by Marilyn Silverstein
NJJN Bureau Chief/PMB

March 04, 2008

Princeton author Mimi Schwartz grew up on her father’s stories about “Benheim,” the tiny farming village of his boyhood in Germany’s Black Forest, where Catholics and Jews got along and where the light of decency burned throughout the dark night of the Holocaust.

“I heard the stories of people getting along as a child,” she said during a recent interview with NJ Jewish News. “In some ways, it was his effort to try to get a foothold in American culture. It became his refrain to sort of say there are other values in the world that matter.

“But, being born in this country, the first American in the family, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with this — not the village, not the Holocaust past, not the victimhood I associated with fleeing Germany,” she said. “I never really wanted to write about the past, or anti-Semitism, or being Jewish, or being the child of Holocaust survivors.”

But in the early 1990s, while on a visit to Israel, Schwartz saw with her own eyes a Torah scroll that had been rescued by the Christians of Benheim on Kristallnacht, the Night of Shattered Glass, Nov. 9-10, 1938, and she began to embrace her father’s stories as her own.

“I was impressed by the story of the Torah being rescued and buried outside the Jewish cemetery,” Schwartz said. “Here it was, and it was the Christians, not the Jews, who had rescued it.

“I think people are hungry for small stories of decency…,” she said. “These are the stories that don’t get told — and certainly don’t get told in the larger Holocaust narrative.”

Now, after a journey that spanned 12 years and three continents, Schwartz has brought those small stories of decency to life in Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village (University of Nebraska Press).

The book, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Jews who fled Benheim and Christians who remained, is at once a personal memoir and a work of what Schwartz calls “creative nonfiction.”

Schwartz, a professor emerita of writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, is the author of four other books, including Thoughts from a Queen-sized Bed and, with Sondra Perl, Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction. She and her husband, Stuart, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University, are supporters of the university’s Center for Jewish Life/Hillel and the Central New Jersey Chapter of the American Jewish Committee.

As she embarked on her research for Good Neighbors, Bad Times, Schwartz’s path took her to Germany; to “Oleh Zion” in Israel, a community founded by some 25 Jewish families from Benheim and surrounding villages who escaped Germany in 1938; and to the homes of Jewish survivors living in Florida, New York, Baltimore, and other American locales. Both “Benheim” and “Oleh Zion” are fictitious names, a choice Schwartz made to protect the privacy of those she interviewed.

Throughout her travels, Schwartz was driven by a single question: How did the approximately 850 Christians of Benheim negotiate decency toward their 350 Jewish neighbors during such a terrible time? As she writes in her book, “If we knew the good stories, no matter how small, might more of us find courage to follow suit?”

“That was what really interested me,” Schwartz told NJJN, “and I think the story of the Torah made it possible to ask that. It’s not a big rescue, but I do identify with whoever saved the Torah. That’s an act of decency we should all be able to do. Saving the Torah is an act of defiance. Bringing soup to neighbors at night is an act of defiance.”

While interviewing Otto Stolle, a Catholic man whose family is from Benheim, Schwartz wonders aloud why such stories get lost. “Because,” he answered, “such acts are something normal, something self-understood.… People who do such things are not helping Jews or non-Jews, but their neighbors, people they know. To brag about such gestures would make them, and everyone else, uncomfortable.”

When she found her voice for the book, Schwartz said, it was in the first person, present tense. “I wanted it to be a story, a quest,” she said, “and I wanted the reader to enter into the same world I was entering and to draw their own conclusions as I was drawing mine.

“Emotionally, it was a journey in which I confronted my past and in which I went from being someone who didn’t really like to talk about being Jewish or about anti-Semitism to being someone who feels comfortable doing that.”

Acts of defiance

At the end of her book, Schwartz meticulously lists every morsel of goodness she found in the midst of evil — among the morsels, the Benheim barber who cut the hair of Jews under a sign that declared “No Jews allowed here”; the shoemaker who repaired the shoes of his Jewish neighbors and shared his ration card with them;

the farmer’s daughter who cleaned house, washed clothes, and brought food to her elderly Jewish neighbor; the shopkeeper who gave food to his Jewish neighbors over the back fence at night; the Hitler Youth Group leader who turned the lights on and off for the Jewish youth group that met in the same building each week on the eve of Shabbat.

“Small acts of defiance,” she writes. “Nothing anyone bragged about. But I, for one, would like to be able to make a mark beside every one, announcing, ‘I would have done that!’ And more, yes…maybe — if I knew others would join me, not betray me. But how would I know? For decency is often such a solitary act; it’s evil that draws a noisy crowd.”

When she contemplates that list, Schwartz said, she asks herself what those acts add up to. “They didn’t save a life,” she said. “What did they mean? They are small acts of defiance and resistance, ones we can identify with — and, if enough people did them, they could make a difference.

“We do need to know these small stories — not to undermine the larger narratives, but to find a place for ourselves and our own behavior in those narratives,” she added. “I think it’s a lesson for me. I think since I’ve written the book, I feel much more that I need to do those acts wherever I can.

“It’s at that level that we need to enter into the political arena,” she said. “That’s what, for me, the book is.”

---

Meet the author

PRINCETON AUTHOR Mimi Schwartz will read from and sign copies of Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village on Thursday March 6, at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble in the Marketfair Mall on Route 1 in Princeton.

She will also present readings from the book on Wednesday, March 12, at 7:30 p.m. during a Holocaust Center program at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, and on Wednesday, March 26, at 7:30 p.m. at the Princeton Public Library at 65 Witherspoon St.

• Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com