Jumping Over Shadows

by Annette Gendler

An intersection came into view. Old but well-kept farmhouses seamed the street. As Harry turned, a low white building with friendly windows and a sign reading CAFÉ appeared on the opposite side of the street.

  “I don’t recognize anything,” Nana said. “Let’s go on and find the church. I know there was a church.”

  After a few houses, a small gray church came into view, next to a slightly elevated cemetery. One side of the church was flush with the street. We drove around. Nana was mustering it.

  “There should be a house next to it,” she said.

  There was, but it wasn’t right next to it, and it was rather new.

  We continued on but had already reached the outskirts of the village.

  “I’ll turn around,” Harry said. “Maybe it’s different from another angle.”

  As we approached the intersection again, Nana yelled, “That’s it! That’s it!” She pointed at the storefront of the same low-lying white building with the café we had passed earlier. “Yes, yes, that was the store. Stop the car.”

  Harry pulled over, and we all scrambled out into the hot street. The village seemed deserted, as if everyone had retired for a long siesta.

  “Oui, oui, c’est ça. Il y avait seulement un carrefour,” she continued. Yes, yes, this is it. There was only one intersection.

  She inspected the storefront. Curtains were pulled shut behind the wrought-iron bars. Next to the storefront, a sign—FERMÉ (closed)—hung in the café door.

  “This used to be the general store,” she said. “Once in a while, the owner gave us kids candy when he had some.”

  “Do you have any idea where the barn where you were hidden could be?” I asked her.

  “Don’t speak German here,” she hissed at me. I bit my tongue. I hadn’t minded the ghosts of World War II that were still with us, even on a bright, sunny afternoon in an empty French village.

  Nana had already moved on and was studying the opposite side of the intersection.

  “There,” she said, “is where the barn must have been. It was across from the store.” We were looking at the backside of an old farmhouse, where a low wall framed a cottage garden.

  She wandered over to that house and turned the corner, following the road we had come in on, and paused by a gate. With her wide-brimmed floppy hat, flowery shirt, and flowing capri pants, she cut an almost bohemian figure, but she still commanded the scene, happy to investigate, pressing forward with her shuffling step. Next thing we knew, she was talking to someone beyond that gate, someone enjoying a hitherto-quiet Sunday afternoon. Harry and I caught up with her while the kids mulled about.

  Nana was explaining to the middle-aged couple, who had opened the gate, that she believed she had been hidden in the village as a “refugee” during the war.

  “Did your house have a barn in the back?” Nana asked.

  “Yes,” the woman answered. “It was torn down a few years ago when the house was renovated.”

  “And on the other side, in the courtyard, did you use to keep pigs?” Nana asked.

  “We didn’t,” the woman answered. “We only bought the house five years ago.”

  “If there was a barn, then that’s where we were hidden.”

  “Oh, really?” The woman added, “We have something that might interest you.”

  She disappeared into the house and returned with an old black-and-white photograph of what seemed to be the same house, taken from another angle. A wooden barn was attached to the back of the house.

  Nana frowned as she looked at the picture. “That could be it, but I don’t remember what the house looked like. I just remember that the barn faced the street and that it was at the intersection vis-à-vis the store. What happened to the store?”

  “There hasn’t been a store there since we came,” the woman answered, “but the building is used by a café. They’ve got their kitchen there now. In fact, can you come back tomorrow, when the café is open? They’ve got old pictures in there that show the village more like you remember it.”

  “Oh, and you should meet the mayor’s wife. She grew up here and knows a lot about the history,” the man said, rubbing his stubbly chin. “Unfortunately, she’s not at home today. Her husband just had a heart attack, and she’s at the hospital. But if you come back tomorrow, you should be able to catch her.”

  “How can we find her?” Harry asked.

  “Just go to the mayor’s office. They can help you,” he said.

  “And where is that?”

  “Behind the café, up that street.” He motioned toward the intersection.

