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My Uncle, the Doctor: The life and times of Hartwig Buxbaum (Part II)

Author: Published on: Published in: Jewish History – South Africa

(Author: Stuart Buxbaum, Vol. 72, #1, Pesach 2017)

Dr Hartwig Buxbaum

In the early 1930s my late uncle Dr Hartwig Buxbaum left Germany to obtain further medical degrees from Edinburgh and Glasgow so as to be registered with the medical council of South Africa. His brother Gustav, my father, left Germany at the same time, working in Amsterdam for the duration of Hartwig’s studies. While in Scotland Hartwig married Johanna Eva Polak but the marriage f loundered. Meanwhile Rebecca Lessem, who would marry Gustav, had left Memel in Lithuania and was living with her immediate family in Johannesburg. It was now the latter part of the 1930s and Hartwig and Gustav were also in the Union of South Africa. Their close family were left behind in Germany.

During that decade of massively disorientating events in Europe, Hartwig had acquired experience as a medical practitioner, varying from small town German patients, to the sophisticates in Vienna, to Scottish gentry. Now he would be working with rural South Africans. According to the medical register in South Africa, the first evidence of his registration in this country was in 1935, in Zeer ust.1 Imagine this highly cultured Western European doctor, finding himself in a town made famous by Oom Schalk Lourens’ creator, Herman Charles Bosman! Roughly eight years before Hartwig’s arrival there, Bosman wrote “….. the farmers of the Marico would make their way to Zeerust every three months for nagmaal2”. Meredith (2007) describes the nagmaal as follows: “At the centre [of the town] was Church Square…it was here every three months that far f lung farming families and local residents would gather for nagmaal, a religious and social event when babies were baptized, marriages were celebrated and the square was cluttered with market stalls, tents and wagons”.3

The doctor would have looked on with some interest indeed!

In family reminiscences, Hartwig’s stay in Zeerust was never mentioned. It is probable that his stay had been brief. The reminiscences, though sparse, become clearer and more illuminating when Hartwig becomes the doctor in the small rural villages of first Leslie, and then Kinross4, on the (then) Eastern Transvaal Highveld.

Out of necessity or through the calling he felt to alleviate illness and suffering, every Friday Hartwig would visit the small trading post of Roodebank, close to the town of Va l.5 Here the Rosmarin family were the landlords.6 Hartwig was quick to gain the confidences of farmers and laborers alike in this anomalous English-speaking farmers’ enclave. It was a little bit of England, almost a dry land version of the Lake Districts. The accents heard were pukka English. It was on one of these visits that Hartwig spoke to Kelly King, a direct descendant of the legendary Dick King.7 Ever concerned for and protective of his younger brother Gustav, who was clinging to the edges of respectability in what he felt to be an absolutely alien Johannesburg environment, Hartwig proposed, quite outrageously, that he be apprenticed on King’s farm as a learner farmer. Gustav was by then a man of thirty. The Kings (Kelly and John) were brothers on separate adjoining farms, and they agreed to this rather madcap idea. And so Gustav shifted gears once more, without grinding the cogs in the slightest, and spent two happy, impecunious years on the farm. He learnt dairying, field cropping and the managing of a piggery with aplomb. A picture of him at this time shows him astride a tall white horse, seemingly quite at ease. Hartwig had thrown his younger brother a lifeline and a chance of a lifetime.

Gustav Buxbaum as apprentice farmer

The Farm Frischgewaagdt, approximately 400 hectares in size, of which five eighths were suitable for crop cultivation, came up for sale around 1938. It was situated equidistant from Leslie and Kinross. Hartwig pushed and cajoled Gustav into making an offer. The sellers looked askance at Gustav, this impecunious, inexperienced putative buyer, and required a guarantor of some standing. It was only Hartwig, by providing a doctor’s good name as surety, who could ensure that the sale to the brothers took place. My father settled, alone, in a small farmhouse built in the style of those houses that were so ravaged during the Anglo-Boer War by Kitchener’s British forces. The Battle of Bakenlaagte, fought on 30 October 1901,8 was but six kilometers away. It was one of many constant reminders fueling the bitterness towards the British Empire in the hearts of Afrikaners. In this suspicion-laden, Calvinist-dominated rural environment, Gustav put down roots. He withdrew somewhat from the ebullience of his European disposition, becoming more guarded and inward looking. Despite this, he showed his mettle and eagerly acculturated to his new identity as a South African farmer.

