My Uncle the Doctor: The Life and Times of Hartwig Buxbaum (Part I)

Preamble

Hartwig Buxbaum, a German-born Jewish doctor who immigrated to South Africa in the 1930s, was my late uncle. While I never knew him, he was the hinge, the fulcrum around which much of our family’s destiny turned. This article will attempt to re-create, from somewhat meager sources, his life and times. As will become apparent, he was a courageous man and a dedicated doctor whose life was, in significant parts, dictated by the broad historical thrusts and currents then swirling about Europe and South Africa. Placed centre stage, this is his story, and it is the story too of his grandmother, parents, siblings, sister-in-law and wives. It is the story of those whose lives he helped save, whose lives he touched and whose lives he enriched. It is the story, too, of his human frailties.

The Early Years

Hartwig Buxbaum was the eldest child of Seligmann and Bertha Buxbaum of Beverungen an der Weser, a town in the district of Westphalia, Germany, some 100km south of Hamburg. Shortly after the turn of the century, Seligmann was appointed as the teacher and religio-cultural officer of the Beverungen Jewish community. He held this position until his brief imprisonment after Kristallnacht and subsequent immigration, together with his wife, Bertha, and mother-in-law, Karolina Nussbaum, to South Africa i n 1939.

In 1908, there were 23 children of varying ages at the Jewish school. The school was housed in the grounds of the town’s synagogue, which had been constructed in 1852, and which in its splendor would stand for almost ninety years. It was here that Hartwig (born in 1905) was educated. His brother, Gustav (b 1906), and sister, Sidonie (b 1908), would follow his footsteps at this junior school, under the tutelage of their father, the Lehrer (teacher).

The town in which the three siblings grew up had a formal settled Jewish community from around the second half of the 16th Century.1 Periodic points of conflict between the community and the towns’ residents have been chronicled.2 In a sly letter of complaint by a resident in 1719, it was observed: “Everyone, both strangers and locals, are amazed at the stately pomp, splendor, wealth and size of the Jews in this minor, small place and maintain also that in the world, to their knowledge, there be no place in which the Jews are permitted such great opportunities as here in Beverungen…..”

The intent of the letter is clear. It reflects the resentment that some townsfolk at that time felt towards the local Jews and entrenched a stereotype of their exaggerated influence. After the establishment by Napoleon of the Kingdom of Westphalia in 1807, a new constitution was adopted, which inter alia declared (Article 10), “All subjects shall be equal before the law, and the various denominations shall exercise their cult freely”.

By the turn of the 20th Century, Jews in the town were accustomed to leading a life well integrated with the general population. So much so that in 1920 Hartwig, still a teenager, met with a number of fussballbegeisterte junge Männer (young football enthusiasts),3 in the town’s Cafe Buhre, and there founded an association for Bewegungsspiele (movement games/physical exercise),that became the forerunner of the town’s football club, Vf B Beverungen. Of the eight friends who met that day in the Cafe Buhre, at least four had identifiably Jewish surnames.4

By this time (1919-1924), Hartwig had moved on from studying at a Gymnasium in Marburg to the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Höxter.5 Between Beverungen and Höxter, in the Westphalian countryside, lay the small towns of Blankenau, Wehrden, Amelunxen, and Godelheim. But Höxter, lying as it did on the border of Westphalia and Saxony, and the fact that he would have been a boarder here, away from his parental home, expanded his horizons. This was post-World War 1 Germany, the early years of flux and promise of the Weimar Republic. Academically successful, and having a father devoted to community service, Hartwig chose to enter the medical field.

Having obtained a grant from the Brunswick Bnai Brith Lodge, Hartwig studied medicine at a series of universities and medical schools: Göttingen, Bonn, Vienna and Münster. In 1929, he worked as an intern at the Israelitische Kranken-Verpflegungs-Anstaltund Beerdigungsgesellschaft hospital in Breslau, and in 1930 at the City Hospital in Altona. It was in 1930 that his dissertation, “Three cases of congenital diaphragmatic hernia spuria” was approved at the University of Münster, and he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Medicine.6

The Tide Turns

Pictures in a family album show Hartwig during these years as a serious and dedicated medical student, participating at the same time in the activities of student life. It is interesting to speculate for a moment on this aspect of German Jewish student life. Anti-Jewish prejudice, despite Weimar (or possibly because of), was a constant ingredient of student life, and of society as a whole. On this, Paul Johnson writes, “The Jews tried everything to combat the poison. Some brought up their children to be artisans or farmers. They enlisted in the army. They attempted ultra-assimilation…..or Zionism. Or they formed militant Jewish organizations, student leagues, (and) dueling clubs”.7

Whether Hartwig’s participation in such activities stemmed from a conscious decision as a Jew, or as a student, is unknown. It is probable, however, that he did so as an enthusiast, given his earlier commitment to forming a football club in his home town. It was during this period too, that his cheek was scarred in a duel, a badge of honour among German students. Stefan Zweig, however disparaging he was of this practice, wrote: “….being a real student meant giving proof of one’s manhood, by participating in as many duels as possible, and bearing….scars on one’s face”.8 By forming Jewish duelling and sports clubs, Jewish students were asserting their masculinity. Adolph Asch, himself a member of a dueling fraternity, recorded: “On Sunday afternoons in Breslau, where the first Jewish fraternity was founded, male students in full dress paraded down Schwernitzer Street and flirted with the ladies. Most fraternity men would have recognized the coloured sash of each group: it was an open declaration: ‘We are Jewish. We are strong men. We are proud men’.”9

There is little doubt about Hartwig’s human qualities; he was brave, courageous and charismatic. He was to require these characteristics in the coming decade.

“On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg gave in to his advisors and appointed Hitler chancellor of a new cabinet in which Nazi ministers were a minority of two.”10 The avalanche had begun. Three months later, the infamous April Laws were enacted, in terms of which Jews were excluded from organisations, professions, and other aspects of public life. In this same month, Jews were curtailed from full participation in the medical profession, and from reimbursement from state health insurance funds.11

For Hartwig, the signals were quite clear: emigration was the only option. The discussion in his father’s home in Dahlhauser Strasse, Beverungen, would have been fraught and wrenching. Presumably his parents, brother Gustav and sister Sidonie would have participated, while his grandmother Karolina Nussbaum, an aged woman close to eighty, sat quietly upstairs in her bedroom. Seligmann Buxbaum was well respected in his town and in the wider community. He was a dignified man (his balebatisher12 top hat is today a treasured family heirloom), upright of bearing, with deft and creative hands. From 1920 until 1935, he kept the minutes of the town’s Ex Service League. The Protocol book’s title page is in his bold writing, and the minutes are set out in his steady, effortless, precise, flowing script.13 But being the pragmatic man he was, he would have encouraged the brothers to leave. Gustav’s job had also become precarious. Sidonie was close to her parents and grandmother. Towards the end of the 1930s, she married a Hungarian rabbi, Phillip Singer, from the town of Ipolysag.

Outside the house in Dahlhauser Strasse, the garden that the family tended so fastidiously lay quiet. The cherry tree that Seligmann had planted and recalled in his later years with so much pride and fondness bore its juicy, luscious fruit. To invoke the title of Amos Elon’s book: “Oh! The pity of it all!”14

“WOHIN”? (Where to?)

South Africa was the land to which Hartwig would immigrate. To all intents and purposes, it seems like a strange choice. South Africa in the early 1930s was wracked by economic difficulties. The Great Depression had a concomitant result in exacerbating a “poor white problem”.15 Antisemitism had found fertile soil in this riven society.16 Quotas aimed at limiting Jewish immigration to the Union were welcomed in the press.17 The Greyshirt movement, formed in 1933, mimicked by its uniform and paraphernalia what would become so familiar in the Germany of that decade. Antisemitism was fueled by the idea of the exclusive belongingness to the Afrikaner Volk – encapsulating language, state, Union.18 The Jews were the foreign, the alien.

