7

The New World

BENEATH A CLOUD-PACKED GRAY SKY the Ettersberg was a white tumor in a white landscape striated with the black streaks of hedge lines, buildings, and scraped roads. On the hill, the thick covering of snow softened but did not hide the radiating outlines of the barrack blocks and the tower-spiked fences.

Gustav leaned on his shovel. The kapo’s back was turned, and Gustav snatched the moment to catch his breath. His frozen fingers were purple, and when he breathed on them there was no feeling of warmth: no sensation at all. He knew that when he returned to the barrack in the evening and the bone-cold numbness leached out of him, they would gripe and ache abominably. He could sense his bones complaining now as they gripped the haft of the shovel, but they did so silently with teeth clenched.

A new year, but nothing had changed in this world except the passing of seasons and the daily passing of lives. Smoke from the crematorium drifted foully in the freezing air over the camp and into the nostrils of the prisoners, the scent of their own futures.

Gustav, his senses trained by more than a year in this place, felt the kapo turning toward him and was already plying his shovel before the man’s eyes reached him. The work of the haulage column had been interrupted by the snow; each day the prisoners shoveled the camp streets clear, hauled the snow away, and each night nature buried them deep once more.

The light was fading. Sensing that no eyes were upon him, Gustav rested again. He looked up at the southeastern sky, marbled gray and scintillating with falling flakes, smeared with smoke from the chimney. Somewhere over there, far beyond these fences and woods, was his home, his wife, Herta, little Kurt. What were they doing right now? Were they safe? Warm or as cold as him? Frightened or hopeful? Despairing? He and Fritz still received regular letters and a little money from Tini, but it was no substitute for being there. He knew only that Tini’s world right now revolved around trying to get the children out of the country, and that her hopes were pinned most on Kurt.

With a last glance at the sky, Gustav bent his back and drove his shovel into the snow.

The sky above Kurt’s head was warm and blue as only skies in childhood memories can be, shimmering with the sunlight-dappled leaves of horse chestnuts and studded with snowy heaps of blossom. He put one foot before the other, gazing upward, dizzying himself with pleasure.

Looking ahead, he realized that he had lagged behind the rest of the family. There were Mama and Papa walking arm in arm, and Fritz, sauntering with his hands in the pockets of his smart knickerbocker pants, Herta strolling prettily, Edith upright and elegant.

They had spent the morning in the Prater, and Kurt was replete with delight. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d shot down the great slide—if you helped out by carrying bundles of mats back up to the top, the man in charge gave you a free ride, and Kurt and Fritz and the other less well-off kids always took a few turns. Now, strolling along the Hauptallee, the broad avenue that ran arrow-straight for over a kilometer through the Prater woods, Kurt was amusing himself by walking with one foot on the path and one on the raised grass bank between it and the road. His senses full, Kurt didn’t notice that the rest of the family was getting farther and farther ahead. One foot up, one foot down, he hummed to himself, enjoying the sensation of boosting himself up on each high step. All awareness of time slipped away, and when at last he looked up again, he was alone.

An instant’s shiver of terror flickered through his chest. Before him, the rows of trees receding into the distance, the woods on either side, the families, the couples, bicycles and carriages and cars swishing by on the road; through the trees the colors of the amusement park and more people—but nowhere could he pick out the familiar shapes of his parents or his sisters or Fritz. They had simply vanished. Were they hiding from him? Had they forgotten him? It was as if they had been snatched away in an instant.

The momentary terror passed, and Kurt reasoned with himself. There was no need to panic. He knew his way around the Prater like he knew the face of a friend; it was little more than a kilometer from home, about a dozen blocks. He could find his own way. And when he got home his mama and papa would remember that they had another son. He kept going along the Hauptallee, past the amusement park, close by the foot of the Riesenrad ferris wheel, and to the Prater entrance. But as he emerged from the park, he met an obstacle. The Hauptallee opened out onto the Praterstern, a huge star-shaped interchange where six other great boulevards and avenues met, in the center of which stood the tall column of the Tegethoff monument. After the peace of the woods, it was a maelstrom of noise and movement. Trucks, motor cars, and trams streamed roaring from left to right across his vision, pouring in and out of the nearest boulevards onto the interchange; the sidewalks teemed with people hurrying, idling, standing about.

Kurt stood there, stunned by the realization that he had no idea what to do now. He had come through this place times without count, but always with a grown-up or older sibling. He’d never needed to pay attention to how you got through this torrent.

