In an unobtrusive building on the North Side live members of a community transplanted from another place and time: well-educated, middle-class German Jews who in the early 1930s thought they were as German as anyone else.
They learned in the most brutal ways possible that the Nazis thought otherwise. Today, more than 125 such refugees are living in the Selfhelp Home, a retirement home and health-care facility for elderly victims of Nazi persecution.
Most came to this country in the late 1930s, just before the outbreak of World War II. Some did not emigrate until after the war and spent the war years in concentration camps. Even those who escaped before the war began lost family members to the death camps.
Most came to Chicago penniless. With the support of the Chicago branch of Selfhelp, a national organization founded by German Jewish refugees to assist newly arrived emigres, they worked themselves back into the middle class.
Now the Selfhelp Home, built by Chicago’s Selfhelp organization, is home to an extraordinary group of men and women.
Here, for example, lives Heinz Graupe, the former head of the only organization devoted to the history of German Jews in Germany.
Graupe, the son of a Berlin Stock Exchange official, received a doctorate in philosophy in Berlin, then left for Israel in 1930. Despite the deaths of his parents in concentration camps, he returned to Germany in 1963 to become the first head of the Institute for the History of German Jewry in Hamburg. He came to the Selfhelp Home in 1988.
A tall, elegant, gracious man, Graupe, 88, spends most of his time battling poor eyesight to write. He is working on an article on a Jewish physicican and theologian, Schnabel Levison, for the 1996 yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, a research center for the study of the history of Jews in German-speaking countries.
The bookshelves in his apartment here are filled with volumes in English, German and Hebrew. Among them is his 1978 book, “The Rise of Modern Judaism: An Intellectual History of German Jewry 1650-1942.”
Throughout Selfhelp, the atmosphere bespeaks the kind of gracious living residents left behind in Germany.
Residents dress well, and live well. The wall in Ruth Bluethe’s apartment is lined with the burled walnut cabinets that she brought from Germany. The hallway outside the apartment of Dr. Ernst Aufrecht, a physician-and one of few Jews for 30 years in Benton, in southern Illinois-is frequently sweetened with the sounds of classical music.
Although most did not know English when they came to this country, they hardly lacked for linguistic skill. Victor Jacobson, a retired trucking industry troubleshooter, had learned French, Latin and Greek in a Hamburg gymnasium, or secondary school. At 76, he can still read a Greek newspaper.
“These are people who are educated, who are articulate,” said Dr. Sanford Finkel, director of geriatric psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, who was a psychiatric consultant at Selfhelp for 14 years.
Finkel still plays piano and sings every year at the center’s Hanukkah party, an event he regards as a highlight of his year.
“They are a proud group,” he said. “But even though there is a formality, there really is a warmth that comes through.”
He has found Selfhelp residents to be largely unscarred by their wartime experiences, exhibiting only the occasional psychiatric problem such as depression that one might find among any population of elderly people.
“There’s a sense of pride, of solidity, of character,” he said. “They enjoy museums; some travel abroad every year. There is a gusto to them.”
`A wonderful life’
For many, the success they have earned in this country does not nearly approach the kind of lives they led before the Nazis came to power.
“They love America, but most of them lost status, power and position (when they came) here,” said Selfhelp administrator Linda Fine.
“I’ve heard women sit at parties and talk about all the maids they had to prepare meals. It was a wonderful life. Then they came here and ended up washing floors.”
“What is unique about this group is that almost each case is a dramatic history of rise and fall and rise again,” said Rolf Weil, president emeritus of Roosevelt University and himself a German emigre who was president of Selfhelp from 1976 to 1992.
“These are people who worked themselves up to middle-class positions, professional positions, and then lost everything and had to re-establish themselves here.”
At Selfhelp, residents do not generally speak of their wartime tragedies.
“They don’t want to call up old memories,” said resident Victor Jacobson, 76, whose father, once a director of one of the four largest banks in Germany, was killed in a concentration camp. “Some of them went through quite a bit. I don’t blame them.”
Fine once arranged for a showing of a documentary about the Holocaust. Half the people in the room walked out.
“I don’t show that anymore,” she said.
And on a recent Selfhelp Home outing to the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Graupe refused to view Judy Chicago’s “Holocaust Project,” a series of paintings, photos and tapestries depicting images from the Holocaust.
“Someone who has lost his parents is not interested in an exhibit of Holocaust things,” he said later. “It is impossible for me.”
Unbidden memories
But for some, memories can return unbidden, especially as they grow very old and the present becomes dimmer than the past.
“People wake up and think they are in concentration camps and they scream,” said Dorothy Becker, who, with her late husband, Dr. William Becker, was instrumental in founding the Selfhelp Home. She was the home’s executive director from 1963 to 1988, and is now a resident.
“Some people, when the exterminator comes, they smell it and they think they are being gassed. Nobody can forget, nobody.”
