Crucible of Terror. Max Liebster
placed in leather coverings) wrapped around his left arm and hand. Leather straps held the little Scripture case that hung on his forehead between his eyes. He chanted parts of the prayer while rocking back and forth. Each time he took the prayer shawl from his shoulder to pull it over his head, I knew that he had encountered God’s holy name. Before Dad started his day, he would daven (pray) for one hour. Even when he had to leave for the city at 4:00 a.m., he never failed to rise an hour earlier to say his prayers.
I would have loved to become a hazzan (cantor) like Grandfather. The villagers always told me that I was the exact image of Grandfather Bär Oppenheimer.
Though I looked like my grandfather, we differed in one respect. I had always been weak around blood. I remembered when I had fainted at the baby’s circumcision so many years ago. My parents may have hoped that I would follow in Grandfather Bär’s footsteps and become a shohet, but I was not suited for it. I happened to be at the kosher butcher’s one day when a cow was brought in for slaughtering. Several men surrounded the pitiable animal. They tied its legs together and flipped the animal onto its back. They held the cow’s head firmly so that it could not move. Then the shohet wielded his razor-sharp knife with a single stroke. In a split second, blood spurted from the cow’s throat. After the animal was bled, the shohet examined the contents of its stomach and looked at the liver to determine if something the cow had eaten, such as a nail, might have rendered the meat unclean. If nothing in its entrails had defiled the cow, the butchering could begin. Tradition or no tradition, the bloody sight left me feeling sick.
The year of my Bar Mitzvah, Hanna, my beautiful 17-year-old sister, finished her secretarial training at the paper mill. She had black velvet eyes, and wavy ebony hair, along with intelligence, determination, and good work habits. Her employer asked her to stay on at the mill, to the great relief of my parents. Our financial crisis deepened as Father’s clients took longer and longer to pay off the credit my father patiently extended. The Jewish communities knew about our dire situation. They thought of Father whenever they needed a man for the Kaddish minyan and would be very generous in covering his travel expenses. If the funeral was in a large city, Father would spend all the money he received on leather skins, much to Mother’s disappointment.
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When I finished school in 1929, my parents decided to accept the Oppenheimers’ offer to give me a job in their store. Since I was determined to work hard and to be self-supporting, I bade farewell to my family and to my carefree childhood days. I was a penniless, 14-year-old country boy setting off for a free education and a new opportunity in the big town of Viernheim. The Oppenheimers would give me room and board in exchange for the housework I would do for Hugo and Julius” elderly mother. I would also have to take care of my own little room in the Oppenheimers’ attic. A whole room for myself! At home I only had a bed of my own.
I didn’t realize how difficult it would be for me to trade the Lauter Valley for Viernheim. Viernheim, with its 20,000 inhabitants, was only 25 kilometers away from home. But it might as well have been on a different continent.
Viernheim was situated in a wide open land where thriving asparagus and tobacco fields sprawled under an endless sky. For centuries the fertile flood plain of the Rhine River had nourished the soil and brought prosperity to the region. Without the protection of the mountains, the land lay exposed to the four winds. I felt vulnerable in the windy flatland.
Viernheim supplied laborers for the Mercedes-Benz plant and other factories in the nearby industrial cities of Ludwigshafen and Mannheim. Thus, the population was a mix of factory workers and farmers. In the center of town were the City Hall, the Catholic church, assorted small shops, and Gebrüder Oppenheimer, with its four display windows. The well-kept homes of the rich clustered tightly around the Catholic church. A little farther away was the business school and, a few blocks behind that, the synagogue.
Our work schedule started at dawn and finished long after the store closed. Early in the morning before opening time, I had to clean the store. New merchandise had to be unpacked and the shelves stocked. Then once a week, all four shop windows had to be washed, and I had to redo the window display using no money but all my ingenuity. All day long, all week long, I climbed up and down the ladder to get items for the customers, straightened the piles of goods, waited on Julius, Hugo, and their mother, and even worked on the cars. And there was still more to do. The Oppenheimers had out-of-town customers to whom I brought samples and deliveries. My employers trusted me to drive the Citroën, even though I was only 16. Despite the extra cushion on the seat, I could hardly see over the dashboard, and to other drivers and pedestrians, it looked as if the car had no driver. I would chuckle when people panicked, thinking they were seeing a runaway car.
Shop signs saying “German store”
are a true blessing...
Here [a German man] can be sure that
he has not given his
hard-earned savings to the
enemy of all that is German, the Jew...
A true German will shop only in German stores!
—“Viernheim People’s Daily,” December 10, 1934
Most of the townspeople received their pay on Saturday. So they would often ask us to come by on Sunday to pick up a small payment toward their bill. The Oppenheimers extended credit without charging interest, but a few customers even exploited that generous arrangement by not paying their bills at all. Bookkeeping kept us busy in the evenings and on Sundays. I took pride in my work, even in little jobs like winding up the smallest bits of string, flattening boxes, and folding wrapping paper. The two brothers ran an efficient and orderly business, and they appreciated my diligence.
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Life with the Oppenheimers also introduced me to an entirely different way of Jewish life. There was hardly any evidence in the Oppenheimer home that its occupants were Jewish. To my surprise their mother did not light the two Sabbath candles on Friday evening, nor did pictures of Moses or Aaron hang on the wall. They didn’t have two sets of dishes—one for meat and one for dairy. Back at home, when a kitchen knife belonging to the meat set came in contact with dairy products, Father buried the defiled blade in the ground for seven days to purify it. The Oppenheimers may have eaten kosher food at home, but when we drove through the Odenwald Mountains, we would sometimes eat in restaurants where the smell of smoked ham was unmistakable and the patrons dined on platters of meat drenched in milk gravy.
The Oppenheimer store even stayed open on the Sabbath. After all, Saturday was payday—the best day for business. Besides, like every other business in town, the store had to close for all the Catholic holidays. How could they also afford to close for Jewish holidays like Rosh-Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) as well? Of course, they observed Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). But what a difference from the way we had celebrated it at home!
At my boyhood home, on this most holy of days, my family would fast from evening to evening and attend the special synagogue services, including the Kol Nidrei, the haunting melodic prayer annulling any rash vows made during the past year. Before asking forgiveness from God, we would ask forgiveness from one another. My family made extensive preparations before Yom Kippur. Father took a chicken by its legs, its wings beating the air. He swung it over his head and mine (since I was the only male child) and spoke some Hebrew words. Then he turned the bird over for the ritual slaughter. Yom Kippur begins in the evening. We all took a complete bath, which was quite an ordeal because we had to heat the water on the stove. Only then would we attend synagogue.
A few days after Yom Kippur comes the festival of Succoth, or booths. We would sit together in a booth that Father had erected in our garden. There we prayed and took our meals. In the evenings we could see the stars through the leafy branches overlaying the top of the booth. Grapes and fruit adorned its walls, an expression of thanksgiving for the year’s harvest. The frail covering of the booth reminded us of the tents in which our ancestors dwelt in the Sinai desert.
At the Oppenheimers’ there were no booths, no thanksgiving prayers, only business.