“Good morning, Rabbi Morganthal.”
“Good morning, Henry. How are you? Are you getting everything together for the University? You are still planning to start in the fall, aren’t you?”
What was this? Why call and wake everybody up for social chitchat? Henry tried to keep the frustration and impatience out of his voice. “Yes, I have all the paperwork finished and my classes start right after Labor Day. Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Well, there is, yes. Yes, I wanted to ask you something.”
Henry imagined he tasted blood, he was biting his tongue so hard. “What was it, Rabbi Morgenthal? What can I tell you?”
A deep sound, a kind of soft grunt laced with sorrow, came over the telephone.
“First, I have no news of your family, I’m sorry to say.”
Impatience built in Henry’s mind. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, why doesn’t this idiot just give me the news first, why the chat, does he think he’s doing me some kind of favor, hiding it in social conversation?” With his hand over the mouthpiece, Henry took two deep breaths and squinched his eyes tight, stopping the nascent tears.
“I was hoping you’d heard something,” he said, proud that his voice didn’t quaver. “I know it’s only been a few weeks since I registered them, but there is some news coming out of Europe.”
“That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about,” the rabbi said. “The reason I asked about university was to see if you were still planning to be in Chicago for a while.”
“I’m not moving anywhere.”
“Do you have a job this summer? Could you use some money for university?”
Sure, he could use money. He was 17. He’d figured on having to take the train to get to school but with a job, a car was a possibility. That would cut it right; drive onto campus, have transportation available.
“I don’t have a job yet, but I have time. What kind of job?”
“You were right, there is news beginning to come out of Europe, and most of it isn’t good. Have you heard about the death camps? As people are liberated, they’re taken to makeshift hospitals and transit camps, given food and nursing but all the supplies are being overwhelmed. Millions of people have been uprooted, taken away from their homes, taken away from their families, taken away from their countries. Many are so disoriented they don’t know what country they’re in or how to get home, if they even have a home.” Though he tried to hold it back, bitterness and desolation seeped into the rabbi’s voice.
“We want to help, we’re trying to help, but we have problems.”
“What problems? I don’t see any way I could be of help with your problems.”
“But you can, dear boy. You have something that we desperately need, something we all lack.”
“Rabbi, I’m only 17. I’m not even a practicing Jew. I just graduated high school. What do I have that you need?”
“A European background. A German heritage. A knowledge of the geography and the countries. And the ability to speak the languages.”
The last part was true. Henry had started out life speaking High German, but his mother had also given him lessons in French and Italian. With the English learned in Chicago, Henry was fluent in four languages.
“Well, I do speak a few languages. How would that help?”
Rabbi Morganthal said that a group of rabbis and Christian ministers from the central mid-west was beginning to get early lists of names of survivors. The refugee lists were not complete, and none of the people spoke or wrote English. The group was going through parish lists and telephone books, looking for similar names in the hopes that some survivors had relatives in the States who would take them in. What he was offering Henry was a job writing and translating letters back and forth, trying to patch together families blown to pieces in the last few years.
Henry said yes, with mental visions of a red convertible for school.
For the next three months, Henry was steeped in such abject human misery that some nights he couldn’t sleep. A woman from the small transit camp of Biederberg in Belgium had a sister living in Terre Haute. The woman came to the States. Two weeks later, she hanged herself from a tree in the sister’s yard, too overwhelmed with grief at the loss of children and all the rest of her family.
A 12-year-old boy from a small town outside of Berlin had managed to survive by being taken in by a group of nuns. A cousin of his father’s was found in a Chicago suburb, but when the boy was delivered to the woman’s house she took one look, said, “That’s not my cousin’s child, he’s the wrong Hans,” and slammed the door, refusing any contact. The boy was sent to an orphanage in Los Angeles.
But there were the other stories as well. A 15-year-old girl was reunited with an aunt, the only two surviving members of a once-large family in Bavaria. Two cousins, each believing the other dead, were reunited through a Bloomington temple. All through those months, Henry looked for his own family. His American life slipped further and further in the background and his German life took on a focus. Speaking the language he learned as a child brought back memories he thought he’d forgotten.
His father taking his students on a tour of the art treasures in the big house. His mother pouring tea in the garden. His brothers and sister getting to go out with friends.
The Sterns, Henry’s foster parents, were a good American family. Michael and Madge Stern had three children of their own. The two older ones, a boy and a girl, were already grown, the boy in the Navy and the girl married and working in a defense plant, when Henry came to live with them. Vickie, the youngest Stern, was in high school.
They took Henry in as one of their own, but they weren’t his family. Now, because of Rabbi Morganthal and his work with refugees, it was obvious to Henry that he needed to find his own.
