{"id":33633,"date":"2019-11-15T03:57:34","date_gmt":"2019-11-15T11:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=33633"},"modified":"2019-11-15T17:13:16","modified_gmt":"2019-11-16T01:13:16","slug":"a-story-of-two-of-six-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2019\/11\/15\/a-story-of-two-of-six-million\/","title":{"rendered":"A story of two of six million"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Michael Hayden delivers the keynote address at the annual Kristallnacht commemorative program Nov. 7. (photo by Al Szajman)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In the 1930s, German Jews were required to register all precious metals in their possession, a prelude to having them confiscated. In Hamburg alone, the Nazis collected 20 tons of silver, much of it Judaica. Of this, they melted down 18 tons. Two tons was deemed by the Nazi curator Carl Schellenberg to be of artistic or other value in its existing form.<\/p>\n

After the war, Schellenberg was kept on by the British because his scrupulous indexing of artifacts made him valuable. His love of the city of Hamburg meant he ensured that some of the most precious pieces of stolen art and artifacts made their way to that city\u2019s museum.<\/p>\n

That is where Dr. Michael Hayden, a Vancouver researcher in molecular medicine and human genetics, and one of the world\u2019s leading researchers in Huntington disease, was able to trace one of the few remaining pieces of his grandparents\u2019 once-extensive collection of Judaica.<\/p>\n

A silver Kiddush cup, crafted in 1757 and embossed with a vivid three-dimensional depiction of the story of Jacob\u2019s vision of a ladder to heaven, which belonged to his grandparents, Gertrud and Max Raphael Hahn, has been restituted to the family. It is now on loan, a small artifact in size but one of the most stunning pieces in a just-opened exhibition at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, titled Treasured Belongings: The Hahn Family & the Search for a Stolen Legacy.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Max and Gertrud Hahn, the patriarch and matriarch of the German-Jewish Hahn family of G\u00f6ttingen. Photo taken in Berlin, Germany, 1918. While their children, Rudolf and Hanni, emigrated to England, the couple did not survive the Holocaust. (photo from Hahn family)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hayden delivered the keynote address at the annual Kristallnacht commemorative program Nov. 7, before the opening of the exhibition to the public. The exhibit runs to Nov. 27, 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a story that it\u2019s taken me a long time to confront,\u201d Hayden told the Independent<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Hayden\u2019s grandparents were transported to Riga, Latvia, in 1941, where they were murdered by Latvian collaborators of the Nazis. Max Hahn had been arrested for the first time on Kristallnacht, three years earlier, but, with Gertrud, had managed to secure the passage of many possessions to safe locations in the neutral countries of Sweden and Switzerland. More importantly, they had sent their two children, daughter Hanni and son Rudolf \u2013 Hayden\u2019s father \u2013 to safety in London.<\/p>\n

After the war, the orphaned pair retrieved the remnants of their family\u2019s material possessions. Rudolf, who joined the British army in 1943 and adopted the less Germanic-sounding name Roger Hayden, moved to South Africa. There, more than a dozen boxes sat undiscussed in the family home. When Roger passed away, Michael Hayden shipped the boxes to his Vancouver home, where they sat, unopened, for another two decades.<\/p>\n

When he finally confronted the parcels from his family\u2019s past, he discovered a stamp collection, maps, artworks \u2013 and 9,000 original documents relating to his family\u2019s history from the 1850s until 1941. These included heart-wrenching letters between Rudolf in England and his parents still in Germany.<\/p>\n

While Michael Hayden was growing up, there were some items that his father had not kept stored away. One was a Paul Ritter violin that Rudolf had received on his bar mitzvah. Michael\u2019s daughter, Anna, now a Vancouver hematology oncologist, played on it as a young person and Hayden hopes to one day hear grandchildren also play it. It is part of the exhibit. It is also a hint of how the family got its name. It was not a coincidence that, in anglicizing his name, Rudolf\/Roger chose a variation on the surname of a legendary classical composer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were piano recitals and all kinds of concerts in the Hahn family every Sunday,\u201d said Hayden. \u201cThey used to have a little chamber orchestra, it was a totally different world. So, he chose the name Roger Hayden from Rudolf Hahn and I\u2019m sure Hayden had some comfort for him because Haydn was so important in his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
The silver gilt kiddush cup adorned with the story of Jacob (Germany, 1757), acquired by Max Hahn in the early 1900s and confiscated by the Nazis in 1939, is the only piece of Hahn\u2019s looted Judaica collection that has been restituted to date. (photo \u00a9 Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hayden credits the German government and museums for supporting restitution efforts. His family recently received a grant from the German federal government to hire a researcher to continue the search. Understandably, the challenges are great. The Hahn family\u2019s collection of Judaica was considered one of the finest and most extensive in Germany, rivaling those of the Sassoon and Rothschild families. Because they had lent some objects to museums, and because of Max and Gertrud\u2019s careful recordkeeping, the family has both photographs and detailed inventories of what the collection included before it was looted. Most families do not have such tangible proof.<\/p>\n

