Longingly we awaited your first news about your trip and your arrival in Antwerp.
I was just over visiting your parents at ll o’clock in the morning when your letter arrived.
I opened the letter and Papa read it to us.
We were all overjoyed to have good news from you, and we all have only one wish: that the dear Lord continue to accompany you to your destination. Whenever I’m so lonely for you, I comfort myself with the thought that at last, after such a long time, in a matter of days you will have reached your place of rest.
I visit your parents twice a day and do all their errands. Your furniture is now at Bush’s where it sits next to Anny’s things. Both will be shipped together, but please do tell Anny that it is totally impossible to send the additional items she has requested.
As dear Martha has just written, we are waiting for your report in order to get a picture of what our chances are of getting there. At the moment there is absolutely no possibility of being allowed to emigrate.
Liebreich and his family were supposed to leave this week for Palestine, but the transport has been delayed indefinitely. Uncle Fritz thinks we should all report for the next transport. Arnold would join us. And so my thoughts are working day and night, and I just don’t know what to do next.
Line by line, I pored over the letter, seeking to understand. Because Emil was the first to glimpse the shadows on the horizon and to encourage my father to go to Canada, I expected him to provide details that others had missed. Although many questions remain, his letter did not disappoint.
Longingly we awaited your first news about your trip and your arrival in Antwerp.
Longingly. Sehnsüchtig. The poetically positioned adverb is as strikingly out of place in German as it is in English. I must remind myself that these words were penned not by a poet, but by a practical, down-to-earth businessman. I double-check Martha’s part of the letter, and note that she has added a postscript that she underlines. Emil is very lonely for you .
How seldom in my world today do I hear a man acknowledge being lonely, let alone for his brother-in-law? Martha’s words are a testimonial to the level of affection between these two men, and to the depth of my father’s loss. Emil had been not just his brother-in-law, but also his confidant and best friend.
I was just over visiting your parents at 11 o’clock in the morning when your letter arrived.
Morning finds Emil at his daily post: visiting my mother’s parents, Max and Resl. I knew that it was Emil’s promise to look after them that had finally convinced my mother to leave for Canada. There has never been, and there still is no doubt in my mind that my mother firmly expected her parents to follow. Realities and potential complications would not have prevented her from believing whatever she needed to believe. Because Emil had assured her that he would look after Max and Resl and book their immediate passage to Canada, my mother left Europe convinced that she and her parents would soon be reunited.
I visit Gretl’s parents twice a day and do all their errands.
I try to imagine the scene that greeted Emil every morning. My grandmother Resl would be sitting quietly in a chair, barely registering Emil’s knock at the door. In a misguided attempt to cure my grandmother’s menopausal symptoms, the medical experts of the early 1930s had destroyed her mind. Fearing the approach of her own menopausal symptoms, my mother had often told me the story. It had only been mid-day when my grandmother took off her apron for the last time. Bone-weary from cooking, cleaning, raising two children as well as daily bookkeeping and work in the shop that was my grandparents’ livelihood, she had sunk into her chair and spoken the fatal words: “I cannot. I am too tired. I just cannot do it anymore.” They had sent her off to a sanatorium for electroshock treatment to regain her ability to work. Now she could barely function.
I try to picture my grandfather Max opening the door to admit Emil. Even on a weekday morning, Max would be formally attired in a three-piece suit befitting his self-image as pater familias. Although he would proffer Emil a hearty welcome, there would not even be a cup of coffee waiting. If his wife could no longer serve him and his daughters had run off to foreign parts, then someone else would have to fill that breach.
Every detail leads me to another question. If my grandmother Resl was unable to function, who did the actual cooking? Surely not Emil, for men of his class and generation stayed out of the kitchen. Did Martha prepare extra food that Emil brought over? An unlikely scenario because my mother’s father was among the very few observant German Jews who insisted on a strictly kosher diet. He would have refused food prepared in Martha’s kitchen.
