My classmates’ bar mitzvah ceremonies were a reminder that I would soon have to go through one myself. Every Sunday morning, a rabbinical scholar came to the house to prepare me for my portion. As he guided me through the intricacies of the Torah, I yearned for that earlier era when the focus of the service had been on the father rather than the son. Instead of a wretched thirteen year-old whose strained nerves and pounding heart made a mockery of his newfound manhood, it was his father who had stood in front of the congregation and relinquished responsibility for his son’s religious conduct. Having reached the age of maturity, the boy – the man – now had to take charge of himself. In my case the thought was even more fantastical, since my father had assumed no responsibility for any aspect of my conduct, religious or otherwise, since I was six years old. That role had been taken by my grandfather, who showed no sign of wishing to give it up, even symbolically. Our rows about my resolve to emigrate to Palestine had moved beyond even Aunt Annette’s powers of mediation. Nevertheless, his adjectival Judaism found room for the bar mitzvah ceremony, which he regarded as less of a religious ritual than an election to a gentleman’s club. Besides, he relished the prospect of a party to cheer us up at such a miserable time. It would be the biggest he had thrown since my parents’ marriage – which was not the most auspicious precedent. Yet, although I was flattered and excited and even comforted by the plans that were being made on my behalf, I was increasingly convinced that I could not allow them to be put into effect.
My mother and grandfather were incensed. They accused me of disrespect and disobedience. They bribed me with gifts and privileges and then threatened to take them away. They used every weapon in the parental and loco-parental armoury, but to no avail. The irony was that, at the same time as I was losing faith in my coreligionists, they had warmed to them. Whereas, in the past, my grandfather had condemned the skullcaps and side-locks of the East Europeans as an affront to modern Germany, he now wondered whether his own attempts to assimilate might not have offended a traditionalist God. Like the soldier who dies with ‘mother’ on his lips or the sceptic who requests the last rites, he had reverted to his childhood credo. He and my mother saw my refusal to become bar mitzvah not as a principled stand against Jewish pusillanimity but as a petty attempt to punish them. Of all their charges, the most serious was that I had taken the Nazis’ ideology to heart and was ashamed of being Jewish. I assured them that, on the contrary, I was proud of being Jewish but ashamed of my fellow Jews. I congratulated myself on the wit of my reply until my grandfather made me repeat it, first to the student who had taught me, and then to the Rabbi whose synagogue he endowed, although rarely deigned to attend. They attacked me with a ferocity that would have defeated Daniel.
‘You claim that your decision isn’t personal,’ the Rabbi said. ‘So who are these Jews you feel ashamed of?’
‘The Jews who allow themselves to be banned from cinemas and sports clubs. The Jews who allow themselves to be spat on in the streets. The Jews who allow their jobs and their homes to be taken away from them. The Jews who allow their sons and daughters to be expelled from schools. The Jews whose greatest act of protest is to throw a party.’ I aimed this last charge at my grandfather, who was seething at the Rabbi’s tolerance of my tirade. ‘The Jews who prefer to suffer any amount of insults in this country rather than endure the least hardship in the land that was given to them by God. Since those are the Jewish men I see all around, why should I want to be one myself?’
‘What right have you, a mere boy,’ the Rabbi asked, ‘to sit in judgement on your elders?’
‘Very well,’ I replied, ‘if I’m a mere boy, then I’ve no need to go through the farce of pretending to be a man.’
I’m telling you this, not to encourage you to defy your elders – particularly not Marcus, whose talent for disputation is already Talmudic – but to show you how I won my case. Victory, however, felt hollow. Luise was the only member of the household who still smiled at me. Even the servants sniffed their disapproval. But my own problems paled when, on 9th November 1938, a date forever etched on my brain, the Nazis launched a devastating attack on our community. Windows were smashed throughout the country, which is why it became known as Kristallnacht. But the damage was far more extensive than that name might suggest: houses, shops and synagogues were set ablaze; hundreds of people were killed and thousands of men were arrested. One of them was my grandfather.
There were drawbacks to our isolation. We had heard the clamour in the streets and seen the flames in the sky but, without any neighbours to warn us, we had no notion of what they might portend: whether it were another attack on the Reichstag or purge of the literary canon, or simply a Party celebration. For once I was grateful that, following the government’s cruellest edict, Winnetou and Shatterhand, my two red setters, had been spared the spate of explosions that would have terrified them. My reflections were punctured by a pounding on the door and the invasion of a Gestapo gang.
