I, on the other hand, very much wanted to visit. This connection served as a little counterpoint to all the friends and connections Harry had in Israel. And Harry urged me to visit. So, unlike Oma and my father, Harry, Markus, and I made a point of looking up Claire and Martha in Haifa. Claire and her husband, Hans, welcomed the three of us with exemplary German hospitality: coffee and cake, served in the afternoon.
Their house was on the steep mountainside of Mount Carmel, as most houses in Haifa are. We stepped down into it from the street; Claire, a springy woman in tweeds, waved us in.
“Kommen Sie doch herein. Es ist ja so schön, dass Sie kommen.” Come on in. It’s so great that you came. Her German was impeccable, even though she had left Reichenberg as a child and was now in her fifties.
We, three jeans-clad tourists, entered their living room. A teak cabinet ran along one side of the room, showcasing books and porcelain figurines; an Oriental rug was spread over the typical Israeli tile floor. This room, I thought, as I sat down by the table, set with cloth napkins and delicate china, could be any living room in Germany. It smelled of coffee and sugarcoated gumdrops, just like the living room of my family’s former neighbors in Munich had smelled. Only here, the Mediterranean sparkled down below.
We got to meet Martha, whom Hans brought from the senior citizens’ home nearby to join us for coffee. She was a wiry, petite old lady with shiny white hair, walking with a stick. She sat quietly in the armchair opposite me, lost in her own world. Claire did most of the talking, now and then checking in with her mother: “Nicht wahr, Mutter?” Isn’t that right, Mother?
As one of Guido’s generation, Martha must have been in her late eighties or early nineties when we visited, even if she was considerably younger than Guido. Oma had told me that Martha stayed so fit into her advanced years because she swam in the cold waters of the Mediterranean every day, walking down the hills to the beach and then back up again.
Our conversation with Martha, Claire, and Hans circled around our trip, and how I was related to them, and how their family had come to Haifa. Their story was typical for Israel, a young immigrant country: one part of the family escaped to Switzerland, then went on to Italy, where they had to circumvent the fascists, then on to dusty Palestine. Another group traveled east into Russia, and farther east, through Siberia, to the Pacific port of Vladivostok, where they caught a ship to Brazil. There they waited out the war, then left for Palestine, where another war was about to erupt, in 1948. Hans had of course fought in the Israeli War of Independence, and he and Harry talked about the unit he had served in.
I loved this kind of conversation, this kind of people—living and making do in different countries, moving seamlessly between several languages, comfortable in various cultures, and yet committed to who they were. These were people who had seen history and who had made the best of it.
They must have wondered what was up with this girl from the Berndt family, the very family their cousin Guido had married into, who, two generations later, was traveling around Israel with a Jewish boyfriend. Naturally, they didn’t say anything about that, nor did they ask any questions. They were too polite. I was keenly aware of the possible parallels in the family history, but I wasn’t going to worry.
Martha made only one short reference to Resi, saying that “the family initially didn’t know what to make of her, since, after all, she did not convert,” but that she had been “a very competent lady.” And Claire added that she was happy to be in contact with Herta and was urging her to visit.
After coffee and cake, Hans took Martha back to the senior citizens’ home, and Claire drove us around Haifa.
“Over there is the German library,” she pointed out, as the car swung through a curve, up a winding street. “And over there is the German social club.”
For her, it was a matter of pride that she still spoke the language of Goethe and lived like her mother, with coffee and cake in the afternoon. Harry and I, however, cared little about how German culture had been preserved in Israel. I have always disliked Germanness sported abroad—it smacks of a nationalism I can’t relate to. Harry had grown up with the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish culture of the shtetl, cultivated in postwar Germany by the few surviving Jews of the DP (displaced persons) camps who had stayed on. To them, German Jews were Yeckes, Yiddish for “Germans.”
