Refugee Sees Hope Amid His Bitter Roots : Holocaust: In his native Germany, where once he encountered hatred, a retired Philadelphia baker has found open hearts.

Alex Mathes, a retired baker in Philadelphia, swore never to return to the accursed country where he spent his first 26 years. He even forbade his children to set foot on German soil.

During Nazi rule, the people of Brand, the town his ancestors had called home for hundreds of years, hounded Mathes’ parents out of the bakery business, forced them out of their own house and finally packed them onto a transport train. Alex escaped, but most of his family was gassed in one death camp or another.

So why is Alex Mathes, a compact, energetic man of 81, back in Brand? Why is he standing across the street from what was once his family’s bake shop, staring at the exterior of the house through six lanes of speeding truck traffic? And why can he not bring himself to cross the street, let alone to knock at the door?

What he sees through the distortions of time, memory and the sparkling eyes of an old man only Mathes knows. That he sees it at all is the doing of Bruno Kreus, a 56-year-old resident of Brand, a German bureaucrat and amateur historian who had never before met a Jew.

Kreus is a member of Brand’s local history association, a group of hobbyists who poke around old record books and cemetery stones, building family histories and churning out books read, at best, by a dozen or so people.

German local history groups are no different from those that flourish in small-town America, except that some German groups have a tendency to lose their concentration when it comes to the middle of the 20th Century.

But Kreus is not like that. When he turned to the Nazi period, his focus became sharper. He asked old Brand residents whether any Jews had lived in the village. When he got vague answers, he turned to the record books.

“I found that there had been a Jewish kid only a few days apart from me in age,” he says. “He was gassed. That really hit me. The scales dropped from my eyes, and I realized that the end came in the camps in Poland, but it started here. I realized there were Jews who left Brand who would have memories of the village then.”

To be precise, there was one Jew left in the world who could give Kreus an account of that time. He tracked the man to the United States and wrote him a letter.

And so a chapter of history that seemed to have ended decades earlier--with a baker raising a family in a new world and banishing memories of the old--was suddenly reopened. Two men of common roots and powerful differences began a most unlikely dialogue.

“You can’t know me,” Kreus wrote four years ago, offering to dig into local records to detail the Mathes family history. Kreus asked for a reply but added, “I’ll also understand if you don’t want to have any contact with me.”

Mathes had lived in Philadelphia far longer than he had in Brand. He worked for 26 years as a baker in a large cake shop. He and his wife, Hilde, raised two daughters and sent them to MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. He wanted nothing to do with Germany or Germans.

Then came the letter from Kreus.

Mathes had so little information about his family. And he had to admit that some of his memories of Brand were good ones--the days he spent riding his motorcycle around town delivering bread, because his father’s regular customers were afraid to be seen frequenting a Jewish store; the friends, guys who called him “Jew Mathes” to his face but seemed to like him just the same.

Now here was a German offering to write his family history. “Time cures wounds. At least, it should,” Mathes thought. He wrote back, giving Kreus permission to search local libraries for Mathes family lore.

Kreus tracked the family’s moves from village to village, spending long days in genealogical libraries and city clerks’ offices. He traced the family back nearly 300 years, finding birth and marriage records, some written in Yiddish.

He learned how deeply ingrained this Jewish family was in the history of Brand. He learned that Jews in Brand never were forced to wear the yellow star. He also learned that no one in town had tried to protect Brand’s handful of Jews when the Nazis came for them.

His sources were varied and eccentric. From a neighbor, he found out that Mathes’s mother had bought new clothes before she was deported; she had told someone that she needed nice clothes for the trip to Poland.

He was burning to meet the only survivor of these people he had come to know from the pages of books brittle with age.

Kreus told his friends at the historical association that he had found Brand’s last surviving Jew and suggested that the group invite Mathes to visit.

Most of Brand rallied around the idea, and when the history group set up a collection to pay Mathes’ way, townspeople donated more than $3,000. Kreus sent Mathes the invitation.

Mathes was touched by the idea, thrilled by the research about his family. But actually go to Germany? Could he bear to see the house where he left his mother? Did he really want to see people who--at best--had cast their eyes away as the noose around his parents’ necks tightened?

