by Simon May
Family legend has it that, in a house not far from here, in the middle of the First World War, two boys of about the same age were determined to do what their mother had always told them must not be done and set the family’s parrot against its bulldog. The parrot had been a gift to the younger, and the bulldog to the older. The two creatures were irreconcilable enemies, and so the boys’ mother had demanded that the parrot be locked in its cage upstairs, while the bulldog was confined to the living room.
The boys loved each other but were rivals, as most siblings are. And they had an ongoing argument over which of their pets was the more lethal.
‘My parrot would win any fight,’ boasted Walter. ‘She could bite out your dog’s eyes, and for all his bulldoggery, he wouldn’t even be able to see his enemy, let alone jump high enough to catch her.’
‘Nonsense! Can’t you see that he will eat your parrot alive?’ Edward retorted. ‘Your little bird will be too curious not to hover close to him and will think that she can bite him and then fly away before getting hurt.’
‘Bulldogs might be strong, but they’re stupid,’ the younger rebutted. ‘They’re all posture and snorting.’
The boys decided that they’d wait until their mother went out and then set the two creatures against each other.
The fight was savage. The parrot scored a first swift victory, deftly biting a piece of flesh out of the bulldog, which left a trail of blood that traced its crazed trajectory all around the room. Cleverly, the parrot had gone for the dog’s rump, so it could escape before the doltish hound managed to lumber round and snap its jaws tight on thin air. Then the parrot moved in again, digging its beak into the dog’s nose. But now the dog was too quick: its jaws seized the parrot’s abdomen, and ripped through it. It was over as quickly as a duel between love rivals. The parrot lay dying as the stunned dog wandered over the coagulating blood, feather, and fur.
The younger boy was devastated and determined to salvage his pride at once.
‘Guess what I’ve got in the garden!’ he teased his brother, trying to distract himself from the carnage.
‘A chihuahua?’ enquired the older with the condescension of the victor. ‘Though you can barely call that overgrown rodent a dog.’
‘No, a rocket!’
They tore out to the garden, forgetting about the dead bird and the dazed dog. The younger boy scraped away at some soil and unearthed a small artillery shell.
‘It’s a British one,’ said the little boy. ‘I found it in the park. There are more there. The British can’t aim! They’ll lose the war, I know it!’
‘Careful,’ shrieked the older one. ‘It could explode!’
‘It’s fine,’ the younger admonished him. ‘If it didn’t explode on impact, it won’t explode by itself now.’ And he started to dismantle it, removing the projectile bit and emptying out the explosive material, or perhaps it was the propellant – neither boy could later recall which.
Where the eleven-year-old had learned to undertake such a delicate technical operation nobody knew. He then placed small quantities of the powder at a few points on the lawn and in the flower beds, and threw matches onto each one in turn, triggering loud bangs.
At that moment, their mother entered.
‘You maniacs! What the hell are you doing? Those are obviously British shells. What will we say if explosives are found in our possession?’
And she scooped up the powder, gathered the shards of metal casing, and ran inside, past the room where the dog was still recovering, to the bathroom, where she flushed it all down the toilet.
A few hours later, there was uproar in the neighbourhood. Yards of sewerage piping had ruptured – something inside must have burst or cut them – and the stench was unbearable. Some said it was those perfidious British: they weren’t just shelling the city; they were trying to poison its water supplies as well. Others were pointing the finger at a still more insidious enemy.
‘Clearly,’ they were saying, ‘this could only have been the work of Jews.’
46.
Lech Wałęsa, the ‘Jewish President of Poland’
It was only in 2016, a decade after my first visit to Klaus Meltzer’s apartment in Cologne, that I overcame the inexplicable inertia which had prevented me from searching for traces of my father’s family in Germany, whether in this city where he had been born, or in the small town of Trier, 200 kilometres to the south, where, my mother said, earlier generations of Mays had lived for hundreds of years.
