“The way things are . . . ,” my father muttered. “What if we refuse to go?”
“When I said I was asking you to leave, it was merely a polite turn of phrase. You are being evicted, Herr Stern. Please don’t make any trouble. You have nothing to gain and even more to lose.”
“Where will we go?” my father said, as much to himself as to anyone in the room.
“I wish I could help you. I really do. But I’m afraid there’s a new policy in our company to conform to the new laws that we are not allowed to rent vacant apartments to Jews. I can give you to the end of the week. Again, I am sorry.”
With that, he put his bowler hat back on and walked out. My father and I stood in silence for a moment. I waited for him to confront me. Here I had just caused our family to be evicted from our apartment with nowhere to go. I watched him rub his eyes, anticipating the explosion. After a moment he took a deep breath and said: “Well, now I’ve got to find a way to break this to your mother.”
He started to move down the hall.
“Papa, I—”
“You don’t need to explain anything to me, Karl. I trust that you were a gentleman.” And then he added, “Or at least I trust that you were a gentleman to as high a degree as she wanted you to be.” He gave a small grin. “I was a boy once too. No matter who is in power, I never want you thinking it’s wrong to desire a girl’s attention. That is life’s greatest sweetness. I would never want to deny you that joy. Come on. We’ve got to start packing.”
I watched my father retreat down the hall and was filled with a strong mix of emotions toward him. For the first time it hit me that he understood me more than I ever gave him credit for. Despite our troubles, he walked straight and tall with his head slightly lifted, a posture I used to think conveyed arrogance or aloofness, but now communicated strength and resolve. It was as if I could see the shadow of the soldier he used to be coming into focus and following him close behind.
My father and I spent the next two days trying to find us a place to live. I went with him from building to building, always with the same results. None of the gentile buildings would accept Jewish tenants anymore. We ventured into the Jewish neighborhoods too, but most of the Jewish-owned apartment buildings were overcrowded because Jews were being forced out of the gentile neighborhoods.
We finally found a small apartment that was available in the Jewish quarter. It was a two-bedroom in a shabby tenement building, less than half the size of our old apartment. My father and I walked through the filthy hallway with the landlord close behind and entered the kitchen.
“You’re charging twice as much as I pay now for a place half the size and half as clean,” my father said, running his finger along the countertop. He lifted his finger, which was now covered with a visible layer of gray dust.
“It’s supply and demand,” the landlord said. “All you need is a little bit of dusting and mopping, and this place will be as good as new.”
My father opened one of the kitchen cabinets, and a dozen roaches scurried out on the counter and quickly disappeared into cracks in the wall.
“What’s a few bugs?” the landlord said.
“Come on, Karl. We’re leaving.”
“Suit yourself,” the landlord called after us. “But you won’t find anything better for the price. You’ll see.”
The landlord turned out to be right. And with no better options, my father decided that we would have to move into the gallery until we could find a better circumstance. The days of art exhibitions were long over, and he had not used the space for anything but storage in well over a year. We owned the small freestanding building. And although it was not made for people to live in, it did have the advantage of having no neighbors who could object to us living there. And the price was right.
My mother was appalled by the idea. I overheard them arguing about the decision late at night through the walls of my bedroom.
“The gallery is only one room!” she said.
“There’s the back office,” my father countered. “And we can divide the front room.”
“Four of us in the front room?”
“Well, there’s also the basement. Karl can sleep down there, and we can split the front room with Hildy.”
“I do not want my son sleeping in the basement with the rats.”
“We don’t have rats, Rebecca. And he’s too old to share a space with his sister. He’s almost a man now. It’ll be okay.”
“It will not be okay,” she said. “Living on top of one another like animals.”
“We don’t have a choice right now, damn it.”
At first I was angry about the prospect of having to live in the basement. But then I realized that given the choices, it was the best option. My father was right that I needed my privacy. And a part of me thrilled at his acknowledgment of my maturity. Something about the gritty environment appealed to me in my boxing training mode, which encouraged the shunning of creature comforts. When Hildy found out the plan, she was excited, as if the whole thing were a big adventure. I knew she had been feeling neglected, and the idea of everyone in closer confines appealed to her, as if it were going to be a big slumber party.
The next day we packed what we could and moved the bare essentials over to the gallery. We had a one-day sale to get rid of the furniture and other things we would not be taking. Several people who lived in our apartment building and the surrounding blocks came to buy. My mother observed bitterly, “One minute they’re our neighbors; the next minute they’re looting our apartment.”
“They’re not looting. We need the money,” my father reminded her. “And we don’t need these things. They’re helping us by buying.”
“You call it helping, I call it cannibalism.”
She couldn’t stand to watch her soon-to-be former neighbors pick over the things that she had carefully accumulated over the life of her marriage, so she went to the gallery to sweep, dust, and set things up. I feared that she might be heading into one of her moods. Our family was already in such terrible circumstances, I didn’t know how we’d manage if she did.
