On October 27, 1492, the first few Jews in the New World, presumed to have sailed with Columbus to escape Spain’s Inquisition, spotted the island of Cuba, where they soon landed. Four hundred and fifty years to the day later, another Jewish refugee who crossed the ocean to flee Europe, Sigmar Günzburger, purchased from the Cuban Defense Ministry the requisite foreigner’s registration booklet that came with strict warnings to report any address changes within ten days of moving. For his own life in the New World, he gave his first name as Samuel and dropped the umlaut (ü) from Günzburger. Yet in the black-and-white mug shot pasted into his booklet, No. 352202, he remains European, formally dressed in a suit, white shirt, and striped tie, and his glance is deflected. Gone, the resolute glare of the man in the family portrait taken in Gray. The picture here is one of submission. He gives in to the photo and fingerprinting, allowing his thumbs—derecho and izquierdo, right and left—to be pressed against a pad of black ink and rolled onto a page like a hustler caught committing a crime. Now as I study the booklet, the eyes in the picture refuse to meet mine, and so I place my thumbs against his, as if some warmth of life might seep through the paper and permit me to feel his hand through the years.
The Cuban Defense Ministry’s foreigner’s registration booklets, including fingerprints, for Samuel Gunzburger, sixty-two years old; Alice Gunzburger, fifty; and Janine, nineteen.
The address that Sigmar provided authorities when his booklet was stamped on October 27, 1942, was a place he was lucky to find within days of being released from Tiscornia. A three-bedroom flat in the manicured upper-middle-class section known as Vedado, it was beyond the hubbub of central Havana and just a short walk from the Moorish–art deco palace of the Hotel Nacional. There, a glittering clientele of Hollywood idols, foreign dignitaries, and American industrialists had worked on their tans, sipping minted mojitos and pink foam daiquiris on seafront patios under the palms, even as Mafia gangsters raked in the dollars from its casino and cleverly greased the government’s wheels.
Never before had Sigmar so easily moved into a region described as “off-limits,” the meaning of vedado in English. The name derived from the fact that in the 1500s it was forbidden to build there, a practical rule designed to preserve an unobstructed view of the ocean and of pirates sneaking up on the beaches from over the waves. Having gone on to become a landscaped neighborhood of broad streets, grand mansions, and jagüey trees dripping thick and eerie aerial roots, it was and remains today one of the finest residential parts of the city. That Sigmar could rent there and live in Havana not richly, but modestly and cautiously well, was thanks to Herbert, who helped with loans, as Maurice and Edy had extended in France.
The family’s new apartment, in house number 855 on Calle 25 between A and B, came furnished in French provincial décor and was on the second floor of a three-story building with only two apartments per level. Each had a large open terrace facing the street and glassless windows fitted with dark brown shutters to keep out the sun. From the living room, adjoining the terrace at the front of the building, a narrow hallway ran between the kitchen and dining room to the quiet of the bedrooms, shaded by trees in the garden out back. Off the hall, there was one green-tiled bathroom with a tub and bidet. A bridgelike balcony looking onto a yard connected the small galley kitchen to the kitchen of the apartment next door. This was a convenient place for the maids of each household to chat in off-hours, domestic help being so cheap and easy to find that even refugees on limited budgets indulged in hiring Cuban servants.
Moisés Simons, standing (L) at the piano, with his orchestra in the mid-1920s (photo credit 16.1)
Their landlord, Moisés Simons, was one of the country’s most beloved musicians, and he lived with his pretty French-born wife in the ground-floor apartment. Simons had made an international name for himself in 1930 with a lilting hit song, “El Manicero,” which introduced Havana’s humble peanut peddlers to the rest of the world. It had probably been recorded by then in more versions than there are notes in the tune. So why would a composer of such success and renown rent space in his home to Jewish refugees during the war? It continues to be a source of conjecture whether Simons—ostensibly Catholic of Spanish descent—might have actually been Jewish himself or else, perhaps, had Jewish forebears. Information about him is scarce, and while it remains unclear how or why he left Cuba for Spain at such a dangerous moment, Simons is known to have died at age fifty-six in Madrid in 1945, some say after a period of hard labor as a captive at Buchenwald.
