My father, Herman Josef Loewenhardt, came from a large German-Jewish family of Oberhemer, Germany. He met Elizabeth Henrietta Ring after his arrival in 1921, and they married and settled in a rented flat in Detroit. Herman converted to Catholicism, the religion of his wife. He kept his Jewish background a secret and this was one of the family secrets of my childhood. Elizabeth came from the small town of St. Ingbert, Germany and left behind her three year old daughter, Margot. In 1935 my half-sister joined our family and her presence became another on the puzzling secrets of my childhood. My Tante Hanny, Dad's sister, was another puzzle: we were Catholic, but I suspected that she was Jewish.
My parents were part of the thriving German-American community in Detroit and this helped make up for the absence of extended family. Dad always had a job even in the depths of the depression. I was born in a small house on the East Side of Detroit in 1934, the first of four children in our family. I attended parochial grade school, until 1944. when I contracted polio during one of the worst epidemics of that decade. The war, together with polio, became an overwhelming dark presence in my young life, as I feared the worst happening to my faraway relatives. I also felt great fear for myself and my immediate family, especially when the 1943 rebellion took place. I thought the war had come to Detroit.
I learned that my mother had breast cancer as I was nearing graduation from high school. After her death in 1953, my father urged me to continue my education, and I graduated from Mercy College of Detroit with a Bachelor of Nursing degree in 1955. My college education was gift that came as a result of polio. Vocational Rehabilitation of Michigan paid for tuition and all expenses. This was a bright spot during the very sad and traumatic time of my life. Part ! of my memoir ends with the death of my father and his sister, Johanna, only one month apart in 1972. In the epilogue to Part ! I revisit present day Detroit and show what has changed and what still thrives.
Part !! tells the story of our search of any living relatives of my father's Jewish family. My siblings and I had little hope of success, but to our surprise and joy, we found Loewenhardt cousins through the internet in 1996. Over the past two decades I have visited my cousins in the Netherlands many times and they have traveled to America to see us. Through the bittersweet saga, I have come to love my cousins deeply and cherish them as siblings. My memoir explains how their parents survived the Holocaust and the stories of the Loewenhardt aunts, uncles and cousins who perished in the death camps. In the epilogue I tell about the younger generation, the children and grandchildren of our cousins.
My memoir is significant for several reasons. It illuminates the day-to-day lives of a German-American immigrant family in the city of Detroit in the middle of the last century. It also shares details of the lives and brutal deaths of specific individuals, my aunts, uncles and cousins murdered in the Holocaust. In spite of many volumes with similar stories, mine if unique in the way it evolved. It also depended on access to the internet, because without it, the story may never have been discovered. My beloved family members are now more than names on a list.
