The dusty, battered carton Kurt lugged from our garage was vaguely familiar. The jagged gray waterline around its bottom attested to its narrow escape from one summer’s flood in our basement in Buffalo. The brittle, dented lid bore the marks of the odds and ends that had been carelessly heaped on top of it in the crowded crawl space of the attic to which it had been relegated decades ago. It had become one of the discards that accrue over a period of forty years, and had survived a moment of indecision about its future value before our move to Arizona. As usual—and because we always lacked time to sort things out—it came along on the journey west. There it was, crammed into the far corner of a low shelf in the garage, among similar items awaiting ultimate disposition. Now, when Kurt came upon it while searching for a ball of string, it saw the light of day.
I remembered that the box contained our letters to each other, written right after the end of the war. Almost from the day of our first encounter in that small town in Czechoslovakia just before the end of World War II, they represented our tentative probing of unfamiliarity and separation, then served to bridge the distance until our ultimate reunion and marriage about a year later.
Once, many years earlier, searching for something in the attic, I pulled out one of my letters at random. Not having read German for decades, I found some of it archaic, if not pompous, and was embarrassed by what I had written. Thereafter I never looked at it again.
This time I was prompted by a combination of amusement and curiosity. I reached into the depths of the carton and, with Kurt next to me, flung myself into these fragments from our early years. Opening the tightly folded pages revealed my youthful angular script, standing out bare and vulnerable in the Arizona afternoon sun.
Suddenly I found myself back there, in the spring of my freedom, in the spring of my life. There was the moment when I first laid eyes on my liberator in the abandoned factory building in Volary, Czechoslovakia (today the Czech Republic)—emaciated among my dying and dead friends, standing in rags, I beheld this handsome young American from what then seemed a faraway, strange world of freedom and again heard his words, “It’s all over—don’t worry!” spoken compassionately, sorrow and outrage reflected on his face.
That night, in the field hospital his unit had hastily established, I lay on fresh sheets, as I had not done in years, and began to pray again, for my parents, my brother, and for that American whose name I did not know. Since then, I have prayed for him every night of my life, for him, my husband.
I spent the next two months lying on my hospital bunk, hovering between life and death—between slavery, degradation, and my newly won freedom—trying to come to terms with the turmoil within me. His visits connected me to a vital self I was trying to recover. Uplifted by the presence of this handsome young American officer, I slowly made my way to the beginning of a new life.
Reading those letters, I remembered how all his gestures and mannerisms had exuded gentle power. The only uniforms of those in authority I had known before were those of our oppressors, Nazis with brutal, often smirking faces, reflecting only self-righteous arrogance.
Soon, though I was in awe of him, he no longer seemed a stranger; rather, he had become a caring friend. I felt bereft every time he had to leave; the fear and horror of my recent past would engulf me again, and so it seemed natural to take refuge in my letters to him. In them I could share with him the memories of my sunny childhood, of my parents and my brother, my home and garden and all that had been mine until I was fifteen, when the Germans marched into my hometown, Bielsko, in southern Poland. I was able to pour out to him the loss of my entire family, the years in the ghetto, then in the camps, capped by the death march to which our guards subjected us toward the end of the war. He shared his memories with me, and we learned how similar his environment and upbringing had been to mine, although he had grown up in Germany.
With each letter, remembering how private and reticent both of us had been, I marveled at how much we had nevertheless revealed to each other from the very beginning. I recalled my attempts to picture the world of freedom he came from: It all seemed like a planet in a distant galaxy, and he, who was so close, so accessible to me, belonged there. He was solicitous, treating me with gallantry and respect, and I could not picture his life there.
Reading on, I wept for that innocent, lonely girl, who tried so valiantly to conceal how deeply and desperately in love she was, never daring to hope that he might love her in return. As the afternoon lengthened into early evening, we reached out to each other, our hands touching, our thoughts back in that far-off time. Feelings of boundless joy emanated from the pages written when I found that he loved me and wanted to marry me.
Reflected also was the pain of parting after our engagement and his departure for the United States, where he would be discharged from the army. This was followed by our long separation and desperate struggle to be reunited. I realized again that I had vaulted from childhood to adulthood virtually without transition, with no one to guide me. Instinctively, and because there were no psychiatrists or support groups, I had turned to the anchor that had helped me to survive before, and on which I was now to build my future: love.
Pulling out a letter at random, I read this sentence: “I pray that we will have children who will inherit the best that is in us: the legacy of our lost parents, and that through them we will be reunited with those we lost.”
The shrill ring of the phone interrupted my musings, and though I was tempted not to answer it, force of habit never lets me ignore such a summons. I was on the verge of tears, but they changed into laughter when the caller turned out to be one of our granddaughters, informing me that she was faxing her homework for Grandpa to look over and correct.
Once again the present had put the past into proper perspective and provided a consolation for which we are immensely grateful.
How often is it given us to relive a part of our lives, step by step, exactly as it unfolded, with all its anguish and ecstasy, in a far-off, dim past? Unexpectedly coming across letters Gerda and I had written each other more than a half century ago, at a time when we were trying to cope with the profound losses we had sustained in our personal lives, afforded us the chance to illumine with piercing clarity an aspect of our formative years that would otherwise have been obscured by the passage of time.
We initially regarded this retrieval with a combination of wry amusement and some trepidation, not knowing what the letters would yield, considering the youthful ideals and ardor we knew they must reflect. We were also apprehensive about the potential discrepancy between recollection and reality.
On closer scrutiny what we found was an almost perfectly preserved record of the time following our encounter under extraordinary circumstances, as well as our tentative attempts to get to know each other in the aftermath of the harrowing war years. In the process each of us had tried to support the other in specific ways. Finding this cache of letters transported us back to that time some fifty years ago.
When, in the waning days of World War II, I approached the small Czech village of Volary, then known by its Sudeten-German name of Wallern, I could hardly have imagined that in a sense I was keeping my own “rendezvous with destiny.” White flags were flying from the rooftops of houses, indicating that the largely German-speaking population of the town was ready to surrender to our unit, the Second Regiment of the Fifth U.S. Infantry Division, part of General Patton’s Third Army.
My driver and I were two of a small force of six specialists assigned to take the surrender, each two-man team dealing with a different aspect of the formalities: civilian, military, and medical. What we did not realize was that a very special situation awaited us in town: One of the last Nazi atrocities of the war had been played out in Volary, final stop along a route SS guards had marched one of two groups, each comprising two thousand young Jewish women slave laborers, a distance of 350 miles, throughout the bitter winter months of 1945. We now came face-to-face with the pitiful remnants of the one contingent, the other having taken a different route. Of the 120 survivors, more than 30 were to die in the days to come. They had been locked up in a vacant factory building, and their tormentors had tried to destroy the evidence of their inhumanity in an abortive attempt to blow up the structure.
The following morning, amid a scene of surreal horror, I had an encounter that was to change the course of my life. Approaching the factory building, accompanied by a full medical unit, I became aware of the slight figure of a young woman standing next to the doorway that led inside. Trying to absorb the scene before me, I saw that she was completely emaciated, her hair matted and grayish; nevertheless a spark of humanity had somehow remained that made her stand out among her companions, those hollow-eyed automatons I had just seen shuffling across the factory courtyard. We had an exchange in German, and as she led me inside, she pointed toward the figures of her skeletal and dying companions, and I was stunned by the words she uttered next: “Noble be man/merciful and good. . . .” In that place, and at the end of her physical strength, she had been able to summon the lofty words the German poet Goethe had written almost two centuries earlier, admonishing humanity to retain the divine that is innate in us. They lent their own irony to the depth of deprivation and degradation to which these young women had been subjected.
