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Eisendrath: een verzonken familie [1845-1945]
In 1845 the Prussian government made it compulsory for all Jews on their territory to adopt a heritable name, I guess that means one that makes it easy to define them as Jewish.
Samson Nathan chose Eisendrath, a combination of iron and thread. It was unique. No other family in the world had that name.
He had 18 children with his wife Julia. They worked on finding their luck outside of Westfalen. Over the years, all but the eldest son Baruch emigrated to Chicago. He went to Amsterdam and worked to become a respected citizen there.
A year after that time, not a single person of the name Eisendrath from that family lived in Holland. Those that lived in Holland in 1942 in Zaandam, the home of GP Dr Bernard Eisendrath and his 5 children landed in the Amsterdam Ghetto, a step towards their final undoing. Their world became one of being in hiding and trouble, betrayal and destruction.
This is a heartbreaking story of the holocaust, one family, four countries and one hundred years.
"About the situations and people here, many books could be written - but no happy ones". - Iris Eisendrath, August 1943
Samson Nathan chose Eisendrath, a combination of iron and thread. It was unique. No other family in the world had that name.
He had 18 children with his wife Julia. They worked on finding their luck outside of Westfalen. Over the years, all but the eldest son Baruch emigrated to Chicago. He went to Amsterdam and worked to become a respected citizen there.
A year after that time, not a single person of the name Eisendrath from that family lived in Holland. Those that lived in Holland in 1942 in Zaandam, the home of GP Dr Bernard Eisendrath and his 5 children landed in the Amsterdam Ghetto, a step towards their final undoing. Their world became one of being in hiding and trouble, betrayal and destruction.
This is a heartbreaking story of the holocaust, one family, four countries and one hundred years.
"About the situations and people here, many books could be written - but no happy ones". - Iris Eisendrath, August 1943
160 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
January 9, 2020
What a wonderful, but very sad book. I was working on my genealogy on MyHeritage and was contacted by a member of the Eisendrath family who discovered that we were related through one of the very few surviving members of this family still living in Holland.
One of the 46 members of this family from Zaandam in Holland, all murdered by the Nazis, in 3 concentration camps, Iris Eisendrath, murdered with gas in Auschwitz, on the year of her death said "Over the circumstances and people here, many books could be written - but no happy ones".
Having said that, there are many touching moments in this book, including some very frank and fascinating insights about Dr Bernard Eisendrath, who by all accounts was a very good doctor, but also at times a real character, who couldn't resist helping himself to food from any table, even when doing house calls.
The book talks about a family's love, their place in society, in the resistance, helped by the resistance and betrayed by Dutch traitors in stories that could belong in a movie. However there are no happy endings, except for other parts of the family who went from Germany to other parts of the world, particularly the US, before WWII.
The prose in this book is wonderful. Dutch is a very nice descriptive language, made for metaphor and romantic literature and Erik Schaap, the author has done an amazing job to make this a fascinating, heart rending read, made all the more poignant to me, fo being about my own relatives.
In an interesting tangent (my life seems to have many of those), my grandmother, a well known German/Dutch Authoress, Elizabeth Augustin (Amongst her writings is a book called The Uncompleted Life of Malcolm X), whose mother was also murdered by the Nazi's in Kamp Sobibor, was a big fan of Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement. She would have been fascinated to know that on my father's side of the family was Rabbi Maurice Nathan Eisendrath (1902-1973) who marched in Selma with Martin Luther King on that famous day, side by side with Luther King, Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_(...
Anyway, if you can read Dutch, I recommend this as a not a good read, but a GREAT READ.
One of the 46 members of this family from Zaandam in Holland, all murdered by the Nazis, in 3 concentration camps, Iris Eisendrath, murdered with gas in Auschwitz, on the year of her death said "Over the circumstances and people here, many books could be written - but no happy ones".
Having said that, there are many touching moments in this book, including some very frank and fascinating insights about Dr Bernard Eisendrath, who by all accounts was a very good doctor, but also at times a real character, who couldn't resist helping himself to food from any table, even when doing house calls.
The book talks about a family's love, their place in society, in the resistance, helped by the resistance and betrayed by Dutch traitors in stories that could belong in a movie. However there are no happy endings, except for other parts of the family who went from Germany to other parts of the world, particularly the US, before WWII.
The prose in this book is wonderful. Dutch is a very nice descriptive language, made for metaphor and romantic literature and Erik Schaap, the author has done an amazing job to make this a fascinating, heart rending read, made all the more poignant to me, fo being about my own relatives.
In an interesting tangent (my life seems to have many of those), my grandmother, a well known German/Dutch Authoress, Elizabeth Augustin (Amongst her writings is a book called The Uncompleted Life of Malcolm X), whose mother was also murdered by the Nazi's in Kamp Sobibor, was a big fan of Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement. She would have been fascinated to know that on my father's side of the family was Rabbi Maurice Nathan Eisendrath (1902-1973) who marched in Selma with Martin Luther King on that famous day, side by side with Luther King, Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_(...
Anyway, if you can read Dutch, I recommend this as a not a good read, but a GREAT READ.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review