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

by Leslie Maitland

  The groundbreaking in 1985 coincided with the first reunion, and the new synagogue, replacing the nineteenth-century original destroyed on Kristallnacht, opened in 1987. The mayor pointed out that it incorporates a Freiburg Bächle in its design, with one of the city’s small canals running across the sidewalk to the temple, where Germany’s waters bubble up at the open core of a large steel Star of David. In what remained a mystery, he noted, in 1938 the old synagogue’s elaborately carved wooden doors were thankfully removed, saved from the fires of Kristallnacht and hidden—along with the Torah’s silver breastplate—in the basement of a city museum. When the modern synagogue was erected, the original doors were brought back into use for a new Jewish population then numbering about one hundred, the vast majority not German, but people who had moved to Freiburg since the war from Russia or Eastern Europe.

  Only five members of Freiburg’s original Jewish community returned from the concentration camps after they were liberated, he said. Rare, too, were those who managed somehow to escape the Nazis and then came back to live in Freiburg when the horror ended. Mayor Böhme told us he was well aware that older citizens now felt shame in facing former Jewish neighbors who visited the city in its organized reunions. He was nonetheless committed to what he called a civic responsibility of confronting and atoning for the past. From his desk, he picked up a nondescript black rock that he had taken from Auschwitz a decade earlier, and he slammed it against his blotter with a thud so resolute it had the impact of a vow. “This stone is from the spot where Jews were selected for life and death,” he said, as heavily as if the stone encapsulated the weight of Nazi guilt. “It is always here … to be conscious … never again.”

  Awed by the unanticipated beauty of Mother’s birthplace and its backdrop of deep green mountains, we marveled at the picturesque medieval buildings in the historic core of town that were flattened by British bombers in 1944 and then meticulously restored—an accomplishment of the Marshall Plan and the economic miracle that saw West Germany rise again from the ashes of its ruin. A few blocks from city hall, we went to see Mom’s first home at Poststrasse 6, and Dad and Gary waited in our rented van while Mom and I went closer to inspect it. She pointed out her bedroom window, the garden where she had played with Trudi, the Hotel Minerva at the corner (which now looked vacant, out of business), and Sigmar’s former office across the street. An EISEN GLATT sign outside a glistening showroom of whirlpool tubs encased in marble provided our first evidence that the Glatts continued to run the construction and plumbing supply company that they had taken over from Sigmar and his brother when it was “Aryanized” in 1938.

  “Oh, how I wish I could see the inside of my old home one more time!” Mom murmured wistfully, which propelled me to the wide oak door and a directory of residents. The imposing house where she was born, converted in the war to expand the Hotel Minerva, had evidently since been turned into apartments, and over her protestations that it would be improper to intrude on strangers, I rang a random bell. A buzzer answered, granting access, and Mom came trailing behind me, virtually on tiptoes, peering past my shoulder as I began to climb the winding stairs. On the second floor, the resident who’d admitted us directed us to the landlord. But when we reached that door, the frail blond woman who opened it a crack assumed that I had come to see her son and pointed up another flight. Rosemarie Stock, formerly Schöpperle, failed to notice Mom, nor did Mother recognize her childhood playmate from the hotel next door. On the top floor, a tall young man with sandy hair responded to my knock, an animated smile lighting up his handsome, open features. I expected Mom to explain to him in German the reason for our coming to his doorstep, but she stood shy and mute behind me.

  “We’re visiting from the United States,” I tried in halting German to cover for her silence. “My mother’s family owned this house before the war, and she is very eager to have a look inside, if you don’t mind. It’s her first time back, and it would mean a lot to her.”

