Crossing the Borders of Time (69 page)

Frau Loewy escaped that fate. On the day prior to the roundup, Professor Ott said, she paid her traditional holiday visit to the graves of her husband and daughter to pray and to leave small stones of remembrance. On the festival morning, in a dank and gray mist, the Gestapo showed up at her door, as at the others, with orders for her to get ready to leave. Before they returned to collect her, however, Frau Loewy, the pianist, then fifty-six, cheated the Nazis by slitting her wrists. She died that evening, not a Jew left in town to chant Kaddish for her, and was buried in Freiburg next to her husband. A year later, the Gestapo sent both of their pictures to the university to be included in racial research into the typical physical features of Jews.

So it was that with pad and pen and camera in hand, I immersed myself in work nonstop, while in the gloom of my hotel room I spent my lonely nights awake beneath the
Münster
’s unrelenting bells. Toward the middle of the week, I hosted a dinner for Mother’s girlhood friends, eager to hear news of her. Then Michael Stock offered to introduce me to Berthold Glatt, the son of one of the two brothers who had taken over Sigmar’s firm. I assumed that we would find him at the Rosastrasse showroom across the street from the Minerva, but Michael drove us out of town into a nearby countryside of modest homes with beaver-tail orange tile roofs set among the pines and with red geraniums blooming in every window even in October. We passed hillside vineyards and fields of
Spargel
, and then we came into an industrial zone stretching along the freight rail line that ran beside the mountains. There were Thyssen and Siemens, and then Eisen Glatt. I was astonished by the size of it, with a fleet of pea-green trucks and yards piled high with construction supplies and handsome, windowed warehouse buildings. Oh, what would Sigmar think if only he could see this!

The Eisen Glatt facility beside the freight rail line near the outskirts of Freiburg was a vast complex of offices and warehouses
.
(photo credit 24.1)

With us was Sissi Walther, an heir to the popular Freiburg brewery that produces Ganter beer. Then forty-seven, she said she had wrestled all her life with her father’s support for Hitler, and from the first reunion of Freiburg’s Jewish former citizens in 1985, she had been passionately engaged in working to reestablish German–Jewish friendship. A six-foot-tall Valkyrie with platinum blond hair cropped boyishly around her striking features, Sissi told me she was well acquainted with Berthold Glatt and wanted to facilitate our unique encounter.

“Herr Glatt?” a frosty receptionist in the lobby raised her voice in a show of incredulity after Michael explained the purpose of our visit. He had told her that a journalist from America, the granddaughter of the company’s previous owner, was hoping Herr Glatt might spare a few minutes to speak with her in connection with her family research. “He’s busy, you’ll have to wait,” the woman snapped.

Hours passed in the lobby, and I was drawn to investigate a stack of glossy brochures that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the company: “50 Years of Achievement and Partnership!… that is Eisen Glatt,” the cover said in German. Inside, a chronology traced the firm’s development from its “founding” by Albin and Alfons Glatt in 1938. Beside the list of dates that trumpeted the sprouting of new branches in several other German cities, a small sepia-toned photograph showed two men dressed in suits and ties, posing before the wooden warehouse in its early days. But whether the two men were Albin and Alfons or Sigmar and Heinrich was indeterminable to me. When Sissi studied the chronology, she leaped to her feet and began to pace the narrow waiting room in her high black boots befitting Prussian royalty, waving the brochure like evidence high above her head.

“
Gründung des Unternehmens!
” she scoffed indignantly, reading the account of the supposed origins of the company. “But that was no founding! That was a takeover from a Jewish family!”

With that, an inner door suddenly slammed open and Berthold Glatt came storming out. A man seemingly in his middle fifties, nattily attired, he was red faced and fuming. “
Ich bin nicht interessiert!
” he bellowed when Sissi tried to tell him that my sole intention there was journalistic. “
Nicht interessiert!
” Not interested. Not today, not tomorrow, not even in another year. “Never!” he exploded. “What right do you have to bring her here?” he barked at Sissi and jerked his head in my direction.

“
Nicht interessiert!
” Sissi sputtered. Her face was drained and pale, and her lower lip was quivering. She thrust the Eisen Glatt brochure beneath his nose, and her finger stabbed the printed time line that purported to describe the founding of the company.

With that, Berthold Glatt seized Sissi Walther by both elbows and marched her through the lobby and shoved her out the door, while the receptionist came scurrying from behind her counter to assist her boss by grabbing me. Neither had the temerity to tackle Michael, who was tall and buff in a loose-limbed sort of way that seemed to advertise his latent strength, and who was, at any rate, already moving toward the exit.

That night I was agitated and excited to tell my parents what had happened, but when I called them from my hotel room, my mother’s news eclipsed my own: Mom said she feared the cancer had moved into Dad’s brain. And so I spent that night, too, sleepless and despondent, counting out the clanging bells that rang a mournful requiem. I hid my head beneath the pillows, but still the bells harassed me each half hour, demanding wakefulness to suffering. They echoed through the winding cobbled streets, across the valley and the foothills of the Schwarzwald, through the violet-tinted Vosges and the craggy Pyrenees, and over cold, wide waters to my parents’ home.

