Family portrait dated 1928, 1930, and 1931.
First row: Resi and Hilde Blumenfeld, Victor Bierhoff, Guenter, Irma, and Julius Goldschmidt.
Second row: Herbert Bierhoff and his mother Regina, Kate and Josef Blumenfeld.

Discovering the story of Herbert Bierhoff and his family

During the Jewish high holidays meals following the day-long services were spent with Uncle Guenter and Aunt Diane Goldsmith and their family. They were joyous belt loosening gatherings with abundant singing and joke-telling. The affairs included the five Goldsmiths, Diane’s extended family, the four Leschens, and my grandparents the Bierhoffs, Alfred and Hazel. My uncle was the nephew of Grandpa Alfred, my mother Vicki’s father.
We attended the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at the Goldsmith’s conservative synagogue. The blowing of the shofar and songs of the cantor topped my adolescent memories. The long stretches between the cantor’s moody improvisations, I’d sit on the bench with little interest, thoughtlessly following the text as it was read from pulpit and congregants. I anticipated the standings-up from those hard velvety seats to recite kaddish and other prayers. My parents learnt that they or my grandparents must be seated between my brother and I, otherwise we’d be fighting or teasing ourselves to quell monotony.
During Yom Kippur Musaf, the Martyrology Service, I wasn’t totally inattentive, nor clouded in kid’s dreams. Holocaust survivors, crying ladies and solemn men, were escorted before the congregation to lead prayers with the rabbi orating, never forget. Descendants and relatives of Holocaust victims who never experienced the Holocaust first hand like me developed a visceral connection to scratchy monochrome images of barb wire, flimsy bodies, mass hangings and trenches, and bellowing smokestacks.
What thoughts rattled inside the heads of Grandpa and Guenter during the Martyrology? I had known that both were the only survivors from their family in Borgentreich, a village in Osten von Nordrhein-Westfalen. They hadn’t been in Auschwitz, nor Treblinka, nor Theresienstadt. They weren’t tattooed, like Mrs. Firestone, who lived alone and lit Shabbos candles in the apartment across the hall from the tiny apartment we lived in during the 1970s. Grandpa and Guenter had left Germany before the killing began in earnest; Alfred making his way to St. Louis, Missouri in 1926 to start anew with distant relatives, Guenter following a decade or so later, departing, we were told, on one of the last Kindertransporte to leave Europe.
The only story from Grandpa’s Borgentreich: As a child, he’d been dared by kids in the village to stuff peas up his nose. He walked home with nostrils flared and puffy. His father Viktor whipped him good.
Long since I had last spoken to Guenter, he spoke out about the Holocaust and the war. When I became more curious about family history, it was too late to meet him. Guenter was too ill to correspond and died in 2018.
For my brother and I, Mom framed copies of a family portrait Guenter had that excluded Grandpa. In front row, a very young Guenter stands, leaning onto his grandfather Viktor Bierhoff’s thigh, seated and clasping tightly onto Guenter’s hand, steadying his impatience. Stage left is Guenter’s mum and dad, Irma and Julius Goldschmidt, also seated. The remainder of the family are standing, Herbert and Mother Regina Bierhoff, Kate and Josef Blumenfeld, and the young girls Resi and Hilde Blumenfeld. Irma, Kate, and Herbert were Grandpa’s siblings. Regina’s plump face is reminiscent of my mother, and I wonder if they also had the same playfully irreverent humour. The portrait sits on a bookshelf in front of me, above my computer, beside the queue of unread books. During the Day of the Dead my relatives are placed into the ofrenda that my wife assembles with an ever-growing number of parted souls.
Grandpa stayed at our house during the months leading up to his passing while Grandma remained at the retirement home. Grandpa would shuffle through the hallway aided by a clunky walking frame, the plastic wheels rolling on the linoleum floors. Once he came to the sitting room as I was watching television. He stood in the doorway staring at me lingering and expressionless. I think, there was something he wished to tell me, yet I was distant. It was a year out from bar mitzvah. My crime: the teenager me snubbed him.
The last time I met Guenter was at Mom’s shiva in 1998. I had returned home the second time within a month, shortly after I immigrated overseas. While in the family den, I prodded Guenter about travelling back to Europe, a bit too sharply so, which agitated him. He abruptly left my parents’ house with his daughter.
Grandpa and Guenter were generous, mild-mannered and joyful men. Grandpa’s credo: It doesn’t hurt to be kind. I had no chance to apologise to Guenter for my goading nor to ask Grandpa what was on his mind during my moment of teen selfishness. Shame haunts me by those last encounters. Never forget.

