Ralph Stern Extended Testimony

My name is Ralph Stern and I was born in Denver, Colorado. I have a broad experience with the United States, both coasts and the West, living in Canada now. I also have lived for many years in Germany and, there in Berlin. The name Stern is obviously a Jewish name. The lineage of my branch of the Stern is relatively clear beginning in Frankfurt in the 1600s, and then, in the decades following members of the family moved from Frankfurt to a small town called Soest.

Soest was under the control of the Prussian Crown. It had two positions of ‘Schutzjuden’, Jews who are protected because they paid, essentially, protection money to the Prussian Crown. The monies paid to the Prussian crown granted them certain rights one of which was to operate a business. Two members of the Stern family came to hold those two positions. And so the family came to have successful members, financially, also professionally, people involved in education and in publication. In the mid-1800s two brothers went to Cologne and they founded a private bank. That bank was literally named the Stern bank. My grandfather became the proprietor of this bank. The timeline would lead me to believe that he is the son of one of the two brothers. It was a successful bank. He was financially well off. The bank was situated in the old city of, the center city of, Cologne.

The bank was located just a few steps away from a main synagogue. I asked my father whether he had recollections of the synagogue. The synagogue was, of course, heavily damaged during the Kristallnacht in 1938. He told me that really his father was very much a secularized Jew and that he himself did not remember the synagogue. This may be an indication of the complexities of memory, of remembrance, of identity, of which memories are suppressed, and how difficult it is to call memories to the fore. At some point, my grandfather built or bought a villa. It may be that most of my father's childhood memories are associated with this house rather than with the apartment above the bank. That's also a possibility as to why he might not know much about the synagogue.

With regard to 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. (Note: Subsequent research clarified the date he left Germany as January 1938, when he was 11)

At the end of World War I, the League of Nations was established and headquartered in Geneva. My understanding is that this particular Internat was founded for the children of those diplomats who were part of the League of Nations following the first World War. 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 race 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.

My father and my mother were born two years apart. My father was born in 1926, my mother in 1928. They knew each other as children. My mother's family does not intersect with Jewish history, but does intersect the history of Germany and particularly the history of Cologne and in the bombing of Cologne.

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.

The second time the application to be recognized as a victim of religious persecution was successful. It was successful because of the connections to Geneva. There were diplomatic connections in Geneva and I have correspondence indicating that this should be granted. It seems clear that there was some kind of political push behind this; who that was or what it was, I have no idea. My father never divulged any of that. He did finally leave Germany and relatively quickly, it was on relatively short notice; he had to get from Cologne to the ship within 48 hours. He got on that ship as a German citizen and when he arrived in New York, he arrived as a refugee. Somewhere in transit, he lost his passport and his citizenship. When he arrived in New York, he arrived as a refugee, presumably with the paperwork that he had gotten with the assistance of Geneva. There was a relative in the United States who was able to vouch for him so that he could enter the United States, but he entered the United States as a stateless individual. When he entered the U.S., America was gearing up for the Korean war. Being stateless, my father was drafted.

As a German citizen he could never be drafted, but he was stateless. So he was drafted into the US army as a refugee. With his education he spoke German, English and French fluently and had accounting skills. All of this, of course, because he had prepared himself for taking over the bank. With this background he was placed in administrative rather than infantry training. In that program, his instructor said that whoever finished at the top of the class would be able to choose their posting. My father was determined to finish at the top of the class. He did so, choosing to be posted in Frankfurt as an American soldier, so he could see his mother. And that's where he reconnected with this woman who he knew as a young child, my mother. As soon as my father received American citizenship, which was about the same time more or less that he was mustered out of the army, he returned to Germany and married my mother, who then came with him to the US. They first moved to New York and then to Colorado. They moved to Colorado because of the mountains, because this reminded my father of Switzerland.

How does emigration actually work? My father wanted to be done with Germany as a whole. When I grew up my father referred to Germany as the ‘old country’: It was a history to be kept in the past and I was never taught German as a child.

This set up also a fundamental break between myself and my grandparents. Did his mother ever tell me anything? She couldn't because she only spoke German. And I couldn't because I only spoke English. I really wouldn't have understood anyway. I was too young. But that, that break between my grandparents and myself because of my father, for many completely justifiable reasons, turning his back on Germany had its own particular dynamics. These ultimately had tragic consequences and, in many ways, some particularly tragic consequences for me personally. How many generations does the effect of National Socialism echo through? One can say: you had nothing to do with that, you had no connection with that. You grew up in a different country, you grew up in a completely different world. What does this have to do with you? But on the other hand, I can say it has absolutely everything to do with me because it is so coupled with the trauma that my father experienced. There were other traumatic experiences, not experiences of the Holocaust, but my mother grew up in Cologne when it was being bombed, a city that was subject to a fire storm. There was a lot of trauma in the family because of National Socialism and so my father did things that in the end that he should never ever have done. Much of this tracks very clearly back to the trauma of National Socialism and the Holocaust.

