Karl Arnold Hopf

Article "The Man from Buchenwald" http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/26th-february-1960/11/the-ma...

Article by Catholic Priest William Walshe in Africa Magazine, a publication of St. Patrick's Missions c. 2012:

Let us never forget

Karl Arnold Hopf (1916 – 1992)

O Earth, don’t hide the wrongs done to me!
Don’t let my cry for justice be silenced!

                                                  Job 16:18

Back in the late 1970’s I visited Dachau Concentration Camp near Munich in Southern Germany. (Dachau was one of the many camps scattered throughout Germany and German occupied territory during the Second World War). It would be impossible to put into words the feeling of desolation, the eerie silence, the bleakness, the absolute pity of the place. This was the pits, an abyss of barbarism in a country that had produced Beethoven. There I saw the ovens, and first read the following chilling words, words written in a little booklet I picked up at the camp, and which I have to this day: “What was it like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?”

“If the miracle should happen, that you live to tell the tale, write it down and tell the world what they did to us.” “That was the most sacred will of the comrades who died in our arms or were removed….. to be gassed……. whose ashes escaped through the chimneys and covered the fields ………..”

Millions didn’t survive the camps; millions didn’t live to tell the tale. Of those who did, very few wrote; most were silent.

I knew a survivor of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, a silent survivor.

Karl Arnold Hopf was born in Germany on the 8th of September 1916, and died near Kitale, Kenya, on the 25th of July, 1992. His move to Kenya came immediately after he escaped from Buchenwald. When he arrived in Kenya he found a job in the Colonial Service where he remained until independence in 1963. He continued working for the new Government of Kenya for some years after independence. When he retired from Government service he settled about a mile or so out the road from St.Joseph's High School, Kitale where I was teaching at the time of his death.

His family asked me to conduct his burial service, something I felt very honoured to be asked to do. Though we met often on the streets of Kitale, or on his way to or from town, I knew little enough about Arnold. I did know that he was Jewish, and that as a young student during the 1930’s in Germany he had been a victim of the Nazi terror. I knew, too, that he had been incarcerated in Buchenwald.

My memories of him are of a very gracious, courteous, highly intelligent and learned man, a solitary and very private person, who walked about six miles to Kitale town a number of times every week to buy food for his family, to which he was devoted. He had married Rosemary, a Kalinjin woman of the Nandi tribe, a nurse at Ortum Mission Hospital, when he was District Officer in West Pokot, and they had seven children, Stephen, Charles, Philip, George, Margaret, Alice and Elizabeth.

When in town he liked to have a beer or two in the Bongo Bar.

The children attended mass regularly in St.Joseph's and were very loyal and faithful members of the Parish. Arnold lived a simple life, as simple as one could possibly imagine, a life of complete obscurity, on a small farm near Kiungani village.

Recently I was fascinated to discover that his father Ludwig was a very close associate of Albert Einstein’s and collaborated with the great man on a number of scientific research projects – he also played music with him. Fascinated, too, to learn that he spent his final years in Trinity College Dublin where he died in 1939 at the age of 55.

Ludwig Hopf was born in Nurnberg in 1884. He studied under a very famous Professor, Arnold Sommerfeld, at the University of Munich, where he received his Ph.D. in 1909, on the topic of hydrodynamics. Shortly after this, at a physics conference in Salzburg, Sommerfeld introduced Hopf to Albert Einstein. Einstein, needing an assistant at the University of Zurich, hired Hopf; it was an added bonus that Hopf was a talented pianist since Einstein played the violin and liked to play duets. In 1910, Hopf collaborated and published papers with Einstein. He collaborated and published papers with Sommerfeld in 1911. Also in that year he accompanied Einstein to the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague. He didn’t stay in Prague very long but accepted a position in Aachen, where he eventually became a professor in hydrodynamics and aerodynamics. During World War I, he contributed to the design of military aircraft. It was during his tenure at Aachen that he made a contribution to the Handbuch der Physik and co-authored a “highly esteemed” book on aerodynamics. In 1934, due to his being Jewish, (“non-Aryan”), he lost his position at Aachen, moved in time to Dublin via Cambridge and became a professor of mathematics at Trinity College. One of his friends in Dublin was the Austrian physicist and Nobel Prize winner (1933) Professor Erwin Schrödinger. Schrodinger, though he was not Jewish, left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933 because of Nazi anti – Semitism and moved after some time to the newly set up Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, where he became Director of the School of Theoretical Physics.

In 1939 Ludwig Hopf became seriously ill and died on December 21st.

