Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland

  Sigmar as a young businessman in Freiburg (photo credit 2.4)

  A telegram handwritten in purple pencil that Sigmar received at the front on January 26, 1915—the same date inscribed on my great-grandfather’s tombstone—makes it clear that when Simon fell ill, his soldiering son could not have returned in time to see him alive. Bereft of his father, Sigmar decided to move to Mülhausen when he resumed civilian life after Germany’s defeat in the war. His older sister Marie and her husband, Paul Cahen, already lived in that city, though its contentious history sowed perennial troubles for those who considered it home, as control of the region shifted between the French and the Germans.

  In the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, France had lost Mulhouse to Otto von Bismarck, who claimed Alsace and the neighboring province of Lorraine as part of his newly unified German nation. Renamed Mülhausen, the city was forced to accept German language and culture. The Germans treated the region as occupied enemy territory, even while drafting its men into their army. Almost fifty years later, the tables were turned. With France’s victory in World War I, the kaiser abdicated and went into exile. Mülhausen, along with the rest of Alsace and Lorraine, returned to French rule under the treaty signed in Versailles in 1919. Joyfully, the beleaguered city reclaimed its French name, and rancor toward Germany burned ever more fiercely.

  Soon after Sigmar’s return from battle, his sister Marie arranged through a friend in Eppingen for him to meet Alice. At that point, the former wartime nurse was twenty-eight years old and all too aware that with so many young men having died in the war, she could not afford to be overly choosy. When the match was suggested, Sigmar was close to forty, shorter than she, a quiet, serious, and intellectual man whose chief enjoyments came from reading and playing the piano. Qualities that might lead strangers to view him as stern and unyielding somehow also lent him a charming, childlike aura of virtue. A person of straightforward standards and firmly held morals, Sigmar never spoke ill of anyone else and would not seek advantage over his neighbor. He adhered to the laws of the country he loved because he assumed they were there for Order and Purpose. Above that, he believed in a God who ruled the universe fairly, and doing whatever he could to assist in that goal, he strove to make sure that justice prevailed.

  From a young woman’s perspective, there was probably little dashing about him beyond the strength and mystery that lay in his silence. Indeed, while Alice admired her reliable suitor, passion likely played no major role in inducing the playful, if bashful, former nurse to agree to the marriage, as she did after only two meetings. In the first, she served him squares of Swiss chocolate on a small silver tray and nervously poured sweet liqueur into colored-glass snifters barely larger than thimbles. In the second, she drifted to sleep and almost fell off her chair while Sigmar earnestly spoke with her eagle-eyed mother, immovably stationed with them as a chaperone.

  Alice was twenty-eight years old and Sigmar nearly forty when they were introduced after the war.

  Ever after, Alice would pride herself for having shown something like wisdom and farsighted good sense in securing her future. Sigmar’s brother and business partner, Heinrich, was a far better-looking, more graceful man, but comparing her own solid mate to her vain and high-strung brother-in-law over the years, Alice concluded—and tried with little success to drill into her daughters—that looks meant nothing in choosing a husband. What counted, she knew, were virtues of character on which a woman could always depend.

  Alice’s marriage took place in a hotel in Heidelberg, and Marie’s young daughter Emilie, or “Mimi,” entertained the small group of guests with Chopin piano mazurkas. A group portrait of the wedding party shows Alice, dressed in white ruffles, her eyes cast down shyly, slouching a little as if to disguise being taller than the unsmiling new husband who stands at her side. Sigmar, wearing a white bow tie and a gold watch chain looped over his tight buttoned vest, stares in dignified poise toward the future.

