Eva Neisser Echenberg - Walters Welcome: The Intimate Story of a German-Jewish Familys Flight from the Nazis to Peru

Copyright 2018 by Eva Neisser Echenberg

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Cover photo credit: Neisser family

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2476-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2477-8

Printed in China

CONTENTS

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

Corrie Ten Boom

Walter Neisser

Introduction

ON the day my Uncle Walter died in 1960, my aunt took me to see his corpse. We walked up the stairs of the big house and down the long hall to their bedroom, where she opened the door and pushed me forward. An awkward eighteen-year-old, I had never seen a dead person before. My uncle lay on the bed, a large dishtowel wrapped around his jaw. I stared, then fled downstairs to the library where the family had gathered. Why did she want me to see him? Did she take anyone else upstairs? Was there a steady procession of mourners who came to see his corpse? The answers are most probably affirmative, for Walter was the sun of our universe, the head of the family, by far the wealthiest; he owned the business that employed most of the adults, and above all, he was the reason we were all in Lima.

Who was my uncle? Walter Neisser was a man who saved lives. He was the only one among his brothers and sisters who was tall in stature, and he was larger than life. His powers of persuasion and his deep pockets were legendary. He had lived in South America since 1923, and somehow the distance from his family in Germany and his sharp intellect allowed him to see what many German Jews did not want to admit to themselves.

Throughout the 1930s, Walter brought most of his extended family from Germany to Peru. In 1933, when the anti-Jewish laws took effect in Germany, he helped his younger brother, my father Erich, and his little sister Erna, nicknamed Kleine Erna (Little Erna), immigrate to Peru. Two more sisters and several cousins followed. To the entreaty of his widowed mother Martha that she could not leave Germany without her brothers and sisters, then in their sixties and seventies, Walters answer was clear: Her siblings, their children, and their grandchildren, all members of the Nothmann family, would come, too. Of his mothers aged siblings, only one went to the death camps.

Because of Walter, some fifty members of two extended families from the German region of Upper Silesia came to Peru. Other Jews from the Silesian towns of Gleiwitz, Kattowitz, and Beuthen, where many of the Neissers and Nothmanns lived, also moved to Lima. Some came with Walters assistance, others, like so many immigrants before them, were drawn to join their countrymen. They traveled vast distances, physically and culturally. They crossed Western Europe, traversed the Atlantic Ocean, passed through the Panama Canal and down the west coast of South America. They left behind a life and tried, in some cases successfully, in other cases less so, to start anew.

Twice, in 1935 and 1937, Walter returned to Germany to cajole reluctant family members to leave. As the Nazi laws gripped the Jewish population, he brought hope. Peru, he told them, was a place of untold potential.

But Peru did not welcome immigrantsquite the contrary. When the need was greatest, Peru passed laws to keep people out. In fact, barely 500 Jewish immigrants entered the country in the late 1930sand Walter sponsored an astounding 10 percent of them. He had the connections, the resources, and above all the will to pay for boat tickets and procure a visa for every one of his relatives, a task that in retrospect seems almost impossible. Some family members received invitations to work at his company and therefore secured the more easily obtainable work visas, but he also arranged papers for all of the older relatives, women, and children.

Everyone lived in Miraflores, a residential suburb of Lima close to the sea, ten kilometers from downtown. Some older relatives moved in with their children; others had their own apartments or little houses, all within walking distance of each other. I have a vivid memory of my grandmothers brother, my great-uncle Moritz Nothmann, who died when I was nine and he was in his late seventies. How could a child forget him? His back had been fused into the sitting position, so when he stood, his cane in hand, his body was bent forwards at ninety degrees, his chest and head parallel to the ground. But he was not scary; in fact, he was quite wonderful. A ventriloquist and a magician, he could make coins disappear into the pockets of the suit he always wore and then reappear out of his or my ears. His other trick, one I never figured out, was to show me a coin, bang his fist on the table, and make the coin reappear below. It seemed to have gone right through the wood.

We were the only large family in the German-Jewish community in Peru, and among my friends, I was the only one who grew up surrounded by cousins, aunts and uncles, grandmothers, even great-uncles and aunts.

Walter was a prolific letter writer; he corresponded with his parents and siblings, relatives and friends. Devoted to the family, he begged for news and expressed his frustration when his letters went unanswered. One letter to his oldest sister filled two entire paragraphs with recriminations about letters sent and received. Another letter contained cards with his name on them to remind family members that he would not write to them again until they had responded to his letters. When Walter received a picture of his father, who died in 1925, he wrote that the picture now hung above his bed and he would have an artist make a drawing from the photograph. His letters and his behavior make his subsequent actions much easier to understand. They show how deeply he cared for the immediate and extended family he had chosen to leave when he was twenty-six and how lonesome he was for their company. When the familys need became pressing, he was eager to help.