ALEXANDRE RIPP WAS MY COUSIN on my father’s side. In July 1942, the French police in Paris, acting for the German military government, arrested him—though “arrested” suggests more force than needed to take a three-year-old child into custody. Alexandre was killed in Auschwitz two months later.

Over the years, I spoke about my cousin very rarely. I could see that the story of his ordeal was of interest to most people only when patched onto the story of the Holocaust, and that had been told many times over. So many books, films, photographs—there seemed no space left for Alexandre. Then something happened that showed me I was wrong.

I was in Berlin’s Jewish Museum to see the exhibit Berlin Transit, about the influx of Russian Jews into Berlin in the 1920s. The Kahans, my family on my mother’s side, had been a wealthy and philanthropically active émigré family in that city, which made them a good exemplar of the exhibit’s theme. Two rooms were devoted to the Kahans.

After an hour spent considering the mementos and documents and photos and wondering how all of it might be connected to the life I was living (ex-professor of Russian literature, comfortable Colonial with paid-up mortgage, three-year-old Honda in the driveway), I decided to have a look at the rest of the museum. The layout was unusual. The architect had designed a building that was itself a sort of exhibit. Strolling through it should be as meaningful an experience as looking at any of the paintings hanging on the walls.

The scheme of the interior kept me moving along toward an intersection of three corridors, two of which especially got my attention. One was marked “Axis of Exile” and opened onto a garden. The other, “Axis of the Holocaust,” ended in an askew, dimly lit room that suggested a prison cell or, once I let my imagination go, a physical analog of shapeless horror. That Jews had few options as the Nazis took control was old news, but the Kahan family exhibit that I had just seen made me look at those two corridors in a particularly personal way.

The Kahan family in Berlin, several generations’ worth, numbered some thirty people, and without exception they escaped the Final Solution. When Hitler came to power, most moved to Palestine; others went westward, eventually to the United States. They had found their way through the first corridor, but my cousin Alexandre had been forced into the second. His mother, both grandmothers, three granduncles, a grandaunt, and three of his cousins also died in the Holocaust. And while the Kahans got a commemorative exhibit, the Ripps who were killed by the Nazis didn’t even have a grave.

Of course the museum had its own goals, and that was fine. Museums have to attract an audience, and they design their exhibits accordingly. My sense of a miscarriage was personal. In my mind, the Ripps and the Kahans were linked. My father married into the Kahan family, but that did not make him any less Alexandre’s uncle. My mother was Alexandre’s aunt, but she never stopped thinking of herself as Zina Kahan’s daughter. But a kinship diagram wouldn’t tell the whole story. The two families were socially and emotionally intertwined.

If the histories of the two families were plotted on a graph, there would be numerous points of convergence. One would mark the German occupation of Paris, when Alexandre’s father, Aron—always Aronchik to friends and family—hid in the Kahans’ vacated business office on Rue de la Bienfaisance. That convergence deserves an asterisk to connote a wrinkle of fate. The office was vacant only because the Kahans had managed to get out of Paris just before the Nazis took control.

There were also moments when the lines on the graph would be far apart, as the two families followed their dissimilar paths. The Ripps went from Grodno, in what is now Belarus, to Paris, while the Kahans began in Poland before passing through Baku, in Azerbaijan, and pausing for a decade in Berlin. But the lines would still be on the same graph because they equally traced how the two families were pushed across the map of Europe by the twentieth century’s catastrophes.

One more link between the families: Put photos of me and Alexandre both at age three side by side. Everyone remarks on the resemblance. But there’s a difference that shadows the resemblance. I escaped the Nazi trap and Alexandre didn’t. His murder is a key moment in the history of the two families, casting a bleak light on many events that went before.

* * *

When I got back to the States after seeing the Berlin exhibit, I tried to write about the two families. But I couldn’t get it to work. The words lay lifelessly on the page as in some antique chronicle. The events occurred long ago, I couldn’t grasp what made them move one way and not another. I had to find something in the world around me that would make the past appear more vivid.

That, I realized when I thought about it, is what memorials do. They exist in the present but take their meanings from the past, they bring history closer, and that was what I needed. I understood that memorials typically evoke the lives of famous men and women and events of global significance, not the histories of two families like the Ripps and the Kahans who had little claim to public attention. But that was only one way to look at it.

