Trusting Calvin

by Sharon Peters

  Classroom instruction took place from eight a.m. to four p.m., Monday through Friday, and from eight a.m. to noon on Saturday. Each night the men had hours of homework. The only breaks were two weeks of vacation every August and about ten days around Christmas. The grueling schedule was probably a deliberate strategy, Max thought, so as to allow no time for self-pity.

  Vocational training offered instruction in professions that blind people could master and for which there was high demand: switchboard operators, court and medical transcriptionists, and physical therapists. Max chose physical therapy. He would not be a doctor, as his mother had hoped, but he would still be helping people. He found the study of anatomy and physiology mentally stimulating, and the practice sessions on veterans at a nearby hospital proved he was good at this work.

  Every Saturday afternoon and Sunday young women from town volunteered to take a student or two to a movie or concert, for a walk, or to a cafe for coffee, and to read pages of their textbooks to them once they began studying for their vocations. School officials encouraged these interactions but warned the men against developing attachments, as becoming involved might interfere with their studies. There was undoubtedly another worry: that these men, still vulnerable because of their disability and most of them quite young, could be preyed upon by women motivated by the postwar shortage of males.

  Helene, a few years older than Max, staked a regular claim on his weekends, taking him to cafes and reading his assignments to him. She worked at a jewelry store and had a son who didn’t live with her. Max assumed that the child may have resulted from the kind of affairs of survival often conducted during war years, but he never asked, and she never offered.

  It seemed casual enough for a time, but one Saturday when, after a concert, they stopped at a tavern for a beer, the air shifted sharply.

  “It’s too late to go back to the school now,” Helene said. “Why don’t you stay in my room tonight?”

  Helene was well skilled in the ways of love, an enthusiastic teacher who helped Max imagine through his hands everything he couldn’t see with his eyes. The affair didn’t last long, however. Worried that he might neglect his studies if he divided his focus, Max put an end to it.

  A few months later, in the summer of 1947, after he had been at the school for eighteen months, Max developed an eye infection and was admitted into the eye clinic in Munich for several days. There he met Hanka, a young patient in for a minor procedure. A kittenish girl with a sunny disposition, she, too, was a Holocaust survivor. It was the first time that Max had had the chance to develop a relationship with someone who might understand what made him feel so different, so unwilling to form attachments or reach out. He never expressed that to her, not wishing to taint their time together, but the fact that they shared an underpinning of similar trauma had significance, he thought, even if they didn’t speak of it. They spent their time together out of view of the nuns who ran the facility, laughing about silly things and grabbing kisses like a couple of boarding school adolescents.

  When his eye infection resolved and he returned to school, Hanka visited Max several times. Despite his vow to avoid entanglements, he found himself emotionally caught up with the young woman. She was lively and cheerful except for those occasional moments when a blanket of melancholy, heavy and impenetrable, would settle unexpectedly over her, and she had given every indication that she was ready to tackle life anew. For his part, Max had learned to be self-sufficient, was growing confident in his abilities, and he was making excellent progress toward being able to pursue a profession. Maybe a life with her was possible. Perhaps the next time she visited he would broach the idea of becoming serious.

  He met Hanka’s train the following Saturday, but before he’d had time to kiss her or say anything at all, she grasped one of his hands in both of hers and launched into what she had come to say. “I’m very fond of you, Max, but I can’t ever marry you. I want a husband who can provide a good life—a family, a house, nice clothes. I was deprived of everything for a long time, and I realize now that I want what I want. You’re blind and will never be able to provide me with any of those things. I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel.”

  The words she spoke would have unmoored anyone on the brink of love, but they devastated Max. They confirmed that a blind man who allowed himself to get swept up in romantic thoughts about the future was engaging in folly. He studied harder.

  In August 1948, Max graduated with a degree in physical therapy. He quickly passed the board exams, earned his license to practice and took a position the next month as a physical therapist at Bogenhausen Hospital in Munich. It had turned out exactly as Dr. Wesseli had promised, and Max allowed himself some pride in his accomplishment.

  He and Sig rented a two-bedroom apartment on Dankwart Strasse in Munich. During the two and a half years that Max had been in school, Sig had opened a grocery store that was now being managed by his fiancée, Marianne. Brother Jack, meanwhile, had opened a tailor shop in Amberg and was engaged to marry a young woman named Violett.

  The three brothers made regular visits back and forth between Amberg and Munich, the conversation always shifting at some point to the desire that each harbored to leave Germany, where their memories of the camps too often rose to the surface. Trying to atone for the devastation of the Shoah, the United Nations that year had carved the nation of Israel from the British Mandate of Palestine, and tens of thousands of Jews set their sights on a new life there. The Edelmans contemplated the same, the idea of helping to build that new state even more appealing now than it had been before the war.

  Max no longer felt trapped or dependent on others. He could support himself with work that he enjoyed. He could take care of himself, and he could make his way around Munich on his own. He could not, however, unclench.

