Goldsmith is well acquainted with the tragic history of his family, having written two books on the subject. But unlike the anecdotes he’s chained over the years, the kettle represents something different to him: a rare and tactile treasure connecting him to his paternal grandparents – whom he never met.
Holding the kettle for the first time, Goldsmith was moved to tears.
“There is very little in the known universe that my grandparents touched,” Goldsmith said. “It was a semi-miraculous opportunity to touch something they had touched; to hold something they had held.
In early April, Goldsmith was unexpectedly contacted by an art historian at a museum in Oldenburg – the town in northwest Germany where his grandparents once lived and where his father was born.
The message came from Marcus Kenzler – a researcher and cultural scholar who traces the origins of the property looted by the Nazis to the National Museum of Art and Cultural History, with the aim of returning the objects to the descendants of the owners of origin.
“Like every human being, every object has its own biography,” said Kenzler, 48. He studies decades-old records to determine the exact origins of an object, looking for traces left by previous owners in an effort to reconstruct the precise path of a relic once taken.
According to the museum’s inventory book, the kettle in question was sold by the Goldschmidt family in November 1934. In particular, “intensive research has shown that the sale of the kettle did not take place voluntarily, but was linked to Nazi persecution, ”Kenzler added.
The Nazi involvement in the acquisition was clearly evidenced by the kettle’s extremely low selling price: 20 Reichsmarks, or around $ 11. In 1942 another museum acquired a similar object for 300 Reichsmarks. Today the kettle is valued at around $ 2,500.
It was not a rare event. Over 20% of art in Europe, collectively worth billions of dollars, was looted or coerced into sale by the Nazis. It is estimated that 100,000 pieces of more than 600,000 stolen artifacts are still missing. The burden of restitution usually rests on the descendants, who must prove their relationship to the original owner.
In an email to Goldsmith, Kenzler presented his findings.
“Fortunately, your family history can be reconstructed very well through your books, and I have been able to find many other sources,” he wrote.
Kenzler suggested that once his research is complete, the kettle – or Lavabokessel, the German term for pouring vessel – should be owned by Goldsmith, the last living relative of Alex and Toni Goldschmidt. Goldsmith has no children and his parents, as well as his only brother, are all dead.
“I was very excited when I first contacted Martin,” Kenzler said, adding that since starting his research in 2011, he has only returned three more artifacts to the families of the original owners – two antique pieces of enamelled pewter pottery and a large Renaissance cabinet. “It too rarely happens that the provenance of a work of art or an object can be completely deciphered.”
“I still have a lot of cases to resolve,” he continued. “This work is important and we have a historic obligation to come to terms with the injustices and horrors of the past.”
In response to Kenzler’s email, Goldsmith wrote: “Although born decades after the Nazi era, you did not escape the responsibility of facing the horrors of those years, but rather did this as you can to try to balance the scales of justice, impossible as that task ultimately may be.
The kettle finally arrived in Maryland on October 11, almost 86 years after it left the family’s hands.
Before World War II Goldsmith’s grandfather Alex Goldschmidt operated a successful women’s clothing store called Haus der Mode in Oldenburg. The family of six lived in a large house adorned with sculptures, paintings, and other artistic objects reflecting their good fortune.
That all changed in November 1932, when Nazi officials informed the Goldschmidts that they had no choice but to sell their home – since a Jew was no longer allowed to own such a beautiful home. It was sold for a mere fraction of its real value.
“The house is easily worth $ 6 million today, and it was sold for just over $ 10,000,” Goldsmith said. “They were forced to move to smaller and smaller neighborhoods.”
In the years that followed, more laws and restrictions against Jews were enacted, leading to the November pogrom of 1938 – also known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass – in which thousands of shops and synagogues owned by Jews were destroyed throughout the Nazi. Germany and 30,000 Jews were arrested, including Goldsmith’s grandfather, Alex Goldschmidt.
The following year, Alex Goldschmidt and his son Helmut fled Germany on the SS St. Louis, a ship filled mostly with Jewish refugees who sailed to Cuba but were turned back. After making an unsuccessful appeal to the United States and Canada, the ship and its passengers returned to Europe.
In August 1942, Alex Goldschmidt and Helmut were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Two months later, his wife, Toni, and their daughter Eva were killed in a forest near Riga, Latvia.
A daughter of Goldschmidt survived and escaped to Leeds, England. A son, Gunther Ludwig Goldschmidt, managed to flee to America at the age of 27 – just in time to be spared. Once in the United States, he changed his name to George Gunther Goldsmith and had two sons, one of them being Martin Goldsmith.
In Germany, George Goldsmith was able to survive as part of an all-Jewish performing arts ensemble called Jüdischer Kulturbund, made up of musicians, artists and actors who had been excluded from German institutions. The Nazis cleared the group, to which his wife (Martin Goldsmith’s mother) also belonged, as part of a Nazi propaganda effort to protect the oppression of Jews from the outside world.
The group was eventually forced to shut down in 1941, although Goldsmith’s parents managed to make it to New York immediately before.
They raised their two sons in St. Louis and spoke very little about their Jewish identity or their past traumas, Goldsmith recalled.
“In my father’s mind, to be Jewish was to be an outcast, to be hated, to be murdered,” Goldsmith said. “So I didn’t grow up feeling like I was Jewish.”
Goldsmith went through life, attending Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and eventually settling in Kensington, with very little attachment to Judaism.
It wasn’t until his fifties that Goldsmith, who worked as a radio host and classical music programmer for 45 years in the Washington area, developed a desire to understand his Jewish identity and family history.
“I had a desire to be somehow connected to my family, to the people I should have known right away,” Goldsmith said, adding that he had studied and had his bar mitzvah at 55. .
While researching his books, Goldsmith visited Oldenburg on several occasions and even visited the stately home his family once occupied, now inhabited by a German architect and his family.
“I felt almost all of the emotions in the catalog,” Goldsmith said. “It was terribly exciting to be inside this house where my family had lived, and it was devastating to think about what had happened to them.
While the brief visit to the house brought Goldsmith closer to his loved ones in a way, it was fleeting, he said.
“The house is no longer in the family. The paintings and various other art objects in the house are all gone. My family’s traces have disappeared. Except for that little kettle, ”he said, from the dining room of his home in Maryland, where the kettle now sits on a shelf in a place of honor.
Goldsmith looked at the little remnant of his legacy – a tangible piece of his history, which is finally his.
“It’s an object that lived 85 years ago in my grandparents’ house. These people I never had the chance to meet walked by, touched it and used it, ”Goldsmith said, adding that this type of kettle was historically – and ironically, given the pandemic – used for ceremonial hand washing, although he does not know how his grandparents used it or if it was just on display in their homes.
Ever since the kettle arrived, every night before bed, Goldsmith has found himself doing the same thing: “I walk past it and touch it,” he says. “It’s a way of saying goodnight to my family.”
