Beny Maissner Extended Testimony

My name is Benjamin Maissner, named after my great uncle. I was born in Israel, actually in Palestine, 1944, May 4th, 1944.

What languages I'm speaking, Hebrew, German, English. Some of my friends say I don't speak English well, and of course Yiddish.

My father, his family, they were actually in a detention camp during the first world war. They’re Polish, my father was born in Lodz and the story is that they were in Alsace-Lorraine in a detention camp. They went to Hanover in 1914, 1917. We don't know exactly, according to the records, my father's side of the family came to Hanover 1914. I was told that they came after the, after the first world war. My mother was born in Galicia, Lemberg.

And at one point during the first war, they immigrated to Vienna. So my mother was born in Lemberg, but she grew up in Vienna with her parents. And so both families, the Sobols are in Vienna, the Maissners are in Hanover. But in the Sobol Alter family, there was an incredible young, talented boy who was named Israel Alter, who went from Galicia to Vienna, he was an incredible talent, which is a story by itself.

To say that the entire generation of my mother and father, both sides all went out as late as 39 from Vienna. And my father's youngest brother also about 39 got out of Germany, which was quite late. He ended up in England and then as a German citizen, he was an enemy of the British, right? So they sent him to Australia. So he ended up in Australia with my cousins and his children. Then he came to Israel, but the generation of my parents from both sides were all saved.

And anyway, Israel Alter left Hanover 1935 when he was on a ship coming back from South Africa, He told me that he heard Hitler’s speech and the Nuremberg laws, his earliest 35. So he took half his family to South Africa. He was an Orthodox Jew, but very modern and modern, Orthodox, not, not Haredi, like, like the rest of the family. And so one sister of my mother came to America, ended up in Tallahassee, Florida. The other sister went to South Africa of my father's I'm talking. And my father went to Israel and the younger brother went to Australia on the Sobol on my mother's side. And, um, one sister ended up in South Africa, again and above in South Africa. And another brother of my mother was already in Israel from 1933. He left much earlier. And so my mother decided to go to Palestine at that time.

And every once in a while, my mother used to burst up in, in, in, in hysterical, crying, especially Yom Kippur, erev of Yom Kippur was like, like devastating. And I didn't understand. In bits and pieces somehow they talked about her parents and Vienna and I don't know at what age? But I think my father's childhood friend by the name of Sigmund Fisher stayed in Hanover and was in Auschwitz five oh, 50 months. He survived and came back to Hanover, but in 1956 or something like this before my bar mitzvah, they came to visit in Israel. And I remember that my parents and this couple Lola and Sigmund was sitting in one room and they chased me out of the room. In bits and pieces somehow they talked about her parents and Vienna. Um, and I remember that my parents and this couple were sitting in the living room and they chased me out of the room. And then I started to hear about showers and shaving heads and being naked. And I didn't understand at that time what it was at all about.

… my father was jobless. He lost his job as an accountant, before he was 50 years old. So he wanted to go back to Germany to study furrier, I have the diploma of my father from 1924 from Bremen, where he received his, a certificate for being the cutter of furs. And my mother didn't want to go back.

This friend of my father from childhood yelled and told my parents, my mother, you have to go back, you have to go back. And my mother, of course, they did go back and she got very, very sick emotionally because everybody in the street was a Nazi for her.

We found out later that, that her parents were dragged out in Vienna. They were dragged out of their apartment. My brother-in-law in the late nineties, cleared his house. Cause my sister passed away in 1990 and gave me two passports with a stamp of the Third Reich of my grandparents when Vienna, how it got to Israel into Palestine I don't know. But my cousin in Israel took me Yad Vashem and we asked, what about these passports? And they told her, we have boxes full of them. We don't know what to do. Years later, we put the names of the Sobols in the Yad Vashem. And it was an entire page coming out at the 15th of June 42, grabbed out the entire building because we put also the stones in, in, in Berlin, in Vienna and on the 15th 42 in Minsk 19th. So my cousins in Israel looked in the Hebrew date of the 19th of June 42. And this is the Yarzheit of our grandparents from Vienna.

