Staying in America

Edith Sachs and Alfred “Henk” Pennekamp were German refugees when they met in exile in Belgium in 1935 or 1936. They were married in 1940 in Lewisburg, New Jersey, just weeks after Henk’s — my father — surprise release from a French concentration camp for German and Austrian anti-fascists, intellectuals and Jews in the Loire Valley.

Neither was Jewish, although Edith’s father, a Jewish editor, had already been murdered by the Nazis.

Just weeks before their wedding, in France, guards had seized and blindfolded Henk and drove him out of the camp. Fearing the worst, the guards instead escorted him onto a ship where he reunited with Edith and sailed for New York. He hadn’t known of efforts to free him by the American Methodist Church and Fenner Brockway, England’s leading pacifist.

The other starving inmates who still languished in Vernuche when France fell to Germany three months later became German prisoners and likely died. Noted illustrator Wolf Hamburger, my father’s closest friend in the camp, joined the French Foreign Legion to escape Vernuche and committed suicide with his wife in Paris.

New Jersey press coverage of the wedding was among the first that most Americans heard of Europe’s concentration camps and the hideous treatment and wholesale starvation of refugees. One newspaper article mirrored our own ignorance today of the condition of immigrants in U.S. detention camps: “Concentration camps of the Continent seem far removed on most days of the week; Europe’s chess-like moves in a game of war are vague and surreal, while stories of persecutions and refugees sound exaggerated and untrue.”

Later, my dad never said a word about his release and arrival in New York. He was likely too ill and dazed to pay close attention. Drafted into the U.S. Army and naturalized as an American citizen in 1940, two years later he received an honorable medical discharge and a commendation from his superior officer. Even that long after his release from the camp, at over 6 feet tall, he still weighed 140 pounds.

My dad had a generous heart and loved his new country, as he had loved the Germany whose Nazi prosecutors charged him with high treason. Love in exile did not survive the poverty and hardships of New York, however, and he and Edith divorced.

Henk never intended to live in America, but life follows its own often undecipherable paths. In 1947, returning to Germany with his second wife — my mother, Marianne — he found he could no longer bear to live there. My Jewish mother had an easier time in post-Nazi Germany than did my one-time Catholic father. They returned to America in 1950, two years before my birth.

Last month, I was interviewed by a German attorney about becoming a German citizen, along with our sons and grandchildren. Under the post-WWII German constitution, prior German “victims of Hitler” and their lineal descendants are to be automatically granted citizenship upon application and confirmation. I have pondered taking this action for years.

But this is my country. My fight for democracy and the decent treatment of all human beings is here in America, just as my father’s was in Germany before and after Hitler’s rise in 1933. Yet I realize it is prudent to have a path to safety if necessity demands it — as my father didn’t have in Nazi Germany. So strange that for me and my family, it might be Germany.

On my country’s 250th anniversary, I dream strange dreams where the old country and the new merge, separate, straighten out, go sideways in unsettling patterns. Yet, I am without doubt an American.

Peter Pennekamp lives in Eureka.