During the year that Janine lived in his house, she took pride in her landlord’s musical fame and in learning to sing his most popular song, in a style called a pregón, drawn from the tunes of the pregoneros or wandering peddlers who enticed customers as they sang out their wares. “El Manicero” was inspired by a vendor of cucuruchos de maní, paper cones of roasted peanuts, whose jingle Simons heard outside a bar in Havana. Legend had it that he composed his lighthearted masterpiece on the spot that night, setting notes to dance on the back of a napkin. From there they took flight as a worldwide sensation.
Not far from the house where the Gunzburgers lived above the musician, a pair of prim English sisters ran a private girls’ school where Sigmar enrolled his two daughters. It was reputed to have a strong English program, and in tribute to England’s patron saint, its founders had named it St. George’s. The school catered to the elite of Havana, Cuban or American girls who lived in Vedado and the still swankier suburb of Miramar, with landscaped palacios close to the ocean. It prepared them for life in the best social circles, whether they married in Cuba, left for the United States, or divided their time between the two spheres, traveling abroad with affluent husbands.
Nowhere in sight were the bare-breasted girls with flowers in their hair, girls in native costumes of grass skirts and beads that Norbert had teased his sisters they would have to adopt. Instead, despite the heat of that tropical autumn, Janine and Trudi were taken aback to discover classmates with prosperous fathers in the tobacco, rum, or sugar business who dressed for the elegant chill of Fifth Avenue. Yes, these were girls who might parade in style equally well in downtown Manhattan or under the wide palm-lined Fifth Avenue running through Miramar. Here, Cuba’s landed gentry and pedigreed industrialists danced in black tie and silks at embassy parties or luxuriated at one of the so-called Big Five country clubs, whose membership was so tightly restricted that even Batista (born out of wedlock, an impoverished mulatto) was never accepted.
Now with nostalgia, Janine remembered the uniformed smocks that her Mulhouse lycée had required its students to wear over their clothes. That was a time when she herself would have preferred to show off her custom-made outfits, but she had long since outgrown the designs of the Freiburg dressmaker. She tried to blend in among Havana’s rich daughters, impeccably clothed in pleated plaid skirts, Shetland sweaters, pearl chokers, and saddle shoes. Chauffeurs drove these girls to St. George’s each day, accompanied by maids who carried their book bags from their cars to the school and then returned to help them back to their cars each afternoon. Privileged as most of them were, however, the Cuban girls vied to be friends with Janine and Trudi, who took care from the start to let it be known that they were French. To be known as German with Hitler’s war still raging in Europe would not win them favor, while being French lent them allure that more than made up for their refugee status. Their classmates openly argued over the pleasure of driving them home and also took them to dinner, to parties, and to lavish oceanfront clubs. Sometimes they even provided the sisters with handfuls of nickels, sharing the naughty excitement of the slot machines that spit unearned winnings all over the floor.
Among other girls new to St. George’s were a few who had also been in Tiscornia with them and talked of returning to Europe after the fighting. But the student body generally looked north for inspiration, and the girls’ cultural preferences showed a distinct American bias, including Dinah Shore, Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Bette Davis, and Donald
Duck. The Cuban girls drank Coke and washed with Palmolive. If most listed swimming as the sport they liked best, it was probably less because of the ocean at hand—sharks and sea urchins being so frightening—than because the school swimming coach, Arturo, was tall, blond, and impossibly handsome. They kept up with the world through Reader’s Digest, Vogue, Town and Country, Life, and Harper’s Bazaar. They liked Longfellow, Gone with the Wind, Lucky Strike’s “Your Hit Parade” radio program, and suitors who attended Yale. Some may have dreamed of college themselves, or even of business careers, but their futures after leaving St. George’s tended to be more domestic. Members of the class of 1944, for example, reported a year after their graduation to be contentedly busy with lessons in tennis, art, French, music, knitting, and sewing, while the most outstanding student among them was taking a secretarial course.