My inertia seems inexplicable because it is, above all, my father and his German world that I crave to recover – and, through a kind of reverse emigration, to reclaim for myself. It was his death at the German Embassy in London, as Ursel had tantalizingly re-enacted it all those years ago, that triggered my lifelong quest to find a living relation to him and to what I see as the sacred inheritance of the German Jew.
Until then, the only route that seemed available to me lay through my surviving parent and her sisters: the world of Marianne, Ursel, and Ilse; of their mother Emmy; and above all of their father, Ernst, the totemic source of it all.
Though I had uncovered so much of Ernst’s life and legacy, there was one remnant of it that still eluded me: his grave, in Berlin. As my mother had no memory of his funeral, except that everybody came to it, I was bereft of clues. Over the years, she and I had made numerous enquiries in Protestant, Jewish, and civil cemeteries in both east and west Berlin, to no effect.
Back in the summer of 1991, I decided that, if I couldn’t track down his earthly remains, I would try to find the graves of his father and grandparents, who, my mother was sure, had died in the place where he was born and raised: Christburg in West Prussia, or, since 1945, Dzierzgoń in Poland. When Ernst was a child, in the 1880s, Christburg had a Jewish population of around 250 (out of a total population of just under 3,300), at least one Jewish cemetery, and its own synagogue. But the sepulchral communist-era offices where we went yielded neither Jewish burial records nor pre-war lists of residents. We should see, though, what we could find at the surviving cemetery, an official said, sketching a little diagram with directions.
We found a rectangular plot, hemmed in by forest, strewn with broken stones bearing traces of Hebrew script, and overgrown with vegetation. A few gravestones still stood, but they seemed mute and expressionless, as if they’d lost the will to bear witness to an extinct community and had allowed its secrets to flee. Desecrated by the Nazis and then abandoned for decades, this habitat of the dead had itself died. Tall trees, their trunks reaching serenely towards the sky, clustered just beyond its wall; but, far from casting a protective eye over the scattered stones, they and their colonies of singing birds seemed oblivious to them. This was a world so inert, so shockingly emptied out, that even melancholy could find no home in it.
A rustling noise by the entrance heralded the arrival of an elderly couple and, discovering that they spoke some German, we fell into conversation. If anyone in the vicinity was in a position to identify the dead in this cemetery and to tell us where registers might exist, the man said, it was him. After being forced to work as a doctor in Auschwitz, he threw in matter-of-factly, he had been a local official until his retirement; so he had some knowledge of where and how the Nazis, and afterwards the Polish communist authorities, kept records. As far as he was aware, the Germans had destroyed all archives of the Jewish community along with most of its gravestones – and of course the synagogue. Besides, he was sure that almost nobody ever asked after the Jews of Dzierzgoń, the last of whom disappeared in the 1930s; we must be the first people for a long time who’d come looking for relics, and certainly the first from abroad.
Our attempts to loosen his tongue on Auschwitz and what he had done or suffered there were unsuccessful. By now it was late afternoon, and we decided that we’d better stay overnight in the vicinity rather than drive, as darkness fell, to a larger city. Could they recommend a hotel? No, they replied, the hotels from communist times had all closed their d
oors, and they didn’t know of any decent new ones. After all, it was only seven months since Lech Wałęsa had become the first freely elected head of state following the fall of communism. But there was a couple who let out rooms and might be able to put us up. They were old enough to have lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, so we’d be able to converse with them in German.
After a long wait, a woman, probably in her seventies, with bright-red hair appeared and, without vetting us, introduced herself as our host for the night. ‘I have a lovely apartment, which you can have all to yourselves,’ she declared. Stammering our gratitude for this astonishing flexibility, not to mention trustingness, we asked how much she charged. ‘Nothing,’ she answered. ‘You’re my guests!’
When we arrived, her husband was waiting for us with a dinner of cold salads and meats and bread, along with beer and vodka. Soon, we were all sitting down to eat.
