Several weeks later he returned to Berlin. This time there was no fanfare, no dinners with Hitler or Goebbels, no endorsement deals, no parades in his honor. The homecoming barely got a mention in the sports pages of the paper. I did find one small photo of Max and Anny getting out of the back of a car together and entering the Excelsior Hotel. So at least I knew he had not been jailed.
The photograph also confirmed that he was staying at the location where I had sent my letter. Yet after several weeks I did not receive a reply, so I wrote him again, and again, and again, one identical letter every few days, hoping that one of them would get through. But I never heard back. I imagined my letter lost in a vast sea of fan mail. Or worse, perhaps Max was just coldly ignoring my pleas.
That summer and fall every week seemed to bring a new piece of bad news for the Jews of Germany, like logs being thrown onto a flame that was burning hotter and wilder. In July all Jews were required to carry special identification cards at all times. Jewish doctors were downgraded to the status of medical attendants and were no longer allowed to treat Aryan patients; and Jewish lawyers were forbidden to practice law. Incidents of anti-Jewish vandalism steadily rose and became more and more brazen. A group of Nazi thugs destroyed the great synagogue in Munich. Eventually we were even required to have a J stamped on our passports.
The Nazi repression of the Jews seemed to march in step with their global aggression as first they annexed Austria and then the Sudetenland, a portion of Czechoslovakia with a large German population. The world seemed to be letting the Nazis get away with anything they wanted.
My father and mother reacted to each piece of news in the morning or afternoon editions of the paper with growing dismay and dread. My father would read a story and mutter: “They can’t do this.”
“They already have,” my mother would reply.
Then two horrible events hit in quick succession. First fifteen thousand Polish Jews were expelled from Germany and sent back to Poland. As my father read the headline aloud at the breakfast table, my mother grabbed the paper from his hands.
“You see,” she yelled. “They’re running us off like nothing more than animals. Like you’d herd a cow.”
“So what do you want me to do about it?”
“Something! Anything!” my mother replied.
“You think I’m not trying?”
“Try harder!” she snapped.
“Thanks for your support,” Papa spat back bitterly. “All you do is sit in the bath all day. You think that helps?”
“I have to find some escape. I can’t stand sitting around watching you do nothing!”
“You’re such a genius? You think of something!”
He quickly rose from the table and walked out of the gallery. He was gone all day. After sundown I started to worry that he was gone for good. It was not uncommon for men unable to provide for their families to simply disappear. Maybe he had decided to leave us to fend for ourselves, or worse, perhaps he had been arrested for selling degenerate art or something he had printed. We all went to bed that night without any word from him. I couldn’t sleep. I nervously watched the clock as the minutes ticked by, hoping and waiting for him to come back.
Finally, at 1:30 a.m., I heard the front door swing open. The smell of him blew in with the wind as he stepped inside. The faint odor of cigars and cheap peppermint schnapps shot through the gallery and into the basement. I heard snippets of his argument with my mother in harsh whispers.
“So you still have money for liquor and cigars, but not to help your family.”
“I’m trying to do business. Businessmen drink. Art collectors drink.”
“So do the whores on Friedrichstrasse.”
“That’s enough, Rebecca!”
They went back and forth for nearly an hour in the same circle of accusation, anger, and frustration until they ran out steam and lapsed into bitter silence, and I was certain that they had both fallen asleep.
The next morning, the paper brought even worse news. A Polish Jew living in France named Herschel Grynszpan, whose family had been deported from Germany back to Poland, had entered the German Embassy in Paris and shot and killed a German diplomat named Ernst vom Rath. As my father silently read the story, his face turned white, and he quietly handed the paper over to my mother, who reacted with a similar petrified silence.
That night we were just finishing dinner when there was a knock at the door. We all froze. There was another another knock and then the urgent voice of a man.
“Sigmund? It’s Dolph Lutz.”
“Lutz?” my father said, rising to answer the door.
He opened the door, and Lutz quickly stepped inside and closed it.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said. “But I had to warn you.”
My mother, Hildy, and I came to the front of the gallery to join them.
“Warn me?”
“The Nazis have taken to the streets and are attacking Jews and Jewish businesses.”
My mother gasped and covered her mouth.
“What about the police?” my father asked.
“We’ve been ordered to stand down.”
“Stand down?”
“Ja. Look, I really have to go. I suggest you just lock your doors and windows and turn off the lights, so no one thinks anyone is here.”
Lutz moved back to the door.
“I will try to check on you later, but I can’t make any promises. I’m sorry,” he said quietly, and then slipped back outside.
My father double locked the door behind him and turned out the lights.
“Get to the back room,” he instructed, “and don’t make a sound.”
We all huddled together in the back room, afraid to talk or even move. We must have sat like that for nearly an hour, listening to one another breathing. My sister coughed, and we all shot her angry glances to suppress it. At first the street was quiet. An occasional car drove past like it was any other night.
Finally we heard loud voices approaching in the distance. The first distinct sound I heard was laughter. Then the voices grew louder and more menacing. None of us dared get up to look out the front window, but we could hear jackboots clomping on the sidewalk, crashing sounds, screams, cries, and beer hall chants.
Finally a group stopped directly in front of the gallery.
“I think this is a Jew store,” a young man’s voice shouted.
“Yeah! I think they had jewelry in there.”
“No, it was an art gallery,” another chimed in.
“It’s been closed for years, though.”
“Yeah, but I bet they’ve got lots of money hidden in there.”
“Open up, Jew!”
A loud pounding came at the door. Hildy cried and pressed herself close to our mother.
“Keep quiet!” my father whispered.
“Open the door or we’ll break it down!”
More loud pounding and jiggling of the handle. Then a barrage of kicks and punches against the old wood, until I couldn’t imagine the door holding out much longer.
“Wait! Wait!” one of them finally said.
There was a beat of silence. Were they going to give up?
Then a massive crashing sound erupted from the front of the gallery as the large plate glass window smashed. My father stood up.
“Stay here!” he directed my mother and Hildy. “Karl, you come.”
We had no weapons in the house, so my father grabbed a mop handle and thrust it into my hands and then took a rusty old hammer out of one of the desk drawers for himself.
“Come on.” He gestured to me to follow him.
“Sig, be careful!” my mother said.
He boldly stepped forward and led me down the dark makeshift hallway between the curtains to the front of the gallery. When we emerged into the front room, we saw our plate glass window had been shattered by a tossed garbage can that lay on the floor tipped up against the couch. A group of young men poured through the window like angry bees from a h
ive. There were four of them, dressed in neatly pressed brown shirts and black leather jackboots. They all carried clubs, and their eyes were wild with bloodlust and the thrill of their violent adventure. The leader was a tall man with wavy blond hair whom I thought I recognized from the neighborhood, but I couldn’t be sure in the half-light.
My father raised the hammer over his head.
“Get out of here! This is our home!”
“You have no home in Germany anymore, Jew!” the leader said.
My father’s eyes narrowed, and he squared his shoulders and seemed to stand even more erect.
“I am a German!”
He suddenly rushed at the man, howling at the top of his voice.
The men were taken by surprise by my father’s attack. The leader was barely able to dodge my father’s hammer blow. It grazed the side of his arm, ripping through his shirt and cutting a thin bloody line down his forearm. He growled in pain.
“You’ll pay for that.”
All four men moved toward my father with their clubs. I stood dumbstruck for a moment as I watched him fend them off with expert self-defense moves he must have learned in the army. He swung the hammer at them in quick wide chops, keeping them at a distance, until the four of them spread out and charged him at once. Papa was able to toss two of them to the ground before the other two grabbed him and pulled him down.
I ran at them with my mop handle and tried to beat them away from my father, who was now on the bottom of the pile, receiving a vicious series of whacks from their clubs.
Two of them broke off from the pile and came after me. I had never fought with a stick, and it felt awkward in my hands. I was not quite sure how to attack or defend with it. I wished I could square off against them in a boxing ring, where I’d know exactly what to do. So I stupidly tossed my weapon aside and attacked one of the men with a quick combination of punches. I landed only two blows before the other man hit me over the head with his club and I went down hard. I tried to cover myself as they both pounded me with their clubs and kicked me.
I saw that my father had somehow managed to disarm one of the attackers. He had him pinned on the ground by the throat with one hand while he fought off the other with the hammer in his free hand. In that moment my father seemed mightier than Superman, Barney Ross, or the Mongrel. Unlike our attackers, who looked wild and out of control, almost frothing at the mouth, my father appeared composed, focused, and determined.
Then the man beneath my father writhed under his grip, crawled one of his hands along the floor, and grabbed a jagged shard of glass, a deadly six-inch triangle.
“Papa!” I screamed.
But before my father could react, the man plunged the piece of glass into my father’s side.
My father gasped in agony and released the man’s neck. The man stuck the glass deeper into his side and then stood over him and kicked at my father’s face. I lunged over to try to protect him, but the two other men pulled me back down. I felt the edges of their boots stomping on the back of my head and neck until everything went black.
Drop Cloth
I FELT THE BACK OF MY HEAD THROBBING AGAINST THE floor and my eyeballs pulsing beneath my closed lids, pushing up against the painful blackness. When I finally opened my eyes, a dark image hovered above me. Slowly the image came into focus, and I saw Hildy staring at me with a look of terror.
“He’s waking up!”
I struggled to sit up. My head felt heavy, and my vision whirled in dark circles. It took a moment for the room to come back into sharp focus. All the curtains had been ripped down, leaving the gallery exposed as the one raw room it really was. Furniture had been overturned and destroyed, pillows slashed and dishes broken. The floor was covered with a layer of feathers, splintered wood, and shards of glass.