  We chatted a little more with this nice French couple, who seemed puzzled by this multinational family who had descended on their sleepy village. Then we stepped back out onto the street, where still no car had passed. As we thanked them, Nana asked, nodding toward the opposite side of the street, “Didn’t there used to be an outhouse over there?”

  She was looking at another waist-high stone wall and beyond it what looked like a vast old garden.

  “Yes, indeed,” the man answered. “We heard there used to be one there.”

  “Thank you very much,” Nana said.

  Nana with Harry and kids in front of the farmhouse where she was hidden in Briosne, 2009

  “Allez,” she said, waving to our kids, who were standing about, bored by the French conversation they could not understand. I watched her cross the street, a little unsure on her feet. They filed in behind her, mystified about what could be so exciting on this sleepy French village street.

  She stopped in front of the wall, where weeds were growing juicily along the pavement.

  “You know,” I heard her say, as the kids came up behind her, “the outhouse used to be here. We’d have to run across the street to go to the toilet. My sister and I were afraid to go there at night because of the rats. Oh, yes, the rats! They squeaked between our feet.”

  “Eww!” our kids shrieked in unison.

  “Yes, we made Hermine come with us if we had to go at night.” Hermine had been her mother’s friend and had been in hiding with Nana and her siblings after their mother had been arrested in Paris and their father was away, fighting in the Resistance.

  Harry and I stood on the other side of the street, watching Nana reminisce about the outhouse.

  “Let’s go over to the church,” Nana said, turning around.

  “Let’s drive,” Harry said. “It might be too much for you in this heat.”

  “Oh, no, it’s so close,” she retorted, tucking her arm in mine. “Thank you for arranging this,” she said, squeezing my arm as we walked around the house and past the café.

  I helped her up the few steps to the cemetery while Harry opened the rusty gate. We saw no one.

  She surveyed the scene as the kids bounded forward, inspecting the gravestones that stood about, many of them crooked or half sunken into the sandy ground.

  “My brothers would tell stories about how the dead came out of their graves at night,” she laughed, “and my sister and I were terrified of passing by in the dark.”

  Our youngest was drawing figures in the dust with a stick.

  “We used to go for classes there,” Nana continued, gazing at the church, which looked impossibly small and rather gloomy, even on a hot summer day. “The priest would take us Jewish kids aside and gave us lessons so that we would know how to behave in church. He taught us the prayers so that we wouldn’t stick out when the Germans came by.”

  “Who knew you were Jewish?” Harry asked.

  “The priest knew, and the mayor, and the teacher. They were the only ones. Everybody else just knew us as refugees.”

  The next day, we indeed met the mayor’s wife for lunch at the café, and she confirmed what she knew of local history: The priest had been part of a larger effort to hide Jews and other refugees. Many people had fled Belgium and the Netherlands after the Nazis’ attack, and once Paris was occupied, many “undesirables” had made their way to the countryside.

  I found
out later, at the Holocaust Museum in Paris, that, amazingly, of the approximately 375,000 Jews in France when the Nazis took over, almost 300,000 survived, thanks to the effective resistance movement of a great part of the French population. Sadly, Nana’s mother was not among those rescued. Like many others, she was picked up by French police, who were collaborating with the Germans to corral the Jews of Paris and ship them off to Auschwitz. We found her name on the Wall of Names in Paris, which lists the seventy-five thousand Jews who were murdered. Engraved into white granite among the thousands of names for 1942, it says RÉGINE WASSERFAL, BORN 1907. We took pictures of Nana standing under her mother’s name with her three grandchildren.

  Nana, the kids and I at the Wall of Names in Paris, 2009

  But for now we sat in the café in Briosne-lès-Sables. The windows stood open, and the gauzy curtains swayed in the breeze. An old picture of the village, with its one intersection, an etching from around the turn of the last century, way before Nana had spent four years of her life here, looked down on us from one wall. A bottle of red wine was set out on each of the tables covered with white paper. I wondered how a café survived in this out-of-the-way place, but I got my answer when, promptly at noon, day laborers from the nearby farms filed in for lunch. They sat down for a simple meal in their ribbed gray undershirts, their sunburned, muscled arms exposed.

