Holocaust (13 page)

My mother and Anna still shared the old studio next door. They, of course, did not attend. My mother had her pride. And Anna, guest though she was in
Inga’s (and Karl’s) old home, made no secret of her resentment of the Helmses’ attitude toward her.

Although the German armies had been victorious in Poland, and the French and English seemed reluctant to fight, sitting in their bunkers in the Maginot Line, a wartime economy was in effect. Oddly, the Germans did not seem to be suffering. They were looting Poland and Czechoslovakia systematically. Shortages could be made up simply by taking food from the occupied countries.

But for Jews, life had grown unbearable. The wearing of the yellow star was mandated. Jews were easy targets on the street. My mother, too proud to submit, became a recluse. Anna occasionally ventured out to visit a friend unlucky enough to have been left behind. They could not attend the cinemas or the theater, ride public transport, shop in Christian stores. Inga still supplied them with food—a dull diet of starches, a bit of meat, ersatz coffee. Inga had taken a secretarial job at a factory. She had had difficulty in getting employment locally whenever it was learned she had a Jewish husband in prison.

But for the Helms family, it was a time of celebration. Poland, gone. The Allies, trembling with fear. Hans Helms, drunk, talkative, was bragging about the way their tanks and 88s had cut through Poland.

Muller chuckled. “Like a hot knife through butter, eh, Hans? Gave the Polacks a run for the money.” He drained his beer stein, eyed Inga. “Me, I’m too old for combat. I’m a damned prison guard. Buchenwald.”

Inga, who had been silent and full of sorrow most of the evening, sat up. “Buchenwald? Have you seen my husband?”

“Is he there?”

“You said so yourself … that he was probably sent there.” “Did I?”

Muller played cat-and-mouse with her, as she pleaded for help. He agreed to look Karl up in the camp records. It was a huge place, she realized. But
Muller would try. Once he touched her knee and she recoiled. He wanted to assure her that Buchenwald was not too bad a fate for Jews. Her brother, Hans, could tell her stories of what was done to them in Poland!

Drunk, but aware of what he was saying, Muller talked about how much worse things would get. Why had France and England gone to war? Jewish bankers, of course. Inga’s father joined in. He hated the idea of their hiding two Jews next door—in-laws or not.

Inga was furious, shouting that she barely recognized them as her family. When Hans taunted her as a kike-lover, one who had brought shame to them, she hurled a stein of beer in his face. Muller and Hans roared with laughter. Inga ran out of the room, to spend the night with my mother and sister.

They had become virtual prisoners in the studio. My mother’s last bank accounts had been confiscated, although she had managed to hide some cash in the lining of a coat. It was impossible to get medical care any longer, even from Christian doctors who had known my father. No one would lift a finger to help Jews.

Inga recalls that as she entered the studio, the radio was celebrating the New Year with a Bach chorale.

“Sebastian Bach, Inga,” my mother said. She was writing to my father again. Most of the letters never reached him. The Nazi authorities in what was called the “Government-General” of Poland intercepted mail to the ghettoes.

“I wonder if anyone plays our piano these days,” Anna said softly.

My mother looked up. “The old Bechstein? Goodness, I can’t imagine. That dreadful doctor who took over Papa’s clinic did not seem very musical to me.”

“He
stole
Papa’s clinic,” Anna said. “I hope they break their fingers if they try to play it.”

Looking back, I see that damned piano as symbolizing an anchor, a deadweight that kept us in Germany, gave us a false sense of security. Some years ago,
here at Kibbutz Agam, a Czech professor of languages confessed to me that he too had owned a fine piano in Prague—a Weber. He and his wife had always had the feeling that no possible harm could come to people who owned grand pianos.

My mother sealed the envelope. Inga saw the address to Dr. Josef Weiss, care of the Jewish Hospital in Warsaw. She kissed Mama.

“There is no harm in trying,” my mother said. “Perhaps 1940 will be a better year.”

“That’s right, Mama,” Inga said. “We mustn’t stop hoping.”

She sat opposite my mother in the darkened room and took her hands, saying, “You’re cold, Mama.”

“I’m always cold. Josef used to say it was my blue blood.”

Anna looked up from her book. “What was your family yelling about in there?”

