Father – Son: 1789 -1941

Northern Advocate, 23 May 1941, Page 8

Father - Son: 1789 -1941

Go back in your mind to 1789, to the year of the French Revolution (writes Stanley Baron in the London “News Chronicle”). New ideas were moving with enormous force in the world. Voltaire had been dead only 11 years. In England there; was a division. While the Prince Regent and Mrs. Fitzherbert strutted at Brighton and denounced the French mobs, Pitt looked across the Channel kindly and Tom Paine fanned revolt higher. Amid all this, a Jewish child. Jakob Buchholz, was born in a crooked house in the Bavarian village of Burg Haslach. His father brought him to Hanover and he grew up a faithful subject of Ernest August, Duke of Cumberland and the Hanovarian King. In the King’s army he served as a private, wearing the quaint State uniform. During childhood and youth hg saw as children do now the terror that marched through Europe in the wake of a great army.

From the Netherlands to Italy a dictator ruled. Spain was under his control. Only on the African continent had he had a major setback. Jakob heard the old men talking round the pump at Burg Haslach and at the inndoors in Hanover, and they said that England was without a friend in the world.

Now, return to 1941. Yesterday I went out to a little house in Watford and talked with an old man, a little bent but vigorous, who fled to England from Hanover in 1939. Yes, his name was Buchholz, too. Not the great-grandson, nor the grandson, but the son of Jakob. From a narrow brown case he brought out a birth certificate dated May 9, 1861. “Julius Buchholz,” it read, “son of Jakob Buchholtz, born 1789,” From under a litter of papers he fished out a copy of a statement issued by the German State Archives Department. It recorded the awarding of a medal to his father for fighting at the Battle of Waterloo. “We wass very proud,” he says of the medal, “it hang on my brother’s wall. It wass very good history.”

When Buchholz the Elder came back from the wars he was given a permit to build a little house in a street in Hanover not within the Ghetto. For 40 years he lived there happily and without molestation. His only sorrow was that he had no children. Then, when his first wife died, he married again, and became, amid chaff and congratulation, the father of three fine children. Julius, the last, was born in his father's 72nd year. His mother, Friederike, taught the child history in a way it seldom is. She showed him his father’s medal and old records and told him stories of the old great days of the Kingdom of Hanover. Like Jakob, Julius wished only to live a peaceful life. He, too, had a little house in Hanover and built up a fine business, making cotton overalls. Unfortunately, one of the few things that Friederike had failed to teach was that history has a way of pro- | ducing remorseless, bitter repetitions. Events caught up old Julius, took him by. the neck, and in November, 1938, in his 78th year, flung him into Buchenwald concentration camp. He was allowed to leave Germany some six months later. Now, with his 75-year-old wife named Hemmy, he lives in a single room. He likes a stranger to come in sometimes, so that he can bring out his documents and show how Jakob, his father, had won a fine medal by helping to beat Napoleon. “You see,” he says, “he was an ally of Britain. He fought by your soldiers’ sides. They were comrades together.” Old Hemmy works at her stQve and sometimes thinks of her children, whom she has not seen for nearly two years now, and her grandchildren, who may soon be going to America. Then she begins to cry gently, while stirring her pots.