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

by Leslie Maitland

  Alice with Sigmar (L) and Heinrich, his brother and business partner, in Freiburg, mid-1930s (photo credit 4.1)

  As to the house at Poststrasse 6, Sigmar sold it to his next-door neighbor, August Schöpperle. The hotel owner was confident that the political turmoil and migrations of war would bring even more travelers with money to Freiburg and was planning to use it to expand the Minerva. In haste to depart by the time their papers came through, Sigmar had been in no position to bargain and had sold Herr Schöpperle the house at a price that was also far below its actual value. But it hardly mattered, he grimly acknowledged, given the fact that he was barred from taking money out of the country.

  The Poststrasse, with the Hotel Minerva at the corner. Beside it to the right is the Günzburger home at Poststrasse 6. (photo credit 4.2)

  Technically, it was arranged that “all things happened legally,” Dr. Hans Schadek, then Freiburg’s chief archivist, explained when he showed me the relevant records on one of my visits. He described how, seeking funds for armaments, the Nazis pillaged Jewish wealth by means of imposing taxes that conveniently managed to total the sum of every emigrant’s assets. Revenue from the sales of the family’s home and business was deposited into blocked accounts at the Oberrheinische Bank that were nominally in the Günzburgers’ names, but from which they could make no withdrawals without state approval. No such approvals were granted. Official taxes on “Jewish wealth,” flight taxes, bank fees on the taxpaying transactions, and punishing fines would eventually claim all that they owned through pretexts the Nazis wrote into law.

  “Ich bin Jude” (I am a Jew), read the form Sigmar was obliged to fill out on June 30, 1938, before emigrating, declaring his remaining worth at that point. And for this purpose, it also described him as a member of the German state, no longer a citizen, yet still subject to the rules of the Reich. Having already signed away everything, however, there was nothing much left for him to declare. Almost every category of assets on the four-page form thus earned the same answer: Nichts (nothing). Money? Nichts. Real estate? Nichts. Other expected capital? Nichts. The only items of any value still in his possession besides their furnishings were three now-dubious life insurance policies, a gold watch, and the simple gold rings he and Alice had exchanged at their wedding.

  All this brought them to the warm mid-August morning in 1938 when they were to leave. Hanna, now almost fifteen, awoke to the familiar cooing of doves on the rooftops and the buzz of the electric cart ferrying mail to the post office at the end of the street. From the Hotel Minerva next door came the familiar clatter of dishes and pans, the smells and the banter of the kitchen staff preparing guests’ breakfasts. It had always been a private pleasure for her to sit at the window and spy on the sophisticated foreign tourists who lingered on the hotel terrace, enjoying their food and their papers and quietly conversing. Now she, too, would be traveling, but the mysterious thrill she had always imagined as she studied those tourists was replaced by dread in leaving her birthplace for the unknown.

  The official form—the Inventory of Jewish Wealth, in accordance with the Reich law of April 27, 1938—on which Sigmar reported no longer having any assets: “nichts”

  “Wir wandern aus. Wir wandern aus,” her father had warned them so many times without her ever believing he meant it. The verb he had used means to emigrate, but also—too aptly, she feared—to wander, to roam, to travel like nomads.

  Across the room, her beloved Käthe Kruse doll drooped on a shelf, its painted blue eyes accusingly staring. Her only doll had been the patient in so many of her first medical efforts that, with its soft stuffed body scarred by long lines of stitches and stained in the cause of science by myriad greasy ointments, Hanna had already decided to leave her behind. They were traveling by train, but a van would carry their pared-down household possessions, including Sigmar’s cherished grand piano. To accommodate the smaller space they would have in their Mulhouse apartment, they were taking furniture only from the living room, dining room, and master bedroom. For the children, their beds. Art, silverware, crystal, and china found space in the truck. Clothes and books were carefully chosen. Still, they were uncommonly lucky to be able to leave with that much.

