Rachel Dror was born
Rahel Zipora Lewin on January 19, 1921 in
Königsberg
[Kaliningrad].
She grew up in a traditional Jewish family—in addition to a public high school
[Lyzeum], she attended a Jewish religious
school. In 1936, two years after she had dropped out of
school and begun to train as a seamstress,
Rachel Dror decided to
join a Zionist youth movement
in order to go to
Hamburg for
Hakhshara the preparatory
training for life in
Palestine. At
this point, the social marginalization of Jews had taken root in German law and
was quite advanced. While Rachel
Dror had been confronted with various forms of
antisemitism during her
time in
Königsberg, she
initially experienced a much better situation in
Hamburg, a city
considered to be open and cosmopolitan, especially while she was surrounded by
Jewish youths whose shared goal was emigration. She and 27 other youths were
staying at a place at
Klosterallee 9.
After one and a half years, on the morning of October
28, 1938, she saw her boyfriend, Wolfgang
Drechsler, for the last time. He was arrested and deported as part of
the so-called “Polenaktion,” during which
up to 17,000 Jews of Polish nationality were expelled from
Germany. Many other
youths from the Hakhshara
group fell victim to this action, so that their communal home was dissolved and
Rachel Dror moved in
with her mother’s sister, Flora Rosenbaum,
who was a teacher at the
Talmud-Torah School in
Hamburg’s
Grindelviertel.
Two weeks later, on the night of November 9,
1938, government-controlled
antisemitism culminated
in the November pogrom.
Rachel Dror was at her
aunt’s house during the night of the pogrom and initially did not learn of the
events. In the first video sequence, she remembers her impressions and emotions
of the following morning, when she witnessed Jews being beaten and chased
through the streets by members of the
SA
Storm Division:
“When I saw that, I immediately thought something bad must have happened. So
I walked faster.”
She goes on to describe reaching a newsstand in front of which curious onlookers
were crowding. The visual memory of this scene has stayed with
Rachel Dror
permanently:
“[...] But he had newspapers piled up like this (gesticulates), and it looked
like blood had been spilled on them or like they had been painted red. And
it was the flames of the burning synagogues that had been set on fire on the
night of November 9-10.”
On the black and white newspaper photographs in front of which onlookers were
crowding, Rachel Dror
notices a red reflection she immediately associates with both flames and blood,
while the newsvendor from whom she used to buy her papers
for a long time addresses her in a
Berlin dialect,
insulting her:
“Hey, Jew girl, want to see how your synagogues burned, do you?”
Although this sequence describes the events on a specific day, the morning of November 10, 1938, in a specific place—Hamburg—it should not be considered an actual account of the historic events during the November pogrom in this city. It is likely that this section of the interview reveals a merging of personal memory and subsequently obtained knowledge about the events. While she was staying at her aunt’s house, Rachel Dror did not personally witness any of the violence against Jews, their businesses, and their synagogues. The red reflection—flames and blood—she sees on the newspapers thus has to be understood as a metaphor seeking to express the destruction and suffering, the full extent of which she did not learn about until later. Being reported in the newspapers, the pogrom becomes real to her as she sees testimony written in black and white. Retrospectively, this moment is meaningful to Rachel Dror since the unleashing of antisemitism which she had previously witnessed only in an abstract sense now manifests itself directly in her own environment. It is precisely at this point that her account switches again from a description of historic events to a form of very personal recollection: in this moment, Rachel Dror, too, was marginalized simply because she was Jewish. It was the newsvendor who, standing in front of her and insulting her, personified the country’s political culture. The fact that she remembers that the newsvendor must have been from Berlin due to his dialect further illustrates the importance of this moment. Rachel Dror immediately returned to her aunt’s home, where she found out what had happened at the Talmud-Torah School. In the meantime, her aunt had learned of the arrest of the teaching staff and many of her students. Deeply concerned about her own family in Königsberg, Rachel eventually managed to contact her father, who ordered her to return home at once.
In the second sequence, which builds upon the previous one,
Rachel Dror describes
her return to
Königsberg. By
the time she arrived, her family had been forced to move out of their family
home and into a small apartment. It was there that
Rachel met her
frightened younger brother, who had developed a major speech impediment as a
result of the violence his family was subjected to during the
pogrom in
Königsberg. On
the night of the pogrom,
intruders had severely injured his father with an oven door handle.
“When I saw that, I thought, I’m leaving. I’m not staying here! My father said,
“Where are you going?”
“To Palestine!””
The powerlessness against increasing marginalization, which first expressed
itself in an inability to act, ended the moment
Rachel learned of the
physical violence against her father. The fact that even her own family had not
been spared by the violent
pogroms triggered an
affective reaction.
Rachel had prepared
for a life in
Palestine in the
Hakhshara community, but
the group had been torn apart. Her family did not only lack the financial means
to emigrate, but emigration was out of the question for them for other reasons
as well. Her family—and especially her mother—identified as German. They
could neither comprehend how
antisemitic
pogroms and increasing
marginalization were possible in the country they considered their home, nor
could they imagine emigrating. The family continued to hope that all would pass.
Not Rachel, however:
not even of age at this point, she intuitively made the decision to take her
fate into her own hands, thus acting against the will of her parents. She
immediately sought to obtain an affidavit for entry into another country. Using
her aunt as a guarantor, she managed to leave
Germany on
April 29, 1939 and thus saved herself from
further persecution. Throughout the interview,
Rachel tries to
contextualize her biography by means of subsequently acquired historical
knowledge, thus attempting to frame it in a narrative. For example, she could
not have known that
Palestine—the
future state of
Israel—was to
become her new home at the time of her emigration.
“And if you ask me whether I identify as Israeli, of course I do! You must
not forget that we used to be dirt and then we became someone. After I had
been treated like dirt, okay?! And then you realize, I am actually not dirt.
I am human just like everyone else.”
Both sequences reveal what
Baranowski called
“the moment between discomposure and
realization,” Daniel Baranowski (ed.),
Sprechen trotz allem. Das Videoarchiv der Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten
Juden Europas, Berlin 2014, pp. 24. in which personal recollection of
one’s own experience, historical knowledge, and contemporary circumstances of
interpretation merge. Only if we take the specific characteristics of video
interviews as sources seriously and analyze them adequately will it become
possible to do justice to the complex narrative of individual testimony.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the material is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute it in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.
Lennart Bohne was research assistant at the Foundation "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe", he was project manager of the video archives.
Lennart Bohne, “To Palestine!” Comments on the Oral History Video Interview with Rachel Dror (translated by Insa Kummer), in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History, September 22, 2016. <https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:article-62.en.v1> [December 06, 2024].