I really had no idea what to make of this scrap of scrungy paper.
Was it part of a will or a won’t…or just what was it?
I thought at first it was one of those bits of newspaper someone used to stuff in a picture frame, with no more meaning than any other random scrap for some dumb use. But I was wrong about that.
With some research I found out that it was the masthead of a newspaper from Germany back in the 1930s. It was called Der Stürmer. The word meant “stormer” in German. But in Yiddish, which makes its own rules of innuendo, it was worse than that…it meant “attacker.”
The paper was part of the whole Nazi propaganda machine and how a fleck of it ended up in my family album is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it found its way to Vilna in the van of a traveling salesman; or perhaps one of my ancestors visited Berlin at some point, though I cannot imagine why. In any case, there it was in the album, preserved as neatly as any of the photos, as though it meant something, represented something, contained something.
A clue to my family treasure perhaps? Maybe it led to an advertisement with numbers that were a secret code to gold sitting in the vault of some German bank.
Maybe.
But all I had was the scrap, nothing more than the nasty reminder of a past that was so brutal to so many families.
For a while I searched for preserved copies of the whole edition but I never found any. Yet even here at my computer in Manhattan by the river, I can imagine Der Stürmer as a futsy tabloid filled with big-nosed caricatures and wild tales of Jewish cabals. I read that it was published by one Julius Streicher, who was accused of being a liar, a coward, of having unsavory friends, and of mistreating his wife and of flirting with women. In other words, the perfect bearer of the Truth. Up until the Second World War, he ran articles demanding the annihilation and extermination of the Jews. He almost got his wish too.
I showed this scrap to my Aunt Betty once and she, naturally, told me a story about it. She said that it probably came from her great aunt Rachel. Rachel who dreamed of high society but joined the Partisans to fight the Nazis like a tiger in the forests of Vilna. But before the war, Rachel was quite the charmer, a schmoozer who could chat her way out of anything. One time Rachel in her new high heels and trim jacket, was sitting at a café in Vilna reading Der Stürmer, of all things. One of the women in the village saw this and came over, rather disgusted with her.
“How can you read this drek?” she demanded.
“What’s the matter with you,” shouted another.
The two women caused such a commotion that soon Rachel was surrounded by people insisting on an explanation. How dare she even bring – let alone read – this vicious screed to the streets of Vilna, and even to the Letz ghetto of all places. The situation quickly got very heated. Rachel sat there for quite a while, trying to figure a way out. Then, knowing that a riot might soon be on her hands, she put the paper down and said calmly:
“Listen my friends, all I hear about in the news is the how we Jews are hated and about all the people who want to eliminate us and how powerless we are to do anything about it. But when I sit down of a fine afternoon here in the plaza and read this copy of Der Stürmer, what do I discover? That the Jews are in control of all the banks, that we have taken over all the arts, and that if we are not stopped we might very possibly take over the world. What power! I feel so much better about myself after that. Don’t you?”
And I guess she smiled that winning smile and sometime later, the café became the center of the resistance. But I know what you are thinking. Was it true? Did it really happen? I cannot say since I have stopped asking myself that question. And started instead wondering whether life on earth is anything more than the energy in spinning stories held together by the stern pull of gravity.
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