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

by Leslie Maitland

  Aging émigrés tentatively built new lives in a land devoid of memories, relying on their own newspaper, Aufbau (founded in 1934 for New York’s German Jewish population with an advisory board including such intellectual luminaries as Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein), to enable them to read in their own language about their generation. I still remember them: Gretl, Marcel, and Jacob, Max and Emma, Frau Burger and Frau Dreyfuss, Herr Meyer and Herr Kaufmann—the latter being my mother’s former Freiburg Hebrew teacher, who reappeared in Inwood, inexplicably retaining his power to make her squirm. Like newly hatched birds fallen from their nests, they seemed frail and small, yet valiant. Yes, even now, theirs are the faces I remember when I hear a German accent that provokes a sense of intimacy stretching back to childhood. In those accents of the Reich, I hear the echoes of survivors. There is nostalgia in the love that a certain kind of German voice, with history in its undertones, always calls to life in me.

  Sigmar spent the decades after his arrival in New York in his own private war with Germany, all of it on paper. His scrupulous efforts to calculate and verify his losses for Wiedergutmachung, or reparation claims, against the German government dragged across the years. He also struggled to obtain equitable compensation for the business and the Freiburg home given up to private opportunists whose payments, however undervalued, had been lost to him in blocked accounts in German banks. For the remainder of his life, as if it were his paying job, Sigmar sat almost daily at his desk, drafting letters and appeals that recounted his losses and expenses over six hard years of hiding and escape. He put the total cost of flight alone, not including the assets he relinquished, at 82,781.50 Reichsmark, for which the postwar German government initially agreed to reimburse him only for the inconsequential train ride across the border from Freiburg to Mulhouse in 1938. Much as he needed money and pursued his claims on paper, making handwritten copies of everything he sent, never once did Sigmar venture back to Germany to press his campaign personally with the acumen and expertise that would have been required.

  In his written appeals, Sigmar mostly directed his attention to the transactions involving the two German brothers, Albin and Alfons Glatt, who had snapped up the Günzburger brothers’ “non-Aryan” building supply business for a token of its true worth. Norbert’s negotiations proved unsuccessful when he first went to see them in 1946, and Sigmar’s nephew Edy, practicing law in Mulhouse, gained nothing from them either. Now Sigmar wrote to tell the Glatts that time had come to reevaluate the situation. Why, the Günzburgers’ warehouse at the railroad tracks in itself had cost 36,000 Mark a full twenty years before they had been obliged to sell it to the Glatts for half that price! The Glatts had obtained the company’s furnishings, cars, and trucks at ridiculously unfair prices, and there were aspects of the business—such as its long-established base of customers and its rights to purchase scarce materials based on seniority—for which, contrary to usual business practice, the Glatts paid nothing. In all good conscience, Sigmar argued in his letters, the Glatts ought to pay the balance of what the business had actually been worth: they should either compensate the Günzburgers for having preyed upon their weakness under Hitler, or else give the business back.

  In reply to such entreaties in 1949, the Glatts wrote Sigmar, insisting they alone had saved the business, while also voicing interest in coming to a compromise:

  Very Esteemed Herr Günzburger!

  We were so happy with the visit of your son. In the past years we often wondered where fate had placed you and where you spent the war years. We are very pleased to know that you and your family are doing well. I imagine your son told you how we are doing, but I wish to add a few details.

  In the first two years after we took over the business, we had to work very hard to manage to get the business off the ground. Once we achieved that we were very busy throughout the whole war. Because all the male personnel were drafted, we were forced to work many more hours than normal. For instance, we spent every Sunday working.

  The difficulties of transportation were enormous. Our trucks and personal cars were requisitioned. We enlarged the warehouse at the railroad tracks. We enlarged the business on the Rosastrasse considerably and started to sell screws. We took very good care of that particular part of the business and it developed well.

  On November 27, 1944, however, the whole Rosastrasse establishment was destroyed [in Allied bombing] and with it the warehouse, offices, and apartment and furnishings of Herr Albin Glatt. Lost on the same occasion were all our files and paperwork and accounting as well as everything that was in the safe.… We racked our brains, but had to rely especially on the honor of our customers. It was impossible to avoid a loss, particularly since many of our clients were hit the same way and many died in the attacks. The railroad warehouse was hit by bombs several times and each time we tried to repair it.…

  We spent the next six to eight months digging through the ruins of the Rosastrasse in the hope of finding anything that could be slightly usable. It was unbelievable how there was nothing to be gotten, but here and there we would find a complete fitting or a pipe or something of that kind. In that way we collected every charred nail and every melted screw or fitting we hoped to be able to reuse. The iron sheeting business was completely dead as we did not receive anything from October 1944 to the beginning of 1946. At the railroad warehouse we had to be very careful as there was always a risk of robbery and indeed several times people broke in and stole materials.

  Beginning in 1946, the deliveries of material began to return, and by the end of the year, the business achieved a very strong upsurge.

