Letters From the Lost (4 page)

According to my father, it was in the spring of 1938 that Emil Fränkel had come alone to Strobnitz for a serious talk. I imagine that their conversation went something like this:

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Canada! Emil, are you crazy?

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But Edi, we talked about it before.

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And I said “no.”

—No, Edi. You said you would think about it.

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Well I have, and the answer is “no.” I am just an ordinary fellow. I like it here, and I don’t want to be alone in a strange country.

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Edi, listen to me! You must do this. For all our sakes.

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It’s for all our sakes that I am refusing to go.

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Edi, you just don’t understand how important it is.

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What’s important is that I look after my family. My wife and child first, and then my parents.

—Looking after your family won’t be possible if Hitler crosses the border.

—But Emil, only last week, Hitler said that he has no interest in any other country.

—And you believe him? This week he says one thing, next week another. The Sudetenland is rich, it’s German speaking, and people here are no different from the Austrians. Last month, the citizens of my dear country voted 99.73% in favour of the Anschluss and annexation. Just like my fellow Austrians, voters in the Sudetenland will choose to join Germany.

—Emil, I know the newspapers are depressing. Bad news makes good headlines, but that is no reason to believe what they say. Reading the newspapers can make anybody crazy.

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Edi, I am not crazy. The reality is that Hitler is going to come to the Sudetenland. You must leave.

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But even if you’re right, I can’t leave. Who would run the store? Papa isn’t getting any younger. What would we live on? You are a businessperson, and a successful one at that. You started with nothing, yet you have done really well.

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Yes, I did well, but now, I may have lost everything. Jews have been warned to leave Austria, but I have nowhere to go. The world doesn’t want Jews, and I have no relatives elsewhere to sponsor me. Besides, we are expecting a baby, and the doctor has advised Martha against travel.

—You could at least go to my brother Arnold in Prague. He’ll help you get established until this blows over.

—Blows over? Edi, Hitler’s just getting started. And much as I love your brother and his wife, I’m no longer so sure that Prague is a safe place.

—Prague not safe? The capital of Czechoslovakia? The Allies have guaranteed its independence.

—I fear that Hitler will come first to the Sudetenland, then to the rest of Czechoslovakia.

—But what will I do? I’ve invested every cent into the store. They can’t just take it away from me.

—They can and they will. Look at Gretl’s parents. They’ve come here with only the clothes on their backs. Do you think Hitler will pay them for their house or their store in Germany?

—But I have no savings. What will we live on?

—But that is why you must leave. Leave everything here, and just get out.

—What about my wife? Can you imagine Gretl in Canada? It’s wilderness. What about Helen? She is still a baby. I cannot leave them.

—No, of course not. You must all three go at once.

—Impossible. Gretl will not leave her parents. They are already upset because their other daughter is going to Canada. But Anny has always been the rebel.

—Gretl must go. I’ll look after her parents and send them to Canada on the next available ship. They’ll be right behind you. You must make Gretl see reason.

—See reason? I’m not sure that I do. Just because her sister Anny is crazy enough to leave…

—Not crazy. Smart. Anny and Ludwig are smart to leave.

—It’s easier to be smart if you have some skills. Ludwig is getting into Canada because he’s a country boy and Canada needs farmers.

With father in front of the store bearing the family name

—Then go as a farmer. You are young and Ludwig will teach you.

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Why don’t you go if you think it’s so easy?

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Edi, you know I’d go tomorrow if I could. You are the only one with a chance to get out. Because Gretl is Anny’s only sister, Anny may be able to sponsor the three of you as first-degree relatives. There’s no other way to get into Canada. They aren’t taking Jews. Once you get there, you must find a way to sponsor us. Don’t you see, Edi? You are our only hope. We are all depending on you. The future of the entire Waldstein family rests on your shoulders.

Wedding, Gretl Grünhut and Edmund Waldstein, June 30, 1935

Edmund (Edi) Waldstein

H
OW HEAVILY THAT RESPONSIBILITY
must have sat on my father’s shoulders! I thought of him often as I continued reading the letters, always in small bits. Sometimes a single sentence was enough to reduce me to tears. Sometimes I would read a whole paragraph before experiencing the need to pace the floor. My thoughts were in turmoil, and no matter how many times a day I walked the nearby woodland paths, I could find no peace of mind.

Unasked questions haunted me. Childhood memories surfaced and mingled with stories I had heard fifty years ago. Why had my grandparents not been aboard the next ship? Why had they not followed us to Canada? What had happened to Emil and to the rest of the family? There were great gaps in my family story that I needed to bridge. Reading the letters broke the serenity of my adult life, making it seem as fragmented as an unassembled jigsaw puzzle.

