Josie’s Story: Stumbling stones

Sixth of eight parts. This series tells the untold story of Josie Rudolph, the first settler girl born under the U.S. flag in Alaska — and how her birth here helped her escape from Nazi Germany. Read the first five parts and more about this series here.

A brass plaque, only 10 centimeters square, is set today in the pavement outside a ceramics factory in Lauf, a suburb of Nuremberg, Germany. The plaque reads “Hier Arbeitete Martin Thurnauer” followed by several dates. The little memorial is easy to miss, and even if people look closely they would have no idea of its connection to Alaska.

The plaque is one of 100,000 reminders set in the ground all over Germany and Central Europe in the past 30 years to commemorate the Holocaust. Each hand-stamped plaque bears the name of an individual deported to an extermination camp or driven into exile. They mark the last free place where the victims lived or, in this case, worked. The memorials are known as Stolpersteine, which translates as “stumbling stones.” The name comes from a Nazi-era joke in Germany: When a hiker would stumble or trip over a protruding rock, he would laugh, “Oh, a Jew must be buried there.”

Fast-forward from 1875 to 1933.

Josie Rudolph, the first pioneer girl born in American Alaska, returned to Germany with her parents, grew up there, married, had a family. Martin Thurnauer, whose name would be remembered on the brass Stolperstein plaque, was her son. In 1933, he was thrown in jail by the Nazis.

Josie’s parents, the Sitka pioneers, were long dead. After several decades living in the United States, Fanny and Martin Rudolph had come back to Germany in 1875 because Fanny’s beloved father was ill. Her father died before they could arrive. Fanny stayed to care for her grieving mother. When the death of Fanny’s mother was followed closely by the death of her own husband, Fanny remained alone in Bavaria to raise her American-born daughter. By the time Fanny Rudolph died in 1895, at the age of 54, she had lived to see Josie marry into the successful heart of modern German Jewry.

Bernhard Thurnauer was a wealthy widower and part of an important Jewish family from the northern Bavaria town of Burgkunstadt. He owned the country’s largest soapstone deposit and an industrial ceramics factory whose products included gas illumination burners for Pullman sleeper cars. The family had built up their wealth and social standing through the decades of Germany’s modernization and the gradual “emancipation” of German Jews.

Family lore remembers Bernhard as kind but strait-laced, while Josie had inherited the adventurous spirit of her parents.

In 1907, Josie Thurnauer brought her husband to the United States for a family reunion in Astoria. The Oregon newspapers made a fuss about the 45th wedding anniversary of Ike and Ida Bergman and how they came from Germany, referring to their visiting niece, excitedly if not quite accurately, as “the first white child born in Sitka, Alaska.”

While the Oregon papers in 1907 were celebrating the expatriate success story of the Bergmans, the national temper was turning against a growing tide of immigration. Congress adopted a law that year revoking the U.S. citizenship of any woman who married a foreigner. This would block Josie Thurnauer from any claim for citizenship, though it hardly seemed to matter at the time.

In Germany, Josie and Bernhard Thurnauer had two children. They named their daughter Lilly and their son Martin, after Josie’s father.

Martin Thurnauer was raised to take over the family factory. At 19, after school and military service, Martin was sent to the United States to study American business practices and English, which his mother spoke so easily. It was 1913. World War I broke out, and Martin was forced to register in the U.S. as an enemy alien. He was able to continue working, though, and his gregarious nature won him American friends in the lighting business.

He returned to Germany in 1919 and ran Steatit Magnesia AG for more than a decade, tripling the size of the family business. By 1933, he was living in a handsome suburban mansion with his wife, Leni, and two young daughters, Lilo and Stephie. His retired parents lived nearby in the picturesque Bavarian city of Nuremberg.

It was about the worst place in the world an extended Jewish family could be living in 1933.

Nuremberg, a medieval city on a tributary of the Rhine, had been the scene of massive fascist rallies beginning in 1927. The old city can be seen today in the chilling masterpiece film of Nazi propaganda, “Triumph of the Will.” The groundbreaking filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl had first filmed a Nuremberg “victory rally” in August 1933, to celebrate Hitler’s takeover of Germany, with SA stormtroopers goosestepping through the old city streets. The director returned the next year to shoot another, even more impressive rally — this time with 700,000 participants but without the SA stormtroopers, whose leaders had recently been edited from the first draft of Hitler’s fascism by Nazi executioners. All copies of the first movie, “The Victory of Faith,” were destroyed, and the second Nuremberg film survived as Riefenstahl’s masterpiece.

Hitler honored the city for helping his rise to power by bringing the Reichstag parliament there in 1935 to pass the “Nuremberg Laws” barring Jews from German citizenship and the right to intermarry. The lovely Bavarian city’s name was so bound to Hitler’s reputation that it was singled out for heavy firebombing during World War II. The half-timbered medieval part of town was flattened. Later the victorious Allies chose Nuremberg as the location for the trial and execution of Nazi war criminals.

Back in Sitka, Josie Rudolph’s father, Martin Rudolph, lived on Lincoln Street. The muddy main thoroughfare had been renamed by the Army to honor the martyred president, two years after the end of the Civil War.

In Rueckersdorf, Germany, outside Nuremberg, Josie Rudoph’s son, Martin Thurnauer, lived on Julius Streicher Strasse. The street had been renamed to honor the Nazi party chief for the Nuremberg region.

Julius Streicher was a newspaper publisher. His national publication, Der Sturmer, spread absurd accounts of Jewish depravity — “We laughed about Julius Streicher’s hate paper in which he published pornographic stories about our friends,” Martin’s cousin recalled after surviving the Holocaust. The stories built a national following for Nazi racial policies. Streicher’s editorial targets were not only Jews but politicians he deemed insufficiently antisemitic. The journalist, who took to striding around Nuremberg with a bullwhip once Hitler was in control, was in the first group of 21 top Nazi officials charged with war crimes at the Nuremberg trials after the war. Julius Streicher was found guilty of incitement to genocide and was one of 10 men to be hanged.

We know Martin Thurnauer’s full address because it was spelled out on the arrest warrant issued in his name on June 27, 1933. His daughters, Lilo and Stephie, were 9 and 7 when the Nazis threw their father in jail. Their mother told them he’d gone on a business trip.

They’d had a happy childhood up to that point. They had friends at school, though never play dates at other houses. They were conscious of being different mainly when they were pulled from class while their schoolmates got religious instruction. At home, their parents celebrated Christmas as a winter holiday and ignored Passover. Martin’s niece Hilde recalled cheating her younger cousins one visit by watching from the window as their mother, Leni, hid Easter eggs in the yard.

Martin Thurnauer was jailed for schutzhaft — a catchall charge of protective custody used for Nazi convenience. “Chief Executive Soapstone Jew Thurnauer” was conspiring with French and English ceramics companies to move his operations, the charges said. The German people were angry and Martin was being held for his own safety. His lawyer opened negotiations quickly, because in the background loomed the new Bavarian concentration camp in Dachau, where leftists and other troublemakers were being treated to even greater protective safety.

From prison, Martin wrote a letter to Leni in his usual jaunty style, asking her to send toilet items and certain books. “As an occupation I have a book from the prison library: German Humor of the Past. It reaches from the 16th till the middle of the 18th century. There it stops. I hope that you are as much at ease as I am. This also will pass.”

He asked how the girls’ homeschooling was going (Jewish students had been expelled in April under the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools). He said that, thanks to the daily walking period in the courtyard, he was getting more exercise than usual. “Everything has also its good points.” But he added his regrets that they would not be able to go to the local country fair, nor ask anybody else to go. (It was a risky double-entendre to slip past the censors, because in local slang asking somebody to the country fair meant asking them to kiss your ass.)

Unlike her good-natured husband, Leni could foresee a day when you no longer got lawyers to argue your case. He was released from prison after agreeing to give up his involvement in the factory. While making arrangements to leave the country, Martin, an active hiker, found himself expelled from the Nuremberg chapter of the German Alpine Club for violating its new non-Aryan clause. But even from his future home in New Jersey, Martin would keep paying dues to the German Ceramics Society, after receiving their letter saying Jews were still welcome.

Many years later, Martin’s family would reflect how lucky they were to have been forced into exile so early. His American colleagues had a job ready in the lighting business and helped obtain hard-to-get U.S. visas. Departing in early 1934, Martin’s family were allowed to bring personal items and furniture — Nazi emigration policies were still in a state of fascist experimentation — after paying a “flight tax” and relinquishing the ceramics factory. Later, Jews could take nothing with them. Later still, they could not leave at all.

Today, the small brass Stolperstein outside the CeramTec factory in Lauf, marking the forced departure of its former Jewish owner, includes the hand-stamped word “Schutzhaft.”

My friends in New Jersey, Susie and Amy, the ones who first told me about Josie Rudolph and her Alaska origins, are Martin Thurnauer’s granddaughters. They have a recording of Susie’s mother, Lilo, recalling the trip on an ocean liner to America. Reasons for moving to New Jersey were kept vague to the young girls. “My father had a talent for making things an adventure,” Lilo said.

But the girls understood their life was changing, and Lilo was thrilled when the Statue of Liberty came into view. “Even now when I see it, I get a little flutter, remembering that particular day.”

As for Josie herself, and her husband, Bernhard, left behind in Nuremberg, their best hope seemed to be to wait for German sanity to return.

Next: An appeal for constitutional rights, and escape across the border.

Support for this project was provided by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.