Rudolf Schwab was born on the 21st of October 1911 to a prominent Jewish family in Hanau, Germany. Rudolf was my auntie, Ricci (Schwab) Lyons’ grandfather. He was one of the only survivors of the Shoah in his family. If it weren’t for an accidental fire that engulfed my auntie’s childhood home in Johannesburg, we may have never known about his incredible story as he never spoke about it to his family. After the fire, the only thing that remained was a random old trunk that the Schwab family kept in the garage. In this trunk, they found thousands of letters that Rudolf wrote and received during and after the war. He kept letters that he received from family and friends all over the world as well as carbon copies of his own responses. The extraordinary correspondence included typewritten and handwritten letters, holiday postcards and New Year’s greetings, Red Cross messages and official documents and aerogrammes, mostly in German but with some in English and French. His collection is now kept at Yad Vashem in Israel and is one of the biggest original collections from the Holocaust. They uncover his extraordinarily unique story that shows that even when humanity reaches its worst, there is still a small glimpse of good in the world…
A few of the letters/documents that were found.
The trunk that contained all of the letters.
It is now kept at the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town.
Rudolf’s story starts in Hanau, Germany, the place where he was born. The Schwab family’s history in Hanau traces back more than 300 years. They were all proud German Jews. Rudolf’s father, Max, was a well-known community member and family man. His wife, Martha, had grown up in an observant Jewish household in one of Germany’s longest-established Jewish communities. Rudolf had a younger brother, Hans. The Schwabs, like most of their Jewish neighbours, were fully invested in both their Jewish and German identities. They spoke German, went to public schools, and had Jewish as well as non-Jewish friends. They were also deeply patriotic. Both Rudolf’s father Max and his uncle Alex served in the German army during World War I, and both were decorated for bravery with Iron Cross medals. They really loved Germany and Hanau. In 1933, there were 477 Jews living in Hanau, just over 1% of the town’s population. They were a small but lively community, and held prominent positions in the town as doctors, academics, lawyers, and businessmen. They also played a key role in the gold and precious stones industries.
In 1938 Max (Rudolf’s Father) wrote in a letter to Rudolf in Johannesburg, “Just think about it – our forefathers have lived in Hanau, uninterrupted, for the last 335 years, and they’re all buried in the same graveyard.”
Close to a quarter of Hanau’s Jews left within a few months of Hitler’s accession to power. Most went to nearby cities, where they sought safety in numbers. Rudolf fled in May 1933, as he had been warned by a close friend and Nazi official, Karl Kipfer, that he was to be arrested. Rudolf was young so the decision wasn’t too difficult for him to make. However, he tried desperately to convince his father, mother and brother to emigrate with him but he failed. His dad was too settled and set in his ways and he was too nervous to leave his home and his childhood in Germany behind. Rudolf went first to Antwerp, in neighbouring Belgium. Like many other Jews he decided not to go too far so that he could easily return to Germany once the regime ended. Despite his efforts he was unable to secure a work permit, and then he moved to Brussels, Belgium and was equally unsuccessful. Rudolf next found refuge in Werkdorp Nieuwesluis, Holland, a vocational training farm that helped to equip German Jews for re-emigration. In spring 1936, as Berlin was preparing to host the summer Olympics, Rudolf was once again forced to leave. After weighing up his options, the 24-year-old Rudolf decided in early 1936 to make his way to South Africa. He knew almost nothing about the country, and his family joked about arranging marriages with the daughters of local chieftains in order to secure immigration permits.
In February 1946 Rudolf wrote in a letter to his Aunt Paula Censer, “How grateful I am to the Belgium Government for kicking me out in good time. Back then I thought it was the end of the world, but it turned out to be an enormous stoke of good fortune.”
The persecution of Hanau’s Jews began soon after the Nazis came to power. On the 1st of April 1933, local Jewish shops and businesses felt the effects of the nationwide Nazi boycott. Brownshirts stood outside shop fronts and intimidated customers, vandalized property, and goaded Jews to leave Germany. In late 1935, shortly after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, Max’s jewellery business Abraham Schwab & Co, which had been founded by his father in 1875, was forcibly ‘Aryanized’. The Schwabs tried to maintain some normality amid these growing restrictions. Max, a proud war veteran and patriot, believed they would be safe from the new regime’s antisemitic policies, he felt that his iron cross would protect him. For him, leaving Germany was unthinkable. The family’s Jewish observance also remained strong. Jewish festivals were warmly celebrated, and money that Rudolf sent from South Africa was used to buy kosher food. In November 1937, the Schwabs celebrated Hans’ bar mitzvah with a synagogue service on Shabbat and a party the following day. It was a notable public affirmation of Jewishness.
