Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland

  “Lisel! Komm schnell! I can’t wake up Norbert!” Sigmar came crying for Alice in alarm outside the women’s dormitory one morning, having woken to find their son unconscious. Norbert had joined a group of young men who broke into the clinic the previous evening to get drunk on rubbing alcohol, which just made them sick. Others channeled their energies more purposefully into organizing political action. Fritz Lamm, a Socialist activist, then thirty-one, whom Janine had met aboard ship, took to the soapbox to call on the young to stand up to the Cubans and militate for release, if for themselves only.

  “The older generation has already lived their lives!” Janine would always remember his impassioned appeal. “Let the older ones stay and wait in the camp. We young must demand our freedom now to get on with our lives, or else we will have to take matters into our own hands! The time is now!”

  When the outspoken utopian placed an inscription along with his picture in Janine’s autograph book, he addressed her in a similar vein. “Needless Fear!” he titled his page, writing in German with its capitalized nouns that seem to dress up the vaguest pronouncements with the dignified luster of aphorism. “No one can seize Freedom and Fortune from you as long as both lie within you, and both lie together with Hope and Memory.”

  Many who gathered to hear Lamm’s orations admired his insistence on action, and, returning to Germany after the war, he would gain public attention as an idealistic social thinker. But within the camp there also were those who resented Lamm’s divisive proposal to demand freedom for just part of the group, giving rise to consternation among older inmates who did not appreciate being discounted.

  This prompted Charles H. Jordan, the hardworking Joint representative in Havana, to send a special report to his New York office observing that the Tiscornia refugees were sunk in a “very depressed state of mind.” He added: “I am afraid that they are becoming very impatient and inclined to follow the leadership of some of the more aggressive people who believe that the policy of waiting for action on the part of the authorities should be changed for a policy of action on the part of the refugees themselves—which expresses itself, at this point, in internal incidents.”

  While working for the detainees’ release, Jordan had been assiduously trying to better the conditions in camp, assisting with food and medical aid, and eventually persuading the Cubans at least to allow for the delivery of mail and money sent to the refugees in care of the Joint. On top of the inflated expenses of life in Tiscornia, the refugees were each expected to show a $500 bond and $150 in “continuation of voyage money” as a condition of winning release. An extremely high sum, for the Günzburger family of five, for example, it would translate to more than $45,000 today. While there were efforts afoot to get these requirements waived, the Joint simultaneously worked through the National Refugee Service in New York to contact the inmates’ American relatives and urge them to help out with loans.

  In regard to Cuba, however, Joint officials pronounced themselves shocked and discouraged by what they viewed as “abnormal” indifference on the part of the local Jewish community, among them fifty American Jewish families, in the face of the troubles afflicting the refugees. They found the community of more than ten thousand local Jews disorganized, lacking in leadership, and uniquely tightfisted in response to pleas for philanthropic assistance. In a report tracing most Jewish settlement in Cuba to Eastern European refugees who had arrived in the 1920s, the Joint charged that although those immigrants had become financially successful on the island, they had failed to develop an appropriate sense of concern for the newcomers, many in need. “There is the perennial antagonism on the part of the East European Jew to the Western Jew,” the report explained, while “the American Jews as a whole seem to resent the refugees’ entrance to Cuba, and are not at all keen on helping, whether financially or otherwise.”

  In an interview that September in Havaner Leben, Jordan spoke even more bluntly, declaring Havana “the only place in the world” where the local Jewish community had failed to help the Joint in its mission. “The local Jews who have lived here many years do not have any feeling about helping the refugees,” he said. “The Jews the whole world over, everywhere on the whole earth, know their duty, except the Jews in Cuba.”

  The Joint went so far as to conclude that not only had wartime immigration turned into a “rich source of graft for Cuban government officials and employees,” but also that several members of the Havana Jewish community were themselves involved in these rackets, while the rest remained passive or wasted their energies in aimless infighting. With unproductive lay members, the Cuban branch of the Joint, founded five years earlier, depended almost entirely on Jordan himself. To help him negotiate with the government, Jordan therefore hired a prominent local attorney and politician, Jorge García Montes—later Cuba’s prime minister—and their combined endeavors achieved major improvements to the refugees’ lot.

  Key among them was a change in the law that had required all refugees to renew their transit or tourist visas monthly, a difficult and costly process. Now all the Jews who had fled to Cuba to escape Hitler’s Europe gained resident status valid until the end of the war. This effectively stopped the graft in the Immigration Department that was bilking them tens of thousands of dollars per year in fees and bribes just for the right to renew their expiring visas every thirty days. With this guaranteed stability, those refugees who had arrived in Havana somewhat earlier and were living in the city could find jobs.

