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The Richest Jew In Frankfurt Artist, Author & Raconteur, Marvin Wolf, tells the story of an unusual (and meaningful) Passover he spent in post-war Germany. |
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It was Passover, 5731 (1971), and I, a US Army captain with the 11th Signal Battalion in Kaiserslautern Germany, needed an invitation to a seder. Rabbi Howard Kosofsky, the Jewish chaplain in Frankfort am Main—and my second cousin—told me that he knew several Jewish millionaires at whose homes I would be welcome—but, "I’m not crazy about any of them," he added. "What do you mean?" I asked. "After the war, ’45, ’46, Germany was in ruins," he explained. "Terrible times. Some of them engaged in unsavory practices. They’re in other businesses now, but do you really want to spend Pesach with such people?" he asked. "Guess not," I replied. "Then I’ll ask Louis Weil. He’s probably the poorest Jew in Frankfurt –- but a very interesting man." I found his four-room walkup in a stadt project, rows of grim concrete apartments slumped around asphalt quadrangles. In Louis’s spotless home a few sticksof severe Nordic furniture tiptoed across bare floors; only a calendar relieved the monotony of whitewashed walls. A compact man in his sixties, his face was deeply lined and he moved with the stiff, painful tread of an octogenarian. Louis effusively accepted the matzoh andkosher-for-Pesach canned goods my cousin had provided. In flawless English he introduced Anna, a Saxon wife less than half his age and at least twice his size,and their flaxen-haired daughter, a giggling 9-year-old with Down Syndrome. Louis opened his Haggada and we began in the usual way: Moses, Pharaoh, plagues, the Angel of Death, the exodus, bread of affliction, bitter herbs, wine.Seamlessly, he continued with his own tale: A newspaperman critical of National Socialism, his career as a columnist ended in 1933 with a midnight warning from a police pal that he would be arrested at dawn. Hegira took him to France, where he wrote for a wire service until Paris fell and the Gestapo hunted him down. Lucky Louis avoided the extermination camps and passed an agonizing captivity among political prisoners in a Belgian dungeon. In 1944 a Sherman tank flying the tricolor broke down the walls. Louis slept three days in a hotel, ate the most glorious meal of his life -– K rations — and went to work reporting the war. In 1945 he returned to Frankfurt. His health broken, Louis survived on a tiny pension supplemented by selling tickets at the operaplatz. There he met Anna, a homely farm girl who eked out a living scrubbing floors. Often, after the house lights dimmed, he found her a seat where she could listen to the music that she loved. One night Anna was assaulted. Upon learning that she was pregnant, she attempted suicide. Louis proposed marriage, protected Anna from disgrace and gave the hapless child the only thing of value he owned: his name. I had swallowed a hundred questions, but now I interrupted. "I don’t understand," I said. "After all that the Germans did to you, after the war, why didn’t you go to Israel, or the States?" "There have been Weils in Germany for at least 1,000 years," he replied. "I couldn’t let a few gangsters drive me from my home." On the long drive back to my base I decided that cousin Howard was wrong. Tally up the things that really count, and Louis Weil was the richest Jew in Frankfurt. Copyright © 1998, 2000 Richest Jew In Frankfurt By Marvin J. Wolf |