From that point on I was to be continually impressed by this young woman, by her bearing, her composure under those unspeakable conditions, and later by all she expressed, verbally and in writing, even after she fell critically ill and hovered between life and death in the makeshift field hospital in that small Czech town.
What I witnessed at Volary, shocking and unprecedented as it was for me, did not come as a surprise; rather, it was the confirmation of my worst fears, based on my own understanding of the Nazi mentality.
I was born and grew up in Germany, amid the turmoil and strife that marked the Weimar Republic in the era between the two great world wars. I was witness to the spread of Nazi ideology until it assumed proportions that proved unstoppable. After Hitler’s assumption of power, we, the Jews of Germany, slowly came to the reluctant conclusion that we were outsiders for whom there was no future in that country. In my case I had the good fortune to be able to leave two years before the outbreak of World War II, when the Nazi machinery of annihilation was still in its incipient stages.
It was in June 1937 that I made my escape to the United States. Then, together with my sister and my brother, I was compelled to stand by impotently as our worst fears were realized step by step, carried out by a nation that had always prided itself on its cultural achievements. We could only watch in horror as our parents were inexorably drawn into the maelstrom of the Nazi design, to become a statistic—two of the six million Jews who would perish.
In due time I was inducted into the American army and, having taken part in the campaigns that followed the invasion, now found myself at the border between Germany and what had been Czechoslovakia.
In view of my own experience, it was only natural that I should take a special interest—aside from a humanitarian one—in this young woman, Gerda Weissmann. It occurred to me much later that instinctively my reaction to the barbaric treatment to which she had been subjected must have been tied to my images of my parents’ fate, and my guilt at being unable to rescue them. Thus it became a personal triumph for me when, despite the physicians’ prognoses, she surmounted her “night of crisis” and gradually made a full recovery. During the period immediately following my transfer from the Volary area, I would contrive to return to the hospital whenever my duties permitted, and it was a joy to watch this remarkable person blossom and once again become the positive, compassionate, and creative young woman she really was.
Although fate was to play a trick on us by consigning us to long periods of separation, the ensuing series of letters that bridged those gaps shows that Gerda had made her way back to normality in the face of great odds. In a larger sense they show the trauma and obstacles most Jewish survivors had to face in postwar Germany in the course of rebuilding their shattered lives.
Starting with the very first letter, written only ten days after we met, there emerged from our outpourings profound insights each of us in our own way had tried to wrest from the wreckage of our former lives. Our instincts at that time proved to have been pure and keenly focused, and they did much to see us through a critical and difficult period.
Soon after our encounter, my army unit was transferred to another area, but I was able to stay in touch with Gerda Weissmann not only through correspondence but through occasional visits to the field hospital in Volary where she was convalescing. In the course of those visits I was able to extract an important promise from a captain of the division that had replaced ours: We knew even then that this Czech territory would be ceded to the Russians in the very near future. The officer assured me that he would see to it that Gerda and her companions were evacuated to points inside the American zone, provided they were able to be moved.
By July 1945, Gerda had been discharged from the hospital, and with the Russian takeover now imminent the captain was as good as his word. Once Gerda and her companion (the others had gone elsewhere) reached my army post, I was able to arrange their move to Munich, as well as to obtain jobs for them with the American occupation forces.
Only a minimum of correspondence exists for the following two months, because, to my delight, I could now see Gerda most evenings and weekends. Ironically, those visits had to be conducted in a clandestine manner, necessitating that I hide my Jeep from the watchful eyes of roving MP patrols, who at that time were indiscriminately enforcing the nonfraternization rule, as far as associations between GIs and the German population were concerned.
It was during those frequent visits that it became quite obvious to me that I had found a soul mate who shared my background, my likes and dislikes, my love for literature, and my specific Weltanschauung. Finding her most attractive, I became sure that I was falling in love with this remarkable girl and wanted to share my life with her.
At the point in mid-September when my orders for discharge from the service suddenly came through, I drove to Munich to break the news to Gerda. I was awed by the realization that I had returned to Europe with the army to fight the immense evil that had prevailed there. I had come there harboring feelings of bitterness and hatred for those who had caused so much gratuitous carnage. In the course of the scourge that the Nazis had visited on our people and the world, I had suffered much personal loss and anguish; I had not been able to save those dearest to me. Nevertheless, out of the tragedy of those times had come the key to my future. When Gerda and I went for a walk in the nearby woods that evening, it wasn’t difficult to ask the question on which our destiny hinged. When we returned from that stroll in a mood of high elation, my heart was full of love.
As it turned out, we were laboring under the somewhat naive assumption that, as the fiancée of a serviceman, Gerda would soon be able to follow me. Neither of us could have foreseen the interminable obstacles that would block our course before we could be reunited.
This correspondence, which goes well beyond the scope of love letters, covers the time from our first meeting in May 1945, to the seemingly endless period of unexpected separation, to our marriage in Paris in June 1946. It reflects the postwar trauma and harsh realities Gerda had to cope with in the chaos and ambivalence that prevailed in Europe in the aftermath of the war. Throughout, it illuminates one survivor’s struggles along the road back to normality, at a time when no countries were ready to afford those survivors a chance to rebuild even a semblance of their former lives.
Also reflected in these writings are my own encounters with bureaucratic red tape and my readjustment to civilian life after having passed through the crucible of events that had molded me. During the years of searching for the woman who represented my ideal, I had come to believe that perhaps I was pursuing an unattainable goal. Once I got to know Gerda I was stunned by the fact that I had found my dream, and that she surpassed anything I could have imagined. Once her shell of suffering and endurance had come off, what emerged was a very pretty, high-spirited, intelligent young woman of extraordinary sensitivity and compassion. Not the least of her attractions were those limpid green eyes that, together with her dimpled smile, could completely disarm me.
These letters, then, are blueprints of the people we were and all we were to become in the fifty-three years of marriage we have been granted thus far. What emerges from them is the redemptive power of love in the face of tragedy and loss.
I was waking up, my hand brushing over something soft and smooth. What could it be? I opened my eyes and saw a blanket, under it something snowy white. A sheet! No, it was not a dream; I was lying in a bed on a sheet under a blanket. I closed my eyes, then slowly opened them again, only to realize that the vision had not evaporated. I stroked the blanket, touching the sheet with my bony fingers. Sunlight was streaming through a window near my head. It was difficult to grasp. How had I come here?
Images flitted through my mind, fragments of an incomplete puzzle. When I concentrated hard, they began to fall into place. I remembered having been on a truck or some other vehicle, then someone carrying me in his strong arms. We had entered a room with wooden tubs on the floor. It came back to me that I had shed the rags that had hung from my body, then felt the incredible luxury of warm water engulfing me. Oddly, I had noticed that the water was green and sunlight was dancing on its surface. Gentle hands were lathering my body, and I was sitting in a tub for the first time in more than three years. Warm water had cascaded over my head from a pitcher, and someone had dried my hair. Yes, there was this pretty girl in a long peasant skirt gathering up my rags, and I overheard someone else saying that they needed to be burned. It was when she reached for my ski boots that panic had set in. My ski boots? Those boots that Papa insisted I wear on that hot day in June just before I saw him for the last time? Oh, God, no, they can’t take my boots! In the lining of the left one were the photos I had hidden for such a long time. Had they been burned? My memory became more acute, and suddenly I knew, was aware of what had happened.
