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UU Faith Works Summer/Fall 2003 Administration
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A Teen Holocaust Story
By Frank E. Robertson
The incredible story of George Landecker's teenage life began to unravel before my eyes on a visit to his home during the weekend of November 16, 2002. I had known him and his artist-wife Jessie since the early 1960s when I served as minister of the Unitarian Church of Barneveld, New York, fresh out of theological school. They became members at that time. I went on to serve other churches, but we've kept up a continuing close friendship over the years. All those decades had gone by and I had never known that he was a Holocaust survivor with a story deserving as much attention as the most astounding Holocaust stories.
George is a rather modest, retired dairy farmer with thick hands, a husky body, and a slight German accent. He worked hard making a success at farming on the hilly land of Remsen, north of Utica, New York, always searching for improvements in stock and seed and doing much of the building and repairs around the farm himself. He worked closely with the Cooperative Extension Service and took leadership positions in its area organization. I had always known that he was extraordinary from the day in 1962 when we met and he showed me around the farm. In the barn, he introduced me to the cows: Tosca, Aida, Butterfly, etc., chewing away at their feed while recorded opera music played in the background.
Was the story there and I just had not been sensitive to some clue in our conversations? Perhaps, but even his church, where he has been a leader in most every position over the years, has not heard his story. Was he overly cautious because of the anti-Semitism in American culture? Perhaps. Some other Holocaust survivors have been known to hide their identity.
Well, somehow he began to tell the story of Gross-Breesen (pronounced bray' sen) as I sat riveted with surprise, looking at pictures in a late-1930s album he had carried with him when he fled Nazi Germany. Then came three thick notebooks full of his and his Gross-Breesen friends' accounts, gathered at a series of reunions he had organized. I did not care to sleep much that night as I curled up reading those stories and wondering why I had not heard of that amazing group of young people before.
Gross-Breesen is the name of a village in northeast Germany in a section called Silesia. Adolph Hitler came to power in 1933 and it soon became apparent to Jewish leaders that a reign of terror against Jews was commencing. At first, no one dreamed of the Holocaust. Hitler's government was actively forcing Jews to leave Germany. In those days, Nazi anti-Semitism centered on boycotts of Jewish businesses and the exclusion of Jews from government jobs. There were occasional beatings but most people thought the oppression would go no further than that.
The Central Association of German Jews sought dozens of ways to help Jews get out of the country. It was the time of The Great Depression and other countries placed various restrictions on emigrants because of fears of a further drain on their economies. Unless someone had relatives with whom he could stay or a job promised to him, they were turned away; however, trained farmers were welcome.
The Association obtained a 567-acre farm with a castle-like great house in Gross-Breesen from a wealthy Polish Jew named Willi Rohr who fled Germany in 1936. They hired Dr. Curt Werner Bondy (1894-1972) to establish a two-year farm-training program for Jewish teens with Gestapo approval. The teens were carefully selected from the Jewish Youth Organization (BDJJ) and, with some exceptions, their parents paid for their tuition.
George was one of the first to be admitted to Gross-Breesen in May of 1936. He was seventeen at the time and considered somewhat of an “expert” because he had helped his father with a team of horses in his hauling business and had worked for his grandparents who had two cows. He went on scholarship because his family could not afford to pay the tuition. Most of the other teens who entered the program had little if any experience with farming. There is a story that got a good laugh at the time when one of those novices was learning to milk cows. He started with the first cow and gradually got the hang of it until he tried to milk a “cow” further down the row that turned out to be a bull.
The young people soon learned that Curt Bondy's program was far from ordinary. He and his farm manager Erwin Scheier not only offered hands-on experience in animal husbandry and field farming, but the program included training in carpentry, machine repair, languages, classical music, philosophy, history, and religion. Over and over again, the writings of Gross-Breeseners express their deep gratitude for “Herr Bo,” as they called him, and the high level of expectation and trust he demanded in their work and attitude development.
Bondy held a PhD in Social Psychology from Hamburg University. He was a full professor from 1930 to 1933 at Gottingen and was also the director of a pioneering prison program for juvenile offenders at Eisenach/Thuringin. One of his books, Pedagogical Problems in the Treatment of Juvenile Offenders , printed in 1925, was considered to be of high importance in the field and was reissued in modern times. He also was the co-founder with Martin Buber of the Jewish Center for Adult Education in Frankfurt/Main in 1933.
George's intellectual mentor has always been the great Jewish humanist philosopher, Martin Buber. Bondy arranged for Buber to visit Gross-Breesen and George had the opportunity to meet him and hear him speak before the students and faculty. Bondy applied Buber's philosophy by stressing the value of a caring community at Gross-Breesen as well as helping the young people think through why intelligent hard work leads to good results for themselves and others. Indeed, years later, it would be a sign with a quote from Buber in front of the Unitarian Church of Barneveld that would convince George that he should try out that church.
One should not get the impression that Bondy's program was liberal in terms of being loose in structure. It was quite typically “German” in structure. The young people lined up in military fashion in front of the big porch of the castle after breakfast to get their orders for the day. Herr Bo would shout “Herschaften!” to bring people to attention, meaning “Better be quiet and listen!” Groups of several students each would be assigned to tending to the animals, plowing, woodworking, machine repair, cleaning, weeding, etc. There were short breaks in mid-morning and mid-afternoon and opportunities to clean up before lunch and dinner.
The evenings were far from free time. Most evenings had a music program and lecture on German history, philosophy, or religion. Some evenings featured plays put on by students, and they participated in the Sabbath services. One outstanding special event was the wedding in 1937 of Wastl and Lisbet Neumeier. George read a psalm during the service. Two other students, Richard and Ruth Bendit, became engaged that day.
Girls slept on the first floor of the castle and boys on the second, often twelve to a room in bunk beds. Each room had a student leader. In rotation, several boys and girls were selected to get up early at 4 and 4:30 AM to prepare breakfast and milk the cows. There were around one hundred students at any one time at Gross-Breesen. During the period from 1936 to 1940, two-hundred-forty people took part in the farm-training program.
Although male and female roles were somewhat separate, with boys doing the more physical work and girls doing the more domestic work, boys took their turn cleaning rooms and washing dishes and girls learned horticulture and the milking of cows. All put in extra hours in the fields during harvest time.
1937 A teen boy inside his room on the second floor of the Castle at Gross-Breesen.
Most of the students were oblivious to the great suffering going on among the Jews outside Gross-Breesen, but their leaders knew and were frantically seeking ways to set up emigration processes to other countries. At first, there was an effort to establish a group farm in Brazil. One graduate, Hans Rosenthal, was successful in starting a coffee plantation there but further emigration was frustrated when the Brazilian government demanded that additional people would have to convert to Catholicism.
A more successful plan took place in Virginia where a wealthy benefactor, William B. Thalhimer, donated land for a communal farm named Hyde Farmlands. Eventually, thirty-seven Gross-Breeseners would escape to there with papers proving to the Nazis and the U.S. Government that they each owned shares of the land. A group of thirty-one were able to emigrate to Australia and several went to Israel, Kenya, England, and Argentina.
On November 9, 1938, came the horrendous Kristallnacht (Crystal Night). Nazi police and citizen supporters were organized all over Germany to break into Jewish businesses and homes, smashing windows, plundering goods, and arresting men 18 years old and older. The Gestapo arrived at Gross-Breesen with a bus without warning. They herded all the students and faculty outside, sent the women and girls into the barn and the boys under age 18 into a shed. The older boys and men were forced onto the bus.
They then proceeded to take axes and smash the furniture inside the castle. The Gross-Breeseners were shocked to learn later that one of the area's non-Jewish young farmers, whom they knew and considered a friend, destroyed the grand piano. Bondy was especially distressed at that. He was the pianist for the evening music programs.
The bus left without a word about where they were going and delivered the older male students and staff to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Curt Bondy was among them. Bondy's secretary, Ruth Hadra and the kitchen supervisor, Ruth Scheier, took over the program for the remaining students.
George had left Gross-Breesen in the fall of 1937 and worked on a sheep farm in Bavaria for about a year. He then went to his girlfriend's house in Frankfurt where he was preparing to emigrate to Hyde Farmlands in Virginia. The Gestapo came to the house on November 9 and took him
immediately without allowing him to take anything with him. By coincidence, he was also brought to Buchenwald concentration camp. When he discovered the others, they gave him support and a blanket. With a wry smile, he calls that “the first Gross-Breesen reunion.”