‘We Poles suffered terribly under the Germans,’ the wife began. ‘My husband had just finished an apprenticeship in a milk shop when he was forced into slave labour.’ As she told us the story, he pulled an identity card out of his jacket that had the letters ‘PK’ on the front, which stood for polnische Kraft – Polish [Labour] Force. She had seen members of her family shot before her eyes, others arrested and never heard of again.
Of course: our speaking to her in German and driving a car with a German number plate meant that she was taking us for Germans. And, plainly, my mother was of a reproachable age. Perhaps our hostess had waited decades for this moment when she could let people like us know, to our faces, what our nation had inflicted on her. Bizarrely, I felt guilty. I wanted to apologize for the unspeakable cruelty that Germans had visited on Poles.
At the same time, something made us cautious about exculpating ourselves by owning up to a Jewish origin. What if our hosts despised Jews as much as Germans? Or more? Just as in some of those German homes back in my childhood, we rolled out the official story about my mother following her violin teacher to England before the war, so that we would neither be implicated in the Nazi time nor be suspected of Jewishness. This version of events really did have its uses.
I think they understood that, though my parents were German, they hadn’t been in Germany during the war. But I don’t know whether they nonetheless assumed that the rest of my father’s and mother’s families had been innocent of Nazi crimes. It did sound like they were trying to make us realize how they had been abused under ‘our’ yoke – and now wanted to be asked for forgiveness.
But this was all a long time ago, they eventually said, and today’s Germans were very different. They had apologized again and again; they were good neighbours; and they were helping Poland’s economy.
The really unredeemable people, on the other hand, were the Jews. They would never be friends of the Polish nation; they would only exploit and extort. German crimes were in the past, but the real and present danger were the Jews.
For the first time ever, I felt relief at concealing Jewish origins, grateful for our trusty kaleidoscope of identities. Trapped for the night in this communist-era apartment with prejudices that, a few decades earlier, had been murderous, I was frightened. I understood what Ernst had feared his whole life. Instinct told us to keep my father silently in the background, and mercifully our hosts never enquired after his ethnicity.
Yes, she continued, the Jews are responsible for Poland’s terrible economic problems. The inflation, the closure of factories, the imposition of brutal, capitalist, so-called ‘reforms’ that have created mass unemployment and forced women into prostitution – all this is the work of Jews. Their aim is to destroy Poland so that its assets can be bought up on the cheap by greedy bankers in London and New York who are in league with Lech Wałęsa, ‘the Jewish President of Poland’, and the ‘Israelite’ Tadeusz Mazowiecki.
This was giddying stuff. Lech Wałęsa, the former trade unionist who had been instrumental in the fall of communism, was certainly not Jewish, and the same went for Mazowiecki, the country’s first non-communist prime minister since 1946. Besides, we attempted to explain, there were almost no Jews left in Poland. But we were getting nowhere. ‘Where do you think all those people who escaped from Auschwitz went?’ our hosts enquired. ‘They stayed here, of course, to rob us and to live off us. Under communism they had to keep a low profile. But now they, or their descendants, have free rein. That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in.’
Escaped from Auschwitz only to rob Poland? The accusations were so fantastical, I argued when they’d gone for the night and we found ourselves alone in the private space of these generous strangers, that it was oddly impossible to take offence.
The next morning, as we were eating breakfast, my mother announced that she’d been awake all night. She looked terse and shattered and vulnerable. Of course: it must have been horrific for her, whose life had been wracked by the destruction of the world of Blumeshof, by those terrible words, ‘Get out of here immediately, you East Asian monkey!’ which had sent her beloved father to his death, and by the insoluble unbelonging of exile, to experience such hate first-hand. And then to climb into the bed of the strangers who nursed it. And before that to find no trace of Ernst or his family in the place of his birth. And to encounter the doctor from Auschwitz. And to see all those smashed and abandoned Jewish gravestones – monuments no longer to lives but to the utter nothingness of a vacated world. How grossly insensitive I had been not to cut off that whole loathsome conversation.
‘No,’ she said, in a quietly anguished tone, ‘it was none of that; it was your face last night. I’ve never seen such haunted grief in anyone. As your mother, it was terrible to witness, Simon.’