  The mayor’s wife, a friendly woman in her sixties, had come to meet us in her housecoat, happy to share what she knew. She was too young to remember the time that Nana had been hidden here, but she knew a lot of the people who had been prominent in the village then. She and Nana reminisced about what life in the village had been like with no electricity and no running water. The vet had been in the nearby town of Bonnétable, and the kids had to walk the sick animals over there. Laundry was done in the local pond.

  After an hour of lively chatting, the mayor’s wife announced that she had to go visit her ill husband, and so we thanked her for her time, left the café, and stood about the intersection, contemplating the place one more time.

  Thinking back on all we had learned about the Battle of Normandy on our visit to the D-day beaches, I asked, “Nana, do you remember when the Americans came?” She had been eight years old then.

  “I do,” she said. “They came down this street, in a Jeep, and they gave us kids chocolate.”

  She closed her eyes for a second, as if tasting that chocolate again.

  “You know what that was?” she continued. “Chocolate? After you’ve been starving for years? We couldn’t believe it.”

  “Come,” she said to our kids, “let’s see if the pond is still there. We used to wash there, you know. Go ahead and check for me.”

  Harry and I watched as she walked across the intersection, waving her grandchildren down a dirt road leading into the fields and toward a cluster of trees.

  “It amazes me that these are happy memories for her,” I said, slipping my hand into his.

  “Yes, but then again, she was a child,” Harry answered.

  “I’m glad we did this,” he continued.

  “So am I,” I replied.

  SH’MA

  THAT SAME SUMMER I ALSO RETURNED TO LIBEREC, which will always be Reichenberg in my mind. I had been there before on a trip with my brother and on a visit with Harry and the children to show them where my grandparents had come from. This time I went on my own, on a three-day side trip from Munich, leaving Harry and the kids with Nana, to do research for this book. I wanted to see whether the library had papers from 1938 so I could get a feel for what life had been like then, and there were certain locales I wanted to visit to be able to render them properly. One of them was the crematorium where Guido’s funeral was held.

  “See if you can find the family grave,” my sister said when I told her what I was planning. “Since Herta died, who knows who’s taking care of it, and, after all, Klaus is buried there,” she added, referring to our father’s brother.

  “Do you have any idea where it is? What cemetery?” I asked. Hunting for a grave had not been on my agenda.

  “I went with Ludwig. It was on the outskirts of town, and I remember he had a hard time finding it.”

  “I’m not going to have a car,” I said. “But I’m definitely going to the crematorium. There are some crosses drawn around it on the city map, so maybe there’s a cemetery there.”

  “Just see what you can do,” my sister said. “And remember, Ludwig put the Berndt and the Knina graves together because German graves were being vandalized. So now it would only say ‘Knina.’”

  I flew from Munich to Prague on a propeller plane, the flight attendant serving sandwiches and beer on the forty-five-minute flight. Then I rode the subway from one end of Prague to the other to arrive at a bus terminal, where I found a coach bus bound for Liberec. I paid my fare of $4 for the one-hour trip and chose a window seat. The bus ride was like being on a plane again—an attendant came by offering newspapers, and later she served soda, coffee, and tea. Video screens dropped from the ceiling with images zigzagging above the seats. The newspapers and videos were all in Czech, but sometimes it is pleasant not to understand a language; the chatter does not distract.

  I settled into my seat, feeling privileged for being on this trip, for watching the hilly countryside sweep by, and for being able to think of my grandparents. How many times had they been on a train, watching that same landscape float by? And what would they make of their granddaughter’s being so interested in the stories of the past? I could almost hear Oma say, “That you are so interested in all that . . .” and shaking her head in that ticking way of hers.