I started corresponding with Claire after that visit, and once she even visited Harry and me in Munich. She was on one of her cultural trips to Germany, and we took her to see the site where Munich’s grand synagogue had stood, right off the crescent of the Stachus square.
I CAN’T SAY THAT I CONNECTED WITH JUDAISM ON THAT FIRST trip to Israel, but I also did not connect with Christianity, as I had expected to. On the contrary, the few Christian moorings I had were loosened during that trip. In addition to Jerusalem, we visited the other big Christian sites: Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, Bethlehem. Except for the church in Nazareth, an imposing modern edifice of crisscrossing wooden beams, the churches were Orthodox, gloomy and infused with incense, and very unlike the cherub-studded white baroque edifices I was accustomed to. In Bethlehem the grotto under the Orthodox church where Jesus was born featured a giant shell of marble, its bottom adorned with a silver plaque. The Sea of Galilee, where Jesus had walked on water, looked like any alpine lake to me.
Harry and I in Jerusalem, 1986
In Jerusalem, my father had been impressed by the hole where Jesus’s cross had been in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, so I entered the church expecting to see it. Instead I found myself in a dim building where crowds flung themselves on stone coffins or wound in a long line around a beehive-like structure. What were they lining up for? I couldn’t find a decipherable sign or an approachable guide. People looked like they knew what they were doing, or they were part of a travel group with a guide hollering in a foreign language who seemed to know what he was doing. I walked among the shadowy figures, around and around, up and down steps, waiting for the church to begin. Where was the wide, lofty space of a cathedral? Instead one cavernous chapel followed another, assembled wildly to clomp onto what used to be the shape of this Jerusalem hill. Between the tourists’ sneakers I naively scanned the floor for the hole of the cross. Incense burned in my nostrils, strange tongues hollered, and lanterns hung on long, gleaming brass chains from arches and walkways up above. Close to the heavy wooden door of the entrance, where the white light of Jerusalem beckoned, steep, worn stone steps led up to another cavern, dripping in gold and icons. Again, worshippers were knowledgeably filing by something worthy of their devotion, a glass altar encased in gold. But what was it? And where was the hole of the cross? For a while I watched a priest in a long black robe and grizzled beard swing his censer from the balcony of this chapel. I looked out over the milling masses down below to make sure I hadn’t missed an obvious guidepost. I hadn’t, so I gave up, climbed down, and stepped out of the dark and into the sunshine, where Harry was waiting.
Sites, I now understand, do not work for me as manifestations of belief. I always felt put upon to feel especially holy in a quaint chapel or a famous cathedral. When we had traveled through the mountains of the Golan Heights, we had visited the grave of a famous rabbi. Thick, black, lichen-covered stones were arranged into a quasitemple, tea lights flickered everywhere, and a few Jews in black garb swayed in prayer. I did not like it. This felt too much like the side altars in Catholic churches, except there was no statue.
Harry hadn’t prayed; we had just looked on.
“This seems odd to me,” I said to Harry as we left, “Jews worshipping a rabbi. I mean, that’s what Catholics do. Oma’s neighbor goes and prays to St. Anthony when she’s lost her wallet.”
“You’ve got a point.”
“I thought Judaism is all about one invisible God who can be anywhere.”
“You’re right,” Harry said, “and yet a site like this gives people something to hold on to.”
OUR FLIGHT BACK WAS UNEVENTFUL,
BUT AS THE THREE OF US stepped off the plane in Munich, Harry’s brother was waiting for us. He had security clearance because he worked freight for El Al and was standing right by the door.
“Hey,” he said, and nodded at Markus and me. He was panting, beads of sweat pearling on his forehead.
He leaned into Harry. “It is possible that Mom is picking you up.”
“Really?” Harry said, frowning.
“I just wanted to warn you, she said something like that this morning.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
“I have to get back to my station,” his brother said, and he disappeared through a door onto the hissing tarmac.
“Well, that isn’t good,” Markus said, as the three of us continued on toward passport control.
“Indeed,” Harry said.