  Sigmar with Alice and her family in July 1920, when they married in Heidelberg. Seated (L to R): Rosie, Johanna, Lina, and Jennie. Standing (L to R): Rosie’s husband, Natan Marx; Alice’s brother, Siegfried; Alice; Sigmar; Lina’s husband, Sigmund Weil; Jennie’s husband, Joseph Guggenheim; and their son, Werner. (photo credit 2.5)

  In 1920, when my grandparents wed, the Nazi Party, founded the previous year, promulgated an overtly anti-Semitic program drafted in large part by a young Adolf Hitler. It declared that “only those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation,” and that “accordingly, no Jew may be a member of the nation.” But for Sigmar, returning to French-controlled Mulhouse after the war—a German war veteran with a new German bride—proved difficult too, with anti-German sentiment in France running so high. Feeling even less welcome as Germans in France than as Jews in Germany, Sigmar and Alice crossed the Rhine once again to settle and start a family in Freiburg.

  They would have to reverse this move eighteen years later, of course, when Sigmar’s record as a German veteran and Alice’s service nursing her country’s soldiers in war could not offset the fact that they were Jews. When they married, however, Alice was especially eager to live in the bustling German university town, with its fine theater and opera. Cable cars provided easy access to cool nearby mountains for hiking and skiing, while in the summer, glacial lakes with festive beer gardens beckoned tourists from all over Europe.

  By 1921, when Alice gave birth to her first child, a son she named Norbert, Nazi Party ranks grew to three thousand, and Hitler set up his unit of brown-shirted storm troopers. The party adopted the swastika, an ancient Sanskrit fertility symbol, as its insignia for banners and badges, and before long the Jew-hating exhortations of Hitler’s speeches were translated into violent action. Two years later, when Hanna was born, the anti-Jewish propagandist newspaper Der Stürmer made its appearance; and in 1925, when the Günzburgers’ second daughter, Gertrude, was born, Hitler published the first volume of his autobiography, Mein Kampf, denouncing Jews as “vampires” who cunningly schemed to enslave other peoples.

  In 1926, the Nazis launched the Hitler Youth movement, but the three Günzburger children were too young to take note of it or of their exclusion from its popular ranks. It was not until several years later, when they tried to fit in with their peers proudly attired in Hitler Youth garb and caught up in the jubilant frenzy of pro-Nazi rallies, that the shock of their outcast status would hit them.

  Alice’s marriage to Sigmar changed her. The spirited young woman—known even to the Eppingen postman as the intended recipient of mail addressed simply to the impudent or “freche Lisel”—turned into a docile, subservient wife. Anxiously, she ministered to her husband’s comforts and needs, providing a nurse’s watchful attention. For as long as he lived, she buttered his bread, buttoned his shirts, drew his bathwater, and ran to lower or open the windows at his slightest hint of discomfort. If he cleared his throat, she ran for his sweater. If she sensed that Sigmar had something to say, she sternly hushed the room into silence. Pleasing him became her prime and constant concern.

  Alice loved her children deeply but relegated their general care to a series of governesses whom she trusted more than she did herself to provide the training they needed for their station in life. Beyond that, unfamiliar with physical shows of affection from her mother, Alice in turn proved undemonstrative with her own children. A noisy smack in the air passed for her kiss, and she shied away with the quickness of instinct and a flutter of hands from any embraces, which seemed to cause her embarrassment.

  Although Hanna would certainly not model her mothering style on Alice, she would later pattern her concept of the nurturing service she owed to her husband on her experience of her parents’ marriage. Meanwhile, Alice’s fixed aim to gratify Sigmar in every conceivable way was one that Hanna also adopted in regard to her father. Desperate to win Sigmar’s loving approval and aspiring to a career as a doctor, Hanna became the obedient child between a rebellious older brother and younger sister wit
h a mischievous penchant for upsetting their parents.

  Her single instance of remembered defiance involved her balking at Sigmar’s demand that she give up her treasured textbooks from a previous year to a younger child from a needy family. “I’d prefer to keep them, Father,” Hanna demurred, mistakenly thinking a choice was involved. “Get them now!” Sigmar roared, lunged at his daughter, and grabbed her throat as a warning.

