DOOR TO DOOR EPISODE 1: A HOUSE FOR A LIFE
[1] Wow! That’s a lot of voices! Here is a family tree from the Strauss family to get a sense of how we are all connected.
[2] This audio was taken from an interview made by the Houston Holocaust Center. You can watch the full video of the interview here.
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to watch
[3] Dr. Sarah Crane, visiting professor in the Judaics Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University of Cincinnati and scholar in residence at the Cincinnati Holocaust and Humanity Center.
Sarah Crane (she/her) studies the Holocaust's impact on contemporary understandings of a "just" response to genocide and other mass atrocities. Her research focuses on the Holocaust’s influence on international criminal law through examining the judicial and expressive functions of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Eichmann, and Frankfurt-Auschwitz Trials. Her research has been supported by the German-American Fulbright Commission, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She holds a Ph.D. in History and Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame, an M.A from Indiana University Bloomington, and a B.A. from Earlham College.
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JULIA: Of course we were gonna go, it's my family's history. It's my grandfather's legacy.
MIRIAM: Welcome to Door to Door: A multi-generational story of memory, trauma, and identity. I am Miriam Terlinchamp. In this five-episode series we follow how my family, over four generations, metabolized a history of survival, trauma and hope, and reclaimed a story nearly erased.
This is Episode I: A House for a Life.
[“Main Theme with Melody”]
We step out of the train station and begin to walk into town. By now, walking on cobblestones with the weight of our backpacks feels like a habit. After weeks of rolling through Europe - London, Amsterdam, Rome, Barcelona, travel feels natural. So, too, does this small town just outside of Frankfurt, Germany, whose name we’ve heard repeated all our lives. Wachenbuchen.
MARK: Wachenbuchen
JENNIFER: Wachenbuchen
NEAL : Wachenbuchen
NADINE : Wachenbuchen
RALPH: : Wachenbuchen
JULIA: Wachenbuchen
SIMON: Wachenbuchen
MIRIAM: A picture of the village hung on the walls of our grandfather’s home, right next to the picture of a black and white stoic family picture from the early 1900s and beside that, a blurry photo of young children being deported to a concentration camp.
My sister, Julia, and I find the house easily. Afterall, we’ve seen it in pictures a thousand times. Neither one of us has been here before, and also, part of us has never left this place. Our mother, Nadine, and uncle, Gary, traveled here when they were our age, our cousins, Mark, Shane, and Marika had been here too, and so, it feels like it’s our turn to knock on the door. Here’s my sister Julia…
JULIA: We always heard about it. it was never even a question.
Of course we were gonna go, yeah, it was never even a question. Of course, we'd go,it's my family's history. It's my grandfather's legacy. there was never a question,
MIRIAM: Each one in our own generation, knocking on a door that hasn’t opened for us since it was stripped from our family.
On Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, our grandfather, Simon, was picked up by the Gestapo in Frankfurt, Germany and transported to Buchenwald concentration camp.
SIMON: I was employed by one of the large international export houses in Frankfurt Main the name was Ellis Mayor. They had both, um, branches in New York, London, and South America. I continued working in that, uh, company on the crystal night in 1938. I used to stay with an aunt in Frankfurt. I never came back home except on weekends. At that particular point, the morning of Krystalnacht, I did not know what was going on in my hometown, Wachenbuchen. The Nazis broke in, lined up all the Jewish employees of that company, the non-Jews pointed out everybody was Jewish. We were shipped or sent to the railroad station in Frankfurt, amain, which is a very large town there. Every Jews, the Nazis could get, hold on, well sampled there. It was the beginning of the atrocities because of the underlings of the Nazis, try to prove their patriotism by beating up the Jews and anybody who stood in front got a taste of the new Nazi power. From there, we were transported to, uh, Buchenwald in a large train.
MIRIAM: At the time, there were ways one could buy their way out of the camps. Of course, a Jew couldn’t handle money due to the Nuerenberg laws in place, so it wasn’t simple. But my great grandmother, Jenny, found a way. Here’s my mother Nadine…
NADINE: my father's mother sold the house so that he could have money to get out of Germany
MIRIAM: She sold her home, the one that had been in the family for generations, and bought Simon a one-way ticket out of Germany immediately displacing herself. This is my cousin Shane…
SHANE: and the fact that, grandma Jenny sold the house in her duress and people took advantage of that situation back then. I'm sure whoever bought it got a great deal on that house.
MIRIAM: A house for a life, but really - a life for a life, with a house as collateral damage. Simon survived, Jenny was sent to Auschwitz. We don’t know the story for a long time. And, even after we learn it, the story continues to unfold. Here’s Julia again…
JULIA: And, um, the story wasn't over when he went into a concentration camp. Not for my family.