After a while he became aware of a presence and a woman’s voice. He glanced up and found a lady peering down at him with concern. “Are you lost?” she asked. Well of course he wasn’t lost; he knew exactly where he was, but he didn’t know how to get from this where to the where he wanted to be. He knew the direction but couldn’t figure out how to physically accomplish it. But he also didn’t know quite how to explain this complex concept. The lady frowned anxiously at him.

From out of nowhere a policeman appeared and quickly took control. He took Kurt by the hand and led him back toward the Prater, bearing left along Ausstellungsstrasse. Eventually they came to the police station, a large and extremely important-looking building of red brick and stone. Kurt was led into a world of dark uniforms, anxious-looking citizens, and quietly efficient bustle filled with strange smells and sounds. The policeman spoke with another officer, and Kurt was given a seat in an office. A policeman working there smiled at him, chatted, played with him. Kurt had a roll of caps, and to his delight the policeman, using the buckle of his dress belt, set them off one at a time, the banging echoing round the office like rifle fire.

Distracted and enjoying the policeman’s company, Kurt scarcely noticed the time passing. Then, “Kurtl!” said a familiar voice. “There you are!” He turned and saw his mama in the doorway, and his papa behind her. His heart lit up within him; he jumped up and ran toward his mother’s open arms.

Kurt woke, staring and shaking, with his heart pounding in his chest. For a moment he had no idea where he was. A rush of sound, thudding, clattering in his ears; beneath him a hard wooden bench; around him strange people; a sensation of rocking rhythmically. A train—he was on a train. Then he noticed the flat packet hanging against his chest, and remembered.1

This was the train to his new life. The old life, the familiar life, the beloved, was behind him, inexplicably, inexorably receding into a different dimension. Or perhaps it was the other way round—Vienna, Im Werd, his home, all were real and of the present, and it was he who had been pushed into this unreal existence.

The slatted wooden bench had numbed his backside, but he’d been so tired, sleep had taken hold of him, and he’d slumped against the passenger beside him. He sat up and touched the packet. He recalled his mother hanging it around his neck.

That image was vivid in his memory: They were in the kitchen in the apartment. She sat him on the table—the same worn surface where he had once helped her coat the velvety veal cutlets for Wiener schnitzel and roll up the noodles for chicken soup. He could see her face, hollowed by hunger, etched by worry, close before him, telling him how vital it was to look after this wallet. It contained his papers, and in this world now, that was as much as to say that it held his very soul, his permission to exist. He must preserve and guard it, for his life depended on it. On the front was written his name and date of birth. She smiled and kissed him. “You behave now, Kurtl,” she said. “Be a good child when you get there—no tricks, be obedient so they will let you stay.” She produced a gift for him, a new-bought harmonica, all gleaming and sweet, and he clutched it to him.

. . . And then she was gone. Blinking out in his memory like a light switched off.

Kurt looked around at the people on the train, glanced out the window at the unfamiliar countryside flowing by under its February frost, and wondered. He knew in that part of his mind where he kept facts that this was the train from Berlin, where he had collected his final papers from the German Jewish Children’s Aid and the travel money he was required to have—fifty crisp green American dollars tucked safe in his luggage—and he knew likewise that he had got to Berlin from Vienna on another train, and that that train must have left from the Westbahnhof or Hütteldorf . . . but in the other part of his mind the memory of it was fading. In time, to his lifelong regret, he would be utterly unable to remember saying good-bye to his mother, or to Herta.

Most of the other people on the train were refugees, and to Kurt most seemed elderly. There were families too, with young children. German, Austrian, Hungarian Jews, a few Poles, all crammed into their seats. Mothers murmured to their little ones while their husbands read or talked or dozed, old men with hats low on their brows stooped in their sleep, snoring and sighing into their gray beards, and children stared at them wide-eyed. Every few stops the refugees had to change trains, gathering themselves and their luggage. German soldiers or police herded them onto whatever trains were available, and sometimes when they boarded they found themselves in luxurious first-class compartments, sometimes second, but more often the aching wooden slats of third. Kurt preferred third class, because at least he got to sit properly; the seats in first had armrests, and the children had to perch on them, squeezed and elbowed between the adults. On a few occasions Kurt got so desperate for comfort that he clambered up onto the luggage rack and stretched out on the valises.