  A more challenging problem involved the special situation of the three thousand five hundred German and Austrian Jews whom the Cubans regarded with extra distrust. Like those German Jews who had sought safety in France before the outbreak of war in 1940, only to be slapped in French prisons under suspicion of being Nazi spies, these refugees found their allegiances questioned. Even before the San Thomé landed, the Joint planned to persuade President Batista to certify the German and Austrian refugees as “loyal aliens,” based on a careful review of their individual credentials and backgrounds. Toward this end, according to a confidential Joint report, García Montes sent the Cuban State Department a “memorandum detailing the persecution of the refugees, their denaturalization by the German government, and the actual feeling of the refugees toward the totalitarian countries.”

  The consulates representing the other nations whose refugees were interned in the camp had sent officials to see their former citizens and seemed prepared to offer them the moral guarantees the Cubans required as another precondition, besides money, for winning release. The American consulate in Havana, as well as other American and Cuban government agencies, had investigated all the passengers, but detainees from Germany and Austria had no way to obtain the requisite moral stamp of approval. On July 19, grappling with their lack of a consulate to vouch for them, eleven German men in Tiscornia, Sigmar among them, hit upon the idea of enlisting support instead from the international fraternal order of the B’nai B’rith. In desperation, they wrote via the Joint in Havana to the Grossloge or grand lodge in New York, beseeching the B’nai B’rith—like a government of a people dispersed—to provide the character references the Cubans demanded.

  No longer citizens of any country, they wrote as “international brothers” and offered the only credentials they had: their former faithful membership in the German lodges of the B’nai B’rith based in the cities where they had lived. And so they listed themselves, each former German reduced to identifying himself through a lodge now destroyed in a city where he no longer belonged: Sigmar Günzburger of the Breisgau Loge in Freiburg, Otto Nussbaum of the Kaiser Wilhelm Loge in Bremen, Alfred Kahn of the Carl Friedrich Loge in Karlsruhe, and so on, all of the men, from Plauen and Stuttgart, Augsburg and Saarbrücken, where going to meetings of the B’nai B’rith had been part of their roles as upstanding Jewish community leaders. They explained their arrival in Cuba on the Guinée and the San Thomé and pleaded for help in winning release from the “bitter torture” of a continued detention behind barbed
wire, an imprisonment they did not understand after so many years of suffering under Hitler’s oppression.

  “Warum wir hier sein müssen, wissen wir nicht,” they wrote. Why we must be here, we do not know.… “While the refugees of other countries have the protection of their consulates, we feel completely abandoned. It would be an enormous relief for us lodge brothers—who in better days always tried to help others—if our American brethren would take some interest in us. Please let us know quickly that we can depend on you.”

  The B’nai B’rith could do little more than forward the letter to the Joint’s New York office. On October 6, a Joint official also updated headquarters on the situation, which by then had dragged on for more than five months. Cuba was about to begin releasing those who qualified, insofar as they would not become a financial burden to the country and they could present official guarantees of their moral and political backgrounds.

  “The passengers of the [San] Thomé have been investigated by the American consulate in Havana as well as by other agencies of our and Cuba’s government. To the best of our knowledge, all of these are unobjectionable and loyal to the cause of the United Nations,” wrote Robert Pilpel, a top Joint official. “Those who are nationals of the United Nations countries, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Belgium, as well as the Swiss and French, number about half those in Tiscornia, the balance being made up of some Austrians and for the most part, Germans. After all these months, the reasons for their extremely prolonged detention remain unclear and ununderstandable. Only now is there a prospect for the release of some whose consulates in Havana are prepared to give a moral guarantee.”

  Those without consular representation in Havana could face problems, he noted, especially the German Jews, deemed stateless as a result of having been denationalized by German government decree on November 25, 1941.

  The High Holidays passed that fall without the buoyant sense of spiritual cleansing and rededication that Janine and others had hoped to recapture in a new world. Prayers for forgiveness of sins, for peace and redemption failed to lighten the hearts of the people whose vision of escaping from Europe had never included hard months of detention. They searched their souls and past behavior, prayed for the blessing of purposeful lives, and extolled the burden of chosenness as if generations had not already paid everything for it.

  On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Janine observed the obligation to fast. But in the parching heat of Cuba’s September sun, her craving for water became so intense that in brushing her teeth in the communal bathroom that morning, she permitted a drop to slide down her throat before she piously spit out the rest. Guiltily, she cast around to see if anyone noticed. But the One who counted, she knew, saw everything. She told herself that her indulgence had been an accident only, yet knew in her heart she had done it on purpose and that punishment was inevitable—especially as camp doctors had warned against drinking tap water, contaminated with dangerous microbes.

  That evening, after Yom Kippur services, Jordan sat down with the refugees at Tiscornia to break the fast. The next day, the Joint official reported bitterly to New York that although the local Jewish community had tried, this time, “to do the job as they understood it best,” the religious observance had been “most inadequately arranged and created a great deal of dissatisfaction all around.” But whatever the holiday may have failed to deliver in spiritual terms, it shortly appeared that prayers were answered.

  Just ten days later, on Friday, October 2, Jordan called the Joint in New York with good news that Cuba’s commissioner of immigration had made a “definite statement” that all the detainees would be released from camp by the end of the month. The Cubans planned first to free the Dutch, with the French to follow, and then all of the others, country by country. Jordan sounded a note of caution, afraid of predictions, yet there was reason enough to celebrate.

