The sound was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Bewildered, I spun around and became alarmed. A burly man about my age appeared to be having a convulsion. Steadying himself against the Information Desk, he was sobbing uncontrollably, his face crimson and contorted. Is this what an epileptic seizure is like? I wondered. Convulsions were not among the contingencies we had been told to expect during our training as the first class of volunteers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I did not know how to react, nor did anyone else in the immediate vicinity—until the visitor uttered a few guttural words of German. That’s when I stepped in.
Hearing me address him in German took the visitor by surprise. He introduced himself as Rudi, a retired mason from a small village near Cologne. He assured me that he was not in any physical distress and apologized for losing his composure. Gradually pulling himself together, he said he had just gone through the Permanent Exhibition and had experienced a violent attack of remembrance. I had seen many first-time visitors break down, but never so dramatically.
Rudi said he was in Washington on a sightseeing trip with a men’s chorus from his village. “Where are your friends?” I asked, surprised that none of his companions had come looking for him.
Rudi looked at me sorrowfully and dabbed at his eyes.
Had I said something wrong?
“They had absolutely no interest in visiting the Holocaust Museum,” he said. “They went to the White House.” He paused. “I am the only one in the group who came here.”
Nothing has changed, I wanted to say, but instead I asked Rudi what had made him want to come. There then flowed forth the tale of his first personal encounter with the Holocaust. He was 13 at the time, the war was nearly over, and the Nazis had begun moving concentration camp inmates westward ahead of the advancing Russians. One day a group of skeletal women were force-marched through Rudi’s village. The macabre scene never left him and had tormented him all his life, especially because of what happened next.
Moved by the spectacle of the prisoners shuffling past, several townspeople, including Rudi’s mother, tried to throw scraps of food to the women. (“Slop that we ordinarily fed to the pigs,” he explained). The guards ordered them to stop. Anyone caught aiding the women was threatened with the same fate as the prisoners. “One of the guards knocked my mother into the mud with the butt of his rifle,” Rudi added with a pained look. “We weren’t even allowed to give those half-dead women water to drink.”
Rudi had other, equally horrific anecdotes. Each brought on fresh tears, and after a few more minutes I tried to distract him by telling him about my own circuitous exodus from Germany to America. Soon I had to rotate to the next volunteer post, so we quickly exchanged addresses and promised to stay in touch. Shyly, Rudi reminded me that he had been a laborer all his life and not much of a correspondent. His parting words were an invitation to visit him. “You can have your own room and bath and a TV with American programs,” he said.
I had little expectation of hearing from Rudi, much less of ever seeing him again. But not long afterward he sent me a handwritten letter repeating his invitation. He even included several photographs of his house. The childlike scrawl ended with a sorrowful lament about the travails of the human race over the past hundred years, “in particular,” he wrote, “of the Jewish people.” And so we began a years-long correspondence that eventually led me to the conviction that if Rudi hadn’t been too young, he would have performed some selfless and courageous deed to earn a place among the Righteous Gentiles.
Two years later an opportunity to visit Rudi presented itself quite unexpectedly when Essen, the city where I was born, invited my wife and me for an all-expenses-paid weeklong visit, a gesture of contrition to former Jewish residents who were forced to flee. I was eager to accept, but my American-born wife, the only child of refugees from Nazi Germany, was reluctant to set foot on German soil. But Evelyn came around when I proposed that, in addition to visiting Rudi in Cologne, we spend a few days in Berlin, the city that her Berlin-born mother had spoken of so adoringly and with a fervor undiminished by time or events.
A warmer greeting than the one we received at Cologne’s main railroad station is hard to imagine. Rudi and his wife Maria embraced Evelyn like a long-lost sister. The two women hit it off immediately, and off to lunch we went like two couples who had been friends for years.
Rudi had our schedule all figured out. Partly by car, partly on foot, we saw a good bit of Cologne—including a number of the buildings that were destroyed in the war and that, Rudi proudly informed us, he had helped restore. Time was also set aside to visit their modest, white stucco home and its immaculately manicured garden (which Rudi, tongue in cheek, calls “Villa Maria”) for the obligatory coffee and cake.
Cologne’s famous cathedral was, of course, high on Rudi’s must-see list, but so was the imposing synagogue on Roonstrasse. Destroyed on Kristallnacht, the synagogue was rebuilt after the war and rededicated in 1959. Like a five-year-old on the way to a toy store, Rudi couldn’t wait to take us there. “Just wait,” he said, barely able to contain his enthusiasm. “It is so beautiful.”
When we pulled up the main gates were locked. Crestfallen, Rudi led the way to a side entrance and repeatedly pushed the intercom button. After what seemed like a long time, a disembodied voice asked what we wanted. “I am here with visitors from the United States,” said Rudi. “They want very much to see the synagogue.” A silence followed, and Rudi repeated his plea with greater urgency. “My friends are here only for the day,” he said, adding, with pardonable hyperbole, “They came all the way from America to see the synagogue.”
“It is Shabbat,” the voice at the other end of the intercom declared gruffly. “You are not allowed to ring the bell.”
Rudi’s massive shoulders hunched over. “Should I tell him you are a survivor?” he asked.
I, too, was disappointed—and, yes, angry. With an effort I held myself in check, certain that any further attempt to gain admission was useless.
“Next time you come we’ll pick a weekday to visit the synagogue,” Rudi said, his pleasant face finally breaking into a grin. “Then we won’t be turned away.”
Our visit to the great gothic cathedral also made a lasting—but altogether different—impression. Begun in the Middle Ages, the cathedral’s twin 525-feet-high towers make it the defining symbol of Cologne’s skyline. The massive and ornately carved exterior is awe-inspiring, despite some minor damage inflicted by Allied bombs during the war. The interior, with its 142-feet-high nave and stained glass windows, enveloped me in a spiritual embrace. As we gawked admiringly at the ornate woodcarvings and gilded altars, clusters of people were silently praying, seemingly in a world of their own.
Rudi, not one to linger over artistic or historical details, soon had us follow his giant strides to a bank of votive candles before the altar. “Here,” he said, insistently handing me a candle while he dropped some coins in a box. “Light it and say a prayer for all the members of your family who were murdered.”
I did as he told me, unself-consciously and without reservations, and when I left the cathedral it was with a wholeness of spirit—and a transcendent hopefulness.
©2005, Pete Philipps. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this website are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.