  For the last two months, business has been weakened, however, and the way the clients pay is terrible. We have to watch closely and constantly monitor what is happening.… I assume you are aware that the profits are pretty well absorbed by taxes.…

  Personally we are more or less okay. Unfortunately, we both have lost our wives. Albin’s wife died in the beginning of 1945, Alfons’s wife in the beginning of 1948.…

  Your son has wanted us to respond to the demands presented through Monsieur Cahen. We suggested a personal discussion and asked Monsieur Cahen to come here, but his busy schedule has made that impossible.… We would of course prefer to come to an understanding with you personally as we believe we would achieve faster results that way.…

  With friendly greetings, the Glatt Brothers

  In October 1949, empowered to act on behalf of his father and uncle, Norbert, still stationed in Germany, went back to see the Glatts again and naïvely settled for 40,000 Deutsche Mark, then equal to $10,000. Still far below the value of the company, it represented total payment for the business in the heart of Freiburg and the warehouse on the railroad tracks, as well as inventory, vehicles, accounts, and an established base of customers. Sigmar and Heinrich soon despaired that by depending on Norbert, with his youth and inexperience, they had once more permitted the Glatts to get the better of them. Indeed, two years earlier, the French military government had enacted a sweeping restitution regulation in their zone of occupation, including Freiburg, stipulating that victims of Nazism were entitled to get their assets back. To make matters even worse, Norbert had gone so far as to sign a waiver of restitution rights that eliminated the chance of further public compensation from the state.

  At the same time, Sigmar and Alice were both kept busy writing to family and acquaintances in Europe and contemplating pleas from former associates who begged the Jewish couple to vouch for them in connection with official denazification proceedings under way in postwar Germany. Nazi sympathies that once appeared expedient now tainted reputations, endangering social standing, employment, and professional advancement. Thus Sigmar’s former Freiburg accountant, for example, wrote for help, as did the wife of the German military man whose family had lived rent-free in the Günzburgers’ basement before Hitler came to power. Writing from Bonn in 1951, their former tenant, Frau Nagel, bolstered her appeal to Alice with snapshots of her daughters, describing th
em as cheated by the casualties of war of the likelihood of finding mates, and of her son, pictured in 1943 wearing a German Army uniform with tall black boots and a medal on his chest. As ever, Alice kept a handwritten copy of her reply to Frau and Herr Nagel:

  It is actually very difficult for me to answer your letter. So many sad and awful memories were reawakened—memories of a time when we were frightened and demeaned, times that took so much from our lives and that we would happily forget. Here, in America, thank God we are well and after our long wanderings we have found in this country a new homeland and bread, and for that we are very grateful. But until we got here we knew hard and painful years, and it is a miracle that we all found each other once again. Already in France, our flight to cross the demarcation line from the Occupied to the Unoccupied Zone was made possible by a worthy German officer. That in itself was a gift from God. If we had not been able to escape at that time, we would probably be among the six million who were gassed. Many of our closest relatives died that way. Also poor Fräulein Ellenbogen with her brother and sister-in-law.

  Alice closed with a pointed observation:

  I am happy your son came home safely from the war. I felt scared for him. At his age, with his enthusiasm and his zest for the Thing, he was surely in the front rows of the battle and an eager Wehrmacht soldier. It must have been hard for you. It must have not been easy for you either, dear Herr Nagel, to repeatedly change your lifestyle and your livelihood. How much misery there is in this context among the refugees you cannot begin to guess. All those people lacking money and knowledge of the [English] language have no choice but to accept the most unbelievably lowly jobs. This is a misfortune of our times that has spared no one, but rather it has hit all mankind.

  The change of “lifestyle and livelihood” that Alice so empathetically mentioned in her letter in regard to Herr Nagel was something she understood firsthand. In coming to New York, she had found her sister Rosie living in a dismal railroad flat in a walk-up building in the South Bronx, renting out a room to a boarder. Rosie’s husband, Natan Marx, once the proud proprietor of the family business in Eppingen, was earning $40 a month washing dishes and pots in a sweltering hospital kitchen in Brooklyn. (A heart attack would kill him in 1949 at the age of sixty-two.) Their daughter Hannchen, sixteen years old when they immigrated at the end of 1938, had been helping to support her parents by working for $28 a month as a live-in maid in the Bronx.

  Spared such hardships that other refugees encountered, Sigmar and Alice lived lives of small routine. On days that Sigmar did not go down to Wall Street trailing Max, his business activities consisted of devouring the financial pages of The New York Times in the mornings and The Herald Tribune in the afternoons, which provided little more in terms of social engagement than a regular impetus to walk to the newstand. Several times a week, he met with Max to play their favorite German card game. On very rare occasions, he and Alice splurged on tickets to the Metropolitan Opera—especially for Wagner—or to Carnegie Hall for a master pianist playing Chopin or Beethoven. But their experience in America was generally confined to Inwood, where they were content with the close proximity of family and other German Jewish refugees who shared their simple gratefulness to be alive.

  With his grandchildren in the building, Sigmar mellowed, and the stern authoritarian that Janine, Trudi, and Norbert remembered fearing in their youth was replaced by a kind and doting patriarch—“Bapa,” adored by all. He taught me how to read from the pages of his newspapers, inspiring my interest in journalism. And he never missed an opportunity to lead me, humming, in stately bridal march down the length of his apartment, culminating in a solemn ceremony in which he placed the golden paper band from his cigar like a wedding ring upon my finger.

