Lifestyle/Community
Jewish journey to Cape Town on the SS Stuttgart, recalled
Rosalie Rogow’s first Jewish memory is as a four-year-old, sitting on a wooden step in the kitchen, as her mother received and read a telegram from the International Red Cross informing her that both her parents had perished in the gas chambers of Sobibor.
MOIRA SCHNEIDER
Rogow shared her reflections on the journey of her parents, Alma and Ludwig Wolff, from Nazi Germany on the SS Stuttgart, the last boat to sail from Germany with Jewish refugees before the start of the Second World War. She was speaking at the opening of Seeking Refuge, an exhibition at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre to mark the 80th anniversary of the arrival of the Stuttgart on October 27, 1936.
The travelling exhibition showcases those who fled Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939 to make their homes in South Africa.
“At that time there was a law in South Africa that permitted only married refugees to enter the country or else they would be returned to Germany,” Rogow related. “The boat stopped in Las Palmas and the German consul came on board to marry my parents. Their marriage certificate bears a swastika stamp.”
On arrival in Cape Town, her parents got married at the Green and Sea Point Shul, but due to some confusion with another Mrs Wolff on board, her parents never received their luggage. “My mother had to be innovative and got married in a nightie, all be it a peach-coloured silky, slinky and rather sexy, nightie which Ren, our daughter-in-law still has to this day!”
The Rogows have recently returned from Germany, where stolpersteine (brass plates inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination) were laid in front of the Griesheim home of her paternal grandparents.
“It was an emotional rollercoaster but it helped to some extent to give perspective to the feelings that I had suppressed for so long,” she said.
Carol Barron (90), who as a 10-year-old arrived on the Stuttgart with her parents and younger brother, attended the opening of the exhibition. She remembers her arrival on these shores as if it was yesterday.
“We arrived in very bad weather, in pouring rain,” she told Jewish Report. “The Greyshirts (a pro-Nazi movement who had come to protest their arrival) were on the quay and we were so pleased because they and their placards got wet.”
Barron recalls being taken to the Zionist Hall where the Cape Town community had laid on a welcome lunch for the 537 arrivals.
Initially her father alone had been granted permission to leave, but he refused to come without his family. The day before the ship sailed, a telegram arrived granting permission to the whole family.
“Our non-Jewish neighbours all helped us to pack and we travelled through the night to get to the docks,” Barron remembers.
German Ambassador Walter Lindner, who sponsored the exhibition, told the gathering: “Wherever I am posted, I contact survivors because I want to hear their testimonies.”
One of the lessons Germans had learned from the Holocaust was that they had to stand by the Jewish people.
“Whatever we think of the policies of the Israeli government, the settlements, we never criticise,” he added. “We are the closest ally of Israel, it is a moral obligation.”
Professor Milton Shain, professor emeritus of Historical Studies at UCT, delivered the keynote address. He spoke of the arrival of the Stuttgart against a backdrop of rising anti-Semitism in the country and the initial resistance of the Board of Deputies to endorsing further Jewish immigration.
- The exhibition is on until Sunday December 4, and is accompanied by a number of ancillary events.