  Once the truck pulled away, Sigmar approached the wide oak doorway with a little screwdriver. There were tears in the eyes of this man so ill accustomed to showing emotion as he reached up to unfasten the five-inch long carved wooden mezuzah that he had hung on the entryway of the house, creating space that was sacred, on the day that he and Alice moved in as newlyweds. Never adept with his hands, Sigmar took off his glasses and angrily wiped at his eyes as he tried to fit the slim head of the screwdriver into the slots of the two stubborn screws that held the mezuzah to the doorframe, welcoming those who entered the house. Once it came down, he saw the tight, yellowed scroll of parchment rolled up inside it with the familiar prayer inked by hand in minute Hebrew letters, admonishing faithful adherence to God’s commandments—among them the holy duty to teach His words to new generations.

  Sigmar took that mezuzah wherever they moved in the years that followed, an artifact of a world destroyed, but he would never rehang it, as he never regained a home of his own. No, he never regarded his small New York City apartment as worthy of consecration by such an imposing ritual object; instead he nailed to his American doorway a small, unobtrusive version made of indeterminate metal. But twenty years after the day he ruefully carried it wrapped in his handkerchief over Germany’s border, Sigmar presented the Freiburg mezuzah to my mother and father, who attached it to the first house that they bought, the house my mother resolved never to leave, despite my father’s persistent entreaties and his efforts to lure her to bigger and better.

  That sorrowful day she left Freiburg was always in mind. Norbert had been called home from Switzerland in order to move to Mulhouse with the rest of the family. Carrying valises, they walked in silence to the corner and turned left at the Minerva onto the Rosastrasse where a sign announced that the Gebrüder Glatt—New Aryan Ownership!—had taken over the firm from the Günzburger brothers. Sigmar vowed that someday they would come home to Freiburg to win it back. Still, as he passed the company’s gates on the way to the station nearby, his mouth was set in a fixed, bitter line, and averting his eyes, he denied himself a last look at all that he had worked to accomplish.

  Good wishes and comforting words filled their tense parting moments, as a small group assembled to see the family off. There was Fräulein Ellenbogen, who still occupied her small attic room in the house, not yet having found someplace to move, with so many Jewish homeowners already gone. Frau Loewy had rented rooms in the home of a Catholic butcher a few blocks away, a difficult choice for an Orthodox Jew who kept strictly kosher. She was not at the station, having said her good-byes a few days before, but there was Buhler the chauffeur. He had named his son Norbert in honor of the Günzburgers’ son and had continued working for Sigmar long past the time that having a Jewish employer made sense for a German. Now he clasped hands with his passenger of so many trips, neither one daring as their roads separated to voice his deep feelings. Before the coming war’s end, Buhler’s son Norbert, still a teenager, would sacrifice an arm for the Führer fighting in Russia—the field of Germany’s greatest casualties in World War II—while Sigmar’s Norbert would later be posted to Germany, a vengeful soldier in the victorious army of his new American homeland.

  Sigmar’s longtime secretary, Elisabeth Hipp, brought chocolates to sweeten the travelers’ journey. For the rest of his life, Sigmar would find occasions to send Fräulein Hipp money, and she, in turn, regularly sent back little German books of Christian devotional verse or evangelical tracts, as well as calendars with brightly colored botanical pictures labeled in both German and Latin. These my grandfather presented to me. I still have most of those books (never read) and calendars (never used) on my shelves even now, unable, of course, to find the right day after so many years to start throwing them out. When it comes to discarding these things
of the past, I can never think of an answer that pleases my heart—the reason to get rid of them now instead of last week or eight months or twelve years ago—which is probably why everyone always gives them to me. A family Dumpster for memories’ traces. I hold on to them all—Sigmar’s cigar butt from the day that he died, Alice’s veil of black lace—as if I could use them to conjure their owners, to bring them back once again.

