Entry 5
New Topic: My Birth and My Forebears
I was born in Rambouillet on November 13 1939. Why Rambouillet? My parents were living in Paris. World War II had started at the beginning of September and the French authorities wanted to keep the Paris hospitals empty in case of air raids, so they encouraged women who were about to give birth to do so outside of Paris; my mother went to the chateau town of Rambouillet, about 30 miles south west of Paris, to have her baby, me. At the time the French were interning Germans as enemy aliens. After a few days she, we as it now was, moved back to Paris. Six months later the French army collapsed and we fled to southern France. From there, we escaped to Uruguay in 1942. Four years later, in 1946, we moved to America. As a result I became an American and English became my native language. If things had played out differently I might have become French, Portuguese or Uruguayan. But all this is for another time, as this memoir fragment is meant to end with my birth, not describe my early years.
So like Pericles and Lincoln, I’ll begin, with my forbears.
My grandparents were about as different as Europeans at the beginning of the Twentieth century could be. Slight exaggeration? Perhaps but not much. My fathers’s parents lived an almost medieval life in an Eastern European shtetl, Sopotskin. “Shtetl” is the Yiddish diminutive for city. Shtetls were generally small, predominantly Jewish, market towns surrounded by peasant villages populated by gentiles. The Jews were storekeepers, owned taverns and produced craft goods. The shtetl was basically preindustrial. In the 1920’s, when my father was growing up, life was changing. In my father’s shtetl there was a man who made spinning wheels for the local Polish peasants. By the 1920’s his business was declining, as even peasants were no longer clothing themselves in home spun clothes; by then home spinning could not compete with machines. My grandparents made a living by running a small store. Their customers were peasants from nearby villages.
My German grandparents grew up in modern late 19th Century cities. I think they had indoor plumbing and electricity by the time they were adult. They traveled by street car and train and later by car. My German grandparents were part of the German bourgeoisie. My grandmother was the daughter of a Prussian officer, Richard Hasenclever, and my grandfather’s father, Albert Sempell started a valve factory in 1870.
I only met one of my grandparents, my mother’s mother, though three were alive when I was born, as was one great grandmother. War prevented me from ever seeing my other living grand parents. My German grandfather died while being operated on in 1942. I think my Jewish grandfather died in 1939, probably of stomach cancer and probably before I was born. I know he had radiation treatment for his stomach cancer. I don’t know exactly when, but it would have been somewhere between 1936 and 1938 and he must have gone to Warsaw (by train) to receive the treatment. (the medieval and the modern lived side by side in 1930’s Poland.) My Jewish grandmother was left alone in the store in Sopotskin, but didn’t stay long, as the Soviet Union took over the town and nationalized the store. When WWII started, the Germans and the Soviets were allies and the the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. Private property was outlawed in Sopotskin. The official who took over the store kindly offered to let my grandmother stay, but as an orthodox Jew she could not live under the same roof with any man who was not a close relative, let alone a gentile and godless Communist. She went to her daughter’s in the nearby town of Grodno. There she soon died, of what I don’t know. She was fortunate to die when she did. Not long after, the Jews of Grodno, including her daughter (my father’s sister) and her daughter’s three sons (my cousins) were rounded up and murdered. I don’t know the details and feel no need to know.
