Four Perfect Pebbles

by Lila Perl

  Hoya, Germany, revisited by Albert Blumenthal in 1993

  Albert on the bridge over the Weser, where Walter had proposed to Ruth in 1930

  Albert and his wife, Diane, (near railing) in Hoya; behind them are the members of the Huth family who have written an outspoken account of Hoya’s Jewish history, including the Holocaust and its aftermath

  Marion with Ruth on December 20, 1994, Marion’s 60th birthday; Ruth is in her eighty-seventh year

  The Lazan family at a wedding on August 24, 2014. Left to right, top row: Rachel; Michael; Gavriel; Yoav; David; Ian. Middle row: Moshe, holding Rachel; Arielle, holding Leah Tova; Dahlia; Jordan Erica; Lisa; Hunter; Kasey Rose. Bottom row: Nathaniel; Marion; Allysa; Joshua; Susan; Rob.

  Memorial blocks at Westerbork symbolizing the 102,000 prisoners who were deported from the transit camp during the Holocaust years. Those marked with Stars of David represent Jews; blocks representing gypsies and other groups are marked with different symbols

  April 1995: Marion at Bergen-Belsen on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the camp’s suffering and dying victims

  CHAPTER 7

  “Freedom and Sorrow”

  The liberation of the death train prisoners had taken place about a mile and a quarter from the small village of Tröbitz, in eastern Germany. At first many of the passengers hesitated to leave the train. They were too ill, too weak, or too timid to venture onto German soil on their own.

  But the Russian soldiers soon made it clear that they had no supplies to share with the former prisoners and were, in fact, assigned to move on north toward Berlin. They also assured the refugees that most of the German population of Tröbitz had fled and that most of the abandoned farmhouses contained food, clothing, and bedding that were theirs for the taking.

  “So before that day was out,” Ruth said, “we left the train and headed for the village. Just as the Russians had said, many farmhouses were empty. In the first one I entered, I sniffed a faint but delicious smell of smoked meat. Following the scent, I climbed up to the sausages hanging around the rafters. At once I cut down a ham and brought it with me to the lower floor.

  “Although we had not been deeply observant Jews when we lived in Germany, we had never eaten pork. But even Jewish law recognizes that there may be a time of great need. For us, this was the first plentiful protein we had had in years, and our bodies craved this nourishment. Marion was at this time ten and a half years old and weighted only thirty-five pounds. I myself weighed seventy-five pounds.”

  The Tröbitz farmhouses were well stocked, too, with milk, butter, cheese, and eggs. Pigs, cows, and even chickens had been left behind, as well as heavy jars of preserved fruits and vegetables.

  Marion delighted in the sweet jams and preserves on the farmhouse shelves. But she soon learned that a shrunken stomach in a starved body must be fed very slowly and gradually. Many of the former prisoners fell too greedily on the rich and abundant food. Some actually died of the sudden overeating.

  The farmhouse that the Blumenthals had entered became their new living quarters. “It was a small house,” Marion remembered, “and we had it mostly to ourselves. Even though we could have spread out a little, we all slept in one room. Papa was in very poor health by this time, and my leg was still a raw and open wound. After huddling together on the train for two weeks, we feared the slightest separation. We wanted to stay as close to each other as my four perfect pebbles, the little stones that I could hold in the palm of my hand.”

  After the Russian liberators of the death train moved on, other Russian units arrived in Tröbitz to secure the conquered region for the formal occupation forces that were to follow. The military, too, foraged in the village and the surrounding countryside for food and other supplies, for they were often poorly equipped.

  “In their crude way, though,” Marion said, “the Russians tried to help us as best they could. They were extremely good to me, for each day they transported me to a nearby Russian Army field hospital, where they treated my leg. First they would clean the wound, and then they would sprinkle it with a greenish yellow powder. Mama and I believed that this powder was a form of penicillin, a miracle drug for infections that had been discovered before the war.

  “As the first weeks in Tröbitz went by, we noticed that new skin was beginning to form around the large burned area of the wound. Mama and I were sure that the nourishing diet, including milk, eggs, and meat, that I was now eating was also helping my body to renew itself.

  “But there was little that could be done to help my nightmares go away. Every day at the hospital I heard the cries of pain of both soldiers and civilians who had been maimed in the war. Worst of all, I saw the ugly stumps of the amputees. It was only then that I allowed myself to realize how close I had come to having my own leg amputated. These terrors haunted my nights in the farmhouse. I’m sure that was one reason why we all remained sleeping in the one room.”

  Despite their newfound freedom, the Tröbitz refugees continued to suffer a serious threat to their lives. Of the 2,500 prisoners who had boarded the death train at Bergen-Belsen, several hundred had died of typhus before reaching Tröbitz. Some, delirious with fever, unaware of their surroundings, had been carried from the train to the village in hand carts.

  In the first weeks at Tröbitz new cases began to break out, and the refugees realized that the germ-bearing lice were still with them. Many who had not already shaved their heads did so, in order to deprive the lice of a place to hide and breed. And Marion, at last, allowed Mom to shave hers.

  On May 7, 1945, the villagers learned from the radio of Germany’s surrender. The war in Europe was at an end. Rejoicing was mixed with concern, however, for the Russian occupation forces now informed the refugees that they would have to remain in Tröbitz until the typhus epidemic had abated. A quarantine period of roughly two months was imposed. During that time none of the former prisoners would be allowed to leave Germany.

  “We tried to settle down to some kind of life in that place,” Marion said. “As the food that had remained in the farmhouses was consumed, people began to go on foot or by bicycle to quite distant farms and villages to beg, borrow, or trade in order to keep their families nourished. My brother, Albert, was an expert at this. He was always off somewhere scrounging for food and other necessities. In many ways, although only twelve and a half years old, he was becoming the provider of our family. For since the journey on the death train, Papa’s health had worsened.

  “Before our life in the camps Papa was a proud and disciplined man, always very exacting and in control of every situation. During Bergen-Belsen, especially, it must have hurt him terribly to watch his family suffer and to be unable to help us. Once he had been a heroic defender of his country and a respected businessman, as well as a loving and caring husband and father. But the Nazi system had broken him down and robbed him of his self-esteem. Yet he continued to have hope, always carrying with him the German-English dictionary from which he studied. For he still planned that one day we all would go to America.”

  As spring came to the Tröbitz countryside, freshly grown vegetables began to be available, and the food supply improved. The month of May also saw a decline in the number of typhus deaths. At last the disease seemed to have run its course, and the refugees began to look forward to returning to their home countries. For the Blumenthals repatriation would mean a return to Holland.

  But suddenly, as May warmed into June, the number of typhus cases began to mount again. “And this time,” Marion said, “Papa was one of its victims. Just as the Germans had tried to kill us in their own last moments, so this last gasp of the typhus epidemic would not let Papa go.

  “For days he lay in the farmhouse bedroom, suffering from the burning fever, the stabbing headaches, the weird fantasies and semiconsciousness of the disease. And then, one morning, Albert went to his bedside and saw that he was dead.

  “I think we all were numb with the shock of Papa’s death. We had come so far, t
hrough flight, imprisonment, evacuation, the Nazis’ final attempt to destroy us, liberation at last, and now this—freedom and sorrow.

  “Mama, too, had been stricken with typhus and was in the early weak stage of recovery. My leg was still in need of treatment, and I could not walk without difficulty. So the task of burying Papa was left to Albert.

  “By this time the telescope graves had been replaced by single graves, dug in a row just outside the wall of the Tröbitz village cemetery. There was no possibility of obtaining a coffin for Papa’s body. Albert simply wrapped him in the bed sheet on which he’d lain when he died. This became his shroud.

  “Then, with the help of two former prisoners who had been on the train with us, my brother placed Papa’s body onto a wheeled cart, with two handles in front and two in back. The men helped him to trundle the cart to the cemetery.

  “There Albert dug a shallow grave, perhaps four or five feet deep. He placed Papa’s body in the earth, covered it, and laid bricks all around it, end to end, to mark the site. The date of Papa’s death was June seventh, 1945.”

  One day after Walter Blumenthal was buried, the Tröbitz residents were notified abruptly that their quarantine period had come to an end. They were given two hours to gather their belongings and board the column of trucks that awaited them. They were about to begin the first stage of repatriation to their former homelands. Although the Blumenthals were not Dutch citizens, their refugee status would take them back to Holland, the country to which they had fled after leaving Germany.

  Somehow Mama and Marion were helped onto the back of one of the open trucks. Albert was to join them. But as usual he was out somewhere gathering a supply of food for the journey. As the time for departure came closer, Mama wrung her hands in despair. What if something had now befallen Albert? Where was he?

  At the very last moment he came running with his knapsack full, and he clambered aboard. Hands reached out to steady him. But suddenly the truck lurched forward. The jolt loosened Albert’s grip on the heavy knapsack, and it flew off his shoulders and bounced onto the road. There it lay, in a receding cloud of dust, as the truck picked up speed.

  “So,” Marion said, “Albert lost his treasured knapsack, which he had had with him since Westerbork. But this was nothing compared with what we and so many others were leaving behind. There, in the Tröbitz cemetery, lay well over one hundred dead, plus hundreds more in the mass graves on the outskirts of the town and beside the railroad embankment. All told, at least six hundred people—one-quarter of the twenty-five hundred prisoners who had boarded the death train in Bergen-Belsen—had perished from disease or exhaustion.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “Holland Again”

  “Once more,” Ruth said, “we arrived in Holland as refugees, homeless and penniless. The first time had been in January 1939, two months after Kristallnacht and Walter’s imprisonment in Buchenwald.

  “Now it was the summer of 1945. Six and a half years had passed. We had just barely managed to survive the camps. Walter was dead, and I was a widow at the age of thirty-seven. My worry about my two young children was the only thing that gave me the strength to face the future. And yes, there was a new name for us. We were no longer ‘refugees.’ Now we were ‘displaced persons.’ To put it more accurately, we were stateless.”

  Marion’s memories of the return to Holland were more pleasant than Mama’s and more filled with hope. “I remember,” she said, “that after we left Tröbitz, we stopped at Leipzig, a much larger place, also in eastern Germany. There was an army hospital there where my leg, still very painful, was given further treatment. The weather was very hot. I recall sitting at a long wooden table and being served cold beer in large mugs. It was not unusual in Europe to give children and even babies a little beer to drink to nourish their bodies. My body must have craved this nourishment, for the beer tasted delicious.

  “Later in the journey we stopped at a cloister near Maastricht, the Dutch city that is wedged between Belgium and Germany. I thought it was very exciting to be able to stand with one leg in Holland and one in Belgium, while waving an arm in farewell in the direction of Germany.

  “From there we went on to Amsterdam. Although the city had suffered much during the war and many of its trees had been cut down for firewood, it seemed a very luxurious place to me. On our arrival we stayed briefly with Papa’s cousins, whom I knew as Tante Gerda and Uncle Ernst. Uncle Ernst de Levie was Jewish, but Tante Gerda, who was not, had managed to conceal his identity from the Nazis during the war. I thought that they and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Ingrid, were the most handsome people I had ever known.

  “Tante Gerda wore her smooth dark hair in a French knot, known as a chignon, at the nape of her neck. She understood at once how much I craved small treats of food and clothing. I was still scrawny and underweight, and my hair had not yet grown in. Also I wore glasses, which I’d had to wear from the age of four because my eye muscles were not in balance. As a result of this problem, I was slightly cross-eyed.”

  Marion could vividly recall the de Levies’s second-floor apartment in a tall, narrow Amsterdam building. Although their home was comfortably furnished, the de Levies, like other Dutch citizens, still suffered from war shortages. All clothing was rationed, and coupons had to be saved up. But Tante Gerda managed to buy Marion her first piece of new clothing, a flower-patterned summer dress. Another hard-to-obtain item was chewing gum. Marion was intrigued with this unusual confection, and when Uncle Ernst offered her an allowance equivalent to about ten cents a week, she eagerly saved her coins to buy a single Chiclet.

