The painting would hang in that position until November 11, 1938—a few days after Kristallnacht— when any valuables became fair game to be smashed, destroyed, or looted. Sarah packed it up—without the frame now—one last time, and when she would eventually board the ship that she thought would bring her to freedom and to Taylor, she marked it prominently with his address and had it placed in the cargo hold. She actually wrapped two small bedroom quilts she had carted from her home around the piece to protect it from careless handling and even the elements of moisture or mold that undoubtedly would accompany it in the bowels of the ship.
Releasing this precious cargo to the ship’s porters was like replaying her good-bye to Taylor. She caressed it with her hands, and blew it a finger wave kiss, as an understanding mate carried it gingerly up the ramp and out of her sight.
After comforting Sarah, her mother left their belongings in a pile and took her hand as she surveyed the surrounding clusters of groups awaiting permission to board the St. Louis. As she had anticipated, it was not hard to find a young family that needed an adult helping hand. They were both drawn immediately to a handsomely dressed couple, looking somewhat overwhelmed, as they corralled their three children, the youngest one a newly walking toddler. Just as Inga had been aggressive in addressing Maxwell Selig when she sought information from him, she was determined to talk to these people. Again, Inga acted in such an officious manner that Sarah could hardly believe her plan to remain in Germany was newly formulated.
“Good morning,” she said to them in German, as she scooped up and returned to their circle the oldest child, a boy probably six or seven, who was dashing away from his exhausted father and edging too close to the water.
“Thank you so much,” the father offered quickly.
“As you can see we are in need of more hands,” the mother added, juggling a diaper and bottle while holding the active baby by his suspenders.
Quiet and trying to be helpful was the middle child, a girl around five years old.
“I’m a big help, Mama,” she said defensively, with eyes hungry for her mother’s attention and praise.
“Yes, my sweet Madeline. You are Mama’s big helper.”
Inga gave the parents a sympathetic look and a warm smile. “My dears,” she directed her words to both adults. “I would like to introduce myself—I am Inga Berger and this is my daughter, Sarah.”
At that point Sarah stepped forward and acknowledged the parents and then took a moment to recognize each child in turn with a “pleased to meet you” and a handshake. “I know you are Madeline,” she said to the girl, “and I would be pleased if you would tell me your brothers’ names.”
Madeline warmed to her immediately. “The baby is Berthold, but we call him Berty, and that wild man is Willy.”
The parents felt an immediate respite from chasing the youngsters and introduced themselves as Cecile and Alfred Blumberg.
Inga shook their hands and added, “We are Berliners— or were.”
“And we are from outside of Dresden—but we presume also to be on our way to be Americans, or at least Cubans,” she said with a light, quizzical nuance, signifying no true knowledge of Cuba.
“Well, it will be an adventure—no matter what. And if you would not think me forward, I have a proposition for you. My daughter has her passage booked and I find now that I cannot accompany her. For my own peace of mind, I would like to know that she would have a family to identify with—so she will not feel so lonely.
“As you can see,” she continued, nodding her head in Sarah’s direction as her daughter had already managed to gather the three youngsters in a semicircle and was passing a ball among them, “Sarah has a gift with children—and she knows English well. She could tutor the little ones, and even both of you, if you are not already fluent in English.”
“What a wonderful idea,” the mother answered. “And our needs in those areas are great. But, unfortunately, we cannot pay—we used the last of our money to purchase our tickets. Perhaps another family could afford her services.”
“Oh, my dear, I am so sorry,” Inga responded, embarrassed that she had not been clear. “Oh no—I am not asking for pay for her—just some companionship so I will know she won’t be alone—a dinner table at which to sit. No—you misunderstand—for that she will pay you with help and tutoring.”
Once more the parents turned from Inga to view Sarah with their children. Already Madeline was on Sarah’s lap, as the older girl was retying the bows on their daughter’s braids.
“Mrs. Berger, we are privileged to do so little for you in return for so much.”
