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

by Leslie Maitland

  Janine destroyed Elfriede’s letter, but Alice’s trove of long-preserved papers contains several from another former domestic employee, Agathe Mutterer, who used to come to the Poststrasse house to iron the laundry. She was seventy-four years old in 1961 when she obtained the Günzburgers’ New York address and, after an absence of twenty-three years, wrote from Freiburg:

  Many difficult years have passed since our life together on the Poststrasse. How I used to love to come to you in celebration of ironing, when your three darling children made a ring around my ironing board, played the accordion for me, and brought me little chocolates to eat! I felt so at home in your dear family.

  Since then, there has been much suffering, we have grown old, and almost all the relatives are gone. But I would be so happy if I could hear from you and know that you still are alive. Be happy that someone in the old homeland is still thinking of you with gratitude. May God always protect you.

  In 1936, the same Agathe Mutterer had inscribed in Hanna’s childhood autograph book a message that would later prove amazingly prescient: “My very good, dear Hannele,” she wrote. “Learn to carry your suffering patiently. Learn to be understanding and learn to forgive. Learn to love, and it will help you.”

  THREE

  DIE NAZI-ZEIT

  IT WAS EARLY SPRINGTIME 1933 in the Black Forest Valley, and a mantle of snow still collared the mountains. In Freiburg, fragrant March violets crept on schedule out of the earth, and cone-shaped blossoms of pink and cream dressed the chestnut trees. But even in this university town in the balmiest corner of Germany, the simple joys of awakening spring would soon be eclipsed by a thunderous new political storm. This was the start of the Nazi-Zeit, the Nazi Time, as Germans now refer to the period, as if it arose like any other natural season.

  On March 31, Sigmar was stunned to discover himself immediately and directly affected by a headline that blasted across the top of Baden’s Nazi Party newspaper, Der Alemanne, trumpeting a war against Germany’s Jews as well as a boycott of all Jewish-owned firms. ACHTUNG! BOYKOTT! it read, naming scores of Freiburg businesses that Germans were exhorted to shun, beginning the following morning, by order of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Reichsminister and head of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, himself a former Freiburg student. The list included the Gebrüder Günzburger. “Jews want to destroy Germany!” the newspaper warned, announcing the nationwide boycott with a barrage of exclamation points. “In the future, no German should buy from the Jews!”

  Printed in Fraktur, the gothic font widely used by the Nazis until they abruptly banned it in 1941 when Hitler deemed it outmoded, the paper urged the citizenry to rally that evening at eight fifteen at the Münsterplatz, the splendid square of the city’s cathedral. Here, at the market set up around the cathedral each morning, generations of burghers had gathered to haggle with weatherworn peasants over baskets and pushcarts filled with products and produce, richly arrayed under bright striped umbrellas. That night, however, in place of fruits and flowers, sausages and cheeses, olives and noodles, black-and-red Nazi banners emblazoned with swastikas dominated the cobblestoned square, as citizens amassed to shout new battle cries at their old Jewish neighbors.

  On March 31, 1933, the front page of the Nazi Party newspaper in Baden, Der Alemanne, declared war against Germany’s Jews and announced a boycott of all Jewish-owned firms. (photo credit 3.1)

  “Hitler has taken the rudder,” Hanna recalled hearing Sigmar bemoan to his brother Heinrich just eight weeks before, on January 30, when the Nazi leader maneuvered to seize power as chancellor. She had puzzled over her father’s metaphor then, but shortly after ten in the morning on April 1, Sigmar’s reasons for worry grew clear, as brown-shirted Nazi storm troopers formed a sidewalk phalanx outside his office. A curious crowd gathered to watch as they daubed the windows with crude yellow Stars of David to brand the business as Jewish and therefore off-limits.

