Letters From the Lost (8 page)

Anny, seated provocatively on the bonnet of a car

Both Anny and my mother loved to tell tales of their childhood. I remember the story of Papa Max who enjoyed the occasional stein of beer, fresh from the barrel at the local pub. Because he preferred to sip it at home in the comfort of his armchair, he often sent the girls out to fetch him a beer in the evening. Anny always slurped off the white foam, never flinching when Max complained that the publican was becoming stingy with his liquid measurements.

Anny Grünhut, a beauty with her hair cut short

Later, there were more serious clashes with parental authority. On a holiday visit to relatives, Anny brazenly cut her long tresses and returned home sporting a flapper bob. Next, she demanded the right to move to Regensburg, where she apprenticed as a technician on Roentgen’s new X-ray device. There, she fell in love with a doctor.

The affair was passionate, but it did not end happily. It was the early 1930s and Hitler was already chancellor of Germany. Anny was a Jew; the doctor was Aryan. He chose safety.

Heartbroken, Anny watched as her sister garnered all the accolades. Gretl, the blushing bride in virginal white splendour. Gretl, the mother-to-be, proudly patting her visible badge of womanhood. Gretl, the mother of a healthy child, little Helen born in 1936.

Anny was nobody’s fool. Her sister and her parents might well be totally focused upon this new infant, but Anny saw what was happening in Germany. Anny knew that she had to do something. Getting herself and her parents out of Germany had to be the priority. She would make it
her
priority.

Czechoslovakia was the obvious place to go. Much of the country was German speaking, so it would be an easy transition in terms of language. It was a democracy created and backed by the League of Nations. Thanks to a midnight blue ball gown and a fortuitous invitation to a New Year’s Eve dance, Gretl was already there, living in the tiny village of Strobnitz.

All Anny needed was a Czech husband. She whispered her request to a relative who whispered it to another woman and soon, the matchmaking was done. Ludwig Ekstein agreed to marry Anny Grünhut.

Ludwig was a slightly older man with the best of references and connections. He was a prosperous landowner with an excellent reputation as a cattle-dealer. This line of work attracted many a scoundrel, but Ludwig was the rare exception: a man who honoured his word.

Anny had tried the route of love and found it wanting. She agreed to follow the path of reason. Hastily, she and Ludwig were wed, Anny in a suit and matching hat and carrying a simple bouquet of yellow roses. She moved into his house in Bischofteinitz near Pilsen and promptly did what she had set out to do. She got her parents out of Germany. It was 1937.

By 1938, Czechoslovakia no longer seemed like such a safe place. When Hitler annexed Austria in March of that year, several of Ludwig’s cousins said,
“We’re next. Hitler will take Czechoslovakia.”

In the face of hundreds of thousands of Jews clamouring to flee Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, Canada closed its doors. A memorandum to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, prepared jointly by the Departments of External Affairs and Mines and Resources on November 29,1938, stated the blunt reality:
“We do not want to take in too many Jews, but in the present circumstances, we do not want to say so. ”
³
In major centres like Prague, the only sources of information for would-be immigrants to Canada were agents from the Canadian National Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway (
CPR,
known colloquially as “The Canadian”) who were seeking to attract settlers to the lands granted to them by the Canadian government for having completed the Canadian railway.

Gretl as a new mother,
elegantly attired for her afternoon walk in Strobnitz

Wedding, Anny and Ludwig Ekstein

Ludwig’s cattle-dealer cousins invited a representative of the Canadian Pacific Railway to visit their rural holdings near Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. Impressed by their industriousness, the cpr representative agreed to put forward a special recommendation to the Canadian authorities. Shortly thereafter, Ludwig’s cousins were granted permission to buy land in Canada and to immigrate as Czech farmers.

Did no one in Ottawa realize that Ludwig and Ludwig’s cousins were Jews? Was F. C. Blair, Director of the Immigration Branch of the Department
of Mines and Resources sick or on holidays when the application was sent to Ottawa?