Yes, I had removed the pictures before blacking out. I reached under my snowy pillow in a frantic search for them, then found with immense relief that they were there. Picking up the dirty, threadbare piece of rag, frayed but dry, I opened it slowly, reverently. I had not looked at its contents since that icy day in January when we started the cruel march that had lasted through the bitter winter months and had decimated our numbers. Now it was spring, and my treasure was safe. I clutched the sturdy small cardboard rectangle on which I had mounted them so many years ago. The tiny photos that I had cut out in the shape of hearts: Papa, smiling, sitting on a boat that was cruising the Bosporus. That was taken when he attended my uncle’s wedding in Turkey in the summer of 1937. Then there was Mama in Krynica, the Polish resort to which I had accompanied her in the summer of 1939. I remembered when she had bought the silk for the dress she was wearing in the photo: black patterned, with raspberry-colored flowers. “If the flowers were red, they would be too harsh, too loud,” she had said. “See how beautifully the colors blend?”
She had the milliner put the ribbon in the same raspberry color around her wide-brimmed black straw hat, demonstrating as always what great style she possessed. The ribbon was detachable, and there was a white one as well, and still another one with polka dots and a yellow silk rose she would attach to complement what she was wearing. Each time she wore it, the hat looked distinctly different. Mama! Mama, where are you?
And there was Artur, sporting a tie, all dressed up. Where was he going that day when he posed with his insouciant smile, leaning against the garden fence? And Abek, my special friend: I can’t tell when or where his picture was taken.
My thoughts were interrupted by a commotion, the dreaded sound of marching boots outside. Quickly, automatically, I hid my treasure under my pillow, the old fear overtaking me. From my upper bunk near a huge window I beheld a sight that filled me with awe and immense relief. A column of German soldiers was being marched down the road, their uniforms bedraggled and dirty. They were unarmed, and their faces reflected exhaustion and dejection. It was with a sense of joy and gratitude that I saw them being guarded by Americans who looked like the proverbial knights in shining armor to me, although I noticed that they wore that armor with a rather casual air. Love filled my heart, and clutching the tiny bundle under my pillow, I began to cry softly. Yesterday? Was it only yesterday that we had been given freedom? And then I pictured again the nurse coming down the aisle of the ward, holding a tray of mugs filled with milk. One of them had a crude flower painted on it. Oh, how I wanted that mug, and as if I had willed it, she handed it to me. Taking a sip of that warm, sweet milk unleashed something tremendous within me. It was a hard, bitter knot coming loose and making me break into convulsive sobs as never before. At the same time, I found prayer again. It was a prayer of thanks for the gift of life, for seeing Germany defeated, for the Americans who had liberated us. Sorrow swept over me, sorrow over the fact that not one person I had loved was with me at this hour, sharing this miracle for which we had prayed for six long, bitter years. It was a grieving, not yet fully defined, for the loss of all that had been dear to me.
An American doctor was approaching my bunk carrying a pad. He looked at me and asked in German about my vital statistics. When it came to my birth date, he broke into a smile and exclaimed, “May 8—why, today is May 8, your birthday! And Germany capitulated today. The war is really over; did you know that?” No, I did not know it. “To me the war was over with my liberation.” “Yes,” he allowed, “that was yesterday, but today it’s official.” He touched my hand and tenderly touched my cheek. “Your birthday,” he spoke softly, compassionately. “You will always remember your birthday.” I lay there, unable to absorb it all. To think that this was my birthday: I was twenty-one years old; the horror had begun when I was barely fifteen.
A little while later the doctor who had shown such kindness returned, handing me something wrapped in paper. “For your birthday,” he said and left abruptly. As I was to learn, it was Dr. Aaron Cahan from Chicago who gave me my first birthday gift after the war. What I found was a piece of chocolate, something I had not tasted in many years. I let a tiny morsel dissolve on my tongue, savoring its exquisite taste—soft, sweet, and soothing—stirring memories of a thousand dreams.
I always got chocolate for birthdays during my childhood. It invariably consisted of Katzenzungen, literally, “cats’ tongues.” My parents knew only too well how much I loved chocolate and my cats. At one time I was the proud owner of eight, all black, and only I could distinguish among them. Schnautzi had given birth to seven black kittens on a snowy, cold afternoon and had carried them in her mouth, one by one, into the kitchen near the warm stove. I named them Frutzi, Schmutzi, Stutzi, Kuba, Mruczek, Tygrys, Ziobak, my terms of endearment, which ascribed to them certain character traits in a combination of German and Polish. How strange that I could again remember all their names now, whereas I could recall only six of them as I stood in line, waiting to be shot, at one point during the death march. While I was frantically searching my memory for the missing names, our guard’s mood changed arbitrarily and we were spared. No, I did not want to think about that now—only about the happy birthdays of my childhood, with all their attendant feelings of well-being, about the gifts from Papa, Mama, Artur, and Omama (my maternal grandmother). Linked with it also were memories of Niania, my nanny. It was always on my birthday that Niania would solemnly intone: Gottes Finger zeigt den Weg (God’s finger points the way). Then she would point her finger at me, “Because you were born, we came together.” I knew the tale by heart because she repeated it so often—and invariably on my birthday.
Niania to me only, because I was the only one permitted to address her in the familiar du form. To everyone else—and that included my parents, brother, and grandmother—she was Frau Bremza. Her first name was Sofie, in honor of Emperor Franz Josef’s mother, as she would proudly point out. She considered Sofie to be the “real” empress, dismissing the emperor’s beautiful wife, Elisabeth, as “a bit of fluff.” Niania revered the imperial family, even though her only child, a son, had been killed during World War I in the service of the emperor, who was dead too by then—as was the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In April 1924 another great tragedy befell Niania. Her house burned to the ground, along with most of her belongings. Blessedly, she and her granddaughter, Irma, were saved. Irma’s mother, Anna, worked as a cook in a small nearby town. Clad in her late husband’s postman’s coat, the only garment that survived the fire, Frau Bremza had come to see my grandmother, whom she knew slightly. On hearing her story, Omama immediately came up with a suggestion. “My daughter, Helene, is expecting a baby soon. She is in delicate health and we could really use some help. Perhaps you and Irma could come and live with us for a few weeks? It would be a big favor.” For the hundredth time Niania would shake her head. “God works in strange ways.” So Niania and Irma, then approximately seven years old, came “for a few weeks” and stayed for thirteen years.
When I was very young, Niania would tell me that my parents found me in a Maiblume, those demure, bell-like lilies of the valley that always burst into full bloom around my birthday. I was skeptical and pointed out how small those flowers were. “You were little, too,” Niania would say in a tone that did not invite any further questions.
As the hours wore on and the defeated columns of German troops kept passing by my window, I let my thoughts take me back to my childhood, my birthdays serving as counterpoints to the shuffling feet below. Memories crowded my mind, fragments that brought certain events into sharper focus. As if in a viewfinder, an image presented itself: a chocolate torte reposing on the kitchen table, as only Mama could bake it. She had a special knack for coming up with the most wondrous confections: homemade marzipan, which she would sculpt into various forms—animals, flowers, and many more. And her Vanillenkipfel, those delicious vanilla crescents, and Pariser Stangen, lemon-glazed nut bars, were the most delectable creations imaginable. Now it escaped me for which birthday she had adorned that special torte with symbols of good luck: a tiny horseshoe, a jolly little pink pig, and a four-leaf clover. Artur immediately interpreted the pig as representing my table manners, and I tossed my new red ball right into his face.