Consider this: When I saw Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, my first thoughts were about how political decisions made thousands of miles from the battlefield had caused many Americans to die. I recalled that politicians talked of communism on the march, about something called the Domino Theory. The memorial prompted thoughts about the sweep of great historical events. That was my initial response, but it was not the only one. I thought about my own connection to the Vietnam War—how luck and circumstance had kept me out of harm’s way, how one friend escaped the draft by going to Canada, how another was a medic in the Mekong Delta. Memorials can trigger different messages, some more personal than others.

The story of the Kahans and the Ripps that I wanted to tell was ultimately a Holocaust story, so it would be Holocaust memorials that I should see. I planned to visit as many as I could include in a short itinerary. They would certainly remind me of how the Nazis killed six million Jews, and a refresher of that history lesson is always worthwhile. But I hoped that some memorials would also spark to life the story about the different destinies of the Kahans and the Ripps.

* * *

I decided to go and see the Holocaust memorial in New Jersey’s Liberty State Park. It was a random choice, but I had to begin somewhere and it wasn’t that far from home. Negotiating the exuberant traffic on the turnpike was probably not the best way to get into the right mood, but once off the exit ramp and into the park I slipped into another mode of existence. The tree-lined driveway was some two miles long, and by the time I reached its end I felt something approaching reverence. New Jersey doesn’t often get this still and quiet. It helped that it was the middle of a workweek—only one family of picnickers to be seen, a few cyclists, a virtually empty parking lot.

The memorial is set off by itself in a treeless space that opens onto a view of the Hudson and the Manhattan skyline beyond. It is some fifteen feet high and consists of two blackened bronze figures. A helmeted American soldier, pants tucked into his boots, carries a concentration camp survivor in his arms. The soldier is robust and strong—he needs only one hand to hold up his burden. The other figure is so thin that his ribs are visible, and his limp body suggests a nearness to death. He clings to the soldier to keep from falling.

The inscription on the pedestal, “Dedicated to America’s Role of Preserving Freedom and Rescuing the Oppressed,” underscores the obvious. The soldier is the focal point of the memorial, the concentration camp survivor is a prop to emphasize the soldier’s generosity of spirit, his heroic nature. And the Holocaust was an opportunity for Pax Americana to show its stuff.

When I looked beyond the memorial, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty loomed in the middle distance. The triptych—memorial, island, statue—was almost certainly not accidental. Grouped with those two national icons, the memorial took on some of their significance. It became part of a celebration of the values America endorses. “The Star-Spangled Banner” playing in the background was all that was needed to complete the composition.

Heading back to my car, I stopped off at the information desk to pick up some literature. I learned that the memorial was created by Nathan Rapoport, a Polish sculptor whose works are also on exhibit in Warsaw and Jerusalem. That was information worth noting. It underscored something that should have been obvious but kept slipping out of focus—that the memorial I had just seen was not the spirit of the Jewish people set in stone with no human intervention, but something built by one man with his own ideas about the Holocaust. It was a Nathan Rapoport production.

I had been struck by how few people were in the park. When I asked the ranger on duty about this, he spoke up for his domain.

“You should see it here on a holiday. Fourth of July, when the big ships sail by into the harbor, this place jumps.”

I could picture it. Fathers and sons playing catch, barbecues heating up, teenagers reveling. America at play, at its unbuttoned best. But what did it do to the meaning of the memorial to be in the middle of such pleasures and excitements? The aesthetic merit of this memorial aside—agitprop, in my opinion, grandiose—the trip had taught me something important about all memorials. The setting counts. A nation’s spirit always seeps into the meaning of a memorial placed within its borders. Liberty Park is likely an extreme example, but any Holocaust memorial set in America would have some Americana in its system. Which is why I had to go to Europe. That was where the destinies of the Ripps and the Kahans had played out.

There were many memorials to choose from. My web search brought up a map showing close to a thousand. The icons were clustered in Central Europe, where guilt was thick on the ground, and that was where I would start my trip. I packed a laptop and a camera, checked that my passport was valid, and got going.

