Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  Six Thousand Miles to Home

  A NOVEL INSPIRED BY A TRUE STORY OF WORLD WAR II

  ALSO BY KIM DANA KUPPERMAN:

  I Just Lately Starting Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence

  The Last of Her: A Forensic Memoir

  As editor, You: An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person

  Six Thousand Miles to Home

  A NOVEL INSPIRED BY A TRUE STORY OF WORLD WAR II

  KIM DANA KUPPERMAN

  AFTERWORD BY RABBI ZVI DERSHOWITZ

  LEGACY EDITION BOOKS

  MOUNT KISCO, NEW YORK

  Copyright © 2018 Legacy Edition Books, a project of the Suzanna Cohen Legacy Foundation

  All rights reserved.

  The mission of the Suzanna Cohen Legacy Foundation is to collect, preserve, publish, and teach the life stories of men and women who marshaled exemplary resilience in the face of forced displacement, and to honor the bravery and generosity of those who provided compassion and assistance to refugees, exiles, and persecuted peoples. Proceeds from the sales of this book benefit the work of the foundation.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without express permission requested in writing from the Suzanna Cohen Legacy Foundation.

  For more information, and to download a free teaching guide, please visit: www.legacyeditionbooks.org

  This is a work of historical fiction, based on factual, historical episodes involving real people. All the given names have been retained, but some of the family names have been changed. Great care has been taken to assemble an accurate record of the events chronicled in this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2018906110

  ISBN 978-1-7323497-0-4 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-7323497-1-1 (ebook)

  First Edition 2018

  Design by GKGraphics

  Cover photo: Image Source

  Printed in Canada

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Hermann and Karola Eisner

  Julius and Josephine Kohn

  Soleiman and Suzanna Cohen

  This book is for all their descendants

  And with everlasting gratitude to Joan and Edward Cohen, whose vision and love made this book possible

  To appreciate the preciousness of the lives that were saved, it is necessary to have a thorough appreciation of the horror from which they were so miraculously preserved.

  —DANIEL MENDELSOHN, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

  PART I

  Uncertainty

  Once, in the Place They Called Home

  JUNE 1938, TESCHEN, WESTERN POLAND

  IT WAS A WARM, CLEAR MORNING in early June. A breeze riffled the pages of a newspaper on the dining table. There the couple—married now eighteen years with a son and daughter—took their breakfast in customary silence. One news item in particular had astonished Josefina Kohn. It shook her hope that some sort of intervention would occur—no, should have already taken place, she thought—to depose the man from Austria who was ruining all she cherished. She clung to an idea that life, shaped with civility and culture, that is to say life as she had known it, would be restored. What was everyone waiting for? she wondered. It was clear that this Hitler, this self-proclaimed führer, was up to no good. He was a criminal, wasn’t it obvious? So much evidence of his grotesque law-breaking had accumulated since his appointment as chancellor in 1933: Konzentrationslager, or concentration camps, at Dachau and Buchenwald, the boycotts of Jewish businesses, the laws segregating Jews, and that was just the short list. Each encroachment by Germany on its neighbors had unfolded at a relatively safe distance from her family’s home in western Poland, but it was clear that the Nazi-inspired wave of anti-Semitism was nearing. And, it seemed to her, the hatred was becoming more dangerously accelerated. Had she not been a refined woman, Josefina Kohn might have spit every time she read or heard about Jews made to get on their knees to clean the streets—sometimes with toothbrushes—or the Nazi proclamations in her beloved Vienna. Instead she took to tearing up the newspaper articles about all these awful events. This she did after her husband and children had retired and the servants had closed their doors.

  Sitting in the kitchen, Josefina Kohn, whom friends and relatives called Finka, tore the sheets of paper with great resolve. First she folded the pages as if making a fan and then she ripped them along the creases into long, vertical strips, which she stacked neatly. These Josefina divided into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, down to the tiniest fraction possible, arranging the resulting little squares in small, tidy piles. Her husband, Julius, slept through the night and never asked what she did when she couldn’t sleep.

