Mrs. Berger started distributing the letters. When I heard her call “Gerda,” I jumped up, but it was for another Gerda: Gerda Feldmann.
The pile of letters grew smaller and smaller. Mrs. Berger looked at her last letter. Quite a few pairs of eyes watched her anxiously. I felt a burning and twitching inside. Then her eyes wandered over the girls. She halted when she saw me, and said the unbelievable, “Gerda Weissmann!”
I grabbed the letter from her hand. My moist eyes spotted Papa’s name. I ran to the fence outdoors, I wanted to read it alone. As I started to tear it open, I suddenly realized that the beloved name on the envelope was written in my handwriting. Over it, in black ink, was: “Return to sender, moved without forwarding address.”
I wanted to scream, but no sound came. I wanted to cry, but no tears came. I clutched the barbed wire and shook feverishly. I wanted to run out–to run and look for my father.
Ilse joined me. She did not ask any questions, but looked instead at the unopened envelope in my hand. She wanted to talk to me, but I would not listen, and I couldn’t speak. Finally she went to Mrs. Berger and told her about the returned letter.
Mrs. Berger summoned me to her room. I stood there and she questioned me, but I could not answer her. Finally, she told me to sit down on her bed. As I did so, she slapped me. Instinctively my hand went up to my cheek. I shook my head.
“I am sorry,” she said, “I wanted to jolt you out of it.”
I started to leave, but Mrs. Berger took me by the shoulder and turned me around. With her cold eyes she looked into mine, and she held me.
“Talk, Gerda,” she said. “Speak to me.”
I shook my head.
She released the pressure and pushed me toward a chair. She showed me a picture of a man and a boy.
“This is my husband and my son,” she said. “I don’t know where they are, either of them. We are all in the same boat. Have you any pictures?”
I went to get a couple of snapshots which I had in my coat pocket.
“Show me your father,” she said.
I had a picture of Papa taken a few years before, when he had gone to Turkey for my uncle’s wedding. The picture was taken during a boat ride on the Bosporus. It was Papa at his best: young, handsome, and energetic. Not my poor sick Papa. Full of pride, I held his picture out to Mrs. Berger, while in my other hand I held the letter he had not received.
She looked at the picture a while and then she put it back into my hand.
“Look at the picture, Gerda,” she commanded, “for your father is dead.”
I looked at the picture, I looked at her.
“He is dead,” she repeated. “You will never see him again, nor your mother.”
“Dead” imprinted itself in my brain. My lips formed to say the word, but no sound came.
“Cry, Gerda,” Mrs. Berger persisted. “Cry for your dead father.”
Then something within me snapped, something wild and horrible. I made a terrible sound, the sound a dying animal might make, the sound Papa made the day Arthur left. It shook me out of my muteness. Without a tear, I cried for my father. My sobbing tore my insides, it pulled at my heart, but my eyes remained dry.
When I calmed down, Mrs. Berger sent me to my bunk. Ilse was most understanding–she said nothing. Finally the lights were put out. Some of the girls whispered a bit. Then silence fell, and in this silence I started to think of home again. Not of the ghetto nor the cellar, but our home as it had been before the war. I thought of Papa, Mama, and Arthur, and all the happy times we had had together.
These happy thoughts were comforting. Memory upon memory, things long forgotten, came back to life. And from that night on, whenever I thought of my parents I thought of them in the happy times before the war, their faces perfect, not distorted by sorrow and hurt–too perfect, perhaps, for ordinary life, too perfect for an adult eye and mind, but so right for me.
Slowly I fell into an exhausted sleep on that horrible day. My parents were so alive in my mind that I could see them coming into my room and bending over my bed to kiss me good night. I smiled, stretched my arms out to them. My lips formed the first word that I had ever spoken: “Papa.”
Chapter 5
IT WAS IN AUGUST THAT I FIRST WROTE TO ABEK, BEGGING HIM to tell me if he had heard from Papa.
Shortly thereafter I received mail from Abek and from then on his letters came almost daily. Abek had heard from Papa right after our separation. He told me that he had tried and failed to get Papa into the camp where he was interned in Bielitz. Papa had written me a letter and left it with Abek. I asked Abek to forward the letter to me, yet I waited for it in vain. In his next letter he told me how distressed his parents were about their failure to keep me in Sosnowitz, but he made no mention of Papa’s letter. When he finally sent it, I knew why he had not wanted me to read it. The nervous scribbling only faintly reminded me of Papa’s firm, energetic hand. Papa asked me why I had left Mama? That question, written in his shaking hand, burned within me for years, for Papa never learned the answer to it.
Abek’s letters were mostly romantic and far removed from everyday life. Sometimes there would be only a couple of lines such as: “It is 528 hours since I last saw you. How am I to stand it much longer?” I remember the day when he wrote that he had been one of a group to go the Bielitz ghetto, to clean out several rooms. He came across a few family photographs in a drawer in our former apartment and he said that he would send them to me in his next letter.
It was a hot, hot day late in summer, and I had a splitting headache. The looms were behaving badly, the brittle yarn kept breaking, and I wasn’t able to maintain the required rate of production. The harder I tried the more I fell behind. My feet and ankles were swollen. I felt utterly discouraged.
Then the worst possible thing happened. I heard a noise and crash, and the shuttle leaped up from the cloth web like a silver fish. As it dropped it tore thousands of warp threads. I stood speechless, unable to imagine how it had happened. I examined the shuttle and saw that the lid was off the bobbin holder. Either it had broken off or perhaps in my haste when refilling it I had not closed it securely.
Desperately with shaking fingers, I tried to repair the damage before I was discovered. But I knew that it would take hours. When the whistle blew at quitting time my loom was still not in order.
That night I didn’t feel like eating and went to my bunk to lie down. Mrs. Berger came by and handed me two letters from Abek. As I opened the first, a few pictures fell out–the ones that Abek had found. One was of Papa’s father taken when he was a very old man. He had a high forehead and a long white beard. I had never known Grandpa Weissmann, because he had died when I was less than a year old. Papa had told us many stories about his father but the one which I remembered filled me with new miraculous faith. He and my grandmother had ten children, five of whom died at an early age. My father was the oldest of the remaining children. During the First World War, my grandparents lived on the Austro-Russian frontier. Anna, their only daughter, lived with them and their four sons were in the Austrian army. The border area changed hands frequently and in 1915 became Russian again. One day Grandfather, who was then in his seventies, went for a walk in the woods. He met a group of drunken Russian soldiers who accused him of laying telephone wires through the woods. I am sure Grandfather had never seen or heard a telephone in his life. Nevertheless, without a trial, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Siberia.
I recall my grandmother telling of the day when she and my Aunt Anna said their last good-by to the kindly old man with his long white beard.
Years passed, the war ended, my father’s three brothers returned home. Papa had married meanwhile and moved to Bielitz. Then one windy, cold evening, my grandmother, who was living with her younger sons and daughter, heard a knock on their front door. They opened the door and an old man staggered in. He first went to his precious Bibles and kissed them, then he embraced his wife and children. My grandfather had come
back! After the Revolution the Bolsheviks had granted amnesty to Czarist prisoners and Grandfather, after many months’ journey, had returned home. He had hardly dared to hope that all his sons would survive the war. They all had.
Always with a quiver in his voice, Papa would tell how he, Mama, and Arthur (one year old at the time) had traveled four days by train across the war-ravaged countryside to see Grandfather. The old man had greeted Papa with the words Jacob had spoken when Joseph had brought his children for benediction. “I had not thought to see thy face again and lo, God hath shewed me also thy seed.”
As I looked at the picture in the dim light of my bunk, my kindly old Grandfather seemed to be saying: “Have faith, my child, have faith in God.”
Meister Zimmer appeared at my looms the next morning. Before he spoke he looked first at me and then at the damage. He must have realized how hard I had worked to repair the broken threads, for he only said in his most abrupt manner: “See that this never happens again.”
Early in September I got my first letter from Arthur. “At last,” I whispered to myself, tearing it open. Yet, this letter that I had looked forward to so long left me troubled. Arthur wrote that he was working and was well and that his only worry was for my welfare. However, there was something about the letter that was not Arthur; strength, hope, and vitality seemed to have been drained from him; even the writing of the message seemed to have been a tremendous chore. When I answered him the following Sunday, I tried to be cheerful in order to break down the barrier that had risen between us. I asked whether he was ill, whether there was something he was keeping from me. His next letter was the same, almost word for word, as the first. I was distressed.
Ilse’s warm friendship and the long talks I had with her and Suse helped a great deal to overcome my worry about Arthur. Talking with the other girls and hearing their problems helped, too.
There was one Bielitz girl, Greta, whom I liked in particular. She was always cheerful. “You know,” she said to me one day, “I actually was never happier than now.” I gasped in sheer disbelief, and then she told me her story. She had been born out of wedlock. Her mother had always worked and Greta had never had a home. She had drifted from family to family. Some children were not allowed to play with her. “I looked at all those kids,” she said, “and you were probably among them–with your frilly dresses, your patent leather shoes, your fretting nannies and doting parents. I always was on the outside. Now finally we are equals. Yes, it’s true, I have never been happier than I am now.”
We had been in camp for three months when Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, came. We all said that we would fast. Meister Zimmer somehow heard about it. He warned that severe punishment would be meted out to anyone who feigned illness or did not produce the prescribed amount of material.
Nevertheless, we all fasted. We worked harder than ever but no one touched food until there were three stars in the evening sky. There was a proud serenity about every one of us, a sense of accomplishment.
That night the heat was unbearable. I could not sleep, and after tossing in my bunk for a long while, I went out into the courtyard. The air was heavy. In the distance, the hills were dark against the rising full moon. The stillness was frightening. The world seemed to be awaiting Judgment Day.
I pressed my head against the wire fence and prayed. Then I noticed two girls clinging to the fence near me. One of them was named Tusia. She was tall, thin, and ugly. I am sure that I never quite understood her but when she spoke I could not help but listen. She reminded me of a giraffe: her small head was set on a long neck, her round eyes were far apart, her mouth was full and wide. She walked toward me and looked down in her peculiar way. “I was very much like you,” she said. “I hope you will never be disillusioned. To you life still means beauty, and that is how it should be. Continue to go through mud without dirtying your feet.” She spoke without explanation or introduction and without finishing, and then she stalked away toward our quarters.
I heard stifled crying and turned back to the fence. The second girl was still there. She was Lotte, one of the girls who worked in the kitchen. I walked over to her and waited without saying a word. Her sobs stopped and she wiped away the tears from behind her thick glasses. “It would have been so different, so different,” she whispered. Then she told me her story.
“My mother left my father when I was a few weeks old. We went to live with my grandmother. Mother was wealthy, but my father gambled. The night I was born, father lost our house playing cards. Shortly after that Mother left him. She never spoke of him until one day when I was seven, she called me into her room and asked if I wanted to meet my father. I had often thought about him, but never dared to ask mother if what the servants had whispered was true. My heart beat wildly–I had never dared to hope that I would meet him. I had heard that he traveled a lot, but that he never came to our town. ‘He is not here,’ Mother said. ‘You will go to another town to see him.’
“I couldn’t sleep that night. Would I really see my daddy? What was it like to meet one’s real father? How would he look? What would he say? What would he buy me?
“I made the journey with my nurse. We came to his hotel and when she knocked at father’s door I held onto her firmly. Suddenly the door burst open and before I could utter a word, a tall man lifted me high, and kissed me over and over again. I felt a peculiar tickling on my face. It was Daddy’s beard. I had never felt the face of a man before. It was the most wonderful day of my life. I got more dolls and toys that day than ever before in my entire life. He bought me sweets and let me eat all I wanted, something Mother never permitted. It was like a birthday and a circus rolled into one. I had found my daddy.