The flight from Beverungen

“In the early hours of November 10, 1938 ….. more than a thousand synagogues and many thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed, while thirty thousand Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps”.9On map 14 of Martin Gilbert’s extraordinarily researched account of Kristallnacht, the small town of Beverungen appears in the top most corner. Seligmann, a well-respected upright citizen of the town, was able before his short imprisonment to rescue the Mezuzahand two Yads (pointers, usually silver, in the form of a hand used to follow the public reading of the Torah) from the ruins of the synagogue. Among those arrested that morrow was Hermann Mannsbach. His widow, Martha Mannsbach, who survived Theresienstadt, described the anguish of the imprisonment, the desperateness of the wives and families of those imprisoned.10

Beverungen lay midway between two diametrically opposed fates: the harbour city of Bremen lay almost 225 kilometers to the west and the concentration camp of Buchenwald 243 kilometers to the east. Once again the surety of Hartwig came into play, ensuring that Seligmann, his wife, Bertha, and mother-in-law, Karolina Nussbaum, would leave for South Africa, albeit separately, from Bremen on 11 February 1939.

Hartwig’s foresight in providing the necessary documents and exit permits for his parents and grandmother saved their lives.11 To suggest otherwise, is not borne out by the fate of Beverungen’s Jewish community. For those Jews still in the town and in various parts of Germany at the time of the Reich’s violent reaction to Herschel Greenspan’s act of revenge, the trigger for Kristallnacht, the chances of survival were slim indeed. A source documenting the fate of Beverungen’s Jewry shows the tragedy of it all. Of the recorded 73 Jews who had not, by 1938, emigrated from the town, fully 54 faced death in the camps and ghettoes of Europe. Of these, only three survived.12

Seligmann and Bertha, because of legislative obstructions, could not directly journey to South Africa, but followed the circuitous route via Lourenco Marques and Swaziland13. It appears that Karolina arrived directly in Durban, on the SS Pretoria. The Lloyd’s Register (1937-1938) describes the ship as being part of the Deutsche Ost-Afrika-Linie f leet. The journey for her would have been especially distressing. She was eighty-two years old, bewildered, fearful and alone, entering a strange country. The Aliens Registration Card of Bertha Buxbaum states that she arrived in the Union from Swaziland via Bethal on 23 May 1939. Karolina Nussbaum’s card records her arrival as being on 13 March of that year.

And so they journeyed on, to the farm on the Highveld, to Hartwig and Gustav.

The Doctor

The role and practice of a rural doctor in South Africa in the 1930s is a fascinating one. Again, Hartwig’s sophisticated European experience would, with a smile and a shrug, have been disavowed. He found himself now confronted by rural black patients, Afrikaner farmers (many of whom were suspicious of the – at that time – modern medical treatments which would supplant their strikingly and immense tome of ‘boereraat’)14and a sprinkling of Jewish traders, millers, hoteliers, and farmers. He would have had a unique kinship and fellowship with them all because of the uniformly respectful characteristics that constituted his make-up. He had the trust, humour, patience, dedication and above all, humaneness and sensitivity to attend to his patients in this truly extraordinary environment.

Hartwig Buxbaum, the Doctor

My late mother frequently related, with a touch of disbelief, a tale about “der Ha r t w ig”. On the Leslie-Ogies road, a strip of fertile farming soil which would, forty years later, be chronicled by Geoff Sifrin,15 there lived a Jewish farmer and his newlywed wife. The lady was expecting her first child and had been a patient of Hartwig’s throughout her pregnancy. Having received an urgent call, Hartwig arrived at the farm in the early Highveld evening. Reluctant, probably, to face a world wracked by confusion and turmoil, the soon-to-be-born baby girl delayed her appearance. Nonplussed, the doctor sat on the edge of the bed with his patient, an inveterate gamer, and played cards with her until dawn saw the arrival of the infant. “Shtel zikh dos for”, my mother would say, “di beyde hobn geshpilt in korten a ganse nakht!”16