Could a stone pillar or a bronze plaque or whatever else constitutes a memorial cause events that took place more than seven decades ago to appear vivid? I would soon find out.

* * *

My first stop was Germany, where a recent survey found more than two hundred Holocaust memorials. This suggests how strenuously Germans have been trying to come to terms with their past. But it also suggests how hard it is to get that business right.

Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is the most visited Holocaust memorial in the country, included in just about every tourist itinerary, and that was where I would go first. But I wanted to get some local comment before having a look. Michael Cullen was the editor of Jewish Voices from Germany, an English-language monthly, and a mutual friend had told me he had been active in the debates surrounding the memorial’s construction. When we met at a café near his apartment in the Charlottenburg district, it didn’t take much to get Cullen talking.

“It took fifteen years to get an agreement to move forward. Why? No blueprint to follow. A country honoring those it killed. Not the usual thing, is it?

“Then the location. Some wanted it in the camps, the scene of the crime. Many Jews insisted on the city center, so Berliners would have to face their past every day. Everyone had an opinion. One camp survivor insisted it shouldn’t be where he would pass it on the way to work each morning.

“A big problem was the design. One proposal was a field of yellow flowers in the shape of a Star of David like what the Nazis forced Jews to wear on their clothing. The Jews as victims. Several proposals were like that. There was a lot of shouting against that approach. As I said, everyone had an opinion.”

Cullen had the world-weary manner of a veteran who had made it back from the trenches. He had fought the good fight and had his war stories as testimony to his efforts, but the battle was behind him.

I asked him if he was okay with the memorial as it was finally designed.

“Let’s say I’ve come to terms with it. It’s good that it’s so abstract that it can have different meanings for different people. The Holocaust was a lot of things, not just one thing.”

* * *

A soft rain was falling when I arrived at the memorial, which accentuated its bleak unwelcoming aspect. There was no marked entrance and no obvious path through the 2,711 granite steles that were arranged in a rectangular grid the area of a New York City square block. Some of the steles were three feet high, others ranged up to fifteen feet. None had inscriptions, only a blankness where I expected something. No Holocaust victims were named, none of their stories were told. There was an oppressive air of sadness and loss, but you had to work to pick out the doomsday vibe of the Holocaust.

I could see the outer edge of any row I was in, but upon reaching it I had no sense that I had arrived at a destination. There was always another row to walk down, and another row after that. As I passed some of the taller steles, the surrounding neighborhood disappeared from view, disorienting me. Nothing to do but keep walking till I had enough of walking. Forty-five minutes later I still was uncertain how the memorial was a statement about the Holocaust.

I was mulling this over when, rounding a corner, I almost bumped into a couple wearing cutoff jeans and Go-Gator T-shirts, the guy photographing the girl, who was grinning clownishly as she peeked out from behind one of the steles. My instinct was to tell them, “Hey, this is a memorial, show some respect. Stop fooling around.”

But I stayed silent. I had just a minute before admitted my uncertainty about the memorial’s meaning. How could I say this couple’s fooling around was over the line when there was no clear line? If they wanted to treat the memorial as a playground, there was nothing I could point to in order to show they had gotten it wrong.

Jews in the millions murdered. Families shattered, traditions desecrated. Shouldn’t a Holocaust memorial acknowledge these facts in a way that can be easily grasped? Do you have to decipher a Holocaust memorial before its meaning is clear? But what I knew about the pedigree of the memorial suggested that the uncertainty I felt was intended.

Peter Eisenman, who designed the memorial, has declared his affinity for deconstruction, a mode of thinking that spread, seemingly unstoppably, through academic circles in the 1970s. Deconstruction holds that there is no single truth. It uses terms like “the free play of meanings” and argues that coherence is a false ideal. Eisenman built ambiguity, which deconstruction insists on, into the steles of his Berlin memorial.

I descended the steps to the information center. It had not been in Eisenman’s original design but was added later at the insistence of the local organizing commission as an antidote to the memorial’s puzzling austerity. A young woman checked my rain poncho and wished me a perfunctory good day, and I took that as a sign that I was back in the workaday world. Here there was none of the mystery of the blank steles of the memorial above ground. Indeed, one question that had troubled me there was answered directly. The Holocaust, which the memorial suggested was a tragedy beyond any earthly specifics, was given names and faces.

