I’M INTERESTED IN FILLING in the blank spaces of my childhood. I want to know who my relatives were, how they lived, and how they died. I want the next generations to know where my family came from. I want to give them names, dates of birth, marriages, and deaths. And I want to extract my lost family from the anonymous six million killed in the Holocaust. How else am I to mourn them? Someone has to know; someone has to remember.
I am not a Holocaust survivor, but I harbor survivor’s guilt. It was luck that spared us. My grandparents on my mother’s side were French. They could have returned to their families just across the border from Basel, Switzerland, where they would likely have faced annihilation. My parents could have decided to live in Frankfurt, where my father had once lived and his shoe business was established. They could have moved to Ann Frank’s Amsterdam, where my cousins Millie, Eric, and Yvonne lived and my father had an office. Instead, my parents settled in what turned out to be a safe haven: Zürich.
My parents, I now understand, had similar backgrounds, though my mother’s family lived in France and my father’s family in Germany. Both had lived in rural agricultural communities, the likely reason being that Jews were not permitted to reside in cities until they were emancipated by Napoleon. France was the second country, five hundred years after Poland, to grant Jews citizenship. This was in 1791. Other countries slowly followed. Switzerland waited until 1868, finally pressured by France and the United States to grant equal rights to Jews who were formerly restricted to the two small towns of Endingen and Langnau. When I made an official visit as ambassador to these towns on the occasion of the restoration of the synagogue, I noted that each house had two parallel entrances: one for Jews, and the other for Christians.
During my ambassadorship in Switzerland I met my daughter, Julia, in Wiesbaden, Germany, where she had a fellowship, and we traveled to my father’s birthplace, a small farming village called Geinsheim, not far from Frankfurt. The officials in the town hall connected us to an unusual woman, Irmgard Schaffer, who had kept track of the Jews who had once lived there. When Julia and I sat at her dining room table and I brought up my father’s name, she left the room and came back with a gray metal box filled with three-by-five index cards, like the ones I used to keep recipes. She pulled out a card: Ferdinand May. He had existed.
Mrs. Schaffer took us on a tour of the town, pointing out the street where my father went to the Jewish school, where my grandmother had her store, and the street where the Jews had lived. I asked her why she had so carefully documented the Jews who lived in Geinsheim. Her answer was simple. “When I was in school, two Jewish boys were singled out and made to stand in the back of the room. Then they couldn’t attend school. I felt sorry for them.” The boys had made the right decision and had gone to Israel. Mrs. Schaffer remained in touch with them.
On a street corner we encountered a man who asked us—we were obvious outsiders—what were we doing there? When we explained that we were looking for my father’s family, he went back to his house and came back holding a book for me to keep. A photo of a group of people gathered around a table was on the cover. Were they celebrating a birthday, a holiday, or was it a dinner party? The title told the story: Unsere verschwundenen Nachbarn (Our Disappeared Neighbors). I found my father’s family name in the section about Geinsheim. They had traced the name May back to the seventeenth century. Was this where our name came from? Jews weren’t allowed to have last names or citizenship until 1808.
The Jewish cemetery was located in the next town, Groß-Gerau. The cemetery, like all Jewish cemeteries in Germany, had been destroyed during Kristallnacht. This community had decided to restore it, and to identify and repair as many gravestones as possible. The cemetery keeper was proud of his work. He was the person I had been looking for, the “Good German.” Within the cemetery’s iron-gated walls, I found my grandfather’s tombstone—Elias May. It was as if he had been waiting for me to arrive. Julia and I stood still and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish together.
I then searched for evidence of my family in Alsace-Lorraine, France, as it was then called. My grandmother and grandfather had attended the same Hebrew school in Habsheim, taught by my grandfather’s father, a rabbi. Jews had lived in these areas—many small villages in Alsace, now known for their wine and cuisine, had a “Rue des Juifs”—since the seventeenth century. Almost all are gone—left or been shipped to concentration camps. It is no coincidence that Alsace, which once contained the largest population of Jews in France, is now a stronghold for the National Front Party, a party known for its anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant policies.
I went to city hall to look for the names of my grandparents, Gaston Bloch and Aline Braunschweig. I expected difficulty—the name Bloch, I learned, was as common as Smith is in the United States—but was shocked when the clerk politely told me that the records had all been burned. So I continued my search in England, where most of my father’s grandnieces and grandnephews lived. My father, the oldest of five children, made it possible for most of his family to leave Germany for England in the 1930s, all except one sister who, with her husband, died in Theresienstadt. I plied them with questions, but they were two generations removed from their immigrant grandparents and remembered little. My oldest cousin, Yvonne, born in Germany and who lives in London, was hidden in Holland during the war and moved from one hiding place to another. Her mother, Millie, was hidden elsewhere. “One family was nice,” Yvonne recalled, and then she was moved to another family that wasn’t.