My late father enjoyed telling the (somewhat apocryphal) story of an Afrikaans farmer arriving at Hartwig’s surgery in Kinross. The rural doctor would be called upon to treat all manner of ailments, and this incident was no exception. Suffering from an incessant toothache, the farmer asked the doctor what it would cost to have the offending tooth removed. Two shillings and sixpence, Doctor Buxbaum replied. “And for the whole lot?” asked the farmer. Twelve shillings and sixpence came the reply. The farmer felt this was a reasonable deal, and that present pain would be a fair trade off to ensure a lifetime of toothless freedom from discomfort. The doctor obliged.17

My uncle had an interesting family among his patients. This was the Mbonani family, who lived on the Booysen’s farm, Schaapkraal.18The patriarch, Willem Mbonani, lorded it over his brood of at least, as I recall, three sons and a daughter. Brought up in the Ndebele traditions of their father, the brood displayed the lighter skin and facial characteristics of their mother, a ‘Coloured’ woman. The family was technically and entrepreneurially gifted, despite the grave restrictions that people of colour were subjected to, especially as farm workers. Hartwig, by equal dint of kindness and persuasion, ensured that they moved to Gustav’s f ledgling farming enterprise on Frischgewaagd, where they were to live, toil and instruct Gustav in the enterprise until he found his feet.

That my mother was in awe of Hartwig remained obvious throughout her life. She had arrived in South Africa, as previously described, a young woman steeped in the culture of German-speaking Memel on the Baltic Sea. Johannesburg was a lonely, discomfiting city, and the family lived on the edge of poverty. She yearned for the finery of their abandoned home in Memel, the music conservatoire that she loved, the forest that edged this island of old Mitteleuropaand wished desperately to return. Alas, it was by now a city that Hitler had entered via that same Baltic Sea, aboard an armed cruiser in 1939, soon after his invasion of Czechoslovakia.19

In Johannesburg, in an almost closed circle of expatriate Yekkes20 removed from the dominant Litvaks in the city, she met Gustav. They would marry in March 1942. If Johannesburg was an alienating city, a brash and harsh environment, made even Kaf kaesque by its racially differentiated structure, how daunting the prospect must have been of living on a Highveld farm, in a ramshackle home which she would share with her parents-in-law. Uncertainly, nervously, she began her walk down the aisle of the Berea synagogue that autumn day. Hartwig watched the procession, standing in the front row. She turned to him mid-step, and he returned her glance with a grand smile and a broad wink. It was a gesture she would never forget. It gave her the courage to continue her walk with her usual confident, elegant step, secure in the knowledge that she would always have an ally, a confidant. She would always like the sound of being the sister-in-law to Dr. Hartwig Buxbaum.

Rebecca Buxbaum, born Lessem

By this time, while he was the doctor in Kinross, a woman, Hedwig Hoernschemeyer, had appeared at Hartwig’s side. Born in 1907 in Wallenhorst, Germany, she was, it would always, almost subversively, be mentioned, a nurse who had previously worked with him at a hospital in Germany. She was German. She was a gentile woman. He was still married to Johanna Eva. Hartwig was torn by her arrival. He was the doctor in a small, rural town where conservatism was the watchword. But even more difficult was the discomfort he and Hedwig felt within his small, immediate family. For his religiously observantparents, just recently arrived from the impending horror in Europe, Hedwig’s presence would have been met with disbelief. She would have felt scorned; she would have felt stif led at the “small town-ness” of her situation, of the bleak Highveld landscape. The couple would later move to Durban.