There were only two other unaccompanied children on the train, a boy and a girl, and Kurt gradually got to know them. Both were sponsored by the German Jewish Children’s Aid. One was a fellow Viennese named Karl Kohn, who was fourteen and came from the same part of Leopoldstadt as Kurt. He wore glasses and seemed kind of sickly and a little small for a teenager. The girl could not have been more different; Irmgard Salomon was from a middle-class family in Stuttgart, Germany; despite being only eleven, she was taller than either of them by a clear two inches.2 Drawn together by their isolation in this train of families and old people, the three formed a bond as the train carried them farther and farther from their homes and mothers—hundreds, then thousands of kilometers slipping by.

Apartment 16 had become a hollow shell. Where there had been family, now there were just two women: one aging, one just blooming. Tini was forty-seven years old—an age when she should have been looking forward to a future filled with grandchildren. And Herta, two months away from her nineteenth birthday, should have been settled in her occupation and considering which of her admirers she might marry, and where in Vienna they might choose to live. They should not have been sitting here alone with each other, trapped in this desolate apartment, with their few possessions robbed from them and their dear ones—husband, father, sons, brothers, sister, daughter—stolen or fled.

Vienna was a place of forbidden zones with all the opportunities of life withdrawn, and the apartment, which they were fortunate to have kept at all, was a prison.

Saying good-bye to Kurt had been a pain beyond pain. He was so small, so slight, such a sliver of humanity to be sent out into the world through the press of people crowding the station. Tini and Herta had not been able to accompany him to the train—only people with travel permits were allowed on the platforms—and they had had to say their farewells outside and watch from a distance as the crowd of refugees swept him away.3

Flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood, soul of her soul, gone from her. Her children were all leaving her. Kurt was her hope; not yet formed, he would have a new beginning in an altogether new world. Perhaps he would return one day, and she would see a new person in his place, shaped by a life that was wholly strange to her.

Kurt lay on his back and gazed up at the stars. He had never in his life seen them like this—a skyscape deeper, blacker, more brilliant than any other on Earth; a vault unadulterated by street lights and houselights. The ship, rolling steadily beneath him, was in blackout, and there were no other visible presences anywhere on the vast disc of starlit black ocean surrounding it.

He felt like the last survivor of a great exodus. After the train arrived in Lisbon, he and Karl and Irmgard—all of whom had acquired their travel papers and tickets with plenty of time to spare before the voyage—had been kept waiting for weeks. There were supposed to be thirty-eight other Jewish children joining them for the voyage to America, and they were all intended to sail in one group. Kurt and his two friends were put in the care of a young woman. Although her name did not remain in Kurt’s memory, the impression of her did; an image of prettiness. He developed a crush on her, and people teased him about it—how could an eleven-year-old boy take a fancy to a grown woman? He retorted that in Vienna you grew up fast, and any eleven-year-old Viennese would know how to respond to a pretty lady.

When the time had come to sail, it was apparent that the thirty-eight other children weren’t going to make it. Somehow they’d been trapped in the bureaucratic tangle of emigration. So at three in the afternoon of Monday, March 17, Kurt, Karl, and Irmgard were taken to the dock with just one another for company. There was their ship, tall as an office block, fixed to the dockside with great ropes and gangways.

SS Siboney wasn’t the largest passenger liner afloat, but she had a certain elegance: two slender funnels and upper decks lined with covered promenades like arcades. Along the hull, partly hidden by the dock and the gangways, were identification markings to protect her from German U-boats: AMERICAN - EXPORT - LINES in giant white letters, flanked by Stars and Stripes the size of buses.

Kurt handed his papers to the officer at the foot of the gangway and went aboard. There were many familiar faces from the train journey among the passengers; by far the majority of people aboard appeared to be refugees, with a few returning tourists and commercial travelers among them. Kurt and Karl went in search of their cabin, following directions along a maze of corridors and down flight after flight of steps. Eventually they found it, right down in the depths of the ship, where it was unpleasantly stuffy and the engines could be heard throbbing loudly. There was a bunk bed; Kurt claimed the top bunk while Karl had the bottom. Having staked out their turf and disposed of their luggage, the two boys left the cabin and rarely went back to it.

Along with most of the other passengers, they watched from the rail as Siboney pulled away from the dock and, with engines thundering, turned her bow westward. The port rotated around them, then receded, Lisbon shrank to a smear, then Portugal to a sliver, then all of Europe dwindled and sank beneath the horizon.

