Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  It seemed as though just yesterday Julius’s Aunt Laura had telephoned from her home in Vienna, but in fact it had been November of last year, after the pogroms everyone called Kristallnacht.

  “It should be called instead Tränennacht,” Aunt Laura had said, “The Night of Tears.” It had left her—a seventy-three-year-old widow—with a broken arm. “I was trying to tell the police,” she had explained, “that my neighbor Herr Rosen has a wife who is ill, when one of them hit me with his rifle. And they arrested Herr Rosen anyway.”

  When it was over, hundreds of synagogues had burned, 7,500 Jewish shop windows were smashed (the stores looted), and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to concentration camps. Josefina could not understand—nor would she ever—how this pogrom was possible. Why had no one intervened? she asked herself, over and over again.

  “And they are making us pay for this Kristallnacht,” Laura had said, referring to the fine of one billion reichsmarks levied against Vienna’s Jews for the cost of damages—to Jewish property and synagogues—caused by the violence instigated primarily by Nazi Party officials and members of the Storm Troopers and Hitler Youth. “I am a widow. How do they expect me to pay?”

  When Aunt Laura telephoned again several weeks later, she reported the regulations against Jews: She was restricted to where she could go publicly. She was sure her home would be transferred to a non-Jewish family, Aryanized, she said, uttering the word with a cough. Though she was, even at seventy-three, a woman of fearsome stature, Josefina heard the fear crack Laura’s voice. And that was just one call from one relative who was living in this new Reich.

  THE NIVEA WAS COOL TO THE TOUCH. Its snow-fresh scent reminded Josefina of her sister. The racial laws in Italy had dispossessed Elsa of her apartment. After a lot of negotiating—Josefina could only surmise the details from the newly frantic script that appeared in her sister’s letters—Elsa had finally secured passage for Argentina and left in January, away from the Fascism in Italy and the madness of the Nazis all over Western Europe. Josefina tried to picture her sister, a widow with two children, traveling to the New World, crossing not only an ocean, but the equator. Had she packed a tin of Nivea cream? she wondered. And just as she dismissed the thought as absurd, the idea came to her that she might never see Elsa or Elsa’s children again. She wondered what the odds were, of surviving the world as it was becoming, and just as quickly decided she should push her thoughts in another direction. Still, the events that had unsettled her family, and the pace at which they occurred, were alarming.

  Four months after the terrible pogroms of Kristallnacht, Germany had invaded and annexed Czechoslovakia, a country separated from Teschen by only one small town, which the refugees came through into Poland on foot or bicycle and by cart and crossing the bridge across the Olza River. With the talk of war on everyone’s lips and the proximity of the Nazis, most of these refugees had continued further east, though some were too old and others too sick to travel.

  This is how it is, Josefina had thought at the time. First one group leaves. Soon it will be our turn.

  Elsa wasn’t the only one in the family who had been forced to leave her home. Julius’s mother had left for Lwów, in southeastern Poland, earlier in the month. Aunt Laura’s daughter, Hedwig, had emigrated to London. One cousin, an officer in the Polish Army, was called up to service and left Warsaw to join his unit. Another cousin, who had been deported from Vienna to a Nazi labor camp, escaped and had made his way to Shanghai, where no visas were required. We are like so many particles of dust, scattered this way and that, thought Josefina.

  Other Kohn cousins lived in Vienna, Kraków, Prague. On behalf of Julius and the family, she wrote to them all, though none of them would ever learn of what happened to the Kohns, and Josefina would not discover until many years later that all but three of them had perished during the war. In her letters, she reported succinctly that she and Julius and the children were headed to Warsaw, as were Julius’s sister, Greta, and her husband, Ernst. Josefina did not mention their specific plan, to retrieve from the tannery warehouse in Warsaw as much of the valuable inventory as they could, sell it, and book passage for England. “We should gather together again once this nonsense is done and we are returned to our lives,” she wrote to them all, unsure she believed these words but certain it was imperative to maintain hope. As the end of August came, and with it news of an imminent and unavoidable war, Julius finally agreed it was time to leave Teschen.