Hedwig’s arrival forced Hartwig to resolve the impasse between him and Johanna Eva. In November 1938, in that awful, destructive month of Kristallnacht, he had finally begun to institute divorce proceedings against her, having come to realize that hopes of reconciliation were dim. She had, in the middle of 1938, left Edinburgh (where she had lived the previous five years) for St. Angél in Mexico City, to be with her mother and step-father. The divorce proceedings dragged on, endlessly delayed by the continental separation that made a court appearance in South Africa by Johanna, as demanded by the courts, well-nigh impossible. The divorce appears to have been eventually finalized only in September of 1941.21

It was with relief and delight that Rebecca Lessem was welcomed into the Buxbaum family by her parents-in-law, Seligmann and Bertha. They liked Gustav’s choice. Rebecca was courteous, stylish, educated, respectful and cultured. But when roused, she could display a cutting anger. She referred to her own parents as Papa and Mama, and to Gustav and Hartwig’s as Vat ter and Mutter. She confronted the bleak Highveld landscape by embracing it, delighting in the farm’s small tree-lined plantations. She saw cosmos f lowers for the first time when they returned from honeymoon in Durban, where they had spent time with Hartwig. When she saw them, from the rough gravel road leading to the farm, she persuaded Gustav to gear down the big Dodge and ran out of the car, gathering arms-full of f lowers and placing them in her lap. Gustav laughingly chided her. They were a pest he said, uncontrollable weeds in a maize field. That much he knew, after a few seasons on the farm.

Back in the small house on the farm with its outside latrine, Bertha would not forgo the habits of her previous life in Beverungen. She would rise early and prepare for the family breakfast, retire, rest, and then, in changed clothing, prepare for the family lunch, retire, rest and, again in changed clothing, present herself for the evening meal. Initially Rebecca, the worldly Memel-raised woman, surely felt uneasy in this household, especially when her mother-in-law one day very ceremoniously handed her the bunch of keys to the kitchen and linen cupboard, bare as they were, saying, “Togter, these are yours now. You run the household.”

So, despite the family fissures, by the middle of 1942 the Buxbaum family seemed to have reconstituted itself in safety  after their degrading experiences in Europe and Germany of the 1930s.

In the midst of World War II, with South African forces “up North”, Seligmann, Bertha, Gustav and Rebecca were safe on the farm. Hartwig had married Hedwig and they lived in Durban, and Sidonie, Hartwig and Gustav’s sister, was living in Ipolysag in Hungary, having borne a young son Denés. She was married to the stately Rabbi Phillip Singer, rabbi of that small town.

Sidonie and Rabbi Phillip Singer

For the German Jews in South Africa, petty restrictions abounded, and these served to heighten the unease that the Buxbaum family felt in their safe yet exilic condition. Seligmann’s registration certificate # 32522, issued under the Aliens Registration Act of 1937, saw him having to report to the police each time he departed from, or arrived in the broader municipal district. Two pages of his ‘book’ are particularly wrenching. After spending some time in Durban with Hartwig, he reported back to the Leslie police on 10 August of 1942. And on 18 November of 1942, he reported again to, in the broader scheme of things, a minor functionary at that same police station. The inscription by Sergeant JJ van Vuuren reads: “To 18 Alice Brown Road Durban, to visit sick son.”

Hartwig in Durban

It was at this Durban address that Hartwig and Hedwig had settled. Hartwig’s profession proved portable. He carried his medical expertise with him. And besides his specialized medical knowledge, he had that other priceless commodity that Joseph Conrad, in his novel Lord Jim (p11), described as “ability in the abstract”. Bearing in mind city council regulations, he could set up practice almost wherever he wished. His wife was his nursing sister. He was open for business.

Sociologists and demographers have speculated about Jews and their choice of occupation.22 Professions such as medicine, accountancy, architecture and dentistry allowed practitioners the luxury of self-employment. It lessened dependence on the vagaries of the corporate world, and ensured a protective cocoon, insulated from anti-Jewish feelings in the work place. Hartwig’s portability and “ability in the abstract” proved great assets.

Durban provided, in contrast to his previous rural consulting rooms, a cosmopolitan and exotic mix of patients. The Jewish population of the city, according to the 1936 census, stood at 2849, forming 3.1% of the white population of the city.23 It seems that the community was concentrated around the central city and the Berea. From his time in Scotland, Hartwig would have felt quite comfortable in mainly English-speaking Durban. He had, however, not previously encountered a large Black urban proletariat, but a generation or two removed from its rural, tribal life. He had probably also had very limited contact with a Hindu patient base. On the Transvaal Highveld, his contact with the Indian population was limited essentially to those of the Moslem persuasion, mainly traders by occupation. Durban was an exciting city for him. His tolerance and open mindedness, and his dedication to upholding the medical ethics of treating his middle class patients as well as the needy and the indigent, was his constant preoccupation. It would be his severest test.