“When we left and I cried, he said to me lovingly, ‘I shall see you soon again, my darling.’
“Mother was anxious to hear all the details of my visit. Soon letters, cards, and presents started to pour in. From faraway places Daddy sent everything that a little girl could dream of. He was an engineer. He built bridges and traveled from England to many countries in Europe. Then, more than a year later, he wrote that he was coming back home, and would Mama and I meet him? Mother was very excited. She bought a new green hat and looked very pretty. We met Daddy and had dinner together. How happy I was!” Lotte stopped talking. Her hand clutched the fence as she gazed into the starry night as if to recapture that dinner when she was eight years old, and for the first time sat at the same table with both her parents.
“How happy I was,” she repeated, tears glistening in her eyes behind her thick glasses.
“Before Daddy left, he saw Mother alone. Then he called me and said, ‘I am going back to England to wait for a letter from your mother. When it comes, we shall always be together.’
“In the next few days Mother wrote the letter. A few days later an enthusiastic telegram came. Daddy just had a few business details to take care of, and then he would come to get us. We started packing feverishly. We were to make our home in England with Daddy. Then a few days later a second telegram came. Mama tore it open quickly. She went pale. Daddy had been killed in ‘a train wreck on his journey to us. On his body they had found Mother’s letter with an address.”
That was the story of Lotte’s childhood. The rest of her life story I can tell in its entirety. We went from camp to camp. In February, 1945, on the infamous death march to Czechoslovakia, I saw Lotte’s corpse thrown into a hastily dug mass grave: her glasses gone, her eyes half-open, a sad smile on her lips. I saw the frozen earth thrown onto her. That was Lotte. I cannot help but want to tell her story, for I might be the only one left in the world who knows it.
The days grew colder. Fall came. In November Abek sent me a big parcel containing warm clothes, a coat, a sweater, a scarf. He thought of everything. I still had my skiing shoes Papa had insisted I wear and so I was prepared for cold weather. One evening as we marched from the factory to our quarters it was snowing. Later that night, when the lights were put out, I got up from my bunk and walked noisel
essly to the window. I watched the first snow fall softly to the ground.
Pictures from the past came to me: a crackling fire, Papa smoking his pipe, Mama embroidering in exciting, bright hues, silk wound around her white, swiftly moving fingers, Arthur reading, I playing with my cats–Schmutzi, my favorite, purring gently. Wonderful days and evenings. I marveled that we had taken life so for granted … .
Christmas approached–we could feel the hustle and bustle in the factory. Goebbels was feeding his people with reports of new victories to make Christmas more pleasant.
The day before Christmas we were assigned to clean the looms thoroughly. It was bitter cold and the vast halls were not heated. My fingers froze to the iron bars suspended between the looms. My throat filled with the year’s accumulation of lint and dust that we brushed away. I was cold through and through and I looked eagerly forward to a shower and something hot to drink.
When we got back to our quarters late Christmas Eve, the hot water had been turned off. We learned that we had to get up early and finish the cleaning on Christmas morning, and that after that we would get two days off. Frozen and shivering, we went back to work in the early hours of the morning, and were done by noon. Then we were allowed to take hot showers. How delicious the water felt on my body! It warmed me and made my pale skin glow; it washed away the dirt and fatigue. Ahead stretched two full free days! As I combed my hair by the window, I saw bright sunshine on the snow. Quickly I put on my coat to go out to the courtyard. On my way I met Mrs. Berger.
“Oh, Gerda,” she called, walking back toward her room, “there is mail for you from yesterday.”
It was a letter from Arthur. I passed several girls throwing snowballs, and walked over to the fence before I opened the envelope. It contained a frayed, dirty piece of paper, covered with a few uneven lines. Arthur was in a camp, I should not worry, he would try to write again.
All But My Life Page 13