Press coverage
Wow, I made the Herborner Tageblatt!
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.)
