Ralph Stern

Who is named on the stones?

My father after Reichskristallnacht, I don't know if it was immediately thereafter in the winter of 38 or whether it was in 39, I don't imagine it would have been any later than 39, but my father was then brought by my grandfather to the Internat, in Geneva. This is where my father grew up. My father was born in 1926, and so he would have been brought to the Internat at the age of 12 or 13 at the oldest…

My grandfather had enough wherewithal and the connections to find a place for my father there. This is an interesting and unusual counterpoint because, even though he had the wherewithal to do this, he did not have the ability to get himself out of Germany. He tried to emigrate to the United States with his family but he didn't make the quota cut-off…

My grandfather was married to a non-Jew that created a more complex status with regard to National Socialist restrictions and eventual deportation. His marriage was considered a ‘Mischehe’ (mixed marriage). My father's official status was a “Mischling ersten Grades” (mixed breed first-degree). He was the first degree result of a mixed marriage. This is an official term. That term comes from the Nuremberg Laws that were passed in the 1930s. There were financial means and my grandfather was able to travel. His marriage status protected him to a degree. Although my father did not talk about these issues, this story was told to me by my father: My grandfather was notified by the German authorities in Switzerland, that his passport was being revoked. He would not legally be allowed to remain in Switzerland as a stateless individual, because then he would have to apply for refugee status. And so this took away his status of being a German citizen in a neutral country, which meant that he was forced to return to Germany. My father, only once and only very briefly described the very traumatic experience of seeing his father leave at the train station in Geneva, and of this being the last time he ever saw his father…

After the war and the suicide of my grandfather, my father came back to Germany and he tried to reclaim this bank. There was no interest in post-war Germany of returning the bank back to someone who still was understood by many Germans as being a “Mischling ersten Grades”. He could start the process of trying to reclaim the bank when West Germany did not yet exist as a country, when it was occupied territory. There are fragments of correspondence in which he really bitterly complains about the ongoing antisemitism in post-war Germany. He tried to reclaim the bank, and took two runs at that, and at a certain point he gave up, after which he wanted to leave Germany. He made an application for having been a victim of religious persecution. The German authorities, who were apparently the first instance of making the determination of whether this was the case or not, came to the formal conclusion, that he was not at all religiously persecuted and that he had spent his time in Switzerland as a kind of vacation…