Alex's Wake (48 page)

With the coming of autumn, however, I did my best to chase away the black dog by beginning to write the story of our journey through Europe. By recollecting the details of my discoveries in the tranquility and safety of our home office, surrounded by an untidy pile of notes, books, maps, and photos, I began to think of the trip as a pilgrimage and an act of love that might, in some mystical manner unknown to me, reach my relatives and grant them a measure of the peace I so wished for them. I began to think that by setting down the story so that others could learn about it, I was fulfilling my long-held desire to place flowers on their graves, blooms that had the potential of lasting far longer than the little yellow, purple, and white wildflowers I had buried along with Alex's photo in the ruins of the crematorium in Birkenau.

As autumn descended into winter and then as the light slowly began its cherished return, three happy things happened that, together, managed to all but banish the black dog from my door forever.

It has been nearly twenty years since I first met my friend Tamara and we made the astounding discovery that her aunt had known my parents in Berlin in 1940. My father had often regaled me with tales of how he and my mother had defied the Nazi curfews by sneaking out after dark to play chamber music with a small group of friends, and when he did he would mention Gerti Totschek, who wasn't a musician herself but who had always been the life of those perilous parties. Gerti's younger sister, Ursula, managed to escape Germany via the
Kindertransport
, the British rescue mission that saved nearly ten thousand Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.
Ursula became Tamara's mother, and it was a source of great joy for Tamara and me to learn that her Aunt Gerti had played such an important role in my parents' lives in those far-off dangerous days.

So Tamara and I already had forged an important bond. But then in the autumn of 2011, she gathered together a group of eight friends, all of whom were children of German, Austrian, or Czech survivors of the Holocaust. Most of their parents had been participants in the
Kindertransport
, and all of us were bound together by our unique ancestry. We began meeting monthly to share potluck suppers and talk endlessly about our common heritage and what it meant to us to be the second generation of Holocaust survivors. A frequent topic of discussion was fear and guilt: how, despite our sheltered, upper-middle-class upbringings, we had all been, and in many cases were still, subject to an irrational fear of that knock on the door in the middle of the night and a belief that we were somehow responsible for what had happened years before our birth. At one of our first gatherings, I was struck by a story Vicki told. At age seven or eight, she fell off her bicycle and scraped one of her legs. She limped painfully home and then crept upstairs to the bathroom to clean the blood from her leg in solitude. Somehow, without her parents ever saying a word to her, she had absorbed the understanding that something terrible had happened to them, and something even worse to their parents, and that a skinned leg paled in comparison. “I knew—at that age!—that I had no right to complain about something so piddling,” Vicki confessed, shaking her head. “Nothing that happened to me could ever amount to the pain my family had suffered, so I had better just learn to deal with my petty problems on my own.”

Learning that my guilt and fears were not unique to me was therapy of the most comforting kind, and the monthly meetings of what I have come to call the Tamara Group have had a profoundly healing effect for which I remain deeply grateful.

The next happy occurrence to befall me is one I have already mentioned. In February 2012, I quite unexpectedly heard from a cousin I didn't know I had, Steven Behrens, of Cheshire, England. Steven and I share a common great-great-grandfather, Elkan Simon Behrens, father of the Bremen coffee importer Ludwig Behrens and grandfather
of Toni Behrens, who married my grandfather Alex. Thanks to Steven's prodigious genealogical research, I learned some key facts relating to Alex and Helmut's whereabouts in the winter of 1939–1940, as well as some details of their transfer from Rivesaltes to Camp des Milles. As important as that knowledge was in filling in the gaps of this story, it was also extremely gratifying to learn that my small damaged family was larger and healthier than I'd realized. Steven and I began making vague plans to meet in person one day, plans that soon came into sharper focus thanks to the third happy event.