Beyond the family specifics, how did my grandfather and other observant Jews cope with having to violate dietary principles that had been among the very foundations of their life? Did such issues dwindle in importance compared to all else that was happening?
My grandparents Max and Resl were completely dependent on others. They had remained in Germany until 1937, when Anny had finally convinced them to come to Czechoslovakia. Their assets remained frozen in Germany, as did Emil’s in Austria. How did Emil cope? In Prague only on a visitor’s visa and denied gainful employment, he must have felt so superfluous. Not once but twice a day, he visits Max and Resl and does all their errands.
What were these errands and what was my grandfather doing while Emil did the errands? Max was only in his early fifties, and in the prime of life. Back home in Cham, Germany, he had been president of the town’s Jewish congregation. For many years, he had also been a member of Cham’s volunteer fire brigade, a responsibility that would only have been entrusted to a fit and healthy man.
When the Nazis first came to power in Germany in 1933, my mother had not yet married and was still living at home. As the new regulations came into effect, there had been a knock at the door. It was a neighbour, telling her father that a Jew could no longer be a fireman, not even as a volunteer. Silently, my grandmother had opened her sewing basket, taken out her best scissors, and cut the brass buttons from the jacket that Max would never wear again.
I opened the letter and Papa read it to us.
I note with interest that although Emil opens the letter, it is Papa Max who reads it aloud. The letter may be intended for the whole family, but Emil defers to the older man. Emil again stresses his personal loneliness.
We were all overjoyed to have good news from you, and we all have only one wish: that the dear Lord continue to accompany you all the way to your destination. Whenever I’m so lonely for you, I comfort myself with the thought that at last, after such a long time, in a matter of days you will have reached your place of rest.
Emil’s list of additional responsibilities was long. Already in charge of my grandparents, he was now also being asked to ship both our belongings and those of my mother’s sister Anny.
Your furniture is packed up in a lift (a large shipping crate) next to Anny’s things and the expediter will ship both lifts together. It is totally impossible to send Anny the extras she has requested.
What were Emil’s thoughts as such requests were made? With all his assets frozen in Austria, what was his source of food and rent? How did he make decisions when all about him the sands of reality were shifting?
As dear Martha has just written, we are waiting for your report in order to get a picture of what our chances are of getting there. At the moment, there is absolutely no possibility of being allowed to emigrate.
For a very long time, I sat unseeing with this letter in my lap. “At the moment there is absolutely no possibility of being allowed to emigrate.” The words are so freezingly final. Only a week after our departure, the situation had become hopeless. How narrowly we had escaped!
Starting over
HOW DID WE GAIN ADMISSION to Canada when others found all doors locked?
I fear that the one person who deserves credit for our entry, my Aunt Anny, has gone to her grave with nary a thank you. The day of her funeral, I went to the market and bought all the yellow ros
es I could find and threw them on her casket. A small cluster of mourners stood by the grave on that cold and rainy day. There were a few neighbours and acquaintances, but no one who knew her well. Her only sister did not attend.
Family histories are complex, and none more so than for those whose wounds have not healed. My Aunt Anny died childless, but for years she let people think that I was her daughter. She loved it when others would say, “It’s okay. We Canadians are modern. These days it’s no shame to have had a child out of wedlock. We know that you only pretend Helen is your sister’s child. Helen is so like you. And look, Ludwig now loves her just as much as you do.”
It would not have been a far stretch to imagine my aunt breaking that social taboo. My mother had always been the good girl in the family while her sister played the role of the wild one. An early photo shows Anny astride a motorcycle. Although two years younger than my mother, it was always Anny who dared, Anny who defied authority, and Anny who ventured into forbidden territory.
Anny, seated provocatively on the bonnet of a car
Both Anny and my mother loved to tell tales of their childhood. I remember the story of Papa Max who enjoyed the occasional stein of beer, fresh from the barrel at the local pub. Because he preferred to sip it at home in the comfort of his armchair, he often sent the girls out to fetch him a beer in the evening. Anny always slurped off the white foam, never flinching when Max complained that the publican was becoming stingy with his liquid measurements.
Anny Grünhut, a beauty with her hair cut short
Later, there were more serious clashes with parental authority. On a holiday visit to relatives, Anny brazenly cut her long tresses and returned home sporting a flapper bob. Next, she demanded the right to move to Regensburg, where she apprenticed as a technician on Roentgen’s new X-ray device. There, she fell in love with a doctor.
The affair was passionate, but it did not end happily. It was the early 1930s and Hitler was already chancellor of Germany. Anny was a Jew; the doctor was Aryan. He chose safety.
Heartbroken, Anny watched as her sister garnered all the accolades. Gretl, the blushing bride in virginal white splendour. Gretl, the mother-to-be, proudly patting her visible badge of womanhood. Gretl, the mother of a healthy child, little Helen born in 1936.
Anny was nobody’s fool. Her sister and her parents might well be totally focused upon this new infant, but Anny saw what was happening in Germany. Anny knew that she had to do something. Getting herself and her parents out of Germany had to be the priority. She would make it her priority.
Czechoslovakia was the obvious place to go. Much of the country was German speaking, so it would be an easy transition in terms of language. It was a democracy created and backed by the League of Nations. Thanks to a midnight blue ball gown and a fortuitous invitation to a New Year’s Eve dance, Gretl was already there, living in the tiny village of Strobnitz.
All Anny needed was a Czech husband. She whispered her request to a relative who whispered it to another woman and soon, the matchmaking was done. Ludwig Ekstein agreed to marry Anny Grünhut.
Ludwig was a slightly older man with the best of references and connections. He was a prosperous landowner with an excellent reputation as a cattle-dealer. This line of work attracted many a scoundrel, but Ludwig was the rare exception: a man who honoured his word.
Anny had tried the route of love and found it wanting. She agreed to follow the path of reason. Hastily, she and Ludwig were wed, Anny in a suit and matching hat and carrying a simple bouquet of yellow roses. She moved into his house in Bischofteinitz near Pilsen and promptly did what she had set out to do. She got her parents out of Germany. It was 1937.
By 1938, Czechoslovakia no longer seemed like such a safe place. When Hitler annexed Austria in March of that year, several of Ludwig’s cousins said, “We’re next. Hitler will take Czechoslovakia.”
In the face of hundreds of thousands of Jews clamouring to flee Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, Canada closed its doors. A memorandum to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, prepared jointly by the Departments of External Affairs and Mines and Resources on November 29,1938, stated the blunt reality: “We do not want to take in too many Jews, but in the present circumstances, we do not want to say so. ”3 In major centres like Prague, the only sources of information for would-be immigrants to Canada were agents from the Canadian National Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR, known colloquially as “The Canadian”) who were seeking to attract settlers to the lands granted to them by the Canadian government for having completed the Canadian railway.
Gretl as a new mother,
elegantly attired for her afternoon walk in Strobnitz
Wedding, Anny and Ludwig Ekstein
Ludwig’s cattle-dealer cousins invited a representative of the Canadian Pacific Railway to visit their rural holdings near Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. Impressed by their industriousness, the cpr representative agreed to put forward a special recommendation to the Canadian authorities. Shortly thereafter, Ludwig’s cousins were granted permission to buy land in Canada and to immigrate as Czech farmers.
Did no one in Ottawa realize that Ludwig and Ludwig’s cousins were Jews? Was F. C. Blair, Director of the Immigration Branch of the Department of Mines and Resources sick or on holidays when the application was sent to Ottawa?
I have directed my questions to numerous history professors whose specialty is Canada in the 1930s. They all say the same thing: “Someone was asleep at the switch. ” Immigration officials likely did not realize that the leader of the Czech group was a Jew. Ludwig’s cousin Karl Abeles was far from the stereotypical Jew that Canadian newspapers of the day portrayed as dark, hunched, and hook-nosed. Karl Abeles was a big, blond man with a handlebar moustache. From his occasional visits to our farm, I remember him as robust and outgoing, with a jovial manner that would fit right into a contemporary beer commercial.
In November of 1938, Anny and Ludwig joined his cousins in Ontario at the Ridge Farm near what was then the small village of Mount Hope, south of Hamilton. Anny and Ludwig immediately sponsored my mother, father, and me to immigrate to Canada.
An IDcard issued by the CPRto Edmund Waldstein
And so, on April 16,1939, we stepped off the old S. S. Montcalm in Saint John, New Brunswick. From there we travelled by train to Montreal where Mimi greeted us. This dear friend, now in her nineties, was then a beautiful young woman whose parents had sent her to Canada with an aunt and uncle related by marriage to the Czech cousins that included my Uncle Ludwig.
Mimi was in Montreal to see Mr. James Colley of the cpr. She had been told that Mr. Colley held the candle of life and the sword of death over the head of each family member now trapped in Europe. Mimi hoped that by making a personal appeal, she could break through the wall of red tape and bring her parents to Canada.
When I asked how she recognized us, Mimi laughed. “It was easy,” she said. “You were obviously foreigners. A skinny man in a too large suit, and an elegant woman in a heavy wool dress with matching cape and feathered hat who was holding the hand of a little girl in a beige velveteen coat with a brown collar. You looked so out of place, so benebbicht.”
Although the Yiddish expression—an adjective for a person who has become an object of pity after failing so often and so miserably—is difficult to translate, I can easily picture the scene. Indeed, the feel of that scratchy collar, so drab and drearily brown, remains etched in my memory, as does the texture and drama of my mother’s bottle-green ensemble.
Because their documents labelled them as Czech farmers, my parents put aside their fine clothes and prepared for a new way of life. They had promised the Canadian government that they would farm for a minimum of five years.
It was a big leap. My mother needed to go from being the belle of the village ball to plucking and disembowelling chickens, milking large, ungainly cows, and feeding slop to pigs that disgusted her. My father needed to say farewell to a life that was all he’d ever wanted, and step into a life
that he hated. He was completely unsuited to farming. His thin body never filled out and his hands remained clumsy. Worse, he was ashamed. He lived in daily humiliation at what he had done. He had reduced to a life of drudgery his Gretl, the beautiful bride to whom he had promised the world.
At first, my parents and I lived communally on the Ridge farm, crowded together with the entire clan of Ludwig’s cousins. As soon as possible, my father and Ludwig pooled their resources and purchased their own farm several miles south of Mount Hope. Their overriding hope was that someday my mother’s parents and all the members of my father’s family would join us there.
They chose the Wren farm because it was cheap, as were many farms in the 1930s. Canadians had fled to the cities in the wake of the Depression, preferring to seek well-paying work in the factories rather than till the land.
The Wren farm was doubly cheap because it consisted of 180 acres that no one wanted. The land was uneven and planting was difficult. Parts were swampy and never seemed to dry out. The fields contained more rocks than fertile soil. Where fences existed, their posts leaned at odd angles. The barn and outbuildings threatened to collapse in the next strong wind.
Still, a beginning was made. Ludwig and my father bought a neighbour’s cow that was dead by morning. They bought another cow and my mother heated its milk on the wood-burning stove in the kitchen. To this day, the smell of warm milk lingers in my memory along with the skin it formed as it cooled in the cup. To this day, I drink my coffee black and the very smell of hot cocoa makes me gag.
More cows were added to the stable, and the barn became a favourite place for me. It was my mother’s job to do the milking. I still picture her perched fearfully on the little milking stool, pulling the teats until the warm milk squirted into the tin pail. Whenever she got up to empty it into the big milk can in the cooling shed, she’d sigh as she tucked a stray lock of hair under the red bandanna she always wore in the barn.
Letters From the Lost Page 5