  “Natürlich!” Of course! he cried, greeting Mom with the cheery enthusiasm of someone who had spent a good part of his life eagerly awaiting her arrival. Oddly, it seemed that we were keeping to a long-arranged appointment. “Frau Günzburger!” he suddenly burst out, surprising us by using her maiden name, which I knew I hadn’t mentioned. He grasped Mom by the arm and drew her into his apartment. “I’ve waited so long to meet you. I can’t believe you’re really here!” he said. “I’ve always wanted to know the truth about what happened. I questioned how we got this house, if your family was treated fairly.…”

  Michael Stock warmly welcomes Janine to her girlhood home at Poststrasse 6. (photo credit 23.1)

  Michael Stock, thirty-six years old, exuding warmth and curiosity, insisted we sit down as he rushed to a cabinet for a brandy bottle and three glasses. “A special occasion requires a toast!” he exclaimed, relieving Mom’s discomfort with such jovial hospitality that, freely pouring brandy into her glass, he let it overflow the rim. Brandy ran across the table in a wasted puddle, and he broke out laughing. The accidental spill appeared to dramatize that the fullness of his welcome surpassed the limits of the possible.

  Then, and in greater detail later on that evening when we invited Michael and his girlfriend, Karla, out to dinner, Mom listened in amazement as he related what had happened on the Poststrasse since her escape. He explained that in 1938, his grandfather, August Schöpperle, had promptly launched the renovation of Sigmar’s home as an extension of the hotel, but found himself overwhelmed by debt before the work was finished. Within a year, riddled by anxiety that the war would cut off local tourism—never imagining that it would actually boost business as the government rented rooms for families whose homes were bombed—his grandfather hanged himself. August’s widow succumbed to alcohol, and management of the Minerva fell to their daughter Rosemarie, then nineteen and unprepared for so much responsibility. No surprise, perhaps, that four days after her father’s funeral she met the man she shortly married—Friedrich Alois Stock, an athlete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics who had the strapping good looks of Johnny Weissmuller and was twenty years her senior. By profession a chemist with Schering, in 1941 he was off to war, assigned to duty until the end at a chemical lab, presumably in Poland. Michael said Friedrich would not discuss it, but he suspected that his father had helped produce deadly chemicals of war, including components of the Zyklon B used in Nazi killing chambers. After his return, the family continued operating the hotel until the mid-1970s, and in 1986, eight years after Friedrich’s death, Rosemarie sold it—or at least the building at Poststrasse 8 that had housed it from the start. It was then, Michael added, that they moved next door to the Günzburgers’ former home at Poststrasse 6, which they had kept, and had it reconfigured into five apartments.

  Michael proceeded to show us all around the building, from his newly renovated home in the peaked-roof attic (where Mom remembered the birdlike Fräulein Ellenbogen living), to his bright, contemporary office in the once-dark basement (where Mom recalled their cook storing bins of vegetables), to tenants’ flats on other floors. At last, Michael led us to his mother’s place.

  “I’m glad to see that you survived,” Frau Stock told Mom. She invited us to sit and talk, but her tone was emotionless and clipped, her eyes alert and darting nervously. Despite a cough so deep and hacking it disrupted conversation, she smoked incessantly. Her words lined up like pointed pickets on a verbal fence around the property, in case it should turn out that Mom’s impromptu reappearance on the Poststrasse after more than fifty years was sparked by some financial motive. She seemingly suspected that we had come to Freiburg expressly to reclaim the house that Sigmar had been forced to sell her father at a price far below its worth. Michael put its value in 1989 at over $3 million.

  “You must have lived very well in the United States on the money my father paid for the house,” Frau Stock proposed, dragging on a cigarette that induced another fit of coughing spasms.

  But Mom herself was drifting in memories th
at overlaid this unforeseen experience in her childhood home like a film of dust, and Frau Stock’s probing caught her unawares. “What money?” she retorted, sitting up sharply, stiff with concentrated effort to remain as polite in this uneasy interchange as Alice would have hoped of her. “What do you mean?” Mom asked, knowing Sigmar had relinquished every bit of it to the coffers of the Reich. “Live well on the money we got for the house? We were forced to leave with nothing.”

  “If that is so, then why did we have to pay anything?” Frau Stock persisted, querulous and deaf to the resentment infiltrating Mother’s voice. “It was hard on my father. Why didn’t your father just give him the house before you left if you couldn’t take the money anyway?”

  “Why don’t you go and ask the Führer?” Mom snapped, jumping from her chair to end the inquisition. “Whatever sum your father paid to mine, the Nazis grabbed it all.”

