THREE

The Loss of Innocence

The hair of my mother would never turn white.

PAUL CELAN

The early spring of 1944 was cold. While much of Europe went up in flames, rural life in Tab, even for the Jews, went on relatively undisturbed, with its timeless, seasonal routine. The fortunes of war were shifting. As the Soviet army approached from the East, Hungary slowly became a battlefield. In Tab the guns were still too far away to be heard, but fly-overs of the American and British air armadas on their way to Germany or to the oil fields of Rumania had become more frequent. On a clear day such orderly flight formations looked like swarms of bees except for the contrails they left high in the sky.

As they continued their ritualized daily lives, Jewish villagers in Tab began to whisper to each other their hopes for an Allied victory. The local newspaper provided them with a small window to the outside world. On March 19, while Bernie was at school preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, the newspaper appeared for the last time. At seven o'clock in the evening as Bernie returned home, a neighbor woman asked him, “Have you heard the news?”

He had not heard the news. How could he? During the strict hours of instruction, only the world of the school existed and nothing else. But while he had been concentrating on his lessons, the Hungarian government had been replaced by a Nazi puppet regime. This was the last news reported by the paper, and its announcement became grim reality in the streets of Tab within a week as anti-Semitic laws were put into effect. A decree forbade Jews to travel, and thus the first boundaries—still invisible—were drawn around the Jewish community. “Stuck in Tab,” as Bernie puts it now. The opportunity to escape vanished. Some Jews, including one of Bernie's cousins, had left Tab for Palestine before the doors were closed. But few could afford to go far away, and as villagers with strong local roots, they had no idea where they should go. Most simply waited in the hope that staying in familiar surroundings would somehow protect them against the outside forces that were closing in on them. This hunkering down shaped the behavior of the Jewish community. It was their undoing.

By mid-May, Jews were ordered to wear six-pointed stars on their shirts, coats, or jackets. Made of yellow cloth, this identification mark had to be of a precisely prescribed size. Bernie's mother purchased yellow material and fashioned the stars for her family on her Singer sewing machine, a brand found in households all over Europe. All Jews —even those who had converted to Christianity—had to wear this star, with the result that the price of yellow cloth went up. Just a short time before, Bertha Rosner had sewn smart sailor outfits for her two boys. Unfortunately, the suits, with ties in the front and bibs in the back, were ruined when the boys were caught in a downpour on their way home one day. The blue and white fabrics were not color-fast, and they ran in chaotic patterns, ruining her labor. She did not have time to replace them. The six-pointed stars were the last items Bernie's mother sewed for her sons, herself, and her husband.

Now the Jews were forbidden to enter the main square of their village unless they displayed the yellow star. The public space within which they had moved as naturally as they had breathed the village air was radically transformed. The paths connecting school, synagogue, home, baker, and railroad station that had been engraved in the mind through everyday repetitions were distorted. New paths were beginning to form, with uncertain contours at first. But their evil nature was to become apparent as the weeks went by. In village life a person's identity is not only defined by family, personal traits, religion, or social status. One's dwelling place, and particularly its location relative to the rest of the village, is also one of its crucial elements. Many European family names derive from the places where people made their homes, marking thereby the origins and uniqueness of one family as distinct from others.

As one area of the town was designated an official ghetto, Tab became two distinct villages. One remained rooted in its established social context; the other, under the control of outside forces, was rendered unstable and marked for elimination. This geographic division created a radical break between Jews and non-Jews that became more and more insurmountable as the weeks went on. Where there had been commerce, personal contact, myriad one-on-one interactions, both hostile and friendly, now there developed an ever-increasing division.

Jews who did not already live within its confines were ordered to move to the ghetto. The extended Rosner family of Tab whose homes lay outside came to live with Bernie's family, whose house, located at the edge of the village, was within the ghetto boundaries. About a dozen people now occupied the house that Bernie had always shared only with his parents and brother. The life Bernie had known collapsed around him. No longer was it the voice of his mother that set the tone for daily life, or of his father, or of the rabbi or the neighbor with the news of change to come. What for the Jews had been a village-based governance under Hungarian law changed to rule by edict, proclaimed by the unfamiliar voices of Hungarian Nazis.