The four-leaf clover now took on a different meaning. It reminded me that ilse, Suse, Liesl, and I had called ourselves that—ein vierblättriges Kleeblatt. But the others were not as lucky as I. ilse died in my arms only a week ago, making me promise that I would go on for one more week. Ilse, oh, ilse—just one more week! If you could have held out that much longer! You made it plain that you were a Pechvogel, an unlucky bird, and, yes, you were. And Suse, it couldn’t have been yesterday that you died! Suse—yesterday? No, it was a hundred years ago. We had made a bet on the train that took us to the first camp three years earlier, a bet for a quart of strawberries and whipped cream. I said we would be liberated, and you said we would not. How could it have been only yesterday? Why am I here while you are not?
But where was Liesl? Her leg had been hit by a bullet from a strafing American fighter plane, an injury she had dismissed as inconsequential. I knew she was hurting because I had seen the wound, but when I took that first American to see her, she only smiled as if she were unaware of what was happening. She must have been running a high fever, her eyes were so strange. Thank God, she is here in this hospital, getting the same good care that is restoring me. I must ask about her right away, I resolved. In the camp we had perfected a game of make-believe. Her bunk had been next to mine, and I remembered how after one night shift I had awakened to hear the rain beating down hard on the roof panels over our bunks. I noticed that Liesl was up too and impulsively blurted out, “I will get up soon and go to the garden. I know the grass will be wet, and I will pick up the apples the storm has blown down.” Without missing a beat she would come back, “Nothing tastes better than a real cold, tart apple. But we’ll have to hurry; remember, we have an appointment later for that new dress. . . .” We would go on and on like that.
Liesl was one of the most beautiful girls I ever met. Oh, I can’t wait to see her, I thought. I made the nurse promise to find out about her. A few days later I learned to my utter dismay that Liesl had succumbed to her wounds on the very day I turned twenty-one, just a day after we were rescued.
I let my recollections drift back to other birthdays. The most memorable one was my fifteenth, in 1939. That May was unusually warm, so my party was held in our little gazebo in the garden. It was green-latticed, with a roof over it, through which the lilacs that grew in profusion had forced their branches, infusing its interior with their fragrance. I thought the purple ones exuded a more intense fragrance than the white ones. My girlfriends were crowded around the small table. Mama had baked a marble cake in a fluted pan, heavy on the chocolate side, and made her divine vanilla ice cream. I wore my new short-sleeved navy blue dress, with an enormous white pleated organdy collar, stiff like a clown’s ruff. And my own first real silk stockings, along with another first: navy blue shoes with heels. My friend Thea had the same shoes, but hers pinched, she remarked, while handing me the most wonderful present: a rather large brooch, made of wood, in the shape of a heart. In its center a small cottage window, flanked by shutters, brightened by dainty white flowers. The overall effect was of a little chalet-type house, and when you opened the shutters, there was a portrait inside of our movie idol, Shirleika (Shirley Temple). I instantly pinned it to the center of my large, white, pleated collar. Papa and Mama presented me with a small rectangular watch, its face bearing roman numerals. It goes without saying that I would check the time every few minutes.
I remember that Artur’s gift was a bottle of eau de cologne that I used only for special occasions. Up to that time, I had furtively sprayed myself with my mother’s Tosca or 4711, but this was my very own Chat Noir “so that you can smell like your cats,” Artur teased. This was accompanied by a big hug and the bell-like timbre of his mischievous laughter, which was reflected in his warm brown eyes and his smiling lips.
Attl—as I called Artur, while I was Gertl to him—Attl, where are you now? You must be thinking of me, because you know it’s my birthday and, of all things, my twenty-first. Can you believe that? And you are twenty-five. We are all grown up, both of us! When will I see you? Soon, soon, I hope; after all, the war is over. Oh, my beloved brother, will I see you soon again?
I let memory overtake me, fixing on my fifteenth birthday. It was the last one before the war, before everything fell apart, was irretrievably gone. I drifted back into the golden sunlight of my untroubled childhood, when I had felt cosseted, secure, loved, and protected. But it began to fade, and I knew I must go on.
I was sixteen in 1940, and a memory came to me in a flash, that of running into the garden with Artur’s letter from Russian-occupied Lvov in my hand. His letters were sparse and infrequent, and this one, addressed to me, came on that very day, as if by magic. It contained a photo, Artur looking very serious and much older, almost like a stranger. He wrote, “I know that you are as brave as you promised to be,” and that’s when I threw myself onto the young new grass and wept. I cried with a mixture of happiness and sorrow, happy to see Artur’s letter, yet sad, so sad. Something was awakening in me, a feeling I couldn’t define, but they were tears for the loss of my happy childhood and all it had held.
A few days later, an ugly sign went up on the gate to our garden: JEWS NOT PERMITTED TO ENTER, making it official that we had been dispossessed. I abided by that prohibition for the next two years, with one exception: I “trespassed” for a final good-bye on the day we left our home forever.
Try as I might, I could not remember anything about my seventeenth birthday, but my eighteenth loomed up in my memory like a monument, like a gravestone: hard and bitter.
I wake up in my bed in the ghetto, Mama and Papa standing at the foot of it. It strikes me how nearly gray Papa’s moustache is, only traces of reddish hair glinting in the morning sun. He touches my tousled hair, his hand gently brushing my cheek before kissing it. Mama’s face is gaunt, her cheeks sallow; though she smiles a wan smile, there is no merriment in her large dark eyes. Somehow it has escaped me until now how much she has changed. Yet her voice is high and full of the old upbeat ring as she hands me an incredibly precious gift: an orange, a real orange! Imagine, an orange in the ghetto! “Mama, where and how could you have gotten it?” Her smile widens. “It’s a secret.” She shakes her head. She knew what it meant to me to get an orange. I peel it slowly, its aroma enveloping my bed. Mama carefully gathers up the peels. “I will boil them with a little saccharine and crisp them into a confection.” On my insistence she tastes a tiny slice, claiming that the acid really bothers her stomach, something it had never done before. Papa, too, declines my offer of a slice, saying that he was not overly fond of oranges, which also leaves me puzzled. I finally persuade him to have a sliver, and he allows that this particular orange is very tasty.
After a while a few of my friends appear, and Mama has baked cookies from hoarded oats. They taste exactly like macaroons, we declare. Then Abek shows up with a portrait of Artur that he has painted from a photo. Somehow it fails to give me the pleasure I would normally derive from such a gift, because it painfully underscores Artur’s absence. I am trying hard not to show my disappointment, knowing how much time and devotion Abek has spent on it. He had been trying to please me in so many different ways, ever since he arrived in town among a transport of Jewish men. He enjoyed a special status and, due to his artistic gift, was able to move about freely to restore paintings for the German occupiers.
Long after I had devoured the orange, I found out that Mama had gone out of the ghetto and somehow managed to acquire it in exchange for a pearl ring. It was the last present I was to get from my parents. A few weeks later we were brutally separated.
I recalled that I dreaded my nineteenth birthday in the Bolkenhain camp in 1943. Yet it proved to give me some unexpected pleasure. My friends had prepared a surprise. On the table was a white paper doily, made from the wrapper for yarn we used on the looms. It was intricately cut into a lacy pattern, and my slice of bread for that morning was spread with margarine! Truly a treat, for only on Sundays did we get that delicacy. Ilse had scraped it from her bread to save it for me. That year I received precious gifts that I had considered impossible to obtain under the circumstances. Yet, my friends had managed to improvise them: shoelaces made of factory yarn; three bobby pins, fashioned from wire on which spools were suspended over the looms; a kerchief, cut as a triangle from a square. The girl who gave it to me kept the more bleached, torn half for herself. And a few green leaves on which reposed a flower plucked through the barbed wire that separated our compound from the director’s garden. Finally a package arrived from Abek, containing clothing, some food, and dried flowers, and I couldn’t believe it had come on that day.