  Almost as soon as Alice and Sigmar moved into the building, their next-door neighbor, a schoolteacher named Lou, started to give them English lessons. For homework, Lou had them fill lined composition books with page after page of random statements and spontaneous thoughts that roamed disjointedly between the political and personal. Sigmar in ink and Alice in pencil, they diligently practiced writing in English and wound up creating haphazard journals as both voiced feelings they normally stifled.

  From Sigmar:

  Everybody has his deal of misfortune. It is better to live in the present than always to remember times past. Many refugees arrive without a single dollar in their pockets. The moment I could leave Europe I was a very happy man. Great nations should work for peace but keep the sword always sharpened for their defense. History will judge our generation as foolish, making wars one after another and destroying millions of people and the prosperity of the countries. Going to the stock market is a hazard. I should like to give all war criminals to the judgments of the Russians. A ruined Europe is all what the war left.

  And Alice:

  A person who travels from one country to another for religious reasons is called a Pilgrim. The Jews are not welcome in any country. To speak a foreign language is hard for older people. Mistakes are human. Life is hard especially in our time. It is very helpful to have a good dictionary. There will be joy and laughter and peace when the world is free. I wish I were able to support the poor. I spend most of my time in the kitchen. It is a long time since I left my home. Old furniture is better than new furniture. I owe my home and my freedom to this country. I will never return to Europe.

  As it happened, despite her resolve, Alice would travel there twice, overcome by longing to visit her brother in London. On her first solo trip, in 1957, en route to see family in Zurich as well, she stopped in Freiburg, gravitated to the Poststrasse, and checked herself in to the Hotel Minerva. It was now being run by the Schöpperles’ daughter, Rosemarie, and her husband, Friedrich Stock. While they were polite, it was upsetting for Alice to see how the ivy-draped premises of the Minerva had swallowed her home—the place where all three of her children were born and where she’d enjoyed the properous early years of her marriage.

  Across the street on the Rosastrasse stood Sigmar’s former business, now called Eisen Glatt. That afternoon, Alice went to gaze in silence at the department store once owned by Trudi’s husband’s family. “Nebbish!” she wrote home, summarizing sad emotions of disbelief on the back of a postcard that showed the Minerva. She mailed it before she climbed the stairs and went to bed that night, but hours later, unable to fall asleep in Germany as a paying guest in what should have been her own home, she packed her things and called a taxi to take her across the border to Mulhouse. Never again would Alice go back to Germany. Or France.

  When she reached Mulhouse late that night, she went directly to the Hotel du Parc, among the city’s finest, and asked in English for a room. But in the empty lobby at that hour, Alice overheard the hotel clerks make fun of her: “Quelle idiote! Avec cet accent alsacien, elle ne parle aucun mot de français?” What an idiot! With that Alsatian accent, she doesn’t speak a word of French?

  “No, not an idiot,” Alice retorted in French with the bravado of her girlhood as die freche Lisel. “Just an American.”

  In the land of my early childhood, no disrespect to Alice, it was my father who stood apart as the sole American. He was the man to count on for directions and information and who drummed up conversation to keep Sigmar entertained. He worked to master French and German, learning lengthy lists of foreign words and complex rules of German grammar to translate for his in-laws, editing their correspondence for proper English usage. In language and self-confidence, know-how and personality, he had no equal. On Sundays, when he played tennis near the Harlem River with Trudi’s husband, Harry, he competed in raiment I took to be symbolic—a classic tennis sweater that Alice knitted for him with thick white cables and stripes of red and blue around the sleeves and V-neck. It seemed a costume meant for him alone, an entitlement of birth and nationality, especially as my uncle never had a sweater like it, with its bold tricolor citizen’s assertiveness. My American father wore that sweater like the flag, and I was proud to be his da
ughter.

  It was rare, however, that my mother or my brother and I got to spend much time with him. Mom had given up her job when I was born, and we spent long summers in a rustic rental on a lake, where Dad could get away to join us only on weekends. But our familial city life was replicated in the country also, for Trudi and Harry and Norbert and Doris also rented lakeside houses just steps away from ours. On Friday nights, the men drove up with string-tied ziggurats of Nash’s baked goods and a week’s supply of dirty laundry for their wives to wash and iron, and they returned to the city early Monday mornings.

  For the rest, Len was often driving out of town on business trips that continued to leave him lonely and disconsolate and determined to reach beyond his salesman’s route and salary. When he was home, he repeatedly debated with Janine the wisdom of striking out in business for himself—a conversation complicated by his being optimistically impetuous, while she was highly risk averse and all too well acquainted with the randomness of danger. Based on agreements with two industrial manufacturers to represent their products in East Coast regions, he quit his job, founded his own company, calling it Unisco, and rented office space not far from the apartment. Energized and instinctively a boss, he grew in stature and authority as he began to hire employees, even as they bristled under his perfectionism. Still required to travel, he lamented in letters from the road how hard it was to build sufficient sales to raise the level of his commissions from 2 percent to 5 percent, and so he logged even longer hours, working nights and weekends.