The family narrative frequently repeated the unfolding of these events in Hartwig’s life, and these have been collaborated in the report of the history of the alumni of the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium.24 One of Hartwig’s patients was a middle-aged Indian man, who was suffering from typhoid fever. Hartwig nursed him as best he could. An ambulance was summoned. The narrative records that due to the war emergency measures in place at the time, ambulances were in short supply, and slow to arrive. Desperate to save the man’s life, Hartwig for once succumbed to an uncharacteristic act of impatience. Gingerly he edged back the elegant Packard that he was so fond of, helped his patient into it and then gunned the motor, racing through the gears to the hospital.

The narrative unfolds, like a play, towards its tragic ending. Hartwig fell desperately ill, having contracted typhoid fever from his patient. The news of his illness reached his patents, brother and sister-in-law on the Highveld farm. Seligmann, as recorded in the police records regulating the travel of German expatriates, hastened to Durban. Meanwhile, Hartwig’s patient strengthened and recovered from his illness. But Hartwig’s illness increased in its severity. He died, aged only 37, on 27 November 1942.25

The family sped to Durban for Hartwig’s funeral. Outside of the town of Springs, by an unhappy coincidence of driver fatigue, anxiety and misty, rainy conditions, they were involved in a terrible accident in which Bertha was fatally injured. My mother Rebecca was expecting her first child, a girl. When she was born, on 9 July 1943, she was named Beatrice, after Bertha Buxbaum, who had mourned the passing of her eldest son, Hartwig, for but a few days.

After Hartwig’s death, Hedwig married Lothar Bromberger, an émigré from Hamburg. The couple settled in Cape Town, where Hedwig passed away in 1965.26

The Singer family in Hungary

Oh Sidonie! Married only a few years and living in faraway Ipolysag, how did she hear the news

of her elder brother’s death, and her mother’s tragic end? Her husband Rabbi Philip Singer had a large and extended family in the town. But could they have quieted Sidonie in her loss, in her loneliness, in her longing? Could her small son, Denés, have given her comfort?

All of this while, Seligmann had been fretting anxiously about the safety of his daughter and son-in-law in Ipolysag. On 3 November 1939, from his new home on the Highveld farm, he sat down to write an urgent letter, a desperate plea, for his family. It was addressed to the British Chief Rabbi’s Religious Emergency Council for German, Austrian, and Czechoslovakian Jewry. Looking at the reply dated a day after the new year of 1940, in the cold light of history, the letter is striking in its almost nonchalant, bureaucratic tone. In its entirety, it reads “Dear Mr Buxbaum, Your letter of the 3rd November addressed to the Chief Rabbi has been passed on to us. In reply to it we regret to have to inform you that we are unable to assist your son-in-law Rabbi Fueloep [sic] Singer to come to this country. Owing to the war the British Government does not grant any facilities to immigrate to this country for the time being”.

There is extant a brief exchange between father and daughter sent via the intermediary office of the Red Cross of Hungary. Sidonie writes on 24 September 1941,27 “We are all well and hope the same about you. Denés is already a great boy. Sidy”. Seligmann replies on 13 January 1942, “Auch wir sind alle gesund. Hatty und Hede waren Weihnachten hier. 28Gustav hat sich verlobt. Wir gruessen euch drei. Eltern”.29

rders at the time of the Second World War, and the number of officially registered Jews in those areas was, in mid-1941, more than 803 00030. While more moderate than his predecessor, Miklos Kallay, under pressure from Germany, began a program of restricting the economic activity of Jews in the system, eliminating them from public and cultural life, and curtailing their civic rights. These measures, however, were too mild for Germany’s liking and tension was heightened between Berlin and Budapest.31 In March 1944, “Operation Margaret” commenced. The Germans occupied Hungary. Eichmann arrived in Budapest in that very month. The internment and rounding up of Hungarian Jewry began in earnest. That month, Jews were ordered to wear the Yellow Badge. This was followed ghettoization and finally the round-ups and deportations, mainly to Auschwitz. By the end of it all, some 565 000 had perished.32

