I rarely read new books about the Holocaust. Spiking European antisemitism, campus harassment of Jewish students in America, and the stabbings in Israel more than fill my quota for bad Jewish news.
But Dina Gold’s new study is an unusual sort of Holocaust book, dealing with the miseries of wartime Berlin but also with her family’s lives and troubles over a century-and-a-half—beginning in 19th-century Germany, moving to Mandate Palestine, and ending up in England.
The theme of the story is Gold’s struggle to recover a large and valuable office building in the heart of Berlin that had belonged to her grandparents, then to the Third Reich, then to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and then to the government of a united Germany. But the theme frequently takes a backseat to tangents and local color. Stolen Legacy is also distinctive among Holocaust books in its unusually unpleasant cast of good guys. The author is perfectly honest in describing her flawed and schismatic family: wastrel philanderers and Communists in prewar Germany, irresponsible stiffnecks in Israel, snobs in postwar Britain. The fact that she manages never to sound disloyal to her family shows a certain finesse.
In 1850, Dina Gold’s great-great-grandfather, Heimann Wolff, founded the Wolff Fur Company in Berlin. He specialized in dying cheap furs to look expensive, which let working-class men take their wives out on the town looking rich. Soon they were calling themselves “The Leading [Fur] House in Germany” and running satellite offices in Paris, Moscow, Palermo, Copenhagen, London, Manchester, Glasgow, New York, and Melbourne. The Wolffs got wealthy.
By the early 1900s, Heimann’s son Victor was running the company and moved its headquarters to a beautiful office building in the center of Berlin, at Krausenstrasse 17/18. When World War I began, Victor’s son Herbert, an army reservist, was called up and won an Iron Cross fighting on the Eastern Front. The economic collapse after 1918 hurt Wolff Furs, but not fatally. They did business in foreign currency when they could and were insulated by northern Europe’s cold winters: Depression or no, people still needed coats.
The Wolffs stayed rich and the kids became dissolute. Herbert’s brother Fritz became an enthusiastic Communist; Herbert himself became an enthusiastic playboy. He married Nellie Danziger but didn’t give up philandering, which Nellie tolerated out of love for their high-society lifestyle. Herbert’s dissolution extended to reckless driving: In 1930 he was driving Nellie’s parents when he crashed into a truck he was trying to overtake; the crash killed Nellie’s father and crippled her mother.
Gold reports that Herbert and Nellie’s marriage was saved by his money. The two escaped whatever sorrows they endured with a never-ending grand tour of Europe; their three children—of whom the author’s mother, Annemarie, was the eldest—would be moved from school to school whenever the “well-heeled nomads” were ready for a new city. By age 11, Annemarie had been in 22 different schools.
Like many prewar German Jews, the Wolffs’ connection with Judaism was perfunctory. Once a year, on Yom Kippur, Herbert would don his top hat and take Nellie to synagogue. Nonetheless, as the 1930s progressed, the Wolff company was slowly forced out of business by the Nazis, who prohibited Jews from doing business with non-Jews. The family’s insurance company transferred Krausenstrasse 17/18 to the Third Reich.
Most German “good Jews,” the integrated members of the upper-middle class, believed they could weather the Nazi storm. But Herbert showed uncharacteristic foresight and decided to get out before things got worse. He packed up his wife and children, but couldn’t persuade his brother to join them. (Shortly thereafter Fritz was arrested as a Communist and then transferred to Auschwitz as a Jew, where he was killed.)
In the mid-1930s, there were few obvious destinations for Jews fleeing Germany. Herbert decided to take his family to the British Mandate in Palestine. Between what the Nazis stole and the cost of a British “capitalist visa” to enter the Mandate, the Wolffs arrived in Palestine with much of their wealth gone. Herbert quickly lost what remained in a bad investment, and the Wolffs, like most of Palestine’s Jewish population, became impoverished. They moved into a boarding house where all five of them slept in one room. Herbert and Nellie found work where they could.
With a little help, and by selling some of their few remaining possessions, the Wolffs were able to get their two younger children into a Jerusalem boarding school and Annemarie into a school in England. Annemarie thrived in Britain: She became a nurse and married a British Jew then serving in the Royal Air Force, Dan Gold. Their daughter—the author of Stolen Legacy—grew up English in England, disconnected from her cousins in Israel and her legacy in Germany. She had heard her grandmother speak about the Wolff Building, but in 1945 it ended up one block into the eastern zone of Berlin, just beyond where the Berlin Wall would be built in 1961.
For a half-century, it looked as if that was that.
The real story begins with the fall of the wall in 1989. Dina Gold, by then a successful journalist, decided to have a look at her family’s building, and as the newly unified Germany opened up to reparation claims, she persuaded her mother to try to establish ownership. As might be expected, the German authorities were not especially helpful. First, they tried to prove that the Wolffs had sold their building voluntarily to the Nazis. Then they sought to prove that the building didn’t exist anymore: A communicating door had been built in the the wall it shared with an adjacent building; this, it was claimed, made the two structures one entirely new building. Then they tried to prove that because the building had been “altered” since it was confiscated, it was no long subject to the laws of restitution. They also contested the validity of the Wolffs’ wills.
Fortunately, Dina Gold was able to find a few good Germans to help her, but they had to fight an uphill battle. How did it turn out? I won’t spoil it for you. But if you’re interested in a good detective yarn lasting 150 years, Stolen Legacy won’t disappoint.
Josh Gelernter is a writer in Connecticut.