Ron Sommers |

The telephone lines were running hot after Ron received the invitation from the city administration of Frankfurt he had been waiting for. His father Walter Sommers called him several times on that day telling him what there was to see and explore: the school (Musterschule) that Walter had once attended, their apartments in Loenstraße and Finkenhofstraße, the head office of the “Wittwe-Hassan” chain stores in Hanauer Landstraße which his grandfather had helped to establish etc.

Walter asked me to remind Ron to bring his hiking shoes so that we could go hiking in the Taunus mountains to those places where the family used to start on the weekends for the peaks of Fuchstanz or Feldberg.

“Why am I here?” was a question Ron rhetorically asked at the beginning of his visit to the school (Musterschule). He is here, upon the invitation of the city administration, because his family used to be firmly rooted in Germany and in Frankfurt. The families originally came from Northern Hesse and moved to Frankfurt around the turn of the century. Walter Sommers was born in Frankfurt in 1920 into an upper middle-class family who ran a thriving chain store. In and around Frankfurt there were about 34 Wittwe Hassan stores selling coffee, cakes and other delicatessen. Walter has only good memories of the time before 1933.

After the Nazis had taken over, the situation gradually changed. And at the very same time when Julius Sommer still was taking part in the May Parade with his car on May 1, 1933, his son experienced the expulsion from his sports club as the first deep cut in his life. In 1936 he had to leave Musterschule, the school of which he still speaks with respect and esteem (Zeugnis Musterschule).

The family thought about emigration, but hesitated to take action. They considered themselves Germans in the first place and then Jewish, as Ron emphasized in his final address at the Frankfurt town hall Roemer. A visit of a family delegation to the United States in 1936 also confirmed them in their decision “We stay here!” (i.e. in Germany), a fatal step as many members of the family lost their lives shortly after. Walter took up an apprenticeship in Hamburg. There he learned that his father had been arrested in November 1938. Julius Sommer was detained in Buchenwald for several weeks. When he was released, he was a broken man. It was high time to leave the country. The family started preparations for emigration. In January 1939, Julius and Helen Sommer and their children Walter and Lore left Germany. The United States became their new home. Walter went to war in the Pacific for the United States and changed his name to Sommers. He turned his back on the old country and became a patriotic American. The family moved to the Midwest, where Ron and his sister Nancy grew up. German was no longer spoken in the family; and Germany at large was passed over in silence. It was only at school that Ron was confronted with the Holocaust. And yet, the German origin of the family showed up at times, e.g in the form of “Struwwelpeter” with which the children grew up as Ron and Nancy remember. In 1970, Walter and Louise Sommers came to Germany for the first time in order pay respect to the graves of their ancestors. Walter was in Franfurt for one day only. He felt oppressed. “I did not feel particularly well. It was easier for me to go to Munich than to be here in Frankfurt.”
Twenty years later the couple visited Frankfurt again; this time upon the invitation of the city administration. Walter went to his old school, Musterschule, and talked to the students. The invitation of the city and the opportunity to tell his life story to young people changed Walter Sommers’ attitude towards his old hometown. He started to study the Holocaust intensively, he gives speeches in schools and in the little Holocaust Museum in his hometown Terre Haute, and he initiated a school competition in Frankfurt titled “They lived next door … Jews in Frankfurt”. “It would be a great satisfaction for me, and the memory of my parents would be honored, if young German students seriously concerned themselves with what happened to their neighbors who happened to be of Jewish belief and whose misfortune it was to become victims of Nazi persecution.” The results of that competition were presented in an exhibition and compiled in a documentation. Today his father got bright eyes when he talked about Frankfurt, Ron told the students at Musterschule.

Search for Traces

What was the most important moment of his stay in Frankfurt? It takes Ron time to find an answer. It is hard to decide. Is it the graves of his greatgrandparents Moses and Bertha Sommer at the Jewish cemetary at Rat-Beil-Straße? They are the last graves of the family that used to be so deeply rooted in Germany. The two graves were hardly visible. The last visit of a relative was in the nineties. In the meantime a thin layer of moss had covered up the surface of the tombstones, and it took quite an effort to remove it.

Or is it the story of the cow at Loenstraße? Ron grew up with the story that the family bought a cow during the world depression that grazed in their garden and gave milk. Ron and his wife look with astonishment at the former head office of the “Wittwe Hassan” company at Hanauer Landstraße and at the place where there used to be one of the chain stores in Oberursel. But he was also moved by the hike through the Taunus mountains, in the footsteps of his father, and by the visit at Musterschule which his father had so warmly recommended to him as well as the hike from Hohemark to Fuchstanz.

