Two Unlikely In-laws

Oma, Gertrud Luise (later Ruth) Zimmermann, née Radtke, was born on November 25, 1905, in Allenstein in the former German province of East Prussia (Ostpreußen), divided since 1945 between Russia in the north and Poland in the south. Estelle (Esther) Feldman, née Potashnik, was born on October 31, 1903, in the recently founded Jewish farming community of Woodbine, in the so-called pine barrens of southern New Jersey. Fate would bring them together in a most unusual way, and their cross-cultural, interfaith relationship would have had Hitler spinning, not just turning, in his grave. Here’s how it happened...

In the summer of 1958, I, then not quite 19, left on an English freighter with a Spanish name belonging to a French company from Montreal, Canada, and headed off to my junior-year college exchange to Germany. After a stop in Southampton, England, to unload grain, the ship made the short trip to Hamburg, West Germany, where the La Pradera would take on 700 or so VWs and return with them to Canada. I left the ship in the U.K., however, and flew to Frankfurt, where I boarded the train that would take me to my new year-long home in the university town of Heidelberg. That spring, during the long university break, I joined a three-week German student bus tour through Austria, the then Yugoslavia, and finally mostly around Greece. The company made sure to fill their 30-passenger Mercedes bus with non-students if required. Most importantly for this story, I ended up having a bus-board romance with one of the latter, a lovely German refugee in 1945 from faraway East Prussia to the Munich area of Bavaria, where she became a bilingual secretary. Her name was Hannelore (later Simone) Zimmermann. After four-and-a-half years of being pen pals, we were married on November 30, 1963, in Dwight Chapel at Yale, where I was a graduate student. We had two daughters and lived happily together until September 20, 2006, when she died of pancreatic cancer in Honolulu.
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During 19 of our 43 years together, we were a three-generation family thanks to the presence of Simone’s mother, Ruth, who during two of her extended visits helped us in the household and with our two little girls. We and everyone else called her “Oma,” German for granny. In 1972, however, while back in Germany, she had a major stroke that left her paralyzed on the left side. Her older daughter in Germany was ill herself, so we ended up taking care of Oma, first in Chicago, then in Honolulu, and finally in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she passed away in the mid-1990s. Thanks to her visits and the fact that she spoke very limited English, our girls were forced to speak German. They also learned from her many German customs, especially for Christmas and Easter. So here’s the story. One fall my mother, Estelle, spent around six weeks with us. She and Oma, the two elderly ladies, each had a different disability. Oma had difficulty walking, while Mother (“Grandma Honey” for our daughters) was in early-stage dementia. Somehow, Oma spoke German to Mother, and she responded in Yiddish, the Jewish dialect that’s 80% German, and they somehow understood each other. So every morning Mother helped Oma up and down the stairs while they chatted back and forth in this highly unusual way. Hitler of course was long dead and the Nazis unconditionally defeated. The thought occurred to me that this is how things should really be in our world—individuals helping each other across what once would have been unpassable boundaries. Where they are now, I hope they are able to continue this highly unusual friendship.

Mother—Estelle Feldman—in her late 70s or early 80s

Oma—Ruth Zimmermann—in her late 70s or early 80s