Sidonie Singer (nee Buxbaum)

On 7 May 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. A postcard bearing a half-sized war-time stamp and dated 15 May, 1945, was received by Seligmann from the Apostolic Delegation in Bloemfontein, South Africa. It reads: “Dear Sir, I have received your letter of the 27thApril, and have to inform you that we are forwarding an inquiry to the Vatican by air mail regarding your daughter, son-in-law and family in Ipolysag, Hungary. If and when any reply comes, we shall let you know”.

Of the Jewish community that had previously lived peacefully in the town of Ipolysag and its vicinity, 554 men, women and children were exterminated, mainly in the Ipolysag Ghetto and in Auschwitz.33 Among them were Sidonie Singer (nee Buxbaum) and her young son, Denés.34

Sidonie’s husband, Rabbi Phillip Singer, survived Auschwitz. In Jerusalem, where he found refuge and safety, he waited desperately for his wife and child, hoping that they too had survived the atrocity, and that they would somehow find their way to Israel. He finally remarried a widow with two sons, all of whom were Holocaust survivors. He retained his deep religious faith until his peaceful death, circa 1989.

And Johanna Eva?

The divorce document gives a clue to Johanna Eva’s life after separating from Hartwig. She had left Scotland in the middle of 1938 for Mexico City where she had family and lived at Alta Vista 36, St Angél. In 1947, then aged 35 years, she married Hans (De) Neumann, a man two years her senior.35 An engineer, Neumann had been born in Graz, Austria and had also studied art in Dresden. Having lived in Prague in 1938, he was sent thence to Theresienstadt. After the war, he made his way to Mexico. Johanna Eva died on 15 June, 1982, of a cardio respiratory illness, aged seventy.36

My mother’s oft repeated remark comes to mind: “She was an heiress, you know”. How true was this? The suburb in which Johanna Eva lived when she joined her family in Mexico City gives a clue. The area has been described as follows: “The architectonic value of this zone is incalculable… [there are] spaces that represent various architectural styles such as baroque, neoclassical and neo colonial….. In this neighborhood, you can find various casonas: bold, old majestic houses that usually belonged to someone i m p o r t a nt…”37

A Tombstone, a Memorial and a Eulogy

First, a tombstone. On returning from a visit to Klaipeda (previously Memel) in Lithuania, our younger daughter, Galia, became increasingly intrigued with the family’s past. At her urging, the lonely, unmarked grave of the late Karolina Nussbaum was traced in the Johannesburg Jewish Cemetery of Brixton. She had died in March 1941, two years after her arrival in South Africa, aged 88 years. The rush of tragic events at that time, of trauma and admitted neglect had left the grave unmarked, without a tombstone. In September of 2010, this historical oversight was righted when, in the presence of a minyan (prayer quorum), a new headstone was unveiled. A plaque on the grave recalls the life of Sidonie Singer and her young son Denés.

Karolina Nussbaum and her granddaughter Sidonie

Next, a memorial. In modern Beverungen a rough-hewn rock marks the site of that landmark of Beverungen’s Jewish community, the synagogue. Recently erected by the Town’s municipality, the plaque on the rock bears the following inscription:38“HAUS LANGE STRASSE 23HIER STAND SEIT 1852DIE AM 10 NOVEMBER 1938 GEPLÜNDERTE UND GESCHÄNDETE SYNAGOGE DER ISRAELITISCHEN GEMEINDE BEVERUNGEN”.39

Finally, a eulogy. I remember well the day that first I met Rasool Malek of Kinross, who had been under house arrest for the ten years between 1963-1973, for his opposition to Apartheid. Among his close associates were Michael Harmel, Dr Yusuf Dadoo and Joe Slovo.40 I walked the high steps into the Maleks’ store with its wide, hospitable verandah. The shop was typical of those multi-range merchandise stores so characteristic of rural South African dorps of decades ago. Clothing, haberdashery, tools, building material, canned foods all packed, brimful on wooden shelves, reached the very ceiling. I was sure that Joseph Conrad’s eponymous hero Lord Jim, that merchant’s agent in the Asian and Pacific seaports would have been happy to provision ships from just such an establishment.