  “Teach Father a lesson! Run away!” Norbert advised her. “Don’t come back until they find you! Let Father think you’re missing or dead. Oh, then he’ll feel bad.” He led his younger sister to a nearby park and told her to hide there all night. But as darkness descended and the park’s keeper began locking its gates, Hanna realized that she herself—hungry, cold, alone, and afraid—would suffer her retribution the most. Sheepishly, she slipped through the gate and made her way home before her parents had even noticed her missing.

  “I can’t punish you, but God will,” Alice routinely intoned with a sigh—a prophecy the children found all the more frightening for the mercilessness of this maternal submission to implacable powers. Closer at hand, Alice left the miscreant to Sigmar, and it was Norbert who generally faced the tight-lipped, eye-bulging wrath of his father, who clumsily chased him around an upholstered circular bench in the foyer, flourishing an old cat-o’-nine-tails they called a Lavatli. Pressed to grow up too soon by the rapid arrival of two little sisters before he turned three, Norbert landed in trouble so often that as a very young boy he felt unwanted and stewed over baseless worries that he was adopted. Craving his mother’s love and attention, he tried to provoke her, repeatedly sparking her frustrated tears, and then he felt guilty.

  “Even if I’m your stepchild and am always treated like an afterthought, I don’t care, I’m already used to it,” he wrote at age eight in a childish hand on broadly lined paper. “Greetings and kisses from Norbert who loves you even if you don’t love him back. I want to be good again.… I put this note next to your bed. Please take it.”

  Yet when Sigmar hired a rigid new governess to assume the challenge of molding his children, she proved far more effective than even the strictest of fathers could have desired. The arrival of Fräulein Elfriede, who took a sadist’s delight in secretly abusing her charges, soon became the overriding event of their childhood. Blindly, Alice and Sigmar ceded her total control. To the children, however, the governess’s cruelty, which they were too afraid to reveal to their parents, made her seem the very embodiment within their own home of the Nazi terror seizing the nation.

  Only thirtyish herself at the time, Elfriede was a hard-bodied athlete with womanly curves, a shock of blond hair, and a prizefighter’s coarse, flattened features. Her unrelenting and disciplined training, she assured Sigmar and Alice, would boost their children’s inner resilience. If it did that, it also helped inculcate in Hanna a lifelong fear of all authority figures, as well as a hunger for approval that later prevented her from straying from what was expected of her. She learned to accept whatever life dealt her. And at times when she might have pursued her own path, both before and during her marriage, she felt constrained by duty—first to her parents and then to her husband and children—to put her own interests aside in deference to others.

  Fomenting a rivalry that would dog their relationship always, Fräulein Elfriede fanned competition among the three siblings, especially between the two sisters, which diminished the closeness that might have made up for what they missed from their parents. The governess insinuated that she would spare the child she preferred the brunt of her tortures, a tactic that encouraged the three to vie for her favor in spite of the fact that they all despised her.

  “I claim Fräulein Elfriede’s right arm!” Norbert would shout as they left on a walk. “And I get her left!” Trudi would hastily add. So they left Hanna to straggle behind, her siblings triumphantly gloating over their shoulders. The whole family called Hanna the nebbish, the timid one—a rare Yiddish word allowed in the household—and her fearfulness drew cold ridicule from Fräulein Elfriede.

  Trudi (L), Hanna, and Norbert in Freiburg, in a photograph taken for Sigmar’s fiftieth birthday in 1930 (photo credit 2.6)

  “Ich strafe dich mit Verachtung,” I punish you with my utter contempt, the governess sneered, averting her eyes as if the mere sight of the girl were too repulsive for any person of substance to bear.