The spring and summer of 1938 were months of escalating anti-Jewish actions across Germany, spurred by the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria and the Sudeten crisis. The tension was felt in Hanau as well. In May 1938, local Nazis began a new boycott of Jewish shops. The entrances to the town’s synagogue were also barricaded shut, and the word “verkäuflich” (for sale) scrawled on the building’s front wall. For many German Jews, the turning point was the pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, Kristallnacht. Hanau’s synagogue did not escape that night’s violence. Several hundred-people attacked the building, desecrating Torah scrolls and throwing furniture into the street before setting it alight. Apart from ensuring that the blaze did not threaten neighbouring buildings, the local police did nothing. The Jewish community centre, cemetery, and local homes were also attacked and damaged. Only a decade later did Rudolf learn, from a non-Jewish neighbour and friend, of his family’s fate during that night. The Schwab home was ransacked by a massive and aggressive crowd. Both Hans and Martha were badly beaten, and a witness strongly implied that Martha was raped. Forty Jewish men from Hanau, among them sixty-year-old Max and his forty-nine-year-old brother Alex, were deported to Buchenwald.
Many new anti-Jewish restrictions followed Kristallnacht. Jews scrambled for visas and pleaded for help from distant relatives. Max and Alex were released from Buchenwald a few weeks after their imprisonment, probably because they were able to show valid emigration papers. In August 1939, Alex departed for Shanghai. By this time, only 82 Jews remained in Hanau. Max’s loyalty to Germany outlasted that of his most patriotic Jewish countrymen. While others made desperate plans to leave, he complained that the town’s Rabbi had abandoned his post and moved to Frankfurt. He also took it upon himself to lead the community and preserve its religious artefacts. Martha’s attempts to challenge her husband were in vain. It is difficult to imagine the level of strain the rapes placed on their marriage, not to mention Max’s continuing refusal to face emigration afterward. Only after the outbreak of war in September 1939 did Max grudgingly acknowledge that leaving might be wise, but by now emigration had become virtually impossible. Two earlier requests submitted by Rudolf to the South African Ministry of the Interior had been denied. ‘We’re becoming more and more willing to emigrate,’ wrote Max in November 1939, ‘but where to?’
In late 1941, Max was arrested for illegally purchasing wine for Shabbat. After five weeks in prison he was taken to the ‘educational labour camp’ Breitenau, and from there to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. On the 19th of February 1942, two days before his sixty-fourth birthday, he died of ‘a weak heart’.
Rudolf first learned of his father's fate in a message from his mother sent via the Red Cross in March 1942. Summing up in her allotted twenty-five words the disintegration of her life, Martha wrote to him: “Long time without message from you. Hope everyone well. Same for me, Hans. Granny also, in Cologne, alone, old-age home. Father taken from us, died of weak heart 19.II. Warmest greetings.”
This was one of the last messages Rudolf ever received from his family.
In November 1942, Rudolf learned from a family friend in Sweden that his mother and brother had been deported to an unknown destination. After that, everything fell silent. As Hitler’s war raged deeper into the Soviet Union, he could do little more than wait. Rudolf embarked upon the search for surviving relatives in early 1945, but it took years to ascertain their fates. In 1947, he discovered that his aunt Alice, her husband Oskar, and their daughter Lotte had been deported to the Lodz ghetto, never to be heard from again. Later, he learned that his grandmother had been deported to Riga. It is not clear when Rudolf discovered the details of what happened to his 53-year-old mother and 17-year-old brother when they were deported. It is possible he never did. Decades later, historians researching the fate of Hanau Jewry confirmed that two transports had taken Jews from the region in 1942. On the 30th of May, 84 Jews boarded a train at Platform 9 of the Hauptbahnhof. After a brief stopover, the train travelled for 17 hours before it arrived at Majdanek, where 26 working-age men were separated from their relatives and registered for slave labor. Hans may well have been among them, given his age, but if he was, he did not live long enough to be registered by the camp authorities. The train’s final stop was at Sobibór, where on 3 June the remaining Jews, including Martha, were sent to the gas chamber.