Kurt remained on deck for three hours after sailing, looking out across the expanse of the ocean. Out of sight, beyond the northern horizon, convoy after convoy of merchant ships dragged slowly eastward toward Britain with Royal Navy escorts circling like nervous herdsmen; in the east, German U-boats slid out from their pens and cruised the vast ocean with torpedoes couched in their tubes. All Siboney had for protection was the set of painted markings on the sides. Kurt descended to his cabin that night tired and replete with new sensations.

That first night was unpleasant in the noisy, overheated cabin, and the next day was marred by seasickness (all Kurt could keep down was fruit). Reluctant to spend another night in the cabin, after dark Kurt and Karl took their blankets and sneaked up on deck. There was nobody to stop them; Nurse Sneble, a compact middle-aged woman from New York, was supposed to look after the children, but she was so busy with the elderly passengers she scarcely had time to cast a glance at them.

It was chilly in the night air, but wrapped up and reclining in deck chairs, the two boys were warm enough. They luxuriated in the quiet and the fresh air. Kurt watched the stars overhead and wondered at this new situation and the place he was going to. He knew a tiny smattering of English from school; under Nazi rule, English had been on the school curriculum, even in the Jewish charity schools. But Kurt hadn’t picked up much; he could say hello, yes and no, and OK, but that was about all. His class had learned the rhyme “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man” by rote, but in Kurt’s mind the words had little meaning. To his ears, the Siboney’s American crew and passengers just spoke gibberish.

Somewhere back there, beyond the horizon where the eastern starfield met the black line of the ocean, were his home and family. He no longer had the harmonica his mother had given him. The train had stopped somewhere in France, and while he and the other kids were waiting to change trains, some German soldiers had stopped and spoken with them, and played with them a little. Kurt had shown them the harmonica. They took it and wouldn’t give it back. When he boarded the train again, he left behind his last link with his mother and home.

A cloud lay over Europe, roiling black and flickering with lightning. Somewhere in mid-Atlantic, Siboney steamed out from under it and into a bright American dawn.

Kurt and Karl, asleep on their deck chairs, were woken by a dash of cold spray. Jumping up, they realized that it wasn’t sea spray but a splash from the mop of a sailor swabbing the deck. Gathering their blankets, they retreated indoors.

Somehow Nurse Sneble found out about their night al fresco, and her gaze finally fell on the two boys. They were reprimanded and ordered to sleep in their cabin from now on. Cowed, they obeyed, but together with Irmgard they continued to have the run of the ship all day long, exploring, playing games, making friends with the sailors. This rich environment of new experiences helped to distract them from thoughts about what they had left behind and the uncertainty of where they were going.

Day by day the weather grew warmer as Siboney steered a southwesterly course. The days passed with island-spotting, lifeboat drills, watching sharks cruise by the ship. It was an idyll that seemed set to last forever. On the eighth day they reached Bermuda, where some of the passengers disembarked. It was announced over the ship’s loudspeakers that in two days they would reach New York. Siboney turned her bow northwest and left the warm tropics behind. Kurt sensed a changed atmosphere aboard; the cruise was done, and people were preparing for the most momentous arrival of their lives.

Around noon on Thursday, March 27, 1941, with every man, woman, and child lining the rails, Siboney passed between Staten Island and Long Island and steamed into the Upper Bay. Kurt pressed between the others to watch the gray waters and distant shores slip by. Then he saw it, off the port bow, the glittering outline of the Statue of Liberty growing and growing from a little spike until she towered above the ship, pale green and magnificent. Siboney steered into the Hudson, past the skyscraper skyline of Manhattan. Around Kurt, children and adults exclaimed and pointed as they picked out the sights, talking excitedly, wreathed in smiles. Many children had been given little American flags, and they held them up, fluttering in the wind, tiny, fragile offerings of hope.

Seventh Avenue was a cascade of noise and color. Canary-yellow taxicabs with flared black wings stuttered at the curbs and barked their way angrily into the streaming, halting, screaming traffic of automobiles and buses, disputing the Forty-Second Street intersection with bell-ringing trams. Broadway and Times Square were like the innards of a racing engine with the throttle wide open. Kurt’s senses were drowning. He clutched the hand of the lady from the aid society like a lifebelt as they waded through the dense sidewalk traffic of skirts and overcoats, swinging umbrellas and canes, bobbing hats, flapping newspapers and flying cigarette ash, all flashing past his face too rapidly to register.

He had been in New York for one day, and it wasn’t enough to even begin getting used to it. Kurt was a city boy to his bones, but this was nothing like Vienna. The old place had its feet in the twentieth century but its heart had never caught up. New York was a city of modernity from foundations to sky, a town built out of automobiles and gasoline and glass and concrete and people and people and people and still more people who themselves seemed more of the modern world than any in Europe. Kurt and his friends were aliens in every way.

When Siboney had docked at the pier, Kurt, Karl, and Irmgard had been released from its charge with their papers stamped. There was a medical inspection, during which they were prodded and scrutinized and tested. Kurt had been fine, the doctor noting only that his eyes were mismatched: one brown, one hazel. But Karl gave cause for concern; the doctor frowned and wrote on the form that he suspected pituitary disease, as well as defective vision.4 After going through customs, they had been met by a lady from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which partnered with the German Jewish Children’s Aid in helping refugees. She took them to a hotel.

There was a lot to arrange for all of them. They were immigrating to the United States, not merely for the duration, and they needed to be settled. Of the three, only Kurt had definite arrangements in place. Karl and Irmgard had no friends or relatives in America; their only point of contact was the Children’s Aid, which had arranged places for Irmgard here in New York and for Karl in distant Chicago. After a night in the hotel the time came for them to part. Kurt would never see either of his friends again.5

The bell rang and “Sixth and West Thirty-Fourth Street!” yelled the conductor as the bus jolted to a halt. The aid society lady took Kurt’s hand, and they joined the knot of people spilling from the bus onto the sidewalk and into another maelstrom of traffic and indifferent, noisy humanity. Kurt looked upward. And there it was—the mythic epicenter of New York’s ultramodernity, climbing up and up, impossibly, inhumanly high: the Empire State Building. Kurt, humanly tiny and insignificant, gazed up at it in wonder. Of all the sights he saw in New York, the visit to the Empire State Building left the clearest impression. Then there was another bus, heading for Pennsylvania Station and an unmissable appointment with the eastbound train.

The strange place names ticked by, stop by stop, meaningless to Kurt’s Austrian eyes but replete with the culture of a previous wave of religious immigrants who yearned for their home towns in England: Greenwich, Stamford, Old Lyme, New London, Warwick. The train had left New York behind, tracing the coast right through Connecticut and all the way to Providence, Rhode Island. There the main line ended.

When Kurt disembarked, accompanied by the lady from the aid society and the suitcase that had traveled with him all the way from Im Werd, they were met by a woman Kurt had never seen before. She was about his mother’s age, but more expensively dressed. To his surprise, she greeted him familiarly in German. This was Mrs. Maurer, his mother’s old friend from Vienna. Waiting with her on the platform was a middle-aged man accompanied by a woman, both regarding him with reserved benevolence. In respectful tones, Mrs. Maurer introduced the gentleman as Kurt’s sponsor, Judge Samuel Barnet.

Judge Barnet was around fifty years old—almost exactly the same age, in fact, as Kurt’s father, but in every other respect as different as New York from Vienna. Samuel Barnet was rather short and stocky, with gray, receding hair, a large, fleshy nose, and thick, bushy eyebrows beneath which were set a pair of deceptively sleepy-looking eyes.6 At first sight, he had a rather grave demeanor, even a little frosty. The lady with him, who wasn’t much taller than Kurt himself, was the judge’s sister, Kate; she was small, neat, and stolidly built like her brother.

Mrs. Maurer, who had taken responsibility for housing Kurt, explained that he wouldn’t be staying with her. She and her husband, George, who was a cotton mill inspector, weren’t very well off and rented a small apartment in a town house;7 instead, she had arranged accommodation with Judge Barnet himself. It didn’t seem to make much sense that he be housed with a stranger rather than with the only person in this new world of Kurt’s who actually knew Vienna, was friends with his mother, and spoke German. But much of this passed right over Kurt’s uncomprehending head.

Leaving the aid society lady to head back to New York, they climbed into the Barnets’ automobile. From Providence they drove into Massachusetts, crossing a seemingly endless succession of rivers, bays, and inlets. Eventually they reached their destination: New Bedford, a large town on the bank of the Acushnet River estuary. This southeast corner of the state was a dense little patch of immigrant England whose traces were visible on almost every road sign for miles around, from here to Boston by way of Rochester, Taunton, Norfolk, and Braintree.

