If you lived as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and ...

Schengen (continued) The Nauenberg Story
they were charged and their friends arrested.
Of course the whole charade took place a safe
distance inside the border.
After 1953, a two-and-half meter fence was
put up around the border and charged with high
voltage, the so-called wall of death. The fence
was the idea of Ludvik Hlavacka, a State
Security officer. He was reputed to have been
a Gestapo confidant. In the 1950s he was an
investigator for the State Security in Uherske
Hradiste, where he constructed an electric torture
device. After studying in the USSR he was
made the head of the border guard, and finally
Deputy Minister of the Interior. According
to historians Hlavacka was one of the people
who were directly responsible for the deadly
installations on the border. The border guards
Hlavacka commanded, who chased and shot
people, were presented by communist propaganda
as heroes, tough men protecting the
“people’s democratic” system. When I was six
or seven years old I met some border guards at
Pioneer camp. They demonstrated the training
of a “self-motivated attack dog” that was able
to bring down the “violator.” In the Border
Guard Museum there was a preserved mounted
dog named Brek, who had personally assisted
in the apprehension of some 50 “violators,” and
was accordingly decorated by the state.
People succeeded in crossing the border by
various means throughout the entire era of
communist rule. In 1951 an engineer hijacked
a train to Germany with more than a hundred
people on it; thirty-four of them remained in the
West. In 1961, a home-adapted truck smashed
through the barriers with seven people on
board. In 1966, two people galloped away from
a police patrol on horseback. During the “normalization”
era of the 1970s and 1980s, people
tried to flee by hiding in the trunks of western
tourists’ automobiles or, in one case, got away
in a small tank pieced together in a barn. One
of my friends from France helped get a persecuted
Czech musician out – he resembled her
French friend, so she got him though on her
friend’s French passport. To close this article,
allow me to say something personal. Sometime
in 1988, my friend Svatopluk and I thought of
a plan to get to the West. I was sixteen, and
it was a pretty adolescent idea: Svata had a
cousin in Austria who regularly traveled to
Prague. So he got the idea (archives show that
he was not alone) of hiding in his Audi, in the
trunk or behind the back seat. He said no one
ever checked his cousin – it was a sure thing.
Fortunately his cousin was a sensible person
and told Svata no way. But the plan impressed
me, and remained firmly in my memory – and
certainly it contributed to the fact that whenever
I crossed the border after 1989, I felt a slight
tingling and a relieved, almost blessed feeling,
when we got to the other side. A polite policeman
is still a policeman; a formal border check
is still a check. Now it’s all gone, and it seems I
feel somewhat more normal than I did before.
Adam Drda, Heart of Europe
It was the summer of 1976, and I was sailing
the Scandinavian seas on the cruise ship Daphne
when I happened to meet two charming women,
a mother and her daughter, whom had a dramatic
Holocaust story to tell. The mother was Erna
Sachs Nauenberg. The daughter is Lucrecia
Nauenberg El Abd. Instead of recounting my
story, I will have Erna tell it: “My husband was
Walter Gerhard Nauenberg, born January 29,
1897. I was born September 26, 1903. We lived
and were educated in Berlin. We were trained
as medical doctors and worked at the Berlin
hospital. Three children were born to us: Eva
in 1933, Michael in 1934, and Uriel in 1938.
In 1938, my mother, Emma Kalmann, was the
only surviving member of her generation in
our family.
My husband and I served as physicians to several
consulates in Berlin. By reason of special
medical service we rendered, we formed a particularly
close friendship with the Ambassador
of the Republic of Columbia. When a visitor to
a consulate in Berlin needed medical attention,
we were called.
With the rise of Hitler and Nazism in 1933,
we realized that we had to flee Germany, but
Emma was too frightened to leave. Because of
Emma’s reluctance, we found ourselves with
three small children under the age of five still
in Berlin in late 1938.
It was on Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken
Glass) November 9, 1938, when the Gestapo
came to our home banging on the front door,
hunting my husband. It was a terrible night. The
Nazis systematically looted homes and stores,
set fire to synagogues and instigated mass
rioting all across Germany. The Ambassador
of Columbia, aware of the gravity of situation,
came to the back door of our home on
Neuewinterfeldstrasse to warn my husband and
offer asylum. With the Gestapo outside of our
front door, the Ambassador helped my husband
escape through the back door and took him
directly to the Columbian Embassy. After the
rioting had died down somewhat, my husband
called me from the embassy and told me to
leave everything and come there with the children
immediately. I was eight months pregnant.
The Gestapo did not take the children and me
on Kristallnacht because the leader of the group
said he did not want to deal with the mess of a
woman giving birth in Gestapo headquarters,
but he stated they would come back for us the
next day.
After that dreadful night, my husband never
returned to our home in Berlin. It was a fine
home, furnished with fine antiques including
a beautiful Bosendorfer grand piano my
husband loved to play. I left everything. The
Columbian Ambassador granted my husband
a visa and arranged for him to be spirited
across the German border into Holland where
he boarded a ship for Columbia. He made one
last telephone call to us from Holland before
leaving Europe; upon being told of the birth of
Uriel on December 16, Beethoven’s birthday,
T h e N e w s o f T h e C z e c h C e n t e r
19
he pleaded with me to name him “Ludwig”
in honor of the great composer. However, in
1938, the Third Reich had issued a decree that
all Jewish women were required to choose the
names of their newborns from a governmentmandated
list. At the time of our son’s birth,
the name on the list that was the least offensive
to me was Uriel. I always wanted to give my
male children names of archangels. My first
son was named Michael, the name of my father
as well as the one of the archangels. Uriel was
nicknamed “Uli.”
After “Uli” was born, the Columbian
Ambassador arranged visas to Columbia for our
children and me, as well as our nanny because
I was by then the official physician of the
Embassy. As we prepared to leave Germany,
the Gestapo came to our home everyday to
inspect items we proposed to take with us from
Germany. The one professional memento they
allowed me to take was the microscope I used
in my medical office in Berlin. My three children
and I, with our nanny, boarded a boat in
Hamburg bound for Barranquilla, Columbia
(one of the few places in South America that
would accept refugees fleeing Nazi Germany).
We arrived there on June 6, 1939. What of my
mother, Emma Kalmann? She was unable to
overcome her fear of leaving Germany, and
despite all efforts to persuade her, she remained
there. For many years we were unable to learn
her fate but eventually learned that she perished
at Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in 1943.
Some of the leading politicians in Columbia
were xenophobic about the sudden influx of
educated Europeans and made life difficult
for us. My husband and I were forced to take
repeated medical examinations in Bogota before
we were allowed to practice. We were without
money, and trips to Bogota for the exams were
very costly. In Berlin, in the early 1930s, a
young Columbian girl whom was a guest of the
Ambassador became deathly ill; my husband
and I were called to provide medical care for
her. The girl lived. When the girl’s mother
learned that we were in Columbia and we were
the physicians who saved her daughter’s life,
we became guests in her home when we were
in Bogota, thus creating a life long friendship.
The girl’s mother was named Lucrecia, and
when our daughter was born in 1947, we named
her Lucrecia to honor the Columbian woman’s
unbounded kindness.”
The Nauenburg family emigrated to the land
of the free and the home of the brave in 1954.
Walter Gerhard Nauenberg died June 15, 1987.
Erna Sachs Nauenberg died April 13, 1990. I
am deeply indebt to my very special friend,
Lucrecia El Abd, for refreshing my recollection
of this intriguing and enchanting story.
Charles Saunders – The Campus Cub
Youth is happy because it has the ability to
see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see
beauty never grows old.
Franz Kafka 1883 - 1924