  Their earlier conversations about departure had been carried on in whispers as they lay in bed.

  “This sounds silly, Finka,” Julius said, “but to run away, to lose everything without defending it … this feels like a dishonor to my grandfather.”

  In a visceral way, Josefina understood this—like her, Julius was the third-generation grandchild in a family with over a century of ties to Teschen and its environs. To leave a place so infused with memory and desire and fulfillment was a bit like stripping away the foundation of one’s inner self. But she suspected something else was underneath Julius’s ideas about remaining in Teschen, and that it had to do with that “war to end war,” as people once called the four years between 1914 and 1918. Josefina was a girl when the shot that started the whole bloody mess was fired in Sarajevo in June 1914. Elsa was married, and Arnold, their brother, was old enough to join the army. Only she and Hans stayed at home in the family’s ample farmhouse. Julius, whom she hadn’t yet met, was a lieutenant, dispatched to the front. He fought, as her brother Arnold had, for Austria-Hungary, the empire that collapsed into countries now allied, annexed, or threatened by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

  Josefina had read about and heard of the terrible bloodshed of the Great War, which spread across Europe without ever really materializing in her backyard, though troops were garrisoned in Teschen. But Julius had actually seen and been wounded in the Great War, and to recall it, she suspected, summoned his worst fears. His imprisonment, she knew from what little he had told her, was tempered by the fact he was an officer. But Julius had lost his eye because his captors were unable, and perhaps unwilling, to save it. Which meant he had lain in a sorry excuse of a bed for weeks and weeks on end. It was November when he went missing in the Carpathians, so he was also very cold during his capture and subsequent deportation into Russia. And given the shortages of food, he also must have been very hungry. He wouldn’t want his family to endure an experience like that.

  The Great War was in the back of almost everyone’s mind, especially those who had lived through or come of age during it. Now, however, it was important to focus on how that war had divided neighbors and nations, stirred old resentments and bigotry, and caused economic divides. It was all of one piece—that war and the rise of anti-Semitism, the swelling Nazi power, and the nationalistic frenzies such power was stimulating. “Julek, I understand your hesitation to leave,” she said during their conversations, “but I am unsure we can save anything. Everywhere the Nazis go, they mow down the Jews, like blades of grass. Besides, if they come here, to Poland, the Germans will Aryanize all Jewish assets.” This was not going to be like the Great War, she said once—“I don’t think we will be able to come home as you came home afterward. I can’t tell you why I feel this, but I do.” She knew he knew what she was thinking about: The unbearable heartache of those children, husbands and fathers, brothers and uncles who were taken away by the immaculately uniformed Nazi soldiers. The wholesale liquidation not only of monetary wealth, but of intellectual, scientific, military, and artistic heritage. How could he forget, Josefina asked her husband, about Aunt Laura’s tale of Kristallnacht, its violence, and the blatant theft the Nazis were perpetrating in the countries they invaded and occupied, seizing Jewish shops, businesses, homes and furniture, farms and animals. “It is foolish to ignore any of this, Julek.”

  “I cannot forget this,” Julius said. “After all, we did sign over the tannery’s management to our Polish neighbors. But Finka, such a measure was only a temporary prec
aution.”