  Whether it was part of her nature or a reflection of her support for Hitler’s insistence on cultivating a “brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel” generation, Fräulein Elfriede cracked down on the children much as the Hitler Youth movement cracked down on their non-Jewish peers. Night after night, she ordered them to take icy showers in front of each other, timed which child could endure the cold and shame longest, and urged the winner to claim a toy from each of the others. She forced them into boxing matches and made them leap, seated atop each other’s shoulders, from the high diving board at the Eppingen town pool before they had even learned how to swim. She locked Norbert outside on the terrace in thunderstorms and often imprisoned Trudi in a small, dark cupboard under the eaves where dirty linen was stored. Whenever Fräulein Elfriede caught the girl falsely denying some naughty behavior, she marched her through town with a humiliating sign on her back that proclaimed her to all as “the Lying Gertrude.”

  For Hanna, however, most dreaded of all were games of hide-and-seek in the mountains near the crumbling ruins of an old castle tower, games that Fräulein Elfriede expressly designed to prey on her fears of being abandoned. On her first visit, Hanna was moved by the grandeur of the location. From the misty crest of the Schlossberg, her view stretched over Alsace, well into France and the smoky blue ridge of the Vosges, while at the foot of the mountain, Freiburg sat a perfect toy town with its orange tile roofs and several high, pointed steeples. At the stroke of the hour, the bells of its churches all rang out in jumbled succession, their various peals dancing like goats on the flowering hillsides. But Hanna’s rapture surveying the scene was abruptly cut short when Fräulein Elfriede demanded that she cover her eyes and then disappeared with Norbert and Trudi. Sobbing as she searched in vain through the pine-scented woods and the clouds that were drawn to the top of the mountain, Hanna was mortified to imagine them laughing at her from the place they were hiding. With comfortable glee, they would witness her terror and later describe it, she knew, to all their classmates.

  Sigmar and Alice, unengaged in the inner lives of their children, saw none of this, but they appreciated the fine Kinderstube, or upbringing, the Fräulein provided. She taught the girls to sew and crochet, to knit and embroider, and she schooled all three in athletics and manners. The girls took separate lessons in posture and walking, being trained to place toe before heel and move as if gliding. Their achievements were put on display in the evenings, when Fräulein summoned them into the parlor to recite a poem for their parents or to play a small piece of music on the accordion before being dismissed to their rooms. Over time, their fear of Fräulein Elfriede grew so overpowering—while their relationship with their parents grew ever more formal—that the children felt incapable of revealing to Alice and Sigmar what they had learned of their governess’s pro-Hitler leanings.

  “I sing the song of the one who does me most good,” had long been her motto. And now, one afternoon, as Fräulein Elfriede put on her coat, the children caught sight of a Nazi Party swastika hidden beneath her lapel. Frightened by the discovery, but more fearful still of her retaliation if they disclosed it to their parents, they were cowed into silence and pledged for their own sakes to mask her ugly political secret.

  With the promulgation of the Nuremburg Laws in 1935 and their strict delineation of contacts permitted between Germans and Jews—including a ban on Jews hiring Aryan domestic employees under the age of forty-five—Fräulein Elfriede quit the household. It was a wonderfully unexpected result of the new Nazi rules. On the day that she left, the three children sat on the staircase as the hated young woman descended, each bea
ting a metal pot with a big wooden spoon—a primitive drumroll to herald their freedom. Down the steps that wound to the street like a conch shell, the governess brushed past their knees with the sangfroid of a ramrod: her lips were clamped shut and she said not a word.

  Much later, however, after the war, they heard from Fräulein Elfriede again when she wrote Alice in New York imploring her Jewish former employer to send her clothing and food. But in an uncharacteristic act of defiance, Hanna (Janine, by then) insisted that Alice ignore these entreaties. In her memories of girlhood, Fräulein Elfriede would ever loom large, wielding absolute power, like an advance guard of the Gestapo and the insidious emblem of the Reich’s creeping evil. “I’ll never come see you again,” Janine vowed to her mother, shocking them both with her threat, “if you send that cruel Nazi witch as much as a toothpick.”