Through the darkness, I finally saw my mother sitting against the back wall, cradling my father in her arms. Deep red blood stained the entire side and front of his white shirt.
I pulled myself to my feet but almost immediately fell back down from the dizziness. I touched the side of my head and felt several large contusions jutting up along the back of my skull like a patch of small half-cut oranges. A deep warm gash ran down just behind my left ear.
“Karl, stay down,” I heard my father call out in a weak voice. “Give yourself a minute for your head to settle.”
“Sig, please don’t try to talk!” my mother said.
But despite his weakness, my father took charge.
“Hildy, come bring your mother some of my shirts for her to use as bandages.”
Hildy fetched a couple of his shirts from the ground, and my father sat up.
“Tear them into strips,” he commanded.
My mother did as instructed and tore the shirts into long strips.
“Good, now wrap them around me, here,” he said, indicating his midsection.
He grunted in pain as my mother tightened the bandages.
“Sig,” she gasped, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“It’s okay. It needs to be tight to stop the bleeding,” he said. “Wad up a piece of the cloth and put it in my mouth.”
My mother folded a small section of the shirt, and my father bit down on it and gritted his teeth as she continued to wrap and secure the bandages. Finally she finished, and he spat out the cloth and exhaled, breathing heavily.
“Good. Now, get me and Karl glasses of water.”
Hildy retrieved the glasses and brought one to each of us. The water helped revive me and made my legs feel solid. I struggled to lift myself to a standing position.
“We’ve got to take the glass out to stop the bleeding,” my mother said
“No. If we try to pull it out, it’ll only cause more damage. I’ve got to get to a real doctor.”
“We can’t drag you through the streets like this,” she said.
“Call Steiner, Hartzel, or Hein Voorman,” he grunted, and gripped his side in agony. “They have cars and they owe me. See if one of them can come take me to a doctor.”
My mother ran to the back of the gallery and made some phone calls, returning a few moments later.
“Hartzel said he’d do it, but it might take him a while to get here.”
“How long?” my father said.
“He didn’t say.”
We all sat together huddled around my father and waited for the car to arrive. Loud, angry noises of the riot continued to ebb and flow outside. Fresh blood soaked through my father’s makeshift bandages and ran along the side of his pants. His breath became more labored with each passing minute, and his eyes fluttered open and shut.
“Sig, stay awake!” my mother said whenever he appeared close to dozing off.
My own face and neck throbbed, and the raw contusions seemed to spread and connect with one another, making my entire head feel like one large bruise. Just blinking my eyes caused sharp sparks of pain to pop inside my head like little firecrackers. Both of my thumbs also ached. In my hasty attack, I had completely forgotten the most basic rule about how to make a fist with the thumb tucked safely over the knuckles. I was lucky I hadn’t broken anything.
After forty-five minutes of tense waiting, we heard a faint car horn from outside. My mother ran to the window.
“It’s him!” she said. “Karl, help me get your father up.”
My mother and I hoisted my father to his feet. He groaned in pain as we pulled him up and dragged him out the front door to the waiting car. Blood had soaked through the entire bandage, so it looked like a crude crimson sash. Our street was littered with garbage and broken glass, but the roving band of Nazis seemed to have moved on to another area.
My father gritted his teeth and took short, harsh breaths as we awkwardly lowered him into the backseat of the car.
Hartzel, the Bavarian landscape painter whom my father had shown at one of his last gallery openings, sat in the driver’s seat, nervously tapping the steering wheel and peering out the windshield.
“Thank you so much
for coming,” my mother said.
“We’d better go,” he replied quickly.
“Hildy, you and Karl sit in the front seat, I’ll be in back with your fathe—”
“We can’t take the children,” Hartzel said.
“What?” my mother said.
“It would make us too conspicuous. We’d be stopped. I’d be arrested. We’d all be arrested.”
“I won’t leave the children!”
“They’ll probably be safer here anyway,” he replied. “The rioters have moved on. Right now this street is quieter than the rest of the city.”
“I won’t do it!”
“Rebecca, he’s right,” my father said from the backseat. “Karl is a man now. He can take care of things.” He looked me in the eye, and I gave him a small nod.
“We’ll all be in greater danger if we travel together,” he said.
“But, Sig—”
“No arguments, Rebecca. I’ve got to get help.”
“We’ll be fine, Mama.” I chimed in.
My mother stared at me and my sister, weighing her choice.
“Okay,” my mother finally said.
She got into the backseat next to my father.
“Here, cover yourselves with this,” Hartzel said, handing them a paint-splattered drop cloth over the front seat.
“How will he breathe with this over his head?” my mother said.
“I can’t drive around with him bleeding out in the open,” Hartzel said. “We wouldn’t make it two blocks.”
“He’s right.” My father interrupted. “Just do it, Rebecca.”
Our mother sat beside our father and positioned the drop cloth over their bodies. Before covering themselves completely, my father called out: “Wait. Children, come here.”
The Berlin Boxing Club Page 22