A group of these Nazis arrived and convened a Jewish council composed primarily of elders. The Nazis passed instructions on to this council, threatened its members, and used them as a conduit for their message of fear to the rest of the Jewish community, now crowded into the ghetto. It was not clear to the disoriented Jews exactly what legitimized the Nazis' authority. These thugs wore no uniforms and belonged to no discernible Hungarian state organization. Apparently, they felt no need to prove their legitimacy. They simply gave orders and spread fear, and this was enough. The victims in the ghetto were made to submit, and the non-Jewish inhabitants of Tab stood by in silence or cheered openly.

A bright boy of twelve, quick on his feet and adept at languages, Bernie was chosen as a runner to carry messages from the town hall to the Jewish council and various other organizations involved in administering the slow destruction of the Jewish community. He was present at some of the meetings of the Jewish council run by the Nazis. The tone set in these meetings still rings in his ears: “You Jews are traitors. Before we go, you will go. If you don't give us your hidden treasures, you'll be tortured and shot.” Threats and humiliation were often directed against individual council members.

Increasingly isolated from the rest of the village and marked by the yellow star, the Jewish community was gripped by a paralyzing fear. People, including non-Jews, particularly those with communist affiliations, started to disappear. Soon rumors raced through the ghetto that whole families were vanishing. One day, without advance warning, close friends of the Rosner family were suddenly gone. When Bernie heard this news, he went to the synagogue and sobbed.

By the beginning of June, the rumor spread that Jews would be deported. No one knew whether to believe it. Then a Hungarian in a captain's uniform arrived and ordered the Jewish council to convene a ghetto meeting. He spoke to the assembled Jews and tried to calm their fears with promises and advice: “You'll be fed. Keep your noses clean. Everything will be fine. You'll be given work to do.” His speech suggested in vague terms that an official relocation was being planned.

Nazi authorities designated Tab, which had the largest Jewish population in the area, an assembly point for the deportation of all the Jews of that region. Jews from villages in the vicinity began to arrive and were added to those already at Tab. Many of these new arrivals not only had converted to Christianity some time ago, but they were well-to-do and thoroughly assimilated in Hungarian society. As they were marched into the ghetto, they made a point of acting relaxed, making light of what seemed to many of them some kind of huge joke. After all, they were converted Christians by choice and baptism as well as respected members of the Hungarian middle-class establishment—men and women of the world with good educations, money, and an enlightened outlook on life. Yet, in the Nazi revolution, all distinctions of social class —education, talent, accomplishments, quality of character—were rendered meaningless. The only distinction that mattered was the one made between Jew, as defined by the Nazi racial laws, and “Aryan.” Thus, “blood” became the deadly metaphor for a new kind of human typology. And this new human typology was the logical complement to the changes in village geography that made the ghetto borders in Tab ever more impenetrable. Finally, the Nazis erected a gate that cut the ghetto off from the rest of the village altogether. To make sure that all the Jews of Tab had been corralled inside the ghetto, the Nazis relied on village knowledge of longtime Jewish residents. In the case of Polish refugees who had recently settled in Tab, the test was simple. Nazis ordered men and boys to drop their pants and reveal their genitalia. If they were circumcised, their fates and the fates of their families were sealed.

