What We Are Reading:
Normal Changes All the Time

Roger Berkowitz

Rebecca Traister tells the incredible story of Marga Griesbach, now 92 and a survivor of—well of everything. Griesbach just recently made it back from a harrowing cruise to her home in Washington state. She was born Marga Steinhardt in Germany in 1927. 
 

Marga Steinhardt was born in Witzenhausen, a town in central Germany, in 1927, five years before Adolf Hitler came to power. I met her in November 2019, when we spoke for hours in the Brooklyn living room of her daughter, whom she was visiting. As we’d parted, I’d asked if I might visit her in Washington in the spring to talk more, but she’d waved me off: She’d be on a lengthy cruise, she told me. If I wanted to come later in the year, when the weather was better, I’d be welcome; “That’s if,” she said, laughing, “I’m still alive.”

The Steinhardts lived on the Marktplatz of Witzenhausen, and Marga said she can remember looking out the window as a very little kid and watching Nazis and Communists “beating each other bloody” until her parents told her to come away. The only Jewish child in her class, she was forced to sit in a corner, but, she said, she wasn’t bothered by the isolation. “You just adapted to it.”...

In 1937, an offer came: Marga could be adopted by a family in Hawaii. “They said, ‘It’s up to you, but then you’ll be their child.’ ”

“I was already 10,” said Marga. “So I said, ‘No, I’m not going to be adopted.’ ”

In the early evening of November 8, 1938, Marga and her brother, Alfred, five years her junior, were playing in the backyard of a Jewish friend when Therese arrived to collect them. “ ‘Something’s going to happen tonight,’ ” Therese said. “ ‘You and your brother have to come home.’ ” As they followed, Marga noticed that their landlord, who usually kept the lights dark in the evening, had left them on — a signal, she presumed, that there were Jews living there. The family barricaded themselves inside Max and Therese’s bedroom, a chest pushed against the door.

When Marga left for school the next day, she saw torn prayer books in the market square. As she walked on, she saw people gathered in front of the synagogue. “As I came down, a couple of people upstairs threw a piano through the window from the Jewish teacher’s apartment.” Then she saw the synagogue itself. “The front door was open, some pews had been pulled out and were smashed; every place prayer books, prayer shawls. I was petrified. Then somebody saw me and yelled, ‘A Jew girl!’ A couple of them started running after me. I turned around and ran to get home.”

That afternoon, Marga, who described herself as “a very curious child,” walked back to the synagogue and went in through the women’s entrance, then into the genizah, the area where the congregation kept old books that, according to the Jewish faith, could not be destroyed because they might contain the name of God. Marga looked at all the religious texts and schoolbooks going back decades. “I was only 11 years old,” she said, “and it just hit me how old the Jewish congregation was and that there was no future.” That night, as the violent Kristallnacht pogroms swept Europe, the Witzenhausen synagogue was burned to the ground.