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 le
arning. 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 ag
ain.”
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.
The Hours After Page 3