My grandparents visited us on a couple of occasions. both my mother's parents and my father's mother. She must have been having nightmares or something. My mother, and I do remember this, explained to me, and I hadn't asked for an explanation, that my grandmother must have been screaming in the night as she had nightmares because of the experiences of the Holocaust. These had to do with my grandfather and her feelings about my grandfather.

When I began to have a framework in which to place these comments I wondered if at some point she had turned her back on my grandfather and that her nightmares were coming from guilt. The story was never told for me to understand that, in fact, it was just the opposite: That my grandmother stayed with my grandfather through repeated attempts by the Gestapo to convince her to divorce him so that they could deport him. It was the marriage that protected him until early in 1944, where the Gestapo finally said “fine, then we’ll deport both of you”. This threat led to my grandfather’s suicide. And I never knew until relatively recently that my father retained my grandfather’s suicide note that simply said: ‘to save the mother for the son’.

My mother—in the post war years in a hunger-ridden, cold, dark, Cologne, contracted hepatitis C. I didn't know this until relatively recently. I knew that she was ill, but never knew with what. She had this underlying condition. When she came to Colorado, my sense is that my mother was pretty isolated. We lived close to downtown Denver at first, and then we moved, like everybody was doing at the time, to the suburbs. In the 1960s in suburban America, having German accents and eating somewhat different food and having a different perspective on things was not maybe the easiest of things for her to participate in larger social settings. America was very proud of its success in the second World War at beating the Nazis.

Post-war America was not necessarily not antisemitic, but the name ‘Stern’ might have added to the isolation. I do remember at one point in time, and I didn't really understand it at the time as I must have been 10 or so. But somehow kids from across the street ended up calling me a ‘Nazi Jew’. It's one of the few times that I saw my father literally go through the roof and telling off the neighbors because I must've come home and asked: ‘What is a Nazi Jew?’ 

There were a number of years when my mother’s health declined and it is very, very tragic but she died when I just turned 15. I would say I lost my mother more or less immediately after my childhood as she first became very ill when I was 10. My father obviously had a difficult time. He lost his father and then he lost his wife. My mother's parents seemed to fault my father. My mother was an only child and, from their perspective, he had taken away their only child to another country, where she died.

This broke the ties with that side of my family. I was 15 and the only person who could mediate between myself and my grandparents was my father, and then there was this break. I simply didn't have the language skills and they lived a world away. This is part of the immigration story, part of the loss of connectivity, the loss of memory. Then, when I was 16, my father met a woman who was considerably younger than he was. She was closer to my age than his. He fell in love with her and married her quickly, very quickly. To a woman in her mid-twenties, a teenager from a previous marriage is a problem. So she got rid of me. Here is one of the real ironies of life: I lost my father at more or less the same age that he lost his father. Other than photographs and some correspondence that I received many years later, I have nothing from any of my grandparents, my parents, or my own childhood.

I became independent when I was 16; I moved out when I was still in high school. I finished high school and then left Colorado. and there was an attempt at reconnecting a decade later … it is harsh, it is complicated. How, how does history work? How does memory work? How does identity work? What are the consequences? The whole point of my grandfather, who meant so much to my father, surviving for as long as he did was that his wife chose to stand by his side. So on the one hand, my father is standing by the side of his wife but, on the other, he is doing so in opposition to his son. My father survived the Holocaust, but I don't believe he survived National Socialism. Clearly it decimated who he would have been, might have become, if there hadn’t been a National Socialism.

I had no contact with my father for many years. After a decade of living in New York I moved to Germany. I immediately identified with Germans; at some macro level, there was a mentality click. When I was in Berlin, I decide to visit Cologne. Years earlier, the summer after my mother died, the summer when I was 15, my father and I made a long trip through Europe and we were in Cologne together. There was a friend of the family, of both my grandfather and my grandmother on my mother's side, and I remembered his name. I had learned German and when I arrived in Cologne on the train, I called from the station and said, ‘Hi, I'm here in Cologne and am wondering if you have time to meet?’. He said immediately ‘oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, you're here, you're here, you're here’. There was this incredible immediacy that I didn’t understand. I grabbed a taxi and within half an hour I am standing as a professional, as an architect and educator, in a suit and tie in front of him, saying ‘hi, I'm here and I'm glad you remember me’. He was shocked and I was completely puzzled, so I asked: ‘what, what’s up?’. And he said: ‘After your father remarried, he came to Cologne with his new wife. And everybody was asking, where is Ralph? My father told everybody there that I had become a drug addict and had disappeared in India’. As I just said, my father survived the Holocaust, but I don't believe he survived National Socialism.

There are many parts of me that really do feel absolutely at home in Germany. Once, though, I had a formal meeting with a prospective employer. In the meeting—I had already submitted all my paperwork— in the meeting it was suddenly said, no we're going to turn this down. And I asked why, as the application had gone through all the approvals. This was the final step. And he said, no, we're going to turn it down. He looked at me and he said: ‘You know, from your name, you could be German, but you're not’. I had an absolutely immediate physical reaction. I actually put my hands out in front of me, as if I was blocking like a physical blow. I was shocked. I felt completely disoriented. I was just in shock because I took it as being an antisemitic remark. I thought that the comment of ‘I might be German, but am not’ … Well, yes. There is a reason for that. It's called the Holocaust.

