The incredible perseverance of the Jewish Olonetzky family
Published: Thursday, Apr 18th 2024, 11:01
Updated At: Wednesday, Apr 24th 2024, 15:21
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Zurich-based author Nadine Olonetzky has published her family history under the title "Where does the light go when the day has passed". In it, she makes it clear that the Shoah is not only important for Germany, but also for Switzerland.
On a bench in the Botanical Gardens in Zurich, Benjamin Olonetzky told his then 15-year-old daughter for the first and only time how he survived the Second World War. Decades later, at the end of 2019, this daughter, the Swiss editor and publisher Nadine Olonetzky, contacted the "Initiative Stolpersteine Stuttgart". She wanted to have a stumbling stone placed for her grandfather Moritz Olonetzky. "One of those ten by ten centimeter stones with a brass plate engraved with his name and his fate would henceforth commemorate him," she writes in her book.
Prior to this, Olonetzky began her biographical research with an internet search for the name Olonetzky. In the chapter "Reading", she describes how she first searched for her grandfather Moritz, then for her grandmother Malka, her father's name and those of her aunts and uncles Anna, Paula, Efrem and Avram. She had not expected the many documents she found.
Grandfather Moritz had been a tobacco merchant and agent until 1938. Then the Nazis frowned upon tobacco as "the red man's revenge on the white race", the company was "Aryanized" and the Jewish employees were conscripted into forced labour.
Language of the National Socialists
In the first part of her book, Nadine Olonetzky traces step by step how her family's possessions and property were taken from them and how they were deprived of all humanity on the basis of the documents available. The language used in the documents seems just as egregiously euphemistic and bureaucratic as the events themselves. "The actual trigger for using the material in quotations was the term 'the confiscation of household goods'. After everything that the Nazis had taken from my grandfather, reading this language triggered an impulse in me: I absolutely have to tell this story," Nadine Olonetzky told the Keystone-SDA news agency.
Everything was documented by the National Socialists: "The film 'Die Sammlung der Stuttgarter Juden auf dem Killesberg', a fragment of which has been preserved, had to demonstrate how well the 'emigration' was organized. [...] The Gestapo confiscated everything; that was an order. Everything except 55 Reichsmarks. Everyone paid for the 'transportation to the East' themselves, 50 RM for a one-way 3rd class ticket without a return journey, 5 RM for a package of provisions," the book says.
Olonetzky allows herself to be looked over the shoulders during this research. She does not claim to be unambiguous, asks questions and reveals that she does not have answers for everything. Like in a crime novel, she puzzles out a plausible story step by step from documented moments and witness statements - despite incorrect spellings, inaccuracies and contradictions.
Labor camps in Switzerland
The second part of the book begins after the father's successful escape, which ended in one of the 600 detention and labor camps in Switzerland. After the war, he was told relatively quickly to leave Switzerland "at the first reasonable opportunity". For example, to Israel. There, his brother Efrem tried to make a fresh start as a press photographer.
Benjamin Olonetzky was not in the right mental and physical condition to be deported from Switzerland for the time being. He stayed. For 24 years, he fought for restitution: "My father had lost everything and all his identity papers etc. and then had to prove everything, explain it under oath, find witnesses. And then came the rejections and the demands for new evidence, until he finally had to accept a settlement - after the usual downward calculations. I also wanted to tell that story."
In her book, Olonetzky also takes a critical look at the fact that such "reparation" was initially reserved for Jews, who were (financially) supported in their complaints by Jewish organizations. Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, people with physical disabilities and other victims were not legally considered for a long time.
While Olonetzky struggled through over 2,500 documents, another war became omnipresent: the images from today's Ukraine overlap with the research, she explains in the interview: "Even today, people are persecuted, they have to flee, lose everything, mourn their loved ones, rebuild something in a new place, live with what they have suffered. They find happiness again, but they have shadows. "*
*This text by Philine Erni, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation
©Keystone/SDA
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