Local History

this one isn't so much a local treasure as it is a little piece of unsung local history.

With only a few short morning hours to myself each day, hours which are inevitably spent shopping or errand running or at the gym or grabbing a quick cuppa with a friend, it's hard to have any real hobbies to speak of.  I do a bit of reading and a bit of blogging (a very little bit of blogging of late) but both of those are difficult with the numerous interruptions a 5 and 2 year old bring to the table, curious and inquisitive little boys who it always seems are bustin' at the seams to, in their words, "tell me something".   However, between fixing lunch, refereeing light saber battles, designing lego masterpieces, and pancaking play doh I can  putz around online.  Yep, pretty pathetic that googling is my hobby, but it is, and I often find myself googling "local German village + World War Two" just to see what pops up.  This week a search for "Gangelt and World War Two" yielded  this link .

Click through and  you'll find the story of Walter Leopold. Leopold, a Jewish survivor of WW2,  was born in a Dutch town not too far from here.  When he was a baby he and his family went into hiding.  They survived the war and moved to the states in 1954.  In 2009 Leopold returned to the Holland to try to discover more about his family's past, specifically his German father.  His search led him to Gangelt, his father's birthplace.  His time exploring Gangelt eventually led him to a forgotten and desecrated Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town.  As things go, he arranged to have the cemetery's gates shipped to him in Massachusetts, to grace a Jewish cemetery in Amherst.  (The details of his story are interesting, so do click through and read his account and see a pic of the gates).

Enter: Google

Not too many years ago, had I happened across Leopold's article in the Amherst Bulletin, short of ferreting out if there was some sort of Gangelt historical society or driving around town looking for said cemetery, that'd been that.   Now-a-days, however, a quick search and a click of the translate button later and we discovered the Jüdischer Friedhof  (Jewish Cemetery)  was in use from 1877-1937 and is located on AmWirtsberg, off the B56.   Today was an  unseasonably warm and sunny Sunday, so another click over to google maps to find the precise location of Am Wirtsberg, and we grabbed the bikes and hit the farm roads to go see for ourselves.  (For any locals out there Am Wirtsberg is off the B56 right at the edge of Gangelt as you head towards Stahe.  The cemetery itself is across the street from the smokestack, up a narrow gravel path. And yep, you could drive past it everyday and not notice it unless you specifically went looking for it).

When Leopold discovered the cemetery in such horrible condition, a group of locals set about cleaning it up, so today it looks respectable.  My kiddos had a hard time understanding why they couldn't climb on the cool looking rocks; they did much better sitting outside with a snack.  Many of the headstones are too worn to read and most of the headstones are in Hebrew.  We did puzzle for a few minutes over the one woman who was born in 1852 and appeared to die in 1997, until we looked closer and figured out the 9 was a 2.  1927 fit better with what we already read about the cemetery anyway.