When she used her compact camera to capture the view from her window in the German city of Kiel one December afternoon in 1931, Rosi Posner was doing more than just taking a snapshot. In the foreground is a brass menorah, the candlestick used to mark the Jewish festival of Hanukah; in the near background, the chilling image of a swastika flag flying prominently from the Nazi headquarters that had opened up opposite her flat earlier that year.
“Most Jews, after the rise of the Nazis, pulled their curtains shut so that the chanukiah (menorah) couldn’t be seen from the street. But she was determined to show she and her husband were not afraid,” says Nava Gilo, Rosi’s granddaughter.
More than 90 years after Rosi clicked the shutter in an act of bravery and defiance – at a time when Germany’s Jews were being subjected to increasing hostility – the menorah she included in the now iconic image is returning to Germany. It will be lit in Berlin at sundown on Monday, the second day of Hanukah, in the presence of German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the grandchildren of Rosi and her husband, Arthur, the last rabbi before the Holocaust of the north German city of Kiel.
The menorah was among the few possessions the Posners took with them when they fled Germany with their three children in June 1933. The postcard-sized photograph was also in a photo album they had packed, along with the camera.
Both are now at the heart of an exhibition at Kiel’s municipal museum, called Kiel, Hanukkah 1931, which explores the city’s Jewish life – and the rise of nazism that destroyed it – through the history of the Posner family. For three days before it goes to Berlin, Kiel locals have had the chance to view the menorah, which the family has borrowed from Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem where it is on permanent loan except for the eight days of Hanukah every year.
Gilo remembers her grandparents – known by their Hebrew names as Rahel and Akiva since they emigrated to Palestine in 1934 – as “wise and warm”. Her grandfather kept in touch with the members of his Jewish community who survived the Holocaust, right up until his death in 1962. Her grandmother, a modern, self-confident woman, had wanted to be a journalist, she says, “hence her love of the camera and writing – but was unable to fulfil this dream as she was the rabbi’s wife”.
Rosi never spoke much about the photograph or how it came about, Gilo says. “It was just one of many in the family photo album where it still is today.”
Gerhard Paul, picture historian from the University of Flensburg who researched the history of the photograph after first coming across it in the mid-1990s, puts the power of the image down to the fact that Posner has “seized the contrasts of both symbols and manages to create a photograph that becomes a symbol in itself – for the approaching antisemitic threat and for Jewish self-assertion in 1930s Germany.”
Gilo insists that her grandmother was well aware of the power of the image, which might otherwise have been a quotidian domestic scene on a drab December day.
“I think you just need to turn the photo over to answer that,” Gilo says. On the back Rosi Posner has written, “just as the flag says Judaism will die, so the light says it will live forever”.
Persecution of the Jews began in Kiel earlier than in most of the rest of Germany, which is partly why the family – under pressure from the community – decided to escape. Already in 1932, before Hitler came to power, public notices saying “Jews forbidden from entering” had started to appear across the city.
Arthur Posner had made official complaints about the signage and was publicly ridiculed for doing so and the family was threatened. In August 1932, Kiel’s synagogue and a Jewish-owned department store were bombed. After the Nazi party opened its headquarters in a popular concert hall, a column in the weekly Nazi magazine Volkskampf asked “whether the Rabbi living opposite will still be able to sleep at night?”
The family knew to take the threats seriously.
In June 1933, three months after Adolf Hitler had come to power, the Posners set out from the city’s railway station where the rabbi urged them to leave Germany behind but “never forget you’re from Kiel”. They went via Antwerp to Palestine where Arthur retrained as a librarian and in his spare time compiled a history of Kiel’s Jewish community. Rosi worked as a cashier and threw herself into philanthropic work.
Arthur campaigned for a plaque to be erected on the site of the synagogue, which was all but destroyed in the pogroms of November 1938, but died, aged 78, six years before it was unveiled.
He, and after his death his wife, who died aged 81 in 1982, repeatedly asked the city of Kiel to accept his comprehensive chronicle of Jewish life in Kiel in which he had amassed biographical details of many of the families who had been murdered or escaped, and were dispersed around the world. Repeatedly the city declined the offer until recently finally signalling its support for a critical edition, which is now in progress.
The photograph first came to light in 1974 when the municipal museum put out an appeal for everyday objects with which it wanted to tell the story of Jewish life for the first time.
“Rahel sent them around 17 of her photographs of everyday life,” Yehuda, her grandson says. “The window picture was just one of them but is the one that most struck a chord with people.” After appearing in newspaper reviews of the resulting exhibition it later spread to school textbooks and magazines, and copies were sent to archives and museums. It has been “on its own journey” around the world, Yehuda says.
“We are amazed that the interest in it has continued to grow. We’ve had requests from South Africa, the US and across Europe to tell the story behind it.”
He and his sister visited Kiel for the first time this week. The flat and the erstwhile Nazi headquarters are gone, destroyed by an Allied air raid in 1944. “So if you like the picture is all that remains,” he says.
The decision to come to Germany, land of the perpetrators, despite the support of Yad Vashem, has been hard for them, Gilo admits.
“Some of our friends didn’t understand us. But Hanukah means light and we want to share that light. As the Jewish saying goes: ‘a little bit of light dispels a lot of darkness’.”