  The following year, meeting with Frau Stock again when I returned to Freiburg for a follow-up research trip, we would sit together side by side in what had been my grandparents’ salon over coffee and a sumptuous array of pastry. In 1952, she would tell me, after Norbert had come to see them and cordially discussed the matter, she and her husband agreed to pay 15,000 Deutsche Mark (then worth less than $4,000) in restitution. She wanted us to know that. She added that in 1980, to satisfy a lien on the property in the name of Edmond Cahen that dated back to 1938, she had also sent him the equivalent of $5,000. At the point when the Reich was confiscating Jewish assets, I realized, Sigmar’s nephew had probably purchased an interest in the building, holding safe his payment for Sigmar in expectation of the family’s penniless arrival in Mulhouse a few months later.

  “But why did your grandmother leave here anyway?” she asked me. “I didn’t understand. Surely, she wasn’t Jewish. She didn’t look Jewish.”

  “What does that mean?” I couldn’t help myself from interjecting.

  “Well, of course, she didn’t have a Jewish nose or lips.” Frau Stock shrugged, laying down her fork. With her finger, she traced a large hooked nose in the air and mockingly rolled down her lower lip. The moist and pink protuberance recalled ugly racist caricatures on Nazi posters.

  Eager to change the subject, I asked her to describe the immediate period in Freiburg following the war. I had pictured dismal years of national humiliation in which the truth about Nazi atrocities prompted worldwide condemnation and a painful imperative to soul-searching among the German people. But through the grimy window of the years, she could see the past from only one perspective, and she translated my question into terms more practical than emotional.

  Rosemarie Stock in her bedroom with her 1934 Hitler Youth track meet certificate (photo credit 23.2)

  “Schrecklich!” she exclaimed. “The peace was harder for us than the war. We had a terrible, cold winter. No heat, no water, no windows, no electricity. There was nothing to eat, but then we had luck because through the hotel, our French and American guests helped us get food.”

  As time went on, she said, like many of her generation, she and Friedrich never spoke to their four children about the Nazi years, about the Jews or concentration camps. (For the camps, instead of using the actual term Konzentrationslager, she used the less evocative and widely accepted two-letter abbreviation: KZ, pronounced Ka-tzet.)

  “We had no reason to speak about Juden or KZ,” Frau Stock explained. “The children never asked about such things. It was not interesting. They went to school, did homework, played, ate. Why should I tell them about KZ? Nein. You cannot turn back the hands of time. You must look forward.”

  All the same, before I left, Frau Stock invited me to admire a memento of those years as she led me to a framed certificate that decorated her bedroom wall. Honoring her victory in a 1934 Hitler Youth track meet, it depicted a smiling boy and girl waving Nazi banners, and she was proud to pose for a photograph beside it.

  Mother moved through Freiburg in a trancelike state, awash in memories and troubled feelings. She grieved to see her former home chopped into apartments, and she seethed in estimating that Alice—dead two years earlier at the age of ninety-five—had resided more than twice as long in her cramped New York apartment than in the spacious home from which they’d fled. Everything hit her as unsettlingly different. Yet by instinct she directed us to her former school, to the cathedral whose Gothic architecture Dad extolled as an astounding feat of engineering, to the famous university whose thick stone walls were pocked by scars of war, and to the corner where the city’s once-majestic synagogue went up in flames. When she and I got lost looking for the new one—planning to meet Gary, Dad, and the rest of the group, including Mayor Böhme, for special Friday evening services—she strictly forbade my asking any stranger on the street for directions to the temple for fear of disclosing we were Jews. Wary of almost everyone we met, regardless of how friendly and accommodating, she puzzled skeptically over their intentions and, moreover, about the city’s reasons for dedicating its energy and resources to hosting Freiburg’s former Jewish citizens at such well-organized reunions.

  “Would you ever consider moving back here?” a German reporter asked her in an interview published in a regional newspaper. Mom paused for a moment and then replied with unusually stunning candor: “Only if everyone old enough to have supported Hitler were forced to leave.”