“I had nightmares,” Mathes recalls. “Misgivings. Terrible memories. But sometimes you have to forgive. Then I’d think how they starved the people, what they did to children.”

And yet: There was only one place in the world where people speak the same dialect he grew up with. There was only one place where he could find the graves of his forefathers, the houses and streets that frame the memories that make an old man smile.

Finally, one day Mathes came home to a pile of birthday cards from old customers of his father’s bake shop, from old friends, all postmarked Deutschland.

Mathes: “I said, ‘All right, let’s go.’ ”

“People liked us,” Mathes recalls of his years in Brand. “Everybody knew we were Jewish, but we still had good, regular customers even after the Nazis came to power.”

This was true until Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938, when everyday Germans, egged on by Nazi brownshirts, attacked Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. It was 5 o’clock the next morning, and Alex Mathes heard a noise in the bake shop below his bedroom window.

“I ran down the steps, opened the door and somebody kicked me in the stomach,” he says. “In 10 minutes everything was destroyed--bread, cabinets, counters, half a century’s work destroyed.”

Later that morning the synagogue in nearby Aachen burned. Police came to the Mathes home, took Alex and put him in a cell in the basement of the mayor’s office. Two days later Brand’s three young Jewish men were put on a truck, transferred to a train and taken at gunpoint to the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

In those years before the Final Solution, Buchenwald was not yet a killing camp, and Jews could still buy their way out of Germany. Mathes spent five weeks at Buchenwald doing manual labor, and then his mother bought his freedom. He spent several months in a refugee camp in Belgium, but when the Nazis occupied that country in 1940, Mathes was tossed into a cargo train and shipped to a camp in occupied France.

There, he lived on a sandy beach with thousands of other Jews and prisoners, watching the months pass, existing just this side of starvation.

Eventually, in 1941, he was released and traveled through Spain and North Africa, eventually boarding a ship crammed with 900 passengers who spent 49 days wandering the high seas, looking for a port that would accept a cargo of Jews. The ship docked at Bermuda, Norfolk, Newport, Havana, Veracruz and finally Santo Domingo.

In 1946, with the help of cousins in the United States, he got a visa and moved to Miami, then to New Jersey and finally to Philadelphia, where he met his future wife and resumed his baking career.

Mathes’ first trip back to Brand in 1988 was a startling embrace from the very village--some of the very people--who had turned their backs on his family. Kreus arranged for a reception at City Hall, a banquet and visits to Mathes’ ancestors’ graves in two nearby towns.

Mathes spent two weeks in Brand that year. The next year Kreus returned the visit, joining Mathes and his wife in Philadelphia and New York. The two families attended Jewish Sabbath services together. At the temple, “no one ever said anything bad to us,” Kreus says. “Some of them spoke Yiddish, and we could converse that way.”

Mathes’s route back home was unusual; aging German Jews who have lived in exile for half a century rarely receive invitations from strangers in Germany. But German Jews do return to their birthplaces often enough; the German government is proud of its efforts to lure what it calls “former Jewish fellow citizens” back for visits.

In recent years the number of visitors has reached the tens of thousands, most of them elderly people, most of them Americans, responding to invitations from the German government or their hometowns.

Even though he had been back once, Mathes was reluctant to join an official visit. “I was afraid,” he recalls. “With so many Jews coming back, I thought some Germans would get jealous that so much money was being spent on Jews.”

In the end, he decided that if the Germans were ready to see him, he was willing to face them. There would be a chance to talk to schoolchildren in Brand, to tell them what had happened in their town, in their families. And there would be a chance to spend time again with Kreus, with the people in Brand, people who, Mathes reminded himself, he was actually coming to like.

Some students seemed stunned by Mathes’s tale. They groped for some way to fit the events of so long ago into their own world. “I want to know the difference between the Jewish and Catholic religions,” said a student named Hans-Dieter. “I can’t understand how different they can be that would make people think Jews are so bad.”

“Everyone is holy in his own religion,” Mathes said. He delivered a rudimentary history of the two religions, and when he pointed out that Jesus was Jewish, more than a few eyebrows around the room popped up.

“I never met a Jew before,” Hans-Dieter said after class. “I never heard this history. Interesting.”