  Beyond that is my link in the chain of possession that has guarded not just these simple tokens of everyday life, but also the family pictures and papers and letters that have survived generations of turmoil to land at my door. I have become a trustee, a conduit, and to honor the past, I must pass them along, “keeping faith with those who sleep in the dust,” as the prayer book tells me. It is, I see clearly, much like the way I increasingly think of the Jewish tradition. In the face of the odds, the forces that time and again have sought to destroy it, the suffering of those who died to preserve it, who am I—who am I in these easy times for us here—to toss it aside, to abandon it now? From the beginning, the Jewish narrative has always been a story of journey, recalled and retold in each generation. Among those who have lived an exodus within their own times and have stubbornly carried their faith to new lands, it is left to their children to save and transmit it to those who come later, forging behind.

  The train that carried my mother’s family out of their ancestral home, a perilous five years after Hitler seized power, stopped at the border, where Reich officials examined their exit visas and verified they were each taking no more than 10 Reichsmarks (under $2.50) out of the country. The heart-stopping terror my mother remembers as the scrutiny continued for much longer than seemed necessary was so indelibly etched in her soul that I have watched her relive it time and again, whenever a situation requires producing identification. Going through customs, returning from any trip outside this country, is an encounter she fears—in part because it involves showing a passport that lists her real birthplace, and because it empowers an official to search and ask questions before granting her entry. “If a doorman looks at me hard,” she has confided, “I still get that feeling, my knees begin shaking.”

  She arrived in Mulhouse with her new French name. As a result, her old autograph book, in which friends inscribed little poems, aphorisms, and colorful drawings full of whimsy and talent, includes entries from 1938 addressed either “Liebe Hanna” or “Chère Janine,” based on whether the entry was dated before August or later. At the border, Hanna-now-Janine buried the German girl living inside her. Then she allowed France to change her, a transformation she quickly embraced to create a new life.

  “After four weeks in France or six weeks in America, we pretended to be Frenchmen or Americans,” Hannah Arendt wrote firsthand of the German Jews’ efforts to reshape themselves and their lives, an assimilationist struggle typified again and again by my mother in every new country. “In the first place, we don’t like to be called refugees,” Arendt also declared, explaining how degraded German Jews felt after fleeing their homes, stateless, unwanted, and empty-handed.

  It was unnerving, when I read Arendt’s words, to remember how deeply my mother had hated my father’s derisive nickname for her, which he tended to use as a verbal stiletto whenever she voiced her own contrary views on political issues. The “Ref,” he would say, knowing each time how the term would wound her. “Listen to the Ref.” But in my mind, the Ref was the woman who slipped into my high school pep rallies and, to her own surprise, cried—tears that sprang from some unexplored zone that had a great deal to do with all she had been through. Unnoticed, she stood in the back of the rowdy auditorium and quietly cried when she saw me alone on the stage, performing routines that required two batons at a time, the captain of the baton twirling squad—a role so totally out of character for me—a serious girl, insufficiently “bouncy” in my father’s opinion.

  It was also the Ref, I see now, who would not permit me to step down from the squad when the war in Vietnam somehow made my white tasseled boots, thigh-high satin skirt, and towering majorette’s hat of black bunny fur unappealing to me. The flags, the salutes, the marching and music—in that era it all seemed uncomfortably militaristic. I had a moral responsibility, my mother insisted, not to abandon the squad. Privately, though, I had my suspicions: the girl forbidden to wear the bold bandolier and tasseled kneesocks of the Nazi girls’ troop in Freiburg, the girl who needed to master French, Spanish, and English and in each of them fretted over her accent, was the very same person who wanted her daughter to strut in the happy parades that took over the streets when our football team won and when crowds waving American flags stood waiting on Main Street to cheer us on Memorial Day. And so when my closest friend resigned from the squad, this refugee’s daughter had no choice but to stay, to belong, and to point her silver baton toward the flag while a wobbly school band bleated its way through her mother’s adopted national anthem.

  In what would prove to be just the first stop on a six-year journey from Freiburg to safety, the family settled into a two-bedroom second-floor apartment at 18 avenue Roger Salengro in Mulhouse, overlooking the chestnut and pine trees of the parc Salvator in the back and just up the street from the ivy-wrapped Lycée de Jeunes Filles that Janine and Trudi would be attending. When the girls’ school began taking boys in 1971, its name was changed to the Lycée Michel de Montaigne, its fifth name change in a century, all four earlier ones reflecting the switches of language required by the back-and-forth status of French and German control of Alsace. So, too, the region’s mixed background spawned a distinctive double-tongued dialect that its own citizens mocked by mingling French and German in rhyming ditties that my grandmother Alice often recited to me when I was a child:

  Voulez-vous Kartoffel soupe?

  Non, madame, je danke vous.

  Je n’ai pas appetite dazu.

  All the same, in Mulhouse, despite her prior academic success, Janine’s French was deemed insufficient for her to continue at her own class level, and she was required, chagrined, to drop back two grades. And excluded as she had been as a Jew from joining her Freiburg friends at joyously nationalistic Hitler Youth rallies, now she felt branded as a German and thus different again from most of her classmates. So in her young teenage years, a point when girls yearn more than anything to fit in with their peers, Janine became an outsider, a careful observer of the people and culture around her. She tried to blend in, but, afraid to make overtures, at the same time developed a reticent stance she would never abandon and that others often mistook, believing her proud and coolly standoffish.

  To the extent she could look forward to starting school in a new country in a new language, Janine was pleased to think that at least she’d be stylishly dressed in the new wardrobe Alice had ordered before leaving Freiburg. Since they could not take their money with them, Alice spent what remained after multiple taxes on indulging her two girls in ways she had not done before and could never do later. On the momentous day she landed in France, for example, Janine tottered off the train in unforgettable pain on her first pair of high heels, chosen in navy blue leather to match the outfits she envied on her classmates in Freiburg. There were also fresh summer dresses in floral prints—dresses I found in my mother’s closet and wore myself in high school and college—and blue silk pajamas with tops so beautifully made that the sisters would wear them as blouses. But on their second day in Mulhouse, Aunt Marie took them to buy the drab buff-colored smocks that the lycée required from the moment the girls entered school in the morning until the end of the day. With long sleeves and buttons up to the neck, the smocks completely covered Janine and Trudi’s custom-made clothes, introducing a French sense of égalité, if not liberté, to the new German students.

  It was here, too, that for the first time the Günzburgers joined a community with a significant number of other Jews, a result of the fact that after its revolution, France became the first European nation to grant Jews full citizenship, gradually leading their numbers to doubl
e. In search of freedom, many Jews had long since crossed over the Rhine to find themselves in a place where entire populations of farming towns had started turning their backs on the fields—on seasonal labor and nature’s careless tricks and privations—in exchange for long and hard, but regular hours in textile factory jobs. Chemists and colorists, artists, engravers, machinists, and workers with specialized skills were employed by the thousands in flourishing printworks that already by the eighteenth century had transformed Mulhouse into a major manufacturing center, producing fabrics for a growing international market.

  Widely forbidden in Europe from owning land, Jews thrived in this industrial setting, working as merchants wholesaling textiles and later on producing apparel. Over time, the Jewish community grew, winning sufficient acceptance that by the point Janine arrived in Alsace, her class at the lycée was divided into three different groups—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—to study religion. A Hebrew teacher came to the school expressly to teach Jewish students about their own faith, and the Günzburger children were surprised to find a welcoming circle of Jewish friends who eased their adjustment to the French way of life.

  For Janine, this meant taking part in a social ritual that continues today in a great many cities and small towns of Europe, as locals derive their prime entertainment in the late afternoon from the sheer pleasure of strolling and greeting each other. In Mulhouse, the street where they walked was the rue du Sauvage, where at number 25 in 1859, the French Army captain Alfred Dreyfus was born. Himself the son of a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, Dreyfus would ignite a hugely divisive political crisis throughout France when his persecution on trumped-up charges of treason exposed anti-Semitism in the French military.