With no pretence of courtesy, they rushed through the house, trampling anything in their path. Their quarry was my grandfather, whom they found, bolstered by Beethoven, alone in his smoking room. The uproar roused the entire household, who appeared in various states of distress and disarray. Sophie struggled to control Luise, who ran up and down the nursery landing, moaning and banging her head against the banisters. My mother, along with Aunt Annette and Felix, Grandfather’s valet, demanded an explanation from the officer in charge, but his curt reply that the Jew Frankel was being arrested on suspicion of arson merely intensified the shock. Felix placed a conciliatory hand on the officer’s arm, only to be knocked to the ground by his gun. While Aunt Annette stemmed the blood streaming from the old man’s nose, my mother remonstrated with his attacker, who appeared to be torn between childhood training and adult ideology. Fearing that the latter would triumph, I pulled my mother away. Her surprise at my intervention was matched by my own that she accepted my restraint. I trembled at my daring but, when the guards bundled my grandfather through the hall, I was petrified that they would arrest her too. She screamed that her father would catch pneumonia if he went outside in his slippers, but she might have been the lone dissenter at a Nuremberg Rally for all the effect that it had. A surer approach was made by Thomas, our butler, who, with his innate blend of deference and authority, carried my grandfather’s coat up to his captors. ‘If you please,’ he said and, without waiting for a reply, deftly released each of my grandfather’s arms in turn and slid them into the sleeves. Then, either from force of habit or in a gesture of defiance, he flicked a speck of dust from the collar, before the men thrust him aside and hustled my grandfather through the door.
For a moment we stood in silence. Then, prompted by Luise’s wails, everyone sprang into action. The servants set about clearing the mess, as if grateful that their role was so clear-cut. Sophie carried a now limp Luise to bed. Aunt Annette led a babbling Felix to have his face washed. I was left alone with my mother, my arms still encircling her waist. She gently disengaged herself and turned to face me. I braced myself for a furious attack on my presumption or, at the very least, a bitter rebuke for my failure to persuade the guards to take me in place of the father she loved so much. Instead, she kissed me softly on the forehead and walked into the study. In retrospect, it strikes me as a turning point: her first recognition that I was growing up. At the time, it just made me shiver.
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked. ‘We must make a plan.’
‘Not now darling,’ she replied. ‘There are a lot of people I have to telephone.’ At a stroke, my new-found status vanished, and I was back to being a boy.
The next day we came to terms with our vulnerability. For all our wealth, we were still Jews. We could no more escape the orgy of destruction than my classmates in their slums behind the Alexanderplatz … and orgy of destruction, like so many well-worn phrases, conceals a deep truth. Looking back, I am convinced that there was a link between the new sense of power – of physical possibi
lity – that surged through my body at the most inopportune moments and the men, adolescent in impulse if not in years, who rampaged through Germany that night. Meanwhile my mother confirmed my suspicions that her unworldliness was a pose, when she systematically contacted everyone who might raise a voice on my grandfather’s behalf, starting with his American associates. Their partnership, which had produced the anomaly whereby my grandfather retained charge of his business after all his fellows had been forced out, may have lulled him into a false sense of security, but there can be no doubt that it facilitated his release after barely five weeks, just in time for Christmas: that festival which, to my growing disgust, he had always so loved. But there were to be no festivities for him in 1938: no dressing up as Santa Claus to distribute presents to his employees’ children; not even a family dinner. The veneer of assimilation had been stripped away. Christmas was no longer a holiday which people of good faith – of all faiths – could celebrate together, but a day on which our enemies could celebrate their ascendancy over us.
For as long as I could remember, my grandfather had remained unchanged. Indeed, his consistency in appearance, habit and attitude had made him my model for that other immutable patriarch, God. But, during his five-week absence, he had undergone a total transformation: he had visibly shrunk; his eyes were sunken; his skin was pallid and his hands shook. It was as though he had been starved of something even more precious than food. He had been imprisoned in Sachsenhausen, a place yet to acquire its murderous associations. I pestered him for details of his treatment and, to my surprise, my mother made no protest: a clear sign that she was afraid to put the questions herself. Grandfather was too pained – or proud – to say anything, except that for the first time he could truly comprehend what Uncle Karl had suffered at the Front. I thought that excessive since Uncle Karl had slept in a trench and washed in a ditch, until I overheard Felix telling one of the maids that the master had come home riddled with lice.
Our joy at my grandfather’s release was muted since, far from having the charge against him dropped, he was now accused of trying to burn down his own store in an insurance fraud. His sole recourse was the payment of a fine so vast that it required him to sell half his stock. This he did with barely a sigh, his arrest having succeeded where my arguments had failed in persuading him of the need to emigrate. Through a business associate, he obtained visas for England, only to reject them on the grounds that the country was too close to Germany both geographically and politically, its toadying to Hitler having strengthened the dictator’s hand. He settled instead on America, where his extensive assets would offset the government’s meagre allowance of ten Reichsmarks per emigrant. Deferring my dreams of Palestine (I was not to abandon them for another five decades), I found myself sketching the Statue of Liberty on every available scrap of paper; but the poem in its pedestal was belied by the President’s strict limit on the number of the ‘tired’ and the ‘poor’ and the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ who were allowed in. Even my grandfather’s influential friends failed to sway the State Department. Our one hope was to obtain a US visa and wait in a third country, perhaps for years, for our quota number to come up, but even temporary refuge proved to be out of reach, until my grandfather discovered that the Cuban consul in Cologne was willing to provide entry permits – at a price. Having paid it, he booked berths on the St Louis, a cruise ship that was sailing from Hamburg to Havana in May 1939.