  Freiburg’s market on the Münsterplatz: the late-Gothic building on the left, with arches, is the red-colored Historische Kaufhaus (Historical Merchants’ Hall). (photo credit 3.2)

  It was Hitler’s stated objective to protect the purity of German blood through the elimination of Jewish “pollution,” and economic restrictions marked his first step. Though Sigmar, Alice, and their assimilated peers took care to present themselves always as true Germans of Jewish faith—any difference of identity a matter of religion, not race—Nazi dogma expressly outlawed that view. As a result, German Jews now anxiously redoubled efforts to distance themselves from the alien presence of Ostjuden rushing over their borders from Poland’s poor ghettos, those Orthodox Jews who attracted embarrassing public attention with their raven black clothes, beards, mangled German, and fringes.

  By contrast, Freiburg’s main synagogue, an imposing stone structure near the university, was a liberal one where, even in prayer, most men eschewed traditional skullcaps or yarmulkes and instead covered their heads with the same dark fedoras they wore on the street. Religion had a place in their lives, but within the greater community they were secularized. Hence Sigmar, like his non-Jewish counterparts, spent Saturday mornings at work in his office, and though he did not permit his wife and children to write, sew, or play on the Sabbath, he magnanimously awarded himself dispensation to continue smoking his favored cigars. “God forgives Sigmärle,” he would say with a shrug and a grin, by way of explaining his happy personal compromise with the Almighty.

  He hewed more carefully to what the community expected of him just days after Freiburg’s first Nazi rally, when, despite the ire aimed at Jews, he persisted in having Hanna deliver paper-wrapped packets of Passover matzo to each of his best Gentile customers as a neighborly gesture. Hanna loved the eight-day holiday and its special breakfasts of Matzekaffee—matzo soaked in large cups of coffee, sugar, and milk—yet she dreaded her annual springtime chore.

  “Guten Tag,” she would say as instructed, bobbing a curtsy with practiced politeness as she reluctantly made her visits through town. “I am the daughter of Sigmar Günzburger, and he would like you to have with his compliments a sample of our Passover matzo.”

  Popular German folk wisdom had held that matzo worked to help ward off lightning, so it became traditional for Jews in some parts of the country to have their children bring the unleavened bread to non-Jewish neighbors at Passover time. New Nazi efforts to fan public outrage over the medieval “blood libel” charge failed to grant Hanna reprieve from her rounds. Indeed, she was obliged to make her deliveries again the following year, even as the lurid anti-Semitic propaganda vehicle, Der Stürmer, published a fourteen-page issue devoted to the Jews’ alleged ritual murder of Christian children in order to use their blood to make matzo.

  Coinciding with Easter, however, Passover gave Hanna and Trudi the pleasure of a new dress, coat, hat, and shoes for public display. After each shopping trip with Alice for this purpose, the girls looked forward to showing their father their new finery, knowing ahead of time exactly how he would tease them. “Oh, but I already know all about it,” Sigmar would say with an air of great wisdom acquired from the rumor mill on the town’s busy square. “Everyone’s been talking about it on the Rotteckplatz!” And when the day itself finally came to parade their new things and they appeared dressed for synagogue, Sigmar would thump the heavy mahogany table that sat in the foyer and then clasp his hand to his chest as if overcome by the sheer delight and surprise of their beauty.

  “Was werden da die Leute sagen?” What will the people say when they see you? he would ask in wonder, a rhetorical query that always elicited blushes and laughter. The joy of this moment was tempered, however, by having to stand next to their mother as she turned aside all compliments about their appearance.

  “Ach, they’re nothing so special,” Alice would say with a dismissive wave of her hand that was meant to be self-effacing, when acquaintances stopped her to comment on the charm of her daughters in their matching ensembles—always light blue to enhance Hanna’s eyes, always red f
or her copper-haired sister.

  Hanna, Trudi, and Norbert studied Hebrew in after-school classes, and on Friday nights they sang in the synagogue choir. At services, where women and girls were relegated to the balcony, Hanna’s thoughts wandered in spite of her will toward pure-minded devotion. A child who was acutely aware of the sudden potential for danger and loss and who groped in lonely spaces for the comfort of love, she believed in prayer as a kind of insurance. In the austere sanctuary, she struggled to find the smiling embrace of a benevolent God who might forgive a child’s secret doubts. Instead, she encountered a God who terrified her with thoughts of how she would pay for the sin of ignoring His Law, with its intricate rules and stern retribution. The reign of God in her world mirrored the authoritarian rule she knew in her home, and the probability of displeasing God or Sigmar engendered not only fear but also a smoldering sense of guilt that was already a driving part of her nature.