Hildy and I each had to get rid of half of our books and toys. I hoped Greta would come by with her family. I still had not seen her since she had run away from me that night. The night before the sale, I had gone to her apartment to deliver the birthday card and present to her. I figured we were already being evicted from the building—what more could happen for merely delivering a gift? But when I knocked, nobody answered. I thought I heard someone quietly approach the door from the other side to look through the peephole and then retreat. But when I tried to stare through the small glass eye, I could see nothing. I knocked again and again, but still no one came. So I left the card and the small box beside the door. I had signed the card, “May all your birthday wishes come true. Fondly, Karl,” which I thought was inoffensive enough to risk having her parents find it and read it before it got to Greta. However, neither Greta nor her parents ever showed up at our apartment.
After the sale, a grimy old junk dealer came and gave my father a few hundred marks for the things that had gone unsold. The man loaded everything into a large wooden cart pulled by a donkey. After he left, the three of us took one last look through the empty apartment where I had spent all my life. I walked into my room and looked around. I could just make out the faded outlines of where my boxing posters had once hung on the walls, the only evidence I had ever occupied the room. I stood in the corner where I had done my push-ups and sit-ups every morning and wondered how many of each I must have done in the past couple of years. The sun shone in through the windows and filled the room with warm light. I had never really noticed how bright my room was until that moment. I didn’t want to go live in the dark basement of the gallery, which I now realized resembled a prison cell more than a proper room.
“Karl?” I heard my father call.
I joined my father and Hildy in the front hall, where they waited with glum expressions. My father gestured to the door
, and we walked out, leaving the front door open as we went. It felt strange not to close and lock our door, but I could see that my father had left it ajar intentionally, as if to announce that those rooms held no value to us anymore. They were just a series of walls and doors, and not a home that needed to be protected. On some level I understood that the open door would also serve as a reminder or even an accusation to the neighbors that we had been kicked out of our home and they had let it happen.
As we emerged from inside the building, I glanced back, hoping to catch a glimpse of Greta through her window. While I was turning, I noticed a hand had been holding aside the drapes in the Hausers’ front room. But before I could see who it was, the drapes fell back over the window. My father called to me to come along.
I reluctantly turned from our building and followed them down the street toward our new home. I half expected Greta to come running out of the front door and into my arms just like in an American movie. I imagined us holding a long embrace and then promising we would wait for each other. I reached into the bottom of my pocket, where I had tucked the clover charm, and held it in my fist, trying to hold on to a piece of her. Yet with each step I took away from our building, I could feel my life with Greta disappearing into the distance.
Word from Dachau
THE ONE POSITIVE ASPECT OF LIVING IN THE GALLERY was that the move seemed to reawaken something in my mother’s spirit. She took on the task of converting the gallery into a home with an energy I had feared she no longer possessed. She immediately divided the front room into three sections, using thick white cloth curtains hung from hooks my father screwed into the ceiling. The front half served as the living room and dining room, while the back half was divided into two bedrooms, one for Hildy and one for my parents, with a narrow hallway down the middle and leading to the back. She set up each area to maximize the space, and by the time she was done, she had created the illusion of a home.
Because of its proximity to the bathroom, the only source of running water, the back office was converted into a makeshift kitchen. Our coal-burning stove was placed by the back window. And my father bought an old freestanding washbasin that he converted into a sink by running a hose from the faucet in the bathroom. A small cupboard from our old kitchen stood in the corner of the living area filled with our good china. We had room for only one set of dishes, and my mother had insisted on getting rid of our everyday dishes and keeping the china, which had been a wedding gift from her parents.
The bathroom was fairly large and had a huge porcelain bathtub that hadn’t been used in more than a decade. A thick layer of dust and rust stains scarred its interior. My mother spent the better part of an afternoon scrubbing that tub, and she managed to clean it to the point where there were only a few small stains visible near the drain. She knew she would need her bath more than ever, as it would be one of the few places to achieve any real sense of privacy.
Although a bit cold and damp, the basement provided me with a larger living space than I’d had in our old apartment. The room had a dirt floor and thick stone walls that formed the foundation of the building. The old printing press occupied one section of the room. Most of the art bins had already been cleared away. My mother placed one of our Persian rugs on the floor, covering a good section of the dirt. I set up my bed, chair, and dresser; and I had just enough room left over for a small workout area, where I kept my dumbbells, jump rope, and boxing gloves. I was even able to hang an old heavy bag I had salvaged from the club from one of the thick wooden beams that lined the ceiling.
For a while life seemed fairly normal at the gallery, or as normal as it could be. We were distracted from our diminished circumstances by all the work it took to make the place habitable, and the shared project bonded us. Hildy was right that it also forced us to spend more time together, and despite the close quarters, we managed to find moments of levity. Even my parents appeared to be getting along better. One night over dinner they both shared a laugh when my father suggested that they try to have a gallery reception with the rooms configured this way.
“Yes, we could hang paintings from the pillows on the beds,” my mother joked.
“Or better yet,” my father suggested, “we should just be like Marcel Duchamp and claim the furniture is the art.”
Years earlier Duchamp had caused a major stir in the art world when he took an actual urinal, signed it, titled it Fountain, and declared it a work of art.
“I wonder how much we could get for our toilet,” my mother said.
“Well, that all depends on if it’s been flushed or not,” my father replied with a grin.
“Oh, Sig, that’s disgusting.”
But she said it with a laugh, and we all laughed together for the first time in as long as I could remember. From then on, when someone had to go to the bathroom, we would say, “Excuse me, I have to use the sculpture.”
After a couple of weeks we found a routine. My mother returned her focus to trying to find out information about Uncle Jakob, who had been in Dachau for well over a year. Originally established to hold political prisoners, the camp also housed “religious prisoners,” like dissident priests and preachers, and Jews. At the time of his imprisonment, political prisoners like Uncle Jakob were considered the greatest threats to the Reich and were not allowed to communicate with the outside world. The fact that he was also Jewish would only have made things that much worse for him. Because of their need for secrecy, we never knew the full names of any of Uncle Jakob’s political associates, so my mother had no way to track them down to find out if they knew anything.
One day Hildy and I were shopping with our mother at an outdoor market near the gallery. Farmers sold vegetables, meats, and dairy products in rows of stalls lining the street. We walked most quickly by the vendor selling horsemeat, because of the powerful stench of the entrails, which were displayed in buckets beneath the trays of butchered meat.
Because of our non-Jewish looks, my mother and I could walk the streets without incident. But with Hildy with us, we had to always be on guard. As we wandered through the market, I noticed several women sneer in our direction when they caught sight of Hildy. At the cheese stall, my mother picked out a small piece of Brie. When she handed it to the farmer to be weighed, he refused to take it.
“I don’t sell to Gypsies,” he said.
“We’re not Gypsies,” my mother said.
“Or Jews,” he replied, staring directly at Hildy. “Go find a kosher cow.”
My mother placed the piece of Brie back down and pressed her thumb into it, leaving a dent.
“Come on,” she said, dragging us both along.
We quickly wound our way back through the market. Suddenly a man grabbed my mother’s arm. He wore a tattered coat and a gray wool cap pulled low over his face. My mother quickly stepped back, assuming he was a beggar or a thief. I instinctively moved forward to defend her, positioning my body between the man and my mother. I held up my hand in warning, and he backed off a step.
“Stay back,” I said, my voice cracking just enough to remind myself of the fear that still resided inside me, even after years of boxing.
“Wait. You’re Jakob Schwartz’s sister, ja?” he said.
“Yes,” she replied, startled to hear the name of her brother.
She looked closer at the face under the hat, and some recognition dawned on her.
“We’ve met before. You’re Stefan—”
“Yes.” He cut her off, glancing around nervously as if at any moment he would be arrested. “Your brother and I were comrades.”
“Have you any word from—”
“That’s why I risked approaching you. I received word through our channels that Jakob is not well.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s very sick.”
“How sick?”
“I’ve told you all I know.” He started to pull away.
“But—,” she said.
“I have to go. You shouldn’t be seen talking
with me. I’ve told you all I know.”
And with that he disappeared into the crowd.
That night my mother implored my father to let her go see Uncle Jakob at the concentration camp. In our new living conditions there was no place for private conversation, and Hildy and I could easily hear every word of their argument through the the fabric walls of their bedroom.
“Are you insane?” he said. “You want to go to Dachau?”
“My brother is sick. I need to help him.”
“What help would it be for you or me to go there? We wouldn’t get past the first barbed wire fence. You’re talking about suicide.”
“We have to do something,” she said. “I can’t stand this silence anymore. Just sitting and waiting as things get worse and worse.”
“If we ask questions, it’ll draw attention to us. Do you want to be interrogated by the Gestapo?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
“Takes to do what? I understand you care about your brother. We all do. But even if we find out more information, there will be nothing we can do. And we’ll have risked something just for a small bit of useless knowledge.”
“It’s not useless knowledge. I need to know he’s okay. He’s my only relative. I’m all he has.”
“I’ll tell you one thing. He wouldn’t want you going anywhere near Dachau or doing anything that would put you or the kids at risk.”
“I’m going to find out what’s happening to him.”
“Rebecca . . .”
“I don’t care if they lock me up. What kind of country is it that they can lock you up for asking a question? I don’t care anymore. . . .”
Then she started crying, and my father softened. He lowered his voice into a more soothing tone.
The Berlin Boxing Club Page 15