We were forbidden to apply for passports until a month before our departure, knowing full well that the authorities might turn us down, for no other reason than to delight in their own caprice. So, in early April, the six of us – my disengaged mother and broken grandfather, my grief-stricken aunt and unpredictable sister, her governess and myself – faced the final obstacle to our escape: the maze of the Reich’s emigration office. It had been set up in a Jewish community centre which, my grandfather informed us with a wealth of irony, he had helped to fund. The jostling crowds displayed little sense of community as they vied for a place in the queue. The officials mocked their desperation, sending them running from desk to desk like clowns gathering water in a sieve. I raged at the Nazis’ brutality and a part of me – I dared not calculate its extent – longed to punch at least one of them in the face. I knew better, however, not least because, in the realignment of the family, I had assumed certain responsibilities. My most pressing concern was Luise, and I worked with Sophie to ensure that she should not be unnerved by the crowd or the uniforms; that no brusque order drove her darting forward to dash her head against a desk from which she could only be prised by a party of guards. So I greeted every taunt about my habits and hygiene with a sporting smile. I heaped thanks on each official, as we collected forms from one and had them stamped by another and then climbed the stairs to obtain our passports from a third, before making a symbolic descent to the basement where, in the final indignity and ultimate sign of our lack of status, they were stamped with a single J.
We had three weeks to prepare for departure although, to judge by my mother, it might have been three years. Faced with the need to squeeze each of our lives into the allotted ten suitcases, she threw up her hands and retreated into her studio. When my grandfather gently remonstrated, she accused him of trying to destroy her creativity, which stifled any argument as effectively as a rabbi’s citing of the Torah. Sneaking into the studio, in itself a serious violation, I saw that she was doing on canvas what she refused to do in life. There were Grandfather, Luise, herself and me – identifiable more by general characteristics than by individual features – squashed inside packing cases beside a ship. With Mother occupied at her easel, it was left to Aunt Annette and Sophie to see to the arrangements. Ten cases appeared to be a meagre allowance even for a fifteen year old, so I persuaded them that, since I was still growing out of my clothes, it made sense to buy new ones in America (in my head, I already shared a tailor with Jimmy Cagney), thereby leaving more room for my treasures: the photographs, books, stamp albums, phonograph records, binoculars and, above all, collection of birds’ eggs, each one painstakingly wrapped in felt.
I was fortunate that none of these attracted the attention of the assessors who ransacked the house for valuables. Their concern was for the paintings and furniture, gold and silver, ornaments and jewellery, all of which had to be surrendered to the authorities. But the much-vaunted Nazi efficiency proved to be flawed and my mother, finally goaded into action, kept back several diamond necklaces and rings, which Sophie concealed in the linings of coats and heels of shoes. My criminal aspirations, already boosted by the discovery of Jewish gangsters in America, received a further fillip when I literally became Diamond-Soled Karl. Meanwhile, my mother relaxed her definition of essentials to include her own paintings, filling three cases with work which, to her fury, the assessor had dismissed as worthless, and my grandfather, driven to defy the law at the age of seventy-six, cut his favourite picture, Poussin’s Flight into Egypt, out of its frame and hid it beneath the false bottom of a trunk. It now hangs in pride of place in my dining room. You may remember, Leila, how baffling you found it as a child. The minuscule figures lost in the landscape, although perfect for a lunchtime game of I-spy, made a nonsense of the title. It was a study of mountains and trees not people. But if – God forbid – you’d been forced into exile, whether by Herod or by Hitler, then I think you would have understood.
We all dreaded saying our goodbyes, apart from Luise for whom the word was an excuse for a frenzy of waving. My own were largely domestic, to the men and women I had known since birth: Wilfrid, my grandfather’s driver, who had taken me fishing and deftly swapped my tiddler for his two-pounder, a deception with which I was happy to comply; Frau Herzen, who had cooked it for our dinner but whom I primarily associated with jams and cakes, an expression of her own sweet nature; Felix and Thomas, to whom you’ve already been introduced; Charlotte and Gunhild, our maids, whose age allowed them to remain in our service when their younger companions had been forced
to quit. Aunt Annette asked if I wanted to take my leave of my classmates, but I declined. I knew that they would see my escape as yet another mark of privilege, especially when several of their fathers had been arrested on the same night as Grandfather but had yet to – and would never – return. My thoughts were far more focused on my former school. I dreamt of walking through the gates to find the last few years sliding away like stage scenery as my friends jumped out of their hiding places. ‘You fell for it,’ they would shout with a single voice, ‘you dupe!’ All the treachery, all the cruelty, all the violence would be revealed as a huge, if tasteless, practical joke, and I would once again be one of them. But God, in whom my trust had been severely shaken, although my faith remained firm, allowed me a moment of truth when, walking down the Kürfurstendamm, I bumped into some of my old gang in their new uniforms. Their only sign of recognition was a globule of spit which landed a few centimetres from my feet. I tried to tell myself that the distance was deliberate, but his fellows’ jeers confirmed my own recollection that Joachim Tressel had always been a hopeless shot.
A Sea Change Page 3