“The modern girl is well able to look after herself,” a former Tiscornia friend of Janine’s would declare in a graduation speech at St. George’s one year after the end of the war. “Her opportunities for independence are vast, but still she feels that her greatest happiness may be found when she is ‘the worthy wife of a worthy man,’ and, far from losing her individuality, and her woman’s rights, she may gain in power. Is it not said that ‘the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world’?”
Nineteen years old when she entered St. George’s, Janine was placed with younger students for English and Spanish, but advanced quickly enough to earn a diploma by the end of the year. With enthusiasm, she wrote about school in a letter to Hannchen, her Eppingen cousin, then in New York. The letter was part of a school exercise, and Janine wrote it in her blossoming English:
You know that when I left France, I never thought to enter in other time a college. But when at the end of six months we finally could leave Tiscornia, father told us that the best thing to do would be to go at school, even if I would not like it so much. At first I was very unpleased of this idea, but then I understood that it is the only way to learn English and Spanish. So I tried to find a school, and I really had good luck because St. George’s is a marvelous one.
Our school is a very nice house, with a little garden before and little flowers help to give us an impression of kindness, and you find it just the same insides. Teachers speak with us like friends and however are respected and everybody works. We learn a lot of interesting things and I only realize that I lost a lot of time during the three years of war, which had us obliged to change our schools three times.
The girls are very nice, but I could tell you many things of the difference of spirit of these girls and the French girls. They have such a different education as we have it in Europe. They see the world from an other point of view; they don’t know what is poverty, distress and even don’t realize that we are in war. Of course it isn’t their fault, they never see such things nor feel them. Consequently their interests are not the same as ours. We think in the happy end of the war, in American visas, in learning to speack English and Spanish, or we worry about our family in France. I think I don’t need to tell you about this. You also must read in the news-papers all the evil the Nazis do in France. Naturally these happy girls can’t care about all those things, so as we also before the war were mostly occupied with dances, dresses and other joys. Nevertheless, I like them all very much and often go out with them. I only tried to explain you that due to the differences of interest we can not make a friendship here, so as for instance I had it with Malou.
Twice a week we go swimming with the college and we have a very good swimming teacher. You see that even the sport is not forgotten. Besides this I go from time to time to the movie, I still like it very much. But the pastime I prefer is to stay at home, reading good books; for you must know that our school has a wonderful library, where you can find all kind of books you like. Now I think you can understand why I wrote you that I am relatively happy and don’t want to leave Havanna very soon.
The parents are very well. Father spends his time reading the whole day, he nearly lives in his books and tells us always about the marvelous persons of the books. He is very much pleased of our college and he takes great interest in our work. He really is often astonished to see us studying so much and he is very glad to see that finally we receive of the “culture” he missed so much in an education.
The only thing I am very anxious about is that my English is still very defective; like you can see in writing I make a lot of mistakes, but so much more in speaking. But I still hope that in several months I shall learn it better.
But now I really must finish my letter. Please answer me very soon again. Today it isn’t a letter I wrote you. It is nearly a narration of my schoollife.
Writing was emphasized for the St. George’s girl, and write Janine did, in Spanish, French, and English, laboring over biographies and book reports, historical analyses, geography projects, and personal essays exploring her feelings—not always as fully adapted to the immigrant life as her letter to her cousin sought to project:
I would be so happy to see a day of winter and to do the sports I so much enjoyed in Europe. I would so much like to see the high mountains covered with snow. I would love to hear the bells ringing and stop in a field to pick flowers and cherries and apples and pears and what other fruit Europeans have. It is the truth that man is never content with what he has, but always looks for other things until he receives them and begins with another fantasy.