There were photographs of Jews being rounded up by the Gestapo, Jews at forced labor, Jews in the death camps. The biographies of some of the victims were spelled out. A Lithuanian businessman and his four sons all killed in Treblinka. A Polish farmer and his family of seven buried in a mass grave near Lodz. Particular lives, various nationalities. But it struck me that the exhibit actually argued against individual destiny. All the stories led to the same ending—it made it seem that the way it was, was the way it had to be.

This depiction of the Nazi killing machine at work was depressing. I was left in awe of the implacable power of evil. All of which made me appreciate, as I hadn’t before, the ambiguous story told by the memorial. At least it didn’t just repeat history as it had been written by the Nazis.

Walking through the exhibit, I found it impossible not to think of the members of the Ripp family who had been killed. Viewed from one angle, their fate seemed controlled by the same iron logic that seemed to control the fate of the Jews shown in the photographs. For them also, the sequence of events that led to their murder was locked into place. But was the way that it was really the way it had to be? Over the years, I had toyed with that question, but I resisted considering it at length. What was the point of worrying about what was over and done long ago? But now in the information center, that question nagged at me again. Was there a particular missed turn that had sent Alexandre and the other members of the Ripp family down the path to their death while the Kahan family had found a detour to safety?

* * *

The next day I took the U-Bahn to Bayerische Viertel, a neighborhood in the outlying western part of Berlin. I had been told there was a Holocaust memorial there that I might find interesting, and I had arranged to meet with its creators, Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock.

I got to the appointed spot early, which gave me time to glance at a billboard that had a brief history of the neighborhood. It had once been called Jewish Switzerland, because of the numerous Jewish residents. Einstein had lived here, so had the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm and the director Erwin Piscator and some sixteen thousand other Jews. Six thousand died in the camps. Others were lucky to have made it out before the Nazi extermination machine was fully in gear. Now there were not enough Jews left to call the neighborhood Jewish Switzerland or Jewish anything.

There was still some time to spare and I decided to have a look around. Several streets radiated off a plaza, and I set off at random. It was a middle-class neighborhood, sedate to the point of somnolence. There were few pedestrians on the tree-lined, cobblestoned streets. Several outdoor cafés with more sparrows than patrons. Four- and five-story stucco row houses, some with shades drawn though it was getting on to noon. But no Holocaust memorial.

As I turned a corner, I noticed a two-by-three-foot sign affixed to a lamppost at a height of fifteen feet or so. I almost missed it, it was so unobtrusive. On one side there was a pictogram of a chalked hopscotch game. On the reverse side, a line of text. Arischen und nichtarischen Kindern wird das Spielen miteinander untersagt (Aryan and non-Aryan children are forbidden from playing together). On the next street, another sign, this one with a pictogram of swimming trunks. On the reverse side again some text: Jews can no longer use Berlin pools. On the alert now, I noticed the signs more frequently. A pictogram of a chessboard and the sentence Jews are not permitted in the National Chess Association. A pictogram of a piece of music notation and the sentence Jews are expelled from all choral groups.

This was, I too slowly realized, the memorial I had come to see. If it was odd to find a memorial dispersed throughout a neighborhood instead of standing in one spot, the arrangement nevertheless made sense. The intervals between the signs mirrored the step-by-step corruption of a nation’s soul that culminated in the view that murdering Jews was acceptable.

When I returned to the U-Bahn station, Renata and Frieder had just arrived. Both were somewhere in their fifties, was my guess. She was voluble, he was reticent. She was short, he was close to six feet. She was demonstrative, emphasizing with gestures her outrage at Nazi behavior. He rolled his eyes at each of her examples, indicating his disgust. We set off on our tour of the neighborhood, Renata in the lead.

She said, “When we first put up the signs, some people took them to be new government rules. There were calls to the police asking when they would go into effect. Apparently these people believed that it was perfectly reasonable for Nazi policies to be put back into practice. Finally, we had to attach a small disk to each sign to tell people that they were looking at art.”