  Josefina disagreed; she was certain war was imminent, though they wouldn’t know for some time how the Nazis would dispossess and murder Polish citizens. Silence followed these terse exchanges, and inside the shared dread that had caused the wordlessness between husband and wife, Josefina yearned selfishly to return to how they had lived before all this. Theirs was a snug and welcoming life, filled with laughter and the snow of mountains and spring resplendent with new sounds and the joy of summer’s color and the quiet introspection of autumn. Hold it close, Josefina told herself. You will need to remember this. Because now, the anti-Semitic violence escalating everywhere in Europe, all of it sickening and perplexing, was coming closer and closer to their family. The brutality meted out to Jews was something, Josefina reminded Julius, that they had not personally known. She knew, too, from how nationalism was seizing and transforming almost everyone, that it no longer mattered if one was an assimilated Jew with a German name. Or if you spoke German, read German literature, and listened to German music. Or, if, even after twenty years of living in the postwar creation that was the Polish City of Cieszyn, you still referred to the town where they lived by its German name, Teschen. At their tables they served Wiener schnitzel and strudel and strong coffee. They employed and did business with people of all creeds. Vienna was their center of culture and intellect, and now their cherished city, emptied of Jews, was under Nazi rule. Czechoslovakia, that country just beyond the river to the west, was occupied by the Germans. Jews in the ever-expanding Reich were forbidden to attend schools or universities or to practice medicine or law. They were not allowed to have any of the money they had so honestly earned or prudently saved. They were blamed for all social ills, from the worldwide economic crisis of the early part of the decade, to the spread of vermin and disease.

  For Josefina, these laws and vitriolic attitudes constituted reasons for leaving Teschen. But when she articulated them, Julius seemed to become more rigidly attached to staying.

  Until the incident at the tannery.

  One evening some three weeks earlier, Julius’s apprentice, Eric Zehngut, had come to the Kohn’s house after supper. Several years older than Peter, Eric had shown a keen interest in tanning. The young man’s father, the Kosher butcher Jacob Zehngut, supplied the tannery with beef hides. Both families lived on the same street. Eric and his brothers grew up with the two Kohn children. Josefina felt relieved that it was he who was her husband’s protégé, and not their son, Peter. She liked Eric, never imagining how they might share the near and uncertain future.

  Josefina and Julius were sitting by the window when Helenka showed Eric into the parlor. The young man’s normally neat hair was in disarray. A bruise had started to darken his cheek, and his jacket was torn.

  “Julek, dear,” she said, standing from her chair, the hint of alarm in her voice enough to raise her husband’s eyes from the newspaper he was reading. “I’m going to fetch some cool water and a cloth for that bruise. Eric, please let me take your jacket to be mended.”

  “No … no,” Eric said, his voice shaky, “please Frau Kohn, don’t trouble yourself.”

  “Eric, I insist,” she said. He removed his jacket and handed it to Josefina. Once it was in her hands, she saw that drops of blood had stained the lapels. On the back was painted a swastika. It took Josefina a moment to realize that the Nazi symbol had been drawn with tanner’s red, the vegetable compound used in her husband’s factory. “Julius,” she said, holding the jacket for him to see. She tried to breathe deeply to dispel the cold surge pushing outward from within her chest, as if her insides were becoming pressed in ice and expanding. But Josefina could only gasp. Once she caught her breath, she spoke, focused on sounding as even a tone as she could manage. “I’ll have Helenka dispose of this and find you another jacket, Eric.”

  “Please sit down,” Julius said, rising to pour a glass of brandy as Josefina made her way to the kitchen.

  When she returned to the parlor, Josefina brought a cool cloth and a small basin of water.

  “… they are part of the Hitler Youth, I’m sure of it,” Eric was saying.

  He had reported some months ago to Julius that a number of workers at the tannery, whom he had once counted as friends, belonged to Nazi organizations, including the Hitler Youth.

  “Did they paint that swastika on your coat?” Josefina asked.

  He nodded. As she tended to the young man’s injury, she listened to him recount what had happened.

  Eric was closing up the factory when four of his coworkers surrounded him. They had changed out of their work clothes and into the signature lederhosen, white knee socks, and Tyrolean hats favored by young Nazi Party members in Teschen.

  “You think you’re a big shot because that Jew Kohn likes you,” one of them said.

  “Zehngut—what kind of stupid name is that? another asked. “It means ‘ten good’—when your family chose that name, could they count only to ten in German?” They all laughed at that, Eric said.

  “We’re going to get rid of all the Jews,” the first one said, stepping forward, “and we’ll begin with you.”