  “I don’t know how many weeks,” Marion said, “I kept that one piece of chewing gum. Each day I would chew it, carefully wrap it up, and then chew it again the next day. I also remember how upset I became when I got a stain on the flowered dress that Tante Gerda had bought me. I wore it one day on an outing to an amusement park where I rode the carousel. As the painted horse on which I was seated went up and down, I must have hit my chin. As a result my tooth bit into my lip, causing some drops of blood to fall on my beautiful new dress. Tante Gerda, though, was not angry. She was comforting and reassuring, all of which made me feel even more unhappy and undeserving.”

  The stay with the de Levie family could not last, however. Soon Mama and Marion and Albert were transferred to a former Jewish convalescent home in Amsterdam. The eight-story building had been converted into a temporary shelter for seventy-five to one hundred displaced persons.

  Although the accommodations were simple, life was no longer filled with fear and uncertainty. Hunger had ceased to be an everyday sensation. And it was possible to bathe, to wear freshly washed clothing, even to brush one’s teeth every morning. In October Albert reached his thirteenth birthday and became Bar Mitzvah in a small, quiet ceremony at an Amsterdam synagogue. So that he would have a special gift to mark the occasion, Mama sold Papa’s pocket watch and bought Albert a ring.

  Mama’s worries about the family’s future were far from over, however. The children needed to be educated, and Ruth herself had no way of providing a livelihood for the three of them. Perhaps, she reasoned, Papa’s plan of emigrating to Palestine was the best idea after all.

  Hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews—broken and impoverished families like the Blumenthals—hoped to be able to make a new start in Palestine. True, the British were still limiting immigration to only about fifteen hundred a month, and conditions in the desertlike land were harsh and often inhospitable. But there were plans afoot to develop a Jewish state in Palestine, one that would become a permanent home for the Jews.

  “So, soon after Albert’s Bar Mitzvah,” Marion said, “he and I were sent to a Youth Aliyah home in the small town of Bussum, about an hour’s train ride south of Amsterdam. There we were to be prepared for aliyah, or immigration, to the future Jewish homeland. We would be taught both the Hebrew language and the Orthodox religion.

  “The home was on spacious grounds with a vegetable garden, chic
kens, and rabbits. And Albert and I had the company of the twenty or so other children, ranging in age from eight to eighteen. Some were orphans, while others, like us, had one surviving parent.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum, who ran the home and did the teaching, were also survivors of Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. They had six children, two of whom were close in age to Albert and me: their daughter, Susi, and their son, Zvi.”

  While living and studying at the Youth Aliyah home, Marion also began her secular education in Dutch at a nearby Montessori school. The teaching was patient and caring. Dutch was a new language for eleven-year-old Marion, as was Hebrew. Before that she had known only German. Albert, too, was now learning Dutch. He and Zvi Birnbaum, along with other teenagers from the home, commuted daily by train to a secondary school in Amsterdam.

  Ruth, meantime, remained in Amsterdam. She had moved in with Walter’s sister Rosi, who had lived in hiding in Holland during the war, and she was studying to become a beautician and manicurist. It was during this time that Uncle Ernst offered to have Marion’s eye condition corrected.

  “I’m so ashamed now,” Marion said, “when I think of how I behaved. Uncle Ernst arranged for me to come to Amsterdam by train. As this was to be a surprise for my mother, he met me at the station and took me to the hospital where the operation was to be performed. I was, of course, quite nervous. But I was also happy at the thought of having my eyes ‘straightened’ and perhaps not having to wear glasses anymore.

  “At the hospital Uncle Ernst put me in the hands of the nurses who were to prepare me for the operation. Somehow I was left lying on the stretcher in a room all by myself for what seemed like a very long time. No one came to my side; no one was there to reassure me. Suddenly I was seized with panic. Maybe it was my years in the camps that told me that I must escape and save myself. In any case, I jumped up from the stretcher, found my belongings, ran all the way to the railway station, and returned to Bussum.