I was stunned. Not just because I had no recollection whatsoever of feeling haunted grief, but also because my mother never proffered intensely personal comments about how I looked.
By the time we were in the car, an hour or so later, and had found the calm to talk about it, the fierce shape of whatever she’d seen in my face had dissolved and she couldn’t describe what exactly had overwhelmed her. Or else she found it too painful to disclose. But her reaction left me in shock: shock that I hadn’t wanted to take the anti-Semitism seriously, though I certainly felt fear and even terror when I imagined being unable to flee; and shock at how grateful I was for the protective lie, which normally infuriated me, about my mother merely following her teacher to London – at how swiftly I’d embraced self-concealment at the merest provocation.
Before this sobering insight into my own loyalty to family tradition – loyalty which might have anaesthetized a much deeper horror that my mother had glimpsed in my face – had had a chance to take root back in the apartment, our hosts had marched in, full of fresh morning energy and I think ready for more conversation.
But by then everything felt different. We had to leave. At once.
Embracing us, they’d thanked us for our visit, which they said they had so enjoyed, and still refused to accept any payment. When their heads were turned, we’d left some money next to a flowerpot, and headed back to the safety of Berlin.
47.
Finding Grandfather May
Unlike in Berlin, where I’d searched for years for Ernst’s grave without success, in Cologne it took me no time at all to locate my other grandfather, Ferdinand May.
Why can we want something so badly – in this case, any trace of my father’s family in Germany – and yet do nothing about it for decades?
Why could I fail to take the simplest action in pursuit of this treasured end, yet remain unfailingly diligent about including organic skimmed milk in my grocery list?
Why did I unquestioningly believe family members who insisted that nobody knew when Ferdinand died, or where he was buried, or what his last address was? Rumour had it that he had collapsed from a heart attack on a park bench in Cologne in his thirties while smoking a cigarette.
But, in minutes, everything can change. A single email, which I sent to the huge Jewish cemetery on the ou
tskirts of Cologne in April 2016, revealed that he had died at fifty-nine, on Christmas Day 1928, at 12.45 in the afternoon; that he and my grandmother Martha had last lived together at Rachdorffstrasse 27; and that ‘the master carpenter Adolf Zirker’ had reported the death.
Riding the subway to the cemetery on a beautiful summer’s day in June 2016, I felt an almost ridiculous sense of destiny: of heritage waiting for me at the end of a rail track, unobscured, for once, by denial, conversion, embarrassment, silence, inertia, and fossilized narratives that compelled allegiance on pain of betrayal.
The manager of the cemetery had sent me a map showing the location of the grave and, as I approached the ochre-coloured building, above which a Star of David was shining unashamedly in the afternoon sun, I was moved as deeply as the first time I visited my father’s grave, which I only did at thirty-five, again after epic procrastination. I was trembling as I followed the immaculately tended gravel paths flanked by gravestones in a riot of different styles, until I saw a large art deco stone bearing the name: FERDINAND MAY. There were no dates, no inscriptions, no names of loved ones, and no Hebrew. Just his name.
Then I noticed that it was a double grave, with single occupancy. Of course: if he died in 1928, my grandmother would have expected to lie next to him when she passed away. Who would have thought, only five years before Hitler took power, that Jews would soon be expelled or murdered?
What also struck me was the speed of assimilation. Thousands of years of tradition over in a single generation. He was the first to leave the Jewish community of Trier; the first to go by a non-Hebrew name; the first of a line of Bible scholars, scribes, circumcisers, and kosher inspectors no longer to be defined by, or even to practise, a religion that had been passed from parents to their children since time immemorial; the first to be buried in a grave with no Hebrew inscription. It seemed amazing to me that he could regard the life of a travelling salesman of ribbons as a step up from being a Bible scholar and a scribe. But he had only taken the first few steps along a path that, in Berlin, might have led all the way to Protestantism, and then Catholicism, and then to a more far-reaching immolation of inherited memory and sensibility, so that one no longer knows who one is or was.