The funnel for Jewish emigration from Western and Eastern Europe had a large aperture, but the spout was steadily being squeezed tighter. America, that land of promise and the path to which the funnel almost directly led, had radically altered its immigration laws between the First World War and the advent of Nazism. The enactment of the cynical Johnson-Reid law of 1924 which placed restrictions on European immigration meant that in its hour of greatest need, Jewish immigration was severely curtailed. Looking at the records19 of the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Höxter (the school that both Hartwig and Gustav attended), over the period 1867-1933, it is evident that 20 of the 25 Jewish ex-pupils who emigrated left for America. In the period after 1933, however, only 18 of 46 Jewish ex-pupils found their way there, while 11 found a home in South America, a new destination of safety. The strangulating effects of the Johnson-Reid law on Jewish immigration were apparent.

In the Union of South Africa, the 1930 Quota Act had been passed with the aim of curtailing the flow of Jews from Eastern Europe.20 Steered by extremists and by Afrikaner leaders and politicians, editors and church figures such as T E Dönges, H F Verwoerd, Eric Louw, and D.F. Malan, they would tout the prevalent idea of European Jews being unassimilable.”21 In this view, Eastern European Jews (were) “perceived as inherently devious and immutably alien.”22There was, however, still a window of opportunity for German Jews to enter South Africa, until these doors too were closed by that iniquitous piece of legislation, the Aliens Act of 1937. It was in the years immediately prior to this that around 6000 German Jews were able to enter this country.2324 Milton Shain has argued that “Jew hatred was not a marginal factor in South African public life during those troubled years”.25 Private anti-Judaism had been transformed into public anti-Judaism.26

So it was, in these fraught times, that the brothers Buxbaum would take their chances and decide to migrate to South Africa. Gustav relied on Hartwig’s good judgment and steadfastness. He would wait in Amsterdam, while Hartwig upgraded his medical qualifications at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. They would then sail to Africa, together.

Edinburgh

At its height in the 1920s and 1930s, the Jewish community of Edinburgh numbered several thousands, out of a population of between 420-440 000.27 For recognition and registration as a medical doctor in the Union of South Africa, Hartwig had to augment his German certification with a qualification in medicine from a recognized university in the Commonwealth. Edinburgh provided the ideal venue. Hartwig read for the triple qualification of the L.C.P. & S Edin., L.R.F.P.S Glasg. He evidently did spend time in Glasgow, but the sparse family lore always located him in Edinburgh during this period.

Edinburgh would have offered the young, idealistic doctor a respite from the grave intensity, and dangerous and claustrophobic German Jewish society. In its place lay the broad Royal Mile, the regulated, ordered and mannered streets of Edinburgh. Here, he will have met a number of South African doctors, some of them Jewish, who had come to specialize at the university.28 Was he alone or did he have companionship? The hint would always come from my late mother’s oft repeated, throwaway line. In a muted tone, she would mention that “he was married to a wealthy heiress, you know.”

Hartwig and Johanna Eva Polak: The mystery

In our family, Hartwig’s early marriage had always been an event shrouded in mystery. Always the hints, always the innuendos, always the cryptic suggestions of an unhappy liaison, told in the hushed voice of my mother. My father, close as he had been to his brother, chose never to let slip a word in all of his expressed memories. It was an impenetrable veil, laced in secrecy.

Slowly the mystery unraveled. A small, tucked away photograph in an aged family album of a wedding group on the steps of a synagogue was only recently discovered by my daughter, Galia.29 The inscription on the reverse side of the photograph nonchalantly recalls the event as having taken place “by dem synagoga” (“at the Synagogue”).

The celebration was that of Hartwig’s wedding, solemnized in October 193330 at a synagogue in Glasgow. The bride was Johanna Eva Polak of Amsterdam, daughter of the late Robert Polak and Olga Beer. Born in Elberfeld, Germany, Johanna was 21 years old when she stood under the bridal canopy. The marriage certificate records her home address as Amsterdam, and that of Hartwig as 105 Hill Street, Glasgow.

Why Glasgow? Hartwig was in the city studying towards a further medical qualification. Johanna was, at some stage, a student at an arts college in Scotland.31 The steps of the partly visible pillars framing the picture of the wedding party were identified as being those of the grand portals of the Garnethill Synagogue in Hill Street.