Crossing the Borders of Time (67 page)

“But why did your grandmother leave here anyway?” she asked me. “I didn’t understand. Surely, she wasn’t Jewish. She didn’t look Jewish.”

“What does that mean?” I couldn’t help myself from interjecting.

“Well, of course, she didn’t have a Jewish nose or lips.” Frau Stock shrugged, laying down her fork. With her finger, she traced a large hooked nose in the air and mockingly rolled down her lower lip. The moist and pink protuberance recalled ugly racist caricatures on Nazi posters.

Eager to change the subject, I asked her to describe the immediate period in Freiburg following the war. I had pictured dismal years of national humiliation in which the truth about Nazi atrocities prompted worldwide condemnation and a painful imperative to soul-searching among the German people. But through the grimy window of the years, she could see the past from only one perspective, and she translated my question into terms more practical than emotional.

Rosemarie Stock in her bedroom with her 1934 Hitler Youth track meet certificate
(photo credit 23.2)

“
Schrecklich!
” she exclaimed. “The peace was harder for us than the war. We had a terrible, cold winter. No heat, no water, no windows, no electricity. There was nothing to eat, but then we had luck because through the hotel, our French and American guests helped us get food.”

As time went on, she said, like many of her generation, she and Friedrich never spoke to their four children about the Nazi years, about the Jews or concentration camps. (For the camps, instead of using the actual term
Konzentrationslager
, she used the less evocative and widely accepted two-letter abbreviation: KZ, pronounced
Ka-tzet
.)

“We had no reason to speak about
Juden
or KZ,” Frau Stock explained. “The children never asked about such things. It was not interesting. They went to school, did homework, played, ate. Why should I tell them about KZ?
Nein
. You cannot turn back the hands of time. You must look forward.”

All the same, before I left, Frau Stock invited me to admire a memento of those years as she led me to a framed certificate that decorated her bedroom wall. Honoring her victory in a 1934 Hitler Youth track meet, it depicted a smiling boy and girl waving Nazi banners, and she was proud to pose for a photograph beside it.

Mother moved through Freiburg in a trancelike state, awash in memories and troubled feelings. She grieved to see her former home chopped into apartments, and she seethed in estimating that Alice—dead two years earlier at the age of ninety-five—had resided more than twice as long in her cramped New York apartment than in the spacious home from which they’d fled. Everything hit her as unsettlingly different. Yet by instinct she directed us to her former school, to the cathedral whose Gothic architecture Dad extolled as an astounding feat of engineering, to the famous university whose thick stone walls were pocked by scars of war, and to the corner where the city’s once-majestic synagogue went up in flames. When she and I got lost looking for the new one—planning to meet Gary, Dad, and the rest of the group, including Mayor Böhme, for special Friday evening services—she strictly forbade my asking any stranger on the street for directions to the temple for fear of disclosing we were Jews. Wary of almost everyone we met, regardless of how friendly and accommodating, she puzzled skeptically over their intentions and, moreover, about the city’s reasons for dedicating its energy and resources to hosting Freiburg’s former Jewish citizens at such well-organized reunions.

“Would you ever consider moving back here?” a German reporter asked her in an interview published in a regional newspaper. Mom paused for a moment and then replied with unusually stunning candor: “Only if everyone old enough to have supported Hitler were forced to leave.”

High on Mother’s list of obligations in every city that we visited was the Jewish cemetery where her ancestors lay buried. At each one, she bent to find a little rock to place atop the tombstone, a ritual of remembrance. In Freiburg, this meant finding the graves of Sigmar’s parents, Simon and Jeanette. It felt strange to realize that their bones had rested in peaceful ignorance throughout the war and persecution that saw their children forced to flee, as also through the decades since, when their graves had gone unvisited. Indeed, it was the first time in half a century that any of our family had gone to see about their upkeep, and Mom had previously worried over their condition. But just as we would learn when we traveled on to Sigmar’s nearby birthplace of Ihringen and Alice’s of Eppingen, Germany’s Jewish cemeteries had been carefully maintained at government expense. Beyond that, in Freiburg, two monuments told the story. One honored local German Jewish soldiers who died fighting for the fatherland in World War I. The other honored Freiburg’s Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Dad wheeled behind me as I paused to take a picture of the tall black marble tombstone that marked the grave of Mom’s grandparents, with its German inscription from Psalm 34: “
Though the misfortunes of the righteous be many, the Lord will save him from them all
.” Later, when the photograph was developed, I was aghast to see the image of my father seated in his wheelchair reflected in the tombstone’s shiny surface. His figure was as clear as if it too had been etched into the marble beside the names of Simon and Jeanette, and it iced my soul like a fatal premonition.

Traveling on from Germany to France, our expedition did not include an effort to find Roland, nor Mom’s devoted friend Malou, nor the helpful André Fick. But near the house in Mulhouse where Roland lived before the war, we visited the family of Lisette and Edy’s son, our cousin Michel Cahen. Edy had died in 1987. As for Lisette, she had abandoned her grand provincial home after they divorced in the 1960s, moving with just a suitcase to a room in a modest Left Bank residential hotel on the rue de l’Odéon in Paris.

