Eva-Maria Simms: An Ordinary Christmas

My family has lived in Siegen, an old town in Germany, for generations. My grandfather, a small business owner, bought a townhouse with three apartments in 1936. My father was raised in the ground floor apartment, while the other two were rented out to families. The neighborhood had all the amenities of communal life, from bar to ballfield, grocery store, butcher, baker, and protestant and catholic churches and schools and a hospital run by nuns. Life in the quarter was lower middle-class and neighborly, and my grandparents and their children made new friends and felt at home.

            By the time my family bought the house, the German government had begun to creep into people’s lives. Life under Nazi rule became more intrusive and restrictive. The catholic hospital was required to engage in forced sterilization of people with down syndrome and resisted; the priest, Pastor Wilhelm Ochse, was hauled before a tribunal and incarcerated in 1936.  People began to disappear from the neighborhood:  neighbors who had belonged to the communist or social democratic party were taken to the Nazi headquarters in the next quarter, known as the “Brown house”,  to be interrogated and tortured, many of them never to be seen again; the two disabled sons of the Stern family were deported to the insane asylum Warstein, date of death unknown; the rest of the family were taken away in 1942 to the Jewish Ghetto in Zamosc in Poland– never to be seen again because they were murdered in the Majdanek extermination camp.  The neighbors believed the propaganda that all these vanished people were sent to places where they would be reformed – the alternative was unthinkable to the good catholic and protestant burghers.  A public air raid shelter was built the next street over, right across from a converted garage where a neighbor operated a steam-heated mangle for pressing linens.

Daily life went on despite frequent air raid warnings. Before the holidays the press-shop was always busy, and the men gathered there to pick up the heavy laundry baskets and chat with each other in the steamy warmth of the shop. Herr Greiner, one of my family’s renters, was waiting for his laundry to be finished.  He had a wicked sense of humor, and because he thought himself in the company of good men, told a joke that made Hitler look ridiculous.  Then he took his laundry basket and went home to his family dinner.  The next morning the GESTAPO rang the doorbell and picked him up for seditious behavior.  He spent 6 months in prison for telling a joke and came home a broken man. 

   Who of the neighbors alerted the secret service?  

Essay copyright 2025 Eva-Maria Simms

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Eva-Maria Simms is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She has worked at the intersection between philosophy and psychology, with a particular interest in phenomenology as it applies to qualitative research, early childhood, community violence, and trauma.