The Hands of War

by Marione Ingram

  The brides were seated in clouds of white tulle between their grooms, surrounded by some fifty people standing or seated and looking at the camera. The brides’ smiles were restrained but I could tell that they were very happy, while the grooms looked rather pensive. Mother was seated on the floor in front of one of the grooms, looking up wistfully, smiling but with a faint suggestion of tears that I hadn’t noticed before. I had seen the photo many times and knew that Mother had been about ten or eleven at the time, that almost everyone in the photo was related to her and that she was the only one still living in Germany who hadn’t been taken by the Nazis.

  I picked up a picture of Grandfather Siegfried Singer and thought he looked sad. It made me feel strange to realize that Mother may have been looking at his photo while I was outside swinging. For reasons that had never been fully explained to me, my grandfather had killed himself before I was born, leaving behind his wife Rosa, my mother, his son Hans, his sister Emma and other relatives. I shuddered at the thought that Grandfather’s example might have inspired Mother’s behavior. More likely she had been overcome with grief thinking about her mother, her brother, and her aunt. It had been a year and a half since the three of them had been deported to Minsk in occupied Russia along with some fifteen hundred other Hamburg Jews. Although there had been no word from them since, and she had been told that the deportees had been killed, Mother had refused to give up hope. If she had just now received some confirmation of their deaths, I reasoned, that might explain her attempt to kill herself, but I saw no sign of this among the photos strewn across the table.

  Mother, aged ten, sits below right of brides at family double wedding in 1922.

  As I put a photo of Grandmother back into the album, I looked to see if she was wearing her teardrop pearl earrings. I didn’t see them there but her warmth, her spirited way of doing things, even the lily-of-the-valley scent of her powder came back to me. She had lived with my uncle, Hans, only a few blocks from us on Hasselbrook Strasse. Ten days before the police came for Grandmother, Hans and Aunt Emma had been ordered to report to Moorweide Park for deportation. The park was on the other side of Alster Lake, next to the Hamburg University Library and across the street from one of the two large train stations in the downtown area. Countless numbers of Hamburgers, including me, had watched as Hans and Emma and almost a thousand other deportees had walked baggage in hand across the city to the park. Before being herded into boxcars they remained in the park for many hours, an encamped spectacle surrounded by armed guards and police dogs with gleaming eyes. Although there were not nearly as many spectators as had jammed the streets in earlier days to cheer their Fuehrer, everyone in the city was made aware that on this day the Nazis had made good on his promise to get rid of Jews.

  So when Grandmother received her order to report to Moorweide Park, she refused to go. Although she asked us to leave, Mother and I waited with her in her apartment for the police to arrive. We knew, because she had told us more than once, that her heart had been broken when socialist firebrand, Rosa Luxemburg, had been murdered by the police and broken again when her husband had died. But the deportations of Hans and Aunt Emma had put her in a cold fury. Seeing our deep anxiety, she told us we shouldn’t worry about her, that she would probably be sent to the place where Hans and Emma had been taken and that she would be glad to be reunited with them even if the conditions were harsh. Although she would not cooperate with the Nazis, she instructed us to remain calm and try not to interfere with the police.

  Grandmother Rosa Wolff Singer, deported and murdered in November 1941

  Great Aunt Emma, deported and murdered in November 1941

  When the police arrived Grandmother told them that she would go with them only if they returned her son. An officer wearing a black SS uniform told her that she would soon be reunited with Hans and ordered two soldiers to pick her up and put her in a van parked outside. Streaming tears, Mother pleaded with the authorities to wait until she could finish putting a few things into a bag for Grandmother to take with her. I was clinging to Grandmother, who quietly stroked my head in an attempt to calm me. When the two soldiers approached, I attacked the nearest one with my fists, but Grandmother pulled me back. Before she was lifted into the van, she quickly removed her pearl earrings and gave them to me, kissed me, and wished me a happy birthday. A soldier grabbed my wrist and tried to force me to give up the earrings, but the SS officer ordered him to let me go. “It’s her birthday!” he said sardonically.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, angrily correcting him. “Tomorrow is my birthday!”

  * * *

  Word trickled back to the city that those who had been deported to Minsk had been killed soon after. Mother wouldn’t believe that this had happened to all of the deportees. We knew several people who had been sent to other camps and were still alive after months of incarceration. We hoped and even imagined that Grandmother, Hans, and Emma had somehow managed to be reunited. Mother begged for news of them on the days when she was required to report to the Gestapo on her activities during the preceding week. I hated those occasions even more than the air raids and worried about her from the moment she left until her return, sometimes hours later. On one of those grim visits she was told that her relatives had been killed upon arrival at Minsk. She refused to believe him but told herself that the Gestapo official was lying to break her will. Another time she was told that Grandmother had not been sent to Minsk with the others, because the van the soldiers had put her into was itself a travelling death chamber.

  Mother told me that Grandmother had tried to get Hans to go to the United States before the war started. Although the Americans had turned down most Jews who wanted to leave, Grandmother had lived in New York for two years when she and Grandfather were first married. In fact they had been married there. With the help of American friends she had managed to get permission to emigrate with Hans, who was then seventeen. But Hans couldn’t be persuaded to leave Hamburg, because he was in love and the girl hadn’t been able to get a visa for America. Both Hans and his beloved were later deported to Minsk on the same train.

  Mother had not been the same after those deportations. Remembering her transformation made my eyes moist and I tried to recall earlier, better times. I remembered that Hans had taught me to read, starting when I was about four. This was one of the happiest experiences I could imagine and looking at his picture I could almost hear his soft voice whispering the name of a word if I didn’t recall it. Aunt Emma also had given me good memories. She lived near Inge in the St. George district, and when she visited she would pinch my cheek and tell me to be proud that I was a Singer because the Singers had been chamberlains to the Czars.

  After closing and putting away the photo album, I looked in the small box where I kept Grandmother’s earrings to see if they were still there. They were. Beside the box was a licorice mask shaped like Winston Churchill, complete with a licorice cigar. Father had brought it on his last visit, promising that the cheeky Prime Minister, whose face adorned dart boards in Hamburg pubs, was coming to our rescue. I treasured the mask, sometimes licked it and frequently talked to it, especially during air raids. But there hadn’t been one recently and the mask looked a bit dusty. I gave it a lick anyway. Then I decided that, since I couldn’t put Mother on the bed, I would put Rena beside her and the three of us would spend the night on the floor. Although there was no air raid that night, I lay awake for long stretches, listening for Mother’s every breath and watching to see if she opened her eyes.

  I couldn’t let myself believe that she wouldn’t awaken, but I wasn’t sure what I would do if she was still asleep in the morning. Thinking hard about our situation and trying to come up with the reason Mother had decided to take her own life, I realized that she probably had suffered much more than she had allowed me to see, and I had seen plenty of hurtful things as she battled the Gestapo and other officials and even our neighbors. I had noticed that she looked more tired and subdued since the deportations, but I was mor
e impressed by how brave and defiant she was, how smart she looked whenever she left the apartment, and how confidently she walked through streets choked with armed men in uniform and prisoners in striped clothing. At home she didn’t mope about or cry and complain; instead, she kept us both busy doing chores or reading or plotting how to get around the ever increasing restrictions on Jews. When I felt bored or blue, she would sometimes sing to me, usually Schubert lieder or songs from operettas or even arias from grand opera. I not only loved her, I admired her and wanted more than anything else to be like her.

  On his last visit, Father had been cheerful and brisk as usual when he first arrived. He called Mother his valiant “Garde Offizier,” and pulled presents—mostly food—out of his bag with the flare of a magician producing a live pet. He kissed Rena, held her over his head until she began to protest, and then presented her with a small stuffed bear with a blue ribbon around its neck. She examined it all over before thanking him with a smile. He smiled back and rummaged in his bag again, then slowly withdrew a beautiful, new brown leather book bag with leather straps which he slipped over my shoulders and deftly adjusted. This was what Aryan children from affluent families wore to school—the rest wore bags made of canvas or a similarly tough fabric—and was what I envied them for the most, even more than the fact that they could go to school and I couldn’t. Father said it was made of Belgian leather, the same as his winter overcoat, and I was sure it was finer than the best German book bags, including those worn by arrogant Hitler Youths. Inhaling the rich aroma, I opened its flap and almost choked up with pleasure. Inside it were two schoolbooks, paper, some of it plain and the rest lined, a pencil box with pencils, an eraser, and a box of watercolors. After I thanked him, hugging him with all my might, I also found a pair of blunt scissors in the small leather pocket on the outside of the bag. I showed it all to Mother, who knew how often I had wished for school materials, and immediately set about drawing, coloring and cutting out images of children, adults, plants, and animals that I hoped, when assembled, would convey some of the deep satisfaction I felt.

  I worked diligently but listened attentively as Mother and Father quietly discussed our current situation, which had deteriorated considerably since his last visit. I didn’t have to overhear to know that our circumstance had grown dramatically more threatened, not so much by Allied bombers, which had already attacked Hamburg more than a hundred times and likely would come again, but by the authorities, which were closing in on Jews who were married to Gentiles. Such marriages had been forbidden not long after I was born, but existing marriages had been excused from complying with some of the hundreds of laws and regulations designed to isolate, immobilize, and depopulate Jewish communities. This was why we hadn’t been forced to move into the designated Jewish quarter, why we had been issued special cards that enabled us to buy some rationed foods, and why until recently we had not been required to wear the yellow star. Though I never heard Mother or Father say so, I understood that their marriage and the fact that Father was in the Luftwaffe were the main reasons we hadn’t been deported along with Grandmother and Hans and Aunt Emma or any of the Jews sent away since then. But listening to them as I drew and cut out paper images, I learned that other Jewish men and women had recently been deported despite being married to a Gentile. Mother looked saddened and tired and somewhat skeptical as Father reassured her that he was working on some of his former communist comrades, including the couple who were sheltering my middle sister, Helga, to help us go into hiding.

  “Let Father see what you’re reading.” (My mother’s comment on the back of this 1940 photo.)

  Father was a wellspring of inside information on developments in the wars that raged outside our apartment. Other adults, including some of his brothers, used to come to our apartment seeking his advice on how to deal with the Nazis, and in Mother’s view he was much too reckless in sharing information obtained through his obsessive efforts to subvert the regime. Although I didn’t always understand everything that was said, I had been an avid listener on such occasions. By the time of this visit, we seldom had any guests, but he had always been my personal tutor on how to stand up to the Nazis without giving them grounds for arresting one of us. Although I already knew how to comport myself, he sat me down for a serious talk before he went back to his Luftwaffe unit. He reminded me that he counted on me to look after Rena whenever Mother was away. He told me yet again to stay close to Mother, to follow her lead, and to do as she said without hesitation. But this time he added that I should look for ways to lighten her burden and help her out at all times.

  “I promised your grandmother that I would take care of her,” he said, “and I need you to help me keep that promise when I’m away.”

  Several days after he had gone back to his Luftwaffe unit, I noticed that Mother looked unhappy, and I remembered what he had said. So I asked her if she was feeling all right and if there was anything I could do to help. She smiled and said she was fine, adding that I could change Rena’s dress. It was obvious that the smile was forced, but I could not get her to talk to me about the things that had made her so unhappy. She couldn’t answer any of my questions about her family, then or ever after, without dissolving in tears. The loss of her loved ones had been too painful, and I had been with her when they were taken by the Nazis. Except for what I had experienced with them or heard others say about them, most of what I came to know about Mother’s parents I learned from my father after the war, when he tried to get the German government to compensate Mother for valuable books, including a Shakespeare first folio her parents had acquired in America when they were living there “in exile” at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  My younger sister Helga and I plot mischief before the war.

  Chapter 2

  Mother’s Story

  Ten years before she tried to take her own life, my mother, whose maiden name was Margarete Singer, had shocked her mother by confiding that she wanted to marry Erhard Ernst Emil Oestreicher, who was known as Eddie and was neither a Jew nor a practicing Christian, but a communist with deep-set sea-blue eyes and dark golden hair flowing back from a broad forehead. Eddie’s mother, who had lost two husbands and raised seven sons and two daughters in Friesland, the wind-swept North Sea area shared by Holland and Germany, made no objection to his marriage plans. And Margarete’s mother, Rosa Wolff Singer, soon softened her opposition to the “mixed marriage,” after being reminded of the furor she had created with her own spectacularly disobedient elopement with my grandfather, Siegfried Singer, shortly after the turn of the century.

  Siegfried was the scion of a wealthy orthodox family that had fled St. Petersburg one bribe in front of the secret police of Czar Alexander II, who had freed the serfs but jailed Jewish intellectuals because he believed—not entirely without cause—that they were plotting revolution. Growing up in Hamburg, Siegfried matured as a scholarly, somewhat reserved young man with unconventional ideas and an antiquated Roman sense of honor. To his parents’ consternation, however, he was intrigued by socialist politics and Rosa Wolff, a well-read young political activist who made hats for a department store.

  Siegfried and Rosa met at a Socialists’ rally on a dripping day in mid-December, 1900, in Hamburg’s militantly working-class district of Winterhude. He was charmed by the cheerfully assertive manner in which she presented a small bouquet of red roses to the main speaker, Rosa Luxemburg, upon the latter’s arrival at the cavernous tavern on Muhlenkamp Strasse where the rally was being held. Like many of the onlookers he noticed a resemblance between the two women and wondered if they were related. He also was intrigued by the younger Rosa’s command of her petite hourglass figure, which contrasted with his own tall, rectilinear body, prominently topped by a square-cut, prematurely dignified head.

  After Rosa Luxemburg disappeared inside the teeming tavern to take a place on a raised boxing-ring platform, the younger Rosa remained outside, handing out leaflets that called for the support of seamstresses who had
lost their livelihood for daring to complain about sweatshop conditions. Siegfried took one of the leaflets and carefully read it through despite the persistent rain that made steam rise from police horses and caused both riders and mounts to snort impatiently.

  Inside the tavern, Rosa Luxemburg spoke through a large megaphone, silencing the boisterous hubbub with carefully reasoned appeals for international worker solidarity. Many in the crowd applauded her scornful depiction of businessmen who grew fat by paying starvation wages, and some grunted in agreement when she told them that the coal miners then on strike in Poland were fighting for workers everywhere. Their sinews and sphincters tightened, however, when she aimed her lance at worker apathy, insisting that the working man or woman who refused to stand with his or her brothers or sisters was stealing desperately needed food from other workers’ families. As she paused to let the point sink deeper, there was a low grumbling and much shuffling of feet. And when she put down the megaphone and stepped back, hundreds of workers shook their fists or raised their mugs and roared their approval of what she had just said.

  Socialist firebrand Rosa Luxemburg was killed in 1919 while in police custody. Here she is (right) with Clara Zetkin in 1910 on her way to the Social Democratic Party Congress.