  For many years Josefina had given purpose to her insomnia by reading or sewing. Often she wrote long letters to her older sister, Elsa, who lived in Italy, and was widowed now six years, but blessed with two children, an older boy and a girl. These days, the letters between the two sisters were darkened by news of anti-Semitic legislation, passed not only in Hitler’s Germany, but in Poland too. In July of 1938, Elsa would write about the publication in Italy of the Manifesto of Race, which paved the way for the enactment in November of the leggi razziali, the racial laws that would strip Elsa and her children of their Italian citizenship.

  In spite of the nationalist sentiment building all over Europe, to Elsa she confided the hopes she had for her children’s futures. Peter was now sixteen, a budding athlete, and she imagined him attending university. Perhaps he’d become a barrister or a doctor, though he was two years from finishing high school and taking his final exams. Josefina sensed that studies didn’t interest her son, but a profession that one might practice anywhere was a pursuit worth considering, and so she urged him to excel academically. Suzi, precocious at twelve but still shy, showed promise at the piano, as Frau Camillia Sandhaus had said. “And Camillia should know,” Josefina wrote to Elsa, who was well acquainted with Teschen’s famous teacher and performer. “Imagine if Suzi could perform in Vienna,” she wrote, “and afterward, we could sit in the Café Landtmann and drink sherry together.”

  Later, Josefina would think of those ambitions for the next generation which she described to her sister as typical of the milieu and times into which she and Elsa were born. They embraced the music and poetry that flourished in their countries and in their own communities. This nostalgic inclination was a kind of residual effect inherited from their German-speaking, assimilated Jewish parents, who had made for themselves successful lives during the stable and relatively peaceful Age of Security preceding the Great War. But Josefina and Julius and their brothers and sisters had all come of age during that terrible, ravaging war. It was not enough to listen to Chopin or read Shakespeare, or know who among the masters had their paintings hung in which museums, nor was it adequate to speak languages such as Latin or Greek, or even to have the acumen for business or commerce. Higher education—a relatively new avenue for the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, provided abundant opportunities to enter into law, medicine, science. Josefina encouraged her son’s pursuit of education, hopeful he would choose such a profession.

  Josefina worked by the light of a candle. After several hours of needlework, reading, letter-writing, or her current newspaper-tearing, Josefina’s eyes grew heavy, and she was sleepy enough to return to bed. She slipped under the duvet next to Julius, in the bare hours of what the French call le petit matin, the little morning. She appreciated the cleverness of that expression, for it promised that the palest part of the day would grow into something larger, and she was fond of such optimism, especially when she was unable to sleep.

  In the morning, Hel
enka the nanny was the first to rise. She put away Josefina’s books and embroidery, or placed the finished letter in the marketing basket. But more and more of late, Helenka’s task involved sweeping into her hand those little squares of newspaper and their broken sentences, which she threw in the wood stove. At first this shredding of the news reports seemed odd but harmless, but once it became a daily habit, Josefina felt the other woman’s keen yet discreet gaze. She knew Helenka was observing her, watching for signs that her mistress might be unwell.

  Anyone who did not feel ill from the news, of course, was not paying close attention. Josefina was the kind of woman who did not want to be surprised or caught unaware. She prided herself on being planful, sometimes even prescient, and she scolded the children whenever they lost their focus. Thus, she watched the news with great care, even the articles buried on page ten or further. Today’s short item was, compared to the accounts of all the more numerous and distressful events over the course of the past five years, relatively insignificant. But it disturbed Josefina, and thus she decided not to destroy this particular article, but to save it.