We came to a sign with a pictogram of a cat on one side and a statement that Jews could no longer keep pets.

I said that it must have taken a truly cruel imagination to think up such a rule.

“Cruel but ingenious,” said Renata. “Pets can mean a lot to people. One man could not bear to part with his canary. He hid it on the balcony but a neighbor reported him. He was told to present himself to Gestapo headquarters. After three weeks, his wife got a notice that she should come and pick up his body.”

We moved on. A sign with a pictogram of an ashtray: Jews can no longer purchase cigarettes or cigars. Another sign with a pictogram of a thermometer: Jewish doctors can no longer practice.

Renata said, “Just your everyday life. Petty things.”

Frieder said, “It’s because they were petty that they were so dangerous. A Jew could never be certain he wasn’t breaking some law or other. Just crossing the street against the light could result in a trip to the Gestapo.”

We stopped at a sign indicating Einstein’s former residence. Renata said there was also an apartment directly across the street that he used for extramarital affairs. No sign for that, she remarked. The oppression I felt momentarily lifted. Einstein’s wayward behavior was no reason to stand up and cheer, but it was a reminder that there was a time when Jews in Germany did not suffer awful consequences for every social misstep.

Coming round a corner, I noticed one last Stih and Schnock sign. Its all-black face was a perfect complement to the text on the reverse side: Emigration for Jews is forbidden. The last exit door slammed shut. The moment when the Nazis decided that making life difficult for Jews was not sufficient. They had to be kept nearby so that they could be killed.

Renata and Frieder had a favorite restaurant in the neighborhood, and after an hour of walking about we were all ready for lunch. The hearty native cuisine was accompanied by more wine than I was used to having at midday, and by dessert I was ready to sit back and listen to Renata’s engaging nonstop talk. She ranged widely, from her admiration of Disney artists to the philistinism of American universities to Japanese men’s obsession with German spas and the unisex Jacuzzis where nakedness was the rule.

“It’s the implants that really get them, they love how they float.”

I laughed because I found this funny, but I was also taken aback. Wasn’t it too soon after our encounter with Nazi malevolence for even mildly salacious anecdotes? But how likely was it that Renata was oblivious of the circumstances? The memorial she and Frieder had designed showed a fine appreciation of the Jewish tragedy. Maybe what first seemed a tasteless remark was actually a proclamation of a belief—Nazis should not be granted the posthumous power to ruin the pleasures of the day.

How long after seeing a Holocaust memorial before life snaps back to normal? Several hours? A day? Each person makes his or her own schedule, and Renata had made hers.

* * *

On the U-Bahn going back to my hotel, I recalled how Frieder had summed up the idea behind his and Renata’s memorial. “We wanted to make visible the conditions which led in an insidiously logical way to the destruction of the Jewish inhabitants.” Yes, the Nazis had gone about their nasty business with a cold logic, tightening the vise by degrees. But what, I wondered, about the other term in the equation? Not the victimizers but the victims. Darkness fell gradually—was it so hard to see that the clock was ticking and that it soon would be too late?

How was it, to put it in terms that most interested me, that my uncle Aronchik, Alexandre’s father, didn’t read the signs correctly? France was not Germany. Nazi policies were adapted to fit different cultural and political circumstances. But the same question could have been asked about how Jews behaved in both countries: Why was it so hard to realize that catastrophe was closing in?

What I knew about Aronchik’s life in France was what my parents had told me, but they hadn’t told me all that much. It was as if the arrest of his family colored all the facts of Aronchik’s life leading to that fateful moment, rendering them unspeakable. But by reading about France in those years, I was able to piece together a narrative. There were moments when I had to stretch the available information to cover some gaps, but this was as close to what happened as I was likely to get.

By the time he arrived in Paris in 1932, Aronchik had been badly treated by Poles, Russians, and Germans, sometimes as government policy, often in random encounters. The degree of mistreatment varied. But the cause was always that Aronchik was a Jew.

By comparison, France appeared a haven. French politicians routinely invoked the egalitarian values of the 1789 revolution. The universal rights of man, including equal rights for Jews, were enshrined in public discourse. Schools, now that their Catholic bias was banned, no longer smuggled anti-Semitism into the curriculum. Several years after Aronchik arrived, France got a Jewish prime minister. Aronchik didn’t follow French politics closely, but it surely must have pleased him to have someone named Léon Blum at the head of the government.