When classes at the university began in early September, Henry was enrolled, but he didn’t drive to the campus in a red convertible. He took the train because every cent he’d earned with Rabbi Moganthal’s group during the summer was stashed away, waiting to be used in his search. Six weeks into the semester, Henry knew he wasn’t going to make it. Life on the campus was just too removed for him and he found himself switching between dual realities. While studying for an art history exam on 14th century Gothic painting, he was suddenly standing in the second floor hallway of his family’s home, listening to his father lecture on the small Leonardo da Vinci sketch hanging on an honored place on the wall.
On Halloween morning, Henry packed a small bag, left a note for the Sterns and took the train to the downtown recruiting station. Three weeks before his 18th birthday, he was sworn into the U.S. Army.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Nuremberg, Germany 1946
With his fluency in languages, the Army agreed with Henry’s request for assignment to Jewish Resettlement Headquarters in Germany. In January 1946 the boy who left Heidelberg as Heinrich Blumenberg returned to Nuremberg as U.S. Army PFC. Henry Blomberg.
He put in long and grueling days, translating official German records listing people sent to slave labor camps and death camps; lists of “captured” art, jewelry and other goods; lists of bank accounts and businesses taken over by the Nazis. He was astounded at the detailed records the Germans kept, but nowhere did he find any trace of his family.
He translated for the oceans of Displaced Persons, the thousands of Poles, French, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians and Germans uprooted by the war. They were many nationalities, but most were held together by the commonality of being Jewish, that thing which had meant a death penalty and now meant homelessness.
He traveled throughout Germany during what free time he had looking for family. He also watched and listened to the German people, trying to understand what happened, trying to absorb how an entire culture and nation had been conned into following a madman. What flaw existed in the German collective unconsciousness that could have allowed catastrophe on such a scale? There were many answers and no answers. All he could do was wor
k to put back together as many lives and families as he could.
Like much of Germany, Nuremberg in the winter of 1946 was devastated and desolate. The city that had nurtured the Meistersinger and Albrecht Durer had also seen the Nazi rallies, torchlight processions of ranks of black and red designed to incite the bloodlust. Because of that, the Allies had taken special care to pound the place of Hitler’s triumphs to piles of bricks and leafless trees lining streets of slick and icy mud.
Even the Palace of Justice, where the war crimes trials were now in full swing, was a bulwark of stone in a sea of rubble. On November 20, 1945, 21 Nazi defendants filed into the dock to stand trial for war crimes. Henry wasn’t part of the trial, his office wasn’t even in the Palace of Justice, but he occasionally tried to sit in for a few minutes. He’d read Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s opening remarks to the International Military Tribunal sitting in judgment.
"The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a great responsibility. The four great nations flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law.
"The crimes which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated," Jackson wrote.
Henry copied down the words and kept them with him as he searched the German records. Finally, after close to two years in Nuremberg, Henry wangled a month of leave. He still had what money he’d earned with Rabbi Morgenthal and he’d saved much of his Army pay, using it to buy cartons of American cigarettes. He hitched a ride on a convoy headed north and reached Berlin just before the Russians sealed it off from the rest of the West.
With his language skills, his knowledge of German documentation and bureaucratic structure, the last letter from his mother and his supply of American dollars and cigarettes, Henry hit the black and gray markets of Berlin. He talked to whomever he could find who knew about records.
When he was down to four days on his pass, he met a German woman who worked in a lawyer’s office during the war, typing up transportation orders and lists. She took him to what was left of a basement under the lawyer’s building, and let him spend a few hours. He dug through the files until he found his parents’ names on a list of people titled “Shipped East.” When he demanded what that meant, the woman shrugged and said she didn’t know. No one told her what she was typing or why, and she didn’t ask.
When he got back to his unit, Henry shared his information with some of the senior officers and they agreed that it wasn’t good news. They would put the word out to the troops who were still working with survivors of Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and other death camps, but if his parents hadn’t turned up by now the chances were almost nil that they were alive.
If he couldn’t find his parents, Henry resolved to find his home and possessions. He particularly wanted to find his father’s favorite piece of art, a small sketch of horses by da Vinci. When his hitch in the Army was up, he stayed on in Germany through the 1950s, using his contacts to find some of the art, jewelry and other precious objects that his family had collected over the centuries. He realized that he’d been somewhat lucky. Because his family’s home was large and sumptuous, the Nazis used it for the headquarters of a unit that was packing up and stealing. They stole vast quantities of rare and expensive objects and paintings—anything that was valuable and portable—and moved them by the boxcar load into abandoned salt tunnels in the heart of Bavaria and Austria.
By recovering and judiciously selling selected pieces of his family’s possessions, Henry was able to stay on in Europe and dedicate his life to quietly making sure that the crimes would never be forgotten so that they could never be repeated.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Clarice looks at me.
I look back.
World War II? A lot happened in World War II.
“What happened?” I ask. “Did the Army use the hotel for troops? Did you get shut down?”
“No, no. What happened didn’t affect the hotel, it affected my grandfather—and his brother,” Royce says.