It was all meaningless to Kurt, and New Bedford was even less like Vienna than New York had been—a town of river ferries and broad streets, small, genteel public buildings, cotton mills, and long, straight avenues of suburban homes of gray shingle and white clapboard, where automobiles hummed, children played, and sober citizens went about their business with decorum.

Judge Barnet’s house was on Rotch Street, one of a grid of quiet, leafy suburban avenues between Buttonwood Park Zoo and the center of town. As a Special Justice of the District Court of New Bedford and a pillar and keystone in the town—especially its Jewish community—Samuel Barnet might well be expected to be of titanic proportions, intimidating and mighty, living in an imposing mansion on the edge of town; instead, the car turned in at the driveway of a regular clapboard home standing shoulder-to-shoulder with others almost but not quite identical to it.

Kurt’s reception into Judge Barnet’s home was warm but, in keeping with the man’s demeanor, reserved. Communication was near-impossible. Yes and no weren’t really sufficient, and “Pat-a-cake, baker’s man” would be of no use at all in this situation. Once Mrs. Maurer had left, an invisible barrier settled between them—a barrier which the judge was determined to break down without delay. Fortunately, he wasn’t alone in this endeavor.

Samuel Barnet had been a widower for more than two decades, his wife, Mollie, having died in the 1919 influenza epidemic when she was only nineteen years old. They’d been married in 1915 when she was sixteen and he was a young and ambitious attorney.8 They had no children, and Samuel had never remarried. But his house was neither a widower’s mausoleum nor a bachelor’s den; with him lived his three sisters, aged between thirty-eight and forty-three, and like their brother all resolutely unmarried.

The sisters were Kate, Esther, and Sarah, and they had already appointed themselves aunts to the new arrival. Sarah, the youngest, had trained as a dental hygienist but hadn’t had work for several years. Esther, bespectacled and lean and a little flustered-looking, taught chemistry at the City High School. And Kate, the eldest, who had come to the station at Providence, had a matronly air; she kept house and worked for Samuel as a clerk in his office downtown.9 There was a fourth sister, Goldie, who was married and lived in Brockton.

They welcomed the bewildered Kurt and showed him where he would sleep. His arrival had been long-expected, and a bedroom had been prepared for him on the first floor. Exhausted, he slept his second night on American soil in his own bed in—for the first time in his life—his very own room.

The next morning he woke to find a strange presence in his room. A tiny boy aged about three, dressed in a little camelhair coat, was standing at his bedside, gazing at him in wonder. He opened his mouth and spoke—and out poured a stream of the same incomprehensible English gibberish that Kurt had been hearing since boarding ship at Lisbon. The tiny boy seemed to want or expect something, but Kurt had no idea what it was. The boy’s face fell in disappointment, and he burst into tears.

He turned to an adult standing behind him, and wailed, “Kurt won’t talk to me!”

The little boy, Kurt learned, was a member of the family. His name was David, the son of Judge Barnet’s younger brother, Philip, who lived right next door with his much younger wife, Roberta, and their two children. Together they made up one large, extended household.

As they grew accustomed to one another, Kurt was assimilated into the household and the family—much more rapidly than could ever have been expected. Judge Barnet—or Uncle Sam as Kurt quickly learned to call him—belied his somber appearance and proved as warmly welcoming as any guest could wish, and Kurt would never be allowed to feel out of place.

The family were Conservative Jews,*1 a concept unfamiliar to Kurt. All he had known were his family’s lightweight religious observances—in which synagogue and Torah played little role—and the strictly Orthodox who were common around Leopoldstadt. Conservatives—who were not necessarily politically conservative—were somewhere in between; they believed in preserving ancient Jewish traditions, rituals, and laws, but departed from the Orthodox in recognizing that human hands had played a part in creating the Torah and that Judaic law had evolved to meet human needs. So they were both conservative and progressive. Also unlike the Orthodox, they didn’t follow any traditional dress code. As Kurt got to know New Bedford, he would discover that the Barnets were leading lights in a large and active Jewish community, within which he was welcomed as readily as he had been in the Barnet household.

Spring came to New Bedford along with Kurt, and the trees lining Rotch Street turned green. If you squinted along it, you could almost imagine that you were in the Hauptallee in the Prater, and that none of this had happened—the Nazis coming, the family split and sundered. As strange as this place was, Kurt could already sense that, but for the lack of his mother and father, and of Fritz and Herta and Edith, and the thousands upon thousands of kilometers that lay behind him, he had found something that felt like a home.