  Dr. Wesseli, who had become as much a friend as a mentor, was concerned. He asked Max to dinner one crisp December evening, and when the meal was over and his wife had excused herself, Dr. Wesseli revealed what had prompted the invitation.

  “You have come a long way since you were liberated. It’s excellent, the progress you’ve made. Now, how do you intend to live with the scars of your ordeal? Go on being bitter, being angry, hating everybody for the evils done? What good would that do you? Negative emotions will consume you, Max. Don’t hate. It’s the acid that corrodes the soul.”

  It would take a dozen more years before the notion of “survivor guilt” began circulating among the medical community. It would take many more years beyond that before professionals would begin to discuss the similarities in Holocaust survivors that were so consistent—thick, periodically debilitating depression; nightmares; anger; disorientation and disassociation; attachment avoidance; strictly structured relationships—that survivor guilt received credence as a real disorder.

  Not until decades later would symposia and papers describe the uniqueness of surviving a trauma of the magnitude of what had happened to the Jews—how the aftereffects appeared stronger and more encompassing the longer a person had been exposed; how most survivors feared that if they opened up, they would be met with reactions that minimized their experience, and so they shut down nearly all connection and feeling. Years into the future, experts would declare that when the fundamental balance of an entire people has been crossed out and overwritten with something so ugly and indelible, it has a profound and lasting impact that extends even to subsequent generations.

  But on this December evening Max was just one of millions of Jews steeping silently in distress.

  And Dr. Wesseli had encountered enough young men liberated from the camps to recognize the many anguished similarities among them. Some learned more quickly than others how to cope; some required a great deal of time to conquer it, or to prevent it from ruling their lives; some went to their graves, sometimes by their own hands, confused and angry.

  Although Dr. Wesseli was heartened that
Max’s newly acquired self-sufficiency seemed to have made his depression less all-consuming than it had been before, he still worried that what remained was shot through with such bitterness—that it was so active and raw.

  The doctor was right about the anger and about the need to extract himself from it, Max admitted that night. But if there was a passageway out, he didn’t know how to find it.

  “You could think about becoming an advocate for tolerance and respect for human life,” Dr. Wesseli offered.

  “There is value in that approach,” Max acknowledged. He wasn’t that strong, he told the doctor, but it was something he could try to live in small pieces.

  “If you can be successful, it would be a lasting monument to your family,” the doctor said.

  There were no organized advocacy groups in Germany as far as Max knew. Most Germans he met, even those who were ashamed about what had taken place, didn’t want to talk about those years, hoping to bury the whole period in the silence of history. Eventually, Max told himself, this ugly residue he was hauling around would dissipate, drifting into the atmosphere like a foul odor brought to nothing by a good, solid wind, and he would feel more normal again. He had to believe that.

  Max began dating one of the hospital nurses, a well-built young woman with a big heart and infectious laugh named Lissy. Nearly every Saturday night they went to shows, often with Sig and Marianne, and later fell laughing into the little bed in her apartment, exploring each other with abandon, relishing their mutual passion. They took weekend trips to nearby resort towns and talked about everything from plays to politics, often into the middle of the night.

  Soon they thought of themselves as a couple, although the label troubled Max. She was solid, and she was attached to Max, but he couldn’t envision building a life with her. Her father had been a Nazi official, but that wasn’t the issue.

  “Maybe we just need each other,” he said to Sig one evening. “Maybe we each need to feel a warm body, a body we care about. But I don’t know if that is love. I only know that I like her very much.”

  Still, the couple talked of emigrating to Israel. Lissy was willing to convert, and she told Max often that she would be honored to be Jewish, to be his wife and live by his side in the new land. In the summer of 1950, they visited the Israeli representative in Munich, Dr. Sommerfeld, to discuss their thoughts. He didn’t refuse them, but he offered no encouragement.

  “The living conditions in Israel at this time are very hard, Max,” Dr. Sommerfeld said. “You have already suffered a lot, and you should consider going to America or Canada. Save going to Israel for a later time, when things will be smoother and more settled.”

  Max had less than positive feelings about the United States, which had denied Jews entry in the buildup to the war, and which during the war had actively ignored what was happening to Jews and others in Europe. Although he was grateful the Americans had liberated him, too much had happened long before that. That’s how Max saw it, and that’s how all the survivors he knew saw it. However, Max’s research indicated that no other country would take a blind Jew—not Canada, not Australia—so America became his focus, and that of his brothers.

  Lissy’s father’s Nazi connections, however, barred her from entry.

  “You know I can’t stay here in Germany; it hurts too much. I have to go,” Max told her as soon as he was certain what he intended to do.

  She cried but did not beg. “You have to plan your life, and I cannot be an obstacle. That’s what I am now, an obstacle.”

  Their time together had come to an end.

  Not long after making this decision, Max traveled to Amberg to visit Jack and Violett. As usual, he made plans to see his former landlady, Mrs. Eichenmueller, and after they had finished their Sunday-afternoon dinner, a knock came at the door.