Aronchik hoped to become a citizen of his new home. He applied to the local prefecture, but the process proved trickier than he expected. Though some requirements, such as years of residence, were spelled out, each prefect retained a large measure of discretion. Granting citizenship was not only a legal issue. It also was an invitation to join an ideal community, one that allegedly existed in the hearts and minds of every Frenchman and Frenchwoman. Aronchik’s petition was denied.

As war worries took hold, the anti-Semitism that appeared to have vanished from France’s daily life turned out to have only gone into remission. Jewish workers were charged with warmongering. Rothschild the banker was caricatured as Rothschild the greedy, hook-nosed financier. Léon Blum’s policies were denounced as “Jew policies.” As much as possible, Aronchik ignored all that. With his wife Vera and two-year-old Alexandre, he had recently moved, and his new apartment on Square La Fontaine could serve as a symbol of his state of mind.

When I was in Paris recently and went to have a look, at first I walked right by Square La Fontaine without noticing the turnoff. When I doubled back, I was confronted by an iron fence designed to block the curious passerby. I got inside only because a young woman buzzed herself in and didn’t notice that I followed in her wake. And then, lacking the necessary code, I couldn’t unlock the gate to get back out. A resident who came by eyed me with suspicion before opening the gate and ushering me back into the city. It was just ten or so nondescript five-story apartment buildings on each side of a narrow street, but I felt as if I had violated a sanctuary.

For Aronchik and his family, Square La Fontaine could also have felt like a sanctuary, off the beaten track and largely cut off from the life of the city. It was in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, and even during the German occupation, Aronchik could convince himself that his life would go on largely undisturbed. German patrols were most active on the Left Bank, especially in the immigrant districts where there were still pockets of resistance. Some Wehrmacht officers, attracted by the quiet and elegance, requisitioned apartments in the Sixteenth, but in general Aronchik could get through the day without a single hostile encounter with a German soldier.

After the initial panic, much of Paris settled back into routine, even though it was a routine suffused with the smell of defeat. Swastika flags were everywhere, to remind Parisians who had won and who had lost. But many normal activities were permitted, even encouraged. The Germans did not want to expend manpower maintaining a repressive occupation when the Eastern Front was in need of troops.

Aronchik had started a business, producing stencils for office use, and it was doing so well that he and Vera spent generously on new furniture. That investment would pay off in the long run, they told themselves, which shows they believed in the long run. The political skies had turned gray, but it seemed a perpetual gray, a gray that would hold.

In October 1940, city newspapers carried an announcement summoning all Parisian Jews to their local police station to register. There was little reason to suspect anything sinister—these were French police, after all. Ninety percent of Parisian Jews registered, providing name, address, nationality, and occupation. Aronchik was among them.

In May 1941, the French police, relying on information collected during the registration, summoned some four thousand Polish Jewish émigrés to their local police station, where they were immediately arrested and transported to internment camps outside Paris. In August 1941, there was a more aggressive roundup, again relying on information collected during registration. The French police, acting under German supervision, blocked off the roads leading out of the Eleventh Arrondissement and took five thousand residents into custody.

Despite these ominous signs, Aronchik could still convince himself he was not in danger. In the May roundup, almost all those arrested were poor and without livelihood. Aronchik ran a thriving business. Many of those arrested in the August roundup were Jews, but most were also Communists. Maybe it was politics, not religion, that was the black mark. Aronchik was not politically active, and communism especially had no appeal for him. The gray, Aronchik could tell himself, was still holding.

But on July 16, 1942, Aronchik’s world turned to darkest black. He was in his office when he received a call from a friend warning him that there would be a roundup of Jews that evening. Previous roundups had targeted only adult males. Assuming this would be true again, Aronchik hurried back to Square La Fontaine and hid in a vacant apartment one floor above his own. His wife, mother-in-law, and Alexandre remained in the apartment below.