  The Freiburg Synagogue was consecrated in 1885 and destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. (photo credit 3.3)

  At the Rosh Hashanah holiday marking the Jewish New Year, for instance, the Günzburger children were expected to write to their parents and critique their own past behavior. With their best handwriting in flowery letters that they placed like offerings on their parents’ pillows, they annually extended their thanks and pledged to mend their performance at home and in school. The tone of their letters hardly varied at all:

  Hanna’s 1934 New Year’s letter to her parents, written in the hard-to-decipher script called Sütterlin, taught in German schools from 1915 to 1941

  “I promise to work harder to please you in the New Year,” Hanna wrote, for example, at age eleven in 1934. “I won’t give any fresh answers. I will try hard to excel in school.” And at Rosh Hashanah when she was twelve: “In the last year, I was sometimes bad. For that I ask you from the bottom of my heart to forgive me. May God make me do only good things and give you all the love and good luck you deserve. So wishes your faithful daughter.”

  In an effort to gain her father’s respect, Hanna worked to find biblical questions she might raise with him during the family’s outings each Sunday, when Buhler, the chauffeur, often drove them to the so-called Alter Friedhof or seventeenth-century Old Cemetery, where the ancestors of the town’s Catholic elite lay buried. There—his preferred weekend pastime—Sigmar led them on tours through the elaborate graves, expounding upon the generational histories of the entrenched Freiburg families whose mossy tombstones he found so intriguing.

  But whenever Hanna asked him about God or death or the reason for evil, Sigmar’s answer was curt and unyielding. “We don’t question these things,” he sternly rebuked her. Ever after, she cringed to recall how shocked he had been when she tried to show off her biblical insight by sharing the news she had heard from a friend—that Adam and Eve were really chased out of Eden not for chastely eating a forbidden apple, but for angering God by engaging in sex with each other. “Who told you such a thing?” Sigmar demanded, and he directed her never to speak with her theological expert again.

  Ever aiming to please, in school Hanna was a hardworking and excellent student. Her prize-winning entry in a penmanship contest requiring the use of a highly formal, complicated Germanic script called Sütterlin was hung on display in a local museum, and she set her sights on winning the top academic prize in her class, for which Sigmar had held out the reward of a new bicycle. When her marks won top ranking, however, school officials refused to grant her the prize because she was Jewish, and Sigmar made no allowance for that injustice.

  As a result, she never got the new bike she craved until she bought me a shiny white Schwinn when I was eleven, outfitting it with near-giddy delight with baskets and bell and red handlebar streamers. Then thirty-six, she occasionally rode it around town while I was in school. Yet those solitary excursions up and down the empty hills of suburban New Jersey could not have brought the same joy she had tasted in daydreams, pedaling in all gleaming splendor through the bustling streets of the center of Freiburg, until she arrived at her school, greeted by the admiring glances of all her classmates.

  With new laws on education in 1933, the Reich decreed that the proportion of non-Aryan students in German schools should be reduced to a maximum of 5 percent, ousting thousands of Jewish children from their classrooms and forcing them into ad hoc Jewish schools. The Central Committee of German Jews set rules for these schools that called for teaching the children about both sides of their lives, the Jewish and German, about the contributions each had made to the other, and about the tensions dividing them now. Under grave existing circumstances, “the entire education must be directed toward the creation of determined and secure Jewish personalities,” the committee said, because “the Jewish child must be enabled to take up and master the exceptionally difficult struggle for survival which awaits him.” In light of her top academic performance, Hanna was allowed to remain, a token Jew, in the German Höhere Mädchenschule (the Higher Girls’ School).

