Crossing the Borders of Time (68 page)

That August, my parents came to Martha’s Vineyard to meet us on vacation. Dad seemed tired, and it was challenging to get him onto beaches, over narrow trails through grassy dunes that distanced parking lots. The only seaside spot we were capable of managing, not without collective effort, was a small rock-strewn beach on the Vineyard’s southern shore where access was easiest, although the surf was strong and the ocean colder than in other places. Each day, aggrandized by the responsibility of their mission, Zach and Ariel scrambled on ahead to clear Squibnocket stones from Grumps’s path, as their grandfather painstakingly advanced, moving with his “horse” for balance. Dan and I inched along beside him for support.

Once settled on the beach, I sat with my parents planning our second visit back to Freiburg. They had been invited that October as guests of the city, and once again Gary and I would go with them. This time we would join the official program of discussions that we had largely missed the previous year by going on our own. Eagerly, Dad proposed extending our German travels by visiting the newly unified Berlin after leaving Freiburg.

Meanwhile, he passed his Vineyard days absorbed in a volume of short stories, a gift from Michael called
The Burning Secret
. It was the work of the renowned Viennese Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, whose books had fed the Nazi bonfires and who escaped Europe in 1939 only to commit suicide three years later. Michael’s favorite story, a psychological novella about chess called “The Royal Game,” was one Zweig wrote in the last four months of his life, as fatal pessimism overtook him.

My father, however, never gave up hope. One long, hot beach day, he insisted that we help him to the water and, resigned to the fact he could no longer fight the ocean, our crippled Atlas sat with outstretched legs in the pebbles at the edge of the surf. Stoically, he stared into the shimmering horizon that he had crossed years past as an able-bodied seaman on his way to war. Now he sat immobilized, leaning on his arms, braced to meet the stinging waves that crashed against his torso. The surf pounded him with rocks lifted from the rugged bottom, his skin grew red and bruised, and tiny shells and star-bright pebbles tangled in his chest hair.

When at last he had enough, it was a struggle to lift him underneath his arms and raise him to his feet and get him back across the sand. But once Mom had toweled him dry and Dad was re-enthroned, my father gave the children—watching gravely, horrified to see him battered—a movie star’s performance. He flashed his blue-eyed crinkled smile, beat his shining chest with two clenched fists, and sang out Tarzan’s yodel, loud enough to frighten any beast or demon lurking in life’s jungle.

One week later, just in time for Mother’s birthday, a large round lump appeared at the base of Daddy’s neck. A grossly swollen lymph gland looked like a golf ball lodged inside his throat, but my father’s burning secret was a deadly cancer. Like Zweig’s, the enemy that attacked him had crept up from within, stealthily evading all of our defenses.

TWENTY-FOUR
CROSSING THE BORDER

I
TOUCHED DOWN
at Zurich’s airport in the white and noncommittal mist of an October dawn in 1990, two weeks after Germany was reunited and Europe was awakening to a world of possibility. At home, it was the opposite, with death already staking claim upon my father.

At his insistence, I was on my way to Freiburg with Trudi (long divorced from Harry) and her partner, Bob, but now I felt consumed with doubt and guilt over having gone away, if only for a week. Discovered in his lung, Dad’s swiftly-moving cancer could not be stopped. Our only recourse had been to try to slow it down through potent interventions that Mother quietly opposed. Why make him suffer through lethal chemotherapy, she asked me, only to achieve some painful extra months of fear, waiting for the end? Yet my father wanted life and anything that might prolong it, and Gary and I agreed with him.

We were all three in denial, very nearly giddy with expectations of recovery, but Mother’s medical acumen was validated once again when the toxic infusions immediately triggered a major heart attack. Treatment ceased and Dad was sent back home to meet a death that he refused to contemplate. Instead, he celebrated coming home as a kind of victory and daily voiced naïve concern as to why he wasn’t feeling better. In contrast to his heart attack of decades past, his recuperation this time seemed much slower, he objected, blocking any reference to his graver underlying illness. Death was never mentioned in his hearing, and while secretly we yearned to share our feelings with him, his doctor’s counsel muzzled us.

“Don’t force him to confront what’s happening until he broaches it himself,” the oncologist instructed firmly. “He’ll be the one to tell
you
when he’s ready to discuss it.”

Throughout September I ferried back and forth between my own home outside Washington and my parents’ in New Jersey. I was desperate for a meaningful connection with my father, yet he expressed no interest in talking at a deeper level. His only concession to this latest, most threatening diagnosis was that he did not feel strong enough to travel, so he and Mom and Gary canceled plans to return to Freiburg. However, as this reunion, the city’s sixth, was expected to be its last, they urged me to go ahead with Trudi, who had also been invited. I had scheduled interviews in Germany to write another story, and at any rate, Mom pointed out, even if I didn’t go, my place would be at work in Washington, and with Dan and Zach and Ariel. I couldn’t hope to spend every minute at Dad’s side.

To console myself, I arranged to fly to Germany from New York and to stay in New Jersey for a week beforehand in order to be with Dad on October 11 for his seventy-second birthday. The only present I thought to give him was a framed photograph of his two grandchildren—the closest thing that I could find to actual immortality. When it was time for me to go, it seemed that even he, in his own gruffly macho way, attempted to enrich the most casual of farewells:

“Have fun, doll,” Dad said, impatient with my extra hugs and kisses when I left him at his desk. “Take care of yourself. I love you too. I’ll see you next week. Now just stop being a pain in the ass and get the hell out of here before you miss your plane.”