Hayden emphasizes that any material value of restituted artifacts is irrelevant and the importance is because of personal significance, and that the process represents steps toward reconciliation and restoring dignity of Nazism\u2019s victims.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, personally, it\u2019s been a process of coming to terms with the unimaginable horror and confronting it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He has had very positive and some negative experiences during this work. He is impressed with the German government\u2019s efforts to seek forgiveness for their country\u2019s past, including memorializations like the 70,000 Stolpersteine<\/em>, stumbling stones, that have been installed outside the last homes of victims of the Nazis, and the fact that the vast Holocaust memorial in Berlin is located between the embassies of major countries in the heart of the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I see Germany and I see what they\u2019re doing, it\u2019s been very instructive for me about confronting your history and confronting it unabashedly,\u201d he said, making parallels with Canada\u2019s reconciliation process with First Nations.<\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s response is especially admirable in comparison to other European countries that experienced collaboration and, rather than confronting their past, are actively denying it.<\/p>\n

But, Hayden has had negative experiences, including the discovery that the school his father had attended in Hamburg had, as recently as a few years ago, what amounted to a museum to those students who had fought for the Nazis, with not a trace of the fate of the Jewish students who had attended. The Nazi display is now gone and a marker lists the names of Jewish students who were murdered. But he also discovered that the school\u2019s long-held assurance that they had never participated in Nazi activities was fabricated, when photos emerged of the school festooned in Nazi flags and students and faculty making Heil Hitler salutes.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt a personal level, for me, it\u2019s trying to give up the stowaway of sorrow and pain on my shoulders that I\u2019ve never confronted and to move forward,\u201d Hayden said. \u201cIt\u2019s not that I\u2019m at forgiveness, but I recognize that forgiveness is not so much for those you are forgiving, but for the forgiver. You can give up your own toxic anger and move forward. For me, it\u2019s also been a journey to acknowledge my own German ancestry and come to terms with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Dr. Michael Hayden, the grandson of Max and Gertrud Hahn, discovered in the 1980s that this Torah binder was in the possession of the City Museum in G\u00f6ttingen. The piece of cloth was used to swaddle his great-grandfather Raphael Hahn for his brit milah (circumcision ceremony) in 1831. With the help of G\u00f6ttingen\u2019s mayor, Hayden organized for the Torah binder to be returned to his family. (photo \u00a9 Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He hopes that the exhibit, his family\u2019s story and the larger facts of the Holocaust resonate in today\u2019s world.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got to be aware of ourselves as Jews of condemning other populations, we have to be aware of stereotyping, we have to be even more acutely aware from our own history about the struggles and making sure that we learn from that in the way that we conduct ourselves, so recognizing, as we look at children on television separated from their parents, that we too can be horrified by that and do whatever we can to make sure that we are not complicit or even silent in the face of all of this,\u201d he said. \u201cIn certain circumstances, unless we really hold onto some deep principles of democratic culture and value of life, your neighbours can become your killers.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the search for additional family heirlooms continues, Hayden acknowledges the challenges. \u201cI think it is a needle in a haystack to be honest, but it\u2019s worth pursuing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the entire experience, he said: \u201cIt\u2019s been an opportunity to give individuality and identity for two of six million people who were murdered, to rescue them from generalizations and understand who they were and understand their distinctiveness and to bring my grandparents out of obscurity and give them the warmth and respect they deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Kristallnacht commemoration where Hayden spoke began with a candlelight procession of survivors. Cantor Yaacov Orzech chanted El Maleh Rachamim. Philip Levinson, president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), introduced the event and Nina Krieger, the VHEC\u2019s executive director, introduced the keynote speaker. Rabbi Jonathan Infeld offered reflections after Hayden\u2019s address. Jody Wilson-Raybould, member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville, offered greetings, and Councilor Sarah Kirby-Yung read a proclamation from the City of Vancouver. The event was presented by the VHEC, in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel, the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and the Robert and Marilyn Krell Endowment Fund of the VHEC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Michael Hayden delivers the keynote address at the annual Kristallnacht commemorative program Nov. 7. (photo by Al Szajman) In the 1930s, German Jews were required to register all precious metals in their possession, a prelude to having them confiscated. In Hamburg alone, the Nazis collected 20 tons of silver, much of it Judaica. Of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[4242,53,6823,118,9438,2051,2364],"class_list":["post-33633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-history","tag-holocaust","tag-judaica","tag-kristallnacht","tag-michael-hayden","tag-nazism","tag-vhec"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}