holiday, and everyone enjoyed the
food because everything was new and homemade. The Seder was a private thing.
Each family had one of their own. People had a real simcha during Pesach. I
recall giving matzos to our non-Jewish neighbors until they wouldn’t take them
anymore. That was on account of the Nazis, and also because someone came and
told them they were made with non-Jewish blood.
* * *
I started school when I was six years old, in 1929. There were two
schoolhouses in Emeruth: one for the younger kids and one was for the older
kids up to eighth grade. Boys and girls were together. We went to school from
nine o’clock to 2:30. We learned the usual things: reading, writing, and
arithmetic. We had homework, and we had to do this when we got home from school
because my parents were quite strict about that.
My brothers and sister and I were the only Jewish children in school. I
had big problems in school because of that. I was harassed and beaten up,
although there wasn’t much name calling. The teachers were fairly tolerant and
didn’t encourage anything like that. But the people of the village were
Catholic and Protestant. The children were taught that the Jews killed Jesus,
so there was a certain amount of antisemitism in the children, and we of course
had to suffer for this. We didn’t wear a special cap to school as the Jewish
students in the universities had to do in later years, but since it was a very
small village, everyone knew we were Jewish. As the Hitler years came closer, the
antisemitism got worse but it was there before Hitler as well.
When I was around 10 or 11, I was taken out of that school and was put in
a Jewish state school in Burg Brebach. The town was near Hofheim, not far from
Bamberg. I would say it was approximately 100 kilometers from Emeruth. We lived
with the Jewish families in the town.
This was an all-Jewish school where we learned German and Hebrew. I
forgot to mention that German law required that you study religion in public
school. As Jews, we were not required to take the religious class in the public
school; rather, we had a teacher who came from Erlangen twice a week, which we
were required to attend, to teach us about being a Jew. He taught us the aleph-beis, Jewish history, and Jewish
writing. So, we all had a certain background in elementary Hebrew.
Now, in this Jewish school in Burg Brebach, I was behind in Hebrew
because my education so far was not extensive enough for this type of school. I
had to study very hard in order to keep up with the other students. I was there
about a year-and-a-half and got my bar mitzvah lessons there. I had three
teachers: Mr. Hamburger, Mr. Nussbaum, and Mr. Lentz. To this day, I am in
contact with a few people I went to school with.
After studying for my bar mitzvah, I went back to Emeruth to became bar mitzvah
in the shul. Mr. Hanwein, who immigrated to America, to Pittsburgh, was the chazan at that time. There was a minyan,
I read a parsha from Yisro, and it
was a very small bar mitzvah. We did have a special meal with chicken, but I do
not recall anyone coming from out of town.
After my bar mitzvah, we made plans that I should go to America, in hopes
of bringing the rest of my family to America. In the meantime, I couldn’t go to
the school in Emeruth anymore because no Jews were allowed to go to public
school. I went to school in Nuremberg, which
was located in the Kanalstrasse. I had to ride my bike every day for about an hour
to go to the train station. Then, I took a train to Nuremberg, which was
another hour by train. I left my bike at some inn with people my my father knew,
who were kind enough to let me leave it there. When school was finished in the
afternoon, I got on my bike and rode home. In the wintertime it was dark,
snowy, and very cold. But I only did this for one semester before I came to
America.
The school in Nuremberg was an all-Jewish school as Jewish children could
no longer go to public schools. The school was not set up on the basis of
religion, but religion was taught there. The curriculum was set up by the
school within a framework of German law. They taught history, German, writing,
and gym. It was mandatory to take Jewish history, but it was not a religious
school like the other one was.
* * *
As we grew older, things got worse and worse for Jewish people in
Germany. In Bavaria, where we lived, especially in the rural areas, the Nazis were
especially strong, and we felt the antisemitism sooner than people in other
parts of Germany did. My father’s business was curtailed. People were afraid to
deal with Jews. They were apprehensive of what could happen to them. And maybe
not the older people so much, but the younger ones participated in Nazism. In
the small town where we were, things got worse. We couldn’t go out on the
street. I know that my father was arrested once. He was put in jail in Erlangen
because he was supposed to have said something to a guy who was a competitor of
his. Whether it was said or not, I don’t know. Anyway, after a couple of weeks,
he was released. In the Jewish school where we were, it was very, very bad. If
we went out on the street, they usually caught us and beat us up; you couldn’t
go out alone.
There was a guy in Nuremberg, Julius Streicher, who was a notorious Jew
baiter, and very active in trying to stop shechita.
Already in 1930, Bavaria was one of the first states that outlawed shechita. We had problems getting meat
and had to get it from other states in Germany. Things got progressively worse.
In 1933, after Hitler came to power, kosher shechita
was banned in the whole Germany. We had to get our meat from
Czechoslovakia, Denmark, and Holland. This put a big strain on Jews because a
lot of people couldn’t afford this. Some people bought non-kosher meat. Some of
them could not help themselves; they had no relatives, no place they could go.
We never had any non-kosher food, although we had a hard, hard time getting
food and keeping the family together. But we were lucky because we had
relatives in Baltimore. My mother knew people from her time in Baltimore who
helped her financially. I recall Mrs. Cohn, who helped keep us alive. These
people in Baltimore finally sent me an affidavit so I could come to America.
To be continued….
