COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Susan and William Otten had planned their river cruise through Germany early last year, envisioning stops along the Rhine River to explore markets, castles and museums.
As anticipation grew, so too did Otten’s quest to learn more about his German-Jewish ancestry. His efforts would lead him to a German town, some grim discoveries and a renewed sense of social justice.
And much of it was sparked by a librarian.
Angela O’Neal is the manager of the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Local History and Genealogy division, home to thousands of books and directories on the third floor of the Main Library.
“A lot of people think we can only do genealogy for central Ohio. But we have resources from all around the world,” O’Neal said.
Otten, she said, “came to us knowing his family was from Germany, but not really sure what he was going to find. Based on the family name, we were able to trace back to his father and who his grandparents were. Once we found the town, we were able to verify some contact information.”
From the library’s collection, Otten learned that his paternal grandparents lived in Goppingen, a southern German city about the size of Dublin, Ohio. He found cemetery records and a contact for the local Jewish museum.
“Their curiosity, from the beginning, was part of the inspiration for me,” Otten said of library employees. He emailed the museum and told them he might be able to visit.
By mid-November, at the end of the cruise, the couple had three extra days and traveled to Goppingen, not knowing who or what to expect.
They were met by a welcoming committee. Meals, gifts and a proclamation followed. More surprising was a visit to his grandparents’ home and the still-operating textile plant they had owned.
There also were stories about their Jewish ancestry, anti-Semitic bigotry and the loss of everything with the rise of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany.
As a child, Otten remembered stories from his father, Richard, but he died when William was 12. An engineer, the father gave his son a sketch he had made of the plant, but he rarely spoke about the painful side of life in Germany, which he fled in 1937.
“I had a hunger ever since I was a child to learn more about my father’s family. … While he shared quite a bit of information with me, for a child, his passing left a huge, unanswered void.”
A ceremony to lay markers outside his grandparents’ home was a highlight of the trip.
It was in and around Goppingen, almost 80 years ago, that Luise and Alfred Ottenheimer lived a middle-class lifestyle, raising two sons while operating the Factura von Gebrüder Ottenheimer (Factory of the Brothers Ottenheimer), which operates today under new ownership.
The markers - cobblestone-size blocks with brass nameplates - are popping up around Germany as part of the Stolpersteine, or “Stumbling Blocks,” initiative to memorialize those who lost their lives, relatives or property to Nazi persecution.
Before the Holocaust and purging of non-Aryans, Otten’s father, Richard, fled to New York while Otten’s uncle went to Cuba. Their lives in Germany and dreams of inheriting the family business were gone.
“Any plans were ruined when power transferred to the Nazis in 1933,” Klaus Maier-Rubner, the town’s representative of the local Stolpersteine society, said at the Nov. 13 ceremony.
Otten’s grandfather died in 1938, shortly after being forced to sell the business and his home at below-market value. His death, Otten said, was “likely as a result of the emotional trauma of being forced to give up property which took him a lifetime to accumulate.” The plant eventually was left under Nazi control.
His grandmother was swept up in deportation raids in early 1942, ending up near Riga, Latvia. She was killed there or in the Jungfernhof concentration camp in Latvia.
“In whatever way Luise was murdered by the Nazis, her death was horrible,” Maier-Rubner told the Ottens.
Today, at 65, Otten, a Clintonville resident and retired labor organizer with the Ohio Education Association, wants to share his story, hoping that the horrors of intolerance aren’t repeated.
Otten was inspired by those he befriended.
“It was very easy to feel their remorse,” he said of his hosts. “Some of the feeling of shame undoubtedly was because of the fact that they were one or two generations removed. And they had to know of some level of their family involvement in the Nazi atrocities.”
After returning home, Otten again met with O’Neal at the library.
“It was definitely a life-changing experience,” she said. “He went through that discovery process. You could tell he had changed.”
Ancestral secrets can sometimes be disturbing, said O’Neal.
“Everybody responds differently to what they find. It’s really a very human story, whether your ancestor is on the right side or wrong side of history. They are still a person.”
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Information from: The Columbus Dispatch, https://www.dispatch.com
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