On Sunday morning I was woken up by a WhatsApp message from my mother: “Sad news, today Erna died. She turned 98, one of the very last witnesses to the truth.” At the end of the sentence, my mother added a Star of David emoji.
Aunt Erna. My circus friend Erna. She was something of an aunt to me, even though she wasn’t an aunt at all, so not mine.
We Jewish families in Emsland, we were one big family, although strictly speaking we weren’t. But we were few. Like panda bears. After the Second World War, it took ten Jewish men to hold a service, the minyan, according to the Torah. And so it came about that the Emsland Jews drove to Osnabrück every weekend to confront the Minjan.
Oliver Polak, 45, is a comedian and lives in Berlin. His show “Your Life ss a Joke” starts on November 9th on Netflix. Most recently his book “Gegen Judenhass” was published by Suhrkamp-Verlag.
Aunt Erna from Lathen with her husband, my father from Papenburg, other Jewish families from the Emsland. This generation got together after the war to live again. To make Jewish life possible in a country where the Jews were hated. In an area where everyone knew everyone.
Aunt Erna, born in Kaiserslautern, voluntarily accompanied her mother to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. She was 19. Her father had died earlier.
The last words of Erna’s mother: “You will live and tell everyone what they did to us.”
Aunt Erna told me during my lifetime that everyone listened to foreign radio and knew exactly what Auschwitz was. And what happened there. Still, she didn’t want to leave her mom alone, and never left her side. They were then separated in Auschwitz. The last thing Erna’s mother said to her was. “You will live and tell everyone what they did to us.”
She never saw her mother again and was herself delegated to death block 25, where she was taken from the group by an SS man shortly before she was gassed because she had a Christian father and was a so-called Jewish mongrel. She was moved to Ravensbrück, where she was freed by the Allied soldiers on the death march.
I was little, Erna was tall. Eight days after my birth in Aschendorf, she carried me for circumcision. This is forbidden according to the Torah of the mother. But it must be a Jewish woman, and she was the only one in a wide area. Whenever she came to visit later, I lived in Papenburg, she in Lathen, 20 kilometers away, I wanted to be with her. After she had eaten cake with the adults, asked her to come to my room. Where I had everything prepared. I am seven years old, she is 60. I played numbers for her with my Playmobil circus that I built myself. She then sat there like a playmate of the same age and was thrilled. My eyes kept falling on the number on her forearm. Although no one had explained it to me, I understood. It was feeling, empathizing. I was surrounded by these people. I grew up with them, grew up, grew together.
Once we even traveled to Leningrad with my mother, where Erna made friends with my Russian grandmother.
I will not forget the day when she picked me up with her mint green Mercedes 280E and her nephew in the back seat and we went together to the Circus Krone, which was a guest in Apenburg. Erna bought me my first cornetto ice cream that day.
When Erna rang the doorbell downstairs, I had set up my cassette recorder in the hallway and proudly played her the hit “Erna is coming” by Hugo Egon Balder. Liked her.
She liked a lot anyway.
You never went without her giving you something to eat
Erna was turned towards life. She had a bird feeder and a bird bath in her garden, where she provided the winged animals with roasted nuts and water every day, especially in winter. Over the last few years she has been running into cats again and again. She volunteered for the library, where she took mountains of books home to label. She looked peaceful as she sat on her sofa, the cat mostly next to her. It was all so quiet. Her warm, loving manner. You never left without her giving you something to eat. Home-baked New Year’s cakes during the Christmas season, and otherwise just a bar of chocolate. Aunt Erna had two candy cabinets, a small one and a really big one.
Contemporary witness as a life’s work: Erna de Vries still spoke in old age in front of school classes, on stages, in lecture halls.
(Photo: Bernd Thissen / picture alliance / dpa)
This small, petite woman with glasses and her hair pinned up, always neatly dressed, that clear, rough, soothing voice. For decades she entered school auditoriums, lecture halls and stages to report again and again about her story, the story of many Jewish people in Europe and the unimaginable suffering that was inflicted on them. It became her life’s work, her promise to her mother. Never accusatory, with a longing for peace.
Lathen im Emsland, the decision to live there with her husband, who died early, to raise three children. To watch the six grandchildren and one great-grandson grow up, in a Germany that awarded her the Federal Cross of Merit in 2006. A Germany in which something like this could not be repeated.
On Wednesday, October 27th, many parishioners of the Osnabrück synagogue, whom you, Erna, and your husband brought to life for decades, at least ten men, the minyan, your village, family, friends from all over the world, will be students , to whom you have spoken tirelessly in recent years, travel to the Jewish cemetery in Lathen in Emsland. To say goodbye to you. Erna goes. Not “The Auschwitz Survivor”, no, my circus friend.