“No, it is not too much for my peace of mind. You see—I have just received reason to hope that I might be reunited with my husband. If there is any chance, however small, I must pursue it. Sarah’s final destination will be to meet a young man in Chicago. I need her safely off this continent.”
“Yes, we all need that,” the father interjected solemnly.
Again, Sarah’s mother had made a bright and resourceful move. Giving her the companionship of the Blumberg family gave her five souls to hug as the ship pulled from the harbor and she stood there, tearfully waving and throwing kisses.
Once the sailing was underway, the tugboats having released their lines, the passengers drifted from the rails and moved inside the vessel. And Inga could walk away from the dock knowing that she had done the right thing for all concerned. Her daughter would be on her way to safety and a new life—and she would be free to find her husband—and together, with the will of God—they could work toward reuniting the family someday soon.
The purser was able to relocate Sarah’s room adjacent to the Blumbergs and adjust her dining assignment to their table. While Inga may have recognized that Sarah possessed a natural way with children, what she probably did not anticipate was the endearing relationship that she would form with the mother, Cecile Blumberg. As it was, Cecile was only eight years older than Sarah, and they would wind up bonding tightly with each other.
Before dinner the first night, Sarah knocked on the Blumbergs’ door to see if she might be of assistance in dressing the children. She would not have disturbed their privacy, but she had just passed Alfred Blumberg with young Willy in the corridor on their way to stroll the deck.
When Cecile slowly opened the door, Sarah could tell she had been crying.
“Oh, Mrs. Blumberg,” she began.
“No, we are ‘Cecile’ and ‘Alfred,’ please.”
“Oh, Cecile. What is wrong? Why are you crying? Here you have been comforting me and I’ve thought nothing of your own story.” As she spoke, she saw a cluster of family photos that Cecile was holding in her free hand.
“I’m trying to be strong—I am the mother—I cannot be weak—but I, too, am a daughter—I am a sister. But my family—they were taken from their home—we don’t know where they are—I don’t even know if I did the right thing by escaping and maybe leaving them in harm’s way.”
For the first time in months, Sarah felt the passion of strength that she must have inherited from her mother. Until now, her mother had enabled her to be weak, and now she was ready (and prepared from Inga’s example) to be strong. She put her arms around Cecile.
“For now, we will be sisters,” she simply said, as they clung to each other. Then, after another moment, she added, “Please show me your pictures.”
Cecile let the dozen photos splay along the nearby vanity top. “This is me with my sister, Estelle—I’d say we are about twelve and eight. We are visiting our grandparents’ summer home and our mother has dressed us in matching outfits.” She allowed herself a slight laugh. “I was so mad. You remember that age, almost a teenager. I was mortified to be dressed like an eight-year-old. Look closely, there; her ribbon is askew because I had been pulling her hair in an adolescent tantrum.” She looked up at Sarah, grateful for the audience, for the opportunity to open up about her family.
“And here—this was a year ago—see how much Mad
eline has grown just since then.” In this picture, she held her daughter in her arms as Cecile stood between her own sister and her mother. The three women were all young looking; you could hardly put them in age order. “We had to take three poses of this picture before Madeline would face the camera. It was worth it now, I know, this waiting for the right shot.”
Later there would be photos taken from this voyage of the St. Louis—similarly smiling photos of well-dressed men, women, and children, leaning on railings, relaxing on deck lounges, looking up from dinner tables…people who let their troubles of a past distant shore escape them for moments here and there, who allowed themselves to be lulled into the security of their old lives of friends and food and laughter. These pictures spoke a cruel irony in later years when they were used to document that historic voyage—a part of family albums or museum archives memorializing so many lives that were lost in the Holocaust.
Rachel
New York, 1976
It was surprising with all she had on her plate, a demanding position at the fashion magazine, freelancing for the design magazine and preparing for a wedding, that Rachel still had the time and the desire to pursue one more project. Although she loved the warmth and security that Ida’s small Greenwich Village two-bedroom apartment had offered her and Jason, she envisioned simple redecorating that would brighten up the interiors and maybe shine more light on its longtime resident.
