A Jewish Girl in Nazi Germany

May 16, 2007

Home » Commentary » A Jewish Girl in Nazi Germany

During the Los Angeles Book Fair at UCLA in late April, sun-splattered readers roamed by the thousands, and scores stopped by Tent 106 to talk to three other authors and me about our books.  Mine is called Hitler Here.  It’s a biographical novel, and the cover bears a menacing, pencil portrait of the man in the title.  A stout woman in her late seventies glared at the book but didn’t touch it.

“It’s historically accurate,” I said.  “All the characters have bylines and tell their own stories.”

Looking at me about like she did the guy on the cover, the woman said, “I have no interest in your book.  I lived through it, and I’m Jewish.”

“Really?  That had to have been difficult.  And fascinating.”

“That’s right.  I’ve written an autobiography called Midnight ‘til Dawn. I’m looking for agents so I can show them the manuscript.”

“How ‘bout an interview,” I said, reaching for paper to host the pen I already held.

“Too crowded.  Here’s my business card and a two-page bio.”

A week later I called the woman once known as Hannelore Gollong.  Her great grandfather, Gustav Schwandt, had been an eminent financier and part of the vanguard that built the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal connecting the Baltic Sea to the North Sea through northern Germany, and he moved in the nation’s highest social circles.  Prestige does not insulate feelings, however, and his daughter – Hannelore’s grandmother – devastated him when she married a merchant marine named Gollong and became a chanteuse.

A generation later, healthy and bigoted in palatial retirement, Gustav Schwandt was appalled that his granddaughter, Irmgard, had been impregnated by a Jew.  Even the wealth of Joseph Gruber’s family was irrelevant.  The aristocratic Schwandt could not risk a scandal.  Wielding the family finances with a clenched fist, he decreed that Irmgard be sent from the family cradle in Kiel, on the Baltic, to a sanitarium tucked into the Harz Mountains where Hannelore was born in 1928.

“The first thing I can remember, at age three or four, is living with a fat ugly witch,” said Hannelore.  “I was sent from house to house to house.  For a long time I only got to see my mother about once a year, and at first I wasn’t even sure if she was my mother.  When I found out, I hated her.  She was a beautiful woman but she’d left me behind, and of course I blamed her.  I never did meet my father.”

Irmgard eventually married Hans Hoffmann, a buyer for a department store and a man acceptable to Gustav Schwandt.  His great granddaughter, Hannelore, remained a family pariah and, in Hitler’s festering nation, a child in danger.  In November 1938 the Nazis battered and burned hundreds of Jews and their businesses and synagogues during a Crystal Night of broken glass glowing under flames on the street.

World War II began in September 1939 and roundups of Jews intensified.  The Nazis studied birth certificates and other public and private records as they spied and lied and forced neighbors and even relatives to do likewise.  The Gestapo told the mother of Hans Hoffmann that she’d be in trouble if she was hiding any Jews.  She said she wasn’t.  They said they’d heard she was.  She wasn’t but blurted her son was married to a woman whose daughter was a half-Jew and revealed where the girl might be.

One afternoon after class Hannelore walked down the school stairs and was stopped by a uniformed man with a pistol holstered on his hip.

“Come with me,” he ordered.

“Where?”

“To the office,” he said, grabbing her arm.  He led her to his car and shoved her into the front seat.

While he drove he eyed the already buxom 11-year old, and after they’d passed all familiar points and were heading out of town the frightened girl asked, “Where are we going?”

“Quiet.”

In a field full of trees, the Nazi finally stopped and jerked Hannelore out and threw her on the ground and fumbled with his belt and pants as he pulled them down.

“Take off your underpants,” he said.

She complied, and he pulled her dress up and pounced.

“He was so big and fat,” Hannelore recently said.  “I thought he was going to crush me, but he didn’t get very far.  I reached for his holster and grabbed his gun and shot him, once, in the side.  He slumped on me.  It took awhile to get that pig off me.  Then I ran back toward town.  Did I tell anyone?  God, no.

“I was able to move right away, and that saved my life.  I found out later that my great grandfather was pulling strings to keep me as safe as he could.  I knew I was Jewish but didn’t understand what that meant.  I just knew I wasn’t loved by anyone.  I felt worthless except for having a good body.”

Her grandmother, the former chanteuse, hosted her for a year in the central German city of Erfurt.  Hannelore loved the old woman but their house was destroyed by allied bombs, and she had to move on to her mother’s stately residence in Elberfeld in the Ruhr where stepfather Hans Hoffman was ultimately able to purchase a forged birth certificate for Hannelore, providing theoretical safety.

“My mother was spoiled and treated me like the maids,” Hannelore said.  “They were a lot nicer to me than she was, so I befriended them. And she said, ‘Don’t make friends with the maids.  You’re not supposed to cross that line.’”