I was uncomfortable that first day I met Mr Malek. I was a young South African farmer who had tasted nothing but freedom my entire life. Awkwardly, I engaged this intellectual poet in some mundane discussion. I remember purposely inserting the word ‘amulet’ into this casual conversation. His face creased into a smile, his eyes f lashed in recognition of this intriguing word. I asked if he recalled my late uncle, Doctor Hartwig Buxbaum. “He lived here in the Stein’s house, right next door to your shop,” I said. He nodded vigorously. ”

Yes, I remember him well. He was a socialist”.More than all the snippets of whispered praise that I had heard down the many years about my late uncle, the Doctor Hartwig Buxbaum, this, I thought, was his finest eu log y.

Postscript

In November 2013, our elder daughter, Lara,41 received the signal honour of being awarded the Thomas Pringle prize from the English Academy in South Africa, becoming the youngest recipient of this prestigious award in its fifty-two year history. She was, at the time, completing her PhD in English Literature at Witwatersrand University.

Lara’s acceptance speech was, in her inimical style, astute, witty, incisive and self-deprecatory.

Her exhilarating concluding remark fused memory with the present, artfully aligning seemingly disparate disciplines in an emotionally charged tribute:

“I will be the second doctor in my family, but unlike the first, my great-uncle Hartwig Buxbaum, who could actually save lives, I’ll continue to bumble along, convinced that literature saves lives”.42

Stuart Buxbaum holds an honours degree in Sociology from the University of the Witwatersrand (1970) and an honours degree in Judaica from UNISA (1984). Employed in the social research unit of the Jewish Board of Deputies in the early 1970s, he subsequently farmed for many years in Mpumalanga.

