Someday You Will Understand

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by Nina Wolff Feld




  Walter C. Wolff in Paris, December 31, 1945.

  Copyright © 2014 by Nina Wolff Feld

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  The author wishes to thank Jeff King for his kind permission to reprint an extract from his blog.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

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  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  Visit the author’s site at nwfeld.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Feld, Nina Wolff, author.

  Someday you will understand: my father’s private World War II / Nina Wolff Feld.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-62872-377-9 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-62872-399-1 (ebook) 1. Wolff, Walter C. 2. Jews—Germany—Biography. 3. Jews, German—United States—Biography. 4. Jewish refugees—United States—Biography. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Germany—Biography. I. Title.

  DS134.42.W68F45 2014

  940.53’18092—dc23

  [B]

  2014016696

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-399-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Jacob, so that Grandpa will always be in the room with you.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Preface: The Maginot Line of Memory

  Prologue

  Part One:

  Hidden in Plain Sight

  Chapter 1 Walking My Father’s Labyrinth

  Chapter 2 Bombs, Bullets, and Lies

  Chapter 3 Vichy, Lyon, and the Flag of Rags

  Chapter 4 No Exit: Marseille, Fascist Spain, and the Nightmare Ocean Crossing

  Chapter 5 Unraveling the Chaos: A Kid at the Dwight School

  Part Two:

  The Long Road to Ritchie

  Chapter 6 Drafted

  Chapter 7 The Ritchie Boy Takes On the Pentagon

  Part Three:

  Return from Exile

  Chapter 8 Coup de Grâce: Vetting War Criminals from Mussolini’s Masses

  Chapter 9 It Is Your Moral Duty: DPs Among the Ruins in Austria and Germany

  Chapter 10 “I Found Your Gold Bally Shoes”

  Chapter 11 The Key to the Wine Cellar

  Chapter 12 Details Are Confusing, and Freedom Is Just Another Word

  Appendix To the Editors of The New Yorker: A Letter from Austria

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of nonfiction and is based in its entirety on the collection of letters written by my father to his family during his World War II service, which he saved for the rest of his life and entrusted to me not long before he died. All of the names of family, friends, soldiers, or Displaced Persons mentioned in this book come from those letters and in some cases from my own subsequent research for this book. The translation of the letters from their original French was done by me, and I have made every effort to be as accurate as possible. Any letters written in German or that have German writing in their letterhead were translated by scholars or friends. No historic work of this scope and nature can be free of error, but it is my hope that the reader will recognize the effort to achieve accuracy while trying to paint a full picture of my father’s experiences during his childhood and early manhood before, during, and in the early aftermath of World War II. All of the dialogue and gestures are drawn from the letters or in some cases from my father’s personal vernacular and body language as I knew him. All of the archival material, whether letters, postcards, Nazi propaganda material, or photographs, has been reproduced from my personal collection given to me by my father.

  Preface

  The Maginot Line of Memory

  Long before he was the man he would become, he was a boy running for his life. With a discriminating eye for detail and the inner mechanisms with which to cope, my father was lucky enough not only to survive but to remember moments with a certain fondness. Later, while he served in the US Army, he wrote with humor and dry wit in such vivid detail that a present-day reader of his letters feels as though immersed in a newsreel. Some of the persecuted from that time returned to prosecute. My father, Walter C. Wolff, was one of them. He sent war criminals to their fate.

  Sometimes that which is precious shines through the misery of the continuum. As soon as there is an opportunity for normalcy, normalcy takes over so that recovery can begin. He almost never spoke to me about those years when I was growing up. Is silence needed to recover from the nightmares of war? Only gradually, and only after my father had died, did I begin to understand.

  His elegant, cultured demeanor hid dark secrets of a childhood lost to time. He carried his memories like a lockbox for valuables. Occasionally, pieces were brought out, but his chosen memories were happy. They didn’t reveal any of the terror his family had lived through, fleeing the onslaught brought about by Hitler’s quest for world domination and ethnic cleansing. From conversations with my father, I had no idea what they had experienced; but if September 11 was one day of terror in my past, for him living that fear on a daily basis until safety was assured was certainly formative. When he reached me by phone from Italy on September 12, 2001, there was no disguise for his emotions or the significance of that date. I had only heard him cry like that once, when my grandmother died.

  We were lucky that day; we lost a legacy but were very fortunate not to have lost any family or friends. The legacy was the Twin Towers. My father-in-law, Lester Feld, had been the chief structural engineer on the original Trade Center project. He went to Japan to inspect and select the type of steel used to build them. Since the towers were his life’s work, we always referred to them as “Grandpa Lester’s buildings” when we pointed them out to our son. Lester died almost a decade before Jacob came into the world, and this was one way to give him a sense of who his paternal grandfather was. On the night of September 11, my then three-year-old son sat at his alphabet table in our old kitchen and wept over his strawberry Jell-O. He somehow understood that he would never see those buildings again and that the planned trip to visit them with his cousins on their next visit to New York would never come to pass. We had wanted to make it a special occasion, to make a day of it. The loss was devastating. War was at home. September 12 often recurred as a significant date in my father’s letters.

