Letters From the Lost (7 page)

Written on the back of this photo:
To my dear Uncle Edi, a souvenir of my second birthday,
January 23, 1933. Ilserl.

How heavy Martha’s heart must have been when she penned those words. From my own childhood, I have retained the perspective that a heavy heart is the norm. My parents always seemed to be walking under a cloud, and their conversation always focused on problems. Equipment that malfunctioned. People who disappointed. Expenses.
“Life is not easy,”
my mother would often say with a sigh.

But my mother and father tried to make me happy. Although they did without themselves, they managed to buy a special gift for each of my birthdays. My first watch. A ring with a small green chip marketed as my birthstone. I knew that the gift was an expression of their love, and was supposed to make me happy.

In return, I tried to make my parents happy. I was always a good girl. I succeeded in making them proud of my achievements. School was an easy
route to that pride. I earned good grades while hiding my social struggles and the many ways in which I knew myself to be a major misfit. As a teenager lacking in Saturday night dates, this became a difficult challenge, but in the early years, my parents were easy to fool.

Their childhood in Europe had been so very different from my early years in Canada. My father had been part of a large, bustling family. My mother had lived with a sister almost her own age and a bevy of friends in a small town in Bavaria. I grew up as an only child on an isolated farm in Southern Ontario where I attended a one-room schoolhouse. My first years in school were so traumatic that I have almost completely erased them from conscious memory. My classmates made it clear that I would never attain social acceptance.

My first sin was that I spoke no English in a school where we were taught to sing “Rule Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!” My second sin was that I spoke German, the language of the enemy. My third sin was that I was a Jew when that was still a dirty word.

For years, I blamed myself for being a social outcast. After we left the farm, I did try to make Jewish friends, but the relationships never gelled. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the young Jews that I met seemed either materialistic or caught up in a pro-Israeli world of which I knew nothing. I was as baffled by those who sought to fight for a homeland far from Canadian shores as I was by those who thought only of what to wear to the next party.

For a while, I thought that if non-Jews got to know me first as a person, then the fact of my having been born Jewish would not matter. Life taught me otherwise. The girls in my high school formed a “sorority” from which I alone was excluded. The few boys who tried to date me backed out after their parents asked, “Helen who?” and heard my last name.

Slowly, I began to understand my parents a little, and to notice the deep scars left by a world that had totally rejected them. I spent much time trying to imagine what it had been like for them. How could they trust again, after their former classmates and the friends with whom they had once played soccer or hopscotch turned against them? What new meaning did they attach to the word “neighbour” after watching those who had always
lived next door hide behind drawn curtains and avert their eyes on the street? For my part, I became both reluctant to trust and eager to trust, knowing well that a diet of suspicion corrodes the soul.

As I think back, not once during those years on the farm or even during our time in the city did my parents connect with what they called “real” Canadians. All the visitors to our home who sat down for tea or a meal spoke with that same Germanic accent that set them apart, no matter what their degree of fluency.

I do not believe that my parents ever lost that sense of alienation, of “otherness” imposed by the outside world. They often mentioned being “foreigners” or “greenhorns,” and there were audible quotation marks around their use of these words. While my mother partly mastered the art of sour grapes, claiming not to want what she could not have, my father was more complex. It was difficult for me to grasp that he had once been a carefree soul who strummed the ukulele and played piano at family gatherings in Europe. I saw him as quiet, thoughtful, sensitive, and shadowed by loneliness.

Although he often thought aloud during our Sunday morning walks, seeming to forget that I was just a child, the concerns my father voiced were always about the present. About his adult years in Europe, he rarely spoke. Now, as I began reading the letters, I also began looking for the roots of that lingering sadness even my best efforts could not dissolve.

I found a clue to that sadness in Emil Fränkel’s first letter. His handwriting follows closely that of his wife Martha’s in that letter of April 2,1939. Emil’s words seem to leave the page and reverberate in the silence of my morning.

My dear ones,

Longingly we awaited your first news about your trip and your arrival in Antwerp.

I was just over visiting your parents at ll o’clock in the morning when your letter arrived.

I opened the letter and Papa read it to us.

We were all overjoyed to have good news from you, and we all
have only one wish: that the dear Lord continue to accompany you to your destination. Whenever I’m so lonely for you, I comfort myself with the thought that at last, after such a long time, in a matter of days you will have reached your place of rest.

I visit your parents twice a day and do all their errands. Your furniture is now at Bush’s where it sits next to Anny’s things. Both will be shipped together, but please do tell Anny that it is totally impossible to send the additional items she has requested.

As dear Martha has just written, we are waiting for your report in order to get a picture of what our chances are of getting there. At the moment there is absolutely no possibility of being allowed to emigrate.

Liebreich and his family were supposed to leave this week for Palestine, but the transport has been delayed indefinitely. Uncle Fritz thinks we should all report for the next transport. Arnold would join us. And so my thoughts are working day and night, and I just don’t know what to do next.

Line by line, I pored over the letter, seeking to understand. Because Emil was the first to glimpse the shadows on the horizon and to encourage my father to go to Canada, I expected him to provide details that others had missed. Although many questions remain, his letter did not disappoint.

Longingly we awaited your first news about your trip and your arrival in Antwerp.

Longingly. Sehnsüchtig.
The poetically positioned adverb is as strikingly out of place in German as it is in English. I must remind myself that these words were penned not by a poet, but by a practical, down-to-earth businessman. I double-check Martha’s part of the letter, and note that she has added a postscript that she underlines.
Emil is very lonely for you
.

How seldom in my world today do I hear a man acknowledge being lonely, let alone for his brother-in-law? Martha’s words are a testimonial to
the level of affection between these two men, and to the depth of my father’s loss. Emil had been not just his brother-in-law, but also his confidant and best friend.