Meanwhile, two supporters of Gross-Breesen found out where the men and boys were and rushed to Berlin to get papers approved for them. One had already had his head shaved and had to wear a hat pulled down over his ears so that he would not be recognized as a Jew. Somehow they were successful getting the papers approved by the Gestapo; but, on hurrying back, they were distracted briefly by a friend on the train platform, only to watch in horror as the train went off with the papers in their suitcase. They were able to convince the Station Master to call ahead and have the suitcase taken off at the next stop and stored for them until they got there. They feared being arrested at any moment, but finally got back to Gross-Breesen with the precious papers.
Miracles happen! The faculty and students were released after about five weeks of negotiations. It took eight weeks for George to be released. Some of them would flee Germany; others would remain and meet a tragic end.
In February of 1939, George left for Holland from his girlfriend Luise's house in Frankfurt. It took another year of negotiations for him to get his American visa and go to Virginia. He spent eighteen months working at the communal Hyde Farmlands and then he set out on his own. Luise and her family also went to Hyde Farmlands in 1939 but her love interest in George ended in that period. She left Hyde Farmlands and eventually married another Gross-Breeseners. Indeed, the communal style of farming did not work. Most people wanted to own their own farm or business. The experiment lasted about two years and then was abandoned.
George met Jessie while he was up a ladder picking cherries at a farm in Pennsylvania. Their courtship did not last long, for along came the war and he enlisted in the U.S. Army in November
of 1942. He and Jessie were married in October of 1943 and by 1944 he was fighting in the U.S. Infantry in France and Germany. All along they saved every penny they could, and after the war they bought the farm in Upstate New York with the help of the GI Bill. They have two girls, Heidi and Heller. After thirty-four years of farming, they sold the farm in Remsen and bought a Victorian octagon house across from the Unitarian Church of Barneveld. Their children are now adults. Heidi is married to Peter Murrell and they have two boys: Noah and Abraham.
George and Jessie continue to be leaders in the church and community. George works on the Program Committee and is most proud of turning Unity Hall into a community center to the benefit of both church and community. He also has been the local coordinator of the Guest At Your Table Program for over ten years, an annual intergenerational fund raising program to support the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Jessie arranges the flowers and wreaths at the front of the sanctuary and her drawing of the church is featured on its stationary. She has taught art courses at Munson Williams Proctor Institute in Utica and her paintings are highly sought after by museums and private art collectors.
Not all Gross-Breeseners were as lucky as George. About half of them died in various concentration camps and many of their family members perished likewise. A diary exists in the Yad Vashem in Israel by one young man from Gross-Breesen, Guenther Marcuse, who died at Auschwitz on March 23, 1944. George lost twenty members of his family, including a brother and grandparents, but his parents and sisters Eva and Hanna and other brother Martin were able to escape. His sister Eva had a very close call. She was fifteen at the time and had been trained to take the part of Hermia in the play “A Midsummer Night's Dream” to be performed at Gross- Breesen. War had just been declared against Poland in September of 1939. People at Gross-Breesen could hear the sounds of the battle in the distance. After that first performance, Eva fled to Berlin to join her family. They managed to get to Genoa and then to Santiago, Chile.
Most other Gross-Breeseners who remained at the farm were herded into concentration camps and perished. The estate was turned into a labor camp to support the German Army with Polish prisoners for slave labor.
Dr. Bondy escaped from Holland to the United States and taught psychology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Later he returned to Germany and continued his teaching career at the University of Hamburg. He never married. On the day of his funeral in January of 1972, one of his students from Gross-Breesen, Ernst Cramer, said: “In those days, when one started to despair of the sense of life, Bondy showed and taught us the true essentials of life.”
George was able to organize the first reunion of Gross-Breesen survivors in 1984 in Utica and Barneveld. Two years later, he assisted in organizing a reunion in Israel. Eighty people went from all over the world and the specialness of that experience is among the most cherished memories of the dwindling numbers, most of whom are now in their 80s. A recent reunion developed a fourth collection of writings called “Roundbrief-2003” containing many touching tributes by the children and grandchildren to their Gross-Breesen parents. All of those parents led successful lives in their work and in volunteer humanitarian service to their communities.
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