From a dining room window, Aronchik had a good sight line onto the street. He watched helplessly as a van arrived and the French police took away his wife. His mother-in-law assumed that the very young and the very old would not be bothered, and she didn’t take Alexandre and go into hiding. But later that night, the police returned and took both into custody. Aronchik never saw any of them again.

Aronchik had loved France, he had hoped to become a citizen. France was a safe harbor after the rough crossings in Russia, Poland, and Germany. Aronchik believed those slogans about Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. France, after all, was the home of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. After the July roundup, he felt not only grief but also betrayal.

It turned out that the Rights of Man meant the Rights of Some Men, as defined in the small print. That was where you could see how France fine-tuned its conscience. The French police distinguished between native and foreign-born Jews. The former were part of the eternal French ideal, the latter not so much, and could be sent off to concentration camps with few qualms. And even when the Germans began deporting native-born Jews, the French offered little resistance. A long-standing belief, often made explicit in the 1930s, was that all Jews in France, whatever their lineage, constituted a group apart. In fact, the deportation that sparked the most public anger and was most resisted by the puppet Vichy government was that of non-Jewish French males who were conscripted for forced labor in Germany. Though that was hard time, it wasn’t the death camps. But those deportees were purely French.

Aside from those he encountered through his business, Aronchik had met few natives since his arrival in France. He was never invited to a traditional Sunday dinner en famille, he never saw the inside of a French home. Aronchik never got a feel for French life. He could see what was immediately in front of him, the overarching dynamics of French life remained hidden. Aronchik had noted many ominous signs, but he was still surprised by the disaster that overtook his family.

* * *

The day after seeing Renata and Frieder’s installation in Bayerische Viertel, I went to have a look at the Kahans’ former apartment in Berlin. It was in the Charlottenburg district. Back then, in the 1920s and early 1930s, everyone called it Charlottengrad because so many Russian émigrés had settled there. Scheunenviertel was where the poor émigrés lived. Charlottengrad was for the well-off.

The Kahans had made their money in Russia by producing and transporting oil, operating mainly out of Baku and Saratov, and they had been very successful. That part of the business had disappeared in the Soviet whirlwind, but there were outposts in several European cities to take up the slack. The Kahans prospered enough for them to buy an apartment on fashionable Schlüterstrasse.

When I came by, the apartment happened to be between tenants, and I persuaded the landlord to let me in for a quick walk-through. Opening the door and stepping aside to let me pass, pride of possession crept into his voice. “One hundred fifty square meters. This is a big apartment, you won’t find many this big.”

It was big, and luxurious besides. Eighteen-foot ceilings, wainscoting, elaborate moldings. Pocket doors with glazed glass. Off a twenty-five-foot corridor, there were six bedrooms. Also quarters for servants. The centerpiece was the Berlin zimmer, typical for the architecture of the period. This large anteroom could hold the seventy guests who typically came to celebrate the High Holy Days with the Kahans. At other times, it served as a salon that attracted Berlin’s prominent Jewish intellectuals and politicians. Family reminiscences suggested a place that vibrated with social energy. But then the Kahans decided they had to give it up.

In April 1933, three months after Hitler became chancellor, the Kahan family gathered in the Schlüterstrasse apartment. Since the death of the patriarch, Chaim Kahan, the family settled important matters communally. There were ominous signs that suggested it was time to pack up and leave Germany, but the Kahans had already been forced from one home, in Russia. It was difficult to believe they would now have to give up the life they had built in Berlin.

The Kahans had come to Berlin in 1920, part of an influx of Russians who left or were pushed out of their homeland by the revolution. The émigré world was self-contained, almost self-sustaining. There were Russian theaters, bookstores, doctors, and lawyers. If you preferred, there were Russian hairdressers. Many émigrés never bothered to learn German. There were numerous Russian newspapers, scores of Russian publishing houses, cafés where you ordered your coffee in Russian or in the Yiddish that some of the émigrés brought with them from their shtetls. The Romanisches Café near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was a favorite gathering place. It was daily given over to passionate debates about those events back in Russia that had caused the debaters to end up in this smoky Berlin café.