By the war’s end, only a handful of members of the extended Schwab family remained alive. Dispersed across five continents, they typified the fates of countless Jewish refugees who ended up in the most unlikely places. Rudolf’s uncle Alex, a decorated war veteran and businessman, endured ten destitute years in Shanghai, where he worked as a house cleaner, subsisted on UN food rations, and was hospitalized three times for malnutrition. His far-flung relatives, themselves struggling to make ends meet, could do little to ease his poverty-stricken existence. In July 1948, aged 59, he was finally able to immigrate to the United States. He ended up in a studio apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota, earning a living as a janitor. Aunt Rosa and her husband, Siegfried Tuteur, were deported in October 1940 to an internment camp in southwest France. Although soon released, they were left isolated and poverty-stricken in a small French village where, despite support from the local Free Evangelical Church, they deteriorated into decrepitude and insanity. Rudolf’s beloved cousin Reny made it to Sao Paulo. Other cousins turned up in Buenos Aires and Montreal. Most of the relatives never saw one another in person again. The very process of writing letters took on the form of a virtual parallel existence for the relatives. On one level, the letters were simply a way of keeping up with family news. On a deeper level, they were a way for the relatives to maintain a connection to their German identities and past.
Crammed into Rudolf’s enormous trunk were four decades of conversations between the relatives, revealing the gradual rebuilding of selves and connections to a larger whole. In these conversations arose a Germany of the mind, a Germany defined not by bricks and concrete, but rather by what it had been, and what it no longer was.
In January 1948, Rudolf received a letter from Karl Kipfer, whom he described as his “best friend, a former fencing and drinking pal.” Karl had been a Nazi, and he was the one, Rudolf claimed, who had urged him to flee Germany in 1933. Karl, in other words, had saved his life. Between 1948 and Karl’s death in 1955, the two friends kept up a heartfelt correspondence, reminiscing about fencing, old friends, and drunken adventures. Despite war injury and paralysis, Karl undertook the colossal job of compiling restitution claims for Rudolf and all the surviving relatives. He apologised for his ‘undemocratic past’ as a Nazi and he raged against Germany’s refusal to take responsibility for what had happened. He pursued the Schwabs’ claims with relentless energy. Was this his way of ‘making good’ for what he called his ‘undemocratic past’? Rudolf never asked Karl what he had done, and Karl never offered. His letters, however, were peppered with ambiguous clues. ‘I would have cut a fine figure if I had ended up in Hell reporting to the Devil on duty,’ he wrote in one letter. ‘I spent several long weeks hovering at the edge of a mass grave,’ he wrote in another. Karl had served with the Wehrmacht on the eastern front in the winter of 1941-2. Here, he almost certainly encountered mass graves, but the archives do not reveal where his company was located, the tasks they were assigned, or what they might have seen or done. Karl’s very presence on the eastern front nonetheless helps to explain his powerful sense of guilt – a sense that he participated, in however small a way, in perpetuating a genocidal system. How did Rudolf deal with his friend’s ‘undemocratic past’? Alongside his genuine warmth and affection for Karl, he retained a deep-rooted scepticism about Germans’ behaviour under the Nazis. Perhaps it was only someone detached from his everyday life, whom he was unlikely ever to see again, in whom Rudolf could confide in this way. Perhaps, also, the warmth and intensity was directed not so much at Karl as at an idea, at a memory of the unknowing 21-year-old Rudolf had been before he left Germany.
South Africa was not a significant destination for refugees fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Between 1933 and 1939, around 6,000 Jews landed on its shores, scarcely 2% of the total number who left. They came to South Africa not because of particular opportunities or connections, but simply because, for a time at least, it was one of the few places that would let them in. When Rudolf arrived in South Africa in 1936, he knew little about the country that would become his new home. Most refugees were, like him, full of wild imaginings about what they would find.