I have directed my questions to numerous history professors whose specialty is Canada in the 1930s. They all say the same thing:
“Someone was asleep at the switch. ”
Immigration officials likely did not realize that the leader of the Czech group was a Jew. Ludwig’s cousin Karl Abeles was far from the stereotypical Jew that Canadian newspapers of the day portrayed as dark, hunched, and hook-nosed. Karl Abeles was a big, blond man with a handlebar moustache. From his occasional visits to our farm, I remember him as robust and outgoing, with a jovial manner that would fit right into a contemporary beer commercial.

In November of 1938, Anny and Ludwig joined his cousins in Ontario at the Ridge Farm near what was then the small village of Mount Hope, south of Hamilton. Anny and Ludwig immediately sponsored my mother, father, and me to immigrate to Canada.

An
ID
card issued by the
CPR
to Edmund Waldstein

And so, on April 16,1939, we stepped off the old S. S. Montcalm in Saint John, New Brunswick. From there we travelled by train to Montreal where Mimi greeted us. This dear friend, now in her nineties, was then a beautiful young woman whose parents had sent her to Canada with an aunt and uncle related by marriage to the Czech cousins that included my Uncle Ludwig.

Mimi was in Montreal to see Mr. James Colley of the cpr. She had been told that Mr. Colley held the candle of life and the sword of death over the head of each family member now trapped in Europe. Mimi hoped that by making a personal appeal, she could break through the wall of red tape and bring her parents to Canada.

When I asked how she recognized us, Mimi laughed.
“It was easy,”
she said.
“You were obviously foreigners. A skinny man in a too large suit, and an elegant woman in a heavy wool dress with matching cape and feathered hat who was holding the hand of a little girl in a beige velveteen coat with a brown collar. You looked so out of place, so
benebbicht
.”

Although the Yiddish expression—an adjective for a person who has become an object of pity after failing so often and so miserably—is difficult to translate, I can easily picture the scene. Indeed, the feel of that scratchy collar, so drab and drearily brown, remains etched in my memory, as does the texture and drama of my mother’s bottle-green ensemble.

Because their documents labelled them as Czech farmers, my parents put aside their fine clothes and prepared for a new way of life. They had promised the Canadian government that they would farm for a minimum of five years.

It was a big leap. My mother needed to go from being the belle of the village ball to plucking and disembowelling chickens, milking large, ungainly cows, and feeding slop to pigs that disgusted her. My father needed to say farewell to a life that was all he’d ever wanted, and step into a life that he hated. He was completely unsuited to farming. His thin body never filled out and his hands remained clumsy. Worse, he was ashamed. He lived in daily humiliation at what he had done. He had reduced to a life of drudgery his Gretl, the beautiful bride to whom he had promised the world.

At first, my parents and I lived communally on the Ridge farm, crowded
together with the entire clan of Ludwig’s cousins. As soon as possible, my father and Ludwig pooled their resources and purchased their own farm several miles south of Mount Hope. Their overriding hope was that someday my mother’s parents and all the members of my father’s family would join us there.

They chose the Wren farm because it was cheap, as were many farms in the 1930s. Canadians had fled to the cities in the wake of the Depression, preferring to seek well-paying work in the factories rather than till the land.

The Wren farm was doubly cheap because it consisted of 180 acres that no one wanted. The land was uneven and planting was difficult. Parts were swampy and never seemed to dry out. The fields contained more rocks than fertile soil. Where fences existed, their posts leaned at odd angles. The barn and outbuildings threatened to collapse in the next strong wind.

Still, a beginning was made. Ludwig and my father bought a neighbour’s cow that was dead by morning. They bought another cow and my mother heated its milk on the wood-burning stove in the kitchen. To this day, the smell of warm milk lingers in my memory along with the skin it formed as it cooled in the cup. To this day, I drink my coffee black and the very smell of hot cocoa makes me gag.

More cows were added to the stable, and the barn became a favourite place for me. It was my mother’s job to do the milking. I still picture her perched fearfully on the little milking stool, pulling the teats until the warm milk squirted into the tin pail. Whenever she got up to empty it into the big milk can in the cooling shed, she’d sigh as she tucked a stray lock of hair under the red bandanna she always wore in the barn.