“Nothing important. Hans is drunk.”

“They want to throw us out,” Anna said.

My mother said, “Perhaps … perhaps we could find one of Josef’s old patients who would take us in.”

“Mama,” Anna said angrily, “Papa’s patients are gone—in prison, or escaped, or just gone.”

“Anna, my child, we could try.”

Anna’s voice rose. She was seventeen then, tall and fine-featured, like my mother, and with the same strong spirit. But my mother’s will was breaking, and Anna was young enough to show anger. “There’s no hope, Mama, none. Karl is in prison. Papa is in Poland … and the Nazis are there now too, almost as if they came after him. And Rudi ran away. We’ll never see any of them again.”

My mother said nothing.

“Mama, you act as if this were a play, as if nothing bad has happened to us. Writing letters, talking about Papa’s patients, as if any of them were left.”

Inga tried to calm her. “It does no harm, Anna.”

Anna was not listening. “You always had the notion you were someone special. So fine, so educated. And you taught us to feel that way. Oh, the Nazis would
never hurt you or your children—and look what happened to us!”

“Anna, your mother is not to blame!” Inga said. She came to my sister and hugged her, tried to stop her from crying.

“New Year’s Eve!” Anna wept. “None of us will be alive next New Year’s Eve!”

Inga talked to her gently. My mother shut her eyes, rested her forehead on her clasped hands.

“Don’t you understand how much your mother loves you, Anna?” Inga asked. “And how much she loves your father, and the boys? She writes letters, and talks about them, and stays hopeful to keep you happy.”

“No! I won’t listen! It’s all a bunch of lies.”

Inga said, “But people sometimes need lies to get from day to day.”

“I don’t! I want my father and Karl and Rudi …”

“Don’t cry, child,” Mama said. “Please don’t cry. Rudi wouldn’t like it, if he knew. And he was your favorite.” The memory of me seemed to rouse her. She put on her eyeglasses again and began thumbing through old letters—letters from years back, reminders of the life we once had.

“I know we will hear from Rudi,” she said. “I know he’ll find a way for us to get out.”

Anna leaped from the sofa-bed and knocked the letters from the table. “No! More lies! I won’t listen any more! I’m running away also!”

It was a bitter-cold night. Anna grabbed her coat from the hook on the door.

“Inga, stop her,” my mother cried.

“Anna,” my sister-in-law said, “you have no money … no place to go. Rudi is strong and tough.”

“Oh, let me alone. I know I can’t run away. I just have to get out of here.”

Worried, my mother got up. “Anna, please …”

But Anna raced past them, into the dark corridor, and down the winding stairs to the courtyard. Normally there was a guard on duty outside the apartment building. But it was the New Year and everyone was drunk, eating, celebrating.

Anna ran into the street. As if denying what had happened to us, she ripped the yellow stars from her coat.

Anna had always had this rebellious, independent streak in her. My father had spoiled her terribly. The baby of the family, the only girl. Instead of making her soft and timid, it had the reverse effect—she was aggressive, perky, almost impudent at times. My mother was always admonishing her—“Anna, ladies don’t use such language,” or “Anna, dear child, can’t you be less noisy when your friends come over to play?”

Moreover, she was extremely bright, a much better student than Karl or me. Things came easily to her—studies, music, perceptions that eluded older people. There was a kind of life force in her, young as she was, a desire to experience a great many things, to plunge into whatever her passion of the moment was—collecting butterflies, American jazz music, needlepoint.

The suppression of her talents, her very freedom, the denial of her natural desires to mature, to have boy friends, must have been painful in the extreme to her. She told me once, before I ran off, that any of the eligible boy friends she had scoffed at, now gone, would be welcomed back with a kiss. Quite an admission, for the daughter of Dr. Josef Weiss.

And so, heedless, foolishly rebellious, she walked the darkened streets. Wartime security measures were in effect. Berliners being the law-abiding folk they were, the streets were empty.

Apparently Anna walked unseen and unmolested for several blocks. She wanted to look at our old home on Groningstrasse. She stood in front of it for a few minutes, thinking about the warm, close family life we had enjoyed there. The music. The games in the back yard. The park across the street where we had played soccer and tennis. Papa’s patients waiting, thanking him; the comings and goings.

