Jumping Over Shadows

by Annette Gendler

  Unbeknownst to him, however, his existence in Reichenberg had already been signed away in December 1944, when Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met in Tehran to determine the postwar order of the world. The German problem was to be solved once and for all. Never again would any German government be able to claim territories in the East. The German population would be expelled from eastern Prussia, Silesia, Bohemia, and Romania; all Germans would be herded into one territory. It was only a matter of practicality as to when and how. The when was now, in this railcar.

  After the surrender of Nazi Germany, the Russians bombarded and then occupied Reichenberg. From then on, the Germans in Reichenberg and the rest of Bohemia became outlaws. All German men had to report to hard labor. First Karl spent days dismantling fortifications. Then he managed to get recognized as a member of the Red Cross and was allowed to work as a paramedic at Reichenberg’s train station. Trains crowded with German refugees from the East, carted out of Silesia, had rolled through.

  On August 13, 1945, my grandparents’ house on Grillparzer Straße 5 was confiscated. They managed to argue their way out of the internment camp on the grounds of their pending antifascist documentation. They were assigned one room with a kitchen, which they shared with three other women, in the suburb of Johannesthal.

  After the loss of the house, Karl concentrated his efforts on obtaining extension upon extension of their lodging permit, banking on his antifascist paperwork coming through. Permits were granted on only a monthly basis, and thus, in October, he had gone again to the Národní Výbor (National Committee) to reapply. While he was granted an extension for his family, he himself was ordered to stay for a long interrogation: What had his role been during the Volkssturm? What did he know about Werwolf, the alleged Nazi resistance group that had supposedly operated behind Allied lines? Ultimately he was kept in the camp, first for a day, then for months.

  The memory droned on in his mind: roll call at five, breakfast of bitter coffee and one slice of bread, at work no later than seven, unloading potatoes. He figured he had hauled an average of eight tons a day until, after five weeks, a cart jammed him against a wagon and he was laid up for ten days with broken ribs. Then it was on to other Kommandos, assignments: moving furniture, clearing air defense bunkers. Work never ended before eight. The coal Kommandos had been the worst: unloading coal from eight in the evening until six in the morning, then back to the regular Kommando at seven.

  In mid-December he was fortunate to be assigned to the German library, where the German books, gathered from the emptied homes, had been dumped and needed to be sorted. He worked every day, even the Christmas holidays. Cataloging books suited him, even though, as he wrote down titles and opened cloth-bound volumes embossed with gilded lettering to note the year of publication, his stomach wound itself into a knot at the sight of the owners’ names, often scrawled in ink on the inside covers. What greater symbol of a culture, an era, coming to an end could there be besides piles and piles of books, swept off the shelves of the villas and studies, their owners carted off or crammed into an internment camp?

  In the meantime, Hanne badgered the referent to get him free. Several times she was dismissed without getting an appointment. Finally she managed to have someone jot down his name. Then it turned out that his file was lost, and without the file they could not do anything. Finally, by asking around among his fellow inmates, he managed to find out the name of the inspector who had interrogated him back in October, and Hanne called on that inspector. In mid-December his file materialized, but by then the referent was on sick leave and nothing would happen until after Christmas. On January 20, he was finally ordered to appear at the police station, only to be asked, “So why are you in the camp?”

  “That’s what I want to know from you,” he replied.

  It had been a misunderstanding. Four months of his life had been a misunderstanding. On January 25, he was released with the offer to be wagon commander on the first government-organized transport into the US zone. He accepted right away, for now it was the best choice. Because his antifascist certification was still in limbo, he would not have been able to obtain another authorization to stay, and of the four Allied-occupied zones, the US zone was known to be the least evil.

  While the Allies had acquiesced to Czech President Beneš’s insistence that the problem of the German minorities in Czechoslovakia be solved by driving them out of the land, they decreed that it would have to be an orderly and civilized transfer. Through a series of meetings in Prague in early January 1946, American and Czech officials confirmed the plans for the transfer: Each trainload would include 1,200 persons in forty heated cars. The Czech government was to provide sufficient food for the trip and for three additional days. Families were to be kept together, clothing was to be adequate, and every person was permitted to bring along personal belongings totaling thirty to fifty kilograms and an allowance of 1,000 Reichsmark. Posters were slapped on Reichenberg’s walls:

  People assigned to be deported are to leave their apartments in orderly fashion. Luggage of 50 kg per person is allowed. If someone has more luggage, it will be taken, without consideration of what it is. The remaining things are to be left in the apartment—for example, curtains, rugs, desk lamps, mirrors, washbasins, pieces of furniture, table cloths, two hand towels. On beds, mattresses, there are to be fresh linens and at least one pillow and one blanket. Luggage is not to be packed into pillowcases or rugs.

  If at the checkpoint it is found that instructions were not followed, the respective person will not be accepted for transport but sent into the interior for work.

