Mike Meiberg’s visit  honors his family and sparks another journey

By Deb Silverthorn

Mike Meiberg was on vacation in Florida in 2017 when he received an email from a stranger in Germany. It was a communication that would change his life — bringing him closer to family members who perished in the Holocaust and introducing him to strangers who have since become dear friends.

That first email included what seemed like benign questions to Meiberg, who, with his wife Anita, has made Plano their home since 1988. The couple has been devoted to Chabad of Plano/Collin County since 1996. They are the parents of Linda Meiberg (Andrew Seligman) and Danny Meiberg and long held onto their family’s history without knowing there was so much more to learn.

Meiberg’s parents, Charlotte and Gustav Meiberg, who were part of the Bar Kochba social and sports club in Germany, left their home in Oldenburg in the spring of 1932 to be part of the first-ever Maccabiah Games in (then) Palestine, then a British colony. Two years later they moved there permanently, urging Meiberg’s paternal grandparents, Fanny and Meyer, to join them — to no avail.

Five years later, Fanny and Meyer visited Palestine to meet their first grandchild, Meiberg’s sister Tirza. Soon after returning to Germany, Meyer passed away. (Meiberg, born in Palestine in 1940, moved to the United States with his parents in 1957.)

Months later, Fanny, her son Julius, daughter-in-law Frieda and their young children Ruth and Manfred were sent to Theresienstadt. There, the family matriarch died of typhoid fever. The others were later murdered at Auschwitz.

A stranger’s email opens a door

The email received in Florida connected Meiberg to Astrid Louven, who works with the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) project. Since 1995, Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig has commemorated victims of the German Nazi regime through these stones. More than 116,000 have been laid in sidewalks and pavements outside the homes where people who were persecuted and murdered once lived.

In 2017, on the way to Israel for a family wedding, Meiberg and his daughter traveled to Germany, where he met Louven in person and saw the stones dedicated to their family.

“When we met, I felt a big sentiment. We cannot make Nazi-history unmade but we can make new networks,” said Louven, who has written two books about Wandsbek (now a district of Hamburg), Germany’s Jewish community.

“When I hear Mike’s Hamburg-German, nearly without an accent, and Linda was reciting a child poem which she learned by her grandmother — a poem I remember from my childhood but had nearly forgotten — tears are not so far.”

Another message, another connection

In February 2025, Meiberg received another stranger’s email, this time from Jörg Witte in Oldenburg, where the Meibergs lived before moving to Hamburg. Witte, a former English teacher who for decades has researched and taught about the Holocaust, has made at least 10 trips to Israel with his students.

“I come to this as the son, grandson and nephew of those who were involved in WWII. I don’t know for certain their involvement but I do believe they were Nazis,” said Witte, who volunteers with the Oldenburger Bürgerstiftung Community Foundation. “My father was captured and was in POW camps in the United States in Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri for nearly three years. He lived out his life as a convinced democrat dedicated to President John F. Kennedy.”

Each year the Oldenburger Bürgerstiftung Community Foundation invites descendants of residents lost during the Holocaust to its annual Kristallnacht march — a tribute to the Nov. 9–10, 1938 pogroms — and erects a memorial for the family: a five-foot post installed streetside near the home of those remembered.

Witte and Meiberg spoke for 10 months before meeting. They built a relationship that both say is a brotherhood, not just for a moment in time.

“There is sometimes some skepticism about what we do but, in Mike’s case, he came and was overwhelmed in a good way. It is unusual to become close like this but I’m very grateful,” said Witte. “It’s possible some of my people killed some of your people. I think about it often and believe it’s a responsibility for me to honor them somehow.”

Now 85 and a retired J.C. Penney executive, Meiberg says he had made his “last trip” in 2023 — to Israel to visit family only two months before the atrocities of Oct. 7. Retracting that declaration, he made a second “last” trip — first returning to Israel, then traveling to Germany for the raising of the post outside his grandparents’ home. He was joined again by his daughter and also by his nephew Nitzan Ariel, who lives in Israel.

“These trips made our history tangible,” said Meiberg’s daughter Linda, who, raised in Connecticut, made a trip to Israel in 1985 that resulted in her making aliyah — until she returned to the States 16 years later.

Delving into and witnessing moments of her family’s history aligns with her work as an adjunct faculty member of art and art history at Bridgewater State University, whose archaeological fieldwork includes expeditions to Greece, Cyprus and throughout Israel. “Standing at my family’s home, it hit me,” she said. “It was no longer an abstract place. They could have, should have, been alive. They were taken.”

From memory to meaning

Wondering about his family’s fate had they all moved to Palestine — given that his mother lived to 106 and his father to 79 — Meiberg appreciates the outreach of the people from where they came.

“The remembrance had the mayor and politicians, news people and, for the march, more than 1,000 people, including 200-plus from the new Jewish community, mostly from Ukraine and Russia,” Meiberg said. “The march, we were told, is in memory, as a warning and for future generations from which to learn.

“There are some wonderful German people with whom I’m deeply connected and who I love. Astrid and Jörg are two of them. Truly two of many righteous among the Germans,” he concluded. “These people want us to know they care, that they feel bad about the history that as individuals we believe they had no responsibility for, and they want us to know our people weren’t — and never would be — forgotten.”

To connect to Stolpersteine Hamburg, visit stolpersteine-hamburg.de. To reach the Oldenburger Bürgerstiftung Community Foundation, visit tinyurl.com/Oldenburger-Community.