When we ourselves reached the capital, Lisette’s daughter Isabelle took Mom and me to see her, now residing in a
maison de retraite
in a far less lively neighborhood. Lisette’s room was crammed as ever with books and little oddities and pictures she’d collected, often from the streets, in a lifetime spent appreciating the world’s most droll discoveries. Electric as in her youth, with her own sardonic brand of joie de vivre, she left us breathless with her storytelling, outpacing our ability to record any anecdote in memory before she ran on to the next one.

For Janine and Lisette, this reunion would prove meaningful, supplanting unpleasant memories of their previous time together, when Lisette came to stay with us for several weeks soon after her divorce. Then depressed and drinking heavily, Lisette was critical of everything Janine tried to show her of New York except the United Nations building and voiced nothing but disdain for her friend’s suburban lifestyle as a “hausfrau” in America.

By contrast, the meeting in Paris—which would sadly prove to be their last—was brimming with tenderness, as each of them found back what she had valued in the other. Even then, however, though not given to self-censorship, Lisette would tell my mother nothing about Roland. Despite the fact she knew him and that having lived in postwar Mulhouse, she surely had some idea of what had happened to him, like Edy, Lisette would keep forever silent on that subject.

Did Mother search the faces that we passed, hunting for an older version of her first true love in every tall and handsome man, as we strolled together on the rue du Sauvage in Mulhouse or the rue de la République in Lyon, those streets where she’d worn thin the soles of all her shoes, either looking for Roland or walking at his side? I have no doubt she did. But in deference to Dad, she and I avoided mentioning Roland, because even as Mom assessed the changes in the old places she had known, the trip was also prompting a shift in the interplay of personalities in the quadrangle of our family.

Dad acceded to Mom’s every wish to stop at sites imbued with meaning for her, and he retreated to respectful silence as she filled in details of the stories of her youth. Tales that we had heard before in outline were gripping as she recounted them again, now on actual location. We journeyed in an atmosphere that reflected our desire to create a perfect interlude. Mom and I were busy delving in her past, taking pictures, taping memories. Dad was marveling at medieval architecture and modern redevelopment, querying construction workers. And Gary was valiantly devoting all his efforts to piloting the van and maneuvering our father in situations that proved trying for him.

Gary had the worst of it. He stood behind our father, arms clasped about Dad’s chest and with his legs spread wide for extra balance, as they tried to walk together—two great wooden soldiers lurching forward in clumsy unison. Laboring to keep Dad upright, helping him move from van to chair, getting him into restaurants and restrooms, and supporting his weight on stairways was all physically exhausting, so that my brother, drenched in sweat, fell asleep in public the instant he sat down. Late one night in Paris, however, alone with Gary at a sidewalk table at Deux Magots after our parents had gone to bed, I listened in astonishment as he maintained that Dad’s medical condition was actually a blessing. Ceaseless trials had helped Dad develop new compassion for lesser mortals: “The more crippled he’s become, the more he’s become complete and powerful. He’s gone from being a comic book hero to a real hero. I found out that while I never really liked Superman too much, I love Clark Kent.”

It was hard for me to take comfort from that analysis. But over the course of the trip, as we each came to terms with one another, it seemed that if only we could climb back in the van each day, finally finding peace in what my mother termed
togetherness
, we might actually continue traveling forever, weaving through the past and future, so lost that even death would not know where to find us.

Six months later, Michael Stock came to New York City with his friend Stefan to compete in an international chess tournament, and Gary, who worked as a lawyer in the city, invited them to stay in his apartment. Several times, Mom had them all to dinner, which was inevitably followed by Dad and Michael testing wits across the chessboard. Then Gary and I suggested Mom invite them to experience their first seder by joining us for Passover. Mom fretted that the focus of the service would make it uncomfortable to share with them, given that the liturgy was fraught with imagery of the timeless suffering of the Jewish people and ultimately of their persecutors. But she yielded to us, and as we invoked the story of slavery in Egypt, escape across the sea, and the Exodus in search of freedom in the Promised Land, our two German guests participated in our rituals. Afterward, Mom was first in pronouncing it an amazing and important evening. “As a celebration of reconciliation, it was unimaginable,” she avowed.

Yes, who could have anticipated that Herr Schöpperle’s grandson would one day journey to America from Sigmar’s former home in Freiburg and read the Haggadah with us, and eat matzo, and dip parsley in salt water to taste symbolically the tears of Jewish captives? Keeping to tradition, we went around the table taking turns at reading, joined that night by German voices. There were moments of unacknowledged awkwardness based upon the passages that fell randomly to them. Yet through it all, our guests engaged unstintingly, even as we read of days “when ignorant and hostile men forced our doors with terror,” and the despot who came to mind was as much the Führer as the pharaoh. Michael and Stefan raised their cups of wine as the text directed, and we all declared in unison:

“More than one enemy has risen against us to destroy us. In every generation, in every age, some rise up to plot our annihilation. But a Divine Power sustains and delivers us.”