  Whoever has not reported to the gathering point within twenty-four hours after receipt of the summons will be reported to the police.[1]

  The transport my grandparents and my father were on adhered closely to that agreement. They pulled out of Reichenberg packed into closed freight cars, little coal ovens providing some heat. Two buckets were dispensed per car: one with drinking water, another to be used as a toilet. At each train station along the way—Prague, Pilsen, Taus—watery but warm food was provided: boiled potatoes, cabbage soup. In Furth im Wald, the border town on former Reich territory, now under US command, they were transferred into a converted Wehrmacht hospital train. Passengers from three Czech freight cars were crowded into one Wehrmacht car.

  They rode on, most of them standing, each person unable to claim more floor space than their feet under them. Maybe it was luck to be on the transport in winter. Karl imagined how unbearable the heat and smell would be in the summer, with all those people up against each other. Maybe they were fortunate after all, to be rattling on, passing through Nürnberg, Würzburg, Aschaffenburg, the cities reduced to rubble, their streets imposing a grid over the heaps of debris, the half-standing walls, the teetering balconies, the dangling shop signs. The countryside, largely hills, some forested, loomed gray and desolate in the barrenness of winter.

  Karl had been told that they were bound for the rural area of Odenwald. He had only a faint idea of where that was. Not as far as Frankfurt—that he knew. The authorities had also told him, in case people got unruly, that the ride wouldn’t be much longer once they passed Aschaffenburg. But people were too tired, too beaten to be unruly. They waited, holding on to each other through the bends in the tracks when the car swayed. Even the woman desperate for her son had stopped muttering and stood silent by the door.

  Eventually, some time after Aschaffenburg, the train screeched to a halt. This must be the destination—what other reason would there be to stop? For a moment, all was quiet, inside and out; only the rain continued to drum. Then a gust of wind beat against the railcar’s sliding door, yanking at it like a desperate person wanting to gain access. But the despondency was inside. They were the homeless, come to be spilled onto a ravaged land.

  Karl opened the door, and immediately the icy rain cut into his face as he peeked out. It was turning into sleet and came down like miniature razors on his uncovered head. A few uniformed men sto
od at the end of the platform by the only lantern that drew a yellow circle into the dark. American soldiers, he figured. He could barely see them as the wind whipped at him. They did not advance. Five or six other figures appeared, coming toward him, carrying dim lanterns. “Red Cross. Red Cross. Come! We have tea for you.” Karl nodded at Hanne. This was it.

  As the storm battered the train, his fellow travelers clambered out, some pulling blankets over their heads, others not minding the storm. The scene reminded him of the first act of Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, when the doomed ship, condemned to sail the oceans for eternity, finds shelter from a storm in a Norwegian fjord and the locals walk up to the strange vessel, gaping at its ghostly crew. Yes, they were landing, arriving like the cursed captain and his shipmates, dependent on the goodwill of those whose shore they were landing on.

  While Karl stood, half leaning out the car, holding hands, passing down suitcases, an official strode up, cupped his hands over his mouth, and yelled, “Endstation! Alles aussteigen! Endstation!”

  THIS WAS, HOWEVER, NOT TO BE THE ENDSTATION, THE LAST stop. Rather, die Ausweisung, the explusion, as my grandmother always called it, was the beginning of a life without Heimat, without a homeland. The next generation would not have that sense of belonging to a place that my grandparents had. The expulsion was the hinge in the family history that set the stage for my father Helmut, the twelve-year-old boy on the train with Herta’s scarf tied around his neck, to pursue his studies in the United States and marry into another country and another language.

  My grandparents never returned to Reichenberg, even though my grandfather filled out numerous applications for Czech citizenship on the typewriter a kindly soul lent him while they were living as refugees in an attic in Odenwald. Eventually, they were able to sublet a room and didn’t have to tie up their food at night anymore to protect it from the mice. My grandfather landed a job as a subject teacher; his antifascist stance now proved invaluable with the “Americans” in charge. Six years after being deported from Reichenberg, they were granted a one-bedroom apartment in a new social-housing block in the nearby city of Wiesbaden. That is where I knew my grandmother, whom I always called Oma, to live.

  My grandfather managed to build a new life in a new land and eventually became principal of a girls’ middle school in Wiesbaden. He taught me my first words—“tick, tack, tick, tack”—by holding an alarm clock to my ear, but, sadly, he died when I was not even two. I came to know him mainly through Oma’s stories and the memoirs that he typed up on yellowed onionskin paper in the early ’60s.

  My grandparents, 1958

  THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS

  ONE GRAY EVENING IN THE WINTER OF 1986–87, I was walking home from the S-Bahnhof (commuter train station) toward our apartment in Prinzregentenstraße. It was my regular route when I didn’t bike or take the streetcar. I was walking along the concrete-tiled sidewalk, the paved bicycle path to my left, and beyond it the four-lane thoroughfare of Munich’s main beltway, Mittlerer Ring. The seam line where the sidewalk’s tiles met the half-rise concrete wall that supported the embankment sloping down from the train tracks is seared into my memory.

  I tend to remember environmental details of my surroundings, preferably lines, whenever something momentous has happened: The beige grout line between floor and bathtub that I stared at in a friend’s apartment in Santa Barbara after I had learned of my father’s sudden death, or the diagonal lines of dark and light the blinds threw on my bedroom wall the night I met Harry. Of that winter evening in Munich, I remember the gray line between sidewalk and embankment wall because it was going to be a symbol. It was leading forward, into the future, a future of two sides, separated by a line.

