Esther Clifford's Prewar Experience
Esther Clifford (nee Ebe) was born on December 5th, 1920 in Munich to Polish parents, who had moved to Germany in order to escape pogroms and pursue a better education for their children. After the Beer Hall Putsch, the Ebe family settled in Frankfurt; there, Esther’s parents attended a shtiebel (a small, less formal synagogue) with their fellow Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews, while Esther and her siblings preferred the more modern, German Börneplatz synagogue. The Ebes were initially dismissive of Hitler, but after he took power in 1933, life gradually worsened — the Hitler Youth threatened Esther and her friends on their walk to school, antisemitic cartoons in Der Stürmer were circulated around town, the town residents burned Jewish books, and an uncle was pushed into the river by Nazi sympathizers. Soon, the Nazis stopped issuing business permits to Polish Jews, and Esther’s father had to close his leather business. Though he continued working in secret, with the help of his children, the family struggled financially as a result of this closure. Unfortunately, the family’s persistent efforts to emigrate failed, and in late October 1938, the Ebes, along with many other Polish Jews, were deported to Poland, though Esther managed to escape and return to Frankfurt. After witnessing the horrors of Kristallnacht, and spending a few more months hiding from the Nazis, Esther got a visa to England, where she immigrated and survived the war. Her parents and two of her four siblings were killed.
Though Esther’s story is undoubtedly similar to that of many Holocaust survivors, some of the most critical turning points in her experience are due to her being the child of Polish immigrants. The Nazis looked down on Polish Jews more than German Jews during this time period, and both the closure of her father’s business and the Ebe family’s deportation to Poland (and subsequent murder) occurred earlier than similar persecutions of German Jews. Overall, Esther’s roots in a Polish Jewish family heavily shaped her experience in prewar Nazi Germany.
While the Nazis considered Jews in general to be inferior, they had a special disdain for Polish Jews, who were quite distinct compared to their German counterparts. Many Polish Jews were poor, relatively uneducated, and worked blue-collar jobs, which stood in stark contrast to the well-educated, highly successful German Jews (Lecture 2). While German Jews were generally assimilated — speaking, dressing, and looking German — the Polish Jews spoke Yiddish, dressed differently, and generally did not interact with the secular world in the same way as German Jews (Lecture 7). For example, Picture 1 depicts two rabbis speaking in front of the Breuer’s yeshiva, an Orthodox synagogue and religious academy located in Esther’s neighborhood in Frankfurt. These rabbis, while not necessarily Polish themselves, exhibit many of the unique characteristics of these Eastern Jews, which included strict religious observance, their own language (Yiddish), long beards, and unique dress (Bergen 19-20).
Thus, the Polish Jews that lived in Germany during the 1930’s stood out to the Nazis compared to the German Jews, and were an easy target for persecution. Furthermore, it was easier for the Nazis to garner support for actions against the Polish Jews, since many Germans felt a certain sense of comradeship with their Jewish compatriots — many Nazis even had Jewish friends (Allen 85) — which they did not feel towards the Polish Jews. Indeed, even though the Ebe family did not perfectly fit this stereotype (they did not pray at the Breuer synagogue, for example), they still were Polish immigrants who spoke Yiddish and were thus included in this category of Polish Jews. Esther herself even sensed this distinction between German and Polish Jews, mentioning that she was “always a little bit ashamed of the fact that [her parents] spoke Yiddish” (Tape 2 ~3:50). Overall, with the Polish Jews sticking out as an “other,” they were an obvious target for early Nazi persecution.
An additional reason for this unique treatment of Polish Jews is the special position they occupied in the Nazi racial worldview. In addition to being Jews, with all the accompanying traits and stereotypes that the Nazis attributed to the “Jewish Race,” the Polish Jews were also Slavs, a group that similarly sat at the bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy. Hitler and the Nazis believed in Lebensraum — the idea that the superior German race required more living space — and thus the Poles and Russians who occupied vast tracts of land in Eastern Europe were standing directly in the way of the Germans’ survival. Indeed, from Hitler’s perspective, the two “prime threats to the survival and dominance of his [Hitler’s] ‘Aryans’ were the Poles...who occupied that land and the Jews, who, in his theory, sought to infiltrate, weaken, and destroy German strength” (Bergen 52). The Polish Jews, being both Jews and Slavs, were therefore doubly problematic to the Nazis.
As antisemitic persecution began to intensify in the years after Hitler took power, the Ebe family was “treated worse than the German Jews around that time [1933-7]” (Tape 2 ~13:00). One notable example of their mistreatment involved Esther’s father’s business, where he made and sold leather bags. In 1936, he went to renew a permit that was necessary to operate the business, but was denied the permit because he was a Polish Jew. As a result, he was forced to make and sell bags in secret, with his children taking on jobs to help support the family. Despite these efforts, the Ebe family “didn't have enough money to pay their rent, to pay for food” (Tape 2 ~14:00). Interestingly, though the Ebe family lost their business in 1936 because they were Polish Jews, the Nazis didn’t forcibly aryanize the businesses of German Jews until after Kristallnacht in 1938 (Lecture 11). Thus, this major turning point in Esther’s story can be directly tied to her status as a Polish Jew.
Another major event in Esther’s story that was shaped by her being a Polish Jew was her family’s deportation to Poland. On October 28, 1938, SS soldiers stormed the Ebe household, forced the family to pack up their belongings, and loaded them into a truck with other Jews. They were then brought to the train station and packed into a train to a border town called Beuthen. There, Esther’s family continued on to Poland, where they were later murdered by the Nazis, but Esther was held in the town synagogue (Picture 2) for a few days. With the help of some local Jews, Esther escaped from Beuthen, and eventually made her way back to Frankfurt, and later England. This deportation is yet another example of how Esther being a Polish Jew affected her experience in prewar Nazi Germany. These early deportations were unique to Polish Jews — Esther describes the train as being “only Polish Jews,” and it was the first time that “Jews were deported in such masses” (Tape 2 ~26:30). German Jews, on the other hand, were not deported en masse until 1942 (Bergen 242).
Overall, Esther Clifford had a drastically different experience of prewar Nazi Germany than most German Jews because of her Polish heritage. The Nazis detested the Polish Jews, whose distinct appearances, language, and customs, along with their Slavic background, made them stick out as an “other” in German society, much more so than the German Jews. Thus, as the Nazis began to persecute Jews in Germany, Esther and her family felt the effects of this persecution more intensely and earlier on than most German Jews, as evidenced by the closure of her father’s business and her family’s deportation. Though Esther is just one of the thousands of Jews who lived under Nazi persecution in prewar Germany, her story offers a fascinating insight into the experience of Polish Jews during this time period.
Works Cited:
Allen, William Sheridan. The Nazi Seizure of Power: the Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945. Echo Point Books & Media, LLC, 2014.
Bergen, Doris L. War & Genocide: a Concise History of the Holocaust. University of British Columbia Crane Library, 2017.
Bloch, Brandon. “HIST 1049: Nazi Germany and the Holocaust." Cambridge, MA
Dansky, Irene and Esther Clifford. “Interview of Esther Clifford.” USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 3 Nov, 1996, https://vha-usc-edu.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/viewingPage?testimonyID=22689&returnIndex=0#. Accessed 27 Mar. 2020