MIRIAM: Each generation adding new information, unlocking new mysteries, and trying it’s best to weave something whole out of a family history shredded by trauma. For most of my grandfather’s life the story lives in pristine frames, in the names Simon gives his children and in stolen snippets of memory shared almost accidentally.
DAVIDA: It was later in life. I mean, he didn't really talk about it that much.
NADINE: It came out in little spurts. It was not like, let's sit down and talk about it. It was small things that I think he had memory of
SHANE: I think ultimately it was interesting that my grandpa took this journey, his post-traumatic journey from being repressed and, and never speaking about it for 30 plus years, to getting to a point in his life where he openly shared his story with pretty much anyone who was willing to listen.
MIRIAM: Here’s my mother Nadine.
NADINE: I grew up in a time when the stories of the Holocaust were very much present in movies. He was interviewed for the Schindler project. There was no shortage of literature about the Holocaust, and there were studies at the time about children of Holocaust survivors, so we all knew them. It's very much part of our everyday life in a way that many other families probably had their own stories. Children of those who were incarcerated during World War II, the Japanese families. I think it was more like that. I don't think there was a moment of trauma. It was more that it seeped through our lives in many small ways.
MIRIAM: Our mother and her siblings grew up in the shadow of missing lineage.
NADINE: I remember being with him and saying, I'm bored. I don't know what to do in the same way many 10 year olds do, or 11 year olds do. And he said very unusually, because he did not talk about his story until the latter part of his life, he said, well, let me see. What was I doing at your age? And then he kind of recounted what life was like for Jews in a very simple Matter of fact way, but it certainly gave me pause for thought that stayed with me. He did not belabor it. It was more subtle…in the way that we spent money or didn't spend money, who we engaged with, how we practiced our communal life.
MIRIAM: Each of Simon’s children chased after these stories that were so opaque in their childhood. Each, in their own way, set out to discover the lost pieces of legacy, reclaim disappeared ancestors, and pay homage to the price of survivorship. Ultimately finding themselves standing in front of the door of their father’s childhood home, as if called into sacred pilgrimage to both remember and reclaim a story that is both uniquely Simon’s and also, an integral part of every single one of our identities.
NADINE: It's kinda like asking why you go to Mecca. That was sort of our focal point. We've heard so much about Wachenbuchen and, and about my father's experience and it was an homage I suppose, and And I did visit with the family that was a neighbor, but the entire time I was there, there was the neighbor across the street on the balcony crying because I was something, I think like a, like a ghost from the past.
MIRIAM: When Simon endured indentured servitude, starvation, humiliation, and torture in Buchenwald, he couldn’t have known how he would tell his story and to whom. And yet, after the worst moments in his life, the murder of his entire extended family, the burning of his school, the loss of his home, his country, his way of being… there would be a wife, and children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, each in their own way always knowing that his story was part of our own. This is his granddaughter, Jennifer:
JENNIFER: Like the first time I laid eyes on him, I, I knew, I knew that all this had happened.I don't remember a time when I didn't know that that was his experience.
MIRIAM: And his eldest daughter Davida:
DAVIDA: I've always heard it. Um, I think in part it had to do with the pictures hanging in our house forever, the one of his house. I always knew the story. I don't know exactly when, but I always knew. the earliest memory I have of the more complete story was when Nadine invited him to speak at the Hebrew Day School where y'all were going. I heard it, and that's when I heard a more complete story than he had ever imparted before.
MIRIAM: When you’ve known part of your story for all of your life, it’s natural to want to know more.
Each of us, making our own pilgrimage to the place, the small house in Wachenbuchen Germany, to stand at threshold and say:
NADINE: Here I am. You didn't knock us all out because he made it. There's a whole family that is in existence because of that. So there was a whole lot of righteousness, I suppose, involved with it. And there was a certain pleasure. And seeing that neighbor be upset because I believe it was a neighbor, one of those people who, who took advantage of Jews who had to leave very quickly. And either just took those ho houses or bought it very much on the cheap. We now know what happened to those houses. They sold the houses, but they didn't really… they had to leave and they got what they could get.
MIRIAM: Each us have a version of reconciling the concept of “we’re still here.” and “those that took advantage of suffering are also still here.” And in between those two statements, just this year, 87 years after the house was taken, the city placed stoppelshtein, memory stones in front of the door. Here is my sister Julia, on a trip in October 2024 to Frankfurt:
JULIA: I walked a lot in, in Frankfurt and I started taking pictures. I started coming across, they're called stumbling stones in English. Came across all these stumbling stones and just really made me really think, I took a picture of six stones in front of a Kentucky Fried chicken, and just thinking about, imagine being in Cincinnati, right. And your kids just walking into a Dairy Queen. And, you had walked across these something like stumbling stones and knowing that there was a deep history there, that there was a personal connection to like what had happened to the family that lived in what is now a Kentucky Fried Chicken., it was so, incredible. Like, I don't know how many people know that's what they were walking across, but next time I'm gonna go to Germany, my eyes are gonna be totally wide open to seeing the city and the community in a very, very different light. And to, to think more thoughtfully about where I'm walking and what does that meant for the generations before me and what they experience and knowing that that legacy is now in Wachenbuchen and from generations to come. You know, like how powerful that is.