  Silence is its own kind of mask. Yet, though silence and reserve were a constant while I knew my father, I grew up with a lot of love. I always felt thankful, for with that came the security to enjoy life and in turn return the love. Before he died, I even taught him to say, “I love you,” back to me. At the end, my father’s heart lost its strength, but I like to believe he used that muscle a lot in his life. It may have hardened to survive his childhood, but I knew it to be a soft and fiercely loyal muscle. He was a complicated man whose love was unconditional. I returned the favor. Even after their divorce, my parents could still find a way to love one another and never throw
that to the wind. It meant everything to me. When he called me from Florence that day, he cried, “How is your mother?” It was for her that he opened his eyes one last time before dying, as she whispered into his ear that she loved him and always would. She kissed his feverish forehead before she said her last goodbye. Poetry.

  I always felt the wonder of privilege. A great part of my education came from traveling.

  When I look back to my childhood, I understand why we spent so much time in Europe. There was no need to discuss the past with the children; my father was too busy building a life—busy with family and business. He had become a very successful furniture designer and retailer in New York after the war. He built his business around his lifestyle, and Bon Marché, his company, was the vehicle. All of the furniture was produced in European factories. We would travel back to what he had left behind because he found comfort in the familiarity. Yet, we never had a second home there. It would never be in the right place; it was too cumbersome and a weight. We had one home, where my mother still lives today. If there were any questions pertaining to his past, the answer was always, “Someday you will understand.”

  We never had to fight for our lives or search for the food that we put in our mouths, as he did. Our charge was to be good children, study, and do well in school and never to worry because we received everything that we needed.

  * * * *

  I loved how my father could switch between languages without skipping a beat. I inherited this gift. Dad was strict, business-like, and hard to reach. His stubbornness was renowned; that quality was a survival tool. He was also a most elegant man, with the finest taste. I looked up to him, I feared him, and finally, toward the end of his life and well into my own, I was able to stand my ground with him—no small victory.

  I am a lot like he was. My father had a guileless love for so many things, perhaps because life had been so tenuous during those early years. I have never lost my childlike love for most things. With every sip of espresso, with every bite of a delicious pastry, with every sniff of a fine wine, with every scarf that I wear like his ascots, so he is everywhere in me. When I lean a certain way, when I speak another language, when I see his lasting impression in a design.

  As I write, my son Jacob is approaching bar mitzvah. Something of his grandfather has passed into his looks, his demeanor, and most certainly his approach to Judaism, which is to act in line with tradition as he questions the veracity of what he is learning. This is completely, but exactly, as my father did. Only, when my father was bar mitzvah at the Grande Synagogue in Brussels, Hitler had been in power for four years and any act of religious tenacity was a brave act of resistance. Though Belgium wasn’t under occupation, the threat of persecution was ever-present. My father adored Jacob and moved beyond his reserve to show affection in the most comfortable way he knew how, through “goodnesses”—pastries and chocolate, toys, and the occasional and most loving brush across his little nose or lift of his chin or tweak at his ear when Jacob was little. He was funny, though. Only my father would run out before afternoon tea with Jacob to buy coffee ice cream for a three year old! When we sat down at his dining table and the “goodnesses” were served, I looked at my father and said, “Dad, ice cream from Starbucks for a three year old?!”

  “Why, it’s latte,” he said in a pronounced Italian accent, pointing to the word written boldly in green across the container.

  “Dad,” I sighed, “latte has caffeine in it. Caffe latte. Dai, Papa?!” I said in Italian, hoping he would catch my drift.

  “Nini, latte is ‘milk’ in Italian.”

  “Really, but here in America it’s coffee ice cream from Starbucks!”

  He was oblivious, always. It was part of his aloof charm. He was, and remains still, a force in our lives, whose influence reaches Jacob on levels both great and small. We are after all the product of a man whose silence spoke of a generation of children who survived narrow escapes to live very full lives, their masks intact to the end.

  Prologue

  Several months before my father died, I visited him at the apartment he shared with his second wife on West 96th Street. It had been a long hot ride uptown on the subway.

  The sun was shining through the window as I faced him, its warm rays settling on us while we talked quietly. My throat ached as I fought back tears, thinking of the inevitability of pending loss. He didn’t need his gold and sapphire stud set anymore. It was part of a life he no longer could lead. My fingers went over the tooling of the metalwork and the coolness of the deep blue stones. This feeling of a last goodbye would replay between us in the months to come, as my father’s body gave in to his enlarged heart and weakened lungs.