Those émigrés who did pay attention to their German surroundings often did so with contempt. The mythic Russian soul had best keep its distance or risk contamination. Russian culture, which the émigrés claimed to have taken with them when they left home, could easily wither in this coarse atmosphere. Vladimir Nabokov, who was part of this emigration, was skeptical about grand notions like the Russian soul, but his story “Cloud, Castle, Lake” captures the prevailing attitude. A Russian émigré wins the prize of a camping trip. The other campers, all Germans, mock and humiliate and finally beat him because he won’t join in the hearty bonhomie. Germans want nothing from life but beer and a little sadism on the side.

Many Russian émigrés considered Berlin a backwater to be endured as they waited for the inevitable collapse of the revolution, whereupon they could return home. “There was a phrase for it,” my mother once told me. “Sidet’ na chemodanakh. Sitting on your suitcases.” No need to unpack since you’ll be moving back to Russia shortly.

The Kahans saw things differently. Because of their money, they settled comfortably into their new home, but they had always preferred Germany to Russia. How could you like a country that permitted pogroms and confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement? That wasn’t a hard standard to beat. The men in the family had been sent to schools in Frankfurt and Marburg, sidestepping the quotas on Jews that existed in Russia’s educational system. Family vacations were in Bad Kreuznach and Wiesbaden. Almost all the Kahans were fluent in the language.

Also, as important, the family was incorporated into Germany’s commercial life. The business in Russia had been lost to Communist expropriation, but there were major investments beyond the revolution’s reach. A chemical factory in Warsaw, a textile plant in Lodz, a publishing house in Vilna. But the Kahans’ main interest was always oil, and this was revived in Germany. At the height of their activity, the Kahans rented or owned thirty-five tankers serving ports up and down the continent. Six hundred storage tanks were spread throughout Germany, stretching from Oldenburg to East Prussia. NITAG signs, indicating the family firm (Naphta-Industrie und Tankanlagen AG), hung on the numerous roadside gas stations that were coming into vogue.

When I was growing up, I heard few regrets about financial losses. The family had barely escaped the Final Solution. Leaving behind some gas stations was a small price to pay for getting out alive. When wealth was mentioned, it was usually to note that despite having money, the family had only a tentative status in Berlin society. I once asked my mother if she’d had any German friends at her school. She gave me a look that suggested astonishment that she could have raised such an oblivious son. Even German Jews, themselves largely assimilated, viewed Russian Jews streaming in from the East with an apprehension edging toward revulsion. It was a case where similarities were all the more reason to insist on differences. Ostjuden was a word that came with a sneer. My mother’s one German friend, a Jewish girl, was not permitted by her father to enter the Kahan home.

And it was also true that the same business success that gave the Kahans entrée to elite business circles also counted against them. Because the punitive Treaty of Versailles placed severe limits on the native shipping industry, the Kahans were able to exploit a vacuum. One of their most successful deals was buying the Wilhelmshaven oil tank storage facility that had served as a fuel depot for German ships in World War I. The Kahans were feasting on German humiliation—or so it could seem to the natives.

All of which put the Kahans inside German society and also outside. This made them different from German Jews. The resonant image here is of those German Jews who won Iron Crosses fighting for the Fatherland in World War I, letting them believe they were more German than the Germans, and then were surprised when they were shuffled off to the killing camps. The Kahans were not like that. They were in the life of Germany but not of the life. And that turned out to be the right perspective from which to see how events were unfolding. They had a feel for the society in which they lived, such as Aronchik fatally lacked.

Several weeks after the meeting when departure from Germany was decided, when the family was already packing up to leave, an event confirmed the wisdom of their decision. My uncle Lolia, my mother’s brother, was strolling down a street when a platoon of Hitler’s Brown Shirts marched past. The Heil Hitler salute was not yet obligatory, but it was advisable. Lolia didn’t mean a gesture of political defiance by not saluting, he was just out for a stroll. One of the marchers broke ranks, determined Lolia was Jewish, and thereupon slapped him in the face before quickly falling back into step with his comrades. It was the routine quality of the slap that made it so frightening. Humiliating a Jew was all in a day’s work, something that had to be done even if it meant interrupting the pleasure of a self-congratulatory march down city streets. Within three months, all the Kahans had left Germany.


Copyright © 2017 by Victor Ripp

Map copyright © 2017 by Jeffrey L. Ward