Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  “No. I am a guest at a small hotel on the Rue du Bac,” she replied. “And I am afraid that I must hurry there now, Mr. Heinemann. I have some work I must do this evening.”

  “Yes. I understand, of course,” he said and glanced at his watch. It was not, after all, too late to visit his old friends, the Schreibers. “But if you will forgive me, Madame, may I make a great presumption in thinking that you might do me a great favor. I could not help but observe that you have great skill with the drawing pen.”

  Leah glanced warily at him. So there would be a price to pay, after all, for his protective intervention. She continued to walk toward the Métro station without breaking pace.

  “I think we are involved in a similar undertaking here in Paris, Madame. And you are enjoying a singular success. You recall the voile evening dress shown by Madame Chanel this afternoon?”

  “The one with the stole and small sheer cuffs?”

  “Ah. Exactly. I neglected to copy it and I wondered if you might share your own effort with me. For a fee, of course. The ladies of my clientele are much involved with the cabaret life and this dress would sell well in my salon.”

  “A strange request, Monsieur. If indeed our projects are similar, then we are competitors. Why would I help a competitor?”

  “Perhaps because your interests are in New York and mine in Berlin. And perhaps because I would guess that you are interested in ready-to-wear production and you see by my card that my clients are exclusively private. And most important, perhaps, because if you are of service to me, then perhaps I might be of service to you.”

  They stood at the station entry and a newsboy dashed by carrying the evening edition of the L’Express and shouting the headlines:

  NEW ANTI-SEMITIC MEASURES INSTITUTED IN GERMANY! ARSONISTS ATTACK FRANKFURT SYNAGOGUES! DUKE OF WINDSOR GUEST OF HITLER!

  “Has it not occurred to you, Monsieur, that I would not be particularly inclined to be of service to a colleague from your country, no matter how mutually beneficial such an arrangement might be?” Leah asked, staring after the newsboy.

  Frederic Heinemann blushed deeply and his finely shaped hands trembled.

  “You do my country a disservice to think that all Germans subscribe to the beliefs of Adolf Hitler. There are many of us who are horrified by him. But we are sustained by the knowledge that ultimately he cannot succeed. He is the craze of the moment, the unhappy political remnant of Weimar, the Great War, and the inflation. Soon, Madame, he will be as dusty and forgotten as the unsuccessful design of years gone past. I am as distraught and repelled by his words and actions as you are, Madame Goldfeder.” He stood erect and Leah saw the small Medal of Honor in his lapel.

  “With all due respect, Monsieur, I do not think you can be as upset as I am,” she replied and took a copy of the Paris Tribune from another newsboy who stopped long enough to wait for the few centimes she dropped into his outstretched grimy hand.

  “I assume that Madame is Jewish?” the man asked gently.

  “You assume correctly.”

  “I wonder, Madame, if you would do me an even greater service than the one I originally sought. I have friends in Paris, newly from Berlin. They are a Jewish couple, the Schreibers. They have endured a great deal because of the Nazi madness and now await a visa to the United States. In your great country they have neither friends nor relations. I planned to visit them now, and if you could accompany me, it would mean a great deal to them.”

  The homeward-bound crowds were hurrying into the Metro now and they moved aside to allow them to pass. Leah looked thoughtfully at the elegantly dressed man who stood before her. The distress in his voice and the gentle urgency of his request had touched her and stirred a forgotten chord. How willingly good people believed that evil could not endure, that it had neither power nor tenacity but withered like weeds with weakened roots. Yaakov had dismissed with contempt Gregoriev’s hordes and Eli had fought greed and injustice with only his own courage and conviction. David daily battled the invisible demons of ignorance and terror, and this successful German businessman, who reddened with shame for his country, did not give credence to the very newspaper whose angry headlines they shared together in the darkening street.

  “If you will have dinner with me at the hotel, Monsieur, I will then visit your friends with you. It may be that my family can be of service to them. And, of course, we must compare our drawings and see how we can be of service to each other.”

  Her decision made, she smiled warmly at him and allowed him to help her into the cab he hailed to carry them to the Rue du Bac.