Hans Hoffmann served the German Army in a logistical capacity, and when he was away his enchanting wife hosted parties and sometimes visited male friends in Berlin.  Once, Hoffmann called when Irmgard was absent.  Hannelore tried to make excuses but could feel his suspicions.  After he returned on leave he confronted his wife, asking, “Are you having an affair?”

“No,” she said.

Hoffmann turned to Hannelore and asked, “Has your mother been seeing men?”

“No,” Hannelore said.

Hoffmann slapped her face: “Liar.”

Irmgard stepped in and put her arm around him and took him into the bedroom, and the next day the couple came out smiling.

Good times were rare.  Allied bombs destroyed about sixty percent of the town.  Germany was crushed.  And Hannelore Gollong wanted out.  Her curvaceous figure helped secure a job with the occupying forces of the United States.  She met a GI named Everett Yates, married him, became Honey Yates, moved to Kentucky, was called a Kraut and a Jew by his parents, bore two daughters and a son before he deserted her, worked as a waitress in Miami and a music talent scout in New York, married singer Trini Lopez’s road manager, Allen Lerner, divorced him because of his compulsive gambling, became a venture capitalist, and after more than 30 years returned to Germany to visit her mother dying of cancer.

“Why didn’t you want me when I was a little girl?” Honey Yates asked.

From her hospital bed the old woman laughed and said, “We had to get you away so the authorities wouldn’t find out.  You kept trying to join the Hitler Youth because all your friends were in it.”

George Thomas Clark

George Thomas Clark is the author of Hitler Here, a biographical novel published in India and the Czech Republic as well as the United States. His commentaries for GeorgeThomasClark.com are read in more than 50 countries a month.

Recent Commentary

Books

HITLER HERE is a well researched and lyrically written biographical novel offering first-person stories by the Fuehrer and a variety of other characters. This intimate approach invites the reader to peer into Hitler’s mind, talk to Eva Braun, joust with Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler, debate with the generals, fight on land and at sea and…
See More
Art history and fiction merge to reveal the lives and emotions of great painters Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, William H. Johnson, Lee Krasner, and many others.
See More
This fast-moving collection blends fiction and movie history to illuminate the stimulating lives and careers of noted actors, actresses, and directors. Stars of this book include Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Clint Eastwood, Cate Blanchett, and Spike Lee.
See More
In this collection of thirty-eight chiseled short stories, George Thomas Clark introduces readers to actors, alcoholics, addicts, writers famous and unknown, a general, a lovelorn farmer, a family besieged by cancer, extraterrestrials threatening the world, a couple time traveling back to a critical battle, a deranged husband chasing his wife, and many more memorable people…
See More
Anne Frank On Tour and Other Stories
This lively collection offers literary short stories founded on History, Love, Need, Excess, and Final Acts.
See More
In lucid prose author George Thomas Clark recalls the challenges of growing up in a family beset by divorce, depression, and alcoholism, and battling similar problems as an adult.
See More
Let’s invite many of the greatest boxers and their contemporaries to tell their own stories, some true, others tales based on history. The result is a fascinating look into the lives and battles of those who thrilled millions but often ruined themselves while so doing.
See More
In a rousing trip through the worlds of basketball and football, George Thomas Clark explores the professional basketball league in Mexico, the Herculean talents of Wilt Chamberlain, the artistry of LeBron James, the brilliance of Bill Walsh, and lots more. Half the stories are nonfiction and others are satirical pieces guided by the unwavering hand of an inspired storyteller.
See More
Get on board this collection of satirical stories, based on news, about the entertaining but absurd and often quite dangerous events following the election of President Donald J. Trump in November 2016 until January 6, 2021, shortly after his loss to Joe Biden.
See More
Join Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and other notables on a raucous ride into a fictional world infused with facts from one of the roughest political races in modern U.S. history.
See More
History and literary fiction enliven the Barack Obama phenomenon from the African roots of his father and grandfather to the United States where young Obama struggles to control vices and establish his racial identity. Soon, the young politician is soaring but under fire from a variety of adversaries including Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh.
See More
These satirical columns allow startlingly candid Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush to explain their need to control the destinies of countries, regions, and, ultimately, the world. Osama bin Laden, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Karl Rove, and other notables, not all famous, also demand part of the stage.
See More
Where Will We Sleep
Determined to learn more about those who fate did not favor, the author toured tattered, handmade refuges of those without homes and interviewed them on the streets and in homeless shelters, and conversed with the poor in the United States, Mexico, Ecuador, and Spain, and on occasion wrote composite stories to illuminate their difficult lives.
See More
In search of stimulating stories, the author interviewed prostitutes in Madrid, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua and on many boulevards in the United States, and he talked to detectives and rode the rough roads of social workers who deal with human trafficking, which is contemporary slavery, and sometimes used several lives to create stories, and everywhere he ventured he witnessed struggles of those whose lives are bound In Other Hands.
See More
In compressed language Clark presents a compilation of short stories and creative columns about relationships between men and women.
See More