  Dad told me how much he loved me, making a difficult moment sweeter. He was always very private with his thoughts. When he summoned his strength, I helped him off the bed and walked in front of him in case he should fall. It would hurt, but I’d rather he fell on me than hit the floor again. This time it really might kill him. The last time that happened, I stood over him in the ER at Mount Sinai and directed the plastic surgeon as he rebuilt my father’s nose. It had been crushed when his six-foot frame fell face first to the floor after he had lost consciousness, flattening his nose. The surgeon immediately asked for a photograph. I didn’t carry one in my wallet, so I pointed to my nose and told him to copy it exactly; they were identical. Though the operation was not for the faint of heart, I volunteered to stay and hold my father’s hand while the doctor realigned his features. As the doctor began the reconstruction, he pointed out each aspect of his injury. At one point he pulled up a broken white band and showed me a severed artery. He said that had my father not been found in time, he might have died from the fall.

  As the surgeon manipulated my father’s nose, I knew Dad would remember none of the experience later. At the time, it reminded me of moving a piece of furniture into place: a little to the left, a little to the right. It was a remarkable moment, and my very vain father was forever thankful that he didn’t wind up looking like Rodin’s sculpture of a man with a broken nose. All of that money spent on a Beaux Arts education was finally put to good use. I didn’t let the surgeon stop until the shape had been restored to a hair of what it had been. It was always about one thirty-second of an inch off. The surgery left a faint scar down the middle, but my father never got over how great the result looked and would often tell the story of how his daughter the artist helped a plastic surgeon restore his nose.

  As he walked to his suit closet in the makeshift office, his lips pursed together, he let out a little whistle through every labored breath. He said, “I want to give you something.”

  While he opened the door to his closet, I took a good look at the books lining the rosewood bookcases that had once lined the library at my mother’s apartment in Greenwich Village. I made a mental note of where my favorites were kept. I had always felt proprietary about them. Someday these would be mine, and I would cherish them as he had. Atop the bookcases were his old radios, each design more modern than the last. A timeline of sorts. He reached up to the shelf just above his suits and carefully removed a green metal file box from his army days.

  “Here, you may as well have these,” he said, and handed it to me.

  Having never seen the box before, I had no idea what was inside. I opened it and coughed, choking on the dust that coated the exterior. There were letters and newspapers that gave off the musty odor of history. When I leafed through the letters, I saw that most were in French. Over the many months to come, I began the painstaking process of archiving them and sorting through the newspaper articles and photographs that told his story. It would be years before I would begin to translate those letters, but a title came to mind immediately.

  “If this were ever a book . . . ,” I would say.

  On a late summer afternoon several years later, I lay on the couch, dictionary in hand, struggling to translate a chapter of a manuscript written by a friend, an Italian writer. If I could give his writing an E
nglish voice, I would be invited to translate his whole novel. For whatever reason—where sometimes only fate can lead us—I felt I was translating the wrong person’s words. I crossed the living room and picked up one of the hundreds of letters that I had so carefully archived, then bounded up the stairs to the computer. Try, I thought, just see what happens. In contrast, the words flowed like water from a faucet. I found my voice. It was my father’s.

  Jews on the run in war-torn France in June of 1940. Surely the situation surrounding my family had to have been more terrifying and damaging than my father let on. The weather had warmed; the heat was already intense during the day. They had no choice but to continue; they couldn’t go home. As they scrambled to safety under their car, the fabric of my grandmother Lisa’s handsome tweed suit got caked with mud. She clutched the alligator bag that would accompany her all the way to the safety of their new American lives.

  Not long ago, I was looking for something in the handbag she carried with her throughout their escape, and I found a very old set of keys. She clearly thought they would return; my father said as much. My grandmother kept those keys, and when she died in 1981 they were still in her purse, where they’ve remained to this day. She kept them as a reminder, perhaps as a talisman.

  When she looked at them, what did she let herself remember? She never went back to Europe again. Never returned to any place that held the keys to her past. I have since turned the three keys into a piece of jewelry.

  Every Sunday, we visited my grandmother at the Park Royal Hotel when I was growing up. She waited for us in her upholstered chair. She learned that kind of patience during the war. Of that I am certain. There was a lot of time spent waiting, wondering, worrying. As her polished, orderly life spun out of her control, all that Omi held dear and familiar was ripped away in a moment. The threat weighing so heavily could have, in an instant, delivered its crushing blow. The elegance of her former life vanished, and she was left with few belongings, memories, and tireless anticipation of a son’s visit, with wife and children in tow. He lived a full life. She could no longer allow herself that privilege, for she had broken with her past, and the depth of loss was too great to overcome. It was as if part of her soul had frozen, so encumbered was she. Loss, like a fingerprint or a scar, is a permanent marker, leaving one to forever compensate. She left living to youth and found comfort as the passive observer in her blue chair, where war could no longer impose its warped rules and break her.

 

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