Complex histories come in many shapes and forms. What is my story? The comment of ‘You could be German, but you're not’ led me to pursue what that status actually meant. I began searching for documentation and doing some research, some of this in the burgeoning internet. All of a sudden, the Stolperstein with my grandfather’s name shows up on my screen. I had no idea. It seems to have been posted by a tourist. Someone who'd been in Cologne and had seen the Stolperstein. I've had a few surprises in my life; that discovery certainly counts as one of them.

It was unclear until I was made aware of the suicide note, which was much later … it was always said that he had committed suicide … then everything was very fuzzy. It was something that nobody really talked about. It's not the thing you talk about and certainly not something you talk about with a 12 year old or a 14 year old. And, after I was 16, the conversations weren't happening with me anymore. What is that actual history? What actually happened? I'd never heard that my grandfather had been deported. I had never heard that he had died in the Holocaust. I didn't know that there could even be a Stolperstein for somebody who committed suicide ... and the way the Stolperstein is formulated is quite moving. That he committed suicide before the deportation transport. I was completely unprepared for this and then all of a sudden it was there.

It's always the question of how do you approach the Holocaust? How do you approach the murder of millions? There is a substantial discourse around the impossibility of representing the Holocaust. I find the Stolpersteine to be the most compelling, the most personal, the most moving memorials that one could imagine because it names the individuals, it cites the date of birth, it cites the date of deportation, it cites the date of death. It gives the precise location, you are essentially on the threshold of these events because the Stolpersteine are at the entrances to buildings, so that you are literally on the threshold of the personal lives that these people lead until they were, again literally, torn out of those lives and thrust into the abyss. I always pay attention to Stolpersteine, I always read them, they're always painful, they are always in many ways, so difficult because you read of an 85 year old woman who suddenly gets torn out of her home and is thrust into the abyss. You read of a three month old infant who, well, it's the same, thrust into the abyss. There is an incredibly personal connection and the incredible pervasiveness of the Stolpersteine. It's not as if one can say: ‘Oh, they were over there, they were in that part of the city’. You see the fine grain of integration. You see the fine grain of assimilation and you realize that all of a sudden, none of that mattered. I find them to be absolutely wonderful in achieving what it is that they set out to achieve. And I think they are phenomenally worthy of the individuals and the individual Schicksal, the individuals’ fates that they memorialize.

Those who don't know their history are condemned to repeat it. I do really believe this, things are the way they are for often for very complex reasons. People may have different opinions about what is more important than what is less important in bringing about a specific circumstance, but human events don't just fall out of the sky. They're here because of histories and, and tracing these histories, being sensitive to these histories is both a professional and a personal fascination. But, overall, I believe that it's a moral obligation. What we are seeing today is perhaps what happens when people turn their back on history and live in a kind of odd moment of the immediacy of internet immersion, a suspension of history. I find this to be very dangerous. I have a story, the story is a continuation of other stories, and if my story may help people to make sense of their stories a little bit more, then I'm willing to share that story.

I'm always shocked and appalled right at the callousness of the world. The child separation policies of the previous American administration on the U.S.-Mexican border are incomprehensible, incomprehensible that someone can think that this is at all approaching a reasonable idea. I hope that people will become more empathetic. Unfortunately, we seem to be living in a period marked by the demise of empathy. 

The one instance that I mentioned earlier was, to me, a clear and unmistakable case of antisemitism. It was an antisemitic remark connected directly to my name; it is not the only time that there has been a focus on my name. The name Stern means star, and it comes from the Star of David. I carry the Star of David in my name. There are times when I wonder if I am not marked in ways I don't necessarily see, or don't really understand and may never be aware of, but that other people may be aware of. Or, perhaps, they may not be aware of it themselves in any conscious way. But I do come back to the remark from my childhood, you know, you're a ‘Nazi Jew’. Where does that come from? How does that happen? And so I do wonder if my name—of which I'm incredibly proud—also carries with it an historical burden. It is a burden that one is proud to carry. But nonetheless, there are events that have arisen in my life that might have been very different if my name were Smith or Jackson.

I have no idea who my grandfather, who is memorialized in a Stolperstein in Cologne, actually was. He seems to have been a responsible man. He seems to have been a very brave man. He is a man who certainly cared for his family as best as he possibly could under the most difficult of circumstances. I hope that what I've shared here is fair to him and does his memory justice. My conflict, which I do believe is attributable to National Socialism and the legacy of the Holocaust, is that I hope that what I've said about my father is something that his father would be able to come to terms with, at least under these circumstances. In this regard, I do feel a personal responsibility to my own family, collectively. I hope that what I've said is also fair to that legacy.