As winter melted into the warm spring of 2012, I heard from my friends Hilu and Roland Neidhardt in Oldenburg that Carsten and Monica Meyerbohlen were still considering placing a plaque on the side of my grandfather's house on Gartenstrasse. But Roland wrote, with sorrow, that Carsten had been visited by an unruly black dog of his own. He was apparently having a very difficult time confronting the knowledge that he and his wife had been living contentedly in the beautiful home that had been seized from Alex Goldschmidt, and he was finding it difficult to design the memorial plaque that he deeply wished to display.

Looking up from the computer screen after reading Roland's news, I was struck by the similarity of my long-held and enervating rhetorical question—“How do I have the right to feel true and lasting happiness when my grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz?”—to what seemed to be Carsten's current quandary—“How can I go on living in this lovely house that was forcibly taken away from a man who would end up in Auschwitz?” He had bought the property only ten years ago, with no knowledge of its former owners, yet he could find little comfort in the awareness that he had no complicity in the crime that eventually delivered the house into his hands.

I recalled that initially I had felt a deep ambivalence at the Meyerbohlens' offer of a plaque. In the months since, I had continued to turn the matter over in my mind, never quite arriving at a satisfactory decision. On the one hand, I thought, this was a generous offer by Carsten and Monica; they were under no obligation whatsoever to let the world know about the history of the house they had legally bought. The plaque
would tell one small story of the countless acts of cruelty and violence visited upon the Jewish citizens of Oldenburg. Perhaps it would be the first of many; perhaps this decision by the Meyerbohlens would inspire other families to erect similar monuments throughout the city. It could mark an important new chapter in my ancestral home.

But, I argued to myself, does this let Oldenburg off the hook too easily? Would this single plaque enable the town elders to briskly wash their hands of the matter, to say to themselves, “There, that's done . . . problem solved. Our collective conscience has now been washed clean”? Can a small piece of plexiglass, no matter how elegant or eloquent, make up for what I lost, for what Oldenburg lost, for what Germany and all the civilized world lost?

Am I being played for a sucker?

I was never more grateful for the emotional and rational resources of the members of the Tamara Group. I didn't have to explain the complexity or the ambiguity of the issue to them. They understood the question at hand and the deeper general questions of loss and guilt and the possibility of reconciliation, all too well. After many nights of discussion, I came away convinced that some tangible notice of what had happened to my family was far better than nothing at all. I wrote to Carsten and Monica to tell them that I was aware of the issues they were wrestling with, that I was deeply grateful for their offer, and that I hoped plans for the plaque could move forward. I sent them a couplet from a poem by Emily Dickinson that I'd discovered, words that I thought would be perfect for inclusion in whatever memorial they might choose.

So it was with a great deal of satisfaction that I received notice from the Meyerbohlens in early June that they had settled both on a design for the plaque and on a date for its unveiling, September 27. Throughout the summer months, I looked back on the days Amy and I had spent in Germany and France and looked forward to what I now realized would be the end of the journey, when in some small way I would reclaim the family home.

I wrote to my newfound cousin, Steven, and to my long-cherished cousin Deborah, to invite them to join us for the ceremony. To my delight, they both declared their eagerness to attend.

About a week before our departure for Oldenburg, I met with the Tamara Group for our monthly get-together. “What should I say?” I asked them. “How do I strike a balance between expressing gratitude for this important gesture and making a strong statement on behalf of my murdered family?” We considered various ideas for hours, sitting around a wooden table on Tamara's deck, eating, drinking, and occasionally laughing as the early autumn dusk deepened into a warm, breezy night.

“I'm sure you'll find the right words,” Anne assured me. “Just make sure you remind everyone why you're there.” I nodded, profoundly grateful for such simple, direct, and important advice.

W
EDNESDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
26, 2012. A cool, damp day in Bremen, forty miles or so from Oldenburg. Amy and I stand in the midst of the bustling central railroad station, peering discreetly into the faces of strangers, searching for Cousin Steven.

