A Sunrise in the Night: Keeping Marianne Wildstrom’s Testimony Alive

By Klaus Friedrich
From the blog series titled, “The Endurance and Relevance of Survivor Testimonials in the 21^st Century” by students of Professor Sylvia Taschka’s ‘Nazi Germany’ class at Wayne State University. In partnership with the Appelbaum Family Compass Fund.

To perceive the scale of the Holocaust is never truly possible. We know those who were lost, and we know those who were able to escape, but we are not able to truly perceive the magnitude of it. What the words of Marianne Wildstrom give us is a very clear avenue of perception of what can be lost through hate and indifference of a people towards others. In this sense, Wildstrom gives us a view into one of many Jewish communities that were wiped from the map. 

Living Under the Nazi Regime

Marianne grew up in the town of Fürth during the rise of the Nazi regime, witnessing the steady rise of antisemitism and violence. By 1934, Marianne no longer had non-Jewish friends, any such relations were met with first verbally abusive, and then physically violent responses. She mentions the surveillance she and her family experienced as the Nazis tightened their control of the community: Their mail was being watched, their phones listened to, and her mother was accused by their postman of “Heiling”, which was the use of the Hitler greeting, something Jewish people were not allowed to do.

At nine years old, Marianne witnessed her father being arrested for the first time, then again at ten years old, increasing the oppression and fear the family was feeling. In Marianne’s memory, it all came to a head during the Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass of 1938, when the synagogues in Fürth burned so bright, her grandmother thought the sun was rising in the night. Like all the Jewish communities across Germany that night, the 10,000 Jews of Fürth were pushed down the brutal path of destruction. 

The Importance of Community

By 1945, Marianne’s community was gone, a mere nine Jews left in a community that had held 10,000. How do we even conceive of this now? How can someone like Marianne identify with a community when it has been truly wiped from the map? 

To understand Fürth’s role in shaping Marianne’s identity would be deeply important to me. More importantly, I think it would help us better understand the Holocaust and the Nazi regime’s impact on people. Marianne said she wished to simply move on from the past, but she still knew every detail of her community all those years later.

To ponder her legacy as a survivor of this community is to also explore how the destruction of her community formed her perception of it today. I think we can all relate to what our communities have done to our lives, and how that may never leave us. 

On this, I would like to present what is left of Marianne Wildstrom’s community, which is a museum. Today the Jewish community of Fürth remains only in the form of the Jewish Museum of Franconia in Fürth and its virtual tours. Please, I implore you to explore what is left of Marianne’s home and try to conceive of what can be lost to hate and brutality.