Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt for Joanna Intrator’s Summons to Berlin: Nazi Theft and A Daughter’s Quest for Justice, which is out August 1st.
On his deathbed, Dr. Joanne Intrator’s father poses two unsettling questions: “Are you tough enough? Do they know who you are?” Joanne soon realizes that these haunting questions relate to a center-city Berlin building at 16 Wallstrasse that the Nazis ripped away from her family in 1938. But a decade is to pass before she will fully come to grasp why her father threw down the gauntlet as he did.
Repeatedly, Joanne’s restitution quest brings her into confrontation with yet another of her profound fears surrounding Germany and the Holocaust. Having to call on reserves of strength she’s unsure she possesses, the author leans into her professional command of psychiatry, often overcoming flabbergasting obstacles perniciously dumped in her path.
The depth and lucidity of psychological insight threaded throughout Summons to Berlin makes it an attention-grabbing standout among books on like topics. As a reader, you’ll come away delighted to know just who Dr. Joanne Intrator is. You’ll also finish the book cheering for her, because in the end, she proves far more than tough enough to satisfy her father’s unnerving final demands.
For about a year before his death, and despite terminal illness, my father tried to achieve restitution for the theft of 16 Wallstrasse, a commercial building in Berlin’s Mitte district that his family co-owned in the 1930s. Wallstrasse means “Wall Street” in German; considered by many to be the heart of the city, bustling, cosmopolitan Mitte was a business center and central to Jewish life in Berlin before the Nazis took over. After World War II, between 1961 and 1990, this area fell under the control of Communist East Berlin. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, restitution finally became possible for Nazi-era crimes committed in Mitte.
Though, I sensed that my father referred to the injustice done to our family as part of the Nazi’s Aryanization program—the transfer of Jewish property to non-Jews from 1933 to 1945—I had no sense of what lay ahead of me when I joined his quest for justice. My experience would involve journeys both literal and figurative, extending over many years, and very nearly break me.
Trudging on through the sodden muck of Sachsenhausen, and deeply feeling the weight of this place where Nazis perfected their use of gas chambers, I suffered through waves of dread. While I was out there in the marrow-chilling cold among the desolate barracks, vaguely formed thoughts and their accompanying negative emotions free-floated through me. Doubts about the importance of my case. Flickering impressions that, perhaps, the attorneys, the Berglases, or both were right to want to get the case settled quickly, even if that meant negotiating with the Ariseurs.
Yet I found myself obsessing again over the Ariseurs of 16 Wallstrasse. After they stole our building, what exactly had they done on Kristallnacht? What were the Heim & Gerken Ariseurs who stole my Jewish family’s building doing, thinking, and feeling when the Nazis imprisoned six thousand Jews here, in Sachsenhausen, in the wake of Kristallnacht?
But there was more than the question of what the Ariseurs were doing on Kristallnacht. Another element in my swirling thoughts was the vague notion that 16 Wallstrasse was just a building. Nobody died as a direct result of it being stolen from Jewish owners.
Then, too, there were my feelings about the Nazi flag having been mass-produced at 16 Wallstrasse. As I was thinking about it at Sachsenhausen, the information regarding the Nazi flag seemed like some paltry crumb I could follow (or not) towards more crumbs, Hansel-and-Gretel style, not knowing whether the crumbs would lead me out of the forest or into an oven.
Nonetheless, despite doubts that troubled me at various times, now resurfacing at Sachsenhausen, I had always wound up determined to fight on. And it was there at Sachsenhausen that I finally understood why I persisted. While working on “The Persecution of Mr. Jakob Intrator,” I had learned about the four additional prime center-city Berlin properties stolen from my grandfather, in payment of punitive, confiscatory taxes that the Nazis were levying only on Jews. Those Nazi acts were targeted at Jews to make them feel worthless and hopeless. And there had been umpteen similar additional cases of Nazi persecution of Jews. It was not the buildings that were persecuted when they were stolen; it was the Jewish owners who were persecuted. Therefore, the thought that 16 Wallstrasse was “only a building” was not an accurate framework for thinking about my case.