Some residents become upset when their hair is washed or when they are bathed. Others are disturbed by the sight of caretakers in uniforms.
Last year, she said, a man in the building next to Selfhelp threatened to kill himself and a hostage. A Chicago police SWAT team responding to the emergency swarmed through Selfhelp with rifles.
“My people were petrified, no matter how much we tried to explain,” Fine said. “They were shivering in their rooms.”
And toward the end of their lives, residents who once spoke English well sometimes revert to German.
It was just such people that Selfhelp was created to assist.
Selfhelp was founded in New York in 1935 by a group of German emigres, many of them professors at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. They called the organization the Selbsthilfe-Selfhelp of Emigres from Central Europe. Its first head was the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich.
Chapters were started in Paris and, in 1938, in Chicago, where Hyde Park was home to growing numbers of German Jewish refugees.
“We were about five women,” recalled Dorothy Becker, 83, who was among the first Selfhelp organizers in Chicago. “We collected clothing for children who outgrew it; we cleaned people’s homes.
“We had to do something,” she said. “We were saved. Anyone who was saved had an obligation.”
Took care of each other
The group took care of the sick; helped newcomers find apartments and jobs; and arranged for single people to rent rooms from families so all would have a place to live.
“Every family had a little box where you would put in pennies, nickels and dimes,” said Weil, whose mother was an active Selfhelp volunteer. “There would be a box collection every few months.”
“We wanted to be independent,” Becker said. “We wanted to do everything ourselves, without help from anybody.”
Virtually unknown outside the insular German Jewish community, Selfhelp became a social circle as well as a helping organization.
“My parents came here for the kaffeeklatsch two times a week,” said Hanna Adler, an opera singer who now lives at the Selfhelp Home, referring to the social gatherings that have been held regularly at the home since the tradition was begun on the South Side in 1957. “I came, too, and sang for them.”
But even after the refugees climbed back into the middle class, they found there was still a need for Selfhelp.
“They had parents, in some cases grandparents, who didn’t speak English and couldn’t make it any more in this country,” Weil said. “They needed an environment in which they would be comfortable.”
In 1950, the Chicago group, led by William Becker, who was president of Selfhelp from 1947 until his death in 1963, bought a three-story brick-and-stone building at 4941 Drexel Blvd. The next year, the Selfhelp Home for Aged Immigrants opened.
“After six months, we had a waiting list of 100,” Dorothy Becker said. “After one year, we had a waiting list of 300.” Even after an addition was added in 1957, the home’s capacity of 41 residents was far exceeded by demand.
In 1963, shortly after William Becker died, Selfhelp opened a second home on Argyle Street on the North Side. An addition was built in 1974, and the South Side house was sold.
Reparations and grants
Aside from a low-interest federal loan for the original building and a federal mortgage guaranty for the addition, most of the funding came from Selfhelp members.
And a small amount, Weil said, came from restitution payments from the German and Austrian governments for the destruction of communal Jewish property such as synagogues and Jewish centers. The home also received a grant from Mercedes Benz in Germany, he said, which used slave labor during the war.
“We’re in the process right now of building an activity complex on the second floor, which is the result of contributions from West and East Germany,” Weil said.
In addition, more than 80 percent of the residents get some sort of monthly payment from the governments of Germany or Austria, he said. These are either reparations for pain they suffered during the Holocaust, compensations for property taken from them, or pensions for jobs they held in Germany or Austria.
“Obviously, that’s not going to bring back the dead or make up for the suffering in the camps,” Weil said. “But it nevertheless is more than most countries have done to make up for wrongs. Many of our residents would not be able to live as well as they do if it weren’t for the fact that they got restitution money.”
Hearing their stories
Their remarkable and tragic life experiences make Selfhelp residents a priceless historical resource. The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago has sent young interns to Selfhelp to hear residents’ stories.
Kurt Schwerin, professor emeritus at Northwestern University Law School and a longtime active member of Selfhelp who is now a resident of the home, debated Holocaust revisionist Arthur Butz on television several times.
The home provides another important resource for the Chicago-area Jewish community: a two-volume publication that lists every Jew known to have been killed during the Holocaust.
The list, published by the German government, runs 1,737 pages, with the names written in small type, single-spaced. The books are used both by Selfhelp residents and local Jews who want to find out what happened to relatives.
The Selfhelp residents are witnesses to not only the tragedies of the Holocaust, but the richness of a way of life long gone. As the German Jewish refugee population ages and its ranks dwindle, memories are disappearing. The average age on Selfhelp’s independent living floors is nearly 90; on the intermediate-care floors, it is 92.
“It’s the end of a generation,” Sanford Finkel said. “The world in Chicago will not see the likes of them again-their education, their background, their heritage. Over the next decade or so, there won’t be any left. They are irreplaceable.”