Letters

Alfred to family: Come to America
They didn’t.
Family to Alfred: The Nazi reign will end!
It did.
But…

Summer 1989

Following field work in the Peruvian Amazon, I spent a few days in the Andes. The church of Santo Domingo in Cusco had been built upon the Inca ruins of Qorikancha. Gold that once lined the walls of the temple was removed and gilded upon the wooden Catholic idols inside. Enormous blocks of seamlessly set masonry serves as the church’s foundation. Upon leaving, I palmed the cool, stonework. In an instant I was overcome by dread, my head drained, and my stomach tightened. Inca spoke to me in the lingua franca of the dead, but not their spirits alone; the Holocaust ghosts emerged from the scorched bloodied ground, their voices united with those of the Inca producing a dirge that wrenched my soul. I wept.
True to claims about the power of images, verity exists in the Borgentreich photograph. The children appear unwary, the adults serious and apprehensive. All were tight-lipped or weakly so as if caught in the moment of exhale. Guenter’s mother gazes into the camera questioning uncertainty. I could not read hope in their expressions. What struck me first about Herbert was his tanned skin, perhaps darkened by summer sun. Second, was his straight-backed posture, a carriage of defiance, purposeful, undeterred by circumstances.

26 April 2024

My wife and I were visiting friends who’d retired to the coastal town of Whanganui. We finished dinner. I remained at the table with J—. She queried my past. My mother’s family name Bierhoff I said. From Borgentreich I said. J— reached for the cell phone. Atop the search results was an article written in German. Here’s something about someone named Herbert she said Herbert Bierhoff.
Pause.
For years I’ve scanned Borgentreich on maps, poring over internet photographs with thoughts of pilgrimage; yet never once had I searched “Bierhoff” and “Borgentreich” together. I hadn’t searched thoroughly for “Bierhoff” anyway, because 99.99% of the results were on a famous footballer. Is he Jewish?

The Next Morning

Fritz Ostkämper had written an article that was included in a web site for a museum established in Höxter for the wood-cut artist Jacob Pins. Among the astounding details, one needed no translation at all:

Murder Most Merciful: Essays on the Ethical Conundrum Occasioned by Sigi Ziering’s The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff, edited by Michael Berenbaum.

Herbert. Bierhoff. Grandpa’s. Brother. My great uncle. A murderer … d’ya think?

We St. Louisans were totally unaware of Herbert’s tragedy, let alone the existence of an academic treatment. Sigi Ziering’s dramatic retelling as a play had been republished in full as the first chapter in Berenbaum’s book.
Great Uncle Herbert had married and moved from Borgentreich to Kassel with Ruth, his wife, and their daughter Ellen. They were safe for a while, until they were transported to Latvia with Ziering and his family, and over 2000 other Jews. In Riga, Herbert became a ghetto policeman. He was among the first Jews made aware of the aktionen via rosters containing the names of those selected to board trains headed to Kaiserwald, Auschwitz, and elsewhere.

One day Ellen was rostered … Mom’s middle name.

Herbert administered a pill.

She died peacefully … we’re told.

The following morning, Herbert was caught digging Ellen’s grave with a spoon. He was brought to the Kommandant, chastised as a murderous Jew and summarily shot.

Whilst working in Copenhagen years ago, I visited the Danish Holocaust Museum where I first read about Folke Bernadotte’s mission to rescue Jews. Sigi Ziering was one of hundreds saved by Bernadotte who negotiated their release with sums of money paid to Himmler.
Ziering, after his arrival to America, garnered great wealth as a scientist and entrepreneur. He kept the story of Herbert secreted until it was publicized by its reading as Murder Most Merciful, aired only once while Ziering was alive at 70 years of age. Cloris Leachman and Jon Voight read the script. Ziering died a year later of brain cancer in 2000.
Berenbaum’s volume appeared in 2005.
In Murder Most Merciful, Ziering tells he was reunited with Ruth after liberation in Eastern Prussia. She is laying on her deathbed and asks him to form a quorum to pass judgement on Herbert’s mercy killing. Essays in the book from Talmudic to secular perspectives judged likewise. In short, despite compassionate ethical didactics and religious moralising, from sacrifice to martyrdom, the verdict: murder, more or less, with Ziering concluding that Herbert had done the right thing. Among other scholarly deductions beyond the aims of this essay was that Herbert hadn’t collaborated with the Nazis.
I wondered if Ziering had contacted Grandpa or Guenter. Can you imagine Ziering not knowing Herbert had family living in the midwestern United States?