At his funeral Professor Schrodinger said: “Ludwig Hopf’s lodestar was truth. The finding of knowledge was what he strained all his nerves for. His remarkable gifts led him quickly from step to step, from success to success and made his name known all over the world to fellow-scientists. He was a friend of the great geniuses of his time; indeed he was one of them. His loss is irretrievable to all of us.”

Alice Hopf, Ludwig’s widow, wrote to her son Arnold at the time:

“But I must say to you, as I said to your brothers: don’t think that I am fully unhappy; I can never be. I was father’s wife; I will always be; and I feel this was such a great happiness, that something always will remain in my life, something that is beyond all grief and all the loneliness. I never can lose this. I know that I was happier than most people, and I was that for 27 years, even in spite of Hitler who spoiled our last years, and without him – I am sure – father would still live. But I feel he could not spoil father’s life in the most secret and most noble part of his soul; there was too much kindness in him, too much detachment of mind …….”

I requested my sister Kay – though she has a million things to be doing with her time being the mother of three school - going children and employed in the Central Bank in Dublin - to go in search of Ludwig Hopf’s grave. It was a bit of a needle in a haystack kind of project for herself and her husband Paul, but they are both of a tenacious disposition and most generous with their time. After a futile search of Dublin’s Jewish Cemeteries they eventually found the grave in Mount Jerome. Sadly, the 73 years since Ludwig’s death had taken their toll on the gravestone and it wasn’t in great shape, but Kay and Paul, who were deeply touched when they heard the Hopf story, proceeded with great respect for Ludwig and his daughter Liselore (who died in Dublin in 1943 at the age of 19 and was buried beside her father), and great tenderness, to restore the stone to something like its original state.

Ludwig’s wife Alice moved from Dublin after Liselore’s death to live with one of her sons in England, and so ended the family connection with Ireland. One can only presume that few people visited the grave down all the years. Perhaps somebody reading this will take a stroll through Mount Jerome some sunny day and offer a little prayer for Ludwig, Liselore, and all the Hopfs.

I never did hear Arnold Hopf speak about the war or about the Concentration Camp at Buchenwald or about Nazi atrocities and genocidal policies, nor do I know anybody who did hear him speak about those terrible things; not his family, not his friends.

His son George has no recollection of his father ever speaking about those subjects. Nor have his daughters. Nor has Fr. Leo Staples who knew him in Pokot, nor has Fr. Michael Kelly who was friendly with him in Kitale, nor has Fr. Patrick Scanlan who was parish priest of St. Joseph’s, nor has Joachim Njenga the proprietor of the Bongo Bar who was in his company several times a week for years. His daughter Margaret suggested that I speak with John Wilson, a close friend of her dad’s. John Wilson is a Scotsman who lived for many years in Karamoja while working for the Government of Uganda, and now lives in Kitale. He stayed with the Hopf's whenever he visited Kenya. Margaret told me her dad and John used to talk at great length during those visits. I spoke with John recently and asked him about their conversations, if they talked about the war or what it was like for a Jew living in Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s when Jews were persecuted, hunted down and dispatched to the death camps in their millions. Never, John said, would Arnold mention the war or the Holocaust. When conversation wandered in that direction the barriers went down, and there was great reluctance on Arnold’s part to engage, so John kept away from the subject and in the end never broached it.

Only once, Alice tells me, was Buchenwald mentioned. In his final illness, shortly before he died, Arnold’s family wanted to take him to hospital. Arnold refused. Hospital, he feared, would remind him of Buchenwald.

We can only imagine what terrible things happened all those years ago.

Elie Wiesel survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald and witnessed unimaginable horrors. For ten years he never spoke about those horrors. Ten years, ten silent years after the liberation of the camps, and at the prompting of the great French writer François Mauriac, Wiesel broke his silence, but though he spoke he knew that words were futile and totally inadequate in attempting to describe the evils he saw and experienced. All he could try to do was to communicate the incommunicability of it all. He knew that even if he found the words people wouldn't understand. It wasn’t because he couldn’t explain that they wouldn’t understand, it was because they wouldn’t understand that he couldn’t explain.

How could anybody understand, how could anybody explain?

“Never shall I forget that smoke”, he wrote, “Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.”

I think I have some idea why Arnold Hopf never talked about Buchenwald!

Mentioned: http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-1.4167

Imprisonment in Buchenwald mentioned: https://books.google.com/books?id=jBoEmGB3B3MC&pg=PA148&lpg=PA148&d...