  At sunset the following evening, most of the camp assembled in front of the building that housed the bodega and above it the prayer room, for which the Joint had provided a Torah. After performing the Saturday ritual of havdalah—marking the formal end of the Sabbath and greeting the secular week as they doused a braided candle in wine—Tiscornia’s Jews burst into a memorably festive observance of the annual holiday of Simchat Torah.

  Under the laurels and eucalyptus, men took turns clasping the sacred scroll in their arms and, as tradition required, carried it in hakafot or joyful procession around the building—seven times, singing and dancing—past the hedges of crimson hibiscus and the exuberant tangles of bougainvillea. The children too went spinning and jumping, the little ones waving colorful paper flags they had decorated over the previous days and marching with candles. The flames leaped with the children and flickered like fireflies in the deepening dusk, men whirled and stomped and voiced praise to the heavens that stretched above the high royal palms, and Jews at Tiscornia affirmed their faith in a God who had brought them from the cellars of death to rejoice in the hope of a fresh beginning. Even those like Sigmar, Jews of more contemplative faith and natural reserve, not given to dancing, watched and prayed with an added measure of feeling that day, after so many years of terror and chaos.

  Camp releases began shortly thereafter. On October 14, 1942, alarmed that they alone might still be confined while the others went free, the eleven German members of B’nai B’rith wrote again to New York, pleading for help. “We are afraid that our cases might not be handled particularly benevolently,” they said, this time in English. But the next day, the Günzburger family was among a group suddenly granted permission to leave. By way of supporting background as to his morals, Sigmar’s files would prove to contain a report sent from Paris six months earlier, in which the French Justice Ministry confirmed that he had no criminal record. By the start of the year, all but thirty-five refugees had won their release, and on February 2, 1943, the last five detainees walked out of the camp in search of new lives.

  “This closes the Tiscornia situation for the passengers of the Guinée and the San Thomé,” Charles Jordan typed his report to the Joint. “In other words, there is nobody left in Tiscornia.” The last sentence he added in ink and by hand, almost as if he needed to shape the words with his fingers to feel the reality, the blessing of freedom, he had worked to secure for so many people.

  SIXTEEN

  LEBEN IN LIMBO

  WHEN SHE WALKED DOWN the splendid Paseo del Prado, with its long center island of trees that stretched toward the ocean, Janine felt like a goddess. A goddess of love or of beauty, or, perhaps, given the way the men eyed her hips, a fertility goddess. Habaneros sprang into her path, whipped handkerchiefs out of their pockets, and crouched to wave them just inches above the sidewalk before her, as if they had only been waiting to clean and to polish the granite in advance of her step. “¡Ay, qué linda!” they murmured, clicking their tongues. “Ay, señorita, to be worthy of such beauty as yours, the street itself must be wearing a shine!”

  Months aboard ship and in the open air of the camp all through the hot summer of 1942 had left Janine slim and tanned, and sunlight had gilded the tobacco-hued curls that wound to her shoulders. Her blue eyes were wide as they took in the vibrant scenes of the city, the pastel-colored porticoed buildings; the Paseo’s bronze lions and wrought-iron streetlamps mounted on marble; the chic boutiques selling alligator purses, jewelry, and perfume. Especially, she admired the fashionable strollers, whom she carefully studied in order to learn how to fit into this place, whose cosmopolitan style and colonial charm had so very pleasantly caught her off guard.

  “¿Ay, señorita hermosa, de dónde es usted? ¿A dónde va?” Oh, pretty young lady, where are you from? Where are you going? “¡Vamos juntos!” Let’s go together! Men in short-sleeved tropical guayaberas tossed questions like roses to draw her attention, trailing her steps. But on this particular morning, instead of sternly evading their greetings as she kept walking, she smiled and she laughed.

  Clutched in her hand was a bundle of letters she h
ad just retrieved, not only that most precious letter the British surprised her by sending from Kingston exactly as promised, but to her delight, numerous new ones—months’ worth of letters from Roland, all waiting for her in care of the Havana post office. Surely, he must have believed she had gotten them sooner! She imagined his worry over never receiving any reply and headed toward the Malecón, where she could sit on the seawall and enjoy them in peace. If she closed her eyes, the sound and spray and smell of the ocean might let her pretend she was back in Marseille, back in his arms, hearing his tender words in her ear.

  Years later, except for the treasured original one, my father would destroy all these letters in a futile attempt to rip their author out of her heart. I can therefore only imagine their fervent expressions of love and desire and how Roland’s pledge of reunion and a lifetime together carried her dreaming over the water and allowed her to hope that nothing had changed. Though the words on the page have been lost, Janine would always remember that she devoured the letters in order, according to date, and that Roland had started the first by quoting their favorite verse from Lamartine:

  “Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé.” Missing a single person makes your whole world empty.