It’s a funny thing about families. They all contain those members that you wish were not your relatives. Some might be plain toxic, in other words, trouble makers. Some might be cold and distant, or some might be just plain weird. The last is what generally made up the relatives we knew from my father’s side of the family. For years my brothers and I could not stand having to be with a particular group of our dad’s aunts, uncles and cousins. All of these relatives were related through our dad’s mother, i.e. her siblings nieces and nephews. We had no family from our dad’s father’s part of the family for a simple reason. Our father’s parents were divorced by the time he was about 2 years old. Our dad did not know his father. He met him once, when he needed his signature on the papers to leave Germany in 1939.
Our mom’s family was very small. These were the relatives we felt close to; our grandparents, aunt and uncle and their children – our cousins. So we grew up feeling our family was very small. Between our mother’s small family whom we loved and the preponderance of dad’s family who were whackos – well – it was a small family. All of that changed August 22, 2011.
That was the day we were found by the part of our father’s family that no one ever knew about. A fellow by the name of Bert Romberg sent an email to my mom claiming to be my father’s first cousin. My mom, fearful this was some kind of scam, forwarded the email to me. I called Bert and within minutes it was clear that there was an extensive family that we never knew existed. Bert was indeed my father’s first cousin as he was the son of my grandfather’s brother – one we had never known about. The little bit that we knew about dad’s father, Walter Romberg, matched up with everything Bert told me. Suddenly, our grandfather became a real figure with real family that included a second wife (with whom he had 4 children) and 12 siblings. Suddenly we could trace our family back to 1785 when Nathan Moses, my great, great grandfather was born.
I asked Bert how he found us. Here is that story. One of Walter Romberg’s siblings, Oskar Romberg, never left Germany. He had married a Catholic woman and survived the war. He had 4 daughters with her, 2 before the war and 2 after the war. In 1959, on a business trip to Essen, Germany, by chance, my father found his Uncle Oscar and met his family. Anne, Oskar’s 3rd daughter, born in 1947, was a young girl dreaming of coming to America to study English when her family met my father. She wrote him a letter and he responded to her. In the summer of 2011 Anne was going through some papers and found the letter from my dad. She immediately contacted Bert and told him to try and find Rudolf Romberg. Bert did an internet search and found my father’s yartzeit notice from my parent’s synagogue. He then wrote my mother.
Within days I was getting emails from Romberg family members in Germany and different parts of the US. Three weeks later an envelope arrived from Germany and it contained my dad’s letter to Anne. I recognized not only his handwriting but the stationary of the business he owned when we lived in West Virginia. My brothers and my mother began to email and speak with our new found relatives and soon we all realized that we had to arrange a meeting. On the weekend of April 27, 2012, twenty eight Rombergs met in Dallas, Texas, many for the first time. Anne, from Germany was there, as well as relatives from all over the US. By the end of the weekend my brothers and I were asking each other, “Why couldn’t this be the family we grew up with?” They were an amazing, warm, interesting group of people.
Audrey and I took an instant liking to Anne and as we were planning to be in Italy for a wedding in June 2012, it was decided that we would also visit Germany so that Anne could show us around some of where our family came from. We visited Anne that June, meeting her sister Doris and nephew Toby as well. Anne took us to Lengerich, where Nathan Moses Romberg lived and is buried. A little Jewish cemetery still exists in Lengerich, overgrown but unharmed. You have to get the key from the town hall to enter. So I was able to say kaddish at the grave of my great, great grandfather. We saw a house, kept as an historical landmark, that he lived in.
Anne had already started to do some research on the Romberg family and had uncovered some good records in Lengerich about Nathan and his descendants. As I have looked over the records, and spoken to various family members, the journeys of different segments of the family through the Holocaust and World War II are diverse and amazing. Even more amazing is how all these family members, who had lost contact with each others by the war, found each other, often quite randomly, during the decades after WWII. Bert contacting us was just he latest piece of a much larger puzzle. I realized that our family’s collective history is a great reflection and a refraction of Jewish history from the war years.
These stories need to be collected and preserved. So here I sit in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas, where in two hours I will begin a process of interviews to put together the family history. I do not know what all I might uncover in the next two months, but it promises to be very interesting.
Rabbi Romberg, I look forward to reading the book that comes from all your interviews. I miss Lunch and Learn and look forward to when it resumes in the Fall.
Jim Croushorn
Enjoying this! Thanks for sharing….
can you email me looking forward to seeing u at KI
Henry Lehrich MD
Allentown