She wanted to do this as a gift to Ida for her tremendous hospitality. Though Rachel had a limited budget, she had an unlimited creative flair, a natural ability in the field. Ida met Rachel’s proposal to make a few changes in the apartment with something between approval and enthusiasm, and insisted on extending an ample monetary contribution.
Rachel’s first purchase was a vintage mirror that was calling to her from Sally’s Resale, a dusty old storefront she passed daily that had been rediscovered in the past few years by Park Avenue decorators. Sally confided in Rachel that she knew they were snatching up her items, including the costume jewelry, and offering them to clients at hugely marked-up prices, promoting them as “tres chic” additions to rooms or wardrobes.
“What do I care? It’s win-win for me,” Sally confessed. “I just run back to the flea market sellers and restock.”
One thing Rachel splurged on, however, was a scrumptious new bedding set for Ida from Bloomingdales.
After less than a month of preparation, while warehousing all of her purchases in the basement storage area of a friend nearby, Rachel was ready to present the make-over to Ida. She persuaded her to spend two nights at a co-worker’s apartment, and then with the painting help of a gentlemanly neighbor, she was ready for Ida to return to the surprise of the new look. With moderate expense, Rachel accomplished her vision of making the rooms come alive with colors. She integrated the popular earth tones of the era—painting most of the space a light cream, and then adding a rust accent wall in the dining room and a cocoa-colored one behind the living room couch. She placed an area rug under the coffee table and found a fantastic paisley fabric to recover a chair.
Ida walked into the apartment and glanced around. She walked from room to room without really saying anything. For a moment, she bent her head as if her breath had escaped her and she couldn’t take another step. Rachel had a brief thought that maybe she should not have insisted on redecorating, that maybe she had insulted Ida. And then Ida lifted her head and smiled and nodded with gracious approval to Rachel. Ida then took Rachel’s hand and led her back to the kitchen table and motioned for her to pour some hot water and find a tea bag. And then she pointed once again for Rachel to sit down.
“My room when I was young was yellow,” Ida began slowly. “It was one of the few meaningful choices in life I was allowed to make. I chose yellow because I loved the outdoors, especially the warm months. We lived in a town in Hungary. Our springs and summers were extended and they could be glorious. Fields of wildflowers surrounded our home. For me, though, the warm season always ended too quickly and the bleakness of winter remained too long. So I wanted to bring the summer sunshine inside all year round.
“That is why I became an artist,” she continued. This was a surprise to Rachel; she had no idea that Aunt Ida was an artist. There had been no evidence in this apartment of any such inclination.
“I don’t know if you are born with that talent or if you can will yourself to develop that creativity out of necessity,” Ida continued. “But, for me, I believe it was the latter. It was not like today,” and she took Rachel’s hand and walked with her quickly back to the hall bathroom. “You see here—how you put up this simple, but beautiful Picasso print—this colorful bouquet of flowers. Well, I envisioned walls of paintings like this, although I had never seen such work. So bright and beautiful—but you could not go to a store to buy them. Not when you lived in a village. And even in the bigger cities—there was no such thing as inexpensive art available to the masses— of art reproductions for everyday people. That is a modern thing.
“I was a lucky girl in many respects. My brother and I did not share a room, and that was unusual in that time and place. But we were not poor people in the village and we were not a family with six or eight or even ten children, as was common. So my mother indulged me in this one thing after months of begging—to freshen up my drab room.
“Ever since I was very young, in the summer, I would sketch the flowers that were blooming along the roads and in the fields. And now my mother said that for my fourteenth birthday Papa would take me to the city and I could purchase some paints and brushes. This was a shock—Papa was so conservative in everything he did— and our community was very religious, although we were only moderately observant. One more thing—Papa had the son of a learned rabbi in mind for my marriage match—a realistic dream, since Papa was a wealthier man in the village. So it seemed out of character that he would chance having me perceived as a girl of independent thought, who might not be an acceptable bride. But, you must understand, above all he loved making me happy, seeing me smile. I could kiss his cheek for the simplest reason and he would be searching his pockets for candies for me.”