Guenter’s tangibles are preserved in on-line videos and a family-held autobiography. There is no mention of his leaving by Kindertransport; besides, the date of his departure to America is listed as 1941, after the rescue operations ended and war was underway. I had not known Guenter had served in the US Army in World War II. After armistice he identified Nazi soldiers for the allies with perfect German and a warm smile that yielded confession.
Historians produce clean narratives from conflictive dates and details, truths, and unknowns. Having read Berenbaum’s book, internet posts, and Guenter’s autobiography, there were unanswered questions. (No wonder Ancestry.com and similar platforms have such appeal.) I wrote Fritz and received further information from Klaus Jürgens, an archivist in Borgentreich. Records indicate that Ruth née Nathan’s daughter Ellen was born illegitimately in 1937. Ruth married Herbert in 1939, who himself had been married for a short period of time to another woman, Toni Kaufmann, who was subsequently sent to Theresienstadt in 1942 and murdered the following year in Auschwitz.
In Act 1 Scene 2 of Murder Most Merciful, Ziering presented particulars about birth dates and places for Herbert, Ruth, and Ellen, matching those sent by Klaus. In the play, Ziering had given Ellen an orange as a gift the night before she was poisoned by Herbert. On one hand, the memory of Ellen’s murder was too painful for Ziering, so certain details were withheld.
On the other hand, true stories, especially those recreated in art or myth art aren’t free from fictionalization and hyperbole; in effect, to make the piece flow and believable. For example, Klaus calls into question that the reunification between Ziering with Ruth hadn’t occurred because they were in separate countries at the time of liberation. It is also possible that the story wasn’t that of Ziering’s but the events that occurred belonged to his cousin Jutti as stated in Act II Scene 5.
Photographs don’t lie, but interpretations of them could. One riddle is the date of the family portrait. Guenter has it as 1930 and mine, written on the backside in my mother’s hand, as 1928. A German newspaper article published in 2022 containing the same photograph cites Guenter as a three-year old, consistent with my mother’s date. It was taken after Grandpa immigrated. Ruth too is not present. A more elusive and pressing question shared with by German colleagues is the truth behind Herbert and Ruth’s marriage and Ellen’s father.
Here’s some news from Grandpa and Guenter:

RUTH WAS A GENTILE

In Guenter’s words, Herbert had thought that he would escape Nazi persecution because he married Ruth. My father, now in his late 80’s, confirmed that this was told to him by Grandpa. I would ask Berenbaum’s essayists to reconvene on the matter of murder and mixed marriage. Maybe I’ll try to append the fragmented narrative.
Talmudic law prohibits a Jew from marrying a gentile. During the late 1980’s as Mom and Dad were becoming orthodox, I spoke to rabbi about potentially marrying my gentile partner. Following strict guidelines, the rabbi condoned marriage with a non-Jew. He also warned that to proceed would be a cruel dismissal and blemish on the Jewish faith. Oy, Jewish guilt’s a toughie.
Ruth, like Herbert, had been divorced before they remarried. According to decree, a Jewess who is widowed and pregnant is barred from marrying for 24 months. Herbert married Ruth in 1939, two years after Ellen had been born.
Klaus located more details about Ruth after I sent him a draft of this essay. Her father was Jewish, her mother Catholic. By the Nazi decree Ruth is a half cast according to Racial Laws, Rassegesetze, established in 1935.

On October 15, 1975, Grandpa died of cancer. On that first day of shiva, our house swelled with friends and family, the dining room table piled high with plates of sliced kosher meats, bagels, pickles, cakes.
At some point Mom blasted out There is no God and burst into tears.
In the late 1980s my parents turned to orthodox Judaism. My father and his second wife made aliyah.
I’m devoutly secular. I believe that there is a feeling-substance-Godlike thingy in all souls. It’s tapped into for goodness, though at times it leans too often to cruelty and horror, resulting in murdered lives and lost stories. Are you wondering yourself if Ziering, Grandpa, and Guenter were ever in contact? I have a notion that my investigation into the spoils of humanity has just begun, that this short essay serves as a momentary reconciliation for a larger incinerated and buried history.
________

I’m grateful for information supplied by Fritz Ostkämper, Klaus Jürgens and the Goldsmith family. History sleuth Louise Michaux corrected errors in a draft.

— R. A. B. Leschen, Auckland, New Zealand, 28 October 2024