  *

  The Schreibers had found temporary refuge in one of the small apartments in that section of Paris known as the Pletzel which Jewish relief agencies such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the Joint Distribution Committee had leased as German Jews began crossing the border into France. The streets of the Pletzel, those winding narrow alleyways clogged with men pushing handcarts and housewives engrossed in their marketing with the intensity of the poor, their string bags bulging with onions and potatoes and hunks of meat wrapped in Yiddish papers soaked with blood, trailed by small parades of sad and frightened children, reminded Leah of New York’s lower east side. Here too, she supposed sadly, air was expensive for the poor. Twice their taxi swerved to avoid hitting groups of bearded, earlocked men, who looked to neither left nor right as they crossed the street, their heads bent together in earnest argument over a point of law. Like her father, their lives were lived within the Talmudic study hall where they erected elegant arguments on ritual purity for vanished priests whose Temple had been destroyed thousands of years ago or debated the disposition of a wandering goat as the traffic of urban Paris trundled by them. How safe they were, she thought, how unworried and insulated from the shouts of “Heil Hitler!” and the guns that were poised in readiness only a border away.

  The long black gabardine of one rabbi was splashed by a speeding cyclist and he looked up with seeming mildness, followed the cyclist with his eyes, and shouted after him, “Cochon!” and then turned calmly back to his companions and continued his conversation in eloquent Yiddish.

  Leah smiled and saw that Frederic Heinemann was smiling too. She had to remember to tell the story to David, she thought, and felt a pang of homesickness. It was almost three weeks now since the sun-drenched afternoon she had waved to her family from the deck of the Queen Elizabeth. They had, of course, all come to the pier to see her off: David, who had clutched her tightly in the night but wakened to mask his fear with calm; Aaron, withdrawn and silent, who suddenly, as the last warning call to dockside visitors hooted over the ship’s bullhorn, grabbed his mother and bent his head to her breast so that her bosom was damp with her tall son’s tears when he turned away, shielding his eyes with his hands; Rebecca, laughing and excited, dashing about the deck with Joshua Ellenberg in joyous pursuit; and a small Michael, who kept tugging at his mother’s skirt and asking her what she would bring him from “Your ope.”

  “Perhaps your grandparents,” she had said and the cheerful little boy in his carefully pressed sailor suit had nodded happily.

  “All right. And a little car. And candy.”

  “Don’t forget. Candy,” he reminded her, as she hugged him tightly in good-bye. “And don’t cry. You’re not a baby. I’m the baby.”

  She laughed but the tears had continued to stream down her cheeks and David had taken her arm and walked to the railing with her.

  “You don’t have to go,” he said gently.

  “I know.”

  He took out a large clean white handkerchief, wiped her cheeks, and lightly kissed her hair.

  He wore a small beard now, its fine dark growth threaded with streaks of early gray, and a gold watch was strung across the light-gray vest of his summer suit. How handsome he was, she thought, and how distinguished-looking, this man who had been in turn her friend and brother, her protector and companion, and finally her lover. She took his hand in hers and pressed it to her li
ps.

  “Just three months, David,” she said and he nodded, his arms enfolding her, his head pressed to hers.

  Now, on this crowded Paris street, so foreign and yet so familiar, she thought of the weeks that still must pass and the borders she would have to cross before joining her family. A heavy sadness stole over her, and Frederic Heinemann, as though sensing her change of mood, leaned forward.

  “Madame suffers from la tristesse?” he asked softly.

  “Yes, I am missing my family,” she replied.

  “I too think of a friend now,” he said. “My young friend and companion, Heinz. It is the hour and this magic Paris light. But you will return to your family and I to my friend. I have the true tristesse when I think of those who cannot return.”

  The cab stopped on the Rue des Rosiers, before the entry of a narrow gray stone apartment building. Concrete pots of dusty red geraniums stood on the windowsills and the steps were cluttered with small children who jumped up and down, weaving their way teasingly in front of the heavyset concierge, a tired woman in a faded housedress who was listlessly trying to clean the steps with a basin of water and a stringy gray mop.

  The narrow stairwell smelled of urine and cheap talcum powder, and the odors of stewing vegetables and frying garlic seethed from each open apartment doorway. Twice, as they made their way up the steps, apartment doors opened slightly and Leah saw pale frightened faces peer from the narrow slice of light before the heavy doors slammed shut.

