After more than 49 years I met the "Jewish-looking American
soldier" my mother, Margarete Buber-Neumann, had met in
Boizenburg, Mecklenburg, in the beginning of May 1945, 11-12
days after she had in the last days of the War walked out of
the infamous women's concentration camp Ravensbrück after five
years of imprisonment there.
This American soldier played an important role in her
life and in that of her daughters. Yet my mother never
learned his identity, and my sister and I did so only rather
accidentally 49 years after the event.
This man is Chicago industrialist Manfred Steinfeld, a
generous patron of Jewish Studies and of the commemoration of
the Holocaust.
My mother has described several incidents concerning
American soldiers in the last two chapters of her famous first
book "Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler" (1948) (in English
"Under Two Dictators" 1949).
Two important incidents concerned the then 21-year-old US
officer, who had in 1938 as a 14-year-old Jewish boy succeeded
to leave Nazi-Germany to join an aunt in Chicago. His mother
and sister stayed behind and perished in the camps in the last
months of the war.
When my mother's book was published by Dodd Mead in the
US in 1950, Manfred Steinfeld, again in uniform, had picked it
up accidentally at a railway station and while reading,
discovered that its author was that camp survivor, a halfstarved,
sick, 43 year old woman, who had appealed for his
help 5 years earlier in Boizenburg. He told me that he later
had tried several times to contact her, but without success.
In the last chapters of her first book my mother
describes her tortuous journey on foot and bicycle through
bombed-out, defeated and occupied Nazi-Germany from
Ravensbrück in Mecklenburg, north of Berlin, to the village of
Thierstein in Bavaria near the Czech border. The Red Army was
advancing rapidly, the Western Allies who had already crossed
the Elbe, were ordered to retreat behind the river.
My mother's desperate aim was not to fall into the hands
of the Soviets who had arrested her in 1938 while she was a
political refugee from Nazi-Germany in Moscow, had sent her to
the huge Gulag-Camp Karaganda in Central Asia, and two years
of slave-labor later, had -- as a part of the Stalin-Hitler
Pact -- delivered her and hundreds of other German and
Austrian anti-Nazi political refugees into the clutches of the
Gestapo, who then had imprisoned her in Ravensbrück until the
end of the War.
She had not seen her daughters for 10 years, but knew
that we were in Jerusalem with our paternal grandparents. We
did not know at all where she was, not even whether she was
alive or dead.
My mother tells that while still in Mecklenburg she had
approached "a Jewish looking American soldier" with the
request to send a message to her daughters in Jerusalem to let
them know that she had survived, and that later she realized
that this soldier had indeed done so. At this time Germans
had no chance to send mail abroad. When some time later she
had succeeded to cross the Elbe, and had reached the city of
Hannover, she put the same request at the International Red
Cross office there, but was rejected outright.
Recently Manfred Steinfeld told me, that as an American
soldier he could correspond with his younger brother, whom
their widowed mother in 1938 had succeeded to send to a
religious Kibbutz in Palestine. In his next letter Manfred
indeed asked his brother to write to Jerusalem, and it was
this younger brother Naftali Steinfeld who sent the postcard
from which my sister Barbara and I received the message of our
mother's survival. We of course did not yet know then where
we could contact her, nor did we know who had sent the
postcard.
We never learned that, tragically, only a few months
later this young brother was killed, when British soldiers
surrounded the Kibbutz whose members had helped illegal Jewish
immigrants ashore, and shot eight of them.
Only in 1994 did I quite accidentally learn the identity
of the "Jewish looking American soldier". When Prof. Gilya
Gerda Schmidt who teaches Judaic Studies at the University of
Tennessee at Knoxville, met me in Israel, she mentioned that
the chair of Judaic Studies there had been funded by Mr.
Manfred Steinfeld, who also was a patron of the Holocaust
Museum in Washington D.C.; talking about Mr.Steinfeld whom she
admired, she mentioned that he once had told her a story about
Margarete Buber-Neumann whom he had met as a soldier in
Germany in the spring of 1945.
When Gilya Gerda Schmidt told me this story, she did not
yet know that this was my mother. From her I received the
name of Mr. Steinfeld's firm in Chicago, and when coming to
the States at the end of August 1994, got his business phone
number from information and his secretary there immediately
made the connection. We talked on the phone and in September,
when Mr. Steinfeld came for a day to Toronto, my husband and I
met with him and a Toronto associate, had a meal and talked
for hours.
Only then did I learn about the other role that the
"Jewish looking American soldier" who had conveyed the message
to us, had played in my mother's life. From my mother's book
and from her stories I knew that while in Boizenburg she had
fallen seriously ill, and had to rest before being able to
move on. One day while walking in the streets of the small
town, she recognized Ramdor, the most notorious SS and Gestapo
camp guard of Ravensbrück, followed him and in desperation
approached an American officer demanding that he arrest him.
He did so. This officer was Manfred Steinfeld. He
interrogated Ramdor and made him admit his identity. My
mother was called to testify; as Ramdor claimed not to have
belonged neither to the Gestapo nor even to the SS, her
testimony that she had seen him in SS uniform, was crucial;
she reported all those incidents of atrocities he had
committed against women prisoners and that she had witnessed.
Men who had been prisoners in the men's camp and who had
helped catching him, added their testimonies. It was in the
course of these events that my mother asked the young American
officer to convey her message to Jerusalem. Ramdor was later
sentenced to death by a British court.
North York, Ontario, 18 October 1994

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