Almost everything turned troubling on my second trip to Freiburg, beginning with the fact that our hosts had failed to book me in the same hotel as Trudi. Alone in the city where my mother had been born, as my father’s life was ebbing, I haunted half-strange streets cut adrift in history. The American descendant of my great-grandparents’ thirteenth child, I traced the silent footsteps of my forebears confused in my identity. And as I wandered through the town that had beckoned me through all my mother’s stories, I allowed myself to morph into her younger self. A girl with chestnuts in my pockets, I was crossing the Colombi Garden, where doves perched high above the pansies, and running up the stairs of Poststrasse 6 to find Alice at her knitting, schmoozing over coffee with tiny Fräulein Ellenbogen.

At night, inside the brooding, lonely confines of my dark hotel room in the town’s historic center, my narrow bed became an oarless raft on which I lay awake, unmoored, tossed through space and time. I fought against the undertow of two terrifying waves: one that rolled into the present from a very different Freiburg of the
Nazi-Zeit
, and another that was rising in the distance far across the ocean, carrying my father ever closer toward oblivion. Every thirty minutes the insistent pealing of the bells from the great spire of the cathedral drowned the silence of the night, denying me the balm of sleep as they tolled his passing hours.

By day, I ran about the city in a frenzy of reporting that helped to keep my mind off Dad and also helped me justify my journey. I had thought my aim in this reunion would be to interview other Freiburg refugees—from Israel, Australia, other points in Europe, and North and South America—who might share experiences and feelings for a longer piece I planned to write. Now I knew I had already internalized their story as if it were my own. I understood the bittersweetness of their return—being welcomed back with honor and apologies even as their losses put them on their guard.

I found myself more interested in hearing from the Germans. In meetings the city had arranged with political officials and civic and religious leaders, with students and with teachers, they spoke about their goals for reconciliation and the need for constant vigilance against the lure of hate. Their words were inspirational, revealing how the postwar generations, born in innocence, grappled both individually and collectively with the burden of their history.

“My parents were responsible,” said Kristiana Wettling, for example, a language teacher who had gone to visit Auschwitz several times. “I don’t feel guilty, because I was not living then, but I do feel
responsible
, because I am a German, and the brutality was always done in the name of the German
Volk
. I am working with a group that is tracking down survivors of the concentration camps, and so far we have identified thirty-three thousand people. I give one month of my salary every year to send them help.”

Mayor Böhme’s press secretary, Walter Preker, who would become a lasting friend, arranged for me to interview Dr. Hans Schadek, then chief archivist of Freiburg. Among other things, I hoped to verify what happened to the two women who had lived with my grandparents before they fled to Mulhouse in 1938. Dr. Schadek, an expert on Freiburg Jewish history, was waiting for me with documents from the archives, dating back to our family’s arrival in the city from Ihringen in 1889 and proceeding through the years of Hitler’s reign. With a sigh more encompassing than words, he handed me a list of the city’s deported Jews, and I was chilled to find the name of Meta Ellenbogen—the first official proof we’d seen of how she’d disappeared. The roster described her
Schicksal
or fate with a single word:
Verschollen
. The term means missing, lost, forgotten, or presumed to be dead. Auschwitz. August 17, 1942, at the age of fifty-seven. Not knowing of her deportation to Poland, Sigmar had continued his attempts to save her from afar for three more years.

Therese Loewy was number 202 on the list of the deported, although the death of the widow who came to live with my grandparents and gave Sigmar piano lessons was marked a suicide. This was something I needed to pursue. Thanks to Walter, I met with Hugo Ott, a University of Freiburg professor and preeminent scholar of Martin Heidegger who had written a book about Frau Loewy’s death. Professor Ott’s study of the widow of Alfred Loewy, Heidegger’s former mentor, was part of his research into the philosopher’s controversial relationship with Nazism in his position as rector of the university in 1933.

Laubhüttenfest 1940
, the book’s German title, means the “festival of leafy huts” or the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, the autumn harvest celebration. Traditionally observed for eight days by dwelling in temporary shelters covered with greenery and fruits, it is reminiscent of the Israelites’ forty years of homeless wandering. But why that title for his book? Professor Ott anticipated my first question. Because before Sukkot arrived on October 22, 1940, the harvest aspect of the Jewish festival drew attention from Hitler’s government. With a fiendish nod to its symbolic meaning, he explained, Nazi reapers gathered 6,504 Jews, uprooting all they found in the western border regions of Baden, the Palatinate, the Saar, and formerly French Lorraine. It was in memory of that grim occasion that Freiburg scheduled its reunions with Jewish former citizens to take place each October.

In 1940, when the holiday came, Professor Ott said, the Kaiserstuhl vineyards were ripe for harvest, and swastikas danced on red flags in the streets to celebrate Germany’s recapture of Alsace. At dawn, the Gestapo burst into each Jewish home with a two-hour warning to pack valises and prepare to depart. Then, led through town to the railway station, the exiles were sealed into trains for a punishing journey to the camp of Gurs near the Pyrenees and the Spanish frontier in unoccupied France. In filth and terrible cold, by 1943 more than one thousand inmates had died of exposure, disease, and starvation. At that point, Fräulein Ellenbogen already numbered among four thousand others deported again, this time to death camps expressly designed to be more efficient.