  High on Mother’s list of obligations in every city that we visited was the Jewish cemetery where her ancestors lay buried. At each one, she bent to find a little rock to place atop the tombstone, a ritual of remembrance. In Freiburg, this meant finding the graves of Sigmar’s parents, Simon and Jeanette. It felt strange to realize that their bones had rested in peaceful ignorance throughout the war and persecution that saw their children forced to flee, as also through the decades since, when their graves had gone unvisited. Indeed, it was the first time in half a century that any of our family had gone to see about their upkeep, and Mom had previously worried over their condition. But just as we would learn when we traveled on to Sigmar’s nearby birthplace of Ihringen and Alice’s of Eppingen, Germany’s Jewish cemeteries had been carefully maintained at government expense. Beyond that, in Freiburg, two monuments told the story. One honored local German Jewish soldiers who died fighting for the fatherland in World War I. The other honored Freiburg’s Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

  Dad wheeled behind me as I paused to take a picture of the tall black marble tombstone that marked the grave of Mom’s grandparents, with its German inscription from Psalm 34: “Though the misfortunes of the righteous be many, the Lord will save him from them all.” Later, when the photograph was developed, I was aghast to see the image of my father seated in his wheelchair reflected in the tombstone’s shiny surface. His figure was as clear as if it too had been etched into the marble beside the names of Simon and Jeanette, and it iced my soul like a fatal premonition.

  Traveling on from Germany to France, our expedition did not include an effort to find Roland, nor Mom’s devoted friend Malou, nor the helpful André Fick. But near the house in Mulhouse where Roland lived before the war, we visited the family of Lisette and Edy’s son, our cousin Michel Cahen. Edy had died in 1987. As for Lisette, she had abandoned her grand provincial home after they divorced in the 1960s, moving with just a suitcase to a room in a modest Left Bank residential hotel on the rue de l’Odéon in Paris.

  When we ourselves reached the capital, Lisette’s daughter Isabelle took Mom and me to see her, now residing in a maison de retraite in a far less lively neighborhood. Lisette’s room was crammed as ever with books and little oddities and pictures she’d collected, often from the streets, in a lifetime spent appreciating the world’s most droll discoveries. Electric as in her youth, with her own sardonic brand of joie de vivre, she left us breathless with her storytelling, outpacing our ability to record any anecdote in memory before she ran on to the next one.

  For Janine and Lisette, this reunion would prove meaningful, supplanting unpleasant memories of their previous t
ime together, when Lisette came to stay with us for several weeks soon after her divorce. Then depressed and drinking heavily, Lisette was critical of everything Janine tried to show her of New York except the United Nations building and voiced nothing but disdain for her friend’s suburban lifestyle as a “hausfrau” in America.

  By contrast, the meeting in Paris—which would sadly prove to be their last—was brimming with tenderness, as each of them found back what she had valued in the other. Even then, however, though not given to self-censorship, Lisette would tell my mother nothing about Roland. Despite the fact she knew him and that having lived in postwar Mulhouse, she surely had some idea of what had happened to him, like Edy, Lisette would keep forever silent on that subject.

  Did Mother search the faces that we passed, hunting for an older version of her first true love in every tall and handsome man, as we strolled together on the rue du Sauvage in Mulhouse or the rue de la République in Lyon, those streets where she’d worn thin the soles of all her shoes, either looking for Roland or walking at his side? I have no doubt she did. But in deference to Dad, she and I avoided mentioning Roland, because even as Mom assessed the changes in the old places she had known, the trip was also prompting a shift in the interplay of personalities in the quadrangle of our family.

  Dad acceded to Mom’s every wish to stop at sites imbued with meaning for her, and he retreated to respectful silence as she filled in details of the stories of her youth. Tales that we had heard before in outline were gripping as she recounted them again, now on actual location. We journeyed in an atmosphere that reflected our desire to create a perfect interlude. Mom and I were busy delving in her past, taking pictures, taping memories. Dad was marveling at medieval architecture and modern redevelopment, querying construction workers. And Gary was valiantly devoting all his efforts to piloting the van and maneuvering our father in situations that proved trying for him.