The “Stumbling Stones” for a brother of his grandfather, for Salomon and his wife Betty Sommer at Schleidenstraße, initiated by the present inhabitants of the house and the meeting with them also left a deep impression on the Texan.
When the official Visiting Program was over, Ron headed for Heinebach in Northern Hesse, the birthplace of his grandfather. His father Walter had made it a point that he had been in Heinebach only once when he was a child and that in the thirties the overt anti-Semitism in that region kept them from visiting the birthplace of the paternal family.

Accompanied by Hans-Peter Klein and other local historians, Ron visited the places of his paternal family, the house, in which the Sommer children grew up, and the Jewish cemetary in which many of his ancestors are buried. Ron is the first family member to trace the whereabouts of his family in Northern Hesse.

How did the students react to Ron’s report? Before the discussion they were sceptical as to how “productive” a discussion with the child of a contemporary witness would be, says teacher Kathrin Guttmann. But their scepticism soon vanished because Ron could not only retell the experiences of his parents, but also express his view of history and of present-day topics.

The ancestors of Ron Sommers, as the family named itself in the US, had lived since the mid-18th century in Heinebach, a village about 30 miles southeast of Kassel in the Fulda river valley, now part of the community of Alheim in the district of Hersfeld-Rotenurg (www.heinebach.de/geschichte/Juden.htm). The Jewish congregation had its own synagogue with school and mikwe, the deceased were buried in the Jewish cemetary at Binsfoerth, the oldest collective cemetary in Northern Hesse. Most of the men were cattle-dealers, Ron Sommers’ great-grandfather, Moses Sommer, was a butcher. Moses, his brother and an uncle fought in the war of 1870/71 (between Germany and France). Since the middle of the 18th century the Sommer family had owned a house and estate where they had lived and worked for five generations before Ron Sommers’ grandfather Julius Sommer moved to Frankfurt at the beginning of the 20th century to take over the coffee business of “Witwe Hassan” in 1912 (www.juden-in-nordhessen.co.de Genealogien juedischer Familien – Sommer aus Heinbach).

We started our search for traces at Rotenburg an der Fulda at the Jewish Museum in the former mikwe (www.Mikwe.hassia-judaica.de). During the restoration at the beginning of this century the excavators not only revealed the 19th century mikwe, but also hitherto unknown remnants of an earier mikwe dating back to he 17th century. In addition, the museum, of which Dr. Heinrich Nuhn is the director, owns many documents on Jewish life as well as numerous biographies of Jewish families of the region Hersfeld-Rotenburg, including those of Heinebach and of the Sommer family. For Ron Sommers this museum was an impressive example of how to deal with the historic and cultural memory of the area. He discovered a number of details about his ancestors and got a good idea of Jewish life in Norhtern Hesse.

Following the Fulda river valley we headed for Heinbach where we were met in the parsonage by Mrs. Sabine Haede and Mr. Wilhelm Soedler. They had spread out numerous documents, genealogies and photographs on the table in the living-room which got us rightaway into an interesting exchange of experiences and provided Ron Sommers with many names and stories about his ancetors. Our hosts had intensively studied the history of their hometown and in particular the history of the Jewish community and the Jewish families. Mrs. Haede had written her examination paper on that subject, and Mr. Soedler, a retired teacher, had researched and documented the history of the community of Heinebach for many decades. During a stroll through the village Ron Sommers saw house and estate (Im Hof 9) in which the Sommer family had lived and worked for centuries, and the synagogue the inventory of which was destroyed in 1938. The building itself, a framework house which also housed the school and mikwe was saved but is presently in very bad condition.

Ron Sommers was impressed by the engagement with which Mrs. Haede and Mr. Soeldner had researched and doumented the history of the Jewish families, and appreciated the contribution they thus rendered to the memory of the Jewish history of heir hometown.

The last stop of our tour was the Jewish cemetary at Binsfoerth. It is the oldest Jewish cemetary in Northern Hesse dating back to the 17th century. It is situated outside the village on a slope above the Fulda river. There are 256 tombstones which were documented by the Commission of the History of the Jews in Hesse and made accessible in the internet (www.lagis-hessen.de/de/subjects/index/sn/juf).

Thanks to a plan of the site which Mrs. Haede had given us it was not difficult to find the graves of the three direct ancestors of Ron Sommers who are buried here: great-great-great-grandfather Joseph Sommer and great-great-grandparents Itzig Sommer and Marianne Sommer, née Abt. In the nineties of the past century the tombstones of the Jewish cemetaries in Hesse were restored and put in place again where possible. Since then the cemetaries are in an acceptable state and are important places for visitors in search of traces of their ancestors. This positive impression and the fact that the local people care for their history is what Ron Sommers took with him after the visit to the graves of his ancestors.

So family means something significant to us, and this visit to Frankfurt is the kind of experience as a descendant that is meaningful for me, because it helped me to establish an identity, maybe an identity, that I really didn`t fully appreciate until I came here.

So thank you for everything you are doing. This is a very positive programme, and I hope, the city of Frankfurt continues with it.

Thank you