Sentimentally recalling my many twilight conversations with my father in his last months, I had decided to travel to Oldenburg via Amsterdam. We arrived in Oldenburg yesterday, welcomed warmly, as ever, by Roland and Hilu. This morning Amy and I drove to Bremen, where we have arranged to meet Steven and his wife, Helen, who yesterday flew to Hamburg from their home in Cheshire and this morning have taken the train to Bremen. We have arranged to meet under the station's big departure-and-arrivals board shortly after their train arrives at 10:42. For some reason, however, we have not exchanged photographs, so I have no idea who among the hundreds of hurrying passengers walking briskly past us is my cousin.

But then a man pulling a wheeled suitcase, a jacket over his arm, pauses a few steps away. He is about my height, with less hair but also less girth. Our eyes meet, we both raise our eyebrows and nearly simultaneously exclaim, “Steven?” “Martin?” His broad smile must mirror my own, and we embrace. Needless but jolly introductions follow, as I present Amy to Steven and Helen. There has doubtless been many a happy scene in this station over the years, as friends and lovers meet, but
at this moment, I am willing to bet that ours is among the most joyful. My little family has just increased by two.

I search for a family resemblance as the four of us walk out to the car, chatting a mile a minute. I peer avidly into Steven's friendly face, not sure at first but immensely pleased at the opportunity for future discovery.

The four of us spend a delightful day in Bremen, first as tourists—as I show my family what I know of such famous sights as the beautiful eleventh-century Bremen Cathedral, the sixteen-foot-tall statue of the medieval hero Roland, and the sculpture of the Bremen Town Musicians—and then as ancestral sleuths. We walk along the handsome city boulevard known as Am Wall in search of the home of my great-grandfather Ludwig Behrens, the son of our common great-great-grandfather Elkan. We find the address, but the area was heavily bombed during the Second World War and the street is now lined with commercial ventures and office buildings. We then drive to a residential area in the eastern part of the city in search of the graves of Ludwig and his wife, Jeanette. We find the cemetery that we're looking for, but as it is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the gates are bolted shut. The detective work and close reading of maps, hurrying down strange streets in search of what turn out to be blind alleys, serve to bring us closer together. By the time we drive back to Oldenburg in late afternoon, Amy and I feel as though we have known Steven and Helen for years rather than mere hours. I am very happy.

At dinner that evening at the Neidhardts, we are again joined by the Lutheran minister Dietgard Jacoby, whom I am eager to introduce to my English cousins. Looking forward to tomorrow's unveiling at the house on Gartenstrasse, Roland and Dietgard tell me the somewhat awkward story of previous attempts to commemorate the persecution of the Jews of Oldenburg. In dozens of other cities across Germany, it has become common in the past two decades or so to place what are called
Stolpersteine
, or Stumble Stones, in the streets. Often simple cobblestones covered in brass, the
Stolpersteine
are laid in the roadway outside houses that once belonged to Jewish families, inset with their names, their birthdates, and the dates and sites of their murders. Literally
thousands of these stones have been placed in German cities from Aachen to Zittau, but up until now, there have been none in Oldenburg. “Why not?” is my logical question.

Roland and Dietgard exchange long looks before answering. The “blame” seems to be somewhat equally shared by reactionary elements in the Oldenburg establishment, who have gone in for the sort of historical airbrushing decried by Roland during my last visit, and—somewhat surprisingly, it seems to me at first—the local Jewish community. Most of Oldenburg's Jews are fairly recent Russian émigrés and, led by their New York-trained rabbi, they have declared that these stones, at ground level where they are both literally underfoot and subject to such indignities as being urinated upon by passing dogs, are not fitting or dignified memorials to the murdered. As a result, other than the maintained ruins of the synagogue on Peterstrasse that was burned to the ground on
Kristallnacht
in 1938, there is no public commemoration of the fate of the Jews of Oldenburg. So the plaque on Gartenstrasse will break new ground tomorrow, as my father's hometown slowly begins to join the ranks of German cities trying to come to terms with the unspeakable legacy of the Third Reich by creating lasting memorials.