The next day, I went with Walter to the Jewish cemetery on a hillside at the edge of nearby Ihringen, a former Nazi stronghold and the farming village where Sigmar had been born. One year earlier, visiting the little graveyard with my parents and my brother, we had found it locked, and Gary scaled its stucco walls in order to inspect the graves of Mom’s great-grandparents. At that point all was well, but the following August unknown vandals also made their way inside and under cloak of night smashed and desecrated almost all two hundred tombstones. The massive monuments, their inscriptions all in Hebrew, had been hacked off from their bases and lay in rows, faceup on the grass like gray-clad soldiers mowed down on a battlefield. Blue and red paint swastikas, SS markings, and mocking Stars of David were suppurating wounds on the broken corpselike tablets. Several of the oldest slabs had been reduced to cracked and crumbled mounds of marble. Amid the ruins, it was difficult to identify our family graves.

Walter showed me a news article from the
Badische Zeitung
reporting there had been twenty-four attacks on Jewish cemeteries in Baden-Württemberg over the prior three years, with the one in Ihringen most destructive. But the German public rose in outrage: six thousand demonstrators flocked to the village to march in silent protest the Saturday after it occurred, and for several weeks that followed, visitors continued to arrive to deplore the desecration. On the day I went with Walter, the graveyard’s high iron gate, which town officials normally kept locked, had been opened for viewing and bore a notice jointly signed by the mayor and the minister of the local church:

The Jewish cemetery has been defiled in the worst way by unknown culprits. We feel grief, indignation, and deep shame. Out of respect for the dead, we beg you, dear visitor, to enter the cemetery in reverence and to conduct your talks and discussions outside the cemetery.

Walter and I moved with other solemn visitors among the broken monuments bearing family names once so prevalent on both sides of the Rhine. Established in 1810, the graveyard’s most recent tombstone was dated 1940, when the last of Baden’s Jews were rounded up for deportation. But the hatred that gave rise to centuries of persecution chased Jewish bones in Ihringen even into death, a curse they had escaped in the graveyard’s hallowed ground all throughout the Holocaust. Scrawled in red and green across the cemetery’s whitewashed wall were neo-Nazi threats, interspersed with swastikas:

In 1990 vandals desecrated almost all two hundred grave sites in the small Jewish cemetery in Ihringen where Sigmar’s ancestors lay buried, including the Günzburger whose tombstone is pictured above
.
(photo credit 24.2)

HE—KOMM DU JUDE—WIR FAHREN NACH DACHAU
. Hey, come you Jew, we’re going to Dachau.

JUDE VERREKKE!
Croak, you Jew!

JUDENSCHWEINE
Jewish pigs

Many of those who walked about the cemetery, shaking heads in sadness and disgust, were holding children’s hands and trying to turn the scene into a learning opportunity. Meanwhile, outside the gates, informal groups were clustering, exchanging reactions and debating how the government should respond. “They must immediately restore the cemetery as it was,” a woman was arguing with her husband, who vehemently disagreed.

“My grandfather was in the Nazi Party in the beginning because they promised him a job,” he said when I asked if they would share their views. “But after
Kristallnacht
, he quit the party. They took him to Buchenwald, and he was killed. Today I see this place, and I think it must be kept like this to be a warning to young people who can be attracted to those old and sick ideas.”

That day I dreaded more than ever the prison of my hotel room. So when Michael and Karla invited me to spend the night at Poststrasse 6, where they planned a dinner party bringing together all my Freiburg friends, I gratefully accepted. Guests included Michael’s chess mate Stefan, Walter and his wife Josefine, as well as Sissi. There was lively conversation over fresh
Spargel
and Riesling. Yet my thoughts kept sneaking to the past, with Alice and Sigmar presiding at their dinner table just floors below the place I sat, with the same gold October moon floating at the gabled rooftops, and the same Black Forest breeze rustling their curtains.

Hours later, when the house was still and dark, I lay awake beneath the massive beams of the pointed attic roof. Now my thoughts insisted on returning to the other women who had faced their nighttime fears in this same house. My grandmother, Aunt Trudi, and my mother preparing to wander out into a foreign world. Tremulous Frau Stock, trying to embrace the future. The grieving widow Loewy and helpless Fräulein Ellenbogen, both aroused at daybreak on a holiday exactly fifty years before.

Through an open window I heard the heavy wooden door open on the street and then bang shut, and there were footsteps on the staircase: I imagined the terror of SS men in jackboots storming to the attic to seize us all. It was just as Mom had told me of her close escape onto a rooftop in Marseille in the hour that she had planned to give herself to love, but fell into a dream that would claim its own reality. Sleep deprived, nerve ends frayed, I wavered in a timeless zone on the threshold of unconsciousness. Though freed of the domineering bells, on this night I was summoned from sleep by buzzing Vespas, traffic squealing at the corner, insinuating sirens, and the raucous blather of beer-emboldened students weaving down the sidewalk. Through waking nightmare’s mist, I pictured drunken youths brandishing sledgehammers, scaling graveyard walls beneath the stars of Ihringen, bludgeoning the tombstones. Unremembered ancestors were crying out for peace, and then I saw my mother weeping—the frightened girl who had unhappily left Germany, yet found in France the tender man whose memory abided in her heart.