I was overwhelmed. How could I possibly repay my friends? And then an idea struck me. I set to work over a period of time, usually by the feeble light of the washroom bulb, to write a rhyming skit, poking fun at camp life and predicting a brilliant future for all. The performance was a rousing success when we put it on during the two-day Christmas holiday when the factory was shut down.
May 8, 1944, was a black day. Orders came for us to be transferred to Grünberg, also in Silesia, a factory/camp rumored to be especially harsh. The following day vividly stood out in my memory. At first the train had created a welcome sense of isolation. My thoughts could roam freely, my dreams not hemmed in by the myriad restrictions of camp life. It was a May morning in all its glory, and I was twenty years old. Around midday we had to change trains and were herded to another platform. It was particularly bitter to note how, although a war was going on, people all around us were walking about briskly, pursuing their busy lives. Only we were the slaves. I was clutching my meager bundle of threadbare belongings, waiting to be shipped to some dreaded destination, the yellow star ablaze on my chest, back, and head.
Then there was a moment I instinctively knew I would remember all my life: It was an instant branded into my consciousness. A girl my age, followed by a porter carrying her luggage, strode purposefully toward a train compartment. She was wearing a light gray suit, accented by a fresh white blouse and a matching beret. My eyes followed her as she entered the compartment; I saw the porter lifting her suitcase into the net luggage rack above the seat, observed her giving him a tip, after which she leaned out of the window, as if searching for someone. And then I spotted a man approaching the rail car, heard her call out, “Hier bin ich, Papa!” (Here I am, Papa!) That’s when I felt the stabbing pain. Some time later, after we were put on the train, I let my mind replay the scene I had witnessed, but when I came to the girl’s joyful exclamation, I couldn’t go on.
Now I was twenty-one, was free, but where would I go from here? What would my life be like in time to come? Who was that girl on the train I had so envied? What turn would her life take? I dimly perceived even then that the scene had been a kind of confrontation with myself, a realization that despite everything that had happened, I had been blessed with my family early in life. Instinctively I knew that somehow I should never want to exchange my life for someone else’s.
Thus my first day of freedom, my twenty-first birthday, was coming to an end. Where would I be on my twenty-second?
My encounter on the last day of the war with the pitiful remnant of a group of Nazi slave laborers, young Jewish women from Poland and Hungary, had a profound impact on me. One of them in particular stood out because of her bearing and her aura of dignity, despite her deplorable physical condition. Her words extolling human dignity and goodness, as unexpected as they were stunning under those circumstances, added new fuel to my own torment regarding the fate of my elderly parents, who had disappeared from their deportation camps in France into the great void of the unknown a few months before I joined the army at Fort Niagara, New York. All we knew of this, the second deportation they had experienced, was that it had taken place in the summer of 1942, from the South of France to an unknown destination in Eastern Europe. The first such upheaval had burst upon my father and mother two years earlier, on an hour’s notice in 1940, tearing them from roots in Germany that could be traced back to the early seventeenth century. It came as a consequence of the Nazis’ vow to make Germany judenrein, to “cleanse” it of all Jews. Nevertheless, along with my sister and brother, I had clung to the irrational hope that somehow they had survived, perhaps in the Nazis’ “model camp,” Terezin (Theresienstadt), Czechoslovakia, set up to dupe the Red Cross inspection teams that occasionally made an appearance there. In the sober light of the war’s end, it became unequivocally clear that I would not see my parents again, although it would take another year until we could get confirmation of the facts of their deaths.
What was the life from which my father and mother had so brutally been uprooted? I can only think of it in terms of a curious blend of cultured middle-class life, with the many hardships imposed by the economic climate after World War I, which had begun with the unchecked inflation of the early twenties and turned into the Great Depression, lasting well into the thirties. Similarly, life in Walldorf, my hometown, could be regarded as an amalgam of provincial outlook, infused with the sophistication that lay just beyond in nearby Heidelberg, that seat of great learning. Geographically, Walldorf belonged to the Province of Baden, and its claim to fame was that John Jacob Astor, born there in 1763, had gone on to become its best-known son and benefactor. (As some good-natured scuttlebutt still had it among the town’s citizens, John Jacob had acquired a cow in a less than legal way in order to pay for passage to the New World, but had more than made up for that by donating a beautiful orphanage to the town in later years, for which the grateful town fathers had erected a monument in his honor.)
Throughout my childhood, all of life was underscored by the discordant voices of political dissent that wracked the Weimar Republic, leading to the inexorable march of Nazi ideology, which reached the heart and soul of the German people. Along the way it intoxicated the masses, sweeping aside everything in its path, in a single-minded effort toward the achievement of its aim: Hitler’s assumption of power as chancellor of the Reich in 1933.
When I think of my parents’ fate, the question that comes to mind is how they coped with the hardships that followed them all their lives, testing them to the limit. Mother was an orphan, having lost her parents and brother to an influenza epidemic at an early age. She considered it a stroke of extraordinary luck that from that point on she was able to spend her formative years in the cultured home of a loving aunt and uncle, getting the type of basic education that other young ladies in her circle were accustomed to. In 1909, at twenty-six, she heard through family members about a thirty-four-year-old man in Heidelberg, not far from her hometown of Grünstadt, whose wife had recently died in childbirth; he was looking for a mother for his infant son. His name was Ludwig Klein, and once he and Alice Nahm met, a marriage was arranged in short order.
As my parents were fond of relating, their honeymoon was one of undreamed luxury, taking them to the enchanted city of Venice. And Mother confided how she had been so abashed when asked by Father what memento she would like to take back to Heidelberg from this fabulous trip that all she had managed to blurt out was the suggestion of a hatpin—and how Father, much to her disappointment, had fulfilled her simple request to the letter by presenting her with precisely that gift.
Considering that necessity brought them together, it was a blessing that their union turned into a nearly perfect match. Mother was modest in her demands yet a model of industry, shirking no duty that came along and resolute in trying to help solve any problems that presented themselves. She was humble and compassionate, at the same time displaying a sense of self-worth. She was generous to a fault, and always mindful of what “they” would think. She liked people and gossip, could be judgmental, and had a good sense of humor, loving fun pursuits, though ready and willing to take on the job of bringing up an infant stepson. She had a simple, steadfast faith in God that was to be sorely tested in time to come and, although not rigid in the observance of her faith in the sense of Orthodox adherence, never lost her belief in the divine. In the face of the worst tragedy that could befall anyone, she had a way of downplaying the gravity of her and Father’s situation, even under the direst of conditions, to minimize our anguish.
Two years after her marriage, Mother gave birth to a daughter, named Irmgard, or Gerdi, as she would be known. She was the second of my siblings, my half-brother, Max, being my senior by twelve years, whereas there was a nine-year gap between Gerdi and me. In retrospect those years before the beginning of World War I were the only somewhat carefree ones Mother was to enjoy in the course of her married life. The hostilities that led to World War I broke out in 1914, and that precipitated a move to my father’s childhood home in nearby Walldorf, because it was thought safer during wartime to live in the countryside, where food was more abundant. My father, meanwhile, was called up for army service. No doubt this move was also dictated by economic necessity on Mother’s part, considering that there was little money to pay the rent on the apartment in Heidelberg. As it happened, Grandmother Babette, by that time a widow in her sixties, still ran that household and needed a helping hand. The war had left the simple country home in Walldorf without men; Grandmother’s seven sons had all been called up for service. She also had three stepdaughters, one of whom was still living with her, so it wasn’t easy for my grandmother during those four war years. At best Grandmother and Mother eked out a minimal subsistence. To be sure, there was enough to eat, but little or no income.