NOTES

  1. SA Medical Journal, August 10, 1935, p542.
  2. Delmar, Peter, The Platinum Road: The road to Botswana,2013, p201.
  3. Meredith, Martin, Diamonds, Gold and War, 2007, p70.
  4. The villages of Leslie and Kinross are approximately 16 kms apart, on the (now) Mpumalanga Highveld, lying east of Springs and west of Bethal.
  5. Val is a village on the Highveld close to Greylingstad, on the road to Standerton. “An inn was established there that would serve the stage coach route from the Goldfields of the Lowveld, to Johannesburg” (http.valhotel.co.za).
  6. “On this farm was our trading store, post office, garage and maize mill. This small trading centre, Roodebank, was a convenient focus for the cultural and political activities of the area. So it was from the stoep of our trading store that politicians of the calibre of General Smuts, General J.B.M. Hertzog, Tielman Roos, Oswald Pirow, Denys Reitz, Jan Hofmeyr, General J.G. Kemp and many others delivered their speeches”, Rosmarin, Ike. Inside Story.W.J. Flesch and Partners (Pty) Ltd 1991, p1.
  7. “A statue which is located on the Esplanade at Aliwal Street (Durban) commemorates the ride by Dick King to Grahamstown in 1842 to obtain help for the besieged British Garrison” (www.heritagekzn.co.za).
  8. Where the Boer forces under General Louis Botha defeated Lt. Col GE Benson’s column.
  9. Gilbert, Martin, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, 2006, pp 44-52.
  10. Martha Mannsbach (nee Davids) of Beverungen, lost both her father and husband in Theresienstadt. She found safety after the war in the then Rhodesia’s copper belt, in the town of Mufulira. She and her brother, Walter Davids, relocated to Cape Town in 1963.
  11. Robins, S, Letters of Stone, 2016, p171. In this extraordinary book, Robins documents the desperate hopes and attempts of his grandparents, stranded in Nazi Berlin in the years prior to the transports to Auschwitz, to leave Germany. Robins’s father, having himself escaped Germany for the safety of Port Elizabeth, is asked, in his quest to facilitate his parents’ migration to this country, “to give an undertaking to assist… in the support of your parents thereby prevent(ing) them from becoming a burden on the Union government”. Hartwig would have received a similar instruction.
  12. Calculation done from a document found on Google, “Namensliste Beverungen”.
  13. For more on Jews escaping Europe and arriving in Lourenco Marques, see Sichel, Frieda H, From Refugee to Citizen, AA Balkema, Cape Town, 1966, pp 98-9.
  14. Frack, Isadore, A South African Doctor looks backwards and forward, 1943. Frack (p118) offers an illuminating description of such boereraat (home remedies). “Bors-druppels, pain elixirs, duiwelsdrek, levensessens, senuwee spisifik…”( p118): “Many a time, when I offered to prescribe for him, I was always met with the same reply: “Ons het ons eie medisyne” (We have our own medicine.)
  15. Sifrin, Geoff, ‘Thirty Miles of Yiddishe Farmers’ in To Gershn. Tales of P.eople of Zjembin, 1995.
  16. Yiddish: “Imagine! The two played cards for that entire night!”
  17. For corroborative evidence, see Frack (p21): “There is a great deal of dental decay in the country districts. There is a type of patient who seems to take a delight in having a couple of teeth extracted whenever he has the opportunity”.
  18. Schaapkraal lies adjacent to the farm Bakenlaagte, scene of the previously mentioned Anglo-Boer War battle.
  19. A video clip. (ww.youtube.com/watch?v=PFsfP_5AcQ4) graphically shows the event in extraordinarily dramatic detail, infused with horror.
  20. Yekkes, a (sometimes unflattering) term for German Jews and referring to the short jacket typically worn by them, in contrast to the longer clothing worn by religious East European Jews (Litvaks)
  21. My grateful thanks to the archivist Dennis Potgieter, who so cooperatively and diligently traced the divorce document of Hartwig and Johanna Eva Buxbaum Ref: vol. 5/545 01 301, 1941
  22. Dubb, A, and Della Pergola, S, Advance Report No. 9 South African Jewish Population Study, 1978.
  23. Ibid, Table 2, p4.
  24. Ostkamper, Network for Westphalian Emigration to America since the 19th Century (2003 – 2014), p6.
  25. Hartwig is buried in the Stellawood Jewish Cemetery in Durban.
  26. Ostkamper, p6.
  27. Robins (p207) tellingly describes how correspondence was regulated: “The war also made it almost impossible to send letters to countries that were at war with Germany… Letters were replaced by twenty-five-word telegrams sent through the International Red Cross Committee.”
  28. My grateful thanks are expressed to Hedwig Riegler, of Vienna, Austria, for her appreciative reading of the text and the many useful corrections to the German spelling and expressions used in the story.
  29. “We too are all well. Hatty and Hede were here for Christmas. Gustav has become engaged. We greet the three of you. Parents.”
  30. Kasnett, The World that was: Hungary/Romania, 1999, p32.
  31. Ibid, p33.
  32. Ibid, p34.
  33. www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/sahy108.htm. The list of the destroyed Jewish community of Ipolysag (now known asSahy) was translated by Yocheved Klausner.
  34. Ibid, p11.
  35. https//books.google.co.za Eva Polak Neumann
  36. My thanks to Dr Rose Lerer Cohen, genealogist, resident in Jerusalem, for tracing the immigration of JohannaEva to San Angél, Mexico. This finding led to more information of the latter days of Johanna’s life in Mexico.
  37. SanAngél, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San
  38. Buxbaum Seligman, op.cit. p. 75. The postscript was written by the present author,, who presented this history to the Eleventh International Congress of Jewish Studies, in Jerusalem in 1993, on behalf of his late grandfather. I wish to acknowledge, again, Mrs Gerda Jackson, who thirty-three years ago, translated my late grandfather’s history of the Jewish community of Beverungen into English.
  39. “The house on 23 Lange Street. Here, since 1852, stood the synagogue of the Jewish community of Beverungen, which was plundered and desecrated on the 10th November, 1938”.
  40. Information obtained from Ahmed Malek, son of the late Mr Rasool Malek.
  41. I would like to thank my wife, Denise and my daughters, Lara and Galia, for their assistance, patience and encouragement.
  42. South African Jewish Report, 8-13 November, 2013

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