Max and Steve walked silently to the monument and stood there for a long time as the full impact hit him that three of his grandparents, four of his great-grandparents, and three aunts who had been children at the time had died there, and he was standing at their grave. This was not just the place where his parents had met. It was where their lives had changed forever, their families had been destroyed, and civilization and humanity had vanished into darkness.
After they stood there speechless for a while, they walked to the crematorium where women, children, and old people and some men had been cremated. Max was crying openly, and Steve put an arm around his shoulders. Somehow, just being there, they both knew that their lives would never be quite the same again. It was a phenomenon that explained to Max everything about his parents that they had never said. It wasn’t a place or even a simple tragedy, it was a horror of such massive proportions that the normal mind couldn’t even absorb it—one race choosing to wipe out another with cruelty and genocide on a mass scale. But even that didn’t explain it when you thought of little children being killed and innocent people whose lives had been taken from them and wantonly destroyed.
They finally turned back, and returned down the path they had come, as Max wondered how often his parents had walked this same road, under threat of death with every move they made, and beatings that had caused the scars he had seen on their bodies and never fully paid attention to. It was all too clear what had happened to them.
Now it was a place of memory and respect. Its shame had been transformed into a memorial for those who had died there. It seemed like a miracle to him that his parents had survived at all, and found each other. It was a mystery as to who survived, and a tribute to the human spirit for those who did. There were photographs of the liberation of the camp by the Third Army too, and Max looked at them intently on their way out, wondering if he’d see his parents. The corpse-like figures standing behind the barbed wire were unrecognizable as normal people, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to distinguish them if they were there. He gave a last look over his shoulder, and got into the cab with Steve. The driver didn’t speak to them on the way back, he knew how it affected people to go there. It was always the same. And many people who visited had lost family members there. They paid him and he left them at the station, they caught the next train, and it was a long time before Max spoke again as he looked at his friend.
“Thank you for coming with me. I never understood anything about my parents until I came here,” he said, wiping tears from his cheeks. “I don’t know how anyone could do things like that, or how they made it through. I always thought my mom was a little weird and overprotective, and worries way too much. Now I realize she’s a saint, and so is my dad. How could they not hate everyone after something like that? And they’re both such loving people.” Neither of them was bitter and Max admired them even more now. Steve couldn’t understand what they’d just seen either. All they wanted to do now was get out of Germany as fast as they could. Max could see why his parents didn’t want to come back. The good memories weren’t strong enough to drive away the bad ones. The terrible memories were too powerful, even for him twenty-one years later.
They caught a train to Vienna that night, and arrived in the majestic beauty of the city that was a little jewel. The architecture and monuments were grandiose and exquisite. It was the last of the pilgrimage for Max. He went to all the places his father had told him about, the bank, their home, the opera, favorite restaurants, gardens, the places he had loved as a young boy and later as a young man. And standing outside their enormous, elegant family home, he understood what his father had come from and how dramatically his life had changed, how much he had lost. Jakob never complained, or talked about it, was never bitter, always kind. His life on the Lower East Side was a universe away from how he had grown up and lived before the war. Only fate and a kind man like Izzie had changed things for him again, but he would never again live as he had. A whole world of elegance, opulence, graciousness, and beauty had been destroyed.
Max’s heart ached for his father as they left Vienna and took the train to Italy the next day. The atmosphere was too heavy for Max in Vienna, the realizations too strong. It was a relief to get to Italy where there was no history for him. They went to Venice with all its charm and beautiful churches, Florence with the incredible art, Rome with its utter insanity and joy. The boys had a wonderful time, but they both knew they would never forget what they’d seen in Germany and the camp at Buchenwald. Max had grown up on that day and learned who his parents were. He saw them differently now and knew he always would.
They arrived at Steve’s father’s rented villa in Saint-Paul de Vence, exhausted but elated. For Max particularly it had been an extraordinary trip, but Steve had enjoyed it too. It had solidified their friendship, and Max was glad he hadn’t been alone.
They spent two weeks with Steve’s father and had a fantastic time. They went to nightclubs in Monaco and Cannes, dinner in Saint-Paul de Vence and Antibes, swam in the Mediterranean and in the pool at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, and spent a day on a friend’s yacht. It was the most amazing trip of Max’s life.
Steve stayed in France with his father for a few more weeks before school started and Max flew back to New York. The two boys hugged when they left, shared everything they felt about what they’d experienced without words. Max thanked Steve’s father for a terrific time. He thought about all of it on the flight to New York. It was a Saturday, and his parents were home when he walked into the apartment at six o’clock that evening. They knew he was due back that day, but didn’t know what time, and Max went to his mother and hugged her so tight she could hardly breathe as tears rolled down his cheeks with all the love he felt for her and everything he had never understood before.
“It’s nice to see you so happy to be back.” She beamed at him. “Was it wonderful?” He nodded and sat down, holding her hand.
“We went there, Mom,” he said as his father stood watching them, not sure what was going on or why Max was so upset if he’d had such a good trip with his friend.
“To Paris?” she asked him, looking confused.
“We went to Paris and Vienna, and a lot of other places,” he said, glancing from his mother to his father. “I went to everywhere on both your lists. We went to Germany too.” Her brow furrowed as he said it. “We went to Buchenwald,” he said softly, and it felt as though all the air had been sucked from the room, as both his parents stared at him in horror.
“It’s still there…intact?” She could hardly speak. He had catapulted her into the past with a single word.
“No, just the crematorium, the medical facility, the guard towers, and a monument to the dead. The rest was taken down fifteen years ago. But there are photographs of it and of the liberation. I don’t think I could ever have understood without going there,” he said with tears still rolling down his cheeks, and his mother pulled him tightly into her arms and held him. She was crying too. She had never wanted him to see the evidence of what they’d been through. He didn’t need to know, but in fact, he did. For himself, and for them. It was an important part of who they were.
“You didn’t need to see that, or even know about it,” she said in a raw voice, as Jakob sat down on Max’s other side and put an arm around him.
“Yes, I did. How were you both able to live through that? How can something like that happen? Now I know why you’re always afraid there’s going to be another war, or people are going to deport Jews again.” Now it all made sense. It was all too real to them and would be forever. How could it not be?
“They’re not going to,” his father said firmly in a strong voice.
“I hope not. But I can see how you’d think that. When you see Paris and Vienna, and how beautiful they are, how civilized, and where you both lived, and then you see that place, how they could take normal people and put them there like animals and kill them, how
could you ever trust anything again?”
“Sometimes we don’t.” Jakob spoke for both of them. “But that was an aberration, a mob of very sick people who took control. The world won’t let that happen again. I believe that, and I think your mother does too.”
“I do now,” she said softly, “but it took a long time. You never forget something like that. And we shouldn’t. The world needs to remember what happened there, and in all the camps like it. I just didn’t want you to see it. I love you so much,” she said, holding him again and smiling through her tears.
“I’m glad I did, and that we went.” For the first time in his life he had wanted to be Jewish and stand up for those people who had been tortured and died there. But they would have killed him too if he had been alive at the time.
They had dinner together that night and talked about it, and he told them about the rest of his trip. He had loved Venice and Barcelona and the Uffizi in Florence, Rome, and everything about Paris, and especially the girls he’d met in the South of France, he said and laughed. He kissed them both and went to bed early, and Jakob looked at his wife with all the power of their memories, after Max went to bed. Their son had grown up. He was a man now, and had learned a hard lesson about the world, and his parents. He wasn’t a child anymore.
Chapter 9
Jakob’s second land development deal, in New Jersey, was far more profitable than the first one in Kansas. He and Lenny made a small fortune from it, and continued to invest in shopping mall construction all over the country. The best ones turned out to be in Texas, and by that time, Max had graduated with honors from Harvard. Jakob had doubled the fortune Izzie had left him, and he felt ready to sell his apartment buildings in his neighborhood. He could make much more money with other investments, the buildings were a headache to run, and developers were hoping to gentrify lower Manhattan, just as he had predicted they would one day. He sold all his buildings there within a year, except the one they lived in, and made a killing on them. He had included Max in some of his investments the year after he graduated. It was 1970, Jakob had just turned fifty, and they were both very rich men, more than Emmanuelle could grasp or even wanted to think about. She liked their small life, and her job in his office, and going to work with him on the subway every day. Anything more than that made her anxious and she didn’t want to know about it.
Max was only twenty-four years old, but he had gotten an apartment in a trendy building on the Upper East Side, full of young people his age and older, and had set up an office with an assistant, where he was making investments with the profits he had made on some of the deals Jakob had included him in. His father was in awe of his son’s instinct for business, and his determination to make money, invest it, and multiply it again. Jakob was never sure what motivated him, but Max knew. He never wanted to be as poor as his parents had been when they arrived in New York or were when he was a young boy. If it hadn’t been for the money they’d inherited from Izzie, they’d still only be modestly comfortable, or maybe even poor. And having visited their history in Europe, he shared some of their fear now. What if they lost everything again? He wanted to get to a place financially where that wasn’t possible. He liked women and had friends, but he was driven to work hard and do business and amass a fortune that nothing and no one could take from him. He remembered how his parents had scrimped and saved through his whole youth, how they always worried about money and were afraid, his mother making his clothes instead of buying them, secondhand shoes as a child, the things they couldn’t do, the vacations they didn’t go on, the baseball uniforms and equipment they couldn’t afford. He never wanted to be deprived again. Just as his mother hated risk, he had hated being poor and never wanted to be again.