As a messenger, Bernie still retained more mobility than most inhabitants of the ghetto. He was allowed to pass through its gate and cross over the newly drawn boundaries. From the town hall to the Jewish council, from the ghetto to the main street, he scurried from one assignment to the next. On the main street of Tab one day, an assembly of high-ranking German SS officers arrived in their military vehicles, presumably to inspect this ever-growing collection site for the Jews of the region. Seeing their elegantly tailored uniforms and neatly polished high jackboots, the boy immediately realized that these Germans were important people. They all wore the Totenkopf skull emblem of the SS on their hats. One displayed the four-star insignia of an SS Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) on his lapel. These uniforms impressed the young Bernie even more than that of the Hungarian lieutenant in Tab, and today Bernie is still able to draw for me the insignia of the top SS brass exactly as I remember them, either from sight or from the primer of Nazi military ranks that I and my young German compatriots committed to memory as members of the Jungvolk. It was clear to Bernie which of these high-ranking officers was in command, because he gave orders to the officers of lesser rank. At one point, this commanding SS officer turned toward the young ghetto messenger, patted him on the head, and said, “Kleiner Bube” (little boy). His picture was unmistakable; Bernie saw it in newspapers after the war. The officer with whom he had come face-to-face was Adolf Eichmann, chief transporter and executioner of the European Jews. (The historical record puts Eichmann in Hungary at this time, directing the transport of rural Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and other camps.)

A few days later, with the Hungarian police and uniformed special forces in command, the order came down that everybody was to be ready, with a minimum of belongings, to move out of their homes the following morning for “relocation.” No one was surprised. “Tomorrow is the day,” they said to each other, knowing only that their exodus into an unknown future was at hand. On the evening before leaving their homes forever—it had been a bright, sunny day—they saw a squadron of Allied bombers heading south high in the sky. The setting sun illuminated the vapor trails they left behind with a brilliant glow. Some saw in this a sign from heaven signaling their deliverance.

At this point in his recollections Bernie says, “It's coming,” the use of the present tense wrenching both of us away from his evocation of the past. It is a signal, a subtle linguistic marker of what I know to be the most difficult event for him to recount. He closes his eyes in a characteristic manner as he begins to tell me about the unfolding of that day.

At about 9:30 in the morning, the Jews of Tab, who had assembled in front of their homes as ordered, were herded from the ghetto to the Catholic parochial school. Each person was allowed to carry one suitcase or package. Because it was unclear where meals would be coming from, the Rosners carried some food in their bags. Bernie remembers that his parents packed, among other things, a jar of goose fat. An old woman who had brought several more jars of goose fat gave the Rosners some of her own treasure. I asked Bernie how he felt having to leave his home and their settled rural life on less than one days notice. He replied that the speed, force, and direction of events unfolding around him were such that he had no time to contemplate how he felt and what it meant. He remembers that his family concentrated on what would be best to take along into an uncertain future. Fear was not an overriding factor but rather expedient decisions and actions. Fear came later.

As the Jews were marched through their village, some of the non-Jewish onlookers jeered, while others were visibly upset at this unprecedented sight. Most remained behind closed doors and windows, however, preferring not to watch or be seen. Those villagers who witnessed the march were not allowed to talk to their former Jewish neighbors as they proceeded to the schoolhouse, the place where, over the next couple of hours, the nightmare began, as Bernie tells me, his eyes still almost closed. There, in this Christian school building, the incident that became the first station of his family's suffering took place. Bernie had hinted at it during our summer visit to Tab while we stood at the railroad station, looking west toward the brick buildings, five years before we decided to write down our stories. I had often wondered what had taken place during this first day of relocation but had never pressed him on it. Even after we began work on our project in earnest, I didn't want to be the one to bring it up. I began to shrink away from whatever it was, to protect him from having to recall a part of his story that was obviously very painful to him and also to protect myself from having to hear it. Even now, it is difficult for me to commit this recollection to paper, although the facts are perfectly simple.

After their arrival at the Catholic school, the Jews were taken to a classroom and everyone was ordered to strip —men, women, and children —all in view of everyone else and of their oppressors. Right in front of him, Bernie's mother was forced to take off all her clothes. He had to watch while, naked and helpless, she was searched by the hands of a hostile Nazi thug. One might argue that Bernie had to endure worse atrocities later at Auschwitz and beyond, but he was only twelve, and he had never seen an adult, much less his own mother, naked. The evil mix of the forced nudity, the public humiliation, and the physical molestation converged to form an enormous emotional shock for him that symbolized a loss of innocence as well as the beginning of unimaginable horrors to come. For a brief moment, Bernie's mother was stripped of her social persona, her family status, and turned into a hapless creature subjected to the crude hands of an anonymous oppressor.