“I know your grandfather was a war hero,” Clarice says, glancing around as though looking for ghosts. “I can’t see what this had to do with you buying the hotel.”
“It’s what happened after the Senator and my uncle got home.”
It seems funny to hear him talk about his grandfather in the third person, but I’ve never had a relative with a title.
“He’s not really my uncle,” Royce continues, “he was my grand-uncle. It’s a small family. My great-grandparents only had two children, William and Robert. They were both in the war. William was older. He finished college and was an officer. Robert joined after high school. He was a wild kid, nothing serious but petty stuff...drinking, bashed a couple of mailboxes.
“But he’s the one who ended up a hero.”
Royce points down the hallway. My eyes are adjusting to the dim light and I see frames and a glass case.
“Because he was a war hero, my grandfather was a shoo-in for the Senate. After he got elected, his folks sold the hotel. Their other son, William, lived in the Bay Area so no one was left here. When Robert knew he was dying, he insisted that I buy the hotel back.”
“So you bought it with others in your family?” Clarice pulls out her notebook and pen.
“I only have one cousin—well second cousin, I guess—living. It’s William’s son, Stewart and he’s here at the hotel. Is this an interview?”
Royce is looking pale again, and I don’t know if this is anger or something else, so I say, “We just want some background. Is that a problem?”
“I guess not. You’ll probably find it out anyway. Stewart has a drinking problem. Actually, Stewart is an alcoholic and I agreed to let him live here as part of his probation for a DUI. I bought the hotel myself. I had to sell my house in Cupertino and I still have a mortgage here, plus the bundle it’s costing to renovate it. See why I need the publicity?”
Royce is looking like he needs to sit down. He has a bucket of worries and is acting like he’s drowning in them. I don’t want to dump anything else on him, but I’m not duty-bound to give him any ink, either.
“I’m not sure what we might plan for a story on the hotel,” I say. “Can we have a tour?”
“Sure, sure, I forgot all the stuff the PR class taught me.” He’s rueful now, probably thinking he aired too much of the family’s problems.
“Over here,” he gestures to a door where I hear silverware clashing, “we’ve finished the dining room. Come on in.”
Clarice and I follow him through the door and into a large space that updates Victorian opulence. Dark blue carpet and drapes mute the sound and the light. He’s installed small spots overhead that shine a cone of light in the center of each table, a trick that allows plenty of light to read a menu by but not enough to shake the overall gloom.
“For breakfast and lunch, we open the drapes,” he says. “It’s not much of a view, just the side streets. I’m planning to extend the dining room to the back of the hotel and open up the rear wall to make patios for warm weather. I’m also in the middle of plans to put in a garden back there, maybe some wisteria. This phase is going to have to wait until business picks up, though.”
I’m impressed by the thought and work he’s put in. “Sheriff Dodson commented on your chef and kitchen staff,” I say.
“I’m serious when I say that I want this to be a destination,” he says. “We can have year-round guests like the Awhanee Hotel in Yosemite or the Elderberry House in Oakhurst. These are five-star places with accommodations and restaurants.”
He’s dreaming big.
“I told you that my grandfather kept pushing to get the hotel back in the family. I know this is what he wanted as a memorial.”
“So where’s the bar?” Claric
e asks, craning around. “Isn’t that where the Baldwin guy’s body was found?”
Clarice knows how to puncture Royce’s balloon and bring him here-and-now.
“It’s across the hall. Joe Baldwin’s body was found just behind the bar, yes,” says Royce. “The lounge isn’t quite finished yet. We’ve got the bar in, and tables and chairs, but the back bar is still covered by plastic sheeting. I’m trying to decide about mirrors and how I want the liquor displayed. Bars and drinks are making a comeback and I’d like to be on the leading edge. Might even call the bartender a ‘cocktailian’,” he says with a grin.
He’s right, the bar has an uncompleted feel. Probably because an opaque sheet of plastic is tacked floor-to-ceiling the length of the room. The same baby spots as the dining room are placed down the length of the bar itself and scattered in the rest of the room’s ceiling. Despite the plastic, it has a warm and welcoming feel. Royce has good instincts.
As we come back into the hall, a man appears on the stairs.
“Oh, here’s Stewart,” Royce says cheerily.
Stewart is an older, fuzzier version of Royce, but underneath the layers of life’s bad choices I can see the Calvert outlines in the bones. As Royce introduces Clarice and me, I’m watching Stewart’s eyes. They’re like an old dog who’s been mistreated but is still trying to please.
“It’s nice to meet you,” he says. “Are you going to be running a story on the hotel? Royce is doing an excellent job on restoring this place. Probably beyond its former glory.” His laugh is deprecating.
“Maybe. I understand that you’re a historian, like your father,” I say, steering away from any promises. “I spent some time at the library reading up on you family.”
Edited for Death Page 6