Many a night, I walked the country road, trying to find the calmness that might lead to a few hours sleep. Longingly I gazed at the night sky, wishing I could name more than the big dipper. Stars have always fascinated me.
The very concept of a light year dazzles me. Despite its incredible speed, that light has taken countless years to reach me. There is even a good chance that the light of that star died long ago, and still, I see that star winking in the night sky.

So it seemed with those who had written the letters. Their words on paper were as real to me as the light reaching my eye from a distant star. Were any of these people still alive? Was even one of them alive? How could I not have seen what I now saw? Each of these people now existed through their letters as certainly as the stars fixed in the velvet sky.

Numbers do not have meaning for me. It is one reason the study of astronomy has remained a pipe dream. I am hopelessly humanist, and the struggle of a single individual has greater impact upon me than the most accurate of statistics. One parent’s agony at the death of a child touches me. My eyes glaze over when children and parents are numbered in the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Millions.

Particularly problematic for me has been the figure of six million, the number of Jews murdered in a deliberate, systematic, state-sanctioned effort to exterminate my family along with all the Jews of Europe. There is no reason why I should not have been among those murdered Jews. Why I am still alive is as accidental and as random as why six million others were caught in the net.

As a child, I had learned not to ask questions that would upset my parents. As an adult, although I questioned many socially accepted premises, I asked no questions about the war. Not until after I had read the letters did I realize the degree of my ignorance.

It was the first letter from my father’s sister Martha in Prague that jolted my thinking. The letter was dated April 2,1939. The handwriting was not hard to read and the German words easily yielded their meaning.

Today, Sunday, it hits us especially hard to be without you. When you left us on Saturday, the house brimmed with sadness.

I had never given thought to the exact date of our departure from Europe. My parents had always been vague. I only remember them saying,
“We left
before Hitler.”
The letter gave me a date. Quickly I counted backwards the eight days that Martha was referring to, first on my fingers, then on paper. If there are 31 days in March and April 2 is a Sunday, then April 1 was Saturday and the previous Saturday was March 25. That must be the day we left Prague.

Why was seeing this date so unsettling? Something was troubling me, and I needed time to process the new information. I headed for the local library. The history section had a whole shelf of books about the war. I checked for dates. Hitler and his armies marched into Prague on March 15, 1939. That was a full ten days before we left.

But why would my parents have been in the capital of Czechoslovakia? It was miles from our home in Strobnitz, and my mother had often denied seeing Prague. Whenever friends spoke of it, she would say with a sigh,
“Everyone claims it is a beautiful city. Too bad that I never saw it.”

My mind whirled. I had never connected the dots. To me, the war had always started in September 1939, months after we got to England where we boarded a ship to Canada. I had never thought about events prior to September. Vaguely I remembered something about Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who tried to buy “peace in our time” at the expense of Czechoslovakia. Now I looked up the details.

Czechoslovakia had been stitched together after World War I by clumping disparate ethnic groups including Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Poles, Hungarians, and speakers of German into a country with artificially defined borders. The German-speakers lived mostly in areas adjacent to Germany and Austria that were called “the Sudetenland.” From the moment that Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933, he sought to bring the Sudetenland under his wing.

How did the Jews know what Hitler would do and that it was time for them to leave the Sudetenland? From a public telephone booth just outside the library, I called my mother’s friend Mimi. She was twenty-six in 1938 and clearly remembered the pre-packed suitcases waiting in the hallway as her family gathered around the radio. In the early hours of September 30, the major powers of Europe announced the result of their negotiations. Without inviting Czechoslovakia to the table, Britain, France, Germany,
and Italy had signed the Munich Agreement that allowed Germany to occupy the Sudetenland. As Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Britain stepped from the plane in London, proud to have averted the danger of another war by dealing diplomatically with Herr Hitler, the German army stirred and Chamberlain’s name became forever linked with the term “appeasement.” Knowing full well what had happened in Germany where Jews had been stripped of citizenship and publicly vilified, the Jews of the Sudetenland boarded early morning trains to safety. That afternoon, German troops crossed the border.

It must have been on that same morning, October 1,1938, that my parents sought refuge in Prague. Six months later, on March 15, they were still there as Hitler stood on the balcony of Hradcany Castle, accepting Nazi salutes from the courtyard. To the world, he announced that not just the Sudetenland, but the entire country of Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist.