The Woman in the Photograph
Page 16
Many German cities did not preserve their Jewish cemeteries. An acquaintance had told me the sad tale of taking her elderly father back to Germany to visit his parents’ graves at a cemetery in southern Germany near the French border. The front area designated for pure Germans was well-maintained, while the Jewish section in the rear was a neglected tangle of overgrown weeds and vines. In Germany, there are no Jewish descendants to care for the graves of their ancestors. My friend’s father stumbled amidst the fallen gravestones but never found his parents. They left wishing they had never come.
Leipzig was different. The city made a commitment to respect its Jewish population and their ancestors. We met the caretaker, a Russian Jewish immigrant who tended the cemetery. We showed him our photo and the records we had obtained from the Carlebach Foundation. He motioned for us to follow him. He paced up and down several rows, then back again. He shook his head from side to side and shrugged his shoulders. There was a problem. Many of the gravestones were knocked over by the Nazis on Kristallnacht or damaged during the war. They were replaced as accurately as possible, but some did not survive.
I was so close. I walked carefully up the lanes between graves, breathing low and deep. I had returned to find my family bones…stronger than death. I tried to push back my looming sense of disappointment.
Suddenly, Matthias called my name. “Mani, here, come here,” he shouted. “We found it!”
The grave was exactly where it was supposed to be, but we had overlooked it several times because we were trying to match the picture. Instead of a dark polished marker with sharp engraved letters, we stood before a weathered stone, streaked with gray, worn almost smooth. Upon closer inspection, the letters became discernible—LEWIN, written across the top. I ran my fingers over the letters and shallow cracks that once spelled Nelly and Max and their dates of birth and death. I pressed my palms against the rough stone, still warm from the afternoon sun.
Matthias walked away and left Michael and me alone. We sat close to each other, cross-legged on the grass. I reached into my pocket and took out a rose quartz stone I had brought with me from home and placed it on this grave that had remained without a visitor for seventy years, probably since my mother left Germany in 1935.
Michael and I closed our eyes, each with our own prayer. Then I spoke.
“I am sitting on the bones of my grandparents. They have crossed over to another plane and the things they did or did not do, the words they said or did not say, are no longer relevant. They are my grandparents and I thank them for the gift of life they gave to Alice, and she in turn, passed on to me. I acknowledge the pain that they may have inflicted, and forgive them for any way they caused my mother to suffer. Now Alice is also free. Like her mirage floating above the bed in Roosevelt Hospital, she has returned to her pure spirit.”
I turned to Michael. “The family legacy of loss and pain stops here, stops with me.” I said. “It’s not the legacy I’ll pass on to Sarah. I offer her instead a story of understanding and respect, with this precious link to her grandmother Alice, and her great grandparents Nelly and Max Lewin. I pray that they may all stand behind her now, and give her a strong foundation to go forward in her life to pursue her own dreams.”
Michael reached out and took my hand and said, “Amen.”
33
Crossing the Border
The train was pulling out of the Hauptbanhof. We had arrived there just six days earlier, yet I felt that my whole life had shifted since then and I was on the verge of a new beginning, unencumbered by the secrets of my family’s past. I had learned some disturbing things over my fifteen-year search, but I was no longer haunted by the sense that there was some missing piece I needed to know to make sense of my own life. I leaned my head against Michael’s shoulder, lulled into reverie by the steady vibration of the moving train.
We were on our way to the Czech Republic to spend the last few days of our trip in Prague. I was sad to leave Leipzig, and certain I would come back again someday. I saw the city as a catalyst for my own rebirth—a focal point where past and present came together and the harsher events of my mother’s history were eclipsed by my firsthand experience and the welcome we received from Matthias, his mother, and his friends. Though I knew loss and my own share of adversity, I had so much more evidence to trust life in a way my mother did not. I had found the peace of mind I was seeking.
I recognized the woman in the photograph as my mother. She did what was needed to survive her time in history and the trials of her personal journey. The pictures in her album showed me that she had grown up steeped in luxury, but she learned to be frugal and pragmatic when her privileged world collapsed. Whatever trust or openness she sacrificed in the process, she made up for in determination. When my father died, there was no soft spot to land. She drew on a hard, cold shield to keep her grief from spilling out, and she learned to type and take dictation to support us. She was proud of her versatility and showed me that there was always a way to get up in the morning and do what you have to do. Later, out of necessity, she made an unhappy marriage. Eventually, she left the husband but kept her hard-won foothold in Manhattan.
When I visited Leipzig, I realized that her Manhattan neighborhood was a perfect mirror of the Musikviertel of her youth. Instead of the Gewandhaus, she had Lincoln Center with the symphony and the opera. In the place of König Albert Park, she had Central Park to stroll through and inhale the greenery she remembered from earliest childhood. She came full circle, returning to a lifestyle that suited her, resurrected in a one-bedroom penthouse on Central Park West.
