Visiting the Graves of My German Jewish Ancestors
On a bitterly cold day at the end of January 2015, I stood beside the grave of Maria Schnunnann, my great-great-great-grandmother, who is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Schmieheim, Germany. Three years of genealogical exploration-using online databases and library collections, particularly those of the Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History in New York-had led me to that spot.
Maria remains somewhat of a mystery in spite of my attempts to get to know her. Born in 1800, she has no husband recorded in the Ortssippenbuch, the definitive town records, and her children bore the name Schnurmann. Could she have married another Schnurmann, now lost to history? Could she have married outside the faith?
I doubt that I will ever solve the mystery of Maria's long and puzzling life. She died at age 81, and her grave-stone (perhaps purchased by her sons Joshua and Joseph, who prospered in America supplying horses to the Union army during the Civil War) is sedate and elegant. With a graceful top and a handsome blumenkranz (flower wreath) carving, her gravestone has the sort of substance and materiality to it that I can never capture in relation to Maria herself.
Similarly, all of my hundreds of relatives there remain just out of reach. As a researcher, I know the statistics and relationships. Nevertheless, other than having learned the occupations of some of the males-most commonly wine merchants, cattle and horse dealers, small manufacturers, and tradesmen or shopkeepers of various sorts I can only guess at what their lives might have been like.
Traveling to this out-of-the-way village between the Rhine and the Black Forest in southern Baden was remarkably smooth. The high-speed 8:05 a.m. Deutsche Bahn ICE train from Centraal Station in Amsterdam to Basel, Switzerland, took me directly to Offenburg, just two stops from the Swiss border, with only express stops. Then 10 minutes on a local train brought me to Lahr, a mere six kilometers from Schmieheim.
Although I had done my genealogical research and viewed maps and photographs, nothing really prepared me for the experience of visiting the cemetery. Because Baden in 1940 was the first area of Germany to be effectively Judenrein (free of Jews) with the deportation of almost all its Jewish residents (including the 14 Jews still residing in the village of Schmieheim) to the appalling concentration camp in Gurs in the French Pyrenees and because of the subsequent chaos of the Nazi years, I did not imagine I would find a place of such solemn and magisterial calm.
The truth is that Jewish history in these small towns and villages did not begin with the Nazis; Jewish history tragically ended there. Before that, for centuries, Jews just went ahead and lived their lives, periodically subject to anti-semitism, sometimes restricted to certain occupations and types of property ownership. Perhaps it was not what we in 21st-century America consider normal, but they managed and often managed successfully and happily, always building families, occasionally building wealth.
The cemetery in Schmieheim reflects that world-the world where for generations Jews were born and died; where they experienced life, the good and bad; where they married Jews but lived side by side with the Gentile community, as a detailed old map of Schmieheim's Jewish and Christian households plainly demonstrates; where they went to the synagogue and the mikveh (ritual bath) during their lives; and, when they died, were buried on a nearby hillside among the agricultural fields and vineyards. For centuries, my maternal Jewish family led such ordinary lives in rural southwest Germany. My ancestors Isaac Schnurmann and Elias Schnurmann were documented there as heads of households in 1707.
On the day I visited my relatives' graves, the weather was horrid: intermittent rain and snow with gusts of fiercely cold wind. Perfect perhaps as a literary device with, as Keats put it, the clouds weeping, but disagreeable in every practical way.
Located on sloping land that runs from the road to the ridge of a hill, the 140-acre cemetery perhaps was more difficult to farm than the fertile plains that stretch to the west, and so was put to a different use. A Christian cemetery is close by, so perhaps the local residents had long ago decided this was a felicitous place to honor their dead. A brick wall encloses the entire Jewish cemetery with a single wrought iron gate for access, not a formidable obstacle, except perhaps for some fann animals, but it manages to create a composition, an architecture, a sense of place. The gravestones are arranged rhythmically in ro"s that renect not the mathematical precision of a surveyor but rather the methodical regularity of a gravedigger. Even with the wind and sleet whipping about, a stately sense of calm pervaded the cemetery. I had to remind myself that this serenity was deceptive. that on Kristallnacht in 1938 the cemetery was vandalized and the monuary building destroyed, but at this moment. the placid beauty of the place kept that violent history from assening itself.
Inside the entrance, a restored World War I memorial commemorates Jewish war dead from the neighboring towns. Three of the four Schmieheim soldiers who lost their lives in the dreadful and bloody battles of that war were. I determined later. in some way related to me. Two were Schnurmanns. Sigmund had immigrated to America as a 14-year-old child in 1903, but somehow had returned to Europe by 1914 to die for his fonner country just three months after the war began. Yet another inexplicable Schnurmann mystery.
After about five hours in the cemetery, my cell phone battery gave out and I lost my gloves. My fingers were numb with cold. and my umbrella was shredded by the wind, but I had gotten to almost all the important graves of my direct ancestors. I had snapped quite a few pictures, though I decided during the visit that photography was less important than the more intimate acts of observation and thought. I have at home Der judische Friedhof in Schmieheim (The Jewish Cemetery in Schmieheim), compiled by Naftali Bar-Giora Bamburger, a two-volume set of more than a thousand pages that document each grave in the cemetery. Genealogical research often can be frustrating, but it also can be enabling and satisfying and can help us understand. At that moment, I felt satisfied-but also deeply saddened.
The large green field within the cemetery, perhaps 30 acres, would have been enough ground, I realized, to handle another century or more of burials. Now, instead of a peaceful resting place for the dead, that field represents the barbarous end of centuries of thriving Jewish communities.
As I looked around on that cold afternoon. the 2,400 or so extant graves, in a reversal of reality, seemed to express life more than death. The beautiful field. in its aching emptiness, absent graves now, absent graves in the future, seemed the more fining place in which to mourn. This particular genealogical journey was complete. It was time to go.