MIRIAM: And my mother, Nadine:
NADINE: Aspiring to put markers at these places that you can't avoid because they're where you walk these stones, you can't avoid them. There are first person statements that are etched into sidewalks on the way to places the German government during that era when all of that happened. Was saying, yes, this happened and never again. So for those of us who are descendants to go and pay that visit and say, we see it, we acknowledge it, we so appreciate it, we support you. How can we participate? And then as our voices, as descendants are strong,
MIRIAM: And my cousin Mindy:
MINDY: There was never a, like a headstone, there was never a monument for his grandmother. And, and he thought that at least, you know, the Stoppelshtein was something. And then when he saw that little stone, it was a little thing in the, but it made it feel like, yeah. She's, she's remembered. They're remembered. And I think that's one of the biggest things that we have with the Holocaust. All these people died. Who remembers it? Who remembers the Holocaust in totality? But it's the individuals, each of them had to go through it,
MIRIAM: Here’s Dr. Sarah Crane, visiting professor in the Judaics Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Cincinnati and scholar in residence at the Cincinnati Holocaust and Humanity Center:
DR SARAH CRANE: Memorials Have a duty to give us a space that we wouldn't have in our lives otherwise. I mean, I think this is also what's so interesting about the stopplesteine, the stepping stones in Berlin, is that I had won right outside of my apartment when I lived in Berlin. I had won right out outside of my apartment when I lived in Frankfurt. And it was part of my daily life that I would see this stone right outside of my door. And what it did for me was did, did create like a little space to kind of reflect and remember even in my kind of daily life. And I think this is something that memorials do very well, but also the fact that I saw it every day. Kept it relevant
MIRIAM: This is Herr Hebert Begemann, who leads to the effort of organizing the stoppelshtein in Frankfurt, and was a long time pen pal of Simons:
HERBERT (German and English translation): Yeah. So the area where he lives, the, you know, it's a com, it's four villages thrown together, and in this whole area they're 84, 85 stepping stones. And about 60 of them are in Vahan hun, where Miriam's family is from. And the majority of people just walk by and over and on, step on them. And no one, no one really thinks about it. The area where I lived is called Maintal It's four villages thrown together, including Simon's family's village of Wachenbuchen. In Al, there are 85 Stoppelstein stepping stones, and about 60 of them are in the area of Wachenbuchen, where Miriam's family is from. And the majority of people just walk by and over and on, step on them. And no one, no one really thinks about it.
MIRIAM: Stepping stones. Memorial markers. Golden bits on the ground saying something happened here. Stop. Remember. One for Jenny. One for Simon. One for each of Simon’s brothers, Lou and Ernst. It took 87 years to have a memorial. A name for what happened in the place where it happened. In October 2024, three generations, 11 people from our family traveled to stand at the threshold, in our own impossibility, our own miracle of continued lineage, and pay homage to the place where the ultimate sacrifice was paid for freedom and safety. Here’s Julia:
LIVE AUDIO [JULIA]: “I’m in Wachenbuchen now about to turn left on Ruben Berg Strauss and uh, we're walking to the Strauss family residence now. There's quite a lot of us. We have students. From the high school here who are who've done research on the survivors and, um, and their families just been kind of weird to listen to kids read it as just a normal biography of someone from the past when it's someone that you're so connected to, which was definitely hard to hear. Um, but also very sweet intentions and nice to see a new generation continue to learn.
MIRIAM: Why does each family member choose to make a pilgrimage to the childhood home and not the concentration camp? Maybe, because it’s where life happened, not the worst of the trauma.
MARK: It never entered my mind not to go. It's just. That's where you go.
MARIKA: I'm already sharing stories with my daughter, and bringing am Maya to Germany will be an important part of her understanding her lineage, her story. The intergenerational trauma that exists within our family. And, being able to allow her to like, touch and, and be an experience on those lands where such atrocities happened is gonna be part of her story. And part of how she hopefully is able to, you know, live in the world in this like, change making kind of way that I'm, that I feel like my grandpa gave me.
SHANE: It's not that I don't want to go to Buchenwald, I definitely do. We go to that house, we make the pilgrimage to his house because his story, obviously, is far beyond his months in the concentration camp. His story, you know, the lead up to, and the exodus from, his before and after life when it comes to the Holocaust. So while the Holocaust, I think played an outsized role in his life,I think we go to his house because that represents normalcy. That was his life was and should have been versus the horrible events that led him and his mother and his uncles and his aunts and his cousins all to concentration camps and this horrific version of what became. So I think that's why we make that trip, because That's the real life. That's what it should have been and that's what it was until it wasn't, unfortunately.
MIRIAM: Or, maybe, out of the fantasy that the current residents would open the door, and we’d embrace and somehow find a salve for the wound of hatred that still throbs within.
[Live Audio from ceremony, recitation of Mourners Kaddish]
MARIKA: …somehow he came out with a belief like in kindness and forgiveness and dignity. And I think my relationship with my grandpa was formed around that… You know, you look at the horrors and the atrocities from the Holocaust and it would be perplexing to imagine, how does someone just find forgiveness, or find a way to live in the world without hate.
SHANE: And I asked my grandpa, I go, grandpa, when you see Germans that are your age or around, that timeframe, do you ever wonder what they were doing, during the 1930s and 1940s? Do you wonder if they were soldiers or secret police or ss Like, do you ever think about that? Do you get angry and think about that? And he said, Shane, I don't think about that at all. 'cause if I thought hard about what that man was doing and I got angry and I hated that man for what he did, then they have won. And if I can look at that man and forgive him for whatever he may have done, then I have won. And that really stuck with me as a beautiful way to look at life. to have that capacity for forgiveness and understanding your own self, that love is so much more important than hate.It really stuck with me through my life.
MIRIAM: Or, maybe, as my sister says…
JULIA: So if anything, it just opened the door of how much more we could learn about my family that we were told was totally erased and eradicated. That was the whole point. That was what the Nazis were trying to do. Right? But talk about what strength there is in the power of storytelling, right? It turns out that through all these new resources, there is a way to learn more and to tell an even more powerful story about what happened to our family members and to their community. I mean, it was very emotional to find out the adventure that awaits how many more questions I, I can now ask. Trying to solve or, or seek out. and that our story wasn't over, that it wasn't gonna be the same story that we could add to it. And I don't think a lot of families are able to add to that story. And this trip opened the door for me to continue telling the story. It's not over.
MIRIAM: When you are raised with a story that is so large, that it will take generations to tell it with any justice, there is a point when the story ceases to be about one person during one particular time, instead it becomes integrated into our own stories and sense of self.
JULIA: When I think about my grandpa, what I valued most with about him was how he healed…It was truly one of the most beautiful things, and I think that, I can't imagine actually. I never really got a chance to ask my grandpa about what that meant for his own healing journey about, his relationship to Germany and to his story about the Holocaust. But for him to be able to come back to his homeland that, that was his one wish, right, is to pass along the story.
[Live audio of airplane travel, backpack shifting to ground, knocking on a door]
I knock.
I knock again.
There’s no answer.
None of us have ever been inside the house.
But it’s not the job of the house, or the current resident, or the neighbors to give us our story back. To fill the emptiness or bear witness to our thriving lineage.
SHANE: And then I think the most, like, most emotional, and I really lost it at this point, was I just thought about how much I miss grandpa, like just being around him and his stories. I. And, um, oh, it's choking me up right now. It, uh, just, you know, it's, uh, it's just I miss being around him and, being at his house is kind of that, getting to replay some of that in my mind and, just reflect positively on what great experiences I had with him and the great relationship I was lucky enough to have with him, well into adulthood. So it was a mixture of grief and gratefulness that, I felt when I was standing in front of his house. And, yeah, a, older German guy came by, he pedaled by as I was crying on the side of the wall, and I'm in like, in my full running gear and he said, “Gut Morgen!” And I it kind of snapped me out of it a little bit, but I don't regret it or anything. It just was like this very emotional moment that I experienced out there.
MIRIAM: It is our job to embody the story, opening our own doors to possibility by declaring who we are in the face of this story, what we’ve been shaped by, and what restorative practice we will bring to the world as part of our own legacy.
[Fade “Main Theme with Melody”]
Ohio Humanities made this episode of Door to Door possible. Door to Door is a production of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future and part of the family of podcasts of Judaism Unbound. Created by Miriam Terlinchamp, directed by Joey Taylor, produced at Monastery Studios, original music by Ric Hordinski, and art by Katie Kaestner.
Check the show notes for bonus material and resources.
We'd love to hear from you, so you can email us at miriam@judaismunbound.com or find us at: www.judaismunbound.com/door-to-door.
Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will explore pilgrimage as a response to trauma. Thanks for listening.