But Rudolf took his new identity seriously. He learned to speak Afrikaans and studied South African history. In letters to his relatives, he enthusiastically described the country’s gold mining industry, agriculture, and tourism. He also fell in love with South African wildlife, and portrayed his encounters in the bushveld with endless delight. In 1939, Rudolf married Rachel Feinberg, a South African woman eight years his senior. “You can't imagine how difficult it is for me to take this important step in my life without you,” he had written to his family. Rachel had a seven-year-old son, Louis, from a previous marriage. In September 1942, she gave birth to their son, Norman (who is my auntie, Ricci’s father.) As he grew up, Norman observed the Sunday morning ritual in which his father withdrew to his writing table, meticulously dressed in jacket and bow tie and grey flannels, to undertake the important work of composing his letters. Rudolf continued to write late at night when his wife and son were asleep, approaching the job of letter-writing with great earnestness and energy.
Rudolf’s first years in South Africa were tough. He drifted from job to job and struggled to make ends meet. But he remained committed to self-education, and by the late 1940s had become a local expert in pest control, and established the first commercial enterprise in the field in South Africa.
He also developed a lifelong commitment to the Reform movement. In 1953 he joined the board of Temple Israel in Johannesburg, later serving on the Executive of the United Jewish Progressive Congregation. In 1967, he was elected president of the national Reform organization.
In working to become South African, Rudolf chose as his model the way in which his father had been German: articulate in the language, passionate about the landscape, and active in public life. His ideas about how to be a good, socially responsible citizen in his new homeland were clearly rooted in his German Jewish past. Accordingly, Rudolf was committed to political engagement. In the mid-1940s he joined the ruling United Party, supporting election campaigns and offering earnest advice to parliamentary candidates. After the 1948 election, as D.F. Malan’s National Party government began to cement the foundations of apartheid, he continued his involvement with the United Party in opposition. He often warned that the National Party ‘is not much better than the Nazis’, and enjoyed ridiculing its policies in anti-establishment banter with Karl. But Rudolf saw few connections between the antisemitism he had experienced in Europe, and the anti-Black racism he found in his new homeland. He quickly adapted to the values and vocabulary of White South Africa, frequently complaining about the laziness and unreliability of his native “boys” (or worse). People outside the country, he grumbled, simply did not understand the complexity of the country’s racial problems. Rudolf was hardly exceptional among South African whites, including Jews, in his attitudes toward apartheid. These kinds of political views were regarded as quite different from the die-hard ideas of Afrikaner nationalists: those who sought the legislated separation of the races, and what some saw as Nazi-like purity of blood. The predominantly English-speaking United Party was a more comfortable political home for Jews than was the National Party, although despite its more reform-minded policies it was also firmly predicated on White dominance. Rudolf’s views on South Africa’s “problems” were probably less a manifestation of ideological conviction than a reflection of his desire to become fully South African: an extension of his efforts to learn local history and languages. Just as Karl’s actions do not fit neatly into the category of ‘perpetrator,’ so, too, Rudolf’s life is not easily subsumed under the label of ‘victim.’ At the same time, it is precisely lives such as theirs, in all their unpredictability, that bring us closer to understanding the complex choices and motivations that—even in extreme situations, or perhaps then more than ever—make us human.
Rudolf lived to see his son, Norman, married to Carol Lynn Matus in 1968. But he only met the first of his three grandchildren: Lori, Ricci (my auntie), and Daniel. My auntie’s brother Daniel was the one who rediscovered Rudolf’s letters in his parents’ garage, and he has devoted himself untiringly to having his grandfather’s collection archived, catalogued, and studied. In May 2010, he and my auntie attended Hanau's first commemoration of individual Jews who had perished at the Nazis’ hands. The family has received unstinting support from the local authorities in tracing and remembering its past.
The Schwabs continue, however, to seek reparations from the German government for their losses. More and more family troves have recently begun to emerge from forgotten storage places. The worlds they chronicle are different from those we might seek in government archives, but they should be taken equally seriously. They, too, are the fragments of which history is made. The Schwabs’ story is, on one level, simply that of an ordinary family. But such ordinary stories are also far-reaching in their significance, and open up vital new perspectives onto history’s most challenging questions. How does racism endure and spread? How do people make the decision to become refugees? How does war transform marriages and families? Their story reminds us that people are complicated and resistant to categorisation. They respond to the challenges of life in ways that are often unpredictable and unlikely, and also entirely human.