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By Robert L. Strauss

Sept. 18, 1999 | For many years I thought about traveling to Germany. My father, who died when I was 3, and my mother's second husband, the man who brought me up, were both German Jews. Although curious about their roots, I had an ingrained hesitation, an aversion to Germany and things German that kept me from traveling to their ancestral homes. It was only when my wife Nina became pregnant that we decided it was time to learn about the past before starting a new future. When we crossed into Germany, the border was nothing more than a small creek on a small country road: no guards, no passport inspection, nothing but a welcoming sign. The skinheads we imagined lurking behind every corner were nowhere in sight.

My grandmother, Hannah Eichenbronner Strauss, came to America from Germany as a teenager in the 1890s. Her only child -- my father, Fred Strauss -- predeceased her in 1959. Three years later, my mother married Henry Levinstein, my father's best friend. It was Henry whom I came to know as Dad and came to think of as my father. Unlike Fred Strauss, who had been born and raised in New York City, Dad had been born in Germany, in a little town called Themar that wound up in East Germany. Dad died in 1986, never having spoken a word about his first 14 years in Germany. Neither did his mother, Nanette, who lived more than half her 101 years in Germany and left there only in 1941.

I don't know that my mother or two brothers ever asked much about their experiences. I knew that Dad's father, Moritz, had died in Germany in the late 1930s. I remembered conflicting stories, that he had died in a concentration camp -- or perhaps not, but that he had been in a concentration camp. After Dad died I found a few postcards in an old desk. Some were from Moritz, from Buchenwald, making it clear that he had at least passed through a camp.

My wife and I left for Germany equipped with very few pieces of information to guide us. One was the name of the village where my grandmother Hannah had grown up. Weisenbronn is much too small to appear in most atlases. I found it on a tourist map given to me by an old friend of my father who knew a little of the family history.

The other piece of information we had was a photograph of Dad as an infant. There was almost nothing to give away the location of the picture except that the uppermost part of a building could be seen in the background. In the photo, Dad couldn't have been more than 2 years old, so we imagined it came from 1922 at the latest. The picture could have been taken in Themar or in some other town; we had no idea. By the time we decided to visit Germany, there was no one left who could tell us.

As we drove deeper into rural Germany, Nina and I were surprised how much it looked like the Germany of fairy tales. The dark dense forests. The villages, perfectly nestled in the folds of soft hills, each with its narrow church steeple. The ancient houses, spotlessly maintained, no window without flowers. We found ourselves making fewer comments about skinheads lurking behind each bend and more about the natural beauty of Deutschland Mitte, as our map called the country's midsection.

"Do you have a plan?" Nina asked me for the dozenth time as we approached Weisenbronn. I didn't. I supposed only to go to the cemetery and see what we might find. It wasn't actually until we passed Rödelsse, a neighboring village, that the name Weisenbronn finally appeared on one of the directional signs that were set at every crossroads, pointing to all the tiny villages in the area.

Next page | How would locals react to interloping Jews poking around their towns?