Sometimes her choice of subject hinted at yearnings she could not express. As mail from Roland ceased to arrive after the Nazis overran France that November, for example, Janine wrote about a fictional postman who found personal joy in the job of transmitting love: “It is for me every day a new pleasure to see a mother or a fiancée smile happily, receiving a letter from their dearest one.”
With Norbert’s formal education behind him, he began work as a novice cutter in one of the new diamond companies that refugees from The Netherlands and Belgium were launching in Cuba. Being new to the country, this industry was one in which refugees were granted work permits, and so thousands of men and women trained to cut and polish rough stones from South Africa. Proximity and favorable American trade regulations facilitated their import to Cuba for cutting and their export back to New York for market. Novices in Cuba perfected skills in cutting eight-sided stones predominantly used in jewelry settings. Trainees practiced, however, on gems so very tiny that when Norbert loudly despaired that he had lost one and it would cost him, it was futile even to bother hunting for it. Only by luck, at breakfast days later, did Janine happen to notice the extra gleam in his eye, where, lodged in the corner, the little diamond was found to be hiding.
Between work and play, Norbert was rarely at home. Had the Nazis not come to power in Germany, his future as an underling in the family business—caught between his demanding father and his irascibly fragile uncle Heinrich—would have been determined for him. Now he regarded losing his eventual share of their company as an acceptable price to buy independence. His frustrated boyhood efforts to win Sigmar’s approval weighed less heavy in Cuba: free of school and the duty to help his father with work, no longer pressured to burnish the family image, he escaped the scrutiny he had always detested. Consequently, with dollar bills lining his pockets and no shortage of female admirers, he was, at twenty-two years old, soon the only family member to enjoy Havana as the lively tropical playground it was. Invariably, when telephone number 8809 rang in the front room of the apartment, it carried a girlish voice asking in mellifluous Spanish, por favor, to speak with Norberto. When he was in, Norbert would dash to answer it first. But bathed and scented, handsome and carefully dressed, he was more often out, allowing Sigmar to answer requests for his son with three clipped Spanish words—“En la calle!” Out in the street! Out on the town!
Sigmar spent much of his day on the Avenida de los Presidentes, which, like the Paseo, featured a parklike median strip sweeping down to the sea and marble benches under the trees. Here he focused on reading El Mundo, t
he liberal newspaper, trying his best to teach himself Spanish. At home, beneath his windows, he heard the call of the lottery vendors selling numbers and the seductive illusion of life-changing riches. But a man of his staunch frugality was never tempted to gamble, nor would he accept any money from Norbert, so that living in limbo meant constant worry over finances. Besides the family debts he recorded on the lined pages of one student notebook, in a second notebook he listed in German all daily expenses, from potatoes and pickles to laundry and paper. Warned of thieves who dangled fishing rods through open windows to hoist men’s trousers from bedroom chairs in dark of night, Sigmar slept with his money under his pillow. And more than once—the maid having blithely stripped his bed in the morning and shaken his sheets over the side of the terrace—he scurried downstairs to crawl through the bushes to hunt for his cash. With each week that passed, he became ever more eager to get to New York, to pay off his debts and plan for the future.
In the steamy spring of 1943, Janine returned home one evening to find her father angrily sputtering. Sigmar’s head shone with perspiration, and he gnawed a cigar as he paced the floor of checkerboard tile. “Hasch du mal so was gehört?” Have you ever heard anything like it? he was saying in dialect to Alice as he reviewed the discussion they’d had with the visitor who only moments before had left the apartment. Alice sat quietly fanning herself with a piece of paper folded in tight accordion pleats. She had lingered too long that afternoon with Emma Wolf in a café where the fierce sun had burned her fair skin through the window. Now red blisters painfully pocked her arms and her legs.
Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed Page 29