Toward midafternoon, the Jews were herded from the school-house to the brickyard located near the train station. Everyone carried bedding, and they were ordered to settle down on the bare ground, because they would be spending the night there. They were not fed. It was a Friday, and as evening fell, they tried to arrange an impromptu Sabbath service. When a frail woman in her eighties stood up and started to recite her pre-Sabbath prayer, a Nazi silenced her with a blow to her head. The brickyard sheds had roofs but no walls. As it turned out, they became a holding corral for a few days until the Nazis transported the Jews and their meager belongings to a collection point for ghetto residents of the region established at the provincial capital of Kaposvar to the southwest. Its railroad station, a stop on the way to Bernie's beloved grandparents, had been turned into a way station for Auschwitz.

These events marked the end of Jewish life in Tab. If the remaining villagers of Tab looted the abandoned homes that were, of course, still filled with possessions—furniture, dishes, carpets, drapes, clothes, memorabilia—their actions did not make it into the history books. On postwar visits to Tab, Bernie found no plaques or monuments remembering the former Jewish community. He discovered the Jewish houses, including his own, still standing and occupied by strangers. How they came into possession of the Rosners' home, he does not know.

The Holocaust had begun earlier in Germany than in Hungary. In my village of Kleinheubach, the Kristallnacht (Night of the Shattered Glass) of 1938 visibly marked the Jews off from the rest of us. Suddenly, there were two kinds of houses in our village—those protected by law and custom and those owned by Jews that became targets for vandalism. Jewish homes were sprinkled throughout the village, and after the ransacking in the night of November 9-10, they all bore traces of violence. As in Tab, Jews could leave their houses only if yellow stars were sewn to their clothes. I remember these stars on people who passed in the streets. It was no longer possible to separate these people from the stars they were forced to wear.

My eighth birthday fell on November 9, and I vividly remember the moment when the news of the violence against the Jews reached the home of my grandparents. It was my agitated father who entered that evening to tell us that average German citizens, not the police or the military, were breaking into homes owned by Jews and destroying their property—under police protection. While a musician in San Francisco, he had worked with Jews and counted many among his friends. He dubbed the violence against the Jews “stupid.”

I was all ears. Even at that early age, I knew that something extraordinary was happening. Everyone was upset, even my grandmother, who had the uncanny ability to see a positive side to virtually anything. I still hear my father saying, “This is the beginning of another world war.” The adults turned on the radio to get the official news, and the tone of the report had everyone in an uproar. It became clear in our house in the Bahnhofstraße (Train Station Street) that similar events were taking place all over Germany. But the destruction of property—and particularly the smashing of doors and windows—had upset the daily village routine. Most of the Gentiles were more upset about the property damage than about the wronged property owners. The Jewish villagers had been victimized not only by decrees from Berlin but also by some of our neighbors. The assault on the Jews was no longer something that took place in the outside world accessible only through the power of the radio or by word of mouth. It had come home. It was happening in our village.

I was not out-of-doors during the Kristallnacht, and our house was located at the edge of the village away from the violence, but many villagers assembled to watch the extraordinary spectacle. Some joined the band of “outsiders” who instigated the attacks on Jews and Jewish property in Kleinheubach. Former mayor Bernhard Holl's local history reports on the events of that night. In the gang that included six or seven “fremde” (outsiders), uniformed SA members of the notorious Brownshirts, one was recognized as the Sturmführer Bertisch from the nearby village of Röllbach. Kleinheubach police commissioner Staab prevented them from destroying the house of Samuel Wetzler by arguing that it had already been sold to a Christian family. Staab, known in the village for decades as a stalwart policeman with a sense of order and justice, came too late to prevent destruction elsewhere—for example, of the Jewish shoe store and of the windows and interior of the synagogue. The roving gang had entered the Jewish place of worship by ramming the door with a tree trunk. They broke all the windows and destroyed the interior, but when they tried to set the synagogue on fire, a neighbor, Fritz Abb, a glazier by profession, intervened and ordered them to extinguish it before the fire burned down the houses next door. This they did before leaving to ransack elsewhere. Commissioner Staab wrote after the war that some Kleinheubach residents joined in the violence, while the majority observed passively and were only willing to aid the victims in secret. After the war, my stepmother was proud to have in her possession one of the few extant copies of this police report.¹

“Why are they doing this?” still rings in my ears as an unanswered question that evening. If I had been sophisticated enough, I could have answered it by opening the primer I had been given by my grammar school teacher the year before. It contained pictures with captions in large print that contrasted Jewish with “Aryan” ways of life: the “Aryan” butcher shop, for example, with its meats and sausages neatly displayed and its slender butcher carving cuts to order for smiling blond, blue-eyed customers. On the opposite page was the Jewish shop with a fat, ugly butcher, bloody handprints on his soiled apron. A cat tugged at a large chunk of meat that lay on the dirty floor. The customers, extravagantly dressed in flowing silk dresses, scowled, with somber miens.

What had been discussed in our home only behind closed doors and secure walls I now saw on my way to school on November 10, the morning after the Kristallnacht. Still etched in my mind is the figure of Frau Sichel, a heavy-set Jewish woman who had the habit of swinging her left arm out to the side when she walked, as if to propel her body forward more efficiently. I saw her when she emerged from the basement of the grammar school—where Jews were permitted to retrieve some of their vandalized belongings—to make her way back to her ransacked house. I remember that she was desperately trying to act normal, as if nothing serious had happened, as she sauntered up the village street, swinging her arm out in her familiar gait. I don't know whether I felt ashamed of something I did not understand, or whether I picked up from this middle-aged woman, whom I knew, her shame at having been humiliated by thugs. Kundera is right when he says that the transformation of a person from subject to object is experienced as shame. I had not seen the thugs who had done this to Frau Sichel. All I saw and experienced was her altered demeanor, a reflection of her altered status. It was unsettling at the time. Even as an eight-year-old, I understood that certain fundamental rules had been broken and that this gentle woman had been robbed of something more important than her material possessions. Frau Sichel had changed in my mind into someone unusual, someone exposed to a nameless dread. It remains a visual memory, one on one, of the eight-year-old boy and the middle-aged woman. I do not recall that I ever saw her again. Years later, at a reception of the German consul general in San Francisco, I met a wine merchant from Darmstadt named Sichel who turned out to be a cousin of my Frau Sichel. She had not survived.²

On my way home from school a few days after the Kristallnacht, I saw an empty house in the Baugasse that belonged to Jews, who were now gone. Halfway torn from its frame, the front door hung open. Most of the windows in the two-story house were smashed. Glass, papers, and books were strewn about outside. Feather beds had been slit open and thrown around so that goose down had floated out the second-story windows to blanket the street like a thin layer of snow. I thought of the figure of Frau Holle in a Grimm s fairy tale, who was said to make it snow by shaking her feather beds out of the windows. I hesitated for a moment but couldn't overcome my curiosity to enter the empty house. I walked up a flight of stairs and came upon a scene of chaos in what had been the living room. I was alone, and suddenly my curiosity turned to fear. I ran back down the stairs to the street, then stopped and stared at the house. Something on the cobblestones in the gutter caught my eye—a long, white, unused candle. I picked it up, brushed off the dirt, and took it home with me. I remember the act very clearly but cannot recall any feelings related to it. Did I think at that moment that I was stealing or saving something? It was years before I understood that I had committed a theft against the owners of that house in the Baugasse.

In the “orderly” days of prewar Nazi Germany, the Jews were not collected in a public square and marched out of the village in plain view of the other inhabitants, as happened later in Tab, Hungary. By January 1942 when the “Final Solution” was conceived at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, most of the Jews had already left Kleinheubach. Holl's record relates how on March 27 the Gestapo ordered local authorities in Würzburg to “evacuate and relocate” (Wohnsitz verlegen — a term that implied a move to a new domicile) one thousand Jews from the area. The gendarmerie of Kleinheubach distributed eleven pamphlets, with ten copies each to the three Jews who still remained in Kleinheubach —Frieda Freudenstein (b. 1884), Ger-son Freudenstein (b. 1899), and Regina Sichel (b. 1893). Seven additional documents described in minute detail all the instructions to be followed by both the authorities and the evacuees, including the amount of food and clothing Jews were to bring on the journey, the type of suitcase allowed, and even how to empty the garbage, turn off the gas, electricity, and water, and extinguish the fires in the ovens of their homes. The records show that on April 23, 1942, the orderly deportation of the last three Jews of Kleinheubach was completed.³

I had not known Jewish children growing up. Because the number of Jewish children had dwindled, the Jewish school was closed in 1923.⁴ The Jewish teacher left town with his family, and the few remaining Jewish children were integrated into the Protestant Volksschule. I have a photograph of my second-grade class of 1937, when I was seven. There are no Jewish children in it. As a child, I knew who some of the Jewish adults were, and I do recall the last Jewish man, Herr Freudenstein, by sight. He tended his garden and went about the village, passing our house to walk in the nearby forest. I never saw anyone speak to him, but I remember that family members started rooting for him “to make it,” to be overlooked by the Nazis. In the minds of many, he stayed an individual villager and in this way escaped the deadly metamorphosis into a Jude for a time. But he, too, was gone before summer 1942.

Although I have no visual memory of him, I remember that people frequently talked about “Judenernst,” who left his mark as a village personality. Bernhard Holl's local history tells something of his story. Born in 1896, Ernst Sichel was a bachelor and an active member of the Communist Party who survived sixteen months of Schutzhaft (protective custody) in Dachau in 1933-34 only to be accused of Rassenschande (racial disgrace or defilement, a Nazi term used for sexual relations between Jews and Gentiles) and imprisoned again for three months in 1936. When authorities failed to prove this accusation, he was released and eventually managed to emigrate to Argentina. By all accounts, he was young, fearless, and flamboyant. A butcher by profession who specialized in poultry, he was said not to have been particularly strict about following ritual Kosher methods.⁵ And, according to village lore, before his departure he swore to return to take revenge. After the war, everyone wondered whether he would return to fulfill his promise, but he never did.⁶

Once the Jews were gone, and as time passed, conversations about them retreated behind closed doors and opinions about their fate were voiced only in whispers. Thus were our neighbors, who had been a living and breathing part of our village life, transformed into the Judenproblem, an abstraction. After a time, the houses of the Jews of Kleinheubach had new occupants, some of whom were especially devoted Nazis.

Sometimes it is difficult to stay in the narrative flow of a story. The story of Bernie's mother in the Catholic parochial school of Tab does not let go of me. A friend to whom I mentioned the incident replied with the predictable comment that worse things happened during the Holocaust. I know this, but this knowledge does not free me to go on. I must try in another way. I have to think of my own mother.

She died in Germany, on October 5, 1934, when I was almost four. She was of Eastern European origin. It was never clear to me exactly what caused her death. A heart attack was the official pronouncement of the country doctor. On the day of the funeral—I knew something dreadful had happened to her, but I did not know what—I was standing in the Jahnstraße when the village midwife, Frau Herrschaft, walked up to me. She told me she had just come from the cemetery where my mother now was, and she asked me if I had seen her soul fly up to heaven. I had seen nothing.

After my mother's death my father broke off with her family, and I never tried to contact them after the war. I had been too young when she died to have more than fleeting memories of her. And, at the end of the war, Germans, young and old —and notwithstanding their individual fates —only looked to the future. The fate of Bernie's mother brought me face-to-face with the past, not only my own, but that of my generation of Germans as well. All Germans suffered a fatal loss of voice because of the crimes they committed or allowed to be committed in their names.

In the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris stands a white marble statue of a nude woman that I've passed by many times. On rainy days, the drops that run down her face look to me like tears. They collect around her neck and shoulders and continue in rivulets down her entire body to the stone base and steps below.