Nazis Were the Bad Guys from My Family’s Stories. Now They’re Marching in Our Streets.

Notes on Charlottesville and Berlin from a Refugee’s Daughter

Sonia von Gutfeld
Aug 24, 2017 · 8 min read

When my husband and I chose to have our wedding two years ago in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, I felt proud to share the city with friends and family and knew they would discover why I adore it. Since I met Lars fourteen years ago, his home has won my heart nearly as much as he has. I love driving down there every Christmas, love those green hills that start to swell once you’re out of the D.C. suburbs and ensconced in Virginia farmland. Contentment is strolling the red brick walkway of the downtown pedestrian mall, perhaps stopping at a charming coffee shop and watching the locals pass on by.

The weekend of our wedding, Charlottesville was in fine form. It had poured the week before, giving the early fall grass a fresh burst of life. We gathered at Lars’s father’s house for the rehearsal dinner, where we ate proper Virginia barbecue on his back patio as the sun slipped behind the mountains.

After Lars’s father welcomed everyone, my father offered a toast. He began by thanking Lars’s father for hosting the dinner, and then he turned to my soon-to-be mother-in-law.

“I want to thank you, too,” he said. “You see, I owe a great debt to your country.”

Lars’s mother was born in Sweden and came to America as a child, and I had a feeling I knew where this was heading. I clutched my beer with one hand and Lars’s hand with the other and braced myself. Please don’t be too dramatic. Is a wedding really the time for Holocaust stories?

Around the dinner table throughout my childhood, recountings of my father’s flight from Nazi Germany were as ordinary as reports of that day’s school or work happenings. His memories, as a four-year-old in 1938, of fire illuminating the buildings outside his bedroom window during the pogrom known as Kristallnacht. His family’s German passports, each emblazoned with a red J, bearing their new middle names required by Nazi decree: Robert Israel, Fritz Israel, Gabriele Sara, Renate Sara, Margarete Sara. The family’s escape to Sweden in 1939, where they lived with hosts in a Stockholm suburb. His parents’ departure for America to secure employment and housing while the children stayed behind in Sweden. My five-year-old father’s journey with his two sisters by ship across the Atlantic, how seasick he and Renate were, how Gabi took care of them. Reunion with their parents in America that November.

The family settled in Richmond, Virginia, where my grandfather, who had enjoyed a successful medical career in Germany, found work as an assistant professor at Virginia Medical College. They encountered American anti-Semitism in bits and pieces. My grandfather’s identity — a foreigner and a Jew — was a double liability when he applied for new jobs, and in America he never regained his professional prominence. My dad also recalls a group of neighborhood girls who kept throwing garbage in their yard, the only Jewish house on the block; repeated calls to the police finally brought an end to it. Still, my father’s prevailing narrative of that era was this: America may have regarded Jews with suspicion and scorn, but it was far safer than staying in Germany, where Nazis hunted and murdered them.

The night of our wedding rehearsal dinner, however, with his glass in hand, my father didn’t go into all those details. He summarized for the guests, mostly Lars’s relatives from Southeast Virginia, how he and his family, Jews in Nazi Germany, escaped to Sweden, before they came to America. He looked again at Lars’s mother.

“So, I have always felt a tremendous gratitude to Sweden, to your country,” he said with a catch in his voice, “and that makes this occasion even more meaningful.”

Implicit in my father’s words was a sense of conclusion. Long ago, my father, his sisters, and their parents had feared for their lives but were saved; long ago, Nazism had plagued Europe, but it was expunged.

As we raised our drinks on that golden evening, we did not know that less than two years later, hundreds of white supremacists would march across the college lawn where Lars had played as a child and chant, “Blood and soil,” and “Jews will not replace us!” We didn’t know that they would parade through the city with shields, swastikas, and semi-automatic weapons, that they would beat residents and mow them down with a car. We surely did not expect that any responsible leader, much less the president of the United States, would respond to such a nightmare by equating white nationalists with anti-racist counter-demonstrators, or by defending anyone allied with neo-Nazis.

But Lars has always been quick to remind me, when I’ve gotten too rhapsodic about Charlottesville, of its racist history. The used bookstores and tchotchke boutiques and restaurants that line the mall tell one story. There is also the story of Vinegar Hill, the historically black neighborhood razed in the 1960s on whose rubble now sits a luxury hotel, the western anchor of that charming pedestrian mall. There’s the story of a town still racially divided by the railroad tracks, of de facto segregation within Lars’s schools, forty years after they integrated in 1959. While I grew up attending assemblies every January to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and celebrate the civil rights movement, his school calendar still recognized Lee-Jackson-King day until 2000.

Lars’s observations echo the more blatant segregation and anti-black discrimination my father first observed just down the highway in Richmond a generation before.

“You’d see two drinking fountains in the train station, one for ‘colored’ and one for ‘white people,’” my father recalls, “and you’d think, ‘What the hell is going on here?’”