Rachel could not help the soft “oh” that escaped her lips. She was trying to respect Ida’s body language indicating that she could tell her story best slowly and uninterrupted. But Rachel wanted her to know that she was there for her, that she was devouring each memory laid in front of her, as she had been hungry to understand Ida for so long, hoping to bring support to this woman who had helped her so much.
“By this time, over the past few years and continuing on, my friends would be leaving the town with their families—something between relocating and running away. Most of them wanted to follow relatives to America. When they did go, they would be leaving behind items they could not carry. We would never pilfer from an abandoned property—that was not our way—and, as I said, we were not a needy family. But friends would continually offer us furniture or clothing or fabrics or some cherished item that they could not feasibly transport.
“But, no matter how beautiful an item and how adoringly I cherished it—integrated it into my wardrobe or my room—I would rather have had my friend return to reclaim it.”
At this point Ida paused, as if the words of her memories had actually transported her back in time and she was not sitting in a New York apartment, but was truly in the bedroom of her youth in Hungary. For a few moments, she wanted to savor the pleasant images that were surfacing. And then, she took a deep breath and continued. “In particular, I remember wanting to see Raizel once more, with her plump cheeks and full skirts; I wanted to hear her infectious laugh. I wanted her to sit on her floral ottoman that was now my vanity chair. I wanted her to come through the door and say I am so sorry but we didn’t go far, so might I retrieve this or that.”
Ida took Rachel’s hand once again and brought her to sit in her bedroom on the new comforter that Rachel had purchased. Like a child, she bounced a few times on the mattress and patted the pillows.
“My first big project was making a patchwork quilt of all the fabrics that we had inherited from these neighbors. But I chose only the bright colors to make up my bedspread. And then, right on the walls, not on canvasses to hang, I would reproduce the flowers of my sketches and those in my memory. I had a mural of a field. I was terrific in recreating the fern-like green leaves with tiny white blooms and that was what bordered my whole room like an indoor hedge. And then I had the idea to draw a gate opening in that field. Later, in America, when I learned a little more about art just by walking through galleries, I understood my technique was trompe l’oleil, a technique for making a flat piece appear three-dimensional to ‘fool the eye.’”
“Aunt Ida,” Rachel said and then paused for a lengthy time, now being the one to grasp her aunt’s hands and search her eyes. “Why don’t I know any of this? Why have I never seen any evidence of your artwork? Honestly,” and now she was trying to lighten the moment, “I don’t even see you doodling on phone pads.”
“There is a reason.” She spoke now so softly, with her head bowed once again, so that Rachel had to listen intently to her. “Rachel, you see…and this is hard for me to speak of…”
At this point Rachel could have backed off, insisted she had not meant to upset her, but she felt maybe it was time for Ida to have a cathartic moment—she knew that she could lend an empathetic ear to her story, so she encouraged her to continue.
“This which you call a ‘talent’—was a blessing—and a curse. When the Nazis rounded up our small family, after mutilating our Torah and setting fire to our synagogue, and then moving business by business, house by house until they felt they had one more town empty of Jews, they loaded us onto trucks, like cattle, for a short distance to the train station. This was already 1944, and I was seventeen years old. We had heard rumors of this— heard how they orchestrated the pretense of peacefully relocating families with their belongings, but then they confiscated everything and loaded them on trains to detention or extermination camps. But for us there was no pretense. How they handled us—by the time they came for us—again it was later in the war—we were not fools to their motives—we were fools to have remained. With each family you were first driven from your house and then told to go back in and pack one small suitcase. On this count, these people were smart—this way we selected items of greatest value for them. They didn’t have to waste time rummaging through our drawers.
Pictures of the Past Page 18