Crossing the Borders of Time (8 page)

Meanwhile, Hitler Youth membership soared to nearly six million. Widening economic restrictions seriously threatened the livelihood of Jews now forced out of civil service positions and jobs in education, law, culture, and science. Hitler had won dictatorial powers, the ranks of storm troopers had swelled to over two million, and beginning with Dachau near Munich, four concentration camps ostensibly for political prisoners had already been opened. Even though 90 percent of German voters approved Hitler’s powers, Sigmar still harbored hope that the situation would change and that leaving their homeland would prove unnecessary.

Increasingly grim circumstances led to changes at home as well. Alice spent much of her time closeted with her friend Meta Ellenbogen, who for many years had rented a top-floor room in the house, supporting herself by selling coffee. A timid and lonely woman with hair dyed jet-black and the fine bones and nervous demeanor of a small, flitting bird, she sat talking in Alice’s bedroom late into the night, flying upstairs only when Sigmar entered and methodically began to loosen his leather suspenders. Downstairs, the retired, impoverished army officer whom Sigmar had met in the war and had allowed to live rent-free in the basement with his wife and two children abruptly moved out, fearful now of being known to live with Jews. But before long, a different tenant moved into the house.

Therese Loewy was a fifty-four-year-old widow whose husband, Alfred, had been a mathematics professor and academic colleague of the eminent existential philosopher Martin Heidegger. On May 27, 1933—with the pomp of a national holiday, the singing of the Nazi anthem, the roaring “
Sieg Heil!
” and Nazi salutes—Heidegger, having joined the Nazi Party, was installed in the prestigious post of rector of the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg. Admirers flocked to the city from all over Germany to hear his rector’s address, but Alfred Loewy, being Jewish, was not invited. Although only sixty, he was blind by then and relied on Therese to lead him to a seat in the last row of the jammed auditorium to hear his former student extol the truth and greatness of Hitler’s National Socialist movement and the fresh beginning it offered the country. The role of science and philosophy, the new rector declared, was to lend power to the Nazi political program as the means of realizing “the historical mission of the German people.”

Pledging to revive the primordial, indigenous power of German
Blut und Boden
, blood and earth, in the academic life of the Reich, Heidegger announced that he would stem within the university the encroaching foreign threat of the Jews. And so, when the dean of the Mathematics Faculty soon sought his help to allow Loewy to retain his position despite the general purging of Jewish professors, Heidegger refused. When Herr Professor Loewy then requested emeritus status as a last-ditch attempt to maintain ties with his students and continue his thirty-six years of research at Freiburg, Heidegger wrote his former mentor that “any further pursuit of your plea is hopeless.” Two years later, Alfred Loewy died brokenhearted, and Therese, whose only child had died in infancy, was ordered to vacate her home.

Touched by her plight, Sigmar invited the widow to move in with his family, who all shifted rooms to make space for her. But the arrangement made everyone testy. Frau Loewy, an Orthodox Jew and a pianist who gave lessons to adults, including Sigmar, repeatedly grumbled to Alice that the children disrupted her teaching, and the children resented the changes her presence imposed. Swathed in the black clothes of mourning, stooped by grief, and understandably bitter, she seemed to cast a pall on the house as she sat at the Bechstein grand piano that had been Alice’s fiftieth birthday gift to Sigmar, softly singing and playing Gustav Mahler’s “Songs on the Death of Children.” On Saturdays, when her own maid was off and Sabbath piety barred Frau Loewy from working, Alice took over making her bed and bringing her water to bathe. Never before having seen Alice in that kind of role, her children objected that their unfriendly boarder was turning their mother into her servant. Alice’s own help in the house had been greatly diminished by the prohibitions of the Nuremberg Laws, but not a complainer—not then and not ever—she kept silent about helping Frau Loewy and firmly instructed the children to say nothing to Sigmar.

With Alice distracted and Fräulein Elfriede no longer in charge, Norbert recklessly seized greater freedoms. Like Hitler and Einstein before him and almost every other boy in the country, he had been a fan of Karl May, the enormously popular turn-of-the-century German writer of adventure stories featuring a noble Apache Indian chief named Winnetou and his German blood brother, Old Shatterhand. May’s tales fed on a romanticized, Germanic longing for the mythologized realm of innocent nature and depicted glorified battles between forces of good and evil. Drawing on their popularity, the Hitler Youth movement devised competitive hide-and-seek exploits called Trapper and Indian, as well as violent war games that encouraged boys to engage in bloody fights with each other—all designed to hone them as soldiers. But even had he not been barred as a Jew from these rough adventures, Norbert’s interests veered in another direction.

The irrepressible uncle I later adored was a handsomer version of the film noir actor Robert Mitchum and shared the screen star’s bad boy pursuits. “Booze, broads, it’s all true. Make up more if you want,” the actor was famously quoted as saying, and my uncle, too, would indulge in such robust enjoyment of life that I always picture him with his head thrown back laughing in total abandon. He smoked and drank to fatal excess, while his pursuit of women was so blithely unchecked by his own or his paramours’ marital status that his love life persistently got him in trouble. In the face of persecution and war, Norbert began to practice romantic skills early.

A strikingly good-looking teenager in 1936, he courted danger in defying Nazi laws against
Rassenschande
, defiling the race, by flirting with German girls, who were now definitively forbidden to him. Besides that, Alice never knew where to find him, he gave no accounting, and his rash rebelliousness threatened them all.