  Perhaps it was because Sigmund Freud, the bearded man in the article’s accompanying photograph, seemed, at eighty-two, agitated in a way that Josefina recognized. His expression seemed baffled, she might have said, by circumstance. Herr Freud was a contemporary of Josefina and Julius’s fathers. The famous psychiatrist was born, as were Josefina and her husband and their respective families, in a small place that was once part of an otherwise large and powerful empire. In fact, his town was only forty minutes west of Teschen, and whenever the Kohns traveled west, to Vienna or Innsbruck, they passed by the great man’s birthplace. He was, also like them, an assimilated Jew who spoke German and for whom Vienna was the cultural capital. Which is where he attended gymnasium and university and where he settled and raised a family. The quality of his life had caught Josefina’s attention, and she respected him for establishing himself as such a prominent doctor.

  Josefina recalled seeing Herr Freud at the Café Landtmann on the Ringstrasse while she was visiting Elsa, who was then newly married and living in Vienna with her husband, Arturo. On that occasion, Herr Freud lifted his head as Josefina passed his table, and they had looked at one another. He scrutinized her face for what seemed like an eternity, though it must have been only the briefest moment. She learned later that he was introverted and often bitter, though she could detect neither quality in his eyes.

  “That man has revolutionized medicine,” Elsa said as they sipped their coffees, on a day that seemed impossibly long ago in a place that was becoming smaller and smaller.

  “HERR SIGMUND FREUD HAS LEFT VIENNA,” Josefina announced to her husband as she tore out the page of the newspaper, “and is now residing in London.” Even a man of such achievement cannot be saved, she thought. The sound of ripping paper and her voice seemed to fill the empty glasses on the breakfast table. “He is, apparently, penniless.” Not until Julius raised his head and looked at her did she continue. “Julek …,” she said, “We talk about leaving, yet we stay. Are we making the right decision?” she asked. “Herr Freud waited and now he’s lost everything.” Herr Sigmund Freud was modern and educated in ways her own parents were not, and though he had been bankrupted by the Nazi laws, he had eluded their grip. Would she and her family escape as he had, by that merest thread connecting luck and timing? On her angular face a vexed expression shaped her mouth into an uncharacteristically bleak, unturned line.

  Julius set down his fork and knife. He smiled in that way he had of smiling only at her, as if they had just shared a private joke. As was his manner before speaking, he took a deep but almost inaudible breath and adjusted the patch over his left eye, lost when he was a soldier during the Great War, before their engagement and marriage. When she first met Julius eighteen years ago, Josefina had considered his injury a testimony to his spirited courage. She often tried to imagine how it felt to be held against one’s will, as Julius had been. He had been guarded by Russian soldiers, wounded and unattended, his vision compromised, the loss of an eye looming. She never asked him how he had suffered for it or what he might have learned. Sometimes she wished they talked about such things, but they never did. It was a terrible irony, Josefina thought, to live so mutely at a time in which a doctor such as Sigmund Freud extolled the virtues of self-examination, ushering in what would become known, once Josefina was older, as the Age of Analysis. The decorum of such silences carried by her generation was becoming a kind of burden, but she couldn’t lay it down, nor could her husband. Besides, these days Josefina Kohn’s worry was trained on matters related to her family’s safety, and she was mostly fearful that the direction of her children’s lives would be diverted. In moments of darker contemplation, she was terrified that an irrevocable harm would come to her family.

  “We’ve discussed this, Finka dear,” Julius said. “Should a war break out, we’ll pack up and leave. We have resources; we have a car. We have the means to reach safety.” It was strange: his voice, like his face, betrayed no anxiety, and Josefina couldn’t quite make out if his apparent lack of worry made her feel more or less nervous. How could it be that you were married to a man for almost two decades and were unable, as she was now, to read his voice? And they had discussed so many things lately—the refugees from Germany, Hitler and the Nazi Party’s meteoric rise to power, the economic strangleholds placed on Jews in Poland.

  “And go where?”

  “Where would you want to go?”

  Josefina eyed the photo of Freud. He seemed smaller than she remembered, and now she saw in him a brokenness, the kind that comes when you are forced to leave a place, a home, a life you love. “Someplace safe, Julek. And I am being absolutely serious.” She paused before speaking again. “England,” Josefina said. “We could manage well there.” An image of sitting at a table in the afternoon and taking high tea came to her mind; the peace and civility of such a tradition symbolized what she yearned for most these days.