I was just over visiting your parents at 11 o’clock in the morning when your letter arrived.

Morning finds Emil at his daily post: visiting my mother’s parents, Max and Resl. I knew that it was Emil’s promise to look after them that had finally convinced my mother to leave for Canada. There has never been, and there still is no doubt in my mind that my mother firmly expected her parents to follow. Realities and potential complications would not have prevented her from believing whatever she needed to believe. Because Emil had assured her that he would look after Max and Resl and book their immediate passage to Canada, my mother left Europe convinced that she and her parents would soon be reunited.

I visit Gretl’s parents twice a day and do all their errands.

I try to imagine the scene that greeted Emil every morning. My grandmother Resl would be sitting quietly in a chair, barely registering Emil’s knock at the door. In a misguided attempt to cure my grandmother’s menopausal symptoms, the medical experts of the early 1930s had destroyed her mind. Fearing the approach of her own menopausal symptoms, my mother had often told me the story. It had only been mid-day when my grandmother took off her apron for the last time. Bone-weary from cooking, cleaning, raising two children as well as daily bookkeeping and work in the shop that was my grandparents’ livelihood, she had sunk into her chair and spoken the fatal words:
“I cannot. I am too tired. I just cannot do it anymore.”
They had sent her off to a sanatorium for electroshock treatment to regain her ability to work. Now she could barely function.

I try to picture my grandfather Max opening the door to admit Emil. Even on a weekday morning, Max would be formally attired in a three-piece suit befitting his self-image as
pater familias.
Although he would proffer
Emil a hearty welcome, there would not even be a cup of coffee waiting. If his wife could no longer serve him and his daughters had run off to foreign parts, then someone else would have to fill that breach.

Every detail leads me to another question. If my grandmother Resl was unable to function, who did the actual cooking? Surely not Emil, for men of his class and generation stayed out of the kitchen. Did Martha prepare extra food that Emil brought over? An unlikely scenario because my mother’s father was among the very few observant German Jews who insisted on a strictly kosher diet. He would have refused food prepared in Martha’s kitchen.

Beyond the family specifics, how did my grandfather and other observant Jews cope with having to violate dietary principles that had been among the very foundations of their life? Did such issues dwindle in importance compared to all else that was happening?

My grandparents Max and Resl were completely dependent on others. They had remained in Germany until 1937, when Anny had finally convinced them to come to Czechoslovakia. Their assets remained frozen in Germany, as did Emil’s in Austria. How did Emil cope? In Prague only on a visitor’s visa and denied gainful employment, he must have felt so superfluous. Not once but twice a day, he visits Max and Resl and does all their errands.

What were these errands and what was my grandfather doing while Emil did the errands? Max was only in his early fifties, and in the prime of life. Back home in Cham, Germany, he had been president of the town’s Jewish congregation. For many years, he had also been a member of Cham’s volunteer fire brigade, a responsibility that would only have been entrusted to a fit and healthy man.

When the Nazis first came to power in Germany in 1933, my mother had not yet married and was still living at home. As the new regulations came into effect, there had been a knock at the door. It was a neighbour, telling her father that a Jew could no longer be a fireman, not even as a volunteer. Silently, my grandmother had opened her sewing basket, taken out her best scissors, and cut the brass buttons from the jacket that Max would never wear again.

I opened the letter and Papa read it to us.

I note with interest that although Emil opens the letter, it is Papa Max who reads it aloud. The letter may be intended for the whole family, but Emil defers to the older man. Emil again stresses his personal loneliness.

We were all overjoyed to have good news from you, and we all have only one wish: that the dear Lord continue to accompany you all the way to your destination. Whenever I’m so lonely for you, I comfort myself with the thought that at last, after such a long time, in a matter of days you will have reached your place of rest.

Emil’s list of additional responsibilities was long. Already in charge of my grandparents, he was now also being asked to ship both our belongings and those of my mother’s sister Anny.

Your furniture is packed up in a lift (a large shipping crate) next to Anny’s things and the expediter will ship both lifts together. It is totally impossible to send Anny the extras she has requested.

What were Emil’s thoughts as such requests were made? With all his assets frozen in Austria, what was his source of food and rent? How did he make decisions when all about him the sands of reality were shifting?

As dear Martha has just written, we are waiting for your report in order to get a picture of what our chances are of getting there. At the moment, there is absolutely no possibility of being allowed to emigrate.

For a very long time, I sat unseeing with this letter in my lap.
“At the moment there is absolutely no possibility of being allowed to emigrate.”
The words are so freezingly final. Only a week after our departure, the situation had become hopeless. How narrowly we had escaped!

H
OW DID WE GAIN ADMISSION
to Canada when others found all doors locked?

I fear that the one person who deserves credit for our entry, my Aunt Anny, has gone to her grave with nary a thank you. The day of her funeral, I went to the market and bought all the yellow roses I could find and threw them on her casket. A small cluster of mourners stood by the grave on that cold and rainy day. There were a few neighbours and acquaintances, but no one who knew her well. Her only sister did not attend.

Family histories are complex, and none more so than for those whose wounds have not healed. My Aunt Anny died childless, but for years she let people think that I was her daughter. She loved it when others would say,
“It’s okay. We Canadians are modern. These days it’s no shame to have had a child out of wedlock. We know that you only pretend Helen is your sister’s child. Helen is so like you. And look, Ludwig now loves her just as much as you do.”

It would not have been a far stretch to imagine my aunt breaking that social taboo. My mother had always been the good girl in the family while her sister played the role of the wild one. An early photo shows Anny astride a motorcycle. Although two years younger than my mother, it was always Anny who dared, Anny who defied authority, and Anny who ventured into forbidden territory.