He remembers choosing to sit in the back of the bus and offering his seat to black people when it got crowded — perhaps as an ally, perhaps just to flout a rule that seemed absurd. My grandfather may never have reached his professional potential in the white hospitals, but when he walked through the black hospital, he observed rats skittering through the neo-natal unit.

I imagine the deeply personal hurt, horror, and anger surging through my body these past few weeks have been a constant reality of life for many black Americans, in Charlottesville and throughout America. Trump’s words cut like a knife, but, at least as of today, the violence is still metaphorical for me. Police haven’t killed people just because they look like me in the name of law and order or slandered me as a thug for expressing outrage at such violence. On the contrary, as a half-Jew who reads as just white, I’ve reaped the benefits of systemic racism in America. My life here has been comfortable.


Earlier this summer, Lars and I spent a week in Berlin, exploring my father’s roots. On our first day, I headed to Klinikum am Urban, a hospital in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, in search of a memorial plaque.

The cheery hospital attendant who helped me locate it told me, “It’s not that we try to hide it, of course! You just need to know the right place,” as he walked me from the side entrance where Google Maps had routed me to the hospital’s front doors.

The plaque reads in German, “On March 11, 1933, the SA stormed this hospital. Jewish colleagues — others because of their political conviction — were beaten, arrested, expelled.” A list of eleven head doctors follows, and then, “We will not forget what was inflicted upon them by fascism.” One of those named is my grandfather, Fritz von Gutfeld.

As a child, stories of my family history had struck me as interesting but disconnected from my own life. When I saw this plaque in person, I cried for my family for the first time. I ran my fingers along the raised bronze letters spelling his name, our shared last name. My grandfather died long before I was born, but I felt like I met him that afternoon.

The plaque is one of Berlin’s many Holocaust memorials. Some are massive landmarks, like the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a sculptural installation that stretches a city block, steps from the Brandenburg Gate. And on a major street just outside the city center stands a 56-foot-high steel silhouette celebrating Georg Elser, a carpenter who nearly assassinated Hitler in 1939. When I asked our tour guide if there had been any objection to honoring violent resistance, the question first seemed to confuse him; Elser was roundly considered a hero.

Many more memorials are interspersed throughout Berlin, as much a part of the cityscape as the U-Bahn stations and parks and sidewalks where they appear. Among the cobblestones across the city (and throughout Germany and other parts of Europe) are stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones.” These brass-plated blocks give the name of a victim of the Nazis, their birth and death dates, and, for many, the concentration camp where they were murdered. They are embedded in the sidewalk in front of the victim’s last home or workplace. We learned about the stumbling stones on our tour, and then I kept seeing them everywhere. Gleaming in the rain on the street behind our hotel. In need of polish, on our way to brunch. Two more, possibly father and son, as we walked back from ramen dinner. A cluster of three: here lived mother Margarete, father Walther, and daughter Ilse, all deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Mother and father were emordet, but Ilse was befreit, or freed.

In a neighborhood a few blocks from where my father’s family lived, we walked through “Places of Remembrance,” an installation of 80 signs with summaries of Nazi regulations against Jews and accompanying iconic images. One of the first I found shows a thermometer with the mercury between 38 and 39, while the other side reads, “Jewish doctors may no longer practice. July 25, 1938.” Affixed to street posts, the signs blend visually and might go unnoticed, until you read one, pause, and begin to read the rest.

Just as persecution of Jews was normalized during the Third Reich, remembrance of that injustice is woven into the fabric of Berlin today. Violence against Jews became entirely ordinary in Nazi Germany; today, the duty to remember is entirely uncontroversial. They have seen the worst, and they continue to bear witness and say never again.

Eight years ago, the German government invited my father back to Berlin as part of a restitution program for Jewish refugees. He and my mother enjoyed a week of tours, programs, food, and camaraderie with other former Germans who had fled. While a free week of vacation is but a token, more significant was the sense of reconciliation he experienced. The jacket he brought that week still sports a Berlin bear pin, and he wears it with pride.

This summer, while Lars and I walked through the tomb-like concrete slabs of the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, we considered our own country. Where are the monuments to murdered Native Americans? Where are the stones on the paths of Dixie naming the black slaves who toiled and died in captivity? Instead, statues deify Confederate war heroes who fought to secede from the union and uphold slavery. And the people who defend them, and all they stand for, and who earlier this month killed and injured innocents while proclaiming their goal of white supremacy, now have our president’s support.

In 2015, on the eve of my wedding, I had the luxury of being a little embarrassed by my dear old dad as he got political during his toast. Today, that feels like forever ago. In the years that have passed, not only has our democracy started to fray, but my father has gotten a lot older. At 83, his voice is fainter, his steps are shakier. I’m aware that the years left for him to tell his story are fewer, and the need to tell it, all the greater. It wasn’t a burden to hear his story that night, but a gift.

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Sonia von Gutfeld

Written by

Sonny is a teacher in New York City.

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