  The Schreibers lived on the top floor; Frederic Heinemann knocked sharply twice, waited a moment, and knocked again. The door opened slightly, and quickly he took Leah’s hand and they slipped inside.

  “Ah, Frederic, I knew you would come. You see, Ilse, he has come, our good friend. I told you he would not disappoint us. I told you.”

  “You told me many things,” the woman said dryly, but her husband, a small dapper man impeccably dressed in tie and waistcoat even in the unbearable heat of the small flat, did not answer but embraced his friend and held out a hand of welcome to Leah. Frederic Heinemann introduced them.

  “This is Madame Goldfeder, a coreligionist of yours from New York City. I had the good fortune to meet her at a showing this afternoon.”

  “Ah yes. The Chanel showing. Was it interesting?” Herr Schreiber asked, leaning forward. His wife coughed in annoyance.

  “This surely must be the peak of absurdity, Madame Goldfeder. Our only son is interned somewhere in a camp. We do not even know where. We have lost our possessions—everything we worked for. We live among cockroaches in this flat for refugees and we do not even know where we shall take refuge, but my husband must know about Coco Chanel’s latest fashions.”

  Frau Schreiber, taller than her husband, her blue-gray hair swept elaborately upward, flicked a piece of dust from her black linen dress and clapped her hands together as though the movement might magically spirit her out of the tiny hot apartment and back to her beautiful home on a tree-lined Berlin boulevard where her faithful maid, Hilde, would shortly serve iced tea in the tall frosted glasses bought on a shopping trip to Venice.

  The sounds of an argument in Yiddish rose from the street below and Ilse Schreiber moved to the window, her eyes filled with sudden tears. She had loved those glasses and had punished her son severely once for dropping one on the tiled kitchen floor.

  “Ilse. Leave the window open. It is hot.” The small man’s voice was firm. “Perhaps our guests are thirsty.”

  “Yes. Of course.” Immediately she was the considerate hostess and the cold coffee she offered them came on a battered aluminum tray which she had covered with an elegant linen cloth.

  They talked over coffee and Leah listened with horror to their stories of life in Germany.

  “If you have eyes to see what is happening and you are Jewish, you have only two choices—suicide or emigration,” Herr Schreiber said in a stoic, matter-of-fact tone that made Leah shiver.

  “It will pass,” Frederic Heinemann insisted, but his voice lacked conviction. His friend shook his head.

  “No, Frederic. We are a people who have survived many things. Our entire history is founded on the supposition that things will pass. In Hebrew we have said again and again ‘Gam zeh yaavor’—This also will pass.’ We have repeated this after pogroms, persecutions, even forced conversions. We will wait. We will endure. It will pass. But even we, history’s most patient, most optimistic victims, now know that this sickness that has consumed Germany, this Nazi fever, will not pass so quickly. Do you know, Madame Goldfeder, that in the weeks before we left Berlin, Ilse and I went to a funeral almost every day—and each funeral was that of a suicide. We are a people who glory in life. We raise our glasses and call out ‘L’Chaim!’ ‘To life!’ Yet each day another Jew chooses to surrender that precious life. Why, Madame?”

  But it was Ilse Schreiber who answered, her voice dry and bitter.

  “We went to the funeral of Professor Ehrenkrantz who was forced to leave the university. Of Dr. Eisenstadt who could no longer perform surgery at the clinic he himself had established. Of Frau Riegenbaum whose son was arrested because, like our own Leon, he committed the crime of falling in love with a German girl and might contaminate her with his Jewish blood. Ach—when people lose their livelihoods and their families and, in some cases, even their homes, to what purpose do they go on with their lives? Your questions require no answers, my husband.”

  Leah stirred her coffee and felt her heart thunder with a fear she had almost forgotten. She remembered, suddenly, the vegetal odors of a summer woodland and the sour breath of fear.

  “But surely the German people will soon realize the insanity of the situation,” she protested, not wanting to acknowledge a reality she could not escape.