  At that point, Eric explained, he tried to get free, but one of the men punched him in the face. The first, who seemed to be leading the rest, instructed two to hold Eric while another stripped him of his jacket. “He was so close to my face, I could smell his rotten breath,” Eric said.

  Holding the jacket, their leader motioned them all toward one of the vats containing the tanner’s red. “OK, you have a choice, Zehngut: you can draw a swastika on your jacket with that tanner’s red and tell us how stupid Jews are, or you can refuse and we’ll use the tanner’s red to draw swastikas on your face.”

  At this, Eric looked to the ground. “I complied,” he said softly, telling the Kohns he was unable to repeat the foul insults the four men had forced him to say.

  Josefina stopped swabbing Eric’s wound. Her hands were trembling. She was relieved that Peter and Suzanna were visiting their grandfather at the farmhouse and had not overheard this story. When she looked at Julius, she saw registered on his face an understanding: their safety was no longer assured, no longer in his hands; he could not defend his family, home, or business. She knew they would be making plans to leave Teschen.

  JOSEFINA DECIDED TO PACK THE FOOD HERSELF. On this morning in late August 1939, her husband was attending to last-minute business at the tannery. Afterward, Julius would drive his family to Warsaw. Though Josefina had expected this, wanted it, even, she felt unmoored. The servants, save Helenka and her nephew Kasimierz Mamczur the driver, had left the Kohn’s employ. Though some people held out hope for peace to prevail, everyone was busy preparing, in case of war: Women busied themselves harvesting backyard gardens and stocking provisions in cellars. The elders who could not lift or cook listened to the radio for news or exchanged gossip. Any child old enough to carry something was doing just that, under the watchful direction of older siblings. Some people did nothing, thinking war would not come. And some—like the men who had fought in the Great War, their uniforms obsolete—saw only futility.

  Josefina thought about her father. The seventy-one-year-old Hermann Eisner, despite her protests, chose to remain in Teschen. “An old man like me,” he said, “would only be a nuisance.” Besides, he told his daughter, someone had to mind the family’s mill and bakery. She frowned when he said that, knowing the business would be Aryanized, and her father dispossessed not only of his property but possibly his freedom. Her older brother had already left to join the Polish Army, and she also knew Hermann did not want Arnold’s wife, Milly, and their infant, Eva, to be alone.

  Still, she hated to leave her father behind.

  “Finka,” her father said, “they might need me here.” He spoke softly and patted her arm. If he should die, he reminded her, he wanted to buried next to his wife. “I should be laid to rest with my Karola, here in Teschen where we were so happy together,” he said. His reasoning did not soothe Josefina, but she couldn
’t argue with her father once he had made up his mind.

  Hermann Eisner sported an unforgettable handlebar mustache. It lent his otherwise serious and distinguished face a jovial tone. As he aged, a kind bewilderment settled in his eyes, imparting an overall tenderness to his features. Josefina would miss the kindness he exuded and the smell of his baking bread. She would miss crossing the river for the Sunday dinners and carriage rides, which she and Julius and the children so loved. When she said good-bye to her father, Josefina suspected she’d never see him again. But she never let on that she was afraid. Instead, she touched his cheek gently and tried to smile, and when she couldn’t, she looked away.

  “Soon it will be a new year,” Hermann said. “Wherever we are, we will eat apples dipped in honey and think of one another.”

  JOSEFINA DELEGATED TASKS TO HELENKA and assigned chores to Peter and Suzi. “Be swift but mindful,” she told the children. “We will be leaving soon.” She went into the kitchen and gathered foods that would travel and keep well: flour, onions, tinned fish, potatoes, cooking oil, cherry preserves, salt, and sugar. Into a small crate, she placed a pot, a pan, some dishes, utensils, matches, and two sharp knives. Finally, she prepared their meal for the six-hour drive to Warsaw: new apples, tart and hard, leftovers from two roasted chickens, some cheese and bread, and the last of the milk. To preserve a sense of decorum, she placed four fine linen napkins in the food hamper.