I also understood more clearly than before that I was not my mother, that the circumstances of my life offered me very different choices. I appreciated many things she gave me—her practicality, her spirit of adventure, her passion for classical music, her courage to face new situations, prepared or not. I always knew she loved me, but I didn’t need to accept everything she gave me, like her fears that people would let you down when you needed them, or the conviction that danger lurked behind every unguarded moment. This part of my inheritance I gently buried in the Leipzig cemetery. I was reminded of it though, by an incident that occurred just before we crossed the Czech border.
In Dresden, the last city on the German side of the border, we got off the German car and boarded the train that would carry us to Prague. The Czech train was dark and old compared to the modern German railroad. The conductor indicated with his gestures that there were no assigned places and we were free to sit anywhere. We found an empty compartment with seats upholstered in worn red velvet, with scarred wood paneling along the walls and framing the windows. The acrid smell of cigarette smoke clung to everything.
It was an overcast day. I stared through the dirty windows at the River Elbe that ran along the tracks. Then, just before we reached the German-Czech border, three men in police uniforms pushed open the sliding door of our compartment and stepped inside. The tallest one, an unsmiling man in knee-high leather boots, a khaki uniform, and short-brimmed cap, barked “passports” at us, thrusting his hand out authoritatively. His uniform, his manner, and his tone frightened me, and my heart started to pound.
My anxiety was exacerbated by the fact that our passports had not been stamped when we landed in Frankfurt. For reasons unknown to me, the young agent had only glanced at our names and waved us through the gate. Suddenly, that omission seemed serious. The officer took our passports and motioned to his two partners to follow him. I could hardly breathe. Was it possible that we would be arrested, detained, or even incarcerated? It was as though time collapsed, and I became Alice clinging to her sister Erika as they embarked on an unknown destiny. I forgot that I was an American citizen living in 2005.
Moments later the guard returned followed by his cohorts. In a loud and aggressive tone, he asked why our passports weren’t stamped. I told him as well as I could in my remedial German what happened in Frankfurt. I felt the sweat on my forehead and my heart pounded even faster. He shrugged
his shoulders, muttered to his comrades, “Ach, Frankfurt,” and handed us back our passports. Without a word to us, he turned on his heel and walked away.
For the next few minutes I sat trembling as Michael put his arm around me and pulled me closer to him on the seat. Elated by our time in Leipzig, I had forgotten that I must also accept the darker forces of history that had shaped my mother’s life. I remembered the words of Winston Churchill: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”[15]
Slowly, I calmed down. I sighed with gratitude that I had been given the life I had, though my heart still ached for two young women thrust into a hostile world seventy years ago. When I looked out the window again, the words on the signs and buildings were impossible to decipher. We had crossed the border into the Czech Republic.
We rose early the next morning, the actual day of my sixtieth birthday, and took the tram to the Staromestska stop. We walked to the Old Town Square in the center of the Prague, and I stood under the six-hundred-year-old Astronomical Clock, threw my arms into the air, and spun around in a circle. I felt the ground under my feet, my legs supported by the ancestral bones that connected me to the past, and my hands open to the mysteries of the future.
Epilogue
Several months after my return from Leipzig, I had a dream about my mother.
I am walking into a familiar house, perhaps my childhood home, and across the room I see my mother sitting on the couch. She appears as I remember her from our last visit, a halo of gray in her hair, a sparkle in her eyes, smiling with apple-red lipstick. I had so often imagined how much I would give just to have an afternoon with her and I want to go right to her, but there is an obstacle blocking the door.
I easily move some heavy cabinet out of my way and run to her. I can’t believe she’s here with me and I can finally find out everything I’ve wanted to know.
I take out the photo of the two sisters. “Now I can ask you all the things I’ve wondered about for so long,” I say.
She stands up and comes toward me. I am overwhelmed with love for her. “Why would I spend this precious time asking you questions?” I whisper in her ear. We fall into each other’s arms.
I woke up with tears of joy still in my eyes.
Afterword
This is not the end of the story. Once the door to my mother’s past had been opened, new discoveries and insights continued to surface. A stranger from Canada, who was searching for his own lost family with the surname Lewin, found a medical book on employing the jacket crown, written by “my dentist grandfather.” He generously sent me a worn green volume filled with instructions and diagrams, published in Leipzig in 1925.
I often put roses in the fluted silver vase that had once belonged to my mother. One day, using a magnifying glass to study a photo in her album, I recognized the same vase. This very item had once stood on the mantle in the living room of her home at 32 Grassistrasse.
Taking out the set of family silver Tom had sent me, and carefully polishing each piece with a soft cloth, I felt the weight of the knives and forks in my hand, each engraved with the family crest of the letter L for Lewin, intertwined with M and N. I realized that they must have a wedding present for Max and Nelly. Both the vase and silver would have been packed in one of the trunks that Alice and Erika sent to New York. I decided to use the silverware for special occasions, savoring the taste of connection with my relatives in the 1927 Leipzig family reunion photo.
On October 6, 2006, I received a letter from the Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation Committee:
The Claims Resolution Tribunal is pleased to inform you that your claim(s) and the claim(s) of the family members you represent are eligible for a Plausible Undocumented Award in the amount of US $5,000.00 each. Your award has been approved by the Honorable Edward R. Korman, the presiding judge in the Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation.
The Court has recognized that of the approximately 6.8 million accounts that were open or opened between 1933 and 1945, the subsequent destruction of documents by the Swiss banks has eliminated the records for nearly 2.7 million accounts. As the Volker Committee recognized in its December 6, 1999 Report on its audit of Swiss banks, this destruction of records has created an “unfillable gap” that can now never be known or analyzed for their relationship to victims of Nazi Persecution.
I was grateful to receive this acknowledgment, and I understood the meaning of “unfillable gap.” They were offering a settlement in return for my agreement to file no future petitions. At least they didn’t say that my cows had died.
The person I most wanted to tell about this was Lynne, though I didn’t know if she would be able to take my call. I had last seen Lynne in May 2006, when Michael and I were in New York. She invited us for dinner at Centolire on Madison and 86th Street. When we met in the lobby, she reached out her arms with her characteristic warm smile and sparkling eyes. She wore a bright red tailored suit and a gray silk scarf artfully secured at her neck with a dazzling brooch. Though she was eighty-five years old and leaned heavily on a shiny black cane, she was still Lynne. The waiters all knew her, and she needed only to wave her hand or give a slight nod of her head for them to rush over to the table and provide whatever she wanted.
“She’s a very gracious woman,” the maitre d’ told me as we were leaving.
But by October, Lynne was very ill with lung cancer. I dialed her home and got her daughter Diane.
“There is no further treatment,” Diane said straightforwardly. “The people from hospice care are here and they’ve been wonderful.”
I felt awkward calling to tell her about the Swiss bank award, but Diane, whom I had never met, assured me that she heard the story from her mother many times.
“Our mother would want to know,” she said. “I’ll talk to her when she wakes up.”
A few days later, Diane called to tell me that Lynne was eating more and felt ready to talk. A moment later I heard Lynne’s voice on the phone, weak but clear.
“How are you and that sweet man of yours?” she said in her familiar way.
I told her we were fine and so glad that she and I had had gotten to be so close over the last years.
“The coin goes both ways,” she answered.
I asked if her daughter had told her about the “plausible” Swiss bank account.
“Yes. I’m so happy that you and your brother will be getting something. In the scheme of things, it isn’t a tall tree,” she added, “but it means something.”
“It means a lot,” I agreed. “You know, Lynne, your words, all you’ve told me will live on. You’ve given me such a beautiful gift. I love you.”
“I love you too,” she said after a pause. “I’ll think of more things to tell you the next time we talk.”
Lynne passed away peacefully at her home on November 26, 2006. She was beautifully dressed in a silk bed jacket, surrounded by her loved ones.
I had discovered so much more than I expected. As I sat over my computer sorting out the details, sometimes laughing at the absurdities, sometimes weeping for the poignancy of the story, I missed my mother more than ever, but it was a sweet, healing grief I had never known before.
In 2009, Sarah and her fiancé Brett were married in a garden ceremony in the Santa Ynez Mountains overlooking Santa Barbara. I wore the diamond ring Alice designed when she was sixteen years old. It rained lightly that June morning, but by the time Sarah and Brett said their vows under the flowing white silk canopy, the sky was brilliant blue with only a few remaining wispy clouds. I held my hand with the sparkling ring up to the light as my mother had once done, and knew she was there smiling.
Poems from Alice’s Notebook
To Erika
November 9, 1982
Your age now reached another round number
To me you are still a green young cucumber
But when hit by wanderlust’s dreams of exotic nights
Please make sure next time to pick a place without parasites
Needless to say my love for you will never fail
But all I can do is expedite my wishes by mail
From Soeurchen to Soeurchen kisses, health and all the best
I drink a Schnaps to a super Geburtstagfest.
To Bill (Willy)
December 14, 1982
Camus said aging means going from passion to compassion
Bill, for your birthday, here comes my confession
With time you mellowed like a fromage de Brie
And lately your disposition even softened towards me
Try hard to make your birthday real sunny
I send you blasts of good wishes
May your future be a real honey.
To Tommy
August 14, 1979
I can’t believe you’re already 42
Being self-conscious and vain I know this is true
Since birthday cards were never my style
Accept these wishes with a smile
Now that you’re a man of a certain age
To figure out a real gift for you one must be a sage
Let’s plan for future tickets for the Met
You might prefer this to shirts, shorts or a hat
Happy birthday, all the best, my dear Tom
Let’s celebrate this for many years with your old Mom.
To Terry-Mani
April 8, 1986
To make a poem for someone age 40 takes little brains
But to rhyme with 41 requires real pains
If wishes work, the super best to you
May all your hopes and wishes always come true
See you soon and admire your charm and grace
And we’ll take loads of time to gossip and embrace.