  “The German people. Forgive me, my dear Frederic, but there are very few with your courage and humanity in our country and you yourself know that your safety and that of your friend Heinz is not assured if you continue to befriend Jews like us. Picture, Madame, a citizenry which passes the office of a veterinarian who has, in all seriousness and adherence to the law, posted a sign saying ‘Jewish Dogs Not Treated.’ The passersby nod, as though such a legend were reasonable, understandable, and walk on. Think of people who have been friends and neighbors for many years, who go to the cabarets which are now all the social life of Berlin, elegantly dressed, some of them in gowns purchased in my husband’s own establishment on Tautzienstrasse and still unpaid for, where they listen to anti-Semitic songs and jokes, so pleased at being able to forget the debts they now do not have to pay to Jews who lent them money in good faith or allowed them to charge in their shops. Surely a Jewish pharmacy is not an international banking enterprise, yet our friend Teutsch, the pharmacist, had to close his shop because his Aryan customers declined to pay ‘filthy Jewish debts.’

  “Quite suddenly, a woman who has belonged to my reading group for many years crosses the street to avoid talking to me. The greengrocer, with whom I have had an account for many years, faithfully paid on the first of each month, ignores me as I stand at the counter. But all this is nothing. Believe me, they do not want only our money and our possessions. They want our lives as well, our friends the Nazis. And the people will not object. The people will cheer them on as the Romans cheered their gladiators.”

  Frau Schreiber sat back quietly and her husband put his hand over hers, wordlessly acknowledging the truth of her words. Finally, he spoke and his gentle voice was laced with exhaustion.

  “Yes. They have a dream now, Hitler and his gangsters. They have a cure for all of the Fatherland’s ills—for inflation, unemployment, and war debts. All evil is caused by the Jews and to save Germany it must be made ‘Judenrein’—free of Jews.”

  “And it will not stop with Germany,” his wife added. “The world is to be turned into an Aryan wonderland, ruled by blond, blue-eyed giants and served by untermenschen—therefore the world itself must be made Judenrein.”

  “You think then that Hitler will truly
plan another great war?” Leah asked.

  “With all due respect to Frederic who disagrees with me, I think it a certainty,” Herr Schreiber replied. “Hitler talks now of the Sudetenland and claims he wants that poor piece of Czechoslovakia because of the German population there. But what of the German population in Alsace-Lorraine, in Rumania, in Hungary, and in the Netherlands. Surely he will want to ‘protect’ all those nationals. With such a pretext and with the rest of the world idly watching and posing no opposition, he simply refuses to recognize borders and treaties.”

  “My husband—he is a psychiatrist in New York—agrees with you,” Leah said slowly. “That is one reason why I came to Europe now. I mean to try to go to Russia—to persuade my parents there to leave. David, my husband, is convinced that no place in Europe will be safe for Jews in a few years.”

  “It is not safe for Jews now,” Frau Schreiber agreed. “Think of it, Madame Goldfeder, I sit here and drink coffee with you and I do not know where my son is—whether he is alive or dead. Is that possible? You too are a mother. Tell me, is it possible to add sugar to coffee and try to decide between a green scarf and a blue one when one does not know whether one’s child is alive or dead, healthy or in pain?”

  She did not cry but stared at the flimsy white curtains that hung at the narrow window, encrusted with grime that weighed them down, as though the grim fears of all those who had sought refuge in the furnished flat on the Rue des Rosiers clung to the gauzy fabric.

  “Life must be lived, Madame,” Leah replied, but did not meet the other woman’s eyes, fearing the encounter with familiar grief.

  “But please, my dear friends, let us talk now of the future,”

  Frederic Heinemann urged. “I have the presumption to think that perhaps Madame Goldfeder can be of service to you.”

  “Only if it is in your power to offer us affidavits, Madame,” Mr. Schreiber said. “There are those who ask why more Jews do not leave Germany if the danger is so great. The truth is, many have nowhere to go. Other European countries hold similar dangers or are opposed to Jewish immigration. The British have closed off Palestine to all but very limited numbers of Jews. The South American countries are asking exorbitant fees for entry permits and the United States has exacting quotas and requires affidavits of support. My wife and I are eligible under the quota but we have no family or friends to provide the affidavit. If you could help us in that way we would be most grateful.”