  I was coming home from an exercise class I had attended with my friend Susanne. The pavement was wet, and the cars zooming by made a swooshing sound. I was carrying my book bag and my gym stuff. Susanne and I attended a weekly thigh-burning alpine ski–prep class together. Unlike her, I wasn’t into skiing, but it was good exercise and free.

  She lived close to the university’s gym, so we usually hung out at her place after our workout. She was still living with her parents while studying to become an elementary school teacher. After chatting with her mom, we would retire to her room to catch up with each other.

  She had been talking about where her fiancé had bought her engagement ring when she said, “Not at Uhren Weiss, because those are Jews and one doesn’t know where their stuff comes from.”

  The meaning didn’t hit me right away. I was pleasantly exhausted, my mind lulled by the cinnamon tea, my thigh muscles buttery from the pumping. I had heard what she said, but it took a while to register. Then it spread in my stomach, hot and heavy. She chattered on and I let her, too stunned to call her on it. Had she really said this? I had never heard an anti-Semitic remark before, or, more likely, I hadn’t noticed.

  Wow, I thought, as the dread settled and my heart beat more quickly, this is what it’s like to be on the other side of the fence.

  I don’t remember us parting, or me riding the S-Bahn, but I remember that walk home from the station. I was in between, alone after being with Susanne and before being with Harry, who would already be home. I kept staring at the line between sidewalk and embankment as I walked up the incline from the S-Bahn underpass, thinking that this was how it must feel to be part of a minority saddled with centuries of prejudice. With that one remark, a switch had been flipped, separating longtime friends into two different groups: those behind the barbed wire and those in front. A demarcation line would now be there forever. Even if met by the right kind of apology and acknowledgment of prejudice, the remark would be etched into my memory. My friendship with Susanne would never again have the same innocence and trust as before, and there was nothing I could do about that.

  As traffic streamed by and the reflection of red taillights glistened on the wet pavement, I envisioned a fence, maybe inspired by the wall along the sidewalk. That fence grew into a tall wire-mesh fence with curled barbed wire on top. Beyond it stood a figure in stripes, and in front of it a farmer’s boy in cap and knee pants who was contemplating whether to toss over a potato. That throwing of a potato came to symbolize, in my mind, the whole question of what it meant to be on either side of the fence. Was I willing to throw my lot in with the Jews? Should another dire situation arise, I would be at a disadvantage being a Jew, but I realized then, in that moment of envisioning a concentration camp fence, that being a righteous person would be equally dangerous. If one were the kind of person who would throw a potato over the fence, it ultimately would not matter whether one was Jewish or not. I hoped that should I ever be tested, I would be the kind of person who would throw a potato. The kind of person Oma had been, visiting Guido in the sanatorium when the Gestapo occupied the upper floors. If I went about things with her kind of righteousness, it wouldn’t matter whether I was a Jew or not—life could be equally difficult.

  On that walk home I saw all that, sensed all that, but mainly I was shocked. Shocked that my oldest friend—whom I had known since I was twelve, whose dad had worked with mine at Siemens, whose family I knew well—could have made that kind of remark. And I was mad. Mad that that kind of stupidity still existed, and that it would force my hand. But really, my hand didn’t need forcing, because if it did, I wouldn’t be mad. It was merely that now I had to show my hand.

  When I came home and told Harry what had happened, he said, “Well, I’m sorry, but now you know what that’s like.”

  He was surprised that I was surprised. It was a rare moment when we both felt that we came from different backgrounds, different experiences. Majority versus minority. If you’re part of the majority, you simply have not lived with prejudice. Dealing with bigotry is merely an intellectual exercise, something you discuss in history class.

  Then, of course, Harry asked what I was going to do about it. I had to do something, I knew. Thankfully, I had a week until the next exercise class.

  I had to ca
ll her on it. There was no doubt about that. I couldn’t look Harry in the eye if I didn’t, but, more important, I couldn’t look myself in the eye. I hated confrontation, hated having to introduce conflict into this friendship. But the conflict had already been introduced, even if it was not intended. There was no going back. I resolved to confront Susanne when we saw each other next, and if she reacted in an acceptable way—meaning, if she recognized her prejudice and apologized—hopefully our friendship could be saved.

  I waited until we were sitting in her room again after class. My memory has her room slightly dim. As she clanged about with the tea service and Supertramp whined in the background, I said, “You said something last time that really disturbed me.”

  She looked up at me, squinting.

  I went on: “When you were talking about your engagement ring, you said that the people of Uhren Weiss were Jews and therefore one wouldn’t know where their merchandise came from. What did you mean by that?”

  She jerked back, her forehead in wrinkles.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just repeated something I’d heard from my father. That’s stupid, isn’t it? I wasn’t even thinking. I didn’t mean to . . . I didn’t want to offend you. . . . I have nothing against Harry. . . .”

  Her father? Well, I guess I wasn’t surprised, even though I liked her dad, mainly because he liked me and always spoke highly of my dad. But he was the sort of staunch and straitlaced German who, fifty years earlier, might have marched with the SS.