One evening when Alice stood at the window in tears, ineffectually pleading with him to come in to dinner or else face Sigmar’s punishment later, Norbert shouted back from the street with a threat of his own. “I’m going to tell everyone that you and Papa plan to throw Papa’s guns in the river tonight!” he called out, having overheard his parents discuss the need to dispose discreetly of Sigmar’s World War I pistols in response to new laws against Jews owning weapons. Her son’s words rang in her ears, reverberating over the streets, bouncing off mountains. She felt certain they would ricochet back to the Gestapo. The next day, Sigmar and Alice decided to send Norbert away to Alice’s sister in Zurich until Hitler lost power or until the whole family could emigrate.

In August 1936, Berlin hosted the Summer Olympics, and Hanna, full of national pride, insisted on wearing a celebratory Olympics pin on her collar. Around the world, despite the systematic exclusion of German Jewish athletes and the racial insults hurled at black contestants, the Olympics proved a stunning triumph for the Nazi propaganda machine. It managed to create a false façade of social harmony and prosperity that duped the international press and foreign dignitaries attending the games into believing that reports of German oppression and militarism had been unfairly and grossly exaggerated.

After the theatrical pageant came to an end and the world’s eyes turned away, the warning notice the children had found at the Eppingen pool began to appear everywhere—on shops, on theaters, and on the Poststrasse also. Until then, a week had rarely gone by without Sigmar’s handing Hanna a
Krügle
, a small earthenware pitcher, to take next door to the bar at the Hotel Minerva to have filled with special wine for his dinner. But one evening as she approached the hotel with her pitcher in hand and the cherished Olympics insignia pinned to her blouse, she was faced by that same large new sign on the familiar door:
JUDEN UND HUNDE VERBOTEN
.

Stopping bewildered and shocked on the steps, she hardly knew which frightened her more—violating the sign by proceeding inside the Minerva, or returning to Sigmar with an empty
Krügle
. Before very long, Rosemarie, the hotel keeper’s daughter, would reluctantly tell Hanna that they could no longer be seen playing together. At her parents’ insistence, their games of collecting horse chestnuts and trapping chocolaty maybugs in jars would come to an end.

Shortly thereafter, not a political movement but a physical one stemming from a medical problem would prevent Hanna from playing with anyone. Whenever she bent at the waist, she experienced a very sharp pain in her spine, and she began to question all her friends, hoping to learn the ailment was common. Throughout the day she would hunch and curl over, arching her back like a cat, testing to see if the pain might be gone. Loathe to worry her parents, she told them nothing about it, which led them to view her repetitive movements as a new nervous tic, and they told her to stop. Then her Eppingen grandmother observed to Alice that Hannele looked a little bit “tilted” and required constant reminders not to stand crooked. Soon Alice made it a point to enter the bathroom while her daughter, then thirteen, was taking a shower and was alarmed to notice a long purplish bruise that snaked down Hanna’s back.

“You wait and see, she’ll have tuberculosis of the bones,” Hanna overheard Alice fretfully whisper to her sister-in-law Toni, who accompanied them a few days later to the university hospital for X-rays. “Today’s the twenty-seventh and my father died on the twenty-seventh.
Gott im Himmel
, of all days, we should
never
have come here today.”

With the eventual diagnosis of Scheuermann’s disease, a decalcification of the spine that generally occurs in adolescence, the family received a dire prognosis: if Hanna grew any taller, she would very likely develop a hunchback. The edges of five vertebrae showed decomposition, worsened by the rigorous daily athletics program imposed by the Nazis in school and Fräulein Elfriede at home. Alice took her to Zurich to be seen by her sister’s son-in-law, a pediatrician, and called for her brother, by then a doctor in London, to join them in Switzerland to consult on her treatment.

Today doctors know that the condition resolves spontaneously without deforming the spine, but in late 1936, they ordered Hanna to bed for almost a year in the hope that with rest and without weight-bearing stress, her back might grow straight. Added to the awful regimen were vitamins, calcium, and cod liver oil. Hanna spent four months confined to bed at home, during which time her classmates—
none
of them Jewish, she would always remember—visited daily, bringing her schoolwork so she would not fall behind. But when her back failed to show the expected improvement, it was resolved that she spend the next six months in a children’s rest home in Arosa, a secluded aerie in the Swiss Alps.

Hanna passed her days there alone on a frosty mountaintop terrace, surrounded by towering pine trees laden with snow. Lying flat on her back, unable even to read, encased in a fur sack on a hard wooden cot, she reposed in fear and in silence while the other young patients went skating and skiing. In deference to her cousin in Zurich, who referred so many patients, the sanatorium insisted on giving Hanna a room of her own instead of housing her in the dormitory with the other girls. Due to the increasing difficulty of crossing the border, moreover, her family was unable to visit her there. And so, stunned one morning to find blood on her sheets, and never informed about her maturing body’s natural cycles, Hanna concluded that she was dying.

Dr. Pedolin’s
Kinderheim,
a sanatorium for ailing children, in Arosa in the Swiss Alps
(photo credit 3.5)

Like Heidi, she finally came down the mountain from her lonely retreat, but she brought with her a horror of the number 27, a unique superstition that was as overpowering as it was irrational, enduring, and unusual for her.

“Can’t you hold on until midnight?” my mother urged, for example, as I rushed off to the hospital in labor on the afternoon of July 27, 1987 to give birth to my own daughter. Be it her father’s rigid Germanic discipline or the influence of living in fear under a Fascist regime, my mother normally avoids confrontation at any cost. Yet about the number 27 she is unyielding. On a crowded airplane, for instance, she once flatly refused to take her seat in row 27 and insisted my father travel the aisle to find fellow passengers willing to trade seats before take-off. And this time, at least, her vehemence left him no choice.

“You see those people seated in the twenty-seventh row?” my father pointed out drily once they had switched seats and were airborne. “I should warn you—if
they
go down,
we
go down also.”

The concept of collective doom was one she was used to, but the goal of escape, the personal struggle toward life and renewal, was like hope through a storm, the thing that prevailed.