Both mother and daughter survived, but Yvonne never recovered from the separation. She walks with a limp, a result of childhood polio. It has gotten worse as she has grown older. Yvonne contacted polio as a child and the doctor told her parents to hide her immediately because disabled children would be the first to be killed. Her father, who was sent to Auschwitz, sent a postcard home from the concentration camp, as if it were a resort, before he was exterminated.
Yvonne’s mother lived to be 102. When I visited her with my son Daniel five years earlier, she looked at him and exclaimed, “Wie der Ferdinand, genau wie der Ferdinand!” (Like Ferdinand, exactly like Ferdinand). It was as if my father had walked into the room. Yvonne later came to visit me in Vermont and brought a family photo of herself with her parents, Millie and Erich Malekovski. In it she was about four years old. For years, I had imagined the story wrong. I thought she had been hidden as a baby; I had never imagined the three of them as a family, looking just like any other family. She showed me another photograph taken in a garden. My father is stretched out across my mother’s lap on a bench. Both are laughing. I wish I knew the joke.
I do not remember my father’s laugh, or his hands, or his lap. I was two and a half years old when he took his life. I am tempted to write “when he left.” My father left by rowboat on Lake Zürich and I imagine he jumped. After a week-long search, they never found his body. As a young woman I imagined that he had made it back to another shore and had gone off to live a different life, that he would someday come back, for me, for us.
My father was drafted into the German army during World War I and had been gassed and left for dead in the trenches. My mother believed that the mustard gas had caused his depression. I now know differently. It had to have been post-traumatic stress disorder. The diagnoses, if correct, make it easier to forgive him. He did not abandon me voluntarily.
My father’s psychological wounds did not surface until some years after he was rescued from the battlefield. He was hospitalized for depression twice at a sanatorium in Kilchberg above Lake Zürich, now called Klinik Im Park. I had wanted to visit, but when I got the courage to do so, I was told by the voice that answered the phone only relatives could visit. Relatives of the dead did not count.
I did receive part of his records, which confirmed his suicide. The day before he was to be released, my father rented a rowboat. He must have planned it carefully. Did he plunge from the boat, or did he slowly slip, knowing he would not be able to rise again and breathe? What was it like in the dark depths? Were his eyes open or closed? Could he have changed his mind midway? The face of death may have frightened him. He might have struggled then, desperate to lighten his weight, regretting that he could not swim.
When the news of his death reached us, I was too young to feel a thing. I think of him more now that I am older. Too old to have a father but not too old to mourn. I experience a different, darker grief for those who were murdered by the Nazis. The Holocaust killings are alive with horror. It is why they died and the way they died that compels me to pursue the past. My father was not a Holocaust victim. I understand that. But his death and the deaths of my family in the Holocaust blur together in my imagination.
I feel sorry for the guilt that my mother must have experienced. Against their recommendation, she had urged the doctors to let my father come home early for the national Swiss holiday on the first of August. She must have had plans for a picnic or a celebration. If, on the day before his discharge, my mother had taken one more walk with him on the green grounds of the sanitarium, or admired the view of the lake from above, would his suicide have been prevented? For a long time, she blamed herself for the hurt he had left for her on his bedside table. He thought it was a gift. “I am doing this for you.”
I never thought that one day I would resemble my mother, trying to bring my husband out of his depression. John has no thoughts of suicide. At least, not yet. “I am doing this for you.” I understand it better now, because those are the words that my husband says to me when he is suffering from depression and folds into himself.
“I don’t want to burden you.”
“Don’t say that,” I say. “Please.” ”
CHRISTMAS COOKIESSwiss Christmas cookies,
you remembered
making them in our kitchen.
Why should that make me so happy?
Zimmet Sterne, Basler Leckerli,
Spitzbüben with raspberry jam.
You wanted to make some
with your brother in his kitchen.
My recipes were hard to read
smudged by bits of butter,
fingerprints of flour.
We went to the Internet and
found almost what we wanted.
The first batch failed because you
mistook powdered sugar for flour.
No wonder!
You turned red with laughter.
The next batch was perfect:
six-pointed stars with slivered
almonds on top.
You thought they should have been
darker, as you remembered.
and tasted just right.
I had been a good mother,