  Reichenberg with Jeschken; this etching hung by my grandmother’s bedside for as long as I can remember

  As the bus drew into Liberec, I watched the streets, trying to orient myself. Liberec is not a well-planned city but wraps and folds over several hills that rise to the surrounding mountains, over which the cone-shaped summit of the Jeschken presides. The city center with the old market square where the Jews used to peddle wool, and the neo-Gothic city hall where Guido and Resi, and my grandparents, got married, sits on such a hill. I had booked myself into the Hotel Praha, right off the square, so I would have a central location from which to explore. I spotted city hall’s spire in the distance and, leading toward it, one long street that I found again after disembarking at the bus terminal. I walked along this street, the former Bahnhofstraße, that led from the train station to the city center. Hitler had arrived here, traveling in his open Mercedes down this very street where citizens had hung swastika banners from windows and flags had adorned cars and empty flowerpots. Resi and Guido’s store had been on this very same street; I didn’t know where, but somewhere among the now-modern storefronts advertising travel agencies and Internet cafés.

  At the bottom of the incline, Bahnhofstraße veered to the right, and I turned into a side street to circumvent a construction site that turned out to be a gaping hole crawling with bulldozers where the orange-tiled Tesco supermarket had been, opposite my grandfather’s former apartment on Tuchplatz. The turreted building with the alcove where he had tended the Queen of the Night was still there. I felt like tipping a hat I wasn’t wearing to say, “Hi, here I am again.”

  The building on Tuchplatz where my grandfather used to live on the top floor and grow his cacti in the turret, Liberec (Reichenberg), 2002

  I stopped to take pictures of the Tuchplatz building, zooming in on my grandfather’s top floor. Each visit needed to be documented. Then I marched on, up the narrow street that is for pedestrians only. My suitcase droned behind me as I pulled it over the cobblestones.

  I had also chosen the Hotel Praha because of its restored art nouveau style. I wanted to stay in a place where the past was palpable. The hotel delivered: the ceiling mosaic in the wood-paneled lobby sparkled with glittery stones set in star patterns to resemble the night sky; the brass knob of the key chain that the receptionist gave me weighed heavy in my hand. Hung in the middle of
a swooping staircase, a cage elevator carried me to the third floor, its slats covered in the verdigris of oxidized copper. My room was at the end of a corridor of whitewashed walls that echoed with the voices of two cleaning women chatting on a bench by a window, and my room, although furnished with plain teak furniture, had the requisite double-hung drafty windows and high ceilings of the turn of the last century. This would do. It was the right setting for rummaging in the past.

  It was a windswept afternoon, the sun peeking down once in a while when the clouds moved fast over the mountains. I decided the crematorium would be my first visit, as that was an outdoor undertaking and rain was forecasted. I put on my hiking boots and made my way down the cobblestone pedestrian street. I walked on to the U Krematoria, the aptly named street that winds up the hill that used to be called Monstranzberg to what is still identified as the Krematorium on the city map. Gray apartment buildings gave way to trees lining the street; grass and shrubbery stretched out beyond them. The hum of traffic fell away as the hill rose away from the bustle of the city and toward the silence of the sky. I could feel my thighs working the slope, and I started to sweat a little in my rain jacket.

  As I climbed, the trees to my left veered off, and a parking lot and, beyond it, the crematorium building came into sight. It was painted a buttery yellow, a curiously happy color, happier, even, as it was basking in a patch of sun. It looked the same as it did in the pictures I had found from the 1930s. Wide stone steps led up to the entrance, a portico supported by two thick Greek columns. Behind the portico towered the rectangular block of the ceremonial hall. Two flat wings spread out on both sides. Their arches and columns created almost a rippling effect, as if these wings were indeed wings about to flap, instead of harboring a flower shop, a stonemason, and the crematorium office behind the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  The door to the ceremonial hall stood open, but it was ominously quiet. It did not seem like a funeral was taking place. Still, I dared not peek. Instead, I took pictures as unobtrusively as possible, as if someone were watching me, finding it peculiar that a tourist should be photographing a mortuary. Then I walked along the office and shop wing. A notation on a glass door read: