FOR HIS 1945 FILM THE Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder traveled back to the neighborhood where his mother had once lived in New York City when she was a teenager. He shot on location, one of the spots the tavern P. J. Clarke’s, with its beveled stained-glass windows, its gas lamps and dark wood paneling left over from the days of the Gilded Age when Eugenia had called the neighborhood home. The ghost of his young mother haunted those city streets.
Wilder was hired by the army that summer, assigned to the Psychological Warfare Division. Because he spoke the language, he was sent back to Germany, where the end of the war unfolded a bit differently than in New York. Though people were relieved the fighting was over, Berlin and those living there were devastated. Wilder flew over the remnants of the Romanisches Café and the jagged broken spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church, the ruins of the zoo and the train station.
Years later, he tried to visit his father’s grave, but it had been obliterated. The New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, where Einstein had once played violin, was also in ruins. “I had mixed feelings,” Wilder said. “I wanted to see the Nazis destroyed, but to see the city destroyed…”
Wilder made his way over Berlin’s once bustling streets. In the hot summer, the air smelled of rot, German corpses floating in the Landwehrkanal and lying under collapsed homes. More than six hundred thousand apartments had been destroyed, and nearly half the city’s population, just gone. Those who were left were dazed and streaming out into the countryside, their few belongings in wooden carts and baby carriages.
As in dollhouses, rooms sat exposed in bombed-out buildings, the outer walls crumbled away, but tables and chairs still standing, beds lying neatly made. On the once grand Kurfürstendamm, the street where Jules’s wedding reception was held, a Panzer tank was stuck in the hot tar, either abandoned or its soldiers dead inside. Airplane parts lay strewn about, propellers and engines left where they had crashed. Saints were toppled onto the ground like corpses outside the Berlin Cathedral. Over the shell-damaged Reichstag, its dome now a skeleton, its walls defaced with bullet holes and obscene graffiti aimed at Hitler from the invading Russian troops, the red Soviet flag sagged in the dead, sweltering air. American GIs handed out chewing gum and chocolate to hungry children begging in the streets, their stunned parents forming long bucket brigade lines to clear the blasted ruins, Ushi and her friend Leja among them.
Wilder met with the Red Cross to try and trace what had happened to his mother and grandmother, but there was nothing. They had likely gone back to Kraków, just like Jules’s sister Golda had, and either died in the ghetto or were sent on to a concentration camp.
Wilder’s job with the Psywar office, as it was known, was to create documentaries for German consumption, and to pinpoint which German filmmakers were actual Nazis and which, out of fear, had just gone along. During the war, the SS had created a series of propaganda films, including an anti-capitalist account of the Titanic sinking, whose director was murdered by the Nazis halfway through production. The ship used in the filming was converted into a prison ship, filled with concentration camp victims, and left as a target for the Royal Air Force, who sunk it at the very end of the war, the death toll triple the actual Titanic’s. The Nazis had also made a “documentary” about Theresienstadt, starring actual Jewish prisoners, to convince the world that concentration camps were not so bad. Many of the film’s “actors” and “actresses”—forced to participate in a staged soccer game—were later murdered.
Now it was time to show the world the truth. Wilder edited miles of footage shot by the US military, which eventually resulted in a black-and-white film called Death Mills. The twenty-minute documentary was made for American-occupied Germany and Austria and was the first of its kind to show what GIs had found when they’d arrived at the Nazi concentration camps.
Maybe Wilder hoped to get a glimpse of his mother or grandmother in that liberation footage, amid reels of gas chambers, crematoriums, and ovens, stacks of infant shoes, boxes of wedding rings and gold fillings, bags of human hair ready for manufacturers, ground-up bone that was sold to local farmers as fertilizer, skeletal camp survivors in striped uniforms, and piles and piles and piles of dead bodies, being bulldozed into giant open graves. There was footage of German citizens being marched to the camps in their towns to face the aftermath of the horrors that they had ignored, to extinguish any hatred or anti-Semitism that might have lingered.
But there was no trace of Wilder’s family.
Jules’s oldest sister, Golda, was very quiet when she arrived in New York, speaking softly, if at all, her large, tired eyes staring into the void from which she’d barely escaped. Amid the chaos of postwar Europe, Jules was able to locate Golda through a Jewish rescue organization and bring her to Manhattan. He and the family found her a three-bedroom rent-controlled apartment in a gray-brick building on Riverside Drive at Ninety-Fifth Street, not far from Harry’s old place, facing the Hudson River and beautiful Riverside Park, which had been completed long ago. But the beauty of the flowing river and the canopy of trees were not much of a comfort for what Golda had been through, for eyes that had seen all that she had seen.
She rented out the extra bedrooms to boarders to make her $500 rent each month. Golda, a broken woman, was crippled by arthritis from walking in and shoveling snow in the ghettos and concentration camps she had somehow survived. She was the oldest and, it turned out, the strongest of Jules’s siblings.
Don, too, made it through the war alive. Golda hadn’t seen her son for nearly a decade and barely recognized him, but the joy of hugging him again was a happiness so great that, for a moment, it nearly outweighed her sorrow. Don had been assigned to various posts, including a unit in the Aleutian Islands, handling shipments of planes and ammunition to the Russian front. But because of his ability to speak German, he was given a job with the counterintelligence unit in Staten Island interrogating captured Nazi officers.
When Don got married and had his son, Jeffrey, four years later, they moved into the same seven-story apartment building as Golda, right across the hall. It was the sight of that grandson, her only grandchild, that cured what the view of the Hudson River and Riverside Park could not. Golda began to smile again, taking the boy for walks down to the park and to the river’s edge along the promenade. Her legs didn’t seem to hurt as much when she pushed his baby carriage all the way to Seventy-Ninth Street and back.
When Jeffrey was old enough, Golda would take him to the movies up at the Riverside and Riviera cinemas on Broadway, laughing again, finally, at the comedies, thrilled by Jewish hero Ben-Hur and his chariot races. Back in her apartment, Golda cooked her grandson all the food she had dreamed of while in the concentration camps: tender beef brisket; delicious gefilte fish made with the freshest carp, kept in the bathtub until she was ready to cook it; and her sweet and savory tzimmes stew, full of fresh apples and potatoes and carrots, so abundant and sand-free now at the local market. But the best times were when Jeffrey came to stay with her every day when he got home from school. Golda would sit quietly with him in her living room in her easy chair, watching the river flow, their third-story view just above the tops of the blooming American elms and black cherry trees below.
She never talked about the camps to Jeffrey, but she hadn’t forgotten. Golda applied for reparations from the German government. For Paul’s and Simon’s murders she was awarded $4,200—each human life worth a mere $2,100.
Since Jules had said goodbye to his youngest sister, Cilly, in Berlin, he had not seen her nor heard much from her. No one had. Many nights, Jules would think of how when they were young, Golda had taken care of them both, helping his own mother to raise them. But Golda had barely managed to survive, herself, during the war.
When Paris was taken by the Nazis, Cilly had stayed, helping arrange illegal transports for some of the Jewish children in the orphanage where she taught. The landlord of the building betrayed her, reporting that she worked for the underground.
All that Jules knew was that Cilly was shot and killed outside 6 Rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais, the center of Paris’s Jewish community. No other details were recorded.
Jules would not learn of Cilly’s fate for years after the war. But when he finally did, he would sit shiva.
Ushi finally resurfaced, her days as a U-boat drifting aimlessly on the streets of Berlin finally over. With Jules and Edith’s help, she was able to make it to America in September 1946, sailing on the SS Marine Marlin from Bremen. She packed what few pieces of clothing she had, along with her once verboten German typewriter, which she had lugged with her everywhere she had hidden.
On her way over on the ship, she met her husband-to-be—a watchmaker also named Jules, who had hid for the entire war like she had, using the German alias Fritz Schlenk. When Ushi arrived, Edith and the family went to meet her at the dock with a bouquet of roses, overjoyed to see her. It was during a September heat wave, but Ushi was wearing a winter suit, probably the only dress clothes she owned. A big black hat covered her curly red hair. She was sweating profusely. At the dock, Ushi put down her suitcase, especially heavy because of the German typewriter inside. She took the flowers from Edith, then slapped her across the face and said, “How dare you leave me behind!” Edith cried and Ushi, lost in an emotional tangle of joy, sadness, and grief, apologized immediately, hugging her sister close.
Ushi lived with Jules and Edith for a year, sleeping in a small bedroom while her hosts slept on their pullout living room sofa. In New York, she landed a job at Alexander’s department store in the purchasing department for fancy women’s wear and was able to buy several new suits. Even when she wasn’t at work, she would accidentally—but happily—answer the phone, “Women’s better dresses.” When she got married, Edith and Jules threw her a wedding at Zichron Ephraim synagogue on East Sixty-Eighth Street.
Leja and several of Ushi’s fellow submarines made it to New York as well, serving as a support group for one another. They all attended each other’s weddings—also thrown by Jules—and raised their children together. And eventually their grandchildren. Ushi was as smart and brave as she had been underground in Berlin, and when anyone was in a jam, she was the one they called. One afternoon when an apartment neighbor accidentally locked her door with her infant inside, Ushi wiggled through a hallway window four stories up, climbed over the metal guardrails, and crawled along the ledge and then into the woman’s open bedroom window. Just like the superhero she was.