Here's an attempt at a translation, with lots of help from Babelfish
and Cassell's:
Herborner Tageblatt, Sept. 10, 2003, p. 14:
"Rose Schnittert accompanied Seth Schoen on the trail of his
Jewish ancestors
The American had come to Herborn for one day in the course of a business
trip"
HERBORN (klk) -- Only seldom does a visitor find his way to the old Jewish
cemetery on the Austraße in Herborn; and if the visitor, following
Jewish custom, leaves behind a stone, then memories or family ties bind him
to the weathered graves, on which the chiseled Hebrew characters are barely
legible after many decades.
The name "Sternberg" particularly interested the 24-year-old U.S. resident
Seth Schoen when he briefly made an excursion to Herborn during a business
trip to Berlin. Together with Rose Schnittert, who lives in Greifenstein
today and was a former neighbor of Schoen's great-grandparents, he found
four stones which bore the names of his ancestors, but he could not
identify the people behind the names.
Schoen's great-uncle Leo Sternberg was, as Rose Schnittert explains,
on a business trip to America well before the 1933 Nazi seizure of power,
when he read Hitler's Mein Kampf and interpreted
the signs in time, persuading his his family to emigrate to America
before the Nazi repression against the Jews made this impossible.
The Path Leads to the Austraße
His parents had operated a kosher butcher shop at Austraße 12, "where
they performed ritual slaughter, as the Muslims do today", explained
Rose Schnittert, standing by the building, in which only a bricked-up
entryway recalled the former storefront.
The Salomon family, likewise Jews, bought the butcher shop at that
time from the Sternbergs, recalls Rose Schnittert. The Salomon family
was only able to save its son, by sending him to England; all the
other family members were probably murdered in a concentration camp,
she says.
Schnittert's grandfather had built the house at Austraße 18 in
1914, and her grandmother Sophie Meckel was a good friend of Leo
Sternberg's sister Betti, a piano teacher.
Rose Schnittert had to disappoint Seth in his hope that perhaps he could
still find students of his grandmother Betti's: "I don't know any more --
they would have to be well over 70 years old now." But she showed him
his great-grandparents' house and the Jewish cemetery, and also another
house on the Marktplatz, right across from the City Hall: "Here was
Rheika, a men's apparel store, that the wife of Leo's brother Bernard
operated."
She is also named Betti and she is the last survivor of this generation:
she celebrated her 90th birthday on August 15 in America. Her husband,
several years deceased, was a popular cattle dealer in the Westerwald
(especially with the girls); and, as the two of them left Germany late,
they had to suffer some evils under the Nazi terror. As a result,
Rose Schnittert told Seth, Betti never again wanted to return to her
homeland.
Plum-cakes for Memory
From England, this Betti even got her parents out of Germany, but they
had to leave all their valuables behind so that it would look like
they were making only a short trip. And so the largest piece of luggage
they had was a basket full of plums, so that they could still bake a
genuine Plum-cake as they had in Herborn. From England they went on to
the USA, and their paths never brought them back to Germany.
It seemed different with Seth's parents: his father Kenny, who operates
a rare book store specializing in the subject of Judaica and National
Socialism, came to Herborn in the middle of the 1960s on the trail of his
ancestors. Leo Sternberg visited his home as early as the 1950s, and he
was in Berlin for the last time about three weeks before his
death in 1990. "So for the first time he had his daughters Patsy and
Ann with him", remembers Rose Schnittert.
Seth knew Greifenstein from the memories of his great-aunt, who
visited the castle ruins with her school class. He also knew something
of the Comenius plaque at the high school: having previously bought a
book about Comenius, he was happy to see it, said Rose Schnittert.
Perhaps he can learn more on his next visit: "Maybe City Archivist
Rüdiger Störkel knows who the Sternbergs in the cemetery
are." And then Seth will learn for whom he placed a stone on the
grave.
(Not all the details about my family are quite right. I'm honored to
see this article, and I would be honored to meet Stadtarchivar
Rüdiger Störkel.)