“Okay, so what do we do?” I asked.
We discussed different scenarios as we walked through the terminal. I could switch over to Markus if we spotted Harry’s mother and pretend to be his girlfriend. But that wouldn’t be good, because it would still mean introducing me to her, but under false pretenses. Plus, Markus had his own girlfriend, so that would complicate things. I could trail behind the guys after customs, and if she was there pretend not to be associated with them and find my own way home. Markus, in his gentlemanly way, thought that was dumb, and we started trying to figure out a spot where he and I could reunite in the arrivals hall after Harry had been potentially carried off by his mother.
Our passports were stamped. We collected our luggage and passed customs and were marching down the corridor toward the gray one-way doors that would lead us into the waiting crowd. Harry and I were still walking next to each other. I stole a glance at him. He held my gaze for a second, and then I slipped my hand into his. He held it hard.
It was a gesture of defiance, but as I held his hand and the doors approached, I felt much more: certainty. He was the one. However messy and difficult it would be, we would make it work.
His mother, in the end, was not waiting for him.
BEHIND WALLS
I PRESSED THE BUZZER BY A NONDESCRIPT BEIGE iron door in a nondescript passageway off Prinzregentenstraße, a few blocks from Harry’s apartment. A camera pointed at me from above. Was this indeed the entrance to the Jewish Youth Center of Munich? It should be if I had followed Harry’s directions correctly. There was no sign and no name by the buzzer, only the slits of a tiny loudspeaker.
A few weeks earlier, I had been along when Harry had done a friend a favor and picked up his son from Munich’s Jewish Day School. Harry had left his car in a side street, and we had walked to the building. Then I had realized why: its entire street front was a no-parking zone. A German police car stood halfway up the widened sidewalk, and an armed German police officer stood guard. The school itself was a tall villa, set back from the street. You would never think this was a school unless you stopped by when school began or when children were picked up. As we got closer, Harry motioned for me to hang back (for fear we might be seen together), and I watched. A tall wrought-iron fence seamed the property. A solid iron gate blocked the driveway. Cut into it was a narrow door through which adults periodically emerged, holding children by the hand. Harry approached and spoke to someone in the guardhouse that was visible beyond the fence. Soon a little boy emerged and Harry returned with him.
The scene reminded me of what I had seen on a visit to Belfast during the Troubles when terrorism was a daily threat: sensitive buildings were surrounded by high walls, topped with barbed wire and cameras, and no-parking zones to guard against car bombs. Here in Munich, it turned out that Jewish institutions had been hidden behind walls and armed security checkpoints ever since seven people had died in a fire set to Munich’s Jewish Community Center in 1970, the perpetrator of which had never been found. On a Friday night, i.e. Shabbat evening when a lot of people were in the building, someone had poured gasoline up and down the stairwell and set it ablaze. All of the dead were elderly Holocaust survivors, who were trapped in the senior citizens’ home on the upper floors. “After the fire, when we kids went to Hebrew class, we used to poke around the charred hallway and argue about where the dead bodies had lain,” Harry had told me.
The fire could have been a neo-Nazi attack, but the 1970s and ’80s were also the age of PLO terrorism against Jewish and Israeli institutions throughout Europe. I had been studying French in Paris in 1982 when a bomb had destroyed the Parisian Jewish deli Jo Goldenberg, killing six and wounding many more.
Now I stood in a hallway and faced such a guard wall myself. Upon our return from Israel, I had decided I would try to learn Hebrew. Learning languages was my thing, and Hebrew’s different alphabet intrigued me. I had signed up for a class at the Jewish Youth Center, the only place in Munich where you could take a Hebrew class. Obviously, Harry could not accompany me, as that could have caused gossip, but he had given me precise directions.
So I went alone, found the unassuming door, pressed the buzzer, and waited.
A raspy voice sounded from the tiny loudspeaker: “Yes?”
“I’m here for the Hebrew beginners’ class.”
“Name?”
“Annette Berndt.”
Silence. I waited what seemed a long time. Then a buzzer sounded and I pushed open the door. Another hallway beckoned and at the end another door. Next to it was a window with thick glass, probably bulletproof, through which a bearded young man in short-sleeved shirt and jeans, a pistol holstered on his hip, peered at me.
“Yes?”
That was the raspy voice.
“I’m here for the Hebrew class.”
“ID?”
I slid my ID through the gap under the window. This was just like being at a bank teller, the receiving side guarded against malice, except that this guy was armed, ready for defense. The visitor had to prove that she had come in peace. I took a deep breath.
The guard pushed my ID back. The door clicked so I could open it. I found myself in a little vestibule, closed off by another door, facing the young man behind a glassed-in counter.
“I need to see your purse.” He opened a little compartment on the counter, and I put my purse inside. He rummaged through it, nodded, handed it back, and gestured me toward the next door.
This one opened onto a lounge-like area where a bunch of people were hanging out. A carpeted hallway led to several classrooms, some sporting dinosaur decorations and brightly colored toys.
My teacher turned out to be a plump, friendly woman in a flowery dress. When I described her to Harry later, he told me she was the sister of a friend of his. I don’t remember any of my classmates, probably because I kept to myself, not wanting to invite any friendships that could get complicated if someone knew someone who knew Harry. Everybody of course had to explain what brought them to this beginners’ class, and I cited my recent trip to Israel.
I enjoyed Hebrew and found the alphabet surprisingly easy to learn. Soon I could read, even though I had no idea what I was reading. This would remain my level of Hebrew for many years to come. I acquired prayer-book vocabulary, but managing simple conversations in contemporary Hebrew would prove a much bigger challenge. For now, however, in my quest to learn the language of the Jews, I had made my first foray into that world behind walls.
SURBERG
IN GERMANY THERE ARE MANY REMINDERS OF THE Holocaust. There are the obvious ones, such as Munich’s Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, the wide intersection named for “the victims of national socialism” where an eternal flame flickers in a steel cage on top of a basalt column, its angles cut in the shape of a heavyset cross. There is the memorial stone for Munich’s synagogue that Harry and I showed Claire from Haifa when she visited. There is Dachau, of course, the concentration camp on the northern outskirts of Munich, where the gas chambers are still intact but were never used. Dachau is easily reached by S-Bahn (commuter train). American tourists and German school groups pilgrimage there. However, the school-group excursions are
not a sure thing; my school, for instance, never went to Dachau, not even those of us who majored in history.
My first visit to Dachau was with Harry. He had a rule of going once a year. I knew it would be a lump-in-the-throat kind of experience, one of studying exhibits in glass cases, arms crossed, staring at black-and-white photos of emaciated bodies, heels echoing through empty halls, and scruffy grass growing between reconstructed barracks.
Dachau was hard, but it was also Germany’s showcase camp. It was the out-of-the-way sites, especially the ones we didn’t even know about, that made us feel like we could never get away from the past. We made a point of visiting lesser-known memorials.
“It is important,” Harry likes to say, “to visit, and to show that these places and these people are not forgotten.”
In November 1987, while visiting my brother in Hamburg, where he was working at the time, we took the S-Bahn and then a bus to visit the site of the former concentration camp Neuengamme. Overgrown trenches crisscrossed the endless flatlands that spread south from Hamburg. The bus bumped over a potholed road, and we grabbed the railing on the seats in front of us to stay put. We were the only passengers except for an elderly woman who was balancing a basket on her lap, its contents hidden under a checkered cloth. She sat diagonally across from us, so I never saw her face, only the back of her headscarf and a strand of gray hair sticking out. She got off with us, her head bowed so that we had no chance of making a friendly comment, and scurried toward the forlorn cluster of buildings before us. Only later did I realize that the damp brownstone barracks were still used as a prison, and she must have come to visit one of the inmates.
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