Dennis Aron’s mother never talked about the family she left behind in Germany at age 16. As the Nazi persecution of Jews escalated in 1937, her parents used their only travel permit to send her to live with relatives in Chicago.
Years after Aron’s mother died, the Skokie resident summoned the courage to learn more by opening a small red plaid stationery box that contained letters, handwritten in German, that his grandmother had sent to his mother in 1938 and 1939.
Thus began an intense genealogical search that turned into something much more as Aron, 66, found help from a surprising source: a non-Jewish German, Hans-Peter Klein, whose life mission is to preserve the stories of Holocaust victims.
Together, through archives and tours of cemeteries and small towns in Germany, the men mapped out Aron’s family tree. In the process, Aron discovered that more than 800 family members had perished during World War II — many distant relatives but also his maternal grandparents and aunt.
The journey was both devastating and gratifying because of the close friendship that evolved between the men — as well as the realization that a single person can serve as a powerful force in reconciliation.
“He helped me build what I thought was a very small family into a pretty deep understanding of the nature of what life was truly like for my family both before and during the Holocaust time,” said Aron, a retired banker who communicated with Klein by email before their first meeting in 2011.
“It led me down a path that was sometimes more emotional than I would like, but it was probably something that I needed to do.”
Monday, Aron will be on hand in Berlin when Klein, 62, is due to be honored for his work during a ceremony at the parliamentary building. Aron and a relative nominated Klein for the Obermayer German-Jewish History Award, given annually to “individuals who have made outstanding voluntary contributions toward preserving and recording the Jewish history, heritage, culture and/or remnants of local German communities,” according to the awards website.
As a nation, Germany has taken important steps in making amends for the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime, and “even established a model for how to deal with the notion of collective responsibility,” said David Harris, executive director for the American Jewish Committee, a global advocacy group.
The billions of dollars in reparations Germany has paid to Holocaust victims and the state of Israel since the 1950s are recognized as part of that effort. Just as important, Harris said, Germany has welcomed Jews to move back into the country. In recent years, it has been widely cited, Germany has become home to the fastest-growing Jewish population of any country in the world.
“Clearly, it cannot undo the damage, it cannot heal the scars, but it was Germany’s effort to recognize the pain and suffering the Third Reich inflicted,” Harris said. “Germany has understood it has to be especially vigilant in the fight against anti-Semitism.”
Yet the response from those whose ancestors were murdered during the Nazi era remains complex.
Aron said he knows Jews who refuse to buy German products or visit the country. But he said he embarked on his personal quest with an open mind. He met Klein through a relative in New Jersey who had also benefited from Klein’s help with family research.
Klein, a history teacher, has helped many Jewish families trace their roots since 1986, when he and his family moved to a small central German town, Gudensberg, and noticed a synagogue left in ruins after the war.
Klein helped organize a temple restoration — an effort not everyone welcomed. It took nearly 10 years before the town council agreed to buy and restore the building, he said. Today the 1843 synagogue contains a permanent exhibit about the former Jewish community.
“In the past years, it was not easy,” Klein said in a phone interview from Germany. “A lot of people didn’t want to bring up thoughts about this time. (They said), ‘Just let it be. It’s better to forget these times.'”
But for Klein, the project led to a much bigger purpose. With Holocaust survivors aging, he worried about what would be lost when the World War II generation passes.
“What for me was more interesting than the old building was the contacts I got to people who lived in Gudensberg before the Nazis came,” he said. “… There are a lot of friendships today. They could tell me a lot about Jewish life.”
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Klein is now part of a larger network of researchers who work to keep the memory of Germany’s Jews alive. He has led students and teachers on dozens of tours and seminars at Auschwitz, a former concentration camp.
Klein also has helped with a project called Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” named for memorial plaques embedded outside the former homes and workplaces of victims of the Nazi regime. The victims’ names and cause of death are etched on the memorials.
Now, as his children and the children of Jewish families forge friendships, he no longer worries about memories being lost.
“Today, I can say it’s a never-ending story,” he said.
The award Klein is to receive was established by Boston businessman Arthur Obermayer in 2000. He came up with the idea when he traveled through Germany in the 1990s “to discover my roots,” according to an excerpt from the speech he’s due to give at the awards presentation Monday.
“In every community visited, there were marvelous, caring individuals who had devoted significant parts of their lives uncovering and preserving their local Jewish history,” he wrote.
Rolf Schuette, the German consul general in Boston, said most Obermayer award winners — there are five this year, including Klein — “feel a personal responsibility for what happened in the Holocaust. It is not just pure historical interest in the places they live, but some moral obligation they feel.”
Klein put it this way: “Memory is the key to forgiveness.”
For Aron, one of the first things Klein did was translate the letters addressed to Aron’s mother by her maiden name, Hilde Speier.
“All the letters together are a very moving story about … a long distance mothering, and about a desperate attempt to get a permit to leave Germany,” Klein wrote to Aron.
Aron chokes up when trying to imagine his mother reading those letters from her mother, father and younger sister. The letters speak of the many Jewish friends and neighbors who were leaving town, noting that it was difficult to assemble a minyan, the 10 men needed to perform religious ceremonies at their synagogue.
One letter dated Oct. 19, 1938, read: “We have not yet got the papers, waiting on them every day. … Have you heard if there is anything you can do from there (so) that we can have an earlier turn?”
Only weeks later, a night of violent Nazi-led violence against Jews — what would become known as Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass” — resulted in murders, vandalism and the plundering of Jewish temples, businesses and homes.
There was no mention of that night in subsequent correspondence, but the family’s growing desperation is evident in a Dec. 14 letter: “Do what you can do for us,” Aron’s grandmother wrote. “I implore you not to be in vain … so we can get away as fast as we possibly can.”
The letters end abruptly with an 18th birthday card dated April 10, 1939.
Aron learned from papers obtained through Klein that his mother’s family ended up in Frankfurt after the last letter was delivered. From there they were sent to a Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Lithuania, where they were shot upon arrival Nov. 25, 1941, he said.
Aron tracked generations of ancestors, in part by poring through online archives provided by JewishGen.org and Yad Vashem, a worldwide repository based in Jerusalem.
“I kept seeing death dates in the Holocaust time,” he said. “I started counting them.”
He was astounded when the number of his family members who died grew to more than 100, let alone 800. While he said he has never felt any bitterness or anger toward Germans of today, “what went on before is beyond understanding. I feel like I have part of my life taken away.”
He and his wife, Jackie, plan to return to Germany this summer to install memorial plaques for his maternal grandparents and aunt on the street where they once lived, about 150 miles north of Frankfurt.
“It is important for me to get those memories down so they can be handed down just like any other family heirloom,” Aron said. “Hans-Peter Klein’s efforts in helping me have really created a scaffold on which I could build a story for my family. For that, I am forever grateful.”