  “Now here is the perfect example of a young lady with distinctively Aryan features,” a Nazi Party official observed to her class, his hand on Hanna’s shoulder, during a visit to lecture the students on how to recognize non-Aryan facial characteristics. No one dared contradict him, but the incident inspired Hanna’s teacher to get even with her for “passing” as German. When Christmastime came and the class was preparing its annual play, he assigned her the role of the Christkind, the Christ child, whose part called for bearing a sack with a gift for the class. Hanna entered the room with the bag slung over her shoulder, and her classmates rushed from their seats to circle around her, eager to see what Baby Jesus had brought them. But when they tore open the wrapping, she was ashamed to discover the present the teacher selected was a large framed picture of Adolf Hitler. The only Jew in the class, Hanna flushed in humiliation to have been forced to deliver, as if a sacred gift, the Führer’s picture to hang in the schoolroom, and she wept as her classmates hooted with laughter.

  Generally speaking, her fellow students nevertheless treated her kindly, even as fear of Nazi reprisals against their parents compelled some of them to ask her to sneak around to their back doors whenever she came to play at their homes. In school, each time a teacher entered a classroom, Hanna had no choice but to join with her classmates, jumping to their feet and shouting “Heil Hitler!” with a Nazi salute, until it became such a habit for her that she accidentally greeted the rabbi that way when she encountered him walking alone on the street.

  At Monday morning flag-raising ceremonies in front of her school, Hanna’s classmates all wore the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) uniforms that Hitler Youth leaders prescribed for girls: navy skirts with white blouses, white kneesocks with tassels, and wide leather belts and bandoliers. In an effort to blend in, Hanna persuaded Alice to buy a white blouse and socks for her and to have the dressmaker produce a similar kick-pleated skirt. The bandolier, the most desirable part of the outfit, was, of course, not accessible to her. But walking home to the Poststrasse one day after school, she was drawn to a crowd of cheering young people who stood gathered near the train station in front of the Zähringer Hof, one of the city’s finest hotels. Garlands of flowers draped the doorway, and bloodred Nazi banners flew from the windows. The children were shouting and waving to a room several floors high above, calling for “dear Göring,” Hitler’s chief aide, “to be so kind as to come to the window.”

  Freiburg’s Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, lined with Nazi banners and flags, between 1935 and 1940. To create a street grand enough to honor the Führer, the city’s main thoroughfare, the Kaiserstrasse, was linked to other streets to the north and south. (photo credit 3.4)

  Lieber Göring, sei so nett,

  Komm doch mal ans Fensterbrett!

  Over and over they chanted their couplet, their clear children’s voices insistent and charged with excitement, until the uniformed figure of Hermann Göring appeared at the window and acknowledged their adulation with an exem
plary Nazi salute. Below him stood a generation determined to rise, phoenixlike, from the devastating defeats their parents had suffered in war and under its onerous treaty. But in the cheering crowd on the street, there was at least one young Jewish girl, confused and uncertain, whose voice mingled with those of her German peers.

  Many years later, when I was a teenager, my father would bring my mother to tears of frustration and anger at the dinner table when he rebuked her for the passive compliance of Jews who had, out of fear, complied with Fascist commands instead of rebelling.

  “What would you have had me do? I was a child. What could any of us do?” she would stammer, her eyes brimming, on the many occasions this issue arose. She never cried out of sadness, but only to drain unvented anger, accumulated over a lifetime and squelched into silence. It was one of the common disputes that sparked my increasingly protective feelings for her, as my father persisted in maintaining that Jews themselves handed power to Hitler through docile acceptance of their own annihilation. He would raise his fist, slide his jaw forward, narrow his eyes, and snarl through clenched teeth, “I might have gone down, but I would have taken a bunch of Krauts with me.”

  That summer, as usual, the children left to spend their vacation with their grandmother Johanna in Eppingen, a trip always made special by Alice’s having friends and relations greet their train at numerous stops on the way, bringing them treats. “I can’t believe how many people we have met, and everybody gives us something,” Hanna enthused in a letter home, describing their journey. “We couldn’t close the suitcase anymore, we had so many chocolates and goodies!” A day or so later, they reported their shock to discover a new sign on the gate of the Eppingen pool, which led Alice to threaten to summon them back: JUDEN UND HUNDE VERBOTEN, Jews and Dogs Not Permitted. Undeterred, Hanna wrote Alice, begging to stay: