Erika Rosenberg-Band’s parents fled the Nazis to Argentina. They didn’t tell their daughter anything. But children know more.
Outside: Aubing-Lochhausen-Langwied is a district on the western edge of Munich. A village-like calm is in the air. Far away from the hustle and bustle of the city center, there are large single-family homes surrounded by fields, an allotment garden, sports fields and forests.
Inside: Erika Rosenberg-Band describes the apartment on the first floor as “diminut”. It is a contraction of diminuto, the Spanish word for “tiny.” She lives here with her husband José and their dog Daphne. Everything takes place in the living room and bedroom. There is a large bed in front of a built-in shelf full of books. It’s just a fraction of Rosenberg-Band’s library; She says she has around 6,000 more books in Argentina. In a wooden cupboard with a glass front are pieces of porcelain and jugs that she bought at flea markets: “A hodgepodge of things that I love.” And then there is the desk. The place where she writes down history and stories.
No silver country: Erika Rosenberg-Band was born in Buenos Aires in 1951, “illegally,” as she says, without a birth certificate. She is the daughter of German Jews who fled the Nazis via Paraguay to Argentina in 1936. Rosenberg-Band grew up with her sister in Buenos Aires and attended an Argentine school. She learned the German she speaks at home. The image that many had of Argentina as a “silver country” did not correspond to reality, she says. Argentina had not welcomed her parents with open arms. The mother, a doctor, was not allowed to work in the German hospital because she was Jewish. The father, a lawyer, worked for a time at the British newspaper The Standard, was then fired because he was German. The couple constantly struggled to find work and had to constantly adapt.
Ford Falcon: Rosenberg-Band grew up in a country characterized by military dictatorships: surveillance, arrests and torture were omnipresent. Particularly the last military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 she experienced it first hand. As a 25-year-old, she was kidnapped one morning in front of the school where she taught, in a green Ford Falcon that was known and feared during the dictatorship. “Like the Gestapo,” she thought at the time. After intensive questioning, Rosenberg-Band was released when officials learned of the parents’ escape. That didn’t make much sense, she says, after all, until then the Argentine government had shown more of a “heart for Nazi perpetrators.” But arbitrariness was part of this dictatorship’s terror strategy.
Be silent: Rosenberg-Band became interested in her story at an early age and asked a lot of questions as a child. The parents kept quiet about what had happened in Germany. The couple longed to one day return to Germany and told their daughters that Germany was the land of philosophers and musicians – “a romanticism, a distorted image”. Rosenberg-Band is grateful to her parents for not knowing what had happened to them when she was a child. So she was able to grow up “free from these feelings”.
Rode: However, her parents couldn’t stop her curiosity: “If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going,” she says. She began researching immigration to Argentina. Rosenberg band wanted to write a book about it. However, it was difficult to obtain historical material because many people disappeared and many documents were destroyed during the dictatorship. But not all.
The encounter: During her research she came across the name Emilie Schindler and met the widow of the late Oskar Schindler in Buenos Aires in 1990. She soon understood that there was much more to the Schindlers’ story: Emilie Schindler, who barely appears in Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List,” had the same problems as her husband in the rescue of over 1,300 Jews contributed. The film is a “fiasco,” says Rosenberg-Band. Not a bad film, but a feature film, “à la Hollywood”.
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Relatedness: Rosenberg-Band became the biographer of the Schindler couple and the executor of Emilie Schindler’s estate. The woman she met was desperately poor. She lived in a “shack” in San Vicente, about 60 kilometers south of Buenos Aires. When Rosenberg-Band visited the widow for the first time, she found milk bowls everywhere in the apartment. “Someone who had nothing shared with the neighborhood cats.” That impressed her. The two women hit it off straight away. What was initially intended as a single interview developed into a close friendship. Schindler, then 83, was like a grandmother that Erika Rosenberg-Band never had.
The circle closes: When Rosenberg’s band later organized Emilie Schindler’s funeral in Germany, she came across the names of her own ancestors. She found the graves of her grandmother and uncle in Berlin, visited the Sachsenhausen memorial and found documents from the family. She says fate took her there.
Embodiment: Erika Rosenberg band is many things. She studied history, education and literature, worked as an interpreter, translator, journalist, author, teacher and trained diplomats. Today she gives lectures in schools and travels around a lot. She describes herself as the “carrier of a story” and embodies it. “Someone from the second generation has to do it, otherwise there will be no one left. What can you learn from books? A book has no feelings.”
Broaden your view: Someone has to come and tell the story from different perspectives, she says. The world is not only divided into “good and evil”. Generalizing like this is harmful and dangerous. “Or people come and say the Germans were all Nazis been. Wrong!”. Rosenberg’s volume wants to report on how people who can no longer report on it themselves stood up for others during a difficult time in the past. In addition to Oskar and Emilie Schindler’s biography, she wrote, among other things, a book about Carl Lutz, the Swiss diplomat who saved over 60,000 people from the extermination camp.
Restlessness: In their free time, the Rosenberg band does a lot of sports. She enjoys swimming, playing tennis, doing gymnastics, jogging and playing with her grandchildren. Nevertheless, she is constantly busy with new projects. She can do both: while cleaning and tidying up, her mind is occupied with something. She holds on to the fact that she has projects that fill her life. She involves her husband and is always planning for the coming year: “I don’t know how much longer, but I’m here now and I don’t know tomorrow.”
Hometown: She doesn’t have anything like that. She feels “at home here and there and, above all, everywhere”. Rosenberg-Band came to Munich 24 years ago through its first publisher. In addition to the apartment here, she has another one in Buenos Aires and a house by the sea called “Unter den Linden”. She says she can’t live in one place all year round. It has to do with her story, she says. Her parents thought their entire lives that they would be able to return to Germany at some point. During her lectures, she reminds the students that they should be happy and happy that they have a home, that they have a family, that they go to a good school, that they have security and a sense of belonging. “I’ve missed that my whole life. I probably still miss it inside.”