Before the war broke out, they deported all the non-citizens of Hanover of Germany to the poles and the poles didn't want them and the Germans didn't want them. So they were on the border. My grandmother came to Palestine, my father got a certificate and also one for my grandfather. And he [my grandfather] went back to Germany to Hanover, to pack up and come up to Israel because at the time they said, if you have a place to go, you can go back and pick up a few, a few things. My grandfather was in Hanover, packing up, sending out everything and was caught on the way to Palestine in Trieste and then we don't know what happened to him.

We wanted to put the stones because we, we knew about this artist from Belgium or from the Netherlands that wanted do it and we wanted to pay for it and they wouldn't let us pay for it. And then, and the mayor and theBürgermeister, Oberbürgermeister, they all were dancing around us. So later on, we found out that these people paid for the stones and my very dear friend Mathias. And he said that he donated the stone for my father. I only assumed that it would put the stones for my uncle and my mother who survived. My uncle survived too that's my mother's side, but for my father's side, in other location of the city, they'll put the stones. And when we came that day, the whole official came with like five, six, seven stones. And they put it right in front of where the Jewish community center, the kindergarten, the hospital, the old age home. And that's where my uncle lived. And my mother who came to Hanover lived there too. In fact, I just found a picture of Israel Altar and his wife, my mother, and their two children, right on the steps outside of the of the house. And the students actually were the one who put the stones down and the stones were, maybe the holes in the ground were already, already dug and the, just pour it. And there was a whole ceremony.

It was really a city-wide public ceremony the next day on Tuesday. It was my wife, myself, my son and my daughter, my youngest daughter couldn't cause she has fortunate when she will to come. And my cousin from Israel came and another cousin from, from England who is from Australia, who is also from a father's side. And he came because it was working in, in England. So he came and, and um, and my cousin from Israel said, you know, until night was public, but now it's private. And my cousin Elsie is not observant or religious, but he says, Beny, we need to do something according to our tradition.

… but the interesting thing that on the day that we saw these young teenagers, one of the girls came and spoke in front of my father’s location, where the stones were put. And she of course spoke in German, I understood. And she said that the Stolpersteine are meaningful to her because until then she knew about the Holocaust, but she could not relate it to any specific person because you cannot comprehend 6 million. But when you stumble over a certain name, when she sees it and she described it that night, she's could relate what this name that she saw suffered that night of Kristallnacht or what it means is as, you know, if the family had children, what the children must have felt. So it was very individual for her.

An example that I, that means a lot to us, not only in Hanover, because in Hanover we know that the city, you know, remembered it and honoured the memory. In Vienna on a one particular day, we went to 15 stations and people spoke in front of each house what happened in this house? And all of a sudden we saw two young people who came out and said, well, we are not Jewish, but we found out who lived here, and we donated the stumbling stones for their memory because they live in the apartment. We're not in touch with them, but every once in a while we get a letter or an email. They decided and committed themselves to clean the stones every once in a while and they followed the entire procession the whole day.

In Hanover when we are there it's like going to the cemetery and looking, and when we look at the stones, I see that people are observing us. And then there's a big monument where I spoke to them and it was like a lot of people, local people. And I said, in German, of course my broken German, we didn't come to forget or forgive, but we came to warn you about fascism and, and terrorism, you know, and of course the, the, the mayor of the city spoke very beautiful. Then we went to the place where the synagogue stood. It was around the Kristallnacht, the nine or tenth of November.

It means a lot to me. I don't think about it daily. When, when people go and look at the stones, they may not know any specific history of a particular person or the fate of that particular family. But the young children may ask the parents, what are these stones here for?

… one other point in my father's location, where we put the stones, um, there was a young man who came and talked to me and asked me about my grandfather. And, and, and I said, well, why are you asking? Why are so interested in? He said because my grandparents never talked to me and never told me anything. And I didn't speak to them for years until at one point they started to tell me the story and I made it my life's project to carry the story that the younger generation, he must've been in his mid-thirties already, but he definitely was, uh, um, shocked by what he heard about his, about his parents or grandparents.

… I don't know if it's a reconciliation you can forgive. The last couple of days, my wife and I watched some documentaries, um, about, about the tragedies in the, in the whole horrific, you know, and I said, how can I, how can we forgive? And how can we, you know, we have bigger enemies today, Iran. And so reconciliation is, is very important.