Mother pitched in right from the start, learning to take care of Grandmother’s assortment of farm animals, mostly poultry, as well as the two vegetable gardens that helped to make them largely self-sufficient. Later it was quite natural that, after the death of the matriarch of the house, she should take over her mother-in-law’s many household duties.
For most of her life Grandmother had run this household of twelve single-handedly and resolutely, setting an example as the epitome of thrift while adequately catering to her family’s needs. As it turned out, the only one of her sons who was able to go on to higher learning was her youngest, Fritz. Fortuitously, he had been named after the Archduke Friedrich of the Province of Baden, his birthplace, and so could avail himself of a university scholarship to which he, as the seventh son of a family and the archduke’s namesake, was entitled. He went on to become a civil engineer.
I never knew Grandmother Babette, having been born two years after her death, but family lore about her abounds. Throughout her years of marriage, and despite her arduous duties, from caring for family and land, to feeding of chickens and geese, even milking a cow, she had always retained an intellectual curiosity that led her to study Latin along with her son, Fritz. Some of her letters survive, attesting to her love of language.
Fortunately, all seven sons returned from World War I unscathed—and unaware of what had happened meanwhile. Just days before the first ones made it back, she slipped on the cellar steps and tumbled to her death. One of her sons, Eugen, would recount how he had been returning from the war when the train stopped at a siding where a gypsy fortune-teller offered to read his palm. She gravely shook her head and with a pained expression predicted that he would not see his mother again.
The end of the war in 1918 had brought some return to normality, but hardly any stability. It fell to my father, Ludwig, and his brother Heinrich to try to revitalize the family business, which had lain fallow during those years of global conflict—in the face of the harsh economic climate that prevailed during the Weimar Republic.
The two brothers had had to take over their father’s hops, tobacco, and grain brokerage business after his death in 1902. In Father’s case it was unfortunate, because he would have been much more inclined toward an academic career, but of course that was out of the question for economic reasons. It was simply taken for granted that not many choices lay open to young men in that time and place.
Unlike Mother, Father was much more reserved, seldom showing his emotions. However, he, too, possessed a good sense of humor and was known among family and friends as a dry wit who could be counted on to come up with many a bon mot. He was widely read and could explain any situation in a lucid and logical manner. His experiences had taught him to be skeptical of others’ motives, although for himself he would adhere to the strictest of standards. It was as though he had made one of the ubiquitous German proverbs his life’s motto. Üb’ immer Treu’ und Redlichkeit, the admonition always to follow the straight and narrow, was something he would practice in business as in his private life, often to his detriment when up against others who were less scrupulous. Because he was a realist, he did not—unlike so many others—delude himself about the Nazi menace toward Jews. My brother, Max, brought to light a most telling memory, in the course of an encounter we had when we were both serving in the American army on maneuvers in Louisiana in the summer of 1942. It dealt with the time, five years earlier, when he and my father had accompanied me to Hamburg and Bremerhaven at the point of my emigration from Germany. My last view of Father was of him and Max standing at the dock, waving farewell. After which Father turned to Max and said, “I don’t believe I will see my boy again.”
For me, watching the receding figures vanish from view and unaware of what the future would hold, the pain of parting was tempered by thoughts of the great adventure that lay ahead. Nevertheless a jumble of impressions took me back to the blurred image of Mother’s tear-stained face in the hallway of my childhood home, where we had made our final good-byes two days earlier.
It was in that house that I was born in the summer of 1920, a place in which education and culture were valued, although in retrospect it appears to me that we always felt on the fringes of “bigger things” that were going on in the world, especially in cities that were deemed a Grossstadt, in short, a metropolis. Still it was a house that exuded warmth and caring—despite the economic woes I was to become aware of during the first decade of my life—and a great deal of laughter would echo from its walls, especially when my older sister’s friends and classmates would spend the evening or occasionally stay overnight.
In the early twenties inflation ran rampant, wiping out any gain my father and Uncle Heinrich had made since the end of the war. I remember M. Klein & Söhne (M. Klein & Sons) as a business that required constant struggle to keep it afloat, creating a great deal of insecurity and uncertainty. By the time I was old enough to comprehend what financial havoc the inflationary period had wreaked during the Weimar Republic, I found myself playing with drawers full of “funny money”—bills whose denominations ran into the millions and billions of marks. My parents had somehow held onto them, I suppose in the vain hope that someday they might be declared legal again.
As was the custom in most middle-class families of that place and period, Mother had some live-in help during my formative years, although I remember that there was a certain turnover: When one of those maids got married, they would recommend someone else from their family or hometown to take over their duties. Most of the maids came from an area known as the Odenwald, where people lived a backwoods type of existence that would manifest itself in the superstitions they all harbored. The maids would regale me with stories of “witches” in their town who had given the “evil eye” to those who had crossed them, to the point of causing horrible illnesses—even death—in those they disliked. What had also gained currency in their town were the many instances of people who had apparently died while in a state of suspended animation. Thus they had been buried while still alive, as was proved in the case of those who through some twist in the maid’s story were exhumed in time to be saved.
Tales of that nature were not conducive to untroubled sleep on occasions when I found myself alone at night and in the darkness of my bedroom would hear all sorts of strange noises, from creaking beams to weird animal sounds. But those were “the good old days.” Having maids in Jewish households came to an end with the issuance of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, along with many other restrictions that disenfranchised Jews at that time, above all depriving them of their citizenship rights.
I do remember that from my earliest childhood I had a love for books, and thereby hangs a tale often recounted by Mother with great amusement. It seems I was sitting in a playpen at a tender age, trying to get her attention about an urgent matter. Because my cries went unheeded for a time, I apparently banged my fist on the toy before me and, in anger and frustration, exclaimed, “One doesn’t even get books around here!” I was able to make up for that deprivation later in life, and some of my fondest memories go back to my childhood illnesses, when I could read to my heart’s content without feeling guilty about neglected chores. I remember times when after lights-out I would continue with whatever saga absorbed me at the moment, reading with a flashlight under the blanket. Only with great reluctance would I come to the last page and the end of my companionship with the characters I had gotten to know and love—or hate, as the case might be.
I clearly remember reading many of the tomes that were classics in the English-speaking world, such as Treasure Island, Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and, yes, the Tarzan series. From these I soon gravitated to James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, and it wasn’t long before I discovered The Last of the Mohicans. Once my interest in the American Indian had been sparked, I became utterly fascinated by a German writer of tales of high adventure, Karl May, who was everybody’s boyhood idol. Many of his writings dealt with American frontier life in an astoundingly authentic way (especially in view of the fact that he never set foot outside Germany and wrote a great many of his stories in prison). Although his tales were set in exotic places around the world, in all those exploits there was one constant: His protagonists always gained the upper hand over their adversaries through measures as cunning and resourceful as they were innovative.
Inevitably the stories dealing with the American West led to an obsession my friends and I developed about everything to do with our romantic notions of American frontier life. This was greatly enhanced by watching the movies of American Westerns featuring Tom Mix or Tom Tyler, or reading the likes of Zane Grey, and we would try to emulate those heroes by dressing up in Western garb (as closely as we could imitate it) and playing “Cowboys-and-Indians.” It was always my fervent wish to explore those mountains and prairies depicted in literature and on film, and I could not have imagined then that the American West would become my own stamping ground in later life.
My boyhood years until 1933 were spent freely intermingling with classmates and friends, in one another’s homes and fields, helping to harvest crops, threading tobacco onto string for curing the leaves in attics, and similar pursuits. Father’s warehouse served as a playground for building secret hideouts among the bales of hops he would process and sell to breweries. In addition, tobacco and sacks of grain were stored on several floors. In turn my friends’ barns and haylofts would serve similar purposes, when we were not engaged in playing soccer or a variety of “street games.” In fact, the whole town was our playground: Woods, fields, or a simple sand hill would become a popular spot, especially in the spring, when we would roll Easter eggs along channels that snaked down the hill under bridges we had carefully built to cross the paths the eggs would take. Those diversions were in no way inconsistent with our own Passover observances, but rather such activities took on secular aspects, like those during celebrations of a national holiday.
In the winter there were ample opportunities for ice-skating and sledding, but whenever weather permitted we would find ourselves engaged in “war games,” in the course of which the French inevitably were the enemy. This was an outgrowth of the indoctrination we received in school and our reading in national magazines—stories drawing on the ancient feud with France, always depicting the French armed to the teeth in comparison with the Germans, and making clear that their Maginot Line was impregnable. At the same time there existed a peculiar double standard: Everything French, especially the language, exerted a certain fascination and snob appeal and was much sought after.
Even at thirteen I could sense that there were forces at work determined to settle a score after the inglorious defeat of World War I. I often thought that the country might be involved in another war before too many years would pass, a prospect I contemplated with horror.
For their part my parents, brother, and sister participated freely in all social or communal activities that befitted their age and standing, as did Jews elsewhere in the country, in other strata of public and private endeavor, or so it seemed to me. It was hardly surprising then that I felt my childhood to be an absolutely normal one until the Nazi takeover in 1933.
Having lived in nearby Heidelberg, our parents still retained many connections there, and much of the family’s social life, aside from the children’s education, revolved around the much broader horizons available in that cosmopolitan city. Thus, individually or as a family we would frequently avail ourselves of all that Heidelberg had to offer, be it social, cultural, or its scenic splendors that abounded everywhere. There would be wonderful walks and hikes all around the city and in its mountainous environs.
Because all this was such a natural part of the structure of our lives, and because I, along with everyone else I knew, considered myself to be an integral part of the fabric of German society—in no way different from others—the feeling of betrayal after the Nazi takeover was all the more acute. Although initially my friends and classmates tended to be apologetic about their gradual estrangement from us, Nazi propaganda eventually took hold, and those apologies changed to derisive taunts that promised a trip to a concentration camp to any Jew stepping out of line. It didn’t take much longer until most of my former friends and classmates broke off all contact with us and a completely hostile attitude set in. For a while there would be isolated instances here and there in which a former friend would still speak to me, but as time went on that too ceased.
In the course of the first year after the Nazi takeover, I had been able to watch up close, during mandatory class attendance at films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, how that masterpiece of propaganda was taking effect, leaving me to wonder how I, at fourteen, had suddenly become an outcast. One of the greatest shocks came when one of my teachers, until then a favorite of mine, addressed the class about the “guests among us,” who had better toe the mark if they didn’t want to suffer most unpleasant consequences.
Of course we should have been prepared for such attitudes by then. The early days after Hitler’s assumption of power come to mind. At school in Heidelberg we had a free period once a week, devoted to religious instruction for the various denominations. Our religious teacher addressed us regarding the latest events. His words still ring in my ears: “Well, we have seen a momentous upheaval in recent times, whose outcome is unalterable. I do not know what I can tell you about what lies ahead for us. The only thing we can hope for at the moment is that no one comes to our doorstep and slits our throats.” That particular projection of what might happen was hardly a random figment of Mr. Durlacher’s vivid imagination. Rather, it was based on a line from a marching song the SA storm troopers timed to perfection so they could bellow it as they tramped by Jewish homes: “. . . and when Jewish blood splatters from our knives—yes, then all will go well!”
While all of us, adults and youngsters, were waiting for what would happen next, an incident occurred that gave us some inkling of what might be in store for Jews. On coming home from school one day and getting off the streetcar at its terminal station, which was at the only hotel in Walldorf, I became aware of a great commotion surrounding that building. Not daring to ask any questions, I made my way home and found that some facts had already come to light in the meantime. My parents had heard from neighbors that in the course of the morning, a contingent of SA men had rounded up all known Communists in the town, had herded them into the courtyard of the Hotel Astoria, a pallid imitation of its renowned namesake in New York, the Waldorf-Astoria. There this gang of thugs had beaten them in an unheard-of orgy of brutality. In order to show the extent of their “humanity,” they had summoned the town doctor—before the beating—to attend and to minister to their victims’ wounds.
During the ensuing weeks, the town’s Jews waited for the other shoe to drop, but when no further excesses took place, they lulled themselves into a false sense of security that let them rationalize that perhaps the worst of the revolution had passed, that as law-abiding citizens who had lived in those surroundings for generations, they would be spared any further anguish. The human mind is ever ready to deny the unthinkable.
In the years leading up to 1933, the number of the town’s Jews hovered around sixty, as against the general population of five thousand, and those numbers steadily declined to nineteen by the time of the 1940 deportation of that remnant—among them my parents—to the Camp de Gurs, in the South of France.
Perhaps because the number of Jews in the town was so small, they formed a close-knit community with a conservative adherence to religious services and, in general, a lively interest in the arts. As time went on it became increasingly more difficult to get the required minyan of ten men needed for any official religious service, according to Jewish stricture. That meant that often the missing number of men had to be brought in from a neighboring village. Although Walldorf had provided two rabbis of note to temples in large cities within Germany, our small congregation could not afford one of its own and so had to make do with a prayer leader, Mr. Hahn, the father of one of those spiritual leaders. During my early teens Mr. Hahn was in his seventies, and it may be said of him that he wore many hats. In addition to conducting services, he served as religious schoolteacher for the handful of Jewish youngsters, and with great determination tried to imbue us with a sense of our Jewish identity. Within the span of my recollection, there were only two births and one wedding on record among the Jews of Walldorf, leaving Mr. Hahn to officiate mainly at funerals, as far as those aspects of his duties were concerned.
Until 1933 the Jews of Walldorf enjoyed an active social life. On weekend afternoons a group of men would meet at someone’s home or in a restaurant for their popular card game of Skat, while in the evenings families would visit one another for regular social get-togethers. On such occasions there would be an abundance of food, much easy banter and gossip delving into the foibles of members of the community not present at those “soirées.” The conversation could and often would take a more serious turn, especially as the position of the Jews became more precarious. Parallels were established with France’s notorious “Affaire Dreyfus,” which still weighed heavily on people’s minds. Before Hitler’s assumption of power, this was often regarded as a bellwether of what could happen in Germany as well when it came to anti-Semitism. I remember a distant relative by marriage, Louis Weil, a confirmed Francophile, perhaps because there was in fact a French branch of his family. He subscribed to various French journals, and I remember him holding forth on the subject of anti-Semitism, and coming to the conclusion that, as in the Dreyfus case, in which someone of Emile Zola’s stature had helped stem the tide of anti-Semitic sentiment in France with his famous J’accuse, so in Germany, too, justice would prevail in the end. So, the Jews of Germany deluded themselves that they were part and parcel of the German nation and that it would always remain that way. It was Louis Weil, incidentally, who told me somewhat wistfully at the time of my emigration that the one thing he envied me about going to the States was the fact that I would soon know enough English to be able to read Shakespeare in the original. Alas, he himself, who spoke no English, was never to get the chance to learn it. Before 1937 was up, he succumbed to a sudden illness, one of the lucky ones to die of natural causes.
Because with the passing of each month it became increasingly clear that Germany represented a dead end for Jews—a fact that we, the young among them, understood and seized more readily—we gave a great deal of thought to where our future might lie. Within my family, the focus became the United States, where we had a number of relatives, some native born, others who had gone there before the turn of the century, and still others who had made their way to those shores more recently.
The ever-increasing restrictions regarding Jewish businesses were achieving their aim of curtailing and eventually halting all commerce between “Aryans” and Jews until the owners of Jewish enterprises either went out of business or were forced to sell to Aryan firms.
As Father’s hands were being tied more and more, and income from his hops brokerage business dried up to minimal levels, Mother, in her resourceful, industrious way, jumped into the breach. She pursued several small ventures. She would ship to clients in cities far and wide the specialty of our region—asparagus—when in season. Or she would provide out-of-the-ordinary sweets and confections to family members and friends in nearby cities, along with specially prepared goose delicacies or poultry from our backyard.
It took only one year after the Nazis came to power for my father’s business to suffer to the extent that he could no longer provide tuition for my pursuit of what I had hoped would be a professional career. That meant that at fourteen, along with other Jewish boys, I began to cast about for avenues that would eventually lead to emigration. In the meanwhile we felt it was important to acquire some sort of training that would stand us in good stead, no matter where our paths would take us. In my case the choice of a trade seemed fairly obvious. Having always been enamored of the realm of books, I chose the nearest thing to that predilection: printing.
In short order I was fortunate enough to begin an apprenticeship at a local stationer’s whose expanded business comprised printing as well. I had barely moved beyond the basic training stage when the authorities got wind of the fact that this “Aryan” shop was employing a Jewish apprentice, and so my career as typesetter came to an abrupt, if temporary, end after only a few months. That left me with few job prospects and emigration still looming in an uncertain future.
At that point there existed a few Jewish businesses in Walldorf that had not yet been adversely affected by events, and as luck would have it, I found employment in a cigar factory, then still under Jewish management. Of course it was hardly what I had aspired to, but considering the options, it was a good job. It also helped bring in some funds in the face of my parents’ steadily declining income. This change of career kept me in greater isolation from my friends in Heidelberg, save for weekend excursions to attend the meetings of the Jewish young men’s club for as long as that was still possible. Having only two other friends in our small circle in Walldorf drove me increasingly toward the more unfettered world of books, which let my fantasies soar toward other horizons. I remember the three years between my leaving school at age fourteen until my emigration at seventeen as a time of great uncertainty—and of the erosion of most of our civil liberties. For the time being I had my work and filled my spare time with books or music from the radio, or both. Often I found myself playing a game of solitaire, well aware of the fact that I was doing so in more ways than one. Although I always craved the companionship of my contemporaries, the constraints of the times helped to intensify a natural tendency toward introversion.
Meanwhile my sister completed her nurse’s training, and—the wheels having been set in motion—her prayers were answered when she received the necessary legal papers from one of our American relatives that provided an escape from the untenable situation in which we all found ourselves. Thus, in the spring of 1936, she was the first of our immediate family to make it to the safety of the United States. Because most of our relatives lived in Buffalo, it was an obvious move for her to settle in that city. In due course she was able to prevail on another relative to furnish a similar affidavit vouching for my support, making it possible, to my immense joy and relief, to follow her a year later.
Transportation provided no problem in 1937, inasmuch as my brother Max was then still working for the Hamburg-America Line, and so I was able to leave by mid-June on one of the SS St. Louis’s sister ships, with a happier outcome than that liner was to have two years later. The atmosphere on board was pleasant, and despite its name and the flag under which the SS Deutschland was sailing, there were few outward manifestations of the terror I was leaving behind, much of that no doubt attributable to the international clientele aboard.
Among the shipboard friendships I formed, one stands out in particular. It was with an American student, my senior by a few years, who had just concluded two semesters at Heidelberg University, a subject that led to many insightful conversations. We talked about his impressions of the country, and he went on to try to depict certain aspects of the American way of life that lay ahead of me, including, I still remember, some of the sophisticated humor from the pages of the New Yorker, a magazine to which I would become addicted in due time. What Fred Irvin was able to convey to me in his flawless German, picked up in the course of his year in Heidelberg, were his feelings about Germany. By and large his experience had been a most positive one, and he had encountered much that he liked a great deal. On the other hand he had not been blind to what he had seen all around him, as he made clear to me. What he enlarged on in subsequent letters, which reached me in Buffalo from his home near Philadelphia, was his observation that a great many of the German people were far too militaristic and in time to come would have to pay a steep price for their excesses, among them those directed at Jews.
It took eight days at sea to reach the safety of the American shore, and the sights familiar to me from photos and films inspired a feeling of awe and wonder. It was thrilling to actually glide by the Statue of Liberty and to see the New York skyline from this vantage point. All of it filled me with immense gratitude. Everything was new and exciting and held out a promise of unlimited possibilities. Above all I felt safe. In 1938 my brother, newly married, made it to these shores as well, and within another year, Max was able to have his wife, Sue, follow him before the entire immigration picture for Jews took a decided turn for the worse. Throughout the late thirties the economic outlook was far from ideal in the United States, as elsewhere in the world. Because we were aware that Father and Mother’s situation was deteriorating rapidly, my siblings and I struggled to hold any kind of job, no matter how menial, that would allow us to bring them to this country. To that end I took a number of supplemental evening and weekend positions that ranged from working in the fast-food restaurants of that day to part-time employment in a tobacco and dry goods store. Apart from that, it was nearly impossible to convince anyone of the precariousness of our parents’ situation. Soon thereafter a chain of events was unleashed that forced us to stand by in paralysis and frustration, witnessing developments that, predictable as they were to us, seemed to take most others by surprise.
On November 9, 1938, the outrage that was to be known as Kristallnacht became a watershed in the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. It represented the start of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the elimination of the Jews of Germany, to be followed later by that of the rest of Europe’s Jews. From that point on, most avenues of escape would remain blocked to my parents, although we came excruciatingly close to rescuing them on several occasions.
The scene most vividly associated with my realization that I would not see my parents again is one that linked the forces of nature to the inexorable movement of catastrophic events in Europe. Engraved on my mind is the evening of September 3, 1939, the Sunday when—in the wake of the German invasion of Poland two days earlier—England and France declared war on Germany. The news of the expected war had burst on the airwaves early in the day, and one of my oldest and closest friends, Otto Kahn, also a recent arrival in the United States, had persuaded me to join him and a few other young people on a visit to Niagara Falls. I remember standing at the foot of this monumental natural wonder as twilight was falling, absorbing the thunderous rush of water silhouetted against a still-blue evening sky. I tried desperately to convey to my friends that this day spelled the end of all hope regarding my parents. Somehow I grasped at that moment that it was the ominous foreboding of the deluge to come.
Peace! Peace! That great word that holds within it the meaning of life, the breath of freedom. Freedom! I welcome it in the rays of the golden sun, and I salute you, brave American soldiers. To us you are not ordinary men, but mythical heroes who fight to liberate us and who meet us with outstretched arms. Your sympathy is great, but we cannot speak the unspeakable and you might not understand our language. You are a people of freedom—and we? Are we human still—or again?
They have tried to drag us to the lowest level of existence, demeaned us, treated us worse than animals. Yet something has remained alive within us, for it stirs anew. It is a soul sensitive to the beauty of blossoming spring. The heart that beats in our breast pulsates with feeling. Slowly the petrified shell under which cruel barbarians have cut deep wounds is breaking, leaving a vulnerable, newly healed heart.
Words of farewell for you were whispered by my friend’s dying lips: “Welcome them, welcome our liberators. I won’t live to see them so greet them for me, they who liberate you!’”
—Gerda Weissmann, May 10, 1945; read by Fifth U.S. Infantry Division chaplain at the funeral of Gerda’s companions.