  Mrs. Eichenmueller introduced Max to a young German woman named Barbara, the daughter of friends. The three made small talk, and Max liked the unhesitating way she answered his questions and asked her own. She sounded strong, competent, and caring.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Max suggested to her after they had talked for about an hour.

  The two headed off to a cafe where he learned she was twenty-four, lived with her parents, was well-read, and worked as a secretary in an insurance office. He felt an immediate attraction.

  They began to visit each other regularly, one or the other making the two-hour train ride between Munich and Amberg. They went to movies and concerts, dinners and cabarets. She was pleasant, generous with her affection, and not at all coy about checking into the hotel by the train station when she visited him.

  Their fate as a dating couple, Max decided, lay in her hands.

  “I don’t have anything to make a decision about—either she takes me or she doesn’t,” Max told Sig one Sunday night after spending yet another weekend with her. “If I’m going to fall first, I could get very hurt. So I’m taking one step at a time. I can’t afford being in love totally because it might come to an abrupt end.”

  Max willed himself to think little about the relationship when they were apart, but matters of the heart proceeded very fast during and after war. Barbara soon invited him to meet her parents, and Max realized she was becoming very serious.

  He raised the idea of marriage not with a request for her hand or an invitation to a life together, but with a recitation of the future as he saw it. If she was going to continue with him, he wanted her to understand precisely what she would be getting into. First, they wouldn’t stay in Germany; they would move to America. Second, the complications of his blindness must not be downplayed.

  She didn’t fear tackling a new continent, she said. Indeed, she found the prospect interesting, stimulating. The language barrier was unnerving, but many people had successfully inched their way into a new culture, and she saw no reason why they couldn’t do the same. As for his blindness, she had considerable experience with disability, she reminded Max. Her father had been badly injured while serving during World War I, had a significant limp, was in pain much of the time, and couldn’t hold a full-time job.

  “I have lived all my life with a person who is disabled,” she said. “I’m not a stranger to living with this.”

  “It’s not all that simple—sighted people marrying blind spouses,” Max countered. “Normal people have all their faculties. You can walk and talk and hear and see, and marrying somebody with a disability, it does not happen too often; it’s not an easy decision. I won’t try to convince you. The decision is for you to make, not me.”

  Those weren’t the words of love a young woman longs to hear, but he wanted to be honest, and he wanted her to understand how hard life as the wife of a blind man would be. He would work to support her and whatever family they were able to establish, he told her. He would never be the sort of man who expected the wife to take on all of the domestic and child-rearing responsibilities. But, he added, “If you live with a sighted person you will have to do your share; if you live with a blind person, you’ll have to do a share and a half. That’s the way it is. At this moment, you may think we’ll do just fine, but that’s not reality. You must face it with open eyes. If you accept it, then maybe we’ll make it, but otherwise, no.”

  “I understand your concerns, Max,” she said. “I just don’t share them.”

  Now he knew where she stood.

  At a lakeside resort that spring, he decided it was time to thrash out the details. “If we’re going to get married,” he said, “we have to do it soon. We have to start the process of immigration.”

  It would be an ordeal. They had to apply and go through many procedures with great speed. The American Congress had passed laws allowing an extra number of refugees and Holocaust survivors into America, but applications had to be made by June 30, 1951, two months away. Jack and Violett had already filed; Sig and Marianne hoped to do so, but they
were waiting to see what Max would do.

  Max and Barbara had additional complications. Barbara was German Catholic, and immigrants had to have sponsors to guarantee that the immigrant wouldn’t need public assistance for at least two years. Since neither had relatives or friends in America to sponsor them, they had to rely on an organization to do the sponsoring. The Hebrew Immigration Aid Society sponsored Jews, while a Catholic organization sponsored Catholics. Getting two sponsoring groups to coordinate and meet deadlines was a prospect few wanted to count on if it was possible to avoid it.

  She hadn’t actually been proposed to in the way most women are, but Barbara knew Max well enough to realize these discussions were as close to some version of an invitation to share his life as she was likely to get. She agreed that they needed to take immediate action. She would, she told Max, convert to Judaism.

  Max didn’t ask her that night why she decided to marry him. In fact, he never, even in subsequent decades, put that question to her, regarding it a breach of privacy to ask. He accepted that once her mind was made up, she was at peace with her choice, and he should be as well.

  They married at noon on May 5, 1951, at city hall in Munich. After the ceremony, they boarded a train for Amberg, where Jack and his wife hosted a newlyweds’ dinner attended by Barbara’s parents, sisters, and brothers, as well as the landlady-matchmaker, Mrs. Eichenmueller. The festivities were high-spirited but brief. The couple had to dash back to Munich to appear at the immigration office to fill out applications as a married couple.

  Because the time for processing applications was so short, the chief rabbi excused Barbara from the usual conversion classes, but she had to go to the mikveh (ritual bath), where she stripped and submerged three times in the indoor pool. The rabbi signed the ketubbah (marriage contract), and Max and Barbara were officially a Jewish married couple.