As nearly as Inga could reconstruct what happened, from Anna’s hysterical account told before she lapsed
into silence, three men approached as she stood shivering under the street light.

Two were civilians. One was in the uniform of the local Storm Troopers, an older man assigned to nighttime duty as a street warden. At first they assumed she was a prostitute, disobeying the curfew for a little business on New Year’s Eve.

But a look at her young, fresh face told them she was not a whore. Then one of them saw the dark patch on the woolen coat, where she had ripped away the star. They were drunk, celebrating. One of them—Inga was never sure which one—even recognized her as the daughter of Dr. Weiss. He must have been a local man; perhaps even someone who had once been a patient.

She tried to run away. They held her back. She pleaded that she had just come out for some fresh air. She explained she lived some distance away, and that if they wished, they could escort her home, to make certain she was not up to any unlawful business.

One of the men then suggested they “talk it over” in the little park across from our house. It was deserted, the ground frozen, light snow covering the packed earth. At first she believed them, but when they began clutching at her clothing, tearing at her coat, violating her body with drunken hands, she realized what their intentions were. She screamed.

It did no good. People did not respond to screams in the night. They were heard too frequently. There was a small bandstand in the park, and the men dragged her there. When she screamed again, she was punched.

One man clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle her shouts. She struggled, broke free once, almost escaped. But they caught her, dragged her back, and while two held her arms down, stuffing her muffler into her mouth, the other ripped her clothing off and raped her.

They took turns.

When they had subjected her to several forms of sexual violence, sodomized her, made her perform acts that I cannot make myself write about, they thrust her
aside and lurched off, leaving her weeping, bruised, bleeding, on the steps of the bandstand.

Anna, leaving a trail of blood in the snow, somehow found her way back to the studio. The church towers around Berlin had tolled midnight, the New Year.

My mother lost her composure when she saw her standing in the doorway. Her face was a mass of welts and bruises. Her lip was cut. She had bitten it herself to bear the pain and humiliation. Under the winter coat, her skirt and undergarments were in shreds. One shoe was missing.

Inga took her in her arms and tried to console her. My mother at last gained control of herself. She put Anna on the bed. They undressed her and bathed her, applied liniments and antiseptics to her wounds, and spent the night trying to find out what happened.

She could respond only in choked suffocating sobs.

So began 1940 for my family.

Wandering, hiding, I found myself in Prague, on a gray damp day in February. Of my family, I knew nothing. I was on the run—lying, using my faked ID papers, walking cross-country, sleeping in barns and haystacks.

I had developed a sixth sense where uniforms were concerned—any kind of uniform, police, army, SS men, local cops. I could almost smell them, hear them before they saw my ragged figure and my knapsack.

Once I spent three weeks as a farm laborer in Bavaria, digging potatoes and carrots, blending into the remote farming village, silent, pretending to be a half-wit rejected from military service. When an army unit encamped nearby, I vanished the next day.

I used back roads, climbed a thousand fences and stiles, ate whatever I could steal or beg. From discarded newspapers I learned of the awesome successes of the German army, the phony war in the west, the bombing of England. And day by day, I realized that the Jews were doomed, and resolved that if I was to die, I would die fighting. I kept my old camping
knife hidden in my belt. I swore that if they came for me, if I were discovered, I’d kill at least one of them before they killed me.

Not far from Munich, in a town called Starnberg—I kept to small towns as much as possible, and secondary roads—I stole a pair of wire cutters from a hardware store. I’d become an adept thief. Brought up as a proper middle-class boy, full of the old Jewish rules forbidding stealing, cheating, or lying, I was learning that survival sometimes dictated something less than adherence to decorum. Many a shopkeeper noticed after my departure that he was missing a loaf of bread, a box of crackers, a pair of socks.

Moreover, I’d learned to travel cross-country—using my sense of direction, and local signposts. At the slightest sign of police or authorities, I’d duck into a field, or the woods, or cross a farm. Many a farmer’s dog came for me, and once I outran a bull. I had learned to be cautious, how to hide, when best to travel. Oddly, midday was always a good time. Cops and SS men, all the security forces, seemed to enjoy long, heavy meals and naps.