And yet his father had gone from being extremely wealthy while he grew up to having nothing after the war, and he was content now to have a great deal of money in the bank, but he and his wife continued to live simply. His new wealth was barely visible except in a few things he occasionally bought for himself, like good suits. Max’s mother still made her own clothes with her sewing machine and preferred it that way. She didn’t want to spend money on things she could do herself, like clean her house. They were a strange dichotomy, a conglomeration of contradictions, and to make Jakob happy because he’d given it to her, Emmanuelle wore her twenty-carat D flawless diamond ring every day. They had pieced their life together like a patchwork quilt in a way that worked for them. But that wasn’t what Max wanted. He wanted the best of everything. He liked earning it himself, and was proud of it. Each successful investment felt like a victory to him. And making money was almost like a drug. He couldn’t get enough of it.
His friends from college didn’t have the same fire in their bellies he did. Steve worked for his father, but screwed around a lot. His father had bought him a Ferrari for graduation, and he chased women all the time, which distracted him from what Max considered the main event. He was missing opportunities to make as much as his father, but Steve didn’t mind. He had set the bar low for himself. Andy had decided on medical school, and his family had so much oil money it didn’t matter if he never made a dime. And Jared was in law school but wasn’t crazy about it, and had no real passion for the law. He was considering some kind of work involved with the environment. Max was the only one out in the world, making real money on his own. His single-minded focus worried his parents at times, but no one could stop him and it was what he wanted to do, and he was good at it. Jakob thought there were more important things in life and didn’t care about being the richest man in the world. He had enough, although he continued making investments that turned out well, but not on a monumental scale. He felt that he was just very lucky, and the time he spent with Emmanuelle was precious to him. She had never been a greedy woman, and was almost more comfortable being poor, or pretending to be. The only sign of wealth she allowed herself was the diamond ring on her hand. Being wealthy embarrassed her, so she never admitted to it, and still pretended to be poor.
Max had suggested to his father several times that he sell the diamond business. He didn’t need it anymore. He had more than enough income-producing investments without it, and why not retire early and concentrate on his portfolio rather than going to work every day?
“Because I enjoy my business,” Jakob said simply. “It gives your mother and me something to do every day and a place to go. And I think it would be disrespectful to Izzie to close it. He left me everything so I could continue what he started, as his son would have,” which made no sense to Max at all. He was twenty-seven by then.
“He’s been dead for twenty years, for God’s sake, Dad. He can’t have expected you to run his business forever.”
“Why not? It still makes money every year. We’ve got a good reputation. We’ve expanded, and we sell to some of the best jewelers in the world on a piece by piece basis. It doesn’t make as much as real estate development. But everything I do doesn’t have to make a fortune. Your mother and I have more than enough and the rest will go to you. And you’re making more money than I ever dreamed of. Where’s the limit here? How much is enough?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” Max said seriously. “I’ll let you know when I do.”
“Your mother is hoping you settle down one of these days. You’re still young so you don’t need to worry about it. But at some point, you’ll meet a girl you’re crazy about and want a wife and a family. You’ll have to spend time with them too.”
“That’s why I don’t want to get married yet. I don’t have time except for what I’m doing. This is the right time for me to be doing it. Later, I can think about a wife and kids, not now.” Jakob didn’t disagree, but he wondered if his son would ever be able to slow down at the rate he was going, or want to. He acted like he wanted to be the richest man in the world one day. He wondered if they had done that to him, by being so worried about being poor when he was young. Max was driven, and the more he m
ade, the more he wanted. He wasn’t extravagant, or stingy. He was just a money machine and an extremely good one. He was in the business press frequently now with his successful deals. Jakob thought that his own father, a banker, would have been impressed by him, but a little startled by him too. Max was taking success to extremes.
* * *
—
Three years later, shortly after Max turned thirty, Emmanuelle started having stomach problems again, similar to those she had had for years after the war, and even after her pregnancy. She began losing weight at a rapid rate and couldn’t eat, and her doctor put her in the hospital for extensive tests. She was fifty-four years old, which wasn’t old, and Jakob could tell from what they weren’t saying that stomach cancer was a possibility, while Emmanuelle kept insisting it was a recurrence of the stomach problems she’d developed in the camp. But there was no reason for it now, and no explanation other than a truly frightening one.
Jakob was at her side for every exam they’d let him attend, and she was in the hospital for three weeks, undergoing grueling tests. Everything had come back negative so far, but she was continuing to get worse. Every possible bacterial infection had been ruled out. They hadn’t been to Africa or any tropical place, and Jakob went home in tears one night, begging God to save her. They hadn’t been through all they had in order for her to die now, at such a young age. It made him think of Izzie’s wife dying at fifty-nine, and how ravaged Izzie had been by it. Nothing in Jakob’s life would make sense without her, and Max was frightened too, and had flown back from meetings in Taiwan to see her. She looked terrible. Her complexion was gray, and her already slight frame had become skeletal in a matter of weeks. It reminded Jakob of how she’d looked in Buchenwald.
In His Father's Footsteps Page 13