  Julius Kohn folded his napkin, and rose from the table. “Finka, I promise we will be safe.” With that he kissed the top of her head.

  She, in turn, straightened his bow tie—it was always slightly crooked to her eye—and then he left for work. She wondered how her husband could be so sure during such uncertain times.

  THE HOUSE AT 10 MENNICZA STREET was tranquil after breakfast. Josefina enjoyed these morning moments, especially in late spring and early summer, because time seemed to slow and the rooms on each of the four floors were still. You could hear the birds and the opening of shutters beyond, and against all this, the light cushioned the edges of everything.

  She liked to remain at the table after her children had gone to school and her husband was off to work and imagine herself drifting in the house, from one space to the next. Josefina pictured her hand brushing the solid mahogany furniture, her reflection in the oval hallway mirror, the drapes in the parlor so heavy that a random gust of air barely disturbed them. From the kitchen came the savory odor of warm rye bread. If she were to go upstairs into her children’s rooms, she’d see Peter’s rock specimens carefully labeled and displayed in a glass case that his grandfather had brought back from Kraków. Light might dance on a trinket left on top of Suzi’s dresser. Down the hall in the master bedroom, she knew Helmut the dachshund was curled and snug on a green velvet cushion. How brown the dog seemed to Josefina, who later would conjure his warm color and moist nose when she needed comfort.

  Josefina continued this make-believe tour, down the staircase, which spiraled, as Peter liked to point out, like the inside of a nautilus shell. Then out the front door onto Mennicza Street until its intersection with Głęboka, where she first lived with Julius, his family, and the children. She’d take Zamkowa Street to the Olza, where the Café Avion dominated the bridge that crossed the river. Once at the café, she would linger outside. In her mind she heard a melody—Chopin, perhaps, or Debussy—coming through an open window.

  Wit
h her eyes closed, Josefina continued her imaginary travels about the cobbled streets of Teschen, back to Mennicza Street and toward the town’s grand main square with its center fountain, where she and Julius liked to take the children when they were small. She ambled past the city hall with its pillars and clock tower, a thing she beheld in wonder as a young girl. Past the stylized façades of the Hotel of the Brown Stag and the Deutsche Haus. At Rynek Square, she pictured Helenka with a basket on her arm, examining the first cherries on offer at the market. Taking Ratuszowa, a small street off the square, to Pokoju Street, she came to the buildings that housed the schools her children attended. There they sat in their respective classrooms, Peter learning English, Suzi practicing French, both of them with collars damp from the warmth of early June. Both of them slightly inattentive from longing for the end of the school year and the upcoming trip to see friends in Skoczów, the start of summer with its visits and birthday parties and outings and travels.

  And finally Josefina made her way from Schodowa Street to Przykopa, where Julius would be walking along the millrace to attend to business at his leather-tanning factory. Her husband strolled, his demeanor amiable and his smile broad, and she could almost, if she tried, reach out to adjust his bow tie.

  PRESENTLY THE DOG BARKED. The urgency of today, Josefina thought as she opened her eyes, always begins the same way. She directed her gaze toward the window and wondered if a day would come when she’d lean over the Juliet balcony and look down Mennicza Street and hear boots falling on the cobbles.

  Better to Carry than to Ask

  AUGUST 1939, TESCHEN

  JOSEFINA WAS TAKING A BREAK—from cooking for the refugees, visits with family, and letter-writing to relatives and friends. As she sat in her bedroom at the vanity and rubbed Nivea cream into her skin, Josefina considered the events of the last eight months. No matter how often she thought about all that was happening, she was always astonished by how rapidly the lives of European Jews were changing. Ten to thirty refugees arrived each day in Teschen. She and her husband and other philanthropically minded citizens tried to help them, but as Julius had said to a friend, “All means are really too little in order to be able to truly help.” Josefina felt the quickening pace of the everyday into a daily existence which was not at all ordinary.